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Design Progression in World of Warcraft, An Illustrated Guide
Diagram of requirements needed to enter Black Temple, the penultimate WoW:Burning Crusade instance, prior to today’s patch:
Diagram of requirements needed to enter Black Temple, the penultimate WoW:Burning Crusade instance, after today’s patch:
Not everyone is happy about this.
Blizzard no longer cares about the hardcore gamers, be that the raiders or the pvpers. Well, we’re done with it. It wasn’t just one thing really. While we were all excited to get some tier6 for our freshly 70 alts from this new badge gear, there’s a part of you that just has to feel some pain when you look back at all the time you spent farming instances…for nothing.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, silly. It’s silly to expect game developers to create content that 50 people on the planet can access. OK, so that’s an exagerration. According to Wowjutsu, 286,000 people have entered the Black Temple, and 121,000 have finished it. Still, that is 5% of a given fairly hardcore population… to show up on Wowjutsu, you have to be in a raid that has completed some portion of Karazhan. Just as a comparison, those figures above are compared to 2.2 million players that watched the Shade of Aran blow up their raid.
It’s obvious that at least someone (probably a community person, they tend to develop black humor as an on the job requirement) at Blizzard had a pretty clear picture of where they eventually wanted to take things from this parody, complete with this world event:
The Illidari Invasion: A major attack is launched on all major cities, both Horde and Alliance. Repel the invaders for 6 hours or lose the chance to face down Illidan in the Black Temple for one month. Additionally, repair costs in cities you fail to hold go up by 20% due to tax increases.
And you know? Some players would defend that. “THAT IS SO COOL, THE WORLD IS RESPONDING TO OUR SCREWUPS.”
It’s an interesting pattern, actually. As the playerbase in general progresses in mudflated power, content is trivialized so that more people can experience it. What was the domain of the l33t a short time ago now becomes content that’s conquered on the test server before it even goes live.
This isn’t a bad thing. If you make your game’s endgame challenge dependent on how fast your content designers can crank out ever-increasingly-difficult challenges, you either have a game that no one can finish, or a game everyone can eventually finish, given enough investment of time.
Which makes some people unhappy. Raiders denigrating casual players in WoW has a long, storied tradition, after all. But casual players pay the bills. I fully expect Wrath of the Lich King to have a hideously complicated attunement sequence for taking down Arthas at the end. I also fully expect that sequence to disappear a year later. And someone will post a snippy letter on their guild page about how they are totally leaving WoW for some other game because no one understands the purity of their vision any more.
Which also has a long and storied tradition.
(Hint 1: Second entry on the list.)
(Hint 2: If you’re confused, check with your devstalkers.)
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about 2 years ago
It’s not that WoW is a treadmill or a grind — all of the “AAA” MMOs are, its just the window dressing that helps us suspend out disbelief — but that in reality, nothing that really shakes up the WoW dynamic has been added since January 2007, when the Burning Crusade came out. Everyone is still level 70, no one gets any new abilities, and no new classes have been added, so the game dynamics have remained completely stagnant since January 2007. Sure, we’ve gotten some new dungeons and new bosses added, and some classes have been nerfed and others buffed (or more accurately, buffed AND nerfed), but there is no feeling of “freshness” in WoW right now New equipment that changes nothing but a set of numbers doesn’t really change how I play the game.
My guild killed Illidan, and I was contemplating resubscribing for the Sunwell, but its just another dungeon to conquer with the exact same classes using exactly the same abilities and tactics. This patch adds a lot of “stuff”, but WoW needs another jolt like the one that Burning Crusade gave it.
about 2 years ago
It’s really not ‘to help casual players’ Casual players will still never get past the first pack of trash in Black Temple.
It’s more to help raiders alts.
about 2 years ago
I understand some of their ire.
EQ’s first expansion was called Ruins of Kunark. I remember going into Karnor Castle for the first time. It was quickly renamed Karnage Castle for a while because people would go in to look around and, suddenly, OH CRAP. People were training things to the zone and killing new explorers en masse. I sat there and resed people for a few hours and we begged and pleased with people not to go run around haphazardly and they all ignored us and died, often taking people with them.
Having been in the meticulously tuned uberzones I can see such things going awry easily. Even though WoW doesn’t have EQ’s training problem, I can see a pull being ruined or an event being screwed up because someone wanted to go look at something new. If WoW really went from restricted to unrestricted on the tippy top uberzone then it may be rough for raiders for a time.
