As an observer of Blizzard for many years, I’ve noticed that they rarely engage or debate the public in open and independent forums. The Blizzard public relations machine runs a tight ship and only designated Blizzard employees are allowed to even talk to the media and then it’s to deliver a controlled and cohesive promotional message.
Yet at every BlizzCon, Blizzard plays the role of the benevolent ruler and opens up the floor for one hour for questions from attendees. This is the only time every year that those purported 12 million subscribers ever get to confront the Masters of the WoW Universe and demand some accountability from their overlords. But as we shall see, very few people get to ask questions.
The scene at BlizzCon is rather bizarre and medieval. It usually goes like this: there’s the wise Blizzard panel sitting high up on the lighted stage like royalty, while the questioners are like groveling peasants come to ask favors of a king. Yet these few petitioners are the lucky ones.
If you are fortunate enough to be able to take time off and afford to travel to BlizzCon and lucky enough to even purchase a BlizzCon ticket and even luckier to ask a question and then even luckier to have Blizzard give you an honest response then you’ve experienced something very rare in a pastime shared by 12 million subscribers.
Despite the myriad of “dude, why did you nerf my class” questions, the occasional good question gets asked at BlizzCon. So I thought to myself, what would I ask Blizzard if I got the chance. Naturally I’d ask tough questions because quite frankly I’m tired of the softball questions posed by most video game journalists and the usual suspects at the sycophantic official WoW fan sites.
Here are 12 serious questions that I’d like to see asked and answered at BlizzCon:
1. Why is player housing in WoW being continually kept on the back-burner while Blizzard continues to experiment and spend resources on various iterations of PVP? If SOE can implement player housing for non-paying Free Realms players why can’t Blizzard implement it for their paying subscribers?
2. Why isn’t Blizzard creating meaningful role-playing mechanics, supporting role-players and enforcing their own role-playing rules on role-playing servers?
3. Who’s story is more important: the personal stories and memories of your players or the stories created by game designers?
4. Blizzard developers often claim that much of what they develop is based on player feedback. However the only time a subscriber is ever asked for their opinion is when they unsubscribe. Why don’t you ask for your subscribers for feedback and opinions on a regular basis?
5. Why did it take 6 years for Blizzard to update the original zones of vanilla WoW?
6. At BlizzCon 2009 one of the questioners on the floor asked Blizzard to do something about in-game gold spammers. Due to Blizzard’s unwillingness to curtail trial accounts, this problem is still happening and it’s gotten worse. Why has nothing been done to stop this once and for all?
7. What is the exact criteria for the selection of beta testers for World of Warcraft?
8. How much did Blizzard spend in airline tickets, hotel reservations and other perks to pro-Blizzard gaming journalists to attend World of Warcraft press junkets?
9. What percentage of the profits from World of Warcraft are put back into the development and maintenance of World of Warcraft?
10. How many WoW current paid subscribers are there in the Americas/Oceanic market?
11. How many WoW current paid subscribers are there in the European market?
12. According to the official WoW Twitter feed the current time it takes to answer a petition in WoW is 5 days. Do you consider this an acceptable level of customer service?
These are just a sampling of the questions I’d like to ask Blizzard if I had the opportunity. I’d like to hear other people’s concerns and possible questions for the Blizzard panel.
Let’s be honest, most of these questions would probably be deleted promptly by the moderators of the official WoW forums. Which leads me to another question, if it weren’t for independent blogs and discussion forums that are not beholden to the overwhelming pressure exerted by big video game companies, who would ask the MMO industry the tough questions?
-Wolfshead
Great questions!
I would amend the first question from “If SOE can implement player housing for Free Realms why can’t Blizzard implement it for their customers?” to “…Blizzard implement it for their paying customers?” or something like that implying that the players of wow are paying monthly fee for the game where as the player of Free Realms – a customer never the less – is not necessarily paying a dime to play the game.
