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

[Johnkie]

this man should be fired, he has done poor on poor decision regarding pvp balance. First of all he scrapped the at the time current talent system 6 months before release. (can not recall if it was cata or mop). But the entire system was remodelled. And at that time he was spending ALOT OF TIME on forums "defending" himself. When he was notioned by blizzard to spend more time on wow, he scrapped the entire talent model VERY shortly after... Connection? mby, mby not.
I dont like him, but he might not be responsible for the changes made. Imo Activision is responsible for the current state of wow.
Wow is boring, dumbed down, catered to casual gameplay.
Nothing is intelligent or rewarding in this game anymore.
Thats my 2 cents on it, im sure alot disagree. But i dont care rly ^^
(u never wondered why so many r1 / endgame arena players quit in/b4 cata?...
Imho cata and mop is very very similiar skill-wise.

ps. Probably weird to use the word skill in conjunction with mop / cata
HOHOHOOHOHOHOHOHOHOOHOHOHO

Last edit, didnt they remove the original development team sometime during wotlk? To Titan... Leaving only like GC left (as main developers)

[Celista]

And haters act as if the consequences of GC's actions are as dire to players as losing the ALAMO was. This is only a game, and GC is only human. If you fire someone every time they make a mistake you'll always have someone who has never made mistakes to learn from.

That's not how business works, you don't pat them on the back and say "oh well, you'll get it right next time" after they have lost a company hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

I do agree with people who say that GC isn't at fault for a variety of things he is blamed for. It's hard to pinpoint who is making the bad decisions, but it is more than just one person.

[Vermicious]

This is a really silly thread. Do people actually think HE DOES ALL THIS BY HIMSELF? No... he's just the 'front' man who we all see, I doubt he makes any decisions purely himself.

[Thimagryn]

That's not how business works, you don't pat them on the back and say "oh well, you'll get it right next time" after they have lost a company hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

I do agree with people who say that GC isn't at fault for a variety of things he is blamed for. It's hard to pinpoint who is making the bad decisions, but it is more than just one person.

Cept losing players isn't necessarily a developer's fault. You can't stop progress and competition, and the blame isn't always the creator's fault, especially if the game is being made better than it was in the past.

How can you stop players migrating to MMO's? How do you stop people from playing Free-to-play games while still maintaining a 7+ million playerbase? No other video game company has dealt with situations involving huge numbers like these, using a business model that has worked in favour of WoW and caused the downfall of the competition. Who are you going to get to replace these people?

[Redmage]

I could see them moving him to another project. Fired? nah.

[Ronduwil]

That's not how business works, you don't pat them on the back and say "oh well, you'll get it right next time" after they have lost a company hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Which only reinforces the fact that GC is not responsible for losing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. If Blizzard's executives honestly thought he was at fault for that, he would be gone. If anyone were to get blame, it's Blizzard's marketing department for not correctly interpreting future trends. However, the MMO genre in general is on the decline, so I'm not sure there was anything marketing could have done, short of setting a plan to end-of-life WoW and coming up with the next big thing. Blizzard was known for the Warcraft and Starcraft RTS games as well as for Diablo long before WoW was even in the picture. However, 7.7 million subscribers is nothing to sneeze at. WoW is still making money hand over fist. If SWTOR had managed to snag 8 million subscribers then maybe we could say that Blizzard dropped the WoW ball. Seeing as how at last count Aion was the number 2 MMO, clocking in at a distant 2 million subscribers, I'd call the fact that WoW is still on top after 10 years a success.

- - - Updated - - -

When he was notioned by blizzard to spend more time on wow, he scrapped the entire talent model VERY shortly after... Connection? mby, mby not.

The talent system was great back in the days when players would experiment on their own to come up with decent builds. However, we made it obsolete. We created simulators to automatically determine which talents boosted damage the most. Once we had that set of talents down we built more simulators to determine the optimal skill order. Then we took it even further and built sites that publicized the results of these simulations in an easily digestible format. Then, many of those players who were too lazy to come up with their own builds started giving players with original builds a hard time, calling them names like "noobs" and "bads" because they actually had the gall to experiment on their own. But that's not how the min-maxers saw it: those players weren't having fun with the game by experimenting with talents; they were slowing down everyone's speed runs (is there any other kind of run?).

