dukes

Did you actually read the rest of the post or decide "TL;DR" and just read the last line? In no way did I say that everyone is lazy/stupid (in fact I never mentioned anyone being stupid in the whole post). I actually said that having a tutorial system would be a good thing.

This paragraph does not mean "don't add tutorials, they'll be useless"; the meaning was closer to "if you do add tutorials, there'll still be some people who won't do them". There's a scale from those people who will go out of their way to do as much as possible to deconstruct the game, down to those people who don't give a shit and will be lazy bums assuming they can get something for nothing. Tutorials will cater to people who are above the base level. There still needs to be some willingness to learn, and I would assume that getting to level 70 means you have some kind of willingness to learn, but it won't rule out everyone. This is the point of the last sentence you so ably quoted.

I'd also go as far to say that enrage timers, however much everyone thinks they're a "cop out" or whatever to give artificial difficulty to bosses, are a perfect demonstration of how small things can be added to teach about DPS, as long as they're kept within reason (see VR, Supremus). Integrating them into the game would be good, but adding them as a side-quest or whatever means people step round them and go about their business.

 

Nezralix

I assumed from your pessimistic tone that you were suggesting the whole idea was a wasted effort. In fact that's still my assumption, but let's pretend for a moment that you're optimistic about the existence of players midway along the spectrum of "can barely scrounge up the effort to log in" to "scours every single EJ forum post for new tidbits of information". In which case, adding quest experience or even some kind of tabard for completing basic tutorials would appropriately incentivize people to do them. And frankly, I think most people are be interested enough in not being useless in groups that they'd do them anyway, and even experienced players could benefit from target dummies.

 

Denogran

Question: How much threat is "significant threat?" Why would you sunder again past 5 except to refresh the stack? Surely the intuitive approach would suggest that sunder armor is mostly useful for the debuff, and less the threat it provides. If you have a choice between Revenge, Shield Slam and Sunder, which do you hit?

We're not talking about people not being able to tank because they can't figure out the spells. I know plenty of tanks that spam the buttons they have. In fact, before my warrior hit 70, I had a buddy whose main is a warrior. Now he started way late(post TBC), never raided, and since I didn't know the first thing about warrior tanking, he had to pick it all up on his own. This guy isn't a stupid guy. He enjoys math, is a computer programmer, and has gamed for far longer than I have. But the difference between his tanking, and that of someone who had been doing it in a raid situation was night and day.

Sure, it sounds intuitive to say throw those spells in because you know the theory behind what they do. Quoting the Protection Warrior thread: How on earth would you have any idea of this? Heroic Strike: "A strong attack that increases melee damage by xx and causes a high amount of threat." Revenge: "Instantly counterattack an enemy for xx damage and a high amount of threat."

How is this intuitive? And this is only one example. Look at Taunt, and how it acts on the threat table. How is that even close to transparent? How many times have you been tanking as a warrior, only to have an over-zealous warlock pull threat, you taunt it back while the warlock continues to unload, and at the end of taunt, the mob happily turns back to the warlock. Would you even guess that when you hit taunt, you magically gained the same level of threat but the warlock managed to get back to 130% of that value by the time the taunt is done?

This stuff isn't that simple, it's not that transparent, and for a majority of people, it's only after significant time in a progression raiding guild before you even get the grasp of how to play your character. Which is fine, but wouldn't it be better to throw a bone to the noobs of the game? I know my buddy would have been stoked if there was a target dummy he could go practice his threat on (similar to how useful Dr. Boom has been to clothies getting their casting rotations down).

 

Katria

Hmm, what if the side-quest gave a visible reward? Say there is a training room where you can take the DPS quest. You get a target dummy, which counts as a boss mob, and you beat on it for (however long) and you need be beat a certain DPS level to win. Also, include an NPC tank and if you steal aggro you fail. Completion of the quest gives you an award (viewable when someone inspects you) that you passed the quest and attained DPS rank 1 (these tests would have dps levels specific to your class, and disables buffs you didn't cast yourself). Rank 1 would be DPS for a character in dungeon blues. If you fail, you get class-specific tips on improving DPS. Completing it unlocks a new quest, DPS rank 2 (for T4 gear). And so on. This way, people can inspect you and see what DPS rank you can hit...could be used as a screening mechanism for guilds and pugs, and gives people an incentive to do the quest.

