Why is it that after 2 decades

Community General Discussion
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This gaming company still struggles with communicating with the community?

We can all speculate but in reality I feel they don’t think we’re worth talking to. Perhaps they resent us as if this is a relationship between two friends who’ve had a huge argument and they’re both too prideful to use words to fix things?

One simple tweet and or website post on a daily basis goes so far. I’m sure this would be a simple task for Blizzard yet here we are in 2018 still struggling with talking to each other. Blizzard consistently implements changes that drastically affect the gaming experience of so many players without saying a word. There is no legit excuse for it this far down the line.

In my 13, 14 years with WOW I’ve hardly used any forum in relation to this game - until BFA launched. Since then I’ve made it a daily routine to visit the forums; to both read about and speak my mind on multiple serious matters. Matters that impact both the game and its community (which both I’ve come to love). I do this because I care. I care about what happens to the game and the experiences of my fellow players.

If Blizzard is hurting for effective people whose job is to help this situation, hire me. I’ve been without a job (and most of my passion) for quite some time. But I can easily and happily type up a wall of text that resembles patch notes every day to every other day. I am willing to take that type of responsibility so that the community and the game (and in turn the company) prosper and move forward. Communication is key in any relationship and when that goes, bad things will happen.

I said it a few times before - I feel they need to hire a team of competent nerds who play WOW 24/7 (coughmecough). We need dedicated people who make it their daily goal to build a rock solid bridge of communication and knowledge between game developer and player. To have a group of people who are consistent and actively seek out relatively useful feedback from the player base and relay that to headquarters. This type of process needs to never stop - it would be of great service to everyone involved.

We the community cannot read minds. At least, not to my knowledge. I don’t believe it’s too much to ask for. A daily/bidaily post to tell us what’s up would be beyond appreciated.

/moo

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it’s a different attitude towards receiving communication these days. long ago, if i heard the phone ring, i ran to answer it because you never knew if grandma was calling long distance or if it was just auntie from down the street

after most everyone got dialup internet, we got caller id so we could now screen incoming calls. and with the cordless handset, i didn’t have to scramble to answer anymore.

same goes for writing letters. i remember being taught how to format and properly word a professional business letter. with emails, you could just delete spam if the subject/sender looks fishy and not even read the body; and nowadays we can just mouth off texts willy nilly till we block one another

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Indeed there have been a number of promises over time to improve communications which have seemingly produced a lovely chorus of cricket chirps telling us essentially we don’t know what we’re talking about (and sometimes that is even true). In saying that, this is an industry-wide issue. It seems something about the gaming industry that produces/attracts really poor communicators, who seem incapable of rectifying this shortcoming. I worked/managed in the hospitality industry for years, and if staff spoke with the amount of disdain some devs and CMs do, they’d be up for first and final warnings…not so though here. I couldn’t have seen any manager surviving in the hospitality industry with the infamous “You think you do, but you don’t.” I bring up the hospitality industry because it too is where you deal with large numbers of unreasonable people who sometimes cloud your vision of all the reasonable people. But it’s your job to make sure that even when the customer is wrong, the customer pays for the food on your table, so find a way to make them right, and if you aren’t sincere about that go work in a less emotionally taxing environment.

Oh but they do…if you mean people like Preach, Bellular, and other quality casters who are also making a living out of this game, but aren’t bound contractually to the company. These are not trolls, hatemongers, abusers etc, these are fairly qualified critics who ALWAYS give praise where it is due, and ALWAYS give the benefit of the doubt. The majority of the major casters have complained loudly and consistently (since beta) that the devs have not been acting on feedback in a timely manner, and worse on some important things not at all. This gives a perception that they are not hearing the base. Of course, they are reading the feedback, if they weren’t I would wonder what is the point of paying people to do so, and that would be wasting profit - and no corporation is into wasting profits.

They are however, clearly trapped in their own narrative, to me. I hear this a lot when the devs speak to defend their decisions - so often it’s about ‘we wanted to do this thing we thought is cool’ Where in that statement is “We researched your desires and pushed out limits to deliver you what you asked for” It does happen, just less often than I think they think. If they are surprised that an expansion is received poorly, that means they have not done their due diligence. If they can’t respond promptly to their own errors, including mis-reading/ignoring the base, then they haven’t managed their risk.

I’ve been in-game since late TBC, have taken a lot of breaks over decisions I don’t agree about. That’s fine I don’t expect the game to cater to all my desires. But I do expect them to listen and act according to the feedback of people far more qualified than me. When those people say ‘Hey look here’s a ton of evidence’ that players are being ignored or paid lip-service - then even if I’m enjoying the game I get pissed. Because while the work of the devs (in particular the art teams) can often be awesome, this game is nothing without the player base.

For me it is a ‘follow the money’ matter - if Blizzard can profit while still not listening to the player base in a manner which the player base feels heard, then Blizzard will do that. If it is more profitable to ignore the player base, then it will become part of their culture, the rest of their blather about games for gamers is just marketing.

Honestly though, I am more worried about the rumours of poor remuneration, poor work-place culture, and an Activision CFO coming in demanding cuts. That, to me is more of a threat, than a well-managed ‘ignore the players until you can’t’ standard corporate attitude.

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Judging by these forums, most of the time they’re right.

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Why is it that after 2 decades you haven’t figured out that communicating with the community isn’t this gaming company’s thing?

