Blizzard; Could DKs have a bit of honesty?

#0 - June 4, 2009, 7:43 p.m.

Dear Blizzard Inc,

Death Knights should be subject to the same balancing and developer attention that all other classes are given and this is nothing but fair. You own your own company as do i; and you run yours however you wish as does anyone else in this fading giant super-power of a country.

However; With it being less than 48 hours after the most recent set of a long, long list of (needed) nerfs; Your employees are already commenting in the General Forum on the next round of nerfs headed for the Death Knight class. Wouldnt it be a professional business model to actually wait (like you do with every other change ever made since the very first day of this game) to see if the recent changes had enough of an effect? Do the employees making these comments even have the authority to do so?

If you balance the game the way you say to the public, i dont see how its possible for this CM to already be speaking of the next set of Death Knight nerfs... it defies the precedent you have set. How could the data or numbers already show the changes have had no effect and the nerfs need to continue? Are DKs topping the arena charts? No. Are death knights topping the damage meters? No.

And then you still allow people to post complete nonsense on this forum, daily, filling up hundreds and hundreds of lines of nothing but propaganda QQ of someone just trying to get your class down out of spite or in hopes of bringing theirs up to par. This does not only pertain to the Death Knight class, but every single class in general. This forum is becoming a cesspool of nothing but misinformation and rhetoric of X vs Y, or Y vs Z and im 99% sure that wasnt your intention; to just have childish fights on this board constantly of "nerf this!!!" and whoever cries loudest wins.

I find it very un-professional to keep allowing this type of behavior. It should and could be easily ignored; however it seems that this attitude more often than not warrants a response from you faster and easier more than any other type of behavior. As an example;

People are still making posts pertaining to Death Knights and Chains of Ice. Given the current mechanics in this game, and the recently nerfed glove bonus; Even when including Death Runes (because apparently most players think we just have these whenever we wish) its not even possible within game balance to keep spamming CoI in any reasonable way whatsoever. As you already know, spamming CoI would take our runes and completely nullify any ANY ANY ANY damage we are about to do as a Death Knight. So i ask you? If people are constantly only spamming CoI; how are any DKs doing any damage whatsoever? Because it isnt true; its not possible to "spam" CoI any longer.

That is but one example..

This isnt a player trying to taddle on others. What these people are complaining about IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE GIVEN THE CURRENT GAME MECHANICS OF THE DEATH KNIGHT CLASS. However; these posts are allowed to sit here and run for days upon days and it just adds to the mob mentality all over again. Half of the time the people posting and complaining are just doing so because "they" are. It seems as if these people dont even know of the recent change made a few days ago. They are just complaining to complain completely oblivous to the fact that this very issue has already been addressed.

I respectfully and humbly ask that you Blizzard; as the company that designed this class please come forward to your loyal player base and make a statement regarding the current situation and the planned future for the Death Knight class. I think this would do well for two reasons.

1. The Death Knight players

2. The other players

I think the community deserves to be told what Blizzards current stance is regarding the DK class. I think its a fair question. I think it would be most professional of you to please address the community with how you feel about the current Death Knight situation. Do you feel things are balanced? How about in a PvE setting? PvP? What about issues DKs are facing and would like addressed? (aka; constant disease removal and being totally gimp in that type of situation)

I truely do not believe im asking you for something thats impossible to give. This is an extremely controversial topic in this game right now not only on the forums, but dividing long time friends and guilds ingame daily. We would truely appreciate and respect you to please update us on how you feel Death Knights balance compared to other classes today. Please, dont be vague. We are loyal customers and deserve the cold, hard truth. Be it DKs are extremely OP, or they are not.

Thank you for reading.

Ghostcrawler

#92 - June 4, 2009, 9:33 p.m.

Q u o t e:
However; With it being less than 48 hours after the most recent set of a long, long list of (needed) nerfs; Your employees are already commenting in the General Forum on the next round of nerfs headed for the Death Knight class. Wouldnt it be a professional business model to actually wait (like you do with every other change ever made since the very first day of this game) to see if the recent changes had enough of an effect? Do the employees making these comments even have the authority to do so?

If you are referencing a post by the community managers, yes they have the authority to do so. They are very familiar with the game and if they have a question about the design intent, they ask us. I speak with them several times a day. You can trust them. We're all on the same team here.

Personally when I make a joke about DKs being OP, I am alluding to the the fact that they were OP, particularly right after we shipped. We got some things wrong and we've been correcting them. To deny they were too powerful would make us look ill-informed or overly defensive. I like to be as honest with the community as I can be so that there is a chance the community will trust us when we lay out our design intent on something.

Q u o t e:
And then you still allow people to post complete nonsense on this forum, daily, filling up hundreds and hundreds of lines of nothing but propaganda QQ of someone just trying to get your class down out of spite or in hopes of bringing theirs up to par. This does not only pertain to the Death Knight class, but every single class in general. This forum is becoming a cesspool of nothing but misinformation and rhetoric of X vs Y, or Y vs Z and im 99% sure that wasnt your intention; to just have childish fights on this board constantly of "nerf this!!!" and whoever cries loudest wins.

We created these forums for the WoW community. It isn't our intent to be overly draconian with our enforcement, though we will try and keep things under control. We want this to be a fun place, which includes not having people spouting epithets on the one hand, but also not having to be paranoid that anything you say might get you permabanned.

