Broken Toys

“When everyone is super, no one is.”

I’m not exactly sure how this applies to the lifting of attunement quests. People who couldn’t clear TK and SSC before will not magically be able to get more than one or two bosses into Mt. Hyjal and the Black Temple anyway.

“When everyone is super, no one is.”

Hardcore is still catered to in EQ1.

“When everyone is super, no one is.”

This statement is only true if your entire concept of being is defined by other people. This is the mentality that leads to the endless grind, the constant one-upmanship prevalent not just in video games but in some of the more cut-throat enterprises in business. It’s a horrible mentality because by nature it thrives on competition, and that is always a zero-sum game.

For someone to be happy, someone else has to suffer.

I personally don’t have a problem with Kara’s key requirements being removed, or the attunement dropping away from various instances. I think that even in failure (and there will be lots of failure) players just getting a chance to see these places will have renewed appreciation both for Blizzard’s development team AND for the guilds who actually have succeeded.

What so many of the hardcore don’t realize is that most normal players could give a rat’s ass about how far they’ve progressed. It doesn’t affect them in any way whatsoever. Some raiders, desperate for the ego boost, contrive this world in which they, because of their success, are somehow considered the “heroes” of the game.

That is perfectly understandable, but most people don’t know who you are at all, nor will they remember even if you told them. Why? Because your achievements have no basis for comparison.

Raider: “Our guild just downed Illidan!”

Casual: “Ok…that’s cool I guess…is it kind of like a harder version of Shadow Labs? Cause that place is hard.”

Raider: “ZOMG”

I believe that allowing players to see for themselves just how difficult, and they are still difficult, these places are actually increases the standing of raiders in the game. It becomes evidently clear how much time and effort went into learning, organizing, and overcoming the hurdles of each instance. Suddenly everyone has a common frame of reference, and suddenly, people’s achievements have meaning to other people.

ugh now i have gilbert and sullivan stuck in my head!

“This entire concept is true only if your entire concept of being is define by other people.”

This is a great counter, most of the time. In MMORPGs your characters power really only exists in relation to the person standing next to you. In this context, your entire concept of being IS defined by others.

lvl x, class y, gear z — only means something in comparison to someone standing next to you. Not a irl application of course, but certain an in-game one where this conversation holds relevance.

And above someone said something about, “Where in the patch note it said Illidan would fall over” — a snippet about the “easier” line of thought. The answer lies whole, again, in the context of WoW Raid progression. So, bare with me a second:

- Guild A had to complete the magtheridon and heroic lines to enter SSC and TK. Then had to complete both instances to get into Hyjal, then the first boss of Hyjal to get into BT. Convulted, stupid, insert analogy showing shitty procedural hoop-jumping here.

Was this fun? No. Did it take months? Yes. Were guilds forced to do this that simply wanted to progress? Well, yes. Slight fast forward — Now, attunements outside of Hyjal and BT were removed. All fights inbetween were severly nerfed. This is prior to 2.4. Now guild A is, every time it recruits a new member, having to back flag them via full run kills through SSC and TK — akin to backflagging in EQ. This went on for months.

Now, fast forward to 2.4:

- Vashj and Kael can be killed solo without touching any boss in the instance, and both again receive severe nerfs to their fight mechanics.
- Attunements no longer exist.
- BT ilevel loot is available via badges — meaning Karazhan running players will have the same ilevel gear as BT raiders.. again, for running Karazhan, ZA, and heroics.
- T6 token dropping bosses now drop 3 tokens.

Now, let’s move to guild B post 2.4, who was stuck on Vashj and or Kael because the fight mechanics were, to say the least, a little complex:

They can now enter Hyjal and BT, and in Hyjal easily take the first three bosses and in BT the four up to Teron Gorefiend — because those fights were, up until 2.4, sort of viewed as the reward for completeing the headache fights of SSC and TK. This over gears them for the fights they couldn’t pass, and equalizes their gear on current fights at a rate much faster than guild A could ever achieve — better yet, once they are able to take on the first of the T6 dropping fights, they gear up there faster as well. Is it a more refined and fluid process geared towards casuals? Absolutely — and it’s a great idea, right up until you were the guy that did the raiding previously and you’re left holding your virtual dick in your hand wondering why you put all that effort forth.

