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

[vesseblah]

Plenty of us pointed out that we enjoyed the "mana management" in vanilla or BC but not Cata, and explained why. But you've apparently decided anyone who has been vocal about not liking something in the game is a worthless human being who can do nothing but cry.

Mana management in vanilla and TBC was downranking and healer rotations, none of which were particularily fun or interesting mechanics. It required no skill whatsoever to pick a correct rank spell or if you're healing or wanding to regain mana from spreadsheet or addon for a fight of x minutes long which guaranteed you'll never go OOM even if you press that button on every GCD. No matter how much healers whine or cry to get that back and they loved it would not have made a lick of difference because it was totally unbearable situation from game design point of view and a dead-end evolutionary path.

The idea between Cata's revamp where you had to think which button to press with variable incoming damage patterns worked great first few tiers and actually required some skill from healers, it just turned into mindless spam due to gear scaling later and today is more or less just smart heals, absorptions and raid cooldowns.

You can be sure there's gonna be another big revamp in next expansion too that tries to break the scaling problem, just like talent revamp required few iterations and expansions to get it right.

[Synstir]

it doesn't need to be game-reasons what counts towards someone being succesfull or not.
Blizzard is company and from it's point of view something is utterly wrong at the moment, as since Cata wow is losing subs consistently (except for 1 quarter).
No company will just go on without any change when they are losing their source of income every quarter......

With this I am not saying that GC should loose his job... as he is not alone in developing wow but from blizzard's point of view something has to be done.
During Cata the bleeding stopped when 4.3 hit live..... something was there which caused the losses to stop. After that it started again and except for that 1 quarter, Blizzard is loosing customers each and every quarter.

I know people are saying that the playerbase is too diverse for Blizzard for keeping everyone happy.. but still 12.000.000 million players where playing this game at the same time and enjoying it together..... I think Blizzard needs to find that magic formula again.

I don't know how long they will go on bleeding subs before big decisions are made... but at some point they can't avoid it.
This doesn't mean GC should go... but changes must be made.

[Seefer]

No, what's pushing MoP toward the "failure" bucket is the rate of loss of active accounts. Sure, the game is getting old and everything, but something is really not working well here.

I unsubscribed a couple of days ago, what's not working for me is it's turning into World of Queuecraft, it's like all I do is log on do my LFR (which really isn't enjoyable for me due to the people in it), Heroic Scenario (10 mins tops), log off until raid nights, do my raid and if I do come on between any of that I usually just sit in Shrine bored.

Personally I think between queuing for everything, the streamlining, and making it easy to blow through content has severely damaged the game beyond repair.

[A Dark Knight]

going to have to agree, I love TBC but its over with now so move on

Here here

I dont think/hope not get fired.

Every class nerf, gc hate's us, every class buff, omg gc rerolled

[Cobaltius]

If he has not been let go by now means he is a permanent fixture.

If you think about it, he has absolved himself and his department of any repercussions for their mistakes and placed the burden of dealing with them on the player base with the use of an easy out button called a nerf, he can quite literally do no wrong.

[Ettan]

I really hope he does the decisions taken during the expansion has been increasingly stupid.

[rebecca191]

Mana management in vanilla and TBC was downranking and healer rotations, none of which were particularily fun or interesting mechanics. It required no skill whatsoever to pick a correct rank spell or if you're healing or wanding to regain mana from spreadsheet or addon for a fight of x minutes long which guaranteed you'll never go OOM even if you press that button on every GCD. No matter how much healers whine or cry to get that back and they loved it would not have made a lick of difference because it was totally unbearable situation from game design point of view and a dead-end evolutionary path.

The idea between Cata's revamp where you had to think which button to press with variable incoming damage patterns worked great first few tiers and actually required some skill from healers, it just turned into mindless spam due to gear scaling later and today is more or less just smart heals, absorptions and raid cooldowns.

You can be sure there's gonna be another big revamp in next expansion too that tries to break the scaling problem, just like talent revamp required few iterations and expansions to get it right.

I LOVED downranking and the 5SR as a holy priest. Most fun I ever had healing in this game. WotLK comes in second and Cata comes in dead last.

As for choosing the right spell and variable damage, I never really had that experience in heroic raiding in Cata. There was so much damage that with the exception of a few single target abilities that hit random people in the raid, it was pretty much an AOE healing spamfest and using mana restoring abilities on CD from the start. I used no better spell variety in tier 11 than I did in ICC. Lots of PoH, CoH, PoM, Renew, and a few random single target heals. How much thought is there behind "My mana is low!! AoE heals are expensive! The raid is getting hit with tons of unavoidable AOE!! My choices are then use cheap single target little heals and let raid die or use the effective, expensive AOE heal and hope that I keep them alive long enough the boss dies before I have nothing left"? How is that a more interesting "choice" than downranking or when to take advantage of the 5SR? I can't really think of ANY Cata heroic raid boss where the first option would have been the better choice.

[vesseblah]

I LOVED downranking and the 5SR as a holy priest.

