Slashdot Mirror
World of Warcraft Interview "Responses"
How much economic monitoring do you do? Both in-game and on the secondary market (eBay)? Have you considered working with an economist (Steven D. Levitt comes to mind, but there are dozens of others as well) to study some of these phenomenon?
Response -
We monitor the economics of the game very closely. We watch the in-game economy on a regular basis and have personnel that monitor game logs every day. When we see irregularities, we take action. This can range from exploring the account further, finding and removing exploits, or even possible suspension and bans. We also look closely at out-of-game transactions involving real-world cash for in-game items. Some of those transactions occur over eBay, some do not. But in many cases, the involved parties are warned or suspended, and some accounts are also banned.
2.) What would you have done differently? by Trespass
It's the biggest MMORPG to date in terms of number of subscribers. It's
easy to guess that you've encountered challenges due to scale that no
other developer has before. Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently, and
when?
Response -
Oh yeah, there were definitely things we wished we could have done differently during the development of World of Warcraft. But we learned from those challenges and used that knowledge to improve the game at every opportunity. All of us at Blizzard strive to study the challenges of development and apply those lessons to our next project. It helps us to refine our development process and make each game better.
3.) Mutiple platforms by Fizzlewhiff
Blizzard is one of the few companies that distribues Windows and Mac
games together on the same media. Going further, WoW allows Windows and
Mac users to play together on the same realms, something which isn't
done in other MMORPGS. What kind of hurdles did you have to overcome to
get both Windows and Mac versions to co-exist and have you had to make
any sacrifices because you were only able to do something on one
platfrom and not both?
Response -
There was never any question that World of Warcraft would be co-developed for Windows and Mac users. Blizzard has always supported the Mac platform; you'll notice that even as far back as Warcraft II and Diablo we were there supporting Apple. However, with World of Warcraft, we wanted to improve that relationship further and shoot for a simultaneous release on both platforms. All of us are thrilled that we succeeded in that respect, and we're sure Mac users are happy as well. Both games are equal in every respect; there weren't any features in one version that didn't make it into the other.
4.) Balance by zaffir
What is the process the dev team goes through for balancing character
classes, items, NPCs, etc.? Seemingly minor changes can have a huge
effect on gameplay, how do you avoid unwanted negative effects on the
overall gameplay experience with each content patch? Also, How much of
an effect does feedback from the community have on this process?
Response -
As you've implied, game balance is a very difficult and challenging thing to achieve. If it were easy, every game would be perfectly balanced. Of course we know that's not the case. Our designers work very hard to try to balance the game and we know that the more feedback we get, the better our odds of achieving that elusive balance. That's why it has always been important to us to hold closed and open beta tests for all our games, a process dating back to Diablo and StarCraft. The feedback of our beta testers has always been invaluable, and that is still the case in World of Warcraft. That's also why we have Public Test Realms and why all our patches go there first: for more testing before we reveal it to the public.
5.) More dynamic universe? by Zarhan
Battlegrounds are a nice feature, but despite them, the World of Azeroth is quite static place. There have been few events - like the orphan week - but nothing big. Are you planning to introduce "events" into the gaming world that would
actually shape it permanently, like in Asheron's call?
Response -
That's something we're looking into. We'd like to enhance our events and create more ongoing ones as well. Children's Week, Darkmoon Faire, and the Stranglethorn Fishing contest are all steps in that direction. Darkmoon Faire, for instance, will continue to be enhanced with new content so that players can keep coming back for new experiences. The Fishing contest is a weekly recurring event that we hope makes the Stranglethorn area more relevant for players. We can't give away too many details for what we have in store, but our goal is to always make the game world feel and act more alive.
6.) Why innovate, if you're just going to stop later? by Mirkon
World of Warcraft was the first MMORPG I gave more than a passing play. Everquest, Asheron's Call, Ultima, SW: Galaxies; none of those interested me, because I saw and read about the endless toil and trouble just to gain numbers on your character stats. WoW was different - I saw the simplicity of Diablo/II in it: easy to play, rich in content, and with a wide world to explore. But then I got to level 60, and all that ended. Now, instead of being able to do most things alone or with a small group of friends, game accomplishments take a full raid of 40 people? You need someone to plan it all out in advance, you need everyone to agree to common rules and to get along with each other; and you need everyone to be coordinated in order to defeat ridiculous enemies. With this, the challenge of the game ceases to be learning techniques and honing skills, and becomes social. The difficulty is not in playing, but in making sure everyone else is playing. Endgame is a different game, and I don't care for it. It's not the game I bought. Rather, it's the games I declined to buy in the past. Friends of mine who played Everquest and Final Fantasy XI are right at home, but I'm decidedly out of place, and don't really want to invest hours, days of my time on goals with exponentially increasing difficulty and exponentially diminishing rewards. The early game is brilliant, and playing it was a joy. Why is that so hard to retain in level 60 play?
Response -
As this question illustrates, the audience for MMORPGs and especially World of Warcraft is very wide and diverse. It is difficult to please all gamers all the time. In fact, some decisions that we make are praised by some players and then criticized by others. It's a difficult balancing act to satisfy so many needs. However, at the same time, we understand that some players just don't have the time or social circle to experience the classic 40-man raids and high-end content of an MMORPG. That's why we created and continue to create more content that can be experienced by casual gamers. Our 10-man PvP Battleground, Warsong Gulch, was a response to this need. It allows smaller groups of people to experience content that is level-neutral and still walk away with great rewards. Arathi Basin, our newest Battleground, is similar in that casual gamers without large social circles can also enjoy playing there and reap great rewards from doing so. Zul'Gurub is an example of non-PvP content that we created for smaller groups of casual players. It is a 20-man raid dungeon that isn't as much of a time commitment as Molten Core or Blackwing Lair. And further in the future, we hope to do some things in Silithus that will enable solo and 5-man groups to still have plenty of fun and questing even after they've hit the level cap.
7.) final decision process? by grungebox
Let me be up front: I don't play any MMORPG's...probably never will. I'm sure WOW is fantastic, but I generally stick to console games. Which sort of leads to my question. How in the world did the decision for a Warcraft MMORPG get made?
Response -
Well, we hope that you'll try out the game. You might be pleasantly surprised. World of Warcraft was designed to be easy and inviting for non-traditional MMORPG players to try. It has an intuitive interface, stylized and familiar settings, and very easy-to-accomplish quests for the casual gamer. As for why we decided to make World of Warcraft in the first place, well, many of us loved playing MMORPGs and we wanted to make one that had all the features we wanted to see and experience ourselves. Since no one else was making the exact MMORPG we wanted to play, we decided to design it ourselves.
8.) What are you doing to curb farming and ebaying? by Amich
I've noticed that "bot"'d characters programmed to do nothing but farm money and items has become a growing problem in WoW. Farming bots can frequently be spotted in the game, and I have evern personally recieved in-game mail spam advertizing mmobay.com . What do you plan to do to curb this issue that is eating away at the economy and atmosphere of your realms?
Response -
We have a zero-tolerance policy against the sale of World of Warcraft items on eBay and similar activities. We investigate such allegations very seriously and those accounts that are indeed guilty of exploits or selling of in-game items for real-world cash suffer disciplinary action within the game. We have various steps we sometimes take in dealing with such issues, but trust us when we say we don't tolerate actions that destroy the economy of the game.
9.) More solo endgame content? by Anonymous Coward
I played WoW since closed beta, and bought it the day it came out. In about 3 months, I made it to level 60. But... then my interest in the game sort of ended. I didn't care about high end raids, or about any PvP content. Elite content was more of a hassle for me than it was fun and exciting. I eventually cancelled my account. So, my question is, are there any plans for more solo content for the endgame? I understand the concept of a MMORPG is to interact with others, but I don't want to have NOTHING to do if I can only play for an hour and want to do something alone.
Response -
We touched on this in the earlier question, but yes, we know that some gamers want more casual content that can be experienced in short periods of time. Many of our quests are designed to be accomplished in short bursts, and that goes from low-level to high-level quests. In future patches, you'll see more casual content that continues along this philosophy.
10.) Developer blogging as done in Linux, MS groups by Sleepy
I loved the Warcraft games so much that I could never play WoW (major time sink! :-) My question is, would your company encourage, allocate time for and generally nudge willing developers to blog? If anyone's worried about bad postings and replies to the blog, a good example to look at is the Microsoft IE7 bloggers. A public blog seems to have influenced Microsoft into fixing IE7 to a degree more than initally planned, which is a Good Thing for many. A theory is their developers wanted to do the right thing, and the blog
helped support that.
Response -
We care deeply about our community and definitely want to keep our World of Warcraft gamers updated, but the development and refinement of our games take first priority. However, we do our best to keep the community up to date with regular updates such as the World of Warcraft "Battle Plan," as well as interviews with various news organizations such as this one. Every company has a different way of reaching out to the community and we feel that the World of Warcraft community site is a great way to keep gamers up to date and informed about every aspect of World of Warcraft. The forums are also a great place for gamers to express their opinions and give feedback about the game.
My pancreas is going to explode from all that sugar! PR people that treat the customers as morons should be unemployed.
Trolling is a art,
That is one bitter Taco.
RTFA again for the best results.
A new web site, an attitude that's more harsh than fawning towards sucky interviewees...
truly the times have changed.
(First post?)
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
This has to be the worst kind of BS a PR department can spud out.
Spot the one response written by a PR flunky...3...2...1...Time's up!
Q: What would you have done differently?
A: ...we learned from those challenges and used that knowledge to improve the game at every opportunity. All of us at Blizzard strive to study the challenges of development and apply those lessons to our next project. It helps us to refine our development process and make each game better.
So...the answer is NOTHING?
Kinda reminds me of something I'd see on G4 instead of Slashdot, but that's what you gotta expect from PR. Way to go, bureaucracy.
Truer words were never spoken. This whole thing is just more of the same: we don't want you talking to the developers, ever.
Can we resubmit these to get it routed to a technical person? Or possibly make requests on the Forums to get the real answers? This is just useless, but exactly what you'd expect out of blizzard. At least on the forums, you sometimes get a real answer of 'yeah, that's a bug, I don't see it getting fixed anytime soon, so stop doing it.'
