EJ forums should remain as they are, trying to tie an enthusiasts’ site to something “official” would just ruin it. As was mentioned earlier the widely linked Alchemy discussion is a perfect example. Think of that on a daily basis…. Inevitably you would see the folks who contribute so much here seeking refuge from the pollution in another less advertised site.
As far as a solution, maybe Blizz could come up with a rating/ranking system for WoW board posters. The rating/ranking could be based off the person’s posting and contribution history. Those that actually have the ability to articulate issues/ideas would be allowed to post, but the masses would only be able to read. That way the forum has full visibility, but posting is limited.
**OR**
Like Deris posted there could simply be a public read only forum with CM’s posting weekly summaries and the “big guy’s” responses. Isn’t that what we want? A small view into what’s going on?
I wouldn't want the developers to make frequent posts here. Every time Tigole pops in, the board is lagged to hell for hours as every community site on the planet links to the thread he posted in. As far as the suggestion of weekly developer feedback - seems silly. This game is incredibly intricate, and there are so many players with so many different questions.
Actually, most of the questions that get asked by the community aren't questions at all. They're statements, or at the very least, suggestions. When I ask: "Are there any plans on modifying the patch process in such a way that fixes get deployed to live in a more timely manner?," I'm actually telling the developers - "fix your goddamned process so that trivial raid fixes can be pushed out independently of other shit that I don't care about." On an even more basic level - "address the part of the game that I care about, and to hell with everything else, k?"
Stuff like that makes up the "community questions" end of developer Q&A. The developer response is:
"That probably won't happen."
"That sounds like a great idea, we'll talk about it."
"We've talked about it, but there are no immediate plans to address it."
"We plan to address it some time in the near future."
"We're working on it. <brief explanation>."
"We've worked on it, and it will be on the PTR soon. <in-depth explanation>."
We only receive information about planned changes when they're already being worked on or almost ready for release. This is fine. Questions about all other topics receive vague, noncommittal responses which impart no meaningful information. This is also fine. Weekly developer Q&A would not alter this situation. It would generally just waste X amount of time per week that could be spent building or changing or fixing things. They have a horde (a real one) of public relations people for a reason - to spit out those generic answers on demand, and to provide the community with information when there's actually information to provide. The developers could add little more than an in-depth discussion of their rationale for a given decision, and that rationale doesn't matter much in the end. They're mostly getting things right, even if they're a little slow about it. That's what counts.
Bottom line: Q&A sounds nice, but it doesn't really accomplish anything. The developers get plenty of player feedback from within the game and from these and other forums, and use that feedback to shape the game we all play. That's just about all the player-developer interaction that is necessary. With that said, just in case a developer is reading this and actually wants to start a regular Q&A, let me kick things off with the first question:
Q: "I appreciate you taking the time to answer questions from the community, and thank you in advance for answering: would it be possible to fix your goddamned process so that trivial raid fixes can be pushed out independently of other shit that I don't care about? I mean, wtf. To hell with voice chat - I want my rep ring. So uh . . . could you look into that? Thanks."
A:
I don't buy that. A lot of what developers could post about is future changes, but that's hardly the only thing. There are tons of things that they could usefully tell us without getting speculative about future content. For example... What is their vision for the Shaman class? Ask 5 different people what it means to be a Shaman, get 5 different answers. Blizzard's class desc has called us everything from "An offensive hybrid with some healing capability" to "a healing class with some offensive capability" to "a melee-based hybrid..." to any number of other things. If a developer were to take the time to explain to Shaman exactly what they saw as the essence of Shamanity, that'd be HUGE to Shaman players, and it's only a matter of explaining past decisions. ...
If only it were that simple.
Once they say something "definitive" about XYZ Class's Vision, the community latches onto it. That statement will be trotted out as a "promise", a broken "promise", etc until the end of this game's life. (It's Blue, so it must be a definitive official statement that is the golden vision of the class)
Players say they want more dev feedback, but they don't act like they want it. If you look at their actions, what they want is a scapegoat to blame for class problems.
"That's the wrong vision! You should adopt my vision!"
"Why aren't you living up to that vision?! My class is in the back of the raid!" (Paladins)
Giving them scapegoats would only encourage further inanity. (Restricting said developer feedback to an "elite player" forum like EJ would only attract said sentiments here)
Mind you, I do want to know more about the decisions they've made, the rationale behind the decisions, and so on --- I simple believe that the community has, through its past behavior, repeatedly encouraged Blizzard to adopt minimal communication.
