Jumping the Wrath Gun?
The WoW community is currently subjected to a wave of commentary, analysis and speculation about so-called leaked talent information from the Wrath Alpha. Already the indignation runs high in some circles, while those rumours get dissected and rejected by the interested parties.
While I understand the hunger for news and the level of passion these induce, I believe this debate is premature. An alpha test is little more than a rough draft. It is absolutely not ready for public review, for several reasons, among these:
- It’s the first tentative implementation of ideas which sounded good on paper. The alpha stage is typically when the designers and the coders take stock of the difference between an ideal (the design paper) and feasible reality (the code). Assessing this difference will give the designers a measure of whether the effect they wanted to produce on a class is present in its implementation or not – if the latter is the case, it’s back to the drawing boards to either find another way to achieve the same effect, or to start over.
- Blizzard is notorious for not being shy to take a realistic assessment of a design’s implementation (at various stages in the development process), and if something doesn’t work out, to scrap the entire idea and start over (instead of endlessly tweaking trying to fix it, throwing good money after bad). If something present in the alpha doesn’t work, they will just bin the whole thing and go back to the drawing board.
- Balance happens in beta. And that’s includes evaluating how new talents and skills scale up when measured up against the other 9 classes in the game, be it in a PvP setting or in terms of group synergies and group desirability.
Community review is obviously important. While we might debate whether the blogosphere campaign to stop the recent Life nerfs (Bloom and Tap) really influenced Blizzard or not, we dare not entertain the notion of what had happened if everyone had simply stayed silent and the changes had gone through unchallenged.
But there’s a huge difference. The information was made public by Blizzard and the proposed changes were out on the PTR, subject to mass testing, not on limited and extremely closeted alpha test.
In starting the dissection (and sometimes already outright hostility) of elements which may actually not even be in the game, the community is essentially diluting whatever influence it may have to change things.
If TBC is any measure, there is definitely going to be a news release including publication of class changes and the proposed new talent trees. At that time, speculating on what these bring to the class and to PvP balance will be spot on. But now?
The brave knight chasing windmills isn’t really to be taken seriously. Don’t squander credibility on over-analysing alpha leaks.
