How can we help DEVS? (and all of us)

[Doffen]

Get a fuckton of money together and take over Activision.

I'll win the Euro Lotto today and tell blizzard to hire you while I pay your salary. They can't say no. Save us!

[enigma77]

'Help' them?

Unsubscribe.

[kaminaris]

Pretty much this.

For us to help two things need to happen.

1. The Devs need to listen.

2. The Devs need to agree.

Somewhere in those two steps there's a brick wall. We can argue about which one but feedback is not translating into changes and that's a fact.

Both point are invalid. Devs should not listen, they should ask.

But getting a feedback from bunch of apes is hard, like put yourself in their shoes, try to read this forum and figure out what people want = impossible. You would loose your mind first.

So crafty surveys is probably the only thing they can do that might just work, and asking a simple questions like:

What did you like in feature A:
1. Art
2. Cosmetic design
3. The story
4. Replayability
etc.

What did you dislike in feature A:
1. It was boring
2. It was too easy
3. It was too hard
4. It did not make sense story wise
5. It was too long
6. Droprate too low
etc.

This way you can collect actual data from players for example if in 2nd question hardly anyone picked point 4, then it means blizzard should not focus too much on making every new feature fit the story as players would not care too much about it.

It would be harder to identify the issues of point 1 thus, if too many players pick this as an answer, ask again:

What excites you the most in feature A:
1. Item rewards
2. Mounts
3. Pets
4. Replayability
and so on.

And by no means blizzard should blindly follow this feedback. But I think they should at least take it into consideration when designing next features.
Data they have in form of participation rates is kinda useless because you can slap some max ilvl gear on warfront and suddenly, according to participation data, it would be the most awesome feature of expansion.

[october breeze]

I think we need all to chip in to Rob Pardo's Bonfire to release the new MMORPG asap.

Acti-blizz can go f themselves then. :P

[re1gn1te]

We can't. They don't listen to feedback.

Yeah didn't read OP but this is the correct answer.

[Malikath]

We can't. They don't listen to feedback.

Welp...

You know it is.


Alternatively, fire J. Allen Brack and the other activision yes-men from the company then sue them for mismanagement of resources and launch an investigation for any potential embezzlement.

[Lei]

Both point are invalid. Devs should not listen, they should ask.

But getting a feedback from bunch of apes is hard, like put yourself in their shoes, try to read this forum and figure out what people want = impossible. You would loose your mind first.

So crafty surveys is probably the only thing they can do that might just work, and asking a simple questions like:

What did you like in feature A:
1. Art
2. Cosmetic design
3. The story
4. Replayability
etc.

What did you dislike in feature A:
1. It was boring
2. It was too easy
3. It was too hard
4. It did not make sense story wise
5. It was too long
6. Droprate too low
etc.

This way you can collect actual data from players for example if in 2nd question hardly anyone picked point 4, then it means blizzard should not focus too much on making every new feature fit the story as players would not care too much about it.

It would be harder to identify the issues of point 1 thus, if too many players pick this as an answer, ask again:

What excites you the most in feature A:
1. Item rewards
2. Mounts
3. Pets
4. Replayability
and so on.

And by no means blizzard should blindly follow this feedback. But I think they should at least take it into consideration when designing next features.
Data they have in form of participation rates is kinda useless because you can slap some max ilvl gear on warfront and suddenly, according to participation data, it would be the most awesome feature of expansion.

i mean most of the stuff is common sense. But like REALLY common sense. Especially for a 15 year old game and it's devs. Like come on.
"Oh! turns out people don't want to refarm their azerite traits after they have refarmed the exact same piece of azerite armor. Who would have possibly known? "
"Oh! Turns out legiondaries with massive power difference dropping randomly and with a maximum limit is not a good idea! I learn every day! "
These are rookie "mistakes". It makes you /facepalm every single time you think about these. Do you even have to be a game dev and study for years to grasp this?
Can you even say with a straight face that these were "mistakes" and not testing the water?

A 15 year old game shouldn't suffer from these teething problems. Not with a competent dev team. Like what new can you learn after 15 years? Not these basic dos and don't dos. Where are the psychologists that were confirmed to work alongside the devs back then?
We shouldn't be worried for the next expansion all the time now ever since WoD, because problems like these. These ideas shouldn't leave the vision board let alone get to f&f and alpha.