I’d also like to know why they are working so slow on the bugs and how long their know bug list currently is. The last number I remember was 18.000, though I may remember it wrong.
C out
I think those are great questions, with a couple exceptions:
1) I think the answer to that one isn’t that Blizzard is incapable of putting in player housing, but rather that they have no desire to have it in their game.
3) I’m trying to decide if this is a false dichotomy or not. I think you have a point, but we’d probably disagree on the details
4) People are always giving feedback whether it’s asked for or not.
5) Right or wrong, I imagine the response would be that they’ve been creating new content. Also, to be fair, several Vanilla zones received big updates years ago (ie Dustwallow Marsh)
8 ) Seems kind of irrelevant.
I really like all the other questions. A shame Blizzard will likely never answer them!
“1. Why is player housing in WoW being continually kept on the back-burner while Blizzard continues to experiment and spend resources on various iterations of PVP? If SOE can implement player housing for non-paying Free Realms players why can’t Blizzard implement it for their paying subscribers?”
A question I’d like answered too. Having a place to SHOW OFF my accomplishments in game would be awesome 🙂
“2. Why isn’t Blizzard creating meaningful role-playing mechanics, supporting role-players and enforcing their own role-playing rules on role-playing servers?
3. Who’s story is more important: the personal stories and memories of your players or the stories created by game designers?”
The people who care about these things don’t appear to work at Blizzard anymore, sorry.
“4. Blizzard developers often claim that much of what they develop is based on player feedback. However the only time a subscriber is ever asked for their opinion is when they unsubscribe. Why don’t you ask for your subscribers for feedback and opinions on a regular basis?”
This is a great question.
“5. Why did it take 6 years for Blizzard to update the original zones of vanilla WoW?”
Eh, not sure this question is very fair. Don’t think about it in terms of ‘6 years’ think about in terms of ‘3rd expansion’. That’s not too bad. I think they timed this just right.
“6. At BlizzCon 2009 one of the questioners on the floor asked Blizzard to do something about in-game gold spammers. Due to Blizzard’s unwillingness to curtail trial accounts, this problem is still happening and it’s gotten worse. Why has nothing been done to stop this once and for all?”
I agree there is no excuse for Blizzard not handling this better.
“7. What is the exact criteria for the selection of beta testers for World of Warcraft?”
Eh, seems like a whine question. Sounds like your saying “Why don’t I get into beta :(” Cry more noob?
“8. How much did Blizzard spend in airline tickets, hotel reservations and other perks to pro-Blizzard gaming journalists to attend World of Warcraft press junkets?”
Oh give me a break. Blizzard is making kajillions of dollars. Who cares that they bribe a bunch of journalists.
“9. What percentage of the profits from World of Warcraft are put back into the development and maintenance of World of Warcraft?”
Not really relevant. You can’t just throw money at a product and expect it to improve faster. You need people who are skilled and enthusiastic and it takes time for them to become better at things. Just because they make 100 million a month but only spend 20 or 30 million a month on development/maintenance isn’t really important.
“10. How many WoW current paid subscribers are there in the Americas/Oceanic market?
11. How many WoW current paid subscribers are there in the European market?”
That would be really interesting to know. No way in hell they’d tell us 🙂
“12. According to the official WoW Twitter feed the current time it takes to answer a petition in WoW is 5 days. Do you consider this an acceptable level of customer service?”
I’d agree with this that they could expand their customer service department. That is one thing where you can spend more money and just hire more people. The talent pool for customer service reps is infinite.
All in all, some of your questions are good, but some come across as whining.
By the way, even though I don’t reply very often, I enjoy reading your posts 🙂
There are some really good questions there, even though I probably wuold try to refrase them a little (without diluting their content), if I was to put them. Now some of them sound a bit biased to be honest, more about expressing an opinion than to actually hear what they have to say.
Like: “Why is player housing in WoW being continually kept on the back-burner”
I’m pretty sure that could be put in a more “journalist style” manner without losing content.
