RSS Account management page issues, Blue posts [Archive]

Azel

29/12/2008, 13:07

[EU] Account Management Page Issues <div class="blizzquotewrap"><div class="blizzquoteinner"><div class="blizzquoteheader">Quote from: Omiraenn (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/23/13909427299-account-management-page-issues--12282008.html" target="_blank" style="color: white;">Source</a>)</div><div class="blizzquote">We are currently investigating issues that may be affecting the retrieval of Refer-a-Friend rewards via the Account Management Page. We will follow-up once updates are available. Thank you very much for your patience while we work to resolve this. </div></div></div> Blue posts <div class="blizzquotewrap"><div class="blizzquoteinner"><div class="blizzquoteheader">Quote from Blizzard staff</div><div class="blizzquote">Burst damage in Arenas Totally agree that the matches like you are describing can involve a lot of skill. But we also heard from plenty of players during the heydey of maxed out resilience that they felt like they couldn't compete because pure damage dealing wasn't of much use in an Arena. Instead, every class was asking for CC, counter CC, ways to close the gap, ways to interrupt or silence, etc. Damage itself was devalued. Even today you can see players who are glad to no longer have 20+ minute Arenas that feel more like chess matches. Things may be too bursty now, but I think we've also been in a state where CC'ing or draining the healer was basically the whole game too. I think there is a sweet spot somewhere, but I didn't want players to think that was a very different place than what we thought. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/13909426107-are-you-kidding-me-seriously.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Resilience and burst damage It is hard to nail the sweet spot on Arena balance, and what that sweet spot is depends a lot on what role you play. At times players have felt that they couldn't prevent someone from healing, which turns the entire fight into mana draining, silence and crowd control, since nobody ever dies. Damage-dealers were frustrated because they felt like just beating on someone (which their entire spec may have been designed around) was ineffective. Currently, the opposite is true, where players can be beaten down very quickly and healers tend to wonder why they should even bother trying to heal. Resilience will make a difference - remember that not only is PvP gear itemized for resilience, but it uses up points that would normally be spent on +dps. The defenses are not only higher, but the offenses are lower. Furthermore, once players can survive for a few seconds, it tends to force everyone to worry about defenses once again. Will resilience make enough of a difference? That is something we are discussing right now. We hear and understand all of the concerns. I don't have any announcements to make of changes at this time, and honestly changes of the magnitude we're talking would not be the kind of thing I would just casually drop as an answer to a forum thread like this. But we do hear you. [...] While that was true to an extent, if you look at the Lich King PvP gear, you'll see that it pays a higher price for resilience. In previous seasons, you could get very high dps and resilience on the same set of gear. That is harder to do now. Rogues, like everyone else, will be risking being very fragile if they go with all PvE gear for the damage. That isn't happening now because very few people have much PvP gear. Once players can survive a few hits, then players without resilience are going to go down quickly. (Weapons are an exception to this, at least for now.) Again, I'm not saying that burst damage won't still be too high. That is something we're looking at. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/13909386074-gc-rumors.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Arenas and skill measurement We like Arenas, and clearly a lot of players do too. What we don't like about them is they really put class balance under a microscope. Ultimately we'd like to see the pendulum on PvP swing back a little closer to Battlegrounds and even world PvP. We think the BGs actually encompass the story of Warcraft (which is essentially Horde vs. Alliance) much better than do the Arenas. Where the Arena currently beats the pants off the BG is that we can detect player skill much better in an Arena. That in turn allows us to offer the best loot to the best players. BG rewards by contrast have traditionally felt very grindy. We do have some plans to change all of that. We don't have any intention of getting rid of Arenas for players that do enjoy that sort of gameplay. But we also want to give other players alternatives to still be able to get great rewards. [...] Class certainly has an effect on the outcome, which is why it is subject to such scrutiny. At the same time, I think there is something interesting to the whole comp strategy. I think we'd lose something if you could get any 3 random people together. I'm not saying certain classes should be doomed to failure. I'm saying who you get for your third should mean something. You actually feel that you can determine "skill" in an unbalanced RNG based game? Within the limitation of the tools, yes I think we can. You're talking down to an awful lot of gladiators out there if your argument is that they just picked the right class or got lucky with the RNG. If I took say a rogue-mage-priest team at the height of its power and played a team with the same gear and comp, I don't think the outcome would be 50/50 every time. If I took my team and played the best team in the world, I would expect to get stomped. That's skill. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/13908766368-why-arena-is-bad-for-wow.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Crowd Control CC isn't a bad concept. But damage isn't a bad concept either. We designed quite a few specs to focus on dealing damage, and when they don't think that's effective, they get just as grumpy (and understandably so) and feel like their spec needs some new tool to shut down the healer. I'm not talking about the state of S5 specifically or the S2-S4 for that matter. I'm just saying that in general there should be a place for crowd control and for healing and for silencing and mana drain and also just plain killing someone. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/13909296195-gc-im-very-very-worried.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Talent builds We design the talent trees with specific builds in mind. We'll slide things up and down to make them more or less attractive to various cross-spec strategies. Players rarely surprise us with builds. When they do it's something like the Holy paladin that goes all the way down Ret but intends to heal like Holy, or the Elemental shaman who goes very deep in Enhancement. I should say players rarely surprise us with builds but they surprise us all the time in general. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/13909386521-gc-do-you-know-what-specs-are-before-tc.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Arena Matchmaking My point was that when the matchmaking is working well, it will pit you against players very close to your skill level. Playing players very close to your skill level increases the chance you will lose. The point is actually not to have the 2000+ players mowing their way through scrubs. It's to pair off the best teams against each other so that getting e.g. Gladiator means something. What I was actually getting at though was a loftier sentiment that players run through quests or an instance and one-shot everything and then go into PvP and can lose a lot. It's a very different experience, and psychologically I think it affects players more than they give it credit for. (If you are highly-ranked or don't even play PvE much then it likely affects you a lot less.) (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/13909426245-are-you-kidding-me-seriously.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Class balancing and player's feedback It is challenging to compare our numbers to those that come up from the community. Since I have been doing this gig, there have been plenty of times when players will say "Yeah, we figured X was overpowered," but that is almost immediately followed by "but the nerfs were too much." I have honestly yet to see more than one or two players ever agree that the magnitude of a nerf (any nerf) was justified. I'm just sayin. We have to rely on our testing more than the community. That's just the way it has to work. Your numbers, however, are a useful reality check. In situations where the community consistently finds different numbers, we might go check our numbers again. We will do so in this case. Something else worth pointing out is the whole concept of "your mileage may vary." Not every player has the same timing, gear, situational awareness or even rotation. In many cases our calculations are based on the higher ends of the spectrum -- the damage potential generated by the best players in ideal situations. For a class like the hunter that does require a fairly high amount of skill to master that may mean that your damage didn't drop as much (because you weren't using a technique that the experts were using to coax every bit of dps out of their attacks) or your damage may drop a lot more (because the experts are able to switch to other sources of damage more readily than a less skilled player). All I'm saying is that WoW isn't such a simple game that a 10% buff or nerf done on our end will automatically result in a 10% buff or nef for every player out there in every situation. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/13909425894-can-we-get-gc-to-comment.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) <img src="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/24x24/deathknight.jpg" alt="" border="0" /> Death Knight (<a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=650" target="_blank">Skills List</a> / <a href="http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight" target="_blank">Talent + Glyph Calc.[...</a></div></div></div>

Fonte (http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=32129.0)