Should blizzard have a voting system for future content?

[Santas]

Gods no, last thing we need is a bunch of opinionated nerds having a say on the content.

[Electric Lighter]

I'd rather not. And if they were, it should not be limited to ranking, as you exclude members of the game from having a say in what they enjoy. And if it were added, it should be voting on interest, not a final say.

I'd rather they invested time in the forums. Throw out discussion posts by Blizzard to see how it is received in feedback and proceed from there.

The issue with keeping it open is it invites the largest group of people unable to vocalize what it is they want. Yes I know that sounds elitist and it likely is but thinking back I rarely saw the "do nothing" player who only does lfr as ever having a firm grasp on the mechanical aspect of the game that one would need to judge new content ideas.

If you made it completely open forum you would simply get people voting on what sounded the most theatrical. It also stands to reason that regardless of outcome those less committed would simply enjoy the watered down easy mode of the content regardless. That isn't to say nothing could be voted on by the masses cosmetic rewards would be a perfect fit for that.

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not a voting system, but gathering some valuable feedback would do wonders. the problem or the difficulty with wow for the game designers is the following: wow has an absurd broad audience. for wow there exists nothing like a target audience or a niche. you have millions of different types of players/customers. and this is by design. Blizz caters to everyone. not to a dedicated target audience.

that said, this produce the following problem: gathering feedback (foremost by forums) and the „community opinion out there“ is pure hell and heavily invaluable. the reason is: many hardcore players never set a feet into official forums and instead posting on forums like this. also many many many players (casual, hardcore, whatever) never posted a single line in years, in official forums. Blizz stated this a few years ago.

this means (what many ppl out there say since years): they heavily need an ingame feedback mechanism (like they did with TBC), while an xpac is running, to get a feeling from ALL players what the next xpac can do better. and its extremely important to doing this over the complete lifespan of actual xpac (every few months or so), because they develop the next xpac in parallel, while actual xpac is running.

this would help A LOT. i have ZERO glue why this not exists. it costs them nearly nothing and if they not agree they can piss on it anyway. it changes nothing but they have more informations. for a very low investment.

no glue why this not exists.

You really don't have "millions" of different types of players though.

You have progression players hitting mythic and heroic raids. Pvpers who do rated and then you have their counter parts that do lfr and unrated battlegrounds.

Sure you might be able to find extremely small collections of players for niche activities beyond that but they are the vast, vast, vast minority you can look at covenant break downs to show just how small that population is.

WoW's community isn't nearly as diverse as people like to claim it is.

[Gaidax]

No, they shouldn't, because that's how we get Wandering Ancient.

[Lochton]

The issue with keeping it open is it invites the largest group of people unable to vocalize what it is they want. Yes I know that sounds elitist and it likely is but thinking back I rarely saw the "do nothing" player who only does lfr as ever having a firm grasp on the mechanical aspect of the game that one would need to judge new content ideas.

If you made it completely open forum you would simply get people voting on what sounded the most theatrical. It also stands to reason that regardless of outcome those less committed would simply enjoy the watered down easy mode of the content regardless. That isn't to say nothing could be voted on by the masses cosmetic rewards would be a perfect fit for that.

That is a very elitist comment, though. I have seen endgame players not knowing much of the current content either, which limits their experience for the game as well. You cannot embrace the future of the game by just relying on the limited selection of people by the demand that they have done endgame.

If you wanted a more secure selection of people, you may as well say the limit is 25.000 achievement points or more. Thus securing you have a varied amount of players who have experienced various levels of the game. And at least 1 max character pr. faction.

Even demand for achievement points is elitist.

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No, they shouldn't, because that's how we get Wandering Ancient.

Really not a fan of that mount..

[Niwes]

The issue with keeping it open is it invites the largest group of people unable to vocalize what it is they want. Yes I know that sounds elitist and it likely is but thinking back I rarely saw the "do nothing" player who only does lfr as ever having a firm grasp on the mechanical aspect of the game that one would need to judge new content ideas.

If you made it completely open forum you would simply get people voting on what sounded the most theatrical. It also stands to reason that regardless of outcome those less committed would simply enjoy the watered down easy mode of the content regardless. That isn't to say nothing could be voted on by the masses cosmetic rewards would be a perfect fit for that.

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You really don't have "millions" of different types of players though.

You have progression players hitting mythic and heroic raids. Pvpers who do rated and then you have their counter parts that do lfr and unrated battlegrounds.

Sure you might be able to find extremely small collections of players for niche activities beyond that but they are the vast, vast, vast minority you can look at covenant break downs to show just how small that population is.

WoW's community isn't nearly as diverse as people like to claim it is.

there are many enough of:

- hardcore m+ players just doing LFR to see story/cinematics
- casuals that do heroic pug raiding
- pvpers doing m+
- ppl just doing „world“ content
- login, raid, logout guldies
- mythic raid players, never doing 1 m+
- ppl solely doing pet battles
- ppl solely collect mounts, toys, pets
- ppl solely doing WQs and Covenant stuff

just to name a few. the list of different wow player types is endless. you can search in the Blue Post Archives around Legion pre patch, when Blizz did a long statement about the diversity of their playerbase and the problems facing with this. i am just too lazy to search for it by myself.

ofc, you do not have millions of different player types (in reality i meant „millions of players, including many different player types - it is just my bad english, sorry). but you have many of them, more than every othr game and enough to make things horrible diverse.