Now, I’ll fully admit I’m being a little whiney and mopey in all this — and I have nothing against casual raiding. What I’m missing here is simply the effort to be “fair”. I don’t think trivializing the work of the guilds who actually ensured the free-for-all zones anyone can enter now were play-tested and balanced is a great way to ensure you keep those players interested in your game — and I find those players to be an important part of any playerbase. And maybe that’s what this is really about — that Blizzard doesn’t really need them.

“Well, when those that want to be uber can pay for the developementcontent team to be aimed at 5% of the playerbase, I guess they’ll be able to be uber forever”

Let’s be conservative and say they only have 6 million accounts world-wide. At 15 bucks a month per, you mean to tell me they can’t come out with faster, less buggy, and more player specific content than they currently do? They aren’t exactly living up to their end of the deal in regards to this and I think players are letting Blizzard off the hook way to easy over it.

They really need to change their logo to the monopoly guy.. or at a minimum someone with a monocle.

While enjoying myself designing my own game in an excel spread sheet one of the first decisions I made was to plan for and make possible “pre-expansion” content “zero out” a few months before the expansion.
Catering to those who enjoy highly difficult content only makes sense to a point. Once the new content is near completion, it just makes sense to open up and soften up content “required” to make the new content enjoyable.
In other words, if you enjoy cat ass there will always be just enough but if you enjoy just playing on damn near autopilot the next expansion box will not alienate you, because you can damn near autopilot to that content. In fact when designing the new content putting in place simple quests that allow customers to upgrade to the minimum, on entry to the content is an absolute must.
Do not bother worrying about people obtaining gear that is equal to your high quality gear on the first day of an expansion. If Blizzard thinks about game design logically, you’ll be wasting your time looking back and you need to get it together and look forward because there will be tons of content for you to enjoy without having to do a few days of “newb” quests.

Serious love for all.

There was a post on the General forums a while back that is worth quoting here (a rarity indeed). Perhaps this should be on the WoW box:

“Warning: This game is not intended as a source of self-esteem.”

“you’re left holding your virtual dick in your hand wondering why you put all that effort forth.”

Because it was fun. Anything else is overthinking it.

If it was NOT fun, then either the player or the designer has a problem.

I have fun raiding. Now more people can have fun raiding too. I cannot grasp how this is a bad thing for anyone involved.

“Warning: This game is not intended as a source of self-esteem”

Gaming is about having fun. We are not doing anything future generations will remember. We are not scaling mountains or discovering lost civilizations. We are playing computer games.

Anyone who judges himself by what others do in a computer game needs a serious reality check.

It’s happened before and I suspect it’ll happen again. I see it as controlling the content burn rate of your hardcore player base. Attunement paths are there to keep bleeding edge guilds from gobbling content within the first week or month of release. These guilds give value to world firsts (and, to a lesser extent, server firsts), and that’s as it should be, as it generates competition between these bleeding edge guilds. After they have familiarized themselves with said content and the new car smell dissipates, it makes perfect sense to remove such obstacles to allow a greater majority access to the content. It renews content. The dungeon isn’t going anywhere, why not let the ‘unwashed masses’ into the theme park? The bleeding edge guilds have their badge of honor for completing it when it took more to do so, and other guilds can experience new content.

Attunment simply staggers the play time of both player types. Your casual watches videos of an uber guild clearing a dungeon for the first couple of months, then spends the next couple of months wiping on the first boss, trying to be like the uber guild. Bottom line is, players will still log on to play and that equals ROI for your development time. It may not be the most seamless design approach, but it does refresh (and/or add) content for a portion of the player base who might not otherwise experience that content. Forum whining and account churn are negligible, compared to the gain.

“As Ferenczys pointed out, most normals could give a rat’s ass about what a hardcore has done’.

Shhh. They’ll feel bad if you puncture their balloon. Let them think we hang on their every action with envy.

>Knurd

Well, I admit, I did not get the humor there. IMO, you misspoke by saying casuals watched the videos and then try to do the raid. What you should have said is that RAIDERS watch the video and then try to do the raid. You just called them “business casual” raiders, but they’re still raiders.

