Seeing as my time in the community council only has like 25% left, I want to give my feedback and review on the project, while it doesn’t directly effect the game, indirectly it does and I think it’s good to get this ball rolling on how we see the program and how we think it can get improved.
Member Activity
The first point, is I feel is one of the elephants in the room. The Community Council exists of 100 people, yet only a handful of people are posting on the forums or are active on the Discord. And yes, for the people who weren’t aware, there is a Community Council Discord where we can talk with eachother and some of us use this as a means to flesh out ideas we have before posting them here. But, on the member list, there are quite a few that I haven’t seen posting on the forums or typing on Discord either at all or very little.
Now, it’s understandable that not everyone can always find the time to be active and posting, but it does defeat the purpose of the Community Council and to be blunt, why did you accept the role if you do not engage?
EU and NA seperation
Now I know I already made a topic about this, but it is worth repeating and I’ve actually noticed some side effects. The fact that I cannot post on my main character feels weird and hindering, noone can check my Armoury page and see that I am a collector/pvp’er/raider/m+ or whatever you can think of, and it shouldn’t be an issue but it feels like it is, many people feel that the members of the community council represent a certain group (more on that later) but all they see is an empty lvl 10 alt with nothing to show for.
Besides the above, the EU forum posters have no way to create a thread using the topic link function to get the discussion rolling among people that can’t reply to topics made in the CC section, which doesn’t feel very community engaging.
Community perspective
There seems to be confusion among the community as a whole about what this council is about, from what I gather there seems to be the opinion that the community council is a PR stunt and that the people who get chosen are representing the community’s opinion as a whole, not ourselves. I don’t think this is true and I’ve always thought that I should add in my views, and not those of a certain community, perhaps an extended explanation would help again on this project and how the selection goes.
What to talk about
I know this has been a recurring topic on Discord, but it is worth mentioning here. We have been told that there is no structure in what we can talk about, so basically anything game related goes, which is great… but also very difficult because you’re not sure where the focus lies for the developers. Perhaps a CM can continue to make threads like “Post your feedback about the raid here” and “Give us your thoughts about X feature in Dragonflight” so we have both the freedom and a direction.
Feedback and Blizzard communication
This has been talked about a lot, and I think this is probably the most important part and can make or break this project as a whole. There is an obvious lack of interaction between the community (council) and Blizzard, which does make the providing ideas and feedback a little one sided, though we have to believe that everything is being read and forwarded, else we might as well stop.
Anyway, it obviously has very little value for a CM to tag every post with “this has been read” or whatever, but perhaps one of the CMs could gather topics been made, discuss them with the developers of the appropiate deperatment and every 3 months write a post with the thoughts and maybe future actions of the developers regarding our topics.
I think this would entice more people to engage and give ideas on how to improve, and it personally would make me check outside the CC forums more and see what other things are important for others.
Anyways, this is all I can think of, I personally think this project is great, but there is definitely a lot of room for improvement going forward.
