Class Difficulty Vs. Encounter Difficulty

Draele · 06/16/08, 12:31 AM

As an overall "skill" design philosophy I can't help but look at Blizzard and wonder if they could have gone about it all a different way. There's two ways to build game complexity, allowing for player "skill" to influence their game experience thus making it interesting. You can go the route of making the game rather simplistic at the core level, with rather straightforward class abilities, talents, etc, but throw a huge monkey wrench at the players via raid boss gimmicks and make the skill of the game based on the gimmicks.

The problem here, or my problem at least, is several of these gimmicks simply feel forced and uninteresting. At this point you've all easily mastered your individual classes...resulting in little more than repetitive button mashing while jumping through hoops. At best you end up with a slightly more complex sequence of button mashes while still jumping through the same hoops. Likewise in PvP... you learn the basic tactics of your class, the muscle memory sinks in, you learn what other classes do, how to counter it, etc. Once you pass this rudimentary learning curve 90% of the PvP game is based either on who you end up fighting- what comp you end up facing determines so very very much OR the RNG slaps you in the face, or smiles at you at it slaps the other guy. This system results in a very low skill ceiling. It's almost binary. You "get it" or you don't "get it".

This system offers very little room for growth as a player. If you haven't gotten it after 2 year you probably won't ever get it. If you already got it...well, you have reached the plateau and can't rise any more. All that's left for improvement in the raid game is more synchronized hoop jumping through different hoops- maybe it will be an obstacle course this time? All that's left to improve upon in the PvP game is changing up your muscle memory a little bit with some new skills. Maybe a counter to an ability you didn't have before. It will still be more of the same.

But what if it weren't a skill plateau, but a ramp? What if mastering your individual class were the emphasis rather than the hoop jumping? Sure, the hoops would need to be there so every fight wouldn't be identical, but they wouldn't be the focus. Playing your class could be difficult. DPSing a target dummy could be interesting and challenging if you seek to maximize your damage...if the game were set up to be more complex on the micro level of each player doing their job in a vacuum. Many tools can be used to create this sort of challenge... from skill combinations, to more reactive skill usage, to more precise timing requirements, the list goes on...

Thoughts?

Glaurong · 06/16/08, 12:36 AM

I think their strategy so far has been to think about these issues when they expand the talents/skills during an expansion. TBC changed the way a lot of classes approached the game entirely. I'm sure Lich King will do the same.

Ton · 06/16/08, 12:58 AM

Early WotLK talents/abilities seem to suggest a focus on making maximum dps/threatbuilding more difficult. For instance, the alpha warrior talents Sudden Death, Bloodsurge, and Sword and Board. SD gives you a 30% chance on a melee critical strike to allow Execute to be used regardless of target health, and Bloodsurge makes your Bloodthirst crits reduce your Slam cast time by 100%, and Sword and Board gives your melee abilities a 10% chance to refresh your Shield Slam cooldown and lower it's rage cost to nothing for 5 seconds.

To me, this looks like they're at least consciously trying to shake up the idea of a set ability use sequence. Which, while probably not incredibly difficult, would certainly be more tricky than the rotations in place right now for pretty much everyone and send things like the hunter dps macro the way of the dodo. At least I hope it does.

Anedris · 06/16/08, 4:32 AM

The Death Knight looks more involved than most of the presently existing classes, and many of the new talents and spells do seem to push towards a more involved DPS/healing/tanking rotation. At a certain base level however I think that the players with room to grow - the people to whom WoW is basically an easy game (though the logistics of finding or managing a raiding guild most assuredly are not easy) - us, in other words - are not Blizzard's customer base. Blizzard gets most of their money from the people who "don't get it after two years" - the people who might never reach the level cap, or play an hour or two a night blissfully unaware of such things as 5-second rules, crushing blow mechanics, shot clipping, latency compensation, etc.

And Blizzard's huge success has come from catering to that audience.

