Should we replace the holinka?

[InfernalDark]

Holinka, the russian crack whore.

[Zervek]

It's always funny to see the keyboard warriors rage on devs. Any of those guys has more brains and actual ability to get things going and stuff done in life that any of you whiners ever will.

It's ironic that you're acting like a keyboard warrior this very moment!

[Deleted]

As someone else in this thread already stated, more updates and fixes have come out since WoD launch BEFORE a major balance patch than almost an entire expansion. In MoP, ele shamans had to wait until 5.2 for any changes to make them less terrible, 6 months after release, only a month into the expansion and they received several major buffs. They can actually do decent damage now, not amazing but decent.

The game is massively more balanced than vanilla, TBC, Wotlk, Cata and MoP launches ever were. How many specs are actually OP? Ret, feral, disc, frost dk, MM? Those are the most common and they aren't so overpowered that they can't be beaten.

To contrast this to MoP: warriors could actually one-shot you, heroic strike hit harder than your maximum HP. Even without this, they could blow up any class in mere seconds with Avatar macros, ferals critting 100k every second from cooldowns, BM stampede ignoring resilience and spirit mend stacking multiple times making hunters unkillable, mage frost bomb burst being absolutely absurd and easy to use, demo warlock chaos wave critting 150k+ usable twice in a row, resto druids being unkillable and warlock instant fear among others.

Point is, every launch is massively imbalanced but even with WoD launch, its much better than MoP or wrath in particular.

Ashran is pretty bad but its still not the entire PvP scene.

[Tyrean]

As someone else in this thread already stated, more updates and fixes have come out since WoD launch BEFORE a major balance patch than almost an entire expansion. In MoP, ele shamans had to wait until 5.2 for any changes to make them less terrible, 6 months after release, only a month into the expansion and they received several major buffs. They can actually do decent damage now, not amazing but decent.

That's one way to look at it. The correct way however is to say that the problems have been pointed out in mass during beta by pretty much everyone with a pulse that played the game. So while they may have made some number changes to prop up terrible specs, they have not been able to do anything meaningful to the terrible design decisions that created the problem in the first place.

Oh and how can you work so hard on a feature, hard sell it to everyone and it fails so badly? (ashran)

Really though, someone at Blizzard just needs to tell people to STFU on twitter, pay some actual PR people to craft messages for the company and interact with the players and stop pretending that the glorified forum mod community managers are anything even close to relevant.

[outz]

i think he should the balance bar is getting further from wow

[Lightup]

It's not about the balance that bother most it his attitude to the community and lack of understanding when it comes to telling us that pvp getting benched for pve also I just don't like how he express himself he just talks about something really irrelevant when they ask him a valid questions like " latter shouldn't be looked at for balance issue of course it should but to some extent example if helf of the latter playing God comp or RLS of course it should be looked at

[Madus]

Only thing what he lil fuckup is Ashran what is not so important at all.
I dont count racial imbalance as fuckup bcs its intended for transfers so they can get $.
And class/spec balance is one of the best of all seasons, there is like most viable specs ever.

[Deleted]

His attitude towards the community needs to change. Blizzard could do with sending him on a few courses to do with human interaction.

And he needs to not be so defensive over something when it's blatantly crap.

If he's responsible for quick balancing hotfixes then that's good. I think he needs time to adjust, rather than the sack.

[Irian]

Oh, gee, I wonder why when he has almost entirely wonderful, teenage / early 20s basement addled faux libertarians screaming at him all day. Clearly someone who would call anyone a "snooty little opinionated bitch" is the perfect judge of character.

PvP has it's issues but they've done significantly more with it this expansion than they ever have any other. If you want a flawless PvP game at all angles, please, feel free to find something that's better suited for it.

The last thing we need is backseat development from this asinine community. The few instances where they do cave to the vocal minority it's almost always a disaster.

