Do you trust Ghost Crawler?

[kojinshugi]

I trust GC.. I trust him to ruin the game, atleast.

He nerfs everything and removes the tiny bits that are interresting, under the argument that it doesn't add anything positive to the game.
E.g.
- Removed need for fishing skill

Not GC's job.

- Removed need for moving out of bad stuff (LFR)

GC has nothing to do with content or encounter design, also, no one's forcing you to do LFR.

- Removed unique abilities (Combat res, Bloodlust etc)

They're far too powerful and therefore make druids/shamans mandatory, or else content has to be undertuned.

- Want to remove racials.

Active racials are inherently bad design. They are either imbalanced, or entirely homogenized.

- Thinkig about removeing enchanting/gemming

It was a rhetorical question in response to someone who whined about gear being too complicated.

- Removed ladder progression in raids

Again, GC is not an encounter designer or a content designer. I'm not sure what "ladder progression" even means, but rest assured GC has nothing to do with it.

- Removed hunter pet levelling and warlock demon abilitiy learning tomes

Good fucking riddance.

- Removed Defense stat for tanks

Good fucking riddance.

- Removed Lock Pick skill-up.

It was a horrible grind for a near-useless flavor ability, tuned for a time (Vanilla) where leveling was the majority of the game.

- Keeps ruining PvE in attempt to balance PvP

PvE isn't ruined. While I'm not happy about PvP balance affecting PvE either, what's the answer? Remove PvP?

[Deleted]

1) Assume that the decision was made SOLELY by Greg Street and not a single one of the other class developers (They generally have 3-4 designers per spec. Across 34 specs, ~120 designers)

Hopefully you dont believe in your on words, else I see no hope for humanity.

You have totally no idea how many people work on classes - I dont know either, but you can be very sure that it is NOT "~120" designers, 3-4 for each spec". There's probably 10 people along with Crawler, and anyone is specified into just one class, let alone spec.

[Elegiac]

Again, GC is not an encounter designer or a content designer. I'm not sure what "ladder progression" even means, but rest assured GC has nothing to do with it.

He means having to do lower tier raids in order to do higher tier raids, like back in BC. Ignoring the fact the destruction of this aspect of raiding was a positive, you are correct; GC is not responsible.

PvE isn't ruined. While I'm not happy about PvP balance affecting PvE either, what's the answer? Remove PvP?

Delineate them to a far vaster extent than is done currently. The excuse for not doing this is "We don't want people to have to learn a new rotation/whatever for PvP" - a crock, imo, given that this is exactly what a lot of classes do already.

[Deleted]

I stopped listening to what GC says long time ago. Either he's trying to deceive people on purpose, or he gets overruled in decisions by other people making him irrelevant. Two specific examples that came to mind: 1) he said they wouldn't make bear swipe hit all targets around the bear... not long after they did exactly that. 2) he said LFD style system would not be work for raids... just to introduce exactly that in the next expansion.

[Armourboy]

Do I trust that he is trying to get things right? Yeah sure, even if some of the idea's they have are dumber than dirt.

Do I trust that him and the other Dev's aren't biased in some way about class balance and design and it shows up in the game? Oh hell no. I think its fairly obvious that over the years certain classes have been pet classes at some point or another.

[Elegiac]

Do I trust that he is trying to get things right? Yeah sure, even if some of the idea's they have are dumber than dirt.

Do I trust that him and the other Dev's aren't biased in some way about class balance and design and it shows up in the game? Oh hell no. I think its fairly obvious that over the years certain classes have been pet classes at some point or another.

No, I actually disagree. 'Pet classes' are a myth, the problem is that their seems to be both a severe lack of communication amongst the devs as regards balance as well as a severe lack of mental competence amongst Blizzard's internal testers.

[Deleted]

It's been said many times before, but this is pretty much the gist of every argument people make when calling for his head:
"My class is Rock. Scissors are balanced. Nerf Paper.

This is basicly what it comes down to.

A lot of players think they are right and GC is doing retarded stuff, while in some cases players couldn't be more wrong.

[kojinshugi]

He means having to do lower tier raids in order to do higher tier raids, like back in BC. Ignoring the fact the destruction of this aspect of raiding was a positive, you are correct; GC is not responsible.

The funny thing is that they're returning to this in MoP. No more Wrath/Cata style badge catchup every tier. Tier 14 has attunements (although not for everyone in the entire raid, thankfully).

Delineate them to a far vaster extent than is done currently. The excuse for not doing this is "We don't want people to have to learn a new rotation/whatever for PvP" - a crock, imo, given that this is exactly what a lot of classes do already.

