Blizzard apologises for communication breakdown

[clevin]

They kinda announced they would change secondary stats in the post Blizzcon Q&A so these changes are bound to turn up on the PTR eventually or am I missing something? And it' P T R, so It's unlikely the first built is the final one?

Anyone care to explain what all this hysteria is all about?

Sure. 1) this isn't the first build, not even close. 2) 'wait until later' always fucks us over. 3) If they feel that they need to nerf secondary stats a) announce it in the release notes, that's why they exist and b) tell us also that they know this nerf people and that they have plans to offset the nerf.

The problem isn't necessarily the change it's that they implemented half of it, didn't explain anything about it so we didn't know there was a second half, have done this several times (not communicated) and, with the AP grind, people are rightly concerned that the spec they've invested in might become less good.

it's also that a lot of the problems they're addressing were pointed out during the NINE MONTHS of alpha/beta and should have been fixed then or very early in 7.0. Not as we approach the second patch of the expansion. They shouldn't be needed to do major stuff about how classes work on the 2nd patch. It's particularly galling when it comes to stats because you can math those out and figure out that, with the items in the game, the secondaries are too powerful, Especially when you consciously choose to remove primaries from the jewelry. This particular one isn't even a gameplay issue... just run the numbers.

[Gadzooks]

IMO the way Watcher explained it during the Q&A they are overthinking and overcomplicating the whole thing.

I would agree with this. Judging by their statements and comments about their design process, they overthink and overcomplicate everything, which is a direct result of designing by committee. They're all over the board these days - they gutted class character and fantasy to "streamline" them, then plop an over-engineered system of advancement on top of it, and threw several wrenches in the works with the current round of re-design and tweaking.

Overall, I'll stand by my view that they took on more than they could handle with the class rebuild for Legion, scrambled to finish it because they ran out of time, and released half-baked class builds. And they're playing catch-up now - which is instability for players, and that's not good. It's a game. It should be fun, but it's not fun when you log into a new patch and your character's class has changed dramatically, and that can impact players severely. In that case, the Devs have earned a round of complaints on their forums.

They've been doing this a long time now, they shouldn't be trotting Ion out to apologize as much as they do. They need a consultant or a look at how other companies set up their production pipelines and decision gating methods* to speed up the process, make it more efficient, so players spend less time relearning how to play, and more time in the content having fun. Blizzard collectively have been doing this for over 11 years now, they should have things like class design and balancing down better, and not need to be apologizing for anything.

They also need to rethink the PTR. Throwing half-done builds up only riles players up. They should either do alpha/beta for the PTR, like not let just anyone onto the PTR until the changes are done, and need testing, and only allow players who's feedback they listen to try the iterations up until that point. (It would clean up the PTR, too, there's a whole community of players there, who use it as a free way to play WoW.) Throwing wierd builds at the general public is justa bad idea. 3-4weeks of development with invited players, 2 weeks with the general public on a finished patch should be enough for testing purposes. The PTR, and the constant posting here of every minute string change in the game on the front page are more to blame for the complaining, than the players. Put bad info in front of the general public, EXPECT complaints.

*Ghostcrawler talked a couple of times about too many gatekeepers in the design process - for those that don't know, that means every change has to go through multiple people who sign off on it. Not only is it slow as hell, but it gives too many opportunities to stall the process if one of the gatekeepers gets super picky or OCD about something, and a waste of time back and forth occurs.

[darklogrus]

I have 12 classes (10 of them maxed and avg 855 ilvl) and I don't think they have to do that many changes, class are good overall, little fails here and there. They mainly do such many changes to shut up whining players. And from those whines only 10% are justified. Most of them are "lol my boomkin can't do as dmg as a mage WTF" and they can't even think that they are an hybrid class who can fucking heal, tank, cast dps and melee dps, when a mage is a fucking pure caster DPS. OF COURSE a pure DPS should do more dmg than a hybrid class. A hybrid class shouldn't be ahead in dmg, heal or tank, but should be good on all of them. The same way I think a priest should be ahead in healing, due to the fact that they are 2/3 healer, the most "healer" class in game. They are breaking this game because everyone wants them class to be TOP in DPS single target, cleave, AoE, best Tank in auto-healing and mitigation, and of course best Healer in mantaining and lifting a raid out of nowhere. Each spec has, and SHOULD have pros and cons. Even if there are 0 cons, players will invent a new con to whine.

