Think back to WoW’s darkest hours - how was that handled by the company? It’s excuses, “we’re working on it,” roadmaps, occasionally a canned apology, stuff like that. Not once ever, in my memory, has anyone - except maybe kind of Ghostcrawler? - at the company come forward to have a real “We know we messed up. We know this isn’t right. We’re so sorry, we’re going to fix it and here’s how” moment.
The Diablo Immortal announcement strikes me as the most glaring example, but even here in present day WoW, that same holier-than-thou attitude exists amongst the devs. We’re spoken to like we’re the problem, not their systems, never them. And sometimes you just need to come forward and be honest about bad implementations [here’s looking at you, phasing], or bad design decisions.
Are they just that out of touch, is something else at play, or am I off base here?
People who work on a product tend to be very protective of that product. Consequently, a criticism of the product is often viewed as a criticism of the person who created it. Programmers, for example, are typically fiercely defensive about the code they write, even if are are demonstrably better ways of writing it. With companies like Blizzard, this defensiveness sometimes comes across in their press releases and interactions with the community (“You think you do, but you don’t.”). It’s a form of self-blindness, so in that regard, sure, Blizzard could be viewed as out of touch.
On the other hand, you have to consider the view from their end of the street. Their aim as a company is to make money, and they do significant amounts of research into this process. Such research would reveal that mobile gaming has seen a significant upswell in popularity around the globe over the past few years. This is most evident in Asian countries like China, Japan, and South Korea, but it extends to Europe and North America too. Blizzard saw an opportunity and decided to jump on it, and honestly, it’s hard to fault them for that even if the execution was a little gauche.
At any rate, I think I’m dancing around your question. Yes, they admit mistakes pretty frequently. Biggest incident that comes to mind is the RealID fiasco, where they were playing with the idea of forcing the user to display their real life information when posting on the forums. They went back on that one pretty quickly.
Square Enix scrapped FF14 entirely to remake the game because they understood it was bad. A lot of companies admit mistakes and try to make things right, just not Blizzard, Bethesda, Bioware, EA, etc.
You guys ever notice that Blizz never takes responsibility for mistakes?
No. Over the two decades+ I’ve played their games I’ve noticed they’re actually more likely to own up to any actual mistakes on their part than most other companies. They don’t always get it right, they’re not perfect, but better than most at saying ‘We screwed up and we’ll try to do better.’
I disagree. I think that they do take responsibility at times. The issue is someone will always think something is a mistake and that Blizzard needs to take responsibility for it. Before you know it everything is a mistake and needs to be accounted for. This game has been around for a long time and I definitely have my opinions on what is a mistake and how Blizzard should fix it but what about when that contradicts what someone else thought was fine and wasn’t broken? Blizzard will always be in a no win situation.
Couple of Factors might need to be brought up, 15 Year Old Game, Not the Original designers, developers, not same company, I kinda feel the people running developing and writing the story really don’t have the passion of the originals people did, and what we are use to, kinda like generic version of what we are use to quality wise. Just my humble opinion.
What on earth are you talking about? Where have they ever honestly came forward and apologizes for anything substantial? I’ve been here with my nose in it since the whole thing began, and that’s not an interaction I’ve seen in nearly fourteen years.
The problem when Blizzard admits a mistake they do it in such a robotic PR fashion that it doesn’t even feel genuine. The only person from Blizzard that made me feel otherwise was Ythisens and he got cut amongst the 800 other employees.
This is where I feel like GC was good. And I had my problems with the way that guy did some things, but he knew how to interact with people. Ion thinks he’s too good to be bothered with anything like that.