Information for the Masses (or, How to Keep the Players Informed) - Page 2

Lookit · 08/31/07, 1:45 PM

I think it's safe to assume that anyone who doesn't even bother to scroll down and look at their own class in the patch notes is not going to be doing bleeding edge content where that information is incredibly important. Who cares if a shaman running Shadow Lab is putting WF on both weapons?

A player who doesn't check their own class's patch notes is not someone who wants to participate in a 100-page mega-thread about class mechanics to squeeze the last bit of performance out of their character - they simply don't approach the game that way. They log on, do a little pvp, maybe try to run an instance if they're feeling hardcore. They do not fill out dps spreadsheets or run calculations comparing different talents.

The one change I would recommend (which is a small one) is to make patch notes readable while the patch is downloading. Presently, the patch notes pop up after the patch has already downloaded, and at that point many players probably just want to hurry and get into the game. But if the patch notes automatically popped up as soon as the patch started downloading, I think most players would read them.

oldmandennis · 08/31/07, 2:19 PM

Going out of their way to beat average users over their head with info they probably will not understand anyways is probably a bit much.

Given that some players are going to go into great depths in the forums, some are going to halfass it, and some are going to get a halfassed explanation from them, theirs always going to be a certain amount of misinformation or outdated information out there. Is it worthwhile to try and send an email to shaman who were clued in enough to do WF 5/4 to begin with, but not clued in enough to go back to 5/5? It's really a pretty small difference, and its something that a shaman class lead should catch. This is a MMO, and players learning from players should be part of it. Especially now that you can armory people and catch spec mistakes.

I would say that some mechanics really could use a blue post, rather then people spending a million years in the blasted lands and making their eyes bleed on WWS. The biggest culprit is weapon skill, which AFIK still isn't fully understood. It's original incarnation was just as bad, with many ACL gloves sharded before it was figured out. Other culprits include parry->swing haste and the level based resists of boss mobs.

Apate · 08/31/07, 2:21 PM

I've often wondered why there isn't a proper manual for the game. Are the players expected to run tests that determine the hit table? It might be fun for some people to work out mechanics on their own, but is there a good reason why Blizzard can't strike some kind of balance? Some mechanics continue to elude even people on this forum, such as miss rate vs. "boss level" mobs. Maybe it's my sleeping difficulties of late, but why isn't there a section on Blizzard's site that says "Character Statistics - Hit: At max level, hit rating helps players overcome the xx% chance to miss a special attack or a single-wield auto-attack, and the yy% chance to miss an auto-attack for DW classes." (written by someone smarter than myself, I hope)

Sceleris · 08/31/07, 2:32 PM

Originally Posted by Malan

Patch notes are rarely a sufficient source of information. They lack the context of all the discussion on the boards with CMs pushing out developer intent. How about the change where mages spell coefficient was lowered when they take talents that decrease their casting time? Where's the context for that in a patch note? If that's the first place you're reading it, all you see is that your class just took a heavy beating with the nerf stick with no explanation.

Malan has an excellent point. After almost every patch, we see a thread on a non-Blizzard board detailing what was changed but not mentioned in the patch notes. The discrepancies can be small or large, but if you are not actively following a non-Blizzard board, you may never know these discrepancies existed.

(Poor example since 2.1 notes were mostly complete, past patches have had larger discrepancies)
2.1.2 Patch Notes and discussion

Krollin · 08/31/07, 2:33 PM

Originally Posted by Mikari

I guess you haven't checked inside your WoW folder for a while, because they already store the patch notes as a HTML file.

You live and learn

There I was always going to the Official Site to check up on them if I needed to.

Draegan · 08/31/07, 2:38 PM

Best way to keep people informed is to stick a dev tracker in the launch panel where the other news is kept.

I for one get all my info from WoR, EJ, FOH, MMO-Champs etc. If it's not posted on one of these sites, its not news worthy imo.

songster · 08/31/07, 2:48 PM

Patch notes are very poorly quality controlled. As well as the missing sutf, there are also duplicated items, or even references back to obsolete builds that never made it off the PTR.