[Niwes]

there is not much you can do.

first:
wow (espacially that game) caters to an absurd broad audience. this means 2 things:
1) there is no „most of the people think...“ your oppinion and the same of another maybe 100.000 is nothing because 10-100 times of that size of ppls have a trizillion another oppinions. so „our“ statments/oppinions are a single stone in the grand canyon.
2) that said, blizz has the same problem. on which crowd, type of player, feedback they should listen? to what audience they should cater? cause of that problematic they simply try to hit the midground and do what THEY think what makes everyone a bit happy (or everyone a bit dissapointed, dependend on your point of view). they try to get money from everyone. so everyone will always complain a bit. they know this and the result is, that they have to give a fuck on feedback. it has just no value for them.

second:
in the rare cases where a „we all say x sucks“ exists and sooo much ppl crying that loud, so blizzard and their data come to the conclusion they must do something, even that fix can in the end only please a part of that huge audience. so half the ppl still go „they fixed it halfassed“ or „they swing from one extreme to another“. in short: even when you pissed off a huge part of a so big and different audience, you can not really fix it at all, for everyone.

third:
they give up on that whole task yeaaaaars ago. they do not listen to beta feedback since 3 xpacs or so. they give a fuck on forums as long as its not the biggest shitstorm ever. the reason for that is that they learned what i said above. also they realized that ppl buy it anyway. they just milk the cow. why invest money in something you can only do wrong, for half or more of your extreme broad audience, when you can save the money and sell it anyway ?

fourth:
they are old. they are lame. they are rich. they are arrogant. they just do not need to listen to your feedback, because they do what they think its best for their wallet, eeehrm sorry, best for their game, anyway. so, if not point 1-3 would exist, they still would drive on point 4 route.

all in all, nearly every aspect that prevents us of „helping the devs“ is caused by the fact that they cater to an absurd broad audience. they way wow is designed and blizzard works, simply give you no room for „helping the devs“.

imo.

[opposing critter]

Blizzard does not care about feedback

[Luxeley]

Not much can be done. Blizzard is locked into Activision's jaws and even if they aren't and I am dead wrong, the Blizzard Devs lack "true" leadership and a firm grasp of what the players enjoy most about WOW. The real talent at Blizzard has been spread too thin and the new Devs are uttely clueless. This is the main reason why nothing ever gets fixed. There are three kinds of mistakes - the ones we all accidentally make now and then, careless mistakes and the mistakes that shouldn't be made because we learned that lesson long ago. Blizzard consistently makes the latter kind of mistake...examples coming soon.

Trying to fix stuff in Wow is like going to a steak house, ordering a steak and getting a chicken sandwich, sending the sandwich back then getting a turkey club. Its annoying, frustrating and rinse and repeat true. Here are a few examples: Gcd changes (no legit reason for it). The idea of needing to pvp to be competitive in pve and vice versa (I can think of 2x's Blizzard promised we will not need to do this anymore). The removal of vendors. 17 different versions of pvp and they all pretty much suck. Endless faction imbalance. Off the charts RNG. Gated content. No more tier sets or bonuses. Non-existent class balance. The list goes on and on.

And then... there's the longer list of things players want and never get - you think you want it, but you really don't. The one and only thing we can do is learn Chinese because apparently that gets Blizzard's attention. But seriously... we can be specific with our criticisms.

Quality who you are as a player - how long have you been playing, are you casual, hardcore or somewhere in the middle, what spec is your main, what end game you prefer...etc etc. Blizzard needs to know this information to provide them with a frame of reference and validate your Xp in the game. Dont simply say something is good or bad without going into greater detail why. For example there is profound difference between a player saying Shadow Priests suck coming from a player who played SPs for 6 months and someone who's played them for 6 years, let alone coming from someone who never played one. Specificity matters and I fail to see it expressed in the majority of criticisms of the game.

[Naiattavain]

Won't matter because Blizzard is no longer a group of devs trying to do something cool but a pure business trying to milk money.
The devs and designers can have the best ideas ever to make the game awesome, but that can't happen when they're ordered to put in gimmicks to increase profits. Things like extreme rng, never-ending farming, pre-order perks, allied races etc.

all we do now is just sit in town noone really cares what the games status is anymore.. bgs suck games design to have a friend be with you at all times.

- - - Updated - - -

Welp...

You know it is.


Alternatively, fire J. Allen Brack and the other activision yes-men from the company then sue them for mismanagement of resources and launch an investigation for any potential embezzlement.

what is this post the revenge of chris metzen? lol

[Segus1992]

They need to take a page out of Bethesda's book and just fly out a certain number of people, like 10-30, all walks of players, Method raiders, joe blow shmoe altaholic, completionists who have at least 30k cheev points, LFR raiders, people who have subbed every expansion, MDI heroes, Brutal grievous insane uber mongo Gladiators, etc, etc and get them all in one room together.

