…you actively get worse at communicating with your playerbase about changes you’re trying to make to the game?
Disclaimer: A lot of this is coming from a Mythic raider’s perspective, but a lot of this boils down to very similar things more casual players have been complaining about, albeit with regard to different forms of content. It’s also a very long post, so there’s a TL;DR at the bottom.
Look, I get it. WoW has a really toxic fanbase and part of me kinda understands why the devs would be so hesitant to want to communicate with the playerbase, especially considering the sheer amount of vitriol going around regarding Blizzard and regarding WoW at the moment. But at the same time, communication is a two-way street. If the playerbase feels as though it is intentionally being ignored, or that its feedback isn’t being listened to, the playerbase will logically meet everything with a ton of vitriol in return.
After basically every interview, be it one with Ion or one with Morgan Day and almost without fail, one of the two parrots the same “We’re always trying to work on communicating better with the playerbase” routine and within half a year there’s nothing but radio silence about much of anything regarding the game. It’s frustrating. How can you realistically say “we’re trying to do a better job at communicating with the players” if that’s just blatantly untrue and with each patch you do a worse job at it?
I think the most blatant recent example of this failure in communication lies in Patch 9.1’s Domination Shard system and the many, many problems it brings:
For as little as I care about Preach himself, he mentioned in his latest video (the one where he says his channel isn’t covering WoW content anymore) that his contacts at Blizzard were genuinely surprised when players’ reactions to Shards of Domination were as overwhelmingly negative as they were considering how loudly they were begging for the return of tier sets since the start of BFA. The only thing here that genuinely surprises me is the fact that the devs were completely blind and deaf to the enormous amount of feedback posts throughout the 9.1 PTR forums about how poorly-implemented the Domination Shard system was.
Every complaint by players posting there boiled down to one of three "categories, if you will:
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The Domination Shards offer a non-negligible benefit outside of the raid environment from which they are obtained, so PvPers and players who prioritize M+ may feel obligated to raid to perform well in their ideal content paths.
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The Domination Shards’ 3-set bonuses are an extremely watered-down version of the tier set bonuses of old and perfectly showcase why tier sets were so beloved in the first place. The Unholy Shard 3-set is ludicrously powerful, amounting to somewhere between a raw 10%-15% DPS increase at rank 5, but all it does is give you stacking primary stat and a big primary stat proc at 15 stacks like the old Shadowmourne did, except now literally everyone uses it. It doesn’t change how you play the game, nor is it something you actively play around: you just get it and it just makes you do more damage with everything, period.
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The Domination Shards and the set bonus system surrounding them kept on receiving a bunch of very large changes while Patch 9.1 was already live. The buffs to the set bonuses (which simply made the absurdly strong Unholy set bonus up to 300% better as is and buffed the other two a decent amount) were hotfixed in the week before SoD was released on live servers, for instance. They were a problem and everyone knew they’d be a problem. They weren’t interesting, still, but they were broken. But, as you’ll find out later, if you take too long to fix something that isn’t utterly gamebreaking you may as well not fix it at all, especially when said broken element is tied to stuff you can only get in extremely limited quantities per week.
So let’s fast-forward to Tuesday, July 27th. Out of the blue, while players are in the middle of their Mythic raids, these set bonuses’ effects are suddenly cut in half and have tooltips to reflect these stealth nerfs. Players are pissed (and justifiably so) because, out of the blue, they’re all doing 5-6% less damage but the raid hasn’t been nerfed by 5-6% at the same time. Nerfs never feel good, but every single person in the raid doing 5-6% less damage or healing in the middle of the raid is just unacceptably bad. We’re talking “I genuinely want to quit the game over this” levels of bad.
What happened, exactly? Well, unless you had access to Twitter or heard from someone who did, you’d have absolutely no idea what was going on. As it turns out, these set bonuses were supposed to be nerfed with this week’s resets but were accidentally pushed through as hotfixes, with absolutely zero documentation to go with them, worldwide. One guild, MnM, had a 45.9% wipe to Mythic Sylvanas with these nerfed set bonuses; since the boss ends at 45.0%, they wiped to the boss because of something that was quite literally not their fault.
The only way, like I said, that you would’ve known about it was if you were actively following Jeff Hamilton, Senior Systems Designer for WoW at the moment or knew about these replies to another person’s tweets. Because that’s the only avenue through which these hotfixes were communicated at all.
I want to add a few disclaimers here, though:
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First off, this was during the height of the ActiBlizz lawsuit controversy and Jeff was extremely stressed out (as literally anyone in his position would be). Not communicating this hotfix and accidentally pushing said hotfix in the first place were a mistake, but they’re also a mistake anyone could’ve made if they were in Jeff’s position. I don’t think Jeff’s a bad person and you shouldn’t either.
