GD is not a representation of the majority of the player base. The majority of the player base is silent. In my 12+ years of wow, I have yet to see a single poll with a majority of participation reflecting how the players feel to anything in particular.
I don’t want to dismiss your concerns, but I am making a point that this line of thought is what incorrectly drives people to make assumptions on why Blizzard acts the way they do. Truth is we don’t know. And we know even less, since sub numbers are not publicly shared anymore.
A lot of them are settled issues before we ever hear about them. Like the blues say, they cant comment on unfinished/undecided things, so all we will ever hear are finished ideas, our commentary means nothing.
Just look at the Azerite system, it was dragged through the mud from the moment testing began but not a single memorable change was made because, to blizzard, it was already a settled matter and we are but flies around its droppings complaining about the taste. This is why they so often just go silent and trudge on, they cant go back and fix things they already finished, Ion has them doing other things by the point we hear about it.
They only time you see change is months later when they schedule time to make a compromise, its always a compromise (Pathfinder/added portal/azerite system changes) then try and act like its better than what you wanted initially.
Blizzard is an act first, then let us know later type of company.
I am guessing that we don’t see the full picture of revenue by streams for Blizzard. But, maybe you are right. Maybe the game’s revenue isn’t growing and we are playing a dying game.
That is the million dollar question. We know he actually reads these forums and player feedback, so he’s definitely aware of the things people consistently complain about it. And even though people have said it, I don’t believe he is ignoring it on purpose to serve his own ego because “he knows what’s best for the game”. I don’t think anyone could repeatedly see people be unhappy with flying being removed and disliking Pathfinder and keep telling themselves that. It’s obvious that ever since they stopped reporting sub numbers, they’ve been designing the game more and more around spreading content out longer, making it take longer to complete. And making sure we’re all doing that content on the exact same path doing the exact same kind of things, like world quests for example.
If that really is the case, I don’t think there’s really anything we can do except vote with our wallets, because it’s obvious that no amount of feedback seems to be working. If profits go down because of the shift in game design goals, they will be forced to shift them to something else, and maybe that something else will be less towards this time gated on rails monstrosity we have now.
It sucks because that’s the last thing I want for this game. I want to keep playing it and just voicing my feedback whenever I find something that I really dislike and ruins my enjoyment of the game. But we’ve already tried that, so what other option is left? They’ve kind of given us no other choice.
And now we never will because we are no longer told how many people play so even if 2 million people used the poll others could point and say thats not the majority, based off the nothing blizzard reports anymore.
WoW is like any consumer product. Trying to predict what your customers are going to want 12-18 months out is very challenging. They may even have to predict further out than that…
Sometimes you whiff… sometimes you hit a home run. But two things are always true:
You can’t please everyone
Without constant feedback from your customers, you will fail
It’s more about a horrible lack of communication in the choices they make rather than the choices, imo.
Blizz is notorious for either not communicating or blatantly spinning communication. For example, portals. The communication on why they were removing portals was: “We’re going to cut portals, but you asked for it players for a very long time and you’re going to love it!”
This would be nice and all… except there are clear choices that consumers do not even want.
GCD was negatively received. It brings nothing to the game, but makes an already outdated combat system even more painful and boring.
The portal change was also negatively received. It doesn’t add anything we didn’t have, but takes away what we had for the sake of?
Flying at launch was fine until they decided it was a problem because people were finishing WQs too fast…WQs as if those even matter to warrant such a change.
Scaling… for the same reason as above.
They have been creating solutions to problems nobody really cares about, but them.
The issue is more people are likely to complain than give positive feedback. Its just a natural human phenomenon. It happens in all customer service circles. Its one of the reasons some places really push surveys. Like I got one from the Fed Ex section of Wal Mart.
People expect perfection and things to be great. When that happens, they aren’t as likely to volunteer feedback. They feel that is how it should be.
When things go wrong, and a person is angry they are much more likely to voice their opinion.
So I am not saying the people complaining don’t have valid complaints. They almost always do. Most complaints, even if I don’t agree with, I can at least see why a person would feel that way.
I am just trying to explain why forum complaints aren’t a direct representation of the playerbase. Yes, i am sure many people with complaints don’t complain on forums, reddit, wherever. But the percentage of people that like something is always much much much much lower in their feedback.
Happy people don’t typically take time to post “hey guys, im happy with everything”.
And once again, disclaimer. Before anyone (not you specifically) takes any of this out of context. I am not saying BFA is perfect, that everyone actually love it, and it doesn’t need things fixed.
With this I can agree. Historically their communication is abysmal and detrimental. And whether or not its the majority, they should listen to as much feedback as possible.
With that being said, we might never know if for example, the data they pull on participation for a specific feature faaaar disproves 10,000 comments in the forums against such activity.
One thing to have in mind, is that historically you can observe that A LOT (more than half) the players that post in the forums, act completely different in the game. This is also data that they observe.