Anyway: I agree about how huge public q & a sessions tend to become pretty pointless as to content. it was the same with the Twitter thing. Ordinary players aren’t very good at putting those questions and of course they’re bound to pick the easiest cherries, ignoring the ones that would take more effort to answer…
I think the major idea about having those sessions is more about performing a ritual where you knit (or pretend that you know) the players and the developers together. “Woaaa! The Gods are stepping down and talking to us!” is what this is all about. Not about offering deep thoughts and analyses, discussing things in order to improve the game or anything like that. It’s the wrong forum.
I wonder though if that kind of questions really would be deleted in the offical forums? I don’t think so. They surely aren’t to be considered as trollish. I don’t think you could expect many replies on them, they would probablty remain un-blue. But delete them? I’ve never heard they would perform that kind of censorship. The only reason they’d delete them is if you would violite their guidelines, for instance putting them in big letters, requiring answer from Ghostcrawler etc. And those kind of actions normally only result in that the thread is locked.
Finally: I can agree with your frustration about the lack of courage and integrity in the gaming press and the fan sites. It’s saddening to see sometimes. Sure, there are many fanboys and biased blogs and we don’t follow many journalistic ethics, but at least we’re normally open about what we are. Those so called video game journalists aren’t. It’s sad to see.
Your design questions are excellent, your questions that imply they’re some sort of sinister corporate entity with a vested interest in self-promotion are a bit duh.
I would love to see questions 1 & 2 get asked.
One other point about accountability to their fans – they feel very much as if they’re interested in what North American fans feel but not anyone else. Why isn’t there a Euro Blizzcon or an Asian one? I wonder if this may change as their numbers diminish in America but increasingly grow in their secondary markets.
It’s not just video game journalism that’s worthless. *shrug* Journalism in general is almost worse than no information at all, these days.
…anyway, I do think that the lack of housing (and appearance tabs) is really odd in WoW. It would be nice to hear an honest answer about those.
I disagree with the journalism in general part (well, at least in the UK.) Whilst, yes, most of the televised stuff is doom and gloom, no intelligence at all but hey it’s a news story type stuff, they still keep me informed with what’s going on.
If I actually want intelligence in my journalism I go read The Guardian 😉
Just a note, my questions reflect my diverse interests as a gamer, MMO critic and game designer. Blizzard is a very secretive company and because of this I think it’s useful to reiterate questions that some of us have.
Meh, since you posted the questions I’ll give my take on them.
1) I genuinely do not understand why people clamour for housing. Really, I don’t. Having played Second Life heavily for a few months, nothing but that is going to suffice for me in terms of housing; and besides, not having it in an actually physical area is just shitty anyway. LOTRO’s housing is just something I wouldn’t be interested in due to its limitations, and EQ2’s because it has no sense of place in the world. Considering Blizzard are looking to curtail their world, I can;t see them doing anything here. Besides that, think about the time that went into developing housing in these games: where did it come from? Probably combat, since both are extremely lackluster in terms of responsiveness and animation sync compared to WoW (although I do agree that Blizz seriously need to fuck off with PvP and either remove CC abilites from it or just declare it there but not supported and concentrate on providing good PvE.)
2) Agreed, to be honest. WoW has a good story to RP in, it’s just badly managed.
3) Good question, although not one I’d want to answer. I think in the end the players’ stories are largely lost on people who know the game and the genre, since there’s nothing new and hence nothing to weave a story from (in game mechanics terms.)
4) Suggestion forum? I don’t want the inbreds that populate WoW’s community to have a say, quite frankly. I think the greatest mistake a developer can make is to place too much emphasis on player feedback, because, fundamentally, people have no idea what they want other than a vague idea.
5) Pointless question: they have made several updates over the years, and I can’t think of any other game that has even bothered to do such a major revamp. I’d be patting them on the back, not asking them how long it took.
