#50 - Jan. 5, 2017, 1:38 a.m.
01/04/2017 05:15 PMPosted by
Crítter I hardly feel the need to quote or reply to these threads, but.... THIS IS PURE GOLD AND SPOT ON! Great post. The CM's just continue to dig a deeper hole every time they try to justify their existence.
Please give the CM role to a true fan of WoW who is willing to do the proper research, and spend the time needed to address the issues of the community.
And I hardly know how to respond to this, but will out of principle. If you think we aren't all fans or the game and we don't research what's going on here, you're sorely, sorely mislead. Looking only at Lore, for example: he is one of the biggest fans of the game. His work on TankSpot and Gamebreaker with Legendary is pretty universally known, and most of the team has played WoW since its inception, myself included.
I appreciate your underlying sentiment in that "we should care more", but we all do care immensely about WoW, and this isn't the way to carry about a constructive conversation with us.
01/04/2017 05:06 PMPosted by
Huvud 01/04/2017 04:15 PMPosted by
Ornyx I have to disagree with your first note, especially when looking at it from the point of a game as large as WoW is, with teams as large as ours are. We CMs aren't a "barrier", by any means. None of us are reading feedback and saying "Oh, thats stupid, let's not send that over." I think that would be extremely dangerous and false to our roles here. We are simply collating feedback together and handing it off, while the developers work on making changes as they see fit based off of it. Those changes are passed back to us, since most of us specialize in communication, and know when and where to be soft and/or heavy-handed with such things (patch notes vs. forum conversation, for example). On the opposite side, we also do represent the player-base to the developers. Some older titles for community management were called "Community Representatives", and its still very much true for the team today in that our goal should ultimately be to represent the desires of the community to the rest of the development team, while acting as a source of information as to the sentiments of the greater community.
Okay, no, actually, I'm not done. I want to address this too.
You, the person behind the Ornyx account. The other CMs. ANY blue type that posts on these forums. I ask this genuinely, without trying to be catty: what good are you doing? If the answer to dozens of pages of feedback, hundreds of player hours spent testing and calculating and theorycrafting and testing some more, and a list of THOROUGHLY researched bullet points of the main issues with classes or specs, all from people who have spend hundreds if not thousands of hours with their class or spec of choice, is merely just "handed info on Point A to devs, will post back with news. they're aware of complaints"? If THAT'S all you can provide, then....
Why are you here? What good are you doing? Do you honestly think you're helping? Are we supposed to be satisfied with that? Are we supposed to be satisfied with another PR politics handbook reply of "design is iterative"? Are we supposed to be happy that we have ONE relatively active representative talking to us, who can't be bothered to maybe spend an hour researching BM hunters and why the belt nerf is so harmful and what their complaints are?
You know what I want, more than anything else, in regards to WoW? If one experienced, knowledgeable person from every class and spec could have one on one time, in face, personally, with the devs of the game. No Watcher to feed us ex-lawyer bull!@#$ about "we're baking in mandatory talents to add more interesting choices". No Lore to make huge TL;DRs absolutely FULL of ridiculous claims and utterly false facts about Shadow Priest mechanics, and then backpedal completely when this was pointed out. No CMs to feed us canned responses we've heard dozens of times just this expac. Just a few minutes to ask the devs, "what the %^-* were you thinking?" with legendary balance, performance disparities, design oversights, feedback going completely and utterly ignored since ALPHA, and a whole host of other problems.
I'm not trying to insult you or disrespect you, Ornyx. I'm saying: this isn't good enough. It never has been and it never will be and the "communication improvements are an ongoing effort" excuse isn't cutting it anymore.
I would much rather hear from the players directly what their problem is, rather than inferring it myself and possibly being wrong (happens more often than you think). There's nothing wrong with asking questions and admitting we may not know - which is what I did. I understand that generally BM has issues with focus, but I disagree that the belt should be the solution to resolve that issue, and, instead, we should be focused on the design of the spec's given skills to resolve that.
In terms of "what good do we do", a lot of that if its not here is behind the scenes, so it makes sense that you would insinuate that you think we aren't helpful. Aside from having daily conversations with developers, we work on tons of other projects that may or may not ever be attributed to us, from blogs to videos to social media to events to the forums - the list goes on and on. People have asked for us to pop into threads and say "Thanks for the feedback, we are looking into this - its been noted", and that's what we've done in a few places recently as sometimes we have nothing to share (various reasons for that, maybe changes are in the work, maybe we haven't heard back yet, etc. Its super case by case and there's nothing we can ever do or say that can make everyone universally happy).
In regards to your last point, I'd be fine with a system where we could have some sort of class representatives or something that could have those honest conversations with the developers in the open (in fact I created such a system in a previous life). It does help to have that one singular voice to talk to instead of 100,000, heh. But the community agreeing on who that person would be sounds like it would be a very difficult task - maybe something to think on.
I'm not insulted by any of what you said - its true in its own regard. I'm just trying to lay out the ground work and reasons behind some observations. As said, we have had communication failings over the last couple of months, and we are working on addressing that in the now.
--
<Edit: Leaving for the day, have a good one all!>