| World of Warcraft Discussion General Discussion about anything relating to World of Warcraft and the Warlock's place with in... |
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October 31, 2008, 07:56 PM
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#1 (permalink) |
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Dev Decision Making
Posting here for those interested... Posted by Ghostcrawler We do very extensive testing on all aspects of combat balance. Remember, as a large company we have access to testing capabilities far beyond that of the average player. As developers of the game, we also have access to a large number of tools that we don't make public. I mention Patchwerk a lot because raiders understand that he is a fight where most of the raid takes no damage and there are no adds or movement issues. It is a very straight-forward fight. "Patchwerk" is shorthand for a tank and spank fight. But he is not a test case for every possible encounter in the game, nor do we use him as such. The designers are generally very good at playing a variety of classes. You pretty much have to be to get hired here. We also spend a lot more time with the game than many players are capable of doing, and can look up numbers or gather data that most players have to estimate or guess at. All of this experience probably puts us in the upper percentiles of player skill. Nevertheless, we don't pretend to be the best players in the world in all aspects of WoW, nor do I think that is necessary to do our jobs. We do employ experts on all classes in both PvE and PvP and as a reality check to our own testing, we are also in contact with expert players of the classes throughout the world. We also read this forum and others just to make sure players are experiencing the same thing we're seeing. I think sometimes there is a misperception from players that we read the forums all day and when we see someone saying "X is too good" we nerf it and when "Y is too bad" we buff it. Forum feedback, while very helpful, is but a small percentage of our actual testing paradigm. (So is personal experience of that matter.) We do make mistakes sometimes, whether because of an undetected bug, or players falling into different spell rotations or gear that we predict, or a number of other reasons. But you generally don't need to worry that e.g. we forgot to test say paladins on non-undead targets. Source: WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums - Dev Decision Making
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November 02, 2008, 09:35 PM
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#2 (permalink) |
Status: Newly Registered User
Character Info
Warpy 80 Human Warlock Kul Tiras US PvE Profile: Blizzard Armory Talent Spec: 53/0/18 |
Re: Dev Decision Making
This post actually raises more questions for me: Perhaps I'm being horribly cynical, but why hasn't Blizzard gotten further with user-interface improvements if their alpha-testing team is so amazing? Screenshots I see from bleeding-edge raiders and high-rated PvPers indicate heavily-modified UI's. Does Blizzard allow their alpha-testers to use add-ons? I have a hard time believing that they developed a working threat-meter or boss-timers, then forgot to make them available to their players. And it's unlikely that anyone will be doing optimal raid DPS for most The Burning Crusade encounters without those. I have reason to believe that certain of the beta-testers are some of the best raiders and PvPers in the world. When Blizzard posters ignore or contradict the beta-testers I regard as knowledgeable, I have a hard time taking the Blizzard posters seriously. And as Killzforcake points out right under GC's post, Blizzard has made decisions that proved to be very unbalanced in live, and hasn't always fixed them very promptly. Did testing fail to uncover those problems, or did the designers not listen closely enough to the testers?
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November 02, 2008, 10:39 PM
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#3 (permalink) |
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Character Info
Elricc 80 Human Warlock Nagrand Oceania PvE Guild: The Silver Hand Talent Spec: Destro |
Re: Dev Decision Making
Guys-Rogues are fine & so are warriors-that makes Kalagan & his girlfriend happy,Blizz is making money that keeps Kalagan in a job. What else matters?