On the other hand, some MMO designers go way overboard in progression. Planes of Power had a progression map about that complex. In fact, it was so hardcore that you only had 4 zones open to you initially out of 15 or so zones. Honestly, it was overkill. There was a quest to open up 2 more zones, a couple of mini-raids and then you had to raid from there on out. It was a good thing when they removed the key requirements for some of the lower zones because getting pickup groups in the better experience zones proved difficult if not impossible. The top tier zones still require a key but it’s not as brutal anymore. No expansion since has locked so many zones.
about 2 years ago
IMO this is a good thing, since the hardcore raiding guilds will take a bite at clearing the sunwell, making it harder for raiders with less time to enter the BT and find a guild that will run it with them. As some players will stop playing WoW after the Sunwell is cleared, it will be even harder to find a guild to do the sunwell with once they have cleared it. At least this way the more casual raider (not casual player mind you) will still be able to experience the end game raiding.
about 2 years ago
Honestly… good riddance.
Now, that sounds petty… and it probably is a bit, but it stems to listening for many years to what basically amounted to…
“It isn’t about the gear, it’s about seeing new and challenging content. So, stop whining casual players and PvPers about gear, because you don’t need the gear and we wouldn’t care if you got the gear.”
I’ve read that time and time again in one form or another… and certainly from Risen on Alleria as I played there. Well guess what, now people are getting the gear (and seeing slightly more content than they would have otherwise), and instead of 5% seeing the final end game content… it may be 7 or 10%. They are still the only one’s seeing that content, still the only one’s getting those named drops that demonstrate that accomplishment…
and the reaction is what?
“there’s a part of you that just has to feel some pain when you look back at all the time you spent farming instances…for nothing.”
yeah, well there’s a good 95% of the population that would love to be capable of seeing/completing that content and instead of enjoying that success they’re upset that someone else got purple shiny toys that made Kara easier (because kara is still the most active Raiding instance).
So, good riddance… don’t let the door hit them in the rear on the way out. Pettiness begets pettiness and this game already promoted the me me me attitude enough.
about 2 years ago
Why would it be “rough for raiders”. That is the same complaint people have about removing Kara attunements. No one is forcing any guild to take undergeared and inexperienced players. Any guild that wants can still have probationary terms and conduct trial runs to test recruits. Rather it just means gearing up alts and new players will go faster, you can still impose skill standards on those players, you just don’t have to wait 6 months before they can join the progression raid where you need them.
Similarly, some people’s complaints (in the links not anyone above) that other people getting loot for badges (i.e. for running kara ad nauseum) somehow lessening their accomplishments is silly. Those players can always point out “I did it when it was hard” and be proud of their accomplishments. It takes nothing away from them.
The complaints about same old same old, and no new content, are valid, but apply equally to all players. Honestly looking at WoW currently, with the dailies, fast track leveling, rep grinds being necessary instead of optional, it’s like it’s not even the same game I started playing 3 years ago. Is it even an “RPG” still? I don’t know.
about 2 years ago
“but that in reality, nothing that really shakes up the WoW dynamic has been added since January 2007, when the Burning Crusade came out. Everyone is still level 70, no one gets any new abilities, and no new classes have been added, so the game dynamics have remained completely stagnant since January 2007.”
What else is supposed to happen? “Stagnant” is the same thing as “stable.”
about 2 years ago
In a content patch, not much is generally supposed to happen. However, expansions for WoW come much slower than for other MMOs, so the game goes for very long periods without any kind of meaningul shakeup.
For you, that might be “stable”, but for me, it’s the more pejorative “stagnant”. That’s all.
about 2 years ago
“Having been in the meticulously tuned uberzones I can see such things going awry easily. Even though WoW doesn’t have EQ’s training problem, I can see a pull being ruined or an event being screwed up because someone wanted to go look at something new. If WoW really went from restricted to unrestricted on the tippy top uberzone then it may be rough for raiders for a time.”
All of these encounters are instanced. It’s not like guilds farming Illidan are going to have random_noob_01 wander into their raid zone.
And they’ve been pacing the lifting of attunements such that there’s always one tier of content that’s still pretty much only accessible to raiders. There’s no attunement on the Sunwell Plateau but there’s not much use in going there until you’ve gotten gear from the T6 content, which just now had its attunement lifted.