Casuals are not raiding. If you are running a raid, you are , by defination, raiding. But most normals have no interest in raiding.

And , to be honest, you lost me on your point about ROI. No is disputing that raiders raid. So, I’m guessing your point is that uber guilds doing a raid first, and then posting directions about how to do the raid, gets people who would not do the raid otherwise to do it. So, the uber guilds are increasing return on investment for Blizzard by lowering the barrier to the raid by posting videos?

I’m not really sure what that says about Blizzards game design.

Thanks, Vivianne. I agree with you. My question was to Knurd.

He said” Bottom line is, players will still log on to play and that equals ROI for your development team.”

That is what I do not understand in Knurds post.

The real bottom line is that WoW is hitting the limit with its design. A better design would offer more equity to casual and hardcore players alike no matter what. It’s actually not that hard to do, but pretty much no MMOs do it because its easier to take the low-hanging fruit and implement a design based on what has already been done. Innovation takes creativity and thoughtfulness, and that bell curve is about the same in the industry as it is everywhere else. Even a billion dollars in annual revenue can’t change that.

“But what casuals want is not so well-understood”

Casuals (and girlz) just wanna have fun!

I played WoW for a year or so. I was a “casual” but I got my main toon to level 70. At that level, there isn’t much to do around the Barrens. I was in a guild and since I was a 70, I was invited for groups for the more leet dungeons and raids. But people would carp about my spec not being optimal or my gear not being up to snuff. So, I wasn’t good enough for the high end, but I was too uber for the regular content.

So I got bored and cancelled. Because it just stopped being fun.

What could have fixed that for me and others like me? I honestly don’t know. Maybe people like me are simply going to use up the content appropriate for us in a year or so and end up moving on…

This is a bit off the subject, but one of the things that I HATED about WoW was that, if you were in a guild, anytime you logged on your guildies could see that and immediately would want help somewhere clear across the map or need cash or something or other. That was fine if I had the time or was in the mood, but there were MANY times that I wished I could log in anonymously without my guildies knowing and just do my own thing for awhile. Would that be so hard to implement?

I actually would have played more if I could have toggled that. Because, sometimes you feel like a guildie, sometimes you don’t.

“But what casuals want is not so well-understood”

I have a hard time believing casuals are so complicated that Blizzard developers are just stumped by them. As was said, normals want to have fun. If Blizzard really can not grasp such a simple concept, they will not stay at the top gaming foodchain very long.

And I have no problem with hardcores having their raiding. If I could play in a well polished , perpetual world along side hardcores, fine. They do their thing, I’ll do mine.

But the conflict occurs when new content is producted only for the few, and not the many. The development cost of raids is being paid by casuals, yet casuals are excluded from the content.

And why does PVP have to be a grind? Why shouldn’t someone who plays casually be able to log in and compete in some BGs without being a secong class citizen to a hardcore? Is it really so hard to design a game that a long term player who plays a few times a week is able to log in and have fun without being forced onto a treadmill? Blizzard seems to think they have to keep a person playing eveynight. They do not. They only have to keep a person fron canceling his/her account. A month of WoW is about the same cost of a movie and popcorn. If Blizzard keeps a person satisfifed that he is getting his value for the fee, they can keep a person easily.

“It’ very hard to argue with 10 million …”

Not really. Not for me, because I’ve been through this before. I remember EQ fans saying you could not argue with Verant because of their success. The logic being, if the game was easy, it would not be challenging, and people would not play. So , you had to stick with the “Vision”. But , it turns out, if you make the game “easy”, people will play, simply because tedium does not equal challenge. WoW proved that. In spades. But is still is a hard concept for some to comprehend.

I do not believe Blizzard proved 10 million players want to raid. I believe Blizzard proved 10 million people value a well-polished, fun, social, perpetual gaming environment.

“I promised myself I wasn’t going to post about WoW ever again”

Yeah, I guess nothing I have said is really new stuff, eh. Sorry if I got on a soapbox.

No, you’re not getting what I’m saying. It’s obvious that casuals want to have fun. Saying that is dodging the question, which is what can we give casuals that will be fun? When you say “if Blizzard can’t understand that, they will not stay at the top of the gaming foodchain for very long,” you are making the implicit assumption that someone else understands BETTER, which has not been borne out in the 40 months or so that WoW has been live.

