Posts with tag official-forums

Reader comments -- ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.

The hot topic at [1.Local]'s press time was an opinion piece from Adam Holisky mulling over the unfortunate high profile of inappropriate posts from disgruntled players on the Blizzard forums. "While it's obvious that trollish parts of the community value and participating in internet yelling matches, the majority of the community does not care to hear it," writes Adam. "We bring this issue up and to the forefront on popular WoW media because it's imperative for the health of the community that this vocal minority does not control or continue to influence the quiet majority."

Urnias: Adam H. is exactly right. Forum posts like the one referenced are why I stopped trying to garner any useful information from that source. I got tired and angry of having to wade through 1) e-peen, 2) flame wars, 3) players who do zero research and 4) those who feel their drop in the bucket to Blizzard's coffers entitles them to dictate game direction and others' play styles.

Please shut up and just play the game. If you're that pissed off, quit. When Blizzard sees the thousands upon thousands of accounts leaving to play Star Trek or Warhammer, they will make the changes you need to feel better and they will beg you to come back.

This post is going to be very meta in some regards, and it's going to touch on a few things that deal with the WoW community's very existence. We've written this article in hopes that it might help calm the waters, or at least bring some will on the part of the multitudes of individuals not to jump on the wrong bandwagon.

If you've been paying attention to the role forums and the "Ghostcrawler drama" this past week, you know what I'm talking about. If not, we'll begin with a brief rundown.

The Inherency of the Status Quo

WoW is designed and run by a team of people, with a handful of "leads" in position to direct the design of the game. These people, such as Ghostcrawler, are at the top of the ladder in terms of game development. They are the conglomerate of the entire design and development teams underneath them.

Ghostcrawler, and in the past a few people like him, post on the role forums daily in an effort to establish a dialogue with the community over some, but not all, game design principals.

The community, as expected, is more than happy to talk with Ghostcrawler and the rest of Blizzard.

The Harm of the Vocal Minority

Ghostcrawler, aka Greg Street, the Lead Systems designer, posted today that he is going to "chill it out a little" from the role forums. These forums are the primary conduit for Blizzard to communicate with the fanbase about changes to WoW and the philosophy behind those changes. For the past year and a half, Ghostcrawler has been the daily presence in the forums, offering a unique and exceptionally detailed look at the inner workings of the design process that goes into WoW.

One of the primary complaints Ghostcrawler has about the forums is how his words are picked apart by folks, often times with such a fine scalpel that things which he says are taken out of context and diluted from their original meanings. We've noticed this ourselves, in that when we post on something he says commenters will often look past the context of the post (or article we've written) and dive right into a uniquely feisty brand of QQ.

As of late the forums have reached a new level of annoyance, with more and more posts being about Ghostcrawler's job performance and him personally, instead of being about the game mechanics. Even post about game mechanics and design issues find a way to devolve into people crying about their class or what Ghostcrawler has or has not done. Some people actually believe that Ghostcrawler promised them a pony, and those people have became significantly more and more vocal.

The possibility of changing your character's race was indicated at BlizzCon 2009, during one of the panels. But then the news about it really got hot when Faction changes were officially announced, because eagle-eyed players noticed the following damning question in the new program's FAQs: Can I use this service to change race on my existing faction? The answer was confirmation enough for most folks: No. We will be releasing a Race change service in the near future for this purpose.

But, this wouldn't be the first time a bit of miscommunication or other confusion has occurred. The final confirmation of upcoming race changes came today, confirmed by Neth again in an official forum thread. All she was actually doing there was referencing the original thread about Faction changes, which had already said Race changes were coming. The announcement even showed up on the official Warcraft Twitter account. So this isn't exactly a brand new thing. Still, it's nice to have it confirmed all over again.

Race changes, of course, subtly differ from Faction changes because you'll still stay Alliance if you're Alliance, or Horde if you're Horde. Race changes might be performed for aesthetic reasons -- you might just prefer the look of a sexy little gnome. Still, I bet most Race changes will be to get access to "better" racials. Especially if racials do get revamped in Cataclysm, a lot of players will see the grass a little greener on the other side. Every Man For Himself, anyone?

