Ghostcrawler: "player feedback is nearly always too long"

[styil]

http://askghostcrawler.tumblr.com/po...ovide-feedback

In a recent blog post regarding useful feedback, Ghostcrawler mentions that player feedback is "nearly always too long" and developers don't really want to "distill out the really critical information".

To be honest, I don't agree with him on this one. I think that this is a copout and I hope that the developers at Blizzard do not share his opinion. Too long and they say it's too hard to find the feedback. Too short and they'll say there wasn't enough feedback to understand the concerns.

Blizzard has paid community managers whose responsibilty is to sift through this feedback and to provide concise summaries to the developers. Which should not be a problem if they actually read through every thread like they insist they do. So I cannot imagine a situation where feedback would be "too long" unless there is some sort of breakdown between the community managers and developers (which would not surprise me given some of the replies as of late).

I don't think all the problems that made it to live in Legion were caused by leaving feedback that was too long in the Alpha and Beta. I think that it was more to do with ego and the developers wanting to do things their way and chose to ignore the feedback.

Is it possible for WoW player feedback to be too long despite the systems that Blizzard has in place? Or is this just another copout on top of all the other excuses when it comes to the issue of player feedback?

[Crysake]

can we finally stop quoting ghostcrawler on everything? soon we'll know what sounds his butthole makes when he's pooping.

this guy is no longer doing wow. stop.

[UnluckyAmateur]

I mean, at this point you're basically trying to squeeze the juice out of a dry lemon.

[Deleted]

it's one of those complaints everybody has about something at their work. yeah ofcourse your job would be easier if your clients/boss had a degree in your field so they could give you precise instructions instead of vague crap.

at the end of the day, interpreting feedback (whether from players, QA, your boss, etc) is a core part of a game designers job, so just suck it up and do what you are paid for, nobodies job is perfect.

[Deleted]

I would not listen to this shit wow community either.
No matter what choice id make as a game developer there would always be a very vocal minority jumping my throat because I did not make the choice they wanted me to.

Id ignore all of em and make the game how I see fit.

[Darkeon]

"WoD is bad." - Omgosh! Too short! Non-constructive Criticism!
"[Long, detailed complain about WoD]" - Ugh... Too Long; Didn't Read.

[thilicen]

I've seen people write essays that essentially say fuck all, others just bash on everything with little to no basis. If I was a dev I'd use very little of my time going through all the crap this community throws at them.

[Relapses]

Good to know we're retroactively applying insight from a dude who hasn't even fucking worked for Blizzard in more than three years.

[Armourboy]

Is some of it probably too long? Yeah I've seen some posts that were several character limits long where even if I had an interest I stopped part of the way through. I do think some are guilty of rambling. Maybe the better way of saying it on his part should of been " players need to be concise and deal with one problem per thread rather than trying to fix every single issue in one post ". That I could understand from their view point as a developer.

The problem is for lots of issues though they all kind of tie in together. Some players feel the need to support every single detail because the Devs have essentially asked you to do that in the past. Arguments without facts quickly turn into crying in lots of people minds.

[mysticx]

"WoD is bad." - Omgosh! Too short! Non-constructive Criticism!
"[Long, detailed complain about WoD]" - Ugh... Too Long; Didn't Read.

It seems to come down to this sadly, just scrambling for excuses to dismiss feedback...

[stolker]

you people really underestimate the volume of text that the community produces. as a game dev myself I tried to keep up with community discussions but gave up extremely quickly... and that was for a game that had a really small community of a few hundred players. you have to realize, community managers would basically have to read all the forums, not just on bnet, but reddit, here, etc., if they were to be fully informed. this is simply impossible because the actual volume of feedback is too big.

community should do bi monthly class specific and overall game feedback roundups, where someone in the community compresses everything down to a short list of bullet points.

[WowIsDead64]

He is wrong. And also a little bit hypocritical. Cuz it's hypocrisy - to ask for constructive feedback and then ignore it due to TL;DR reasons.

Players try to provide as detailed and constructive feedback, as possible, cuz devs ask them to do it - cuz they simply ignore "shallow" feedback, as non-constructive. And ripping feedback from context - is the biggest reason of all Blizzards' mistakes. They hear buzzwords, like "flying killed world PVP", and fix game according to them, without even understanding real reasons behind this problem. As the result - fixing, what isn't broken, while real problems stay unfixed. Result - game becomes even worse, than it was. For example: if my feedback about outdoor content having broken design, forced competition, PVE mentality, immersion, RP elements, etc. would be packed into some short version - it would be "No fly - no buy" and devs would simply treat it as non-constructive and ignore it. If you want to know not only why content is bad, but deep reasoning behind players' opinions - you need to read whole feedback, not just some main "buzzword" idea, like "Forced PVP" or "Wow turns into MOBA and it supposed to be RPG".

