I'll be happy to delete this post if it's felt to be off-topic, but I was chatting to an RL friend today - cool guy, works hard, plenty of friends and a good social life. Has been playing for maybe a month or two. He's been a casual gamer for some time and has had zero MMO experience before. This is a chat I had with him on his Lv.42 shaman about 15 minutes ago:
He's also somehow familiar with the progression of instances and a few other little tidbits. Interestingly, he didn't know he could buy a mount at 40 or how to get to Badlands.
I don't mean this as "indicative" of anything, but rather as a statement that players can fall anywhere on a spectrum, and can be remarkably strong in some areas (for him, dps min/maxing) but weak in others (general knowledge).
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.
Precisely! Blizzard purposely allows players to level from 1-70 with relative ease and never prepares them for the reality of the "endgame" in WoW. Imagine if from grades 1 to grades 12 you as a student sat around sang songs and finger painted (the "fun" stuff that children do in primary school). Then you graduate and enter college and suddenly realize that all of those years of non-learning failed to prepare you for your ultimate destination: college and then a career.
This is exactly what Blizzard does by creating the the extremely easy, and accessible content from 1-70 (and made even easier in a previous patch). Players new to MMO's are left confused, dumbfounded and perplexed at what to do next. Suddenly social skills and meeting new people become paramount as one has to literally find a guild in order to experience all of the multi-million dollar content that lies ahead.
Why then has Blizzard knowingly created a play experience that fails to adequately train and prepare the player for the content that lies ahead?
One of the tenets of good game design is to ensure that players are always faced with appropriate challenges at or near the margins of their skill level. This is how players learn and get better. Every good game does this. Blizzard does this somewhat adequately with their raid content but fails to do this with the transition from solo to grouping to raiding. WoW from 1-70 should be a boot camp for the ultimate destination of the self-actualization of the players avatar: raiding. Yes, that very same raiding that puts the player right in the middle of all of the major plots and storylines.
We know that Blizzard has intentionally created WoW to be like this. Again at this year's GDC Rob Pardo talked about the '"solo to max level" as one of the cornerstone's of WoW's success. Last year's GDC Pardo talked about the donut theory.
The real reason must be that they are doing it to retain as many subscribers as possible. They get 10 million people hooked on the admittedly fun and easy part of WoW. The character advancement and progression is euphoric. Then it stops but by then, the player can't stop. He must find a way to keep progressing his character. He wants to see Ragnaros. He wants to defeat Illidan. He wants to vanquish Arthas and so on. WoW is the ultimate carrot on a stick.
While WoW is a very successful and popular MMO, it is not a very good MMO because it's spreads itself too thin in an effort to be all things to all people. We see how this kind of philosophy is currently ruining class balance in the drive to balance classes for PVP at the expense of PVE. Yet in process Blizzard's approach ends up pleasing nobody. There is a real lack of cohesion in the various playstyes in WoW currently. One wonders how long the middle can hold.
In answer to the original question. I believe that Blizzard should reset the learning curve for raiding in the upcoming expansion. As far as I'm concerned MMO company's are treading dangerously close to the precipe of creating content that is far too complex and heavily scripted for the average person out there to complete successfully, let alone enjoy and have fun doing it. Future growth in MMO's will demand that we accept more people into the ranks of MMO players from the periphery of society. The next WoW could very well have 50 million people worldwide. That will put pressure on content designers to create scripted encounters that satifies the lowest common denominator player out there. Which in turn supports my point made above, that challenge and difficulty levels should be ramped up to prepare players for the endgame.
I'll assume you're talking about the L60 quest for rohk'delar (not entirely sure I spelled that right, it's the MC leaf drop right?). It's worth pointing out that not all hunters got into MC, and even then, unlucky leaf drops meant that a guild could easily be in mid-BWL before every hunter got his leaf and did the quest. And if you were in BWL, there were plenty of easier to get weapon drops, like the Heartstriker (Broodlord), Dragonbreath Hand Cannon (Ebonroc) and Ashjre'thul, Crossbow of Smiting (Chromaggus). (...)
Not to mention a lot of hunters actually paid their colleagues who already did the quest to run it for them. But I wouldn't call that a good training exercise: it was hard, but failing at it was frustrating and consumed time. A good training course is a one where you can try again and again until you've succeeded or are tired.
Another feature a learning course would have is to be extremely unforgiving. You either succeed, or you fail and try again. Luck won't get you through. Think Leotheras' inner demons, on the whole raid at a time, and if even one person messes up everyone dies. I'm not sure dungeons following such principles would be very popular...
There is one thing Blizzard can do to help, though: avoid convoluted and unintuitive mechanics like the hunter autoshot/cast time skills.
