An idea about the limits of humanity (@GC)

#0 - July 19, 2009, 2:01 a.m.

Dear Ghostcrawler,

I understand that you cannot learn all of the class mechanics, nor can you personally comprehensively test every class and understand deeply how they work. This is reasonable. You are human. You put your pants on your tiny crab legs just like the rest of us: one at a time. You eat soup with a spoon, just like us. You. Are. Human.

Thus, because you cannot possibly have a fully comprehensive understanding of the mechanics of every class, I would advise for you to find people who completely and fully understand their class and are willing to test them and excited about the direction that should be taken with their class.

Take 10 people from your staff. Each one should know as much as possible about their class and only play their class. There would be one from each class.

They would (pa)troll the relevant forums for their class and they would understand the questions. We can see that you don't know everything. Get the people who do.

Ghostcrawler

#8 - July 19, 2009, 6:23 a.m.

Q u o t e:
I understand that you cannot learn all of the class mechanics, nor can you personally comprehensively test every class and understand deeply how they work. This is reasonable. You are human. You put your pants on your tiny crab legs just like the rest of us: one at a time. You eat soup with a spoon, just like us. You. Are. Human.

Thus, because you cannot possibly have a fully comprehensive understanding of the mechanics of every class, I would advise for you to find people who completely and fully understand their class and are willing to test them and excited about the direction that should be taken with their class.

If I (or any single person) had to design and balance WoW by myself, the game would be an utter disaster. Fortunately, I don't have to do that. I have a competent team of some of the best game designers in the world. We are fortunate that Blizzard's reputation attracts them.

Some of these designers also happen to be extremely talented in PvP or PvE, and sometimes both. If we don't feel their opinion or number crunching is sufficient, we have an enormous testing department that can run some numbers for us as well as give us their opinions. If that isn't sufficient, we can collect enormous amounts of data from within the game, contact expert players out there (see, we already do what you're advocating), and get feedback directly from players on the forums and throughout the community. It's a pretty robust decision-making process when all is said and done. Though like any complex process, it isn't 100% foolproof.

WoW is developed by a very large team. It has to be -- it's a very large game. I'm just a guy who posts in forums a lot. I don't need to know every spell in the game to an immortal degree of comprehension. Though I do know most of them to a reasonable degree of comprehension.