I agree, but I don't think this is GC's decision, but rather Tom Chilton's.

And here I'm speaking out of utter ignorance, but at least I recognize it - I am biased. I want my PvE to be left alone, because I've given up on PvP due to no tri-spec (I need to be fury/prot for PvE and I can't be arsed to respec/rebind every time I want to PvP).

I don't know the data on people's playing habits. I don't know how many people spend equal time in PvP and PvE, I don't know their skill level or retention rate. If I had all this information, I might end up agreeing with Blizzard's decision on this. I might not.

But I do trust GC to make these decisions. Vanilla and BC balance was horrifically bad. Systems design improved a hundred fold from Wrath onward. It's only because GC bothers talking to us that the less bright among the playerbase ascribe every problem with the game to him. He didn't revamp Naxx, he didn't design TOC or the shitty vehicle battlegrounds of Wrath. He didn't decide to keep us in ICC for 12 months or recycle Dragon Soul.

http://www.raidbots.com/dpsbot/Overa...14/60/default/

This is nothing short of amazing compared to Burning Crusade.

---------- Post added 2013-02-04 at 12:28 PM ----------

I stopped listening to what GC says long time ago. Either he's trying to deceive people on purpose, or he gets overruled in decisions by other people making him irrelevant. Two specific examples that came to mind: 1) he said they wouldn't make bear swipe hit all targets around the bear... not long after they did exactly that. 2) he said LFD style system would not be work for raids... just to introduce exactly that in the next expansion.

Or,

1. he tries different solutions, and the best one at the time may end up being one he didn't originally want, like 360 degree swipe or a gazillion TPS icy touch spam.

2. GC doesn't design raids. And LFD most certainly can't be used for raids. The content has to be vastly nerfed and simplified. An entirely new difficulty level has to be designed for every encounter for LFR to be possible. So he was right, and you're just having trouble with moderately difficult concepts.

[GKLeatherCraft]

I trust GC.. I trust him to ruin the game, atleast.

He nerfs everything and removes the tiny bits that are interresting, under the argument that it doesn't add anything positive to the game.
E.g.
- Removed need for fishing skill
- Removed need for moving out of bad stuff (LFR)
- Removed unique abilities (Combat res, Bloodlust etc)
- Want to remove racials.
- Thinkig about removeing enchanting/gemming
- Removed ladder progression in raids
- Removed hunter pet levelling and warlock demon abilitiy learning tomes
- Removed Defense stat for tanks
- Removed Lock Pick skill-up.
- Keeps ruining PvE in attempt to balance PvP

There are probably MANY MORE things but I think most get the picture.
Each of these small things didn't add much, but many grains of sand, makes a desert (or atleast a sand box). Each time GC removes something, he kills the game a little.

Yes because GC himself removed all of those, Noone else was involved, no discussion/research nothing,
Get a grip
Seriously people need to get outside of their special bubbles if they think he alone can change -anything- he can't, everything is a process, it's not down to a single person to remove things
And OT i don't trust him because i don't know him, I trust he will do his job well, or he wouldn't be in the position he's in, and to do what he does and not get stupidly bitter over all these clowns blaming him for everything, that man deserves a medal^^

[Deleted]

1. he tries different solutions, and the best one at the time may end up being one he didn't originally want, like 360 degree swipe or a gazillion TPS icy touch spam.

But he wasn't talking about different solutions. He stated that this is not something they would do, yet it was done anyway. So what is the point of listening to him? Just because he says something today, doesn't mean that they won't do something completely opposite tomorrow. So I won't waste my time reading something that has zero informational value.

2. GC doesn't design raids. And LFD most certainly can't be used for raids. The content has to be vastly nerfed and simplified. An entirely new difficulty level has to be designed for every encounter for LFR to be possible. So he was right, and you're just having trouble with moderately difficult concepts.

He is the lead systems designer, LFR system falls directly within his job description, the content of the raids does not. LFR is precisely LFD for raids, something he specifically stated that would not work. He was right though, LFR does not work and it's one of the worst additions to WoW ever (or best, if you agree with Blizzard's vision of repositioning and dumbing down WoW for the farmville audience).

[Drithien]

I am not quite certain what he means by trusting in him. He is far from the only force in the developing team. Mostly he is referred to since he is next-to-the-only avenue for players to express themselves to the developers kind-of-directly.

