You know, Curse-Gaming.com has had interviews with Kaplan in the past. Why can't EJ? Why can't we try to get Gurg to do an interview, via email or private IRC?
Perhaps because we are a discussion forum and not a news site? We're not curse-gaming or WoW Radio or wowinsider or whatever other sites have emerged over the years. In case you haven't noticed, we're pretty satisfied with that niche.
The whole "+ EJ" part of this thread is silly and even a little embarrassing. The first part of the conversation is more valid, though.
Personally, I think that one of the most time-efficient things the devs (the big guys -- the lead raid, class, profession, etc., folks that headed up the major Blizzcon panels) could do to increase satisfaction would be to allocate 30 minutes of their Friday morning or something, while they drink their coffee at their desk, to just respond to a few posts. Maybe even have the CMs prepare a list of "good" threads/posts for them the night before, so they don't have to waste time filtering through the awful signal:noise of the official boards.
When Daelo appeared on R&D to post about SSC and BT tuning fixes and actually explained the logic behind them, it was incredibly welcome. When Tigole or Kalgan respond in a thread and offer some insight, it's a huge deal. Every WoW fansite immediately links and discusses the post and it's a major event. It shouldn't be -- those posts shouldn't be months apart (about as frequent as content patches, haha!) and it shouldn't be a momentous event when they happen. It doesn't need to be some formal Q&A or sponsored chat or interview on a fansite. The simple fact of giving the impression that the devs are there and listening, in a context that allows them to immediately correct any misinterpretations of their wording, rather than have some awkward sentence in an interview turn into a 40-page shitstorm of a thread about how Blizzard only favors raiders or whatever, is a benefit. Seriously, just 20-30 minutes a week, a couple of posts here and there. It'd help.
I am completely baffled as to why their communication is so awful. They did so many things, with WoW, better than everyone else, but they fail miserably in that area.
The class forums especially are graveyards. A blue post once a quarter is optimistic.
Even better - they could create a new forum titled "Dev Q&A", and like others said earlier the CM's/Devs could choose a few Questions a week that are fairly deep/unknown/heavily requested/etc. and just Post the Question, and answers. Locked forum, no other posts from users - just a simple area to view Questions and Answers.
Do it like a monthly or weekly newsletter maybe even, and I think satisfaction on the whole would go way up.
What I found pretty ironic was the contrast between the everyday communication Blizzard does (or rather does not) and the way the devs have presented themselves on Blizzcon and Gamesconvention during those interviews and panels that are now all over the web. My personal impression was that they really do their job because they like and love the game (and I guess this shows in the many little details that can be found in the game). But its sad that this doesn't carry over into the problems players right- or wrongfully complain about. Of course there are boatloads of whiners but there are also quite a lot of concerns that should be taken seriously. Selecting the latter is from my point of view one of the tasks a CM has.
Regarding the EU boards: at least the German boards are a wasteland, the only thing the CMs do is closing threads, banning folks and posting small talk (only a little bit). The only parts that do actually help the customer are the GM and technical aid boards though the quality of the responses there varies from right on the spot to absolutely useless :P
Perhaps because we are a discussion forum and not a news site? We're not curse-gaming or WoW Radio or wowinsider or whatever other sites have emerged over the years. In case you haven't noticed, we're pretty satisfied with that niche.
I realize that, but Curse represents the population as a whole, whereas this forum represents a smaller niche of players. Thus, Curse asks questions that everyone wants to know - professions, whats the new zone like, whats the plan for artwork, mounts, etc. There isn't a site out there that asks anything that our subset is interested in.
While I do like the idea of more developer interaction, whether a blog, separate forum, or the like, it does raise some issues.
First, one of the largest and perhaps most problematic issues with developer posts is that when they talk about the future and say, "we'd like to" or "it'd be great if we could do," people tend to take that as a final decision about a particular subject and then when it doesn't happen, or doesn't happen as quickly as they'd like, they give the forum mods a headache with dozens upon dozens of threads complaining about it. True, the developers could only answer questions about past decisions, but how many "player concerns" are actually about things in the past compared to "what will you guys do about X in the future?"
