Do you think Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street will lose his position ?

[Mawnix]

I believe Blizzard should perhaps hire the guy above. I mean, they hired people who incorporated pokem0n to the game for heaven's sake. The guy above would be a refreshing addition to the people who implemented the Panda/Pokemon concept. I mean, it can't really go any worse than this.

And this guy is an example of why Blizzard shouldn't listen to the community.

[Fullmetal89]

TBC was the best expansion this game ever had. I played during vanilla as well and I think vanilla sucked. Do I have nostalgia goggles, too?

While TBC was a big improvement over Vanilla it wasn't exactly perfect. World PvP pretty much died by the end of it, PvP rankings were take away, raiding (other than Kara) was pretty much hardcore only. There was a crapton of gating for everything, you needed keys for heroics, then attunement keys for raids which you could only get by beating the prior raids. Not to mention that if you raided you where forced to have certain professions. At least in vanilla you could have fun throughout the entire leveling experience because most players weren't 60 yet and the ones that where 60 where most likely not geared at all.

Wrath was the best of WoW in my opinion, it had casual content, hardcore content, good lore development, proper exploration (10 level gap instead of 5), great soundtrack and an excellent theme (defeating a fallen prince, who is now the ruler of the dead in a frozen wasteland).

[Fiddlesnarf]

This is the dumbest kind of thread.

[Deleted]

The best part of this thread was when GC brought it up, highlighting just how stupid it really is.

[Gohzerlock]

I don't mind the guy, but when he answers peoples questions.. he can be a bit of a dick sometimes. I'd assume it's because he's answering the same kind of question over and over and quickly becomes agitated as most of us would.

Some of what he says makes a lot of sense, other times doesn't make much sense at all. He contradicts himself on his stances in the game, but at least there is a face to communicate with instead of "blizzard thinks that blah blah blah".

They won't fire him though, people have said in the thread there should be someone fresh. But I think he probably already has "fresh" peoples opinions on what should be going on all the time. He's a figure head.

[RickJamesLich]

While TBC was a big improvement over Vanilla it wasn't exactly perfect. World PvP pretty much died by the end of it, PvP rankings were take away, raiding (other than Kara) was pretty much hardcore only. There was a crapton of gating for everything, you needed keys for heroics, then attunement keys for raids which you could only get by beating the prior raids. Not to mention that if you raided you where forced to have certain professions. At least in vanilla you could have fun throughout the entire leveling experience because most players weren't 60 yet and the ones that where 60 where most likely not geared at all.

Wrath was the best of WoW in my opinion, it had casual content, hardcore content, good lore development, proper exploration (10 level gap instead of 5), great soundtrack and an excellent theme (defeating a fallen prince, who is now the ruler of the dead in a frozen wasteland).

I think the gating was kind of a good thing. If you hit 90 today, chances are you can see every fight within 2 weeks (some of my buddies can do it in one)... I'm pretty sure for a lot of casual guys, it kinda takes away from the incentive to play further as you just already saw everything. The heroic attunements IMO were a good thing, as generally it meant the people you were teaming up with had an idea of the place ahead of time. Nowadays you don't need that for heroics, but only because they are so easy that a lot of classes can solo them.

I thought wrath made things too simplistic, I remember seeing guys that were awful that had lich king kills and the only challenges really were with heroic content. Ditto with places like Naxx, although Wotlk did have Ulduar, which I think in many ways makes up for ICC and Naxx. But anyways, you could go into a 5 man heroic and pull the entire room, including the boss, and aoe it down easily. Questing once you were at 80 was pointless as you could get way better upgrades with way less effort from pugs and LFD.... speaking of which, the game introduced LFD, which slowly killed off the social aspect of the game and lead to many more dungeons that lasted 10 minutes.

[vesseblah]

TBC was the best expansion this game ever had. I played during vanilla as well and I think vanilla sucked. Do I have nostalgia goggles, too?

I agree that vanilla sucked, but so did TBC for most parts. The fact is the game has gotten better with every expansion, but problem is people are whining over the lost community. Or to be precise, they're whining over all former friends and guildmates who have since stopped playing. It has got very little to do with the actual quality of WoW but their subjective view of the community around them.

