AMA Questions So Far

[SirCowdog]

Fun is subjective and will always be the product of developer group-think. I no longer think that raiding is fun. I never thought PVP was fun. I don't believe in any sense that grouping up with total strangers is fun. Treating the concept of "fun" as some absolutist definable thing is pointless. It isn't and will never be. The difference in my case is that I don't wear myself out trying to force my personal concept of fun on others. Disagreement on terms is unavoidable and the pretense that there is an objective definition is a waste of everyone's time.

Yes. Of course its subjective. But its also comparable in this situation.

When your beta and alpha testers are continually telling you something is bad, and your reponse boils down to "too bad we're doing it anyway", then the rest of the playerbase gets ahold of it and also says its bad, and you still make excuses for it, what then? At what point do we as players stop glazing over these problems?

As I said: I really just don't understand the willingness to let so much bullshit slide.

[thottstation]

The problem was all the answers could be summed up as "It'll work later in the expansion, after we've fleshed it out."

"So if the retail product you're trying to sell me won't work properly until later, why should I buy it now, Mr. Salesman?"

"Uh... anyone have any questions about Dance Studios?"

[Alanar]

Oh hey, I remember her!

She sent us Hordies to grab those troll prisoners from Stormwind.

I think she's... still... waiting... for us? I sure hope no Alliance forces invade Orgrimmar in the meantime.

Yea, I think you are right, but I think that undea human guy with red eyes said he would bring the message to that other dead person with red eyes.
No idea if it worked out tho..

[Gadzooks]

Perhaps on a very high level, but I really doubt he runs around approving every sprint content. That doesn't really work well when your teams are supposed to be empowered and self-organizing.

I never said or implied that, or stated that there were sprite level issues. There are "big picture" issues, and he is directly responsible for approving them - and he takes responsibility for those decisions in his opening remarks. Are you saying he's lying when he posted:

I am accountable for everything that goes into WoW, so that should begin with me.

?

You can talk about teams all you want, but the buck stops at his desk, he states that pretty clearly, but you're still arguing that things were decided without his approval?

[Deleted]

the highlight of the ama for me is them dismissing the concern about ignoring beta feedback with "WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH DAHTA"

[Deleted]

This is taken from reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comment...r_ion/e5zxajz/

I'm not Ion, and I'll apologize in advance that I don't have a perfect solve for this ready to go, but I wanted to at least say that addressing this issue -- the feeling that we're ignoring your feedback -- is (and has been) one of our primary goals on the Community team.

We weren't happy with our communication in Legion (particularly towards the end of the expansion), and tried some new approaches for BfA, which were beneficial in some ways, but hurt our outward-facing communication a lot more than we expected. I could do some handwaving here about internal processes or organizational structures but the key point I want to get across is: We're not okay with that. We obviously have improvements to make, and probably always will, but it is and will continue to be a top priority for us.

Again, apologies that I don't have a silver-bullet fix to share today, but we recognize that the current state isn't working for you and that's not okay.

Seems like a pretty decent post. It's pretty well accepted that Blizzard's communication has been pretty bad.

Wait a second, this sounds familiar... https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comment...nrest/dantwrv/

To maybe give a little more hope, we had several meetings and discussions yesterday about ways to improve our internal processes so that we can converse more freely and immediately on in-development changes. Some of those improvements have already been made, and I'm personally hoping the difference will be noticeable over the next few weeks.

Oh look, Lore said the same thing a year ago about feedback being ignored. And yet despite claiming they were making steps to improve communication, it's only gotten worse since then.

Posts like Lore's destroy any belief I had that criticisms on Blizzard's communication are actually being taken seriously.

[Lime]

That was probably the worst AMAs I've ever seen.

An attempt at damage control completely backfiring.

[Deleted]

jesus christ, they've been saying they "know" their communication with fans is bad since... wod? maybe even mop? or cata? bottom line is, when are they actually going to do something about it?

this is the biggest issue with this ama and the proof that they still don't know how to talk with their customers. as someone pointed out, pretty much every reply to each question was "yeah we know this is a problem, but we know how to fix it and we'll fix it soon buddy..........." excuse me, if you knew that there are these kinds of issues (and bfa has a lot of issues), why not communicate that with the playerbase? why not communicate that you're bothering to fix them? why aren't you telling people about the 8.1 ptr when plenty are worried?

let's not be surprised that the game is attracting negativity since blizzard is attracting it like a magnet. nobody is expecting a flawless expansion, but when all your biggest selling points of it are doing poorly and attracting loads of criticism, where there is so many issues with exploits and bugs, i think the community deserves a lot more than a few half assed twitter-esque posts.

and what the hell? nobody asked any decent questions about pvp? or is blizzard once again trying to act like that part of the game doesn't exist/whatever issues it might have are super secondary? jesus christ, some of the people working in this company have so much expierience, yet sometimes they act like vanilla launched this year and they're all newbies. get your shit together, blizzard, you can do better than this steaming pile of dung

[Deleted]

This is true, and it's also true that Activison and co control how development works. It's easy to hate a name and a face over a big corporation, but Ion is literally doing damage control because that's all he can do. He can't get too negative.

thank you, someone that gets it.

[hrafnblod]

Its probably because we said this in the first week and it takes them another month to acknowledge the system is severely flawed. So by the time they do decide to get around to fixing it the player base is all but fed up. Had Blizzard of responded in week 2 I bet the feelings would have been a lot different. I think a lot of people would have just waited til a fix was implemented instead of beating the dead horse.

Think about this, it took them almost a month to address the lack of island rewards. It took them less then 3hrs to hotfix Fetid Mythic that only a a couple guilds were on.

I get all of that, but my question still remains. Being that we can't change the past, and they already didn't respond in week 2, what do you actually want? If you're not satisfied with them continuing to ignore the issue, but also not satisfied with them taking steps to address it because it's too late, what do you actually want? And how is your feedback supposed to be in any way useful?

[darklogrus]

I get all of that, but my question still remains. Being that we can't change the past, and they already didn't respond in week 2, what do you actually want? If you're not satisfied with them continuing to ignore the issue, but also not satisfied with them taking steps to address it because it's too late, what do you actually want? And how is your feedback supposed to be in any way useful?

It's in there you just chose to ignore it.

[hrafnblod]

It's in there you just chose to ignore it.

K bro. Whatever you say.