You can't sit there and tell people Pvp adjustments will not effect Pve and then nerf Pve because of Pvp. Not to mention you can't tell people you wont rework classes because of the time sink of Ap and then turn around and start to rework classes mid expansion. How about telling your player base nothing was pruned and then turn around months later and admit you pruned way to much.

Kinda funny how the players whining back in Alpha has been true ever since.

[omni]

I don't know if an apology was needed but they've got their communications backwards.

Their recent post about secondary stats is great but again they waited for someone to raise hell on the forum before posting their official explanation on what's going on.

If they're going to do a PTR then the changes implemented and being tested on the PTR need to be clearly explained when they're actually made. Not after people spam their forums.

Generally I think Blizzard has amazing communication and are way more in touch with the community than they could be but I don't understand why their explanations always come at the wrong time.

[Korru]

Personally I think both Blizzard and its playerbase are both fuckwads here.

Blizzard's playerbase has always been horrible and somewhat entitled.

but Blizzard shouldn't bother talking to its playerbase and it repeats the same mistakes or doesn't put money in their mouth enraging them.

Blizzard can apologize all it wants (even though likely they don't mean it) causing a riot in the comment section, who cares, just enjoy what the game offers. Legion has been a great expansion so far but not flawless.

[OperationFerret]

no its not they should apologise for there incompetence and there lazy ass devs who dnt fix shit , so you think its fine for a company to take your money and then not listen to your feedback when your class is broken or anything else thats broken, blizzard basically sell wow expansions with so called free boosts to whatever and make more money and after they sold the expansion to all of us they dnt give a flying fuck, they do as little work as possible more max amount of money

Buying a product doesn't suddenly make you a shareholder. You are free to voice your feedback and Blizzard is free to ignore it if they feel that it goes against the Megaconglomeration's best interests.

[Gorsameth]

I don't know if an apology was needed but they've got their communications backwards.

Their recent post about secondary stats is great but again they waited for someone to raise hell on the forum before posting their official explanation on what's going on.

If they're going to do a PTR then the changes implemented and being tested on the PTR need to be clearly explained when they're actually made. Not after people spam their forums.

Generally I think Blizzard has amazing communication and are way more in touch with the community than they could be but I don't understand why their explanations always come at the wrong time.

They have also lied several times this expansion sofar in regards to Legendaries.

First by claiming the the bad luck protection was not broken in the first month of the expansion. Giving people who had one a 2nd one 2 weeks later. They had to back track on that and patch it.
Just recently they had to come forward that there was indeed a soft-cap on the amount of legendaries you could have.

There is no faith in Blizzard at the moment, and for good reason.
That causes people to complain more and more.

[Igi]

You're like babies, screaming for attention, can't be left alone in a room for more than 2 minutes.

These guys have a big ass game to make. Their job isn't to entertain and hold hands with a bunch of needy nerds. Get real already. You're ridiculous. Become real persons for once. Handle life.

Please, i beg you, let me use this comment as a signature.

[Halicia]

I think the "communication breakdown" would improve considerably if Blizzard stopped trying to communicate with players about design intent in the first place.

Anything Blizzard says will be taken as an ironclad promise in perpetuity. It doesn't matter if it was said back in Wrath, *I have a blue post promising free lock cookies for life!!!* and shame on you for taking away my cookies!

[Donald Hellscream]

And the players should apologize for being incapable of formulating a sentence that actually contains constructive feedback.

Seriously most threads are whinefests without any meaningful content.

[MoanaLisa]

Two points, kind of related:

- Blizzard has always had issues trying to communicate with players. It's not really a part of their corporate culture, nor has it ever really been. I think they're trying but changing corporate culture is hard, tedious and always full of zig-zags. They get better and then they get worse. In this respect they probably really miss having someone around who could do what GC used to do although I think Ion is getting the hang of it.

That said:

- They fuck with classes way too much and way too often. That's true. It seems like they try with every expansion to draw a new baseline to expand upon in future expansions. Except they never do. The next expansion they look to start over. It's a vicious circle between players who constantly bitch about their classes and Blizzard often making things worse by listening to them. There's no clear winner but stability and then building out would be a decent start. Classes and specs that don't require complicated spreadsheets just to understand how they tick would be a decent place to begin. I think that's more or less what the prune was really about but they just can't let go of their wheels within wheels within wheels calculations. The more complicated you make it, the easier it is to gum up the works.