All they’re really doing is constantly raising the entry level so that it’s the same distance from the endgame as they add new content. There is room for raiders to excel and have gear that shows off their progress, they just have to keep doing it as new content comes out.
about 2 years ago
>>It’s silly to expect game developers to create content that 50 people on the planet can access.
for most developers I would agree, but since we’re talking about blizzard, i say develop for the gold
about 2 years ago
I’d be more impressed if black temple suddenly became a small group dungeon. Dropping the raid requirement has a bigger impact on already established raiding guilds more than it does for anyone “up and coming”.
about 2 years ago
“While we were all excited to get some tier6 for our freshly 70 alts from this new badge gear, there’s a part of you that just has to feel some pain when you look back at all the time you spent farming instances…for nothing.”
Maybe you should have done something actually fun instead, so you wouldn’t regret it.
This is why I quit Eve Online – the amount of time you had to spend not having fun (mining /ratting for isk) so that you could have fun (0.0 PVP in a big corp).
about 2 years ago
Mist: “It’s really not ‘to help casual players’ Casual players will still never get past the first pack of trash in Black Temple.
It’s more to help raiders alts.”
In some sense I agree but this change shouldn’t be taken out of context. This is just another in a very long series of changes all designed to make raiding easier\more appealing. The ultimate goal of this change and changes like it is to get more people into endgame raiding.
IMO this devotion to raiding continues to be the huge mistake that hopefully someone will exploit thereby snatching a big portion of the market blizzard has grown. None of these changes are going to get enough people into raiding to ever make it anything other than a very small niche. Could do as well devoting the bulk of your content dev resources to husband and wife duos who require accessibility aids demographic.
about 2 years ago
Not to throw cold water on a generally good point or anything, but there are a couple of misstatements above:
- The big, nasty flowchart is for attunement to Mount Hyjal, not Black Temple.
- Most of the big, nasty flowchart is actually requirements for attunement to Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep, both of which were removed months ago to similar Chicken Little whining from the hardcore elite.
about 2 years ago
Anybody else remember when Lum’s rants used to be *against* the game companies?
about 2 years ago
Neil wrote:
For you, that might be “stable”, but for me, it’s the more pejorative “stagnant”. That’s all.
For an EQ1 player, I’d take stable over “wild ass barely tested (if that) expansions every six months” anytime. Really, there are still bugs and untuned content left over from Luclin (7 years ago) that are unfixed and complained over. Hey! why is the animation so retarded looking? Because they had to rush out the animation to meet the deadline – poke much with a hammer? Then there’s the rush GoD expansion cluster fuck that was pushed out without a level increase needed to do the content (no joke) – basically GoD was an raiding expansion that even raiders couldn’t do. Keys wouldn’t work, flags were screwed and many hours and tears expanded.
So yeah, unless you have experienced rushed bugfuck expansions released to meet arbitrary 6 month deadlines; I would not be so fast to dismiss stable as “stagnant”
about 2 years ago
Mobhunter article:
Flagging and Attunement: Blizzard Gets It, SOE Doesn’t
Mobhunter used to be Moorgard’s online job application resume (in a form of a blog) to SOE before he finally got the job. The guy that writed Mobhunter now – Loral seems to have decided that he doesn’t need a SOE job (good choice – you can do better) and start writing whats actually affecting players in EQ1.
Fairly accurate article IMHO, flagged or keyed zones destroy guilds. You have got to remove the restrictions when the content gets old. I would think even the raiding guilds would appreciate the removal. Once their e-peen rage subsides.
about 2 years ago
Believe me, I’ve been into MMOs going on 10 years now, and I am well aware of their ups and downs over the years.
I’m just saying that for me, the fresh coat of pain that are WoW’s content patches aren’t worth justifying a monthly fee anymore. For me, the game is stagnant. No need to get hostile.
about 2 years ago
Blizzard understands some of their customers. Bravo!
about 2 years ago
This is the kind of redesign the tax code is in serious need of, take note presidential candidates.
about 2 years ago
The big, nasty flowchart is for attunement to Mount Hyjal, not Black Temple.
The attunement quest for BT is killing the first boss in Hyjal. So it’s off by one. =)
about 2 years ago
Even though every bit of common sense tells me that it’s better to serve the 95% than the (screaming) 5%, experience watching and playing MMOGs says otherwise.
