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In an interview with the media, the head of World of Warcraft said there was one big thing the company could have done better: listening to the voices of players.

Holly Longdale joined the cast ofWorld of Warcraft》 team to work on World of Warcraft Classic, following a long career on EverQuest and EverQuest 2. She quickly became the head of all World of Warcraft games and is now the VP and executive producer of the series. During her tenure, the game has undergone three major changes: more game content, more transparent update plans, and stricter deadline compliance.

While reflecting on the history of the game, the media asked her what she would change if she could change one thing.

"I want to speak to this as someone who has been through this journey very much as a player, and more recently as a very humbled and blessed leader of this team," she said. "I think we should listen more to the player community."

World of Warcraft's top management has always been trying to find a delicate balance between player needs and game balance. However, when Longdale joined the team, this balance had already tilted heavily towards ignoring player feedback.

The company was shocked to learn that the reaction to the Shadowlands expansion, especially the demands for more flexibility in faction contracts and criticism of the plot, was barely taken seriously. As a result, World of Warcraft lost a large number of players and faced a serious crisis.

The company's subsequent expansion, Age of Dragons, saw a renewed commitment to player feedback, a shift that paid off significantly.

Longdale said it's not difficult to understand why developers of World of Warcraft and other games sometimes struggle to balance player feedback, especially 20 years ago when game development was more art than science.

“I think in the early days, game design wasn’t even really a job,” she says. “It was just a bunch of super-enthusiastic geeks trying to turn tabletop games into 3D games. So they were more intuitive about what they were doing.”

She mentioned that the methods and platforms for player feedback have also changed dramatically.

“We didn’t have the depth of social media that we have now. We had forums, and the forums were the hub for all the feedback, which wasn’t entirely reflective of what was happening on the ground,” she said. “So it was a two-pronged evolution: more listening on the one hand, and more observation on the other.”

The strategy now is to use social listening tools to understand the issues players are asking, and then use more sophisticated in-game analytics to determine the true scope of the problem, she explained.

“So listening to the community and being able to validate the discussion,” Longdale said. “Now we have the technology and the data to map those two together. Like, wow, are we really missing something? And then validate, oh yeah, this is a problem.”

She said the team looks at the actual statistics with a critical eye when fielding career balance complaints from the community.

“For example, if someone says, ‘My career sucks,’ you get a ton of commentary and support for that view, and then you make a change and it undermines everything else,” she said. “Balance is a great example of this.”

She admitted that the response to player feedback during the Shadowlands period was too slow, and that the pandemic and working conditions were a factor. "It took longer to make content than we would have liked. We are still committed to getting that content out, but the results are not good enough and not what we would have liked. We reflect on this deeply and still use this as a guide as we move forward."