Zmaj · 06/16/08, 5:28 AM

I believe this was blizzard intention to begin with. Overly complex class mechanics would turn a lot of casual people away and thus decrease the number of subscribers they receive. Lets face it, they are still a business and it's all about making money. You can appeal to both casual and hardcore gamers by making class difficulty relatively simple and adjust the content difficulty from there.

This of course has it's downsides as to make endgame raiding sufficiently difficult usually requires the rng system to play a big part in the encounter.

Prinsesa · 06/16/08, 5:35 AM

Originally Posted by Anedris

The Death Knight looks more involved than most of the presently existing classes, and many of the new talents and spells do seem to push towards a more involved DPS/healing/tanking rotation. At a certain base level however I think that the players with room to grow - the people to whom WoW is basically an easy game (though the logistics of finding or managing a raiding guild most assuredly are not easy) - us, in other words - are not Blizzard's customer base. Blizzard gets most of their money from the people who "don't get it after two years" - the people who might never reach the level cap, or play an hour or two a night blissfully unaware of such things as 5-second rules, crushing blow mechanics, shot clipping, latency compensation, etc.

And Blizzard's huge success has come from catering to that audience.

For us player who are "in the know", so to speak, I think it's our responsibility to help everyone else get it, succeed and move forward.

One of my proudest achievements was just the other week, when I PUGed Karazhan with a group of people I had never run into before yet managed to clear everyone but Netherspite in just 3 hours. Say what you will about "LOL KARA IS SRS", but as someone who used to spend 3 hours on just Prince back in 2.1, that was quite an achievement.

The key? Idiot-proofing your instructions, making them as simple as humanly possible. I didn't explain that Nightbane cleaved and tail-swiped, I said "Melee, get in front of NB and you die. Get behind NB and you die. Stab his sides". I didn't go into details of how Charred Earth worked, I put a star sign on our most competent Warlock and told the raid "If Nightbane is here, stand on star. If Nightbane is flying, stand on me"

Blizzard has been successful by catering to that audience because there's always the smart ones who are willing to lead that audience to victory. Sometimes it's by kicking the noob healer and getting someone else, sometimes it's by coaching the healer with efficiency and throughput lessons, but in both cases, always by someone stepping up and taking the reins.

glowacks · 06/16/08, 7:33 AM

A person I knew who is very competent at the game but knew next to nothing about BC raid dungeons led an attempt at a pug Karazhan while I was in the game store/LAN center he was playing at. He said he went through over 30 different people to get those that were willing to follow directions and actually knew what they were doing. The fact that he didn't know the instance was somewhat irrelevant since among the people he got were people he could tell that knew what was supposed to happen and had them be the actual leader in terms of actual fighting. Despite him knowing nothing about the instance he managed to successfully lead a kill of Attumen and Moroes on the back of entirely his skill of knowing about the game in general and how to recognize competence in others.

I saw that raid as a great example of how the difficulty in the game lies mostly not in the game mechanics, but in the social issues. Only once you get into later raids does there approach anything resembling difficulty besides just knowing how to play your class. The last part is why theorycrafting is not only popular but very effective in improving raid performance; we can attempt to duplicate the same calculations that are made by the server in order to determine what we're capable of. The more you get abilities like the talents that reset cooldowns frequently not only do you make awareness of your abilities more important than a strict rotation, it gets far more difficult to build a closed-form solution of what the best plan is. If there is not some easily describable best plan or something reasonably close to it, Blizzard will have made the game far too complex. I personally find the complexity of maintaining top DPS of classes on average a bit low and would never raid as a Destro Warlock, but that'll be fixed a bit if the Warlock and Druid talents that have you weave different schools together are worth taking.

Unseen · 06/16/08, 8:33 AM

Originally Posted by Draele

Likewise in PvP... you learn the basic tactics of your class, the muscle memory sinks in, you learn what other classes do, how to counter it, etc. Once you pass this rudimentary learning curve 90% of the PvP game is based either on who you end up fighting- what comp you end up facing determines so very very much OR the RNG slaps you in the face, or smiles at you at it slaps the other guy. This system results in a very low skill ceiling. It's almost binary. You "get it" or you don't "get it".