A lot of people liked that, but it was dumb playstyle... Maybe because it was dumb.

You'd play whack-a-mole with raid frames for 2-3 minutes with single downranked Heal, then wand for a minute to regen mana and get back to whack-a-mole. That's not healing, that's sheer boredom. I'm not mainspec healer anymore, but I raided in vanilla and TBC as holy priest, and far prefer what the healing has become. Or rather what it could be without current problem of infinite mana.

[Deleted]

He's completely ran out of new ideas. In Wotlk it was good, in Cata it was already clear that he started to run out of ideas at that point. They need someone with new ideas and perspective.

[rebecca191]

A lot of people liked that, but it was dumb playstyle... Maybe because it was dumb.

You'd play whack-a-mole with raid frames for 2-3 minutes with single downranked Heal, then wand for a minute to regen mana and get back to whack-a-mole. That's not healing, that's sheer boredom. I'm not mainspec healer anymore, but I raided in vanilla and TBC as holy priest, and far prefer what the healing has become. Or rather what it could be without current problem of infinite mana.

Well, it's your opinion that it's dumb, just like it's my opinion that Cata's healing was dumb (can't speak for MoP but I doubt it's any better). Heck, there were more choices/options even with the Wrath model as a holy priest. Cata was still an AOE fest from day 1 in heroic raids. Healer mana was just another enrage timer if that. There was no meaningful "choice" in most encounters.

[zenyatta]

He's made some pretty lousy decisions, but so has EVERYONE who works with the game. Not all the things we hate are his fault, and some of the things we love have been his idea. He's frustrating as shit with class balances, but he can only work with the information he gets from other devs testing/calculating. He doesn't do this all by himself.

[xanzul]

He's completely ran out of new ideas. In Wotlk it was good, in Cata it was already clear that he started to run out of ideas at that point. They need someone with new ideas and perspective.

And pray tell exactly what kind of "ideas" is he supposed to have? A large part of his role in Wow development is all math based and tweaking numbers. There isn't a whole lot of room for creativity.

[Cobaltius]

And pray tell exactly what kind of "ideas" is he supposed to have? A large part of his role in Wow development is all math based and tweaking numbers. There isn't a whole lot of room for creativity.

All of his ideas are based on what make his (Greg Streets) job easier, he has systematically stripped out so much from the game players today that have never played Vanilla would be in shock if they had the chance too and see what they are missing, all the skill choices, the plethora hybrid builds and buffs, even some of the hunter pets had viable unique skill sets.

I wish I had a job where I was hired to be responsible for say, 100 different tasks then just could arbitrarily do away with most of them as I see fit in order to make the job easier for me, end user be dammed.

Here is the big rub; his job is to balance skills sets, he has basically whittled the users choices to six virtually insignificant skills per role which should make balancing child's play now. However even with skills set in cement and most variables removed he still has to nerf stuff, this is a big fat sign that he is someone that should have never ever been given the job in the first place.

[Wildtree]

All of his ideas are based on what make his (Greg Streets) job easier

Can you enlighten us, what exactly HIS ideas are?
I'm curious about such a list.. But make sure you can prove that every single thing you are going to list are HIS ideas and decisions.

[DeathbyFrostBomb73]

This isn't a thread to bash the guy, for better or worse I think he's done a great job. Its just that for the last two expansions the game has been bleeding subs by the millions. Now I know that WoW is aging and people are just not that interested in it anymore but in the world of business all that matters is how much profit you can make for the company. So way I see it, those last two expansions are like poor performance reviews for GC. He seems to be out of touch with the game as of late. The stuff he said about hunter utility I found to be kind of ridiculous and the inclusion of Flex Raiding seems like a cop out for lack of catch-up content. I don't think they would or should flat out fire the guy but I do think its time for someone else to take the lead. Let GC work below this person advising them. I would argue the same thing about Chris Metzen. Seems the guy can't be reasoned with and everything he says goes, lore-wise.


EDIT: I never wrote that he has the sole responsibility of the game therefore sub losses are all his fault. Apparently I wasn't clear enough, what I am trying to say is that he has a leadership position therefore if the game performs badly he is partly to blame. Of course he isn't in charge of everything but the truth is that companies always look at who's in charge whenever they are losing money. Of course this can be applied to Tom Chilton or anybody else in Blizzard. Also he isn't infallible he's adapted a lot of poorly developed ideas into the game over the years which have eventually been either completely removed or broken other aspects of the game.

Why even waste time asking a pointless question???

[tripleh]

You should add in the option of having metzen and kosak to loose there positions.