6) Agreed here; if they stopped them using trade it’d be end of problem. Sigh.
7) Who cares? It’s random; whatever anecdotal evidence you have (i.e. Gordon’s brother) that they only invite people who quit I can counter by saying I did the same thing, citing Cata as a reason to come back, and never got a beta invite. And, personally, I think being in the beta would only ruin it.
8 ) Not an answer I really give a crap about since every company’ll do that, but I can see where the idea comes from.
9) Yes, yes, yes.
10+11) Interesting, would be nice to know why Europe is over-priced in the Blizz Store and why we get shafted when it comes to developer interaction, especially if we have more than or equal to the number of US subscribers.
12) Biased time-frame considering it’s 4.0.1 patch week. Normally I think their support is some of the best in the industry, in terms of answering the question and having reasonable reading comprehension (SOE *shudder*.)
I think you missed the question I’d most like answered: Do you acknowledge that the dungeon finder has rapidly killed the socialising in-game and the ease of making new friends, as well as ruining realm communities?
If they said No, I’d be worried.
Well as a EQ2 fan I’d suggest upping the animation rate if you find things are syncing (on low end systems it defaults lower).
I’ve played WoW and EQ2 and they’ve worked fine with combat animation. Where LOTRO and EQ2 took the development budget from though I guess is profits (Bobby Kotick has talked before about demanding 40-60% profit margins), good for them too since not being WoW (and having now a social sort of “critical mass” that is hard to go head to head with) they need differences to keep them alive.
But to answer your last question about Dungeon finder, Ghostcrawler replied already on the official forums some time ago
Player : ” Supporting the national community at the degradation of the server community. I know that servers don’t have the same feel of closeness that they once had. I like to attribute this to cross realm interractions (BGs and Dungeon Finder) and soon to be national BGs. I feel like this takes away from the internal community somewhat that should be allowed to flourish.
Ghostcrawler :” I think this is a legit issue and I definitely miss a little bit of the community feel my server(s) used to have. On the other hand, I’m not sure that’s a good justification for long queues. Dungeon Finder can feel a little anonymous at times, but it beats the pants out of not being able to run dungeons at all. ”
Original source : http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25626102433&pageNo=1&sid=1
So crap combat is a difference to help keep them alive? I don’t buy that for a second.
Also, cheers for the quote. But it’s a load of bullshit, partly because they could merge servers for queue times anyway and partly because I highly doubt things would change that much for any one other than DPS (which, quite frankly, doesn’t bother me in the slightest.)
I’m not a Blizzard employee but most of these questions have already been answered in the past.
1) If they wanted to implement player housing then of course they could do it. They /don’t/ want to because it would needlessly pull players out of the world into instanced areas leaving the big cities like Orgrimmar desolate.
2) This was asked at one talk today I read. The suggestion of adding a pane for character back-stoires was brought up
4) Do you think asking players on the forum for design advice is a good idea? I certainly don’t. Good posts tends to be seen [and sometimes replied to] by blues.
5) They chose to focus on new content that could be experienced by everyone rather than spending resources redoing old content that wouldn’t be seen by as many people. It seems reasonable given that they’re redoing things now while they’re updating all the old world environments.
6) They could definitely do more here but addons like Badboy do the job for the time being.
7) A bit of luck, a bit of random (I don’t know).
8 ) The question isn’t how much was spent but what was the return on investment? How much publicity did it get in the media?
12) From person experience it definitely doesn’t take 5 days to respond to a ticket. Perhaps you’re referring to character restorations of hacked accounts which usually takes longer because of the the number of inquiries they get. The last few tickets I’ve had to submit have been addressed in <24 hours.
Interesting that so many comments have echoed question #1. That one has been asked and answered by Blizzard repeatedly over the last six years: they don’t believe that player housing is a worthwhile feature which would justify the development effort. They don’t believe that a significant proportion of the playerbase care about it at all, although they acknowledge that the minority who does care is quite passionate about the idea.
