My brother plays WoW occasionally. He has a level 67 warlock. This is an intelligent and educated man in his mid thirties that has played video games on and off for over 15 years, for entertainment.

I looked at his character, and found he was geared with multiple +healing items. He usually killed mobs by drain tanking them (blissfully unaware that the technique had a name), so it made perfect sense to increase the healing he was receiving. Other than that he had lots of intellect and spirit, because "that's the kind of stuff wizards need". His favourite spell when grouping was Soulfire, because it hit the hardest.

Sure, he's not vying to become a raider, but he's the perfect example of someone who plays this game for pure fun, and doesn't approach it in a professional manner. There's no doubt that the game has completely failed to teach him the game mechanics. He was going off tooltips and learning within the boundaries of the game. I'm sure his equivalent exists in the low end raiding world as well, and in various less clueless incarnations up towards the high end.

For the health of the game, Blizzard should try to take a note from Valve and their advanced theories on player learning.

A guild hall where I could randomly spawn doomfires and void zones under people while they try to practice maximizing their DPS...

That would be unbelievably awesome.

Yeah anyone would think Blizzard want you to learn by dying and wiping, but clearly what they really want is for everyone to beat the game on a simulator with no cost or trash so they can turn up and collect their free epics...

[e]
Just no.
Blizzard dont go through all the time and effort of building boss mobs so you can practise them in a simulator. You are ment to go there and die, and if you are a good player then during this process of dying you will learn a little bit more about how you might go about beating this challenge.

If you are a bad player you will goto the WoW forums and demand they make the challenge less challenging.

[ee]
If your friend thought for a moment he would realize.
1) Spirit regenerates health and mana
2) He has a spell called lifetap that regenerates mana
3) He has a spell called life drain for regenerating health.
4) Logical conclusion: I do not need to stack spirit for regeneration when I can lifedrain and lifetap

Its not that your friend cant figure this out, it is, as you said, he has never stopped to think about it. Sure he might have looked at it and though "Ok I need int and spirit so I have mana for spells and regereate my mana faster". What he hasnt done is think about it a second time and say "Hey, wait, I can turn my health into mana, and I can generate (almost) unlimited health with this soul drain thingy, so really I dont need spirit at all, or much int, I just need enough stamina that the monster dies before I do. And hey there is this stuff here that makes me do more damage, that would make my life drain return more health, and the monsters die faster. So really if I had enough of that I wouldnt need stamina to outlast the mob either."

Thanks for spelling that out.

The point is the game never puts you in a situation to think about that or help you to think about that until the very end game.

It's also not always obvious to people which their core skills should be and which are redundant for their build. Like fury warriors using slam - doesn't say anywhere on the tooltip that it resets the swing timer and improved slam is in the fury tree after all.

Just another point, I think for the older players, or more experienced from other RPGs we pick up on Warcraft quite easily. I know people who do not understand Warcraft unless I put it in a FPS setting. For example the raid I was explaining became 'my team' the trash became 'bots', the instance a 'map' etc etc.

Knowing how the various game mechanics work is not inbuilt! Claiming doing 5mans teaches this doesnt relate now in the post TBC world. I know many players who never did an instance until lvl 70, or if they did it was a friends 70 rushing them through.

What advice do you give to friends starting now? Get to 70 straightaway, forget instance no one does them anymore.
Its definately not run heaps of instances, they will help you understand core game mechanics.

On a side note there needs to be a Boss where standing in the fire is benefical...

Eagleboss on ZA.

Teaching people their core skills is impossible.
Specfically, WoW is built on there being several ways to play any given class, from simple things like different talent builds to more subtle points based on your gear level. There is no way Blizazrd can teach a player the right way to play his class and in many ways they dont want to because it would make the player feel constrained. The message from blizzard is this: Play your character in whatever way suits you, we arent going to tell you what is right or wrong. And thats a perfectly good message that has drawn in alot of non-serious game players; Blizzard are not trying to produce the next generation of amazing players, they are trying to secure mass subscriptions.

How about we all agree to this rule from here on if you want this discussion to progress:
Before you post some great idea on how to imporve the game, take 2 minutes to consider how you might affect this change. Too many of these suggestions are so obviously flawed they shouldnt keep being raised.

