Early patchnote confusion / EU/US forum merge

25/10/2016 12:35Posted by Gombado

Just to be clear; I was talking(the disinterest and malice part) about the seperation of english speakers and english speakers within the wow community. I personally think the label malice here is justified ever since we got a glimpse of how the devs culture's view on the eu community; we're face palming picard monkeys with no possibility for worthwhile insights- we should be kept in our cages well clear from the 'always constructive' us forums. (if you missed it, our current Game Director's views on the EU community can be seen here in a fun 10th anniversary celebratory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d3M6N5vMoQ&feature=youtu.be&t=51m12s ). A sentiment that is judging by the utter lack of developers ever visiting these forums still present.

I'm going to respectfully disagree with you here. In that clip, Ion is comparing US and EU feedback threads on the same topic - and you even see the Picard ASCII he's scrolling past in the EU thread. While I understand that people have the pereception that their feedback isn't valued here, I feel it's a huge stretch to take that one example and claim it's how the entire EU community is viewed. The seconds after that section even go on to explain how feedback is integral to the raid design process. Furthermore, Ion even elaborated on that clip here.

Ion still posts feedback threads for all the raid testing for both the beta and PTR, something he'd hardly take the time to do if the team didn't care. During the course of the Legion beta he replied to threads on both the EU and US forums and more recently, he has even shared details on the EU forum first.

As for disinterest? Not on Aerythleas part, surely, but from blizzard as a whole I think that's a fair assessement , both myself (http://eu.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/17612252191?page=1 ) and many others have made many a post without a reply. Now I know this is the communication policy, but seeing the breath and scope of the posts I find saying theres a disinterest in this subject more than fair.

We (/ I) simply want to talk about wow things, it's what unites us on these forums and it frustrates me (and judging by the amount of posts others aswell) that we're limited in this for archaic reasons we have to think up ourselves.

The request to merge the EU and US forums is one I see quite a lot of, the reality is I don't have a good answer to provide right now.

The purpose of the EU forums is to provide a platform for European players to discuss the game with each other, which allows us to gather European feedback and sentiment. While on some topics, the feedback being voiced on both EU and US is pretty similar, there are also cases where one region has reacted far more strongly to something than the other. If the forums were merged, this would be harder to differentiate when we construct our internal reports, and we have to consider how to adapt these processes accordingly.

There is also the matter of service related topics. The US forum already has separate sections for the Oceanic portion of their subscriber base. If the EU subscribers were added to this, we'd still be looking at having separate EU General Discussion and Recruitment sections, as well as separate EU and US service support forums which could make it even harder for non-forum regulars to track down information in times of technical problems if that's the only time they check the forum. The alternative is; do we restructure our forum support teams to be global? This brings with it a whole new set of factors such as: Will this require new tools? Can we provide coverage with our current workforce or will that need to be reviewed? Are there any regional variances in policy that might cause roadblocks? (etc.)

Furthermore, there are technical considerations on the back-end (a small example, but by no means the only hurdle: how to make a clear differentiation in cases where EU and US share server names and there's a character of the same name on both servers?) as well as subtle cultural differences to consider. Then we also have to think about what this is going to require in terms of resources from our web teams. Will we just do a 1-for-1 exchange and merge EU general with US general, EU Class forums into US Class forums (and the resulting mess that would likely need to be cleaned up) or put the EU forum into some sort of read-only archive mode for example.

Even then, despite seeing requests for this merge, we do also see people asking for such a merge not to happen. If any solution is decided upon, we'd want it to be the best fit possible (and leaving things as is, is one potential solution).

I guess the TL;DR here is: This isn't even an exhaustive list of all the factors and variables - it's not a simple case of flicking a switch and it happens.

25/10/2016 16:08Posted by Kreep

Any idea why the petition on the US Death Knight thread got closed within a few hours, but the same thread on the EU Death Knight forums is still up, weeks later?

I agree I should've locked it by now, but I let it keep ticking over as there was some very useful feedback coming out of it.