Maybe the Devs are 2000+

#0 - Nov. 28, 2008, 3:58 p.m.

Most of the time when I see people complaining about class balance in PvP, and eventually of course bemoaning how underpowered whatever class they play is, ultimately someone will say that it's obvious that nobody at Blizzard plays that class, or plays it at a high arena rating.

What if the opposite is actually true? What if the reason Blizzard is so slow to buff certain classes in the arena (like hunters for instance) is not because nobody at Blizz plays them, but the exact opposite, that those in Blizzard who do play them all actually are over a 2k rating and thus they can't understand why the playerbase seems to be having such difficulty?

Just a thought. :)

#25 - Nov. 29, 2008, 10:07 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Ghostcrawler dodged that question when asked point blank about it, so I suspect it is a resounding NO.
He dodged it because admitting no developer has one would give the hunter community far to much ammunition against them.

You'd be surprised at the ratings people at Blizzard have. Remember, we play the game an awful lot and we know exactly how certain mechanics work that players have to experiment with and guess at. Some Blizzard employees got their positions in part because they were experts at the game.

The real reason it's not a good idea for us to talk about our characters:

Perception of favoritism. You see this all the time. X class is good because a dev plays that class.

Perception of ignorance. You see this a lot too. Y class is bad because Blizzard doesn't understand their issues first-hand.

Perception of double standards. Here I am refering specifically to the characters we play on live. It is very important to us to experience the game the way players do (minus our insider knowledge of course). We don't cheat. We don't create characters at max level, give them lots of gold or free epics. It was important to the original members of the WoW team not to strut around with a lot of stuff they didn't earn, and I have been impressed to the extent to which guys at work still regrain from abusing the system. (This is different from a GM occasionally livening things up by spawning mobs or the like.)

In other words, when we're playing, we just want to be normal players. We don't want you figuring out which characters out there are played by Blizzard employees. If you know I play an orc shaman, that starts to narrow things down, and eventually the power of crowds comes to bear and somebody figures it out. We don't want there to even be a hint that we might cheat, so it's easiest to just not be readily identifiable. But mostly we just want to play the game as regular players.

It's also fun to be hanging out in Dalaran or in a pug and have someone quote me to me without realizing it. To the ground, baby. :)