That's why the talent system had to go. It was no longer a source of fun. It was a source of anguish for the min-maxers who were frustrated about having to play with original players, and it was frustrating for the original players who caught no end of flack for daring to deviate from the established optimum. So don't blame GC for that. If you want to blame anyone, blame the community at large for forgetting that WoW is a game and that games are supposed to be fun. Blame all those speed runners who can't think of anything but getting as much gear as they can as quickly as possible. Blame all those raiders who insist that content be tuned to a level that mandates optimal builds. There's nothing hard or clever about going to noxxic, wowpopular, or elitist jerks and copying their build onto your character.

TL;DR - It was time for the old talent system to go, GC or no GC.

[Galluccio]

77 percent for gc. Can you imagine if a presidential candidate got 77 percent?

[Deleted]

I think naturally that because Ghostcrawler is so high up in the chain of command, a lot of pressure and responsibility bores down upon him. Considering the quality of WoW hasn't vanished and you could argue that it's improved, he's done a pretty awesome job.

I feel sorry for him though, virtually any change that comes with a patch of hitfix seems to stir a turmoil within the player base which he in some way has to endure, resolve or confront. Kudos to him.

[apepi]

No, if he would have lost his job, he would have already lost it by now.

[kenshinag]

I don't think he will lose his job and I don't think he needs to. This expac was the most risk they've ever taken and I think it worked out.

[LordBalkoth]

Ghostcrawler is the biggest fucking idiot at Blizzard. His narcissism never fades no matter how many times he is wrong. I don't like when people rewrite history and make it as if WoW's precipitous decline in subs was inevitable. It was far from inevitable. People left Cataclysm and MOP for different reasons. Those of you who remember the bleeding with cata started when the powers that be determined that dungeons in wrath were too easy and decided to fill cata dungeons with one shot mechanics. The outcome was queues of 1hr+ that ended up disbanding because someone could not avoid a one shot mechanic. Blizzard also changed healing styles from Wrath substantially which made healers mad at that time too. GC in his infinite wisdom decided to post "dungeons are supposed to be hard" http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2053469#blog (GC's greatness on full display for those who want to travel down memory lane). That is when serious diving in subs began. Unification of 10 and 25 brackets was the right thing to do but executed horribly in Cata. 10 man normals were too hard for people who were used to going far in ICC @30% on normal. The end result was that casuals really had no content for them. Dungeons were horrible and raids were inaccessible. Mediocre players had their faces rubbed "in it" when it came to illustrating their poor play. One of the many reasons WOTLK was the pinnacle of WoW experience was that everyone had content for them. People who were bad could still go into ICC @30% and take out a few bosses, those who wanted heroic challenges killed LK on 25 heroic before the buff got to 30%. Everyone could have fun without being insulted. Cata started off on the wrong foot big time. It took desperate measures (Annual pass and Scroll of Resurrection) to prevent an absolute collapse in subscriptions. Blizzard saw the issues and decided to make an expansion about an April fool's joke. A Seinfeld expansion, an expansion about nothing.

MOP brought about completely different problems. Blizzard saw the light and decided to make heroic dungeons once again accessible. LFR continued from Dragon Soul was intended to let people see content without doing anything really. GC in his infinite wisdom decided to nuke talent trees. He also thought that reputations were being achieved too fast and that instead of a tried and true system of tabards, people would gain rep through dailies only(real exciting). There was nothing wrong with the tabard system. Reputations are simply a nuisance to most people and should be disposed of in short order. GC's stupid way had to be changed and he implemented a system whereby a character at a certain level could purchase a book and accelerate reputation gains on all characters on the account for that particular faction. Subsequently even that proved to be inadequate and people could gain rep from dungeons/scenarios in a limited way. GC could have simply kept the old system but it was too complex for him to leave something that was obviously working intact.

