I'm not a hateful person, so all the personal insults and whining towards CM's on the WoW forums aren't something I approve of, but I couldn't help but smile when I read this post. For all of you who don't know who this is, you missed one hell of a show on the forums.   Tharfor is, or used to be, one of the CM's on the European WoW forums, but he wasn't like all others, no. Tharfor possessed the ability to make official Blizzard posts saying so much dumb stuff, that other GM's couldn't do anything else but admit that he was "funny". I read his first posts here in the shaman forums. Now, I have to admit that you got to have some balls to post there as CM. It's probably one of the hardest class forums to manage at the moment, but you can have balls and still be somewhat intelligent. When a shaman made a post about the false promises and all other things that happened to the shaman class (which is sadly true) Tharfor found it necessary to go on the offensive, thereby enraging the shaman community even more, making a fool out of himself, and thus Blizzard.

The result is some of the saddest, and funniest, blue posts I've ever read. Statements like:

“You then go on to talk about the CMs and how when they get ill it's clearly a conspiracy just to avoid shaman concerns, and how a little bit of miscommunication during a very busy period is a blatant attempt to nerf or deride the shaman class.

Although this kind of micro-level discussion is what these forums are for, it has been said that we are not aiming for game balance at specific talent spec levels. As long as each class is able to be reasonably involved in every aspect of the game then things are going pretty well.

From that list of statistics I can see that shaman are probably the closest to being at the balancing point that the devs have talked about because you are represented in 5v5 and not so much in 2v2.

...and as for the sticky requests: when have we ever made a sticky out of a post which basically says "You fail, Blizzard."?

There is a potential here in this thread, I can see that. I can't say I'm surprised that it's the ones who are left after me banning so many in the dot spam this week who can formulate potentially decent threads, but I think you need to take a breath and get some perspective.

The stats don't show a lack of popularity for shaman, they just show a ridiculous popularity for other classes. It takes a negative mind to assume that other peoples popularity is a reflection of your own unpopularity, if that makes sense.

Now I don't know, but if you are representing a company, Blizzard in this case, and customers are complaining, that's not good. It doesn't matter if they are right or wrong, they are your customers, you are there to either answer them or at least make sure things don't spin out of control, do some damage control. But no, instead Tharfor patronises, ridicules, and insults customers, making himself look like a fool. When Tharfor speaks, Blizzard speaks, and I doubt many people at Blizzard liked what they were saying there.

So reading a few weeks later that Tharfor was leaving restored some of my faith in Blizzard as a company, a faith which is at its lowest point ever (and yes, being a shaman does play a role here). I just hope Blizzard continues this and tries to get CM's who are actually capable of doing their job and representing Blizzard in a worthy way. I know this is the big bad interweb, where real life rules don't always apply, and people will say whatever is on their mind even faster, but that doesn't make this golden rule less true “The customer is always right”.

Oh, and one more thing, add the question "Did you play on a RP server ?" to the recruitment format, if answered with a yes, throw away the application. RP CMs don't work, Tharfor proved that.

Column from week 16: WoW, The console game