I'm sure that everyone has had their fill of looking at blue.cardplace by now to see what Tseric said/did to get himself a permanent change of scenery this week. Boring. Done with. OK. Overall, Tseric's leaving is not significant, innate of itself, it's just a guy getting fired for going over the edge. Not that exciting really, but what does interest me and, in my opinion, provide insight on the game as a whole, are the circumstances that led to this situation.
Honestly, he didn't get fired because he fucked up and snapped, he got fired because he is in a job where it is impossible to please all, or even most of the people all the time, especially when you have as many different attitudes to please as the Shaman community (not to mention, the game as a whole) represents. He was forced to attempt to bridge the gap between PvP and PvE, hardcore and casual, and when he came back lacking the results that posters wanted, was caricatured as the one making the trouble and attacked personally for not trying hard enough. He was the one accountable face for all the problems that the Shaman community are facing at the moment (real and perceived) and became the whipping boy for everything that has people dissatisfied.
And so, he was "let go", and there was much rejoicing. The problem still remains though. WoW is a dangerously overextended and bloated MMO. Tseric's firing is indicative of something deeper, I feel. It's clear that WoW is attempting to be the end all, be all MMO to everyone, and in doing so, it is tenuously close to becoming an amorphous mess that is nothing to anyone. WoW has no real focus, its desired market is extremely broad and impossible to universally please, and its aspirational model has been undercut due to the lack of emphasis on PvE Raiders remaining the pinnacle at the top of the food chain. It is simultaneously attempting to be a casual single player RPG, casual PvE/PvP MMO, hardcore PvP/PvE MMO, social game, and recently, eSport. And not meeting expectations in any of the categories.
Who's to blame for all of this? It's hard to tell in the scenario, maybe the expectations of the fanbase are, in the end, what will kill WoW, but it seems clear to me that there is a growing gap in communication and expectation between the play base and the corporate side. You can't blame the CMs or the Developers and I feel for them, because guys like them have poured their hearts and souls and lives into WoW, but I think WoW is sick. It will continue on, making impressive profits and maintaining a high population for at least the next 3 years, but I think the soul of WoW is already dead.
Don't get me wrong. WoW is a good game, not revolutionary, but solid in all aspects. Good art direction, solid gameplay, and perfection of an (already nearly perfected) addictive game mechanic has made WoW what it is today. But. They didn't re-invent the wheel in any way, the only significant thing they did was really take UI customization a big step forward, but most of the innovative content there was developed by players, not Blizzard.
They stood on the shoulders of those before them, put the Blizzard quality model to an MMO, and profited. a lot.. plenty... too much. Maybe I'm a cynic, but I can't help but root for games like Warhammer Online or EVE that have a more directed focus on an audience and are going out of their way to make sure that they provide a total quality product to the people that are paying them to play. Hopefully, this will keep their customers happy enough that they don't feel so disenfranchised and powerless that they are compelled to fling brainless insults at a man just trying to do the best job he can managing all the interests on the forums.
Obviously, we're back to Tseric. I honestly think the guy loved his job. He seems like a man of conviction, judging by his comments about getting tear-gassed at political rallies, and I know at least one shaman that thinks he was honestly busting his balls trying to get us the augmentations that our class needs. Nevertheless, he is gone, and someone in line of Netherea is most likely going to fill his place, a fluff-posting forum pacifier who posts in ridiculous threads 90% of the time and cares about self entertainment as much as surveying the status of the game from the player's perspective.
The problem with all this, of course.. .is that I'm an optomist. I want to believe that WoW isn't just a corporate greed machine sucking money from people 12 to 15 dollars at a time, but damn if they're not making hard for me. Where is the game going, guys, not from a raiding perspective, but from a quality control standpoint. Do you think Blizz is going to be able to get things back on track, or am I not the only one feeling the earth tilt beneath me as the downward slide begins?
Where is the game going, guys, not from a raiding perspective, but from a quality control standpoint. Do you think Blizz is going to be able to get things back on track, or am I not the only one feeling the earth tilt beneath me as the downward slide begins?
Tone down the melodrama there - Tseric's departure, whether he left or got fired, has a lot more to do with the stress of dealing with an anonymous mob than any particular past-time that said mob is advocating for or against. Dare I say the stress is getting to you too?
I personally like the attitude of Drysc. He posts some fluff, sure, but it seems like he more than any of the rest is the one to garner some concrete information. He's not the smartass that Tseric was and he's not the fluff whore that is Nethaera.
This is a silly thread BUT I do think it's reasonable to discuss customer relations, Tseric's outburst and the subsequent handling.
The forums are a mess. A godawful mess. We all know it. The problem is that there is a signal to noise tipping point where they become completely unusable and we may have reached it. I can't find anything there; imagine being a new player. Every other thread is a blatant troll.
For whatever reason Blizzard apparently hasn't given their mods enough power to put the hammer down and now it may be too late. And while we may scoff at using the boards well run boards are IMMENSELY helpful to the devs. As it is now they probably know they're useless (for the most part) and it creates a bit of an echo chamber; having followed MMOs for a long time I've no doubt that in addition to time constraints the static covering dev-player communications contributed to some of the issues with the BC raid game.
Mages have a set time that they want you to ask for food, and that time is pull #4 of the night. You may notice them putting a little snack table down before the raid, that's them cooking the food for you to demand on pull 4. --Nork
Yeah Drysc is my kind of CM. He can joke around with people and usually isn't too sarcastic about things. Though I have seen one or two sarcastic posts from him recently; perhaps the burnout Tseric suffered is being felt by more than just he.
It's an unfortunate situation to be put in; we all know the type of forums they have to dig through to find worthwhile posts that deserve a response. I wouldn't want that job if it was the last one being offered to me.