If this was the case, you wouldn't see some teams consistently sitting in the top 5 of a bracket while other teams with the exact same comp/gear/specs can't rise above say 2200. I'd claim that atleast most people at ~2200 "get it", but there is a lot more depth to the game than basic game mechanics. Coordination between 2-5 players. Small finesse details, like for example pulling off a vanish->sap between dot ticks, or interrupting drinking with a distract. And of course stuff like when you use your cooldowns, and what choices you make when you only have a split second to decide; chase the druid who went off to drink, or try to burst down his partner in the meanwhile? All these things combined result in the fact that we actually see teams that consistently perform a lot better than others.

Gryzemuis · 06/16/08, 10:42 AM

Originally Posted by Draele

But what if it weren't a skill plateau, but a ramp?

The basic problem is this: WoW is a MMORPG. Even though Blizzard seems to call it a MMO game now, the core gameplay is still that of a Role Playing Game.

In RPGs, success is based on the skills of your character. Not on the skills of you as a human being behind the character.

Agreed, success in this game depends on both the in-game skill-level of your character and the skill-level of you as a player. But ultimately, it is about your character. Not you. Many people seem to forget this. Especially the pvp players. I'm not saying this is a good or bad property of the game. But if you want player skill to have a bigger impact than character statistics, you will make a fundamental change to the game. I think much more must change in the game then.

I'll give you an anecdotal example. I've played a bit of Age of Conan recently. AoC has a combat system with "combos". In stead of clicking/pushing the ability you want to perform, you need to click/push it, and then do a follow up with 1-4 more button pushes. People call this "skill", as opposed to WoW, where you have to click only a single button. Well, I don't like the AoC combo system. I find it irritating. My mind tells me I want to perform an ability, my finger causes my character to perform that ability in a split second. I like that the success of my gameplay depends on what my mind wants, not on how well my finger can execute a combo. I see the connection between my mind and the actions of my character as a limitation of human-computer interaction. I do not see it as a challenge. People in AoC say they love the combosystem. But fact is, 80% of the new characters are casters/healers nowadays, who have to do a lot less of these combos.

Gryzemuis · 06/16/08, 10:54 AM

Originally Posted by Unseen

If this was the case, you wouldn't see some teams consistently sitting in the top 5 of a bracket while other teams with the exact same comp/gear/specs can't rise above say 2200. I'd claim that atleast most people at ~2200 "get it", but there is a lot more depth to the game than basic game mechanics.

That might all be true and all. But there might be a simpler explanation.
One thing that people never talk about in WoW is ping. Network Round Trip Time. It is a property of all online games. Your reaction times are modified by your ping. Also, the fps (Frames Per Second) of you computer have some impact. In game that depend much more on skills, and not gear or strategy, like FPS (First Person Shooter) games, people do everything to improve their fps. And when official matches are fought, there is always a big debate in advance about on which server they should play, to give everybody equal pings.

In WoW nobody talks about that. But I'm sure it has a big impact. In my own raid group, I see people from Israel, and people with crappy computers, die a lot quicker on AoE, etc. It could be that they are all crap players, but I find it only natural that their low fps and high ping makes the game more difficult for them.

So this has an impact on any changes you want to make to the game. If you want to make the player's reaction times more important in game, you might make the fight impossible for people with bad computers and connections.

The complexity of raiding used to be in determining the strategy for each fight and the execution of that strategy. Nowadays you can read strategies everywhere, and see movies explaining a strategy, just days after the world's first kill. I know you can't prevent that. But imho it takes away a huge part of the challenge of raiding.

