Serious question for blizz devs

Q u o t e:
Because for every right answer that the forums provide, they also provide a hundred wrong ones.

Q u o t e:
The issue I have with GC's quote above is the quality posts that have great feedback get no attention while troll posts do.

I want to address this because it gets brought up a lot.

1) You don't know that they get no attention. They may get no public attention.
2) I can't post in every thread even if I wanted to. I do read them all.
3) Blue posts can derail a good thread.
4) Your expectation should not be that your posts are here to get a blue answer. If you post something intelligent, then you've done your job.
5) "Quality" post is very subjective. It does generally have a lot to do with whether you were the author or whether the author suggested buffing your class though. :)

Q u o t e:
Customer Satisfaction: We'll take what you say under advisement and consider the fact that maybe some people out there also have knowledge and background in game development. We'll read in to this and make sure our customers are having a happy game experience.

Customer satisfaction is actually very important to us. The disconnect happens when a player says "fix this and I will be satisfied." We don't think the game would be improved by implementing every player suggestion. We think WoW benefits from a strong design direction overseen by a small number of people. Crowds may have wisdom, but they kinda suck at design. :) "Designed by commitee" is another way to say it.

Sometimes players suggest things that they think would make them happy that are actually bad for the game. "Kel'Thuzad should always drop loot I can use," is one of those sounds-good on paper deals. Who wouldn't be happier to get more loot? But showering players in loot is not necessarily good for the game. A contrived example, I know, but it is easy to come up with plenty of them.

Sometimes players suggest things that would make them happy but would make another player have less fun.

Q u o t e:
What about when the suggestion is to make skills work? Lately it seems like it's going to be forever before I can play my class how I want to because of bugs holding it back.

-AoW resetting swing timer(I reported this back in beta)
-Sacred Shield not scaling with Sheath of Light (I reported this back in beta)
-BoPing someone else makes it so you can't bubble
-Bugged glyphs

Bugs are bugs, I know but they should get fixed in a decent time frame when the ability's functionality is screwed.

Yes, bugs are bugs. It is not necessarily the most efficient way to get them fixed to mention them in the role forums, though I note them when I see them. We actually have a pipeline in place in the bug forum to make sure those issues get to the proper people. I don't mind you bringing up bugs in here though, especially when they color perceptions or have huge effects on class balance.

As for why we can't always fix bugs in a timely fashion, it's just the nature of software development. Sometimes it is technically difficult. Sometimes getting the bug to reproduce consistently is a challenge so we can't isolate what is causing it. Sometimes the change is so risky that it is better to live with the bug for the time being. Sometimes we need new tech to fix the bug and that time might even come at the expense of a more important feature. Several of the bugs we introduced in 3.0.8 were things that were working perfectly on our servers or in some cases even on the PTR. What happened to them in between that and live deployment? (I actually know the answer in most cases, but I'm trying to illustrate what happens in developing a game as large and complex as WoW.)

I don't mean to suggest that we don't test our content. We do and we have an oustanding QA department. Almost all software has bugs, especially complex applications. I am perhaps more forthcoming about the state of the game than you are used to, which may make it appear that we have more problems than we used to. But I don't honestly think that is the case. I remember how insane patch day has always been, especially a patch of this magnitude.

This was a massive patch in terms of number of changes. It fixed several hundred bugs of all sorts. They are not all reported in the patch notes or the patch notes would be pretty unreadable.

Ulduar is a large patch from a gigabyte perspective, but that is mostly art. It will have many class changes too of course.

We do listen to players who post good numbers. The problem is that sometimes players post bad numbers and are convinced they are good numbers.