Lookit

Forgive me for trying to get back on topic?

If this thread were titled "Blizzard should correct incorrect tooltips" then there wouldn't be much to discuss. I think we can all agree that that would be great.

 

Malan

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Trying to figure this stuff out is not fun. Look at the hours of testing, simulating, discussing that has gone into figuring out Flurry and its quirks. And the conclusion is: we have no fucking idea how it works and now nobody wants to deal with it. You think its asking too much for Blizzard to have a little menu someplace that says "Advanced Flurry Mechanics" that explains that?

Your argument boils down to "keep players in the dark." I contend that's pretty silly, and not so amazingly, a lot of the major theorycrafters here who have put a ton of work into this stuff, have agreed with me.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Arcos

Your argument is circular, and appears to have returned your post of yesterday and "What more do you... want?" It's clear you see little wrong with the status quo, while the OP and others (myself included) see something that needs to be made clearer for the good of everyone. Everyone, mind, these aren't some esoterica that only the few and the chosen need to trouble themselves with, but mechanics that should be widely understood.

Further, you're engaging in a rather flawed appeal to authority; "it is expected for a player to be able to determine the coefficient on their own by testing"? Expected by whom? Blizzard expects every single spell caster to rediscover the wheel? If there is a Blizzard quote to that effect then I think we would all be glad to see it, if for no other reason then we can stop wasting time. Blizzard certainly does explain details of advanced mechanics, the issue is that they do so in a slipshod fashion that is not illuminating to the more casual player and often frustratingly vague to the more experienced.

While it's not unreasonable to imagine that this poor dissemination of information is part of a conscious design decision, it seems far more likely that it's simply the result of poor dissemination of information within Blizzard itself.

We all have seen that CM's are poorly informed about many of the mechanics of the game, but those that remember back to the original previews of BC talents (especially the rogue talents) will remember the impression that even developers don't fully comprehend the mechanics at work. A year ago rogue forums (and this forum, I seem to recall) were filled with vitriolic arguments over the nature of the combat roll system and it's implications for talents like Surprise Attacks.

This illustrates why precisely the game would be improved by the addition of a knowledge base along the lines Malan suggests; without it, we see that not only do players argue and misunderstand how the game works, but members of the development and community relations team do a well.

I don't have to reference back to the infamous "pop enrage" quote to recall that the CMs sometimes make errors that go way beyond slips of the tongue, but statements indicating they simply don't know what they are talking about (a good one recently concerned an EU CM remarking that WF would do little to increase druids' damage, as their attack speed was so fast...). A mechanics knowledge base would do more then just settle long running arguments over obscure mechanics, do more then provide some additional transparency (which many, though clearly not all, regard as a good in and of itself), it can be expected to raise the level of understanding of mechanics for everyone, including within Blizzard.

 

◊ Vontre

I'm not sure what to make of this. It wouldn't surprise me, in the slightest, to know that hiding game mechanics is an extremely deliberate move on Blizzard's part. I don't want to go too much into their possible psychoanalysis of the players, but perhaps they think we enjoy having access to secret, hidden knowledge that most people don't understand? You have to admit it is kinda cool being the go-to guy when a guildie has a question about gear or spec.

But maybe we're talking about entirely different things. Caster mechanics have, I think, always been simpler than melee mechanics. Even so, it may not be fun for the guy doing the tests, but for the player who digs up that knowledge, the discovery could be just as potent as discovering a new instance. A "wow that's cool" feeling that takes pretty much no effort on blizzard's part to keep going for a long time. Like discovering some forbidden, hidden knowledge. We all want to have that edge, after all.

www.magegraf.com

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

◊ Nork

It lets you decide whether you should equip the ring with 5 more spell damage or 5 more spell crit. Call me an idealist, but I figure that if they're going to take the time to put information on tooltips, it would be nice if the information was accurate (and honest).

