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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsHow the WoW community is about to push the self-destruct button
by Adam Holisky 
Dec 12th 2009 at 10:50PM
If you've been paying attention to the role forums and the "Ghostcrawler drama" this past week, you know what I'm talking about. If not, we'll begin with a brief rundown.
The Inherency of the Status Quo
WoW is designed and run by a team of people, with a handful of "leads" in position to direct the design of the game. These people, such as Ghostcrawler, are at the top of the ladder in terms of game development. They are the conglomerate of the entire design and development teams underneath them.
Ghostcrawler, and in the past a few people like him, post on the role forums daily in an effort to establish a dialogue with the community over some, but not all, game design principals.
The community, as expected, is more than happy to talk with Ghostcrawler and the rest of Blizzard.
The Harm of the Vocal Minority
The vast, the extremely vast, majority of WoW players are quite happy with the direction of the game and the balance that has been struck therein. The majority of players understand that the game is ever changing, that just because you're at the top today doesn't mean you'll be at the top tomorrow. The vast majority of players take this to be a game, and nothing more.
However, a minority of the players, which have recently developed a very loud voice, are not pleased with the direction and development of the game; especially those that have been around the entire time the past five years. While this vocal minority have many legitimate issues, some which truly do deserve to be addressed, they risk having not only themselves but the entire system of direct designer interaction shut down over their inappropriate and abusive tactics.
Case in point is a 20+ page, 20,000 view topic on the role forums that has developed over the past day (there have also been innumerable other ones deleted). In it, the vocal minority goes on a direct yet rambling attack against Ghostcrawler and the rest of the designers for what they've done with the game. The attacks are inappropriate and a complete distraction from the real questions and concerns the community needs to have addressed.
Solving the Problem
The community needs to do a few things, and these things need to happen soon.
First, the inappropriate commentary needs to either be shot down en masse, or it just needs to be ignored. The vocal minority only responds the way it does because players in general respond well to their tactics. When a person yells "FSCKING GC nerfed paladins again! I'm quitting!" and then sees two dozen affirmations of his sentiments, not only will he continue but he'll also cause other players to mimic his behavior. Instead, if he saw two dozen replies telling him to grow up and behave, then he would be shamed into behaving.
Secondly, the community as a whole needs to understand that it doesn't have a solid grasp on class balance and general game design. The topics are infinitely complex, often times requiring high level education to understand completely; especially in such a huge system like WoW. The people who do understand these systems are employed by Blizzard, and if not, they're listened to by people like Ghostcrawler. The community is not entitled to run the game. The fact that we all have a unique and valuable opportunity to engage in discussion about its direction is not a blank check to demand change.
In addition to the community changing, Blizzard needs to do something as well. The need to get another person in the role forums whose job it is to police the participants. This would have two effects. First, it would serve to show that the vocal minority that Blizzard supports its designers – no one could say that "I was just banned because Ghostcrawler didn't like what I was saying." It would be much clearer that they were banned by the company and by a group of individuals for being inappropriate.
Secondly, and more importantly, this would allow Ghostcrawler and the team he represents to go back to posting and discussing actual topics of interest to the community, rather than having to respond to the vocal minority.
While it's obvious that trollish parts of the community value participating in internet yelling matches, the majority of the community does not care to hear it. We bring this issue up and to the forefront on popular WoW media because it's imperative for the health of the community that this vocal minority does not control or continue to influence the quiet majority.
If these problems within the community are not cleared up, we all stand to lose the most insight we've ever gotten about the internal workings of WoW. And when that insight is lost, along with it will go the ability to exert any influence, however small, over those internal workings.
So tonight we implore the community not to press the self-destruct button. The results are not what you want.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Virtual selves, Blizzard
Reader Comments (Page 5 of 27)
Tuscansalami Dec 12th 2009 11:22PM
*rolleyes*
This article has nothing to do directly with the direction of the game and people's happiness - it's how there is a group of people that resort to inflamitory remarks, qq, requests for nerfs and buffs etc without actually discussing the problem.
