WoW Down to 6.8 Million Subscribers, CM Lore On Devs On Twitter, HotS: Stitches Trailer

This thread has been a very interesting read so far. I’ve really appreciated the discussion, especially since we’ve been having very similar discussions internally lately, particularly regarding Twitter. Let me shine some light on our thinking to hopefully help you guys understand where we’re coming from:

First off, we’ve definitely made some serious missteps over the past couple of months. Bladespire and Karabor should have been communicated in a clearer and more complete form than Twitter can really allow, as an obvious example. We’re sorry about that, and are doing our best to learn from our mistakes and avoid making them again in the future.

When used properly, however, we think Twitter’s a great platform. It offers developers the ability to respond quickly to simple questions without tearing them away from more involved tasks. It allows community managers to communicate and interact with the community on a much more personal level. As we’ve been embracing Twitter more closely, we’re learning where the line is on “good interaction” vs “bad way to share information.”

I also found some of the comments about transparency interesting. One issue we face constantly is “when is a good time to let players know?” The answer is a lot trickier than it might seem. If we tell everyone about every change we make the minute we decide to make it, many of those changes will never make it past the concept stage, and we create a whole lot of stress for players (let alone ourselves). Furthermore, it can be difficult to understand why a change needs to be made before all of the related pieces are in place.

On the other hand, if we don’t share changes until they’re complete, we miss out on the opportunity to hear concerns from players, and use that feedback to create a better end product. Neither extreme is a good answer, so it’s a matter of finding the right spot in the vast grey area between the two.

I realize I’ve just used a lot of words and didn’t really say much, so I’ll finish up with a couple bullet points:

• We think Twitter is a good platform for some things, but recognize that it’s not working well for others.
• We recognize that many of you would like to see us participating more actively on the forums. It’s not as simple as “post instead of tweet”, but we’ll do our best.
• As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, fansites such as Wowhead do a great job of consolidating and organizing tweets if you’d prefer a “news roundup” format.

Posted by Blupache

I’d also like to see more general design commentaries like the post on dps warriors earlier in the alpha/beta process.

Agreed, and more are coming. The dev team is just crunching pretty hard right now to get the expansion ready to go, which doesn’t leave a lot of extra time for commentary. Once they’re to a point where they can come up for air, we’ll work on getting some more design insight blogs together.

08/05/2014 07:48 AMPosted by Elaedrial

As far as it not being as simple as “post instead of tweet”, why is that? Does it really take you longer to bring up the forums and type the same thing you’d put on twitter into the forums instead?

Yes, actually. Reading a tweet takes less than a second, and replying to it often doesn’t take much more time than that. A designer with a pile of tasks to get through for the day can easily sneak a glance at Twitter here and there, while waiting for a zone to load or some code to compile or what have you.

Reading a forum post, however, can be a much more involved task, especially if the discussion takes off. Quite often, designers (or community managers), upon noticing a particularly interesting thread, will make a note to come back to it later when they have time to give it their full attention. In fact, I’ve actually had to step away from my desk 3 or 4 times just in the course of writing this response.

That’s not really an excuse for us to not spend time talking with players on the forums, I’m just explaining why it’s not as simple as “use the forums instead of Twitter”, especially for a designer hard at work on the expansion. They’re just very different mediums, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.