A day at the damage dealing office

Q u o t e:
I am legitimately curious to know what a typical day is like in the Blizzard offices, especially for the "class design" team. I assume the programmers are busy writing, evaluating, and proofing code and calculations. Marketing is probably busy......marketing? But for the class balance team, what do you guys do? Do you have meetings all day where you say "alright, lets fix paladins!", that sort of thing? Or are you busy interacting with the programmers so that everything works properly, are you going over statistics, reading the drivel in these forums, dealing with "management", or all of the above? This isn't a "omg look they don't actually do anything" post, I just really want to know what it is like to be Ghostcrawler (or any member of his team) for a day.

Most of the day is spent in communication of some sort. We'll have formal meetings where we review a current talent tree. We have just tons and tons of discussions of "Hey, guys, I had an idea," or "Hey, I can't solve this problem. Any thoughts?" We do work quite closely with the programmers implementing things like the new talent UI or the new scaling spell model. We also work closely with the artists coming up with new spell visuals. Our QA department is constantly trying to sort through what the design of the moment is, and they do a great job of triaging the totally broken things from the "fix this before we ship" things. The community team brings us concerns that they have seen on the forums or from their interactions with players. This is particularly true for the non-English forums, because my non-English for one is sadly lacking. History geek that I am, I studied Ancient Greek in college, which serves me about as well in day to day life as you probably imagine.

GC's got friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan. He speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom. He'll blend in -- disappear -- you'll never see him again. With any luck... he's got the Grail already.

GC: Does anyone here speak English? Or even Ancient Greek?

There aren't many typical days. Sometimes we will spend literally hours discussing one problem. The last few days it has been the paladin rotations. We'll throw things on white boards, send out some ideas to guys not actually in the office, try out some stuff in game to see how it feels, and get feedback from anyone who has recently run one of the new dungeons or tried a new BG. We interact a lot with the community outside of the building, visibly on forums like this one, but through email, IRC and even in game. There are a lot of excellent PvP and PvE players with whom I regularly correspond, and I want to call out any of you reading this and thank you publically.

Overall the environment is very collaborative. The team as a whole (by which I mean the artists, programmers, producers and everyone else) don't get enough credit for the design decisions that go into the game. In many cases, my guys are just the implementers, but the ideas and feedback come from everyone working on WoW.

Q u o t e:
Ευχαριστώ πολύ για μια αφήγηση κοιτάξτε μέσα στις ζωές των υπαλλήλων χιονοθύελλας: Δ.

Η ευχαρίστησή μου.

(If I did that right!)

Q u o t e:
I'd be pretty interested in knowing something like that, from the general conception of, say, the new Retribution rotation to how it's finally implemented in game. That sort of stuff is fascinating to me.

In the Ret case, we started with a basic question: what is it they should be managing? There are a lot of things they *could* be managing. Today it's cooldowns. It could be mana or procs or a lot of things. There was one Ret talent in particular we really liked, and we started building a rotation around it. Then we decided the mechanic was good enough to flesh out for Holy and Prot too.

We're not ready to share the design just yet, and like all changes of this sort, it will be controversial. Some players crave a more interactive rotation. Some like their paladins the way they are. Some are only attracted to the class because it can be overpowered and they like to feel like a superhero. :)

Q u o t e:
Hey GC i got a question too. When you play WoW on your actual toon, does your guild know who you are? do they know you are "GC" or do you keep your identity hidden in game?

My closest friends know. Many others don't. It's not generally known on my server(s) or I probably wouldn't be able to play. Remember I was in the game industry before Blizzard, and so are many of my friends, so it's less weird that we might have a Blizzard connection than a lot of people.

Q u o t e:
According to him, he's "usability testing on the tutorial", which I'm not quite sure the meaning of. Maybe it is enough information for you to find him.

Usability testing is where you put players (of various gaming backgrounds from expert to noob) in front of the game and see what areas are fun and what areas are confusing. Many, many of the Cataclysm leveling changes came out of usability testing. If I bump into him, I'll say hi.