Softball questions are going to be picked.
Not real questions like why was azerite feedback ignored, or class feedback, why did it take till mid xpac to adress the overpurning, or why instead of baking in artifact abilities you made then talents. why even bother having a CM team if we arent listened to.
Being listened to doesn’t mean you’ll hear the answers you want.
What, if anything, have you learned from the release of Classic and current retail World of Warcraft that you would apply to the current iteration of the game?
Will Gladiator Warriors ever make a return?
MFW you idiots think its gonna be anything other than softball questions that dont really have answers.
lol, we already know that your bosses have already had a team of writers come up with the questions. the climate around the protests and everything else is too hot for you guys to even contemplate taking actual customer questions because you know 99% of them are going to be either troll questions or about FORBIDDEN TOPICS that you wouldn’t be able to acknowledge anyway.
that being said, i do have some questions that have nothing to do with certain recent events.
account wide essences when? if not, why not?
why do you hate alts so much?
why do you hate alliance so much?
yeah, those are the main questions i have…
-Bornakk 2k19
EDIT: My actual question
Is there going to be a discussion on any worthwhile class changes coming in the near future? Now this is only a rumor of a whisper of a conjecture but I heard that there was an issue within the company of the current software for World of Warcraft not actually being sufficient enough to implement the subject matter and material that the developers want to, so the next expansion maybe be the last one for this game. And then after the next expansion, There is going to be a World of Warcraft 2 with a different software/hardware system within the company that is more modernized so the players can finally get next-generation content for this gaming platform? It wouldn’t be the worst thing to do, to start a new storyline with a new concept and all the game material being updated and optimized, but within the same game-world.
When am I getting my Geblin?
They have to listen first. The only thing blizzard said so far is they screwed up on classes.
Yeah I wonder who’s going to be that guy who wants to be in the Spotlight of Stupid asking questions like that to game developers and not company executives.
Does your development team actually have players with a variety of playstyles playing their own game? Blizzard used to say they just designed games they themselves wanted to play, but I can’t believe that’s the case anymore.
As someone with a mindset oriented towards collections, BFA has probably been the worst expansion Blizzard’s ever done for collectors. Who do they run their collectible systems and tuning ideas past before it makes it into the live game? Every patch in retail unleashes a big tide of items all subject to varying levels of over-saturated RNG, often with absurd requirements, and never with bad luck protection.
Do the developers only experience farming for this type of stuff when it’s on some PTR server with an artificially inflated drop rate? How many people on the development staff have actually experienced, say, opening 20 paragon chests in the live game (200,000 rep past exalted) and still not getting the item they’re after? Players barely post about this stuff anymore, because why bother? All the feedback was ignored patch after patch.
Example Areas of Severe RNG Outcomes
Paragon chests still suck because they lack bad luck protection for such a grindy method of experiencing RNG (complained about since Legion - in fact, at the end of Legion, the devs said they’d stop putting mounts in paragon chests because of the complaints, then they doubled back on that in BFA with the Nazjatar paragon chest, but regardless, the problem is putting soulbound collectibles in the chests without bad luck protection).
Island Expedition mounts look like they’re going to get an improvement next patch, but it’s about a year too late to wipe the stain off of the experience of them in BFA, and the solution Blizzard happened on is… more RNG loot boxes you’ll be able to buy with dubloons. Despite all the feedback asking to just make the items purchasable with dubloons directly, Blizzard is STILL sticking them in RNG loot boxes (Will they have bad luck protection? Probably not, going by Blizzard’s track record).
And who’s the awesome developer who said to themselves, “you know, 1% drop rate mounts are fine, but what patch 8.2 really needs is rare spawns with less than 1% drop rate mounts. And lets give one of them a variable spawn rate that can take several hours and has variable spawn locations.” (Soundless)
RNG is Not Inherently Bad - But it is Overtuned and Overused in Retail WoW’s Collectible Side of the Game
RNG to some level is great. RNG has a healthy role to play in the game. But holy hell, between paragon chests still lacking bad luck protection with collectibles, island expedition mounts, less than 1% drop rate mounts, and other miscellaneous insanity, this stuff just looks like it’s being designed by a sadist hoping to keep people around through gambling addiction. (And yes, many of us do just stop pursuing these things, but it’s made WoW feel like a worse game because of it).