I feel the issue with the CM's and poor feedback in general from Blizzard and the WoW community is the proverbial "I cannot see the forest because of the trees." For all the thousands of posts being hammered out on the official WoW boards (take for example the WoW recruitment forum, you have be pretty vigilant in bumping or else that post will fall off page 1 very quickly) there are only a hand full of Community Managers in charge. Drysc, Nethaera, and a couple others.
Everyone has a voice, and everyone wants to be heard. Unfortunately it's logistically impossible to satisfy even the majority of the forum player base. It would be awesome if EJ was a sanctuary for Blizzard designers to come discuss ground-breaking theories and game-breaking technical issues. In reality, it would only take a few weeks for the retarded zombie mass that is the WoW Forum community take notice and eventually flood these boards with complaints about questing in STV and whether or not Krol Blade is still worth it.
Blizzard needs this forum because it's one of the few existing bastions of intelligent discussion. We (the royal 'we') find the poorly designed encounters, we reveal the flaws in itemization, we expose the shitty class specs. I think it could be fair to assume that the majority of end-game encounter adjustments coming in 2.2 are a direct result of discussions on this forum (Shahraz, Archimonde, RoS, Solarian, etc.). Honestly I expect to see a change to the attunement processes for BT/Hyjal just based on the threads here discussing how poor the recruitment pool is once you reach a certain level of progression.
I would love to see an official, frequently updated bulletin board dedicated to design/development. It would be nice to read a few blue posts that are not focused on babysitting trolls.
I think EJ fills an important purpose vis a vis the devs, and I suspect they understand it -- it's the "voice of the raiders". Not, importantly, the "conversation with the raiders", but a fairly good signal-to-noise ratio version of what people on the high end are thinking.
The theorycraft in the alchemy thread contributed, probably significantly, to a major change in wow. Instead of having to farm forever to make sure you had the buffs to go up 3 tiers in power, now you don't. Instead of the devs having to balance encounters assuming those buffs are available, now the devs have a tighter, more controllable balancing window.
Unfortunately I think the devs are holding the reins of a runaway chariot, and only infrequently have the bandwidth or understanding to make decisions that really improve the game. Not because they're dumb / evil / incompetent, but because there are so many variables both invisible and visible that they're probably at the human sensory limit.
I would be happy if Tigole etc. never posted again on these boards, but instead did as they seem to have done with the alchemy thread: read it, understand it, and if necessary, make changes to make the game play better. The fact that EJ has a very high S/N ratio can assist these guys, and we should all do our part to ensure that we keep it up.
Players say they want more dev feedback, but they don't act like they want it. If you look at their actions, what they want is a scapegoat to blame for class problems.
"That's the wrong vision! You should adopt my vision!"
"Why aren't you living up to that vision?! My class is in the back of the raid!" (Paladins)
Giving them scapegoats would only encourage further inanity. (Restricting said developer feedback to an "elite player" forum like EJ would only attract said sentiments here)
Mind you, I do want to know more about the decisions they've made, the rationale behind the decisions, and so on --- I simple believe that the community has, through its past behavior, repeatedly encouraged Blizzard to adopt minimal communication.
Ah, because the group of people who play this game are substantially different than any other large group of people?
No.
When people start wailing like this, the developers or CMs could RESPOND to this, pointing out the reasons why their reaction is silly and that such an unreasonable and extreme response precludes real discussion. They could then keep trying.
Would it be pretty at first? No.
But would it get prettier as time went on? Yes.
People will and do self-police themselves. Shaman forums are a good example. After the 1.11 fiasco, people were terrified that no one at Blizzard knew anything about or cared anything about our class. There were thousands of posts begging for developer or CM feedback, and even such inane responses as "Tell us again in a different place the same information we supposedly already gathered from you," were met mostly with a helpful attitude, if a little confusion. As time went on and no real feedback or dialogue developed, the community, feeling abused, turned abusive. They JUMPED on any blue poster who dared tread those walks. Blue posters snarkily refusing to talk since people were really incensed about not being talked to worsened the situation.
