WoW: Does Blizzard care about the opinion of EU players? A "Blue" answers

Already often we could read in the official WoW forum, in comment columns or on community platforms that the responsible persons at Blizzard would not care enough about the European players. If there is feedback, then mostly on posts in the forum of US gamers, according to the critics.

And also the player Retributor struck a few days ago in this notch and wanted to know whether the opinion of the EU player community would care the developers at all? In the EU section of the forum, there hasn't been a developer post that goes beyond superficial PR blah blah for years. Yet there would be more than enough actual feedback from EU players in the Shadowlands Alpha forum, the class forums, and the general forum that should be heard.

Once again, no developer responded to this post, but Rejuvithorn, a Blizzard employee, did. Here are the most important insights from his extensive post:

• Communicating with the community is a big challenge: one wrong word and suddenly "the developers are thinking about it" becomes "Blizzard has confirmed that", even if it was never written that way.
• Likewise, a weak wording, a poorly worded joke can quickly lead to a shitstorm or become a meme for years.
• To prevent that, you would have to invest a lot of time even in simple answers. Especially if you haven't been trained for this type of communication. On top of that, info has to be approved for release and translated into different languages.
• For developers, it must also be very intimidating that their words can be so far-reaching and bring consequences for themselves, fans, colleagues and the whole company.
• Often enough it happens that the post of a blue also attracts players who are not interested in the actual topic at all, and who then distract from the concern of the thread creator with their posts. Blizzard has had better experiences with observing the community's discussions on a topic from a distance and thus getting a more accurate picture.
• It's also important to remember that the developers' time is better spent working directly on the game and making improvements here.
• All this doesn't mean that player feedback goes unheard. The developers can read along in the forum. In addition, numerous reports with your feedback end up in the appropriate places. In all direct contacts with the developers, Rejuvithorn always had the feeling that the community's opinion is important to them.

Afterwards, some of the statements were hotly debated, and the reactions support Rejuvithorn's statements. For example, some players are annoyed that the developers "can read along in the forum", because this wording implies that they don't necessarily do that. Furthermore, the reasons given by Rejuvithorn do not explain why developers in the US forum do speak up here and there, but not in the EU area.

How do you evaluate the communication of the Blizzard developers with the community currently as well as the statements of Rejuvithorn? Do you also miss Ghostcrawler, who was very active in the forums at the time? Tell us in the comments!

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