This is not a matter of the learning curve, but rather a problem with Blizzard's progression system. Sure, instances are supposed to be optional, like all content. But when a neighbor who recently picked up on WOW asks me if he could join my raid guild, while he is level 58, and all the money he's got so far was from me setting him off, and all the instance loot he has comes from boosts, and every time he goes into WSG he whispers me asking how to kill a rogue/hunter/whatever... well, that's when I seriously doubt Blizzard's leveling system. That guy had it easy, and every time he's been told to do SOMETHING on his own, he serves me the same crap about not knowing what to do. Well, fucking figure it out...

See, people like that are far more common than you may think. There's one in every PUG to Black Morass, for your alt's Kara key; there's one in your guild, left over from the MC days; there's one dozen in your typical AV...
Now, that's just a result of people choosing the easy way for a substantial reward. Now, if you ever walked into Stormwind or Orgrimmar, you know what I'm talking about. "WTB boost to <random instance>, paying 5 gold". That means people want rewards, but simply can't be bothered to work for them. Now, if those people actually HAD to work for upgrades, they could be as thick as lead, and they'd still pick up a trick or two...

Basically, Blizzard underestimates the training role of running instances at low levels. Now, and this is just speculation, imagine if for some reason, instances only allowed group members that meet the level requirements zone in. Eventually, people would start forming reliable groups again, much like vanilla wow. Survival of the fittest? Maybe. But couple that with the threat meters and damage meters that Blizz never really incorporated, over the course of 70 or 80 levels, I think it'd be a lot easier to assimilate some of the basic mechanics of the game.

Shade of Aran. Flame Wreath.

I would argue that if he's ignorant enough not to listen to you, what makes you think he'll pay attention to an ingame tutorial? Or even an in-game tip to check the WoW Forums? Furthermore, if he's too dumb to accept help from a fellow guildie, why should the game make any effort to teach to him? "I'm too proud/stupid/ignorant/whatever to accept help from a guildie" has a consequence, and that consequence is taking forever to kill a mob.

I think the point is, there needs to be a fight where raiders run into a fire, to counteract the fights where you have to run out of a fire. Flame Wreath gets targeted at you, you don't run in/out of it. However, ZA's Eagleboss (someone pointed it out earlier in the thread) is a nice example.

There is a difference between an unwillingness to learn and a lack of knowledge about how to learn. People that are presented with the info they need and refuse to use it can rot in their own cesspit of stupidity in my opinion.

Sons of Hakkar? Not exactly a fire, but close enough.

I think your essential analysis of the problem is correct, but I wouldn't call it apathy. A player isn't necessarily apathetic if, as you pointed out, all the feedback they're given is positive. Those of us who are on this forum are partly here because of the cutting-edge mentality of always doing more and doing better, but we surely can't expect that of people in general, at least not in the majority. For the most part, not fixing it if it isn't broken works well for most people, and a lot of WoW's pre-endgame reinforces it.

I don't think that's what needs to change, though. Being able to make your way to 70 while doing anything and everything is a fairly integral part of WoW, and breaking the message would require something like tuning every 70 instance and quests past about level 67 or so to be impossible without good play, and some players, especially those who are never going to raid no matter what, will likely just drop the game as too hard if it's like that.

I disagree with this. I'm not sure people would do tutorials if they were implemented, but more importantly, I agree with the point that Blizzard itself doesn't know what the best things players should be doing are. When it comes to it, I don't think Blizzard should be in the business of providing solutions, just more clearly defining the problems. In that respect, my response to the topic of the thread is a conditional yes.

The goal isn't to teach any one skill. The idea is to teach the concept that one can be doing better than one already is doing, that learning is necessary, and to start the player on the path of thinking about their gameplay in that manner. But the key is providing the stimulus in a way that makes people understand.

As an example, Gruul should teach good DPS skills but regularly fails to do so. It seems evident to us raiders that Gruul's growth mechanic is a stacking enrage and that it's essentially the DPS-constraint on the fight, but people who've never seen anything outside of a 5-man simply don't always come naturally to that conclusion. Some people are going to see that their Gruul wipes always start with the main tank dying, and 5-mans teach you that this result is a healing failure. The tools aren't in the game to measure damage, but even if they were, there wouldn't be any incentive to use them. Doing whatever will carry someone all the way to the beginning of raiding, and by then people simply aren't set up to understand the relationship of DPS to raid success.