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
If I submitted a question and after a lot of time read this, well, I'd be quite p'ed off... :-/
Pumbaa! I don't wonder; I know.
This has been a long-standing problem in the WoW community, the "ivory tower" approach (or lack of approach) that the developers have taken to the common gamer.
Compare that to a game like City of Heroes where the developers post on a daily basis.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
I am totally underwhelmed by the evolving storyline WOW is putting out. It would be nice if the entire game had the depth of a 300 page novel but sadly it doesn't. After a string of missions from any of the racial leaders there is a little more than finding an item here or there with a shoddy backstory.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Wow customer != moron? lets not get ahead of ourselves :)
Maybe what they are trying to say is that the important people with important jobs cannot be bothered by silly questions from some very silly people. They are too busy buying servers or something.
Live according to the Categorical Imperative. If the Categorical Imperative tells you not to live by it... ignore it
as an ashtray on a motorcycle. What a shame they could get real answers to some great questions.
This is a paragraph with absolutely no meaning. It's like cotton candy minus the spun sugar, good taste, and positive childhood associations: i.e., stinky carny air.
We care deeply about our community and definitely want to keep our World of Warcraft gamers updated, but the development and refinement of our games take first priority.
This is meaningless, but we have to pretend to care so you will keep giving us money.
However, we do our best to keep the community up to date with regular updates such as the World of Warcraft "Battle Plan," as well as interviews with various news organizations such as this one.
Our marketing drones send marketing blurbs to marketing-friendly news outlets, where they give us free publicity.
Every company has a different way of reaching out to the community and we feel that the World of Warcraft community site is a great way to keep gamers up to date and informed about every aspect of World of Warcraft.
The website is a place we can funnel the people who give us money so they can help each other out and save us on tech support costs.
The forums are also a great place for gamers to express their opinions and give feedback about the game.
Not that we will pay attention to it. But feel free to post away!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Understanding how their responses would be perceived (read: very negatively) is not as important as how their responses would be received by their bosses.
It's the same problem with HR people - they don't care about employees, they care about their bosses.
It's ------ up, basically.
I saw several questions in the last topic about support for GNU/Linux, were they included when you gave them your questions? Or did they simply ignore them?
-- Linux user #369862
Those are great questions, it'd be great to have answers from the real developers. Any chance of that happening? I *assume* someone at Blizzard reads slashdot, they must know these answers are lame and are making them look bad.
The only people who have time to respond to things like this in software development are those who have no meaningful duties. They justify their positions by doing inane crap like this.
What else is to be expected? When you have millions of accounts, you don't care about minor erosion due to poor(or non-existant) customer service/public relations. The game is solid enough to keep most people playing, all they need to do is keep things from being totally unplayable and they'll make a ton of money.
These guys couldn't pass a Turing test. Eliza could do a better job at answering these questions.
Actually, let's try that:
Q: Blizzard is one of the few companies that distribues Windows and Mac games together on the same media. Going further, WoW allows Windows and Mac users to play together on the same realms, something which isn't done in other MMORPGS. What kind of hurdles did you have to overcome to get both Windows and Mac versions to co-exist and have you had to make any sacrifices because you were only able to do something on one platfrom and not both?
A: Is it because distribues windows and mac games together on the same
media going further wow allows windows and mac users to play together
on the same realms something which is not done in other mmorpgs what
kind of hurdles did I have to overcome to get both windows and mac
versions to co exist and have I had to make any sacrifices because I
was only able to do something on one platfrom and not both that you
came to me?
I think Emacs' doctor has a future in PR!
Come on guys, I'd expect this kind of PR slush from Electronic Arts, but Blizzard? You've got a user base that really loves the work you do, and a chance to answer some of thier more technical questions and make them even happier with you and your games, and you just toss it right out the window.
Way to go.
worst. interview. ever.
I thought at first that the story summary was a bit harsh, but it is pretty clear that Marketing neutered the answers and produced a press release instead of an interview. I commend /. for following through with the promise to publish even though the answers were so sycophantic that it made me wince more than once. I guess that's what happens when you have millions of subscribers: you can't say anything even mildly interesting for fear of creating a target for discontent.
Sig under construction since 1998.
What can I say? I'm massively dissapointed. I've been fan of Blizzard, and especially Warcraft franchise, since Warcraft 1... and it more than slightly annoys me to see the company which always seemed to care about its player base visibly more than most other companies suddenly finds it necessary to answer both the most basic and quite intriguiung questions related to their best-selling game with a load of cookie-cut, soulless and rather empty phrases instead of honest, insightful answers that'd show us Blizzard still consists of people who -enjoy- creating games.
Yes, I play on WoW. And while the game, in itself, is quite awesome (though not, by any stretch of imagination, flawless or perfect), I am increasingly annoyed and dissapointed by the kind of feedback players receive for Blizzard representatives on all levels of game - from in-game issues and assistance requests sent to GMs, through many querries directed to Bliz Forums CMs, all the way to requests for assistance regarding account and payment issues. I find it hard to believe that any company that reached its current cult status purely through great products it created by listening to its fans and customers can make such a sudden and radical turn for the worse in the ways it communicates with those same fans who helped it grow into what it is now.
{ Durmitor/Hermann, Alliance side of Terenas (US) Server}
'...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons...' Popular Mechanics, 03/49'
Well, Blizzard just sucked it up there. Thanks for "delivering timely information to most accurately convey the concern that Blizzard has for its loyal customers".
http://www.bynarystudio.com
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4272418.stm
I've got one more day to go at my para-corporate job as a Project Manager.
When I've been asked for my opinion, I try to give an answer with some substance to it, something that can be discussed and built on. However, I find that more often than not, people are looking for answers like the ones we see above, where literally NOTHING is being said. It makes me mad that people would rather have nothing said to them but said well than nothing at all.
Anyone care to speculate why Blizzard is so interested in insulating its developers from the public? Is it some sort of fear they will leak secrets? Maybe the PR people are afraid the ravaging hordes will make the devs cry. I guess if I were Blizzard, I wouldn't want my devs spending time replying to comments, I would want them writing the code I told them to write.
"Preceded by itself yields falsehood" preceded by itself yields falsehood.
That was a crap sandwich. It would have been less insulting if they had just not bothered to respond.
"Look! There! Evil, pure and simple from the Eighth Dimension!" --Buckaroo Banzai
To whom did you promise, them, or us?
If us, then you did not print answers. You should have sent the entire interview back and said: "try again".
If them, then *why*? You call your selves journalists. Why give up editoriral control?
I hope you have learned that in the future you should tell all interviewees that you reserve the right to reject tripe and give them a chance to answer again or have the story dropped with a notice as to why. Or simply post it to a "hall of interview shame" section, not the front page, for crying out loud. You had options.
PR people are taught never to use the word problem, except when referring to a competitor's products and services. When your own company has a problem, it's a "challenge," usually one that gives you an "opportunity" to continue to "innovate" or be creative.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
ringbarer writes "News is coming in that the lands of Azeroth have become infected with a deadly plague which the developers never intended to spread. Originating from the new P'R instance, the plague has spread from marektng bot to marketing bot via 'consultants'. Entire teams are being rendered incpable of independent thought and expression, yet players are surprisingly finding this rather predicatable!" From the article: " Some answers have gotten so bad that you can't read them without getting covered in bullcrap (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately drowns in it). GM's even tried quarantining marketing bots in certain areas, but they kept escaping the quarantine and spreading their nonsense."
They *used* to be such a cool company, really cutting the edge in gameplay mechanics even when they lagged behind on graphics. WOW is a great game, with tons of eye candy. Unfortunately, it's a great game by a company that's now owned by some mindless,faceless multinational corporation (Vivendi Universal).
The upside of this is that Rome must fall, and the recent exedous of Blizzard's devs has already started to erode away the machine, in this instance. Witness Guild wars, which had several refugees from the Diablo team on board, there's another new one too that sprang up from a WOW team exedous in the last month.
Vivendi just doesn't get that the players can tell when the people making the games are having fun doing it. I cannot imagine that this kind of 're-routing' can be good for morale among the people who matter at Blizzard, i.e the people responsible for actually CREATING the products.
PR Department, pfft.
That's insulting.
-chitlenz
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
This set of answers sounds like a bot responded to them.
With all the marketing doublespeak and evasion of questions, what was the point of asking anything when all the responses are obfuscated.
This Q&A is as clear as mud.
Fear is the enemy; the one true enemy. {Sun Tzu-The Art of War}
That'd be relevant if a WSG match had run since the patch went live. I haven't seen one on Llane when I've been /whoing, and from what the queue tells me (admitedly in the 20-29 bracket, I just started a month ago and have alt-itis) there hasn't been one period.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
They've got a license to print money, for the time being. It would have been nice to have an answer to my question about what they would have done differently, but I suspect anyone that knows is NDA'ed out the ass.
World of Warcraft was a rare treat for me: It's the first MMORPG I've played, and I got into the industry last year working on a MMORPG that'll be out next year. It's nice to see what works and what doesn't while having some power to make a potentially better game.
I suspect they really wish they could have ramped up for the number of players better and faster. That may be a limit imposed by their suppliers of server and network hardware. Sure, they're the biggest game, but how many players they lost because their realms were overloaded is open to speculation. I suspect their numbers will fade in a year or so, depending on what they can do to keep people interested and what the competition is like.
It's all well and good to insult Blizzard for their czarist relationship with their players, but realize that their are things to learn from them anyhow.
...but also just plain wrong on occasion.
Our 10-man PvP Battleground, Warsong Gulch, was a response to this need. It allows smaller groups of people to experience content that is level-neutral and still walk away with great rewards.
I'm sure that was the original intent for Warsong Gulch. The sad truth is that the people most likely to take full advantage of WSG are, again, people in large guilds who get together 10-man teams and farm it for honor and rep.
Ironically, the 40-man Alterac Valley can be a better option for the casual solo gamer to PvP for an hour and walk away with anything other than a bitter taste in their mouth.
I'd be shocked if any "official" response from Blizzard ever touched on anything like this...