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November 03, 2008, 01:56 AM
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#4 (permalink) |
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Character Info
Rleab 70 Warlock US PvE |
Re: Dev Decision Making
Warpy, if the devs and beta are anything like SOE betas and SOE devs then they don't listen. They read the feedback, make the changes without evaluating the feedback and won't change it back unless it creates a horrible imbalance or a lot of complaining...in which case they tend to over nerf it. That is to say, they might not be paying attention to beta testers outside bug reports. I'll cut them some slack on the UI though, not everyone likes the same UI stuff. I love(d) Mazzle and had to have all 50+ add ons it came with. Others prefer bare minimum. Some like different styles. The threat meter and boss timers would be nice if they got them working better than omen/DeadlyBossMods, but I wouldn't consider them vital for anything other than raiding or (debatable) heroics. I think it would be nice if they offered two more variants of the default UI, minimalist and raid set ups. As it stands the default UI drives me crazy for raiding on a DPS or tank class and I would consider unplayable as a healer; I must have all 25 people's names neatly organized so I can monitor health bars better! Last edited by Rleab; November 03, 2008 at 02:02 AM.. |
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November 03, 2008, 02:24 AM
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#5 (permalink) |
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Re: Dev Decision Making
i think the problem we can't grasp is that blizzard looks at a very large sample. there are what 11+ million people playing WoW. just because everyone here are posting that warlocks are doing poorly in all areas isn't really indictive of their sample. even with maths backing it up, at the end of the day blizzard will go back and look at their spreadsheets and their data which is gleaned from servers for EU USA China Russia and whatever other countries i've missed regarding UI, i've think they said before they don't like to implement elements for niche areas. class specific and the likes. i normally level using the default UI and I found it perfectly acceptable. it's only when it comes to raiding where we seemingly require a ton of info that UI modification is needed. |
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November 03, 2008, 04:13 AM
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#6 (permalink) |
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Re: Dev Decision Making
Source: Ghostcrawler in Lack of change - Devs I answer the way you described typically when asked about specific cases, because the truth is that I don't always know the history there. But I can respond in general terms. We've handled class balance adjustments differently over the course of the game. We used to do the big passes where every patch was someone's turn to get overhauled. On the plus side, players really looked forward to these and it did build a lot of excitement. On the down side, we felt like we needed to tweak classes that in our estimate didn't really need a lot of tweaking. It also took so long to get back to the earlier reviewed classes again that new balance problems had crept up. We didn't make a lot of changes during BC. In part the whole concept of Arenas was new to us and we didn't want to suddenly nerf someone massively in the middle of a season. We also changed some specs quite a bit, really getting specs like Prot paladin and Shadow priest into raids for the first time. We knew it would take some time for players to adjust. You always have to be careful making adjustments. Even if we did nothing, the game would change over time because the community would figure out new rotations, new ways to use gear, and new responses in PvP. It's hard sometimes to predict when we really need to intervene or when players will just adapt. I will say that we realize the Arena design, while overall a positive experience, has put class balance under a powerful microscope, and we're not sure that's in the best interest of the game. We also made some pretty dramatic changes to classes as well as combat mechanics, so when problems arise, we do need to be able to respond to them. I do think you will see classes adjusted more frequently than occured in the past. There will be a lot of tweaking shortly after LK ships, but still substantial changes even beyond that. Some will be us responding to the state of the game and some will just be new things we want to try or new solutions to old problems or just things we can finally get around to taking a look at.
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Whether you're a forum expert, newbie or just want a good laugh...
Everyone can learn something from : Posting And You... They're, there, their? Wear, were, where? Test yourself! |
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November 03, 2008, 08:30 AM
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#7 (permalink) |
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Character Info
Xavron 80 Gnome Warlock Moon Guard US RP PvE Guild: Veritas Profile: Blizzard Armory Talent Spec: 53/1/17 |
Re: Dev Decision Making
Interesting admission about having to balance for Arenas as not necessarily being the best thing for WoW in general. What comes to mind with that statement is - if Blizzard thinks that, why are level 80 PvP gear choices requiring arena points? (At least, the last time I heard, they do?) If you think the QQ now about PvP issues is large, what happens at level 80 when everyone who wants good PvP gear has to do arenas against unbalanced opponents? Are we going to see arena PvP made optional again in Wrath a few patches down the road? |
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November 03, 2008, 08:55 AM
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#8 (permalink) | |
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Re: Dev Decision Making
Quote:
The introduction of arena has put so much focus on class balance that the PVE side has been screwed to hell and back. I just hope they figure out a way to Not mess with the PVE side while keeping the bottle in the mouth of the pvp cry babies.
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♪´¨) ¸.·´¸.·*´¨) ¸.·*¨) (¸.·´ (¸.·`¤ Namuh LvL?? Warlock Last edited by Namuh; November 03, 2008 at 08:59 AM.. |
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November 03, 2008, 10:22 AM
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#9 (permalink) |
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Re: Dev Decision Making
I agree Namuh, and it's always interesting/frustrating to see how every thread on the state of warlocks always descends into how we can't beat melee in Arenas/BG's. PVE is the aspect of the game I enjoy most and it always seems that the part of the game I love is being messed with just to accommodate an aspect of the game that is, in many regards, little more than an addon to the original WoW world. I know people enjoy Arena but I always contend that people who really love PVP would go play another game as WoW PVP isn't especially good. Maybe I'm just annoyed because so few of what I consider are the problems with our class are ever addressed by developers. Everything seems to be about our PVP survivability rather than our PVE spell rotations, or (lately) dispell resistance rather than the fact our DPS has been nerfed to the point that heroic geared mages can put out similar DPS to raid geared locks. |
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November 03, 2008, 10:53 AM
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#10 (permalink) |
Status: Darkbinder
Character Info
Aily 80 Human Warlock Doomhammer US PvE Guild: Arisen Profile: Blizzard Armory Talent Spec: 53/1/17 |
Re: Dev Decision Making
They can already give spells different effects based on if they're used against players or mobs. Why can't they just work on making spells that way so that if one class is OP in PvP they can nerf the pvp side of the spells and if OP in PvE nerft the PvE side w/o effecting the pvp side? |
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