You should expect them to get a decent answer, instead of pretending like they know what they're talking about and argueing with people more knowledgeable about the class than they are.
Certainly.
It seems that people are afraid to say that players might know more about a class than a CM, or perhaps even a dev, simple fact is that many players spend more time on their mains that any dev devotes to that class, because dev's have more important things to do.
The thing about player feedback is that while they might in fact have a more detailed understanding of a class they have been playing for 2 years than any developer, they have a very narrow view. And they are hardly objective. Developers on the other hand have the whole game to consider, not just the one class. I doubt there are players out there with as good understanding about the nature of all the classes and how they relate as the developers have. And if such players exist, it is not the flame spouting, drivel posting troglodytes which are the wow forums.
It is not the CMs job to know anything about the classes, which is why they often end up with a whole lot of foot in their mouth when they try to engage in these discussions. They have no "training" in different classes or game mechanics, the only experience they have on the subject is from actually playing the game in their spare time.
A CM is a messenger, public relations. When you throw up a stink in the forums, they bring it to the developers. Then the developers decide if this needs to be checked further.
In short: If you asked a Microsoft PR rep why c# has no fall through in case blocks, you could not expect any semblance of a good answer. He does not know. The developers still have a clear idea of why (which you are free to agree/disagree with).
I am personally of the school that holds out hope that these words were Tseric's own and that they do not reflect the thoughts of the developers. But your analogy is somewhat faulty... Tseric did not claim to have no idea, he claimed to know the answer, and he gave an answer that every raiding Shaman knew had never been seen to work out in practice. Without further commentary from Tseric, it's not clear if this was his personal opinion or developer intent.
To the individual who suggested that Elemental Shaman switch to a 2-Hander, that might improve the situation slightly. However, with purely caster stats and no melee +hit talents, the Shaman would still not be doing much more than 200 dps, no matter what weapon in the game he was using--this is not raid viable. He would also be out of position to drop totems for his ranged caster group and would have to deny them those totems (almost certainly worth more than 200 dps) or travel back and forth, even further decreasing his damage due to time spent doing 0. He will also be in a significantly more dangerous position, increasing clumping and the danger from Shatter and the Rock rain on Gruul, and being in danger of ae damage on encounters like High King. Regardless, doing 200 or even 300 dps for a significant portion of the fight I think can fairly be called "not viable."
There's also the fact that any raid-specced Elemental Shaman won't be able to hold a 2-Hander with higher dps than this: http://www.wowhead.com/?item=25183
Could this be an issue of not understanding to play the class? Perhaps, though with the number of people playing this game and the fact that no one has come up with a numerically viable proposal for how a casting/melee raid role would work out, I'd somewhat doubt it.
It was not my intent to hijack this thread into Shaman issues, but merely point out that this is a poor example of good communication--it is the CM's job to pass information between the players and the developers, and if they give their own faulty opinions in a way that makes them seem attributable to the developers, it is not altogether surprising that they cause panic.
I agree there has been some horrible communication from the CM's recently, particularly the bizarre and contradictory messages on the Shaman boards it would be a shame that the opportunity to chat Tigole and others and find out what they have installed - posts such as the 2nd Battle plan (http://blue.cardplace.com/cache/wow-general/4782636.htm) do give us an insight into issues and ideas on the horizon that can be more than 'Elemental mana use is fine'
The official forums are always going to be a cess-pool if the community feels they need to beat the changes out of the representatives. 'Blue-tagging' posts is not the answer, if the community feels part of the design process - even if the class changes are justified or explained it would go a long way from the knee-jerk reactions that we appear to have now (the notice given on the druid flight form is a example of how things can be done right). A little empathy from the blues to player base would cause a lot less issues and acrimony as well
Ways to make the Blizzard forums much lower-volume, more productive, and less stupid:
1) Ban trolls. Immediately. No second chances. If someone makes a troll post or a wildly offtopic post, ban their entire account from the forums immediately.
2) Ignore joke/silly/offtopic threads (those that don't meet the banstandard.) Don't post in them as a CM. It's nice to be able to appear witty, but serious communication will get you a lot farther.
