Do you believe Blizzard cares about their community?

[Agent Smith]

This is a question I have asked myself. There are extreme people who will shake their fist at Blizzard because they had a 2 hour down time on maintenance day. On the other side of that, there are extreme people who will praise Blizzard for putting a Battle Pet at 20% off.

This poll is NOT for you / those kinds of people.

The question I have, do you believe Blizzard, as a company, cares about us? Or do you believe they're going to do whatever they want regardless of any input we have?

Id also like a reason behind the vote, if possible.

Thank you for your time.

[Big Thanks]

After 7 years or more on MMO-C reading patch note after patch note...fix after fix...change after change...blue post after blue post
One should already know Blizzard listens to feedback every expansion.

Contrary to what some people must say...for some strange reason.

[Nagawithlegs]

This is not a yes or no question, just like most things in life.

Stupid question, bad thread and dumb OP.

[Nnyco]

Yes they do but they dont put everythin into action what random-nerd#31823 has to say on forum who expects it will when he yells loud enough, obviously we get flooded any minute now by said people who will instantly vote no without even reading OP.

[valax]

After 7 years or more on MMO-C reading patch note after patch note...fix after fix...change after change...blue post after blue post
One should already know Blizzard listens to feedback every expansion.

Contrary to what some people must say...for some strange reason.

I was about to comment how they ignored all BFA beta feedback about classes , the GCD change and other stuff to be ignored. Then when the obvious backlash manifested they just said , sorry <sad eyes> we will fix it later, the rest is history and BFA will be probably remembered as the 2nd worse expansion for the game.
The only times this blizzard does anything for the players is when they need to be forgiven for something bad of stupid they did.

[neik]

Sure there are a lot of passionate and talented people who work for Blizzard. Designers, story writers, etc. But whoever puts the puzzle together is just a "bait master", nothing else.

[Agent Smith]

My answer is, look no company is going to please everyone. Its difficult when there's massive following and by trying to please all sides, you're gonna spread yourself thin. So you're bound to upset some people.

My vote is, yes they care. We dont always get what we want, mistakes are made, but they do care. Maybe not as much as before??? I guess we can argue that? IDK.

[Gonfer]

They care about money mainly.

[Seranthor]

This is a question I have asked myself. There are extreme people who will shake their fist at Blizzard because they had a 2 hour down time on maintenance day. On the other side of that, there are extreme people who will praise Blizzard for putting a Battle Pet at 20% off.

This poll is NOT for you / those kinds of people.

The question I have, do you believe Blizzard, as a company, cares about us? Or do you believe they're going to do whatever they want regardless of any input we have?

Id also like a reason behind the vote, if possible.

Thank you for your time.

No matter what anyone says someone is going to come along and proclaim that person wrong... 'care' is also a loaded word with different meanings to different people.

[Sett]

They care about money mainly.

Was going to say this.

The Blizzard North some of us grew up with has died out. Money and profits first.

Anything else comes as a bonus. I know I sound negative typing this but it's like that for a lot of other companies.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Blizzard is a company.
That company is made up of human beings.
Do you believe that 100 percent of any group of human beings all has the same thoughts and mentality?

Obviously some employees feel differently about different things.

But I am sure of one thing.
"Blizzard" cares about having enough revenue coming in for World of Warcraft to remain on servers and profitable.

Sometimes, caring about the community is not the best way to achieve this.
Some times it is.

[Hitei]

This is a question I have asked myself. There are extreme people who will shake their fist at Blizzard because they had a 2 hour down time on maintenance day. On the other side of that, there are extreme people who will praise Blizzard for putting a Battle Pet at 20% off.

This poll is NOT for you / those kinds of people.

The question I have, do you believe Blizzard, as a company, cares about us? Or do you believe they're going to do whatever they want regardless of any input we have?

Id also like a reason behind the vote, if possible.

Thank you for your time.

A company is not a thing that can care, because it's not a thing that has feelings. It's a mistake to even try and general sum what "the company" feels when it's hundreds of completely different people with completely different values. I'm sure there are GMs and individual programmers out there that do not give a shit about the community at all, they are just doing their job.

Conversely, even the profit-driven upper management wants people to be happily buying shit, so to some extent they care about your wants and mood.

That doesn't mean battle pets going on sale is for the community's sake. It does mean that 99% of "bad decisions" are just the result of them trying something that doesn't work, or attempting to do what one subset of players wants and other subsets getting pissed off, or doing something that people don't like because they are looking at a larger picture instead of the individual decision. Despite what idiots parrot, Ion doesn't sit down at his desk everyday and try to come up with ways to annoy players.

I was about to comment how they ignored all BFA beta feedback about classes , the GCD change and other stuff to be ignored. Then when the obvious backlash manifested they just said , sorry <sad eyes> we will fix it later, the rest is history and BFA will be probably remembered as the 2nd worse expansion for the game.
The only times this blizzard does anything for the players is when they need to be forgiven for something bad of stupid they did.

I wish people wouldn't just spout factually incorrect shit when they have no idea what they're talking about. They literally asked people to play with the GCD change for a bit and comment on what felt good and bad, and then a few weeks later gave an update on what they were pulling back off the GCD and what they were leaving on it.

