[Update #2]: It took a while, but the Community Council forums have now gone live.

[Update]: Shadowlands' quality-of-life focused Update 9.1.5 has now arrived onto the live servers.

Over the past two expansions World of Warcraft has had quite a few misses when it comes to its gameplay mechanics and endgame systems, and that's putting it gently. So in order to hopefully avoid these kinds of problems in the future, Blizzard is now setting up the World of Warcraft Community Council as a way of getting concrete feedback.

The WoW Community Council will essentially consist of a rotating roster of players that will be able to directly talk to the development team about every aspect of gameplay, from endgame raiding to something as casual as collecting transmog gear. Most importantly of all, these conversations will be entirely public and available for everyone to see, which should in theory give the WoW team an easy way to explain their decisions and the goal behind them.

While the exact details behind how they will select members has not been revealed, you can already attempt to sign up yourself by filling out a brief form. Given some of the questions asked throughout it, and the fact that you have to share your WoW account with them, I'd imagine Blizzard will be looking to select as diverse group of players as possible, so don't feel afraid to apply even if you aren't an expert at the game.

Whether Blizzard will actually listen to all of the newfound feedback, however, that remains to be seen. After all, they've already had numerous private forums where dedicated players could offer feedback, and the vast majority of those ended up being closed after a short while as tensions started to run high and polite talk just got replaced with pointless arguing. So if you ask me, I'd remain cautiously optimistic about the whole WoW Community Council as Blizzard is currently facing a lot of backlash and might actually be willing to change, though not so optimistic that I'd be surprised if the whole thing just follows the usual path into nothingness.

Whatever the case may be, I'll make sure to let you know once the WoW Community Council forums go live. Until then, you can read a little bit more about the whole idea over at the World of Warcraft website.