Rob padro returning as lead designer for expac 5? What will happen to GC?

[Erishkigal]

Bring back Daelo imo

[Arbs]

Ghostcrawler gets moved to Titan with Jay Wilson, I'm just kidding,

but cmon seriously people will blame Rob Pardo for all the problems, just like they blame GC. The community will point fingers at anyone who is in his position no matter what. Rob Pardo could remove every change GC has ever done & there would be mass complaining !!

[Numeanor]

The game has never been balanced, it never will be. Welcome to the Real World.

All GC and friends can do is plug the leaks in the dam when they find them, but new leaks are inevitable.

They make new leaks by themselves. It's not like they are just created out of thin air. They added stupidly OP DK's in WOLTK but they could avoided that but not making them so OP. They always have option to not do something so OP. They have PTR, beta, arena realms and forum feedback but they still ignore everything and make FOTM classes and OP bullshit over and over. I would say that would be OK for a game under 1 year, but heck, wow has it 8 years now and with every neext expansion they blow their work to pieces again and again.
I have had much more fun in 1 month of playing SWTOR in pvp than in WoW in 4 years! It's not perfect there, but much much better than here. At least no more one-shotting morons running around.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

GC isn't lead designer, he's lead systems designer. The difference is he only handles the systems themselves. Not the content put in them or the project as a whole.

[Pull My Finger]

The reason I dislike GC is his condescending attitude towards players, mainly on twitter. His reasoning for why he doesn't need to treat customers more respectfully? Most don't know who he is.... No joke, that's what his response was to criticism of his handling of tweets.

That's nonsense. GC is a very nice and likeable guy, as anyone who watched some interviews with him will know. Also, I can't think of any other developer who devotes so much time to adress WoW-related stuff in detail, answer questions etc. He's also incredibly patient and professional and often answers questions and comments that are worded in a very rude and insolent manner. No way I'd put up with that bullshit, I'd either brush it off or wouldn't even bother answering, like most other people.

I noticed that a lot of people have a rather vivid imagination when reading posts on the internet, and interpret all kinds of crap into perfectly constructive posts just because they don't like the message. A lot of people are also totally paranoid and suspect sarcasm and arrogance where there is none just because apparently the writer didn't bother to embellish his text with all kinds of smileys.

I get that from people too sometimes. I tend to write properly in my e-mails for example, and then there's the ocasional idiot who interprets my correct use of punctuation as drily arrogance, and assumes that I'm being harsh or upset because I don't end my sentences with ASCII symbols.

[MoanaLisa]

but cmon seriously people will blame Rob Pardo for all the problems, just like they blame GC. The community will point fingers at anyone who is in his position no matter what. Rob Pardo could remove every change GC has ever done & there would be mass complaining !!

I doubt this unless Padro [sic] begins to tweet and make blog posts in as public a manner as Street does. A great deal of the silliness directed at GC is, in fact, shooting the messenger and little else.

[lunchbox2042]

They've removed a lot of the old role playing elements from the game in favor of convenience. Things like leveling up weapon skills or spending talent points every level are gone for the sake of convenience. You may as well call it a MMO action game at this point because it no longer contains the core components of an RPG. The journey is lost upon new players because of the emphasis on max level gameplay.

Personally 4.0 and 5.0 were my favorite two parts of the last two expansions. 4.0 was fun because dungeons were challenging again and no longer a faceroll and 5.0 had the most content of any expansion at launch to date.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

I do beg your Pardo?

You went there...

No, I think it's cool Pardo will be back. Maybe he can recapture some of that Blizzard magic and finally let us forget about that horrible disaster that was Cataclysm.

[Byniri]

It did have a source but it was only a hint that he was working on Expansion 5. Didn't say ANYTHING about Lead Designer

Link to the revision info for the delete:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...ldid=545219170

Link to the sourced reference:

http://www.blizzplanet.com/blog/comm...n-in-the-works

Tweet that started the speculation:

https://twitter.com/Rob_Pardo/status...98014640205824

"Oh don't worry, we will go plenty slow... this is Blizzard after all."

That's hilarious

WTB Kaplan back from Titan. Notice he left WoW team after Wrath and it's been downhill (subs and reputation wise) since then.

So he IS working on Titan. I doubt he's coming back to WoW for the next expansion, ESPECIALLY after Titan got scrapped and remade.

[ComputerNerd]

It's off of Twitter, actually:

http://twitter.com/Rob_Pardo/status/261898014640205824

As for GC, love him or hate him, the numbers don't lie. The bleeding started on his watch and he and his team haven't been able to slow it down, let alone stanch the flow.

He is not the sole person responsible for those decisions.
He is just the outlet through which most are communicated.

Correlation does not equal causation.
The numbers do not lie, players do.
The game suffers from all sorts of issues, not least it being nearly 10 years old and on what is now a minority business model.
The original young audience without many real life commitments are now grown up and with real life responsibilities.
There are too many factors to blame a single person, and the persistent attempts to do so prove those people to be ignorant.

[leviathonlx]

Bring back Daelo imo

Daelo was the Lead Encounter Designer before going on Titan. Most of the Titan team is on WoW now so it's pretty likely he is on WoW again for the time being.

[Aquamonkey]

Which is pretty silly and thoughtless on GC's end, in my opinion. Tweeting about stuff his own department isn't even responsible for... I don't know, does he do it on purpose to pretend he's bigger than he really is?

All the departments collaborate. Also, since GC has become the de facto spokesperson, they probably just pass him info to say.