Lol yeah take a page out of the book of company that created the biggest AAA gaming fiasco of recent history. Blizzard is so much better at caring for their customers than Bethesda is right now, even if Blizzard is the second worst.

[Naiattavain]

well here is the thing people everyone is in majority tearing down blizzard on a daily effort the devs don't want to make stuff cool for you guys anymore. thats probably right over the target what i just said. your talent just keeps leaving the door because you guys are constant assholes to them. maybe if you took a long break from the game and got your life in order before playing we could all figure out how to be nicer to each other.

then perhaps a dev might wanna make something really cool for you guys to go to shit and add to the void of never ending bullshit..

I AVENGE CHRIS METZEN chris metzens memory!

[Segus1992]

I think we need all to chip in to Rob Pardo's Bonfire to release the new MMORPG asap.

Acti-blizz can go f themselves then. :P

What's this, another WoW killer? Never heard of one of those before. People haven't learned yet?

[WowIsDead64]

...

Overall problem - Blizzard have stopped listening for feedback. Their idea currently is - player X asks for A, but player Y asks for opposite B. What should we do? Let's just give up and cater to player, who plays more. We'll lose one of them, but it's inevitable. So, let's do it, cuz development will be cheaper -> higher profit. I.e. let's just go that cheap F2P Korean MMO way. So, many players, that just can't bear it, are kicked out of this game. And it's not 50/50, as shown in example above. I have a fear, that it's actually something like 1/10. I.e. Blizzard actually do, what many hardcore players were asking for long time ago - let's have 1% of players, but "good" players, that play "good" game.

Question is - what can we do about it? We should come to some consensus. And use some creative solutions to solve problems. Some players want game to be hard, some to be easy. Some want it to be casual, some to be hardcore. Some want game to be social, some want it to be soloable. Some like PVP, some like PVE. Overall Blizzard should focus on making new systems, that would allow players to play the same game, but differently, without feel being forced to play the way, they don't like. Simple example: difficulty levels. It should be current MAJOR DIRECTION OF DEVELOPMENT. Problem is - another xpack announcement, but I don't see any movement towards this goal. Conclusion? Shadowlands xpack is already dead - even before being born.

[Naiattavain]

plus you got the professional gamers constantly beating your guys content so that is a problem there blizzards to busy catoring to the professional players..

[MoanaLisa]

They ignore all feedback that goes "I hate this" and doesn't say specifically why they feel that way. "Class design is terrible" isn't very informative.

Also, for any given topic or question they get multiple replies that are often diametrically opposed.

My own opinion is that they often do listen and it usually works out for the worse. Forums are hotbeds of terrible ideas. So are elite high-end raiders who don't represent anything even remotely like average players.

[october breeze]

What's this, another WoW killer? Never heard of one of those before. People haven't learned yet?

Rob Pardo is on par with Mark Morhaime, founder and creative director of Blizzard for many years. He left before Morhaime, and started his own studio, Bonfire.
If you look up his website, you will see many of its development are former Blizz developers.

I really hope they pull off a WoW killer this time, for good.

[Segus1992]

Rob Pardo is on par with Mark Morhaime, founder and creative director of Blizzard for many years. He left before Morhaime, and started his own studio, Bonfire.
If you look up his website, you will see many of its development are former Blizz developers.

I really hope they pull off a WoW killer this time, for good.

So is this your first time seeing a WoW killer MMO? That'd explain the naivety.

Not to mention that the studio has been working on making said MMO for AT MOST a year or so, and it's a tiny team. If that MMO is going to rival WoW, it's going to take almost a decade to get here.

[Kallisto]

They do not listen feedback so no, thanks. It is waste of time.
I already 'helped' them by not playing this hot garbage game.

Here is player feedback in mop:

No dalies
No flying

Which is what we got in WoD.
Feedback In wod:

Nothing to do.
We want flying
Dungeons need to last
Means to continue to improve our character at max level outside of gear like xp.

So in legion we get.

M+
Pathfinder (Well that came in WoD but more fleshed out.)
World quests.
Ap in weapons.

In legion feedback was:

AP doesn't let us even have alt specs.

In Bfa we get AP as a neck piece allowing alt specs to work.

To say they don't listen is a myth. Most of the changes are listening to the biggest crying that comes out in the current expansions.

Just because they don't do what you want doesn't mean they don't listen to others.