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
and I feel like I won the prize for best use of time on slashdot
these responses are scheduled to be fixed in the patch next tuesday morning.
i could live a little longer in this prison
But how do you combat such things?
In this case it is easy, share the link to this interview with others. Post it in other forums while bad mouthing the kiss ass, watered down drivel that we see. Once enough mindshare is reached the PR flunkies must then answer to someone above them who sees a PR failure because of the negative attention. Then those ever so smart PR guys will flip into damage control and give you the answers from the dev team...
Maybe they are waiting for their convention to occur to give real answers. No, wait, perhaps the con in BlizzCon means something else... it definitly is not for 'Content'
You may have promised to print ttheir replies, but they promised responses, not cut-and-pastes from their marketing handbook. I say email them back and ask for actual answers.
(questions snipped for brevity, apologies if any questions were mangled. Also, please read it with a grain of salt *smirk*)
1) Question: How much economic monitoring do you do? Both in-game and on the secondary market (eBay)? Have you considered working with an economist (Steven D. Levitt comes to mind, but there are dozens of others as well) to study some of these phenomenon?
Response: We ban bots. I've banned 3 myself today.
2) Question: ..It's easy to guess that you've encountered challenges due to scale that no other developer has before. Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently, and when?
Response: Why yes, there are things we wished we would have done differently...wha.. is this a two part question?.. Brain.. hurts!
3) Question: ..What kind of hurdles did you have to overcome to get both Windows and Mac versions to co-exist and have you had to make any sacrifices because you were only able to do something on one platfrom and not both?
Response: We made a windows AND a mac version. That means, if you have a mac, you can install it, and play it! Without a PC!
4) Question: What is the process the dev team goes through for balancing character classes, items, NPCs, etc.?..
Response: It's very difficult. Otherwise it wouldn't be easy. Ppl complain all the time. Stop bitching.
5) Question: ..Are you planning to introduce "events" into the gaming world that would actually shape it permanently, like in Asheron's call?
Response: We made it so you can run around and fight stuff. It's awesome.
6) Question: ..The early game is brilliant, and playing it was a joy. Why is that so hard to retain in level 60 play?
Response: Dungeons are cool. You can crawl thru them with 39 of your friends. It's awesome.
7) Question: Let me be up front: I don't play any MMORPG's...probably never will. I'm sure WOW is fantastic, but I generally stick to console games. Which sort of leads to my question. How in the world did the decision for a Warcraft MMORPG get made?
Response: Please play World of Warcraft. It's pretty awesome.
8) Question: Farming bots can frequently be spotted in the game, and I have evern personally recieved in-game mail spam advertizing mmobay.com . What do you plan to do to curb this issue that is eating away at the economy and atmosphere of your realms?
Response: Dood, we answered this questions 7 questions ago. RTFA plz.
9) Question: ...So, my question is, are there any plans for more solo content for the endgame?
Response: Dungeons are cool. You can crawl thru them with 39 of your friends. It's awesome.
10) Question: would your company encourage, allocate time for and generally nudge willing developers to blog? If anyone's worried about bad postings and replies to the blog, a good example to look at is the Microsoft IE7 bloggers. A public blog seems to have influenced Microsoft into fixing IE7 to a degree more than initally planned, which is a Good Thing for many. A theory is their developers wanted to do the right thing, and the blog helped support that.
Response: Use the forums plz, kthxbye.
1.) Economic Monitoring... by nweaver
How much economic monitoring do you do? Both in-game and on the secondary market (eBay)? Have you considered working with an economist (Steven D. Levitt comes to mind, but there are dozens of others as well) to study some of these phenomenon?
Response -
We monitor the economics of the game very closely. We watch the in-game economy on a regular basis and have personnel that monitor game logs every day. When we see irregularities, we take action. This can range from exploring the account further, finding and removing exploits, or even possible suspension and bans. We also look closely at out-of-game transactions involving real-world cash for in-game items. Some of those transactions occur over eBay, some do not. But in many cases, the involved parties are warned or suspended, and some accounts are also banned.
Marketing droid just didn't get it. I'm interested in ACADEMIC modeling. EG, Star Wars galaxies has published interesting flows. People have done economic models of Evercrack's secondary market trying to estimate the GDP assuming a convertable currency. And Freakonomics is a GOOD BOOK damnit.
Stupid marketing droid. Needs to have his memory core wiped and reprogrammed over at Hammerhead.
Test your net with Netalyzr
While answering the questions.. the PR team forgot that they are replying to a forum full of geeks. We like technical answers to technical questions. Something like "what would you have done differently during development?" - I think most of us would be more satisfied to hear "yes there were challenges and we learned from em but the rest is one big secret than a suger coated answer for the numbed masses. I for one am downright disapointed by the answers - almost feel like I'm being patronised.
_Vishal www.squad9.com
You've once again ran the name of Blizzard through the mud. Hundreds of thousands of people(potential customers) are seeing how frustrated your customers are getting with you. Not a good way for potential customers to be introduced to the game. And now even more your customers are even more irritated than they were before. Get your act together.
They obviously use bots to answer questions while not at the computer, a clear violation of the EULA.
I work for a banking firm, and although I'm not a great SQL guy, I know within about an hour I could find damn near every gold seller with a page or two long query. They don't give a crap or they would have devoted a few thousand dollars to buy up some gold online, and then do a transaction search off of those sellers accounts to find who had purchased gold, who the sellers were gettin gold from, etc.
Well could be worse, atleast they still give you the freedom to give opinions as well as some other services. Still, would have been nice if they trusted the community enough or the devs, to let them communicate somewhat more with each other.
Specifically, instead of selling the game in stores, make it freely available for anyone to download. Free. No charge. Maybe even give away actual CD's too... just like AOL CD's.
Of course, as you have to actually pay money to the company to play the game online anyways, it doesn't seem to me that this approach would leave them out of pocket any real serious amounts of money.
Or maybe I just don't understand enough of any of this to be usefully contributing to this discussion.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
...when you sell your soul to conglomerates such as Vivendi.
It's time to face the fact: Blizzard has been assimilated.
Message to the Blizzard PR dept:
You fail it! The bad PR generated by these bland answers is 100 times worse than anything that you could have gotten with sincere answers. I'm not buying WoW until those responsible are sacked.
Blizzard is owned by Vivendi. All the employees that are not directly developing WoW are more than likely managed by Vivendi management. I'm sure the developers got the original questions, answered them, and forwarded them up to whoever needs to check these things, and they "edited" the answers to what we see here. Vivendi is afraid of ANYTHING that might affect their revenue stream on this game. They've lost one cash cow in Valve through not having control, they will try to keep Blizzard and their other developers on a very short leash.
The things I want in games are : fun, action, be confronted to (tactical/strategical/mental) challenges and have fun solving them.
Well, what Wow gave me (I played an undead demonist) is :
Chores/Errands : to solve the typical Wow-quest, you have to (like in morrowind btw)
1) get the qest
2) find and walk to the place where to fulfill the quest
3) kill 10-40 monsters or harvest objects of 1-3 different species to get quest objects
4) come back to the person who gave you the quest to get the xp.
This kind of quests is ok when you just have to fulfill a dozen. .
The thing is, you have to go through like 100 of those to get to level 26...and when you know that the fun begoins at high levels (at level 60 ?).
(to gain xp you have either to kill huge number of monsters (gets boring aor engage in
Routin/no tactical choices :
Well, I played a demonist. Basically...from level 1 to level 26, in fights, you can only use one tactic :
Use your pet to stop the monster coming at you, curse/zap him with the same sequence of spells (the more efficient one),
then finish him with your weapon.
There are 2 variations :
a) drink a potion/heal yourself a bit
b) run for your life when your pet get killed/your hit points get dangerously low.
In WOW, the demonists (specialized in summoning..lol) can only summon 4 different monsters...
In Wow, you only gain xp if your opponents are high lvl enough (at most 9 lvls beneath you).
result : you never become powerfull as you are forced to constantly fight monsters that are the same lvl as you.
Low levels monsters can easily kill you if they are numerous enough (4 or more if you are a demonist)
result : you can't solo in instances/epic quests.
I happen to remember fondly my wizard in neverwinter nights.
I could scout dangerous places at level 3 (invisibility..damn usefull spell),
invoke like 50 different monsters : familiar, elementals, random monsters, undeads, fiends, morden kainen's sword...)
resist close combat warriors a bit (stoneskin)
turn into a juggernaut warrior
zap 'em into oblivion
I could kill huge numbers of weak mob with one spell (and get a little xp)
Death spells (my kingdom for words of power, phantasmal killer, cloud kill, weird)
Man, in neverwinter nights..playing a wizard was fun ! (and playing online was/is still free)
Now, I wonder why I bought Wow in the first place....Had I known...
Can't wait for neverwinter nights II....though
Maybe they're miffed at how this was sanitized and willing to spend some time as ACs actually answering.
With that hope, I'll repost my question which was posted way too late for the original question batch:
What about single player?
Sounds odd, but hear me out:
I'm not a huge fan of MMO's, but I've played a couple (EQ & CoH). How hard would it be to package the world and soloable quests into a single player, non-online game?
Why don't MMO's offer this as an introductory experience? If people like the single player, they could upgrade to the online, monthly-fee system.
And those of us with severely limited gaming time could play offline, alone, at our own pace. All while making Blizzard money off an already-developed product.
C'mon devs, we know you're reading this.
Shoot us some AC answers!
Jezz,
The answers came from the PR department. Don't SLAM them, they were just doing there job. SLAM Slashdot for not making it clear who the questions were meant for.
I've not see a larger bunch of "whiners" than when I last checked the "EverQuest" boards 2 years ago.
I wanna talk to a developer! Whin, Whin, Whin...
Its just a video game!
OMG the PR man broke my BSometer!
I don't understand why Blizzard is so opposed to any sort of real, technical response to questions. Other MMORPGs have done that and it's worked fine. DAoC was a very successful MMORPG (and is still around, acitve, and profitable, though fairly small) and they did it all the time. Someone would ask a question about game mechanic X, PR person would find out the programmer responsable, send an e-mail, and print the response. In that way the PR people still made sure nothing secret leaked, and that everything looked good (proper spelling and so on), but you got real responses.