MeCh · 08/31/07, 3:47 PM

Relevant information to raids should be displayed when zoning into raid zones. Perhaps in the raid information tab, or as a pop up message, with the ability to disable it in interface options of course.

PSGarak · 08/31/07, 4:16 PM

There's a difference between having the information available on the game mechanics, and quantitative min-maxing based on that information. Min-maxing is a player-based activity, and i do think that blizzard should stay away from it. It can happen on their own boars or here, whatever, but blizzard really has no imperative to post their own advice on negotiating heavy mechanics in order to optimize dps under different conditions.

However, I do think that blizzard has an obligation to publish, somewhere, the guts of their combat system. I don't think that all of the esoteric worky gubbins have to be forced upon every player. Most don't care, and more than a few would probably quit if they were force-fed some spreadsheets with decimals and percents. What's missing is a blizzard-sanctioned list of non-obvious effects, like the single-roll combat table with priorities, the hidden autoshot cast time, parry, the debuff limit (which is buried in patch notes, not posted anywhere official for new players to find) and the debuff priority system.

Example: it is not blizzard's place, duty, or responsibility to provide a guide to the hunter shot rotation. It is their responsibility to list the autoshot mechanics, with the hidden cast time and the shot delay, and how haste has an effect on that.
Creating the shot rotation, complete with diagrams and macros, is something for the player community to do, but the necessary "hidden" information should be availabe on some "advanced mechanics" page somewhere on the website, updated as necessary. I should need the EJ forums to talk to other smart people about optimizing my spreadsheet but blizzard should provide all the information I need to create that spreadsheet, rather than relying on n=10000 tests to test and verify the operating mechanics.

SeanDamnit · 08/31/07, 5:24 PM

Seems to me that if blizzard is willing to give the large amount of information present on the armory, then they wouldn't have a problem with giving info on some of the mystery mechanics.

However, I do think they are doing a great job with providing information, and things like the armory are evidence that they are working towards providing more and more official information.

Dakous · 08/31/07, 6:33 PM

Originally Posted by Malan

Without specific information from Blizzard we'll never know for sure what percent of the player population actively uses the official forums, but I think we can all agree that it is some non-trivial value.

City of Heroes's Statesman, years ago, revealed that the percentage was in the single digits (percentage wise) for that game, there's no compelling reason to believe it is otherwise for WoW. A socialization theory I subscribe to is that certain persons are information mediators - town gossips, if you like - where the EJ forum reader and the average player collide through an intermediary filter person; this results in juicy information (Death knights) some details of which may be difficult to attain (starting level ~55-70) quickly having large market penetration.

Your concern seems to lie in the idea that everyone wants to be informed, or that even presented the information, people will be informed. Surely anecdotal experience thusfar has demonstrated that premise false (where is the US on a map?)? To go to Barlet's model, there are three motivations to players that are not explorer - that is, the type concerned with the workings.

In fact, I would argue that WoW's (and Starcraft, and so on...) success lies entirely in that the interface presents useable information (A-ttack!) without being too dense for the wide birth of players to not immediately latch on to. Requests for Theorycraft/DrDamage style improvements to the interface/talent trees have been met with a very sensible response - that's expert level information that they don't want the average player exposed to. The information is out there - if it was something they were against players knowing per se, they'd randomly shuffle around values every month in mini-patches, therefore, it seems likely that they just want that chess vibe of easy to learn, lifetime to master (say, I heard checkers was solved recently and there's a rubix cube reduction solution floating around a few months ago... how long until chess goes?)

Xei · 08/31/07, 6:36 PM

Blizzard does not need to teach players how to play ... if you want to best out of your character you do your own research (and inevitably end up here). Joe-Casual doesn't know much about the game, but until you play it at a high level it really does not matter, and Blizzard has no need to inform players about mechanics.

My only beef is with stealth hotfixes or patch changes which are NOT documented or announced.

Rob · 08/31/07, 7:06 PM

Originally Posted by Praetorian

From a purely self-interested perspective, why should Blizzard do what you suggest?