[ImpTaimer]

"Do as I say, not as I do." mentality can suck my balls.

Pre-merger dev team made the game a certain way, and post-merger devs make every effort to dismantle it so they can project their fantasy on it. Any attempt to criticize them results in them secluding themselves on Twitter.

Seems like devs need their toys taken away and put in timeout so they can get their homework done.

[Marrilaife]

I really don't understand why for example Blizzard can't communicate like creators of League of Legends. They often answer players concerns like "my fav champion is too weak" with stuff like "we'll adjust x item or talent that this champion will benefit from, therefore become better" or "we did small buff to this champion, we'll see in the next 2 weeks what effect did it have on that champion performance" or "we can't buff this champion right now because it's more powerful in coordinated team play / high elo than in solo queue across other divisions, we need to first figure out how to trim excess power so he doesn't become OP in pro play", and so on and so forth.

And tbh Blizzard introduced pvp talents for that exact reason to give classes tools like cc, anti-cc, mobility, utility and so on they didn't want to be abused in pve. Therefore, they should utilize their own tools they created first.

During beta they should also have gone for pragmatic approach than "omg class fantasy so cool", otherwise things like surrender to madness would never go live.

And indeed, maybe they should stop reinventing the wheel and redesigning for the sake of redesigning every single class every single expansion. It wastes them so much time and then they fall into investment fallacy read "we spent so much time designing this we can't back off now". They put so much effort into changing classes they fall in love with fruits of their labour and turn deaf ear to anyone daring to have any criticism that x or y won't be so hot when it leaves design room and marches into pve or pvp environment.

[sponge5307]

I don't mind the changes what I do mind is some of the talents they put makes no sense at all. Then they decide to nerf the noes they are actually useful to force players take a crap talent. It seems like they lack common sense and just like to throw whatever comes first in their mind and use that.

[Varitok]

The root of the problem here is the bloody players.

Players are whiny, ungrateful little shits who dont deserve communication in the first place. Id rather blizzard focus on making the game than try to give frequent updates to the playerbase which will just be taken out of context and overanalysed to the extreme.

This is why communication is crap and the game is broken everytime a patch comes out, because people like you cry about whiners (The irony) who just want to know whats changing and what to expect. "Stop communicating and just make patches" thats a terrible idea and is the reason why classes are all over the place. Disconnecting from your playerbase is how you end up with an utter crap game.

Overwatch has its fair share of so called "Whiners" but they constantly communicate and the game is in a better state for it.

[Berengil]

Ya I wouldn't say not blaming the game is a "stupid but cool" opinion, it's just obviously based on more clarity of the actual issue. If you're a fan of jumping on the hate bandwagon and not thinking for yourself be my guest, but you're really damaging gaming as a whole with that attitude in the process.

Nmit, I could not give less of a sht about "gaming as a whole". What kind of metaphorical nonsense is that?

Let me tell you what I am, not just with Blizzard, but with anyone who takes my money in exchange for products/services: I am a demanding s.o.b.

When I give someone my money and I am not satisfied, they will hear about it, loudly and repeatedly, until I am satisfied. And If they make me wait too long, they will stop getting my money.

You may be content with giving away your money even if you're not satisfied, and that's your choice. It's a choice I will never, ever make.

[Pantalaimon]

they completely dropped the ball on legion class design. throughout the alpha and beta processes we saw threads with 70+ pages of feedback about a single spec which was overwhelmingly ignored. nevermind the fact that many specs were working great before (subtlety rogue -- which they completely butchered for absolutely no reason at all) and should have been changed only minimally in legion, even worse is the fact that trying to build 36 specs (complete with rotations, talents, pvp talents, artifacts, etc) completely from scratch is an overwhelmingly expensive and time consuming undertaking if you value doing it right (clearly they didn't as evidenced by the results)

legion is an expansion that is filled to the brim with gorgeous content, some of the best they have ever made. and yet the fundamental lense through which the player experiences the world is their class, and when you see an elegant and finely tuned class that you have enjoyed for 12 years get utterly trashed for no reason at all, the best content in history can't polish that turd.