Excellent of you to pick out the one quote of that entire sentence without anything else and accept it as a one-sentence statement, because it really wasn't. I could flip it around with the assumptions and say you're a brown-noser and a suck-up but I'm not going to because I generally wait until I see proof of said assholery before insulting and profiling someone, as I did in his case.

I've been supportive of devs in the past that have communicated with their playerbase, not just Ghostcrawler, as I mentioned in that comment. Holinka's attitude and stance in response to players is pretty much unanimously stubborn and borderline challenging when a lot of the complaints are actually legitimate, like how many issues there are with Ashran, how out-of-wack PvP class balance is and how ridiculous the racial bias is. His only real response to this is that it's "Alliance's time to shine". If you read his tweets you can see exactly what I mean.

I defended devs in the past when it seems like they're actually giving a shit. The whole "devil-may-care" attitude and the deflecting and passive-aggression is not going to get him far and if he's going to act like that he very well should just stop tweeting about PvP balance at all and putting himself out there, because he was doing that for a good while and he was fine. There's a difference between accepting that developers deal with rude people and a guy who just flat-out comes off as an ass and it's really hard to argue that he strongly comes off as the latter.

The "vocal minority" has a point when people bring up, as the most recent example, the ridiculous imbalance towards Alliance in PvP and he not only deflects but practically brags about it in another instance.

[Deleted]

Most developers at Blizzard are adult neckbeards with communication difficulties. Just have a look at Tom Chilton,its not just Holinka. They don't run the company by the way,they are not the higher ups who do the thinking. So yea in this sense they are not entirely at fault either but some of the developers and designers give a pretty lame image of Blizzard. They don't have style, they don't even play their own game.

[Deleted]

I clicked yes because it's swag. Kappa

[Deleted]

he and his team are responsible for trashran and the forced participation

so yes

[Deleted]

I Always wondered if they should perhaps outsource certain aspects of the development.

Blizzard is the absolute master in creating a great enviroment and atmosphere. The game world looks great, the artsyle is stylish and unqiue and the music is just superb.
The Lore and stories in WoW are, even though in a bit of a repeating cycle lately, also fun and interesting.

However, when it comes to balance between classes, they never really got to that same high level.
In PvE it's sometimes more forgiving, but in PvP it can be absolutely gameplay destroying to have HUGE imbalance between classes, specs and even factions and races.

[idunnowatdo]

nope. pvp is as balanced as it has ever been. casters and burst has been dailed back as they needed to be.

itt people are mad that they used to be op and now they cant 1 shot people

[Deleted]

Hehe i remember when everyone was happy that he replaced Ghostcrawler. But i knew even then that in the end he will be flamed

[Aggrophobic]

There are alot of things wrong with WoD. PvP is not one of these problems.

[Mormolyce]

Yeah let's fire him because game devs are fired on the basis of angry threads on the forums LOL.

[Terahertz]

Yeah let's fire him because game devs are fired on the basis of angry threads on the forums LOL.

LOL IKR heaven forbid we have a discussion in a forum thread LOL SO WEIRD BBQSAUCE.

Jeez -.-

Yes and No. I don't know Holinka's true position and what he does, however if he's the one in charge of balancing and forced participation mechanics then he should be. I'd also like to know if he actually plays WoW PVP or if all he does is theorycraft.

If anything there should be 2 lead pvp designers. Yes as to prevent one guy from making the final calls. I also think that Holinka is being suppressed however by PvE designers as well as other higher ups. I get the feeling that the PvP department of WoW can't really act on their own.

But yeah, as a public image he's doing an amazingly crap job especially because he knows that he can't argue with many legitimate issues out there.

[KillerKm8]

Think he has big ideas that do not work. Even before ashran and the poor pvp rewards system, there were huge imbalances that were never fixed. I remember for quite a while there, in capture the flag games it was not even possible to catch the f/c mounted. Also just basic common sense if in random bgs, one class gets top dps or healing constantly its op

[Worgar]

no, because there's an entire line behind him full of people even more stupid than him, its the same reason why even Republicans are thankful to obama for not dying. Nobody wants a Biden in the office.