[Eapoe]

It's not really dismissive, as in a lot of businesses feedback can be too short or too long. Just as an example, McDonalds Big Mac, you decide you don't like it. You state in the complaints section "I don't like the taste of the sandwich." This is an example of to short. What didn't you like about it? Was it too salty, spicy, flavorless, too much of 1 flavor, etc?
The reverse is also true: where you can state what you don't like by making a 5 page essay, most of which doesn't even cover your basic point or explaining how it's not the same as a Burger King whopper (as an aside, businesses also don't want feedback of why they are too similar or dissimilar to another company, they want to stand apart and have you say how you feel THEIR product could be made better).
There is a happy medium of what to convey and what is to much, and a lot of people haven't found that yet.

[nekobaka]

Ill take the main section relating to the OP.

So, yes, strictly speaking if you want to be as efficient as possible in your feedback, focus on explaining the problem. State the problem very clearly. Don’t assume the reader, even a dev, understands your shorthand. You might end up talking about two totally different things. Then state the consequences for the problem. That’s it. Suggestions on how to fix it are probably most useful as a way for us to reverse engineer what the specific problem is, but again, it’s more efficient just to state that clearly in the first place.

As an aside, I’ll risk making another sweeping generalization here and opine that player feedback is nearly always too long. There must be this other maxim somewhere that the length of a post is somehow proportional to the strength of the post, but that’s just not true in my experience. Players love bullets. Posts with lots of bullets get upvoted, as if the writer must certainly be an authority on a topic if they can come up with so many things that are busted or so many reasons why something being busted is bad. But longer isn’t automatically better. Longer is automatically less efficient however. You are probably burying your good stuff in a sea of words.

I largely agree in particular when it comes to the Official forums and what actually gets popular. Long winded emotional threads gets votes including those weak in factual substance. The on going discussions in such threads also end up being very broad and largely a wash in opinions. It is unfortunate it is the blown up rant posts that receive blue posts. It is Blizzards own fault though for their unwillingness to build a healthy forum community. Than again it keeps the community bickering among themselves.

However, I do not think more concise threads will lead to devs making the major chances the OP wants to be seen. Simple things like profession leveling issues would have multi-month long threads in beta documenting the issues and not get resolved until post launch after the majority of players already had to deal with the issue. The devs make the choice of the path they want and how to prioritize their resources. Though hey they still keep getting praised as the number one AAA dev and have easily continued to make WoW profitable by selling extra services and cosmetics.

[MoanaLisa]

It's neither wrong nor right. It's what they want to see.

OK, you're a developer and on your desk one morning are anywhere from 35-50 messages about the work you specifically do. Some are short and to the point explaining clearly what the problem is; others wander all over a number of topics, some of which might not even apply to you.

You've got 15 minutes before a meeting. Which ones are you going to read?

GC's post in the news this morning really has nothing to do with Blizzard per se. It's about communication loops between players and developers and what works for them.

[Coffeexbean]

the people who are salty about ghostcrawler are killing me hahaha hes never going away lololol

[Deleted]

You post "My warlock feels clunky to play and doesn;t do enough single target damage"

The repsonse is we want constructive criticism backed up by objective data

You post multiple paragraphs detailing how Soul Effigy doesn;t work and feels unrewarding for the damage it gives plus logs that show how affliction's single target is under-par

The repsons eis we dont; have time to read and sort through posts that are too long

[WowIsDead64]

Also I want to say, that in most cases there are always other players, who either don't understand your reasoning or simply oppose it. That's why in most cases players also try to predict all possible problems - cuz opinion of community is also important to them, cuz Blizzard shown us, that sometimes they listen to echo chamber of vocal minority. They don't want to explain everything 100500 times on a 100500th page of discussion, where this information would be lost in mess of trolling and flaming - they want to explain literally EVERYTHING in their original post. Because it's just bad style, when you write some post and have to explain it in later posts - it would mean, that your original post is bad.

[Chrno]

We do have a solution for very long in-depth posts.
It's called TL;DR (Too long, did not read). By reading the tl;dr you should be able to decide wether it's worth the time to read it all.

And then there is:
- If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

[Deleted]

You post "My warlock feels clunky to play and doesn;t do enough single target damage"

The repsonse is we want constructive criticism backed up by objective data

You post multiple paragraphs detailing how Soul Effigy doesn;t work and feels unrewarding for the damage it gives plus logs that show how affliction's single target is under-par

The repsons eis we dont; have time to read and sort through posts that are too long

And then Bliz ends up having to stop publishing your sub numbers, since 1) their current fluctuations show how full of shit they are in every announcement they make 2) they no longer confer bragging rights since dropping to the levels normal for the existing competition in MMORPG market while a tank shooter boasts popularity levels of Lich King. Keep up the great communications policies, Bliz