However, eventually some Blues came in and tried to actively engage us in dialogue. When Nethaera got the sniping and nastiness past treatment had engendered she said, more or less, "Hey, cut that out. I don't deserve that and it's not productive. I'm trying to help you, and you can help me help you by acting in these ways. But, even if you keep acting like that I'm going to keep trying to help you." Lo and behold, faced with evidence of actual caring, a lot of the venom died down. A few people did still take swings at her, but as time has gone by people who attack Nethaera get told off by 3-4 of their fellow community members before Nethaera even gets back to the scene. Threads she posts in are suprisingly civil given that no Shaman has any proof that there is a cohesive vision for our class and that we never received the second half of our talent review.
So, don't tell me the WoW community is "too big." Don't tell me it can't be done. It will be hard work to change the attitude and atmosphere of a community, but it is totally within Blizzard's reach to do so.
When people start wailing like this, the developers or CMs could RESPOND to this, pointing out the reasons why their reaction is silly and that such an unreasonable and extreme response precludes real discussion. They could then keep trying.
The developers would never do this, argue with trolls. It's a huge waste of time to even try to argue with a troll on the WoW forums, because frankly, even if you convince one that they're wrong, another ten will take up the cause. It's a losing battle from a time perspective, if you're not someone who deals with customers on a regular basis.
The CM's do engage in this, and sometimes they're moderately successful. If anything, the issue is that they don't get a ton of relevant information from the developers.
People will and do self-police themselves. Shaman forums are a good example. After the 1.11 fiasco, people were terrified that no one at Blizzard knew anything about or cared anything about our class. There were thousands of posts begging for developer or CM feedback, and even such inane responses as "Tell us again in a different place the same information we supposedly already gathered from you," were met mostly with a helpful attitude, if a little confusion. As time went on and no real feedback or dialogue developed, the community, feeling abused, turned abusive. They JUMPED on any blue poster who dared tread those walks. Blue posters snarkily refusing to talk since people were really incensed about not being talked to worsened the situation.
However, eventually some Blues came in and tried to actively engage us in dialogue. When Nethaera got the sniping and nastiness past treatment had engendered she said, more or less, "Hey, cut that out. I don't deserve that and it's not productive. I'm trying to help you, and you can help me help you by acting in these ways. But, even if you keep acting like that I'm going to keep trying to help you." Lo and behold, faced with evidence of actual caring, a lot of the venom died down. A few people did still take swings at her, but as time has gone by people who attack Nethaera get told off by 3-4 of their fellow community members before Nethaera even gets back to the scene. Threads she posts in are suprisingly civil given that no Shaman has any proof that there is a cohesive vision for our class and that we never received the second half of our talent review.
It turned out different for the Paladin class. After the 1.9 patch, Eyonix tried to give us some of the better communication we said we wanted. When some changes he previewed didn't make it in its entirety, he got the "broken promise" treatment. He stopped posting eventually.
The community behaved a little better when Feathers/Corielel(sp) gave regular posts, but she wasn't a CM, just a friendly moderator, so those posts had 0 class-related content.
Even now, you still have plenty of paladins willing to trot out the inaccurate SOB story of the paladin class as a historically maltreated class of WoW, which is further complicated by the things Blizzard did wrong in TBC. (And of course, the average player doesn't give credit for the things Blizzard does right; he simply expects it and complains when he doesn't get it)
So, don't tell me the WoW community is "too big." Don't tell me it can't be done. It will be hard work to change the attitude and atmosphere of a community, but it is totally within Blizzard's reach to do so.
I didn't say anything about WoW's community being too big. I just think it's just full of idiots (as any large group of people is); and for my class, we've failed at the community self-policing you say will happen.
My class community hasn't put in that "hard work", and so we've gotten about the same effort from Blizzard. Sad? Yes. Surprising? No.
(That's more in general though; Prot paladins have managed to create a sub-community of level-headed players)
Its easy as a gamer to fall into the mindset that we are privilaged to just be playing the game the developers have put out for us. Everything they have done is right, and we should eat it up.
But we are customers. There are alot of us, and it is not possible to attend to everyones wants, or to communicate with each and everyone. But it is still nothing short of good business to communicate with your customers and to try and address their wants and concerns with your product.
Failure to do this results in closed accounts.
But it is still nothing short of good business to communicate with your customers and to try and address their wants and concerns with your product.
