View Poll Results: Should Ghostcrawler be replaced as Lead Systems Designer?

Voters
2314. This poll is closed
  • Yes

    526 22.73%
  • No

    1,788 77.27%
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  1. #221
    Herald of the Titans Baine's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by lunchbox2042 View Post
    He's responsible for everything but lore and quests pretty much.
    A little less than that: "Systems design specifically is everything that is not level, story, quest or encounter design. My team handles everything from classes to mechanics to items to trade skills to achievements to UI design, and that includes the game balance."

    http://wowpedia.org/Greg_Street

  2. #222
    Quote Originally Posted by ihyln View Post
    Ghostcrawler's job is the only job where you could lose 4-5mil players and still keep your job. It's quite literally insane. He needs to find something he is good at.
    You among bunch of other confused whiners need to understand that there's very little Greg Street actually decides which direction WoW is going. Click on the "credits" button next time in loading screen, it's Frank Pearce (Executive Producer) and Tom Chilton (Game Director) are making the big decisions.

    The way something like cash shop comes into WoW is Bobby Kotick sending email to Mike Morhaime "figure out something to make up for the lost WoW subs". Morhaime sends "gimme cash shop, more sparkleponies or whatever so that we can make more money" email to Tom Chilton. Chilton decides to add few transmog items to the store and draws up the cash shop UI with a ballpoint pen and lists few items that could be sold there. Chilton gives the drawing to the UI lead who delegates it forward to some intern. The intern whips up an UI based on the drawing, takes a screenshot and sends it to his boss who passes it up and up and up in the chain to Morhaime who stamps it and replies to Kotick's mail "added cash shop, will see how it worked out in next quarter". GC might be in the same mailing list as the UI team lead, but will not personally do shit about it since it's not his job as long as the cash shop items have no stats.

    GC's job is tweaking classes, spells, abilities and talents and all that game mechanics stuff. If warlocks get nerfed that's GC's fault but things like cash shop or the design of Dragon Soul raid map or lore isn't. He's just taken the unofficial job of scapegoat for the internet twits.
    Never going to log into this garbage forum again as long as calling obvious troll obvious troll is the easiest way to get banned.
    Trolling should be.

  3. #223
    Quote Originally Posted by Sturmbringe View Post
    Ever since he moved to the forefront, WoW has been deteriorating instead of improving.
    Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
    "There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
    "The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
    "Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"

  4. #224
    Quote Originally Posted by Baine View Post
    Agreed, and it is not even close imo.
    Lol stop fooling yourself. Blizzard's probably laughing at MoP fanboys.

    OT: No obviously nobody is going to be fired if Jay Wilson didn't get fired.

  5. #225
    "I know what's best for Blizzard's business much, much better than the people at Blizzard who have more business knowledge and experience and have access to more relevant information than I do."

    - Everyone in this thread saying he should get fired.

  6. #226
    I doubt ANYBODY could stop the falling numbers in WoW.

    Too many other MMOs, WoW is what, going on 9 years now? I laugh at myself for playing this game so long. Free to play is another reason for less subscribers.

    Sometimes things just run their course. I run a decent sized level 25 alliance guild..... and we had a SMALL pop in people coming back to play when MOP hit. Within 6 weeks of MOP, those people were gone again, and many others followed. We used to have 25 - 35 different people playing during Lich King, and now we have 5 - 8 people who actually play a reasonable amount. From the few people I talked to, most of it was the tedium of running dailies for rep / gear.

    Personally, the thought of running another daily makes me want to cry.... So, I started 3 new alts and am trying to do areas and things that I have never or rarely ever done.

    So, to sum up, IMO, I don't think anybody gets fired or should be fired. WoW's time is almost at an end. Death by Natural Causes.

  7. #227
    Pandaren Monk
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    I like how this thread has come to Ghostcrawler's attention. I recommend the following to the professionals at Blizzard, who are clearly reading this thread:

    * Ghostcrawler is clearly responsible for all Blizzard decisions ranging from Starcraft 2 being a three-part release to their logo being red instead of blue. As penance he must cut down the tallest tree in the forest with a herring.

    * Chris Metzen needs writing lessons. Perhaps he can become so corrupted that 24 Blizzard employees cast fireballs at him while a guy in plate mail yells mean things to get his attention. I suspect he would place fire on the ground.

    * Perhaps while they're cutting trees with herrings, one of them can Google "too dumb to live trope" and ask how this applies to the remaining heroes. Thrall is the only one who hasn't yet figured out that some old god corrupts his friends every few months. (It's the Franklin Mint "Corrupt WoW" collection: one new corrupted hero comes every 6 to 8 weeks...)

    * Ulduar's hard mode triggering was a big part of what made it awesome. We don't mind if it gets recycled. Honest.