 

Jebraltar

It's not even just a problem with tooltips missing mechanics like hidden cooldowns. How do you deal with things like combat ratings? They don't translate easily into percents in many cases, and doing the calculations yourself is tedious. Sure, we've got mods that do it for us, but wouldn't it be better if an item you hovered over just told you how much crit it gave? That's information Blizzard has given out publically that can be easily calculated in seconds by a computer, but which takes a player significantly longer to calculate whenever interested. That would be included in the notion of "increasing the knowledge base" as well.

Why should we need to do torturous experiments (with very little capacity for controlled tests) in order to determine mechanics like the Windfury cooldown that literally change gameplay? (Without the cooldown, fast weapons VS slow wouldn't be a big deal for Shamans. With it, they need weapons as slow as possible in both hands. Don't they deserve to know, without serious testing by third parties who have no reason besides a hunch to be doing the testing, that there's a cooldown so they can make the appropriate choices?)

How can a player choose between Icy and Fiery when they have no idea of how often either procs? How can you choose between Weapon Skill and any other stat? Testing is still being done about the change to Weapon Skill that took place more than six months ago. How would a Hunter realize that Auto-shot has a cast time that is interrupted by nearly all other skills? Hiding the entire combat system from us just makes sites like this necessary for playing at reasonable levels. A Hunter who visits EJ (or other third-party discussion sites) often does more than double the DPS of a Hunter who doesn't. Is that fair?

Worse, this lack of knowledge can cause problems with class balance. Let's say that high-level Enhancement Shamans were able to double the DPS of similarly skilled players of other with slow weapons, but the average player was using a slow mainhand with a fast offhand and doing half the DPS of similarly skilled players other classes. (Probably the most natural setup for someone assuming there's no cooldown on Windfury - slow mainhand since it most affects Stormstrike, fast offhand for UR procs.) Do you nerf the class to make the top-end closer to others or do you buff it to make the average closer to others, or do you make some other, bizarre change?

 

Melador

Well of course the theorycrafters agree. That's like asking whether chocolate bars should grow on trees at a fat camp.

I think there's something to be said for hiding mechanics, or at least the numbers behind mechanics in games. Sometimes feeling out the boundaries of a system is actively part of the gameplay. For example, in Thief, we decided that we'd provide a light gem to give players an idea of how much light was hitting them, but we explicitly didn't want to make it a binary seen/not seen thing. We wanted players to have a general idea of how "detectable" they were, but part of the tension of that gameplay experience was centered around uncertainty.

This was at the time hotly debated internally, and I think we ended up compromising by having a green/yellow/red mark on the light gem that gave a bit more discrete info about your visibility state. But I didn't like it, and would have removed it if I had the power to do so. Alas, at the time I was too low on the totem pole.

As for a WoW example, to some degree, I feel this is true about aggro/hate. Something about quantifying something that appears to be intentionally vague (future intentions of a built-in aggro-meter notwithstanding). Of course the ramifications of pulling aggro are often so dire and there's so little in-game feedback about where you stand on hate that I wouldn't argue against people using mods like Omen. But still, I can see why there's value in a game design that can't just be reduced to a spreadsheet.

All that said, I think WoW is so largely about min/maxing and there's so much spreadsheet-style data that already exists inside the game, that they should, if anything, err on the side of transparency.

 

Dakous

... to disagree, again: Players Who Suit MUDs...

(emphasis mine)

The problem may lie somewhere here:

Am I suggesting that incorrect tooltips are "fun" or "value-added"? No. Am I suggesting that some information shouldn't be added to the interface? No. I am, however, suggesting that there's no reason to communicate, for example, that WF > GoA, let alone anything more sophisticated then that.

Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.

