◊ Wraithlin

So when the fat kid turns up to your college team team and says: "Hey I want to be on the varsity team, I pay the same school fees as everyone else why ahouldnt I be allowed ?" What are you gonna do ?

Will you tell the rest of your team "Hey he isnt lazy, he just has a hard time running around, and yeah he may not play too well, but man, has anyone ever tried teaching him? Sure he never trains, and he only started playing a month ago, and I know he never even watches games, but you know thats hard work and he has a short attention span and is allergic to putting any effort in. Despite all that I really think we should appeal to the sports governing body because, damnnit, the rules need to change so that this guy can get on our varisty team and have that experience."

This isnt basic education, people do not have any right to be good or to get rewards from WoW just because they bought the game and logged on; they have to work at improving and earning those rewards, even leveling takes some effort from the player. Further, developement resources are finite, what you spend building quests for speical people, you take from something worthwhile.

The correct analogy for WoW is not school, it is sport. Its an optional, team activity where you get out what you put in. Sure you might be naturally talented, or perhaps youwill never get past an amateur level because you dont have the time to train 5 times a week, but the sport owes you nothing and the rules wont change so you can play in the professional leagues because you think that paying your league membership each year gives you the right to have that experience.

 

◊ Anias

Wraith - you're (at a minimum) ignoring why I want player training to be examined:

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 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.

Personally, I don't care if random mouthbreather z can raid - I do care that the total raiding population increases, and I can acknowledge that to increase the population requires more mouthbreathers learning to play.

In the long run - if the entire game can raid, then there's more dev time spent on raiding, which as a raider you should enjoy the benefits of. Same deal on the pvp side. As we've gone over - raiding in wow isn't particularly taxing in terms of actions per second. So raiding should be fairly accessible to the general wow populace. What likely holds it back is that the entrance requirements are non-trivial (find matching schedules) and the mechanics of organizing/functioning in a raid are noticably different from the single player training.

Math is very easy, explaining math is quite difficult.

 

Pyros

The issue I have with your argument is this pretty much. You don't need to know these to be able to raid early content, and most likely if you can't be bothered to read the official forum sticky about your class, you're not gonna have time to devote to raiding more than early stuff(so karazhan in our case, or MC back in the days), or you're not going to want spending that time raiding. To me it is as simple as this.

Hunter shot rotations are not needed. Dot rotations are not needed(do dot rotations even exist, last time I played a lock I just casted new spells when last one wore off, that's just common sense, not a rotation). Threat rotations are not needed, you press the key when they light up and automatically get into a rotation that's close to the perfect one, barring heroic strikes on every hit and shield block all the time. You don't have to know how to heal and conserve your mana, spamming heals works just fine if you drink potions or if you're not a shaman.

All these technics become useful as you raid harder content, but it doesn't mean they're necessary to start raiding, or do 5mans or heroics. For the casuals, all these mechanics are not needed. Would they improve their play? Probably. Are they well hidden that only a handful of hardcore raiders know them? They're all over the official boards, the wow wiki and you can even google them.

If you really think a tutorial would help people grasp concepts without actually stating those concepts with words, in my opinion, you're wrong. And if you're going to word the concepts, you might as well skip the tutorial part and just have some kind of compendium thingie, like the warhammer book of whatever, that has a special part entitled Raiding Tips, and that gives class tips about how to max your efficiency.

Again I really doubt that people will do a tutorial just because it's there. You compared it to quests, but people don't do quests because they want to discover their character. They do quests because it's the easiest and fastest way to level in wow, it gives xp, money and items. There's a solid reward. You really think the same people who can't even read their quest log and find out where to go would bother doing tutorials that have no rewards but teaching them how to play their character?

 

Kyne

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'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".

 

◊ Wraithlin

If you join a raid guild you are immediately surrounded by people who can give you that information, or at the very least, should know how to find it. If a player joins a guild, gets linked a guide to "Play class X better" and decides that it is too muchw ork, then they were never going to be useful as raiders anyway.

The simplest and most obvious example.
To even play the game you have to goto the official webside and make an account, and you most likely return there semi-regularly to keep your subscription going. And yet taking another 5 minutes to click on your class forum and read the first post of each sticky (which will link you to better resources) is too difficult and uninstinctive ?

