Consolidate Your Information

#1 - Aug. 1, 2014, 5:15 a.m.

There has been a few highly misinformed forum posts which have received some heavy attention in the last few days. After thinking about it for a while, I feel as though Blizzard can do much better at selling their game. Although Blizzard generally responds well on forums to some highly misinformed people, it is obvious that Blizzard has not been able to get their information out to as many people as possible in an efficient manner without people like this cropping up here and there.

1) Twitter is not read by everyone and many, many updates to WOD have been mentioned using twitter and only twitter. If it were not for MMO-Champion and others with twitter following feeds, many would not know what you've ever said on twitter.

2) Taking just your news releases alone, it's hard to piece together exactly what WOD will be. Patch notes are great, but they (as Blizzard has acknowledged) only really discuss changes to how the game is played, not really changes or additions to the game itself. This makes it difficult to follow unless your like me and follow twitter, build data-mining, and other social media nearly daily.

3) MANY, MANY people followed Blizzcon and WAY fewer people follow you on social media. The gap between what is being offered and what was discussed at Blizzcon can be painted pretty large by misinformed people, even if it may not be entierly true. If you're a somewhat casually informed player, it may be difficult to see exactly what is being delivered.

I wish I knew what the solution was. Granted the blog posts and news releases very much help with getting word out... there isn't a comprehensive guide to the changes being made to both the Game and Game-play. This is probably the most critical thing I have regarding expansion releases. Where can I go to see everything being offered in WoD in one logically laid out manner?

The truth is I can't. I have to be a twitter follower for 40 people, a daily follower of Battle.net for news releases, an avid reader of beta and general forums, and an MMO-Champion forum follower just to be ahead of the curve on the offerings of the Draenor X-Pac. I can't imagine how misinformed I would be if I had to piece together everything myself without being a twitter follower and a forum monitor.

I highly recommend being more precise and more concise with your methods of releasing news. Twitter bombs are just as bad as a lack of information or information that is spread out too far. This leads to things like some of these recent highly visible, yet misinformed posts getting some momentum in the forums.

I also HIGHLY RECOMMEND a consolidated publication of the offerings of Warlords of Draenor to the point where it explains in depth each aspect of change for the game and game-play. You guys have almost all the information out there, it's just spread out over twitter, forums responses, and news releases.

If I didn't follow those things, how are you telling me the details of what you're offering in your new product (Warlords of Draenor)?

If I was new-ish and not attached to social media, how would I know what the differences were between Mists of Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor?

Lore

Community Manager

#63 - Aug. 5, 2014, 1:28 a.m.

This thread has been a very interesting read so far. I've really appreciated the discussion, especially since we've been having very similar discussions internally lately, particularly regarding Twitter. Let me shine some light on our thinking to hopefully help you guys understand where we're coming from:

First off, we've definitely made some serious missteps over the past couple of months. Bladespire and Karabor should have been communicated in a clearer and more complete form than Twitter can really allow, as an obvious example. We're sorry about that, and are doing our best to learn from our mistakes and avoid making them again in the future.

When used properly, however, we think Twitter's a great platform. It offers developers the ability to respond quickly to simple questions without tearing them away from more involved tasks. It allows community managers to communicate and interact with the community on a much more personal level. As we've been embracing Twitter more closely, we're learning where the line is on "good interaction" vs "bad way to share information."

I also found some of the comments about transparency interesting. One issue we face constantly is "when is a good time to let players know?" The answer is a lot trickier than it might seem. If we tell everyone about every change we make the minute we decide to make it, many of those changes will never make it past the concept stage, and we create a whole lot of stress for players (let alone ourselves). Furthermore, it can be difficult to understand why a change needs to be made before all of the related pieces are in place.

On the other hand, if we don't share changes until they're complete, we miss out on the opportunity to hear concerns from players, and use that feedback to create a better end product. Neither extreme is a good answer, so it's a matter of finding the right spot in the vast grey area between the two.

I realize I've just used a lot of words and didn't really say much, so I'll finish up with a couple bullet points:

We think Twitter is a good platform for some things, but recognize that it's not working well for others.
We recognize that many of you would like to see us participating more actively on the forums. It's not as simple as "post instead of tweet", but we'll do our best.
As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, fansites such as Wowhead do a great job of consolidating and organizing tweets if you'd prefer a "news roundup" format.

Lore

Community Manager

#122 - Aug. 5, 2014, 7:18 p.m.

08/05/2014 02:12 AMPosted by Blupache
I'd also like to see more general design commentaries like the post on dps warriors earlier in the alpha/beta process.

Agreed, and more are coming. The dev team is just crunching pretty hard right now to get the expansion ready to go, which doesn't leave a lot of extra time for commentary. Once they're to a point where they can come up for air, we'll work on getting some more design insight blogs together.

08/05/2014 07:48 AMPosted by Elaedrial
As far as it not being as simple as "post instead of tweet", why is that? Does it really take you longer to bring up the forums and type the same thing you'd put on twitter into the forums instead?

Yes, actually. Reading a tweet takes less than a second, and replying to it often doesn't take much more time than that. A designer with a pile of tasks to get through for the day can easily sneak a glance at Twitter here and there, while waiting for a zone to load or some code to compile or what have you.

Reading a forum post, however, can be a much more involved task, especially if the discussion takes off. Quite often, designers (or community managers), upon noticing a particularly interesting thread, will make a note to come back to it later when they have time to give it their full attention. In fact, I've actually had to step away from my desk 3 or 4 times just in the course of writing this response.

That's not really an excuse for us to not spend time talking with players on the forums, I'm just explaining why it's not as simple as "use the forums instead of Twitter", especially for a designer hard at work on the expansion. They're just very different mediums, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.