A higher chance that they'll implement spectator mode for Arenas, because that's less prone to abuse and loopholes. But not totally implausible either way.
I find this to be completely backwards, actually. There's a reason most of the more-competitive FPS servers (see: Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, and other similar games) don't even have a 'ghost' mode for after death. And more often than not, they don't have spectators set up - though admittedly I've seen more of the spectator servers recently than I have in some time. Anyway, the point being that spectator mode - especially in a non-controlled environment (i.e. anywhere except for in some sort of Tournament with judges looking over your shoulder) - is just begging people to cheat in arenas. Yes, it's the sort of methods that are already used with auto-ignore mods and the like, but these are things Blizzard is actively trying to prevent.
Originally Posted by Nezralix
You might as well come to grips with the fact that they're never going to implement a playback feature. Any way they do this would just be totally unnatural in the context of WoW's interface. They probably could do it, as it's been done in plenty of RTS and FPS games, but they still won't. It would be a hassle to implement for them, and for what benefit? Letting people figure out who to blame when something goes wrong? To let strategists pore over playbacks until they figure out every nuance of every monster ability? I'm willing to bet that they have an interest in actively discouraging both of these. So they're definitely not going to (1) spend a lot of time to (2) kludge an awkward interface into an interface design that prides itself on cleanness to (3) give people a functionality that they'd rather not expose anyway. As far as they're concerned, FRAPS has it covered.
I'd actually love to see a Spectator mode for PVE. If you don't think that strategists already pour over FRAPS/WWS/any-other-log-they-can-get-their-hands-on to figure out every nuance of every ability, then you're delusional. It doesn't have to be a standard part of the UI. Hell, it could be a viewer wholly seperate from the actual WoW client. You could trade/host csq files (csq: combat sequence - just made that up.) that would replace instructional videos (in depth ones, at least). And back on the Spectator mode - it would be a truly eye-opening sight for a guild of average/below average players see the absolutely withering DPS of higher end guilds IN ACTION. Hearing 1000+ DPS is quite different from watching Curator die before he finishes the first evocation (whereas this group takes 3-4, or more). Or, even better, seeing a guild of good players who are near this group in progression - not even as geared - obliterate mobs and bosses like this group never imagined.
It's one thing to see numbers on a website (lord knows the internets are always to be trusted), see the spreadsheets and see the timelines of DPS rotations. It's quite another to see it all in action. It's also a wholly different experience to see a party/raid function like a well-oiled machine as oppsed to 25 people in a raid split into 5-15 seperate semi-cohesive lumps.
Originally Posted by Whiteknight
Similarly, I don't think anyone will argue that TBC encounters are an entirely higher level of complexity compared to pre-TBC. When there are adds in an encounter, there are more of them, and they have different abilities (contrast Akama to Gehennas or Sulfuron for example). Even the simplest bosses have multiple phases (Supremus/Naj'entus), etc. Kaelthas and Vashj are leagues more complex than anything prior to BC with perhaps the exception of 4h.
And yet. Folk describe 25man TBC raiding as easier.
I think the answer to that is actually fairly simple - Anias already hit on it.
Originally Posted by Anias
Finding 24+ other good players to play with is by far the hardest part of the game
And this also goes into why 40-man groups were generally harder to get into, and why Karazhan/ZA are infinitely more accessible. There are of course other reasons, but the logistics of getting a raid with perfect composition get utterly more complicated as you increase the size of said raid.
It was also mentioned earlier (I believe by Anias as well) that being a bit more lax on necessary raid composition would help tremendously. I agree with this, and put forth that they've tried this route already. But somewhere between initial execution and final product, they still want every class to retain some unique quality that others don't have. Therefore a tank is not a tank is not a tank. Warrior, Paladin and Druid are very different beasts when it comes to tanking. And while the tanking specs are all infinitely more viable than they were at the inception of WoW, they've still yet to become interchangeable on all levels. The mechanics of each factor in, of course, but the main problem of all of this is the fact that they must make encounters very demanding in order to make them feel like an accomplishment. And because of synergies, mixed with class differences, the raid makeup writes itself indelibly in the minds of raid leaders, and those who generally care. And there is very little variation from this to be had without out-gearing the content and/or making it up with elbow grease and brute force consumables (though, yes, this is decidedly less than it used to be - very much a step in the right direction).
