Ghostcrawler Watch 4-16/09: A Veritable Conflagration!

Ghostcrawler has been rather quiet lately, so I didn’t have much to relate from my vigilance.  No logner, however: 3.1 has gone live and Ghostcralwer exploded onto the forums with it!

First up, a topic which rather amuses me: Blatant lack of professionalism

Ghostcrawler decided to take the challenge and post therein, noting that he would not respond and would leave the thread open, and was reading it.  I do suggest reading the thread…it’s fascinating to watch the discussion on both sides.  I think this post sums up my feelings on much of GC’s posting style:

GC does the community a favor by posting useful information. Discussing ponies does not provide anyone with any insight about the game. As stated by him numerous times: if your post does not provide anything to the conversation, don’t post it them. Would you talk about ponies with your boss or professor during a meeting GC? If not, why would you post about that in response to people’s questions?

I also think GC’s communication style is somewhat broken…he’s not a people person.  His sense of humor, as expressed on the forum, tends towards mockery rather than “levity”.  I have seen him deride trolls outright, sarcastically mock complaints, and condescendingly inform the forums that they know best.  I have never seen any of the more subtle forms of humor used in communication, such as wry self-deprecation, situational irony, or shared jokes.  Often he is an authority holding, at best, an arms-length conversation with someone he is educating.  He never feels like “one of us”.  He comes off as a know-it-all who thinks we’re all children.  That’s fine, he can feel that way and Blizzard can allow him to do that.  I don’t think it’s very professional though.

And if you’re going to pretend to be a know-it-all, I will happily demonstrate that you, in fact, do not know it all.  Honestly, thank god for GC…otherwise I’d be scrambling for subjects to rant about and you’d have to deal with more discussions about logic or math.

To really understand the professionalism call, imagine that you are trying have called a customer support rep to make what you consider a reasonable gripe about their product.  It may or may not be something in their power to resolve, your gripe may not be very important or reasonable at all…that’s really beside the point.  How would you prefer to be treated as the customer calling in?  Would you appreciate having your gripe be mocked, even mildly?  That would be unprofessional.  The same holds for GC responding in the forum.  He’s not responding as just another forum poster…he’s a representative addressing community concerns and information.  That makes him customer support and customer outreach.  He can play that game how he wants, but that doesn’t make it professional.

The big GC forum topic has been the rapid-fire nerf to Conflagrate within a day of 3.1 going live.  Conflagrate was changed with 3.1 to this effect:

Consumes an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the enemy target to instantly deal damage equal to 15 sec of your Immolate or 8 sec of your Shadowflame.

The nerf took the damage dealt to 70% of an immo or shadowflame.  The reasoning was purely pvp: the burst possibilities made it possible for locks to rapidly crush most other health pools.  That’s reasonable.  The spell hit live, turned out o be unacceptable for the player base.  Lock that shit down, then start reexamining assumptions.  If the prior damage level of conflag was used to determine pve damage and balance them, then this likely necessitates changes elsewhere to make up for the nerf.

Obviously, this sort of change produced a cacophony from the crowds on the forums.  Ghostcrawler leapt on to the scene with a somewhat disjoint series of responses in a variety of threads.  For instance, one poster notes that this has been on the ptr and was never changed.  GC responds:

Sometimes you need pretty large sample sizes from Arena or elsewhere to make a call. Sometimes you don’t. I think every one of us who was playing last night (warlocks and no) came back this morning saying “Um…”.

The PTRs move pretty fast. I think some of you may not have participated on them much have the impression that a PTR is like say patch 3.09 that stays relatively static for weeks so that everyone gets really used to the way the game works. But we make many, many builds during the course of PTR testing. Not all of those builds go external of our offices to the PTR. There are builds where horrible bugs stop you from doing any testing. Sometimes you think an issue is caused by a bug but it’s casued by a different bug. Sometimes things work one way on the PTR and work differently when they go live even though nobody changed anything in the interim (usually because of the nature of the server – client structure). It’s a big game. Doing a complete regression test on it takes a long time. All of these are reasons (and certainly not all the reasons) why something that might or might not have been a problem on the PTRs might or might not be a problem when the changes go live.

