How to use the role forums

These new role forums are a new experience for all of us. Part of their intent is to consolidate class balance discussions into one place. If you want to discuss class balance in PvE or PvP, this is a great place to do it. The existing class forums are intended primarily for distributing information among players. The class designers, such as myself, visit those less often than the role forums.

Here are some suggestions so that we can all get the most benefit out of the role forums.

1) These forums will be moderated more heavily than you might be used to. To some extent, we are encouraging debates between different classes and at times those discussions may get heated. Please make some attempt to treat each other with respect. Flames and trolls tend to get deleted. Repeat offenders tend to get banned.

2) Before you start a new thread, look to see if there is already an existing thread on the topic. If there isn't, that's cool. But we would rather have fewer, longer threads than many short threads.

3) Please don't bump. If everyone bumps their own posts, this forum is going to be a mess.

4) Sometimes Blizzard employees, such as me, respond to threads. We decide which threads we respond to. Please do not complain about which threads we respond to.

5) I personally read all threads in this forum even when I choose not to respond. This also means you don't need to address me or any blue in the topic to get attention. Again, if you want to discuss class balance, this is the place to do it. I do not read the class forums regularly -- those are for providing information to other players.

6) However, even in this forum, you should be here primarily to communicate with other players. You shouldn't have the expectation of ever getting a blue response. You certainly shouldn't have the expectation that any suggestions you make will get implemented in the game.

7) Before you hit that Post button, ask yourself if other players or blues will really get anything out of your post. If not, don't do it.

8) Be reasonable. If you're smart enough to be an expert on your class, you are smart enough to have a civil conversation. Blizzard developers have no problem if you want to challenge our decisions, make a complaint about class design, comment on a spell, or make suggestions on a talent. But you must make it civil and you must make it informative. If you just want to vent about something, we are certain you can find a better place on the Internet to do so.

Q u o t e:
4) Sometimes Blizzard employees, such as me, respond to threads. We decide which threads we respond to. Please do not complain about which threads we respond to.

Complaining about which threads Blizzard posters respond to will likely result in your post being deleted and the poster being banned. Sorry to be so negative but there is just too much of this going on.

Hint: discuss class mechanics, not Blizzard mechanics.

Adding a recent forum post:

If there is something you think is wrong with the game that we have't addressed, usually one of the following is true:

1) We don't think something is wrong. In this case, repeatedly posting the same thing over and over is unlikely to change our minds.

2) We think something is wrong, but we aren't ready to announce a change yet. This could be because we don't know how we want to fix it yet, we know how we want to fix it but require new tech to implement it, or because the change is going to take awhile.

In both of these cases, posting the same thing over and over again or bumping a thread when you have no new information to add isn't going to have the effect you're looking for. The goal often seems to be to post over an over either because you're so angry you can't take it anymore, or because you're stubborn and are looking for that blue post that finally says "here's how we're going to buff you." That happens, but it doesn't happen that often, and in those cases it is always because we agree something is a problem, not because you wore us down.

I know some of you just want a thumb's up or thumb's down answer on a community question or issue, but even that is beyond what we want to do with these forums. We don't have the time nor inclination to respond to every issue, let alone every thread. Furthermore, simple answers are rarely enough for a design-savy community that wants to know why, wants to explore edge-cases or perhaps even wants to see hard proof. Short blue answers rarely "solve" anything and more often throw fuel on a fire.

Here is how the process should ideally work: If you have an issue, bring it up. See if other players agree with you. If they disagree, don't shut them out. Once you've explored the issue a little bit, you've done your job. You don't need to keep starting new topics on the same issue nor bumping those already so long that no reasonable person is going to read them (though I try to).

Sometimes we'll respond to a topic and sometimes we won't. But given the realities of developer time and the number of WoW players out there (even the minority of forum-posting ones) you should interpret those responses as almost random and not suggestive of a topic's severity or merit.

"What if I don't care about PvP (or PVE)?"

WoW is a game with a PvP and a PvE component. We're not asking you to like both parts of the game, though I might suggest that maybe you're missing something if you don't participate in both.

However, if you are going to participate in the role forums, which are here for discussions of class mechanics and balance, it is not acceptable to say that you don't care about PvP or PvE. We care about both. We balance around both. If you post here, you need to keep both aspects of the game in mind or your feedback is going to be of much more limited value.

If you wish that one of those halves didn't exist, that's fine, but trying to articulate that argument in these forums is an utter waste of your time (and I rarely ever say that or use those terms lightly). Similarly, so is saying that WoW should break apart the PvP and PvE components into different games. You may think that's a swell idea, but we don't, and this is one of those very few topics where you aren't going to be able to change our minds even with the most logical and impassioned argument.

It is perfectly acceptable to talk about the ramifications for PvE of specific PvP changes and vice-versa. Those kinds of discussions go on all the time. But the posts that essentially say "I don't like PvP so I wish nobody else did" within the role forums are more or less a waste of 1s and 0s. I have made the comparison before to trying to argue that we should remove the Horde or Alliance -- which are core components of the experience and not open for debate... just like PvP and PvE.