Q&A appreciation

Seriously, that was nice.

I liked the filtered set up very much and it's that kind of interaction that needs to happen more often.

I hope you guys can find the time to post more of those.

Thanks

Thanks, man. We really appreciate it. :)

That was our first run using CoverItLive for a public Q&A and we already have a lot of ideas for smoothing out the process for future chats. We plan to hold these events for StarCraft II and Diablo III as well.

But right now we're working out some details in the hopes of doing a class-specific Q&A as early as next week with Greg Street and his design team. The focus would be class balance/design for patch 4.3 and beyond (not just about Mists of Pandaria).

Again, thank you all for being a part of our first real hands-on experience with this format! <3

I'd like to suggest that the devs, next time, don't answer so many general questions on features that have already been announced, and instead link to the website (that they already linked to in the Q&A description). It's nice to have Q&A sessions, but it's nicer to get answers we don't have, instead of repeats that take time from answering other questions.

We definitely want to do this. We just felt that, with so much announced at BlizzCon and this being our first Q&A with CoverItLive, we'd keep the subject very general: Mists of Pandaria.

10/27/2011 06:27 PMPosted by Mahdi

I didn't like how many pointless and silly questions they answered. Durp do bears cry while skinning bears...yes I need them to answer this for my life to be complete and to understand the expansion more...

I answered that one. I'm not a developer. I was facilitating and hosting the event. But while the devs were busy typing up responses, I tried to throw in a few quick answers to keep the chat moving and relatively fun.

Edit:

10/27/2011 06:28 PMPosted by Hardtack

Yeah, I agree for the most part. I did notice that most of the 'no-brainer' questions were fielded by McFloaty Skull and he was likely filling time while the others typed out their much longer answers to the more poignant questions. That's how I saw it at least. Had he not thrown those in there I doubt there would have been much less in the way of meaty questions and probably just alot more deadspace.

This. :)

Still want an answer to my balloon question and a friending on facebook!

We used to be friends. :'( Why do you hates me now.

While Cory was busy typing up an answer, I heard him read your balloon question and state, "Hmm... if we could get decent animations for that [laugh]." :p

10/27/2011 06:47 PMPosted by Switch

None were answered. 20% of it was random fluff, and at least 40% of it were questions we already knew the answers to or didn't really care about. (How to get to Pandaria, where do we level from 85-90, will there be an underwater zone? Seriously?).

I'm not a fan of "we already knew" or "didn't really care about" feedback when you're claiming to speak on behalf of everyone. We'll always welcome anyone who wants to participate into our Q&As, and they'll have varying degrees of knowledge.

Also understand that all of the questions you posted here were very specific class design questions, while the questions you pointed out as being silly were either answered by me (not a developer), or Cory Stockton (Lead Content Designer who doesn't work on class balance). Greg was the only one typing up responses to class balance questions and there were many thousands of them. As I said before, we'll do a class-specific Q&A with Greg and his team very soon.

Can we have a lore specific Q&A?

Short answer: yes. :)

Dave Kosak stopped by to see how things were going. We'd like to set him and some of the other story guys up with a Q&A soon.

But surely you'd agree that it'd be better if people read up some on worldofwarcraft.com so as not to keep asking the same questions over and over. How many times does GC need to state that "yes, you still pick a spec at level 10"?

Why not skip over the questions that you know are answered on the expansion's web page and instead just remind people in the closing note that answers to many of the questions you saw can be found there. You don't have to be mean to people who haven't read, but you don't have to waste time either.

There were plenty of questions asked that have never been answered and while many of them likely can't be answered at this time, I'd wager there were at least an hour's worth that can.

I'm not trying to be negative about eh Q&A here. I love that you guys are doing it. I just want to encourage you to make the content a bit more useful and valuable.

Rehashing already-answered questions simply isn't either.

I appreciate the feedback. There were several circumstances we couldn't have fully anticipated before trying out a Q&A with the public, but the issues became pretty immediately apparent to us once we got started. Filtering questions, and syncing up on publishing each question and answer were among those issues. But the solutions to some of the issues we encountered on our end have some easy fixes. So that said, I'm very confident we'll be better equipped to run future Q&As with increased efficiency. And we're determined to improve upon the process with each CoverItLive event we run.

I firmly believe this Q&A format is far superior to some of the things we've tried in the past, and it'll be easier technically for us to host more of them.

10/27/2011 07:47 PMPosted by Aenimma

I found it annoying when you guys posted the Videos and Pictures in the chat. I would be in the middle of reading a Question or Answer and my screen would rush up and I would have to scoll up to catch back up. I know the purpose was just to show us stuff, so perhaps you guys can make the screen that we see/use taller which would require less scrolling and be able to see those link's/picture/video?

We'll have to play around with the interface more. We should be able to make the window taller and turn off auto-scrolling to prevent you from losing your place when new data is submitted in the window. Thanks for the feedback. It was actually a very good learning experience for us. :)

Any time frame (or even gustimate) when the next ones will be? (within a week, 2 weeks, month, several months down the road, or you have no idea so it could be as soon as tomorrow if the <whatever topic> team is ready to go)

I'm sending out an email right now to start working out the details and scheduling. I'd like to host one next Thursday before noon (so our European counterparts don't have to stay up so late to take part). No promises on that date yet though.

As I mentioned in my first post in this thread, I want the next chat to be simply "class design" and not specific to the next expansion (though we'll surely field questions about the new talent system and monk gameplay if we feel the answers will be useful for a lot of people). Hopefully we'll have at least three or four class designers fielding questions for that one. We received nearly 10,000 questions in the hour we were live, so that's a lot to take on. =]

Do you plan on doing a Q&A for the monk class in the future before the next expansion releases?

We'll see how the class design Q&A plays out. We can put up a poll at the beginning to see how many people participating want to see more monk questions fielded versus existing classes, but we know there are virtually an infinite number of questions/concerns players have about the past, present, and future of their class.

Random side note: is anyone else seeing post #1997 from God Knows What Thread from back in February in place of post #20 of this thread? What's so super-secret about post #20? I must know!!!

O.o

That is the strangest bug on the forums I've seen to-date. I've passed it along to our web team. I'm somewhere between "jaw on the floor" and "lolololol."

10/27/2011 08:29 PMPosted by Hippeaux

O.o

That is the strangest bug on the forums I've seen to-date. I've passed it along to our web team. I'm somewhere between "jaw on the floor" and "lolololol."

But... but... what's in post #20?

Can you see it?

Nope.