e: didn't complete my point. The main problem is that each tank has a niche, and rather than make the bosses more generic, thus more boring, and letting the raid composition hinge around what sort of tank you've brought, they introduced gimmicks that are tailored to a certain class' role. Therefore, the Paladin has a chance to shine on AoE pulls, bosses that hit fast (thus require alot of shield blocks) and/or Demons/Undead. Bears have the advantage where high TPS is required alongside very steady heavy physical mitigation. And warriors just generally being the sort of jack-of-all-trades, with quite a few 'oh shit' buttons. Not to mention keeping up sunder for all those melee
Originally Posted by Katria
Putting in some kind of training ground would help a lot. NPCs that teach people some of the basics. The addition of threat and damage meters to the game help a lot in this regard...put in a quest where you can see your DPS or TPS while you beat on a target dummy, and you have to reach a certain amount to finish the quest. When you fail, have the NPC give you tips for what you could do differently. Now Blizzard has shown they do not know their own game as well as posters here, but they can guide people away from big mistakes (hunter shot rotations? How is a hunter supposed to know about that from within the game?). Actually...I don't know how feasible this is, but Blizzard could spawn an NPC with identical class/spec/race/gear and you compete against it. It uses a semi-optimal script (something generic, good enough but not optimal) to generate threat or dps while you do the same. The objective being to come close to or beat your opponent. And at the end you get a screen that looks like a WWS parse, showing what abilities you and your opponent used and such...helps a lot if you failed to see what you did wrong.
I'd love this idea if they simply made it a self-training-ground. Dummies which you could simply practice on. Have a dummy set up that will actually hit you, you have an NPC healing you, and your only job is to stay alive (thus your mitigation abilities come into play) and generate as much TPS as possible - with the final test requiring something like 70% demo/TC uptime, always have SB up, etc, etc. There are tons of scenarios that come to mind - Teach warlocks how to seed 4+ targets so the it actually functions as a chain-reaction mass explosion. Set up a dummy with normal mob (of the +1/+2/+3 of player's level variety) ac/dodge/parry/resist rates to let people test their sustained DPS. Even potentially add a party function so you could test a 5 person group's DPS (think melee group) - set the time limit, and possibly even mob debuffs (CoE, Sunder, FF, anything else you could think of), then let the DPS fly. Set a TPS for your simulated tank and add the challenge of not pulling agro if need be!
I suppose toward the end I was just thinking aloud, and the ease of implementation might not be quite as simple as my mind makes it out to be. Even a practice dummy which a single player can use to practice and get a very accurate in-game summary of DPS for benchmarking himself would be a huge step toward making difficulty curves (and resetting them) less necessary.
However, they will always be necessary for the reason Xi and Anias mentioned - you don't want a steady increase of difficulty. It very quickly leads to frustration and burnout if you don't have a couple of encounters to slide through after pounding your head against the wall for weeks on the same boss. But for 'training' people - there are far far better ways.
That feels like a paper I wrote for class and suddenly remembered the topic in the last 4 sentences.
I find this to be completely backwards, actually. There's a reason most of the more-competitive FPS servers (see: Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, and other similar games) don't even have a 'ghost' mode for after death. And more often than not, they don't have spectators set up - though admittedly I've seen more of the spectator servers recently than I have in some time. Anyway, the point being that spectator mode - especially in a non-controlled environment (i.e. anywhere except for in some sort of Tournament with judges looking over your shoulder) - is just begging people to cheat in arenas. Yes, it's the sort of methods that are already used with auto-ignore mods and the like, but these are things Blizzard is actively trying to prevent.
The biggest difference in those FPS games and wow though, is that they are much more reliant on positioning and map play than wow is, so having spectator mode helps them a lot more. Having someone on vent yelling that the druid is behind the pillar is not nearly as helpful as having someone spot a sniper, for example. Back at blizzcon tigole mentioned that they wanted to keep arena maps very simple, so I doubt that spectator spying will be a big issue in the future.
Depending on how far into the 1-70 path you wanted to do this, somewhere like Theramore is set up nicely for the alliance. It's a port, there is already plenty of NPC training going on (so it is themed properly), and it would encourage players to hop continents once in awhile. Chances are, you're already there to do the damn bandaid quest; why not add this feature in as well?
I'll be happy to delete this post if it's felt to be off-topic, but I was chatting to an RL friend today - cool guy, works hard, plenty of friends and a good social life. Has been playing for maybe a month or two. He's been a casual gamer for some time and has had zero MMO experience before. This is a chat I had with him on his Lv.42 shaman about 15 minutes ago:
He's also somehow familiar with the progression of instances and a few other little tidbits. Interestingly, he didn't know he could buy a mount at 40 or how to get to Badlands.
I don't mean this as "indicative" of anything, but rather as a statement that players can fall anywhere on a spectrum, and can be remarkably strong in some areas (for him, dps min/maxing) but weak in others (general knowledge).
