Nezralix

Yes, MMO's have a certain obligation to leave some content to the imagination of the majority of their players, and to that extent they may have even made BT/Hyjal too easy. But at the same time, it's inherently obvious that Blizzard still wants to encourage new players and retain players who aren't in top-flight guilds, so that requires new content and occasional revisions to existing content to keep it fresh or enticing. It's a difficult balancing act, and "I want to see all the content on two hours a week!" is as foolish as "PHOOEY to players who don't EARN their right to raiding content through sweat, tears and blood!" For every overly casual player who whines that the game should be tailored to their limited schedule and limited interest, there's a hardcore player who whines that the game should be tailored to their extreme schedule and extreme interest. So let's not get into the game of arguing about who's more unreasonable.

This is just plain idiocy, and that kind of simplistic view of the game has been blown apart in countless threads on this forum. Does it please you to think that raiding is so black and white?

 

Dralmoo

This is in the new 2.4 combat log, by default, for what its' worth. Right click on [dead person], select "Show me what happened to [dead person]?" and there you go.

 

Uglesh

Getting back to the "learning curve" discussion.

I completely agree with many people here that the game itself has a lot to do with the apparent lack of "skill" shown by many players. This idea of inherant skill is simply obsurd. I have taken people who are new to the game who were honestly being out DPS'd by the tanks on their first Kara run and educated them to the point where they became top 5 DPS. The solo grind to 70 doesn't teach people ANYTHING about their class... and this is a design fault.

I think that implementing even some sort of "daily" type quest that tested basics like shot rotation, sheild block uptime, DoT uptime, effective healing.. etc. (picture a sort of training ground) While this might become mindless for experienced players, it would at least become a mechanic for players to work on skills that they will need later.

 

Talgog

I wouldn't say that it teaches nothing. Rather, it doesn't teach skills necessary for raiding such as how to push your DPS to the theoretical maximum of what your gear allows.

There is plenty of room and encouragement for most players to experiement with what their class can do, and a lot of people do. Paladins soloing elites with sword and board Light/Light (long before buffed Protection), warlocks and hunters seeing if there is any possible way to avoid grouping for group quests, mages seeing how many things they can blow the %&^# up at once, and so on.

However, a warlock rounding up an elite felguard from Forge Camp: Fear and beating Banthar's face in does not teach much in the way of how to DPS down Boss X.

Most people are willing to look at their book of abilities and see what works on a given problem. What you are talking about is something quite different. If anything, Blizzard has to nerf or immediately fix certain types of player creativity with their classes. It took a matter of minutes after the PTR opened before warlocks tried grabbing the "demon" tagged Pit Lord Commanders and found out that they could. See also: Paladin one-shots Kazzak, kiting Kazzak to Stormwind, suiciding to Kazzak/Krull to grief other or same faction, enslaving Lord Banehollow, enslaving giant felhound in Blasted Lands, bringing Corrupted Blood or exploding pets into IF/Org, rogues making off with tens of thousands of gold from Heroic Chests, etc.

 

◊ Anias

I want blizzard's worlds, with valve or nintendo's player training.

There's a large amount of player training for the multi-player segment that is very rudimentary. That's a shame really.

Ignore the casual/hardcore argument for a moment and just consider someone who simply "plays wow". How are they going to intuit how hunter mechanics work? It's by no means obvious. Same deal for learning the basics of raid leadership.

That sort of basic "this is what you need to know to perform this job in a raid with minimal competency" should be taught by the game. It's largely not. That's a problem in the design.

 

Elensar

You have me all wrong and slating my own ability is unnecessary. The players who seek to improve themselves or are willing to learn in no way fall under my bad player tag (why would they). The bad players are those that are completely ignorant of what it takes to play their class to a standard higher than a failed kara pug. Everyone has encountered them, some have played since day 1 others are new in TBC. A reset learning curve wont help those that are happy in their ignorant bliss.

 

Shandara

In all honesty those players are not what raids are aimed at and never should they be, no matter how much they cry. Blizzard should (and has for the most part) aim their raids at a level expecting a certain amount of adequacy. The debate whether the current level is too high or too low is outside the scope of this discussion.

