Want a Blue response, post a silly thread?

Not to derail your concern, but those insights may have to wait for at least a bit longer. Most of the development team are out on break until after New Years.

We answer what we can, and some of the more open ended questions require more coordination than others.

Here's an example of something that I was able to answer without waiting for everyone to return. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7415465927?page=2#26

As another example: You can report and post feedback on a bug freely without having to do any verification. But, when we respond the issue needs to have been verified, and preferably with a plan of action behind it beyond 'we know'. That isn't something that can be posted at will.

Other issues such as subjective opinions without a clear answer could be derailed by our involvement. There are implications to responding to those topics. As a(simple) example, a topic like "Which is better, Horde or Alliance?" would generally be left alone. Imagine the field day you all would have if I were to attempt to provide an answer to that one!

Rygarius I have a few questions for you.

1. Are you aware that both the phone and in game support staff direct people to these forums to ask questions when they do not have answers?

2. Are you aware that your a repsentive of Blizzard, so therefore when you donn't take the time to respond to serious threads and topics but do for the none serious ones, it appears both do not have concern for the cares of the community and for serious feedback.

3. What is it you view your job as being? There seems a very wide gap between what you think and much of the community thinks.

The simple fact that your customer support team will advise people to take issues to these forums and to provide feedback lead to the anger over what the community managers choose to post about. When told to do so by company reprensenstives you would hope your concerns would be taken serious on these forums. Sadly they do not appear to be since the community mangers do not take the time to respond to those threads and instead choose to respond to the silly ones.

Either you need to take your job serious or the support staff needs to quit sending people to these forums for help when they cann't provide it.

1. Yes.

2. Feedback is read, but may not receive a reply for a number of reasons. Repeatedly posting "We read the thread but have nothing to contribute at this time." would not be helpful and not what you're looking for. All posts reporting changes or fixes needs to be checked and verified; that takes time.

3. If you can still find it, there was a job posting for Community Representative that would describe the general expectations and duties that the position entails. Regarding the second part, the community is welcome to submit feedback on the community team's performance anytime at wowcmfeedback@blizzard.com.

While directly posting in a thread saying "Rygarius was here" may not be beneficial, I could see some merit in adding a field that gets checked if you or your cohorts have looked at the thread.

While there's always going to be posters with persecution complexes, something along those line may help assuage the concerns about whether or not you guys are actually conscious of what's going down on the forums. I'd like to believe that you guys are being 100% honest when you say you read everything, the length of time some thread survive makes me suspicious. I obviously can't speak for anyone else, but I'd be surprised if I'm the only one who sees some of those threads and wonders if the reason it hasn't been deleted is because whoever is on forum duty doesn't care, or if there simply isn't anyone there to see it.

A 'this has been read by a blue' tag may not be as useful or have as much of an impact as you'd think. Reading a large number of threads about class balance doesn't directly imply that a post about that topic was imminent. Criticism would turn to our reading habits; the threads we've been reading or not reading.