I'll bite... if the average player were better, more of the game (heroics and entry-level raids) would be accessible to them and the game might thus have a greater draw. Most of the players in my guild raid only a few nights a week, so we are not necessarily investing more time than other players. We have just made an effort to learn the mechanics of our classes. If this information were easily accessible, then the average player would be capable of entry-level raiding. I assume this would be to Blizzard's benefit, by effectively increasing the content available to each person without creating anything new.

The reason Blizzard hasn't made detailed information available is probably because it would expose all the shortcomings of the game's balance and lead to complaints from every class. I can see it now:
Mage -- Look! A rogue in T4 is capable of 950 theoretical DPS and I'm only capable of 900 in T4! Nerf plz!
Warrior -- Hey! A druid's maximum theoretical TPS with T5 gear is 1250 and mine is only 1200! WTF?
Priest -- I signed up to heal! How come a shaman's maximum HPS is 3400 and mine's only 3300? ZOMG!
Shaman -- Why is Elemental doing only 750 DPS while Enhancement does 850?! WTB buffs!

Et cetera. It would be nice if Blizzard could find a middle ground, to be honest. It's OK that they don't publish coefficients for every spell, but it's ridiculous the amount of intense testing that people have to do just to find the hit cap or the effect granted by weapon skill.

crimsonsentinel · 08/31/07, 7:25 PM

Not exactly relevant but imo there is a general disconnect in communication betwteen the community and the developers. Its not only from blizzard to the players, its hard for players to communicate with blizzard as well. Right now, theres basically the blizz forums and press conferences. It's amazing how much information we were able to get from 1-2 hour panels at blizzcon, simply because people who knew what they were talking about (mostly) were able to speak directly to blizzard.

Something that I've always thought would be nice is if blizzard had community reps that participated in fan sites. Other games have "official" people (even if they weren't on the payroll) who participated in discussion on fansites.

Having a CM visit this forum or gameriot and other major fansites would really help the customer service aspect of the game. Sure, tigole visits every now and then, but there's no permanent presence so to speak.

PS:

Patch notes are very poorly quality controlled. As well as the missing sutf, there are also duplicated items, or even references back to obsolete builds that never made it off the PTR.

Patch notes will never be a good source of information because the people writing them (the CM's) are not the people making the changes.

Pyria · 08/31/07, 8:04 PM

I remember seeing a site where you could filter all patch notes by class and display them in sequence for a great overview of changes and fixes, but my Google-fu fails me. Having information displayed in that way is a huge step towards understanding the ebb and flow of changing mechanics, and I think setting something similar up on the official site would be a nice tool for anybody trying to understand their class better. Take the current class descriptions (which are at times unintentional comedy to informed raiders, but accurate enough descriptions for somebody rolling their first characters), add an "advanced" section with relevant patch notes sorted, and perhaps throw in guides for raid roles, rogue Energy management, hunter shot rotation, the five second rule, all that jazz.

I think the ideal solution would be to implement a very heavily moderated Wowhead-esque comment system or Wiki that players could use to commit all these theories to an official form. To take it one step further, add links in main page updates as a "Did you know?" feature. Having these things be player contributed (albeit in an official frame) at least lets Blizzard preserve some of it's secrets and avoid certain criticisms, though it's also probably too high upkeep considering the horrible death the Warcraft Encyclopedia died.

Lookit · 08/31/07, 8:26 PM

Originally Posted by crimsonsentinel

Not exactly relevant but imo there is a general disconnect in communication betwteen the community and the developers. Its not only from blizzard to the players, its hard for players to communicate with blizzard as well.

Subscribing to WoW does not entitle you to giving detailed input on the development of the game. It is not reasonable to expect a player to have easy communication with the developers. What could you possibly envision as a proper level of player-to-dev communication that is beyond what currently exists?

You seem to think that there is great consistency in what players want. There is not. Nine million players equates to many millions of opinions and ideas on what would make WoW better. Should the devs feel they have failed their community every time one of those millions of ideas isn't personally responded to in blue writing?