Failure to do this results in closed accounts.
They communicate quite a bit, just not about the issues that hardcore players may care about. And in many cases they probably don't do it because they're not sure what the eventual solution is going to be. And in the case of the hardcore gamer, a lot of those guys are going to complain like it's the end of the world no matter what the case is, but just keep on playing.
Nevertheless, they should be a little more forthcoming on important mechanics issues, and things that they see as problems (which they were at Blizzcon).
Well, I think in general, people appreciate any of that information that shows that the developers truly understand their own game. I thought one of the best slides they had with their Blizzcon things was when they mentioned the "Holy Trinity" (with statements like "Improved Death") - it showed that they do understand fundamental things in the game that aren't going according to their design intent and that they are working on adjustments to correct them.
Sure, in that specific case, there may not necessarily be the solution that we want, but the point is that they explicitly showed that they do understand these things and it hasn't slipped under the radar. Likewise, when Kalgan had the gigantic Mage Post of Doom (at least I think that was Kalgan; it has escaped my mind at this point) in which he did state "JAW DROPPING DAMAGE" - the intent and overall content of the thread was exceptionally good and satisfying.
I fear that the community reaction to it though was to latch onto that one phrase (on damage) and smear him for it, which ends up alienating him from engaging the community as opposed to appreciating some of the philosophical decisions that he exposed for us (such as on Invisibility and what they're trying to do there).
I do think it would be great it we had a weekly or every other week post that would just be a few comments on something they're working on in their own words. It would be something to look forward to (kind of like the horribly spaced out Blizzard Insider Emails) and could go on different themes. They clearly are going to work a ton of changes into 2.3 and 2.4 and every subsequent patch they come out with, so it would be trivially easy to just talk about a few of the bullet points they're working on and what they're thinking about with those.
An example is that they made changes to all of the TK/SSC weapons with the PTR patch - it wouldn't have hurt to have gotten an actual explanation of what they were thinking about with it - a real explanation of what the actual decision making process was on these things instead of them just being nice surprises in the notes. It makes it really add to the community when we get to feel that kind of "behind the scenes" look at why they are doing things instead of having to just guess and infer.
The number one problem they have is jerks / angry people taking excerpts of their comments to use against them, but the reality of that is that the comments are made so rarely, people cling to them like straws; if we had more of a flow of ideas from the Devs, there would be less inclination to latch onto individual ones to attack.
Stickies that show up on the R&D board are invariably great tidbits of info - more of that would be great, especially if we get to know it is coming; gives a reason to follow those boards.
Assuming this isn't everyone's first Blizzard game, since when have you known Blizzard to actively talk with their playerbase about changes. upcoming or implemented on a regular basis?
I mean this goes as far back as Warcraft II, I've NEVER known Blizzard to communicate back and forth with it's playerbase,
WoW is supposed to be evolving, and they need to keep us interested for the 15$ a month. The other games are supposed to be static (except for the once in a lifetime xpac), and the changes are pretty much a bit of tweaking.
Apples and Oranges. And the old battleplans were good, another one is way overdue.
Apples and Oranges. And the old battleplans were good, another one is way overdue.
I liked being able to see what is almost ready for release in the immediate future, what is a bit distant, and that which is only in the planning stages. It gave us lots of things to talk about, I'm sure the devs received good/bad feedback on proposed changes, etc.
Ahhh I dunno, I kinda like the big brother is watching approach, but this place would become overly swamped if people actively knew developers actually answered here.
Every time Tigole has graced us with his presence, we get a handful of retards that come make posts like "lawl, I no ur here, aswr my q plz, wut u gunno dew aboot shaman thx". EJ Mods are on top of it like always, but at the same time it would just attract a lot of non-sense and stupidity.
I already know that Blizzard developers pay attention to public fourms, class fourms, these fourms, FoH's fourms, and maybe even Nihilum/D&T fourms. I don't need them posting to let them know they're listening to the intelligent talk with the retard filter.
Ignorance is bliss. Keep me in the dark please.
I'd be willing to bet that devs are posting on these and other forums a lot more frequently than people think they are. They just don't do it on accounts that we recognize
@Gurgthock: I probably gave this thread an inappropriate title. I never intended to even suggest they post on here specifically, but rather rolled two interlinked topics (dev communication, and devs reading this board) into one thread. My bad.
