Just a side suggestion: Why not follow the HotS, OW and SC model, and do small explanations with each change in the changelogs? Is it because there are just too many different specs in wow and too many changes for it to be viable?
That's part of it. We typically do add those explanations for major hotfixes or release notes. Agree that we need more of that for PTR changes.
I imagine the holidays are also playing havoc on the overall ability to respond, what with everyone going off on vacation/time-off.
As a guy who works in Dev, the amount of reasons for silence, from "We have no solution and don't want to bring it up without one" to "Policy to not talk about changes until finalized", is sometimes ludicrous.
We've typically shied toward the former more than we probably need to. Historically we've wanted to be able to say how we're fixing an issue before we say anything, but I think that "we're going to fix this, just haven't decided how yet" is still a good message to get across in the meantime.
we haven't done a great job of communicating regarding the 7.1.5 class and systems changes
How many times do they think this is going to be an acceptable response to handling things poorly?
I've been taking a mostly wait and see approach to the patch, but I can understand people maining classes like warlock being beyond frustrated that they keep seeing massive changes flying around while their class is neglected, or the only changes appear to be yet more nerfs.
Blizzad themselves are saying they're not communicating well, so they also believe it is a problem, yet they keep working in this way. They put these changes on the Public Test Realms so the public could test them, but we have no idea what we're testing because the only changes we're aware of are data mined.
Then the community voices concern (in both productive and unproductive ways, as the community is wont to do) and we receive the response "we're still fine-tuning!" Okay, that's fine, but what are you tuning? What is the goal? Are you trying to blanket nerf fire mages or move their damage from burst windows to sustained dps?
We can't test what we don't know. There is an argument for blind testing, but with Blizzard's stance of "we're bad at communicating" that doesn't seem to be the case.
To go back to the mage analogy, if they're trying to put more of fire's dps into sustain instead of burst (I have no idea if this is the case, but it's something I heard in passing in a post somewhere), players in heroics or even low mythics are going to go in and see their dps dropped, probably substantially, because those environments work better for fire's burstiness. Of course they're going to complain because they have no idea what the end goal is because of bad communication.
There are other areas that have been handled poorly, as well. Secondary stat nerfs have been atrocious. I just read another thread that said they're exponentially increasing secondary stats on rings/cloaks to help make up the difference, so players should not see much of a change and that this information was obtained from recent dev interviews.
I have to take this at its word because I didn't read/watch the recent dev interviews and don't know where to find them now. The amount of effort required to obtain context of the changes to the PTR that players are expected to test for Blizzard is unreal at this point.
Maybe WoW should take a similar approach as Overwatch. When alterations are made to a character, there is a little dev blurb after the change explaining the philosophy behind the change. People still disagree with changes some (a lot of the) times, but at least we understand what they're doing.
Anyway, rant over. Feel free to disagree, but I would like any kind of idea as to why some of these changes are being made, especially when it appears that everything is getting significantly nerfed.
To maybe give a little more hope, we had several meetings and discussions yesterday about ways to improve our internal processes so that we can converse more freely and immediately on in-development changes. Some of those improvements have already been made, and I'm personally hoping the difference will be noticeable over the next few weeks.
Devolore
That's part of it. We typically do add those explanations for major hotfixes or release notes. Agree that we need more of that for PTR changes.
Devolore
We've typically shied toward the former more than we probably need to. Historically we've wanted to be able to say how we're fixing an issue before we say anything, but I think that "we're going to fix this, just haven't decided how yet" is still a good message to get across in the meantime.
Devolore
To maybe give a little more hope, we had several meetings and discussions yesterday about ways to improve our internal processes so that we can converse more freely and immediately on in-development changes. Some of those improvements have already been made, and I'm personally hoping the difference will be noticeable over the next few weeks.