World of Warcraft®

10/30/2011 10:00 PMPosted by Córt

It's not really a matter of not giving a hoot, but rather giving more of a hoot about something more important.

No one is stopping them from saying why the bugs and balance issues are still there, though.

10/30/2011 10:22 AMPosted by Ryegeleye

One of the reasons people are quitting this game is because they're tired of hoping that you'll do something, instead of participating in a portion of the game without thinking "this is a joke, is this honestly STILL broken?".

I sometimes wonder where all the WoW programmers' time are going. In one day, my programmers can make multiple GUI additions and changes that tie-in to an enterprise-complexity database.

It took Blizzard months to create the wargames interface when the command-line back-end was already built.

The DK Ghoul not having enough energy for Gnaw is an issue that was fixed in WotLK within a month. The problem came back (poor coding practice), and it has not been fixed since the Cataclysm release. This is an absolutely simple problem to fix (1 hour max), yet Blizzard decide not to do anything about it.

One of the following is happening at Blizzard: a) let programmers surf the net 90% of their time, b) devote programmer time to other projects, or c) decide to not hire more programmers to save cost. Regardless of which of the above is true, we can see the result of their decision to not make changes to the game: A huge loss in subscribers.

Blizzard has been dumbing down the talent trees to reduce balance-work. Blizzard has not been making the changes when necessary -- to cater to people who complain about there being too many changes. What Blizzard doesn't realize is that people who complain about "too many changes" don't even notice any difference when the changes are made, and likely, those people would quit regardless if the changes are made or not.

Blizzard has been making decisions in order to cater to the mass market which completely backfired. Doing so caused WoW to lose the fundamental reason why people play Blizzard games -- the depth. The casuals that Blizzard wanted to catered to -- still quit. The lack of depth caused veteran players to quit, so they, in turn, do not bring in new players.

The depth of the game, and changes to the game, has been slowly pruned-out in favor of ease-of-balance and less-programming. 6 talent choices is already horrendously low for a single player game, let alone an MMO; but that is the direction MoP is following. Even for a 40 hour single player game-experience, such static design sounds boring.

Blizzard needs to take a hard look at their subscriber numbers before giving only 6 choices for their Talent 2.0 design. Blizzard either spends time giving more choices to players, make the necessary changes and fixes, or they can be lazy and lose even more subscribers due to the monotonous nature of their current design direction.

Blizzard can do all the PR in the world to downplay the loss of subscribers; the reality is that it is the _design decisions_ with Cataclysm that is the root cause of the loss of subscribers -- the lock-down of the talent trees and the lack of changes made Cataclysm a completely stale experience.

I sometimes wonder where all the WoW programmers' time are going. In one day, my programmers can make multiple GUI additions and changes that tie-in to an enterprise-complexity database.

It took Blizzard months to create the wargames interface when the command-line back-end was already built.

The DK Ghoul not having enough energy for Gnaw is an issue that was fixed in WotLK within a month. The problem came back (poor coding practice), and it has not been fixed since the Cataclysm release. This is an absolutely simple problem to fix, yet Blizzard decide not to do anything about it.

One of the following is happening at Blizzard: a) let programmers surf the net 90% of their time, b) devote programmer time to other projects, or c) decide to not hire more programmers to save cost. Regardless of which of the above is true, we can see the result of their decisions to not make changes to the game: the huge loss in subscribers.

Blizzard has been dumbing down the talent trees to reduce balance-work. Blizzard has not been making the changes when necessary -- to cater to people who complain about there being too many changes. What Blizzard doesn't realize is that people who complain about "too many changes" don't even see any difference when the changes are made, and likely, those people would quit regardless if the changes are made or not.

Blizzard has been making decisions in order to cater to the mass market which completely backfired. Doing so caused WoW to lose the fundamental reason why people play Blizzard games -- the depth. The casuals that Blizzard wanted to catered to -- still quit. The lack of depth caused veteran players to quit, so they, in turn, do not bring in new players.

The depth of the game, and changes to the game, has been slowly pruned-out in favor of ease-of-balance and less-programming. In MoP, 6 talent choices is already horrendously low for a single player game, let alone an MMO. Even for a 40 hour single player game-experience, such static design sounds boring. Even Diablo 3 has more choices than WoW. Blizzard needs to take a hard look at their subscriber numbers before giving only 6 choices for their Talent 2.0 design.

