Hey Devs (esp Ghostcrawler) - read me.

#1 - Jan. 27, 2011, 3:54 a.m.

Some Thoughts on what is broken so far

There are two main points here for the TL;DR crowd
a - the ‘this needs to be harder’ attitude is disrespectful
b - you’re fixing something that wasn’t broken

Fights (raids and dungeons) are disrespectful of the majority of players i know (my guild right now has roughly 130 accounts in it, with several hundred more friends/former raid allies etc that i come into contact with. Their feelings are nearly the same as mine on this).
1 - risk vs reward is broken in heroics - after a week, you’re just farming Valor Points. This is boring. No-one likes a boring game.
2 - too many instances start with a boss of disproportionate difficulty / ridiculous random factor that makes pugging/raiding that instance more trouble than it’s worth.
2a - examples - Corborous in Stonecore, Halfus Randombreaker in BOT.
2b - If it’s more trouble than its worth, then the money to develop the content is wasted. Wasted money by your dev team is bad. It is better from a money standpoint, for US AND YOU, for the content to be taken in by everyone (even if it is easier) than for it to be taken in by only a few people.
3 - All of the rep runs, VP runs, trash farming means one thing - return of the grind. WOW promised to reduce the grind. WOW, when it launched, basically prided itself on being less grindy than its spiritual predecessor, Everquest. I Left everquest because of the disrespectful amount of grind. 200 players followed me to WOW because of this (yes, i brought you 200 customers between launch and BC). They followed me because we had a good time together and i knew when to say ‘enough’.

I’m very close to saying ‘enough’ with wow. You need to re-examine what you’re doing.

Blizzard’s attitude is disrespectful
1 - Ghostcrawler’s intensly insulting ‘dungeons are hard’ post
1a - we don’t deserve to be talked down to. you sounded like a d*ck
1b - you need to make the content fun before you make it ridiculously challenging. We’re doing this for FUN. You hit the fun channel pretty firmly in Lich King. Not sure why you abandoned this model. Was it that you listened to a ridiculous minority that didn’t like it ‘too easy’? This is silly. Easy is relative and it is an opinion. Usually it is an opinion applied after you’ve done something difficult, not before.
1c - instead of talking down to us - fix the content. bring the content to us, not vice-versa. we’re paying for this. do what we want, not what you think we should want.
2 - the departure of the old dev team should not have heralded a completely new vision, especially considering that they built a game with 11 million players.
2a - we are invested in their game, deliver us more of that. Don’t sit there and arrogantly think you know better. I’m willing to bet that given how angry my guildmates and friends are that you don’t know better.
2b - new devs are custodians of the plan-as-in-place, not purveyors of a paradigm shift

There aren’t just two ‘skill levels’ or ‘interest groups’ of players
1 - there are casual raiders, not just casual players. There are degrees of players between ‘totally casual’ and ‘hardcore raiders’ You have a duty as persons providing a service to provide an experience that caters to these players. Lich king and Burning Crusade did this. Currently, Cataclysm is not. This is messed up. We’re left to wait until VP gear becomes JP gear to gear up to do content as ‘older content’? This goes back to my disrespectful of the player comment above.
2 - there are semi hardcore raiders who deserve a challenge, but can’t invest 6 hrs straight to learn a fight.
3 - some very good players are friends with not-so-good players. they deserve to bring their friends along. You have ended this for now and that’s bull*!*#. You say ‘bring the player not the class.’well what if that player is a friend of 22 yrs who doesn’t have the time to grind 30 hrs a week on reputation. Should i leave them behind? Don’t be a jerk and tell me yes. Again, that's a messed up, disrespectful attitude.
4 - In lich king, the ‘heroic’ difficulty on raids was a good separator for the ‘elite’ players. Why was this abandoned and everything made more difficult? To slow progression down? The pace of content release in LK was almost perfect. Why are you fixing something that wasn’t broken.
5 - the nerf to healing, when the change to grind and gear is taken into account, is usurious. You have taken an already difficult (mentally and skillwise) class and made it completely unfun.

The proof
1 - long queue times for DPS (they've gone from 15 minutes to 40 minutes) in instances means fewer people are willing to risk their time tanking and healing for heroics
2 - healers are not taking risks with groups and very fast to bail on groups that are hard to heal. The lack of surplus mana/mana regen means that they aren’t willing to risk their time because too many X factors are weighing down on their mana management. You have made it so it’s harder for marginal players to even get a chance at getting better.
3 - the game itself lacks feedback and the sheer volume of numbercrunching needed to learn the endgame is daunting (especially as a DPS player). Making the non-heroic raids a bit easier is not a bad call - it isn’t coddling the ‘carebears’ - it’s just accepting that not everyone is willing to make wow their job.

