When picking an expansion theme, why does Blizzard ignore the themes people want?

[Maggibesti]

PR bureaus send out polls to gather public opinion with respect to a product. "Marketing" uses Google to hack everyone's email and see what they are talking/chatting about and deduce their interests. Blizzard doesn't send out random polls to players. They do data analysis and draw conclusions from it. Like participation in zones. Vashjir had significantly lower participation than the other cata zones, so it was reasonable to conclude most people didn't care for it, despite it being rather new and visually impressive.

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You must be new if you missed the endless threads of "why are we getting an April Fool's joke for an expansion" when MoP was revealed...

Why do people still bring up April's fool joke.

Maybe they thought it was a good idea, which it was. Wanna know why? I'll tell you a little secret, please don't tell anyone else.

Blizzard, yes a company who made World of Warcraft, also made a game called Warcraft, I know shocking, but don't tell anyone, especially the next part I'm about to tell you.

PANDARENS existed in WARCRAFT. Yeah i know even more shockingly.

And World of WARCRAFT is an MMO based on WARCRAFT.

Aren't you surprisingly shocked now?!?! Please don't tell anyone though, it's a secret.

[jjuice32]

Honestly, I have a strong feeling that a very large % of the WoW population knows VERY little about the lore so I agree with you.

I think I will agree. I've personally asked many people who asked for Emerald Dream Expansion what the Emerald Dream is and I get some very interesting answers. Very few understood what it was.

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I believe pandaren were a horrible idea and in my experience they lost quite a few older subscribers with it.

You can rationalize all you want that people shouldn't get upset over talking bouncy pandabears, but humans are humans and they have their limits on what they'll tolerate or not. The bouncy Kung Fu pandas were enough to make some people feel uncomfortable playing the game. Not many 25+ year olds like to be regularly reminded they're playing a game with 14-16 year olds.

Until you can prove your reasoning with actual data then it's just your opinion. I know many people who are my age(23) or older who love Pandaren and the addition of them to the game.

[Bleys]

I posted this about 3 months back, but I'd guess the numbers aren't too far off and it can still be relevant....:

Let's do some happy math time here

Straight from the statistics at the bottom of MMO-Champion:
Members
383,258
Active Members
30,594


So let's assume we're working from the 7.7M subscriber number.

That means that the total membership of MMO-C amounts to 4.977377% of the subscribers.
The active members computes to 0.397325% of the subscribers.

Let's go a step further and say that only about 10% of the active members actually post on threads involving game play. That now comes in at a whopping 0.03974% of the subscribers.

This, of course, is all assuming that 100% of the current members referenced above are still actively playing WoW, and 100% of those members completely support the idea being brought forward. Any statements claiming that "the players want this" based purely on the fact that it's posted on MMO-C are most likely not the case.

Saying, instead, that about 1500 players (we'll go for roughly half of the "10% of the active members") support this idea, and then taking that number to Blizzard as the basis for the immediate implementation of said idea is probably over-stating the number of players who would actually jump at something

There's your math around "well everyone wants such-and-such".

[Deleted]

I think the "community" asked for a couple of themes for the least years that we still havent seen, yet Blizzard picks something strange like Warlords of Draenor, that no one asked for.

Some examples:

- Emerald Dream: Pretty much requested since Vanilla
- Demon homeworld / Demon theme: People actually expected this as the upcoming theme and talked about this since BC.
- South Seas: People are talking about this since at least early Cataclysm.

It's not that I have anything against WoD, but the theme just strikes me as odd when there are so many other (better?) themes that people like and have been waiting for.
Especially if they want to get people back into WoW, wouldnt it make more sense to use the themes mentioned above?

Design by public request is the worst possible way of designing something like a game. It would mean nothing but rehash and poor decisions. The mob, as a group, is absolutely horrible as a designer.

Thank God Blizzard uses their own experts instead of idiot's majority vote.

[Bigbamboozal]

Come on now OP...it was obvious we were going back to the outlands. They told us they wanted to return, and it's something I had hoped for...just that I wasn't expecting them to do it like this.
Lots of us wanted a return to outlands. What rock you been under?

[Draenox]

They plan out several expansions ahead of what we see, they are likely to have their own set of plots and storylines all panned out without us ever having the slightest influence on the overall theme of an expansion.

[DeadmanWalking]

I think the emerald dream would make a good mid-tier raid but not a full expansion. If ever we have an expansion where we deal with the Naga once and for all then toss that bad boy in there for mid-tier and then Az'shara/N'zoth. It only makes sense as N'zoth is considered to be the one corrupting the emerald dream and under the sea corrupting the Naga. As for an entire expansion? No, theres not enough 'life' in the emeral dream including quest givers, animals to make poop collection quests or critters to throw mercilessly into battle ala thunderdome, two squirrels enter! One squirrel leaves!

[ringpriest]

The day Blizzard make an expansion's story entirely based on something some random group of nobodies post on a forum is the day I die of laughter...

Why? It's not as though using plot manatees like they are now is producing plots that are any better.

Pandaren + Old God + Garrosh + Trolls = MoP

Orcs + Bronze Flight + Outland + Garrosh (again) = WoD

[ReleaseDay]

Ohhhh, you mean like how everyone wanted Pandaren as a playable race?

Yeah, look how well that turned out...

Nobody ever wanted pandaren as a playable race ever. Not even as npcs. 99.88% of all players had never even heard of pandarens in warcraft. It was a flop, it is a flop, it will remain a flop.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Nobody ever wanted pandaren as a playable race ever. Not even as npcs. 99.88% of all players had never even heard of pandarens in warcraft. It was a flop, it is a flop, it will remain a flop.