The game puts the forums and resources in your face, you dont even have to google them, and yet you claim these people are suddenly unable to navigate "teh intrawebs".

We dont need to teach everyone how to do a shot rotation, we probably dont even need to teach every hunter in karazan to do a shot rotation, hell, blizzard likely dont even know about shot rotations (example: the changes to KT's range weapon based on theorycrafting posted on these very forums).

All the information required to get to 70 and run some instances is provided, the rest comes from being prepared to listen to other players.

[e]
Anias:
Im not so much in disagreement that more raiders is a good thing, I just disagree that everyone needs to be given the same skillset as a T6 raider by the time they hit 70. People hitting 70 need a skillset large enough to run 5mans, and from there 5mans should teach them the skillsets to get them through heroics, 10mans and 25mans.

 

Denogran

This is bullshit. Nobody in this thread is suggesting that either A) people deserve to be in the top-end raiding guilds, or B) people deserve the best items in the game simply because they're paying the same amount. Trying to frame the argument in that manner is deceptive and annoying.

You want the correct analogy? Say the super-talented foreign kid shows up to your baseball team. The kid is ripped, can run fast as hell, but has basically never seen baseball before. Has no idea of the rules, the concepts or anything. Strikes and balls? Outs and stolen bases? He's clueless. In this analogy, you're basically advocating the "Fuck him" approach. You're saying that he knows the basics, should be able to figure out the advanced by osmosis, and it's only his own fault if he doesn't become a star, given that he has all the physical tools. People advocating for tutorials are saying, give the kid a frickin' coach or two already, and develop those natural talents. When to hit and run, where to try to hit the ball in different strike counts, different outs, and with different numbers of people on base.

You argue that this is a waste of developer time, but I disagree there as well. The raiding scene especially needs an influx of new people in order to continue to propagate. How many raiders do you know that have just burnt out? Only to be replaced by healers, tanks, dps that you have to re-train. Why not provide some interesting, useful and rewarding training quests? Hell, turn it into a mini-game. Something to compete against your fellow guildies for high scores.

There's actually some precedence for this in the game already. The First Aid quest where you have to heal all the wounded soldiers in Theramore Keep is actually a pretty good trainer. Situational awareness, hotkey or action-bar your bandages. Learn how to throw bandages on people that are close to you with low health. I didn't beat this quest the first time. I had no idea what was coming, I wasn't prepared for the awareness, or quickness that I needed, and it just didn't happen. More quests along this line, only aimed at specific classes and specs.

I guess what I really don't understand is the fairly vehement opposition to the very idea of tutorials? Does it threaten your elitism? "I had to do it the hard way, so everyone else should too?" I mean lets face it, the developers are going to do with their time what they see fit. Wouldn't a thread like this be better propagated with some kickass ideas for new quests? Or even 5/10 man trash and bosses that teach it?

Edit: I don't think that telling people "Go find it on the web" is as intuitive as you're making it out to be. Every game I've played until WoW, and indeed the early part of WoW, having to look shit up on the internetz was basically akin to cheating. I couldn't figure it out myself given the constructs of the game? Someone else managed to and posted the information me. So either the game developer fucked up by making the game too hard, or I was a stupid/lazy bastard who couldn't figure it out given the information presented to me in the game. Why is WoW magically different. What inherently in the game makes it such that looking up stuff on the web is not only accepted, but encouraged? How is this a failure of the players instead of a failure of design?

 

◊ Wraithlin

No Im advocating he needs to go join a starter team, come to a few training sessions. He needs to go read up on the rules, watch some major league games. Maybe he needs to sit down with the the coach and go over specific steps to make him a better player. He needs to practise and put in time and effort to improve. What doesnt need to happen is the league rules change so he can get on the team.

Your anaolgy is wrong here: Blizzard are the MLB, your guild is the team, your guild officers are the coaches, team staff, and captain, you are the player.

Blizzard are not the coaching staff.

 

Uglesh

Ok... using your analogy, when a kid pays to play on a local baseball team does he not recieve the same level of service?? Of course he does... whether that kid can throw a ball from 3rd to 1st base doesn't matter. He paid the fee and good or bad he PLAYS. Not only does he play, but he likely recieves even more attention from coaches and trainers because of his lack of skill. No one in their right mind would advocate leaving the new kid to learn by osmosis.
If you want to compare WoW to somehow playing a completely voluntary sport (eg: varsity athletics) you are missing the fact that people PAY to play.




