Q u o t e:
I disagree I think he's listening too hard to the community and not enough to the facts and figures. The buffs and nerfs and redesigns of the last few patches have mirrored closely the popularly held biases of the player community often with little regard to the basic design of the game itself and many times in contradiction to game stats.
No, if anything the reverse is true. But you have to remember that sometimes the community keeps bringing something up because it's right.
I made the comment in the beta forums once (which ended up sounding more condescening than I intended) that some players were treating the forums as a deli, ordering up changes to their class, and then getting upset when we didn't go implement those changes. That's not really why we're here. Here is what I get out of the forums:
-- Understanding where players are having problems.
-- Understanding when players are confused about something.
-- Understanding what's fun and not fun.
-- Catching the occasional bug.
The forums are typically not a great source of solutions, though it does happen. That's not meant to disparage the people who post here. Just like WoW has an art style, it has a design style and sometimes the solutions offered just don't mesh. (Other times they are technically difficult.)
The forums are also not great at detecting problems. They are great at detecting *potential* problems and that's a big difference. You get a lot of false positives. If we see a lot of players complaining about the same issue (and I mean a lot of players, not the same few players starting multiple threads) then we usually will look into it. Looking into it involves a lot of discussion, a lot of data mining, and perhaps some test cases. We bounce ideas and solutions off of a lot of people internally, and people whose opinions we trust (typically because they are expert players) outside of the company. I can't think of any cases where we just took a player's word for it and just made a change because of a QQ. That is pretty easy to prove to yourself if you just examine the ratio of requests (often demands) for change to actual implemented changes.
But sometimes players are right too. Never discount that. Sometimes players are right even if all of your data suggest otherwise. One of the trickier talents for a good game designer to master is knowing when that is happening.