Similar themed quests could be offered to healers and tanks, and would need to be class-specific (and even spec-specific). Healers and tanks will need NPCs Other elements could be added to higher rank tests (DPS has to avoid cleaves, tank has to take multiple mobs and taunt off NPCs stealing aggro, healer has to heal multiple targets). By adding an award that is viewable, people have an incentive to do the quest, and other players have a way to rate someones (very) general capability before taking them along in a pug or into a guild. And bleeding-edge players such as yourselves can work on getting alts to pass rank 4 of these quests in greens and a blue or two.

 

Tucker

Personally I like these ideas because they are doable in a solo situation. I am on a low-pop server and many days/times it is difficult to get a group together to do anything, much less "practice" game mechanics. I also feel that "spectator mode" usable in raids that I mentioned earlier in this thread would be a HUGE help to those of us "average" players who would like to improve our skills... even if we are hopeless morons as some might think.

 

dukes

WoW is a very intuitive game at the very base level. You do damage to things, they lose health and die. You cast a healing spell on someone, their health goes up. You cast resurrection and it resurrects things. This is intuitive in its base meaning.

The majority of raid things are logical in my opinion.

A cooldown ability is generally more powerful than a non-cooldown ability, combined with things that are talents generally being more powerful than things that are not, hence the "Shield slam > Revenge > Heroic Strike" lineup being logical. Sure, shield bash has a longer cooldown so it should be "logical" to do more threat, but it doesn't specifically say anything about more threat in it's description, therefore it's logical it's not a "threat" skill.

Taunt says "Taunts the target to attack you, but has no effect if the target is already attacking you." This says nothing about what it will do after you taunt it. It is logical in it's direct action.

If a mob is in your face, you should be more of a threat to it, hence the 130% ranged threat threshold is logical (I know you didn't say this, but it followed from your comment).

I'm not sure how you can convert these things into directly intuitive things. You can put an interface on the front and call it a tutorial all you want, but that means it's a training program for telling people what things are, which is neither logical nor intuitive. The major breakdowns occur when less logical things happen, such as Windfury being better with slower offhand weapons, Pyroblast being outperformed by Fireball even though it's a talent spell, etc.

And I've still never said tutorials would be a bad thing. I may come across as a pessimist (tired, thinking I shouldn't have stepped into this thread in the first place, I said that I agreed with Xi earlier, etc) but I'm really not. I'm being realistic as to the number of people that I think (i.e. my opinion) would actually use/learn from a tutorial program being implemented. A simple addition of Threat/Damage meters may do a lot more than a tutorial program from a standpoint of people seeing how well they perform at things and wanting to do better.

There's also a set of people I didn't mention who just play the game because it looks cool. They don't care whether one spell is better than another if it looks like crap to them. Why chaincast some fireball when they can hurl huge blobs of rock (pyroblast) at things.

Ninjaedit: I like the ideas on "achievements" for these things - having seen what lengths people go to to get things for XBox Live/etc it would be quite an incentive to some people, especially if displayed fairly publicly (even awarding visible things like pieces of armour as showcase sets or whatever would be good).

 

PSGarak

Threat conditions make sense after the fact, and all the specific mechanics have an intuitive explanation, but they're not necessarily things that you would have guessed a priori. To take your example, yes there is an explanation why from range it takes 130% instead of 110% so it makes sense when you already know it, but there's really no reason to expect the game to be like that if you didn't already know. There's really no reason to expect a threshold at all--realizing you needed to exceed the tank's threat by a nontrivial margin to pull agro was an important, exciting, and largely unexpected finding when it was discovered. And there's absolutely no way to guess what's going on 'under the hood' with taunt without knowing about that. Here's another problem that requires explicit testing: tank weapon speed. If you thought 'high threat' is multiplicative rather than additive (and it is for some spells, but not warrior ones), you would think that slow weapons are better for heroic strike, and could end up gearing in way that does the exact opposite of what you intended.