As for specific forum communication examples there is a thread I've been participating in: WoW Forums -> Shadow priest Gear Itemization discussing Shadowpriest itemization. The issue is that DoT based casters scale mostly from one stat, +dmg, large amounts of this stat are rarely available on gear, and when they are the way budgeting works is penalizing. Thus you run into the issue of few upgrades and many items, including tier sets having stats on them which offer minuscule DPS gain.
Couldn't we see Kalgan post "We plan to make +crit have some kind of effect on DoT spells"
Or have one of the itemizations guys say "We will make sure in the future to place more proper items in the game"
Or even a "We do not see this as a problem"
Little things like that, addressing issues are what I'd love to see. It's something players can merely speculate on, and seeing it as an issue can be very frustrating, not knowing if there will ever be a change, of if it's even on the dev's "radar".
Well that basically goes back to what heel posted. You're not looking for an answer to a question, you're looking for them to fix your issue. Most of the time "we don't see it as a problem" isn't an acceptable response because people want it fixed regardless of what the developer's "philosophical" viewpoint on the issue is.
Everytime a dev posts about ANYTHING, the wow community begins to twist it and turn it into whatever they can to try to get their posts to seem valid. It would take 1:45mins of their "2 hours" to figure out how to word their statements so they can't be taken out of context.
Personally, I think that one of the most time-efficient things the devs (the big guys -- the lead raid, class, profession, etc., folks that headed up the major Blizzcon panels) could do to increase satisfaction would be to allocate 30 minutes of their Friday morning or something, while they drink their coffee at their desk, to just respond to a few posts. Maybe even have the CMs prepare a list of "good" threads/posts for them the night before, so they don't have to waste time filtering through the awful signal:noise of the official boards.
What could they realisitcally say that would increase satisfaction but that they could whip out off the top of their heads in a couple of minutes? A half hour of firing off quick posts means they can't say anyhting really substantive, as a half hour doesn't include enough time to have someone do all the cross-checking that substantive communications need to avoid becoming 'broken promises' in the future.
A good example of a question someone wanted answered in this thread is below:
if we could hear devs talk about the justification for the haste nerf (not saying its unjustified),.
What do you want them to say exactly? Something like "Haste in its current form is grossly overpowered, it was the best stat for most melee classes to stack and was leading to people doing more damage than intended." is pretty easy to deduce without a comment, and I'm not really sure what more detail you'd expect them to give.
If they said something like 'we expect BT rogues to do X DPS', they're quoting a number that's going to be repeated ad nauseum by players and taken out of context all the time. Plus they're going to measure damage with some internal tool that doesn't do it in the exact same way as WWS or any of the common damage meters (since they all calculate dps differently), so the number is pretty much meaningless to everyone but Blizzard anyway.
Would we prefer that they stop developing the game to work on responding to player questions on a weekly basis? I don't know.
Allow me to be the first to say: Yes, Yes, a thousand times Yes!
Two reasons:
1. Tunnel vision, ivory tower theory vs. real world results, whatever you want to call it: this applies to any team caught up in a creative endeavour. You get so wrapped up in how awesome everything you are making seems that you can miss the forest for the trees. I'm sure thats how it was for one infamous example, the TBC raid game. Blizzard don't deal with a vast array of guild drama/issues so I'm sure that the coolness/originality of their design in dealing with Kara, SSC, Magtheridon sustained them.
Now, once the expansion goes live, we see the response from the raiders: uh... is it really a good idea to have a 10 man instance required to progress? And is it really good to have the first 2 25m instances be Onyxialikes and just dump people into the first "real" raid at a very hard level? And whats the deal with these keying requirements?
Before the community could criticize, though, it was essentially set in stone. There was no going back and tweaking the line of progression. All they could do was post an April Fools joke lampooning their short-sightedness, and eventually suspend the keying requirements.
A little public brainstorming session earlier on could have prevented all the tension and whining in the community, and prevented the wasted development time on things like the Trials of the Naaru, which are now just curiosities someone doing Shadowmoon Valley quests in the future might happen across.
2. "In episode 2F09 when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we to believe, that this is some sort of a magic xylophone or something?"
