Myth busted! Dev team has shaman!

This kind of thing gets asked every few weeks. I haven't responded to one in a long time, so consider this my token response so I don't have to it again for awhile. :)

We have an amazing shaman on the team, arguably one of the best in the world, but it wouldn't matter if we didn't. We hire people who have a fundamental understanding of the classes and whose philosophy is in line with ours. We don't hire to fill a class quota. "Sorry, dude, if you switch mains we're going to have to let you go." I could care less what classes my designers play, as long as they play the game and can put themselves in players' shoes (which they do).

There are plenty of examples in other businesses where people who make the decisions are not necessarily the ones in the trenches. Many famous directors and producers can't act, but that doesn't mean they don't understand acting. Athletic coaches are often former athletes, but that doesn't mean they can still compete with their actual players on the field or court. CEOs set the philosophy of a business. They don't execute all of the trades or make purchases themselves. Generals are not necessarily crack shots any longer. The people in the book industry may not be great writers, but they know what readers want to buy. Great chefs aren't necessarily the people who can eat the most food. They just have to love food. And so on.

The people making the decisions just have to be very knowledgeable of the details and the experience that actual players encounter, which our designers are.

Many times (though not every time) that players post that we aren't familiar with a particular class or spec, what they are really saying is "I have a different vision for this class or spec than Blizzard does," or even "I don't like to be nerfed."

Q u o t e:
The bolded part kind of scares me. It comes across like everyone agrees with each other on how the game is supposed to be handled, and up front that sounds like a good thing. On the other hand, having 10-15 people who all think alike tend to get into ruts. Recurring themes are good as they provide consistency, but if it falls into running in circles, or spinning your tires so to speak, things need to get shaken up.

I didn't say we agree on everything. Far from it. We have lively debates all the time. Different points of view are critical when you have a fan base that numbers in the millions. But it's important that on a higher level everyone buys in to some basic philosophies or we're just going to be working at cross purposes. We have people who say would rather have an elegant fix that doesn't quite fix the problem or designers who would favor a more complicated fix that absolutely fixed the problem. The key is that both agree there is a problem and that we should try to fix it. If someone doesn't think the problem exists, then we need to keep discussing it until we reach a consensus or at least agree to disagree.

When we disagree though, we know how to do so in a professional manner. Being able to disagree with someone without insulting them is a pretty important skill in almost every line of work. Even if you are certain in your heart that someone is wrong, wrong, wrong, you still need to maintain respect for them if you really want to engage in a conversation. I mention it just because it is a skill so poorly mastered by many of the posts on our forums. :(

Q u o t e:
All your examples either have or can have two-way feeback with their subordinates, or there is a chain of command that is two-way all the way down. I would argue that the Blizzard -> Players feedback loop is not like this. I can't ask a question, get an answer, and then ask another question. It's more like a squabble, and the loudest noises get attention. Even then, it's like a mystic decree. That's why Blue Trackers are so popular.

We have plenty of communication with "subordinates" (though Blizzard hierarchy is pretty flat overall). You are talking about the degree to which a few dozen people can carry on an open conversation with a few million people. That's hard. I would rank our attempts at communication pretty high overall though. No, you don't get answers to all your questions from a high-ranking person on our side of the fence, but you pretty much don't ever get that in life. You do get some, and that's the best we can do. I would be surprised if you got a similar level of conversation with say the people that made your computer or your car or who manage your bank account or roast your coffee beans. That's not to say we can't do better. But I think many of you confuse "poor communication" with "didn't answer *my* question."

Q u o t e:
I should ask, are there only a few dozen of you to manage the interaction with the player community? I'm having a hard time believing that. I'm sorry to be so frank, but that is honestly what I am thinking. I would imagine that there would be more folks than that actively managing the player base, asking questions, and polling for feedback continuously, and pulling together an overall message from the community into a concise and digestible report.

We do have a great community team and they are involved in a lot of different projects, many of which you never see on the forums. I was actually referring to the developers though. The conversation was about the folks empowered to make decisions. The fact that lead designers post in these forums (and I'm not the only one) is pretty unusual for a game, particularly one of our size, or really any kind of business. That is why I posited the conclusion that it's not lack of communication that frustrates some players -- it's that their specific question or issue was not personally addressed. That is a somewhat unrealistic expectation. Sorry. :(

Q u o t e:
Shaman player/designer: "I'm at 2800, and pulling 8k dps in raids, tell the forumers to L2P, we don't need buffs."