Whichever game has the most ridiculous, convoluted, elitist ‘hardcore’ progression involving areas that most players never see also somehow turns out to be the most popular. Conversely, it appears that often a significant and lasting decline in popularity follows a change that opens a game up to the ‘casual’ players.
Maybe that 5%, the sort of people who actually have the spare time in hand to grind hours ad nauseam to advance and the moral flexibility to climb over other people to enter the ‘elite’ guild, exert influence beyond their numbers because they also have the spare time to rant endlessly on multiple forums and the lack of character needed to do so using multiple identities, misrepresenting their role vis a vis the game, and so forth so as to make it appear to the casual reader that ‘everyone’ is now upset with a given decision.
As a result it appears to me that many of the 95% make their buying / subscription choices at least partly based on the will of the 5% because that’s whose opinions are seen when players and potential players search to see what other players think of a game change.
(Obviously people don’t just blindly follow what they read, but it’s a significant influence).
That may not be fair or right or just, but it appears to be real.
From a design standpoint, it’s a tricky thing to keep 4-8 hour/wk players satisfied with their progress and also keep 40-80+ hour/wk players from being bored.
Currently content intended to challenge the hyperplayers, particularly expansion content, is IMO sold improperly. Casual player C is forced to shoulder the cost of developing an area he won’t see in order to get access to other content (e.g., a new race or class) bundled with the expansion.
I would argue that ‘elite’ raid stuff should be purchasable with a microtransaction a la EQ2 adventure packs or XBox Live but maybe someone who knows how EQ2′s experiment in adventure packs went can lend an opinion about the viability of such an idea.
about 2 years ago
Newbies are welcome to the Black Temple.. probably the most tedious instance in the game.
The front bosses drop a bunch of crap that would go ignored by most raiders. It was yard trash taken to new extremes. Then you got the legions of more classic yard trash to filter through, and maybe after a day of raiding you would get to the fun fights (Mother, Council, Illidan).
So, welcome to the suck guys. Soon you’ll realize that Karazhan is about as fun as it’s going to get.
about 2 years ago
Hmm .. have they ever considered making the attunement guild-specific, not character-specific?
about 2 years ago
My thoughts are best summed up by the bad guy from The Incredibles: “When everyone is super, no one is.”
Without end game goals to strive for with actual effort, I can’t really find the game entertaining. If I want that sort of instant gratification, I’ll run single player games. I prefer my MMORPGs with a side of cat-ass, thank you.
about 2 years ago
“When everyone is super, no one is.”
That is the bad philosophy to design a game around, and is something the game industry is going to have to overcome. I remeber it from EQ, and people are , at this very moment, whining about WoW purples not being “epic” anymore.
The thing is, gaming is entertainment. If a game wants to get a huge player base, it has to be fun to a huge number of people. Like all other forms of entertainmaent, then everyone has to at least feel he is “super”.
People do not read “Lord of the Rings”, and imagine themselves as one of a thousand footsoliders fighting in the battle at Black Gate. They relate to the heroes. People do not watch Star Wars and think, “Hey, this is exciting. I want to play the online game and work in a tavern.” They want to be a hero. They want to be entertained.
I understand that many MMO players feel there has to be an “elite” in a game , or no one is “super”. But that will not net a game millions of players. That is on it’s way to being how to design a niche game. And that doesn’t mean it is not a vaild form of game design. It means you can not appeal to a lot of people by telling them only a few will be jugded worthy of the game.
So , even though you may think Ingmar Bergman is the best movie director ever, his movies will never make the numbers of a hollywood action film. Because most people just want to be entertained. You can talk of how intellectually lazy the movie veiwing audience is till your in the grave, but it will not change the reality.
about 2 years ago
Without end game goals to strive for with actual effort, I can’t really find the game entertaining. If I want that sort of instant gratification, I’ll run single player games. I prefer my MMORPGs with a side of cat-ass, thank you.
There are still end-goals. It’s called Sunwell. Blizzard just moved the cheese.
That is the bad philosophy to design a game around, and is something the game industry is going to have to overcome. I remeber it from EQ, and people are , at this very moment, whining about WoW purples not being “epic” anymore… I understand that many MMO players feel there has to be an “elite” in a game , or no one is “super”. But that will not net a game millions of players.