From these and other forums/web resources any motivated person new to the game may find all the information needed to become a 'top' raider. All they might lack is reflexes, but the 'inherent' skill they might have will have them acquire this quickly enough. The learning curve (if it is there) is very small for these kinds of players, in all honesty.

Is this learning curve of the OP aimed at educating the (apparently) non-motivated masses then? Unless they want to better themselves actively, no amount of forced participation in 'getting to know the game' in-game activities is going to help. And resetting the skill curve at the start of the expansion won't change this either. It didn't work 2-3 years ago, why should it now?

Pointing a person to the appropriate resources should always be enough.

 

Mode

Anecdote time!

I participated in a ZA pug the other night. Confused as to how one of the hunters did so very poorly, I glanced at recount.

Autoshot: 70%
Aimed shot: 20%
Serpent Sting: 9%.

He used steady shot once. It was probably an accident. The culture of his guild allows him to be like this, probably perfectly happy with his sub-500 DPS. The contrast between them and mine is pretty stark.

Everyone in my guild is an experienced MMORPG that I know from outside WOW. We grinded in MUDs, we yelled "BRING BACK PRECASTING, BIYOTCH!" from the roof tops, we taxi'd to victory in WW2OL, we know what NEED SOW 4 CR means, we've been brutally flamed by MMORPG developers, and a few of our number even work in the industry now. From level 1 to 70, we've been intensely competitive with each other. There's no need for us to call anyone out for sucking because we're our own worst critics. If one of us just sucked on the meters and couldn't figure out why, they'd turn to us and ask, "What am I doing wrong?"

Theirs is a group of friendly people that plays WoW together.

---

My personal favorite solution to people sucking is a daily mentorship quest. Lowbie players get into a queue and are automatically matched up with 70's of the same class. Neither party HAS to do anything but stay in a group with the other for an hour. The high-level player gets gold, the lowbie gets experience for a quest and maybe a +speed buff or something. The idea is that few feel comfortable just walking up to a stranger and asking for help, if two people are put together for the explicit purpose of one helping the other, the barriers'll be broken down. Some 70's SUCK (see above), but hopefully the correct info will get around better than the bad stuff.

 

zeidrich

I had coffee this morning and ran into someone I went to school with, along with his father and my co-worker. Somehow WoW came up. He has been playing since it came out, and has a level 70 warlock.

He asked what class I play, I said I have a level 70 paladin. He said "No way man! Paladins SUCK! Warlocks are where it's at!" The topics were mostly guided by the other people at the table. My co-worker, who plays in a semi casual 10-man raiding guild and the warlock's father, who doesn't play the game. Things came around to what content we do. I said a few words about raiding. He said "Yeah, I can't even do that stuff, because on my server, horde outnumber us like 20,000 to 1, and I get pwned just trying to get to the gate!"

Somehow the topic of keybindings came up, and he said "Yeah, but on some classes, like the warlock you have way more spells than you have keys so I just turn on all my extra action bars and then I can click them all. Sometimes I have to move buttons around, but I always make sure I have all of my damage over time skills there."

I said very few words the entire conversation, letting the majority of the flow be dictated by the other people at the table. But there is absolutely no way that this guy is playing the same game as I am.

This guy brought up wild statements like that the expansion was set to be released in September but kept being pushed back, and that horde was Blizzard's favored faction and alliance are crapped on etc.

So, to that extent I think that bad players, such as this guy, will never manage to become good players. Not because people can't improve their skills, but because the game that people like this play is so far removed from the game that I play, our worlds only collide in the form of a terribad pug.

There's no DPS rotations in that world. There's no maximizing anything. There's only feeble attempts, goofing off, and excuses.

Anyone who takes the game seriously, strives to improve themselves, and can put in the time, can likely kill Illidan.

 

• Whiteknight

There is an interesting conflict I see regarding how folk describe TBC raiding compared to classic WoW. Almost all folk will agree that individual responsibility in raids is much much higher. You hear common statements like 'everyone needs to be awake and paying attention' or similar things in the context of most TBC raid encounters. Folk say 'deadweight' is a much higher burden.

