We’ve seen a lot of discussion recently on how feedback for Legacy of the Void is being handled. Some are concerned that the feedback being provided isn’t being considered or used. This has come as a bit of a surprise to us, as so many changes that we’ve tested and implemented in Legacy of the Void were from player feedback. Here are some recent examples of how player feedback has impacted our decisions.
- The Liberator wouldn’t exist without the community’s input. We originally only had the anti-ground mode as a normal siege range unit. But with the community providing feedback that it overlaps too much with Siege Tanks, we explored a different type of positional unit. And we believe the way the unit turned out is much better due to the help from our community.
- The chat system improvements that we’re working on right now are mostly based off of community feedback and suggestions. While we can’t promise that we can get to the right place with only one or two passes, we have more changes to this system coming very soon that were influenced by feedback we received last month.
- We did a pass on sub group priority at the community’s request and we aren’t done just yet. We’ll continue working on it until we know it’s good.
- Resource suggestions: We’ve fully explored many of the community’s most popular models internally and took time to examine and evaluate the show matches as well. We watched the tournament matches, heard your responses, and we agree that the proposed change was not big enough compared to the Heart of the Swarm model. While we may have ultimately decided to not implement the changes, exploring these types of ideas often helps us explore different areas that can lead to other changes that help the game in the long run.
- Per community suggestion, we've been exploring various ways to show possible enemy spawn locations per map to help players on new maps where certain spawn locations are disabled. This is something that will go into the beta within the next few patches.
- Many of the changes being tested are heavily influenced by the community:
- We split mech upgrades based on feedback that “Terran can almost never go bio in Void.”
- Now we’re going back the other way by reducing mech upgrade costs now that the majority of community feedback has turned in favor of bio.
- Ravager changes we’ve seen throughout.
- We’ve been doing multiple passes internally trying to make the Disruptor max case lower and min case better so that it’s not as all-or-nothing as we’ve heard from the community.
These are only a few examples of the ways the community has directly impacted Legacy of the Void development. That being said, we still need to improve our communication efforts to make these sorts of things clear to everyone. Going forward, we’ll be providing smaller, more frequent updates on current topics to keep the community well informed.
Another topic of discussion that has come up recently, is a “pro player chat” referenced by some players. This was a casual group chat created by the StarCraft II Community Managers as a way to get more direct feedback that could be gathered and passed to devs. While the intentions were good, the format wasn’t the best way to gather feedback. Also, the lack of devs in the chat frustrated some players. We’d like to continue to find ways we can collect formal feedback from pros, but with more dev interaction. So we’d like to iterate on the idea and fix some of the issues that were recognized using the group chat format. We’ll be creating a new way for pro players to provide feedback directly to the devs and get responses on their feedback. We think this format will provide better results for both sides.
Please keep in mind that while we’ll be increasing our communication across the board, we’d also like to make it clear that even extremely popular suggestions may not always be right for the game. We’ll still discuss and test all of these suggestions internally, but we hope that we can continue to have constructive discussions, even when we disagree.
Thank you.
