The vocal minority....

#0 - March 14, 2009, 8:55 p.m.

I'm posting, which I rarely do, to point something out. Those who enjoy things the way they are have no reason to post on here and say "I like things the way they are, thanks blizz!" Our continued playing the game says that. This is why i see changes like this latest one to swipe, or savage defense, and get angry. I'm tired of seeing people complaining about stuff that works perfectly fine, and they are just too dumb to use, and then it getting dumbed down.

This also applies to the plethora of changes to the less spoken of aspects of the game as well such as no failing at mining/herbing/skinning, but thats for a different forum. Yes some of the changes that happened with the expansion were needed, such as the target limit removal on swipe, but most i have seen have done nothing more than homogenize the game to the degree that we are struggling for any feeling of originality.

I just want to end by saying that none of my RL friends who play enjoy these changes that are making everyone the same, and most of the people i ask about it in game are of the same mind-set. The problem seems to be that they simply don't post on the forums to tell you that you had it right before and are fixing what isn't broken and removing the flavor of the game. Sorry for wall of text.

Ghostcrawler

#13 - March 15, 2009, 5:41 p.m.

Q u o t e:
THe savage defense adjustment was implemented as a way to scale back what was quickly become a MASSIVE gap in effective health. THe DK changes (nerfs) are of the same sort.. It wasn't because druids said "hey we want more stats to stack" or other players saying "hey druids are toooo good"... it was blizz saying... druids are to good and they need to be corrected.

Actually, a big part of the change was because druids pointed out, correctly, that getting better gear wasn't as fun for them as other tanks because so few stats were relevant to their tanking, coupled with the fact that we don't itemize strict druid tanking gear. Getting more parity among tanking classes was a bonus in this case, because we probably could have done that in other ways.

But look, we don't design by saying "Hey, you players go figure out what you want and then get back to us and we'll put that in." Players make suggestions. We consider them. Most of them we reject for one reason or another. Some of them strike us as having potential and we discuss them. Popularity (or probably more accurately if a topic comes up a lot) will figure into our decision. But we also might make a change if we only hear it once but think it's a good change.

It's very difficult, if not impossible, to use forums for any kind of quantiative measurement. Most players post because they have something that is bugging them in the game that they want to correct. You get very little discussion on something that is working well. You can't say "Most players want this change" because it gets mentioned a lot. You can't say "This is a huge problem" because a thread has 35 pages. And even if you could, this isn't a majority rules sort of deal. We make the changes we think are best for the game. We use community feedback to make informed decisions. Community feedback does not make the decision.