Secondly, Blizzard appears to be fluid and collaborative in their decision process. Once a decision is made, it is hardly set in stone. From reverted changes, retcons, and the like, many of their answers to currently dominant player issues would be "we just don't know yet," which would probably cause even more of a backlash than not answering any questions at all.
Those two things in mind, a blog of some sort would really be the only thing they could use because they could control the tone and content of it. But at the same time, one has to wonder if WoW players want more new information than the devs could supply in a normal week's work. Would we prefer that they stop developing the game to work on responding to player questions on a weekly basis? I don't know.
I've been out of the games industry for 4-5 years now but interfacing with the public in an uncontrolled way is a pain in the ass. Anything you say has to be completely accurate and not subject to change. If you say something that winds up not being true, then the poor kid making 12$ an hour doing your web stuff has to deal with your mistake every day until he quits because people are evil on forums. So in general information leaked to forums tends to be vanilla stuff that is already decided upon and you rarely see information about anything that is up for debate.
Then when you do choose to deal with the public it gets over analyzed to death. You don't want to interact with the grognards because they are a timesink and will never be happy anyway. If you communicate with the casuals the grognards feel betrayed.
It is a common mistake I think to assume that this is the type of thing that would take 20-30 minutes a week from a couple key people but really it is something that needs to be very orchestrated and planned and would require significantly more time to do in a way that does not cause more harm than good.
I am completely baffled as to why their communication is so awful. They did so many things, with WoW, better than everyone else, but they fail miserably in that area.
The class forums especially are graveyards. A blue post once a quarter is optimistic.
Too little time, too many forum trolls and morons. That's why.
<Fric> I think the only kind of gay buttsex I'd enjoy on any level would be assraping a smug hipster douchebag (also possibly a roid head and/or fratboy/Jersey Shore cast member)
I think it might not be a bad thing if we had an official (or even undercover) blue poster on these forums.
It sort of reminds me of the UO forums : Stratics Message Forums: Viewing forum: UO Great Lakes
The devs, and CMs comment directly to some of the player comments, though not all that frequently it does result in some interesting discussions.
-= Random Ravings - RSS Feed =- Rogue and Hunter stuff here. As well as guides to get you trough your spare time.
Assuming this isn't everyone's first Blizzard game, since when have you known Blizzard to actively talk with their playerbase about changes. upcoming or implemented on a regular basis?
I mean this goes as far back as Warcraft II, I've NEVER known Blizzard to communicate back and forth with it's playerbase, I still honestly go into a certain form of awe when I see an actual developer come on the boards and talk to people, I got to argue with Kalgan, and that was awesome, but it was honestly not something I was expecting, hell the name of my thread was "Feedback is worthless," and I was a little caught off guard by Mr. Lead Designer arguing me down.
I mean, I hate to sound like the token old lady, but if you think this is bad, you should have been around back in the day for "communication" with Blizzard. You have it better now then the old school playerbase did then.
I mean, I hate to sound like the token old lady, but if you think this is bad, you should have been around back in the day for "communication" with Blizzard. You have it better now then the old school playerbase did then.
True enough as well, back with diablo / starcraft blizzard was up in it's ivory tower.
At least we got CMs now that reply quite frequently on the official forums, though the ammount of information given is sparse.
-= Random Ravings - RSS Feed =- Rogue and Hunter stuff here. As well as guides to get you trough your spare time.
While I do like the idea of more developer interaction, whether a blog, separate forum, or the like, it does raise some issues.
First, one of the largest and perhaps most problematic issues with developer posts is that when they talk about the future and say, "we'd like to" or "it'd be great if we could do," people tend to take that as a final decision about a particular subject and then when it doesn't happen, or doesn't happen as quickly as they'd like, they give the forum mods a headache with dozens upon dozens of threads complaining about it. True, the developers could only answer questions about past decisions, but how many "player concerns" are actually about things in the past compared to "what will you guys do about X in the future?"
Secondly, Blizzard appears to be fluid and collaborative in their decision process. Once a decision is made, it is hardly set in stone. From reverted changes, retcons, and the like, many of their answers to currently dominant player issues would be "we just don't know yet," which would probably cause even more of a backlash than not answering any questions at all.