In other words, it's just about how bad forum behaviour is dragging down the wow community by taking up time of the mods to deal with it, and making the whole place look bad.
Eruntalon Dec 12th 2009 11:29PM
Absolutely there are more than 5 people out of 100 who aren't happy, that's common sense. However, that number could be 6, 7, 12, 50, or 99.5 (account for split personalities you see)
I'd ask to see where you got your numbers from that makes you so sure that it's more than 50%, but I don't think I'd like to see just where you pull them out of...
trogdor7 Dec 12th 2009 11:32PM
You're missing the point, Drew. There are 10,000 people posting; say that 1/2 are upset with the game. That doesn't mean 1/2 of the playerbase is upset, far from it in fact. The biggest thing is: people who have no complaints rarely take the time to even look at the forums, let alone make a post about it.
Let's compare this to your example. Say the game has 100 subscribers. 10 post frequently on the forums, and five have problems with the direction of the game. Those five claim that this means that 50 of the players of the game have the same problem of them, when in reality the number is closer to 10 who actually have issues.
brendan.euclid Dec 12th 2009 11:33PM
Ask anyone who has ever worked in customer service how often people call up to talk about how happy they are with a service or product. It's very, very rare. Unhappy people are FAR more likely to express themselves than happy ones. If 5% of the posts are unhappy, it's actually more likely that 1% of the players are unhappy.
tarvis2 Dec 12th 2009 11:39PM
and that 50% come from what? if you really have a problem you shouldn't be so angry you should play another game i commend GC he isn't like you (random anonymous player) when he says something or makes a decision it get micro Analyzed misquoted take wrongly and people will literally get angry. i would LOVE to see you have yo put your job under the microscope when u post... and i would love to ask that if everyday thousands of people try and get you to quit. GC and the other developer are doing the best they can to balance the game, work for its future and make millions of people happy.
When is the last time u made millions of people happy?
Mike Dec 12th 2009 11:41PM
If 5 people out of 100 were so unhappy about the game, then 5 people would stop playing. If they really represented 50% of the populace, then 50 people would stop playing the game. Blizzard doesn't get their numbers about how many people dislike the game from the few insensitive coots that post on the forums, they get it from the people who desubscribe. And apparently those numbers say people are happy.
btw, please do us all a favour and do a combinatorics or probability course before you start pulling numbers like 50% out of your ass like that.
ChromeBallz Dec 13th 2009 12:09AM
You sound like Lt. Steven Hauk from Good Morning Vietnam.
"5 upset posts out of 100 subscribers does not mean that there are only 5 subscribers who are unhappy. It just means that there are only 5 people out of ALL of the unhappy subscribers who decided to voice their discontent.
The reality is far different from what your article and, sadly, Blizzard wants to acknowledge. This should be viewed in the same way that every other major business out there views paper mail these days. For instance, for every one letter that AT&T (to use just one example that I have had personal experience with), receives from a customer, AT&T imagines that there at least 1,000 other people out there who feel the same way, but didn't take the time out of their hectic schedules to actually sit down and compose a letter and write in. When looked at this way, what you realize is that the numbers of people who are frustrated with the game - especially given the financial commitment they have made over the years (much of which, I might add has gone to pay people like Ghostcrawler's salaries), - is significant. Let me repeat that: The number of people who are frustrated with the game is SIGNIFICANT. To look at it any other way is to simply be blind."
How am i blind if i don't see something which isn't there to begin with?
Only 5 out of 100 people complain.
That means that only 5 out of 100 people complained.
Any other conclusion is pure conjecture, and would be based on pure guesswork rather than cold hard facts.
Fact is, only 5 out of 100 people complain. It can safely be assumed that the other 95 are either satisfied, or are not bothered by whatever the problem may be, ie, accepting it and moving on. If people were dissatisfied, they would discontinue paying for the service or they would voice their concerns.
In this case, most of the complaints in WoW come from the 'hardcore' community. People who spend 18 hours a day playing the game. People who theorycraft in their sleep. People who actually bother to look deeper into the mechanics of their class than what they see in the game itself.
