Blue News for Dec. 24-26

Trying to play catch up to the holidays right now as I was “out of the office” for the past 2 days. So bare with me folks as I pickup more momentum!

Je’Tze’s Bell – correction
I was incorrect, unfortunately. The item will remain soulbound. My apologies for the misleading information. (Source)

Target DPS for each class
From our perspective, we don’t want to tell you how much dps you should be doing and don’t want to make it too easy for you to figure out how much dps you can do. It depends greatly on situation to situation, and on your gear, skill and the comp of your group.

I also think it takes a little of the fun out of the game if the numbers are posted and made official for everyone to see. The discovery aspect adds a lot of depth to the game.

Don’t ask us what your Xmas presents are. Go open them. (Source)

“Vehicle” mounts
Yep it was me. All vehicle-style mounts will be changed to function as normal mounts, which should theoretically alleviate many issues people have with them. When? Probably 3.1 but this isn’t confirmed. (Source)

So basically we’re not going t see folks taking massive insane leaps on their mammoths and motorcycles anymore because fall damage will apply. Targeting issues were also a pain in the ass with the mounts working as vehicles.

Being in a guild disconnecting people on PTRs
This should be fixed in the next PTR build. (Source)

Russian PTRs
There are no current plans for RU PTR access. May I remind you that our Russian forums are found by the link below. Please can you use the RU forums for all Russian-language related queries. Thank you! (Russian language WoW Forums: http://forums.wow-europe.com/index.html?sid=5)

Class balancing in WotLK
We overhauled the classes for LK moreso than BC and introduced a new class for the first time. Also remember that when BC launched, nobody knew what Arenas were or what they would do to PvP (or the microscope under which they place cass balance). I also think we have just been more open this time around. Certainly we didn’t address the community with this degree of candor when BC launched.

You have to realize that Blizzard is it’s own worst critic. From our point of view, we can always improve every aspect of the game. When we talk about bugs or things we still want to work on, that doesn’t mean we shipped the game before we were ready. It means that we hold ourselves to a very high standard, honestly a lot higher than most of the players do. If there is something that annoys you about the game, it almost certainly drives us nuts.

WoW is a gigantic game with a huge player base. Please don’t mistake our open discussion about things we would like to improve as our feeling that Lich King is in any way a failure. We are enormously proud of it and most players I speak to are having a blast. (Most of those players aren’t the ones posting on forums.) (Source)

New roles forums (Source)
If it’s a class specific issue, then the class forums may be a better place for that. They are useful for questions such as: What spec should I use? What glyphs should I use? What gear do I want? How do I beat a Frost mage?

The reason we launched these forums is increasingly we’d see a thread where someone would say “Our class is the worst. Everyone agrees.” Then someone from another class would post “Um, you are exaggerating” and the first class would respond “GET OUTTA OUR FORUM INTERLOPER!”

Yet, we think there is a lot of benefit of having different classes talk to each other. Sure it’s going to get heated sometimes, but it also can offer a lot of perspective to you and to us. The start of the Arena season brought out a lot of (often redundant) posts on this and the healing forum, but that shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Overall, I think these forums have evolved nicely from their initial launch.

Since I’m up on a soapbox already, here are my suggestions for getting the most out of them:

• Talk to other players. The worst threads are the ones asking for blue responses and ignoring any response that isn’t blue.
• Don’t spam, troll or QQ. I know a lot of players are used to that from other forums. We don’t want it here. You are welcome to disagree with our design decisions, and many players do, but you need to do it in a mature, intelligent and civil fashion.
• Don’t waste other players’ time. Don’t post about how much Blizzard hates your class or how you feel neglected or how you wish your thread got a blue response instead of some other thread. Please don’t drive the smart players away.
• Don’t expect your suggestions will get implemented. It happens, but it is very rare. Don’t mistake having access to the developers here for being able to make demands. We love suggestions, but understand that the nature of how we work is that the vast majority will get filtered away.
• Don’t get frustrated. If I can be patient, you can be patient.
• We read all the threads. We appreciate it when players can read a lot too. “I didn’t read the whole thread” is a particular pet peeve of mine, because it feels like you are saying your opinion is important enough to be heard, but those of other players are not important enough for you to read them.
• Have fun. It’s a game.