Some of you still have this misperception that we have "the shaman guy" who buffs or nerfs solely depending on his or her experience online the night before. That would be a pretty amateur way to do class design and I don't think it would account for WoW's longevity.

We have a class team and we work very closely together to make sure the changes are right for the game. Not a single change is made that doesn't weather some debate first. "Well, I play this class so I know and you don't" wouldn't fly around here. "Shaman are having problems here and here," is more typical and appropriate.

The whole point of my original post was to point out that there is a massive difference between someone who plays a given class and therefore has strong opinions on that class, and someone who is a professional game designer. Many of you seemed to have missed that part.

We play the game because we think it's important to get "real world" validation for our design, and frankly because we all still love the game. But there are many great players who are terrible at game design and people with fantastic ideas who play the game pretty casually. Designer != great player.

Q u o t e:
1. Getting people on the forums to agree with you no where near means your issue is widely accept. If anything, less than 0.01% (<10,000) of the people that play this game probably post on their respective forums. The "many" voices just doesn't exist.

2. You're not allowed to comment on the threads that GC is commenting on. He's said it before, I'm sure it's in the rules for this forums somewhere. If anything, it's almost MORE profitable if GC DOESN'T post in threads that already have a good discussion going. What happens when he does? People come in to whine about other stuff the thread isn't about, other classes want to present their issues because they think GC is only reading that particular thread, and the thread derails into flamefests and GC has to lock it anyways.

I'm not trying to deter you from posting or call you out specifically, Monarchan, but that's just the trend I'm seeing from the forums. I don't want to discourage GC from posting either. Coming in and correcting our assumptions (a la the threads for SS in the 3.3 PTR) is great interaction with the community. People just need to not be so selfish when GC posts in threads and flood them with stuff that is irrelevant and ruining the discussion.

Well said. Thanks.

Q u o t e:
This isnt demanding a response, a few of us have made really good posts that just get swept under the carpet. It's getting old that GC will not give us any feedback

Um, that’s pretty much demanding a response. Even if you don’t call it literally “demanding,” it’s saying “I’m going to be really disappointed if you don’t answer my question.” My response to that kind of feedback (aside from refilling my special coffee cup) is to conclude that I’m just going to make people unhappy by only answering *some* questions and addressing *some* issues, so I am better off not answering any at all. The response you are looking for, namely that I answer *all* questions or conclude that *yours* are the most important and therefore the ones I need to answer, is just not realistic. Sorry.

Q u o t e:
You're burying the intelligent posts with your "I want answers!" QQ. Just like GC said ppl do when the blues pop into a thread. That's why he posted in a QQ thread, to avoid burying good ideas. Which have shown up here regardless, and the posters of these intelligent posts are now leaving, dejected, because no one has answered their intelligent posts and instead respond to GC's comments from two pages ago. This is why Blues avoid posting in good threads.

Yes. Some of you seem to perceive the way this works is I am allocated 10 (or whatever) forum responses a day and that if I respond to a thread like this that Real Issues Go Unanswered. That’s not how it works. If we are ready to share something, I’ll usually find a place to share it. Asking, begging, threatening or whatever are unlikely to get us to post or announce anything before we’re ready to. Sometimes I reply to threads like this just so players are reminded that we do read and care about these fourms.

Q u o t e:
So at what point are we allowed to get upset? We went through all this last month...there were six threads posted detailing our problems that were not even touched.

You’re not allowed to get upset. Not publically. That’s not the way people behave in civil society. Yell at your monitor if you want. Post nasty things in your guild forum if that is cathartic. Go butcher gnolls. This is not the “I get to vent and that makes me feel better” forum. Sorry. If I got upset in a meeting with my peers or superiors, I would most likely be fired. So would you.

Q u o t e:
The title alone is full of enough QQ to poison a preteen, and it would've sunk faster had it been left alone.

Possibly. My hope was that some players really stop to think about the whole “they must not have my class on their design team” issue. Not many will. Some just want to vent. But maybe some will. :)

Regardless, I think the tenor has shifted from a discussion on our design process to just class complaints, so maybe we should call it a day.