Actually, that philosophy did net WoW millions of players. Meanwhile, people got to max level in other games that had no elder game with no high level goals, and found that there was nothing more to aspire to. So they left.
Instances like Black Temple and Sunwell are ultimately good for the game, as they provide a gameplay horizon for the players to continue to strive for. This is not to say that the raid progression game doesn’t have it’s own host of design challenges to be addressed. But it’s ultimately served the game well.
about 2 years ago
In theory, sure. In practice though?
If every person in a MMO is a carbon copy of the next, and getting the top end gear/equipment/whatever is solely a function of your ability to log in… how much appeal will the game have now that any semblance of “progression” has been completely disassembled in favor of running on some even virtual keel?
I’ve always felt, and I’m by no means an expert, that the key to MMO longevity was your connection to your in-game avatar. It made you fret dying in certain games, and created an atmosphere that was fairly engrossing. With Blizzard basically shatting on the idea of risk v. reward and systematically handing out the top teir items for really next to nothing, how much of a connection can people possibly build to this character — or better stated how long will they find this character to be the source of entertainment if they have nothing really to strive for?
And I’d wholeheartedly disagree with the idea that creating sort of a player-class division (casual v. elites, and the various shades between) will not net a game millions — it just has to be done well. EQ did well for itself and grossly leaned to the elite side, whereas Blizzard is at the other end of the spectrum and catering towards the casual. I’d like to think there is a happy medium out there somewhere.
about 2 years ago
As an X hardcore player who finally got a life I never understood the “if other people get gear equal to mine with less effort then all my life accomplishments are worthless” arguement.
Sounds like a childish “I’m better then you so only I get shiney things. You can’t have them, and I don’t have to share. NOT YOURS!!! MOOOMMMYYYY!”.
It just does not make sense. How much development cash was spent on Naxx? How many players saw it? This is not efficient use of resources.
My initial hopes of badges/heroic modes enabling casual players to see hardcore content are gone. But hey, it is a step in the right direction. Maybe the next game will get it right.
about 2 years ago
“Actually, that philosophy did net WoW millions of players.”
I wish I had a for every key to WoW’s success I’ve read.
about 2 years ago
insert any random monetary unit in my post
about 2 years ago
“Actually, that philosophy did net WoW millions of players”
I respectfully disagree. It is the philosophy that stopped the EQ franchise from having millions of players.
WoW has millions of players because casuals can play and have fun. Not because millions of players are trying to be the “super elite”.
And it worked very well, until endgame. Then the casuals were told they were palying the wrong game.
about 2 years ago
I did what seemed like years of backflagging in EQ to get new guild members up to speed and able to participate in the latest raids. Been there, done that, don’t want to do it again, and I doubt I’m even close to being the only one who feels that way.
If removing admissions requirements for raid instances makes you want to leave a game, you were ready to leave anyway.
about 2 years ago
As a raid leader for what by the standards of this blog would be a hardcore uber guild (i’ve killed Illidan multple times and was in Sunwell last night), removing attunements was the best decision Blizzard has made in ages. Watching your guild fall apart because it’s impossible to replace players who have quit without spending 2 days on really old content is NOBODY’s idea of fun.
In fact, if you read the Risen post linked above, they’re not complaining about attunements either, in any way.
about 2 years ago
The last 2 patches have been about lowering the bar so that the majority of people would be able to see the remaining content before Lich King. Next to no one saw Naxx and it’s too a sweet zone for that to happen.
The badge gear and attunement changes don’t mean anything if you suck. I know tons of people with fancy gear who can’t find 1000 DPS with both hands and a flashlight. In fact, a cursory look at my last few WWS runs show lesser-than rogues with all their fancy toys (including a decked-out master macesmith) that are, at best, 125dps below me and my piddly little S2 swords.
I’ll still finish the attunement quests. Why wouldn’t I? A Fancy title and the knowledge that I led my group through difficult encounters is something worth doing.
I’m friendly with the GL and some of the top-players in the #1 guild on Stormrage and I’ve yet to see them gnashing teeth. They don’t need others to be denied something to validate their accomplishments. Someone chain-dying in Hyjal has no bearing on anyone’s life but that group. It ain’t my repair bill…
Also, the hyperbole by way of detail graphic also includes Karazhan keying and such which is a) trivial and b) the place most people spend months in getting ready to advance. The philosophy of keying isn’t to prevent you from getting good stuff, it’s to provide a reasonable benchmark as to when you are ready to start moving up. If you can’t get attuned for BT it’s unlikely that you’ll make it through trash. If you can’t beat a heroic, you’re not going to kill Nightbane, etc, etc.
about 2 years ago
Some peoples’ ideal game is a hair shirt, I guess.
