Draele

I was reading the 'Information for the Masses' thread and one particular post about developer communication really got me thinking. Yes, we as players are not entitled to communicate directly to the game developers as much as we might like. It is rather frustrating to not even know if something you have issue with has even been noticed by the development team, and if it has been noticed if they agree, disagree, etc. Getting info is rather rare and getting feedback on issues players bring up is even rarer. It really makes you wonder seeing them do such a great job communicating through avenues such as Blizzcon but doing so poorly in regard to forum posts, not even having a couple dev posts every few weeks on each class forum/PvP forum, etc even with the large playerbase of WoW considered. Perhaps I'm personally spoiled, having played other games where a direct question, or at least a general issue would be addressed directly by a game dev.

I guess my general question is how do you feel with the overall level of communication both to and from the devs? And more specifically how much impact do you think our posts here on EJ have? Have you noticed any particular issues brought up here addressed directly? Is this forum seen as a vast minority of "1337" players that know too much for their own good, or does Tigole, Kalgan, etc. hop on the EJ forums looking for thoughts from knowledgeable players who aren't trying to directly petition (whine) as seen on the official forums.

What do ya think?

 

Grogzor

I would personally enjoy if Tigole and Kalgan took a Statesman like approach to the forums. I enjoy reading what they have to say because that IS what the developers are thinking. You don't have to go through the grapevine and hope the CM decided your point was more important then that other guys so they will discuss it with the developers. If you see Kalgan reply on your thread, You KNOW that he understands you have a concern.

I remember the day they posted the changed to Alchemy and the way the CM put it across it seemed like all they were doing was only slightly improving it instead of the drastic changes that were necessary and it took Tigole posting on these very forums to let people realize that Flasks were getting hit hard with the nerf bat.

I would be extatic if the devs took 2 hours out of their busy schedule each week to have a DEV IRC chat or more realistically, they posted a few extra responses each week to threads in the forums.

 

Eylirria

Considering that we know Tigole posts here from time to time, it would probably be insane to not assume that at least he reads these boards, whatever frequency it might be, and by extension, other developers as well.

EJ is a vast source of information regarding their game, and instead of just whining/bickering about things, people here tend to really go deep into whatever it is that they have their thoughts on -- it would just be crazy to ignore the data that gets presented here, and if I had to bet money, I'd bet that they don't. (ignore the data)

Also, there have been times where some bugs/exploits/problems/unintended-things were brought up here at EJ, and while some of these things (really bad memory, sorry, no specific example to share) might've been out there for a while, they sure got fixed/straightened out fast after being mentioned here -- yeah, they must read these boards, even if all they do is lurk around.

 

Siddown

And get two hours of "Why do you hate <insert class> so much?" questions? For the life of me, I can't remember the name of the CM who finally lost it and posted what he really felt about the community when he was leaving/quit. There is a small, but incredible vocal part of the community who would hijack something like an IRC chat and just spam it with literally hundreds of thousands of questions about why Blizzard hates the Alliance/Horde, why they don't play the game, why they all suck, etc., etc.

This isn't saying I don't wish they would actually just post details about what they are doing, but if the past is anything to go by, it's just not worth their time.

As for Posting more, look at every post a Blue makes, and watch what follows it. 3 pages of "Firsts" followed by "Since you are hear, please answer <insert question that has nothing to do with the thread>", then comes all the threads from people who take the most negative view of anything said and somehow turn it into a personal vendeta. Devs would likely be better off never reading the WoW forums.

 

Grogzor

Tseric.

But they obviously thought it was worth the effort because they had one before and I was lucky enough to have a question answered (not the answer I asked but whatever) which some people might say was a waste but whatever.

Also, plenty of other MMO developers have chats all the time and they pretty much consider it their duty to their customers. But like I said, I would be happy if they had a more proactive approach to their own forums.

Edit: Also, they can easily pre-screen questions that get asked and not have to answer those that are obviously ridiculous. I bet you one question that would be asked (pertinent mind you) would be how does +Weapon Skill work with mobs +3 Levels higher then you.

 

Draele

Well ultimately they'd have to be specific in who they replied to. Hit a thread with a reasonable suggestion/question/problem, reply to the OP and a few of the more notable posters, issue information or at least express you see something as a noteworthy concern, and leave it at that. Sure the rest of the thread might be ruined but most threads drift to obscurity/trolling anyhow even without blue intervention...

Rantings of the Afflicted, a Warlock blog: http://draele.blogspot.com/

 

Siddown

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but the reality is, WoW has 7 million subscribers. It's not realistic to expect the same level of interaction with Blizzard as their is with a game with a much smaller player base.