Ok... what about Defence Cap so that you can't be crit?? Is that terribly obvious?? Something THIS FUNDAMENTAL to tanking isn't every mentioned anywhere. How about Crushing blow mechanics?? These 2 points alone would stop a new guild from moving past Attumen. Ok... so that's tanks... but what about Healers?? How about a lack of explaination of what Blizzard terms as "Out of casting" (5 sec rule) in terms of mana regen? DPS... what built in mechanic tells you how close you are to pulling threat?? Why can you do more damage as a ranged class before pulling aggro then a melee DPS can?? These days a MOD like KTM or Omen is a MUST, yet nothing like this was touched.

If you pay for a product there is an expectation that it's going to provide you with instructions. My vacuum instructions provide me with how to operate it on various surfaces and conditions. While I don't need to know the principal of suction and how to tear apart the motor, I think i would have been ticked if it said "Good for all surfaces" but didn't tell me how to turn off the brush or adjust the height. This is no different.... people deserve to have the basics of how to perform in all situations. Why the responsibility falls on the customer to research this is a terrible oversight.

 

◊ Wraithlin

You dont need to hit the defence cap to tank normals, and not even heroics though it helps.
Again, there is what you need to know for raiding and what you need to know for playing; not every player needs a a T6 raiders skillset.

 

Denogran

Why? I don't get this at all? Why make this the accepted norm? Why even suggest this is right? I have never, ever, ever played another computer game in my life where I got in, and the game was like "Have fun sucka!" and left me to be. Blizzard should be the coaching staff, and to suggest otherwise is just letting them off the hook.

Also, you keep suggesting changing the rules. I don't even get what you mean by that. No one has said anything about making the game easier, nerfs, or anything of the like. We're suggesting adding in a training staff, so that people can more effectively play the game. Within the same rules. Also, how can he "watch some major league games?" There's absolutely no way for this to happen right now. That was one of the interesting suggestions made earlier in this post, which you keep claiming are a waste of developers time.

I'm going to quote myself from my last post, because this part still has me really confused:

 

malthrin

Nobody's talking about changing the rules. The point of tutorials is to take the teaching out of the hands of officers in Kara guilds, who are probably poorly informed themselves. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's not that many ways to hold a bat. The form of a good swing is something every coach from little league to the pros can show you. By contrast, how many enhancement shaman in Kara guilds can explain why slow/slow and a Windfury cooldown timer mod are important? Some, sure, but not all.

If the game itself teaches the player, it removes the potentially frustrating experience of searching through mounds of stupidity and supposition for actual advice on how to improve and makes the game experience better as a whole.

Travian - Resto Druid
Malthrin - Priest

 

◊ Wraithlin

Any FPS.
FPS's dont teach you how to shoot, or strafe, or jumpstrafe to give you better chances to not be hit. They dont teach you which weapon to use when, or how to bounce grendades. All you get are key bindings and a generic line like "The killergun300 does lots of damage but has a slow rate of recharge".

Any RTS.
Ive never seen an RTS which taught you when to build which unit, what all the hard/soft counters were, what the best tech strategy or build orders were. They taught you how to play the game, but how to play the game well was left in your hands.

I could go on.
There are few games that teach you much beyond keybindings and "How to play", and none which teach you every last little trick about "How to play well".

Wow already teaches how to play, what you are asking is that it teaches you how to play well. And in doing that you take away alot of the learning experience that is actually rewarding in itself.

All you are doing is showing that WoW is probably the first game you ever played semi-seriously.

 

◊ Anias

Having the only way available to develope the t6 raider skillset dependant on a 3rd party non-blizzard provided source seems terribly bad for the future of t6 raider populations.

There is a reason that the first level of super mario brothers doesn't just run you directly into bowser. Instead you fight the lowly goomba. It's to teach you the skills you will use to overcome later challenges. This is really core design philosophy for games.

The mechanics for high level raiding are often largely obscured to the extent that there isn't even a good reference pointing you to someone who knows better. You can't even pull out "this hunter is doing more damage than me" from the game without a 3rd party addon. Even the mechanics for basic raiding, stuff like you really want a composition that fits your groups into roles, isn't too obvious. As an example - what if we gained a size or saturation visual buff based on which player in the group had dealt the most damage, mitigated the most damage/andor generated the most threat, and healed the most damage? That would help the new people some.

