Why do interviewers ask so bad questions?

[Gurahk]

We already know there's 8 dungeons coming, sounds like you haven't paid enough attention to the interviews.

[ablib]

I’m glad others are finally noticing this. The answer is quite simple.

1. The interviewers act like journalists, but have zero journalistic knowledge or experience.

2. They’re kiss asses — like Sean Hannity interviewing Donald Trump. They ask softball questions so they don’t piss anyone off and to guarantee another interview down the road.


I can’t stand video game “journalism”. It’s so weak and almost always a waste of time. It also speaks volumes to the devs that are too pussy to answer actual questions.

[Swnem]

Because all questions have to be submitted and approved by Blizzard, most likely.

[SoulSoBreezy]

if you wanna say you dont sign an ICA (interview consent agreement) when doing a Blizzard interview, you simply straight up lying. you do. believe me. or ask any interviewer out there.

since an ICA can not define any prohibition of „even telling someone you signed an ICA“, since this isn’t part of such contracts, law wise, every interviewer will have no problem to tell you: „ofc, i signed an ICA“

i.e. just ask hazel or others on twitter.

I guess I'm lying too, because I haven't been asked to sign anything, was never asked to presubmit questions or none of that.
Here's the time and place to show up, or here's the zoom link. 1 minute for audio prep and fire away.

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Everytime I see an interview with Blizzard that has been posted in Wowhead or here, I always think the same thing: why do they ask banal questions all the time? Since this expansion has been announced, I haven't seen a single question on new allied races, nor a question on how many dungeons are there gonna be, nor if they will add a tank spec for the Evoker in the future...

Blizzard should ask the community and choose the most voted ones, because the people who are interviewing them are the moment tend to ask silly questions.

It's pretty simple. We're asking for clarifications to information we've just learned. Followups.
I imagine most people's idea of "hard hitting questions" are frankly unproductive and won't provide any useful information. I mean really, please present what your folks questions would be.

[FelPlague]

Everytime I see an interview with Blizzard that has been posted in Wowhead or here, I always think the same thing: why do they ask banal questions all the time? Since this expansion has been announced, I haven't seen a single question on new allied races, nor a question on how many dungeons are there gonna be, nor if they will add a tank spec for the Evoker in the future...

Blizzard should ask the community and choose the most voted ones, because the people who are interviewing them are the moment tend to ask silly questions.

"New allied races" we cant say anything on that just yet. or . We have plans for more of them in the future but we cant speak on those right now
"how many dungeons" they literally told us 8.
"Will you add a tank spec to evoker" Not planned at the moment.


boom i just answered your questions and im not even a dev.


Also can confirm what soul said especially as these are live streamed (like bahjeeras) you literally just ask whatever you want but ya know if ya ask "why is your dev team so fucking shitty" you wont be getting a future interview ever.

[Tziva]

if you wanna say you dont sign an ICA (interview consent agreement) when doing a Blizzard interview, you simply straight up lying. you do. believe me. or ask any interviewer out there.

since an ICA can not define any prohibition of „even telling someone you signed an ICA“, since this isn’t part of such contracts, law wise, every interviewer will have problem to tell you „i signed an ICA“

This is a bizarre thing for you to accuse me of lying about, but if you don't believe me than that's certainly your prerogative. I just thought I would clarify things in here since this thread seems full of a ton of misconceptions about the process. I've done probably dozens of interviews now for Blizzard games over the years, so I'd like to think I'm a pretty accurate source for how Blizzard handles the process in various contexts, and have decent insight as to why you don't see "good" questions asked.

But folks can and will believe what they want.

[Sorrowseer]

The community is usually too busy shouting out their guild name and server, how long they played, their life story, the race and class they play etc. before they even ask a question. And then when they actually start asking a question they give a 30 second backstory to why they asked the question. And the question is "new boomkin skin?"

Watching the old blizzcon question and answers will give you a migraine with how much time is wasted.

This gave me a chuckle.

[Ringthane]

Strawman arguement.

• Will you add more solo challenges like the Mage Tower?

• Will reputation questlines come back?

• The coomunity has asked for Tinker/Dark Ranger/Necromancer and Ogres/Naga/Sethrak for a long time. Why did you choose draconians over them?

Come on. Think logically. If they asked the first two questions, no matter the answer, nobody would be happy (and half the people here wouldn't believe them anyway).

The answer to the last question is "because we're Blizzard, we own and design the game, and we wanted draconians".

This isn't rocket science.

[Celement]

This is a bizarre thing for you to accuse me of lying about, but if you don't believe me than that's certainly your prerogative. I just thought I would clarify things in here since this thread seems full of a ton of misconceptions about the process. I've done probably dozens of interviews now for Blizzard games over the years, so I'd like to think I'm a pretty accurate source for how Blizzard handles the process in various contexts, and have decent insight as to why you don't see "good" questions asked.

But folks can and will believe what they want.

Do you find more pointed questions are steered away from or that there simply isn't that much interest in them?