 

Soul

You've got to be kidding me. The most egregious counterexample I can think of to this kind of claptrap thinking is threat mechanics. Do you know how much effort it took to discover how aggro was generated by different classes? A great example of the difficulty involved in testing is Heroic Strike. Here's the tooltip:

What is a "high amount of threat"? Is it a multiplier or a fixed amount of threat added? Does it change with stance? Sure, now you know all the answers, but how many times did some warrior out ithere cast Enrage, run up to a mob, cast Heroic Strike and then stand around while some mage cast Rank 1 Frostbolts until they pulled aggro to find out how that skill worked was? And bear in mind that about 40 trials were required to build up a consistent data set for this one skill alone. Why on earth should we have to do this for every skill out there? How long did it take for people to find out that, although threat is directly proportional to damage caused, the proportion varies between classes and whether they are at range or in melee? And how much aggro does it take to pull? That's a lot of effort for one guy to go to to find all of that stuff out for himself. And it's hard on other players too, in case you haven't been on a server that is starved for high end raiders.

 

Malan

Again, for what must now be the 5th time in this thread, I am not saying the devs should expose things to such a degree that the 'one true path of WoW' is visible.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

PSGarak

If blizzard has hardcoded mechanics into the game such that Windfury Totem has a dynamic internal cooldown, based on the character it's buffing, so that GoA totem is always inferior, then yes blizzard has a responsibility to tell us that WF>GoA.
In any other situation, we only want a description of the mechanics so that we can formulate for ourselves whether or not WF>GoA. No more, no less.
AFAIK this is the general consensus of the vast majority of the thread, and of this forum. And you agree with us! Welcome to the club.

 

Lookit

I've been much more abrasive than I intended in this thread, and for that I do apologize. It is not my intent to rile anyone up.

I think an in-game knowledge base regarding mechanics would be awesome. Who would argue against that?

What has caused me irritation in this thread is the way the idea has been presented: "Blizzard needs to step up their flow of information to players." I should skip out on reading the patch notes and then criticize Blizzard for not telling me about important changes to my class? That strikes me as ridiculous.

I think you're absolutely right about how such a knowledge base could improve the game. But I also think there is value in the approach Blizzard has taken.

At the time the tooltip was written, I think it was Blizzard's intent to create an experience more organic than simply looking at a threat meter and knowing at any given moment precisely to the point how much damage one could do before pulling aggro. They wanted players to get a "feel" for how much they needed to hold back to keep from pulling aggro, and to have the constant gameplay decision of determining how far they wanted to push the envelope between playing conservatively versus maximizing damage. The looseness of early raid encounters like Ony and those in MC reflects this.

As time went on, most of the threat mechanics were discovered, and threat meters began to be extremely accurate. Blizzard had to begin designing encounters based on the assumption that all players were using one. High end raids in BC and late vanilla reflect this, as having a meter is a necessity for many encounters.

As with other addons that became so popular that Blizzard began designing the game with the assumption that they were being used, they've now spoken of plans to develop something similar for the default UI. To me, this is an example of Blizzard keeping up with changes in the community, and not an issue of "They would have done this from the beginning but they are lazy. And like to keep players in the dark."

 

Dakous

You missed the quoted text. Players - in previous populations, approximately 10%, that is, an amount not wholly disproportionate from hardcore raiders - in direct contradiction to your supposition, do enjoy discovering underlying mechanics. It has been studied, quantified, identified, and explicitly designed to.

I even bolded and italicized those words so it would be hard to miss.

That is, the entire R&D budget that developed Naxx could have been cut to sufficent amounts to vaguify Blessing of Might and Windfury tooltips in circumstances where they are both active so that, say, the AP bonus from BoM is variable, and then every month those values (WF's BoM-less AP value, and BoM's AP values around WF) could be slightly adjusted and it would provide as many people as much entertainment (as inconceiveable as that may be to this crowd). If that sounds absurd, please remember... there is at least as large segment of the population that logs on to use WoW as essentially a glorified IRC client with /join Barrens in the start up, and surely you've seen/heard of them (and they are as equally inconceiveable, no?)

My underlying text was to agree with you on the level of "C'mon, let's [at least partially] unhide hidden cooldowns," in sharp contrast to your response implying it was to disagree with you.