However, very few of those concepts translate to tanking, or even to healing. Min-maxing the three different cardinal game styles are very differently behaved beasts. DPS is nice and well-behaved (unless you're an enh shaman) and it's all about mathematical modelling. Most people who don't get it, are generally working from qualitative impressions rather than quantitative analysis. The example someone brought up of thinking that 15%agi and 10%AP would probably be good is perfectly valid--it stands to reason, and I honestly don't blame people for not breaking out a spreadsheet to confirm or deny that general impression. Even the general idea that as a rogue your white damage is more important isn't obvious, because general impressions are more tuned towards what you expect than what happens and you would expect your yellow damage to be more important.

People aren't good at tanking or healing for entirely different reasons than not being good at DPSing. Tanking is a matter of transparency--blizzard has intentionally hidden the threat mechanics, and yet made min-maxing them so important to the well-being of the group. Even if you were mathematically inclined you can't figure out agro mechanics without help. I could have built a DPS spreadsheet for a warlock from scratch myself, and I'm sure many people have with varying degrees of success without vising EJ or similar, but due to the availability of information I doubt any single player has replicated the infoz we have lying around here. Research is actually important, rather than being one valid possibility out of two (research or do it yourself).

Meanwhile healing is a reactive and organic problem. It's further compounded by how different healing in a raid is different from healing in a 5-man, especially one that you're undergeared for where your mana supply and throughput are both challenged. The preference for regen over int has to be beaten into every single new healer I come across, simply because it's not apparent how much mana it gives you, and therefore how much more mana it gives you. And how you heal in the presence of other healers of other classes changes in ways that are completely unrelated to your class, eg: healing touch is actually a good spell in its own right, it's not used because of how druids fit with respect to other healing classes. Which means that a player's experience, and (completely reasonable) gear talent and playstyle choices, becomes wrong for no foreseeable reason.

I'm still leanding towards the idea that this is an MMO, teaching should be a social/community thing rather than a game thing, but currently the game supports neither. The amount of testing required to uncover some mechanics are, frankly, unreasonable (we still don't know how target level affects spell crit rate). In theory, the teaching of raid-specific skills should occur within a raid guild rather than from the game itself, and certain learning-friendly encounters could help facilitate this. However, it seems the easier solution is to find, rather than create, players with the necessary skills, which leads to social stratification (cf hardcore vs casual debate).

I think incentivizing personal improvement is the way to go. I also think that binary win-or-don't-win situations don't do a very good job of this, because players stop looking for ways to improve after they win, and often win via gear or luck rather than actual ability. Something that gave further rewards for each tier of performance improvement (up the gold for each minute under the enrage timer?) would give a constant, rather than one-off, pressure to personal excellence, something that I think is currently missing in raiding in general... with the notable exception of the ZA time challenges. While I'd like to see, eg, more loot for each extra five minutes you beat the last timer by, it creates a beveled tier of progression so that people continually have goals in reach to work for.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....88847noszh.png

 

◊ Anias

If you have not played through portal, you should.

Then watch some of the developer commentary on player learning.

The concept of player training applies to all games, regardless of their genre. Social games get to get away with leaning on institutional knowledge more, but they shouldn't rely upon it exclusively.

 

bortson

While many things are pretty intuitive in the game, there are a number of aspects, especially in raiding, that few people would ever figure out on their own.

The ones that spring to mind most readily to are :

-- the concept of downranking spells. Most people either need to be told this or find it on the internet. Casting your most powerful heal is normally the intuitive option.

-- the importance of hit rating and the related issue of hit caps. Without internet research, a mentor, or good tracking addons, it would be perfectly reasonable for a player to think that stacking spell penetration would solve their raiding problems (especially since it says "resist" on your combat log. How do I prevent a mob from resisting? Why, by lowering his resistances, of course!) and that you can either achieve 100% hit or at least asymptotically approach it (ie, get 99.99999999999999%).

 

◊ Wraithlin

If you want to raid you should be willing to spend an hour looking up basic class mechanics.
If you dont want to raid, why are we wasting precious developer hours writing a tutorial for you ?

