Why are blues dodging the Healing forum?

Q u o t e:
Some Paladins responded poor and nonconstructive responses. I blame them as little for that as I blame GC for abandoning communication.

I didn't abandon the forums. I've just been busy. I still read them every chance I get.

When I don't respond, it's sometimes because I am just seeing the same discussions over and over, and sometimes because there's just too much yelling (loved the "GC popping in briefly to provide some made-up numbers on healing and him asking about ToL. Neither of which really amounted to feedback so much as it did amount to GC looking for justification for upcoming pre-planned changes" from above).

But sometimes I'm just busy. :)

Q u o t e:
When your audience consists of millions of people, its inevitable that you will find someone smarter than yourself.

Goodness. I don't pretend for a moment to be smarter than every WoW player, and certainly not all of them put together. That's a pretty tall order. :) But players heading down that trail are usually ending up at the place where they conclude the community should decide how to design WoW and the developers are just the implementers. That's not how we work, though we definitely, definitely listen to our players.

Q u o t e:
I doubt GC is thinking "yeah let's punish paladins for posting" - he's just trying to wade through hundreds of threads to get to the good points... good points that keep getting obscured by all the spam.

:)

Q u o t e:
Exactly. We're they're customers. There are fundamental basics of customer service that Blizzard fails miserably on:
1. You must communicate with your customers.
2. Don't make promises unless you will keep them.
3. Listen to your customers.
4. Deal with complaints.
5. Train staff to ALWAYS be helpful, courteous, and knowledgeable.

I think we communicate pretty well, though I am certain there are always ways to improve. Understand that a few dozen people communicating to a few million people is not going to feel like a normal water-cooler-style conversation though. The fact that some of these forum discussions at all even approach one on one -- that I recognize the names of people who keep posting smart things -- I think is a triumph.

We are very, very careful not to make promises. But because we don't, the community tends to then define any remote hint of something as a promise. :(

We listen to our customers. I think we even deal with complaints a lot. Now, it's not my job to deal individually with every player who has a concern. We do have customer service avenues, but this forum is not one of them. Instead, it is for players to have a place to provide feedback on class mechanics and balance. It is not a venue for airing of greivances (though some players very clearly wish it was).

I try to be pretty courteous, certainly in comparison to players who feel as if they have the right to say anything they want. But again, I'm not a customer service rep. These role forums aren't the kiddie pool and we expect a little more of players who choose to post here. There are going to be debates, sometimes heated ones. That's not an invitation to insult people with whom you disagree. But the water's deep and you need to know how to swim.

Q u o t e:
There is a forum for customer feedback from Blizzard.

GC has blatantly said "don't fish for blue responses, don't expect blue responses, don't take patch notes for anything more than a grain of salt"

Posting here doesn't guarantee you inner-circle advanced information about upcoming patch notes.

It isn't even supposed to be about helping *us*.

It is supposed to be about helping *him*.

Quoting Snowfox. Again. :)

I know, I know. It's shocking that we would agree with players who try to see our point of view.

Q u o t e:

I think you need to take a fresh look at several of the very constructive and informative posts by Paladins here. There are some VERY good threads in this forum that are very well written and thought out, discussing the 3.2 changes in great detail with extensive research and comparisons between the 5 healing classes.

They also happen to completely debunk everything that GC had said with accurate numbers generated from many "real world" parses. I have a feeling that is the cause for the silence. I've seen a lot of classes deal with a lot of stupid nerfs, but I've yet to see a case where it's as cut and dry as "here's the numbers the community has concluded after extensive analysis, your numbers are not only wrong, but are off by more than 50%".

Even the best threads can't expect a blue response. If that is the world that we have created here, then I agree that the role forums have set up unrealistic expectations.

We're also not going to balance around your numbers. Ever. Sorry. We appreciate when you post them, because they can help us to understand why players respond to a particular decision the way they do. They serve as reality checks for our numbers. They are quite helpful. But at the end of the day, we're not turning over game balance to the community. That isn't our decision process. It's not a design process that I have seen work very well. Blizzard has a design process on the other hand that has done pretty well over the years. It's not foolproof. But it's not bad.

In before "I can't believe he posted and didn't address all of our healing concerns!"

Q u o t e:

If you don't balance by our numbers and you only give made up numbers when talking about things, how are we to understand why changes are happening? This, above all, is why most people here get frustrated IMHO.