The connection needs to be made explicit. Wonders would be done for the overall DPS of players in endgame if the first raiding mob is simply a tank-and-spank with a timed berserk who regularly checks how much damage he's taking versus time left on the berserk and booms out voice-acted /yell warnings if DPS is too low. "Fools! You are not damaging me enough, soon I will destroy you all!" Sure, this seems juvenile. But all it takes is one thing like this to make DPS classes understand that they can, in fact, do better. And any smart player will then take the time to find out for him or herself how to do that.

In essence, what I'm saying is that WoW needs to more specifically point out to players that they are not playing up to their potential in a manner other than general failure. Without a specific prompt, players tend to be mildly egotistical, unwilling to do what other people do just because they say so, and taking excessive offense at suggestions that they're underperforming. No prompt means also that otherwise intelligent people may not even be aware of a problem that they need to examine. Once people understand that they're doing something wrong - and the only authority that they'll accept without question is the game - that will lay the groundwork for getting better.

I think we're not really talking so much about resetting the learning curve as how to improve learning curves overall.

So have to recognise that there are several different skillsets required to be successful in different areas of the game and you can't expect 5 mans to teach all of them. And also, raiding won't teach people a lot about tanking or solo healing heroics. And like others have said, a smart dps will learn from levelling in 5 mans that 'good' dps means CC and not pulling aggro off the tank, so they are taught to be cautious rather than to ride the tank's threat.

However, 5 mans can teach some situational awareness, dps knowing not to out-aggro tanks and to be aware of CC, getting out of void zones, spreading out, running away from the group when you have a debuff, decursing/demagic etc, line of sight pulls, using the scenery, multi-tanking, following marks -- you can get to 70 without knowing these but grouping with more experienced players will get people up to speed quickly who are interested in learning.

But also, healing in battlegrounds can teach a lot about raid healing. Being aware of where people are, using the right heal at the right time, sorting out a UI with range checking (haven't seen a lot of comments about this being added to the default raid UI but I think it'll be a huge help for new healers who maybe arent yet aware of raidframe addons), locating a safe spot to heal from etc. A quest for healers to go heal amount X in bg Y would encourage people to go figure it out.

So I think the game needs to assume that new 70s/80s will have soloed or duoed most of the way to max level which means that max level 5 mans could benefit from a more well marked out progression.

In particular, an easier levelling curve for tanks that doesn't involve having to go back and tank low level instances would be good. I say this because I was grouped with a friend the other day whose warrior just hit 70. Her gear is fine for intro tanking but she was having trouble tanking 2 mobs at once -- she's not an idiot, it's just something she'd never had to do. We ended up in BM to give her some confidence, but that's from having experienced players around to advise on which instances suit which classes, not from the game helping out at all.

Emphasis there is mine. So here's my question(s): Is your brother having fun when he plays? If the answer is yes, then it really doesn't matter that the game hasn't taught him the mechanics. Not to be rude, but this discussion isn't about people like your brother. I don't really care about some dude who plays just to have fun/kill time; I care about the guy doing Kara with the intent to see BT some day (and not two expansions later).

Well, I could argue that since we're talking about raiders here, there's going to be someone in the raid that's running damage/threat meters (hell, I'm sure we've all run into the 5-mans where some asshat is posting meters after every trash pull). However, I agree that the game gives no qualitative feedback on your performance outside of, "Yay, I managed to turn this quest in after dying 50 times."

I could see a built-in damage/threat meter helping. Or perhaps when you kill the final boss of a 5-man (or maybe after every boss) an option for an "after action" report pops up with some handy stats. Again, though, you're relying on people to have the initiative to make themselves better, which I can say from personal experience that not a ton of people do (outside the mindset of, "purples = I'm better now"). Would people make the move toward bettering themselves if they were simply provided with a performance report? Could go either way. But yea, perhaps adding in some feedback tool would at least give a shove to those who might have an inkling of being a self-starter.