They can pre-screen questions, but if there are over 100,000 of them (just a WAG), are you sure they'll even see a Weapon Skill one? I'm quite positive that 95% of the questions will be things like "Why do you hate Shaman" followed by "Shaman are overpowered, what are you going to do to fix it", etc., etc. People who care about Weapon Skill are a very small percentage of the players who play this game.

I'm not trying to be negative, but just look at any blue post...now announce in advance that they'll be taking questions and watch it get a hundred times worse.

 

Infenwe

I think one of the best examples of communicating your thoughts to the players of the game you are making is Mark Rosewater's long-running series of weekly articles called "Making Magic" on Wizards of the Coast's website: Magicthegathering.com Column Archive

Of course that requires a certain flair for creative writing and I'm fairly sure that Maro spends a lot of time writing those.

I have no idea if Tigole has any talent in this direction, but I'm fairly sure he doesn't have time anyway .

 

Emeraude

Ahhh I dunno, I kinda like the big brother is watching approach, but this place would become overly swamped if people actively knew developers actually answered here.

Every time Tigole has graced us with his presence, we get a handful of retards that come make posts like "lawl, I no ur here, aswr my q plz, wut u gunno dew aboot shaman thx". EJ Mods are on top of it like always, but at the same time it would just attract a lot of non-sense and stupidity.

I already know that Blizzard developers pay attention to public fourms, class fourms, these fourms, FoH's fourms, and maybe even Nihilum/D&T fourms. I don't need them posting to let them know they're listening to the intelligent talk with the retard filter.

Ignorance is bliss. Keep me in the dark please.

 

Draele

The devs chats were nice though you are right. More direct forum interaction, through either CMs or devs would be preferable. When you *ask* for opinions/questions the morons/trolls will come out the woodwork. If they just respond to concerns already posted on the forums they are likely either dealing with more knowledgeable and dedicated players, or the issue is particularly important to warrant posting.

Hell, just do class forum rotations. Each week post in half a dozen notable threads of one class forum. This would ensure each class got some info every 9 weeks.

Rantings of the Afflicted, a Warlock blog: http://draele.blogspot.com/

 

• Theras

As it so happens, Mr. Kaplan does have a knack for writing. I've always enjoyed his writing, both when he was updating Legacy of Steel's website (and was a little more vulgar) and when he was posting on Blizzard's and FoH's forums.

 

Siddown

I do agree with you on that though, there does need to be some better information transfer. I'm not sure what exactly it would be, maybe just post once a month (or every 9 weeks as you suggest), and lock the post. Anything that involves a give and take (IRC, Regular Posts, etc.) probably isn't feasable.

 

◊ Cylyna

Lets make a hypothetical situation:

Jeff Kaplan agrees to have some kind of "Primal News Transmute" of his own for the EJ forums.

It seems to me that the best course of action, as far as what to ask him, would be to let the Moderators of EJ handle the communication between the forums and Blizzard.

A lot of us trust their advice when it comes to the strategies and breaking the whole down into its individual parts, would we not trust them to represent our feelings to Blizzard?

We ask the questions here, they moderate the discussion and pass on what they feel is most pertinant once a month, Blizzard responds with an idea of what they are thinking, rinse, repeat.

I guess, I always thought that a role like this is what the CM's are supposed to do but rarely do I see it work out that way.

 

Sando

He makes a good point, if the dev's do post more, i sincerely hope it's not on EJ, because anywhere they do post will become a magnet for moronic responses.

 

Titanx

I've made various suggestions through my time playing wow on the general or suggestion forums and albeit just a couple, they have been implemented or at least addressed in some way. I've always hated that I spend a lot of time leveling enchanting and getting rare patterns, but I have to find someone else to enchant stuff for my alts and sometimes have to pay money to have the enchants done when I have the very same ones on my main. So I made a post explaining benefits of having BoE enchants that can be tradeable/AH'able a few weeks or so ago and I recently read that they are considering this for WotLK.

I also made a totem suggestion way back when about totems duration/mechanic being changed (so have many others I know), but I gave specific suggestions and although they weren't implemented exactly, they were compromised. It's possible that someone else posted these ideas before I did, but you know how the saying goes "There's strength in numbers."

 

Warpony

Coming, through offways, from DAoC i can just say that WoW fails so hard it's not even funny.

Yes, Mythic probably needed to keep their players closer (not having 8mil subs), but still, the level of community communication in that game was just stunning.