The thing is, those people are a vast minority in the game. They have spent so much time on the game that they think it's their right to demand anything from the developers. Most of them demand changes which would most certainly drive away 10 million of the 11 million subscribers they have, with 800,000 of the remaining million leaving after they see that the game has been changed permanently to suit the remaining 200,000, those who originally were the ones requesting the changes. A year later, the game is shut down because it's turned into a financial disaster.
However, they can't see that. They only see *their* game, *their* class, *their* dungeons.... But it isn't. It's Blizzard's game, and ultimately, however many people complain about anything, it is THEIR choice what they do with it.
If people don't like it, they can, as has been said multiple times already, speak with their wallets and leave the game. In the end, you are a consumer, and if you don't like what you consume, you don't have to consume it - You buy another product or stop buying it alltogether. That's how a free market works.
Seriously, this is like someone walking into a Ferrari showroom and demanding that they make all Ferrari's look like Fiat Panda's, because "obviously i represent a vast and silent majority which will not stand for the way Ferrari runs it's business!".
Just so fucking stupid.
Drew Dec 13th 2009 12:49AM
I have never, not once, posted a complaint or a grievance on the forums. Yet I am a dissatisfied customer. Not so dissatisfied as to cancel my subscription. Not yet. But I am getting there. Out of the 23 people aside from myself that I know personally that play, I do not know of one who would call themselves a satisfied customer of WoW. They are all disappointed in one way or another with the direction the game has gone either with their class or overall. Some have switched classes. One has cancelled out right and another goes in and out of having a subscription.
Where do I get my 50% number? Well, if I and the 23 other players I know personally are typical of WoW's customer base - and basic logic and marketing says we are - then I would say that a huge chunck of WoW's customer base is unhappy with one aspect of the game or another. Maybe not exactly half and maybe not 99%, but a large enough amount of people that Blizzard should start listening.
A previous poster to his forum quoted Ghostcrawler/Blizzard as stating that they don't make game design policy based on forums posts and they would not even if the posts represented a majority of the Warcraft customer base. That is very arrogant. A company can only be that arrogant for so long before their customers, satisfied or not with the product, decide to take their business elsewhere. May not happen tomorrow, but nothing last forever.
Blizzard has a good thing going. They shouldn't ruin it by alienating so much as one customer. Despite what people choose to believe, it really is possible to make everyone happy at once. All you have to do is listen.
MasterAsh Dec 13th 2009 12:26AM
@ Drew
Wasn't their "vision" to create an accessible, but still addictive MMO? Because I'm sure they've only gotten better and better at realizing that vision.
Matthew Rossi Dec 13th 2009 12:41AM
"A previous poster to his forum quoted Ghostcrawler/Blizzard as stating that they don't make game design policy based on forums posts and they would not even if the posts represented a majority of the Warcraft customer base. That is very arrogant. A company can only be that arrogant for so long before their customers, satisfied or not with the product, decide to take their business elsewhere. May not happen tomorrow, but nothing last forever."
No, it is not arrogant. It is necessary. You cannot make a narrative of any kind (and WoW is a kind of narrative storytelling device using a game framework, although certainly a new form of art and not, say, a story in the conventional manner) by taking a poll and delivering exactly what the majority wants. This isn't a buffet. This isn't an order at a restaurant. Blizzard has a vision and they seek to execute that vision. If you don't want to participate, you're free not to, but acting as if your consumption of their product gives you the right to dictate how they produce it? That's arrogant.
Your only vote is to play or not to play. People don't leave because they think game designers are arrogant if they enjoy the game. Saying that they do is foolish. People leave because they don't want to play anymore, not because they have philosophical objections to a company and its game design process.
Res Dec 13th 2009 12:46AM
@drew-- You and your group of friends are obviously not representative of the typical WoW player, because if you were the game would be in ruins. We'd hear about realm merges every other week, and instead of subscriber numbers Blizzard would announce ridiculous stats like how many total characters have been created like LOTRO did. I have a feeling you and your group of friends have much more invested in the game than the typical WoW player who has never even visited the forums. The typical player has fun in their free time and couldn't care less about class balance. As long as the game is fun they keep playing. You are still playing, so it must not be so bad after all right?
