This is for a number of reasons, among which the importance of having potential bugs collated and centralized as much as possible, which makes the entire bug checking and fixing process more efficient.
It may sound silly, but having bug reports scattered around too much doesn’t help but can actually do the opposite by increasing the time needed to gather information, or making it difficult to determine how widespread a problem may be.
Please rest assured that bug reports submitted in-game are not ignored, keep in mind however that checking and fixing a bug is something that can take time, and that some potential bugs may have a lower or higher priority in fixing/investigating than others.
And WHY can’t we have a bug reporting forum here too? I get the bit of being easier for the devs or QA or whomever reads the reports to have a single place, but then, why not allow players with characters in NON-US regions to report bugs online?
Creating an account in a zone you don’t play in just to level a character to level 10, may seem like a little thing, but it is one more unnecessary thing to manage.
Being able to have ONE forum, that you guys could set as English Only but could work across regions, THAT is what would allow you to better have a feel of HOW widespread a problem is as you’re more likely to get people to say “#metoo” than to actually take the time to report it in detail… Reporting it in-game almost feels like I’m just typing:
echo “Here’s my detailed problem description” >/dev/null
Hell, if you want to really push the boat out, how about adding a way to VOTE on bug reports to prioritize fixes?
I have to say … this is something that has bugged me (pardon the pun!) for a long time. I understand potential hardware issues etc for keeping US/EU seperate … but I’ve never really understood why the US and EU forums were seperate. I mean sure, there’s a little more work with sub-forums for realm-relevant stuff but you guys can do sub forums, right?
I’ve seen the US forums … I’ve contributed … and they’re waay more involved than the EU.
It would be a complete win:win for you guys … less duplication of news articles and support areas (sure, occasionally you might have to say “and the day after for EU”, but hey, we all get that); less work; possible even less staff? Or at least … the ones you have would actually feel like they’ve have a more compressed area to work in.
It’s always frustrated me, being part of the EU, having the feeling (rightly or wrongly) of being excluded or overlooked, simply because we’re not in the US. The US have the community council section, the bug reports section, and way more other, useful and interesting forum sections AND they seem to have much more active GM’s (not saying anything again the EU GM’s … you can only do what you can do with what you’ve been given).
I’m genuinely interested to learn the reasoning behind splitting the forums between the two regions, and why it’s still valid today.
Also, though I don´t have the numbers for WoW specifically, it could probably be argueed that the EU is actually the larger of the 2 markets, with a much more diverse playerbase.
For those reasons alone I never understood the logic behind any developer of any game segregating their forums, just to treat the larger one like the unwanted stepchild “because we´re americans”
No offense intended, I too am a US citizen… But it more often than not seems to be the only actual reason, esp in a case like this where both use the same language and even have teh same “Staff”… I´m pretty sure for ex. Linxy or Kaivax wouldn´t mind only having to post in one forum
I guess the original theory behind it was to create a forum per region? I don’t know if that’s the actual case … but it’s the only reason I can think of.
However, I can see no GOOD reason for them to be split now. Not when Blizzard have obviously been reducing their staff, they’re based in the US (even more so, now Microsoft has gotten involved), and the EU forums are very obviously the “poor relative” in this scenario.
Just move that poor relative across the pond, move in with their bigger neighbours, and stop spending rent on the old house …
Just for goodness sake get a forum address that doesn’t include “US” in it. Then everything will be hunkydory.
*Edit … and by “bigger” I’m referring to the forums here, that have more blue posts, more interactions and more forums sections.
Still waiting for a word on this. My bear is nowhere near ilvlcap but his passive physical reduction from armor is 80% before Ironfur (which adds another 20k armor and caps out at a single stack while during pre patch this required 4-5 stacks). Existing gear had their secondary stats buffed by around 7% but armor values were NEARLY DOUBLED. It’s not just tanks but every armor class in the game is now twice as durable.
Other plate classes are already at 85% by default, also without any buffs or passive effects.
Yet on beta in a moderately high difficulty dungeon none of the tanks can survive two packs of melee only attackers longer than 10 seconds without external heals.
Hard to provide any kind of meaningful feedback when scaling is in both cases this extreme. Tanks are powerful, but aren’t intended to be strong at all? Which is it? Will PVP adjustments follow anytime soon because physical attackers are tickling me while I still die to casters in a matter of seconds because all the self healing and shielding has been taken away.
Been playing since the launch of the game and have never ever understood the reasoning for splitting the forums.
Any software developer who cares about their product wants feedback and bug reports centralized - why the hell is this region split still in place.
AND WITH IT, WHY IS THE LVL 10 CHARACTER STILL A REQUIREMENT?
I will never pay for a sub on my US account, only to be able to post there, to get my feedback more visible, to have Blizzard have a higher chance of successfully bettering their product.
Because there are no European developers. The entire development team is in the USA, and do not participate in the EU forums. So any bugs reported on a EU bug reports forum, would never reach the people it needs to reach. Whereas a bug report made in-game, gets delivered directly to the QA team in the USA.
I would assume, to cut down on spambots posting on the forums.
Since you can play for free up to level 20, just the same as in the EU, you don’t have to have a sub.
I work in a software company as well. We have offices in all 5 continents with all sorts of teams, including devs, spread across the world - physical distance is not what it used to be when everyone is WFH these days.
Blizzard needs a PROPER bug tracking tool - in-game reporting is laughable at best (most tickets get closed for no good reason asking to re-open if the problem still persists, which, of course, if they haven’t looked at it in the 1st place is going to most likely be the case) and there’s NO visibility on bug reports, unless you go through the hassle of creating a character in the US and then having to post in the US forums, at which point one begs the question - why should we then ALSO be using the EU ones?