Their lead Community Manager (Sanya, who to this day in my eyes are one of the best spokesperson a mmorpg could have) EVERY WEEK had her "Grab a bag" post on their herald, answering about 10 questions reaching from "If i stack item X and item Y, will their procs work together and how does the math for that haste work out?"... to "This quest is borked, will you fix it?".
The responses were honest, in depth and really made players feel like they were constantly beeing updated on the state of the game, coming patches, class balancing and what not.

Would this be so hard to do? Just find 10 questions of the forums each week, take 2h of a employes time to actually talk to devs, talk to designers and get straight answers about things the community is wondering about.

I can just say that Mythics extremly open attitude towards their players is the number one reason im going to whatever game they release next (aka WAR. Which allready has it's grab a bag on their homepage, tho only once a month for the time).

It doesnt take that much to keep most of the people happy, just some honest responses concerning widly discussed topics.

But then again, blizzard probably feel it's not needed, allready having theyr 8? million subscribers and all.

 

◊ Quigon

The devs do a decent job communicating with us. What they do not do a decent job with is implementing the ideas that are communicated to them internally or publicly.

I didn't see this many "Dev chats" or "video interviews" in prior games. And also to the person who said WoW is bigger, therefore devs should communicate less... what is that about? This isn't a relative scalar of information per people. They should release the relevant and important information to the masses, not try to take everyones questions and be our friends.

 

Bloodyrazor

First of I would like to state that I would like to have acces to more definitive information about the game, but I fear it just wont happen.

You see its just not in Blizzards interest to release definitive information. They sure could have given more information about the game especially the mechanics, but they havent and they won't. We players who enjoy this game tend to see it as something of a real world with Blizzard as its government, from who we demand transparancy and democracy, but this is not the reality.

In reality Blizzard is a company trying to make money, and how many companies are really being open with information towards their product? Sure they release tiny bits of information to advertise their game, just as Blizzard does on occasion, but never do they release all they know about it and neither will Blizzard.

You may think that this being a game and all the workings of said game are hardly dangerous information to release, but this is not true sadly. Everything they say has a profound effect on their playerbase. A good example is the pots and proccs fiasco which happened with the druids, all hell broke loose simply because we received info from Beta that something we hadn't had before was taken away again... Every amount of knowledge they feed us players makes us more dangerous, the more we know, the more we can complaint about, and the more reasons we may have to leave the game.

In the end itsa all about population management, they feed us just enough information to keep us complaining, BUT playing. Which is their job ofcourse, but that doesnt have to mean we have to be happy about it, or stop asking our question because every question might gift us with the few tiny tidbits of information that we so cherish...


Shapefinder

 

Vaccine

I don't see why they can't do something like this.

They could even post the minutes up of their meeting with the devs each week, censoring any information on upcoming content that they didn't want us to know. At least that way people would be able to see that there was something being done about problems, or that their problems were being raised in the first place.

I also think at least one of the devs should do some sort of development blog each week to show off something new from the development stages. Even if its just a rant about design problems with a few stills of a WotLK dungeon or TBC content (depending on the team) it would be nice to feel we were still getting some information.

I detest the current state of thins. We're kept in the dark about most things, we have little to no contact with the developers and we aren't even sure if issues are being raised with them or are just being swept under the rug.

Even the warcraft battleplans which we used to get have stopped now. Its about 4 months overdue for the last one and my post about it on the general forums got ignored by blue in favour of posting about peoples signatures or faveourite pet names.

Which moves me neatly onto the next of my complaints. The current Forum Mods are infuriating. They sidestep any real issue and topics in favour of posting in "fun" and "stupid" topics. I realise they aren't privvy to the developers thoughts and often know less about the game then the players, but is a weekly 15 minute meeting with one dev and the CMs too much to ask? Just to fill them in a bit and let them ask a couple of questions back to satiate the masses on the forums. But we see none of this, instead we get to see them (EU this is mind) talking about their "oh shit" moments in raids or why they choose their avatar.

That said, it has been slightly better recently, but a lot of it has just been reiterating things revealed at the most recent games shows which were on EJ and MMO-champion weeks before the official wow borads.

Maybe I've been spoilt by playing another game which was less popular, and so we got direct time with the developers to discuss issues. But Blizzard needs to shake up its customer relations Dept big time.

TLDR: Get some clear link going between players and devs. Create a new job or add it to an existing one. Get the guy to post three forum questions each week to the developers and get proper answers. Even something as small as that would be a huge step in the right direction, if we could hear devs talk about the justification for the haste nerf (not saying its unjustified), their stance on ferals not scaling or BM hunters rise to power over their other specs.

