Quote:
Originally Posted by Ngruk  Hard thing is to understand, for the most part, they do. They can't NOT be smarter than you and know more than you about the game you're testing, and they're making. |
I am sorry, but while it might be nice to think this, this is probably incorrect.
During the StarCraft beta, several players were much better and knew a lot more about StarCraft than developers. Blacklizard was the first player who famously used to crush blizzard developers at their own game, while it was in beta.
Developers might have the benefit of a more holistic vision, but just a quick browsing of EJ will show you that there are people who can write several page essays about incredibly technical details of how certain spells work.
Manly for example figured out an explot on how to abuse rolling ignites after they were fixed by using a very specific amount of haste and and abusing the travel time of certain spells. The problem is that developers lack any ability a priori to figure out which players are actually worthy of paying attention too and which ones are just idiots who happen to write in a non-retarded manner.
In the end, it is just not worth it to write novellas when they will most likely get lost in the signal-to-noise ratio. The most easy way to gain direct access to developers is either by playing alongside them or by having a fan-site with a huge following - for example, several fansites have direct access to developers even though the people writing for those fansites are awful theorycrafters.
edit:
I agree with you entirely about CS. Blizzard CS is downright amazing, professional, and usually curteous. They also have fairly strict guidelines, but if you ask for something politely and are fairly reasonable about it, they tend to err on the side of helping you out (for example, refunding items a few hours after the theoretical deadline)