Again, I may be insane in that I'm not citing personal interest here, but rather, research of the Daedelus Project (sp) and Richard Bartle, Ph.D, and, in fairness, his model has been very thoroughly critiqued/dismantled, but really, the replacements are essentially discrete distillates (it turns out some explorers never go for physics, they're exclusively geographers, e.g)

Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.

 

Grogzor

That article is from 11 years ago and probably doesn't really apply to World of Warcraft because this game has pulled in people who would never have played a MUD from back in the day. The average player who played UO is entirely different then the average player who plays WoW.

 

Malan

Look, let me spell this out for you in very simple terms because you don't seem to understand what I'm saying. I am not disagreeing with you. Stop thinking that I am. Exploring mechanics is GOOD. Not telling us the mechanic exists, or leaving false information in which misleads us about the mechanic, is BAD.


BAD = "This item has a chance to do X on hit"
GOOD = "This item has a chance to do X but cannot do X more than once every few seconds"

BAD = "This stat does ABC (but really it does DEF)"
GOOD = "This stat does DEF"

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

• Disquette

I can chime in on one issue raised, that of exploration and ego. I do actually like the personal reward of being "in the know", and near the forefront of a lot of the shaman dps stuff. It's egotistical, no doubt.

That having been said, the part I like about it is putting together all the pieces of the puzzle, not testing to see what the pieces actually are. I have spent, quite literally, over a week of my life hitting on servants of ____ in the blasted lands finding proc rates, weapon damage calculations, flurry mechanics (!@#$!@#$ @#$^!!!), and more. That's very unrewarding. It is necessary, however, to do those in order to do the fun stuff - writing simulations and building dps theories.

Perhaps blizzard is looking at things not from a theoretical stand point, but a practical one? If we know the mechanics, we can know "the answer" for many questions. It's why feint is in the game - we used to not know threat values. That led to encounters in raids and dungeons for a year and a half that were fun and engaging. As long as we can't find "the answer", blizzard can make encounters that don't rely on those answers being known.

As more answers are found, through testing, Blizzard has to script and generate encounters differently. They've gotten a pretty good feel for it with the Hateful strike and Aggro drops - those have extended the use of Threat even in a known-value situation. They'll probably have to become more creative in the future as more shaman know to use x weapons, more rogues know to use y damage cycles, etc. They may just be extending the life of the game, while knowingly vexing some of the theory crafters who want as much to understand the game as we do to excel in it.

 

Krollin

You are right about the percentage of players who are into analysing things like this being smaller than it used to be.
But the actual number of people who do this is vastly higher than it used to be simply because the availability and accessibility of these games is infinitely greater than it used to be back then.
I was a MUD creator way-back-when and we -never- revealed game mechanics simply because that would have removed the "learning" out of playing the game.
The better players worked out what worked best, that is why they were the better players.

It is equivalent to learning a musical instrument. You don't have to know the physics behind what you are doing at all, you can stil play the instrument. But finding out what is actually going on may help you become better at playing it.
Noone demands that the instrument makers supply you with a Physics 101 though do they?

The Target Dummy

The idea of having target dummies is beset with an unsolveable problem, you want to play a game of "what if" when comparing gear. Great if you already have that gear but bad if the gear you want to compare is not in your bags already. Are you going to buy stuff from the AH simply to test it knowing that it is vendor trash if it isn't an improvement?

As to the comment that "it would be simple to implement". Nothing is simple to implement in a game as complicated as WoW. Adding something new adds additional complexity and could add unwanted sideeffects (bugs) which could be the next big loophole for an exploit in the game. It is also not content, Blizzard are happy to provide content but this kind of thing?

Not only that but we already have mobs around which are perfect for the job, Servants in Blasted Lands and Dr.Boom in Netherstorm.

Current Information in game

Correct tooltips are a good thing, incorrect ones are bad. We all agree on that.

However a lot of us don't want everything revealed to us by the game regardless where the information comes from. Not from detailed tooltips (a performance hog btw), not from combat targets which inform us as to everything that occurs when we fight them (we have AddOns which report this information if we want it, we have mobs we can test against), not from anywhere other than what Blizzard supply now. If we want to know more we can go look for it. If we don't we won't.