    * So was the non-linear path. In fact, the less an MMO feels like a rail rider, the more people want to play it. [I am being subtle]

    * Fix Vanish.

    * Shamans need and deserve a tank spec!!1!1!!!11!!111!1!ones!11!

    * Cataclysm armor art sucks. No really. It really sucks. Any time I look at it, I feel like an intern shellacked kimono patterns on Ulduar's leftovers. Wrong expansion, wrong country. Google "Han dynasty lamellar". My consulting fee for telling you what to Google starts at $60 an hour.

    * Everyone in "Blizzard" deserves to get fired for catering to "casuals" who want free "epics" for nothing and it's destroying "the game". By the way, if you replace the things in quotes with {Congress, welfare queens, money, the country}, you get the argument wingnuts constantly posit about the US Government. It has exactly as much truth to it, and comes from exactly the same people...the only differences being that Blizzard didn't remove all protective tarriffs on its economic interests 30 years ago, thereby guaranteeing slow economic collapse, and that the first version's proponents are 20 years younger and don't live in shacks in Montana. Yet.

    * "The best expansion was Burning Crusade", agrees everyone with 0 ToT hard mode kills and an account created in WOTLK.

    Did I miss anything?
    The plural of anecdote is not "data". It's "Bayesian inference".

  8. #228
    Quote Originally Posted by Baine View Post
    Agreed, and it is not even close imo.

    Did you play BC?

  9. #229
    He won't be fired or demoted. He (very obviously) does not know what he's talking about a lot of the time & I don't agree with him sometimes but a good chunk of the sub loses are out of his (and Blizzard's) control.

    I'm sure many of Blizzard's sub loses are their own fault however. Blizzard is ridiculously slow at implementing requested features and horrible at fixing issues. They also tend to reiterate on designs and somehow make them worse in the process. Part of me thinks Blizzard is simply lazy as well. They make a lot of excuses about stuff! More than any other game developer I've ever seen.
    Last edited by xixixviixiiii; 2013-08-06 at 03:59 PM.

  10. #230
    Herald of the Titans Aurabolt's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Drithien View Post
    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.
    /thread.

    Honestly this sums up my thoughts on this poll exactly. And it's why I recently bought Guild Wars 2, which has a heavy emphasis on open world exploration. If you try to grind in the same spot you'll get bored very quickly.

    When I leveled my first toon to 70 in TBC I'd gone through 90% of the quests on Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms along the way. I loved the quests so much I went zone to zone doing all of the quests to fully experience what they had to offer. When I first got to Outland--and mind you I started playing WoW mid-expansion--things were a bit more spread out after Hellfire. I'd say I did about 45% of the quests on my way to 70. When Wrath of the Lich King went live I did 98% of the quests on Northrend excluding non-progression Dailies (I did do Argent Tournament for example but not the Grizzly Hills Dailies).

    When Cataclysm came out...whew. Due to the vocal minority, Kalimdor and EK were set up in a way that even without Heirlooms or Guild Perks you will always outlevel a zone before you finish a quest chain. The reason? Some people complained the questing experience was boring and they wanted to get to end-game content faster. The tradeoff is most folks never bother finishing quest chains in a zone before moving on. A slap the face of the Dev Teams who spent the lion's share of their resources revamping two continents in answer to the community's feedback.

    I'm not saying the revamp shouldn't have happened. I'm glad it did and I love the new quest chains. I just wish they'd cut the EXP needed to level a bit or maybe offer perks to people who see a quest chain through to the end. The new Silverpine Forest, Westfall, Stonetalon Mountains (both sides) and Eastern Plaguelands (both sides) chains for example are pretty cool. I honestly don't get the hate for the revamped continents. It made me want to go back and level new toons to experience Azeroth post-Cataclysm. I haven't even done 40% of the quests and like Northrend I actually WANT to see them all eventually.

    When MoP was announced...the vocal minority again. The hate expressed for the expansion on the day it was announced to now must have bruised alot of egos at Blizzard. I know they never will say it publicly but they should just say "Look, if you don't like our game don't play." Now I will be the first to admit Pandaria's Questing experience is only worth doing once per faction. Furthermore, I don't like being forced to do the questing experience on land with my alts just to satisfy the campers on PvP realms. It makes me feel like I'm being punished to satisfy a group of players I don't belong to.

    Pandaria's questing experience was impressive given it didn't have the strong lore background Wrath of the Lich King did. I know alot of folks would disagree with me on that and they have a right to if they want. Even so this proves to me that WoW still has plenty of gas left in the tank.
    ...Ok, time to change the ol' Sig ^_^

    This time I'll leave you the Links to 3 of my Wordpress Blogs: 1. Serene Adventure 2. Video Games 3. Anime Please subscribe if you like what you see. As a Bonus, I'll throw in my You Tube channel =D

  11. #231
    Quote Originally Posted by RickJamesLich View Post
    Did you play BC?
    I did and I 100% agree with his statement.