Those two things in mind, a blog of some sort would really be the only thing they could use because they could control the tone and content of it. But at the same time, one has to wonder if WoW players want more new information than the devs could supply in a normal week's work. Would we prefer that they stop developing the game to work on responding to player questions on a weekly basis? I don't know.
These are good points. I know that I *would like* more information on what the designers are working on, specifically as it relates to major mechanics issues, but there are very real logistical issues behind that, not the least of which being the vitriol that some players seem compelled to direct towards practically any change.
There's a lot of potential for any conversation between developers and the community to turn into a long series of apologies that doesn't really accomplish anything. Developers are human; they've got a lot on their plate, and it's not really that unreasonable if some things that are major issues to players get pushed back for a rather long period of time (one example: hilariously broken paladin tanking, pre-taunt). And quite frankly, the playerbase has a very limited view on what the developers and designers are working on; while the stuff that we, as players, are involved in may seem like the most pressing issue, the Blizzard team is rather busily working on The Next Big Thing on top of addressing current changes. And of course, there's always some pressure to hold off on major improvements so that they can be bundled into a content patch or expansion, so that those big releases get that extra bit of publicity.
Whatever lets devs communicate some of what they're thinking about without being assaulted by criticism is great. Even then, they're somewhat beholden to the crowds that will cry "WHY DON'T YOU CARE ABOUT XYZ!!!" when their issues aren't highlighted.
Even better - they could create a new forum titled "Dev Q&A", and like others said earlier the CM's/Devs could choose a few Questions a week that are fairly deep/unknown/heavily requested/etc. and just Post the Question, and answers. Locked forum, no other posts from users - just a simple area to view Questions and Answers.
Do it like a monthly or weekly newsletter maybe even, and I think satisfaction on the whole would go way up.
That's a pretty good idea imho. In general I would very much welcome more communication from the devs, one way or the other.
What would also go a long ways would be hiring more and / or better CMs. I realise that moderating the official forum might seem like a daunting task, but that's just because the current policy towards posters almost encourages trolls/flame wars/spamming etc. Once people understand that you can't get away with that kind of behaviour I'm sure the forums would improve, and the amount of time/work of moderating them would improve as well.
By the way, does anyone know what exactly CMs do all day? They must have lots of other tasks apart from moderating the forums, that's the only explanation I can think of for the current state of the official boards.
It would also be interesting to know what kind of training CMs receive, or if they're just tossed into the shark basin. And how they are recruited, what requirements have to be filled.
Because, just as an example, I remember this one time when some CM contributed to a discussion on the official boards (Rogue forum), I think it was something like Rogues vs Mages regarding openers. And that CM stated how he'd always use Cheap Shot and that we should try it because would work just fine.
Now a statement like that as a CM and your credibility just goes right out of the window.
I mean, if CMs DO choose to communicate with the players, at least it should be something useful every once in a while (no, patchnotes don't count). I'm sure that pet-name thread won't miss one more reply, but there are others that would value one highly.
Last edited by BlackCadian : 09/06/07 at 11:50 AM.
"If teh alliance had shamens, we wud win more battlegrounses" - random ally (Pre BC)
Too little time, too many forum trolls and morons. That's why.
When you have millions of customers, I dont think that is an acceptable answer. Full time paid moderators, as many as it takes to weed out the noise, that is not too much to ask for the WOW forums. This is not just a video game, its a business. A really big business.
If they had competition, real competition from another MMO, we would see them treat customer service and developer-community interaction as more of a priority.
If they had competition, real competition from another MMO, we would see them treat customer service and developer-community interaction as more of a priority.
Well, I wouldn't count on that happening anytime soon. It takes a pretty huge company to put out an MMO, and most of the other huge companies really just don't have the talent to produce a competitive one, or want to take the risk of bothering to compete.
So in the meantime, we'll have to arrive at other solutions!
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.
I would say that is a serious understatement if anything. Kaplan is an excellent writer indeed.