Considering he's using a 1.8 speed weapon and a 2.0 speed weapon and you shouldn't switch from a big two-hander on a shaman until you have dual wield specialization maxed for the +hit (which is minimum shaman level 43 if every point is put in enhancement) I'd say he's an even worse player than the generally ignorant: the knowledgable player who nonetheless disregards empirical facts because he wants his character to be omg-so-sweet
Considering he's using a 1.8 speed weapon and a 2.0 speed weapon and you shouldn't switch from a big two-hander on a shaman until you have dual wield specialization maxed for the +hit (which is minimum shaman level 43 if every point is put in enhancement) I'd say he's an even worse player than the generally ignorant: the knowledgable player who nonetheless disregards empirical facts because he wants his character to be omg-so-sweet
Er, I wouldn't quite say that not knowing the break-even point between dual wielding and 2h weapons, which could only really be figured out accurately by using a spreadsheet or simulator, means he's disregarding the "empirical fact" that slow weapons are better than faster for a shaman.
Which once again brings us back to the point of this thread: The UI and in-game experience does a terrible job of explaining these mechanics to help someone know whether one thing is better than something else.
So we can agree that players aren't prepared enough in raid environments, because of a lack of learning 'core mechanics' for their class, and for various encounters. Some people say you should be taught these mechanics while leveling, but in most cases you can overgear them anyways. So making an easy encounter to teach you needed skills isn't really possible in most scenarios.
So what does it come down to at the end of the day? If you want to play your class well and perform in raids, you will learn how to. There are innumerable resources for learning more about this game. But if not, there's nothing that's going to end your cycle of... sucking.
Maybe Blizzard should implement a tips conversation piece to the class trainers, level/spec specific with good class basic information like that.
Possibly a good idea would be to have players able to join NPC raids where they can learn a bit about a role in a raid through NPC text prompts while fighting x monster somewhere. The raids could alter their makeup based on player class, spec or even group make up when starting I guess.
Very interesting thread, not sure if it's been suggested before but what about non essential "training" raids. IE you get a quest to run some 10 man instance which involves fairly basic mechanics to teach new players the things they would have missed from vanilla wow. It doesn't even need to be filled with players, why not simulate it with npc's?? Then you could use it to test applicants to your guild, watch them run this test instance and monitor their progress. It would also provide a nice place for theory testing and talent testing etc. Make it modified by what class you are, eg. quest is to keep certain npc alive throughout the fight for healing classes or quest is to prevent certain squishy npc's from dying for tanks etc. Could have a lot of potential?
The funny thing is I remember all the doom and gloom talk after it was announced raid sizes in TBC would be reduced to 25 people, but a lot of the top end guilds saw it as a way to drop that 10-15 people dead weight the majority of them KNEW they were dragging along. Oddly enough it probably still seems to most people even after the switch to 25 man raids there are a few people they could shave off from that number. Its not that the fights got harder, its just that everyone has to pull their weight.
The main problem with the game as many have stated on this thread is that they already build in a curve for all the non hardcore raiders...nerfs. I fully understand if they were trying to slow down progression with all of the bs early on in TBC raiding, but the way they did it was just a terrible timesink or a retarded grind your faces against the wall and you might pull through. Gruul, consumables, t5 trash on 45 min respawn...all of it was poorly thoughtout and obviously over-tuned on purpose to prevent guilds from going to far too fast. Many of us had seen this before with Everquest expansions and unfinished content months after the release of said expansions.
Their solution to the difficulty issues after the front lines got through the zones was to nerf it into oblivion until any old guild with some decent gear and half a brain could do it. Remove key quests, allow full entry, and fight now easier bosses so you too can see the whole game! I guess it just irks me that vanilla WoW did NOT have this problem towards the end before TBC came out. Yes zones like MC and BWL got fixes/nerfs for a lot of stupid problems, but on the whole they didn't change as much with even AQ40 and Naxx they pretty much left more alone than any other raid instance I can think of. This is probably why most people never finished that zone, because it wasn't "dumbed down" for them to get easy epics.
Its not that I don't see a value to doing across the board nerfs of content the front-line raiders have already progressed through for Blizzard money-wise, I just think its a further extension of the problem with 1-70 not being a "boot camp" for the game after one hits 70 and still wants to keep progressing. Technically they will continue to get better gear as they beat the next nerfed to hell encounters, but it will be very hard for a middle of the road guild to be one of the guilds seeing the content first because they will not be able to deal with the encounters before they are watered down. Virtually all of the legit "tough" fights that required a higher level of skill to beat have been nerfed in this fashion. Original Gruul may have been a bit much but jesus he couldn't even walk after he got beat so bad with the nerf bat. Fights that were amazing in their original form (Leo and Kael stick out for me) fell victim to the constant whining of the casual raiders who didn't want to have to step up their game.