Blizzard can do all the PR in the world to downplay the loss of subscribers; the reality is that it is the _design decisions_ with Cataclysm that is the root cause of the loss of subscribers -- the lock-down of the talent trees and the lack of changes made Cataclysm a stale experience.

Well said.

10/30/2011 11:56 PMPosted by Jesriel

I sometimes wonder where all the WoW programmers' time are going.

Tsyeah, iknorite? Probably on a 3 month "team building exercise" in amsterdam while all the new content in 4.3 and an entire new expansion sit in the repositories all ready to be deployed when they get back, while the work experience kid spends a week finding where cancrit = true goes.

10/28/2011 02:27 PMPosted by Kaivax

Our point at Blizzcon was this -- we have a responsibility to adjust stat values as little as possible from patch to patch, because if we swing them wildly, players then feel like they have to constantly adjust their stats (through gems and reforging). It's likely that Unholy DKs will still not value crit as much as other secondary stats, even with the bug fixed.

Not to really derail this or go off topic, but then what do you say about what you're doing to Fire Mages in the next patch? With the GIANT boosts to our damage, but NO changes to our actual broken mechanics, I almost feel like Haste will be much more beneficial than Crit, since not only does it give us faster/more Fireballs, but it will also give us more DoT ticks (slightly upping the value of our poor mastery). All Crit will do is further devalue T3 Hot streak (Which I think is already at 0%, at least it felt like it was back in T11...) Not to mention that Haste is already simming high for Fire Mages, so why would you make this sort of change, yet saying that you DON'T want to do things like that? :(

10/31/2011 05:47 AMPosted by Pewpewblast

Not to really derail this or go off topic

Yet you still did.

10/30/2011 09:27 PMPosted by Córt

First it's slighty better. Then it eclipses. Then it's probably still worse. Then it's better again. But barely. Do you see why it's hard to believe your conclusions on face value?

I know why you would have a hard time, but the consistent message is that they're very close, with crit barely edging out. Those quotes are proof enough.

Known
Would
Would
Consider's initial impression from the news...
...followed by him concluding crit is barely better.

More convincing quotes that conclusions were off would be having a few wildly different stance like "Crit will be nearly as good as haste" somewhere in there.

I know why you would have a hard time, but the consistent message is that they're very close, with crit barely edging out. Those quotes are proof enough

You can't claim to have "known" it for 3 months, when you then say you still don't know it because you calculate them as being very close anyway. What you're saying is you still don't know.

It's inconsistent. And given the only two places I've seen how you may be calculating crit (Slant claims mastery is linear while crit isn't, which is incorrect. both are linear) and the referenced blog post in a previous thread where crit was calculated very poorly (by only factoring off of normal hits in a log) there's simply no faith in your methods.

If you're so confident why not post your proof instead of hide it? I'm fine if you don't want to share it, but it's quite hypocritical of you to abuse others' who get different results when you don't, isn't it.

edit:speeling

Slant, the 4.3 sim puts crit at 1.9 where mastery is at 1.6. Haste is at 2.0. The 4.2 sim puts crit about on par with mastery.

I'm curious how you conclude the sim agrees that crit barely edges out mastery.

Cort, if you use any math to analyze parses, like Tsuki and others have done, you will see that the sim data is very incorrect. Your numbers are hugely inflated. Sims for DKs have not been accurate for a long time now, and the fact that you still believe they are is quite frankly embarrassing.

Autopsy. I don't just rely on the sim. IN fact, i'm on record in many places for severely doubting unholy simming (frost is very good). I was just calling out Slant.

We have 9 pages of a thread with a handful of IRC buddies making wild claims. The claims are inconsistent. And provide no evidence or math at all. If you folk are so confident then go ahead and show your proof.

On my maths, on live crit and mastery are about the same, on something like baleroc, being about 1.22. Giving all pets (army, ghoul, gargoyle) crit inheritance bumps crit up to 1.65, which puts it very close to haste. It certainly overshadows mastery, it's not even a competition. They used to be close, now crit will miles ahead.

I crit once a month as unholy :(

nice buff for pve prob

The last time it was tested, it came out to approx 12.8%-13%chance to crit base, resulting in an 8% flat chance to crit against Skull level mobs.

Good discussion.