Originally Posted by Anias
There are a load of non-trivial tasks in wow that are not at all intuitive from the game. Hunter shot rotations? Game sucks ass as making them clear. Warlock dot rotations? Game sucks ass at making them clear. Warrior threat rotations? Game sucks ass at making it clear. How to heal and conserve your mana? Not automaticly obvious.
Even if it was just a series of npcs as groupmates and a tossed together "end of the encounter, here's the blizzard WWS" it would be vastly superior to the existing out of the box wow. While it's nice to say that "the game is extendable, and the player community provides a lot of player training" that doesn't absolve a game dev of their core responsibilities, some of which involve "teaching new people to play their game". Look at how many resources the average raid leader of a bleeding edge guild has availabe, and then consider how likely it is that (for instance) a 30 year old non-gamer who pored themselves into the game would find them from the game alone. They'd probably have someone point them out, or they'd head out to google, but wow itself doesn't do a very good job, it depends on people teaching others or google stepping in to index and that's bad design.
|
I don't remember when it was the game itself that was supposed to teach you how to play your class, or tell you what the most effective class ability rotations are. I also never saw a problem that the game doesn't hint at what a proper group composition for 5 man content through 25 man content or how one should spec a character because that's
their fucking responsibility, not Blizzard's. If a player wants to improve that's their responsibility and nobody else's. This isn't going to turn into Mavis Beacon teaches World of Warcraft anytime soon.
Furthermore, since when was it the responsibility of the
developers to tell you how to open your Firefox application? It's not like the game doesn't have lots of intricacies that are blatantly obvious to anybody who takes three seconds to look at it. Why should a developer have to sit back and cater to a complete moron and design a guide to tell them exactly what to do because they're too fucking stupid to figure it out for themselves?
|
I don't think player x the lazy/stupid is going to be helped. I do think player y the ignorant can be. It's nice to say "type it into google, get an answer" but given the number of real people I deal with on a regular basis who simply don't know about google, that's not an acceptable position for the dev team to take. Someone buying wow from the walmart stand isn't guaranteed to have played any other game before. It's likely they played solitaire on their window's pc at least once, but assuming everyone's gone through the player training in "The Legend of Zelda" wherein many people learned to hit everything with your sword, just in case seems foolish. Wow already has a fair bit of player training built into it's leveling - and it did incredibly well as a result. It seems that if we want raiding to do as well as the game as a whole, we should at least consider the merits of additional player training related to raiding.
|
I'm calling bullshit on ignorance. Are you really going to sit there and tell me that people haven't heard of Google, and that by some magical hand-of-god retarded streak that they bought World of Warcraft, installed it on their computer, have had zero experience with an internet search engine? Most everybody online has a search engine that they prefer, be it Google, Alta Vista, etc. Should Blizzard have a quest that says "Hey moron, open your internet browser and type this shit in. It'll teach you a *whole lot*". I don't buy that for a second.
Furthermore, why on earth would it be better to add people who can't spec right, won't respec for PvP -- don't have the appropriate gear because of either of the two reasons -- to the bleeding edge raiding world? I sure as hell wouldn't want some complete idiot play-testing a new raid dungeon because they'd probably end up screwing it over by asking for it to be "more player friendly".