Ghostcrawler The Blogger

I've whined a lot in the past about Blizzard's lacking communication with the community.

I've talked at length about how their former website sucked and I've criticized their fumbling attempts to talk to the playerbase through fragmented, pointless chat sessions. In July I questioned the strategy where Blizzard's lead systems designer Greg Street, a.k.a Ghostcrawler, answers forum posts, more or less randomly. I suggested they rather should make him write proper columns, where he could pick an current topic and share his views on it from a more general perspective. And lo and behold! Now Blizzard is doing exactly this!

Ghostcrawler made his blogging debut the other day in the post "Why Does Blizzard Hate Healers?" where he explains how healing is changing in Cataclysm and the reasons for those changes. Here's a sample from his wrap-up:

"To be clear, we don’t want healers to constantly run out of mana. We want them to run out of mana when they don’t play well. And we don’t want them to always fail. But we do want them to feel good when they are challenged, and overcome those challenges to succeed. When someone is wounded, we want healers to consider whether to use a slow, efficient heal (because they aren’t in immediate threat of dying) or a fast, expensive heal (because they are). That’s called triage, and it was notably missing from the Lich King healing environment. We think triage will make healing more fun. We’re making this change not to make healers sad by nerfing them, but to make healers happy by making the game more fun for them."

It's a good blog post, not the least thanks to his honest approach. Ghostcrawler sounds pretty relaxed as he mentions critique from the community as well as his own doubts about the healing design in Wrath. This isn't just a text with empty marketing phrases. GC knows how to balance between his own ideas and integrity and a genuine interest for what the players have to say. And that's why we trust him and want to hear what he has to say.

A success
Looking at the reception of this post; I would call Ghostcrawler's blogging nothing but a success. I don't think the news about Blizzard's new fansite has reached more than a fraction of the playerbase, but as I'm writing this, there are already over 1200 comments on Ghostcrawler's post and more incoming. And it's a pretty good read. Most of them are decent and reasoning, even in the cases where they don't agree. Overall they're far less aggressive than what we've seen previously on the forums.

This post has also been translated into the other major languages that Blizzard supports, such as Spanish, French and German, which also is an improvement. Now it's not only the US players who get first hand information and can comment on his writings.

It's also worth mentioning that Ghostcrawler isn't the only one to write proper blog posts. Blue poster Lylirra came up with a little piece about what to bring in an Elemental Invasion Survival Kit, which was a fun read, something you could have seen at one of the fan WoW blogs, and it also got a lot of comments. I hope more will follow.

What remains on my wish-list is a little bit more of interaction with the blogosphere, now that Blizzard's staff has joined our ranks. Until now they've had us more or less on ignore, and maybe it's too much to hope for that to change. But considering the general overhaul they're going through in their communications I wouldn't rule it out completely.

In any case it's nice to see that they're making use of Ghostcrawler's potential as a popular and trustworthy spokesman. The new community site has got a good start, so let's hope they can keep it up and expand it in the future.