Combine all of this with the welfare epics they keep making easier and easier to get getting very close to matching the gear the top end raiders see (and mostly through beating the content before its retarded easy after nerfs) I just don't think they can continue to see the top guilds be satisfied with doing the most amount of work for the least amount of benefit. There are exceptions of course but on the whole I see WotLK as the same race to beat the content before the nerf bat hits if you want to feel like your guild actually accomplished something.
Maybe the head raid designer just saw too many pug raids cause too much Doomwalker spam in SMV over and over even after they took out the sub 20% 16k earthquakes. "Wait a while and EZ Mode" became the new fix it.
Precisely! Blizzard purposely allows players to level from 1-70 with relative ease and never prepares them for the reality of the "endgame" in WoW. Imagine if from grades 1 to grades 12 you as a student sat around sang songs and finger painted (the "fun" stuff that children do in primary school). Then you graduate and enter college and suddenly realize that all of those years of non-learning failed to prepare you for your ultimate destination: college and then a career.
This is exactly what Blizzard does by creating the the extremely easy, and accessible content from 1-70 (and made even easier in a previous patch). Players new to MMO's are left confused, dumbfounded and perplexed at what to do next. Suddenly social skills and meeting new people become paramount as one has to literally find a guild in order to experience all of the multi-million dollar content that lies ahead.
Why then has Blizzard knowingly created a play experience that fails to adequately train and prepare the player for the content that lies ahead?
Not only is this a good post but I think it sums up well an issue that has been around for many, many years. In many senses, it is a philosophical difference between Blizzard and previous developers and in some other ways it is a difference in execution.
First off, one has to keep in mind that many of Blizzard's subscriptions will never hit the level cap and will never see the change in direction needed. Much as I play HG:L as a 95% solo game, many people play WoW as a solo game period. Many others play it as a grouped game but only with specific friends and so casually as to seem foreign to most of us here. WoW excels at that on a level that no other game even approaches too; one can party only with friends once a week and hit all the level-specific dungeons and quests and honestly, you'll have a damned good time. For these ultra casual people, things work very well indeed.
Secondly though, we need to delve a little deeper. I have a few close friends that never played EQ or DAoC or UO or AO or whatever, never got into the whole genre and yet did indeed cap out and get confused. This didn't much happen in EQ for example. If you were at max level (and assuming you were not a necro, bard, wizard or druid) you probably had not only grouped but you had probably spent the vast majority of your time online in a group or waiting for one. If you were successful at the cap, it was because you had some grouping/raiding skills and some social skills that meshed. I've played a lot of these games though and the gamut varies a lot. DAoC? More social skills, less need for TCing and such. AO or EVE? Math or a willingness to read forums and follow instructions at least. So on and so on. It's a continuum not hard and fast. We all remember our early grouping efforts in WoW. It was basically people soloing mobs near each other and that to me is not a good thing. It's fine for "kill XX defias YY" but it grates when it is something a little more involved. The really tricky bit is the semi-casual and they tend to burn out. They don't like the fools much but they are loath to go to the extremes that I and others like me go.
Moving on though, you have to ask *how* exactly WoW can teach without hindering those that frankly have no interest in learning. Bob the shaman with two daggers can still kill things. He'll kill em a little slower but honestly, not that much slower. The math and the theorycrafting really only matters when you are raiding or at least grouping. EQ did well because you were both forced to learn your class and because your class was incredibly simplistic. WoW is more intricate by far though and that expectation is a bit too much. Plus, for good or for bad, the model of forced grouping is dead in modern times.
I think WoW has split the difference pretty well in the end. No, it isn't perfect and yes, of course players are forced to visit places like this to learn the details of certain mechanics but in the end, the system does function. Those that want or need to know certain information can get it and those that either don't care or are willfully ignorant can not be burdened by it.
EDIT: An anecdote comes to mind as well.
Back in the early days of Everquest and long before I was involved with the "real" raiding scene, we did things that now would be considered laughable. Keep in mind, these were the days where applicants were expected to be plebes for three months (no loot or rot only and 90%+ attendance) and in an environment where being in X guild instead of Y guild meant being a tier or two behind in gear for a game that really was defined by gear.
We'd do things like have applicants form up in a raid and bark orders in chat. (These were the golden days of zero voice or voice only for officers/etc.) It was like an old-school army thing. "Follow me!" and I'd jump off a cliff or into the bear pit or charge an obviously unkillable target and so on. Don't follow? Next guild for you sir. Even in that environment where training was part of the leveling process, we added a lot more. Most of it wasn't even that cheesy =)
Back in the early days of Everquest and long before I was involved with the "real" raiding scene, we did things that now would be considered laughable. Keep in mind, these were the days where applicants were expected to be plebes for three months (no loot or rot only and 90%+ attendance) and in an environment where being in X guild instead of Y guild meant being a tier or two behind in gear for a game that really was defined by gear.
