Bravo Blizzard, Bravo.

Q u o t e:
Now tell me Ghostcrawler, how does the Blizzard design team work? Allowing mechanics to go live only to be hotfixed nerfed in a matter of days (or even hours) does not seem very professional, and frankly makes it seem like you and your team are throwing darts in the dark when it comes to PvP balancing. The best part about all of this is that the changes came after massive crying on these very forums, which may make players feel that if they kick, scream and cry loud enough that you will change things for them. You have said in the past that you and your team do not balance the game around forum crying, but with these recent changes it is honestly hard to say that you don't.

When players get nerfed and they feel it is an unfair nerf (which honestly is a good deal of the time), they tend to blame QQ from the community. It's a practice as old as multiplayer gaming itself. The players are not always wrong when they sense a balance problem, and they aren't always right either (from our point-of-view anyway -- all of this is subjective to some extent). When we see an issue that gets raised, we talk about it and test it ourselves. This wasn't a problem that was hard to see in our minds. Yes we should have fixed it before 3.1 went out. I could say that about every change we have made since 3.1 went out, up to and including all of the Ulduar balance tweaks.

PvP is monumentally difficult to balance. WoW's PvP game has not been perfectly balanced before, and is not balanced now. But that does not mean we throw up our hands and give up on it. We have solved some nasty problems over the years and created some new ones. Such is the nature of MMO game design. We try and learn from our mistakes and move on.

We do internal tests and we do invite players to participate (voluntarily mind you) on betas or the PTR. That in no way can substitute for what happens when 12 million players get their hands on the game and begin playing. Good companies try not to make mistakes. Great companies admit when they make mistakes and take steps to fix them. Even greater companies I suppose never make mistakes, but I don't know any of those.

Q u o t e:
What I meant was, the first hotfix shouldn't even exist. They should've deliberated and come up with the 2nd fix before they deployed anything to live servers. And imo, that is a poor practice and not very professional.

You seem to imply that letting major balance problems endure is somehow more professional. I think many players would disagree. More than likely they are not playing your class though.

Q u o t e:
Does that mean that ghostcrawler is a hybrid game designer? Does he get paid less than other pure game designers because he can always dual-job and go study marine life? :O

That hybrid pay tax is a slap in the face. :)

I was trained as an oceanographer. Angry forum posters like to suggest that disqualifies me from game design. Do you know how many professional game designers I know who were trained as game designers? Zero. I imagine that will change over time though. This is, happily, one of the few industries where talent > experience > education.

Q u o t e:
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Q u o t e:
Exorcism may be a PvP issue, particularly given its range. This is one of those cases though where if we just nerfed it, Ret probably would not be PvE viable. If we decide it's an issue, we will have to proceed carefully.
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"may be an issue"
"if we nerf it"
"if we decide it's an issue"

It sure didn't seem to be a "major balance problem" 5 days ago.

Part of why I posted that was because we knew a lot of players were discussing it. We were discussing it. I figured if I said outright "Hey, this may be a problem," maybe paladins wouldn't feel like it came out of nowhere when and if we made a change. That post was emphatically not an attempt to say "Don't worry, you can relax, we won't nerf it." Furthermore, we did find a way to nerf it in PvP without affecting PvE. It's not a particularly pretty way from our POV, but it solved the problem.

Q u o t e:
I hope I didn't come off sounding disrespectful, but the recent changes did have myself as well as quite a few other players scratching our heads.

As I said, it is always going to be subjective to some degree. In our shoes, some of you may have made a different decision. I can appreciate that many paladins believe in their heart that it (and they) were not overpowered and that other classes were just out to get them. We have to do what we think is right for WoW, and you are probably not going to agree with every change, or perhaps even many of them.

Q u o t e:

We really appreciate your posts and the quicker response time to balance changes, but it seems like it would be much better if these things were even just discussed during the ptr phase when people were bringing up their concerns.

That’s fair. To some extent you’re saying “Even more communication would be even better,” which I don’t deny. Making that work is challenging, but we can consider new options. Maybe we treat the PTR forum more like the Beta forums, in which we restricted posting, but because the pool was smaller, it was a lot easier for us to discuss every single issue that came up. I have no idea if that is technically feasible – I’m just brainstorming ways so that players feel like their issues are heard without me or other blues having to supply posts (and often more than one) to every single thread. We could hire a thousand more people and still not be able to discuss every issue with the detail and depth that the community would probably opt for, given the choice.

Q u o t e:
1. Why was exorcism a problem?

I answered this in the original announcement / confirmation. Many of you just don’t like the answer. It is, to reiterate, that adding a ranged attack to paladins gave them too much burst potential along with their other GCDs.

Q u o t e:
2. Why wasn't this allowed to even enter the arena season before being taken away?

We felt like the problem was serious enough to fix. As I said, other players are going to feel differently. Some paladins think it was perfectly balanced at it was.

Q u o t e:
3. What are you going to do to fix/compensate for this?

I already stated that we want to re-design the basic combat attacks so that paladins are just using their first few GCDs to unload with big hits (that then pay for their front-loaded burst with long cooldowns, which is small consolation to a dead opponent). The Exorcism change, largely made so that paladin damage wouldn’t decline once they moved from the undead-rich Naxxramas to the undead-poor Ulduar, gave them extra damage in PvP that we didn’t feel paladins needed.

Q u o t e:
Paladins were overpowered in the previous Arena season. While there were more Holy than Ret paladins, Rets were powerful too and Exorcism was also a problem for Holy paladins. You can’t just look at the percentage of each spec and conclude that the highest is the most powerful and the lowest is the least powerful. Maybe the number two spec was so high because it was the only thing that could survive the dominant number one spec. Maybe Ret was overpowered, but many paladins rerolled Holy because it was more overpowered. We don’t just take the lowest rated spec and buff it while taking the highest one and nerf it. It’s much more complicated than that of course.