The problem I hear from people complaining is not that they cant find out how to play their class more effectively, but they dont want to make that effort. That, somehow, the game should be redesigned so they can aquire this knowlege through osmosis and thus be able to walk into a raid and perform well without having to put any effort into learning their class.

Hey that was acceptable when MC was new and scary, but it isnt acceptable any longer. We dont need to waste developer hours fixing a problem the community has already solved just because some people are too lazy to google "hunter mechanics".

[e]
"hunter mechanics" in google, 7th hit: http://elitistjerks.com/f40/t9274-hu...s_--_v2_0_tbc/

[ee]
The other assumption everyone is overlooking is that Blizzard actually understand their own class designs well enough to built reasonable tutorials for them. The simple fact is that all available information indicates that blizzard have little to no idea on how to maximize each class until the player community tells them. Itemization is the clearest indicator of this issue.; but other problems like the threat scaling of ferals and warriors in 2.0, which were specifically explained to them in beta but still went live. Other examples are the various terrible talents that have no reason to exist.

Brutallus : http://files.filefront.com/Brutallus.../fileinfo.html
Eredar Twins : http://files.filefront.com/Twinswmv/.../fileinfo.html

 

Nezralix

Virtually anyone can attest to the fact that a lot of players get to 70 without a solid understanding of how to not be a pain in the ass in a group setting. Screaming to all the world "PEOPLE ARE LAZY AND STUPID!!!" won't help to remedy that, even if it does make you feel better. So if you want to be even marginally productive, try to think of some ways that Blizzard could assist the WoW community in this problem without spending a lot of developer time on it.

 

◊ Wraithlin

No offence but if my non-game playing 16 year old sister, who could barely move without looking at the keyboard to see where WASD were 6 months ago, can level to 70, respec prot and tank every instance on both normal and a few weeks later on heroic, and you are still here saying the game is too hard then you have two options,
1) People really are retarded and no amount of help will really help because they will be too retarded to follow the training anyway.
2) People are being fucking lazy.

Take your pick, but when a 16yo non-gamer girl can learn to tank (the most mysterious of all the roles) with no prompting from me other than a little help on gems and enchants, then problem is you not the game.

Brutallus : http://files.filefront.com/Brutallus.../fileinfo.html
Eredar Twins : http://files.filefront.com/Twinswmv/.../fileinfo.html

 

Nezralix

Gee, you're right, if a girl can play WoW then anyone who thinks the game doesn't teach you how to play in groups must just be a fucking idiot.

 

◊ Shalas

There is a very large difference between playing a character perfectly and not playing a character incredibly stupidly. It's unreasonable to expect someone to perfectly gem thier gear, use a perfect threat rotation, or play a hunter in raids at all without some information beyond what WoW hands to you. However, it isn't unreasonable to expect people to do some very basic math with the information that WoW gives to you. A ten year old with a calculator could show that hemo daggers is shit in about five minutes, yet I see hemo dagger rogues depressingly often. Figuring out whether or not pyroblast is higher dps than fireball should take under 30 seconds. You don't need a spreadsheet to tell you that getting a scorch stack up on mobs that are going to live a decent amount of time is worth it. You don't need to read a detailed guide to threat to realize that Taunt doesn't do anything if the mob is already attacking you, considering it says that on the tooltip, but there's still warriors who spam taunt on cooldown for some reason.

You could prioritize HS over Revenge and still put out enough threat to tank anything in the game. You're massively overstating how much you need to know about the game mechanics to play the game. BWL was full of threat sensitive fights, and yet somehow it was cleared long before we had any real understanding of how threat worked. We didn't know anything about how taunt worked until about two years after the game came out. Somehow, people managed to use taunt effectively anyway. You don't need to know about the 130% rule to know that if the warrior had to taunt a mob off you, maybe you should go lighter on it.

There's plenty of game mechanics that aren't very transparent, but a huge number of players have blatantly never thought about the ones that are transparent. If someone cares about finding out how things work, it's incredibly easy to find information on nearly anything, and if they don't care it doesn't matter how hard you smack them over the head with it.