We'd do things like have applicants form up in a raid and bark orders in chat. (These were the golden days of zero voice or voice only for officers/etc.) It was like an old-school army thing. "Follow me!" and I'd jump off a cliff or into the bear pit or charge an obviously unkillable target and so on. Don't follow? Next guild for you sir. Even in that environment where training was part of the leveling process, we added a lot more. Most of it wasn't even that cheesy =)
Leading my guild's raids from BWL through early Naxx, I really developed an appreciation for the benefits of close order drill. There's a reason militaries the world over still do this for new recruits. I honestly think my guild would at that time have benefited alot from me making them practice marching and following instructions, if I could ever have convinced them to do it.
It took me a long time raiding to realise that it was more important to do the job I was assigned than to smash mobs in the face. When it dawned on me I wondered how I had survived this far without being gkicked, I consider myself a fairly intelligent player so I wonder how many people in my guild have also come to this realisation and how many are still "duh, smash face". Although I think the use of damage meters might have prolonged that realisation a little bit, I am fairly competitive when it comes to games.
I believe that Blizzard considers TBC a success in many regards. The steady supply of PvP gear and badge gear, while not always popular among hardcore raiders, have been by large very well received by the player base. Nerfing of many of the bosses and removing of attunements (to SSC/TK and soon to MH/BT) have created a raiding climate that allows guilds to progress at a steady pace through the content.
I do think if they learned anything for WotLK it will be to give people easier raids (at least the first big one) and more epics. Sure, there will be the odd rant about welfare epics and loot piñatas by those who will rush through any content that isn't fundamentally broken.
I wonder if overtuning bosses as a way to slow down progression is a thing of the past too. It seems that things like the AQ event or the Sunwell unlocking or even the tedious task of farming for resistance gear does the job better than having people pound their head against a wall. The balancing on Karazhan/Gruul/Mag/heroics, while keeping people busy, did a lot of harm to a lot of guilds at the start of TBC.
I believe that Blizzard considers TBC a success in many regards. The steady supply of PvP gear and badge gear, while not always popular among hardcore raiders, have been by large very well received by the player base. Nerfing of many of the bosses and removing of attunements (to SSC/TK and soon to MH/BT) have created a raiding climate that allows guilds to progress at a steady pace through the content.
I think you are correct that Blizzard does think that TBC is a success because they have, in a sense, equalized the playing field. In TBC that have made it possible for the average Joe, through badges and arenas, to acquire gear that is almost as good as the best gear that raiding has to offer. From a numbers standpoint it makes sense for Blizzard to do this as the majority of their customers are “the average joe” type of player.
However, for me, it’s a bit disheartening because the hardcore raiders have lost their "Elitist" aura (couldn’t think of a better way to put it). The guilds that took the time to tackle that new content where rewarded with gear that truly was the best available and their stats and dps reflected that. In TBC that gap is marginal if not non-existent (with the preliminary numbers for the S4 weapons).
It seems to me that Blizzard is trying to the “one stop shop” of MMO’s, and I’m not sure that is entirely possible. Others would better tackle this subject as my view is a bit bias toward PvE because that is what I enjoy. And feel that skill should be rewarded greater than folks willing to grind for gear.
I think you are correct that Blizzard does think that TBC is a success because they have, in a sense, equalized the playing field. In TBC that have made it possible for the average Joe, through badges and arenas, to acquire gear that is almost as good as the best gear that raiding has to offer. From a numbers standpoint it makes sense for Blizzard to do this as the majority of their customers are “the average joe” type of player.
However, for me, it’s a bit disheartening because the hardcore raiders have lost their "Elitist" aura (couldn’t think of a better way to put it). The guilds that took the time to tackle that new content where rewarded with gear that truly was the best available and their stats and dps reflected that. In TBC that gap is marginal if not non-existent (with the preliminary numbers for the S4 weapons).
I think this goes back to that interview from 2004 which I can't find at the moment saying that raiders and non-raiders would have equally powerful swords, but the raider's would "burst into flames when used". At BC's release, the gear gap was small because the upgrades were small; now, the gear gap is small because there are multiple ways to obtain high-quality gear. In either case, the difference between the top guilds and Joe Semi-Casual isn't all that large, and I don't see how that's a bad thing. The guilds that take the time to tackle new content get the reward of seeing new content; the guilds and players that don't can still get the gear but they'll never see, say, Maiev kill Illidan.
It seems to me that Blizzard is trying to the “one stop shop” of MMO’s, and I’m not sure that is entirely possible. Others would better tackle this subject as my view is a bit bias toward PvE because that is what I enjoy. And feel that skill should be rewarded greater than folks willing to grind for gear.