There's a real benefit to adding items like this to the game world for both the developers and the players. The players get a wider community of competent participants (in turn earning more demographic share for their preferred playstyle) and the developers get longer subscriptions because there is "more to do". It's much cheaper to teach 10000 willing but clueless people to raid than it is to develope the next raid zone for the 1000 people already raiding, and in the long run it's better for both groups.

Cynical Aside: Unless you really want wow to go more casual and more arena focused, you should probably consider the merits of growing the "raider" population relative to the "non-raider" population. Even if the majority of "raiders" are in karazhan 2.0 as a result of the changes, having them there instead of Arena 2.0 means that in turn more resources will be devoted to BT/Sunwell 2.0

Pretty much every "amazing" game I can think of has excellent player training. Your example of "A room of target dummies" is actually "bad player training". I'd offer as an example of good player training the initial start room in portal, which gives you insight into how the portal mechanic works. I'd offer the first goomba in mario brothers as insight into "you can jump on me, but you can't run into me". Games have a lot of these moments where you teach the rules through gameplay. I want some of that type of "good" player training added to try and give players the skillset required for t6. As an amusing corrolary, this would automaticly require harder gameplay in some places.

It's just as important, if you enjoy playing the game in way x, to make sure that there are new people entering who enjoy that playstyle, as it is to make sure that there is new content entering that matches that playstyle. (Perhaps moreso, given that content tends to be developed in response to demand, whereas demand tends to be a result of people enjoying something.)

Math is very easy, explaining math is quite difficult.

 

Denogran

Again, that's not true at all. Every FPS I've ever had has a beginning level where they teach you explicitly how to jump, shoot and strafe. And many have even suggested things along the line of "combining different tactics will help you out." Any FPS and RTS that I've ever played has a single-player mode where the levels get significantly more difficult and teach you to adapt. WoW doesn't. (By the way, assumptions about my game-playing commitment are dangerous on your part. I'd suggest you refrain from doing so in the future. You don't have a clue to my experience, knowledge or the like ). And I'll ask, how many times did you have to go to the internet in order to discuss game techniques for a FPS? Why is this an accepted requirement for WoW, but not for other games.

WoW's beginning quests are fantastic. They teach you the layout of the game in a pretty decent way. They teach you how to solo, and give you a basic foundation to build upon. The problem is that they do Nothing to teach you how to play nice with others.

In addition, the game changes drastically at level 70. The raiding scene is basically a completely different game. What RTS game have you ever played where that happens? This is not a fault of the player base, this is a design flaw by Blizzard. To be honest, I doubt they thought their end-game would turn out to be nearly as compelling as it has been, and they've been trying to catch up to that ever since.

I think you're missing the difference between tutorials and just plain divulging of information as well. Read the thread again. Read what I've, and others, have been advocating. It's not, "Go to this NPC, he'll tell you the optimal hunter shot rotation, you implement it." Instead, it's "Go to this NPC, he'll give you a quest to maximize your single target dps while not pulling threat. If you succeed, here's a new kick-ass quiver." Similar to the RTS level where they start you out with a fixed number of units and you have have to succeed just using them. It's not giving you explicit strats, but it is forcing you to try to create them.

And for the second time, you've avoided answering my question. Why does this offend you? What problem do you have with having a tutorial in-game?

 

Uglesh

Are you serious??? Pretty much EVERY FPS game has some sort of Solo mode that "teaches" players as you progress through the missions. I have yet to see an FPS game where mission 1 was as difficult as mission 25. Typically these games start you off with a restricted pool of weapons that you slowly learn to use situationally. Not to mention that FPS is about as far from MMO as possible. FPS games are typically VERY quick to pick up and generally everyone has the same start point... after that it's a matter of skill. That's why FPS are great for competitive gaming and MMO's are terrible.

RTS games are much the same... 20-30 solo missions where you usually start off with minimal access to advanced technology. The solo missions ARE THE TUTORIAL! Even moreso, this completely destroys so many complaints that everyone here has had about how you can't make the game "teach" people. The fact you can build it directly into the game has been done over and over again.