 

Whitemane

Revenge costs very little rage and is an announced high threat skill in the tooltip, plus it's instant. Heroic strike is high threat as well, but any warrior will know that it works on next attack and also makes that next attack give no rage at all. I've only levelled a warrior to level 34 and I knew that. Not from reading theorycrafting threads or whatever, but simply by experiencing the warrior class.

I played a rogue once, and I mean once in, in BWL. I placed second on the damage meters at Nefarian, not because these people were horrible players or anything, but just because I had a basic understanding of what was good as a rogue. Basically all I knew was "Slice and dice = Good, keep it going". I can't remember where I got this from, could have been as simple as been told by a friend. Yes, if you want to be the best there is in every possible way things can be quite complex. A little logic can get you a long way.

All I'm saying is: If you want to perform decently in this game, it doesn't really take tutorials, theorycrafting and what not. All it takes is some thinking on your part. I'm guessing that's what that 16 year old girl did.

So are we talking about becoming the best raider in the world or good enough to be fairly succesful in entry level raiding? I'm going for the latter.

Edit: Very well said Shalas.

 

Derketo

Am I missing something on test? This couldn't be further from the truth in my experience.

I'll be alright when we get to pass out time.

 

malthrin

Not to pick on you specifically, but this is exactly the kind of choice XI was talking about earlier. You may think it's very minor and completely acceptable to sacrifice a small amount of effectiveness on personal preference or to accommodate other game modes (PvP and 5-mans) - and you may be right - but when everyone in your raid feels this way, the cumulative impact is large. If your guild has just finished Kara and entered ZA, you probably still have trouble with Prince from time to time. How many wipes due to difficult infernal placement or a bad phase 2 flurry could you have avoided if your raid DPS was 20-30% higher, resulting in faster fights with less chance of Something Bad happening?

 

Thorgrim

I really think that what will help a lot in the expansion is if they divorce the different raid 'progressions' from each other entirely.

I will say right know, Karazhan is the best thing that the game has ever done for guilds that are at our level of participation/time commitment. We can clear the place in 2 nights, everyone gets loots and badges and has fun and we're happy. It would be cool if we could progress on to ZA but frankly we find that a little too big of a jump up in difficulty, and the fact that the bosses only drop one piece of loot for folks like us who aren't really going to be getting the timer loot makes it a bit of a rough sell to people right now - and there *has* been a little bit of drama in the guild we are allied with, with regard to people having different expectations about progression and wanting to move on to content that there just isn't a lot of interest in. Those people have moved on and everyone on both sides of the split is happier for it, but it got me thinking that part of what causes issues like that is the fact that the progression with 10 and 25 person content is all jumbled up together.

What would be fantastic, is if in the expansion, us smaller guilds have a clear, balanced progression through 10 person content that doesn't impact the 25 man raids at all. Don't force the big guys through our content, and suddenly you have the freedom to balance everything apples to apples, and you don't have to worry about whether or not 10 person content is training you properly for 25, since the 25-ers will have their own intro raid to hone *their* skills. It means that gear progression can be more sensible too - it is pretty frustrating that the T4 sets, for example, which would seem natural for progression going from Kara->ZA require us to jump up to 25 person content in order to have any more than 2 parts. We have no interest in Gruul's Lair or Magtheridon for the most part, we just want to keep on trucking along with the group size that we're most comfortable with.

Judging from the popularity of Kara compared to the larger raids, I would say there's certainly a player market for this sort of split progression, too. Bonus points if they can sensibly integrate crafting into both progressions without requiring hopping back and forth for different special materials. There's no reason to require nethers from heroics and special drops from 25s; if the gear is targeted for use in 25s, keep it contained there, and just have slightly less uber stuff that people can work on for the smaller group progressions.

 

Galred

I don't see why there would be a problem with some of the craftable gear from 25-man content being attainable (but difficult) via smaller content.

For example, Blizz could allow 10 Primal Nethers plus 100 BoJ to be traded for one Shattrath Nether Vortex (rep requirement: Exalted with Lower City). Painfully expensive, sure - but for players who are willing to pony up, now they can get some great items. And if the better items help encourage more players to raid, all the better.