3) Have the CM's only be in charge of posting official announcements or responding with, "I'll pass this along." Other than that, their job should be solely to read, evaluate, and pass things along to the developer staff.
4) Have the developer staff also post on threads that a CM tags because they are especially worthwhile. Respond to the concerns with either current developer opinions, fixes/developments, or why the issue is as it is. None of this, "Oh it's so hard to translate from devspeak to normal English."
5) Regular standardized communication from the devs, either in the form of a dev blog, IRC chat (ok so this wouldn't be good) or some other method so that the players feel like the devs are present and focused on their needs, instead of E3 or the next expansion or the next raid zone that they won't ever see.
'War' is too small a word for what I'm fighting. Like a candle in front of the whole burning Sun. Now, I am not going to die today. I have other projects, and other options.
Ways to make the Blizzard forums much lower-volume, more productive, and less stupid:
6) Have the developers themselves actually communicate through means of vid blogs, developer diary or other means that is not vulnerable to the idiotic "first!" posts.
A ton of noise would be reduced in the blizzard forums if the developers just said what was on thier mind and gave people even the most general "vision" for the game in it's current/future state. If they had the stones to actually state it. However, I believe it's partly fear of being questioned and cried at, and mostly fear of people just quitting if the developers really told them what thier plan was.
0) Much clearer separation (i.e. different colours of text) for forum moderators, class moderators and devs. Right now they're all "blue".
Devs are the easiest to deal with - they come in from on high and play forum God at their own whim. Stick to blue text.
Forum moderators should be the high visibility ones (red text?) that ban people, make posts sticky, tag things to bring to forum members' attention, and yes, post in fluff threads from time to time if they want.
Class moderators (purple text, or whatever) should be clearly recognised as go-betweens from the forums to the devs and back. If I were a CM, in all conscience I would try to produce:
1) A stickied FAQ covering questions that have already had a dev answer (e.g. Mind Flay coefficient).
2) A limited set of canned responses to "tag" threads on-the-fly as having been passed on.
3) A monthly summary of the tagged posts saying what issues had been passed to the devs for consideration, and any replies received. Yes, most months it would be empty or repetitive, but even a simple regular "Yes, I know prot pallies are concerned about this, and will continue raising it with the devs until we get an answer" would help
As far as the canned responses go, I'd do something like:
A) Thank you for your input. This is a regularly-raised topic and has been answered before
(see FAQ).
B) Thank you for your input. This topic has been noted and the concerns within it will be
forwarded to the devs for consideration.
C) Thank you for your input. This topic has been noted and the concerns within it will be
forwarded to the bug report team for consideration.
And nothing else. This is the important bit. Where things get horribly confusing is when you have people wearing too many of the above hats. Tseric (for example) has forum moderator functions and CM functions, and it's when the two collide that the most flames are generated. Whether that's because he's posting in fluff threads (forum outreach and PR function) when others think he "should" be playing CM for their concerns, or whether he's making his own speculations without clearly flagging them as personal opinion rather than a dev's word - it's confusion of roles, and it would do well to change.
I've just been catching up with this thread and have some responses to a few topics raised and discussed pages ago. I hope they're different enough to be worthwhile.
1) The question of why the game is not fun is problematic because fun is a moving target. What may have been fun some months ago is no longer fun, and what people thought would be fun may not turn out to be. When it takes a long time to develop something, it can certainly happen that the development time changes how the product will be received. If it were possible to instantly implement some of the ideas they come up with, they might be more fun than they end up being.
2) Developers of computer games analyze what went right and wrong all the time in things called postmortems. I see them published sometimes at places like Gamasutra or game dev magazine. There doesn't seem to be a repository of them, maybe because they're often internal efforts and documents. I really don't know if that's the reason as I'm not involved in the game industry. But I'm certain that many people at Blizzard are thinking about real and perceived failures of their game and writing about them. The resolution to these failures should be as elegant as possible to avoid the need for another fix to the same thing. That takes time and probably more room than you'd have in an IRC chat.
3) edit - see songster's post above
Originally Posted by madsushi
The East Coast is just a relic of the past, like England.