I fail to see why Blizzard has such a problem with that. It also seems somewhat counter productive. Humans like reasons, they like to know why. Reasons don't always satisfy them, but it'll at least satisfy some people, and is often better than nothign for the rest.
When the server cluster I play on was having massive problems I really wanted to know why. I suppose there's no rational reason, it's not like it'd get fixed faster or I could help them or anything, but I had a need to be told what was wrong. I was mad that the response was just "we have a problem and are looking at it." Well ok, WHAT is the problem? Tell me, it'll make me feel better.
Sending it back with a link to http://www.cluetrain.org/ would be a great first step. Then if the same mess comes back, post the correspondence between parties, allowing the world to see that Blizzard doesn't speak to people, it speaks to "markets." With enough negative word-of-mouth like this, revenue decreases, and marketroids get fired.
As a side note, marketroids *must* be hit directly in the face with negative publicity, otherwise they won't learn. I speak from experience in a dev organization; developers, product managers, et al. were never allowed to talk to "press," customers, etc. without a marketroid present (and after being heavily coached). Net result was that the press and customers never trusted a word we said.
And no, I didn't work for a certain Redmond software company. But when marketing controls a company, this behavior is commonplace.
"We are building a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude. We forge our spirits in the traditions of our ancestors. You have our gratitude!"
I'm sure the development manager sat down with the assistant head of PR and came up with these gems.
Just junk food for thought...
Does anyone want to give away their WoW stuff?
Yes, I am the one with the legendary sig.
"We have a zero-tolerance policy against the sale of World of Warcraft items on eBay and similar activities. We investigate such allegations very seriously and those accounts that are indeed guilty of exploits or selling of in-game items for real-world cash suffer disciplinary action within the game."
What a crock of crap! Zero tolerance my ass. If there were, then there wouldn't be people buying and selling gold, items or decked out characters on e-bay or these other sites.
On any given day and any given time on my server you can use the whois and see a collection of lvl 60 rogues farming the hell out of a particular area. I have ran into gold farmers plenty of times, and I just love when they run up and ask me for food. Once I actually gave a farmer a stack of food and he replied in broken engrish "no 20...200 food". Yeah ok...
So how hard would it actually be to write a script to parse the logs. Flag any account that is staying connected 24/7.... Answer not very...
I had been mulling over getting into WoW for the last two months (I was burned by Final Fantasy XI for the PC.) I was actually looking to see if Blizzard had ever responded to the questions earlier today because I was really interested in hearing about what was going on. I was at the point where I was probably going to go out and purchase this game tonight. Now that I've read Blizzard's responses I'm convinced that if I were to purchase their game I would once again be a paying drone to a company that doesn't listen to or respect their subscribers, just like FFXI.
Sorry, but I'm not giving you my hard earned money if that is your attitude. Instead I'll skip purchasing WoW and start looking more into this Guild Wars everyone is talking about.
END OF LINE
So here we go...
If they post 'real' answers here, then their customers feel left out because slashdot got something more in depth than the real forums did.
If they post fluff, slashdot cries. Who cares? Given the quality of editorial service here, we'll probably see this repeated tomorrow anyway.
Real answers don't work anyway. The concept of MMORPG development requires being vague. One tiny change, etc. can change the whole thing. I demand clearly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
I could go on, but what's the point?
Did the Bilzzard PR department do one moment of research before replying to these questions. Look at the group of people that you are responding to! You think that we would be happy with the bland, dodging, political answers that you gave us?
What a load of crap. Makes me less interested in the game if I know there are people like this working to control things behind the scenes.
Between this honest (and correctly spelled!) posting as promised, and the new CSS update, my faith in Slashdot is starting to rise a bit. I'll be back more often, and may even start Medamodding more. Keep it up :)
if I saw them say "richly innovative" in there that Blizzard had been bought by Microsoft! It's rare to see anyone other than MS who is able to say so little with so many words. This must've been penned by another one of those MS defectors.
It's ------ up, basically.
Oooooh, I love Hangman. Ummm, 'G'?
For showing your true colors. I guess there's just a little too much refreshing, interesting commentary happening between companies, and you need to add that PR yin to the Community-Based yang.
This interview isn't one. It's a press release, and what's worse is that I was thinking about resubscribing to WoW. No longer.
If you can't give me straight, truthful answers not wrapped in Blameless Marketing Drivel, you simply don't deserve my money.
Pity.
A. Cause even morons without intelligence can get to the high level gaming of this whimpy mmorpg. Besides the purrty colors and graphics, there wasnt much else here. Move along nublets and fanboy cunts!
HR exists from the company's point of view, not the employee's. Anybody who thinks otherwise is foolish.
Those responses were just plain terrible. It read as if the Bush administration were doing PR for blizzard. They owed this crowd a lot more than that.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -Hunter S. Thompson
Odd that when submitted, they put me down as an anonymous coward.
this post, question 9 was mine. Yet: 9.) More solo endgame content? by Anonymous Coward
Not real important, just... odd.
I noted that almost every response completely ignored the question and instead, plonked down the most pat and predictable "answer" that merely served as a placeholder for a "buy our game" message. Not like the /. editors didn't warn us though - their disappointment was very apparent.
It felt like I was speaking with my manager, lol.
Cmon Blizz! You can do better!
We should go post on the blizzard feedback forums and see if we can't get it noticed that we are not happy with these types of answers and they need to retry...
o w-general
o w-suggestions
General discussion:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.aspx?fn=w
Suggestions:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.aspx?fn=w
Note world of warcraft login required.
When you make a post like that you reveal two big things: The inside information you have and your writing style. Between the two, it'd probably be fairly easy to figure out who it was. Unless you stuck to giving information from a cross of groups, and having someone else write your posts for you, you'd run significant risk of being caught. Remember that private companies can fire you for basically any reason. They don't need probable cause even, if they think it's you, they can fire you. Whistleblower protection doesn't apply, that's only for revealing illegal things your company was doing.
Pissed off Potential Customer 1
Pissed off Potential Customer 2
... of a White House press conference.
They're too busy counting all their money to take any of you seriously.
They need to get on the Cluetrain!
http://www.cluetrain.com/
Cadmann
It looks bad on the single-player content end of the game for level 60 players. It appears Blizzard HAS finally been listening to the requests for more single-player and small-group content for level 60 and above, but miss the point. This is from their "Under Development" setion:
The redesign of this zone includes high-end outdoor quest area for both the solo players and 5-man groups, focusing on repeatable quests players can complete to gain epic items as a casual alternative to raid dungeons.
Repeatable quests? How tedious! The idea is to give us new places to explore, new quest chains and world events, new ways to develop our characters. This is just grinding, which is so NOT fun. It's clear the goal is to keep you busy so that Blizzard can keep making monthly profits from you.
I'm hoping the expansion makes the game fun again; that the undeveloped areas are completed, new continents or islands are made available, along with character customization, Hero Classes, new quests, events, etc. THEN I'll be back for more.
I think several of the questions here were speaking to this. When I hit 60, why isn't there something exciting for me to do on my own? Why are there no new places for me to discover that require some real skill and determination but not 20 to 40 other people as an escort. Anyway, I think the responses to these questions indicate a lack of understanding of a not-so-small component of the playerbase and I know it is one of the reasons I suspended my WoW account for half a year and I know it is likely the reason I will do so again when the next nice MMORPG comes out with a new solo experience that lasts for 40 or 60 or X levels.
(I should add that I do play the raid content and the BGs and I know what they offer and they can be enjoyable. For whatever reason, I personally gravitate toward doing that as a "special" occasion and prefer going out alone most of the time. Maybe it's because gaming is decompression from 8 hours of interacting with all kinds of people, :-))
I don't think Blizzard gets this.
I've leveled two chars to 60 (first a Shaman, then a Warlock) and had a reasonable time. Spent too much time pushing for that next level, but I figured that once I had a level 60 char, I could cut it down to an hour or two on some days and maybe 3 or 4 on a weekend -- something like most people's TV watching.
Unfortunately, WoW has simply taken EQ and done it better. And it appears that the original designers -- brilliant all -- have all left the company or have slept too close to pods from outer space or something. Instead, the developers are currently thrashing around and not really accomplishing anything beyond setting us up for an expansion.
Test realms? Please! No bugs are fixed in response to these realms. The 1.6 patch broke more Warlock features than it added or fixed, and every one of these new bugs were well-documented in the test realm forums. And the new highest-end content was so broken it took two hotfixes to get it to work. No, test realms are to generate enough buzz that people will wait another month before canceling their account.
High-end content for casual players? Notice how they mentioned "quests". Quests are only applicable to chars that are leveling, with the possible exception of Warlock/Paladin quests for their epic mounts. Other than that, you need a large guild that can guarantee 40 people attending a raid. Some of us cannot be there at some raid times (in my guild's case, set too early in the evening for me to make it from work), so as the questioner asked: what about content that a level 60 can do solo or with 1 friend in an hour or two?
No such content. How about content that may take many hours but can be worked on an hour or two at a time? Nope. Of course, there is grinding/farming, mind-numbing to raise cash for some purchase, but that's not enjoyable and the item bought requires some kind of outlet to be valued, not just using it to do more grinding.
How about PvP? As far as I can tell, they're trying to create a fourth-rate Unreal Tournament 2004. I'd hope for a third-rate or even second-rate, but they're not even close. PvP boils down to zerg-fests and the computer spec required to not be zerged AND lagged is probably 2x or 3x what UT2004 requires. (Not to mention that an RPG has many intrinsic factors that will keep PvP from being as balanced as Halo, UT2004, etc.)
And did we mention no Blizzard-written voice chat? UT2004 includes it, so it's a lowest-common-denominator. WoW depends on vent, teamspeak, etc, which fragments voice comms. (Or in the case of Macs, eliminates it.)
Anyhow, I'm bored out of my skull now and thee last three times I've logged in I've been unable to get together a party to tackle the items I have left to tackle. If this continues for another week, I'll probably have to reluctantly cancel my account.
