Blizzard backs down on forums

Nethaera has posted to say that the forum developments planned by Blizzard will no longer include the use of real names.

Second good job by Blizz in two days, I'm impressed.

I'm really pleased to see that they are willing to respond so quickly and so generously on an issue that is clearly of huge important to their many customers. As Neth said: "We strongly believe that Every Voice Matters," which doesn't explain why shadow priest glyphs are so shit but then I doubt Neth's ever read my blog :P

Crisis over, now back to the game.

I wouldn't put my name to this but...

Nethaera has just unveiled an upcoming change to the forums, and it's a belter. In the not-too-distant future, you will be forced to post under your real, full name.

This change, along with some other stuff I don't really care about (read the thread if you're interested), is designed: "to help improve the quality of conversations and make the forums an even more enjoyable place for players to visit." In other words, it's a troll hunt:

"The official forums have always been a great place to discuss the latest info on our games, offer ideas and suggestions, and share experiences with other players -- however, the forums have also earned a reputation as a place where flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild. Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before."

I can see how Blizzard has been backed into this decision. Unfortunately, it's a terrible one, and real-world experience tells me it is destined to failure.

Ask yourself two questions: how will this affect the behaviour of those it is targeted at, and how will it affect the rest of us?

Firstly, can this really improve the quality of discussion on the forums? Does the kind of person who posts unwanted comments care that their real name is against them? I'm sure some do — but not nearly all of them. These are already people who show an unwillingness to consider the consequences of their actions, or else lack the social skills to appreciate the impact of their words. And this is the internet, a medium which by its very nature imparts a (sometimes false) sense of anonymity — whatever they say on the forums, you can bet it's tame compared to their Facebook wall. I once moderated an internal staff forum for a FTSE 100 company. Even with their full names visible, and in front of their colleagues and managers, people were willing to write things that they would be shocked to hear spoken in person. Forums do that to some people. So even with the best will in the world, I fear this is not going to solve the problem.

It will, however, do irreparable damage to the forums by discouraging genuine users from participating in the discussion, because fear of being branded a troll is nowhere near the most important consequence of this move. The people you most want on your forums — the thoughtful, intelligent, considerate ones — are going to be discouraged because of privacy concerns. I, for one, have taken great care to avoid all possible connection between my real name and my gaming activities because I fear it will harm my chances with some career opportunities. Recruiters can, and do, Google candidates, and some would invariably disapprove of online gaming as a pastime. But more significantly, exposure on forums would give identity thieves an extremely powerful vector of attack, not just for WoW accounts, but in the broader world too. How many of you have passwords with WoW-related terms? For some, privacy concerns go much further, whether it is out of a general wish to remain anonymous, or a need to keep your name a secret from others.

I appreciate that these concerns probably don't bother all players — younger players, particularly, who don‘t need to think about jobs or data protection — so they may go on happily chatting away without fear. But it will turn many more into lurkers at best, or drive them onto other forums altogether at worst.

The only effective way to clean up a forum is to moderate it thoroughly and consistently against well-defined guidelines and to enforce a strong set of punitive measures for offenders. The Elitist Jerks forums remain such a valuable and highly-respected resource in strong part to their moderation policy. Some find it a little... heavy-handed... but it works for them. Sites are free to carve their own identity.

The trouble with this approach for Blizzard is the resource needed to moderate the vast quantity of forums they host. The cost would be unjustifiable. And, as I found out to my expense in my FTSE 100 company, official moderators run the constant risk of accusations of censorship and propaganda. What starts out as a neutral space can rapidly devolve into a war zone. That's not a position I would ever wish on Blizzard.

Instead, they could have turned to the community for moderation support, but if they considered this, they may have discounted it for all the complications that it would have entailed. How do you recruit them? How do you manage them, and ensure the effectiveness and consistency of their work? It works for fansites, sure, but a corporation would have to take a more professional approach, with all the legal and ethical ramifications that implies.

So at the end of the day, I completely understand why Blizzard felt they needed to take action, and why they eventually plumped for this plan. But I don't have much hope for its success, and I for one will be deleting my historic posts and giving the forums a wide birth when the changes go live. (The change will only apply to new forums created near the Cataclysm launch.)

