http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/4055148?page=1#page-comments

My personal favorite part.

"Look, we tried the talent tree model for seven years. We think it’s fundamentally flawed and unfixable. We know some of you have faith in us that someday we’ll eventually replace all of the boring +5% crit talents with interesting talents and give you 80 talent points that you can spend wherever, and that the game will still remain relatively balanced and fun. We greatly appreciate your faith, but we fear it is misplaced. It’s not a matter of coming up with enough fun mechanics, which is challenging but ultimately doable. The problem is the extreme number of combinations. When you have such a gigantic matrix, the chances of having unbeatable synergies, or combinations of talents that just don’t work together is really high. That’s not lazy design. That is recognizing how math works."

In other words

"We can't do what Trion has done with Rift, because we're bad"

Trions design philosophy consists of throwing a billion choices at you, and if something is overpowered, throw in a counter somewhere and watch people take advantage of it, and if that doesn't work, just Nerf it, you have a Billion other things to choose from.

Blizzard designs philosophy consists of "It's to hard... lets do something else"

 

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What a douchebag.

 

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This is why I can't stand GC, and why I think bliz upper managment is failing (because they let him continue to be employed).

WoW has lost ONLY 10% of subs after 7 years. That's insane. That is ridiculous growth and retention. It means you're doing something right.

So instead of sticking with what works, they mutilate core systems (10% loss there) and when that fails, they decide to go even further with it (I hope they lose another 10-20% over kung fu panda with coloring book talents).

WOTLK was good. Cata is a rehash of WOTLK - same exact content setup, same rep grinds, same emblem revamp garbage. They massacred the talents and tanking with cata for lack of anything new or interesting. They're doing the same thing with kung fu panda - same repetitive content, massacre talents even more for lack of adding anything new or fresh.

I'm glad I bailed WoW when I did and can't see myself ever returning. Cata ruined WoW for me and the Firelands patch sealed it. I said then the only way I'd even consider returng was if they did something extraordinary in the next xpac. Instead it'll be cata part 2 with pandas. MMORPG playing children, rejoice, you can play WoW as your stuffed animal now.

 

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*Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft. He role-plays a Fury warrior who has taken too many blows to the head.

 

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I don't think Ghostcrawler knows one Mod Edit: Profanity thing about how math works.

(I know Dums is going to ban me for this, but there just isn't any other way to say it.)


Let's watch the profanity, please.

 

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Personally I find that the old system with +1% crit and such choices works better when you have more levels. I don't want my only choice in an entire week's worth of gameplay to be +1 crit, but if I get to make 10 choices in a week, I'll gladly blow some on stat boosts.

 

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I can't figure out where the disconnect is. Since when did people stop liking the talent spec meta-game? What I heard was, "We can't balance talents so we're not even gonna try anymore." You'd think they could just stick with what worked and fix any unintended exploits. Elemental shammies like their class and spec? Then leave it alone. Melee shammies feeling generally gimped? Then figure something out for that one spec. Why they felt like they had to take a perfectly happy class and spec (ret/prot paladins) and make them into holy rogues is an example of something that makes no damn sense to me.

I guess iterative development isn't something they're capable of when it comes to class design.


Makes you wonder, though: how many people would character transfer to a new server type that had 3.3 talents/mechanics/1-80 content but the new Cata 80-85 zones and 81-85 talent additions.

 

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What I got was what we want is beyond their skill level. Not exactly something I would admit.

 

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What this really says is that since we are still trying to make WOW into a super huge E-Sport. It hasnt caught on for years but this time dammit we will get it!

 

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