The most fundamental reason why MOP is bleeding subscribers is that Blizzard is desperately trying to provide as little real content as possible. There have not been a single new dungeon since launch of MOP. The emphasis is on daillies(and more dailies), scenarios, heroic scenarios, challenges, brawler's guild, pet battles, proving grounds instead of dungeons. Blizzard is doing everything it can to not provide more dungeons because they take valuable developer time. Problem is, Blizzard is making its cash cow approach to WoW way too obvious and people resent that. So if you take an expansion with a lame lore direction, over reliance on dailies for everything and least amount of dungeons ever, you can see where MOP is falling short.

[rebecca191]

Healing was more boring before Cata revamps, so GC was right on that. At least for priest and shaman classes that I have experience of. Simply disagreeing with him isn't valid reason for anybody to get fired.

It's why I don't like him personally, and why I think he made the game less fun for me. If I could fire him, I would. I don't have the data to say if it's his fault if the game performs worse than Blizzard would like.

MOP brought about completely different problems. Blizzard saw the light and decided to make heroic dungeons once again accessible. LFR continued from Dragon Soul was intended to let people see content without doing anything really. GC in his infinite wisdom decided to nuke talent trees. He also thought that reputations were being achieved too fast and that instead of a tried and true system of tabards, people would gain rep through dailies only(real exciting). There was nothing wrong with the tabard system. Reputations are simply a nuisance to most people and should be disposed of in short order. GC's stupid way had to be changed and he implemented a system whereby a character at a certain level could purchase a book and accelerate reputation gains on all characters on the account for that particular faction. Subsequently even that proved to be inadequate and people could gain rep from dungeons/scenarios in a limited way. GC could have simply kept the old system but it was too complex for him to leave something that was obviously working intact.

I wonder why they never tried the more "middle ground" approach for rep (seen in BC and to a lesser extent vanilla) where you could get rep in dungeons but you had to go to certain zone's dungeons for certain reps (like heroic Hellfire instances for HH/Thrallmar) rather than chain farm the fastest one. If they had to make it more annoying in some way.

[Sierra85]

Ghostcrawler is the biggest fucking idiot at Blizzard. His narcissism never fades no matter how many times he is wrong. I don't like when people rewrite history and make it as if WoW's precipitous decline in subs was inevitable. It was far from inevitable. People left Cataclysm and MOP for different reasons.

Just because you disagree with some of his ideas, reasons and the way he presents himself doesn't make him an idiot. Far from it. He is pretty intelligent. You really think Blizzard would put an idiot in his position? It's a bitch of a job and someone has to do it.

You're entitled to your opinion, as am i, and I think he's a top bloke and i'd like to buy him a beer.

[Meldar]

Ghostcrawler is the biggest fucking idiot at Blizzard...

this describes my views about GC pretty much.

[LordBalkoth]

Just because you disagree with some of his ideas, reasons and the way he presents himself doesn't make him an idiot. Far from it. He is pretty intelligent. You really think Blizzard would put an idiot in his position? It's a bitch of a job and someone has to do it.

You're entitled to your opinion, as am i, and I think he's a top bloke and i'd like to buy him a beer.

Men in much more important positions than lead systems designer were morons throughout history. That is not really an argument to assume that just because a person occupies a post, that person is qualified to occupy that post. When your subscriptions go from all time high of 12,500,000 to 7,700,000 you have to be responsible. Blaming player fatigue is lame and masks the real issue. Cataclysm could have been a lot worse if not for annual pass and scroll of resurrection. Those were desperate measures and allowed Blizzard to stop the bleeding temporarily until MOP arrived. When people got a taste of MOP the bleeding continued and accelerated.

Even as far as player relations go, GC is horrible. His tweets mocking this thread underscore it even more.