[leviathonlx]

Which is pretty silly and thoughtless on GC's end, in my opinion. Tweeting about stuff his own department isn't even responsible for... I don't know, does he do it on purpose to pretend he's bigger than he really is?

Well GC isn't that low on the totem pole. For WoW development it goes Tom Chilton as the Lead Producer of WoW -> GC as the Lead Systems designer and under him are the teams like the UI team and class team. Cory Stockton/Mumper the Lead Content Designer is at the same level as GC and under him are the content teams such as Dave Kosak and the quest team. Chilton, GC, and Stockton are more or less the main people heading WoW.

[MoanaLisa]

Which is pretty silly and thoughtless on GC's end, in my opinion. Tweeting about stuff his own department isn't even responsible for... I don't know, does he do it on purpose to pretend he's bigger than he really is?

I doubt if he feels like he has to 'pretend' anything and the suggestion that he does feel some need to enlarge himself is laughable. I'm certain that if he was tweeting anything out-of-bounds on a consistent basis, he'd get a call from Morhaime asking him to ramp it back a bit. "Pretend to be bigger than he is": Ha ha ha. People will reach for anything to find something to criticize. He's pretty much the de facto voice of Blizzard for World of Warcraft. I'm certain that if he stopped communicating at all, people--yourself included--would be in here complaining about that too.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

He is not the sole person responsible for those decisions.
He is just the outlet through which most are communicated.

Correlation does not equal causation.
The numbers do not lie, players do.
The game suffers from all sorts of issues, not least it being nearly 10 years old and on what is now a minority business model.
The original young audience without many real life commitments are now grown up and with real life responsibilities.
There are too many factors to blame a single person, and the persistent attempts to do so prove those people to be ignorant.

Pardo had the good luck of being on the team during the post-WC3 years. When they could find an award-winning story just by throwing darts at a board with WC3 villains on it.

GC had to lead the game into being solely about WoW, not about wrapping up WC3 storylines. And it's worked a bit, but has been vastly overshadowed by the disaster that was the Cataclysm itself.

[DrMcNinja]

Well GC isn't that low on the totem pole. For WoW development it goes Tom Chilton as the Lead Producer of WoW -> GC as the Lead Systems designer and under him are the teams like the UI team and class team. Cory Stockton/Mumper the Lead Content Designer is at the same level as GC and under him are the content teams such as Dave Kosak and the quest team. Chilton, GC, and Stockton are more or less the main people heading WoW.

Thank god, somebody realised you can't blame one single guy for changes. He has a team, there's other people working on stuff that is of equal value and there's somebody above him.

I don't think Rob's comeback will make a life changing difference. Blizzard needs to realise their own flaws and correct them. The majority of the players may be their main concern, but they are not always right in every decision.

Now I know people will come with all kinds of fallacies in order to portray Blizzard as a bunch of greedy bastards that will do everything for the sake of money (Cause you know... they are a market of their own). But even they can't be so stupid as to not notice that people become more rebellious, unsub more often and just do what they have always done.

[Amerrol]

Correlation does not equal causation.

I wish people would stop spouting this in every thread. You know what? Sometimes it does.

[MoanaLisa]

Thank god, somebody realised you can't blame one single guy for changes. He has a team, there's other people working on stuff that is of equal value and there's somebody above him.

I don't think Rob's comeback will make a life changing difference. Blizzard needs to realise their own flaws and correct them. The majority of the players may be their main concern, but they are not always right in every decision.

It's impossible to know anything like this but I sometimes wonder if the intellectual design vision behind Cataclysm and MoP--which according to legend weren't really mapped out before launch like BC/Wrath were--were less driven by specific Blizzard personalities and more by committee. Group-think and design-by-committee would explain some of the generic feeling to the game of late although I will be the very first to say that coming up with truly new stuff for a game this well-established, i.e. 'old', would challenge all of the critics here and elsewhere. But it's a natural progression once something is commercially successful to remove the 'vision piece' from a single individual or very small group and spread it out more to play it safe.

Just a random thought I've been having for about a year now. I like WoW still and have enjoyed MoP but I think it really is missing something elusive and trying to step back from my own memories of the game I don't think it's all nostalgia. I can't quite put my finger on what it is.

EDIT: What I'm sort of trying to get across is that some sort of a major story arc that extended from vanilla through Wrath came to a conclusion at the end of Wrath and everything since has been episodic at best. Cataclysm really had nothing much to do with Wrath and even less to do with MoP and I don't think that the next expansion is going to really have a lot to do with either of those two either. So maybe that's where the immersion or whatever it is that people are missing comes from. It feels very episodic at this point. If the next expansion is more driven by a fork from the BC arc, then that might provide more of a sustaining arc to the whole.

It bothers me a lot that I can't quite get to what I want to say but it's really very tenuous.

[Aquamonkey]

I wish people would stop spouting this in every thread. You know what? Sometimes it does.

No. It doesn't. Correlation by itself is not enough to determine causation. Sometimes a correlation can lead to a causation being determined, but that requires further investigation to weed out the confounding variables.

[Amerrol]

Thank god, somebody realised you can't blame one single guy for changes. He has a team, there's other people working on stuff that is of equal value and there's somebody above him.

He is the head of his team though. He has final say on what to present to Morhaime. You think Morhaime is going to go through all the data to make sure GC is doing his job? He takes what GC thinks is a good idea and discusses it with the other heads to see how it will affect the game in general in their weekly meetings. For all intents and purposes, GC is the one responsible for balance at the end of the day because what his team does, he presents to his boss and counter-parts in the other departments. I'm not saying everything is his fault, but his vision is the one that his department runs with.