What Malan and many of us are missing is this: it is pointless demanding that Blizzard give us the game mechanics on a plate, they have already stated that this will never happen. Not to mention that even if they did 90% of your player population wouldn't give a rats arse about it because they get their kicks out of trolling on the forums, with complete disclosure they would still pollute the bottom of the gene pool regardless.

 

Malan

I seem to recall they said that Druids would never get Innervate as a trainable ability. But that happened, didn't it? Same thing said about 2H weapons for shaman, but that appears to be reversed from information available at Blizzcon. Haven't we figured out yet that Blizzard does not deal in absolutes?

Oh and you just opened yourself up to a tongue-lashing with your comment about the Blasted Lands mobs being "perfect" for testing.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Cromfel

They do far from perfect job. They are just only thing closest to target dummy that people can use. They are there, people use them A LOT for this exact reason. So there is exactly the need for such dummys. if they werent there, people would find next closest thing they can imagine to test things.

There is demand for something, people fill that demand whit what ever they can use to arrange best environment. Those mobs work almost perfect to certain classes, and create problems for others. Lets say if there wasnt DrBoom, how could casters test thing with Blasted Lands mobs with them hitting you all the time for interupt? How monster hitting you effects warrior testings? DrBoom is perfect example of the situation where people will find next best thing available where to test when Blasted Lands mobs dont work that well for them.

So why not give us proper tools instead of these? There is obvious demand for them. Some people are at Blasted on daily basis testing things. Some spend hours and hours there. So how much of trouble it would be to arrange proper tools for this kind of ingame activity? Sure, everything new in game is possible loophole for exploiting 10000 gold for your self. But that really isnt proper argument against such harmles activity. And to be honest, I cant think of any real scenario where static dummys would create game breaking loopholes.

Is it matter of life and death? Hell no, there are a lot of other things to do also. But Im just saying that this game needs "DrBooms", and it could be done properly by just making ingame objects that are already there to be attackable. If they dont have time to go into detailed dummy levels (Green, Orange and Red) then just "enable" the existing ones for being attacked.

*Copy paste Blasted mob properties*
*Immobilize it*
*Disable attack*
*Assign location coordinates*

And we have perfectly fine working dummy that is there for the exact reason. Now just copypaste that code and place it few feets away from the previous dummy and make it boss level. Ok ok ok, I know it wouldnt be THAT easy, but not far from it either!

.:. Retribution Paladin Hideout .:. http://cromfel.battlefield.fi/

 

Krollin

Ok, I concede that they are not "perfect" for the job but we can still use them.
Dummies as suggested are not going to much better if at all though.
You can have someone tank them for you, once they go Immune they don't move either IIRC.
Where do such tools fit into the context of a role playing game?

"You see a Target Dummy that you can use to beat senseless in order to discover exactly how combat for your character works". Really appropriate to a fantasy setting.

There is demand for a lot of things that, like this idea, are not what I consider appropriate for a GAME where searching for and discovering things brings its own reward.
If Blizzard started introducing things like this then it would level the playing fields ok but at the cost of dumbing an already relatively simple game down to an unacceptably low level.

The things we need to work things out for ourselves are already out there. If they weren't then we couldn't possibly know the things we do know about the game.
It is upto us to work methods out and to analyse the results for ourselves though. Part of the adventure.

People should never make the mistake of confusing a change in the game with a change in a company philosophy.
Statements about disclosing game mechanics (for instance) are -not- made by developers.
Blizzard have categorically said that game mechanics are things that players themselves should go out and discover. That they support the gaming community in providing a place to discuss things work is laudable and more than sufficient.

Statements about things like whether or not Druids getting Innervate as a trainable skill are made by the devs. IIRC things like this are always covered with a caveat along the line of "not at this time" when referring to changes that could possibly be made.
I don't remember anyone saying officially that at no time ever would Druids get Innervate as a trainable skill, again as an example.