Eventually you do get feedback on individual performance, but only in reference to specific gimmicks later in raid content (Leotheras, Gorefiend, Archimonde, to an extent Shahraz). The question is how to give this feedback to people before they're getting to T5 raids.

How about adding class/role specific quests to the game? One thing the hunter/priest epic quests did (at least until people figured out how to cheese the priest quest) was require a certain level of class competence, and for your trouble you were rewarded with a weapon.

A DPS quest might involve fighting a mob that doesn't do a whole lot to you (with the exception of a few abilities which your class abilities allow you to counter), but has a large amount of health and a hard enrage. A healer quest might involve assisting a healable NPC. A tank quest might involve the assistance of a "party" of very fragile NPCs against a pack of ~3 monsters; you might also have an ability to call for the NPCs to assist you (even better if this somehow involves raid markers). All of these quests would reward you with a pretty good weapon, such that people are less inclined to skip it, but they're all soloable and if you fail it's in an extremely obvious way.

Two problems: tuning and timing. You want this to be early enough that they don't pick up bad habits/inflict their badness on the rest of us, but late enough that they can't just outgear it and still reap the benefit. And if you're already level 80, there's some momentum of bad experience that might prevent people from changing.

Even better: make it a contest of some sort. Give people a standard set of gear and have them compete to see who can put up the most DPS on a mob that offers no resistance. (Yes, I know this doesn't quite work for either healers or tanks.) Either people will be pushed to beat their high score, or groups will start having (probably ludicrous) "baselines" and you'll be forced to get better if you want to proceed.

Hmm it should be possible for Blizzard to calculate the maximum possible DPS / HPS/HPM / TPS a DD / Healer / Tank is doing. Sure it's not everything for healers, but it still improves your effiency if it is about HPM stats.

You know Guitar Hero? There is a maximum score you can achieve at any given song.

When you finish playing a song, you get your score and a rating how good it was with 1-5 stars and 5 special stars if it was 100% perfect. EVERYONE understands that.

It still has huge gaps between the star levels and 5 stars are still far from being perfect. Since they are based on your real score and not on the % of notes you hit, you still get 5 stars for around 92-95% of correct notes, even if that's only 70% of the possible points (because you have a multiplier that increases on streaks and resets on faults, that means playing a sequence of 90 notes correct and then missing 10 notes is far better than missing one of ten notes every time).
Still if everyone was trained to achieve 90% of the DPS of the possible maximum, it would be more than fine.

Why don't they just calculate a rating based on the players performance and compare it to the best possible performance? I know it's getting complicated the more mobs are involved and possibly that's the main reason why it would be too much computation time / work to implement it, but it would even be enough to have the calculation without regarding aoe effects.

You could display those stars with a "Jim's Cooldown Pulse"-like effect at every "Combat off" event after a combat that took let's say at least 60 seconds or involved a bossfight, plus a more detailed combat log entry like "You achieved 700 of 1366 possible DPS, that's 3 stars.). There you have a perfect system that everyone understands and that motivates you to theorycraft and to give your best.

Nobody wants to see low star ratings flashing on his screen, so this would motivate nearly everyone.

Okay, it does not fit into the mmorpg environment... make it 5 moons for nightelves, 5 axes for orcs, 5 swords for humans, 5 mechanic wheels for gnomes, 5 bottles of milk for tauren, 5 cigars for trolls, 5 mirrors for bloodelves, 5 bones for undead, 5 mithril bars for dwarves and 5 elekks for draenei...

If someone reads this who has the skills - make it an Addon. you can reuse spreadsheets/formulas on this site, recount and jims cooldown pulse code, so it should be pretty easy. ^^ It's just about combining the stats of a fight into a result everyone understands. The problem with Addons is just that those who really need them, do not bother to install them.

It doesn't work that way.

There is global DPS needed that can be counted, but individual DPS is impossible to rate because of random elements of the game like secondary attacks, stuns, silences and delays. In games you quote player have total control over his performance as well as no distractions whatsoever. In boss fight, player is not in full control of his actions - he might be for example targetted by boss 4 times in a row with some special ability, hampering his DPS. And if we use average values, it will turn out some of the players got 110% performance... because they were lucky, not because they were more skilled then a guy with 80%.

