Power Word: Barrier Scrapped Completely

An announcements of something we are working on is a very interesting beast.

On the one hand, some players love the chance for the insight. They get a little bit of information about the game at a time when there isn't much news. Maybe they learn a little bit about our thought process or the direction we are trying to take their class or spec.

On the other hand, even if we use 24 point font to write "None of this is set in stone," some players can't help but get their hopes up and and then are devastated when the changes don't go live.

This leaves us in a difficult position, because we would like to be able to be more candid with the community, but we also feel punished sometimes when we do. Believe me, I hate hate hate having to talk like a politician. I hate that it can take so long to craft a quick forum post because I have to be so careful that nobody can misinterpret anything I say. But I'm also sure you can understand how easy it is for us to get that way. I'm not sure of the best solution to that problem, but we will keep experimenting with better ways of communicating.

Q u o t e:
The orginal announcement was phrased as a list of key changes that were coming with the patch, and my impression was that they were listed to make players excited.

Since I helped write that announcement, I am fairly certain we said it was subject to change and might not see the light of day. Since players still didn’t make that connection, I’m not sure what to do short of making you sign a document that says “I understand this is not an announcement of changes but just some things the team is working on.”

Q u o t e:
If I were you I'd just not worry about my words being taken out of context and just liberally throw the banhammer at the people who, for reasons of trolling, leveraging for buffs, or just plain idiocy, take them out of context and twist them around. Generally speaking the people who would do that aren't people who are going to contribute anything intelligent to the forums anyway.

Fair enough, but read some of the posts above and below yours. Those players are not irate trolls. They really did think those announcements were for things that would almost certainly come to pass. It may be a vocal minority as some of you say, but it’s vocal enough that “broken promises” threads become a pretty big distraction on the forums.

Q u o t e:
Do not do it as a sticky in some grand "patch preview" thread. The only thing you should be putting in a thread like that are things that are so close to set in stone that the chance is negligable that it will never see the light of day.

That sticky would have maybe one or two bullets in it at the most. Also realize that one of the purposes of those previews is to get players used to the ideas of possible changes. There were some warlocks surprised when we pulled Siphon Life and Immolate our of the Affliction rotation, but many of them had heard us say that was something we might do. While they might not agree with the change, they weren’t totally blindsided by it.

Our design process is a lot more iterative than many of your probably suspect. It's not like PWB is written on the white board and then the next day erased. We talked about it, we tried to figure out how to implement it, and at some point we moved on to other things and realized we probably weren't going to have bandwidth to really do it justice for 3.1. There were some technical reasons and some art reasons. But things are rarely black and white for us. There wasn't a day when PWB (or any feature) slipped from 90% certainly to 75% certainty.

Q u o t e:
Can't you just ignore them and keep the more positive posters/players in mind when deciding what to do or not do?

Ignoring them is easy. You can’t do this job for very long without being pretty good at that skill. :) We are more concerned about creating a negative environment on the forums. Every time we read from a poster who said they came to the forums are were just discouraged by all the QQ, insults and Blizzard bashing and decided to go to other forums, then we die a little inside. Since these forums are an official presence of Blizzard on the net, we want to go farther than just ignoring the bad people.

It hasn't been scrapped completely. The reply probably meant there is almost no way it is going to make it into 3.1 at this point.

Working on an MMO is a little unusual because nothing is ever finished. We have this very, very long list of things we want to do which ranges from "implement this new UI" to "try a boss fight like this" to "make sure warriors can tank content when overgeared." Sometimes that may look to players like we shipped something before it's ready, but from our point of view, there isn't a single thing in the game that cannot be improved, and our wish list is very long. Sometimes getting in something as big as PWB might come at the expense of 10 little things. Sometimes we just run out of time before we've come up with solutions to potential problems. We could delay patches indefinitely in order to literally get everything in, but then, you know, we would be delaying them indefinitely (and I mean by years if you look at our wish list).

Things definitely get scrapped with no intention of ever seeing the light of day -- shaman tanks for instance. PWB doesn't fall in that category. Will it be in 3.2 or some future patch or expansion? We can't say with any degree of certainty. It's still a cool idea though.

Q u o t e:
SO... i would take that to read that, it's more likely priests might one day get PWB. Unlike camo for hunters, which was basically totally scrapped in the development of wotlk? how come it reminds me of the idea of camo for hunters though and I think it will suffer the same fate...

We decided not to go forward with Camo because we didn't like the ability. We didn't offer PWB because it was expensive in terms of development time. The difference is we still like the idea of PWB. I'm also not going to promise that we will never, ever do Camo, because the game changes over time and so does our design philosophy.

It's also totally fine to ask "Hey, is PWB dead forever or just not for 3.1?" We won't be able to answer every question, but we try to answer some every day. That is totally cool. What is less cool are the kind of "Oh priests were lied to again" responses.