True, but he’s being disingenuous.  Burst damage in pvp has been a hot-button issue since 3.0 went live, forcing nerfs to mages, paladins, DKs, and rogues.  I’d rather expect that, by this point, you’d be paying attention to that specifically.  This should be something internal testing finds.  Taking conflagrate in a destruction build isn’t some uncommon, strange twist that would never have occured to testers.  This is a core ability.  In fact, I’d guess test DID find it, and it wasn’t considered a big deal till the uproar hit live.  As to “I think every one of us who was playing last night (warlocks and no) came back this morning saying “Um…”.”, seriously?  You guys have had this in front of you for a while.  Surely someone saying “Damn, look at my conflag crit!” would be a cue?  Much of that preceding paragraph on build testing is true…to an extent.  Development testing is constantly in flux, because developers work on the codebase as it is then.  They receive almost all changes as they become available.  But TEST should not.  Test should receive a stable build for a continuous time period on which they may stably and consistently test for problems.  They can then compile those and they will be addressed in a future build.  Full, consistent, systemic testing is nearly impossible in a development-style environment.

Besides, it’s all beside the point of the conflag bug.  Most of that has very little bearing on determining Conflagrate’s damage.  In fact, this would qualify as a perfect case for theorycraft: the value of conflagrate should be readily determinable from analyzing underlying values.  Discrepancies between that damage and the game can be analyzed and understood.  Once those even out, it’s a design issue, and not a bug.  That is to say: bugs should be an issue when this is analyzed.  Consider this unit testing for design: when you implement something, first develop a prediction of what should happen.  When your prediction isn’t matched by the data, find out why.  Reevaluate your prediction model or fix the causes of differences.  Repeat until prediction matches observation.  Done.  Having done this, bugs in conflagrate could not be an issue.  This was entirely a balance concern, and one that probably was noticed and then glossed over.  Perhaps test wasn’t vocal enough or design was otherwise occupied.  I don’t know.

A more reasoned post from GC occurs here:

We need to see what effect this change (Conflag nerf) really has on PvE. I know players are posting simulation numbers, and those are helpful, but we also need to see what it really means for a raid. You’ve seen some of the boss encounters now so you know it varies a lot from tons of adds to lots of running around. Different strategies are going to work better for different fights and therefore different specs are going to work better for different fights. We don’t want every lock to go Affliction, but we don’t want every lock to go Destro either (or hybrid for that matter).

Fire and Brimstone is something we’re looking at, as is Molten Core. We don’t want to necessarily kill the hybrid spec dead, but if there is going to be a “mandatory” spec, we’d rather it be one that didn’t just cherry pick all the best talents from multiple trees. Molten Core is there to make Demo’s rotation a little bit more interesting than send in the pet + Shadowbolt. So far it seems like a lot of them may just be using Shadowbolt anyway to benefit from the debuff.

We’re also not sure the Conflag glyph has ended up all that great in practice. It’s interesting perhaps, but it also works at odds with some of what the talent tree is trying to get you to do.

Hope that explains a little bit about where we’re trying to go with the PvE design.

Here’s a pretty solid response, though I’d wish he’d consolidated all this somewhere.  First , explain your reasoning: “This was a nerf to lock PvP damage, which was far too bursty in light of other things.”  Then demonstrate empathy with those affected and apologize for the trouble you’re putting them through: “We’re sorry we missed this during testing, I know nerfs are never fun.  While we try and keep our eyes on important issues (and burst damage in pvp recently has certainly been one), sometimes things can become overwhelming.  This has been a huge patch and sadly this slipped through the cracks.  I know I was looking forward to the built-in Outfitter, myself.”  Finally, describe how you plan to address their concerns: “We understand that you may be concerned with the impact of this on pve damage, especially since conflagrate at 3.1 launch seemed to put full destruction in line with all other specs.  While we are looking for additional data from live playing to supplement the simulations and theorycraft, we share your concerns and are examining a few possible ways to rebalance destruction damage while keeping conflagrate burst damage manageable”.