I'd agree that you can't have everything, but not for the reason you give; more for the pattern of nerfing PvE to balance PvP and vice versa.
I think, with all respect, that the raiders in this thread may be too attached to their mechanics.
In Mario cart, there's an exploit where rapidly shifting right and left will make you go faster than anything else. So everyone does it, and it becomes part of the game. Likewise bunny hopping in quake, or whatever that thing is called in smash brothers. Each mechanic is counter-intuitive and the vast majority of players never discover it, which makes them unfit for tournament play.
A similar thing has happened in wow. If you remember when the shield block mechanics were discovered, it was widely considered a bug or exploit due to the nature of combat tables. Seriously, players should be able to explain combat effects in terms of flavor text (I raise my shield so he can't hit me as hard) rather than programming concepts (the table fills with alternate possibilities and crushing blows are pushed off).
What blizzard should have done is to nerf these unexpected mechanics as soon as they were discovered. Make shield block not stop crushes. Make hunter auto shots continue regardless to casts made. Get rid of rolling ignite ticks and rolling lifebloom bonuses much sooner than they did. Remove the hidden cooldown on windfury weapon, balancing it somewhere else. In fact, they eventually nerfed a lot of "raiding skills" like the double sacrifice of demons or stacking weapon skill to reduce glancing blows, but it never happened quick enough.
Rather, Blizzard usually tries to pull a "as intended" and fold it into the game. Some bosses don't crush anymore (shield block bug)--but now minimaxers need to measure which ones. Shaman weapons are itemized to be slower (unexpected windfury mechanics)--but now people need to know to avoid other weapons.
It's precisely the embracing of unexpected mechanics that causes unclear, unintuitive gameplay.
Seriously, players should be able to explain combat effects in terms of flavor text (I raise my shield so he can't hit me as hard) rather than programming concepts (the table fills with alternate possibilities and crushing blows are pushed off).
For all intents and purposes a Warrior's Shield Block does feel like it works the first way. Due to the fact that it gives 75% shield block you don't need to specifically gear for it outside of wearing a general set of tanking gear, and it basically comes down to "Hey, I don't take these unusually large hits when I use shield block".
For Paladins on the other hand you need to be aware of the mechanics because the block provided by Holy Shield isn't large enough to get rid of crushing blows by itself.
Some of your other examples confuse me as well; Hunters I agree on, but Lifebloom is pretty clear from the tooltip on how it works, and it just takes some minor experimentation to realise that yes, it might be a good idea to keep it rolling as opposed to casting it once for the 7 ticks and final bloom.
buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of
I recall Warcraft 3, and how everyone I've talked to (not that many) shared a similar experience. I'm assuming this is the norm:
Complete all of Warcraft 3 except the last mission (Hyjal) fairly easily on normal difficulty.
Get a lot better for Hyjal on normal difficult, and eventually beat it.
Fire up a skirmish game in Booty Bay against a Normal opponent, get brutally thrashed.
Fire up a skirmish game in Booty Bay against an Easy opponent, get brutally thrashed.
Log on to Battle.net in a 2v2, get brutally thrashed.
Ponder why all of the hours spent playing WC3's campaign haven't taught you a thing about build orders, rushing, scouting, peon assassination, and so on.
"I've never known people as dogmatic as those who insist that all opinion is equally subjective."
Why then has Blizzard knowingly created a play experience that fails to adequately train and prepare the player for the content that lies ahead?
There is knowing and then there is knowing.
Let me provide you with an analogy. Let's assume you were one of the cool kids; the things you do were cool, the people you hung out with were cool, all the cool things. As a cool kid, you recognized people as cool or not cool. You could even tell uncool kids how to dress or how to not snort when they laughed, but that got old fast as most of the time, you were talking to a wall. You never understood why they were uncool, because you weren't there yourself, and hadn't been there for years.
Training, using this analogy, consists of transforming uncool kids into cool kids. It's tough but it can be done, as we've so often see in Disney movies. Changing a mind set, however, isn't something done by the trainer, it is done by the trainee. Whatever blocks they have put in their own way will undermine anything they learn on the surface; at best they will be able to follow the instructions (don't wear white after Labor Day), but not really understand why.
Now, to clarify the analogy into what I'm trying to say. Nerds and jocks seem to be totally different cultures, but excelling at World of Warcraft is exactly like merging nerd culture and jock culture to create players who deeply understand the mechanics and processes of the games they play, while having the drive and social adeptness to play at the level they want to play. I think that is a very tall order, one that Blizzard is not up to yet.