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 all of it is true, and the discrepancy can be described by a little fairly elementary mathematics.

Let f be the chance that someone fails.

The probability of your raid failing is related to the binomial distribution:
classic = 1 - (1-f)^40
tbc = 1 - (1-f)^25

The big difference between the two is the exponent. This means that you can significantly increase the individual difficulty in any encounter and still result in an encounter that is *easier* overall for the raid to execute.

The obvious insight that comes out of this relates to how pre-tbc encounters often had a lot of slack built in. Individual failure was much less strict. Folk could die on most encounters and provided it wasn't above a threshold or one or two critical roles, you were generally ok (read: bliz encounter design reducing the exponent from 40 to some smaller number).

Fights where everyone had to execute perfectly were very rare pre-tbc because of this issue. Everyone remembers them. Gothik, 4h, Thaddius, etc.
TBC encounters it's easier to have a much lower tolerance for failure on an indivdual level and still not run into the binomial probability of failure problem just due to the lower number of players. So you can have fights like Archimonde and actually have it work (if anyone thinks archimonde would scale to 40 people, you'd need to go revisit basic probability theory :P).


Anyway, the conclusion simply is - it's harder to design fights for 25 people that will take weeks to learn. At least without throwing random failure into the equation. Just because the mean time to failure for your raid is so much lower even given the same level of skill of individuals.


As to providing training content, I think Karazhan provides an excellent training ground for most raid roles. CC, add control, tanking, reactive healing, raid healing, proactive healing, dps checks, etc. Furthermore I think the 5mans are varied enough to provide a good training ground too. I'd venture to say heroic trash is a bit overkill for teaching tanking, but it can be a challenge for folk that want to push it.
Is there scope for more content to bring folk up to speed? For sure - and I'd certainly say bliz is planning on it in the next expansion.

 

Whitemane

I think the game is just fine as is, the people that want to improve will improve and those that can't be arsed would probably not even respond well to any tutorial in the first place. As I see, the tools are readily available to improve yourself but not in the form of an in-game tutorial. It takes some digging and some thinking, but not too much really. Most classes aren't as complex as the hunter class and you can become fairly proficient with any by just applying some simple logic and dedication.

Any in-game tutorial, or any such thing, would probably raise the bar some but it would really be groundbreaking or usher in any kind of new era. Dumb people would still be dumb and crappy players would still be crappy, just at a higher level.

 

Doroteasenjk

(I presume you mean "wouldn't really be groundbreaking". I will answer your post as translated by me :=)

This whole issue is predicated on two things: players want to get into the real end game content and fight the big bad bosses, and they may be stuck in smaller, slower guilds; Blizzard wants those players to experience real end game content because they want the game to expand and take in new players. Both of those statements of "fact" obviate against making strictly exclusive content, and keeping attunements in place, and keeping barriers always too high.

As a side note, a lot of people are not willfully bad; they may need encouragement and support to learn how to improve their game.

It's not necessary to have a tutorial, but it is a very good idea to have a training ground. This is related to learning theory, as I understand it. Some people learn by reading and then by doing it. Some people learn by doing it and then by reading about it. Some learn by watching others do it and then copying it. I won't even go into other learning modalities.

Forums and theorycrafting threads do not cut it for most people. For one thing, the theories themselves are too complex. The threads get very long, the details get very cumbersome, and a minor patch can kill skill rotations in the blink of an eye. Summary threads like Working Theories of Theorycrafting help to some extent, but there is so much inertia from all of the data and equations and opinions, that that thread is hard to keep current.

Karazhan is more of a training ground than UBRS ever was. For all I knew when we were running UBRS in 2005, things just happened. We were never really sure why, but they just did. People who came from earlier MMOs knew that wasn't correct. There was a lot to be learned in such encounters, and they knew how to read combat logs and work on their skill sets.