It's a sad day for the community; maybe the trolls win after all.

Merlot feels whelmed

Chastity: I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?
Bianca: I think you can in Europe.

— 10 Things I Hate About You

Good job I went to bed instead of waiting up for the priest preview: it turns out there wasn't much to wait up for after all.

Brief shadowy summary (and the full thing for those who haven't see it yet — thanks, as always, to mmo champion):

• New spell: mind spike, learned at level 81, which deals 'shadowfrost' damage and debuffs the target to increase the damage of the next mind spike. Short cast, spammable, and will not be locked out with other shadow spells.
• As per the warlock preview, confirmation that all hots and dots will benefit from crit and haste innately, and that haste will not reduce the duration of the spells but increase the number of ticks. Unlike the warlock preview, though, no hint that we'll be able to stop worrying about clipping.
• Devs are determined to give shadow word: death a place in the shadow arsenal as an execute spell (good luck to that).
• Shadow should be better equipped for short fights and less susceptible to school lock out.
• Shadow talents are in for a bit of an overhaul to strip out all the passive boosters.
• The misery hit debuff will go.
• The shadow mastery bonuses will provide spell power, crit and a chance to create 'shadow orbs' — which boost spell power and may interact through talents with other spells.
• Lots of noise about healing, power word: barrier's back on the table, but you're all going to be ooming every five minutes.

These few statements of intent are fair enough — and the noises about burst and spell lock out should be cautiously welcomed particularly by pvp priests, I think.

I'm struggling to see at this stage how dots can scale smoothly with haste if their length doesn't vary, but no doubt this will all become clear over time. And I wish the developers had a consistent view of how dots will behave for shadow priests and warlocks — if locks can't clip their dots, surely priests shouldn't be able to either. But it could be an omission, or indeed a very sensible distinction. No need for nerd rage yet. Edit: an enlightening, if not emphatic, clarification came from Ghostcrawler later, to the effect that they'd like to prevent dot clipping in general.

Mind spike doesn't interest me. No doubt it will have its uses, but it just doesn't grab my imagination. The shadow orbs, however, could be very cool, if only visually. I hope they resemble the old troll priest racial, like our very own purple water shield.

Of course, it's just a very early preview. We don't have enough information to speculate about shadow performance or talent builds or any of the things we're itching to hear about. The fact that we are loosing the misery debuff might worry priests who rely on their utility to secure raid spots. But I say it's too early to panic.

In fact, this preview exercise leaves many questions unanswered — and raises a few more than it answers. I got pretty excited about the shaman preview, so why do I feel so underwhelmed by this?

A trickier fix

Just in case a few other people were inclined to misinterpret the corruption fix, like me apparently, ghostcrawler waded into the forums to put us all straight (thanks as usual to mmo champion for the quotes):

We think Shadow Priest dps is in a good place without SW:P benefiting from haste based on the data we have seen so far.

And...

There is no bug per se. On the PTR for a time Shadow Word: Pain, Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague all benefited from haste. We remove SW:Pain because the dps increase was too high, particularly given the ability to constantly refresh the spell with an inflated haste rating. Some players interpreted the inflated haste rating problem as the reason we removed SW:P, but I posted when we made that change that Shadow dps was just too high.

And...

The OP was pointing out that since we fixed the haste problem for Corruption we could go back and fix SW:P pain too. But that point of view is based on the assumption that Shadow priests need that additional dps to be competitive. We don't think that is the case. Hence, we have no plans to change SW:P at this time.

For the record, I still think it makes more sense to allow sw:p to benefit from haste and scale back shadow dps in other areas where appropriate (my personal choice would be vampiric touch's coefficient). And, regardless of dps issues, I take slight offence at the speed with which the corruption glyph was 'fixed' when sw:p's refresh has been buggy for over a year. But that's just me.