AKA the power of a million nerd minds working in tandem. No matter how sure your 200 man team thinks they've tied off the loose ends, a million nerds on the internet will do a better job. In most cases its past the point where you've done wrong, so it just comes out as anger or criticism... but presented at an earlier stage, it can prevent you from contradicting yourself.
Take the bizarre itemisation of +spell crit on paladin healing gear. We have no idea what it was there for, why it got put there over other stats, etc., but we can say its probably inappropriate. Who knows what happened at Blizzards think-tank? Maybe a post-60 skill was supposed to have a major benefit for that, and the armor got itemised with that in mind, only to have the skill removed/changed whatever.
There are a lot of things that make their way in as sort of vestigial tails, things changed to synchronize with an overall design at an earlier state. Now on a team with only so many people, you can't be expected to remember everything, and your schedule demands you focus on other things, so they get swept aside, and bugs can remain for months or years.
If *some* sort of rationale/plan was provided, not even one they expected criticism on or were accepting changes, mind you, just *something* detailing their motivations, it would committed to the deep memory of a million Aspergers cases overnight who could notice, at future points, when a major design "thread" was being dropped and thus what should be reverted/changed back to avoid being useless or nonsensical before it goes live.
If Blizzard just said *something* about class roles or skill changes or whatever we wouldn't be treading water as we do here on EJ so often, wondering why the core mechanic of shamans in totems are so silly (do they have a better idea? is their plan to just move on and not worry? are they having trouble dreaming up a fuller role for them?) or why Blizzard has seemed to abandon hunters' main gimmick of safe DPS being important compared to the old BWL/etc. days (does it just not work in their vision of WOW? Do they just wanted a ranged damage non spell caster class? Are they giving pets a bigger role?)
Basically, it comes down to this: when you are designing an entity of sufficient complexity, like WOW, not detailing your motivations or hinting at them means that, depending on the individuals bias and what variables they have talent at examining, you will end up with a hundred different "dogmas" about what your intention with any one section of the game is. Those sorts of arguments, although perhaps interesting in a junk-food sort of way, are incredibly unproductive, and no one is even guaranteed to be correct in the end. A ounce of exposition could save a metric ton of argument, and focus the communities arguments in useful directions.
Just because some people on the forums will twist around something a CM or developer says doesn't mean they shouldn't post.
If they say something isn't set in stone and it doesn't happen, if anyone calls them out on it, they should reply once with "I said that it wasn't set in stone and it could possibly change" and then everything after that would be trolling and they should temp ban those guys from the forums.
Hell, I got Perma-banned for theorycrafting about TBC content before it was offically released but they let people continuously troll their forums without any care. The CM's themselves helped create the problems with the WoW forums because they refuse to maintain their own posting up to certain standards.
A) Give information regardless of if it might change.
B) Reply once if they get called out on it.
C) Start banning people from the forums for being Jackasses.
2. "In episode 2F09 when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we to believe, that this is some sort of a magic xylophone or something?"
AKA the power of a million nerd minds working in tandem. No matter how sure your 200 man team thinks they've tied off the loose ends, a million nerds on the internet will do a better job.
I think you just pointed out exactly why they don't seek "community input" more often: most of it is useless drivel!
But yes, a large number of people will typically find holes/problems with any proposed solution.
The Washington Post helps perpetuate a common and pernicious misreading of the decision, referring to "the Supreme Court’s judgment that corporations have the same rights as people when it comes to political speech." What the Supreme Court actually said is that people do not lose their free speech rights when they organize as corporations, including nonprofit interest groups as well as businesses.
I think you just pointed out exactly why they don't seek "community input" more often: most of it is useless drivel!
To an extent it is their fault thats what I am saying! Look, at say, retribution paladins. All the work done right now is essentially in theory. The orthodoxy is that warriors are the defense stat/main tanks with shields, bears are the high HP for elementals and stuff. Now what if (I am not saying this is remotely true) Blizzard had imagined the TBC raid system as having a legitimate tanking role for the paladin, even the ret paladin, thats just radically different and they never made the "class vision" public? Everyone could have missed what it was supposed to be and now they are the least wanted spec for raids, Nihilum says don't take them or boomkins, and so on. Blizzard sees this as a "failure" and as such goes for a redesign when the community never really demonstrated their intention was a failure or ever geared competent ret paladins to a level where they could ever excel? Who can say if even a single one of the ret pally discussions we've had on EJ is even remotely useful because we just talk about what the orthodoxy assumes they are there to do without having any real idea? We can post math, talk talents/hybrids, whatever, passionately and intellectually honestly for 50 pages and not produce anything helpful if our initial assumptions are faulty.
