I’m going to try and tackle some of the most recurrent questions and concerns here. Bear with me!
Again I want to reiterate that your feedback does get read. The tricky situation is that replying to a thread with a small “thanks, this has been forwarded on” can then set a false expectation that there will be an answer, or a change to the game, when that post appears out of context somewhere else on the internet.
Likewise, after a while a simple “thanks for the feedback” in response to every thread can begin to feel just as empty as not receiving an answer at all. It may also cause people to feel more neglected than they already are, if their own topics are not replied too. Having a lot of similar replies can even make relevant answers harder to locate on the aforementioned Blue Trackers. Of course, if a topic is particularly prevalent I will endeavour to let you know that it has been heard. (
for example)
I’m also not a developer, so I’m not really in a position of speculating or commenting on game design choices where the Blue text effectively causes any response posted to be viewed as Blizzard’s official stance. That being said I will try to chase up on widespread concerns and, any significant information I do get, I will try to relay to you as much as possible. Though I also want any information I provide to be as accurate as possible to avoid potential sources of confusion. This leads into:
To the green - seriously? Timezone difficulties and "permission-to-post" issues?
It’s not really a permissions issue. Of course we want to make sure that everything we post is accurate which can cause delays. Some communications are partially a timezone issue, with the developers being in the US it’s far more likely that any tweets or posts that the developers make, will be during US hours, because that’s when they’re working. Likewise it means that here in Europe, we may have to send e-mails to the developers enquire for information if our schedules don’t overlap.
For all important communications, we are trying to get everything communicated at the same time in all regions via blog posts. If any localisation is needed, then that may delay the process, but the goal is for important communications to be on blogs in all regions within 24 hours.
Yes, this may not have always happened in the past. We’re well aware of that and working on improving.
On that note, let me pitch a question here – would you like for the
Updates from @WarcraftDevs thread to be mirrored onto the EU forums so you have better visibility of it?
07/10/2015 10:09Posted by
Cerrin Eu needs to get the information in all languages at the same time or the world is destroyed.
This isn’t always the case either. While it is true for important announcements and updates, there are smaller, more language-specific, updates from the community that may not be posted in all languages. This is decided on a language by language basis. For example a Hearthstone tournament running in Germany, only being casted in German, would normally only be communicated to our German speaking audience as it’s of more relevance to them.
And I'm simply astounded by your welcome thread and Bashiok's farewell thread, because most of those blues, I've never even seen them here or anywhere for that matter, especially not this year, AND YET - most of them bear the "Community Manager" title.
The Blues you see in those threads are Community Managers that have individual game and languages responsibilities. For example, here in Europe we support 6 games in 5+ different languages; to break that down there is (generally) one Community Manager per language, per game. That means there are a lot of Blues you may never see outside of those types of threads, simply because they are supporting a different game/language.
I have a question; as a community manager surely managing the community of the official site takes precedence over third parties i.e. twitter, youtube, fansites etc. Why is this not the case? If people have feedback to give or questions to ask surely the official forums would be the place they're most likely to come to do so.
I know this isn’t going to be a popular answer, but Twitter, Facebook and YouTube (and probably more to come) are also official channels. These sites may not be directly hosted on Battle.net, but they are still official channels. The World of Warcraft community, as a whole, is very diverse and spread out more than just on the official forums. All feedback is valuable, regardless of where it comes from.
To go back to an earlier point, any important information we try to communicate through the official blogs. The official Twitter and Facebook pages are generally used to highlight fun stuff the community is doing (Cosplay, Machinima, Fan-Art, etc.) as well as direct people to the official blog posts. Again, this is something we’re striving to improve on.
But, and ultimately…
I fully understand that you have all been feeling neglected here on the EU forums and I definitely hear that there are aspects of the game that you’re unhappy with. However, I can’t change what has happened in the past. I can only change what happens going forward. I want to go forward working together with you all, which is why I made my initial post (and this follow-up!) giving you a view of the stuff I do. The main takeaway I wanted to give from that post is that some days (maybe even weeks), I might not post all but that this isn’t because I’m ignoring you. Interacting with the community, championing your feedback and also highlighting all the great content the community makes, are all things that enticed me toward this job – it’s what I aim to do as often as I can! :)
