would wow be better off not listening to the community?

[pkm]

I don't want to start a flame war but I want hear peoples opinions on the topic. I myself would of preferred it if the devs didn't listen to the community but that's just what I think and im sure there are many that agree or disagree.

[Deleted]

On certain subjects yes.

On others maybe no.

[Justignoreme]

Blizzard always listens to the community, but they do not always take action based on the vocalisations of forum goers. Either way, they are damned if they do or damned it they don't with the vitriolic and volatile community we have.

[Woebegone]

I don't think they even make much design decisions based on the community reaction alone. There's a difference between listenting to the community and letting them design the game. If the community says something isn't working, they can take a look at the ridiculous amounts of internal statistics they gather and see if there's any truth to it, then make decisions accordingly.

[Feral Camel]

A majority of the time the community can't even agree with each other. Its about finding a happy medium. Its just a shame though. Something I feel Blizzard might not be taking risks with the game to avoid upsetting the community.

[Cliff]

I don't think they even make much design decisions based on the community reaction alone. There's a difference between listenting to the community and letting them design the game. If the community says something isn't working, they can take a look at the ridiculous amounts of internal statistics they gather and see if there's any truth to it, then make decisions accordingly.

Pretty much this.

I'd even say they sometimes defend downright stupid design decisions just to make it clear the community is not in charge of game balance. For example, the ridiculous burst capabilities warriors used to have with TFB stacks. They went as far as saying it could be avoided, that it was incredibly random and that low resilience was the reason HS numbers were that high. Eventually they nerfed it, i'd like to think it's because they knew it was downright dumb to have such an ability in the game, but they had to let the community know they nerfed it not because they demanded it, but rather because they "realized it was not the best for the game" to get globalled out of nowhere.

A majority of the time the community can't even agree with each other. Its about finding a happy medium. Its just a shame though. Something I feel Blizzard might not be taking risks with the game to avoid upsetting the community.

True, can't really blame them though. Many people are already upset about having to "relearn" how to play their classes every expansion. They'd lose so many subscribers if they decided to make radical changes in every patch, (as much as some of us would like that).

I still hope that eventually, perhaps the next beta, they decide to remove flying mounts from whatever new area they create, just to see the community reaction. Most likely it'd never go through, but just testing waters would be a big step. I'm thinking it's just something that will never make it into Titan, and WOW will continue to have flying mounts, but owelp, one can only hope :P

[schwarzkopf]

Absolutely, as a matter of fact - I even suggested it to them officially a few months back.

Sadly - they didn't listen

[Immitis]

no. even though alot of the times it seems like the only people they are responding to are the ones yelling the loudest they actually try to take in ALL feedback. there are plenty of people who write in on forums and other websites and whatnot that are actually constructive or good ideas.

does blizzard ALWAYS need to do what the community thinks? no its their game and every once in awhile theres gonna be something somewhere could be anything where they basically have to say "i dont care this is our game and we like it this way if you dont like it go somewhere else" then theirs other times where basically whatever the community says and wants goes.

typically the one where community input has the most power to change things is for stuff that doesnt really change main gameplay things like pet and mount ideas, spell effects like green warlock fire, new races and classes. those type of things are usually VERY dependent on community feedback

[Justignoreme]

I don't think they even make much design decisions based on the community reaction alone.

Community QQ'd about Wrath heroics being too easy, so Cata introduced time consuming heroics requiring tactics and brain power to complete, community QQ'd about them being too hard, so MoP is back to the Wrath model.
Community QQ'd about being "forced" to wear ugly rep tabards while they grinded heroics beyond valor cap just to get faction rep and clamoured for change. Now they QQ about being "forced" to do dailies to get rep to unlock gear.
Community QQ'd about gear being too easy to obtain and welfare epics being cosmopolitan. Now gearing in desirable stuff takes time invested, and suddenly no one has the time to do dailies and dungeons/scenarios for valor.
Community QQ'd about World PvP being non-existent so the fixed the issue with CRZ, but now people remember what World PvP was like and complain about it (but want to get rid of flying mounts to "get more people out in the world" but only to go to dungeon instance portals, not farm or do daily quests <.< )

[Deleted]

companies will always go the thin red line between listening to their customers and doing their own stuff ...

listening to customers won't make everybody happy since not all 10 million players (in case of wow) want the same.

doing their own stuff might piss off others because they didn't like it ...

you just have to make sure that the majority of the playerbase enjoys what you're putting into the game.