We aren't looking to teach people max dps cycles or anything beyond the basics needed to raid. This is what people keep glossing over. There is a HUGE difference from 5 man's to 10 or 25's... while you can limp through a 5 man, it's just not possible to learn so many aspects of this game without information from outside the game.

 

Addled

I'm hard-pressed to see how this really matters. This thread has already commented on what you're bringing up, look at page 10 of this thread for Shalas' comment. Warrior threat rotation? As long as you hit all the moves that say "produces high threat", i.e. Sunder, Revenge, HS, Devastate, etc, and renew your Shield Block every cd, your threat will be more than fine. Sure it won't be optimal tps, but it'll be more than enough to clear at least T5 instances.

Warlock dot rotations? Do warlocks have dot rotations other than "Keep all DoTs up at all times and spam SB?". And even if there is one, would that rotation have significantly higher DPS (5-10%) than a warlock that just kept renewing dots and SBing? It's pretty darn intuitive that SB > Drain Life, Immolate, etc.

Hunter shot rotations and healer mana conservation, I'll concede you that much, but I would point out that there are ways to ameliorate mana conservation issues, i.e. slamming down mana pots and having an Alchemist's Stone.


You've never looked something up on Google for a school/college/whatever project? I don't know how old you are, so I won't make any assumptions, but I don't see how the average Joe doesn't know about Google. Everybody searches the web at some point, either for school/work/fun/hobbies/etc, and I don't see how you can't apply that to WoW as well. Barring that, once you're in a raid guild, you should have people telling you these things. By now most, if not all semi-casual raiders should read the WoW forums, EJ, worldofraids, etc. Ignorance is not an acceptable defense in law and it shouldn't be in WoW. Saying "But I'm too stupid to look up information and get better" should have a consequence, and that consequence is failing versus Attumen.

 

dukes

YouTube - Half-Life in Half an Hour

Show me where valve tell you how to do that in Half Life and I'll accept your point.

The leveling process, the attunement process and everything around it such as 5 mans, heroic 5 mans, the pvp system and everything else in the game teaches you how to play. Sure, it doesn't teach you how to play it perfectly, but if you have any drive to do things better, you will improve.

The problem I have with the game as it is (as Anias says) the mechanics are relatively vague once you get past a certain point. It requires 3rd party addons, websites to share knowledge as the user base is too big and the signal:noise ratio is too crap on the official forums. Some kind of better/simpler mechanics for things would be much more useful. Something like this Eve online page the official developers made to explain some mechanics in more detail (see the tracking and missiles guides for good examples).
Even as little as an addition to this page with more in depth description of some of the mechanics at work would be good.

 

malthrin

This is a symptom of viewing the culture from the inside. Of course the resources seem obvious to you and I - we've already found them. For someone not a part of gaming and internet culture, one of the millions for whom WoW is their first game, how are they supposed to know that the information is out there at all? Speaking as a 23 year old, I've grown up with the idea that whatever I want to do, someone else has already figured out the best way to do it and posted it online - I just need to find it. The majority of the people on the Internet, however, can't (yet) craft their searches and quickly distinguish between useful and nonuseful resources.

When you're making games for gamers, you can afford to rely on a certain subset of behaviors, like access to supplementary online communities. When you're reaching beyond that niche market as WoW has, accessibility is everything. Extending WoW's accessibility into the end game is the next step.

Travian - Resto Druid
Malthrin - Priest

 

Fenwick

The question is, however, who is ultimately responsible for Johnny Boy learning how to efficiently play his class. The answer: Johnny Boy.

The absolute baseline information on how to play any particular class is in the ability tooltips. Skill X causes high threat. Spell Y does Z damage. As others have pointed out, so long as you're not someone who can only turn to his left, you can manage to get through an average amount of content by basically mashing buttons once they light up. Hell, I did it on my rogue before ever reading a thread on how to be a good rogue: SS a few times, SnD, SS some more, Evis, repeat. Was it the best? No. But I figured it out on my own and managed to do well. It was only when I got motivated and said, "Self, it's time to figure out how to be better," and went in search of info that I actually got better.