I'd just have to echo what many others have said though. Although the lack of communication is frustrating to the playerbase, attempts at honest communication far too often degenerate into complaints and drama. I think they would like to avoid that unnecessarily. Heck, LoS's unofficial motto was "We know Drama" and Pardo, Jeff and Alex at the very least are far too familiar with how these things affect the player community.
I remember back in the days that SOE had set up class reps for EQ (coming from the community), those were gathering questions / priority lists and semi-regular responses were given by Dev.
Of course at that time all classes pretty much had a semi-official volunteer-operated board like Mage Compendium, Monkly Business... Doing that through the official forums would no doubt lead to a huge job sifting through crap to get the rare gems...
I went through some posts on Steelwarrior (EQ warrior board) the other day and I was pretty surprised to see some discussions with raid devs on current EQ raid-content (direct feedback given to devs and devs answering quickly), of course this might be easier with a smaller community...
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.
Drawing connections to Presidential Debates, and Senate Committee Hearings, the reason people aren't allowed to speak during the Q&A portions of the hearings, for example, is because if you've ever seen CSPAN, during confirmation of controversial positions, such as military commanders, or judges, you always see (at the end) the people who shout "MURDERER" and "TYRANT" at the people in question.
If there was a moderator who could prevent the trash of the community from asking the junk that you talked about, there'd be no problem. Mute everyone except the moderator who asks the questions, and the handful of devs who answer them. A transcript could also be posted on the wow forums for those who weren't there, and lock it so they don't get responses such as "hey they didn't ask my question, and it was the best wtf" or "tigole avoided the question because he doesn't know jack." If they have rules, they need to enforce them strictly.
WoW's too big and has too many retards to have any meaningful discussions with the community. It'd be nice to see the devs open dialogues with forums like EJ and WorldOfRaids though. I prefer the channeled approach.
One problem is that if Tigole started talking here, this forum would get spammed by idiots. I am sure Kaubel is up to the task banning mostly all, but I think the quality of this forum would go down if devs would participate in discussions.
It is out of question though that they read this. Just looking through the Mother Sharahz thread and then looking at the fixes made to the encounter suggests that this board is one of their main sources of feedback right now.
If I was Tigole, I'd particapte in this and other forum discussions but just under a fake nick. Maybe the wow char (I believe most of them have actual chars on normal servers? At least I know a lot of GMs do.) he plays on, maybe a totally fake one. But posting here with 'Tigole' sounds like a bad idea in general. I believe that would make things much worse then actually improve discussions.
WoW's too big and has too many retards to have any meaningful discussions with the community.
You just need a filter. Obviously the bigger the community, the bigger the filter needs to be. That's the problem with the Official forums right now - the filter is way too small for the size it needs to be, and only catches the really big chunks of crap rather than all of it. There's also the famous picture of the "random guy + internet + anonymity = total fucktard" which is pretty applicable to the WoW forums.
A discussion doesn't have to be in real time, and most discussions aren't (I would call forums turn-based, for lack of a better description, and it's a much prefered medium for me because I always end up re-writing half of what I say, and not posting 75% of posts that I start writing anyway).
At the moment the amount of forthcoming information from dev's is so small that every single word is looked at to try and draw meaning out of it, and so even very good posts/talks get filtered out by people over-hyping the bad stuff. It's just not worth it for them when the game is going so well to suddenly decide to post a load of stuff that people may not agree with in the first place and lose them business. At least they seem to listen when important topics come up and fix things (even if some things are outrageously late, like the Shahraz upcoming fixes in 2.2). They're certainly a world away from where they could be in terms of customer service (Hi EA).
Perhaps because we are a discussion forum and not a news site? We're not curse-gaming or WoW Radio or wowinsider or whatever other sites have emerged over the years. In case you haven't noticed, we're pretty satisfied with that niche.
The whole "+ EJ" part of this thread is silly and even a little embarrassing. The first part of the conversation is more valid, though.
Personally, I think that one of the most time-efficient things the devs (the big guys -- the lead raid, class, profession, etc., folks that headed up the major Blizzcon panels) could do to increase satisfaction would be to allocate 30 minutes of their Friday morning or something, while they drink their coffee at their desk, to just respond to a few posts. Maybe even have the CMs prepare a list of "good" threads/posts for them the night before, so they don't have to waste time filtering through the awful signal:noise of the official boards.