[Apexis]

This isn't a thread to bash the guy, for better or worse I think he's done a great job. Its just that for the last two expansions the game has been bleeding subs by the millions. Now I know that WoW is aging and people are just not that interested in it anymore but in the world of business all that matters is how much profit you can make for the company. So way I see it, those last two expansions are like poor performance reviews for GC. He seems to be out of touch with the game as of late. The stuff he said about hunter utility I found to be kind of ridiculous and the inclusion of Flex Raiding seems like a cop out for lack of catch-up content. I don't think they would or should flat out fire the guy but I do think its time for someone else to take the lead. Let GC work below this person advising them. I would argue the same thing about Chris Metzen. Seems the guy can't be reasoned with and everything he says goes, lore-wise.
EDIT: I never wrote that he has the sole responsibility of the game therefore sub losses are all his fault. Apparently I wasn't clear enough, what I am trying to say is that he has a leadership position therefore if the game performs badly he is partly to blame. Of course he isn't in charge of everything but the truth is that companies always look at who's in charge whenever they are losing money. Of course this can be applied to Tom Chilton or anybody else in Blizzard. Also he isn't infallible he's adapted a lot of poorly developed ideas into the game over the years which have eventually been either completely removed or broken other aspects of the game.

Personally, started read this garbage about a week ago, I am still wondering why the thread has not been locked at least by now. That said, this is your opinion, nothing more. Blizzard already admitted that Cata was not well received, they spent too much time revamping the leveling zones and not focusing on the endgame, I know, I have read more iterations of this in blue post over the past 6 months or more. As for MoP, they only issue that I really had with this xpac was the gating of VP gear behind rep and dailies. Before the rep tokens even hit, I had completed GL on 6 characters, just to open up SP and AC, burnt out on dailies is putting it mildly. When the farm opened up to sending crops to the factions for rep, I stopped doing dailies on the other four 90's altogether. As far as raiding goes, I stopped raiding after DS, mostly because it get boring blaming and yelling and doing some more blaming and yelling and not actually progressing through a raid tier.

I have done LFR for all of MoP so far; I might tire flex raiding out and see how that goes. I like the LFR feature, but the mentally challenged are taking over and it is no longer much fun, hell even doing the world bosses were fun at first, now not so much mentally challenged found another way to grief others. I am sure that is another of many reasons Blizz decided to gate the world boss with the legendary cloak on Timeless Isle to minimize the impact of those people. The concept, design, and lore for the most part have been every good in this xpac, perfect no, could it have been even better sure, in hindsight pretty much anything could be done better. I also think GC as well as others have stated that would have liked to do things a different way. Time and money are your enemies when it comes to what you can do and not do.

As a final point, not sure what the OP does for a living, but if it’s not in the making and designing of some kind of product then you have some balls asking if someone should be removed from their position, because you, yourself do not like that way the flow of the game has gone over the course of the previous and current xpacs.

edited for formatting.

[ringpriest]

All of his ideas are based on what make his (Greg Streets) job easier, he has systematically stripped out so much from the game players today that have never played Vanilla would be in shock if they had the chance too and see what they are missing, all the skill choices, the plethora hybrid builds and buffs, even some of the hunter pets had viable unique skill sets.

I wish I had a job where I was hired to be responsible for say, 100 different tasks then just could arbitrarily do away with most of them as I see fit in order to make the job easier for me, end user be dammed.

Here is the big rub; his job is to balance skills sets, he has basically whittled the users choices to six virtually insignificant skills per role which should make balancing child's play now. However even with skills set in cement and most variables removed he still has to nerf stuff, this is a big fat sign that he is someone that should have never ever been given the job in the first place.

I think you hit the nail on the head. While Greg Street has been resposible for game design, WoW has gone from being a middling to low complexity mmorpg to a lobby game with large arcade combat element.

[Schroedinger]

WotLK is the peak of Wow. The subs are flowing in, community is alive, people are talking about of Wow even outside the game community. Blizzard decides to start Titan, moves their top people to it. Wow is "stable" they just need someone to maintain the status quo. Second choice people step in, Ghostcrawler is born. One bad decision here, one lazy there. The system starts to crumble, slowly. He takes the praise for the good, blaming the bad on others. Cata comes, the worst of the worst. The bad things from WotLK magnified by the inability to understand basics and to correct mistakes. People start to leave, point fingers. The toxic parts of the community start to spread. More blame is born out of more and more bad decisions, so who to blame? Yes, the community. Casual are excuse, no one is satisfied. Then MoP. Huge market gets closed. Titan is a huge fail. Some original people come back, they try to revert the worst, but Gregism has already took deep roots, community is toxic as never before, balance is a joke. He gets slowly shuffled only to be witty on twitter and forums, but the damage to the system is too high. Maybe next expansion...

On the other hand, from the struggle a fanboy is born. Quantity over quality, broken Blizzard seal of approval is enough for the sheep to give milk. The store, oh the store to spend money for the subs which will never come back. And the milk must flow...

[vesseblah]

I think you hit the nail on the head. While Greg Street has been resposible for game design, WoW has gone from being a middling to low complexity mmorpg to a lobby game with large arcade combat element.

Are people really this slow? GC is not the guy making big decisions, he's several paygrades below the people who are responsible for deciding things like should the game be easier or harder. If you don't believe me, just click the "credits" button in login screen.