World pvp still existed in BC due to things such as no instant teleports to most spots in the world, the need for questing, and important mat drops (such as at the elemental plateau).

Not on low or medium pop realm.

5 mans were considered impossible by the few that couldn't do them - generally if you were a massive server troll that had a bad reputation, or if you were just really bad at your class, you wouldn't get invited. With the exception of a place like Shattered Halls, you could get in as any type of dps if you knew what you were doing.

Wrong. TBC trade channel was "lf3m daily heroic: tank, healer and dps (no cc=no inv)". You really did not get pugs as non-CC dps classes. Rogues that didn't spec into improved sap were frequently kicked out of the group for being noobs.

The items actually gave you upgrades back then.... as opposed to giving you stuff that's good for the first 2 weeks of the expansion.

Those upgrades shouldn't last for multiple tiers, that's just retarded. I had to change profession to tailoring on my shadowpriest because of Frozen Shadowweave set which was BiS for whole two tiers. That's just ridiculous devaluing of all raid drops and forcing people into professions they don't give a fuck about.

I find it amazing any time someone says "blizz can do better" fan boys and blizz agologists will always bring up the nostalgia thing.

There are things that could be better (like for example merging realms to fix the broken economy), but what you listed is pure nostalgia.

[Inval1d]

Nope, I don't think he'll be fired. WoW's drop in subscription numbers is due to a dozen different factors unrelated to his job, and the game's systems (which ol' Greg is responsible for) have improved massively since the ridiculous imbalancefest of Vanilla and Burning Crusade. Shamans can DPS, Paladins and Druids can Tank, Hunters don't just cast Steady Shot until they go blue in the face, talents are actually interesting now. No reason to kick him out.

This. Failing sub numbers have infinitely more sources of influence than just GCs decision making.

[tehdef]

This kind if thread is, in my opinion, representative of just how much out of touch the online communitites of the game are with the actual community of the game itself; as well as how uninformed about the structure of companies.

Ghostcrawler is one of the lead developers of the game, true. But he is, at best, one among several people that make the big decisions at Blizzard, if even that. He is just given an assignment most of the time, to be carried out under certain conditions, with certain resources. And his is only one part of the game which he supervises and leads; one among many parts. So what do you expect from him? If the direction of the game is decided to be towards a certain place his work is to carry out his part of the steering, nothing else.

Has he failed partly? Oh yes. A lot actually. He has removed so much of the uniquness of classes and specialisations. Dumped down theory-crafting elements. Almost eradicated sandbox gameplay. Streamlined the #&$% out of the game, and has cut so many elements that most of the classes and specialisations feel tasteless, unexciting, routinely "okish", safe, predictable, restrained. He has substituted the excitement one should feel by playing a game with logical equality in performance, not! balance.

He has failed to understand that most players don't give a damn about balance; they just want to have fun. And that by catering to some echo chamber-effect driven minority that hangs around forums, he has missed the vast majority of players that don't even visit sites about the game. Oh yeah: MMOC's 36k active posters are nothing compared to the game's 7 million + players, or the past 12 million. They are not even representative of the community, because they are not chosen randomly. Yet he caters to them, and their never-ending conversations about "balance," whatever that is supposed to mean.

Even worse, he is a professional that should have long ago understood one simple thing: there can be no balance between two or more different elements. Only identical elements can be equal. So the best thing to do is strive for some semblance of equality, while keeping fun and excitement as his most important goal. But then again, even though instanced gameplay is far from what most players enjoy in the game, it's what the company is trying to promote, because it's easier to develop content for, and cheaper; and of course in instanced content you need balance for PvP, and absence of uniqueness for 10-man raiding in PvE. And so, whether he wants to or not, Ghostcrawler has been tasked to play his part is steering the game to be more accomodating towards those activities.

