That (sort of) was the title of a mail that I found in my inbox this morning. After careful inspection it turned out to not be just another stupid phishing attempt - Blizzard does indeed ask random players for feedback this way sometimes. Considering that I've been rather unhappy with recent developments, I thought that this would be a good opportunity to make my voice heard and immediately went to fill out the survey.
Unfortunately... I'm not sure it's actually going to be very useful to anyone. On the plus side, the questions indicated to me that Blizzard is quite aware of most of the game's current problem areas, but the way they were phrased I doubt that my (or anyone's) answers are truly going to provide a lot of useful feedback to the developers.
Am I "satisfied" with daily quests? No, not really, though some are better than others. They never asked about the whys though, so for all I know they could interpret my answer as "There aren't enough dailies, we need to make more!", which could hardly be further from my intended message.
Same with raiding. How useful is it really to simply ask me to rate how "fun" I consider raiding on a scale of one to seven? If you're just going to guess about what exactly I like and dislike about it, you're just as likely to make things even worse. Am I satisfied with Cataclysm raiding? Considering that it made me quit that part of the game after more than four years, definitely not, but it's not as if Cataclysm just dropped one big change on me that instantly flipped my feelings from love to hate; it's been a long time coming based on changes that already started in WOTLK.
Do I approve of storyline quests? In principle yes, I just wish that they didn't turn entire zones into one giant linear quest chain. But again, if I simply declare that I haven't liked the Cataclysm storylines that much, how are they going to interpret that? Now I'm actually kind of worried about my responses being used to justify more changes that I won't like.
At least I got a chuckle out of how many questions they asked me about Star Wars: The Old Republic. Are you going to buy it? Are you going to stop playing WoW then? They may not care about the details of my opinion about the game, but they are certainly concerned about the competition...
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Hello? Is Anybody There?
6 hours ago
Wow, that's crazy. I hope they would listen to you, but the cynical side of me does see the SWTOR questions and think "oh so thats why they suddenly 'care'".
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing. I had no idea Blizzard did those kinds of surveys (the only one I've seen was the one you can get after a GM chat).
I'm sure that they're feeling a bit outflanked by SWTOR right now. EA made a point of not being sucked into giving away a specific release date until Blizz couldn't overwhelm them with their own press releases.
ReplyDeleteNotice they're not concerned so much about Rift...
This reminds me of when I unsubbed and they asked me why, and had a short list of options from which I could pick one. Because obviously I quit a game I'd played for five years over one single issue and nothing else. Maybe if they had deleted the paladin class that might have done it.
ReplyDeleteIf they would fear SW:TOR, they would release D3 in December to rain on their parade. D3 can't be that unfinished that can't rush it out. I mean, it must be at least as finished as e.g. Cataclysm or TBC when it was released (Cata wasn't done in all low level zones and TBC was severely lacking in raiding content by the time it was released).
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, the question why I quit were cute. I played WoW for many years and they offered me about 5 reasons and "other". Other had a text field which capped at about 250 chars. :)
Very interesting; I've been a customer for a long time and never gotten one of these. I wonder how different my answers now would be from several years ago. In fact... if you still have that email, could yo zap it over to my site in a comment or via email? I feel a great post idea coming on.
ReplyDeleteGreat post!
Stub, just unsubscribe and you get such a form. I'm not sure if it's the same but maybe you'd like to look at this too. :)
ReplyDeleteYou can always resub later.
I've had one of those surveys on two occasions, once this year, once several years ago. I've always assumed that they sample (say) 1% of their player base a year by that kind of method, to supplement things like in-game statistics, forum feedback, community trends (like on this blog).
ReplyDeleteHaving spent 19 of my 40 years of life crunching very large volumes of information, I doubt they intend these surveys to provide detailed answers. That's not really the point of a survey like this. Rather, they might notice a trend that less dailies are being done, they see on the forums and in blogs that people find Firelands dailies grindy, and this is corroborated by their 1% of population survey sample that says they don't like dailies. The different data sources all point in the same direction, so they can draw some conclusions. To design *and analyse* a really large survey covering even 1% of the population (or 0.5% or whatever it is) with text answers is mildly ludicrous in concept.
I think something like a couple million wow players in Europe? So for Europe alone, a 1% survey is 20,000 replies. Surveys aren't designed to find out the answers (for lots of reasons). Surveys are designed to find out what areas the questions *might* lie in. That's all.
Cheerio,
Boring Pedant
@Redbeard: Actually they asked whether I played a couple of different "rival" games, and Rift was among them. Since I don't play it though, I didn't get asked any more questions about it. Maybe there are some if you tell them that you do play it.
ReplyDelete@Stubborn: I mailed you; I hope you can still do something with your great post idea even if you can't do the survey.
@BoxerDogs: You're not boring, that was quite insightful. :) I never meant to imply that they should ask open questions though, just ones that are more specific and less open to interpretation maybe? It's just that there are so many different aspects to raiding for example, that simply asking me to rate raiding in its totality strikes me as not very useful, unless they are considering getting rid of it altogether instead of aiming to fine-tune it better.
I noticed this with Blizzard surveys as well. Too many general questions, too little space to expand on your answers. I understand they don't want to read paragraphs for each survey, but as you say more specific questions would be a step in the right direction.
ReplyDelete