Who is *not* being sunwelled atm?

This is not a forum about me. This is a forum about WoW class design and balance. Let's try to stick to that topic please.

I said warriors benefit from haste more than other classes do. Haste has a direct result on rage generation, which is not the case for say energy or runes.

I was wrong about Mirror Image, which I acknowledged. The original intent was that it worked the way I described, and some of the designers thought it had been implemented that way. But I don't pretend to know every detail of every spell off the top of my head, and fortunately I don't have to because I can access our tools to see for sure.

Q u o t e:
it should come as no surprise that there are a number of players who have a far better grasp of game mechanics than a guy who studied fish watching. Don't be ignorant, the devs regularly post nonsense that makes it blatantly clear they don't have as firm an understanding as you'd like to believe.

The WoW forums... where a PhD is a liability. :)

If there is something you think is wrong with the game that we have't addressed, usually one of the following is true:

1) We don't think something is wrong. In this case, repeatedly posting the same thing over and over is unlikely to change our minds.

2) We think something is wrong, but we aren't ready to announce a change yet. This could be because we don't know how we want to fix it yet, we know how we want to fix it but require new tech to implement it, or because the change is going to take awhile.

In both of these cases, posting the same thing over and over again or bumping a thread when you have no new information to add isn't going to have the effect you're looking for. The goal often seems to be to post over an over either because you're so angry you can't take it anymore, or because you're stubborn and are looking for that blue post that finally says "here's how we're going to buff you." That happens, but it doesn't happen that often, and in those cases it is always because we agree something is a problem, not because you wore us down.

I know some of you just want a thumb's up or thumb's down answer on a community question or issue, but even that is beyond what we want to do with these forums. We don't have the time nor inclination to respond to every issue, let alone every thread. Furthermore, simple answers are rarely enough for a design-savy community that wants to know why, wants to explore edge-cases or perhaps even wants to see hard proof. Short blue answers rarely "solve" anything and more often throw fuel on a fire.

I don't think players coming to these forums are going to get much out of a thread like this, so hopefully this post will explain a little more about how the process should ideally work: If you have an issue, bring it up. See if other players agree with you. If they disagree, don't shut them out. Once you've explored the issue a little bit, you've done your job. You don't need to keep starting new topics on the same issue nor bumping those already so long that no reasonable person is going to read them (though I try to).

Sometimes we'll respond to a topic and sometimes we won't. But given the realities of developer time and the number of WoW players out there (even the minority of forum-posting ones) you should interpret those responses as almost random and not suggestive of a topic's severity or merit.

Cool?

Q u o t e:
GC, you've mentioned in the past that you are concerned that your presence in these forums is hurting game discussion more than helping it. I think it's time to admit this as firm reality and withdraw from these forums.

I love reading your insights, but it seems the majority of the community will never be satisfied with the answers a rational person should know are often the only answers you're allowed to give.

Every day there are new topics that are not really about gameplay discussion or gameplay issues, but merely about getting a blue post to "address" something (usually whatever issue is currently perceived as mandating a blue response) and to address it specifically in a way the community is demanding.

Maybe players will be more willing to discuss the issues among themselves if you aren't around to encourage them to make demands of you.

Eh, I'm not sure. I still get something out of these forums. We like to know what players are concerned about, even in those cases where we do disagree. Players could be strident or insulting or just plain wrong long before I came here. Maybe some people scream louder knowing that we are actually listening whereas before you could just post and post and not know what happened to those posts. Then again, you still see plenty of people who don't believe we listen even today, so in that respect I'm not sure stuff has changed that much.

I'll compare it to teaching. You might be answering the question that one student asks, but that doesn't mean that the others don't hear the conversation. You might be talking to the loudest or smartest kid in the room, but you're being heard by everyone. Don't think of the forum community as the WoW community. Think of it as the tip of an iceberg.

To the poster worried that I post too much instead of working on WoW, I tend to post on my own time when I can't get any work done anyway. Shortly before or after we release a patch or a new Arena season, I tend to dial in a little more often.

Q u o t e:
GC spends waaaaay too much time responding to completely pointless posts and QQ and not actually addressing issues.

Pointless perhaps if your point of view is just demanding an answer to the latest crime against your chosen class. But from the point of view of someone who want to see these forums endure, a couple of posts now and then about the most and least effective ways to communicate might eventually lead to having to make fewer of them in the future.

Our style is never going to be banning our way to obedience. We'll ban the jerks who just don't get it. But this needs to be a place for anyone who plays the game and is interested in class mechanics or balance issues.

I suggest you do what I do and take the good posts to heart and ignore the bad ones. They only take on a life of their own when too many people reward an obnoxious post by saying "The OP nailed it. Let's see the designers get out of this one," and then shouting down anyone who shows up with a different viewpoint. I still tend to ignore those threads. The ones I am most interested in are those with a back and forth discussion, not those that are thinly-veiled mandates. The threads where everyone agrees are usually the worst discussions -- nobody is challenging anyone's assumptions and we've almost certainly heard of the issue before anyway. The ones that bring up a different point of view are often the ones that make us pause and say "Huh, you know they make a really good point."