You take a look at all the other games out there that are very literally failing because people have quit en masse, then compare if to WoW. THOSE are game with problems of unhappy customers. WoW does not have the same problem of unhappy customers that LOTRO, WAR, Age of Conan, DDO have, or Aion soon will.
Drew Dec 13th 2009 12:50AM
This will be my last post, but I just have to say this:
I really am sick and tired of people suggesting that the only way subscribers can and should express their discontent is with their money by canceling their subscription. Such as when the previous poster said that your only vote is to play or not to play.
That is like saying the only way you can participate in American politics and make any worthwhile statement is by going to the polls to vote or staying home and not voting. That is not true. There is such a thing as calling up your senator or congressmen after the vote and voicing your opinion. There are such things as town hall meetings and letters to the President. Those things do work and should work.
Blizzard is a game, yes, but it is also a community. People have invested in it, beyond just financially and they have a right to speak up. It is wrong of Blizzard and every other arrogant person out there to suggest that if people are unhappy they should just cancel their subscription. Canceling a subscription would be a lose/lose for everyone involved and it is by no means the only way to voice discontent.
Alchemistmerlin Dec 13th 2009 1:56AM
"Not enough to cancel my subscription. But I'm getting there"
Dear god, you people are always "Getting there" or "On your way there" or "Going to soon"
Just do it. If enough of you actually quit (You won't) Blizzard will notice (They won't) and the game will change (it won't).
...
(You suck)
Fnord Dec 13th 2009 2:01AM
With Blizzard as with politics, it's certainly all right to make your opinions known, far as that goes. However, let's say for the sake of argument that Drew's way of providing feedback to his congressman was roughly similar to the forum populace's/GC feedback loop. If so, no one should be surprised that was his last post, because the Secret Service would likely have him in a headlock about now.
When the forum complaints become as feverish as they have, it does not impress their passion upon Blizzard, GC, or anyone else. It just impresses how unhinged Internet anonymity can make someone. As Holisky said above, some of their arguments may have real merit. But they've ended up making it harder for a reasonable person to take their arguments seriously, because they've so abundantly exposed their own nigh-complete lack of seriousness.
Matthew Rossi Dec 13th 2009 3:32AM
"I really am sick and tired of people suggesting that the only way subscribers can and should express their discontent is with their money by canceling their subscription. Such as when the previous poster said that your only vote is to play or not to play.
That is like saying the only way you can participate in American politics and make any worthwhile statement is by going to the polls to vote or staying home and not voting. That is not true. There is such a thing as calling up your senator or congressmen after the vote and voicing your opinion. There are such things as town hall meetings and letters to the President. Those things do work and should work."
Blizzard is not a democracy, you are not actually a voter here, it was a metaphor.
Seriously, I don't even know how to reach you. Any attempt to reason with you brings out these kinds of self-entitled, frankly ridiculous comments. Blizzard is not a community. Fans of Blizzard's games might be, but the company itself is just that: a company that makes games. What works in a representative democratic republic does not work when applied to processes and entities that are not representative, nor democracies, nor republics.
What is admirable in the case of a political entity (town hall meetings, calling your congressman, and even voting) is pathetic and absurd when dealing with the company that runs the service you consume monthly. I don't vote on my cable company's actions unless I'm a stockholder, and even then, only at specific times as controlled by its corporate structure and board of directors. If my cable company provides substandard service, I change cable services.
If you find Blizzard's game to be substandard, stop playing it. You simply have no other rights here. You are not a citizen of Blizzard. You're a customer. Your analogy is ridiculous and flawed and should not be applied here.
DenverBigDad Dec 18th 2009 3:28AM
you're making your own argument invalid...you're saying that only 5 out of 100 are willing to take the time to respond, but that a 'significant number' are dis-satisfied...if they were really that dis-satisfied, don't you think that they would hide behind the anonimity of an internet avatar and bash as hard as they could against the objects of their displeasure? If the issue is truely that upsetting, then they will prioritize the time voice their opinion.