 

songster

Yes, there's been a huge amount of Dev chats and info released recently. But I think part of the problem is that this communication, while real, is perceived mainly as advertising, since it usually focuses on future content rather than existing content. Just one or two Q&A theorycraft sessions on existing game mechanics would be gold dust. Perhaps something for them to include in a future Blizzcon - a "Game Mechanics" panel where people throw questions at the people who designed (e.g.) the hit table, one-roll and two-roll systems and get some final word on how the things work. Might have to be pre-submitted questions rather than "from the floor", since it's likely that the answers will be moderately complex.

I also wouldn't say they don't do a decent job of implementing the ideas that are communicated to them - just look at the VAST improvement in the raid game brought by the 2.1 consumable changes. That said, it's beginning to look as though they've fallen back into the old trap of trying to do all the improvements at once, and thus incrementally delaying patches as more and more stuff gets added in.

 

vorda

Exactly, remember back when WoR and all the other big news sites all had big links to Tigoles post here? It took weeks and weeks to get rid of the massive amount of 'morons' that joined the forum in that period, and the stickies were obvious that it was a problem.

Lets consider what the mods would think of this. Moderating EJ seems to be a pretty time consuming job as it is, if we go back to ~3-4 months ago when EJ was for a small period 'worthless' because of the overload of WoW.com topics, I can imagine even more drastic measures.

Also, nothing is stopping the Devs to post their information on the official forums, even if it is strongly related to a topic here. There might not be a real 'dialogue' possible there, but even if the news isnt posted here, a ton of EJ members will give their opinion/additional questions on it anyway here.

In short, theres nothing the Devs AND EJ can gain from this.

 

anathor

Most of the questions here are easily answered if you consider that the guys at Blizzard try to do a professional job (at least that's the way I look at it). We are not talking about 4 guys designing a game in their parents' garage with a few hundred fans as a "community". I would reuse Popovich's words (he coaches the Spurs NBA team, one of the most succesful ever) when he was asked how he did it: "I have some of the greatest players, all I have to do is just try not to f*** it up". I'm sure Blizzard feels the same: they have (one of?) the most successful game ever... and the only thing they have to do is not to f*** it up.

That means control on communication channels. If too many people talk and promise things, it will be chaos. Therefore it goes up to a handful of guys at most. And when they take some of their time for an interview, I'm sure they are more interested in talking about the new instances they are currently designing than about the specifics of weapon skill (at least I know I would!)

That means control on information flows. I don't think it's in Blizzard's interest to give all the info about the game mechanics. First of all it would mean one could come up with a perfect solution to everything, and obviously (given how many ppl participate here) players like to figure that out for themselves and discuss endlessly if that ring is better than this ring in this specific situation. It's part of the fun. Second, I'm sure somebody would spend an awful amount of time to test if the game really behaves "as intended" (or as described by the devs). Hint: coding implies bugs.

That means testing and a real development process. Let's say an idea comes up that looks great on paper. Let's say the devs agree with it and want to plau with it. Should they announce it straight away? Of course not. That would mean endless whining in case they change their minds or in case tests show that it wasn't such a great idea after all.

One final comment: devs play the game too. They can sign up here with their char name and who would know better? Their posts wouldn't be more blue than anybody else's :-)

 

◊ Cathela

What's funny about this is that those of us who use the North American boards are extremely jealous of the level of activity you guys get from your CMs. Ours are even more unhelpful. (Which I expect is more of a numbers problem than anything else; Blizzard just needs to hire more of them.)

A set of knowledgeable and active CMs could vastly improve the player-dev communication without taking up any noticeable amount of dev time.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Cromfel

Least they could do, is assign 1 forum moderator to gather "Community 10 Questions" every week. All he would need to do is pre-filter ~50 best questions he finds from community and every week devs would answer those what they see that they can give sufficient reply. Too much work for the benefit? I really doubt. If week is too frequent, make it 2 weeks. Or even 1 month. Just that there would be any kind of reliable and contant communication between devs and players.

.:. Retribution Paladin Hideout .:. http://cromfel.battlefield.fi/

 

• Playered

Yes but here comes the problems on which questions they answer, if they had 10 'hardcore' questions and 40 'general' questions, they will end up picking mostly the general ones... not only because they are easier to answer but because they tend to be of more concern to more players.

They could however do questions on different aspects of wow each week/period (like a panel) which means your more likely to get the specific questions answered when its 'your turn'.