Now if we were to attribute all of the work of the developing team to his online persona, as a sort of representative of the entire team: I think that he is quite intelligent, certainly much more than most players would have an easy time understanding and conversing with comfortably. He actually likes to discuss matters instead of throwing tantrums and being all dramatic. And that would be such a challenging attitude for, sadly, most players: 'NOT ALL CAPS TALK?! SRSLY?!/No one liners?!/I can't rightfully rage?!/He is not trying to insult me to prove his point?!/etc.

And I enjoy the insight in his way of thinking. I also approve of a lot of his opinions. The effort to make all specializations viable in both PVE and PVP. The effort to create content for everyone. Trying to fix talents. Trying to make the game approachable no matter how much time one has to play. Making it easier to play with friends regardless of realm.

However, I also look at the facts. What is actually happening: -Talents didn't get fixed. They got 'fixed', like a dog's annoying testicles; from talent trees we went to talent glyphs, for the sake of actual choice, which didn't even come, since almost all choices are actually 'choices' in name only as min-maxing still exists in most cases, and in the rest the choice is irrelevant. Way to sacrifice a staple of role-playing games to come up with... nothing of value.
-Instead of making the buff meta game more interesting with the ascent of 10-man guilds, so that depending on which unique buffs a raid team has there are ever-so-slightly different ways to defeat boss encounters, he just gave the same buffs to more classes.
-Instead of making each class and specialisation more unique, he made them more homogenized.
-Instead of more content as the game got more succesful, it got less. And I am not even talking just about raiding. Vanilla, for example, had two continents, each with tenths of zones to play in, TBC had only seven, and a dailies zone. WOTLK didn't fare much better. Neither did Cataclysm or Mists. How can a game that was expected to cap subscriber numbers at two millions in the best case have so much content, and when the numbers almost literally sky-rocket the content gets cut in less than half of what it was?!
-Instead of making resistant fights more interesting, they scraped them.
-They turned small-group dungeons from vast interesting places, like Blackrock Depths, to small gauntlets that are only there for points. I have pretty much lost all hope of ever seeing a big, complicated dungeon in the game ever again, or a fight like Atiesh in Stratholme. Now it's the place of the herp-derps.
-Is Armour Penetration a hard attribute to balance? Out with it!
-So what if shamans' iconic weapon is the two-handed mace? It's easier for itemization if we lump enhancement shamans with one-handed weapon users, so, there.
Instead of buffing restribution paladins so as to be viable, he turned them to rogues and gave them an army of cds, so that they will be easier to design due to similarities.
And lots of others.

In general, so much has been scrapped, dumbed down, twisted around, or just made stupidly redundant, that there comes the point where I feel it would be better to just let some things be instead of tampering with them, not because they are fine as they are, but because the solutions he will come up with will most likely be of bad quality. I think he has good intentions, and is quite capable, but for some reason he creates such a mess some times. And the worst part is, when he realises it, it's so difficult to reverse the mistakes. I am glad he is not incompetent like a lot of other designers seem to be in that field, but much as I want to see it in him, I just don't see that touch of genius.

[schwarzkopf]

With my house keys, or my money - not at all as I don't know him.

With WoW - course I do. No reason not to.

[Polarthief]

Ghostcrawler has never, and I repeat, never used the word "promise" when discussing classes in any way. Because he does have a degree in communications (as well as his degree in marine biology) and is much smarter than to corner himself with trigger words like promise.

Okay, and when people say X is an issue, and then they don't touch X at ALL, what would you call that?

You call that bullshit.

---------- Post added 2013-02-04 at 07:35 AM ----------

This is basicly what it comes down to.

A lot of players think they are right and GC is doing retarded stuff, while in some cases players couldn't be more wrong.

For PvP, sure. What about for PvE?

I'm annoyed purely from a PvE standpoint for my class, and he agrees there are issues, and doesn't touch any of them.

---------- Post added 2013-02-04 at 07:37 AM ----------

I trust GC.. I trust him to ruin the game, atleast.

He nerfs everything and removes the tiny bits that are interresting, under the argument that it doesn't add anything positive to the game.
E.g.
- Removed need for fishing skill
- Removed need for moving out of bad stuff (LFR)
- Removed unique abilities (Combat res, Bloodlust etc)
- Want to remove racials.
- Thinkig about removeing enchanting/gemming
- Removed ladder progression in raids
- Removed hunter pet levelling and warlock demon abilitiy learning tomes
- Removed Defense stat for tanks
- Removed Lock Pick skill-up.
- Keeps ruining PvE in attempt to balance PvP

There are probably MANY MORE things but I think most get the picture.
Each of these small things didn't add much, but many grains of sand, makes a desert (or atleast a sand box). Each time GC removes something, he kills the game a little.