Seife · 06/16/08, 11:01 AM

Originally Posted by Gryzemuis

The basic problem is this: WoW is a MMORPG. Even though Blizzard seems to call it a MMO game now, the core gameplay is still that of a Role Playing Game.

In RPGs, success is based on the skills of your character. Not on the skills of you as a human being behind the character.

Agreed, success in this game depends on both the in-game skill-level of your character and the skill-level of you as a player. But ultimately, it is about your character. Not you.

That is just not true. The skill of the players in front of the computer and the coordination among them are the deciding factors in who gets a 2000 rating, a 2200 rating and a 2300+ rating.

Gear or 'RNG' don't play a role in deciding who becomes gladiator and who doesn't. Why? Because starting at 1900, everyone uses the same gear - and RNG (bad) luck evens itself out.

fip · 06/16/08, 11:48 AM

Originally Posted by Zmaj

I believe this was blizzard intention to begin with. Overly complex class mechanics would turn a lot of casual people away and thus decrease the number of subscribers they receive. Lets face it, they are still a business and it's all about making money. You can appeal to both casual and hardcore gamers by making class difficulty relatively simple and adjust the content difficulty from there.

This of course has it's downsides as to make endgame raiding sufficiently difficult usually requires the rng system to play a big part in the encounter.

I think this is honestly the direction that Blizzard went for the most part. If you tell someone: ok here's your class, and if you suck, you literally can't do 50% of the class because you're not good enough, then they'll have a decent chance to leave. But if you say: anyone can learn this class, it's really pretty easy, and then you throw encounters of increasing difficulty at players, it creates a far more tiered system.

Blizzard can either dual-tier both character skill AND boss difficulty, or they can just make all classes basically simple to play, and focus purely on making encounters different and more challenging over time.

Furthermore, any discussion of "random" elements in encounters to this day just implies that you don't understand either the base mechanics behind the fight, or haven't yet properly learned how to mitigate those factors.

Caligula · 06/16/08, 11:53 AM

Originally Posted by Gryzemuis

The basic problem is this: WoW is a MMORPG. Even though Blizzard seems to call it a MMO game now, the core gameplay is still that of a Role Playing Game.

In RPGs, success is based on the skills of your character. Not on the skills of you as a human being behind the character.

Agreed, success in this game depends on both the in-game skill-level of your character and the skill-level of you as a player. But ultimately, it is about your character. Not you. Many people seem to forget this. Especially the pvp players. I'm not saying this is a good or bad property of the game. But if you want player skill to have a bigger impact than character statistics, you will make a fundamental change to the game. I think much more must change in the game then.

To be honest, I think this is a horrible argument.

Games that don't rely on the "skill" of the person behind the character are what I refer to as "shallow" and "boring". Just because you've got T6 or S4 gear shouldn't mean you should automatically win over someone who has T4 or S1.

In an arena game last night, my 11k HP alt warrior with a skillherald and blues/greens/mixed S1 ended up in a 1v1 versus a warrior in mostly S3. Now with a little bit of not sucking on my part (disarming, demo shout, TC, keeping faced towards him, etc.), I was able to kill him even though he far outgeared me. Now I'm not going to even claim to be good at PvP, in fact I consider myself pretty bad sometimes, but if there was absolutely no chance for me to win just because "the skills of his character" were better than mine, I'd have quit this game long ago.

The same goes for if the game was a generic Rock/Paper/Scissors fight. For example, melee beats ranged, ranged beat healers, healers beat melee. This would be an atrociously boring game if you knew the outcome of a fight before you even entered it. Player input must take precedence as a path to winning over everything else the game (gear, spells, whatever else you can think of), else it is simply about picking the correct "winner" at the character screen.