The argument about the number of people that have left the game representing a majority as opposed to a minority is also flawed. Look at the subscription base of Blizzard over the life of the game. From all accounts, they have grown subscription base year over year every year. Essentially, what that means is that even though those people leave (for whatever reason they give) the game has made direction/development changes that have pulled more players into the game than are leaving. Again, this means that the number of players 'satisfied' with the game are larger than those leaving or thier subscription population would be declining (just as the folks at Warhammer about that one)
I work as a statistician and I understand the relative basis for your argument, but you're letting your asumption of dispersion (how often an action is replicated in a complex system) run amok. An event (such as a complaint) deserves immediate attention when a statistically valid sampling shows variation from the NORM. From a statistics standpoint, you need to have clear event details for AT LEAST 10% of your statistical sampling in order for it to be considered a statisically valid issue, or a shift in performance outside of 3sigma range. While 10%/3sigma are industry standards, I think that most of the readers here would agree that we're not talking about over 1M completely dis-satisfied customers. I mean really, if Bliz lost 1M customers after 3.3 came out, then there would be a significant, important, and immediate response to what had happened. Has that happened? No, then there is no statisical significance that we can see. Now if they are looking at duel details, dps, kills, or other things and seeing significant statistical variation, then they have an obligation to address it. We, the players, do NOT have access to that and until you're using \a parser and can show definative statisical proof of variation, my stance is just hold your tongue and give them the benefit of the doubt that they ARE looking at it and trying to validate legitimate concerns against the statsitical data.
We'll assume, for the moment, that there are 100K completely pissed off players. Lets assume that ALL 100K players vote with their wallets and leave. The direction that Bliz has articulated is to make the game more accessible to the casual player. I would suspect that they have gained more than the 100K that would leave. This speaks to the 80/20 rule. It comes from the teaching arena, but is valid here. You design a game (or a teaching plan) for about 80% of your base/class. You're going to piss off/lose the top10% to an extent because the content is too easy. You're going to piss off/lose the bottom10% to an extent because the content is too hard (easy and hard are subjective, be it grinds, gear accessibility, whatever floats your perceptual boat) If they can keep the 80% happy and paying, then they have acheived thier goal.
The reality is that I stopped reading the forums years ago for this very reason. The 'ZOMG BLIZ NERFED ME AGAIN I QUIT WTFBBQLOL post get old after a while...I agree that that community does more harm than good at this point and I'm surprised that Blizz even bothers to let GC still read the content and respond. Asking a community to police itself without the power to affect change is a little shortsighted though. You can see that the negative responses here are being downrated, but there are no ramifications for that. It grays the comments out....even if they went to all black, there are no real consequences for posting content that is inflamatory, derrogatory, or just generally disruptive to the end goal of getting good dialogue with the community. Until there are consequences for those actions, those that enjoy the feeling of hiding behind an internet avatar and fermenting dissent, verbally abusing people that have no power over them, and those that support those people will have the freedom to continue to do so.
analogkid Dec 12th 2009 11:10PM
Ghostcrawler has routinely stated that those that post on the WoW forums are the minority and they do not take orders from them, and that even if they were the majority, they still don't believe having the community set direction of the game is in the game's best interest.
As far as handing out bans, there doesn't need to be any special reason given, I'm fairly certain flaming anyone and causing trouble on the WoW forums is grounds for a ban.
That being said, I don't think Ghostcrawler never expect to get flamed on the forums when he started posting there.
Lorini Dec 12th 2009 11:10PM
This is not a problem. Blizzard has been making quality games with a vocal screaming minority for nearly a decade. They know what's what and I don't see any evidence that Blizzard is listening to these people. Blizzard will not let the insanity kill their cash cow, I'm not even worried about it.
Abremm Dec 12th 2009 11:13PM
here here and well said.
benai Dec 12th 2009 11:10PM
sorry to be offtopic but i dont know where to put this... is anyone else expieriencing an insane amount of server lag? frostwolf is unbelievebly slow and i was wondering if this was a known issue