WoW is easy and fun and has a good sense of humour. That’s what drew me and my friends in, after the dour grind of other MMORPGs. You got to sit down and enjoy yourself. Casual WoW raiding can be like this too, and I’m glad to see it expanding. It’s the kind of game you can play while arguing over Ventrilo about whether the Battlestar Galactica could beat a Star Destroyer in a straight fight.
People who get all bent out of shape about it seem to be missing the point – and the fun.
about 2 years ago
The problem isn’t removal of attunements, its the active devalueing of the effort required for every person who completely or put time into cockblock A, right up to the point Blizzard arbitraily decides to just remove it…while still yeilding the exact same reward.
If this has always been the ultimate plan, it should just be released in that form.
Seriously, why make people jump through month+ hoops just for the sake of making them jump through hoops? No “hardcore” raider would have felt slighted by this at all if Blizzard has just never put attunements and the like in the game in the first place.
about 2 years ago
SSC and TK attunements were removed a while ago. So, 90% of your ‘before’ diagram was obsolete. And the reason BT/MT attunements were removed was because of the difficulty in attuning alts and players new to the guild.
Do your research before making a post like this next time
about 2 years ago
@Drakks: Simple. They were designed for one thing and the “cost” of doing that thing was deemed to be far, far worse than the benefit. Therefore, TADAA, changed.
I’m also curious as to how removing the need for keying delivers the same “reward”, since it doesn’t auto-complete the quests or kill new bosses for you. This is the same kind of dubious logic that people use to decry gay marriage as damaging “normal” marriage.
about 2 years ago
SSC and TK attunements were removed a while ago. So, 90% of your ‘before’ diagram was obsolete.
Which invalidates the diagram, but little of the discussion that follows.
And the reason BT/MT attunements were removed was because of the difficulty in attuning alts and players new to the guild.
Discussing the motives, and the exact ramifications of what this means for the future, is the interesting part of the new story. Has Blizzard changed their minds on attunements, or is this just a one-dungeon thing, the way the SSC/TK removals were? Should we see fewer attunement quests in the next expansion? Will they move from personal attunements to guild attunements? Or is this just a pattern now that Blizzard will enforce for the foreseeable future (let people have at a raid for 4-6 months, then remove attunement to help bunch people up again).
about 2 years ago
Make the end game uberstuff all BoE so the Chinese farmers can farm and sell on AH. Then make the end game instances into non instances and PVP BGs instead but they must be premaids only. If the uberguilds want to keep the uberstuff all to themselves, let them defend the areas. If the casual players want the uberstuff they can buy it.
I’m from the government and I’m here to help.
about 2 years ago
Then make the end game instances into non instances and PVP BGs instead but they must be premaids only. If the uberguilds want to keep the uberstuff all to themselves, let them defend the areas.
*EQ flashbacks*
about 2 years ago
I still don’t understand where the “no effort” comes from. Can someone point me to where in the patch it says Illidan will drop dead upon seeing me?
What can I buy with badges, 3 -4 upgrades of t6 quality? yeah.. that will make Illidan a chump. sure….
about 2 years ago
Seriously, why make people jump through month+ hoops just for the sake of making them jump through hoops
Because people will do it and pay for the privilege.
about 2 years ago
“Will they move from personal attunements to guild attunements?”
…yes, that’s the plan. That or account-based attunements. If they haven’t finished the technology, they probably won’t bother to make any extensive attunements, otherwise they’ll run into the exact same problem they did here.
about 2 years ago
*EQ flashbacks*
But they want it to be HARD!
about 2 years ago
Hardcore logic for the win. Seriously screwed up stuff here.
From what I’m reading the rules of the hardcore are:
1. If you make the content easy then we don’t have anything to strive for over others!
2. If you make the content hard, don’t ever change it because that makes us sad. We don’t have very good memories, so all of the satisfaction we had before is negated instantly!
