Those Damn Dirty Scoundrels

Recently, Blizzard went back on a thing they said. It was super significant. Discussion about it had been going on for kind of a long time if I remember correctly.

As any time where Blizzard does something differently than they said they would earlier, people jumped out of the woodwork and wrote angry forum posts about how Blizzard are LIARS!

NO! THRALL SAVE US!

Liars, all of them! They said they would never do this thing, and then they did. They said this thing would be a thing forever and now it's NOT! This other thing, they said it would be made this thing, but now it's a totally different thing! How can we ever even trust any single thing they ever say?!

these things

The very idea!

Here's the... thing.

lots of things

Either we get communication about stuff and accept the possibility that Blizzard is made up of regular people who are not seers, time travelers, magical, or omniscient - or we never get told any single thing until the time has come for that thing to become reality. Got a question about what Blizzard's plans are for your class? Either you get answers that might be false once the future comes or you get nothing.

Blizzard blues have battled for years with the playerbase, trying to be helpful and informative, only to accidentally say something that was destined to not stay true in the future. Then they have to sift through a thousand angry internet users, who are not usually kind about it.

I've seen them - forum posts where someone takes a blue post and dissects each word used to the smallest detail. These people drag out the etymology of words used by the feared and mighty Blue Poster to prove without nary a doubt that they have actively and purposefully intended with malice in their hearts to lie and mislead us - the innocent, wide-eyed and hopeful playerbase.

We have those same people who seem to know words so well misunderstanding what lying even is.

Generally, unless Blizzard has in fact lied about a thing (which could have happened before, sure, it's not impossible), when they make statements, that declaration is true to the best of their knowledge. This is an important distinction - if someone has tried to the best of their ability to tell the truth the fullest extent of their knowledge, it would be fallacious to accuse them of lying.

Statements that are true at the time of them being announced and that become untrue due to changes later are not lies - that's called rethinking, reviewing, revising, amending, or more colloquially known as changing your mind.

gasp, NO! NOT THAT!

When Blizzard changes their mind about something and revises something to be different from what it was when that announcement was originally made, people who are not in favor of that change tend to get all riled up. This looks like people generally believe that changing your mind is actually not okay.

We spend a lot of our time and energy, especially people with very many opinions about stuff, trying to change people's minds. And yet, when someone does change their mind about something, we somehow decide to call this "lying". We also hear the negative term "flipflopping" which insists changing your opinion is bad - we assume that if you would change your mind about something, you simply can't be trusted. We are so attached to our ideas and our efforts to defend them that when someone else decides that, due to new information, they are going to change their outlook and approach to something, it's not good.

It's very common to perceive changing your mind as a negative thing, which is simply bizarre. We view this kind of behavior as some sort of fault, as if that person is not wise enough or confident enough to defend their original opinions. It assumes that once you have an opinion, never let it go. It's yours forever, to cherish and defend to your last breath.

So, please, allow Blizzard to actively work to revise and change their philosophy as they gain more experience and get new information without accusing them of being downright rotten, no good, dirty liars. You can dislike the new philosophies as much as you want, but that doesn't mean anyone was being untruthful.