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Second, Blizzard did end up reading feedback from hundreds upon hundreds of extremely disgruntled Mythic raiders and reverting the nerfs going forward (they aren’t coming this reset when they were supposed to, they aren’t coming thereafter, and the hotfixes stickied at the top of GD prove this). I was one of the people who replied to Jeff on Twitter and I also made a post on the thread in r/CompetitiveWoW that got a lot more attention, and the main points I presented were points that much, much better players than me pointed out as well. The Shards and their set bonuses are not being nerfed anymore, and that’s good, but it took a lot of extremely outraged Mythic raiders (the players who were affected the most by these nerfs) to get this change made.
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Lastly: Though there was a massive lapse in communication on Jeff’s part, this is not Jeff’s fault whatsoever, at least based on what he Tweeted out. The devs need approval from someone else (a higher-up; maybe Ion, maybe someone else even higher up the totem pole than Ion) to communicate to any significant degree. They read the feedback, but they can’t really have a dialogue with the playerbase without someone else telling them they’re allowed to.
So again: no, this isn’t exclusively Jeff’s fault here. If you’re going to harass him or any of the other devs over this, you’re a scumbag, plainly and simply. Don’t do that; it’ll just give the devs even less of a reason to communicate with us.
The last point is indicative of a much larger problem in terms of the devs’ communication with the playerbase: someone higher up on the totem pole (I don’t know who and neither do you, so don’t go pointing fingers at anyone) is consciously making it difficult for these two parties to have some form of proper dialogue, and when said rare dialogue even happens it’s almost always through and based on feedback from some third-party website like Twitter or Reddit and not through and based on feedback posted on the game’s official forums. Why is that a thing?
You also shouldn’t just randomly drop a stealth hotfix that just nerfs everyone by 5-6% and not communicate that somewhere within the game or its official forums. Not everyone who plays WoW has Twitter, nor does everyone who plays WoW have a Reddit account. And such a colossal nerf also has some serious ramifications: not only is everybody getting a 5-6% nerf a day later (with many of whom probably not even knowing why) and effectively doing less damage from one week to the next despite getting better gear and better set bonuses, but everyone’s getting nerfed after spending large amounts of a currency (Stygian Embers) that can only be obtained in extremely limited amounts per week.
The change, should it have gone through with the gross lack of communication it ended up getting outside of Twitter (again: not really Jeff Hamilton’s fault so don’t come after him over it), would’ve sent a very horrible message: that the developers of an MMO like this one have zero respect for invested players or the large amounts of time they willingly spent being invested in this game. No player, be they a casual transmog farmer who does World Quests as his or her ideal endgame, a World First-level Mythic raider from a prestigious guild like Limit or Echo, or anyone in between these two extremes, likes having their time blatantly disrespected and wasted.
In this case, Mythic raiders felt like their time spent trying to get these set bonuses, the gear that enabled them, and the currency needed to upgrade them was blatantly spat on by the devs. An unannounced sweeping change of that nature, several weeks into the raid tier, genuinely would’ve made Mythic raiders quit the game in huge numbers; you’ve already disrespected your casual players’ time, so the last thing you’d want is to disrespect that group’s time as well. I was very, very close to quitting the game for good over this change, and so were many players from a lot of my server’s Mythic guilds.
I’d just like to note, though, that the Shards of Domination system and all its catastrophic failures are just the most recent and applicable example of “your gross lack of communication is severely hurting this game for your players.” The fact of the matter is simple: every time someone like Ion or Morgan Day has promised “better communication,” ever since the cataclysmic failure that was Warlords of Draenor six or seven years ago, communication has only gotten worse. While changes have been made to Shadowlands after extreme amounts of complaints from players (i.e. raid loot no longer having a pitiful 1 in 7 droprate or M+ gaining a semblance of a gear progression system), they’ve been arriving at as glacial a rate as the expansion’s content itself. It genuinely feels like there’s little to no communication between the devs and the players whatsoever more often than not, and that’s absolutely unacceptable. Torghast is still only using a fraction of a fraction of its true potential and has become extremely stale extremely quickly. Conduit Energy is still universally despised by the entire playerbase yet still exists for some arbitrary reason. And the entire Covenant system has so much potential yet continues to be every bit of the flop it was slated to be from Beta. Yet there’s no communication about it at all from the devs. And if that means the higher-ups who are intentionally stopping devs from having an open dialogue with their players are the ones that need to hear this message, then so be it.
“TL;DR” for the people who don’t want to read this exceedingly long rant:
Every time one of the lead devs promises “better communication” the exact opposite has been delivered and there’s been little to no communication whatsoever each time, and it’s only been getting worse. Stop only communicating with players through third-party sites instead of official first-party means, as this has been a problem for casual players for a while and nearly became a huge one for more competitive players very recently. And if the devs are being restricted from actively communicating by their higher-ups, those higher-ups need to know that the last thing this company needs right now is to lose even more goodwill with even more of its customers like this.
Obviously, though, Blizzard’s #1 priority should be cleaning house. There are some genuinely disgusting people that have worked or are still working at that company and if you really do want to regain some level of goodwill with your current or former players addressing the rampant sexual harassment going on within the company, as described in the lawsuit, should be the first thing on any higher-up’s mind.