For example I always wanted them to explain how they learn lessons. From my perspective taking artifacts for example. The positive of the system was customization of high detailed weapon models based on feat. Yet the lesson it looks like they took away from it was they love systems...

I understand most interviews are presented more as a press event but is there a reason we rarely see people asking about the why behind they do things?

[Niwes]

This is a bizarre thing for you to accuse me of lying about, but if you don't believe me than that's certainly your prerogative. I just thought I would clarify things in here since this thread seems full of a ton of misconceptions about the process. I've done probably dozens of interviews now for Blizzard games over the years, so I'd like to think I'm a pretty accurate source for how Blizzard handles the process in various contexts, and have decent insight as to why you don't see "good" questions asked.

But folks can and will believe what they want.

you did dozens of interviews about Blizzard games, after xpac/game announcements and you never signed a ICA ? ok…

[FelPlague]

Strawman arguement.

• Will you add more solo challenges like the Mage Tower?

• Will reputation questlines come back?

• The coomunity has asked for Tinker/Dark Ranger/Necromancer and Ogres/Naga/Sethrak for a long time. Why did you choose draconians over them?

1- yes they obviously will, they added the mage tower back that is literally mage tower 2 electric boogaloo
2- yes, and they have had them in shadowlands and bfa, and legion, etc for legion it was stuff like the suramar campaign, for bfa it was the allied races and campaign, and for shadowlands it was renown.
3- because this is Dragonflight not Ogreflight or nagaflight or sethrakflight or tinkerflight or dark rangerflight or necromancerflight

same reason warlocks got metamorphasis in wotlk, cause they felt "hey we just had the perfect expac for DH, but we didnt, so we wont be back for a long time if ever, so lets just let warlocks be Dh for now"

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you did dozens of interviews about Blizzard games, after xpac/game announcements and you never signed a ICA ? ok…

I can confirm
Soul can confirm
Tziva can confirm
they are pretty lax about interviews compared to other media, because content creators are few and far between. compared to random reporter 154832 working for random corporation who can simply be replaced or well they were going to do 1 interview about this movie, so they can just interview another person, content creators (including fansites like mmochamp) are part of the community, and if they ask shitty questions in an interview they just... wont get another interview.

[Niwes]

ICA's aren't even used for media interviews, what are you saying? They're for focus groups and research interviews, and they're signed by the interviewee to give consent for their data to be collected and published.


Also, Tziva, the person you're arguing with, has LITERALLY done Blizzard interviews, they've got first-hand experience.

maybe i confuse ICA with something else i mean.

but if in US you can „just ask your questions“ at Blizzard, after an announcement, well then my world picture is damaged. i know nobody that ever could do this in the EU without signing something that i maybe confused with the term ICA. but you have to sign a, lets call it, „standard paper with some interview definition clausels“ in EU. you can’t just go there, when invited, and start asking ANYTHING. it sounds rather crazy and VERY unbelievable to me, that in the US this is common. but if you, Trivza and others say so, i believe.

crazy. even for Legion at Gamescom in Colone, we had to sign that. for all interviews, regardless if Blizz or whoever. maybe its an EU thing.

[FelPlague]

You think good questions are questions that will be answered with, “We’re always looking into adding <insert fan requested feature here> in the future.”

especially since the first 2 questions are literally "hey are you going to continue to do the thing you have never stopped doing?"

They might as well ask "Is there going to be more raids? Is there going to be more dungeons? What about more patches?"

[Tziva]

Do you find more pointed questions are steered away from or that there simply isn't that much interest in them?

For example I always wanted them to explain how they learn lessons. From my perspective taking artifacts for example. The positive of the system was customization of high detailed weapon models based on feat. Yet the lesson it looks like they took away from it was they love systems...

I understand most interviews are presented more as a press event but is there a reason we rarely see people asking about the why behind they do things?

I don't think it's entirely either, and it sort of depends on context. I think mostly the issue is that these kinds of questions usually result in very broad, vague answers when asked (I also think they'd disagree if someone said their takeaway was "they love systems" even if, functionally, that certainly seems like the case). Any question that is a little too general about how they learned or determined or decided something will result in some kind of "we talked about it a lot" or "we heard feedback from the community." It's not really that worthwhile to ask questions that you already know how they will respond, whether that is in the sense that they won't answer it, or in the sense that they're just going to give the same general kind of statement they always give.

I think you can probably get some good questions pertaining to Legion weapons in hindsight, but I think "what and how did you learn from Legion weapons" is probably too broad of a question to get anything but that same canned response. If it was brought into a more specific series of questions ("have you considered bringing back weapon recolours based on accomplishments" etc), there's a much higher potential to get a good answer.

That said, as you mentioned, interviews are usually for generating press after big announcements, so it's unlikely one could even really find a context in which that would be relevant today, unfortunately. You are typically asked to keep questions entirely relevant to that topic.