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No, they shouldn't, because that's how we get Wandering Ancient.

i am not a fan of that mount too. totally silly. but it was what the most ppl wanted, obviously. at least they did what their community wants. this is a good thing. even when you and me not represent the default type in that community. maybe you and me are the wrong ppl here, not the masses. maybe we play the wrong game or have the wrong community. but when you and me are a minority, not we are right, they (the majority) are right. and its our problem, not theirs. many ppl are happy with that mount, because many ppl voted for it. simple as that.

[Nnyco]

Hahahaha, no oh just no.

[LilSaihah]

Retail content? No, the point of retail content is to create new stuff.
Classic+ content? Yes-ish, Blizzard should follow cues on what the players actually want here.

[Osmeric]

Devs don't need to listen to player votes. Devs DO need to be held accountable for their decisions, though. If they make decisions that lead to what should have been an easily predictable failure, they should be replaced.

[Niwes]

Devs don't need to listen to player votes. Devs DO need to be held accountable for their decisions, though. If they make decisions that lead to what should have been an easily predictable failure, they should be replaced.

how exactly do you declare a „failure“, when you having no target audience and instead a super broad audience and half (or quarter, or 1/5th, or 1/8th...) of your playerbase like a descision/design/whatever and the other half does not ???

can you explain me ?

in my opinion (and in the opinion of many beta players) Covenants was a „failure by design“ since day1. and you can see now the objective negative consequences of it. nonetheless a great portion of players like Covenants. and now ? is it a failure ? is it not ? should they fire Ion ? should they not ?

in the end of the day, Blizz defines what a failire is. and a failure is „not producing enough/expected profit. as long as this is not happening and ppl accept and pay for what they get, as long Blizz will see no reason in firing ppl. regardless how fail a design or xpac might be. look at WoD: nobody was fired, because WoD and good marketing pushed the player subs for 2-3 months to 12 million and 12 million xpacs were sold. ofc they were not happy with whats happening after the first 2-3 months and they corrected it in Legion. but do they call WoD a fail ? not sure. did they fire ppl ? no.

so, ... not sure if it is that easy, you wanna make it look like !?!

[Osmeric]

how exactly do you declare a „failure“,

By the only metric that matters to upper management: $$$

[WernerCD]

Taking a page from Runescape would wow benefit by having players vote on future content to be developed?

If they put a small restriction on it like rival, aotc, or keystone master to mirror runescape's restrictions would that improve the overall quality of the game by killing off ego projects like warfronts, isles. ap system. and such things like changes to torghast rather then allowing them to go live with a large amount of wasted hours gone into developing them to completion?

Would wow be helped or hindered by a system like this?

No. Gamers are stupid and don't know what they really want.

[Niwes]

By the only metric that matters to upper management: $$$

ok, here i 100% agree.

[loras]

Taking a page from Runescape would wow benefit by having players vote on future content to be developed?

If they put a small restriction on it like rival, aotc, or keystone master to mirror runescape's restrictions would that improve the overall quality of the game by killing off ego projects like warfronts, isles. ap system. and such things like changes to torghast rather then allowing them to go live with a large amount of wasted hours gone into developing them to completion?

Would wow be helped or hindered by a system like this?

Hindered.

Democracy only works if the populace voting is of proper quality, to that end one either needs to select the best and allow them to vote (this rarely to never works in practice) or uplift the populace itself (also extremely hard to do, but it has many positive side effects).

So yeah, in the context of WoW you only need to look through this forum a couple of times before realising why you'd want to avoid voting.

[Halyon]

It would silence a lot of dissenters on what they think Blizz should do or not do. Assuming they actually do it faithfully.

[Darkeon]

While the devs are not always on their A game and fuck a ton, there's a reason why they are devs and not mere players like us.

[Swnem]

Hindered.

Democracy only works if the populace voting is of proper quality, to that end one either needs to select the best and allow them to vote (this rarely to never works in practice) or uplift the populace itself (also extremely hard to do, but it has many positive side effects).

So yeah, in the context of WoW you only need to look through this forum a couple of times before realising why you'd want to avoid voting.

Wooow... some priviliged bs there.

Democracy is for all, not just for the educated. Even if they vote against their interests, which often happens, they still deserve to be heard.

It does work even with dumb populace, as long as the institutions hold, because democracy doesn't elect a leader for a lifetime. It selects an employee for 4 years, after which you can oust them based on performance.
Democracy is still the best cause of that. It allows mkstakes to be fixed later.

But, it doesn't work quite as well for designing a game because failure can mean the shutdown of the game.

[zesilo]

I think a polling system where the devs choose what is polled and the players vote, needing 75% or more to pass (74.99% is still not passing) would work out amazing.

[Byleth]

The developers already solicit our opinions.

I was sent a survey last year asking me all kinds of questions about features, what I like and did not like, and what future content I would find exciting.

[MoanaLisa]

No, it should not. Players should not design the game.

[Kumorii]

No, players not knowing what they want is a real thing.