Blizzard again rises the bar and sets a new standard.

The warrior protest in World of Warcraft produced some results. I documented the protest itself here, then gathered more comments here.

For me the protest was more a crusade about the communication than getting involved in the problems of the warrior class in the game. I’m really happy and pleased by how Blizzard reacted. Kalgan, one of the devs that engaged some PvP debates during beta, wrote down an incredibly exhaustive, deep and informative comment to the issues that the playerbase underlined during these months.

The only ‘bad’ element is that this post arrives only after the protest. I believe that engaging the community in a discussion is extremely useful. For both the parts involved. I’m happy to see that Blizzard did a relevant step in the right direction and I hope now it won’t stop or feel satisfied.

With this entry I re-read (with my broken english) what has been written, summarizing and underlining those parts that I consider relevant.

—
Kalgan starts explaining that the rage-generation of 1h+shield is intended to behave differently than 2h. This because the rage builds up as you deal damage AND when you are hit. In the case of 1h+shield you are supposed to have more aggro on you and “hold” more opponents at the same time. So the rage-generation is compensated because while you deal overall less damage you are also being hit a lot more frequently. The issue then become how you are able to take the aggro. He explains that you can do this by switching stances and with the help of the Tactical Mastery talent and the Bloodrage skill.

Then he passes to discuss and analyze why warriors cannot be directly compared with rogues. This is obvious since, you know, classes are supposed to play differently in this game. Built on completely different mechanics. This was a non issue for me but it needed to be explained because it’s a very common assumption of the players when they compare directly the classes. So there’s not much to argue or discuss here, aside the fact that this was absolutely needed on the “communication level”.

Direct quotes:

If rage and energy were generated at equivalent rates, it wouldn’t have been particularly meaningful for them to be different mechanics. If we intended for them to be the same, we probably would have chosen to make warriors use energy just like rogues do, yet all this would have done is water down the core differences between the character classes.

Finally, if when it was all said and done warriors dealt as much damage as rogues (due to similar rage-energy translation into damage and similar power generation rates), warriors would be flat-out better characters then rogues (better armor, more hit points, same damage), so again, it simply isn’t reasonable to draw direct comparisons between the two.

All of that having been said, we agree that there are some issues with rage generation in general, and we plan to address these so that warriors dish out some more damage and push slightly more buttons than they do today.

Then he continues to explain how 1h+shield, 2h and dual wield are considered and balanced. To begin with he explains how 2h was balanced against 1h+shield. To do this they calculated extensively and exhaustively the overall time to kill 100 creatures. So including the downtime. 1h+shield is supposed to kill one single creature more slowly, but with less downtime between each fight. While 2h is supposed to kill more quickly but taking more damage, so more downtime. These tests brought directly to a rule:

2h weapons needed to produce approximately 20% more DPS then 1h+s. What this meant was that in order for DW to be an interesting (but not overpowered) choice, DW needed to also produce a total increase of 20% DPS over 1h+s (just like 2h does).

Given that, we needed to find a way to modify some combination of damage, hit chance, attack speed, or other basic combat factors in order to achieve 20% rather than 100%.

The miss rate, one of the most debated issue, is also considered intended. Balanced between 1h+shield, 2h and DW with the formula here above and with an overall ratio that is balanced to offer a “reasonable amount of unpredictability”.

This is instead what ISN’T working and will be addressed (soonâ„¢):

Now, regarding improving the warrior’s overall rage generation. We’ve found that there are indeed a few issues with rage generation as a result of bugs. Warriors (and druids in bear form) are intended to gain some rage on block,dodge,parry events, but apparently this isn’t working correctly. This needs to be fixed asap in order for warriors to meet their total expected rage generation.

In addition, while our tests have indicated that players are getting the intended 5% miss rate while using a single max-skill weapon against even level enemies (yes, we’ve tested this exhaustively, and cannot reproduce the 9% miss rate you’re reporting for normal swings), we have found the bug causing abilities (ie: heroic strike, sunder armor, etc) to miss around 9-10% of the time under the above conditions instead of the intended 5%. This does mean that warriors are getting the “miss” even about twice as often as they should. Obviously, this needs to be rectified asap, since it directly impacts the warriors DPS and rage use (since missing wastes 20% of the rage cost of the ability).

The next topic is the rage potions. Recently commenting this I wrote: “The design decision is to not make the game a potion fest. This destroys the game when you HAVE to go around with a hundreds of potions because you know the standard is about to use them ALL the time. Potions are ok if they are odds. To be odds they need to be limited or “odd” becomes just “catass”, where this catass can just own everything everywhere because he has super loot and potions to use all the time.”
Kalgan explains my point of view:

We understand that Rage potions being on the same timer as other combat-timer potions means they don’t amount to “free” rage. If rage potions were on a separate timer, we’d actually have to balance the game around the assumption that rage potions are used in a significant number of fights. Therefore, rage potions aren’t intended or expected to be what provides a baseline amount of rage for a fight.

