#0 - Aug. 25, 2006, 6:07 p.m.
The previous thread (linked below) has hit it's post limit and is dropping off the main page. As I feel this is a well thought out and well written topic I'm reposting the original post in it's entirety in a new thread so further signitures can be added. I realize that technically this violates the forum guidelines against spamming, and only wish for this topic to stay near the top of the boards in either this thread or in the original with it's post count expanded. I also must disclose that I am not the original author of this post, I only wish to keep the post from fading to obscurity before a blue responds to it (not likely considering it sat on page 1 for 300 replies, none of them from blue)
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=79172827&sid=1&pageNo=1
Open Letter to Blizzard PART 1
Blizzard Entertainment:
I have purchased and played Blizzard games for a number of years (Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo) and had always been impressed by the overall quality, attention to detail, and playability of your products. Accordingly, as a mmorpg player, I awaited the release of World of Warcraft with great eagerness. I was not disappointed. The world of Azeroth was large, richly detailed, and for a gaming environment of such size and scope, surprisingly free of bugs; the classes had connection to the Warcraft game line and had diverse and interesting play-styles associated with them. Consequently, I was not at all surprised by the unprecedented success of World of Warcraft.
It is therefore with great disappointment that I am forced to conclude that Blizzard has been a victim of its own success. Having worked in organizations experiencing dramatic growth, I am aware of the tremendous organizational stresses which are generated by a rapid scale up including institutional inertia and resistance to the devolution of decision making authority which must accompany such growth. In this case, however, I believe that Blizzard Entertainment has fallen prey to the most pernicious of the rapid-growth pitfalls, arrogance bordering on outright contempt for its customers.
Such strong language might seem to be merely another emotional response to the changes to the Priest class which have engulfed this forum recently, and while those recent changes have certainly brought some issues into clearer focus, I assure you this is not written in anger or without thoughtful consideration. Rather, this letter is written in response to the gradual accumulation of evidence that, because of its enormous subscriber base, Blizzard Entertainment now views its World of Warcraft customers as no more than grains of sand on the desert floor: collectively significant but individually meaningless.
(Note to Forum Readers: The next four paragraphs may seem off-topic, but I do have a point)
I first became aroused to this suspicion after a friend of mine in Arizona was the victim of a security breach which Blizzard had been aware of for some time. He had over the course of almost two years of fairly regular playing managed to equip his character with a set of tier three epic (purple) gear. He had logged off in the afternoon, and logged back on that evening to find that his account had been hacked and all of his gear, along with the entire contents of his inventory had been stolen. He immediately completed a customer service ticket and attempted to contact a GM. A day after not receiving and response, he attempted to contact Blizzard by telephone. He was told that they would not discuss in-game issues over the telephone and just to wait for an electronic response. By way of comparison, it is worth noting that even those paragons of efficient, customer-friendly service the U.S. Post Office, the NJ Division of Motor Vehicles, and the Internal Revenue Service, will allow one to address problems, in-person, by e-mail, or over the telephone: not so Blizzard Entertainment.
When, some time later (and being unable to participate in raids or level appropriate content in any meaningful way during this time), a response from the GM was finally received, it indicated that although they could confirm his loss, they were “very sorry” but could not restore the lost items and instead sent him a set of level 40’ish green (inferior) gear. The response concluded with a line no one who knows anything about the game could utter with any sincerity, “We hope this experience does not diminish your enjoyment of the game.”
Any definition of respect with which I am familiar, includes, at a minimum, crediting the recipient with a modicum of intelligence and treating that person with some basic level of honesty. Blizzard Entertainment failed outright on both counts. First, Blizzard most certainly COULD restore his lost items, it is clear to anyone familiar with the game, that this was not beyond their power, it was beyond their interest level. While I certainly can understand policies being developed to prevent people from utilizing customer service features to unfairly profit in-game, I do not believe that anyone (including the staff at Blizzard) believes that a US resident (a fact which is easily confirmable from billing information) would spend hundreds of hours accumulating gear for the scanty gold that would be received from selling it to vendors (as this bind on pick-up gear had to be).
Consequently, Blizzard was aware that this was a legitimate loss and that this represented the loss of a substantial portion of the benefit from hundreds of hours of playing World of Warcraft (an activity that Blizzard not only actively encourages, but handsomely profits from). However, when notified of the loss, Blizzard refused to expend any effort to assist their customer, but instead decided to cash the check and tell him, in effect, “too bad.” Even in this brush-off, Blizzard could not summon sufficient respect for a long term customer to discuss the matter honestly; Blizzard in fact COULD have restored the lost items, Blizzard clearly was not “very sorry” or else they WOULD have restored the lost items, and lastly Blizzard could not seriously expect that any player just having lost the end result of two years of effort could not have his “enjoyment of the game” diminished.
Sadly, it is, I believe, this complete lack of respect for individual customers, manifested by a disregard for their individual playing experiences, the failure to credit them with minimal intelligence, and lack of honesty behind motivations and circumstances, that largely informed the decision making process for the most recent changes to the Priest class.
Specifically, regarding Blizzard’s attitude about individual playing experiences, I believe that the Blizzard development team is aware of the altogether pitiful state of Priests in player versus player (PvP) situations and further is aware that this situation has been greatly worsened by a number of recent changes to the game including reductions in damage rates for Priest spells, an exceptionally poor (and poorly thought out) expansion of the Priest talent tree (though retracted, how much thought went into a 41 point shadow heal?), as well as the inclusion of a number of powers granted to other classes, which, while not necessarily aimed at Priests, included them as collateral damage by substantially degrading the utility of Priest abilities (such as unstable affliction, cloak of shadows, etc.). I also believe that these changes, like the changes to prayer of mending and vampiric embrace were made to address perceived imbalances in very specific settings, but because of Blizzard’s disregard for the playing experiences of individual customers, these changes were made without meaningful evaluation of the substantial impact they would have on the affected players in other settings. In this I am referring primarily to PvP in all of its settings (arena, battlegrounds, and in the territories) and while I appreciate that Blizzard has put substantial effort into player versus environment (PvE) content, it cannot simply pretend that the impact on PvP experiences are unimportant when it maintains entire servers dedicated to this pursuit.
Specifically, regarding Blizzard’s failure to credit customers (in this case Priest players) with minimal intelligence, the constant denial of the existence of any substantial problems with the class is simply at odds with even minimal evaluation of the facts and, more to the point, the playing experiences of virtually all of Blizzard’s Priest playing customers. I do not need, in this setting, to fully catalogue the litany of substantial long-term issues such as itemization, spell scaling, near meaningless crowd control, the wide availability of counters to Priest abilities, the absence of a snare/root ability (mind-flay immobilizes the Priest more than the target), staggeringly poorly thought out talent trees, and a DPS build without burst damage which when combined with a Priest’s terrible survivability renders the class completely disadvantaged in PvP. On this point it is sufficient to say that Priests primary function is becoming, and shortly will become, to absorb two seconds of focus fire or ten seconds of a rogue’s attention.
