My question to the community.
Does Blizzard actually read forum posts, or are these forums purely made for most people to vent so they don’t have to deal with the problems?
What’s your experience with this, have you seen Gm’s actually listen to posts before or are have they always been mostly ignored?
We dont know if they read them. But its 100% guaranteed that GMs will not answer them directly.
What blizzard does is get statistics form them. So if everyone (many people) complain about something in particular they will look into that thing. And maybe make a “blue post” communicating the changes they did.
And the reason is that Blizzard works with a different PoV. Each of us comes here to the forums with our own PoV. For example: “I, Uda, dont like XYZ thing”.
But Blizzard’s job is not to please me. Their job is to please as many people as possible. So unless there are many people saying they dont like XYZ it wont even register in their radar.
If the outcry is big enough then they will.
But I don’t think they read and listen to individual little complaints (nor should they).
You can’t make a game like that. You can’t please everyone.
Of course from a personal standpoint we all want the game to be what we ourselves like. But that’s not always in the best interest of the game as a whole.
So we voice our opinions and hope we get heard. It’s the most we can do in a normal scenario.
Lets cut to what this is really about.
You’re asking if they balance based on the repeated whines of a level 60 alt with a very biased take?
The answer is no.
Blizzard is not a single entity. There are community managers that read at least some of the posts, and it’s their job in meetings to say what the community opinion is. That however means that they have to distill the opinions on the forums, so they won’t include every single complaint that appears here.
Yes, in general. That doesn’t mean that they will implement the feedback in the same form or soon at all.
You meant these forums are generally used as means to vent rather than as means for feedback by the people venting. Because to deal with a problem they will need to get something constructively instead of (see 4th paragraph below).
GM’s don’t work on the forums. You and others commonly mean “Blizzardians” like CM’s but I don’t think we have an EU one so far. Sometimes the US one duplicates important posts across multiple regions but that’s it so far.
That getting “ignored” comes from things like:
“We need to buff x class because y is hurting me too much or you’re (a lot of expletives here)”
or
“we need to buff y class because x is hurting me too much or you’re (a lot of expletives here)”
This is obviously not usable feedback in any form other than two classes are duking it out at each other on the forums. In my POV the grand majority of feedback threads does not contain any useful feedback or is just an angry rant after getting clapped.
The simple answer is “yes but…”. The developers are likely far too busy to spend much time digging through the thousands of new posts that get opened each day.
That said part of the community team’s job is to monitor the forums (and other community sources like social media) for any active hot topics and to make sure they are highlighted to the leads and producers responsible for the relevant area of the game.
That does not mean that every topic that gets passed on gets acted upon in the next release or hotfix.
If the team tried to do everything we wanted they’d have no time left to actually finish and release an expansion - and that would be for the best- as if they did manage somehow to release what we asked for it would be the the most awful mess in the history of gaming.
We players are great at identifying what’s wrong with the game - but actually terrible at solutions!
That doesn’t mean that feedback doesn’t matter tho - the reason that the current M+ season is so popular with players is because Blizzard took onboard the feedback about the issues with M+ Season 1 and took action to address them - to use just one recent example.
The paladin player is reading.
The shman player is browsing.
The managers playing other classes are on vacation. :))
The mage player has also started reading :))
i dont think blizzard devs play the game
id argue they most likely dont want to, let alone reply to forum posts
i bet if you asked the blizzard devs they are playing
many many other games in their spare time.
Do you know what a GM is?
Since the moderators are considered part of Blizzard, then yes, Blizzard reads the forums 
On a serious answer, the developers don’t. At most the blues may analyze and consolidate our posts into useful information which they will present to the lead designer, who on their own discretion may or may not take decisions based on those.
The irony is that the best devs are ones who don’t play, exactly because then they can be unbiased in their decisions. If they see everything as numbers that don’t affect them, it’s easier to make objective decisions than if they were also invested in the game. Imagine, for example, if you had one of the top < insert class/specialization > players be part of the class design team. They’d make their favourite class super OP.
-=EDIT=-
For example, there is a thread by Kaivax asking us about our favourite dungeons. That’s because they want to see what we like in each dungeon and what we don’t. And they will use that feedback to design future dungeons to be closer to the dungeons that are voted most favourable by the playerbase.
Can you blame them? Most people prefer to leave work at work and do something else at home, to replenish energy for returning to work the next day.
Its not their job to reply to forum posts, its their job to take feedback into concideration during the development process. Feedback is not gathered by devs, its gathered by community managers and other entities who pass the word along.
Wich is a good thing, Game developers have always drawn inspiration from other games, if they didn’t, gaming would get really stale.
Too many people foolishly believe their feedback is somehow extremely valuable. Then when Blizzard doesn’t change the game for them the very next day it becomes “they never read the forum” etc.
id guess no. Theres too many moronic suggestions that would ruin the heart and would of the game
If Kaivax would have played last season he would have known right off the bat NOBODY was going to vote for CoT and SV… 
Did you really need a community vote to know which dungeons people would choose? Its not rocket science if you played them to be honest…
With the added bonus that if he would have played last season he would have pushed for nerfs … nerfs we did not get !!!
US one they got devs responding, here it’s only mods.
They dont read wow eu forum posts
That much is certain
I’m fully convinced Blizzard devs do read the forums
But only as bedtime stories.
“Dear Blizzard please stop nerfing my class every Tuesday”
“And then the rogue said he wanted PvP balance…mwahahah!”
Knowing damn well it’s just going straight into the comedy vault
I like to think that they do
90% of the times NO