The problem of the “hitpoints” is another hot topic in the discussion. Again here the damage comes directly from the experience of the players with other games and the assumptions that the same mechanics need to work in the same way in World of Warcraft.

You’re claiming an imbalance exists is because a warrior that focuses on getting gear with stats other than stamina gear can end up having a lower total health then another character that focuses on stamina equipment, I still don’t see the argument as entirely valid. That scenario seems more like a conscious choice on the part of the players involved, and evidence that WoW has interesting and meaningful equipment choices.

With respect to the implication that warriors should have more base health, our combat durations, damage values, ability/spell statistics, etc are all balanced around a warriors having their current health values. Changing those health values yet retaining similar combat times, downtime, etc for the game as a whole would require a huge number of changes across the game, impacting the balance of the game in general.

The problem of spells dealing damage to a warrior without a protection value coming from the armor factor is considered intended but again felt broken by the players because of assumptions coming from playing other games. They know that the spell damage isn’t reduced by the armor factor and the damage of spells (compared to warrior’s styles) is balanced keeping this key mechanic in mind.

Therefore, a warrior’s base melee attacks are deliberately “overpowered” with the expectation that the targets will have some amount of physical damage reduction due to armor.

The next problem is the “survivability”. In particular when warriors are compared to Paladins. Basically what Kalgan writes is that this issue will be partially solved with a paladin nerf more than a warrior boost:

While paladins are indeed intended to be the most survivable of any class in the game (players sometimes assume warriors are, which is not the case), paladins aren’t intended to make the best “tanks� in the game, or to have superior offensive abilities then warriors. What this means is that survivability alone does not a tank make.

The other key concept to tanking is the ability to hold agro on mobs (especially simultaneously on multiple mobs). This is the key difference between warriors and paladins in PvE. Simply put, warriors are intended to be the best at holding agro against multiple mobs (which will also be a more clear distinction once the Seal of the Crusader bug is fixed). So, assuming a group scenario that includes healers, a warrior’s survivability rivals that of a paladin’s, with the warrior having very significant advantages in terms of holding agro.

A quicknote is about the use of bandages compared with food:

Bandages heal considerably more quickly then food.

The rest of what Kalgan writes is simply about dissipating more and more wrong assumptions. Again this is needed and it’s an OPTIMAL way to communicate with the playerbase. It allows the players to UNDERSTAND how the problems are perceived by the devs and allows them to finally understand, accept and SHARE these design choices.

I’m more than sure that the time Kalgan ‘wasted’ to write all this will be rewarded. The communication isn’t simply important to keep the playerbase calm. It is important because the community itself is the biggest and more precious resource for a dedicated dev team. This message, that I read and analyzed, definitely improved my faith and trust into Blizzard. I’m sure that many other players feel the same way.

To conclude this is a quick list of what will hopefully change in the near future:

Cumulative List of Fixes:

1- We’ve found that there are indeed a few issues with rage generation as a result of bugs. Warriors (and druids in bear form) are intended to gain some rage on block, dodge, parry events, but apparently this isn’t working correctly. This needs to be fixed asap in order for warriors to meet their total expected rage generation.

2- We have found the bug causing abilities (ie: heroic strike, sunder armor, etc) to miss around 9-10% of the time under the above conditions instead of the intended 5%. This does mean that warriors are getting the “miss” even about twice as often as they should. Obviously, this needs to be rectified asap, since it directly impacts the warriors DPS and rage use

3- We agree that Bloodrage is too punishing right now. We plan to improve Bloodrage so warriors don’t feel as hesitant to use it.

4- (about the Improved Thunder Clap talent) This talent needs some love.

5- (about Improved Execute) The full consumption of rage upon missing is a bug that will be fixed.

6- (about Bloodthirst) I agree that this talent can use some improvement. It turns out the current design leaves it vulnerable to always being either too narrow or too powerful, without much in-between. As such, this talent is a likely candidate for change.

And a possible nerf in the future:

– (about Sweeping Strikes + Cleave or Retaliation) In truth, it was never really the intent that sweeping strikes would work on multi-target abilities (it is intended to turn single-target abilities into dual-target abilities). However, in the interest of not weakening warriors right now, we’re inclined to allow the combination to work as long as it doesn’t become highly abusive and create balance problems.

I archived permanently the original message here on this site in the forum. So that it won’t vanish as it always happen on Blizzard’s forums.

My reportage is here below.
On the forum thread Caydiem (Blizzard CR) wrote:

Please understand that we value your feedback and we know how upset the Warrior community is at this time. There are ways to express your opinion on this. Post on the forums — we do read the class forums, we know you’re not satisfied, and we appreciate your well-written posts.