The fact is, WoW WAS fun for casuals at several different points in the game’s history. It was fun for a few months at the beginning of the game, it was fun for a few months after BGs were added (and before the honor system sank into super-grind with all preset teams), it was fun for a few months after BC was added and everyone was levelling again. This part is the part we understand. However, the other lesson of the WoW experience is that casuals actually burn content much more QUICKLY than hardcores because they don’t respond well to being cockblocked. Hardcores will bitch and moan and post long rambling whines on the forums, but they will soldier through; casuals will realize it’s not worth it, and quit.

It’s an inherent flaw of the “content shovel” game concept that I believe Lum has discussed before, and at this point? Not terribly much Blizzard can do about it.

There is a need to keep ideas simple (among designers), e.g. the low-hanging fruit is to throw in more eye-candy and new maps, different race/class setups, a different but identically boring crafting system, etc. KISS. Status Quo. Don’t rock the catamaran.

There is very little that is clever in MMOs because there are so few clever people in the industry. I don’t mean to be cruel, but in our industry there are plenty of people who know how to slice a different block of cheese the same way, plenty of people who think their two-minute ideas are so off-the-charts genius that they won’t listen to anyone, plenty of horrible managers, plenty of technicians who just wanna beat traffic home and had more synaptic response during lunch at Chilis talking about other people in the office than they did all afternoon during work, plenty of deadline confusion, plenty of indecipherable hires and paper-napkin schedules, plenty of complacency. There a few at the top of the bell curve who have some really innovative, thoughtful, creative zingers that are very often not even difficult to implement, but getting those ideas past the rest of the bell curve quickly becomes rather nightmarish because the rest of the curve wants it simple…

Vis, those are great questions — whether they’re in earnest or rhetorical (hard to tell, but I think the former). You would think that with WoW’s success as *the* entertainment/social networking app of the century that investors would be interested in *real* next-gen designs, but alas that has not been my experience so far. Mediocre social networking apps are finding funding in the 1-3 million dollar range, but in the 30 million region it’s very, very difficult. I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve been in the industry for years, have several very successful titles under my belt as CTO of a well-respected developer, have the absolute no-holds-barred clever, infinitely-playable core MMO design in the palm of my hands — the Holy Grail — complete with new animation technology that no one has even thought about, a fully dynamic questing system, a fully-fleshed out and prototyped mobile component, social networking plugins and components, a business model that is highly profitable even at its most conservative projections, a killer management team, etc. But VCs don’t want to touch it because of the high-dollar, and publishers want to… well, don’t get me started…

Genius spouts from my fountainhead.

@Ben

A real name or resume with actual game titles would really help your credibility. I’m not a professional game designer, but I can still think that my ideas are better than those of the persons who designed World of Warcraft’s PvP system. There’s no shame in that, it just takes a little bit more evidence on my part to prove that my ideas have merit.

Knurd,

/bow

“What I mean is that an intricate web of attunement keeps bleeding edge guilds playing longer, as they will progress faster than other guilds. Not only that, it channels them through as much content as possible, in attempts to get the most usage from any given dungeon.”

With the highest respect, o great one, you have two errors in your thinking.

1) You assume that players have pretty much zero opportunity cost for playing a game, that it doesn’t matter if they don’t really ‘achieve’ anything long-term as long as they have fun in the present.

2) You assume sympathy for the company will have weight in the players’ decisions of value and obligation.

#1 applies for many, but not all players who play an MMO. It’s complicated because there is story value, and there is ‘gear’ value, and while they are two different things they are related and it’s easy for people to confuse the two in arguments. On one hand pixels in a computer game do not really matter; but on the other hand the story of achievement players have been thru, and which is commonly represented by those pixels when it comes to endgame achievements, is something that many players (not all) do place value in and get upset when it is subsequently removed.