---------- Post added 2013-01-10 at 10:57 AM ----------

Community QQ'd about Wrath heroics being too easy, so Cata introduced time consuming heroics requiring tactics and brain power to complete, community QQ'd about them being too hard, so MoP is back to the Wrath model.
Community QQ'd about being "forced" to wear ugly rep tabards while they grinded heroics beyond valor cap just to get faction rep and clamoured for change. Now they QQ about being "forced" to do dailies to get rep to unlock gear.
Community QQ'd about gear being too easy to obtain and welfare epics being cosmopolitan. Now gearing in desirable stuff takes time invested, and suddenly no one has the time to do dailies and dungeons/scenarios for valor.
Community QQ'd about World PvP being non-existent so the fixed the issue with CRZ, but now people remember what World PvP was like and complain about it (but want to get rid of flying mounts to "get more people out in the world" but only to go to dungeon instance portals, not farm or do daily quests <.< )

^ this
very good point.

those who are unhappy with stuff usually scream louder than those happy ...
me as a happy no-QQer am sometimes pissed at blizz listening to those crying the loudest, thus reducing the quality of my gameplay ^^

---------- Post added 2013-01-10 at 11:00 AM ----------

I still hope that eventually, perhaps the next beta, they decide to remove flying mounts from whatever new area they create, just to see the community reaction. Most likely it'd never go through, but just testing waters would be a big step. I'm thinking it's just something that will never make it into Titan, and WOW will continue to have flying mounts, but owelp, one can only hope :P

not flying was already hard enough for most during leveling in MoP ... ^^
i'm quite ok with it ... but a slightly faster riding would be nice ... like there is this 280-310 for flying mounts, it would be cool to be able to raise ground mounts from 100 to 110% which doesn't than stack with other movement increasing buffs or passives. this would set the riding speed of all the players to the same level.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

If the community can provide empirical evidence as to why something should be changed, then they should listen to that. If the community can only bring anecdotal evidence to the table, then they shouldn't listen to it.

[Vargur]

I don't want to start a flame war but I want hear peoples opinions on the topic. I myself would of preferred it if the devs didn't listen to the community but that's just what I think and im sure there are many that agree or disagree.

I think WoW would be better off if Blizz would do what WE want. The game IS the community. There'd be no game without us.

[anabolicz]

Yeah mages would use Titan armor plating and the spells would hit so hard that ur wow file wud be deleted!

[Shrouded]

The community is so fragmented because of Blizzard's one-size-fits-all design, I'm not sure they'd gain much from listening. However, I firmly believe they need to listen less to numbers and statistics. More or less everything is designed and balanced around numbers and averages, to the point that they actually view average participation across all servers as a measurement of success for an activity. It's no wonder the game started feeling so bland - if you design for averages, the game will become average.

[Jackielope]

Some things they listen to and make design choices around. Theck's work compiling and modeling prot paladin data during the beta was probably instrumental in getting things changed for the better.

As a counter to that though, them listening to the hordes of people wanting buffs to DKs during WotLK's beta resulted in a mess they had to clean up and are still feeling the effects of.

In short, taking the advice of everyone is a bad idea, but so is taking none of it. Blizzard is already in the middle and only taking some of the advice given to them. It's impossible to be perfect of course, but overall they do a pretty good job of filtering stuff.

[Woebegone]

Community QQ'd about Wrath heroics being too easy, so Cata introduced time consuming heroics requiring tactics and brain power to complete, community QQ'd about them being too hard, so MoP is back to the Wrath model.
Community QQ'd about being "forced" to wear ugly rep tabards while they grinded heroics beyond valor cap just to get faction rep and clamoured for change. Now they QQ about being "forced" to do dailies to get rep to unlock gear.
Community QQ'd about gear being too easy to obtain and welfare epics being cosmopolitan. Now gearing in desirable stuff takes time invested, and suddenly no one has the time to do dailies and dungeons/scenarios for valor.
Community QQ'd about World PvP being non-existent so the fixed the issue with CRZ, but now people remember what World PvP was like and complain about it (but want to get rid of flying mounts to "get more people out in the world" but only to go to dungeon instance portals, not farm or do daily quests <.< )

Did you read my entire post? Because I don't know how accurate it is to attribute all of these changes to community QQ. That's suggesting Blizzard would not have seen problems with any of these had the community not started whining about it.