Not everything needs bad luck protection. But the more grindy a task is in order to pull a slot machine lever, the more it should have bad luck protection. That’s what ought to separate a Blizzard developer from being like some sleazy casino manager.
And this is just talking about the collectible side of the game, which Blizzard of course has always designed as a major area of player activity. (There’s a reason a big chunk of the user interface was built to guide players on obtaining mounts, pets, toys, transmog, identifying locations to farm them, achievements designed to reward collecting groups, meta achievements built around hitting collection benchmarks, etc.)
Talking to Blizzard Just Feels Pointless
I won’t even rehash the mountains of feedback about the over-abundance of RNG in PvE gearing, or the irritation with the removal of PvP gear vendors, which were replaced with… RNG gearing (seriously, does Blizzard have PvP’ers on staff who complained that there wasn’t RNG in PvP gearing?). What happened to designing games you yourselves would want to play?
Sadly, there’s no way to ask this kind of thing as a small Q&A question and get a meaningful response. Ask them about bad luck protection, and they’ll just say they don’t think it’s needed and that RNG is fun. Ask about the severity of RNG reliance these days, and they’ll point to past rare collectibles and say that’s nothing new (even though the first big difference these days is the volume of RNG things released, which is definitely higher, and some RNG reward systems have no analogue to expansions before Legion - like paragon chests or island expeditions as they’ve functioned till now).
Unfortunately, a decent exchange over a topic like this would require someone actually interviewing the developers to discuss it in depth, but generally the interviewers are even more about “softball” questions than the Q&A is (because the interviewers don’t want to risk not getting to interview them again in the future).
Blizzard’s developers just seem utterly insulated from the experience of playing their own game from a variety of gameplay styles. Or maybe any style. (I would say they at least have Ion for the hardcore, mythic raider style, but the people raiding at that level don’t seem happy either these days, often for similar, too-much-RNG reasons).
Torvald, this isn’t a question submission thread. It’s a thread about the question submission process.
" If you can’t attend BlizzCon in the flesh, don’t worry. We’ll open a forum thread* for your questions on Friday, November 1, and we’ll collect your questions until 6:00 a.m. PDT on Saturday, November 2."
And? As I said, my kind of question doesn’t work well for the Q&A process. It’s a post about an issue I’d like to see them address, but why I’d have low expectations of them addressing it substantively or honestly in the Q&A.
If you look through the thread, most commentary is about questions people would like to see or what questions they think they’ll be evasive in answering (or just people mocking the Q&A). Not a bunch of people talking about the specific date and time the question thread will go up.
Also, threads like this can be a good place for people to discuss how complicated topics with large questions could potentially be turned into a small question capable of eliciting a substantive answer.
And…expecting a blue answer here is setting yourself up for disappointment. Now if you were just posting for the forum crowd and reactions from forum goers - forget I said anything.
Yeah, I’m generally always just posting for the forum crowd. I never expect blue posts to respond to anyone on anything anymore (though who knows, maybe some Blizzard developers do a fair bit of lurking on the forums without posting, but I kind of doubt it - I think it’d depress them too much to read this place).
Sometimes I’ll phrase a point though as if it’s addressing Blizzard. I don’t usually think about it too much, but thinking about it now, I guess it’s because it can give a post more of a rhetorical flow.
So when is the Q & A forum going up?
So some of us have been faithful to N’zoth and kept his blessing. Will there be rewards or punishments for those of us who still have the gift in 8.3?
I almost thought I missed it! 
When will players see more bugfixes for the new worgen models? Glowing eyes don’t work, many sounds are totally wrong, and the running animations are still way too stiff.
Question now that we have the expansion reveal.
How will the level squish affect the old legacy raid content and it being soloable?
But do you have a mobaphone?