Wait, you LIKED these things?

[Wishblade]

I trust him to try his best at making the game stay great, along with the rest of the team at Blizzard. And atm the game is at its best imo. Too many whiners blaming that and that person for every little thing. They can do what they want, live with it or shut up! Blizz is doing a good job I feel, that's that.

[Austilias]

PvE isn't ruined. While I'm not happy about PvP balance affecting PvE either, what's the answer? Remove PvP?

Separate effects for spells in PvE/PvP. They've already done it with Hunter's Binding Shot. Not only would it make life much easier in terms of balancing, but it would starkly reduce the probability of a PvP change ruining something or even a class for PvE, and vice versa.

[SodiumChloride]

I can understand why you feel this way, and I can explain why other people feel this way as well.

Blizzard started doing something about 2 years ago that other game developers had not really done. They started documenting everything for the players. They began with the Dev Watercoolers, and continued on to things like the PTR Set Bonus thread that is up now. They share ideas and changes, basically, as they come up with them. Without testing, they do with us what they do when they are just sitting around a table discussing. They trust us enough to say "This is what we are thinking of doing, and this is how we think we might go about it."

Several years ago, this was not the case at all. What we got was a set of patch notes every 6 months when new bosses came out. These things were tested on PTRs for a few months with little to no contact with the players as to how balancing was going to be handled. When the patch came out, we got to see what had changed from our feedback on the PTR.

Now that they spoonfeed the playerbase with every minor change that a class and spec are taking as they take them, it seems like they are much more reckless than before. However, all these changes, Such as "Spell x now does 3% more damage. Wait. Nevermind, it does 4% more damage. No. 5% more damage", happened before -- however, they happened behind closed doors and we didnt see it until it was "Spell x now does 5% more damage."

The speed at which information becomes available to the players now (Whether it be from Threads started by developers or datamined tooltips) has changed the way that balancing and tuning are perceived, even though the actual process of balancing probably hasn't changed very much behind the scenes.

I don't think this is why I feel GC and company is "reckless".

They have a habit of making drastic changes to classes then "ignore" the feedback indicating that the change will be problematic.

In Wrath there were already players QQing a little about Frost Mages' roots, but nothing severe. So what did they do in Cata? Give mages a talent that added a root to CoC a 8 sec CD spell ... What the heck did they think will happen?

In MoP ... Warriors were complained about a ton in beta, yet they still went live being retardedly OPed. Druids, and the return of shifting removing roots and snares. Now we have unpeelable Feral druids ... Seriously what the heck do they need the uptime for? They have DoTs tick for 30k per sec for heaven sakes. There was a reason it was removed in Wrath.

Shockwave ... 20 sec CD, zero build up, 4 sec stun and nearly a 100k damage if it crits. Can you imagine the QQ if Kidney Shot did damage too?
Beast Displacer ... Vanish on a 30 sec CD. I'm speechless ...

Their reply regarding why they did what they did was, "we believed who could balance it" ...

Personally I prefer they don't go live with stuff which they assume they can balance. "Assumption is the mother of all fuck ups."

We aren't paying them $15 a month to beta test their game for them.

[Mission]

Personally I think GC is an attention seeker, in any way possible and thinks he is down and cool with the wow kids.

get rid of GC and wow would be a hell of alot better.

What pisses me off is almost everything is subject GC... he isnt only person involved in wow, wow has so many facets, yet everything is GC this GC that.

He gets far too much praise then he deserves

[vindicatorx]

I agree with his statement that it's not really important if I trust him or not

[Mandible]

Its not a matter of me "trusting" one person, since I know its not just down to one person to make the game function - nomatter how much he has something to say in the end. My limits to trusting "blizzard" with making a proper game instead of just adding stuff is reaching its limits though. Wether thats due to the game getting old, or just the team doing the game I don´t know, but looking storyline aside they just aren´t overly consistent with things and change way too much back and forth so it doesn´t give the impression that they know either what they are doing, or what direction they actually want the game to go in ex. we want lfr so people can see it all - ooh yeah, except all of these things thats suddenly only for the "hard core". I´m fine there is different content with different difficulty level, but BE CONSISTENT.

[Deleted]

How important would it be for you to either trust or don't trust some random guy on the internet you don't even know personally?
I trust him doing his best to make the game as balanced as possible at that time with the tools he has, other than that i dont care, don't know the guy so cant really have an opinion on his credibility.

As mentioned in his own tweet : I'm also not sure if that's important.