[Tharkkun]

Men in much more important positions than lead systems designer were morons throughout history. That is not really an argument to assume that just because a person occupies a post, that person is qualified to occupy that post. When your subscriptions go from all time high of 12,500,000 to 7,700,000 you have to be responsible. Blaming player fatigue is lame and masks the real issue. Cataclysm could have been a lot worse if not for annual pass and scroll of resurrection. Those were desperate measures and allowed Blizzard to stop the bleeding temporarily until MOP arrived. When people got a taste of MOP the bleeding continued and accelerated.

Even as far as player relations go, GC is horrible. His tweets mocking this thread underscore it even more.

I disagree. Class balance is closer than it ever was prior to him joining the development team. He does class and tradeskills and has *input* on other areas. Just like we have input.

If you don't want to be mocked by GC then maybe you shouldn't troll him in a public forum. You get so invested in this game you get the idea that you control how it's developed. Let's see any other game that has more than 1 million paying subscribers. You will find 0. Show me a game with 500k active accounts after 5 years. You will still find 0. We're approaching 9 years will close to 8 million paying subs. There's no prior history to follow on what WoW should or shouldn't do because no one has been at this point.

By gaming standards WoW should have become a ghost town 5+ years ago. Yet we're still here.

[Mawnix]

this describes my views about GC pretty much.

Why.

He hasn't even made half the decisions you probably dislike with the game.

Did you or the guy you're quoting even read the other responses in the thread, or did you just find a need to come into the thread with no actual knowledge on how the development team works and spew unaligned hatred?

[LordBalkoth]

I disagree. Class balance is closer than it ever was prior to him joining the development team. He does class and tradeskills and has *input* on other areas. Just like we have input.

If you don't want to be mocked by GC then maybe you shouldn't troll him in a public forum. You get so invested in this game you get the idea that you control how it's developed. Let's see any other game that has more than 1 million paying subscribers. You will find 0. Show me a game with 500k active accounts after 5 years. You will still find 0. We're approaching 9 years will close to 8 million paying subs. There's no prior history to follow on what WoW should or shouldn't do because no one has been at this point.

By gaming standards WoW should have become a ghost town 5+ years ago. Yet we're still here.

WoW became a great game and industry leader well before GC showed up on the scene. Comparing it to other games is moot. Industry leader should not have collapsing subscriptions it is that simple. Blizzard made other mistakes as well which are beyond GC's control. If I am a new player and want to get started I have to buy Classic+BC+Wotlk Battle Chest and Stack Cata+MOP on top of it. That is for a "9 year old game" as you say. Blizzard resisted merging servers for the longest time and even now is getting ready to do it in its own way. Blizzard never wanted to merge servers not because of any technical problems (numerous other games managed it just fine) but because merging servers would have sent the signal that the game is in trouble. Well the game is in trouble.

N.B I would have never gotten my TLPD in Wrath or Grey Camel in Cata had CRZ's been implemented back then.

[Mawnix]

Men in much more important positions than lead systems designer were morons throughout history. That is not really an argument to assume that just because a person occupies a post, that person is qualified to occupy that post. When your subscriptions go from all time high of 12,500,000 to 7,700,000 you have to be responsible. Blaming player fatigue is lame and masks the real issue. Cataclysm could have been a lot worse if not for annual pass and scroll of resurrection. Those were desperate measures and allowed Blizzard to stop the bleeding temporarily until MOP arrived. When people got a taste of MOP the bleeding continued and accelerated.

Even as far as player relations go, GC is horrible. His tweets mocking this thread underscore it even more.

When the game goes from 12,500,000 it isn't a single man's fault.

It can also not even be any person's fault.

Why do so many of you forget this game is 9 years old?

Look at Everquest. It's not where near as successful as it used to be.

Everything wears down with time. Why is that such a hard fact to accept.

Why do so many people find a need to put a name to their disdain that has no actual aim?

You're just blaming GC because you don't like the game you don't play anymore.

It's not even his fault. If you want the game to be around 1 million subscribers, find someone to take his and the other developer positions.

[theWocky]

Oh well well, not intended sir. My humble apologize. *bow*

He He, it's ok.