It feels like a horrible waste to throw away such cool chars. It's like I have the Batmobile and several of his gadgets but the power sources are all dead and I either have to pay for storage for them until maybe someday we discover how it's powered or just junk them. It's more fun to read Theorycraft and rumors on Blizzard's site than to enter the game. Sad, really.
Okay, I'll take a bite out of this one, since no one else has yet (at time of post):
I don't think Blizzard cares if you sell their *game* on eBay, each CD has a key so that it can only be used with one account. As far as I know, it's perfectly reasonable to sell an unopened or even opened and used copy of the game on eBay or anywhere else - because any one CD can only be associated (read: used to play) with one account.
The question is in regards to people (known in-game as "chinese farmers" - though certainly they are not all Chinese) who "farm" for gold and/or high-level items and then sell the gold or the items on eBay or through some other means. So these farmers are getting paid physical money for virtual items, something that is clearly disallowed in the EULA -- as it should be -- but which is rampant on all realms I've played on. Search google for "buy WoW gold" and there will be not a dearth of hits.
Hope that helps!
Throx of Greymane
I have been looking forward to this interview. Was checking the games section every few days to make sure I didnt miss it. It finally comes and its the same marketing schlock we get on the offical wow forums.
So sad.
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
What's the area of the WoW landmass. I know UO's original landmass was 12 sq miles, EQ was 350 and AC was 500. I'm dying to know how many sq. miles WoW is
so what did you expect the answers to be?? Learn how to ask poignent questions, and you might get better responses next time. Ass.
Or learn to play your character. Crowd control and getting out of sticky spots are aspects of the game that requires you to employ the tactics you haven't learned yet at your level (or the char does not yet have available skills for).
If you want dozens of different sidekicks, there's always the Hunter. Tame any beast you like.
So, the fact that you can wipe out multiple monsters 10+ levels lower than you, that you struggled to kill a single one of 10 levels ago, is "not more powerful"? How many XP based games do you know that gives you great XP for killing monsters so much weaker than you that you can wipe them out in a single hit? How many games that stops throwing anything at you that's dangerous to your character once you reach a third of the level cap?
So, bascially, you won't be happy unless you can take out an entire camp of mobs the same level as you without any danger? I take it you also dislike any game without a god mode?
Yes, see, that's why there's solo content (the majority of quests), and team content (instances and some quests). It's to cater for players of both preferences, as opposed to just yours. It's an MMO game. If you want full access to every part of the game on your own, don't play an MMO game.
If that's what you want, you should've made yourself a Rogue. Or bought invisibility potions. Of course, higher level mobs will stand a greater chance of discovering you either way. As it should be.
Several classes have temporary invulnerability and other close combat survivability skills. Dwarves have stone skin as a racial trait (just mentioning it for the likeness in name, it's not terribly useful). Not all classes are meant to take a beating up close. That's why they have pets and rely on ranged attacks.
Druids get bear form at an early level. And at level 40 a bear form tailored for tanking.
Sounds like you might like the mage. The talent tree opens for several potent area of effect spells. Mobs 9 levels lower than you are very weak compared to your char. Unless you're utterly clueless of course. Just like a soldier isn't invincible against a crowd, neither is your higher level character against masses of lower level ones.
WoW is pretty much the most newbie friendly MMO around. And you found it too much of a challenge. Though I could name plenty of wrong with WoW, I think your post speaks a lot more about you than it does about WoW.
I mean to say "stone form", not "stone skin". Not terribly important I know, but I swear someone would nitpick on it if I didn't correct it :)
Dear WOW "Development Team" --
On behalf of the entire Slashdot Community, I'd like to thank you for taking the time to so carefully craft responses to our questions. It's thoughtful respondents like you that make our workday such a pleasure.
It's with some dismay, however, that I can anticipate that certain members of our community may choose not to respect some simple guidelines that we have established to make this board a fun and informative place for everyone. They are likely to accuse you of being a "marketing droid" or a "PR hack" or a "community-college intern" or having "screwed your way to the middle" or being "functionally retarded" or having "your head up your ass" or your "hand down your pants" or having "your other hand up your boss's ass" or various other unpleasant and discourteous phrases for implying that your responses were less than substantive.
Please be assured that our Moderation System(tm) is designed to specifically addresses many of these users, and simply because you may see a few of these discourteous posts with "+5 Insightful" does not mean we are not working very hard behind the scenes to make sure that this is a fair and objective forum for all involved.
Again, thank you so much for taking the time to respond. We look forward to hearing from you again in the future.
-- The Slashdot "Developer Team"
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
In some ways, Blizzard is smart to give as little technical information it can, and in others, it is dumb.
/bump yourself, which is a punishable offense. They still haven't learned how to run a forum for an MMO.
Let's face it, the average bnet kid is a complete jerk. If you give them even the smallest tidbit of information, they go crazy because you didn't release the source code, let them attend development meeting, and be in charge of product design. And this makes up a large portion of their player base. I mean, have you *read* their forums???? A more idiotic group of complainers hasn't been found.
Having said that, many of their best spoken critics could be silenced with a few, well spoken responses. Blizzard won't give them, though, because of the flames they take from the masses.
Blizzard's forums are a wreck, because they refuse to clean them up. If they deleted off-topic posts, flames, and the like from their General forum ad naseum, maybe things would get better. Because they don't, their forum mods end up playing tag with a ton of nutcase windbags. Posts blow off the front page of their General forum in less than 5 minutes in many cases, and then you get no response, unless you
In a nutshell, the response that Blizzard gave here was a very watered down version of things they have let their forum mods share with the public.
Why harder hitting questions, like why does it take months between patches, and the like, were left off, and these questions were included, is curious. Heck, EQ2 is patched almost daily, yet Blizzard still leaves bugs in place for as long as it can get away with. The amount of bugs in each release clearly indicate that their Q/A process is a joke. And many problems found on the Test Server are left in the release, because they don't want to go back and fix them. Important things like this were ignored for the questions that got asked?
The questions that *were* posed to Blizzard have all been answered in their forums, for the most part. We weren't going to learn anything new, especially when 2 of the questions (1 and 8) were essentially the same. Hello, economy and farming questions go hand in hand!
The fact that the results of this were lame is partly related to the poor choices of questions asked. The rest of it is that Blizzard is a bunch of weenies.
Me, I've gone back to playing CoH, and having fun again. That, and monkeying around in the CoV beta.
Yeah yeah, World of Warcraft, blah blah blah, I don't care.
Guild Wars has a lot more that a geek could sink their teeth into. Seriously, there's one worldwide "server," so the top guild is the best in the real world - how cool is that? How do they organize it? How do they distribute the load? How does the update streaming work?
I want to know the specifics behind joining an international district, forming a team of players from different regions, entering a PvE region, then coming back into a new town. How does it swap me and my party from server to server? How do they store so much data? How do they keep everything up and running?
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
Mr. Blizzard, what you've just written is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
do you also think that catching money laundering is also as a simple matter as making a few SQL queries?
I'm sure that companies that sell gold in-game are a lot smarter than you make them to be and have *many* levels between the gold seller and the gold buyer (going through several AH trips buying/selling/diverting money around, going through things like crafting items for disenchant and reselling its profits, and so on and on and on).
If blizzard doesn't have tagging for every single gold/silver piece that exists on the server's economy I doubt you'd be able to "ban" a gold seller. On the other hand banning gold buyers *maybe* would work, because it'd be kinda easy to do a search for people that mysteriously acquired 100+ gold in one day and drill down to see where that gold came from.
-- the cake is a lie
A few million people play this game. Many of them are obsessed by it, and are extremely argumentative and vocal.
Did you expect something along the lines of specific flaw admissions or real technical discussions?
Anything they said will be seized upon by all sorts of aggravated pinheads. If they mention a technical issue, a couple thousand know-it-alls will chime in with ridiculous high-level responses claiming it's not a problem, and that Blizzard is just incompetent. In fact, any real discussion is going to result in nothing but lost time and face on their part, because everybody seems to think they know better.
In the end, the PR approach is simply the best way to handle this type of situation.
We monitor the economics of the game very closely. We watch the in-game economy on a regular basis and have personnel that monitor game logs every day. When we see irregularities, we take action. This can range from exploring the account further, finding and removing exploits, or even possible suspension and bans. We also look closely at out-of-game transactions involving real-world cash for in-game items. Some of those transactions occur over eBay, some do not. But in many cases, the involved parties are warned or suspended, and some accounts are also banned.
BS. They might monitor farmers, but I've bought over 5000G worth of gold from ebay and never had a warning.
Worldofwar.net let it's forum goers do the exact same thing as CmdrTaco did with Slashdot. It was even promoted it as a "developer interview"!
The responses brought back? A bunch of saggy PR responses that contained nothing out of any value at all. Basically worth nobody's time if you were already up to date with the WoW community happenings. I don't even think the developers even read the questions. Even many of the most devoted Blizzard-fans were displeased, as voiced on their forum.
If Blizzard's going to continue to do these things as an effort of trying to garner publicity and please their audience, at least treat the people with dignity. Because, as we're seeing now, it's biting back -- and this is completely justified. The honesty of the Slashdot community, especially CmdrTaco, amazes me. There's plenty of websites who would find that they even responded sufficient enough to be pleased with their PR-tunneled answers.
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
5.) More dynamic universe? by Zarhan
7 2418.stm
Battlegrounds are a nice feature, but despite them, the World of Azeroth is quite static place. There have been few events - like the orphan week - but nothing big. Are you planning to introduce "events" into the gaming world that would actually shape it permanently, like in Asheron's call?
Response -
That's something we're looking into....
You mean, like the plague?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/2/hi/technology/42
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
You work in HR.
I know this for a fact.
First, you post as anonymous coward, hr Flag #1.
Second, you bleep out fuck. Why would you bleep out fuck if you were posting as anonymous coward?
Third, you said fuck, but chickened out. You WANTED to say fuck. But your chicken shit HR side said no. Then the hr side completly took over and clicked the anon button so censoring fuck had absolutly no point.
I thought for a minute maybe you were just uncomfortable with the word fuck. But then thought why would you feel obligated to use that word just to censor it.
