ye except i doubt your guy was lead game designer at Ensemble Studios for the Age of Empires series (which btw makes him more experienced in gaming software development than any of the other 'big name' WoW developers who post)

people who complain about GCs interaction need to cast their mind back to what developer interaction was like before he voluntarily stepped up to the plate to interact with the community (and have no doubts the new damage, tanking and healing forums were created at his behest to enable him to do so)

i'll take GCs level of interaction any day over the cryptic snippits we used to get from the forum mods and the very occasional paragraph or two from Kalgan and Tigole on specific issues of major, major contention.

community developer interaction at the level he provides did not and is not required to exist.

bare it in mind.

@miko

Actually, I can tell from GC’s responses that he is an experienced, management-level game designer. I’ve worked with many experienced designers and project managers, and the job tends to mold them to the point that they develop certain tendencies. (In my experience they are most often not software, math, or engineering types, because those types prefer to implement rather than design.)

One designer tendency is to think that they know better than the customer. Always.
- That attitude can lead them to conclude that customers are just whining - until someone produces the math that proves the problem. Rather, when a problem is heavily reported, a good designer should have someone actually check it out rather than dismissing it outright (and get embarassingly pwned by a freelancing math wiz).

Another designer tendency is to think in terms of cost versus reward.
- The case of Wintergrasp lag (because of a bad design) is a good example of this: The Blizz “solution” is to try to get less people to participate! Obviously a *real* solution is quite expensive in terms of development or physical resources, so the “solution” is to push customers to do something else. (I used to have a manager who would endlessly defer problems when the estimate to fix was longer than 2 weeks - he got played like a fiddle by developers).