More importantly, I did not understand raid management. Nobody in the guilds that I belonged to had done anything more organized than City of Heroes. Raiding operations were brand new to most of us because we had never raided before. Reading strats only told you some of the basics, it didn't make it real when you had to deal with the people you had signed up, or could recruit.

Coming back to the learning aspect, Most of the current players of WoW had no raiding experience before WoW; most of the players since BC had zero raiding experience. Part of the issue is training the players, and part is the training of the raid leaders. Very good raid leaders are quite rare. You might find maybe a dozen on a server. I suspect fewer than that. Some guilds have one, and a lucky few have two. There are a bunch of people with leadership aspirations and skills who need to learn how to lead the end game raids. The surest way to burn those people out before they become very good raid leaders is to overwhelm them with a greater number of players, the complexity of the instances and complexity of the mechanics.

So, it is very much in Blizzard's best interests to keep enhancing the depth of the game by making more end game raiders, raiding further into the content, and staying and playing the game longer. Putting in training grounds that allow raid leaders to better learn leading, players to learn roles, and groups to work together will help to raise the standard of play, while reducing the need to dumb down the harder parts of end game.

 

Dralmoo

I really wonder about 25 man Naxx in WotLK. Fights like Gothik or Heigan just don't seem like they could ever be accessible to the level 80 equivalent of a Gruul/Lurker/VR guild without totally changing the nature of the fights. It seems to me, at least, Naxx at 60 was much harder than even BT at 70, even accounting for the "only need 25 good players instead of 40" factor.

Or maybe it's their intention that those guilds just do spider wing etc, who knows.

 

Katria

This is a vast oversimplification. I know lots of players that would like to improve, but don't want to scour the internet for advice. And many things are not intuitive...without reading this site, I would have no idea how important hit rating is for rogues. I quit the game for a about a year before coming back several months into BC. Talent trees had changed (I was already killing things in outland before I noticed I had no talents since my points had been refunded), there were new types of stats on gear, etc. How can deep subtlety not be good for DPS with talents that raise agility and AP by a significant percentage? How is it intuitive that sword spec procs main hand swings? Without knowing that, wouldn't a 1.3 dagger in off-hand be good for more combat potency procs?

Sure I did know that slice and dice is essential for DPS, but there are still rogues who don't know it. And this can be true for any class...I remember running with pallys in 5 mans as a new 70, and thinking that they suck for holding aggro...until I ran into pallys who knew what they were doing. Dunno what the first couple pallys were doing wrong, but it had to be substantial.

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.

It's not always a matter of being dumb, just unwilling to study this stuff outside of the game. So doing whatever seems to work, with occasional advice from guildmates/friends, and stumbling along.

Gear advice would be helpful too...general advice about what stats to focus on, this could come from class trainers. Rogues often go for crit over hit, which is hardly optimal for PvE DPS. But that should be what trainers are for...to actually train you in the basics, not just offer you skills.

Think of it this way...imagine you had never been to this website. In fact, imagine the internet doesn't exist, and you have no addons to parse your combat logs. You log on, do daily quests, run some 5 mans, and log off. How do you learn to optimize your character from only in-game info? There should be tools in place to help people do just that. And even though it won't be truly optimal (and I'm sure whatever Bliz thinks is optimal you would all be shaking your heads at), it will help a lot to bring people up to a certain minimal level of viability.

 

mko

By not being a moron and being able to comprehend elementary math/logic?

I've only skimmed through all this but from my personal experience, when I read what Xl says about how dumb people hold their guild back and all that, it has nothing to do with simple min/maxing. It isn't knowing whether a 9dmg gem is better than 6dmg4crit or whether those 2 points should go into imp evisc or murder. It's just blatantly stupid gearing/speccing/etc due to either a. not caring enough or b. being a fucking retard. You don't need to bust out spreadsheets and charts to understand that drain life in pve as a warlock sucks and shadowbolts are >>>>>. You don't need to be brilliant to understand imp kick is a useless talent and should not be taken over weapon mastery if your goal is PvE. Pre BC everyone knew that MS sucked dick and fury was amazing. Everyone knew fire shit all over every other mage spec in Naxx but how many AP pyro retards did you see running around all day in the non bleeding edge, average raiding guilds? assa/prep rogues? etcetcetc