Blizzard is dead wrong about their justification for not implementing player housing. I’ve not seen any cogent arguments from Blizzard backed up by serious data that players “don’t” want player housing.
Why is it that the loudest applause came from a lady who asked for a simple closet to store all her quest gear? To me that signifies massive public support for player housing. Let’s be honest, how many people were really in support of “barber shops” in WoW?
The real reason they don’t want it is that, the current dev team have personal prejudices and biases against MMO role-playing. Either that or they just don’t care. So logically it follows they would not be in favor of spending their time developing mechanics that would support it like player housing.
In fact Jeff Kaplan the former Lead Designer of WoW talked about player housing to MTV a few years ago:
http://www.mtv.com/games/video_games/news/story.jhtml?id=1550175
Sadly, he’s no longer on the team and currently working on Blizzard’s upcoming next-gen MMO which will probably have player housing which could be another reason why Blizzard keeps avoiding the player housing question.
The fact is that personal virtual space (which is essentially player housing) is the biggest trend in gaming right now. There are hundreds of millions of players on Facebook playing social games and all of them center around the mechanic of managing one’s own personal personal virtual space. Farmville, Frontierville, City of Wonder and so many more games are all about this and they are far more successful and popular than WoW will ever be.
Could you clarify what was meant by “a simple cabinet to store quest gear?” I immediately thought: what? Banks already exist, fool. Is it referring to some sort of mannequin style thing where the cupboard is full of visual representations of the armour?
I don’t get the weird fixation on player housing. I’ve played games both with and without player housing and I don’t especially understand the (perceived) appeal. Even in RP-focused MUDs, it did not seem especially useful.
By contrast, the argument that adding player housing might depopulate the cities seems fairly straightforward. Why play an MMO if everywhere is a ghost town?
All that aside, I think your fourth question is excellent.
Well on the “digital castration” blog I did see a review of his experience of the Blizzcon, the Ghostcrawler looking bored/unhappy picture I saw last year seemed to be the attitude based on his experience
Original source http://daeity.blogspot.com/2010/10/blizzcon-2010-day-two-sucked-little.html
Thanks for the post and the links. Nice to see some honest actual critique of BlizzCon instead of the usual cheer leading.
Well, they used to announce accounts per region, as little as 11 million users ago. They just changed that practice when they started bleeding in NA/EU and growing exponentially in Asia. That’s bad PR for the NA market.
Eventually, when you are the sole WoW player in North America they will announce ’22 Million users world wide!’
Some good questions in there, and honestly, I wish more long-term questions were asked of Blizzard at BlizzCon and not just momentary “why did you reduce the effectiveness of my X ability by 3 seconds” as those questions are of the moment and often irrelevant a week or two later.
I would love to hear the response to the straightforward question:
“How many active subscribers are there currently on US/Oceanic servers?”.
I would also add in “How many brand “new” subscribers have signed on in the last month or year? About what percentage of players currently active in the game have, at one point or another, disabled their account or stopped subscribing?”
I think your question about Ticket times is no longer relevant – responses seem to come to me within 24-48 hours now… sometimes within an hour of submitting a ticket.
I also don’t know what the fuss about housing is about. This isn’t a feature I have been eagerly anticipating, but perhaps done well it’s something I would enjoy.
I think it’s a shame that there’s not more in the game to support RP. We rely on the same emotes over and over again. I’m constantly typing in /awe and nonsense because a part of me thinks it ought to be in there. Starting every /e emote with “Character name #blank#” is a bit limiting too.
Frankly I couldn’t care less about what they spend their revenue on as long as enough is spent keeping the current game going. In fact I hope they use the cash to invest in their less commercially viable/risk taking projects.
And I think it’s a true shame that (a) we’re expected to argue amongst ourselves on the forums when we try to give feedback or (b) unsubscribe.