I read, and then read again, but I still don't get the point of this thread. I have the WoW official forums' feeling, yet with a niftier outfit. I don't think Tseric departure (and the drama around it) will really change something in the way the CMs, developers and the official forums mob interact. The game, with TBC (and 2.1 the "final" patch leading to TBC as it should be) is a whole lot better than 1.0 for the "purpose of the game" as I see it: a casual-friendly-yet-challenging-raiding-game.
Is it really a good idea to post threads that parade assumptions as facts? We don't even know if he got fired or if he quit. We probably will never know. As such, even the basic premise of your post is faulty. :-/
Not to mention that even if he was "let go," I personally didn't rejoice. :V
I would think a simple Blue once a week, een if it's just saying, we hear you, we know your concerns, we may not address them but we know them and something may be done about them would do much to diffuse the "troll central" attitude on the WoW forums.
This is a computer-generated message and needs no signature.
Yes, you are a cynic, and this game is doing a lot better than you're giving it credit for. If you don't enjoy the game then just stop playing it and resist the temptation to do as so many have done and try to make other people not enjoy it either.
I'm trying to choose my words carefully here because I think the OP is being a teeeeensy bit overdramatic. Read what Tseric wrote. Whether he quit or was fired or moved to a different department the grandiloquent purple prose is way over the top and pretty obviously the mark of a man who's burned himself out.
So to salvage this thread I think it's more interesting to discuss why CMs/mods burn themselves out and what tools can be given to them to get the forums in some sort of order.
While I didn't always agree with Tseric's approach he was obviously a reasonably sharp guy. So what happens when the reasonably smart guys say, "Screw this, I'm done with this stuff"?
Give them the power to permaban accounts. Force people to post only on their accounts highest level toon. Allow only fifty posts a day. And go on a week long spree banning people left and right; you think the guy posting two hundred times a day about the latest priest nerf is going to actually unsub? He's addicted anyway and isn't going anywhere.
Mages have a set time that they want you to ask for food, and that time is pull #4 of the night. You may notice them putting a little snack table down before the raid, that's them cooking the food for you to demand on pull 4. --Nork
I would think a simple Blue once a week, een if it's just saying, we hear you, we know your concerns, we may not address them but we know them and something may be done about them would do much to diffuse the "troll central" attitude on the WoW forums.
Nothing will defuse the trolls except truly massive numbers of permanent forum bans. Give someone a yard of rope on a forum and they WILL TROLL. It is not a question of if, it is a question of when and how much. If Blizzard wants their forums to become better than they are now, it will take some radical changes in philosophy at the level of the people who give Coreiel orders.
'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.
Aye, not that I've looked I haven't seen it either. Anyone care to hand out a link/quote?
Regardless, I think the OP is deriving too much from a CM being let go. WoW has problems, sure, but what MMO doesn't? They miscalculated pretty badly on the raiding scene when they were cooking up BC but there's still a ton of stuff to do no matter what you like doing in the game. Just look at the options now compared to the horrible time between all progressive guilds having Nef down x20 and AQ40 coming out. I did 2 raids a week and one of them was just to not have fun gearing alts and getting a few loners their T2 pants and there was nothing else to do. Really, WoW is a pretty solid game. Reading forums will never portray that. There's not much to say about stuff that's fine.
Did anyone else find that little poem sad? It made me pity the guy, and it was so true. Tseric wasn't stupid at all, and I guarantee whoever replaces him can't match his intelligence, and perspective/
The original post reads as though you wanted to type a bunch of words just for the hell of it.
You post a slew of opinions as though they were fact, such as your opinion that WoW is not meeting expectations. Maybe it's not meeting yours, but it's meeting mine.
You're also pretty sure Tseric was fired, when you actually have no idea at all. Honestly I could go through your post quoting each topic but I literally disagree with everything you've posted and there's not much else for me to say. If WoW isn't revolutionary, what is? The game has completely obliterated all previous sales records of any game in the genre, and you're saying the only exceptionally groundbreaking feature of the game is it's customizable UI?
I think your post is terrible. Maybe I should be adding more to this thread, but I seriously disagree with every point you've made in the OP.
I was told when I had something to do with CSR that the lifetime of a CSR agent was 3 months.
Anyone who wants to make hay about this should consider that fact very carefully: this is a career path where you can mark a date on your calender when to expect your breakdown.
I assure you, 8 hours a day, day in and day out, of you personally being held accountable for having, apparently, reached through the internets and breaking their computer, will break and wreck the best of us.
Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.
I found Tseric to be extremely helpfull at the time of the mage-patch in late 2005. He encouraged a useful dialogue in his rather unyielding manner, reported back from the "devs departement" (whatever that is) and finaly reasonable suggestions have found their way into the patch, which turned out to be what I expected it to become.
I am still under the impression, that this wouldn't have been the case without him.
Ontopic: As already said, the official forums are a mess and I expect it to be even less entertaining without him. As a european customer I can't post there, so it was great to have someone I mostly agreed with posting. That said, I haven't followed the shaman forums.
Ciaras, what's the point of your rant? I don't think you built a convincing case at all, given that you based it on emotions and unsubstantiated rumors. If you give me some poetic leeway and paraphrase you like so
Tseric is gone now
WoW forums are a cesspool
Future uncertain
I think you revealed your true intentions when you called yourself both a cynic and an optimist. You have no idea what to believe and are basically asking people to take your e-head to our collective busom and say, "Hush, everything will be fine."
Somehow the title of this thread gives me a mental image of tearing up a pink slip and scattering the bits in the air and reading them like tea leaves to divine WoW's destiny as a market-leading MMO.
This is probably because I slept two hours last night.
Also probably because my brain is trying to protect itself from the actual content of the OP by conjuring up distractions.
05/21/07, 9:48 PM
in EJBSG 17 (soundtrack)