Nerf Blizzard PR!
Hello dickless.
Why do you feel the need to spew such bullshit? Or is it the best you can come up with?
You're pathetic.
I will not be trying out World of Warcraft. Once I get a network connection, it will be Guild Wars instead.
Why don't you merge with cingular? Then your developers can leave and you can just be one big ball of suck.
could that be because there are so few linux users that it makes no sense to publish linux games separately? x86 linux users can also easliy boot into windows for games like they do now. I suspect they keep that in mind when they ship CD.
Also, there is a difference between computer harware and software. Many linux users I know don't even install Mplayer DLL packages becasue they dont want anything closed source on their PCs. The Linux community is very politically motivated against non-free software, I doubt you can deny that. Look at any thread about a new commercial program for linux and there will be a few nut jobs demanding not only the source but also the rights to modify and redistribute the program.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
WoW has always had issues with getting any feedback from the developers. Just see every patch how they nerf things without any note on the patch notes. This is common to many games sure. But Blizzard has been making so many changes that really change game play. Today was a first...real data explaining changes:
w ow-general&t=4988940&p=1&tmp=1#post4988940
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=
It was kind of excited. Doubt we will see it again though..
After reading this, I am actually looking forward to hitting 60 for when the 5-man instances come out. Being female there are rarely any games that interest me, but WoW has actually completely enthralled me. I look forward to a patch that means I don't need to get my whole guild together in order to avoid ninja looting.
I'm sure a good proportion of slashdot was enthused about this interview, and all we got back was a huge friggin' depository of PR crap. After initial bemusement from reading the first couple of questions...you scroll down and realize they are ALL of similar length, ALL regimented, ALL inane babble, and most importantly lacking in any substance whatsoever.
The question is though, were there any devs there to answer questions in the first place? Or did the editors just acquire some internal blizzard address and send our questions straight to the Class D marketing droids? I'd feel more comfortable knowing that at least somebody at Blizzard wanted to answer our queries.
A point a lot of dudes have been making is that there were some defections of devs to NCsoft/ArenaNet, who recently released Guild Wars. Now, every single WEEK the Guild Wars homepage links to informative and seriously written answers to questions directly from the userbase. Compare that to Blizzard who take over a month to pull a few paragraphs of nothingness out of their overly large marketing department. For shame, this is hands down the worst "interview" slashdot has ever received back.
So, I plan to offer them, in my own small way, an object lesson in how this ties to making money. Yup, I'm gonna cancel my account and let my poor little mage that I've lovingly levelled up shrivel into a pile of overwritten magnetic patterns.
Right on. Is there some kind of unofficial contest to see who can pull off a lousier Slashdot interview than William Shatner? If so, please announce the finalists already, and let us vote on the "winner" in a poll (I'm thinking mc chris), so we can get back to meaningful interviews again.
This is really disappointing, I don't play WoW but I was enthralled by some of the questions and points raised in the original topic by the posters here that DO play (especially the thread on the economy, as I play FFXI). I read the entire thing at +3. These answers are a kick in the teeth.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
This comes as no surprise at all, given our experiences in WoW. The entire GM staff is completely incompetent, with no knowledge of their own game. Any time you start a ticket, you can almost always guess, word for word, what the copy-and-paste response will be.
And I speak from experience. Almost my entire guild was banned for a couple days due to a moron GM with no understanding of the game. It took about a day to get it straightened out, but this is was still a PR disaster that Blizzard still failed to handle properly, even after the fact.
(Long story short, they said we killed Ragnaros 3 times in 8 days, so we MUST have been cascading timers since such a feet was impossible. We educated them on how their timer system works, and the response was "See! You just admitted it yourself! The timer is 8 days, and the suspensions are upheld." The timer is SEVEN days, not EIGHT. Even after a senior GM reversed the suspensions, we still got more copy-and-paste responses saying they had 'reviewed our accounts' *cough*BULLSHIT!*cough* and the suspensions would not be reversed.)
Blizzard has a good game, they just need customer service to back it up. As it stands, that service is non-existent or so horrible that it becomes downright insulting to have anything to do with it.
Shyeah, right. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten ganked trying to switch from my herbalism toolbar to my combat toolbar, or trying to find the right spell icon...or how many times I've accidentally quaffed a potion or food item trying to drag it from one pouch to another...I'm spoiled by City of Heroes UI...
When it arrived, however, it turned out that 90% of those players and, more importantly, GM's would be wankers. Consequently, I don't play online RPGs and stick to the paper versions, which are funnier, cleverer, cheaper, and above all have better graphics and sound (ie, your imagination), and you get to pick your fellow players.
It's amazing how a 2D sheet of paper can be a more rounded character than a 3D graphic in a hack 'n slash computer game.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Hmm I used to be at VUG, and from what I recall, Vivendi took a very hands-off approach towards Blizzard in particular, since Blizzard was their shining jewel that could do no wrong.
This was about as informal as a 0k TXT file.
You seem to be, and I apologize if I am reading you wrong, blaming developers for the chicken-and-egg problem. It's not their problem, it's not their mission to jump start a linux game market. Their job is to reach gamers, if a linux gamer is willing to dual boot or emulate then a Win32 version works. Blame those who dual boot or emulate for this situation, not the developers. I don't think developers dislikes linux, they are merely not evangelists.
A little over a month ago we asked you for your questions to send on to the World of Warcraft development team. Unfortunately, it appears that these questions were misrouted to the Blizzard PR department.
;-)
Taco, you've got it all wrong... now that all the original developers have left, those marketing people are the development team!
umm.... since we really didnt get answers I dont think you should have printed whatever this drivel is.
Instead, I would have recommended u send the same questions back and tell them u want real answers this time
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
If, for example, the answer was
"We had a major hard drive crash over here, and IBM is being super slow about replacing our RAID array. We went down to best buy and grabbed a couple fujitsu drives to try and get things up and running for now, but that's just not working out. We have a complete backup of everything, so as soon as IBM gets back to us, we'll be good to go."
then you might feel better. If, on the other hand, the answer was
"Steve and Jake were eating pizza and kicking some back in the server room, and Steve accidently unplugged the server. Jake said 'Oh Shit!', and tried to plug it back in, but spilled beer in the case, and possibly some pepperoni. Unfortunately we're not sure when the last time we ran a full backup was. I think we're going to have to restore the Christmas backup, and then patch in the 200+ incremental backups we did since then (assuming none of them are corrupt of course)."
Well, then you'd probably be MORE angry.
They could only answer when the answer was good, but then their stony silence would be a dead giveaway when they'd done something wrong. They could LIE when they did something wrong, but then you'd never be able to trust anything they said anyways, so the whole exercise would be rendered moot.
For World of Warcraft users, The Register ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/21/wow_virtua l_plague ) reports that "When Blizzard introduced the God of Blood - Hakkar to his mates - in a new World of Warcraft scenario called Zul'Gurub, little did it know it was summoning up the online equivalent of Ebola or AIDS. According to a posting on WoW fansite Shacknews, anyone who ends up in a fusticuffs-style confrontation with Hakkar will be attacked with a magic spell called Corrupted Blood. It's a nasty one. There's little the victim can do to resist it, and it should do sufficient damage to wipe them out." ... "the contagion continues to spread from non-player characters to non-player character and anyone else entering the game."
Sound like they would be perfect for this, as test subjects.....
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I just write it out left-handed
you're expecting them to stop working on the next patch with all the big and little features you've asked for and explain their decisions to you? Are you suggesting replacing the PR department, whose job it is to relate with the public (read: you) , and use programmers' time to answer questions when they could easily be working hard to try to make the game better?
/." crowd.
LOOK AT THIS YOU PRICK
The team has kindly offered to take some time out of their extremely busy schedules to answer questions.
Oh, wait.... this is Slashdot. Nevermind.
Please fuck off if you hate us so much, and that goes to all of you "oh wait this is
Oh wait, this is +5 insightful.... never mind
"Therefor we can conclude that public interaction is unnecessary to having a successful mmog." No we can't conclude that. I think you can contribute the success of WoW to the fact that Blizzard is an already well established company, and WarCraft is an extremely popular franchise. Just because WoW is more successful than City of Heroes doesn't mean that _everything_ Blizzard does is superior, and everything that City of Heroes does is inferior. Oh wait... we're in PR mode. Nevermind.
I guess this is what Ballmer is constantly referring to when he talks about Microsoft and its seemingly endless drive to "innovate."
You missed my point buddy.
:D).
:
-/I guess I should know better than to respond to someone feeling they know everything a game has to offer after putting in a fraction of -/the time the game's designed to take.
I played it intensively for 2 weeks...this means I slept, ate, drank...worked like 30 hours..and..MAINLY played for days...
14 days of intensive gaming a fraction of time is not what I would call a fraction of time.
I stoped playing because the game was too repetitive. To the point it became annoying.
2 years ago, I recall playing neverwinter nights for 2 straight months the same way and loving it all the way....do the maths...
-/If you want dozens of different sidekicks, there's always the Hunter. Tame any beast you like.
I wanted to play a wizard..the summon demons kind. The demonist seemed to offer that
-/learn to play your character. Crowd control and getting out of sticky spots
I have been playing computer games, RPGs, Wargames, hack and slash, chess and GO for a long time (including Diablo I& II, warcraft II&III), so I know a bit about tactics, stategy and learning my character. Thanks.
-/So, the fact that you can wipe out multiple monsters 10+ levels lower than you, that you struggled to kill a single one of 10 levels -/ago, is "not more powerful"?
The fact is...If you are a demonist, being targeted by 4-5 monsters 10 levels lower than you is instant death.
Try casting a 2s-spell when you get stabbed by 5 monsters at the same time...
Not being able to handle 4-5 monsters that are 10 levels below you FEELS like the demonist is not powerfull enough
-/How many games that stops throwing anything at you that's dangerous to your character once you reach a third of the level cap?
Lots of games are more fun than WOW, when doing the same job. Diablo I & II, neverwinter nights, dungeon master (atari st
Try them...
-/So, bascially, you won't be happy unless you can take out an entire camp of mobs the same level as you without any danger? I take it -/you also dislike any game without a god mode?