Would a good middle ground, in this case, be for your team to come through with some details on your hypothetical long-term solution, as well as the time frame for said solution?

No, IMO. That would lead to more “they broke promises” replies if the final implementation wasn’t that. It is unfortunate everyone has to suffer because of the “they lies!” responses, but maybe someday they will figure out the connection.

Q u o t e:
The complaint is with the manner in which they were done, after surviving the PTR, with many many posts about them, and assurances that they were working as intended, only to be hot-fix nerfed without warning or compensation immediately on live.

We have addressed this many times. Regardless of the timing we are going to make changes when we think they are necessary. I don’t honestly think most players are interested in discussions of our design process, oer perhaps more accurately they only care about that stuff insofar as it leads to them getting buffed or nerfed. I think most of them hate being nerfed, but kinda understand why they were nerfed, so the only thing left to vent about is how and when the nerfs were done.

Q u o t e:
Major Balance issues should be hotfixed. Exorcism was not a major balance issue.

We think it was. Many players think it was. Obviously you disagree. Okay, so what then? Do we take a vote? Do we somehow stack rank players and only listen to the most knowledgable ones? You have to offer a solution more compelling than “Listen to me. I understand things. Don’t listen to him. He has an agenda.” Logic, experience and showing your math all can help improve the points you might try to make on these forums. But at the end of the day, we’re going to be the ones making the call. We’ll listen to your input. We won’t abdicate our responsibility to make tough calls when needed.

Q u o t e:
GC, you admit that you made a mistake this time. But I cant find any apology.

We apologize for not fixing this before it went live. We apologize to players who feel they adequately predicted this issue on the PTR. We apologize if you still feel that your spec is stigmatized. However, if any of you think Exorcism was the only hope Ret had of being viable in PvP then we pretty strongly disagree.

Q u o t e:
Arena is not the PvP that warcraft has to offer. Your constant failed attempts to balance the great potential of this game around that little playground will be this games downfall.

We read this as “I don’t like Arena and players who do are dumb or something. Don’t listen to them.” If what you are saying is that you hate when PvP intrudes on your PvE or when Arena balance intrudes on your BGs, then we are slightly more sympathetic. However we still read that as something a kin to “I don’t like priests. You should remove them or at least make sure that my gameplay is not affected by them.” Arenas, PvP and priests are all part of WoW.

Q u o t e:
Retribution dps, especially in PvE, is lower in 3.1 than we want.

At the time I said that it was true. We made changes after that point, such as fixing a bug with RV and increasing the damage of Divine Storm. Ret PvE dps seems pretty close to where we want it now. We’ll definitely keep an eye on the situation, but don’t assume that if you can’t touch the dps of warriors or shamans that it is automatically our fault. Sometimes it is. Sometimes there is more individual players can do.

Q u o t e:
game balance and design is run by people who have no trianing in the field whatsoever, instead, they know about whales and crabs n @%@!.
are the numbers run by mathmeticians?
are the models designed by artists?

brilliant business plan.

no wonder this game has so many problems.

News flash: There is not a successful game I know of created by designers with a degree in game design. Since presumably you don't take issue with the industry as a whole for our lack of college degrees in a field in which very few degrees are offered, I suspect you're just trying to figure out a way to insult us. What we hear from this kind of message: “I don’t like being nerfed, therefore Blizzard is dumb.”

Q u o t e:
What may help is having developers on hand on the ptr, or even a persistant ptr that has its own set of face ppl instead of gms handling issues.

We were on the PTR. We are on many realms, but obviously we can’t have a developer on all of them at all times. Spending time interacting with players in that manner, while valuable, does take a lot of time, making it harder to find time to complete our other duties.

Q u o t e:
Why not implement on the forums a "read" and "unread" indicator/notifier in the same fashion that urgent emails are handled in a client such as outlook.

A reasonably common suggestion. My response is:

1) Players would assume we automated it.
2) Players would be frustrated that we “only” read a thread instead of replying to it.
3) We already read all of the posts. There is no benefit, we can see, of documenting that (esp. given points 1 and 2).

Q u o t e:
We've gotten used to the third or fourth redesign of the paladin class and now you're going back to it again. This is troubling.

We aren't deleting the files and starting over. We changed paladins pretty substantially for Lich King and by most accounts, paladin players like the changes. It doesn't surprise me at all that the details are taking some tweaking to get just right. Consider that most of the balance problems we've had were for classes that received substantial changes or were brand new classes.

We like the new Seal / Judgement system and aren't likely to mess with that. What we would like to do is take say CS, DS and Exorcism, make one of them have no cooldown, and make the others something you want to do at the right time. Here are some dumb, mostly fake examples. They all have problems and aren't very original (because I spent all of 20 sec thinking of them) but are in the right vein. We have some actual ideas but aren't ready to share them yet.

1) Your Crusader Strike stacks something on a target. Divine Storm then does more damage per stack (but consumes the stacks?).
2) Your Divine Storm has a dot component. The closer you get a Crusader Strike to the final dot, the more damage it does, but its cooldown keeps you from spamming it.
3) When someone under the effect of your Retribution Aura (or whatever) is attacked, your Divine Storm lights up and you can then make them pay for the affront.
4) Your Divine Storm has a dot component with a very short duration. However Crusader Strike has no cooldown and extends the duration by one tick. Basically you have to hit CS three or four times in a row quickly to keep the whirlwind spinning.