The continued development, or evolution, of classes in World of Warcraft (WoW) has taken a turn for the better in 2007, thanks in great part to talent tree revisions resulting from the Burning Crusade (BC) expansion. Players are now expecting existing issues to be rectified in future patches, and 2008 marks the release of the second WoW expansion that will undoubtedly mix things up again; as talent trees gain another few levels, balancing them will make for an interesting design experience.
The issues prevalent in the various classes balance-wise are a continued fight against balancing of another sort: PvE versus PvP gameplay. Important to this balancing is not only internal development discussion, but also the experiences of those at every level of gameplay, but particularly those accomplished in end-game PvE and competitive PvP. By the former, I refer to those who have entered Karazhan and beyond, and by the latter, I refer to high-ranked Arena players and those who have already built up a sizable cache of PvP badges in order to purchase infamous welfare epics.
While it only makes sense to query players in the aforementioned categories, it makes me wonder why a publication like WoW Insider decided to interview random players in a recent article. And by “random”, we mean “n00bish”. While less experienced WoW gamers certainly have a right to comment, and should comment on their experiences in order for Blizzard to properly weigh the function and playability of the nine WoW classes, comments from players inexperienced in real end-game activities are unable to place proper emphasis on various aspects of the game on account of their relative lack of accomplishments. That is to say, readers of the aforementioned article can easily dismiss the opinions of the interviewed gamers on account of the fact that there is no information to indicate that these gamers are good at WoW. A gamer commenting on which class is weak in PvP, for example, should have a basis for this opinion, and that basis should not be purely on hearsay or very isolated experience. At minimum, interviews as conducted in the aforementioned article should emphasize the experience of each interviewed gamer, and breaking it down into purely “raiding” versus “PvP” is not good enough. After all, there are different forms of “raiding”, and different forms for “PvP”. As the Arena brackets themselves indicate, a class that does excellent in 2v2 games (e.g. the Druid) does not fare nearly as well in 3v3 or 5v5 games.
While the idea behind WoW Insider’s Gamers on the Street column is a good one, it needs a bit more journalistic oomph, and by that we mean more solid reporting, instead of just fluff. Sites like WoW Insider really need to focus on well-researched, in-depth posts, rather than going at things half-assed. Fortunately, WoW Insider does have a solid repertoire of featured posts; it would simply be nice to see more of WoW Insider’s quality reporting, and less fluff material just to keep the ads flowing.
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