Sometimes people don't care and just play to fuck around which is fine, but most of the time from what I've seen in several guilds is that most are just fucking stupid. And of course, when you're too stupid to understand how to simply spec your character for it to be halfway decent, there's a very good chance you're gona fail at knowing how to press your 2-3 buttons in the right order and how to move away from scripted laserbeam of death. I just don't see how a popup in game giving them advice is going to help. Why even have all the options and possibilities in the game then? Why not just remove gems/enchants/talent trees and have everything be set at the best possible choices? I would be willing to bet all the people that are terrible would still be terrible if that were the case.

After playing this game through every boss on dps, tank and heals, absolutely nothing has ever been any sort of challenge outside of possibly archimonde, pre nerf shahraz, kt and... ya. There's no "skill" requirement to flawlessly play through this game as an individual, it's just either being an idiot or not being an idiot. Whether or not the game should be tuned to cater to the masses who are (sadly) incompetent and inept is a different question, but to suggest that any problems any guild faces in this game are due to anything other than 100% player fault is dumb.

 

Riallatar

I wouldn't exactly say the math built into WoW is elementary. People with advanced degrees in it debate formulas for days and weeks after they're altered to figure out the best item or stat to choose.

 

Douglas

Testify, brother! Any ideas on how to change it?

I'd like to see more grouping with NPCs. Most solo grouping with NPCs in my experience is the generally-painful "escort quest". Well, how might we mix that up?

I'm imagining an escort quest where a tank NPC escorts you through a group of very rough mobs with either progressively less forgiving enrage timers or a steady spawn rate. To get through the escort mission, you have to both DPS down the mobs fast enough to move along the path, but also avoid pulling agro off the NPC tank. This is definitely stuff that DPSers need to know how to do, that the solo game doesn't necessarily teach 'em. It's also not too rough to imagine a "keep the healer alive" escort, or a "for god's sake don't break the CC" escort.

 

Uglesh

Thank you for your helpful and insightful post. Such well articulated and thought out replies are hardly seen these days outside of the General Forums.


I have seen 30 page threads of people arguing back and forth over the value of stats or talent specs. By no means is it reasonable to expect your average game player to devote that much time and energy to understanding their class. While there will always be an element of min/max'ing that escapes the general population, the game SHOULD provide the gamer with enough knowledge to at least move into raiding if they want. Right now too much emphasis falls on the shoulders of Guild Leaders and Officers to educate new players.

As encounters become more challenging and dynamic, this knowledge gap is growing and one side is going to be hurt by it. Either the end game players will be upset because it's not challenging enough or new players will become disinterested due to the overly steep learning curve and a "glass ceiling" type effect.

 

Sillia

Perhaps I am coming late to the discussion... but wouldn't everyone expect the raiding curve to reset each expansion, due to needing to learn to use new skills/classes/mechanics introduced in that expansion?

I mean... pre-BC, druid healers mostly used downranked Healing Touch, hunters had an aimed/arcane/multishot rotation, warlocks had to manage the number of DoTs, shadow priests were novelties, and there were only paladins *or* shaman in raids.

Now druid healers are trees and never use healing touch, ever. Hunters use steady shot and kill command, high end warlocks eschew affliction altogether and go destruction, shadow priests are extremely valuable, and you can have both a totem farm and blessings for all.

They are adding a whole new class, in addition to new skills for 70-80. I think that it would behoove them to reset raid difficulty again, simply to get people used to the new class and skills.

 

Pheroz

I don't know. I sort of thought that the 'playing in groups' was taught by the 5-mans at 70.

Things i needed to learn to function in a group, which I certainly didn't learn from grinding or questing I did as I relentlessly farmed the level 70 5 man dungeons.

Needing to go through dungeons for karazhan attunement, then for reputation grinds, then again at a higher level of difficulty for badges and other goodies. That's what taught me to work in a team.

Things like breaking CC, maximizing and sustaining my damage, managing threat, positioning - you get very basic elem