We try to tell you why changes are happening when they don't seem obvious. But that's not really the issue, IMO. The issue is that sometimes the community wants us to prove that the changes are justified. When we provide theoretical numbers, they want to challenge the numbers. In short, they want to put themselves in the position of power and the developers in the role of asking permission to make changes to the game. We just aren't interested in working that way. We are interested in your feedback. We're not interested in debating every change we make to WoW. I hope the distinction is clear.

It's probably inevitable to some extent that you get frustrated when we don't see eye to eye. I think that's natural. But you shouldn't get frustrated when we haven't convinced you that a change is warranted, because that is putting a very high burden on us, not the least of which because there are so very many of you and you often have different opinions and visions for how the game should work.

Q u o t e:
What a lot of people want is just more clear and consistent reasoning behind major changes made to the class. Or they would like to know what a certain change is meant to achieve, and what plans there are for the classes in the future to rectify problems that are not being addressed in a current patch's notes.

I do try to answer those. If there is something you feel isn't being answered, please feel free to ask. But also please understand the difference between these two questions:

1) Why did the developers nerf Illumination?
2) Why did the developers nerf Illumination even though the community has proven time and time again that the nerf is too severe and you guys haven't offered anything in your defense that would make us think the changes are warranted?

The first question is a legitimate attempt to understand where we're going with something. The second is someone wanting to pick a fight or try to talk us out of a change. A lot of players think they're asking the first question when either blatantly or subconsciously, they're going for the second.

EDIT: Odes said it above succinctly: People don't want clarity, they want agreement.

Q u o t e:
What's wrong with trying to talk you out of a change if we don't feel it's deserved or necessary? Especially if we're giving you a lot of really concrete numbers to look at, the community is spending a lot of time trying to present the facts here, Ghost. We're not trying to pick a fight, we're just in the dark here on this whole thing.

I totally respect and understand that you feel like banging your head against a wall here, but you need to understand that we do also.

There's nothing wrong with trying to talk us out of a change. My point was that when it comes to "We aren't getting any developer face time" concerns, I try to prioritize those issues where players seem to not understand the design intent over players who want to argue or debate something (even if they do so civilly). If you want to campaign to get a change reverted, by all means go for it. Just don't get frustrated if I can't come into the thread over and over to pick apart your points. I will try and read them, and even at times when I cannot, someone at Blizzard will.

Q u o t e:
Also, a lot of the really aggressive posts on this forum stem from just how slowly class changes are put out. It's completely understandable that you want a certain level and quality for any given change to a class. The problem is that a lot of players feel that if their "issue" is not handled right now then they will have to wait several months or more for another chance to have their issue looked at again, and there is no guarantee that that will even happen. This is the cause of the very frantic and "spamming" nature of a lot of player's posts.

The solution? More, smaller patches with more flexibility to make class changes. Easier said than done, yes, I know.

There is a lot of merit to this and it's something we'd like to improve. However, I will also add that when I started this gig, I assumed that the faster we could get changes out the better. Not every change would be the right one of course, but at least players would see us doing something instead of just sitting passively by. I have come to back off of that stance just a little for the reason that many players feel overwhelmed by constant change every patch. You can be cynical and say that's only the overpowered classes who want to be OP just a little longer. But I comment constantly that player whiplash appears to be a very real phenomenon.

That doesn't mean you never make changes (the community likes to jump from one extreme to the other when arguing their case). But it does mean you need to keep in mind that for at least some population of our players rapid change isn't always desirable.

Q u o t e:
Alas when they put out too many changes, players complain about the game changing too fast. When they don't put out enough changes, the game moves too slow.

The only compromise here is to put out the "right" changes at the "right" times. And no two people will ever agree on what those changes and times are.

Quoting Angua. Of course that still doesn't mean the right solution is just to give up either.

Q u o t e:
It promotes more of this kind of junk. If you want the healing forums to be a place where we players discuss things with each other instead of a place where we constantly beg for blue, I think you're approaching this the wrong way. Sparring with players that don't like your design decisions will simply promote more of the same. This is a well-known principle of trolling.

I understand what you're saying and of course I generally agree with it. However, in addition to my day job I also have a vested interest in keeping these role forums going (because they help me do my day job). If players are legitimately feeling neglected, I can probably afford the time to post "We still care about you. We still read your feedback. We aren't done with the forums." I'm not actually discussing paladin regen issues or any other healing-specific topic here. I'm more trying to keep the forums a happy place. Like I said: it's a secondary concern to class design, but still a concern.