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Blizz isn’t 100% to blame for lack of communication the “community” that is full of baseless toxic statements not really interested in talking just after attention is to blame as well

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A large problem here is that mob mentality has taken over. With that comes hate for the sake of hate because it is the popular thing. If we got more Blue posts and responses to things and less of these Ion Hazzikostas (spelling?) lawyer speak answer dodges on rare occasions, i think the vitriol would be MUCH less. Yes negativity will still exist but people are able to accept straight answers even if they dont agree. In the end at least only the extremists will keep up the hate, and they wont do it much because they will obviously be a minority.

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They are paid to look beyond the toxic stuff. Using the toxicity of a certain percentage of the community to excuse poor corporate behaviour shouldn’t even be an argument should it?

I mean when you have people given such detailed, qualified and insightful feedback like the Method Team (and other pro-players), casters such as Bellular, Preach, Evital & Taliesin (who I should note have been mostly positive about the expansion), SignsofKelani, etc; and the vast majority of them have complained since beta about key issues not being addressed even up and including 8.1 - you have to start counting down the days until Ion walks out another one of his ‘apologies.’

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The forums have been a cesspit of complaining that the game has been ruined since beta.

I remember back when mages were “ruined” because invisibility got removed from beta and didn’t make it to live.

RPG Elements were “ruined” when paladins couldn’t turn evil undead player characters.

The list is endless, and its always “but this time is the worst”

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Communicating is hard when a majority of your community calls for people to be fired over every little thing.

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99% of the crap on these forums are toxic hard to look past that and when there is a blue post nothing but insults follow.

Blizz needs to be better listening to beta testers (100% their fault)

They don’t need to listen to the morons on these forums (100% our fault)

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It’s hard but even toxic trolls sometimes produce gold. In a service industry, it comes with the turf that you have to wade through the poo to make sure you don’t miss that gold. From Ion’s comments about such over time, I think the executive team gets that. Again the level of player toxicity is not an excuse for poor corporate behaviour - and their communications across their games (and to be fair for corporations across the gaming industry) is really poor. The poor corporate behaviour has zero to do with player toxicity. We only have rumours as to why it seems like Blizzard’s internal culture is in a bit of choas, but I’ll lay a bet it has more to do with that than the player base.

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:slight_smile:

Depends though, how you define communication. Subscriptions are a form of communication, so is buying WoW tokens for gold, etc. etc.

How about this, let me ask you:

What are the top 10 things from these forums (with links to the original posts) that Blizzard should pay attention to, and what are the stats (with links) that support those being the top 10?

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More communication isn’t the answer. Hazzikostas can’t give a Q&A without lying about something.

Today it was “BFA had less pruning than previous expansions” when we all know that isn’t true.

The best thing regarding communication is if Blizzard granted legitimate interviews, like politicians and business leaders do with actual journalists.

Put the WoW devs in front of somebody with balls who will ask tough questions, call out Blizzard on their lies, and push them until they give real responses.

But Blizzard won’t submit to that. Not when they can do puff pieces with “influencers” who are just brown-nosing for beta keys to give away.

EDIT: Note that this is an industry-wide problem. There is no actual coverage of the game industry because it’s so blog-slanted. Even sites like forbes and kotaku get much of their “news” from bloggers. You can read through anything they put out and find tons of factual errors. Same goes for just about any industry source, except the actual data-stuff that is limited to white papers and data houses, which isn’t distributed to the public.

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Oh, but you see, it use to be that way. Back in vanilla the developers would actually get on the GD forums and converse with players, they even had a “Suggestions” forum where players could pitch ideas about the game. That all evaporated about 2014 when the original development team was replaced with the current one. I’m not sure why this current team are so afraid of us - we’re not that scary IMO.

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Before there was multiple devs ready to face the “shi t-storm” of being a public face. Now we only get Ion, there’s not so much a man can do alone.

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Well, I’ve noticed a trend.

  1. You can write a lengthy, but constructive post and it not be worthy to the MVPs for highlighting out of the mines of Moria “echo chamber.”

  2. Dance the fine line of subversive attitude and hinge on ad hominems.

Which is quicker, ultimately, in the hope of a response? Frankly, it is exhausting hoping for any response. I get it; they cannot talk to us all one on one.

Being heard is powerful. I, at least, try putting in my thoughts in as many threads that I might have something worthwhile to say. Still, it feels like i am part of the dregs, the level 3 running out of the start zone on gray gear.

You must be this tall and important to ride the train to the big city where big people are so important. And unless I have a blog, stream, twitch, or etc then my perspective, my motivation to play is irrelevant because reasons.

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This is true - not just in WOW but in real life as well. People form tribes whether it is done on purpose or not. Within these tribes structures of thought and beliefs are created. And anything that goes against the common way of thinking used within the bubble is seen as an attack. We need to stop this way of thinking.

Great things happen when tribes are able to have discourse. Constructive conversation is important to have even among seeming enemies. When the conversation stops it creates a breeding ground of distrust and turned into resentment then turned into hatred. It’s not healthy to avoid communicating with each other - we need it so we can improve each other’s lives. /moo

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They don’t view it as a discussion between friends. They view themselves as elites. Probably because they have thousands of people screaming their names at every Blizzcon. They are above us. They’re teachers: we’re children. They don’t want to bother talking to us, and they certainly don’t think they have to care what we think or want.

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A WoW developer said to me, near the end of Burning Crusade, “It doesn’t matter if people like it. WE like it.”

Says it all.

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