What so wrong with taking it easy?

I read the forums. It's true. I don't often post there, but it certainly provides an eye-opening experience every time. It's as if Gameriot represents my local high end clothing store and the WoW forums represent Wal-Mart; when you go to the latter you see those who are on the lowest end of the totem pole. You forget by shopping at that nice place that there are far, far more of the Wal-Mart types than there are of you. The fat, ugly, trashy girls at Wal-Mart wearing those tight fake-velvet track suits find their WoW-counterparts in the terrible QQers of the forums. The ones arguing Warlocks need overall nerfs, because Fear can cause you to DC in Orgrimmar Arena. The ones who played a Hunter in the 1400s for three seasons and truly believe that the dominance of their double BM Hunter 3s team has nothing to do with broken mechanics.

GC made another one of his comments the other day, where he says something without adequately explaining himself and leaves it far too open to interpretation. Bromsius made a nice post about them already. The source can be found here, and the TL;DR is that as often as possible the developers will opt to take the easy solution when posed with a problem. As you can imagine the standard forum rhetoric ensued - Blizzard is lazy, Blizzard doesn't care, Blizzard just wants to make more money, etc. Reading all of this leaves me with one question:

What's wrong with taking the easy route?

Of course this isn't the first time such criticism has been directed at Blizzard for acting in such a way. Whenever balancing is done that is less extensive than players demanded or expected the same accusations have been made of "taking the easy way out". From a short term design standpoint I agree with the QQ, it may be more effective in any given case to completely revamp the mechanics of whatever isn't working. But what about the long term? Not only does the frequency of new problems scale with the complexity of the solution, but what happens when a future concern that could have been easily fixed can't, because so many changes have been made to the mechanics.

You're building a new road to get from point A to point B more quickly. You come to a mountain with a town built on it, which you can either build around or built a tunnel through. What do you do?

Here is a case where the goal is getting somewhere quickly, and the more expensive and complex solution will be more effective. You need to consider the externalities; in the immediate there is the issue of what happens to the town. In the future you need to consider that the mountain is speculated to contain gold, what happens if this turns out to be true? Likewise Blizzard must immediately consider what happens to other aspects of the game, and how this compicates things for the future. As any city-planner can tell you a complex and more efficient roads-system only makes future construction much more difficult.

Take the current PvP issues. Could extensive changes to class mechanics be the most efficient route of balancing? It's quite possible. There is a lot to be said, however, for attempting to solve as much of the problem as possible simply through changes to Reslience mechanics. Changing things one piece at a time helps isolate the problem in the event that it doesn't work. Not being developers puts us in the fortunate position of not needing to worry about anything beyond the immediate, because future changes to aspects of the game beyond that which we're interested in are not our concerns.

I do think that we are in a frustrated position right now where we will criticize Blizzard for just about anything. I've seen raiders complaining about the lack of emphasis on stacking raids class-by-class because it caters to casuals. Really? Did anyone not cheer at the prospect of not needing to bring a ****ty Shadow Priest because you needed a mana battery? I wrote a blog recently in which I stated that even if Resilience doesn't fix the bulk of the problem, as I predicted, the best course of action would still be to see how things turn out. There are certainly reasons to be critical of Blizzard's actions but I don't think that taking the easy way out is necessarily one of them, unless it means doing nothing.

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