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From Goblins and Worgens to Mastery and Guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.

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For some reason, this post in the WoW Europe general forums asking what shapeshift form has the best dance moves makes me suspicious. The poll itself is innocuous enough, although I don't understand why Tree of Life and Moonkin carry such a commanding lead (Cat is my personal favorite).

No, the suspicious part is: why are they asking this now? New dances were a much-hyped feature in Wrath of the Lich King, although they have so far entirely failed to materialize. If they're still working on them, for 3.3 or 4.0, this might be some market research to see what sort of dances we like.

On the other hand, it may just be an innocent piece of fun from Ancilorn. Who knows?

Here's a good question from the official forums: What's your favorite raid boss, and why? The original poster chose C'thun, from classic WoW's second-hardest raid, AQ40; Bornakk agrees. I haven't actually seen C'thun, but from what I hear it was both incredibly frustrating and incredibly awesome. Crygil picks Doomwalker, but he might be a little biased.

As for me, picking out of the fights I've done, I'm going to say Hodir. I don't remember classic raiding very clearly, and I only got through Karazhan and most of Zul'aman in BC. Ulduar is probably my favorite raid instance out of all the ones I've done, and the Hodir fight is really fun and demands a good amount of coordination from your group. What's your pick?

The first answer post from the class Q&A series is up! 6:30 PM on a Tuesday night is not exactly when I expected this to drop, but I'm not complaining, and neither are most shamans, I expect. 4,400 words from the devs answering the community's questions is always nice. I've summarized the major points below; my summary may seem long, but it is only 20% of the original post.

As of Wrath, the goal is for all three Shaman trees to be viable in end-game raiding, and for Shaman DPS to be not necessarily quite as high as pure classes, but close; the goal is that "no raid worth its salt would turn down" any shaman out of concerns that the class is underpowered.

They do think Shamans are a bit underpowered in PvP, especially smaller Arenas, and view that as a problem. They mention particularly wanting to improve Shaman performance on 2v2s.

Blizzard gets more and more communicative every week recently. I love it. They recently announced that they're seeking questions for a community question and answer series, with a separate thread for each class. They'll be going through the class threads in order, answering questions and generally being awesome (one hopes). Afterwards everything will be gathered into one big blue pile of answers and presented to the community.

Nethaera is going to be the organizer of this little event, it seems. She warns us that it is "probably going to be a couple of weeks" before we start getting answers, because they want to give sufficient time for WoW players around the world to get their questions in. She also says she's going to try to get "the most prominent questions" answered, as well as questions that have been around for a long time without being addressed.

This is a great time to get your class questions and concerns addressed, so if you have anything you've always wanted to ask a dev, go find the Q&A thread for your class (in your class forum) and post away.

This is a few days old, but still a quality post. The original poster has a bad experience with a Pop-Tart, leading to nerf calls against fire damage - apparently a pastry being able to take his tongue down to 60% in one GCD is just too much burst. Of course, if the opponents hadn't been running a Pop-Tart/Toaster combo, this never would have happened; burn damage is highly situational.

It's a good set-up, but the thread really starts to shine when later posters get into it, like "You didn't specify the flavour of the pop tart, so we can't exactly see what the problem was. If it was strawberry that's kinda understandable since it is considered a hero class, but if it was brown sugar, yeah, you're making this up." You heard it here first: Strawberry is the Death Knight of toaster snacks.

What do you think: do Pop-Tarts need nerfs, or do you side with the poster who says that "Pop Tarts are fine. l2eat"?

There's a short, five-page locked thread over at the official forums that starts out by quoting Ghostcrawler although the OP doesn't quite make his point clear. I think what he's trying to say is that there's too much crowd control in the game, so much in fact, that a PvP trinket is mandatory. The discussion devolves into a criticism of the prevalance of crowd control in PvP. This is arguably exemplified by one of the most enduring and successful 3v3 team composition in Arenas, the RMP or Rogue-Mage-Priest comp which has access to a good number of crowd control (and interrupt or silence) abilities.