You don't speak for everyone. Everyone may not have wanted Pandaren but to say nobody is just an outright lie.

[Cthulhu 2020]

Pandaren have always been a part of lore. There has always been known to be a Pandaria continent since WC3, which is even longer than we've known about non broken draenei. Blizzard introduced their continent then it was torn apart by the alliance/horde war which awakened the will of an old gold. That sounds pretty damn WoW-fitting to me. People need to stop coming up with bad excuses for why they didn't like Pandaria. If you didn't like it that's fine, but to say that it doesn't fit WoW is blatantly FALSE.

Lots of players had been ASKING for a Pandaria too, and a playable Pandaren race. Their "thank yous" were drowned out by the torrent of 0.5% of the population QQing and making the same thread over and over again. You'd think that all the threads were indicative of everyone hating Pandas, then you go in to find out it was the same 20 people hating.

It's also not exactly easy to just up and change your plans for an expansion. When Pandaria had been in development for years at the point of the announcement, they couldn't exactly go back on it.

[DeadmanWalking]

Nobody ever wanted pandaren as a playable race ever. Not even as npcs. 99.88% of all players had never even heard of pandarens in warcraft. It was a flop, it is a flop, it will remain a flop.

You have confused yourself with everyone. Stop it. MoP was the best story driven expansion to date and one of the best expansions wow has ever produced from beginning to end. Your opinion is not shared by 99.88% of the player base. My opinion is you should stop making up numbers because it makes you look silly.

[Cthulhu 2020]

I saw more forum QQ that Blizzard retconned the fuck out of lore to fit draenei into the story, than over Pandas.

[The Madgod]

And Blizzard does just that time and again. They aren't the company that makes a great game and everyone tags along because it's so good. They are the company that is trying to figure out what they can do that will make the most money. It's money first, everything else second now.

And yes, I know they are a company. But business isn't "Make as much money as you can at all cost". Blizzard is sacrificing integrity more and more as time goes on.

Except not really. Outcry against Mists was staggering. They didn't drop it, they continued on, and continued the story Mists told into Warlords. That's absolutely artistic integrity, they're making the game THEY want to play.

The only time they pandered was basically in the beginning of Cataclysm and look how that turned out.

[ComputerNerd]

Because what players ask for is not always what you see on forums.
Lots of views here which get represented vocally, even if they prove to be the minority.
You can't judge the popularity of a subject by the amount of noise, as typically those who have a more negative view of the game yell a lot louder.

[Cthulhu 2020]

In my experience it was only a very vocal minority on the forums asking for Pandaren to be added to the game. So it's funny when 0,05% of the playerbase loudly asks for something it get proclaimed as: "Everyone wants it!", but when it's criticism everyone pretends it's only a minority that is complaining.

People ask for Pandaren, people ask for Emerald Dream, people ask for Burning Legion. People only got it in their heads that a Burning Legion expansion was coming up because of all the hints given via the legendary quest line. People ask for a lot of things, but overall it all seemed about equal.

I know I'd been looking forward to them expanding on Pandaren lore since WC3. And that Pandarens were first put in as a "joke" was a rumor that has been debunked long ago. Samwise made a drawing of a Panda in the WoW theme for his kid, and when the devs liked it, they put it in as a "secret" character for WC3 with various hints to Pandas throughout WC3, the biggest being Illidan's glaives. He stole them from a demon, but why would a demon have warglaives with panda faces on the hilt guards?

People who say Pandaren don't belong in WoW are ridiculous. Pandaren have been a part of WoW lore far longer than even non-broken draenei. Blizzard had to retcon (go back and change) established lore to make non-broken draenei fit with the story FFS! And people complain about Pandaren not belonging? Please. They just saw kung fu pandas and completely blocked it out of their head that pandas could ever be a part of WoW. Blizzard made it work well, but people were stubborn and refused to accept it. The loud forum crows is ALWAYS a tiny minority, and those content with changes or upcoming content tend to just be quiet, while those not are the loudest complaints. As a regular forum presence, I can tell you with certainty that I can look at the complaint threads on the WoW forums and MMOC and I see the same people posting in every complaint thread over and over. A few new people will chime in every now and then in agreement, but by and large it's the exact same 20-100 people (depending on the issue) complaining for months on end. And even their numbers dwindle as time goes on.

People can not like Pandas all they want, but they need to stop convincing themselves that Pandas didn't belong, because that is patently false.

[Dazzy]

Because game development is not a democracy, games are not designed solely on the desires of the majority of the playerbase. When blizzard asks for feedback or any developer for that matter they don't ask you how to design the game they already have some goals beforehand but do "some" changes to the original plan based on the feedback they receive and the goals they already have in mind.

It's not even close to the majority, the number of people on the blizzard forums is a tiny fraction of the playerbase.

[Sal the Shieldhog]

In my experience it was only a very vocal minority on the forums asking for Pandaren to be added to the game. So it's funny when 0,05% of the playerbase loudly asks for something it get proclaimed as: "Everyone wants it!", but when it's criticism everyone pretends it's only a minority that is complaining.

Blizzard themselves have said, "The amount of requests we've gotten for the Pandaren have been staggering over the years." You forget that they have other ways of getting feedback than the forums; emails, surveys, etc. Hell, the outcry back in the days of W3 were enough to justify a whole new addition to the game, in the form of this: http://classic.battle.net/war3/pandaren/