Broken Toys

Yeah, I played last night and without Cosmos it reminded me of why I quit last year. Without the UI addons WOW is very nearly unplayable as far as I am concerned.

Blizzard owes the UI guys thanks for my monthly fees, at least. It’d be interesting to know just how many fewer players they’d have if it weren’t for those addon communities.

Yeah, but we got Felguards. That’s got to count for something, right?

Too bad mine plays the succubus summoning sound whenever it appears. A hulking, fearsome, MALE demon just doesn’t come off as intimidating when it enters to the sound of a seductive female voice saying, “Don’t touch what you can’t afford.”

I wouldn’t claim to be know a whole ton about how to keep an MMOG running, but I have been involved in software development in the past, and this quote actually made me laugh:

“As others have said this did appear to occur on the PTRs but as our team deals with the live game we’re not intimately knowledgeable on all the goings on for bugs and testing on the PTRs. At this time I’m unable to find any information on this but we’ll try to find something tomorrow and confirm what this is and what plans we will or may already have.”

(it was in referance to the “click” sound playing when people join/leave a raid)

It seems like a simple concept for the “release” team to communicate frequently with the “development” team for coordinating resolutions. It’s not unusual for software development to experience snafus, but this is a left hand/right hand problem so basic I would have thought a veteran company would have sorted it out a long time ago. Even an intermediary QA team could have done a lot to prevent such problems.

Even worse, it looks like the code they patched in was older than what was available.. many of the reported bugs were already fixed on the test server, but never made it live. Guess someone forgot to run a cvs update, eh?

My only complaints about this patch are incredibly minor – the new sneaking animations look stupid, and enchantments now show as white instead of green.

The one mod I view as absolutely necessary (Zhunter, try playing a Hunter/Engineer without it) had a working version available before the servers were back up on Tuesday, so I really can’t complain about the UI changes.

UI addons are crutches… toss them away.

What boggles my mind is why is it so hard to code workable customizable UI? About the only game I didn’t needed 3d-party UI was SB, as to WoW – its as bad as UO, where you *need* 3d party to just play.

Here’s Blue giving the playerbase a nice warm fuzzy. Quote via Cosmik over at n3rfed

‘Tseric, putting on his Compassionate Hat, followed up by posting in another thread.

I’m sure it’s easier to pass that judgement from your well-informed, armchair designing position. Because of the way in the whole expansion is being pushed out, the gap that we are currently in was expected to cause a number of issues. With so much content that is being pre-released, we are going to see a number of inconsistencies that will be resolved on release of the expansion. Plain fact is that this is about production schedules and not about you. This is needed for smooth production of the game, because when expansion hits and people are actually patching the rest of the content, we will have more pressing issues than going back to check some loot tables. This is about putting in order as much as we can as soon as we can, so when serious matters come down the road, we have as many resources available to address them quickly. Issues that, I assure you, will be more important than this. This isn’t about you. It’s about the game. Find something more worthwhile to complain about. This issue will not change until the expansion is released, so railing against me or anyone else on the boards is a categorical waste of your time.’

Well I think its more of a Tseric problem than a staff problem. He’s always been ‘class’.

Right there with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton type of class. I would say similar intellect but those two have managed to make a ton of money and don’t need a day job.

I know most game designers come from IT field and tend to think (or not think) in terms of code stability, maintainability and similar equally useless things when it comes to UI design.

When you design UI you should concern yourself with following things:

1) Does interface does what players need to do at all times with at most 2 clicks or 2 key presses?
2) Does interface is easy to understand and easy to master?
3) Is it consistent at all times – i.e. does what it suppose to do at all times in the same way
4) Is there too much clicking involved, what are most click-intensive tasks that should be automated?
5) What is longest click/button press chain for single action? How can I shorten it?

“Maybe one of you design/dev types could explain the reasoning behind letting loot no one can use for a month or so start dropping.”

Assuming that it was a known issue: if the data isn’t very well compartmentalized, you can’t really pick and choose what you’re going to patch if you’ve already changed a lot.

In other words, if all the treasure data is in one big file, and there’s some stuff in there you want to patch and some stuff you don’t, it’s a pretty painstaking process to go through and clean it up, especially if you have crap source control and/or crap data design.

Liet – AutoAssualt’s *2 hour* application times for 100MB patches come to mind. No, really.

Knurd: generally, you want to implement the stuff that’s going to need the most testing first. I liked to implement the new classes first, because all those new spells take a while to test. You also want them ready for day one of beta, because you need as much time as you can get to iterate on balance.

I would argue that treasure data needs to go in early too, because the data entry is prone to error and the testing is time-consuming — literally, the QA guys are spawning hundreds of mobs and killing them to see what they drop. Is this new thing spawning 1% or 2% of the time? If it’s on something that spawns a lot, little differences really add up, and it’s not always going to be apparent in internal testing (another reason to have it ready to go on day one of beta). Treasure table fuckups can really hurt the economy, and economy fuckups are hard to recover from without embarassing rollbacks.

That’s an argument to not mess with treasure data that you’re confident in, and not to bother branching bits of it even if the data layout makes it possible. They’re high-risk changes.

When I commented earlier, I wasn’t actually thinking about the unique nature of treasure data. I was just remembering times when I got frustrated that I had to patch stuff that shouldn’t have been patched yet because of data design problems. On second thought, yeah, I have to say that I’d rather not touch treasure data that’s passed testing, even if early release makes me look bad.

As much as the beta server is supposed to find all issues in a game before ship, it never does. The path that Blizzard has taken has increased the odds that most data issues with the game, such as class imbalances and whatnot, will be fixed before the expansion goes live in a month.

What Blizzard has managed to do is quite clever, actually. Whether they meant to do it is a matter of some debate, but the net result is that they probably aren’t going to lose any of their hardcore subscribers, at least until they launch the expansion, while getting the patch out early increases the odds that most of the data issues are found and fixed before BC launches, and most flaws will be restricted to content issues – which is a pretty good place to be.