Q u o t e:
Actually classic had class reviews. There was normally one class that got a lot of changes and the rest got very few. The advantages were that it was easier to see how the changes would affect the class and you didn't fell like you were playing a different character every time a new patch came out.

The disadvantages were:

First, that if an important issue didn't get addressed, you were going to be waiting a long time before your turn came up again.

Second, the developers felt obligated to change some things for the sake of change just because the community of that particular class would take it badly if they didn't get buffed after they saw everyone else get buffed.

Some amount of change to every class is probably good for the game. However, we also think there are some classes that are working much closer to how we want them to work than are others. (If you want to know which ones, the patch notes give you a good idea, though we can't make every change we want to make at a given moment in time.)

Q u o t e:
1) Numbers we can't see really annoy me. This might just be my personality, and maybe you should just tell me to get over it. But honestly, when you do decided to counter a poster's argument, it's not exactly fair to do so with information you can't share with us.

To us, it's the equivalent of going into a nice restaurant and telling the waiter that you can't appreciate the food unless you can see the secret recipe for everything and perhaps even debate with the chef about which spices are used. Instead, I would encourage you to adopt the strategy of commenting on how the food tastes. Do you like it? It's okay to say it's too salty or too dry or whatever. That's different from wanting to see the recipe so you can correct it.

Now, unlike my cute little analogy, WoW uses a language of numbers and it's okay to reference them. But when we talk about our numbers, the debate shifts to trying to find flaws in our numbers instead of focusing on the game design, which is what we're really here to discuss.

The other side of that is we don't want to tell you how to play. We want you to get out in the game and make it your own. We'll let you know when we think you're trying to do something that breaks the rules, and you are welcome to tell us when stuff doesn't feel quite right. But I think the day we say "Mages are designed to do 4500 dps in X gear, and here's how you do it" then the game loses something.

Q u o t e:
2) There have been times when individual topics wind up getting discussed over and over again, but without feedback from you or another dev, the conversations wind up going nowhere. If you want an example, look at the 20+ pages of comments on the Penance nerf thread.

I understand that POV, but really in my experience if people disagree with something they will keep at it. I think my posting in long threads often just makes them longer. Instead I just try and adopt the strategy of not stressing too much about where I post. I would not try and convert length of a thread into any kind of indicator of anything. There are long threads on trivial subjects and short threads on very important subjects. There are threads warning of dire consequences that never manifest themselves. There are a lot of threads that get rolling if a few eloquent or passionate yet misinformed players start handing out pitchforks and torches.

Q u o t e:
These situations seem to crop up a lot. Personally, I'd appreciate it if you just let us know flat out that you disagree with the community, and you're not going to be doing X or changing Y. Just a simple "No" so we can end the conversations and move on.

That works for some players, but it doesn't work for all (many?) of them. Not everyone will move on. Some players want to understandably debate something if they disagree with us, or they want to try and understand why we feel the way we do, or test the limits of where we feel our design decision applies. There is nothing wrong with any of that, except that it takes a lot of our time to explain.

The opposite response can get us in trouble too. If we say yes, we agree and that's something we want to change, then players can get incensed pretty quickly if the change doesn't happen right away. Thus saying we disagree can cause flame wars, and saying we agree but aren't ready to change anything can cause flame wars. Really the only thing we can say that won't launch a thousand threads is "We are buffing you next patch." I'm not saying that to be clever -- I really think there is a lot of truth there. You may not get bent out of shape, but someone will.

I know it can be frustrating, but we have to communicate in this forum to all the players, not just the ones that can handle intelligent debate. I'm not talking about the jerks who get permabanned -- good riddance to them. I'm talking about players who might get upset about something, but either eventually get over it or come to realize maybe it wasn't worth getting that upset about in the first place. One of the nice things about the LK beta forums was we had a smaller pool of people who could post. Everyone could read the comments, but we had a much tighter reign on who could actually post.

Q u o t e:
But what about when it becomes a pure problem of numbers and not game design? I'm personally under the impression that many parts of WoW healing are designed nearly as good as they can be- but the numbers are just horribly off, so in the process it can produce a skewed view of things. Like your old analogy of how DKs and Rets are so popular, that only classes that counter them really do well at all in a certain season, thusly skewing everything else.

If you think the numbers are off, then do just what you did and tell us that. That's still different from us having to convince the community that our numbers are correct. We just aren't going to get community buy off on the decisions we make. We do however welcome your feedback on them. There's a difference there that must be difficult to communicate, because I make posts like this about once a month or so. :) I'll hit on the right verbiage to express it eventually.