PvE difficulty has swung back and forth with each expansion ever since vanilla. Dungeon and raid completion percentages and participation rates are probably one of the easiest statistics to follow and adjust accordingly. What started with one difficulty for each has now evolved to three difficulties for each to cater to an as large an audience as possible. I don't know how big a part the community ultimately played in any of this.

Same with World PVP. Blizzard's attempts at WPvP have pretty much sucked ass ever since the towers in EPL and CRZ was something that could finally fix population and faction imbalances. I really, really doubt that kinda tech was developed over a few forum posters complaining about lack of WPvP.

I could continue but you're probably getting the point by now. Just because the community is able to occasionally point out poor design choices, doesn't mean Blizzard wasn't aware of the issues to begin with.

The only instances where I can remember Blizzard just outright folding were the Real ID thing and the idea to make grouping with cross-realm friends a paid premium service or something. Then again those created shitstorms of unparalleled propotions.

---------- Post added 2013-01-10 at 01:18 PM ----------

I'd even say they sometimes defend downright stupid design decisions just to make it clear the community is not in charge of game balance. For example, the ridiculous burst capabilities warriors used to have with TFB stacks. They went as far as saying it could be avoided, that it was incredibly random and that low resilience was the reason HS numbers were that high. Eventually they nerfed it, i'd like to think it's because they knew it was downright dumb to have such an ability in the game, but they had to let the community know they nerfed it not because they demanded it, but rather because they "realized it was not the best for the game" to get globalled out of nowhere.

I've sometimes wondered how certain builds ever make it out of test servers. It was the exact same thing with colossus smash in Cataclysm. I mean sometimes every single tester or anyone capable of rudimentary math is able to tell something will not work, it will be too powerful, but still the changes just go live and then get nerfed.

[AnotherInternetOpinion]

Yes yes yes.

[MasterHamster]

They don't always listen to the community, and that's a good thing.

[Kisho]

They listen as much as needed. The community in general does have some useful feedback sometimes, but it's not necessarily what they're actually saying. It's what they're doing that can be important.

Sometimes they do also say some useful stuff, but we all know what the WoW community (and gaming communities in general) can be like.

But yeah, the key is to listen to the right stuff. Blizzard in general does a good job of this (largely because of their hard-working community management team), so overall there's nothing to really complain about.

This thread is interesting though. Amidst a sea of whine posts about how Blizzard never listens to us, never pays attention to the community... There's still people who can think Blizzard listen to the community TOO much. Perspectives and opinions are interesting things.

[Cliff]

I've sometimes wondered how certain builds ever make it out of test servers. It was the exact same thing with colossus smash in Cataclysm. I mean sometimes every single tester or anyone capable of rudimentary math is able to tell something will not work, it will be too powerful, but still the changes just go live and then get nerfed.

Yeah, I think alot of us wonder how some things manage to make it live after months of beta testing. I think it's perhaps because they experiment with new technology when introducing new abilities, and scrapping all of that hard work for the sake of balance isn't necesarily always worth it. Perhaps it's data thats missing, and are unable to take desicions until it's tested massively on live, and hotfixes get implemented.

It seems to go like this:

New ability might be op, but we've put alot of hard work and we want to see if this new tech works. We don't have enough data, so we'll just have a hotfix ready for it, incase it gets out of hand.

Talent/skill X turns out to be OP, gets nerfed via hotfix.

Sometimes they're probably not testing new tech, rather the skill in question is integral to the way the class is "meant to be played" and they're unable to fix/replace it without messing with the deadline.

Chances are i'm talking out of my ass though, I have zero experience in game developing. It just really seems this is what happens.