I GOT IT.....

Q u o t e:
Wait no i dont.

So how does the Devs work.

Do we have a Dev. Team for each class?

Or one for Healers/damage and tanks?

How is the hierarchy set up. Is the code writers on the teams or do the teams go to the code writers and say this is what we want to happen. Make it so.

There are different types of designers. Some work on quests, encounters, world events or zones. My team works on classes, items, tradeskills, UI, PvP, combat and pretty much most of the crunchy bits of WoW. It's a great team of very talented players and they don't get the recognition they deserve. This is partially because some of them wish to remain anonymous. (Shameless plug: we are hiring an item designer. Check the hiring portion of the site for more details.)

Within our team, nobody owns a particular class. We all work on them together and nobody make a change (at least a serious change) without getting consensus from everyone else. We draw on our own experiences, community feedback, internal testing, data collected from the live game, and correspondence with friends, guildies and other players whose opinions we've grown to respect.

We also interact a lot with the other designers, because they all play the game too and many have a great deal of raiding or PvP experience. They come to our meetings or just drop by with an idea or a piece of feedback. That goes for the rest of the WoW team, and in fact all of Blizzard. We are extremely collaborative and not particularly hierarchical.

Our designers tend to be fairly technical as the industry goes, and some of us know a little programming, but typically we aren't writing actual code though we do write scripts and make data queries if you understand the distinction.

The programmers are a separate but equal department. They do write code and they are extremely talented, sometimes intimidatingly so. We ask them for new features or code changes that would improve the game and they tell us what is feasible, what is risky, and suggest alternative ways to get what we want. They are all gamers too so it's really a back and forth process as we work on an idea together until we come up with something we are happy with.

The process is similar for interacting with artists, or really any other component of the team. The big secret of WoW's success is that Blizzard just manages to hire very, very good people who "get it."

Q u o t e:
The reason I am asking is that some classes seem to get put in the spotlight more and longer than other classes. And I was wondering could his be because not all dev teams are equal? Since I know druid and shaman seem to be lacking in some areas and have been for some time. And it seems that not alot of thought and consideration went into moonkin itemization as well as scaling concerns. Could a leader of one of the dev teams actually be the boss over the other dev teams? This has happened to me in the past.

I try to visit the forums often, but obviously (I hope) I can't respond to every thread or issue that gets brought up. The ones I tend to post in often have to do with topics that we have been discussing lately. We don't have 100 class designers, so while we work on many things at once, we also tend to have burning issues. As you might guess from recent posts, we have been discussing shamans and paladins a lot lately. Not too long ago it was warlocks and warriors. This doesn't mean we're playing favorites or ignoring other classes. A class "in the spotlight" as you put it might be overpowered and in need of nerfs.

Whatever your list of problems with WoW looks like, I can assure you ours is much longer. We are very hard on our own design and we don't think there is a single aspect of WoW that can't be improved. If you sense a problem in the game, particularly one that has been around a bit, it is almost certain that we know about it and just haven't gotten to it yet. Sometimes players suggest that we do hire 100 class designers so that we can get even more changes into the game. That isn't a good idea for a couple of reasons. One, we already change the game faster than some players can realistically handle and we give them whiplash. Second, I just said that WoW's secret is that we hire great people. We can't hire up too quickly without diluting our talent pool, and even great new hires need some time before they really understand our philosophies. Just as WoW's art has a consistent style, so does the rest of the game, and learning that takes time.

Q u o t e:
In a more serious question: Does your team take feedback from external sources? For example these forums and more specialized people (Elitist Jerks, Arena Junkies, etc).

If yes, how do you evaluate if their suggestions are not out of order?

Yes, of course. We evaluate their suggestions the way we do all suggestions. Even suggestions that are numerically sound (as many EJ ones are) can be technically unwieldy, overcomplicated or just against the vision we have for the game. AJ suggestions might help certain traditional specs or comps at the expense of others, or be fixes that only affect the most skilled players. I guess what I am trying to say is that suggestions can be quite good and still not find their way into the game.

Q u o t e:
If your team does tradeskills, why can't a forum like the profession forums get the kind of great input you yourself do when it comes to these forums? I know there's only so many hours in the day and I can imagine how much time you have to put in just doing this, but the profession system itself is something that's been hugely neglected in this expansion so far, with rampant imbalance throughout it.

I think "hugely neglected" is an overstatement. If you go back and look at the patch logs, we have tweaked the professions constantly since LK shipped. It's a hard balance to nail correctly because players have a vested interest in them being very good, but if they too good, they overshadow the rest of the game (or at least the PvE and PvP rewards). We'd love to carry on a more detailed correspondence in many areas of the game, but our ability to communicate is limited. We do read every post on the topic though. If you provide feedback, we will see it.

Q u o t e:
All I remember is, at the '08 Blizzcon, a team of Blizzard employees got absolutely massacred in 3v3 fights by the European team that won the tournament.

This needs to stop getting trotted out as evidence of anything. It was a publicity stunt designed for Blizzcon entertainment, not a test of PvP competence. First, those employees were not the best team we are capable of creating. I just said above that some of our guys don't yet want their identities made public. Second, assembling a group of players who don't play together against established teams is hardly fair. Everyone knows that team synergy is hugely important. Third, it is ridiculous to assume that we can or need to be able to be the best players in the world at PvP in order to understand the mechanics or know how to balance it. We have very good PvP players here with years of experience. We can collect a lot of information about what goes on in Arenas. We are in contact with players who *are* the best in the world -- likewise, I am pretty confident you wouldn't want some of them designing the game. :) While WoW's PvP system is far from perfect and there are a lot of things we can do better, I think its enormous popularity is testament to the notion that we have a clue about what we're doing.