[xenogear3]

Blizzard doesn't care !

Remember the mini raid between the expansion? Sunwell Plateau and The Ruby Sanctum.
Not any more.

New battleground? No.
A free level 80 promotion? no

It is missing lots of content.

[Gonfer]

Was going to say this.

The Blizzard North some of us grew up with has died out. Money and profits first.

Anything else comes as a bonus. I know I sound negative typing this but it's like that for a lot of other companies.

It is sad, but unfortunately you are right.

[Sharpbladez]

The people that make the game probably do, at least most of them.

The people at the top that are only concerned with making money dont care.

[Mirishka]

This is a question I have asked myself. There are extreme people who will shake their fist at Blizzard because they had a 2 hour down time on maintenance day. On the other side of that, there are extreme people who will praise Blizzard for putting a Battle Pet at 20% off.

This poll is NOT for you / those kinds of people.

The question I have, do you believe Blizzard, as a company, cares about us? Or do you believe they're going to do whatever they want regardless of any input we have?

Id also like a reason behind the vote, if possible.

Thank you for your time.

I believe that the developers do, yes. Obviously the corporate-level people, the financial officers and the people that talk to shareholders, etc are going to be focused on $$$ and user count and such at the end of the day.

But yeah, I do think the devs themselves care about the community of people playing their games. Its easy to be cynical and say 'reeeee actiblizz' but Activision's culture and attempts at influence actually don't set well with some of the WoW team. That's something I know for a fact.

[Donald Hellscream]

Of course they do, they wouldn't be implementing fixes etc. if they didn't. Granted they may be very slow at fixing stuff, but that has more to do with them taking their sweet time doing it rather than them simply not caring.

When I say "they" I am refering to the people who are working on the game, I am sure people like Bobby Kotick, that new google guy they hired and so on, couldn't give less of a shit about the playerbase as long as wow keep the money flowing. But people like Ion Hazzikostas, Jeremy Feasel and Brian Holinka still care, unless they are all masochistic nutjobs who loves going to work every morning working on a project they hate.

[Orby]

Yes to an extent

Blizzard as a multi-million dollar company doesn't give a crap, especially on that higher echelon of corporate CEO and Directors. The only language they know is money.

On the other hand, I do believe those making the game like developers, community managers, writers, and those on that level care about the community. A lot of those people making the game are just living out the dream unfortunately the publishers and higher ups make them and the games look bad by being pieces of shit and treat their workers like they treat us, which is like shit, and that's sad, because there are people there that care, I just think that corporate shadow just looms over them and its that shadow that doesnt care.

100% love for the grunts of the bottom floor that put their heart and soul with blood sweat and tears into the games we play, 100% disrespect for the corporate management and dishonest pieces of trash that wanna exploit a good game and fill it with micro transactions and horrible monetizations to prey on their customers...

[crakerjack]

Of course they care about their community. Without a community they wouldn't be able to make profits. They rely on having a community. That being said, they are a business and every business shares the same primary goal: Profits. Every move by every business always has the businesses interest at heart. For example, this 100% xp boost, while nice and generous from blizzard, benefits them more than it does us. Players like me who already have one of every class at max level, don't really benefit much from this. Sure I could level some allied races for their heritage armor or level some old horde alts to max level, but I'm not overly motivated to.

I'm not complaining that they didn't add more on top of the 100% XP boost, I'm just merely pointing out who benefits the most in this scenario. It's a win-win for blizzard because not only do they look like generous good-doers, but this boost will ultimately lead to more alts and more alts means more time spent in game, and more time spent in game correlates to high MAU's. If they were truly trying to make a kind gesture with zero intention of benefiting, they'd have found a way so that then entirety of their playerbase benefited from noob too elitest, casual too hardcore, collector too altoholic and so on.

I think what hurts the community the most is that there are some people who want to see WoW crash. They just want it to implode because they're upset with decision making and therefore hold some everlasting grudge. People can tolerate the critiquing, but then it reaches a certain point when it's too frequent and too often that it just comes off as constant nagging. Because of this cycle and how long it has been going on for, some people will interpret ANY critiquing as a WoW-hater. The same thing happens when people disagree with someones critique and get categorized as a blizzard brown-noser.

I myself enjoy the game overall, but what keeps me from remaining engaged is trying to balance essences on my various alts, even with the new echoes system in place. What annoys me further is that the system will be replaced with covenant abilities in 9~ months. On top of that, covenant abilities will be unlocked account-wide once you obtain one on any character, removing any grind of having to unlock it on an alt. So if the system replacing essences will be account-wide, why am I then expected to grind these essences 6-7 more times for my alts when I did the original grinds 4-5 on my original alts? Again, all for a system that'll be gone in 9~ months.

Went off on a little tangent, but overall I'd say they do care about their community. Not strictly for profits, but making a community happy typically leads towards more sales/profits.

[Nnyco]

Blizzard doesn't care !

Remember the mini raid between the expansion? Sunwell Plateau and The Ruby Sanctum.
Not any more.

New battleground? No.
A free level 80 promotion? no

It is missing lots of content.

We literally had a mini-raid and new bg this expansion.