Most Atrocious GC quote yet....

Q u o t e:
GC, you better get your therapy sessions paid for by Blizzard.

I has a coffee mug.

[Not tracked]

Q u o t e:
So does my complaint ring hollow jack***.

Dear angry person, come back and post when you can do so without calling people names. No matter how outraged you are, you must behave like adults on our forums.

Q u o t e:
They wanted people to play it, and they really didnt care about the results.

I has a tinfoil hat.

Q u o t e:
I would love to see the numbers GC saw in order to do such.

We don't typically share our numbers. There are two very important reasons for this, though there are others too.

1) WoW is a game in which both mystery and personal improvement play a huge part. Huge communities have formed around WoW theorycrafting. If we just came out and said "Mages are balanced to do 7200 dps on Hodir" then it takes the fun out of the game for many people. A lot of the desire to experiment and try different things might be squashed out. You can see this in action in the those cases where we do clear something up completely. The conversation just stops.

2) In the rare case that we have posted numbers, the community has tended to attack those numbers rather than looking at the actual problem we're trying to fix or the solution we're trying to implement. They end up just trying to discredit the data set or ask for more and more proof and documentation to convince them that it's legit. Our point of view is that we balance the game the way we think it needs to be balanced. We're absolutely open to your feedback on what we do and how we do it, but we don't want to get into the position where we need to run all of our changes past the community first.

Q u o t e:
You should probably read what he was responding to before complaining about his answer. The person he was responding to claimed warriors were being ignored 'again' and had always been awful. GC's response was basically "Uh, that's not even close to true" albeit in a more tactful form. It didn't mean that there hadn't been problems since the expansion started, or that they weren't going to fix them. If those kind of things make you as angry as your post makes you sound, you should reconsider playing any MMO game since that kind of thing is bound to happen.

Yes. Exactly. This kind of thing is often the result of a poster reading a quote of mine, typically on another website, without the benefit of the whole conversation. The poster said “warriors should be used to disappointment.” Warriors have at times been the best tank, higher dps than rogues or warlocks, and a very dangerous force in PvP. I can respect it if you think warriors are currently underpowered. I won’t tease you for that viewpoiunt. But when you try to make your situation sound more dire by claiming warriors have always been in that case, then I call a little bit of you know what. :)

Q u o t e:
Your company does not require that you have to actually be an adult to post on these forums. Since you and your company are so concerned about the age group of posters on these forums. Why do you not change it so that only "adults" could post on these forums?

There are plenty of younger people who behave better than some of the actual adults that post here.

I think some players are just used to the Internet as the wild west where your anonymity protects you and there is little consequence for insults, flaming or just generally behaving badly. That is not the way people communicate in civilized society if they want to get anything accomplished. That is not the way I suggest you approach the "vendor" at the local market, your co-workers, your boss, your teacher, your friends or your family. If I told a fellow designer that they were an idiot with an agenda just because we disagreed, I would probably be fired.

"Act like adults" is the most concise way I can think to say it.

Q u o t e:
Actually that's not true at all. Most of the time when you post your numbers, they are just that: numbers. For example you posted that Resto Shaman X in Uber Guild Y cast CH 100 times on a hard mode encounter. That's simply a data point, and doesn't say anything about why that data point occurred, or what the proper interpretation of that data point is. People typically respond to stuff like this with reasons why your interpretation of that data is not the best interpretation to be had. And then you freak out and say they are arguing against your data instead of what you imply it's saying about the game.

I picked a data set that was very representative of the kind of thing we are seeing among expert guilds on hard modes. My point was to say "Look, this is what is happening," so the context of our changes would make sense. The community attempted to disprove that the shaman or the guild was good or that somehow the case was not typical of what is happening. At the very least they wanted more details, more evidence, more documentation. In short, they wanted Blizzard to prove that the numbers were true.

This is a natural response, because it's how you respond to other players that come up with numbers. The difference is that we can't be in a position where we are obligated to convince the community to allow us to make changes we feel are necessary. That's just not a process we're going to use for game design. We'll communicate the changes and even try and explain our line of thought and answer a few questions. We might ask you your opinion sometimes. But we're not going to ask your permission, or ultimately we think the quality will suffer.