Players are going to say dumb things sometimes. Sometimes they are just not well informed and sometimes they are intentionally trying to get a rise. Just ignore them. We listen to the player feedback and take it under advisement but we don't let the community design the game for us.

Q u o t e:
People are still making posts pertaining to Death Knights and Chains of Ice. Given the current mechanics in this game, and the recently nerfed glove bonus; Even when including Death Runes (because apparently most players think we just have these whenever we wish) its not even possible within game balance to keep spamming CoI in any reasonable way whatsoever.

So they are either misinformed, and you can correct them if you'd like, or they are just being jerks. Unless you are 100% sure which one it is, why get bent out of shape over it? If we banned people for posting occasionally incorrect statements then even I would be off the boards. :)

Q u o t e:
I respectfully and humbly ask that you Blizzard; as the company that designed this class please come forward to your loyal player base and make a statement regarding the current situation and the planned future for the Death Knight class. I think this would do well for two reasons.

This is beyond the scope of a forum post and if we started doing it for DKs every other class would want their manifesto. We are doing that, to an extent, with the class Q&As mentioned in your respective class forums. DKs will get their turn.

I will say that we don't think DKs are perfectly balanced, but we don't think they are dominating tanking, dps and PvP to the degree that they once were.

Ghostcrawler

#167 - June 5, 2009, 4:48 a.m.

Q u o t e:
I love two completely contradictory statements in the same post. Honestly, that's the one thing about this game that has continued to piss me off since day release. The complete lack of clear, concise class direction and intent. Ever since release where the manual was a complete lie about mages.

I don't see how they're contradictory. I like to be honest with the community, but I also don't have excess hours in the day to come up with several clear, concise paragraphs (that players couldn't misinterpret or take out of context) about the state of the class in PvE and PvP.

As far as class direction and intent, what is your actual goal there? We want to give you enough information to help you choose a class at start up, but ultimately you're not really going to know how it plays until you try for it awhile. I suspect you'll also learn far more from communicating with other players than you will from reading a definition that is either so short as to be simplistic or so long as to be tedious to read.

We like to give players a tool set, but we ultimately don't want to go overboard with telling you exactly how you're supposed to play. The game is supposed to be about experimentation and discovery. There is also the risk that sometimes players are asking for a clear definition of their class so that they can use that definition to somehow argue for buffs for their character. But we'll try not to let them ruin it for everyone. :)

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Ghostcrawler

#168 - June 5, 2009, 4:51 a.m.

Q u o t e:
As a warrior tank I can assure you that rarely will you get a straight answer from the current development team. I have read more dev blue posts that I can count and I can assure that all teams take their cue from their leader. Which leads me back to my original statement.

We give plenty of straight answers. We don't announce things too far in advance, because that ends up causing more heartache than not, and we don't say "here's how we'll buff you" probably as much as players would like. We also don't answer every question, because there's just no way to realistically do that, but if you have burning questions, ask them in the Q&A threads in your class forum.

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Ghostcrawler

#190 - June 5, 2009, 4:59 p.m.

Q u o t e:
As a shaman player, I think while you may believe that statement, whether or not it rings true to players is what is important.

Shaman was repeatedly reported in Wow beta of having extremely low dps, i recall you saying once you hit 80, it'll all be fine, basically ending discussion. No straight answers about totems, its been since 2008 when devs originally asked for player feedback on totems the FIRST time

Alot of issues, for my retired shaman perspective, have been repeatedly "pushed back" or mired in a development process that has apparently taken the better part of three years (see totems)

These issues , like totems, have been around alot longer than you have been Lead systems designer, and during your tenure, we had another 500+ page thread of "shaman discussion" that lead to a glyph of stoneclaw. A ...GLYPH.

Since you havent been LSD since the beginning of wow, im not sure how you can say with 100% confidence that all classes are met with the same level of detail and communication, quite frankly, theyre not, and their lack of polish shows

What I get from this is not that you are frustrated with a lack of straight answers or communication. You just want more changes to your class than we have delivered so far. You are talking essentially about "issues that have not been addressed." If that's your beef, say that. Don't say "Blizzard won't give me straight answers" when you mean "Blizzard won't make the changes that I think they should."

I am pretty sure just about every player thinks that other classes get more detail and communication than their class gets. Even if we had many threads on a particular class at some point, players tend to not count those if they occurred more than a few weeks in the past. We don't make a heroic effort to make sure everyone gets cookies of the same size, desirability and frequency, because frankly that's an impossible task. "I counted blue responses, and druids had 5 responses last week while warriors only had 4," is pretty typical. So is "There were 14 patch notes on warlocks, so clearly they are the dev favorites" followed closely by "There were 14 patch notes on warlocks -- clearly the devs have no idea what to do with the class." :)

If you have issues, post them. I suspect everyone would enjoy this forum more if it was focused more on actual class mechanics and less on the history of the treatment of your class by the developers.

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Ghostcrawler

#191 - June 5, 2009, 5 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I'm generally on board with you bro but I gotta call shenanigans on this one. Maybe this is a paradigm that you are trying to move toward but historically it simply isn't accurate IMO.

What part? You think the developers have historically tried to tell you how to play your class?

Or do you mean that players won't try to lobby for changes based on definitions or assumptions that e.g. they are supposed to be "the master" of something?

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