The WOW Q&A of Blizzcon 2021

[Leyasi-argent-dawn]

Greetings!

This is gonna be my first longer posts ever normally i do not talk much as i like to be that person who stays in the background but now well i had to come out and write this… so a bit of feedback to blizzard as well anyhow i do not know where to start with this but i’ll try to start off that i have been playing wow for a long time now not as long as a lot of you here but enough to see a lot of changes. I love the game, i love the lore and i love the community and what i love the most is the small details there and here which make the game really special it’s one of the reasons why i keep playing here.

What makes it really special is each year blizzcon happens where i look forward towards a lot of things mainly for the newer announcements and mostly questions related to wow.

This year i feel like every single question that was asked was just not great all, there were only 2 questions which caught my eye. But when it came to the rest it was just lore question after a lore question, barely answering the crucial things that people want to know. There’s so many good questions which were asked “here” Yet when it came down to it things like class balances, pvp related issues, new battlegrounds, covenant related issues, mission table balances, soloque, and A LOT MORE things well… absolutely nothing was provided it fell like the whole QA section was spat on, only the majority lore questions made it in???

What is wrong with you blizzard? I cannot even consider this anymore as a community engagement this just feels like where you are just hyping things up pick few questions out mainly lore related and then that’s it. In the past when people were asking questions there was so much more feedback towards those questions… and yes i do understand were in a pandemic but really you could have done a lot better than that, this whole QA just seemed to be rigged.

Honestly this expansion has been amazing a huge selling point for me was the character customization now i am just reading left to right that customization is not getting any new updates no longer? I just do not understand how is that possible something that is highlight of the expansion to be this bad? There are tons of MMO’S out there who have done a lot more with character customization and yet all these resources we cannot add more color variation options to races, let alone create new assets or use certain assets from in-game npcs??? You got great community who even goes out that far to show their creations for you, showing what can be done and give inspiration and yet nothing can be done?? Just baffles me.

I do not understand how are the developers working but clearly there is something wrong here big time not to mention the philosophy of pushing expansions out faster is not good at all rather than making the current expansion better and making most out of it what it can offer towards players.

Anyways if you Blizzard still have some sort of decency left have community managers & developers take a look at the QA on both EU and US forums and start at least providing feedback to those people whose voices have not been heard at all.

As for the people reading here thank you for taking your time to read through this if not then you can just say tl;dr, and also i would really like your thoughts about it.

Thanks again!

[Jito-turalyon (Jito)]

I think the Q&A format doesn’t really lend itself well to the kind of questions the savvy forum lurkers want with regards to class balance and Covenant balance and Legendary balance and balance balance balance.

The reason why is that Blizzard don’t really keep the balance answer a secret until someone asks them about it. Once they make a decision about buffing or nerfing or changing, well then it becomes evident on the next PTR update.

There isn’t really a scenario where they can reveal a bunch of class balance decisions in a Q&A, because it would inevitably just be revealed through the next PTR patch notes anyway.

And it’s not like Blizzard haven’t tried it before. At the Blizzcon for Cataclysm they had a Class Q&A hosted by Ghostcrawler alongside the prominent developers responsible for class balance (including Ion Hazzikostas). And if you watch that Q&A, then yeah, they definitely get all those questions like “Why’d you nerf me, bro?!” and “As an Affliction Warlock I’m noticing a 0.0001 point discrepancy between the dps of Shadowbolt during Bloodlust relative to a Mage’s…”

And Blizzard don’t really have the definitive answers that people seek to those very specific questions, because it’s inevitably something that is decided based on internal discussion and PTR testing. It’s not something that’s thought out months in advance so it can be revealed in a Blizzcon Q&A. So the answers end up being the typical: “We’re keeping a close eye on this.” and “This is something we’re aware of, but we don’t have anything to announce at this point in time.”
And that’s not really satisfying either. Players don’t get more out of that than just waiting for the next PTR build’s patch notes.

Blizzard’s iterative design process where decisions aren’t made through a process of A->B->C, but rather A->B->C->A->B->D, that makes for difficult communication.
If they say one thing and then change their mind, then players get upset. So unless they’re 100% sure, the answers become flimsy. And if they are close to 100% sure, well then the answers become evident on the PTR.

And for reference:
Blizzcon 2010 Cataclysm Class QA [1/4] - YouTube