Is ignorance of class changes bliss?
by Elizabeth Wachowski 
Sep 10th 2007 at 1:08PM
Ahhhh, how I love the Elitist Jerks forums, the home of the most intelligent, informed, and well-written players of WoW. EJ produced another gem of a topic recently that made me think a bit about the purpose of sites like ours, and what function they serve in the overall scheme of WoW.
Malan, who plays the tauren shaman Keiji on Skullcrusher, recently posted in a thread on the shaman forums about an upcoming patch. Rather than complain about shaman mechanics, however, he asked the community manager Nethaera an important meta-question: If most WoW players don't read the forums, and the forums are the main way the developers and community managers tell new information to the player base, then isn't there a huge gap in communication for most players?
Nethaera responded by saying that players can get information on the forums, the main web site, magazines, interviews online, newsletters, and fan sites (yay for us!) but Malan still detects a problem. The main issue, he says, is that players have to seek out the information out of game, rather than having it somehow come to them. Patch notes are the one exception, but because the patch notes recently have been so long, it's difficult for players to read through them and find the important things. Malan suggests the use of in-game mail or pop-up notes to inform players of changes to their class. "Greetings <Class>! We've changed the damage output of <Ability XYZ> in order to rebalance <Class> for PvP and PvE in the upcoming patch due to mechanics changes. Please adjust your gear and ability use as you see fit! Please press [OK] to dismiss this window!"
This all sounds like a good idea, but the Elitist Jerk leader Praetorian has a different perspective: what more casual players don't know won't hurt them. "What does Blizzard have to gain from sending a personalized letter to Joe Clueless that essentially reads, "Hi, you probably don't understand half of this, but we nerfed you because you were too strong. Enjoy your time in the World of Warcraft!"" Praetorian writes. "A huge portion of the playerbase is casual beyond what anyone who reads this board would ever consider "casual." Avid fans seek out the information they care about, under the current system. Casual players will hear about the big stuff, "Hey, there's a new dungeon in the next patch" or "Arenas are now live!" or "there's an expansion coming out next year that'll raise the level cap to 80 and let people interact with Arthas.""
I can really see both sides of the argument. On one hand, bringing more information about class mechanics to players might help decrease the percentage of bad players out there. On the other hand, anyone who's read the forums for a while knows that sometimes people are happier if they don't know all the behind-the-scenes machinations of class balance. There are many "serious issues" in-game that would have barely been noticed by the majority of players it if weren't for vocal forumgoers.
Can you think of a better way to get WoW information out to players than the current system? When it comes to nerfs and buffs, is ignorance bliss?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Seppuki Sep 10th 2007 1:18PM
you can have it both ways... have a check box in the options menu "Receive Class / Game Mechanic change Notifications"... click it, and from there you can receive an automated update via in-game mail.
Don't check the box, and voila, no in-game mail!
CVJ Sep 10th 2007 1:34PM
I am pretty sure the forums are a small part of changes but I think over all they look at collected data to see over all trends either numbers of certain classes number of deaths in BG's or wins, etc, etc. I think this is how they are changing the next expansion after seeing how few guilds made it into the 25 mans.
john3103 Sep 10th 2007 2:07PM
Yep, Ignorance is bliss. Most of the class changes do not significantly impact the playstyle of probably 90% of the player-base. Sure, raiders and hardcore PvP-er will notice differences, but getting told patch after patch that "Your class will now do slightly less damage" is going to discourage casuals that don't need discouragement.
rafe.brox Sep 10th 2007 1:38PM
Maybe make each the shoulder armor for each class/race reflect how much it has or hasn't been nerfed.
Todd Sep 10th 2007 1:47PM
There are a lot of assumptions on both sides. The Elitists give the community too much credit in assuming the community will learn of ANYTHING on their own. That's pretty ignorant of them.
There is one guarentee in all of this, and that is every player will check their in-game mailbox. The best way to get the message out, is to simply send them mail in-game.
Mir Sep 10th 2007 2:17PM
Interesting question, but I think I'm with Praetorian on this. I myself don't ever read the forum though, in fact I'm rarely visiting the official site at all. Instead, I let all those fan sites out there do the digging for me :)
btw, rofl@3
Epiny Sep 10th 2007 2:21PM
I think most nerfs are ran off what the Dev's see in game and not what the see on the forums. 90% of the forums are people QQ'n about a class they lost too.
Arena Team Class make up has helped with rogue, druid, and hunter, they are getting nerfs to increase arena usage.
Other isssues though would be that classes are used alot, but not how people want them used. Paladins want to tank/dps but are forced to heal. Priests want to heal but are forced to dps.
Delta Sep 10th 2007 2:27PM
Anyone who is interested in learning and finding out information on their own will. That is the basis for curiousity and learning. The ones who will simply wait for someone to tell them, or not really need to seek out said information, either expect someone to tell them, or don't really care either way. That's not just WoW, that's the story of going through school. The kids who didn't give a damn would drop out and find something else to do where the ones who wanted to learn and wanted to get somewhere engaged the system. People who are interested in how their class mechanics work and how it will affect their play style, be it casual or raiding or whatever, will visit some sites, forums, or such and learn what needs to be learned. As much as I generally support keeping everyone else somewhat informed, those people have to want to learn about their own class mechanics for any of that information to be of any use.
The in-game mail option and tooltips are useful, but I think what you should do is simply offer a short message at each patch update when you log in that says "Hi, we have changed a few things with your class, please see the forums or patch notes to learn more!" Those who are interested will, those who aren't, will close the box and continue playing.