I don't believe it's Blizzard's responsibility to teach you anything but the baseline information about how to play your class (which, admittedly, sometimes amounts to "grab this sharp thing and stab stuff til it dies"). If you're motivated, the information and people that can help are out there. It's up to YOU to ask/look/etc. though; give a man a fish and all. Why is it Blizzard's responsibility to put in a tutorial that says, "Howdy Mr. Warlock, here's how you min/max your DPS" and then shove it in your face? Concerning your analogy, which happens more:

a) Physically talented kid with no knowledge/experience shows up at school, finds the coach and says, "Please teach me to play baseball."

or

b) Coach walks into the classroom, finds a physically talented kid with no knowledge/experience and says, "Kid, you're coming with me and learning baseball!"

Even that analogy doesn't quite line up, because as Wraith said, Blizzard is akin more to the league than the coach (which would be a guild/forum/etc).

If there was zero player information about the game out there, I'd be inclined to agree with you that it's a design failure. However, the information IS out there, so saying it's a design flaw would be like saying the Mass Transit system sucks because I can't be bothered to look up route schedules on the web. Or the poster on the wall next to me. Or asking someone who's ridden the bus before.

As for why it's encouraged to look up information on your own outside of the game? Welcome to the information age. People don't want to be required to re-invent the wheel every time they want to go somewhere or do something, nor do they want to hand-hold those who are too lazy or ignorant to find the information like they already did.

 

Kyne

First of all, that's a really horrible analogy that's in no way relevant to the topic. By the same thinking, when you're level 1 you fight level 1-2 monsters, when you're level 10 you fight level 10-12 monsters -- what good does this thinking accomplish other than a "well, no kidding" conclusion. This topic is veering steeply off path, dipping back into the same casual vs. hardcore posts over and over.

"Internet searching" really isn't as vague as you might think, because about 90% of what I learned from this game came from sheer experience. What ever happened to just "playing the game"? The day Blizzard implements a class quest that has a player go through a basic skill rotation for completion is the day I have a tag on my toe. Leveling from 1-70 gives a player adequate time to learn the intricacies of the player skills, and entry-level raid content teaches the player very basic realities: Flask for everything. Bring potions. Repair before you show up. Bring buffing reagents. Spec for maximum performance. Balance your class distribution. Pay attention. Stay out of the fire. Did you fuck up? Pay the price. Did you not come prepared? You're directly contributing to the wipe.

I can't think of many fights in even T5/T6 content where what you learn in Karazhan/ZA or even pre-BC that isn't either completely recreated or re-implemented elsewhere with a twist. Just for a quick example, remember Halazzi the Lynx Avatar? Fathom Lord Karathress (totems), Mother Sharahz (tank stacking/healing) in one little pile, dumbed down for even the biggest of mouthbreathers and scaled way back damage/duration-wise.

There's a line to be drawn between being told how to play the game and figuring it out for yourself.

Step in the fire? Everyone dies. DPS too low? Enrage timer forces a wipe. I'd really like to hear where the game has some kind of shortcoming in teaching you the "basic framework" of an encounter, it's just not in bright flashing neon-signs with a siren going off like you just won on The Price is Right.

 

Denogran

It's not that I'm not aware of Google, it's that going to look up stuff about WoW on Google is cheating. If part of the point of a quest is for me to discover the location, then I basically take a lot of the fun out of it by going to Thottbot and figuring out the coords. Not that I don't do that often now, but when I first started I always felt bad doing it. Anyone here remember Myst? Personally, I thought that was a cool game, the fun coming from the graphics and figuring out the puzzles. At one point I got stuck, bought the guide book for it, and the game was never really the same. Sure, it was fun to look at all the neat graphics and animations, but the interest of beating the game was pretty much lost.

Same deal with WoW. Part of the fun for me is trying to figure out how to optimize my rotations, threat, etc. But there's certain things I'd never have come up with on my own, and more importantly, I would never have come up with everything across the board on my own. Take for example crushing blows. I honestly would probably rarely use holy shield, saving the mana instead to be used to toward threat/damage. And without a damage meter or combat log parser, I'd never realize that the crushing blows were happening because I wasn't reaching 102.4% avoidance. Especially since the character screen doesn't show the base miss/dodge/parry, and that boss swings are sorta random anyway.

