WoW team must serve as a role model regarding communication

WoW team as a role model?

“You think you do, but you don’t!” This legendary phrase, once uttered by J. Allen Brack regarding WoW Classic, can be used to sum up many years of WoW development. For a long, long time, Blizzard had the feeling that they knew everything better than the players anyway. Therefore, communication or gathering feedback was a useless endeavor from the developers’ point of view. The players should just play and then they would see that everything is perfect.

In the early days of WoW, that may have been the right approach. But that changed little by little. By now, players probably know the world of Azeroth better than all the developers combined and player behavior has also changed dramatically. Mechanics and features that used to work well no longer attract players. For many years, however, developers continued to insist that they knew better and stubbornly did “their thing”. Sometimes with success, as with Mythic-Plus dungeons or world quests in Legion, sometimes with rather little success, as with Azerite armor or the “meaningful choices” of the pacts. But this attitude has changed drastically in the meantime.

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Communication is capitalized

Instead of throwing a finished feature at the players according to the motto “eat or die”, the players are already involved during development – at least in places. This requires one thing above all: good communication. And it’s precisely in this area that the WoW team has become exemplary.

For months, there has hardly been an adjustment in WoW that has not been explained by the developers. Patch notes for alpha builds consist of two-thirds “developer note:” whether it’s a change to dragon riding or talents being moved, the developers explain every action they take. This makes it easier for us players to see and understand the intentions behind them, which leads to less aggravation.

So there’s no need to open twelve forum threads about a new talent tree, because the developers directly state that only the talents themselves should be tested now, and the proper distribution in the talent tree will be done later. Two years ago this would not have happened, I’m sure.

Feedback is heard and (partially) implemented

Most customizations to the Dracthyr caller are based on player feedback.

Source: Blizzard

Of course, developers can’t and shouldn’t implement every piece of player feedback. Because some feedback is simply unqualified or not well thought out. So not every feedback makes for an adjustment. But every adjustment is based on feedback. If you look at the major adjustments in the Dragonflight alpha, you will find a forum thread for almost every change.

So instead of trying to respond to “this is dumb” with their own ideas (and possibly make it worse), the developers are helping themselves to the wealth of player knowledge. However, this doesn’t always work that way. Because the amount of players, whose feedback was not taken into account, is of course always larger than those, whose feedback the developers have implemented.

Other teams continue to ignore

Of course, not everything is perfect with WoW teams and communication with players either. But on the whole, they are on the right track. Maybe they should tell that internally to the other development teams. Because everything doesn’t work as well there for a long time.

You can basically go through almost any team or franchise. In Overwatch, there was radio silence for years before they vowed improvement and now wanted to make communication more open and regular. What followed were further months without a real dialog with the players. In addition, many things were only discussed internally or with a very limited number of players before they were implemented. This includes the change from 6v6 to 5v5, which is still viewed critically by many players. Even with the new monetization of Overwatch 2, players were simply presented with something – without in-depth explanation.

The latter was also a big issue with Diablo. After the fiasco surrounding Diablo Immortal, surely not a single player in the world would have given positive feedback on the in-game store idea for Diablo 4. Instead, the developers announced it just like that and the franchise had its second shitstorm within a few months.

This might not have been prevented with better communication, but it could have at least been mitigated. Even if the developers don’t have any freedom regarding monetization, the fans’ anger would certainly have been smaller if they had explained the circumstance better.

Please keep it up, WoW

If the WoW developers keep up the good communication like this, the future actually looks pretty good. Sure, none of this is a guarantee that WoW will become (or remain) a good game, but it should certainly help. The developers don’t always have to listen to the feedback if they want to bring in their own ideas in some places. But it is important to understand each other. The developers have to know what the players think and the players have to understand what the developers want to achieve. And that’s exactly the case for the most part at the moment.

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