2) Developers of computer games analyze what went right and wrong all the time in things called postmortems. I see them published sometimes at places like Gamasutra or game dev magazine. There doesn't seem to be a repository of them, maybe because they're often internal efforts and documents. I really don't know if that's the reason as I'm not involved in the game industry. But I'm certain that many people at Blizzard are thinking about real and perceived failures of their game and writing about them. The resolution to these failures should be as elegant as possible to avoid the need for another fix to the same thing. That takes time and probably more room than you'd have in an IRC chat.
A post mortem for MMOs is rare; they aren't dead yet.
If they were to post too much, they could both get negative reputation with the player base (admitting failure, design choices they don't agree with, etc), but also fuel competing MMOs.
If you were the developer of the most successful MMO on the market, would you hand out tips that might make other MMOs better than yours, resulting in lost subscriptions for your game?
I think not.
Look, Lactose, we'd rather you didn't eradicate the whole human race.
- Sam & Max
There seems to be a fair amount of at least conceptual exchange at places like the game developers conference. How much of their deck folks keep hidden is certainly an interesting point, because often design decisions do get discussed only after it's in a release and not before, so in some sense anybody can see it already anyway.
Edit: That reminds me: Anybody been to Rob Prado's panel session at this year's GDC? Would be curious.
To be honest, I doubt the forums are meant as a place where the developers hope to find clear feedback. Their are other communities more fit for that, their internal testing team for example, their private testing team that consists out of players they handpicked, sites like these (see prot devastate change: The devs thought (read as: read the ej forums) that this change ...).
The official forums are just there to give their players something to do in the downtime.
The cm's aren't meant to provide some quality feedback and to interact with the players, they are meant as forum mods to make sure the spam isn't to bad and to link to official statements.
I'm sure the forums are used as feedback though, but not for the content that's in the posts, but more for the number game. If I was blizz I'd keep statistics of my playerbase, and try to see if there's a correlation between posts on the forum and those numbers. I wouldn't be surprised if they could give you a rough estimate of how many times the idea of "dualwielding" as an enhancement 41 point talent got offered in the board before the TBC release.
At least I hope so, I like to hope that blizzard and wow bring professionalism to the MMO genre.
2) Developers of computer games analyze what went right and wrong all the time in things called postmortems.
There are articles called postmortems on Gamasutra, but those are rather general and usually say the same thing every time. "We were too ambitious. We underestimated how much time it would take. We had to cut lots of features." They're rarely worth reading.
In my experience, a few game companies do a detailed analysis of previous games, but most just move straight to the next project. Deconstruction of the last project is only done informally over lunch or in the early design meetings for the sequel.
Developer-fan communication is a lose-lose situation, anyway. If you don't post, you get flamed for not posting. If you post, you get flamed for what you said, what you didn't say, and for several bizarre misinterpretations of what you said. The typical game forums do not encourage developers to post at all, much less honestly.
Yes, there needs to be a better way to do it. I've been on the fan side and the developer side, and I'm not sure how to make communication better. Reps for each class and subject (PvP, RP, etc) is one good idea. Mythic tried a limited form of that, and the class reps did a fairly good job. But after a few months of seeing the reps say the same things and pass on the same info, it didn't feel that different from a company that ignores the forums entirely. Having class reps didn't stop Sanya from answering questions based on outdated documentation instead of current code, either.
Most game companies don't allow their employees to post on the forums, at least not officially. I enjoyed posting on the Elder Scrolls forums when I worked for Bethesda (I was affamu, Jobasha, Codus, etc), but that's the only company I worked for that allowed it. I screwed up a few times and revealed features or pissed off the fans or was misinterpreted in a way that took hours of actual work to correct... So these days I agree that it's best to just not allow developers to post at all.
There's a great deal of game design discussion at some game conferences and on a few game-related websites and mailing lists where developers hang out. OGDC and the Austin conference are still more useful than marketing. Some of the independent game conferences are supposed to be good, but I've never been to those.
As was said earlier, the disturbingly ignorant posts on Shaman boards by Tseric really let a bad situation get out of hand. And I'd assert that ANY class who received "help is on the way, we're looking at your concerns" messages, then got all their DPS trees smacked with the nerf bat while the CM in question denied the nerfs even existed, would have responded in much the same way.