Malan · 08/31/07, 8:36 PM

That's not true, there have been other games where players had frequent access to developers through weekly IRC dev chats. Thousands of players each week got to sit in IRC and chat live with the dev team about their concerns. Blizzard has simply chosen not to do that. (Probably correctly in this case as their success has been above and beyond any other MMO)

Something a bit disturbing to me is that people keep saying that "joe casual doesn't need to know this stuff." Well why not? Doesn't every player aspire to be decent (at a minimum) at his class? I mean come on, some of the worst examples of clueless players we have seen on this forum would probably tell you in-game that they're great at their class. But they don't "deserve" to know things about the game, unless they're willing to "put the time into it"? That doesn't make sense. That's a "hardcore vs casual" and "have vs have not" argument. (And thus not an argument to make lest you draw the ire of Kaubel.)

Danther · 09/01/07, 12:30 AM

Originally Posted by Osse

Most people dont play this game hardcore and they dont have to push it to the limit to succeed and some have fun in Karazhan.

The fact that Karazhan is mentioned shows the disconnect between what Praetorian referred to as 'more casual than you can imagine,' and what people on this board often think of. Truly casual players (the majority of the WoW playerbase), are not in Karazhan. Casual 'raiders' are in there. The player who can devote a few hours to the game each week is not generally working on Karazhan, unless those few hours happen to come in a four-hour block one night a week.

My friends who play casually couldn't care less about the details of the raiding game. They're not even close to level 70, as they play WoW as something to do here and there, picking it up maybe every week or two. So why would they care whether or not Blizzard goes out of their way to inform them of the details of game mechanics, which really only matter at the higher end.

There is such a thing as giving too much information. Though, I do agree that an Advanced Guide wouldn't be a terrible thing. While not going into theory, it could at least lay out a few of the more obscure rules of the game.

Unaz · 09/01/07, 1:06 AM

Originally Posted by Krollin

Actually Blizzard have been very clear about the fact that they will never provide details on any of their games to the extent that you seem to want.

I beg to differ.

The main problem I and others have is they don't update errata on the game manual and abilities. Things like the ever sore spot that Windfury is.

- Players discover that Windfury has a 3 second cooldown.
- Not only was it a cooldown, but it was apparently linked across both weapons. Players assume it a bug because hey, the in game tooltip that they have no reason not to trust says 20% on hit.
- A player goes "Hey, it seems to not share this mysterious cooldown that nobody official has acknowledged yet if you switch ranks"
- Lots more silence in and out of game on this mechanic.
- Eventually the cooldown is linked across all ranks, showing the shaman community that it was indeed meant to be there, but (as far as I remember) still not even mentioned in any patch or in game anywhere, Just by a single forum post saying "Yeah that's a bug and we're changing it"

That's just the one semi large recent example I can think of. It's not even that there's stealth changes that aren't mentioned. None of this can be found be someone who plays the game and pays attention. There's no way to NOTICE this happening. You have to save large combat log parses, and manually analyze reams of data or write your own addons to figure it out. Or you have to regularly follow the forums and sift through the long winded cesspool of "hey wouldn't it be cool if our pvp trinket had a 10 second cooldown if you got three crits in a row" to find the theorycraft post where a single person says "hey this doesn't look right, here's math I didn't completely pull out of my ass".

And then you look in-game to the many many changed abilities where the in-game descriptions that the casual smart player base relies on to be accurate. I know a few rpg power gamers who know near every secret of every console rpg, but wouldn't think to go anywhere near the official forums to find stuff that didn't get mentioned on the main website or in the patch notes for an MMO. After all, anything official would get published on the website, it's such a pretty and highly maintained resource. Look at those talent trees! And Blizzard can easily update the tooltips to reflect what things do right?

Even if they can't keep up with changes in the in game UI, the CMs are obviously responding and verifying issues (like the CM that said the WF cooldown was meant to be linked) and can be logging them in a knowledgbase. If only they had a knowledgebase somewhere on their support site...

Errata is a part of any game. There's board games and books that maintain errata databases that reflect things that aren't publicly advertised, but are there for the people that care.

