Maynard

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).

 

Wolfshead

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.

 

Onomatopeizator

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.

 

◊ Ugato

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.

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.

I think the answer to that is actually fairly simple - Anias already hit on it.
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

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.

 

crimsonsentinel

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.

 

thorpac

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?

Good suggestion.

 

Opioid

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

 

rayijin

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.

 

Nocenhatred

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.

 

Junpei

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.

 

Drunkmunky

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?

 

Merrith

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.

 

Northerner

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 =)

 

• Orestus

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.

 

Drunkmunky

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.

 

Sebalot

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.

 

Redelm

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.

 

Incoherence

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.

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.