Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Critical Hits, Commenters

Follow Up on Critical Hits

The commenters on my last post have convinced me that having a stat with negative effects is a bad idea.

However, I still believe that in PvP, the presence of resilience means that healing will scale much faster than damage will. Inevitably, healing will have to be reined in, probably through a debuff in arenas and battlegrounds that reduces the overall effectiveness of healing, like in Wrath.

I still think that Blizzard should normalize crits at 200% across the board. Since that debuff will probably come sooner or later, Blizzard may as well bring the debuff in sooner, and maybe at slightly higher values. But a normalized crit would make critical strike more valuable to healers, and simplify the game.

Commenters

Sometimes it seems like Tobold is at war with his commenters.

To be honest, I think he takes commenters too seriously, and doesn't wield the delete button as aggressively as he should. People respond to their environment, and push the edges a little. Prune aggressively and people will respond to that, and live up to expectations.

I mean, take the last post of mine. Two one-line "this idea is stupid" comments. Both promptly got deleted. And the next two comments, by The Crossbowman of Sarcasm and Azuriel, are solid, insightful, and useful. I strongly believe that you don't get comments and insights like those two if you allow the terrible comments to stand and even flourish.

Finally, as advice to aspiring bloggers, I don't think you should second-guess what your audience wants. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that I cannot predict what other people find interesting. Completely random posts get linked. One-off posts that you spend 10 minutes on get multiple Likes on Google Reader, while crafted epics that take you hours go uncommented on.

Just write what you want to write, rather than worrying about what you think people want you to write about. It will sort itself out.

6 comments:

  1. Indeed. Most of my posts are Pro-Alliance, anti-Horde in nature and no amount of silence from anyone's gonna stop me! XD

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  2. I remember I did a post about the distribution of loot in the cata raid instances, and mused about all the holy plate loot that seemed to drop, and the dk tier token being vastly over-represented. It's funny that although I stated in that post things like "my sample is too small to actually mean anything" and "I could just be unlucky" I got comments that said the same thing, basically admitting they hadn't read more than the title of the post, but still thinking they could bash down on my 'idea'. All I could answer was "yes, exactly", since they only repeated what I had already said :P

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  3. Ah yes, the disheartening and confusing experience of the masterpiece that is going to rock the blogosphere with its stunning insights, arguments, and wit, gets no comments, no links, and no views. But you make one post calling Europeans unpatriotic and they are all over that.

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  4. I'm no old hand at this; quite the opposite, but I completely agree with the concept that you should write what you want. You don't want to become a slave to your audience by always trying to cater to them, and if you're honest and direct, people who don't like it will either keep reading and comment negatively (which is fine if you're up for discussion) or will leave, in which case your audience comes more in line with your interests. It's win/win.

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  5. Yes, write what you want. But by the same token, you have to accept that you have limited control over the comment string.

    Commenters will write what THEY want.

    Tobold hates to moderate, yet it makes him nuts that people turn his attempts at objective, intelligent discussions about general game design topics into criticisms or defense of specific games.

    And IMO he seems to give those commenters too much attention.

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  6. I think many people are opposed to your idea of resilience because it IS Stamina (with a couple of side effects on shields and hand of sacrifice). The major difference - I would argue the only important one - is that it would be possible to get gear with lower ilvl but higher sta. My opinion is that it should be called Stamina if it is Stamina.

    I don't agree with an idea of healing debuff as it applies to people with low resilience too. Bringing a healing debuff in order to reduce the crit increase would be OK as the crit increase applies to all healers, bringing it to combat resilience not so much.

    I think the best way would be to apply diminishing returns to resilience - I know they are planning to do it or maybe even did it already, making resilience scaling the same way armor does.

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