Has Blizzard Changed Their Philosphy?

Over the last couple of weeks Blizzard has been making quite a few minor changes to the game every day or so. They have said that this is going to be their new policy going forward in order to address bugs in a more timely manner than they can by waiting for major patches. Personally I'm a huge fan of this new philosophy as it means that if something is broken we won't be waiting weeks or months for a fix.

The other philosophy that appears to be changing and the point of this post is Blizzards attitude of everything being the same in both PVP and PVE scenarios. There have historically been few instances where spells were different in the two scenarios with Curse of Doom being the only instance that I can think of off the top of my head. Blizzard stance in the past has been that by seperating out the PVE and PVP mechanics to be different they would be introducing complexity into the game for newcomers.

However, in the last couple of week's they have made two major changes that affect only PVP while leaving PVE alone. The first change is making it so that Exorcism does not work in PVP and the second is a change to the way that replenishment works in PVP making it only affect the caster. Now you can debate the merits of these changes seperately, but the main point I want to make is that Blizzard has finally done what a large portion of the playerbase has been asking for since the advent of arenas and that is separating PVP and PVE mechanics. Instead of attempting to balance everything around both scenarios at one time they are finding ways to fix a problem in one situation without changing anything in the other.

Personally I love what they've done here. I think that in the long run this is the only way that we'll ever have a balanced game. Trying to balance both aspects in the same way will never lead to a truly balanced game. Admittedly Blizzard comes closer than I think most people would assume in a situation like this, but it's come to the point where both aspects have so much focus that continuing down the path of simultaneous PVP and PVE balancing is going to become impossible. At some point they are going to have to step back and realize that they are in essence developing two seperate games and what works for one doesn't necessarily work for the other.