Ghostcrawler is Awesome

In ref­er­ence to Adam Holisky’s recent WoW Insider’s post The Ghost­crawler Exper­i­ment, where the ques­tions are:

1. Is the GE (Ghost­crawler era) of WoW bet­ter than the BGE?
2. Does Ghost­crawler do a good job?

I just wanted to post some­thing quick in response. I’ve writ­ten about Ghost­crawler before, although I per­haps wasn’t as blunt as I could have been. So, I will speak more plainly now: Yes, and I can’t believe that we’re even talk­ing about this.

Upsides of Ghostcrawler:

• The game itself is bet­ter since he joined. There are fewer bro­ken tal­ent trees. I don’t remem­ber exactly when he came on, but are there any bro­ken builds left? I mean, for the most part you can find a good build for your cho­sen tree, learn how to play it, and not com­pletely suck, right? Is this all his doing? No. Is he the lead of sys­tems design and are those basic sys­tems are bet­ter? Yes.
• He com­mu­ni­cates with a notice­able lack of bull­shit. When peo­ple point out that some part of the game seems out of bal­ance, the answer is any­thing from “Yes, we’re hot­fix­ing that” to “Sorry, work­ing as intended” to “I’ll go check that out”, with every­thing in between.
  Point me at another game com­pany whose lead designer posts such open and thought­ful dis­cus­sion about the goal of its game design, includ­ing frank admis­sions of short­com­ings and parts that need improve­ment! I’ve never seen it. He’s not spend­ing his lim­ited time for cus­tomer com­mu­ni­ca­tion brag­ging about his top-tier arena team. Does any­one really look back on those days with misted eyes?
• He’s putting on a game design clinic. The sub­ject of my pre­vi­ous post regard­ing him. To review, here’s a recent exam­ple from today’s mmo-champion blue tracker, respond­ing to a ques­tion about how tal­ents and spells are designed (source):
  

  We have bud­gets for the power of indi­vid­ual spells and tal­ents. We do not bud­get based on the total num­ber of abil­i­ties avail­able — some classes just have more than others.

  I would also call the bud­gets a guide­line. You have to know when to change the num­bers on some­thing even if the bud­get sug­gests that will be over­pow­ered or underpowered.

  To be meta­phys­i­cal for a minute, you can’t define the uni­verse with one gigan­tic equa­tion. There are just too many vari­ables. You can use sim­pler equa­tions to attempt to describe small parts of things as long as you under­stand their lim­i­ta­tions. A great deal of your suc­cess in WoW, per­haps even more in PvP than PvE, is your skill in using your abil­i­ties and that is a hard thing to model.

  By read­ing what he writes, you bet­ter under­stand not just WoW, but all large games. Is this ground­break­ing, rev­e­la­tory stuff? No. But it’s hon­est, and if you’re try­ing to fig­ure out how this one piece fits into the sys­tem, then he has taken the time to explain it.

• He obvi­ously cares deeply about the sys­temic improve­ment of the game sys­tem of WoW, the entire game, whether it’s lev­el­ing or quest­ing or instanc­ing or raid­ing or arena or bat­tle­grounds. He posts a lot on every sub­ject. He is in the details.
• He weath­ers a con­tin­u­ous tor­rent of unbe­liev­able whin­ing, and con­tin­ues to do his job with good humor. I can­not empha­size this enough. The whin­ers of WoW are numer­ous and pro­lific. Some of my favorite blog­gers and play­ers are chronic whin­ers regard­ing their class. We all, I sus­pect, tune such noise out while look­ing for the use­ful sig­nal, but it’s his job to actu­ally sift through all that noise, every class, every­where. And for the most part, he suc­ceeds. I have no idea how he man­ages to do that with­out going the road of the other hands-on com­mu­nity man­agers who have been worn down in the past.
• I know this is a per­sonal thing, but: he writes well.

Down­sides to Ghostcrawler:

• None.
• Par­don me, there is this: Because he posts open game design, includ­ing admit­ting errors when they arise, the whin­ers now have more fod­der with which to ply their trade. “Bliz­zard hates my favorite class!” Even this is use­ful, because I read that as “I don’t under­stand or don’t care about game design! I only care about my char­ac­ter!” and put that per­son into my skim-or-skip queue.

I’ll close with a rant.

When some­one admits imper­fec­tion, a cer­tain type of per­son will fee­bly scream with the goal of get­ting peo­ple behind their plight–via per­sonal attacks, exag­ger­ated despair, and so on–all of which is summed up in these gam­ing cir­cles as QQ. The nat­ural response to QQ is to be less forth­com­ing, and fill that space where hon­est talk used to be with some­thing else. Because fight­ing through the QQ is not worth the effort, most of the time.

This ten­dency, when expanded beyond this lit­tle cir­cle of game design, ulti­mately leads to the cur­rent and per­sis­tent sea of unbe­liev­able bull­shit that we wade through in all walks of life: media, pol­i­tics, busi­ness, careers, and yes, even game design. If you enjoy con­sum­ing bull­shit, con­tinue with the QQ! How­ever, if you do not, stop whin­ing! Some­one who speaks hon­estly isn’t a bad thing. Some­one who speaks truth about the flaws in his work, and has the abil­ity to solve the prob­lem, and actu­ally works to do so?

That per­son is awe­some. In WoW, that per­son is Ghost­crawler. Haters, please stop whining.