Insurgence Sep 10th 2007 2:42PM
One of my problems is that many of the changes are minor enough by themselves that when they are implemented I do not really care. Largely because I am not that into paying attention to characters equations for damage output. I pay attention to the big numbers not to the small ones that make little difference in how I play. It is one thing if it is something like when the fear effect was added to deathcoil, or Soul Link was dropped down to 20% damage absorption, but added 5% damage increase for demon and warlock (btw, I am a Warlock). So the big updates for the classes are what interest me, they are the ones that make the difference, not the small ones that I would never notice unless they were all implemented at the same exact time.
Boonie Sep 10th 2007 4:25PM
What if we actually gave the heralds something to do... in every Alliance city, (Never played a Horde so can't speak for them,) there's a Herald NPC that does nothing.
On a change every player gets an in game mail... about changes... nice and vague for all our captains clueless out there. However it says if you want more information see a herald in a capital city.
Then if you want to know you can find out in game what the change is, have it run for a week or so, then the herald can get back to saying "I bring news of great deeds and events." And then have nothing to say again.
James Thompson Sep 10th 2007 6:25PM
One thing they really need to do is update the manual when they ship new copies of the game. Or at least put an up to date manual on the disc as a pdf. While I have been playing WoW since beta, in the past I have picked up MMOs a good while after release only to find that most of the info in the manual is just plain wrong.
This even happened with WoW at launch, I am sure I wasn't the only one to notice that the manual talks about Tauren plainrunning!
I can only imagine how confusing it is for new players who have only just bought the game to read the manual and then come online and find out that everything is completely different.
I have to admit I haven't bought a copy of WoW recently so maybe they are on top of this, anyone know?
roguedubb Sep 10th 2007 6:34PM
Option: Display patch notes upon login (or an abridged version)
Either when you first enter your password, or perhaps just class-specific notes once you select a character and enter the game so that instead of seeing, "Patch X.Y is now live!" (I can't recall what it actually says), players would be aware that a patch could mean something to them.
Malan Sep 10th 2007 11:55PM
Wow this got some coverage.
Note that while our discussion initially covered things like patch notes, we were just skimming the surface of the issue. The real problem that we were digging at in the EJ thread was that Blizzard does a poor job at providing relevant info to the masses. We don't need/want them to tell us "this rogue DPS cycle is best", but we *do* want them to tell us which items have hidden cooldowns, which trinkets can't be used in feral forms, etc. There's a *wealth* of information missing from the tooltips, etc in-game. As mentioned above, the boxed instruction manuals and even the online material are a *terrible* representation of how the game is played.
Ultimately it may be true that a lot of players don't care to know a lot about the game. But I'm betting that a lot do, and they just don't have access to the info they need to get them started. ie, the tooltip for Windfury Weapon doesn't tell a new player about the 3 sec hidden cooldown. How are they to figure this out on their own?
Artsi Sep 11th 2007 3:12AM
The disconnect is two-way, and I would argue that the direction from players to developers is more important and more broken than the other direction.
Players already provide a lot of information for the playing community, and thus those who are interested in the details can get them from wowwiki, and other sites, Blizzard and WoW Insider included. Of course, providing information about the most relevant changes in-game should take place, but in a "RP" manner, ie. not breaking the immersion.
The most obvious lack of community builder, and information gateway IMHO is the lack of an in-game newspaper. That could provide a lot of automated content (like people reaching their level cap, completeing major quest chains, downing major mobs, completing rare armor sets, etc). It would also offer a channel for sending information to the whole player base in a lore-like fashion. A change to some game mechanic could be reported as observed "weird" changes in class abilities from the notable class representatives (eg. "Recently, The Association of Warlocks, has received reports that Fear is not as frightening as it used to be. Upon researching the matter widely, it has been indeed concluded that where Fear would previously last four seconds, it now seems to last only two. This seems to affect all warlocks, and it is not yet known if the effect is permanent or temporary. All warlocks beware!". Creating such content would of course require a reasonable amount of resources, which, as we know, Blizzard rather spends on new expansion content than improving on the existing world.
The more important problem, though is that Blizzard can not possibly react to community needs properly, since the forums are not a representative sample of the user base. Furthermore, they discourage polls, and don't implement them themselves in large scale at all. Although the most arcane or obvious details can come from active players, who regularly visit the forums, the "whole" player base can not be reached through the forums. In addition, those who occasionally might be willing to provide feedback through forums, can not often log in. Of the few occasions I've wanted to post something on the forums, only one time I've been successful in logging in there. Never had real problems logging into the game, though, (or if so, then it's been server-wide and fixed very fast).
It would be relatively easy to implement a mechanic for the log in screen to take a poll every now and then about issues concerning the players (or through the in-game newspaper/mailbox system). Done once per account, and possibly based on characters on that account, Blizzard could collect a wealth of information from the real, active players (active in the sense that they play the game). The critical part would be formulating the poll questions very precisely to avoid any inherent bias. The results would give a proper insight to *why* players do what they do, and what they *think*, instead of relying on only statistics and forum whiners (though there is a wealth of very good information and lots of very knowledgeable and skilled players there, too).
Want to know what is wrong with X, ask those who are most affected by it. Want to know what to do with AFK at AV? Ask those who actively do Arena and/or BGs with proper statistics to back it (honor?, kills, rank, etc). Want to know what needs to be improved in a class? Ask those who play that class. And if possible, let a proper polling expert do the questions, so that results are both meaningful and useful.