Legion is hardly the worst expansion for class design/balance. It gets tiring when the same line is vomitted EVERY. SINGLE. EXPANSION. Are we really supposed to believe that each expansion is literally the worst that classes have been each time? Does anyone even remember the expansion where all three specs of shaman were not competive in PvE & the only alright spec in PvP was enh? Anyone remember when the pendulum nerfs hit BM hunters in Wrath (specifically nerfing BW/TBW by roughly 50% with very little number balancing anywhere else to make up for such a huge pendulum nerf)?

Classes have been "butchered" worse than Legion. The sky is not falling. Eventually the nerfed classes will be good again in the future, then nerfed again, then buffed, then nerfed. It's how the game works. The game is meant to change, classes included, as one of many aspects to change the game to prevent it from being stagnant. Contrary to popular belief classes and specs are NOT meant to more or less be the same for years on end. WoW has never been that kind of game.

- - - Updated - - -

I really don't understand why for example Blizzard can't communicate like creators of League of Legends. They often answer players concerns like "my fav champion is too weak" with stuff like "we'll adjust x item or talent that this champion will benefit from, therefore become better" or "we did small buff to this champion, we'll see in the next 2 weeks what effect did it have on that champion performance" or "we can't buff this champion right now because it's more powerful in coordinated team play / high elo than in solo queue across other divisions, we need to first figure out how to trim excess power so he doesn't become OP in pro play", and so on and so forth.

And tbh Blizzard introduced pvp talents for that exact reason to give classes tools like cc, anti-cc, mobility, utility and so on they didn't want to be abused in pve. Therefore, they should utilize their own tools they created first.

During beta they should also have gone for pragmatic approach than "omg class fantasy so cool", otherwise things like surrender to madness would never go live.

And indeed, maybe they should stop reinventing the wheel and redesigning for the sake of redesigning every single class every single expansion. It wastes them so much time and then they fall into investment fallacy read "we spent so much time designing this we can't back off now". They put so much effort into changing classes they fall in love with fruits of their labour and turn deaf ear to anyone daring to have any criticism that x or y won't be so hot when it leaves design room and marches into pve or pvp environment.

Redesigning the wheel actually serves a purpose most players don't consider; it gives players who were considering quiting the game due to boredom a fresh breather/perspective on a class they may have been potentially playing for years. Sure, there are players who don't mind a character or class that doens't change after many years, but that isn't every player. There are players who want to see things changed so that it feels like the game is actually going somewhere (in this case classes adapting and 'refreshing' the gameplay and mechanics). I for one would have hated to have BM hunters or Elemental Shamans still playing as the steady shot/lightning bolt single ability spam classes they used to be back around TBC/Wrath. Was that redesign simply for the sake of redesign?

The first part of your post is something that Blizzard has done and communicated to players before, they simply have phrased it differently sometimes. They'll usually just say that an overperforming spec is doing fine (ie competitive enough as it is) and that they dont' plan on buffing it further.

[Pull My Finger]

Please, i beg you, let me use this comment as a signature.

Be my guest

[Maudib]

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/t...36?page=10#184


You know the communication is bad when Ghostcrawler is discussing WoW more at the moment than the current WoW dev team combined. Do you think that we should expect improved developer communication in the future? If so, in what ways? Or is this just more PR spin?

Of course it's spin. Blizz isn't communicating because they don't care what the users want and haven't since they brought the Elitist Jerks on board. The people that had the passion that brought us WoW are gone now.

I expressed my concerns for Legion back in Beta; Legendaries, the "borrowed" D3 mechanisms like paragon points = artifact power, greater rifts = Mythic+... and of course the RNG nature of gear.

The art and design team have always been top notch but it's the lead developers that have driven this game into the ground. WoD and now Legion have finally convinced me that WoW is over. That amazing game full of fantasy, wonder, and entertainment is gone... a thing of the past.

- - - Updated - - -

Redesigning the wheel actually serves a purpose most players don't consider; it gives players who were considering quiting the game due to boredom a fresh breather/perspective on a class they may have been potentially playing for years.

Don't fix what ain't broke. BC and WotLK... near perfection. When you have a perfect game... don't change... make MORE. Instead all the "new blood" Blizzard brought in had to tweezer their wieners in an attempt to make their mark on the iconic game.

They marked it all right... smells like piss and streaked with turds. <snip>

Infracted: Don't talk about private servers by name {MoanaLisa}

[Tech Priest Bojangles]

"we’ve done a poor job of communicating that thus far. We’d like to apologize for that failing, and it’s something we’re actively working to correct."

Yeah okay They're for real this time, guys