Right now, I think Blizzard needs to do some serious damage control (with the entire community, not Shamans). TBC has become a disaster for the raiding community, who (despite their relatively small numbers) have a ton of investment in the game and want to see it succeed. The game is in trouble, and 2.1 seems to me like a do-or-die moment for Blizzard. 2.1 needs to blow us away, much the same way Naxxramas wowed the raiding community. Personally I think it's an enormous mistake to jam so many fixes and so much content into one patch. Even small changes tend to break other things, so this patch has true clusterfuck potential. What's wrong with fixing some things every couple weeks? Would it have killed the devs to make Rogue poisons dispellable sometime in the last few months?
While I don't neccessarily agree that the situation is that dire I agree with your last statement. They should have fixed the issues one by one instead of relying on one jumbo patch. Leaving many problems unaddressed for months and then trying to rectify it all in one big swoop is risky as the expectations and built-up frustrations are sky high. And when you are the publisher of the financially probably most successful game in history, risk is the last thing you want.
Originally Posted by Ghando
As was said earlier, the disturbingly ignorant posts on Shaman boards by Tseric really let a bad situation get out of hand. And I'd assert that ANY class who received "help is on the way, we're looking at your concerns" messages, then got all their DPS trees smacked with the nerf bat while the CM in question denied the nerfs even existed, would have responded in much the same way.
Right now, I think Blizzard needs to do some serious damage control (with the entire community, not Shamans). TBC has become a disaster for the raiding community, who (despite their relatively small numbers) have a ton of investment in the game and want to see it succeed. The game is in trouble, and 2.1 seems to me like a do-or-die moment for Blizzard. 2.1 needs to blow us away, much the same way Naxxramas wowed the raiding community. Personally I think it's an enormous mistake to jam so many fixes and so much content into one patch. Even small changes tend to break other things, so this patch has true clusterfuck potential. What's wrong with fixing some things every couple weeks? Would it have killed the devs to make Rogue poisons dispellable sometime in the last few months?
Reading the last few posts during my lunch break at work I can't help but think every single one of these suggestions for improved communication is over analyzed, wishful thinking and completely impractical..
I'd much rather the developers stick to fixing bugs (based on bug reports) and creating new stuff based on awesome suggestions on the suggestions board. Screw wasting time posting to blogs and the posting in the general/class forums. Any piece of game information that they could post there is going to be over analyzed, misconstrued, posted about and argued about for days by crybaby troll whingers with too much time on their hands.
By and large the majority of the people on the official forums need to STFU, learn2play, learn2spec, learn2gear and most importantly just play the game how it is... Any game with multiple races/classes/sets of gear is never ever ever going to be perfect or balanced. There will always be imbalances, nerfs and bugs to deal with.
The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements. Energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.
So did the dev IRC chat happen last night or get postponed to next week? I read through the thread and must have missed it.
'War' is too small a word for what I'm fighting. Like a candle in front of the whole burning Sun. Now, I am not going to die today. I have other projects, and other options.
More important than all the above:
0) Much clearer separation (i.e. different colours of text) for forum moderators, class moderators and devs. Right now they're all "blue".
I've seen the CMs state repeatedly that there are no "class moderators." It seems to actually be broken down like this:
- devs (Kalgan, Tigole, etc.), who rarely post
- CMs (Neth, Tseric, etc.), who actually address player questions and concerns (sometimes) and sometimes act as relays between the players and the devs
- moderators (Coreiel, etc.), who mostly just move, lock and/or delete threads
- other (bug report CMs like Hortus, support CMs, etc.)
CM means Community Manager. Too many people think it means Class manager... which is a failure on a small scale (identification of officials should be transparent and easy) but not a fatal one.
Those of you who volunteered to be injected with praying mantis DNA, I've got some good news and some bad news.
Bad news is we're postponing those tests indefinitely. Good news is we've got a much better test for you: fighting an army of mantis men.
Pick up a rifle and follow the yellow line. You'll know when the test starts. BSG Quick Reference
05/16/07, 4:32 AM
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