Pretend you saw the discussion written up as an article in a newspaper or web page. Would you keep reading it? If it was a rallying cry for how your class has been mistreated, then the answer is usually yes. But what if it wasn't about your class? Would you still find it interesting or compelling? If so, then we probably would as well. Those are the most useful discussions in these forums.

Q u o t e:
Wonder if hes ever going to respond to the MMR threads..

In forums about class design? Probably not.

I know it might seem tempting to ask anything WoW-related in here because I post often, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be able to answer questions on every topic. Don't beat us up for responding to one category of player feedback just because we can't do so for every topic.

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Q u o t e:
Perhaps you should blog (proactive) instead of reply (reactive), I dunno? Just a thought. Replying to threads seems to have created an atmosphere where people don't actually discuss with eachother, but instead simply make threads for blue.

Charsi, I really do get something out of the back and forth. If we wanted a platform from where to pontificate, we could do that, and we do on occasion. But I like being able to ask follow-up questions, try and redirect a discussion to something more useful, or otherwise be able to participate in the conversation directly.

If we ever think it gets to be too much of a distraction though, maybe we'll try something else.

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Q u o t e:
I see where you're coming from, and I myself am guilty of reaching points where all I had to say was QQ and complaining. I recognize that the development team has about a million different demands from a million different players on a weekly basis. I also recognize, from browsing each of the class forums and the DD forum that often times, at least some portion of every class thinks that they have it extra bad- that Blizz has singled them out and is secretly working up a scheme to destroy the class.

I guess my concern is that, in several cases in the past, I've seen a pretty solid discussion on some game mechanic develop and I'll be pretty engaged in the conversation, thinking to myself, "man I hope a blue sees this discussion and gives us some feedback". Then I actually see that there is a blue response, but instead of a comment regarding the quality portions of the discussion, it will instead be a response to a single QQ poster or something like that.

I understand wanting to defend your name and rectify misconceptions, but I also figure that at this point you and the entire development team should recognize that there's always going to be QQ, and there's really not a whole lot you can do about that. I'd only suggest that sometimes, when there is a lot of QQ coming from one particular class or role that maybe some of it is justified. So take a look, and rather than addressing a particular QQer offer us more incite on the issue in general. Pick a couple of the reasonable comments and give us your thoughts on those.

No, I understand, and I have tried to be better about not jumping into discussions that were churning on fine on their own, even with the occasional troll or non-constructive post. The risk is that players feel ignored because then the good discussions get no blue responses at all.

I don't care too much about defending my name. Players will enjoy WoW or they won't and that is what ultimately carries all the weight. I just find the "This is what happens when they let a marine biologist design games" jabs to be amusing, because I don't know a single professional game designer with a degree in game design (though I expect there will be more in the future). I've also been a game designer for longer now than I was a scientist, and longer than most people in the industry. (Though perhaps not-surprisingly, Blizzard has a lot of folks who have been here a decade or longer -- that is very rare in this biz.)

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Q u o t e:
I actually laughed a little cause thats exactly what im studying.

And I don't mean to disparage those programs. I'm familiar with some of them and with the faculty who teach them and I think they could really turn into something cool. But they are pretty new and haven't had a chance to churn out many greats yet. Half the careers people will be doing in twenty years don't exist yet, so the education programs to train those people don't exist yet either. Such was the way of game design not long ago.

Even so, one of the things I love about this industry is you can get into it from a lot of different places.

Best of luck. It's a great gig.

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Q u o t e:
You don't really understand how many people you insult when you say it and I'm sure your intention isn't to offend.

Don't dismiss the people who have put years of their life into the education of game design just because you personally don't associate with them.

No, that isn't my intention at all. I'm not at all saying those programs are worthless. I'm saying they are new. I, sadly, am not.

Who knows, in ten years it might carry a lot of weight to say "How can you be a game designer without a degree in game design?"

Here's one hint: communication is probably the most important thing you can learn. Half of the game designer's job is to pitch new ideas, then explain to people who actually know how to code or to create art what it is you're talking about.

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Q u o t e:
Sometimes I wonder, because you do seem to spend quite a bit of your time playing bad cop and reminding people of just what Blizzard's collective expectations are. I know people like to whinge and moan that you don't reply to their concern and instead reply frivolously to some nonsense. It's often unfair but there's also a grain of truth to it, in that you do spend a bit of time - dare I say it - pontificating to people about how they should act.

Yeah, I know. But sometimes I come here and the forums are in an unhappy state, and I think about the player who has just gotten into WoW and thinks they might want to explore their class in more detail, and comes here and just sees all the roadkill and thinks "Ew."

Maybe it's naive to think I can have any impact at all on the health of these forums, but you have to have a little of that chasing-rainbows mentality to do this job or you'll get beaten down pretty quickly... or pick up the bottle.

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