A tricky fix

From mmo champion's latest blue post report I spotted this bug fix:

Rolling curruptions no longer use the initial haste value indefinitely. This is really more of a bug fix than a nerf. The problem here was that players could inflate the initial cast of a corruption and have the spell tick for that damage indefiinitely as long as it was refreshed. This resulted in some "jaw dropping" damage. Technically this was a tricky one to fix but we wanted to keep the glyph of quick decay and were able to ultimately find a solution. When this fix goes live, the hasted corruption should correct itself to your current haste within a tick or two of the spell being refreshed.

Huh. Tell me again how difficult it is to fix the rolling refresh on shadow word: pain?

RIP SW:P

In a recent test realm build shadow word: pain vanished from the tooltip for shadowform, removing it from the list of shadow priest dots that benefit from haste.

I didn't jump on it at the time, although with hindsight the writing was clearly on the wall for shadow word: pain. This weekend, a blue post confirmed the change and explained why:

We removed shadow word: pain from scaling with haste because we thought shadow dps was too high with all three dots hasted.

There is a bug where you can get big sw:p dots and keep them rolling at that magnitude forever since the spell gets constantly refreshed. It's a nasty bug to fix. However, that isn't why we removed sw:p from shadowform.

That last sentence is completely baffling because unless I have just developed sudden onset aphasia that's exactly why they did it. So we'll just ignore that bit. There's some other stuff about best-in-slot gear and theorycrafting, I stopped reading. The message to take home is that Blizz thought shadow was doing a little too well on the test realm and they've come up with an easy way to rein it back in.

I'm completely ok with that. If I'd wanted to be top-dog dps I'd be playing my lock right now, or my hunter, so I understand when Blizzard takes action to maintain class balance. But, as usual, I'm a bit disappointed about the way they've gone about it.

Shadow word: pain is already the weakest of all our dots. It has been riddled with bugs from the start of the expansion, outpaced in damage by devouring plague, and practically dwarfed by vampiric touch. Without haste scaling, that weakness is only going to be amplified. This for what was, in Burning Crusade, a class-defining spell and one of the most lethal dots in the game.

I know this isn't game breaking: if Blizzard gets their numbers right, whether one spell ticks for two hundred or two thousand is irrelevant at the end of the day. I'm just very sad to see such an iconic spell decline so miserably over the course of only a few months.

The designers have taken a very pragmatic approach — they needed to tone damage down and they found an easy way to do it. But it's not good game design to go around making two essentially identical spells work in different ways for convenience's sake — or to use flaws in the game that they have ignored since the expansion launched as the excuse for doing so.

Ok, so the bugs are too tough to fix: remove the refresh mechanic then, or nerf it to one of those 'extends duration by up to xx seconds' deals. Or nerf vampiric touch's spell co-efficient, which was basically doubled as a quick-fix buff to start with. There are a hundred ways you could balance shadow's dps without guaranteeing that one of the class's core spells fails to scale with gear and falls more and more into disrepair.

We'll all continue to cast shadow word: pain because it is basically free damage — and maybe that's the real point of the spell's current fortunes. But I'd gladly put up with a few more complications to see it restored to its former position of fear and respect and see it finally scaling properly with gear.

Shadow is fine (for now)

Thank god for blue posts, otherwise I'd have no time to post today (WTB civilisation without work commitments).

Confirming what we already suspected, devs think shadow dps is fine:

In the case of shadow priests, we thought damage was a little low and made a very small adjustment. [i.e. The twisted faith/improved spirit tap buffs.] Many shadow priests think their dps is still unacceptably low, but we don't agree. (That also doesn't mean we won't make changes in the future. We do change our minds.)

I want to meet the person who says it's fine. Not to shout at them (although that would be my first instinct) but to try and learn from them. Logic says Blizzard knows the game better than I do, so when they say dps is fine it probably is — in theory, even if we don't see it in practice. Knowing how Blizzard conducts these tests, and under what circumstances, would be hugely informative. Do they play the class in raid situations to do the tests, or are they based on mathematical models? What tactics do they assume for each situation? Are they lumping AOE capability in with single target? Do they factor in stat variations, buffs, debuffs, lag, frame rate, what skill level do they balance around? How do you even quantify skill level? So if you have any contacts at Blizz, please drop me a line.