You are making asumptions.
The easy way would have been to play a TANK, I chose to go the hard way with the demonist
because I like CHALLENGES and I like to win through WITS (when the game gives me enough tactical choices to do so).
-/there's solo content (the majority of quests),
Did you read my post ?
Theis majority of quests of yours are sooooooooooooo boring, uneventfull, un challenging....
One point for you though : though it's true, it's so evident that I shouldn't have written that
-/you can't solo in instances/epic quests.
of the RARE very good moments I spent with WOW though, were fulfilling ALONE (through stealth and infiltration)
a few elite-quests that usually require groups
The attack of Fenris isle, infiltrating the village with the people that turn into werewolves at night etc...
-/Or bought invisibility potions.
Being quite a skilled herborist-alchemist, I made some of 'em. Thanks.
-/Several classes have temporary invulnerability and other close combat survivability skills. Dwarves have stone skin as a racial trait -/(just mentioning it for the likeness in name, it's not terribly useful).
-/Druids get bear form at an early level. And at level 40 a bear form tailored for tanking.
-/If that's what you want, you should've made yourself a Rogue.
-/Sounds like you might like the mage.
I'm very happy that these other classes get those feats, but you see...
I just wanted to have fun being an undead demonist...
Role playing games are about having a lot of choices.
Having fun playing RPGs is about using these choices wisely to survive/achieve your goals
Through the 26 levels, the demonist just didn't have enough tactical choices for me to enjoy playing.
Sure, I can kill quickly and efficiently any 2 monsters of the same level that are attacking me.
And I can handle 3 monsters of
Babelfish English -> Russian -> English
The writing style discovers you!11!!!
could that be because there are so few linux users that it makes no sense to publish linux games separately? x86 linux users can also easliy boot into windows for games like they do now.
I wonder, now that Apple is coming out with x86, will game companies drop support for MacOSX? I'd think Wine would work on these machines. Mac users could just play games that way.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
Did anyone else find it ironic that, by having their PR professionals handle the questions instead of the engineers, the interview resulted in terrible PR for Blizzard?
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Q. How much do you monitor the economics?
A. We monitor it.
Q. What would you have done differently?
A. We learned a lot!
Q. What challenges were involved with simultaneous development of the game for both Mac and Windows?
A. We released the game on Mac and Windows at the same time!
Q. What is the process for achieving class balance?
A. It's hard.
Q. Are there going to be events like in Asheron's Call that really impact the game?
A. You can go fishing! Every week!
Q. The game is boring at 60 if you don't know 15-40 people to play with, how are you doing to deal with it?
A. By adding new content that requires 15-40 people to enjoy.
Q. I don't play your game, but I'm curious about what made you decide to make it?
A. PLAY OUR GAME! PLAY IT YOU WILL LIKE IT! PLAY IT! IT HAS TONS OF FEATURES FOR YOU! YOU WILL LOVE IT! YOU WILL MARRY IT! YOU WILL SLEEP WITH THE BOX UNDER YOUR PILLOW! YOU WILL FORNICATE WITH THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL! YOU WILL FRAME THE CDs AND HANG THEM ON THE WALL! THE UI IS AWESOME! THE QUESTS ARE EASY, IT'S TOTALLY FOR THE CASUAL GAMER JUST LIKE YOU, IGNORE ALL THESE OTHER QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW YOU NEED A SOCIAL CIRCLE LARGER THAN THE POPULATION OF WYOMING TO FINISH BLACKWING LAIR! THEY'RE JUST BITTER! PLAY IT! PLAY IT! PLAY IT PLAY IT PLAY IT PLAY IT PLAY IT.
Oh, and we made it cuz we wanted to.
Q. What are you doing to deal with farming and boting?
A. Making it against the rules and saying loudly and frequently in public that it's against the rules. Nobody breaks the rules when you repeat them loudly and frequently. Don't farm or bot. Vote Quimby.
Q. I don't want to PvP or Raid, and the game is dull at 60 for me. Now what?
A. Tough shit, most people love it. Roll an alt and keep paying your monthly fee until some unpaid intern slops together some bullshit you might like.
Q. Why don't you let the developers blog, it helps a lot?
A. We think it's far more useful to set up forums for you to read, in which you can be insulted and accused of being a stupid, immature 12 year old by people who are stupid, immature 13 years old.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
It is my opinion that just *because* a large number of people buy and play the game, it's no excuse for the company or its developers act like assholes. When they do, it only means that people play the game DESPITE the company, not because of it- each player is just one additional node of revenue, nothing more. The whole notion of "customer service" doesn't go out the window just because it happens to be an online game.
hahaha. you put it so much more eloquently than I did. good work!
still a bit daft that i got modded "troll". perhaps whoever modded me down should read what a troll is
Let me summarize.
1) Our job is hard.
2) We do it well.
3) If you haven't played yet, play it. You'll love it. 'Trust me'.
This interview was than informative than official outage notifications on the WoW boards (if that's actually possible).
A more idiotic group of complainers hasn't been found
You're new here, right?
Mike McCurry works for Blizzard?
It's no surprise that the PR suits responded. But that needn't be the end of the story.
Now it's the dev's turn. Come on guys, answer the questions properly, ie. technically. You're in a position of strength anyway, the suits probably don't want to lose more of you to NCsoft (well, not if they have a clue anyway), so if you approach it in a constructive fashion there shouldn't be any fireworks.
And if there are, well, perhaps it's not the right company to work for after all.
You're the key people, remember that. The suits are two a penny, and you ought to remind them of that occasionally.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Now I know that I don't want to play WoW!
Don't forget that.
(And they discrimiate against people with bad eyesight, in their games)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Fry: Don't you worry about Planet Express. Let me worry about blank.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
If you try to ask what happened re the Slashdot article on Blizzard's forums, they'll delete your posts without a trace. It's already happened to two threads I was posting in.
A: Look! A pony!
Q: WTF?!?
well put
Non, je ne veux pas coucher avec toi ce soir.
The 1.6 patch saw more features broken in the Warlock class than were fixed or added. It took a couple of hotfixes to begin fixing them and even with the 1.7 patch they still haven't gotten it right. These new bugs were well-documented on the test realm forums so they chose to release a very buggy release for political reasons. (And it wasn't just Warlocks, but since you seem to play a Warlock also, I address that. BWL, their PREMIER high-end content took two hotfixes to get it working.)
The mods that they have made to the Warlock class have not addressed the core issues nor the core bugs of the class. For example, Curse of Agony simply does not work properly: it's our only Curse -- and the only DoT in the game -- that stops working if the target moves out of sight, including stealthing or the caster dying. DoTs, even with shortened durations (unless they turn out to be REALLY short) are still not viable in PvP because of slot limitations and decursive, and are not that much more viable in PvE because of slot limitations versus raid size and the speed with which non-boss mobs are killed.
As you acknowledge, they've buffed Hunter pets while ignoring the LONG STANDING problems with Warlock "High End" pets. Our endgame pets have been #3 or #4 on the Warlock request list since retail release, yet they've instead handed us all kinds of other "fixes" while ignoring these pets. Hunter pets, which carry no risk or cost, could give them a run for their money all along. They've been improperly balanced since Day 1. It's just with the latest Hunter over-buff that Hunter pets can now solo Warlock pets 100% of the time. And, oh yeah, they're looking into it and it's something that snuck up on them because mob toughness somehow crept up since retail release. Yeah, right.
This is not a slow-but-sure approach. They claimed they were done with Warlocks in 1.6 and were moving on to Hunters, etc. But it was obvious to Warlocks that they addressed none of our top issues, and instead did stuff that's nice but not wanted or really needed. They've publicly claimed that Warlock talents have been looked over and fixed. Except any 60 Warlock can easily name 5 or 6 talents that are absolutely worthless. Literally, not just a matter of taste, but they don't do anything useful at all. So now they acknowledge that after two "Warlock" patches they really do still have major holes to plug, and even then they still only give passing mention -- much less attention or discussion -- to core issues that Warlocks have discussesd since Day 1.
That's not the great job you talk about. No, what we see is a bumbling in the dark as they try to fix things that they as players of each class (or non-players for some classes) think should be fixed. Most of the changes reflect a cargo cult mentality where they refuse to change some things (shards come to mind) because the gods once said that this was critical to the class. They're busy attempting to turn out enough content now that they can justify an expansion (which is being worked in parallel, sucking off resources from the current paying customers). They're busy throwing out a bunch of half-baked BGs to see which ones might be popular. They generally refuse to communicate and when they do it's not with the attitude of "We have reasons for this decision and here they are", but rather "working as intended".
Having woked in the software industry for many years, I can smell a confused bunch of folks a mile off. These guys don't understand the principles upon which WoW was designed. They don't have a clue as to how to proceed. They have some rules that were written down in presentations of documentation somewhere, but they don't understand the underlying theories and so they bumble around, tweaking here and there. They will be very successful, as they have a lot of momentum and anyone who loved, or would have loved EQ is bound to love the increasingly EQ-like WoW. But don't even try to get away with claiming they're doing a superb job.
The CMs are a joke. Instead of policing forums to remove "nerf Shaman" posts in the Shaman forum, they lock threads with titles in all caps. Literally weeks go by without any apparent CM presence, much less posting. And when they post they often post retrospectively, to explain why this change was not documented in the patch notes in disingenuous ways.
The CMs don't advocate in the forums for their communities. The European Warlock CM recently became a celebrity in the US because he actually bothered to summarize the issues that the community feels are important -- as opposed to what Blizzard feels is important -- and posted the summary. You get the impression that perhaps he actually plays a Warlock and perhaps he actually roots for them and has sympathy for their complaints.
Plus, about half the dev posts I've seen have also been disingenuous weasle posts that ignore major issues involved in a discussion to address it in a way that can be summarized "working as intended". They reallly do bring it upon themselves with CMs allowing a lawless atmosphere, then filling it with suspicion and doubt, with the devs coming in to occasionally inform and occasionally reinforce the party line.
