The other day I received a request via email to fill out a survey for Blizzard.
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| From the email I received. |
I figured, sure, why not, so I logged into the survey website* and pulled up the survey to fill out.
The first question, about whether I played World of Warcraft, elicited a "does a duck like water?" response from me. I was in the process of clicking "yes" when the brief thought of "what if they meant Retail as opposed to Classic?" crossed my mind, but I ignored it and finished clicking. After all, I had actually logged into Retail on Tuesday or so to check out something from Neve**, so I could truthfully say that I had "played" Retail.
I should have listened to my inner voice, since the next question made it plain they were talking about Retail WoW: it was a query about what I thought of The War Within. (And going back later to take that screencap above confirmed that yes, it was about The War Within and I completely missed that.)
Well, I thought, I'd just select the "Does Not Apply" or "No Opinion", and...
There wasn't an option for either of those responses. Just a number scale.
I wasn't going to be one of those people who assign terrible responses just because I don't play the current expac, so I just selected the "Mediocre" responses and kept going.
More and more numerical rating questions came at me, all about aspects of The War Within. Although at one point the questions turned to the various types of activities I could participate with in-game and I truthfully answered "No" to all of them. Then, for some reason, the survey believed I was a PvP-er and gave me a bunch of those questions too.
It wasn't until questions finally surfaced about the latest patch (Undermined) --and what patches The War Within I have played before-- did I finally have the option to select "Did Not Play" or an equivalent.
Then I received an open ended question about repeat activities in Retail and what would encourage me to participate in those activities, and I finally got the chance to explain a few things. Yes, I wrote, I play WoW, but I'm primarily a WoW Classic player. If I play Retail, it's usually just to login and putz around a bit. I'm not interested in repeat activities because I hate it when a game becomes a job. I learned this in TBC Classic, when due to external pressure Dailies turned the game into job, and I play WoW to have fun, not because I don't have enough work in my life.
I also got an open ended question about what to change about the experience that could be improved, and I certainly had an answer to that one given that I did just run the gauntlet of crap you have to work though when you come back after being away for months (or years). I suggested a button you could click on the Warband login screen where you can prevent all of the login pop-ups from happening. If all you want to do is login and explore, having to get rid of "do this" and "do that" is annoying and makes me want to logout and do something else.
After submitting that last response, I got a "I'm sorry, it seems you're not the primary person for this survey."
"I could have told you that," I grumbled.
The survey then ended abruptly, and that was that.
***
If there's one thing that Blizzard seems to have trouble with, it's the concept that someone might play WoW but not the current Retail expansion.
That was pretty obvious by the lack of options to simply respond with "Did Not Play" or "Not Applicable" or "No Opinion". You'd also have thought that the option of saying "Do you mean Classic or Retail WoW?" at the beginning would have provided a proper clarification to the survey, but they didn't. So either they were lazy or they didn't consider it to be a real option. I'd like to think it's the former, but it's most likely the latter. People who design surveys ought to be able to provide sufficient clarifying questions to weed out people earlier than at the end of the survey.
This leads into another another issue that the survey highlighted is that Blizz isn't sure what to do with people who play Retail WoW in a non-standard way. Sure, those people play Retail WoW and likely even own the current expansion, but they don't actually "play the game". When people say that, what they really mean is "play the game properly" or "play the game as-intended".*** Blizz can't seem to break out of that trap themselves, despite them harping on how important the world itself is to the game. From what I saw, the focus of the survey wasn't what worked and what didn't (despite the email), but "How do we get you to try all of the things? Is it you don't know where to go? Do you need reminders? Do we need to make it easier to get to the repeatable activities? Can we improve the UI so that it's easier to do all the things?"
The final issue I see Blizzard having trouble with is that they're stuck in Diablo-style tunnel vision: quickly get to the end, then do repeatable things. Whether you call them "repeatable activities" or "dailies" or "world quests" doesn't change the result: all Blizz seems to know what to do is to create things you do in WoW over and over and over. And Raids/Mythic+. That's partly a player driven issue, because the player base expects it. Hell, I look at the number of times my Questing Buddy or I have gone into instances, hoping for that elusive gear drop --over the course of a single day-- and I realize that we are part of the problem too.
But could you imagine a World of Warcraft expac leveling experience that takes 100 hours to complete? Or more? I'm pretty sure the collective heads of the player base would explode, because as a whole they're not interested in a deep immersive experience, but different types of speed running to get to the various forms of endgame as quickly as possible.
Here's the thing: my first experience leveling in WoW took me well over 150 hours to go from L1 through L80 back in Wrath of the Lich King as (mostly) a Holy Paladin. And I loved it. That long journey shaped my opinions of MMOs, fair or not, and it impacts what I've done since. I've found I prefer the long game, with self-directed play exploring the nooks and crannies of the world, rather than playing optimally. It's kind of sad that even the development staff simply don't appreciate that aspect of their own game.
*After having had friends recently get hacked and one of my own cards end up on a dark web site, I've decided to be more cautious about email than I usually am and skipped clicking on links like this. I've found that if companies want me to fill out info, I can go to their website independently and find it there.
**I can't remember what it was, honestly. It wasn't anything she had in her bank or gear, that's for certain, but it might have been something like what quests she still had in her Quest Log. Whatever it was, the results weren't interesting enough for me to follow up with a post on it. (Yet.)
***What I've found over the years is that the quickest way to get a person to show their biases in WoW is that when they ask what I do, I tell them "Not much; I just goof off for the most part. Don't raid, don't PvP, don't RP, don't bother with the quests or story." There are people who say "Hey, good for you! Have fun!" But then there are a subset of people who simply can't fathom that and try to get me to do different things. "Hey, let's go do this! Let's do that! You HAVE to try this other thing!" And I've seen more than my share of YouTubers talk up the vast number of things to do in WoW, but when the rubber hits the road they're all about the Endgame in it's various forms (I include alts as an Endgame activity).
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