As another example, look at the soul shard discussion. As you say, the discussion is currently 100% worthless, argument-in-circles drivel. The reason is that *no one* in the public sphere sees the reason for it. Why can't we stack shards and why are they content with soul bags being the solution when they were obsolete by C'Thun? I know in my heart Blizzard isn't just stupid or cruel, they probably have a good explanation for what they did... maybe having so many shards leads to a power imbalance when a lock abuses a shard requiring power? maybe having 200 of the same item or whatever the average lock would carry around compromises the bagspace database and induces unplayable chop? I don't know for sure except to say the warlocks on the customer side have *no idea,* and that the same tired "Blizz is fukkin us wit soulshrds" discussion will continue to happen unnecessarily month after month.
Tigole came here to clear up the whole alchemy battle/guardian elixir shitfest rather eloquently, but to be honest, it would have just taken one sentence! "Do not worry about having to shell out for flasks as their effects are being nerfed by half and their costs will be about a third of the herbs that they are now." Voila, one sentence and you've stopped the snowball that becomes the avalanche. If, as one person earlier suggested, they even gave us 2 or 3 good sentences about their vision for a class each week, on a rolling 9 week schedule, it would make those "worthless drivel arguments" we have 99% more focused and likely to generate a good idea or solution or discussion.
But yes, a large number of people will typically find holes/problems with any proposed solution.
Its more expecting Shakespeare when the monkeys that play warlocks/druids have been given typewriters with Roman type and the shamans/hunters/whatever have been given Cyrillic type. The latter might compose the Brothers Karamazov but in context of the project they are guaranteed to be useless no matter how genuine their efforts.
I liked the battleplans, and regular communication would be great. I also liked (and said at the time) every Tigole interview, ever (omg, creepy ~). There are repeated studies where purely textual communication has its tone misjudged, and that just by virtue of hearing someone speak (let alone seeing subverbal communications, as one would in videos) increases the likelihood of positive impression (if anyone has the link to the study where a number of guilds without vent were surveyed for average satisfaction, then trialed out vent, and the huge bump in average satisfaction led to the conclusion...). Tigole at the Leipzig convention looking haggard instead of fat and smug? Pretty good ammo against the trolls and their cries of, "You don't care! You're rolling in the $billions!"
I can't imagine that there aren't some form of executive-ish team meetings that they couldn't just hire someone to record and edit (censor out the bits about their secret plot to prevent gnome Death Knights, running length, pauses, eccet) - viola - regular, empathetic communication, battleplan, and it doesn't eat any more of precious developer time.
The problem, I think, is that there's not a lot of information (Attention mortals: Deathknights, and level 80, that is all.), Blizzard has been routinely and severely burned for premature informationulation (What?! You promised us gnome deathknights!), and that what information there is has a certain currency that is viewed as best leveraged towards hype building at key intervals via publication ("Get issue so and so of GFW, it has loads of infos on the WOTLK including never seen before screenshots of a gnome Deathknight!")
Once the genie is out of the bottle...
Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.
The problem, I think, is that there's not a lot of information (Attention mortals: Deathknights, and level 80, that is all.), Blizzard has been routinely and severely burned for premature informationulation (What?! You promised us gnome deathknights!), and that what information there is has a certain currency that is viewed as best leveraged towards hype building at key intervals via publication ("Get issue so and so of GFW, it has loads of infos on the WOTLK including never seen before screenshots of a gnome Deathknight!")
Once the genie is out of the bottle...
They did the right thing with the gnome death knights: They explicitly prefaced it with "We are not sure at the moment." Just specifying something as being in a stage of either (A) wild imagination/dream world/wouldn't-that-be-nice, (B) beta stage of actual coding/proof of concept testing is easy enough and solves a lot of that problem by itself.
Its also useful to remember even magazines are fallible and not necessarily a better choice. I still have a PC Accelerator with a multi-page feature on what was (once) Warcraft 3. That game is lost forever now to the sands of time.
09/06/07, 1:58 PM