I'm glad sites like EJ have hit critical mass to the portion of the population that likes to analyze the mechanics of the game, so I can go here and point others here. But it would be certainly be a boon to have a single place to direct players to for their class to find out the details of how it works at the current time.

Disquette · 09/01/07, 2:35 AM

I think Unaz described this issue very well with his example. By not being fully truthful with the information, Blizzard creates ill will from it's customers. Worse, even, the current IN GAME information is patently false.

If we're talking about advanced theory, then you can argue whether or not it should be published, I guess (even though I personally think it should be exposed). It's another thing entirely when Blizzard has publicly acknowledged, in a forum, something which contradicts the information given to players in the game. What is the downside if Blizzard changes the tooltip from:

Imbue the Shaman's weapon with wind. Each hit has a 20% chance of dealing additional damage equal to two extra attacks with 445 extra attack power. Lasts 30 minutes.

to

Imbue the Shaman's weapon with wind. Each hit has a chance of dealing additional damage equal to two extra attacks with 445 extra attack power. Lasts 30 minutes. This effect cannot happen more than once every few seconds.

This new tooltip is (I believe) 100% truthful. It encourages testing by the people who care about the specifics, and is accurate to the casual observer as well.

Franklin · 09/01/07, 12:52 PM

The trap I think they have fallen into is no news is good news, you can't be pestered about upcoming changes nerfs, ETA's etc if people don't know about them... In a perfect world it would be ideal if upcoming changes were published before they the actual notes. A good example was when the druid epic flight form was added there was a 'sticky' on the class boards for several weeks before the patch was on the PTR explaining to people the ins-and-outs of what it meant.

I think Blizzard as a whole fail to use the Development cycle to their advantage – I for one accept that things take time to build and design what we're missing the overview of what's in the pipeline even if its pretty broad at first and details emerge over time right now we just seem to have 'we're looking at things but can't tell you what' then patch notes the worst example of this was the hotfix to Windfury totem which I think blindsided everyone. This used to be the case on the R&D boards where Tigole especially used to interact with the community.

The issue I think is 'Who is the target audience of the official boards?' a change to targeting posts to people that want to learn and improve their characters rather than anonymous posting from low level alts would make a great deal of difference – basically take a leaf from how these forums are managed and don't dignify garbage or better yet somehow ban/restrict hiding behind alts. I agree that the game needs to be more self sufficient via tool tips and official communication such as Battle Plans so a person can understand some of the mechanics and maximize their potential should they choose to. I don't buy that casuals don't care about this – maybe not to the levels of raiders – but things such as understanding why Trinket A is better than Trinket B due to internal cooldowns affects every player and may change what they aspire too – if they didn't we would have at 3 sites like Thottbot or Wowhead devoted to quests/items and class help let alone countless covering news.

Overall I think things are getting better, the new CM's are at least engaging people even with questionable responses – there was a while recently where there wasn't a blue post in sight on issues. The Armory is actually shaping up into a pretty powerful tool that could be expanded to convey messages and information in a way that didn't invite trolling.

Ohi · 09/01/07, 1:00 PM

Originally Posted by Mikari

I guess you haven't checked inside your WoW folder for a while, because they already store the patch notes as a HTML file.

There's a lot of people who don't mess around with their computer's files and such for the sake of they think they're gonna screw something up

Bender · 09/01/07, 2:13 PM

I'm surprised that most of you seem to think that only the ultra casual players miss out on significant information and that they don't care about it even if they knew where to find it. There is an assload of players in hardcore raiding guilds who have no clue about the more advanced class mechanics, people that in most cases want to perform as good as possible, but can't because they missed the important info. Usually these guys get it eventually, since the good players in their guilds will notice their suboptimal performance and will try to fix it for them, but if they could find this stuff on ingame tooltips or maybe on some knowledgebase on the WoW site they would be able to perform better to begin with.