I think it was one of your old Devs (someone who's now on your 'Titan' project) who said in regard to problems in Everquest 'Fix This' - how about you fix this. We want our fun back.

Zarhym

Community Manager

#36 - Jan. 27, 2011, 4:51 a.m.

I appreciate the time you took to lay out your critique of the current expansion, as well as your experiences with World of Warcraft over the past six years.

One thing needs to be made perfectly clear though if we're to maintain a real dialog with the players who spend their time providing feedback on the forums. You cannot justify violating the forum Code of Conduct and Posting Guidelines because you're very passionate about gameplay, frustrated by our development philosophy in Cataclysm, or insulted by the way we've tried to communicate that philosophy to you.

You don't react to someone you feel is being insultingly dismissive, stubborn, or whatever else some players felt after reading Ghostcrawler's blog, by retorting with literal insults via masked profanity.

I challenge everyone reading this who feels similarly to the original poster to help steer this community toward better civil discourse. Don't respond to trolls insulting you. Report them. If you want to vent, be reasonable about expressing why you're frustrated, rather than choosing an inflammatory tone. Vote up the posts you feel have reasonable, well-stated feedback, even if you don't agree with their viewpoints. Vote down the posts that aren't going to lead to anything more than impulsive ranting, finger-pointing, and insults. (Carrying this type of mentality into the game goes a long way as well if you aren't satisfied with some of the behavior around you.)

Most importantly, don't make things so personal. Ghostcrawler doesn't have disdain for you. He wants what is best for the game and this community, and we report to him what players are saying on the forums every single day. He's playing the game just like everyone else in the community constantly, using the Dungeon Finder, fighting for Tol Barad, raiding, etc. He's been in failed pick-up groups, he's been in partial guild runs where he was kicked just because another guildmate came online, and he's been in runs with three fellow guildmates where the fifth player left out of fear of being kicked further in.

He experiences the full gamut of World of Warcraft gameplay on the same level the majority of the playerbase does, even while working more than 40 hours a week, spending time with family and friends, and pursuing other hobbies. And as community managers, we have in-depth discussions in person with him and other lead developers every week about our experiences, and the experiences reported to us by you on the forums.

The simplest thing to remember about people who develop video games, is that they want to make a really fun, epic game. That is the driving factor above money or anything else. The simplest thing to remember about community managers, is that we act as conduits between the developers and the community. That doesn't stop at reading the forums and sending them what we're seeing. We're always paying attention to what people are doing and how people are acting when we're playing among you.

So, if you come here with those things in mind, it'll probably be much easier for us to have a focused discussion about what you do and don't like about the game.

We're done hearing about how you feel what Ghostcrawler said was mean. Look at the information and philosophies he's provided and challenge those if you feel we're still not heading in the right direction, even with the changes coming in patch 4.0.6. Then, we can start discussing how patch 4.1 should look. :)

Zarhym

Community Manager

#70 - Jan. 27, 2011, 5:20 a.m.

01/26/2011 9:06 PMPosted by Thelan
When people complain in this forum as much as ive seen then there is obviously somthing wrong with this game just common sense.

You're correct, in that the forums are very contentious. A big reason for that though is players will never fully agree on what is right or wrong in such a complex game. That doesn't change the fact that it's still our goal to provide meaningful entertainment for everyone, while finding the best possible middle ground for what is considered enjoyable endgame progression.

01/26/2011 9:07 PMPosted by Fallenlegion
You won't be done hearing about it because it's not going to be the last time it happens. GC rubs a group of the player base the wrong way almost every time. Right or wrong, they are getting more aggressive about it.

If you are waiting for the day when a developer shares his view of what fun gameplay is, and everyone is on the same page in perfect agreement, you will be disappointed.

Zarhym

Community Manager

#76 - Jan. 27, 2011, 5:26 a.m.

Please ask him to play a warlock post 4.0.6. The warlock community is getting really REALLY tired of being nerfed for no apparent reason.

I'll be playing my warlock post-4.0.6. I'll let him (and you) know how I feel. :)

Nethaera

Community Manager

#5778 - Feb. 1, 2011, 8:51 p.m.

This thread has gotten a bit unwieldy and it seems we're seeing a lot of back and forth arguing that isn't really resolving itself. It's understandable that people will have different opinions and we're always open to hear these as long as they are done in a constructive manner. We are going to close this thread in the meantime.