Not that CmdrTaco will be any more likely to answer a question from the unwashed masses than the Blizzard devs are, but one of the things being argued about on the official WoW forums is whether there was an actual agreement between Blizzard and Slashdot that indicated that Blizzard would have developers answer the questions rather than just whoever. Was there actually such an agreement that Blizzard reneged on, or was it just a big misunderstanding?
CmdrTaco,
Your comment has been rated +5 Insightful (Blizzard: objective truth hurts, no?). Extra bonus points will be allotted for actually replying to their e-mail with exactly what you wrote on the Slashdot front page; no more, no less.
It's been tried. It failed.
Those who don't know Lisp are doomed to reimplement it.
Nope, not new here.
But if you go to the WoW forums, in General... They practice the art of dupes the way politicians practice lies. It's a never ending thing.
Truly, they make most slashdotters look like MIT's Magna Cum Laudes.
You can thank WoW's players for Blizzard's apparent desire to filter out any real content in their replies. Blizzard knows that any specifics they provide (such as admitting to features not included because of the cross-platform issue, or mistakes they made which they would have done differently in hindisght) will be used against them by their own players. It is the same reason why the forum moderators, when responding to a thread that contains hundreds of legitimate questions and suggestions and one or two personal flames, will respond to the flames and leave the questions unanswered. There is nothing in the EULA that states that the company has to pay heed to the needs of the customers, and indeed they don't. Every MMORPG administration has to deal with the average MMO playerbase: 98% arrogant, immature whiners, 2% concerned, consciencious players. It is no surprise that they would respond this way. It minimizes the threat.
If you are representative of the people there, I'm glad I'm not there.
Deleting links to sites because you can't control the content bothers me. Off-topic or no. Delete extra copies of the links or whatever, but just plain deleting them all doesn't seem right to me.
If you give people any credit, allow them to decide slashdot is a wasteland on their own.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Not posting information the community wants because you're afraid of a few trolls is horribly retarded. That is not a valid excuse at all.
If it wasn't evident by the tone of my question, I had cancelled my account a month or two previous to the interview request, and really had my hopes set on playing and enjoying the game again. My roommate (an FFXI veteran as I noted in my question) still plays, and what with the - slow as it might be - trickle of new playable content like Zul'Gurub and Arathi Basin since I last played, I was looking forward to getting a good reason to start playing again.
You see, Blizzard? I gave you my money for months. After I stopped, I wanted to keep giving you money. And now, after sitting on my question for over a month, you have amazingly succeeded in dashing that hope yourself.
Thanks for all the fish.
Glog!
MIT doesn't participate in the whole "with honors" degrees thing.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
Where the moderation controls are for the article? I think -1, Flamebait is applicable. :(
The space unintentionally left unblank.
I posted this interview 3 times. The second time I posted it I didn't believe the first post had been deleted--I thought I must have messed up. The third time I posted it, I added comments that implied that I believe mere technical glitches to be responsible for the missing threads, since you're not supposed to mention deleted threads on the forum there. The third posting got a couple responses saying that all threads discussing the interview were being deleted--so now I knew for sure. After it was deleted, I was irritated, so I posted a wholly innocuous thread about cereal and explicitly stated that this thread was not about any interview on another discussion board (I hoped that by not putting any names down the thread could splip through). Alas, it was caught and deleted. So I had a plan to post something that truly was innocent (on an entierly different subject) and discovered I'd been banned. I don't really care about posting to the forum there, but it just irritated me to no end. (Well, at least until later tonight when I forget all about it.) If a company is going to bother putting forth a lackluster response to an interview with little overall importance, then why would they also want to censor it? Unless they realized their mistake--that the interview sucked and those responding lacked reading skills? *sigh* /rant
well, that clinches it, i'm not buying WoW. way to blow it, PR drones: your responses were sufficiently vapid that it convinced me that you're playing me for bling, not selling me something. i'll follow your former employees now. bye.
Has Boeing never made a bad press release? Has Valve never let someone post a reply that they shouldn't have? Should we all just completely wig out because an accident was made? Clearly those are bad replies, but should start signing petitions, quit the game, and demand apologies?
NO. Roll your eyes and move on with your lives. I'm getting back to the game. Join me, or don't, but don't dwell on it.
You assume the role of a character, and play as that character, within the confines of a game.
Role... Playing... Game.
It's an RPG, to the letter.
Humans like reasons, they like to know why.
s/Humans/Geeks
She was a bit preoccupied for the rest of the day.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Blizzard's forums are a wreck, because they refuse to clean them up. If they deleted off-topic posts, flames, and the like[...]
:)
Well, they already started to delete every thread mentioning this "interview". Does that count as a start?
This post is awesome.
Damn. It's a pity we can't moderate the article itself.. but then I can't decide if it deserves a -1 Troll, or -1 Flamebait.. hard choice there.
This was not written by The Dev Team.. or, if it has, it has been heavily 'moderated' already by Management
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
I think you mean "Hear, hear!"
7.) final decision process? by grungebox Let me be up front: I don't play any MMORPG's...probably never will. I'm sure WOW is fantastic, but I generally stick to console games. Which sort of leads to my question. How in the world did the decision for a Warcraft MMORPG get made? What a stupid question.
In Soviet Russia the joke misses you!
A moose once bit my sister.
OMG I almost spit out my Iced venti Carmel Machiato.
That was the funniest thing I have read in at least three weeks.
Thank you poster for brightening the day of a poor (no really) clinical apps MGR.
dw
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
when it regurgitates lawyer-approved marketing speak to gaming fans totally p.ss.ng them off, and is clueless that it did so, as it's grown the bureacracy like the morons in DC have been doing since 2000.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Since January 14th, I've been collecting WoW population data and archiving it. Well the script recently stopped working, and since I don't play, I froze the graphs and decided to share them. The graphs are now available online. I was catching population, server loads, current # of servers, and even an RSS feed of the in-game alerts.
And since this is a story summary - yes, population is increasing slowly but steadily. Oddly, less people seem to play in June/July. So much for "school kids"
I'm planning to make the data available if anyone is interested. Contact info is on the page or via my link here.
You're new here, right?
Haha, touche'! But seriously, as bad as Slashdot may be, it has nothing on the WoW forum whiners.
Any time an incredibly minor rebalancing is introduced, the shrill cries of "OMG WTF, I can't play anymore!!! I'm canceling!!!! GG Blizzard! $@$#" fill page after page.. Q: "So.. with the slowest weapons in the game you'll now do 4% less damage, 5% at the most on an attack you can't exactly spam?" A: "SHUT UP!! They nerfed the whole class! FU. I should be able to p0wn all the other classes, that's what my class does, now this will make it harder!! Forget it! I'm quitting!"
A little off-topic, remember when Blizzard was the new kid on the block, and not the behemoth that ignores their own fan base? I miss back then, and not just because all I had to worry about was passing enough classes to keep my scholarship.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Working as intended. :)
Ape nosed knee grows
... they have changed the MMORPGs are made and played. I am one of thos players with a real life and want casual end game content (drop at a moment's notice, 1 hour or less to complete the first time you run through it, etc.).
IMHO, Blizzard as forced all the other MMORPGs to do things differently such as leveling and questing. In the post-WoW MMORPG world, you cannot dare to release a MMORPG that is a damn time sink and think that you are going to be successful.
I know I will be quitting pretty soon. It was a kick ass experience and I cannot wait for the next big ORPG.
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
I never could get into Neverwinter Nights. Absolutely horrible interface that game had, though it's nice that it was a little more flexible with hotkeys than WoW is.
I have been playing computer games, RPGs, Wargames, hack and slash, chess and GO for a long time (including Diablo I& II, warcraft II&III), so I know a bit about tactics, stategy and learning my character. Thanks.
And very little of that has much to do with learning your World of Warcraft class.
The fact is...If you are a demonist, being targeted by 4-5 monsters 10 levels lower than you is instant death. Try casting a 2s-spell when you get stabbed by 5 monsters at the same time...
This is why you have a demon that can tank (voidwalker), use various channeled area of effect spells, etc. I don't play a warlock myself, but I've partied with warlocks who do that sort of thing. And yes, fighting 4-5 enemies at once, regardless of their level, can be pretty brutal, especially for a spellcaster. You're not supposed to sit back and just absorb hit after hit after hit.
The easy way would have been to play a TANK, I chose to go the hard way with the demonist
Ok.. yet you wanted to play your demonologist like a tank, which the class is not suited for. Every class intentionally has its strengths and weaknesses. If I pick a mage I don't expect him to do a lot of melee damage, and that lack of melee does not mean he is somewhat "underpowered." This is why the grandparent poster said "learn your class."
PvP sucks : the fact that you can't attack/harm your buddies really harms realism and social relation on WoW.
Lol, If a player of the same faction screws you (by lying, being too egoistical about spoils of war) you can't even attack him to make him pay.
This leads to griefing. It's one of those ideas that sounds great on paper and usually ends up being a disaster in reality. This sort of thing was awful on Battle.Net in DiabloII, as you had a bunch of kiddies getting off on killing low-level folks at will. Griefing. Oh, you say, well if two allies want to attack each other shouldn't they be allowed to do it? That's what dueling is for. The reduction in griefing far outweighs the desire to "pay another guy back."
Besides, they were talking with "grammaticaly correct english sentences"...you know...the thing called "roleplay"......
Man, the number of "need Tank 4 xyv quest" sentences you get on WoW servers (I translated..on the french server that would be "g pour lcdl"="group pour la caverne des lamentations"
And I have seen plenty of splendid roleplay on WoW servers (especially, of course, the RP servers) and seen tons of 'leet speak on other online games. World of Warcraft is not really better or worse in that respect.
The original question didn't even come close to hinting at cheating and they bring it up. In reguards to eBay they simply attacked the issue of selling virtual goods and the possible punishment.
From what I see, the original question was directed at what kind of research was being done on their virtual economies. Instead Blizzard talks about cheating and how selling virtual goods is a violation of the EULA. Not to mention that I could read this kind of 'PR' response from no less that 10 different sources.
What's funniest of all is that the people who ACTUALLY cancel never say so...they just leave. The ones that keep saying they're quitting just stick around making everyone else wish they would. :)