Sick of Blizz Lies about hearing feedback

11/13/2012 09:37 AMPosted by Librily

I have one question: Where's the proof?

11/13/2012 09:44 AMPosted by Maladomini

The OP has a point.. They did specifically say that they felt it was too much for players to feel that they had to grind reputations for head and shoulder enchants and then they turn around and put the enchants for other slots behind reputations.

Not really. They're different things. The enchantments were absolutely, without-question mandatory, because there was no other way to obtain those particular power increases no matter what else you did in the game.

The current dailies might feel that mandatory to some particularly progression focused players, but it is entirely possible to skip them, and the gear they provide, pretty much entirely and still arrive at the same level of character potency.

No doubt someone will mention profession recipes. Profession recipes have virtually always required some hoop jumping - ranging from RNG raid drops to rep grinds; the best recipes have always required a little something extra.

I have one question: Where's the proof?

I'm not interested in citing the entire massive list directly, but World of Warcraft has a long history of adjustments in response to player feedback. A couple simple recent examples would be raising the Arena and Rated Battleground base point caps or the upcoming changes to the way that Pandaria faction reputation is gained by alternate characters on an account.

When something you feel strongly about hasn't been changed, that doesn't mean that we've dismissed feedback. In fact, sometimes we really like a suggestion, but implementing it doesn't quite fit into the schedule yet, or there are technical or design reasons why it doesn't fit into the game yet. Sometimes, we want to wait til we can implement a more elegant solution. And, of course, sometimes we simply disagree that a particular change is the right course for the game. Nonetheless, in none of these cases is feedback dismissed - it was still taken into account during the decision making process.

11/13/2012 10:52 AMPosted by Vicksome

You mean the one that just got a huge nerf? Yeah, they nerfed all the dmf cards.

No! Bad! Stop pointing to data-mined content as fact. The change that got picked up was actually an adjustment to Darkmoon Card trinkets for Challenge Mode stat scaling.

11/13/2012 10:58 AMPosted by Librily

When I read this, here's what I am understanding. The enchant on the gear is MORE IMPORTANT than the actual gear itself? So, enchant > gear?

Unfortunately, it seems that you did misinterpret what I wrote. No, the enchantments are not more important than the gear, but they do complement all the gear you'll ever get over the course of that expansion (which is what made those reps essential). In Cataclysm, and previously, you had to have those item enhancements because they would apply over any gear you ever got. In Mists, you can skip rep gear, and move on to better gear, and never miss the reputations you didn't earn in the long run. Not that I'm advocating skipping dailies - there are definitely reasons to do them; just not to the point of fatigue that some choose to. We loosened the cap, and the intention there was to give players some flexibility regarding how they approached them.

While better gear is always helpful, the rep gear is only compelling enough to be called "necessary" relatively early in the progression cycle - and, in truth, it's only "necessary" for the guilds that are competing on that level. On the other hand, it seems that a certain type of player is always running extra miles of one sort or another to be at the cutting edge of content in every expansion, and with every new raid release. I mean, is any tangible, useful reward we provide--regardless of venue--going to seem to be anything less than absolutely mandatory to such a player, unless it is purely cosmetic?

Finally, as Zarhym mentioned elsewhere. We are paying attention and want to do better in the future. We're not in a position to completely re-work the way players interact with dailies on-the-fly, right-this-second. That expectation is unrealistic. We are always interested in learning better ways to approach these design challenges and make fun and compelling content, though.

That's fairly rude and unbecoming of someone who is in the position you are in, Dax.

Treating people like an animal by saying, "No! Bad!" and then rubbing their nose in it for jumping the gun is definately not what you should have done. Rather, you should have POLITELY STATED the incorrectness of it and moved on.

In this case, both parties here made an error in judgment. Shame to both of you.

It was a tongue in cheek post, though I've re-read it and I still don't find it particularly offensive. Agree to disagree?

This is an interesting example of dissonance in the style of communication that the community wants though. There's a segment of the community that would prefer nothing but perfectly polite, all-the-sharp-edges-grinded-off kind of customer service speak. Meanwhile, there were many players in this thread requesting 'bluntness'--some specifically to the point of rudeness. I think I usually tend somewhere in the middle, with a touch of humor thrown in now and then.

11/13/2012 12:18 PMPosted by Christhemity

Daxxari, my question for you is, how am I supposed to feel you guys in Blizzard HQ enjoy our feedback if you delete all the posts that consists of feedback?.....

Simply because a thread contains feedback doesn't mean that it abides by our posting guidelines or code of conduct. Constructive feedback should probably be the buzzword, rather than feedback on its own.

We welcome it, we want to read it, and we want to share it with the development teams. You still need to play by the rules while you're here, if you want to be heard.

11/13/2012 03:52 PMPosted by Tovi

Those polls only used a few thousand people...

It's true that the forum population represents a relatively small chunk of the overall player base. It's also true that the kind of player that's apt to post on the forums doesn't necessarily represent all of the vast and incredibly diverse World of Warcraft community, but that doesn't mean that the feedback here isn't useful. We do realize that forum goers are often our most invested, passionate players. We appreciate you guys, and what you have to say matters.