3. Make the content hard and keep it hard forever and ever. Then when we quit, we will be happy knowing we have dominance over all those soft casual players. I’ll be 75 humming a soft song of satisfaction at the thought of it. “We are the champions, of the world…”
All of this is regardless of the fact that 99% of those guilds not in those instances today won’t be there tomorrow or ever anyway. The gear checks are still well in place people. That is the true “attunement.” Your treasure (my precious) is still well guarded.
“We are the Champions!…keep those filthy hobbitzes away from my precious…OF THE WORLD!” – Time for your medicine Mr. Hardy Corz.
about 2 years ago
“Seriously, why make people jump through month+ hoops just for the sake of making them jump through hoops? No “hardcore” raider would have felt slighted by this at all if Blizzard has just never put attunements and the like in the game in the first place.”
Because there are a large number of raiders who apparently consider it a point of pride that they suffered through those cockblocks. When Blizzard puts out a new zone with a new set of cockblocks, they lift the old ones so other people who don’t care to deal with cockblocks can see some more stuff.
about 2 years ago
When everyone is super, no one is.
Simplistic, but great point, and one that I argued strongly for here.
about 2 years ago
argued much more eloquently many years ago, D&D style:
http://home.netcom.com/~rogermw/ADnD/IPDC1.html
it does help to read the previous stories but either way~
about 2 years ago
“Simplistic, but great point, and one that I argued strongly for here.”
Well when those who want to be uber can pay for a development/content team to be aimed at 5% of the player base, I guess they’ll be able to be uber forever. In the meantime though, I think they are going to have to slog along in the common muck with the rest of us plebians and be grateful for any content aimed at them at all.
I’d love to see an ROI on the uber content. I’ll bet its in the negative numbers.
about 2 years ago
“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.
about 2 years ago
The funny thing is, none of this will matter when Wrath of the Lich King is out.
about 2 years ago
“When everyone is super, no one is.”
Hardcore is still catered to in EQ1.
about 2 years ago
Drakks>My thoughts are best summed up by the bad guy from The Incredibles: “When everyone is super, no one is.”
Or, if you prefer the veneer of authority given by a more historical reference:
“When every one is somebodee,
Then no one’s anybody!”
Richard
about 2 years ago
“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.
about 2 years ago
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
Exactly. nothing has been made easier (except Mags and guilds that progressed beyond Mags stop doing him as soon as possible because he’s annoying relative to the rewards) getting a couple more pieces of gear just means you get to see the content a month to a few months sooner than you would otherwise, it doesn’t make that content easier. It just means we’re not as big of victims to the RNG as we were before.
The only valid point I’ve seen is people are afraid it will be harder to recruit since some players might want to just run kara every week for the next 5 months. well if someone does want only that, they’re not someone you want in your progression guild anyway.
The funny thing is , I only raid casually, and this barely effects us. We still want to progress and down the bosses. I don’t know anyone that wants to stop 25 man and go back to Kara.
about 2 years ago
ugh now i have gilbert and sullivan stuck in my head!
about 2 years ago
Well since i finally hit 70 on a new server after abandoning my old PvE server for a PvP server I’m very glad I don’t have to do the damn attunemnt for kara again. I need the gear from there to be more effective in other raids (at the moment i’m limited to tanking the Seer in the high king fight in Gruul’s) and this just means I can get in there sooner /shrug
about 2 years ago
“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.
about 2 years ago
“Because nothing has been made easier beyond Mags”
I’d reccommend checking the undocumented changes threads that run on elitiest jerks and other somewhat reliable game information sources. Both Kael and Vashj were nerfed again in 2.4, and there are a few other listed mechanic changes I think for bosses even beyond them.
Not that Vashj or Kael really matter now with the attunements lifted, but still. Point of the matter.
about 2 years ago
“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.
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
@Ferenczys
I could take a page out of Prokofy Neva’s book and call you a dirty communist, or I could just argue that competition and aspiration to greatness are the primary motivations for many, many people. Gamers especially tend to fall into the “competitive” category. The only real consequence of advancement withing an MMORPG is, in fact, a feeling of accomplishment at achieving what many have not, or a feeling of superiority to everyone who has not. All other consequences involve virtual rewards — gold, experience points, loot; competition is the only real-world motivation for advancement.
“This entire concept is true only if your entire concept of being is defined by other people.”