As the creators in the MUD I used to help with used to say in answer to questions like "how does X work?", "Explore and Discover[tm]". We should be prepared to do the same if it is important enough to us.

 

Cromfel

I only suggested it because I dont like directly telling how things work. We arent told, so we need to go to Blasted Lands and figure it out.

As I have said many times, the setting is there. Only that its not done properly. Its bubblegum + ducktape. All I am saying is that it could be done properly. No matter how hard you make up excuses to not make it properly, it is already there in some form. The Blastedlands mobs and DrBoom are there every day, serving us as dummys. There are target dummys in Theramore, what NPC hit. How is that putting them into wrong context? They are there, blasted lands mobs are there.

.:. Retribution Paladin Hideout .:. http://cromfel.battlefield.fi/

 

• Disquette

Do you know how hard it is to get someone to agree to sit with you for 4 hours tanking something when they don't care about what you're doing? I ended up spending 400g when I wanted an hour long test done with a full group of 5. I payed each person 100g for their time, because it's hard to get a group. That finally worked.

Servants are also problematic, assuming no quixotic tank, because of positioning. How does a rogue test backstab?

Servants are problematic because they have lvl 54 to lvl 57 amounts of parry/dodge/block. For the same reason, your crit rate is much higher against them.

Servants are problematic because after they unbanish, they hit back. You need some sort of outside healing.

 

Zifna

And hah, it was such a pain when I wanted to try to test if each bounce of Chain Lightning had an independent chance to trigher Lightning Overload. And honestly I still don't know that my data are conclusive in any way since I only abused charitable guildmates with Rank 1, and only for a half hour or so.

 

Diogo

No, no one demands that instrument makers supply you with the physics behind the functioning of the instrument. But your analogy is a bad. This is more like having hidden buttons included in your instrument from time to time, or having guitar makers randomly changing the position of the chords. The fact is, instrument makers, while not giving detail on the physics, go to extreme lengths to make sure musicians know everything about their equipment, from having electronic gadgets to help you fine tune them to detailed explanations of what each button on a synth does.

But that is beside the point. As Malan has pointed out, no one wants blizzard to spell things out to the degree where people are basically being told how to play their class. But it seems to me that there is clearly a need for blizzard to inform players better about:
- information/tooltips that are wrong (windfury, windfury totem, for example)
- information that was poorly disseminated on blizzards part (i.e., combat ratings, wf cooldown, wf totem hotfix, druid hotfix and a number of other info that appeared on "blue" posts that are now - or will become soon - hard to find)
- internal/hidden cooldowns and mechanics. There is no reason to keep part of the mechanics known and another part hidden. Besides the cooldowns, this also applies to druids, for example, since they can use some trinkets in some animal forms which varies greatly. I.e, we had a feral druid taking one of those spyglasses in SSC just to find out that it wont work in bear form...

 

Malan

Interesting anecdote came up yesterday that made me think of this discussion.

One of my guildmates was on his alt warrior and was tanking an instance, after awhile they realized the shaman in the group had been dropping Grace of Air. So they asked if he could start dropping Windfury for better threat generation. The shaman replied "No I can't, I already have it on my weapon."

Now my first reaction, and I'm sure most of yours, would be to call this guy an idiot. But I thought about it a bit more, and I realized that this is a decent scenario of what we've discussed. The shaman gets Windfury Weapon before he gets Windfury Totem while leveling. The Windfury Weapon imbue shows up on his list of buffs as a temporary weapon enchant. Windfury Totem however, only shows up on his buff list if the shaman does not have an imbue (or sharpening stone) already on his weapon.

To a player without much gaming experience it might appear that having Windfury Weapon on prevents Windfury Totem from working. And how would he know otherwise really? Most of the other shaman buff totems display their effect on the buff list, but in this case, imperfect information (Lack of a proper Totem UI and somewhat ambiguous tooltips) has led to a confusing situation.

... or the shaman really was stupid, its still a viable option.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06