When Daelo appeared on R&D to post about SSC and BT tuning fixes and actually explained the logic behind them, it was incredibly welcome. When Tigole or Kalgan respond in a thread and offer some insight, it's a huge deal. Every WoW fansite immediately links and discusses the post and it's a major event. It shouldn't be -- those posts shouldn't be months apart (about as frequent as content patches, haha!) and it shouldn't be a momentous event when they happen. It doesn't need to be some formal Q&A or sponsored chat or interview on a fansite. The simple fact of giving the impression that the devs are there and listening, in a context that allows them to immediately correct any misinterpretations of their wording, rather than have some awkward sentence in an interview turn into a 40-page shitstorm of a thread about how Blizzard only favors raiders or whatever, is a benefit. Seriously, just 20-30 minutes a week, a couple of posts here and there. It'd help.
If you don't mind, I'm gonna quote this because I wholeheartedly agree with it. I personally (as many others) think the information stream to the players is abysmal.
I rarely even go to the WoW forums anymore, all they contain is senseless spam and nothing from which I can learn more about the game. All you need nowadays is MMO-Champion and the EJ forums.
I can also say that I really miss the Warcraft Battleplans, they really gave you an in-depth view of what they were really up to. Now, when I saw news about WotLK I didn't even want to believe it. We were left in the dark for so long and then they come up with that.
While I do like the idea of more developer interaction, whether a blog, separate forum, or the like, it does raise some issues.
First, one of the largest and perhaps most problematic issues with developer posts is that when they talk about the future and say, "we'd like to" or "it'd be great if we could do," people tend to take that as a final decision about a particular subject and then when it doesn't happen, or doesn't happen as quickly as they'd like, they give the forum mods a headache with dozens upon dozens of threads complaining about it. True, the developers could only answer questions about past decisions, but how many "player concerns" are actually about things in the past compared to "what will you guys do about X in the future?"
Secondly, Blizzard appears to be fluid and collaborative in their decision process. Once a decision is made, it is hardly set in stone. From reverted changes, retcons, and the like, many of their answers to currently dominant player issues would be "we just don't know yet," which would probably cause even more of a backlash than not answering any questions at all.
Those two things in mind, a blog of some sort would really be the only thing they could use because they could control the tone and content of it. But at the same time, one has to wonder if WoW players want more new information than the devs could supply in a normal week's work. Would we prefer that they stop developing the game to work on responding to player questions on a weekly basis? I don't know.
I don't buy that. A lot of what developers could post about is future changes, but that's hardly the only thing. There are tons of things that they could usefully tell us without getting speculative about future content. For example... What is their vision for the Shaman class? Ask 5 different people what it means to be a Shaman, get 5 different answers. Blizzard's class desc has called us everything from "An offensive hybrid with some healing capability" to "a healing class with some offensive capability" to "a melee-based hybrid..." to any number of other things. If a developer were to take the time to explain to Shaman exactly what they saw as the essence of Shamanity, that'd be HUGE to Shaman players, and it's only a matter of explaining past decisions.
Other things they could usefully post on would be topics like "Our design goals with Serpentshrine Cavern was to create an instance that would do X for players and take about Y time to run and yadda yadda. We're very happy with it in these ways but are taking lessons from the ways we fell short of our goal in those ways so we can try to do it better next time."
Or perhaps, "Our goals with voicechat are X and Y. The patch has been in testing for so long because we have concerns about Z. We know players have expressed a desire that we leave Voicechat out to patch sooner but at this point seperating it into different releases would take longer than simply fixing the bugs with this patch," or whatever the real answer is.
There are tons of things of this nature. Maybe the answers we got wouldn't be groundbreaking but it'd give the player a ton more insight into the developers' goals.
Also, as far as whether it's worth it for the devs to take 30 minutes out of working... I'd have to say yes. How much development time have they wasted over the years working on things that were ultimately unsatisfying to thier users? Couldn't an increased familiarity of their users help prevent that?
09/06/07, 10:21 AM
