#61 - March 26, 2009, 4:21 a.m.
Q u o t e:
Yes, but why are there such massive changes from one build on the PTR to the next?
That's what really scares me. I mean shadow priests got some love then had it taken away. Blood DKs were given a decent 51pt talent when fully specced for it only to have it's duration crushed by 50% (while the damage was already down by 50%). It's not like blood was even a top dps spec for DKs to begin with.
You are imagining every PTR build is what we call a release candidate -- a build that potentially might be the one that goes live. Instead the PTR builds are just snapshots of whatver the data look like at that time. Sometimes they catch us in the middle of a change or a bug fix. DRW is one of those talents we change, test, change and test. The alternative is we don't put the PTR up until all of our changes are in. But then it's only up for like a week.
Q u o t e:
What I'm getting at is if you do a small patch every week on Tuesdays, changing only one or two small things about classes, you can better pinpoint what the problems are. If one of your changes took it too far, or there is an unforseen consequence you can hotfix it later that week before the issue is compounded.
We would love to do that. Unfortunately, on the production side, we just aren't set up to handle patches that way. Getting out a patch is a huge undertaking that involves literally hundreds of people. Many of those people have to put in long hours and be away from their homes and families. We have to test things very thoroughly. While your class being unbalanced may seem like a pressing concern to you, we are far more concerned with making sure our changes don't crash the servers or mess up characters.
It would be great to get to a point where we can make smaller patches more frequently (and we have made a few - 3.09 was one). I am in no position to promise anything on this front, but I think it would be good for balance in the long run.
Q u o t e:
When you have a problem within a system and you aren't sure how to fix it, you change one variable, run some tests, and see if that solves the problem. If it makes it worse, you revert the change and make another change. You continue doing this until you've pinpointed the problem. Once you know what the root of the issue is, you can make drastic changes from an informed perspective.
I was trained as a scientist. Isolating variables is something I actually understand pretty well. However, we don't have the luxury with many of these issues of making a change, then testing it for awhile and making another change. If players feel hopeless you risk them quitting the game. We owe it to the players to get things fixed as quickly as we can and not let them drag on for weeks or months (though we are well aware there are some things that undeniably have).
Q u o t e:
Cmon GC, you know how to spell "too" :P
Oops. That wasn't me. I just forgot the quotes. Fixed.
Q u o t e:
I think what the main concern here is GC. Is a lot of players right now ( both long time players and new ) are trying to understand why classes that are not considered OP in anyway by players in PvE, or classes that are not even close to being top represented in high end arena,,, get any kind of nerfs at all.
Forgive me for putting words in your mouth, but what you saying here is essentially "Why are you balancing the way you want instead of what the players want?" We're not asking the community to balance the game for us. We invite the community to give feedback so we can make informed decisions. Perhaps we are trying to head off a potential problem before it mushrooms. Perhaps we know of a bug that is going to be fixed that will cause issues down the road. Many of the changes we make are not for balance reasons. There is more to game design than just number tweaks (though there is a lot of that too).