This is why the singular focus on items in WoW is so flawed btw, and why the devs try (unsuccessfuly, because the entire rest of the design pushes in that direction) to put value in other things, like the two PvE titles for the SSC/TK and BT/MT attunements. But anyway, the relevance here is that it is a very unwise idea to include attunements or any other achievement with the intention of later removing or nerfing it. It establishes a pattern for players who think long-term, being.. ‘nothing I do in this game is of any use because it’ll just be nerfed and made 1000x easier for anyone who waits half a year for the playerbase to catch up’. If done right this wouldn’t matter, but done wrong it injects uncertainty into the minds of players who did it the hard way whether players who did it the easy way will view the ‘hard’ achievements as something that is respectable, or something that is to be pitied and scorned.

A nice example would be the treatment of HWLs/GMs after the WoW 2.0 transition patch.

You justify, Knurd, because you see there is no better way to accomplish the ’slowing’ of initial progression, but there are definitely other and better ways. It does not accomplish good to have attunements or other progression that is planned to be removed after some time… it may have some support from the ‘zomg buff’ mentality, but such attitudes are always short-lived. To use yet another example… one of the reasons WoW was so successful was because the leveling game was deliberately planned to be so short, compared to previous grind-based games. This has gotten away from the dev team probably because of all the people who quit the company.. ;​)… but if they had wanted to, they could have continued the same philosophy without compromising content. They just don’t know how to address the relevant barriers to achievement.

The reason attunements were removed was more complex than ‘it makes getting into endgame content difficult’. There were many complex dynamics from how the attunement requirements interacted with stuf like guild dynamics; you had guilds that would have to run an ‘old’ instance with’useless loot’ just to attune someone, or players hopping from guild to guild by selling their attuned status with instances (one of the main reasons the Karazhan attunement requirement for SSC/TK was such a flop). Note that the raid instance that’s been in WoW the longest, Onyxia, has not had its lengthy attunement chain removed for either faction… because the chain is PUGable in its entirety and doesn’t require any grinds, the way the Heroics requirements for Karazhan attunement did. However difficult that escape quest in BRD for alliance is, you can’t say it’s a grind.

“I promised myself I wasn’t going to post about WoW ever again.”

But isn’t there something to be said for learning from past successes and continual improvement…? from death comes life, phoenix..

“P.S. – You didn’t answer Viz’s question(s)”

I hope Ben will excuse me if I attempt to answer her questions myself.

MMOs are more difficult than many other media because the issue they attempt to solve is so much more ambitious and complex than usual. This means that most attempts will, relatively, be failures. And exactly because it’s so complex (the dichotomy of being forced to offer progression, while at the same time that progression is the same thing that can doom a game), it’s hard to understand and also hard to communicate a perspective on how to address it. This means it’s hard to get funding on top of the fact that, again, most attempts will be relative failures.

Not to mention the whole insularness of the industry.. :/ Why try to address the flaws in the usual design with a more expansive attitude towards the wider market, when instead you could just (unconsciously) design to be insular for those who ‘have no life’ in the real world and don’t mind how much time they spend grinding in a computer game.

The old casual vs hardcore is the age old arguement that’s never going to fully go away. I think the reason WoW is so successful is obviously because its the most casual friendly game on the market, by leaps and bounds. My 70 year old retired father has a blast running around on his level 30 undead warlock, you can’t get much more casual friendly than that. Like others posting here, I can confirm casuals don’t really think of the raiders very much and when we do its usually in a ‘don’t speak to him’ guy in a klingon suit kind of way, not a reverent way. Seriously I am a massive dork but the idea of raiding and raiding and raiding all day and night… ugh. No thank you.

Nothing is perfect, obviously, but I think WoW nails it about as well as I can reasonably expect on casual post 70 content. Now that I’m finally 70, I can do daily quests, work on faction, do instances, PvP in several interesting battlegrounds, or, gasp, do some raiding. The point is, there is at least something reasonable for you to do whether you are a raider, a pvper, or a casual player. And it gives us casuals the best chance of eventually getting to the point where we want to be that 40th man in the super duper secret best friends club uberguild and get the tier 6 drop and win the internetz.

The secret to what casual players want to do btw: get home, take off our shoes, kiss our significant other, watch some TV, go in front of the computer, get in vent with our friends, tell lame jokes, have a beer, and kill some monsters (or even better Alliance players) for a few hours while arguing whether Wolverine can kick Yoda’s ass or not.

And WoW lets me do that! Thanks Blizzard.