#27 - July 2, 2009, 5:29 p.m.
Q u o t e:
He's the dev team's assigned liason to the player base, which is why most of the controversial stuff like class changes gets shoved onto him to report to the player base and take the flak from idiots like the OP who think he's the only dev anywhere, or that he makes all the development calls.
I can see how one might come to this assumption, primarily given his posting activity. However, that's not how things work -- specifically him being an "assigned liaison to the player-base". Designers are "assigned" to designing. The community team has always worked closely with the World of Warcraft design team. We tend to communicate the most with the senior and lead designers.
Ghostcrawler tries to chime in as much as possible to address concerns, confusion, answer questions, etc...
He is neither obligated or required to post ever....
However, he does so to help players better understand concepts, changes, philosophies etc... When I originally created his account during WotLK beta, the idea then was that when the expansion launched he'd stop being active -- but his posts had a strong and positive impact amongst players and "he just couldn't quit you" :P
Our team (community) began to work much closer with him in regards to external forum communication focused on game design -- where he'd bounce responses to threads off of us, and visa versa. Ghostcrawler of course isn't the only designer on the team that works to bring about better communication, but he's the subject of the thread. Tom Chilton for example communicates quite a bit on the forums, but it's usually through us, sometimes GC, etc...
One thing that makes our job much easier is how community oriented our design team is.