Gnolfo · 06/16/08, 12:32 PM

EDIT: I should preface this with mentioning I'm not taking PvP into account, this is just in the context of pve/raiding:

WotLK definitely seems to show a shift from static skill rotations to "priority queues" where procs and triggers determine what your next course of action is. It exists currently, though more for other classes than others. There's classes that have a standard cycle that they might deviate from from time to time (eg. fury warriors, holy paladins), and there's classes that have no defined cycle and are basically playing with various cooldowns/procs to use the most effective ability available every GCD (prot warriors, shadow priests). Though it's certainly a gradient more than a fine line between the specs and classes as far as this goes, and even the classes with the most static of "cycles" still learn to time trinkets, cooldowns, reprioritize abilities, etc with heroism/drums and other group/raid-wide "proc" effects.

In fact heroism deserves a special mention, I think. What guild hasn't used the "blow all heroisms/cooldowns together and burn the crap out of the boss" tactic for difficult bosses/phases? Anecdotal, but we got our first gorefiend kill a few weeks ago on the first night we saw him, and turned consistent 30-40% atrophy wipes into a not-too-sloppy kill by timing 3 heroisms with everyone going full bore about 10 seconds into the pull, putting a huge dent in his health while we still had a full raid. Anyway, after a very short while every class (healers and tanks included, but dps especially) knows instinctively to blow their trinkets or what have you when they get heroism, and now you have this very powerful staple maneuver that can be used whenever the time is right. To me that's a combination of situational awareness (brand new / "don't get it" raiders will probably need to be told about coupling abilities w/ heroism) as well as knowing how your class should adapt to big buffs like that.

Lich king I think will involve more of this line of thinking when it comes to encounters. Call it positive-reinforcement situational awareness. Most situational awareness in BC is negative reinforcement: "if you DON'T account for X something bad will happen". So now we're all trained at knowing where to stand, when to move, how to spread out, etc, or else we kill ourselves and others. That will still be there, of course, but the next evolution will probably stem from events that impact the raid from the other direction: "if you DO account for X, good will come of it". If you know how best to exploit those events, you gain, and if not, you just miss out (of course, bosses will probably be tuned so you need to take advantage of those beneficial events at least nominally).

Think of mag's debuff when he gets banished, or curator's evocate, and how any DPS class thinking ahead (eg. a rogue letting their energy bar fill up just in time) can exploit that quite a bit. There's not a great many examples of that sort of thing in BC (compared to all the fire-you-shouldn't-stand-in, you-just-blew-up-the-raid stuff), but I've always considered them clever and much more rewarding when you incorporate them (success gives positive rewards versus success avoids negative consequences). Whereas negative reinforcement events mostly require positioning, on-your-toes movement and quick reaction times, it seems to me positive reinforcement events will more involve timing and coordination with your personal abilities--and potentially synergy abilities like heroism--with the abilities, phases, mixed-blessing debuffs, etc that a boss fight might produce.

That seems to be the way they're going. Nearly across the board, classes have new talents that mix up what ability is best to use next in a rotation--though this reduces the idea of a "rotation" and instead delivers a priority queue idea. Instead of staple 3:2 rotations of abilities X and Y or whatever, optimized ability use will have a skeleton rotation filled in with "when X procs do this" and "when buff Y is up this is better than that"-type caveats. That's a class difficulty issue. But I can see raid encounters possibly going the same way, with new encounter difficulties being how to exploit the available gain while minimizing the potential drawbacks.

Done that way, it's not necessarily an automatic wipe if your raid isn't able to fully confront those difficulties, but instead extends the fight (thus opening up larger windows for wipe opportunities). Guilds that can fully address those encounter difficulties (and synergize that with new dynamics in class abilities) will still progress faster. But guilds that cannot fully exploit those intended opportunities for gain (or cannot maximize themselves with the different procs and priority queues) will still be able to progress. Bosses will instead be a soft wall rather than a hard one.

Mordekhuul · 06/16/08, 12:52 PM

Another good example of positive reinforcement for paying attention and planning is the Curator in Karazhan. Popping bloodlusts and fire elementals just before his Evocation, and popping trinkets and other class cooldowns just as it starts shorten the encounter immeasurably and make it a lot of fun.