Why do I need to "cheat" and go to google to even have a chance of figuring stuff like this out? Why isn't there some tooltip that tells me "If you block/dodge/miss or parry an attack you cannot be crushed" (and explain wtf crushed means...). Or "If your defense is high enough, you can't be critted." Why is this too much to ask for?

E: Dukes: I'm at work so I can't watch the video. I'm assuming it's someone destroying t^1/2 in no time at all. I'm not saying WoW should teach you to be the master of the craft. There's always going to be someone trying to push the boundaries and solo kazzak/hydross/etc. That's not what I'm advocating WoW teaches. What I'm asking for is some sort of in-game system that helps people with the basic framework. Those don't exist currently for the 5/10/25-man part of the game.

 

Talgog

What weird sorts of FPS and RTS do you play? In almost all RTS, you don't even get all your abilities until halfway through the packaged single player campaign, and they always tell you what to do. Most of the tooltips say explicitly what unit beats what even when you would think it would be obvious (Uruk-Hai Pikemen are strong v. cavalry, etc).

I can't even think of an RTS off the top of my head that doesn't include a tutorial or an in-game advisor.

Same with FPS. This is how you run/jump/shoot/lean-aim. Look, here is a mook of an enemy. Kill it. Now kill two. Now use grenades. You can't even choose to use the more powerful weapons because you don't have them unless you dropped down the console and entered a cheat code.

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In WoW, the only two classes that can expect to learn most of the mechanics through solo play are warlock and hunter, and they still won't learn to push their DPS to their theoretical gear maximum. They do learn what aggro is when the mob leaves their pet and comes for them, they actually learn a fair amount about healing versus incoming DPS (See, e.g., "this mob hits 2 hard 4 mend pet, Fluffbutt cannot tank"), they learn about CC, and they learn some basic positioning, hunter more than warlock, obviously, but both learn that it's good to be as far away from the mob as you can be so that you have time to react if something goes wrong. And as a result, you need to check for mobs behind you.

Great and broad training for these classes. A warlock who uses his Felguard to take on multiple mobs and elites probably knows more about efficient healing than a priest who went shadow solo as soon as they could or a ret paladin or enhancement shaman who "is damage spec for leveling, damn it! I don't heal!"

You can discuss the merits of grouping all you want, but the fact is that WoW has made grouping *less* important rather than more important. Instances are optional, and, if you are a new player, you probably won't run a meaningful one before you get to Outland. Most of the old world elites were nerfed to normal so everyone could easily solo them. If anything, grouping is being discouraged, not encouraged. Even in Outland, XP is so good and most quests are easy enough to solo that you won't be running instances or groups unless they fall in your lap or a quest is connected to a really good reward (Ring of Blood).

Now when you get to 70, guess what? The healing classes have to heal, the tank classes have to tank and wear gear that they do not really understand what it does, and the hunter and warlock are, for the most part, supposed to stand in the back and nuke shit as hard as they can without pulling aggro off the tank. Oddly enough, while warlock play teaches you just about everything, it doesn't teach you anything about raw nuking. Warlocks (mine is 66) quickly notice that when they break out their big nukes the pet can't hold aggro and they have to drink all the time which costs money and is irritating. Why would they nuke?

Same with hunter. They learn all this other stuff, but where is this "shot rotation"?

WoW absolutely could train people better.

 

Kasi

I think Wraithlin is right. FPS games I've played (not a lot of them but some) just showed you the general combat controls. They in no way showed you any of the advanced strategies one would need to know to compete in MP matches online.

As for RTS well that is a genre I have more experience with. And once again no on the more complex nuances of the game. Yes they release units for you slowly over many levels. But guess what, WoW does that too! They don't give you all your skills at level 1. Most classes don't even have all their skills by level 30, some even later. Does anything in SC games or their training teach you about optimal build order to maximize your production early game? Any strategies on rush tactics or defending them? How to build the proper base defence? (the base defence level in original SC where you have to hold out for X minutes is by no means a tutorial for that). That it is a better idea to use templars for taking out peon lines rather than attacking enemy units? In fact none of these are taught at all. Instead you play against substandard computer opponents and get the basics of doing stuff. Just like you do in WoW. It's more than enough to get a jump start on how to play though, and from there you can progress forward by either putting in the time and learning yourself through trial and error or by getting help from somewhere else.