Which leads to the actual reason why the game is declining so fast in subscriptions: fatigue. Not that much from the age of the game, but its content: its focus on instanced content in both PvE and PvP. Such content is desirable from high-performance players; actually the closer it is to a MOBA or a fighting game in an arena the better; but it's boring to most players of the game. Because the vast majority doesn't care about raiding or arena. They joined the game when it was an open-world role-playing game. When there was a vast world for them to play in, adventure and explore. Vanilla was the period of time that the game met its highest rise in players in percentages; and the time when, barring a small minority of ever-complaing high-performance players or their wannabe followers, most players actually enjoyed the game; they were genuinely excited about logging in and playing, as opposed to routinely logging in to do their online chores nowadays.

That's what made the game such a raving success: its open world. Not the dungeons. If it relied on dungeons then it would have stopped at the usual 200k subscribers mark of all other similar mmorpgs; perhaps gone a bit further because of its accessiblity. But that would be it. The several-million-players success story was built on the one thing WoW did better than any mmorpg until then, or since: its tenths of zones, with their thousand of quests, its exploration, and sense of a vast world filled with immense potential. Not the grind for points and shinies that it has become now.

And it's quite obvious really: Shenmue, Driver, Zelda, Yakuza, Fallout, Grand Theft Auto; do you know what they all have in common? Hugely successful games. With an open world theme. Most recently Skyrim, with its horrible combat and clunky animations, surpassed 10 million copies sold, in an era where piracy is huge, on PCs especially. So the actual number of people that have playeed it? Yeah, one can only imagine. 10 million + players. Which other open-world role-playing game once had such numbers? Hmm....That's the genre WoW belonged to in Vanilla, and that's the genre it has forsaken, and a major reason of why it has declined so much in popularity. Shinies instead of actual open-world content is only going to take you so far. And this seems to be the extent of the trick's longevity. Most players are just bored and tired of grinding points instead of playing a proper open-world role-playing game. So they leave.

But that is not just Ghostcrawler's fault, if at all, it is the company's fault for deciding not to invest in the kind of content most players enjoy, but try to shoehorn almost everyone into the cheaper and faster to develop for instanced content. And these are the results.

Holy shit, look at what it is. An opinion being presented as solid fact.

Please, tell me how you manage to be such a self important fool that you would take presumptions and try to shove them off as empirical data and evidence? Please, I would like to know the secrets so I can also behave in such a manner in the future.

[Mexa]

He might be, he does stand to answer for everything his team does. The game is the way it is under his authority, of course its not solely his fault, but that doesnt mean someone else wouldnt be able to do a better job.

[Deleted]

I wish they did, the guy has no clue on what he is doing.

[RickJamesLich]

I agree that vanilla sucked, but so did TBC for most parts. The fact is the game has gotten better with every expansion, but problem is people are whining over the lost community. Or to be precise, they're whining over all former friends and guildmates who have since stopped playing. It has got very little to do with the actual quality of WoW but their subjective view of the community around them.



Not on low or medium pop realm.



Wrong. TBC trade channel was "lf3m daily heroic: tank, healer and dps (no cc=no inv)". You really did not get pugs as non-CC dps classes. Rogues that didn't spec into improved sap were frequently kicked out of the group for being noobs.



Those upgrades shouldn't last for multiple tiers, that's just retarded. I had to change profession to tailoring on my shadowpriest because of Frozen Shadowweave set which was BiS for whole two tiers. That's just ridiculous devaluing of all raid drops and forcing people into professions they don't give a fuck about.



There are things that could be better (like for example merging realms to fix the broken economy), but what you listed is pure nostalgia.

Yes, the low pop and medium pop realms had nothing to do with the expansion itself though. I will admit, blizz is making *some* improvements here but a lot more can be done, CRZ is a step in the right direction and I see that they are now "linking" realms.... gives hope lol. If you had trouble getting into a 5 man, just join a guild, problem solved... same thing with raiding. And I don't remember any groups that looked for 3 people that could CC, as opposed to one or 2... with the exception of Shattered Halls and Magister's terrace.... and also, you could always start a group yourself. I think people over think this one, honestly if you made buddies with a few tanks or heals and built a reputation for yourself, you'd have more people asking you to run stuff then you could handle.