Ghostcrawler pops in to give his two centavos worth (apparently he can sift through QQ much better than I could) to say that "crowd control abilities are part of WoW," and is actually a little surprised at the reaction. "If you don't like being CC'd," he chides, "use your PvP trinket." He goes on to say that too much crowd control isn't good for the game, and also acknowledges that too much burst and too much healing aren't palatable, either. A little later down the thread, he gives a little illumination behind developer philosophy about crowd control design and distribution. Newsflash: it isn't equal.

By not being equal, I mean that some classes have more CC than others, while some have access to more CC breaks than others. But the accusation was that this made the game unbalanced, and this is what our favorite crab disagreed with. Despite the trend towards a little class homogeneity (e.g., identical or non-stacking buffs), he draws the line at making classes carbon copies of each other. He admits that "making classes identical or even very similar makes the game easier to balance," but he also astutely points out that "it also makes it boring."

Blizzard has gone ahead and implemented their own blue tracker on the official forums, easily showing every blue post made throughout the day.

Now personally, I don't like theirs compared to MMO-Champion, World of Raids, or WoWRaid. All those have a nice layout that allows for quick viewing and easy summaries of posts. It's much preferable to the "tool" Blizzard has put up.

Additionally, the Blizzard blue tracker lacks an RSS feed and the ability to search through the posts.

It's clear that Blizzard did this to dissuade the use of third party blue trackers and other sites.

Many of the people who are actually allowed to surf the official World of Warcraft forums were a little unhappy with the change to Battle.net accounts simply due to the fact that it meant that if you had an authenticator attached to your account, you now had to use that authenticator to log onto the forums, which wasn't needed before. Even if you're allowed to surf at work, and even if the authenticator has a ring on it to so it can be attached to your keys, not everyone feels comfortable carrying that thing around all of the time. You lose it, you're out of luck for awhile.

The other day, Bornakk announced some good news that I think a lot of those individuals may have missed: They've temporarily removed the requirement to use an authenticator for the forums and the Armory. In the future, they'll be making this feature optional. You'll be able to choose whether or not you want to use the authenticator on the forums. Why would you want to do that? Well, if your account uses an authenticator, it's going to keep keyloggers and hackers/scammers from stealing your account or characters, but if the authenticator isn't attached to your account on the forums, it can still be used for spamming keylogger links since all that's needed there is your password. If you have your authenticator turned off, it's going to do a whole load of nothing to stop that from happening.

It's nice that it will be optional, but if you frequent the WoW forums and don't plan on using your authenticator there, keep in mind that you'll still want to be very careful about where you surf and what you click if forum access is something you enjoy having. In my experience, the forum mods are much less forgiving and not nearly as quick to respond as the in-game GM team.

Nethaera has posted the official "patch notes" for patch 3.0.8.9506/3.0.8a today. They are listed in their entirety after the break.

These notes mirror what Ghostcrawler said in a series of posts last night. I imagine that these patch notes could be updated at some future time, listing more bug fixes if they're present. So you'll probably want to check back later and see if that's the case.

If you're looking for a download mirror for the patch files, check out our listing.

The official forums have been quite fickly over the past few days. Sometimes you'll be lucky and you'll be greeted by what you're trying to look at, other times you'll get an "error500" message, and still other times you'll see a message like the one pictured above.

The plight of the official forums seems to mirror the activity on the servers. Queue (har har har) the Homer Simpson-esq: Forums go up; forums go down... Forums go up; forums go down...

The past few days of hellish lag, unstable forums, and broken parts of the game have been like the song that never ends. (Note to self: Eat some lamb chops tonight.) After four days of the patch, we're still getting a constant stream of tips detailing bugs and other errors.

I wish I could say that we'll report to you when this is all fixed, but honestly I don't think that is going to come anytime soon. Perhaps next Tuesday they'll roll out another patch to fix some of this, or change something in the datacenters, etc... It's really nearly impossible for us to know exactly what's wrong.