That said, election polls and the forums are different in several key ways. Among them--and I don't want to get into how statistics works in detail (especially since I'm not an expert)--but I do know that the forums are what is called a 'self selecting sample', and that trying to derive representative statistics from such a sampling is an excellent way to get skewed results.

Obviously they listen to feedback. But that doesn't necessitate any applause. When they discount feedback (even after listening to it) that was well reasoned and highly supported, they should offer better explanation (if they want to keep their community feeling like communication is valuable). They should be judged based upon the context of the time, and right now the context does not look good.

Brace yourself, because I'm about to say some things that will probably ruffle a few feathers. Got your feathers ready? Okay, here we go:

We have a long tradition of explaining our design decisions. In addition the various posts we make on the forums, there are numerous Dev Watercooler blogs authored by Ghostcrawler and other developers that exist solely to discuss what we're thinking, and why we're thinking it. Those vary in frequency since, ultimately, developer time is best spent doing things like developing World of Warcraft.

That said, there will be times when, after reviewing the feedback, we still stick to our guns and not offer a follow-up explanation regarding why. There are pitfalls to starting a discussion to provide our rationale after such an event:

• Players that are okay with or neutral toward the situation don't particularly care.
• The players that aren't okay with the situation almost certainly aren't going to change their minds because we made a post. They're almost always heavily invested in a particular position on the subject, and further discourse won't alter their opinion. In these cases, the expressed desire for follow-up on feedback doesn't result in useful clarification; it simply provides more ammunition for a debate. Typically a debate that already played out in prior feedback and resulted in a decision one way or another.
• While sometimes it's necessary to make our stance clear, refraining from a 'this is just the way it is, and here's why' statement can offer us the latitude to change our minds in the future. In some cases, we're still evaluating a situation, but we need to see how it plays out for longer than a few weeks.

And, on that note, it's very much worth noting that we change our minds with a fair amount of frequency. Our decision to provide alternative means to acquire Brawler's Guild invitations was based on player feedback, but I didn't create a post to discuss why that decision was made, just as I probably wouldn't have created a post to explain why we didn't make the change--the rationale was already out there, and it's still largely in place. That change is a compromise.

CRZ is harshly criticized by some, and praised by some, but mostly it fits seamlessly into the gameplay of many (as it was intended to). The technology makes possible some truly cool things, like cross realm parties. It's a response to the many complaints that the old world felt empty and devoid of life. It's also a lot more than that. We're aware of the concerns that players have expressed about it, and we'll continue to improve it so the experience that players have with it only gets better.

Yes, the current design for dailies is very much based on player feedback, and it fixes some of the things that, ultimately, really weren't working well in Cataclysm. Now we're seeing a totally different kind of feedback, and we'll learn from that too. World of Warcraft is still very much an iterative entity.

Finally, some food for thought. Some changes that are pretty much universally embraced now were highly contentious in their time. For example, one of the largest debates World of Warcraft has ever seen revolved around something as essential and commonplace today as offering non-raiders access to epic items. Some of you will recall that this was an extremely active debate, and opinions were harshly divided (and harshly expressed) on the subject. We'll continue to listen to player feedback as we design into the future - but we also know that we can't please all the people all the time. If nothing else, history has absolutely taught us that.

Of course, we're still going to try.

Crossrealm parties I love & all (I really do)... but seamlessly isn't even the word I'd use for CRZ. >_>

"Mostly" is a key part of that sentence. There are certainly still improvements to make.

Just taking a guess here but I would think Blizzard generates a lot of its information just by watching how people play. What content they do and don't do, player activity, time spent playing, etc.

Your guess is spot on. We are constantly gathering and analyzing information on gameplay. Raw data is tremendously useful, but it doesn't really offer context, which is why other sources of information are essential.

11/16/2012 02:11 PMPosted by Tatertawt

I don't know why you guys cannot admit you made a mistake and just give us some alternate ways to gain rep. Many excellent suggestions have been made and yes, before you say it, making the dailies the only path to reputation progression was a mistake.

There are discussions about adding in some reputation gain from other methods. There's not much concrete to report yet, though.

If CRZ is here to stay, it would be nice if we could get some confimation that the fishing tournaments will be back and that two player mounts will eventually be fixed.

Those are both issues that we're working on, amongst others.

11/16/2012 02:20 PMPosted by Reactable

Sure and you also have feedback from people that work at Blizzard that play in this world they helped to create. Surely having that internal type of data proves to be useful in seeing what is going on in the game?

Absolutely.

I've seen the following statement I made quoted a few times:

Your guess is spot on. We are constantly gathering and analyzing information on gameplay. Raw data is tremendously useful, but it doesn't really offer context, which is why other sources of information are essential.

The responses it has received suggest that the responders didn't read the most important part of that statement, though:

Raw data is tremendously useful, but it doesn't really offer context, which is why other sources of information are essential.

We know that raw data doesn't give us the whole story regarding why players are doing one thing or another in-game - we're always trying to fill in the context behind why players make the choices that they do. It's not enough to know that an activity or feature is popular, it's important to try to understand why.

11/19/2012 12:23 PMPosted by Hozzarn

Any ETA on CRZ fixes? Not troling/whatever but i am interested when all the bugs are going to be worked out. Good Luck all!

No specific ETAs, but there are some changes coming in 5.1 that may help address some of the issues with the timing of holiday events, confusion over realm time zone changes, and the like.