I don't think having some kind of ingame guide would be a bad thing. Telling the players important stuff regarding their class/spec would be nice in my opinion. They could have a system similar to the game tips you get every once in a while, you know the exclamation mark at the bottom on your screen, and when you click it you get a short message. This could be implemented in such a way that when you learn a new skill from your trainer, a small info box with the most relevant stuff about that ability will pop up. For example, when a shaman dings 30 and trains windfury weapon, a box appears which tells you that due to the 3 second cooldown, it's extremely detrimental to your damage if you use fast weapons with this weapon imbue. This wouldn't require a lot of work on Blizzards end, most abilites would not need an info box, but some do (windfury, steady shot and aimed shot for example).

Krollin · 09/01/07, 3:03 PM

Originally Posted by Unaz

I beg to differ.

How old is Diablo 2 now? Very.
The information there never used to be that accurate either.
The Arreat Summit is also driven by player input, I know because I was one of the people sending in corrections and new information to the Web Dev in charge of the site.

The WoW Official Web Site is not driven by player input.

Blizzard did exactly the same thing with Diablo 2 and LoD as they are doing with WoW now.
The difference is that Diablo 2 is hardly comparable to WoW in terms of size and complexity and the amount of information that Blizzard supplied to D2 back then was comparable in accuracy to that supplied to WoW now.

No possible comparison between the game mechanics of the 2 games can be made, WoW is infinitely complexer and fluid than D2 ever was or will be.

The state of the web sites reflect that, there isn't much to tell about D2 or LoD, there is a hell of a lot to tell about WoW and Blizzard made the same statement about WoW as they did about D2.
They are prepared to supply enough information to get you going, the rest you need to find out for yourself. That is the crux of the matter.

No matter how much detail Blizzard put out the majority of players will either never bother reading it or never understand everything.

Not only that but if they got that information wrong then the troll and whine post count on their forums would rise beyond belief. They don't feel it is worth doing it and I don't blame them.
There are plenty of examples of what happens when Devs post equivocal or ambigious things on the forum. Joe Troll does his usual "lol, first" post, 90% of the people replying misread what is put in front of them and you have to grind your way through the Thread in case there is anything coherent you may need to know. God, the noise when they post something accurate is bad enough most of the time.

A lot of you are arguing that Blizzard don't do enough to inform the players.
What seems to be flying over a lot of peoples heads is that there is already more information than you could ever possibly need to play the game out there already and none of it is hard to find. People who use the Internet and the World Wide Web should learn to use it properly, it isn't the responsibility of any one person or organisation to teach them how.

Don't you enjoy discovering these things for yourselves?

I don't think having some kind of ingame guide would be a bad thing. Telling the players important stuff regarding their class/spec would be nice in my opinion. They could have a system similar to the game tips you get every once in a while, you know the exclamation mark at the bottom on your screen, and when you click it you get a short message. This could be implemented in such a way that when you learn a new skill from your trainer, a small info box with the most relevant stuff about that ability will pop up. For example, when a shaman dings 30 and trains windfury weapon, a box appears which tells you that due to the 3 second cooldown, it's extremely detrimental to your damage if you use fast weapons with this weapon imbue. This wouldn't require a lot of work on Blizzards end, most abilites would not need an info box, but some do (windfury, steady shot and aimed shot for example).

Sorry but it is not in the game makers interest to tell you how to play the game. It would far less interesting if they did that.
Those that learn the game inside out would have no advantage over those that don't, the kind of level playing field you are suggesting would cool the interest of the better players and that would lose the game makers custom and ultimately destroy the game entirely.

Bender · 09/01/07, 3:20 PM

Originally Posted by Krollin

Sorry but it is not in the game makers interest to tell you how to play the game. It would far less interesting if they did that.
Those that learn the game inside out would have no advantage over those that don't, the kind of level playing field you are suggesting would cool the interest of the better players and that would lose the game makers custom and ultimately destroy the game entirely.

Those who learn the game inside out would still have a huge advantage. What I'm suggesting is just that they actually tell the players of very quirky mechanics that makes no sense at all, such as green 2.6 offhands being better than epic daggers in a DW shamans offhand for example. Seeking stuff out on your own to be a great player is nice, but seeking out third party info to not suck ass is another thing entirely, like hunter dps for instance.