As for professions, I think it's much more interesting when they actually give items that you would want to use instead of stuff that is worse than what you already have equipped. Does it need to be strong over multiple tiers? No, but the current system is much worse as crafters have very little stuff that is of value to craft after the first month of the expansion. You level up something like tailoring to 600..... and when you get there, you realize you don't need any of the stuff you can make. How interesting is that?



As for the the nostalgia thing, I find there's a good portion of players that have some sort of past expansion contrition, where they think nobody ever raided, nobody did 5 mans, everyone was bored in the game and nobody had fun. For me though it's one of those things where I'm like "dude were we playing the same game?!"

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

The best part of this thread was when GC brought it up, highlighting just how stupid it really is.

How stupid we are thinking our opinion influences Blizz's personnel decisions.

[vesseblah]

As for the the nostalgia thing, I find there's a good portion of players that have some sort of past expansion contrition, where they think nobody ever raided, nobody did 5 mans, everyone was bored in the game and nobody had fun. For me though it's one of those things where I'm like "dude were we playing the same game?!"

You can admit you were having fun. Even I admit I was having fun at the time. That's ok and normal, otherwise we wouldn't have been playing the game.

Where things goes into nostalgia territory is when people say "things were lot better when..." while it actually wasn't better. They remember the feeling of having fun back then, but for the wrong reasons. Nobody had fun farming 200 demonslaying potions per Sunwell week and "dumbing down" like limiting consumables use did make the game better, but all people remember they had fun raiding in Sunwell in their guild which they associate into "raiding in TBC was better than now" if they aren't really happy in their current guild. It has got nothing to do with the state of the game, objectively speaking.

[darxide]

While TBC was a big improvement over Vanilla it wasn't exactly perfect. World PvP pretty much died by the end of it, PvP rankings were take away, raiding (other than Kara) was pretty much hardcore only. There was a crapton of gating for everything, you needed keys for heroics, then attunement keys for raids which you could only get by beating the prior raids. Not to mention that if you raided you where forced to have certain professions. At least in vanilla you could have fun throughout the entire leveling experience because most players weren't 60 yet and the ones that where 60 where most likely not geared at all.

I still fail to see why any of this was a bad thing.

[vesseblah]

I still fail to see why any of this was a bad thing.

if you raided in a stable top100 guild it wasn't... But for the 99% of players who weren't it was a bad thing.

[Yag]

How stupid we are thinking our opinion influences Blizz's personnel decisions.

Our informed opinions can influence Blizzard, that much is true.

[rpm]

if you raided in a stable top100 guild it wasn't... But for the 99% of players who weren't it was a bad thing.

Yet the game was growing back then unlike now, so maybe, just maybe, players like to be challenged and stick around for a longer time if everything can't be completed in 2 weeks of afking in LFR.

Imo Ghostcrawler should step down, in the short time he has been at the head of WoW, sub numbers went back 6 years to the ending of Vanilla, and say what you want about the game being dated, if it was still enjoyable like it was pre ghostcrawler era, most of the ppl that left would probably be playing right now.

[krisusu]

Yet the game was growing back then unlike now, so maybe, just maybe, players like to be challenged and stick around for a longer time if everything can't be completed in 2 weeks of afking in LFR.

Imo Ghostcrawler should step down, in the short time he has been at the head of WoW, sub numbers went back 6 years to the ending of Vanilla, and say what you want about the game being dated, if it was still enjoyable like it was pre ghostcrawler era, most of the ppl that left would probably be playing right now.

Most people can't be asked to play the same game for years on end. I don't particularly have much against the game in its current state but after so many years it has been too much of the same. That's something that people like GC have to contend with all the time.

[Kelmart]

Will he? No.
Should he? Yes.

I dislike damn near everything he has done to this game since joining and I dislike his arrogant ass attitude.

Completely agree. He won't be because Blizzard has their heads up their asses. The Diablo 3 failure dude, Jay Wilson right?, got a semi promotion after turning out a shit game. Blizzard rewards mediocrity. He absolutely should be moved to something else and NOT be in charge of it. I don't believe he should get fired but he should not be working on this game anymore.