Now there are some things that should be available to people. Training dummies of different levels with infinite health in major cities to practice your damage skills on. Maybe even a training mob that you can talk to and engage to simulate tanking. Why these things aren't available to us I don't know. And for classes, hunters yes have an issue. There is a severe lack of explanation on their abilites in this game. But for most of the other classes it is not that hard. Find out what abilites hit the hardest. Use them for as long as possible before going oom. If you go oom too quick, maybe try some more efficient abilities mixed in. Simple enough.

 

Disarbadia

People should be aware of search engines, no one should be arguing this, Google is mentioned for one reason or another on the news pretty much weekly, no one should be in the dark about Google.

I fail to see how looking information regarding WoW on the internet is cheating. Other games, sure, I see your point. But WoW? Its not cheating, its making your fellow guildmates hate you less because you're less of a sack of dead weight in raids. Honestly, I didn't know SHIT about proper hunter shot rotations until I stumbled across EJ after a guildy mentioned it. We were just breaking into 25 mans, and I knew I wanted to do the best I could. I'd seen too many horrible dps'ers in Kara and I knew that I wanted to be the best I possibly could be. I didn't raid at all pre BC, so I also knew that if I wanted to get into a progressed or quick progressing guild, I'd have to show that I can put out the numbers and not fuck up while I'm doing it. So I *gasp* used the internet to improve. I don't see that as cheating in the slightest, and I see no reason anyone should think it is.

There will always be resources like EJ around to help those who WANT to improve, and it honestly doesn't take much time to find your basic class guidelines for improvement, even just skimming a class thread might help you immensely when you stumble across some little hint.

Those who think its too much to come outside of the game or think its cheating to look up information, are beyond help if you ask me, and are not deserving of the time and effort devs would have to put in to attempt to help them with an in game tutorial.

I will agree that certain mechanics that are just completely transparent in game need to be shown somehow (Hunter rotations anyone?), but it doesn't require training quests, large in game class tutorials, etc. Just stating in the tooltip of autoshot "This shot has a .5 second timer that is set off when you fire another damaging shot". We already know that autoshot has a .5 second cast since it says it in the tooltip, but it should also mention that if sets that off when you fire another shot. One problem solved. There should also be a built in threat meter, but I won't get into all the details of what needs fixed.

To end this, if you want to get better at your class because you want the shiny purples off Archimonde or you want legendaries off Illidan, then you should be more than willing to come to an outside source to find information to improve yourself. Expecting to get into a guild thats killing Illidan yet not knowing proper threat output, healing efficiency, dps rotations and then wondering why you have no access to these guilds and complaining that Blizzard should have taught you all those things is absurd. You have to learn on your own through other sources, be it your guildies or EJ or whatever.

 

Addled

Sure, I'll agree that WoW could train people better. But the question is, do people really need to be trained too far to be decent in raiding?

"Raw nuking" is generally a BAD IDEA under MOST circumstances, unless it's some kind of rigged fight (Ranged on Ragnaros, for instance, can go all out without pulling aggro). A warlock can easily outthreat a tank by spamming Searing Pain and other high DPS, threat moves. If people could full out nuke, we wouldn't need a threatmeter, because our tanks would be generating unlimited threat and we wouldn't have to care about threat in the first place. In fact, I'd go so far as to say any DPS that couldn't outthreat their tank any time they wanted to is a bad DPS.

Warlocks do perfectly good DPS by just slamming up all their dots, keeping them up, and spamming SB. Is it the best? No. The most desirable? No. Will it clear Kara? Gruul? Mag? Most of T5? Yes. And that's the line. It's "good enough".

Hunters, fine, I'll agree with that. But frankly a hunter lead or a GL should just order the hunters to make the BM macro (Autoshot, Steady Shot plus KC, pop trinkets and Beastial Wrath whenever possible) is close enough to good DPS. And by the time you're in T5 instances, hopefully that dumb hunter/lock/whatever gets it through their heads to try and read EJ or whatever.

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I think everybody will agree that BC raids are generally easier than their pre BC counterparts. Yet pre BC raids did perfectly fine, and we never needed to agonize over "do people need a learning curve." I don't understand why we need an 11 page thread on if/how/why/when do we need to teach stupid people how to play. If you're reading EJ forums, or even skim them, you're automatically not stupid and taking the first steps to not sucking.