Thread: Call to Blue. We want to recruit you!

I think your proxy idea would be best, Sinshroud -- it's asking too much of a Blizz staffer to 'unofficially officially' represent the company and their policies on public boards. But the proxy thing could work if the relationship were limited to just one or two people.

It really would be nice to be able to establish some feedback loops with Blizz that are specific to the WoW economy considering all the ways the game is impacted for both good and bad.

In my opinion it's Blizzard best interest to check in with the goblin communities. Having helped many of my guildies provided me with an insight of the huge gap there is between goblins and regular players. It might come as a shock, but, for example, a lot of players still use the default, ancient AH UI.
While Blizzard helping the regular players might hurt the goblins' profits in the long run, i'm sure Blizzard wants to make the general populace happy.

I applaud and support the idea.

However, I am not optimistic.

For one thing, there wasn't a lot of blue interaction on the Professions beta forums or live forums. Regretablely, I don't see the economy as important to Blizzard as I wished it was. In particular, the comment from the announcement of BoP SoH was "Initially, we want crafters to be out in the world adventuring instead of camping out in front of an auctioneer, hoping to score some cheap mats. We understand that this may be of concern to those who play a variety of profession alts" Perhaps I am being overly sensitive, but while newer games give XP from professions, I felt Blizzard was explicitly if not anti-crafting then at least anti-AH. I knew the economy was not a huge focus but the "instead of camping out in front of an auctioneer" comment was a bit of a shock.

Nor does a GM seem like an appropriate person. While wonderful, hard-working people, entry-level customer-facing, customer service employees tend to be fairly far away from where policy is made and interpreted. So unless something is in their policy & procedure manual, "One time one GM said ..." is negligible protection or precedent.

I am sure there are certainly many client and web API issues that could use examples, documentation, clarification, fixes and enhancements.

But some of what you are asking for is not in Blizzard's best interest. I.e., like a lot of enforcers, they benefit by the rules being vague. Especially since this is not a legal proceeding. They can ban you for botting or "abuse of economy" and you have some appeals but little recourse and little insight into why. The blue response to norky, the TSM user who seemingly spun his mouse too quickly and was banned seemed like a form letter with few specifics. It keeps people more cautious if there is not a clear line. Besides, as soon as the Dark Side learns that the policy is that 25 mouse spins per minute gets you investigated but 24 does not, then that will be incorporated into the evil software. In the same way that the algorithm that the IRS uses to decide if your return is suspicious is a very closely guarded secret.

A true pessimist might say that if Blizzard got involved and really understood the issues and situation, they might decide the huge gap between someone with two dozen addons including TSM and CKS versus the majority with a stock UI was too large and make some unpleasant changes.

But hopefully this works out. Perhaps those of you going to Blizzcon can give out some business cards and get lucky and find a sympathetic ear.

Barring a few special example that don't tend to stay secret for very long it is not hard for blizzard to find out how the Goblin community works and as far as i remember a changed from many years ago was that all add-ons can only be used if their source code is publicly available so i am sure for the major add-ons at least they have people keeping an eye on exactly how they work.
This has been shown for example with some raid enhancing mods which have been nerfed in the past as they were deemed to be too advantageous and to some degree gold making add-ons.e.g. a notable one when they changed it so each actions required a human interface action so you could post an infinite amount of items with a single click.

So from that side i think we have very little to fear, especially as i saw a recent blue post (can remember where to link) that stated they actively left certain game improvements to add-on developers, with a specific mention to the AH. And if that is the case and add-on developers are seen effectively as proxy developers for the game it would be greatly in their interest to have at least some real interaction with those developers.

I'm sure if it was warranted Blizzard could appoint a member of the support/community team to interact here directly no doubt. Operating under the same employment guidelines.

However I'm not sure if its possible, to my knowledge Blizzard don't have staff operate on third party forums no? I realise there are people that do, but thats out of hours and even still they have to be careful. I'd imagine they would only do it via their own forum.

But I do think it would be constructive and beneficial. One thing I've noticed here in my 2 years knocking about, is that its an extremely constructive and helpful community you have here. And with gold making its not exactly balance discussion(which when you view twitter and official forums is people screaming for a buff with no factual data), here there doesn't seem to be roars about imbalance.

And if there was, considering your spreadsheet connoisseurs , I'm sure it would be pretty productive.

Originally Posted by Sinshroud

Well, they have had quite a number of Blizz employees interacting on the Elitist Jerks and MMO-Champion forums in the past.

Where they doing so in an official capacity?

I'm a regular to Elitist Jerks for YEARS, and I know lately there has been a grown resentment towards blizzard thanks to some unruly comments from GC.