Equivalent of that situation in Guitar Hero world would be game simulating the orchestra, where every player have his own instrument, own partiture, all players have to coordinate their actions - and even then, score of some of the players depends on score of the others (well timed buffs and debuffs). On the top of that, such game would randomly turn off notes for random players causing them lose score, while for others would give score for free. Hope you see where I'm going.

you would need to dynamically adjust the possible maximum of course on random abilities. So if there is a unavoidable raidwide stun effect for 2 seconds, you subtract 2 seconds of the maximum. The same for adding more to the maximum on buffs, etc...
Could be done by combat log analysis.

It's harder for movement dependency and for cooldowns like adrenalin rush / heroism, especially when calculating in synergies, but i'm sure everything can be approximated with 98-100% accuracy.

It is probably just not worth the required effort because it is too "mmo"-untypical and far too "arcade"ish. You could even publish online ladders and highscore tables for particular bossfights to increase competition.

All that needs to occur is optional (this is key) quests along the way the emphasize that classes abilities against a target. Many people do not know how their classes abilities work. Now you cannot train people some attack rotation or anything like that because Blizzard themselves adjusts what these are in patches and expansions.

Give some optional class based quests that can only be completed solo by that class (put it in a solo instance if they wish) that just has players use their abilities. Hopefully players will remember some of those abilities and come up on their own uses for them or ask about them, but if not hey whatever no loss.

Admittedly, I'm guilty of this. I helped the priests in my guild by parking my paladin close, buffing them all with Wisdom and Improved Retribution Aura.

You could cheese the hunter quests somewhat too. If I remember correctly, one time a hunter, warlock, and myself (pally) went down to Silithus to do the Silithus demon part, the hunter and lock started a duel, lock put down Curse of Recklessness (or was it Weakness? can't remember) and then the hunter attacked the demon, with the premise being that the curse would help somewhat.

If anything you would have to put in 1-man dungeons into the game, to really guarantee that players are completely by themselves.



To be fair, even 5mans wipes are not always healing failure. Consider Lieutenant Drake in Durnholde, which does a MS, and a bunch of other special attacks (WW, etc) that will quickly rip apart a heavy-melee group. Not to mention BM, where the 2nd boss could stack up his Mortal Strike effect to 100% if the tank didn't dodge/kite the boss adequately.

But, yes I agree that largely raids do not do enough to teach DPS how important it is to kill the boss quickly. Mostly I blame this on MC/BWL style thinking, where fights could be dragged out for a long time, without any enrage timers or limits, as long as you had the healers.


I like this idea. The boss could do /whispers to individual players as well, threatening them if they didn't do enough DPS. Hakkar used to do something like that in ZG, although those whispers were just random insults at random points in ZG. C'thun as well, although he didn't whisper in text, he whispered through your speakers.

I agree that the game needs to explain more IN GAME, this is a very obvious point but it's extremely true, many players have no idea how their classes work. Not because they are ignorant or stupid, but because there is no opportunity to learn that within the game, and most people don't research games, they just play them.

Hunters at 70 often have no idea what the point of Steady Shot is, and ignore it entirely, and even use Aimed Shot on a regular basis in PvE; this is not really their fault, as the game never directly explains why Aimed Shot is bad and Steady Shot isn't. Similarly, a resto druid spends most of their game career depending on healing touch, regrowth, and rejuvenation - how are they supposed to know they should basically ignore this arsenal in favour of Lifebloom as soon as it becomes available? Why would a shaman have any idea that fast weapons are bad for Enhancement? I see players doing this sort of "dumb stuff" all the time, and I just politely correct them and they are pleased as punch... how were they supposed to know any better?

In-game training is an awesome idea, and it could be easily integrated into existing class trainers; it wouldn't be very hard to create an instanced tutorial for each spell or set of spells, so if a player wants to know why and how they should use their new skill, they can practice before they make a fool of themselves.



edit: An obvious way to challenge DPS, would be to make a 5man boss that heals itself in an unpreventable manner (eg. Ebonroc, but less horrible.) Power drains like Malacrass and totem stomping like Jin'do are also other decent mechanics. This reminds me of how the heroic SV mech boss had a pug reputation of being VERY HARD, because his add spawning provided an effective dps check.