    BC was shit IMO.
    Quote Originally Posted by Princess Kenny View Post
    Avocado is a tropical fruit , south seas expansion confirmed.

  12. #232
    Quote Originally Posted by Destil View Post
    I did and I 100% agree with his statement.

    BC was shit IMO.

    If you dislike world pvp, 5 mans, content for casuals are hard core players, professions having interesting content, pvp in general... I can see how you might believe BC sucked.

  13. #233
    Quote Originally Posted by Drithien View Post
    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.
    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.
    Veteran vanilla player - I was 31 back in 2005 when I started playing WoW - Nostalrius raider with a top raid guild.

  14. #234
    Ghostcrawler's the developer that World of Warcraft deserves, but not the one it needs.
    "So my advice is to argue based on the reasons stated, not try to make up or guess at reasons and argue those."
    Greg Street, Riot Developer - 12:50 PM - 25 May 2015

  15. #235
    I think we should go back to how it was before: They don't give us any information or keep us up to date VIA Twitter, Don't let us know who the Lead Sys Dev is, and don't let us know any off the staff/dev names because we are all ungrateful for their openness.

  16. #236
    Quote Originally Posted by RickJamesLich View Post
    If you dislike world pvp, 5 mans, content for casuals are hard core players, professions having interesting content, pvp in general... I can see how you might believe BC sucked.
    They're so cute when they're so young and stupid, aren't they?

  17. #237
    I am Murloc! dacoolist's Avatar
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  18. #238
    Quote Originally Posted by RickJamesLich View Post
    If you dislike world pvp
    One of the more common whine on this forum is that flying mounts killed world PvP, flying mounts which were introduced in TBC. Which is false since it was the introduction of Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch that killed world PvP during vanilla. People just didn't give a fuck anymore about endless unbalanced corpse running without any rewards.

    Quote Originally Posted by RickJamesLich View Post
    5 mans
    That were ridiculously overtuned on launch, and still year after TBC came out you weren't invited into daily heroic group playing class without CC ability. Feral druids, shadowpriests, dps shamans dps warrior etc all excluded.

    Quote Originally Posted by RickJamesLich View Post
    content for casuals and hard core players
    Casuals had Karazhan for a year and half, nothing more. Nothing.

    Quote Originally Posted by RickJamesLich View Post
    professions having interesting content
    Perhaps the word you were looking for is "broken", not "interesting"?
    Raider in Sunwell? Reroll leatherworking or you're noob.

    Quote Originally Posted by RickJamesLich View Post
    pvp in general
    TBC introduced arenas which introduced the term "welfare epics". You literally lost 10 games per week and would get free epics for nothing.

    Quote Originally Posted by RickJamesLich View Post
    I can see how you might believe BC sucked.
    I can see how you're looking at it all with nostalgia goggles.
    Never going to log into this garbage forum again as long as calling obvious troll obvious troll is the easiest way to get banned.
    Trolling should be.

  19. #239
    Quote Originally Posted by vesseblah View Post
    I can see how you're looking at it all with nostalgia goggles.
    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?

  20. #240
    Quote Originally Posted by vesseblah View Post
    One of the more common whine on this forum is that flying mounts killed world PvP, flying mounts which were introduced in TBC. Which is false since it was the introduction of Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch that killed world PvP during vanilla. People just didn't give a fuck anymore about endless unbalanced corpse running without any rewards.

    That were ridiculously overtuned on launch, and still year after TBC came out you weren't invited into daily heroic group playing class without CC ability. Feral druids, shadowpriests, dps shamans dps warrior etc all excluded.



    Casuals had Karazhan for a year and half, nothing more. Nothing.



    Perhaps the word you were looking for is "broken", not "interesting"?
    Raider in Sunwell? Reroll leatherworking or you're noob.



    TBC introduced arenas which introduced the term "welfare epics". You literally lost 10 games per week and would get free epics for nothing.



    I can see how you're looking at it all with nostalgia goggles.

    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).

    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. BC had Gruul, kara, ogre council, arguably magtheridon, and ZA - MoP gets LFR, which I think even most LFR players will agree, is boring. As for professions, now they exist to give you a *slight* boost to your primary stat (or your best secondary stat) and provide nothing interesting, aside from engineering. 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.

    And yes, TBC brought welfare epics but they did slowly improve on this, putting ratings requirements on gear and overall, arena being introduced itself was a massive deal. Compared to now, you can get elite gear that doesn't have a ratings requirement, and blizz doing very little to stop botters and wintraders (which have always existed, but from my experience, were much much more rare back then, now you see wintraders in trade chat, advertising for it lol).

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

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