The protest is not a constructive way to get your point across. It causes lag for many customers and can ruin their gameplay experience. This is why we cannot allow such a thing to continue. If you use constructive means of communicating with us, trust me… we’ll listen.

To which I replied that ‘trust’ is one of those qualities you have always to earn slowly, with the time.

Again I believe that the importance of this protest is about the communication level. The rest of the comments I paste here should describe well also my point of view:

anarch:
A trend I have noticed, if you post something completely inane you will get a CSR response, while many actual requests for information on stealth nerfs go ignored.

Its become clear that the CSR’s are kept in the dark and are basically having to use “we’ll look into it” posts and never return to the subject. This is why the protest happened and the response was hilariously inadequate for such a gesture. It seems Blizzard ignored all the lessons learned from EQ CSR despite the large number of former EQers on their payroll.

J. the Yellow:
If the easiest way to get the attention of CSR’s and/or CM’s is to do or say things that are totally stupid, the relationship is broken.

hound:
I think it is called dealing with them on their own level. Joking of course. At any rate I thought I would never experience worse CS than SOE’s however judging from my own experiences with WoW and EQII, it does seem that SOE has improved their act out a lot and Blizzard is fumbling in the dark.

Korak:
Protests even to the point of crashing the server should make it plenty clear that there is a problem that needs to get a fairly quick remedy. The only problem is when you have every single class or guild doing this constantly for arguably stupid reasons.

Good tool and I’m afraid it’s the only significant one players have at this moment. Quitting doesn’t improve the game. Whining on a forum doesn’t improve it either. Crashing the server doesn’t necessarily help either, but it is a more aggressive stance to a lackluster problem.

anarch:
Not having a true line of communication with the playerbase is the problem. Blizzard can solve all of these protest issues by just responding to issues. All it would take would be for them to divide up the classes amongst the 4 or 5 CSR guys they have working the forums now. Once or twice a day go through the class forums and just respond with a I’ll bring it up at the next dev meeting or I’ll look into it for you.

Does that seem so hard? Unfortunately it is more than what Blizzard was willing to do until several thousand people upset with the lack of communication crashed a server in protest. Now they have said what they should have before any of it even happened.

A policy of open communication is not something we, as players, should have to even think about. It’s so fucking common sense I have to wonder about the competency of those in charge of the industry CSR/GM programs.

And finally two core points. The first is that Blizzard is *slow*. Painfully slow. They aren’t an optimal company for a mmorpg because they are organized in a completely different way. Single player games need a completely different structure and while an “old” approach brought to a really polished and successful game, now it’s absolutely inappropriate. And we are only starting to see the difficulties Blizzard will face (and they are somewhat aware of this). My point of view is that this situation isn’t just a temporary adjustment. Again I was expecting this already in May.

Sable Blaze:
We also know exactly how long it takes Blizzard to change anything. So patience is a virtue in this case (a necessity, more like).

shild:
Patience is a lot harder to find when you’re paying $15 a month. And I think that’s the problem here. Waiting five months for a patch on a game with no monthly fee is one thing. Waiting five months in an MMOG is $75 and with the leveling curve, you’ll probably max out even if your class is gimped.

And the last point, again about the communication:

Rasix:
But is a “we’re looking into that”, “good stuff is on the way”, “you’re wrong, it works like this” really going to satiate these frothing fanbios?

myself:
No, it’s about searching a real and open communication without placeholder answers.

Communication is again two-way and it needs a discussion. This discussion goes only from players to devs. They need to start discussing and offer their own feedback.

It’s not about posting a long programmatic announce. It’s about posting it, read the reactions and engage a discussion.

Conclusion with a precious nugget from Freakazoid:

Disco Stu:
How about fuck you. I pay to play the game. They have enough trouble keeping the servers up as it is. If your stupid ass is going to try and crash them because you (in your obviously unbiased and well thought out opinion) don’t kill shit quick enough then you need a kick in the balls and a 24 hour ban.

Freakazoid:
(paraphrasing)
How about fuck you. I pay my taxes. They have enough trouble keeping the roads uncongested as it is. If your stupid ass is going to try and halt traffic because you (in your obviously unbiased and well thought out opinion) think the police are racist then you need a kick in the balls and a 24 hour detention.

(comments ‘borrowed’ from Corpnews and F13)

Here’s a “visual” reportage of the protest that took place about two hours ago on the Argent Dawn server of World of Warcraft. The subject of this protest was the problems of the warrior class, the purpose of the protest was to draw the attention over those issues and ‘to awaken’ both the playerbase and Blizzard.

In general I do not care about classes discussions, in fact I rarely rant about nerfs or direct unbalances of the classes. But I was there, of course. These type of “happenings” are way too fun and interesting from an “observer” point of view. They are something unique that has its roots directly in the very potential of the genre.

