Will Blizzard "get it right" in Cataclysm?

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Now generally I've been, and still am, an avid fan of Ghostcrawlers. I love the fact that he posts a lot and agree with most of his view and assessments.

But he and his team are obviously not free of short-comings: What surprises me on a regular basis is how "surprised" Blizzard acts about "unpredictable" developments large parts of the community have seen coming weeks ahead. It almost seems like Blizzard listens to the wrong feedback and they don't even play their own game. I know the WoW community can be a real pain from a developers PoV, and MMO-Champion is surely no exception, but even I know what information (as a passionate gamer, yet outsider) to look for and how to filter through to vast see of pointless QQ. Hell, I don't even need to be playing this game to know what issues there are and what needs to be fixed.

An example was a thread created months back about what was going to be the most OP class in Cataclysm.

Now obviously there were plenty of people pointing fingers to all sorts of classes and issues, some with good reason, some with less. But there was a pretty clear trend pointing towards Mages (and to a lesser extent, Warlocks). Of course this assessment was not made in a scientifically profound way. But then again, it doesn't take a science-degree to figure out that having a Frost-Mage, arguably already one of the most flexible and powerful specs in-game, and adding Mortal-Strike, Time Warp, Curtain of Frost, permanent pet, PvE competitive damage etc. etc. was going to cause some balance issues.

I don't mean to beat on Mages here, as there are other OP classes as well. I'm just trying to point out that the general community knew this was coming 2 months ago. And yet Blizzard is now "hotfixing" what seemingly took them by surprise. There are plenty of other examples to be found as well.

I don't get it.


While I'm still looking forward to Cataclysm a lot, the recent balancing disaster and what it might imply for 4.03, is a little disheartening. I really don't want to see another Season 5 where Blizzard needs 2-3 patches to finally acknowledge and solve the real problem.