The other side of the coin is that the strongest social direction comes from the guilds that players stay in. It's actually the raid leaders who determine much of the strength of the guild in its push up the achievement ladder. You can have a strong leader in a weak pack, who will transform the pack into something to be reckoned with (Disney movies again). If you have a weak leader, no pack of any strength will stay very long.
I think that training raid leaders to lead would have a much bigger impact on opening up content to the larger populace than training the raiders.
It's precisely the embracing of unexpected mechanics that causes unclear, unintuitive gameplay.
Your examples are poor and don't support your point at all. The WF cooldown was intentionally added by Blizzard in a patch; if it is unintuitive they have only themselves to blame. The same applies to Steady Shot, spell coefficients, weapon skill items, these are mostly post-release mechanics that Blizzard added themselves. They don't even resemble player-discovered mechanics like SSB's wavedashing or L-cancelling.
Metagaming things like rolling ignites really only came into play in cutting-edge raiding... the examples you've missed are the important ones as they are totally necessary to adequate gameplay, and near-impossible to discover individually.
The problem with the expansion goes back to pre-expansion and Naxxramas. Blizzard released it before a majority of server upgrades. This place some realms at a great disadvantage as after the first seven or eight bosses ... prime time raiding on the old hardware was daunting to say the least. The realms which were upgraded last had just enough time to barely finish Naxx before the expansion. This left many raider weary, as they had been focusing on school, holidays, and naxx right up until the expansion. Then factor in the race to seventy and the thought or going into SSC with the same levels of consumables required(naxx), for gear that at best could be described as lateral. Then have Blizzard's promise a reworking of consumables(which simply took to long) and you have a recipe for disaster. If that is not bad enough, when they finally went back and rebalanced content and iLvls, it seemed as if Tier6 content was designed for the older iLevels and therefore simply to easy. Combine this with the issues of massive parallel content(basically meaning time played is the most important factor)(you could also factor in losing some raiders due to arena only becoming viable.) and it is no wonder that many guilds found it challenging to survive.
Well to make a long story short this is what I hope Blizzard has learned from their past mistakes.
1) If there is ever a hardware upgraded require to run new content, make sure the new content is not released until all servers can handle said content. Even if this means downtime and spending extra money on their part. To me this was their largest mistake, which did not have its effects fully measured until after the expansion.
2) When designing the expansion make up your mind where you plan to place the first instance. Having one with the same level of consumable requirements, while rewarding inferior gear makes it difficult to motivate raiders. Considering how easy consumables are now... it should not be an issue again, but going into the expansion you just have to wonder what they were thinking? Either make the first instance lateral/slightly down from Sunwell, or make it challenging but make sure gear matches the effort involved.
I would like to see the first instance be more akin to a training instance. Something more for raiders who have not raided before. I am not saying it should not be enjoyable to hardcore raiders, but not something exceptionally challenging. The dual track/single track well personally I prefer single track raiding due to the reduction in raiding hours required. Arena/pvp gear/10 mans would fill in the voids to allow guilds with raiding issues to simply outgear encounters they are having trouble with in due time. In the end I would guess you will never please both sides, those which were helped with parallel content would hate to go back to the old ways, and those who want to reduce the time they feel they have to play would prefer single track raiding.
I would like to see the first instance be more akin to a training instance. Something more for raiders who have not raided before. I am not saying it should not be enjoyable to hardcore raiders, but not something exceptionally challenging.
I think the best example of an introductory raid encounter in TBC is Lurker. Something that doesn't have big logistical demands and a very steep learning curve (like Maulgar) or randomness that can easily screw you over (Gruul) or needs a lot of situational awareness (VR). It's a tank and spank with a devastating but easily avoidable ability in one phase, then kill some adds in the other phase. It's also long enough to require mana conservation, and interesting enough trying to beat my own WWS records that I don't mind doing it even though it's really easy. Something similar as the first WotLK raid would be appropriate, I think.
When my guild started Maulgar with a scraped together team it wasn't fun and we wasted so much time recovering from bad pulls that we hardly spent any time doing the fight. This was pretty dispiriting, and gives a bad impression of 25-man raiding since you don't feel like there's any progress. We found Lurker pretty easy, but seeing Leo go 70% -> 50% -> sub-15% over two/three weeks had everyone raring to get back at him for more tries.
I couldn't fit this cleanly into the last paragraph: Your survival only depends upon the tanks not dying, so for the new recruit there's no real need to pay attention to anything apart from who gets killed next.
Lurker is also unique in being the only T5 encounter we have a laugh about people screwing up on, and we can't be the only guild that bets on which newbie will die this week.
Last edited by Joq : 03/07/08 at 11:49 AM.
Reason: Damn quote tags
02/23/08, 5:36 AM
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