Q u o t e:
Its all fine and well you are a happy democracy NOW, but you could, and arguably should change that. You, the current ones, are Generals. Then you can hire a bunch of foot soldiers. They don't have a say in anything. They are there to do the bidding of the Generals. The Generals design a new quest involving getting wolf tails (which for some reason are only on some wolves regardless of what they look like from afar) - and then you tell some of the foot soldiers to go do this to your specs. The Generals still meet and talk things over, the foot soldiers just shut up and do it. And they get the bonus of being able to say "i have worked at blizzard"

And then they would add "and it sucked." :) We empower our people. That is why they are inspired to do great things.

Q u o t e:
I'm curious ( and this isn't a troll >.< ) as to what you did to get hired as a lead designer GC? I understand you were previously a marine biologist, it seems a very different field to come from into a head position in game design. What did you do that made the hiring team say "ooh, let's get him!" ?

I was in the industry for almost ten years before I got this gig. But I got my original one with a good cover letter, resume, some design samples and a killer RTS scenario. This is one of the few industries where talent trumps experience and both trump education.

Q u o t e:
For example, would a dev ever go to a designer saying, "I think you need to have a look at explosive shot again; it's not going to scale as well as it should" or "This guy's specialty is insanity, right? Wouldn't it be pretty fun if you had to fight him without looking at him or you get mind controlled?"

We pretty much use "developer" to mean "someone who worked on the game." If you mean: would a programmer go to a designer with feedback or a concern for their class or a boss idea, the answer is yes, all the time.

Q u o t e:
The issue is not the quantity of problems with WoW that you identify. The issue is that your list, wherever it is, has clearly been formulated by someone with no sense of priority.

You could miss thousands if little bugs and if you just fixed one major balance issue people would be happier.

Our not using your priority system != us not having a priority system. I'd wager you are also wrong about those little bugs. People might say that, until the bug happens to them. Polish affects the gameplay experience and bugs affect the level of polish.

Q u o t e:
You're clearly wrong, PVE DPS is closer than it has ever been to balanced by their state philosophy, it is only suffering from two major outliers (hunters low, DKs high) across 10 classes and a wide variety of playstyles.

Parity among tanking classes (and I say this from the current "worst tanking class") is closer now than it has ever been and the problems remaining have been acknowledged and patch history shows that those problems that get acknowledged by the devs do get addressed. All this and despite the cries of homogenization it remains a unique experience to tank as a warrior, paladin, druid, and deathknight.

That there would cover probably 6 to 8 of the top 10 problems on anyones list for PVE in TBC. PVP is obviously not the same story, but raiding is obviously wow's prime content and you can't blame them for working with that in mind first.

Thank you. However, I wouldn't say that raiding is our prime content (though it is quite popular). It's just that PvE balance is much, much easier than PvP balance. That's not an excuse, just an explanation.

Q u o t e:
Along those lines, though, it sounds as if Blizzard could hire many more content creators. Two people can't do more work trying to design one class, but two people can churn out twice as many models or a double-sized zone over one designer.

It might seem that way, but it isn't the case in my experience. The content creators have to learn the tools and the content pipeline. They can't just make any crazy thing they want -- it needs to fit into the plan that the whole team has developed. Our models and textures and animations and zones all have a style and it can take a long time for a new artist to really be able to deliver content in that style. Their work is just as collaborative as ours. (Finding exceptional level designers or artists to consider hiring isn't trivial either.)

Q u o t e:
So let me get this straight, you "tend" to post in topics that you guys are discussing, and now that you're all done with Warlocks and Warriors for the time being, you've moved on to shaman and paladins...

So I take it that with this mindset, Locks representation will remain low until you guys get back to looking at us down the road.

You are reading too much into that statement. It could just as easily be that we are waiting on tech for our next warlock change, or one of the designers is implementing talent changes and we are waiting to test them, or we have a meeting scheduled later in the week. My point was more that it's easier for me to have say 4-5 conversations at once than 8-10 conversations at once. Players sometimes get frustrated if they don't see a lot of posts on the topic that is most pressing to them at that moment, but we're not sure how else to handle that situation.

Q u o t e:
I have a question on your “shameless plug”. How does the hiring process work at Blizzard? I actually applied for a position, submitting what I feel (biased of course) a very competitive résumé, and I heard nothing. I spoke with a friend who works for a “competing’ game company and he stated that more often than not positions are filled internally (posted only for compliance reasons) and game companies are still working in the era “it’s who you know”. That was sort of discouraging to hear.

I can't comment on individual cases of course (and I'm not sure of yours in any event). We hire both internally and externally all the time. I am not aware of us ever putting up an external position just because we had to when the sneaky intent was to hire from within. Blizzard takes hiring very seriously. I couldn't get a friend or guildy hired here if they couldn't get through the interviews with the other designers. Likewise, we hire people that none of us had ever met before all the time. I would say the "who you know" deal is not a huge factor at major studios. It might be in smaller startups.

Q u o t e:
Message: We need you to create a sword with medium stats for a combat rogue. Can you handle that?

Response: No problem, when's it need to be done by?

Message: When it's ready.

I gather you were posting in jest, but the way this would actually work is all of the items would need to be completed in a reasonable amount of time so that we could test them and try them out in game. If for some reason the whole package didn't work (say we decide to change the ilevel, or change the way swords work for rogues, or just itemizing things differently) then we would have the luxury / pain of redoing it all. "When it's ready" applies a lot more to deciding when something is finished, not postponing starting it. :)