It’s somewhat surprising to me, although I guess with how much noise is created by ineffective and biased so-called “valuable” feedback that Blizzard would turn this option off, however…is there really no dedicated way to provide meaningful, constructive & thoughtful feedback?
I get it that you guys are tired of hearing the same biased rambling, however, some of us understand your position of an entertainment business, your business goals and how that needs to be taken into account when criticizing the systems you’re trying to build.
You dont, really. You have to hope many other people have the same feedback as you, then a big community creator such as Bellular might notice it and make a youtube video about it.
Only then might Blizzard notice it and with a low low chance make a change.
The forums are an excellent place for feedback. As goes for any other fansite forum or social media or community page or anywhere else people talk about WoW.
Blizzard have a Community Management team who will collect all the feedback from these various areas and boil it down into a nice little weekly report which they send to the developers, like: “These are some of the hot topics in the Asian and Australian community these days, and here’s an interesting post written by someone on the forum, and here’s a collection of player feedback about this spec you enquired about.”
Then the developers will read through that and in the process become informed about what the community at large thinks and feels. And then they can make design decisions with that level of understanding in mind.
Community Managers are also present at design meetings, basically representing the community feedback. So if the design meeting is about revamping Shadow Priest and all the designers think Void Form is so cool and the spec should be about more Void Form, then it’s the role of the Community Manager to voice the concerns and feedback from the player community about Void Form, so the developers are more informed about whether a certain change or direction is ideal or not.
That’s basically how it goes with direct player feedback.
Blizzard also has a Business Intelligence Team that collects data on everything players do and don’t in the game – how much they do it, when they do it, what they do instead if they don’t do it, if they’re doing it more or less after a specific change, and so on.
They’re statistical nerds who basically take all that data and boil it down into fancy little conclusions on A4 paper for the developers like: “Since you made this change we’ve seen a 300% decrease in player activity in this area and a 6000% increase in PvP Pet Battles between 6 o’ clock and 9 o’ clock and a 35% increased rate of canceled subscriptions with a prevalence of reasons given being that “You ruined the game!””
And then the responsible developer takes that A4 paper and locks himself into the toilet and has a mental breakdown over the imminent trashing he’s going to get from his manager.
So that’s indirect feedback that players constantly provide in spades simply through how they play the game. And this is by far the most valuable feedback players provide – their actions.
To be fair, for once, they should stop listening, and they should start actually playing the game. It’s the blind leading the blind right now.
Edit: To clear it up, no, I’m not referring to the players being blind, I’m referring to the developers not knowing what is worthy feedback, and what changes to make.
You can give feedback in game or via the forums. If it’s related to Shadowlands Alpha there is a whole subsection for that.
If you really subscribe to the EU do not count, or simply want to take part in both forums, then it’s very easy to set up a US starter account, level it to 10 and be able to post over there.
On instagram.
Tbh US forums are silent aswell.
Blizz normally read instagram nowadays which is stupid since not every1 that post on instagram play Wow unlike the forums.