But on the general subject of more pointed journalistic style questions, folks are certainly welcome to ask these, but it's really hard (as I mentioned in other posts) to find the sweet spot between "something they will answer" and "something that will result in meaningful information." It is also very rare, in my experience, to see critical questions that aren't some form of "why aren't you doing the thing I personally want you to do" which isn't very useful.

you did dozens of interviews about Blizzard games, after xpac/game announcements and you never signed a ICA ? ok…

Correct. I've never had to sign anything pertaining to an interview, although there's been general handshake agreements about certain minor things (for example, sometimes I film my interviews at Blizzcon but they ask us to only release summaries and not the footage itself, but even that is a request I honour because I'm not a dickbag, and not something in writing).

[Niwes]

I don't think it's entirely either, and it sort of depends on context. I think mostly the issue is that these kinds of questions usually result in very broad, vague answers when asked (I also think they'd disagree if someone said their takeaway was "they love systems" even if, functionally, that certainly seems like the case). Any question that is a little too general about how they learned or determined or decided something will result in some kind of "we talked about it a lot" or "we heard feedback from the community." It's not really that worthwhile to ask questions that you already know how they will respond, whether that is in the sense that they won't answer it, or in the sense that they're just going to give the same general kind of statement they always give.

I think you can probably get some good questions pertaining to Legion weapons in hindsight, but I think "what and how did you learn from Legion weapons" is probably too broad of a question to get anything but that same canned response. If it was brought into a more specific series of questions ("have you considered bringing back weapon recolours based on accomplishments" etc), there's a much higher potential to get a good answer.

That said, as you mentioned, interviews are usually for generating press after big announcements, so it's unlikely one could even really find a context in which that would be relevant today, unfortunately. You are typically asked to keep questions entirely relevant to that topic.

But on the general subject of more pointed journalistic style questions, folks are certainly welcome to ask these, but it's really hard (as I mentioned in other posts) to find the sweet spot between "something they will answer" and "something that will result in meaningful information." It is also very rare, in my experience, to see critical questions that aren't some form of "why aren't you doing the thing I personally want you to do" which isn't very useful.


Correct. I've never had to sign anything pertaining to an interview, although there's been general handshake agreements about certain minor things (for example, sometimes I film my interviews at Blizzcon but they ask us to only release summaries and not the footage itself, but even that is a request I honour because I'm not a dickbag, and not something in writing).

ofc i believe you.

but to me that’s just crazy. always thought US companies are even more strict by that than EU companies.

thx for clarifying!

[Sialina]

Strawman arguement.

• Will you add more solo challenges like the Mage Tower?

• Will reputation questlines come back?

• The coomunity has asked for Tinker/Dark Ranger/Necromancer and Ogres/Naga/Sethrak for a long time. Why did you choose draconians over them?

Are you in luck today or what? I can actually answer all your questions for you, just like blizzard would, here goes

Will you add more solo challenges like the Mage Tower?
We are always looking to add fun and interesting solo options, and we would love for something like the magetower to be in game, but it won't be in Dragonflight, it's something we are looking at for the future though.

Will reputation questlines come back?
We are happy with the way you progress quests currently, and we are moving away form the old system towards a more reward structured system like renown.

The coomunity has asked for Tinker/Dark Ranger/Necromancer and Ogres/Naga/Sethrak for a long time. Why did you choose draconians over them?
It's the Dragonflight expansion, not the stinker expansion.

[Eosia]

The information on flying not being available is from this tweet -> https://twitter.com/Wowhead/status/1516771415311233035

Which links to this article -> https://www.wowhead.com/news/flying-...-dragon-326774

Where they state:


Now, I've read the original interview(https://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3639901), and it doesn't mention no flying directly, which suggests to me that Wowhead got confirmation directly themselves, as they're unlikely to publish something like that without being certain about it.

So, in other words, it was not in an interview. It was in a Tweet. Sorry some of us are not connected to Social Media 24/7

[Soeroah]

You get a very limited timeframe to ask questions and receive answers. If your questions have been asked before and have traditionally resulted in "we're thinking about it", "no plans at this time", or by the simple fact you don't have an answer already means they're not ready to talk about it or have nothing to say on the matter, you're throwing your time away.

Better to ask 'safe' questions that will result in actual information than use the time to air personal grievances or wonder if a class explicitly announced with two specs, with no hint of that ever increasing, is ever going to get a third spec.

[Tziva]

ofc i believe you.

but to me that’s just crazy. always thought US companies are even more strict by that than EU companies.

I don't think it's lack of strictness, I just don't think its something necessary in this context. They aren't collecting any data from you, you're not getting any data from them that they don't explicitly want you to have, and for anything iffy they've got a handler (usually a PR person but years ago it was often a CM) to manage any grey areas.

[Niwes]

I don't think it's lack of strictness, I just don't think its something necessary in this context. They aren't collecting any data from you, you're not getting any data from them that they don't explicitly want you to have, and for anything iffy they've got a handler (usually a PR person but years ago it was often a CM) to manage any grey areas.

understand. rather interesting stuff to know. didn’t know that.

so, i am sorry here for my older comments. i just couldnt believe US companies like Blizz really act this way.

thx for updating me to US defaults