You can read in detail about what happened and find more proper and informative links here.

Instead if you follow the “read more” link on the right of this article you’ll see my visual reportage. From the beginning to its pitiful end ;p
(about 16 images and 4.8Mb in total)

My conclusions are unrelated: the client of the game is amazing. Everything remained perfectly smooth with no hiccups or freezes even when someone started spamming AOE spells. I could consider this as a preemptive test for the upcoming battlegrounds.

UPDATE: Pasted at the bottom the letter I received from Blizzard about the account suspension.

P.S.
My mailbox is still waiting an answer. So I don’t know if the account got suspended for a day, a week, a month or just forever. Voices say it’s three days.

I shouldn’t play around happily when my account isn’t even completely ‘legal’ considering I play from the Europe.

UPDATE:
This is the letter I received a minute ago about the account suspension:

Offense: Harassment – Zone Disruption

Details: Zone disruption for Ironforge during warrior protest, player would not disperse after many warnings

The actions detailed above have been deemed inappropriate for World of Warcraft by the In-Game Support staff of Blizzard Entertainment. As a result, this account has received a warning and a 3 hour account suspension. Until the suspension has been lifted, the account will not be accessible. Please note that Blizzard Entertainment will be unable to provide further information regarding the specific time an account will be accessible again.

Be aware that additional inappropriate actions may result in further disciplinary action, including account closure. We thank you in advance for respecting our position and hope that you will continue to enjoy your gaming experience in World of Warcraft.

EDIT: Comments disabled for awhile.

I wouldn’t write about this but I got called on.

It seems that the Koreans were able to kill the biggest foozle currently in World of Warcraft, aka the dragon named “Onyxia”. This while the 600k players on the north american servers are still tinkering to accomplish it (and struggling with raid-related bugs).

This news is accompanied by a choreographic screenshot and the announce that they just needed three days to level up a mage to 60 (but weren’t characters kept from beta to release in Korea?).

The news isn’t important as a big event itself. It is important in the way it’s tied to something Ubiq wrote recently (today it’s all-Ubiq, Ubiquitous).

“World of Warcraft” is the exact same game here and in Korea. It’s not getting a localization that will adapt the mechanics of the game. In this case I’m interested in observing how Blizzard will react to this. If what has been said is correct, this game will become a huge hit in Korea and this means that those players WILL HAVE an impact on the design of the game. This super hardcore playerbase will feel flat bored way, way sooner than the north american players and I’m more than sure that Blizzard won’t just ignore a million or so subscribers paying up to 24$ each month (that’s the monthly fee in Korea, confirmed by Blizzard).

This may be both a good (because it will push the development of a game that now seems sitting and yawning, glutted, the day after the party) and a bad thing (because it will force the flat, horizontal development. Adding an infinite number of ‘stuff’ in a strategy dictated by mudflation and removing directly any type of depth from the game world).

Btw, your ph4t 133t is here.

World of Warcraft will patch the next week, we have the notes. Highlights:

* Group loot has been fixed to work as originally intended. It will now work exactly like round robin does, with the exception that when an item of threshold level or above drops, it will use the auto-rolling system. (Prior to this fix, when in group loot mode, the round robin system was only being used for items (all players could loot coins), which was rather confusing).

* Fixed a group loot permission bug that was telling players they did not have permission to loot.

* Fixed a bug that was causing the game to freeze when scrolling through auctions in the Auction House.

Well, that’s all. Very good usability fixes but where’s our ‘stuff’?

From Tom Chick’s World of Warcraft mini-review:

After numerous attempts at sushi, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t like sushi. But then someone took me to a little tiny place in a strip mall on Ventura Boulevard and I discovered that I was wrong. It’s not that I didn’t like sushi; it’s just that I hadn’t had the right sushi yet.

As you probably have read everywhere a possible reason why half of World of Warcraft servers are going nut is because of a “ship bug”. A thread debating this idiocy can be found here.

The reason of this entry instead is about a “Message from the President of Blizzard” that appeared on the forum. In particular this part:

The boat between Menethil Harbor and Auberdine was disappearing intermittently, dropping players into the ocean and crashing the servers. Passengers on this boat who were disconnected and tried to reconnect would crash the server yet again when trying to log on. We knew that this was unacceptable and immediately took down the servers when we discovered the problem in order to implement a fix.

It’s unacceptable that a bug that beta players know since September now crashes the server. Yes, because till now this bug just dropped you in the ocean, killing you and forcing you to do two or three corpse run. Loosing time and durability on items, breaking parties and, overall, delivering a really nice experience (and if you were lucky also reiterating it more than once).

Obviously this wasn’t enough to be put in the list of things to fix. But now…