I would say that for most people, this is mostly true. Whether you’re talking about advancement within real-world social structures or within a (much more limited) massively multiplayer game, someone is going to be deemed better than someone else. I think I know which side of that dichotomy most people would choose to place themselves on.
about 2 years ago
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.”
about 2 years ago
“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 has always been a large part of the argument against making progression less linear for various raid games, and I think it’s a really stupid thing to do. I don’t think it’s specific to WoW; it’s just a byproduct of the way raid instances build up to a huge boss fight and then they have to start over again in the next raid to build up to a new final boss.
Putting in bosses that are well below the curve in difficulty for where they are in progression as some sort of reward for getting that far makes absolutely no sense; your reward for getting to this level of progression should be being at this level of progression(loot, access to raid zones,whatever), not bosses that fall over just because you got past the last one.
about 2 years ago
“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.
about 2 years ago
“Warning: this game is not intended as a source of self-esteem”
well that pretty much wraps up anything i was going to write.
about 2 years ago
“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.
about 2 years ago
“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. ”
I don’t see how this addresses my point (and Lum’s actually) that building content for 5% of the player base has a good ROI or, well, any ROI actually. Furthermore up until the last big patch where they made levelling easier, they hadn’t aimed any content at the below 70 crowd since BC came out and they certainly aren’t doing so here — and yet there actually is content aimed at the 5% uber folk. So frankly I don’t understand why you guys are whining. You are the smallest percent of the player base and getting the largest percent of content.
And paying 15 bucks a month has nothing to do with buggy and faster. That’s like some sort of strange strawman you threw in there — I guess you’ve got an old grudge.
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
“Your casual watches videos of an uber guild clearing a dungeon fir the first couple of months, then spends the next couple of months wiping on the first boss, trying to be like the uber guild”.
No. That is the myth raiders put out there, but it’s not true.
As Ferenczys pointed out, most normals could give a rat’s ass about what a hardcore has done.
about 2 years ago
“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.
about 2 years ago
I’m simply illustrating a point with (perhaps failed) humor. Some dungeon releases, as I recall, we’re usually accompanied by some video preview of the interior, posted on the official website, along with any number of subsequent fansite videos. I never understood the appeal of said videos.
“As Ferenczys pointed out, most normals could give a rat’s ass about what a hardcore has done.”
And that’s all fine and true. It still doesn’t change the fact that removing attunement opens content for players who might look to bleeding edge guilds for published strategies, dungeon FAQs, etc. These ‘business-casual’ guilds gain content they might otherwise not experience.
about 2 years ago
>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.
about 2 years ago
@John Moore…
Uh no. When you design a game you are making an investment and you hope that people will buy it and play and if its an MMO you hope they will continue to play it. If, by using all your development staff to design and cater to 95% of the player base — the casuals here — you will loose the 5% of uberfolk then one supposes that somewhere some finance person asks is it worth the investment to continue to design for that 5% so that you will not loose them.
So pretty much any idiot can see that devoting resources to 5% of your customer base at the expense of ignoring 95% is probably not going to make good financial sense. So then I suppose some person somewhere has compared the costs of keeping the uberfolk happy against the amount of resources devoted to them and has made the decision to devote X amount of developers to that 5% of content while keeping a larger staff to handle content for casual players and bug fixes and the like. (Except that’s not happening because there is no new content for casual players. Heh.)
However, knowing a little bit about how game companies are run, I doubt anything is ever decided that logically. What I suspect is that you have hard core gamers on the development team that like the uber content and so the ubers get catered to and somewhere some finance guy isn’t getting enough sleep at night cause he’s afraid all the casuals who actually pay the bills are going to wake up and realize this one day and get pissed and leave. (remember that the last actual less than 70 level content that was put into the game was the last patch, before that it was BC — there is nothing in this patch for the less than 70s and there won’t be any in Lich King)
I never ever equated ROI to some sort of directions that the uber guilds might or might not post. Frankly if the uber guilds are so damned worried that casuals might take away their uberness then they shouldn’t post directions. But regardless of them doing so, or not, it doesn’t have anything to do with ROI.
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
Oh right I didn’t see that until you pointed it out right now. OK my bad.
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
I think it’s sort of funny to say that everyone, for lack of creativity, doesn’t do something that’s “not that hard” and would dramatically improve the game on a blog with numerous game designers working on MMOs. What you really mean is that the idea is simple–but there’s a deep chasm between simple and easy.
The trouble with all the WoWtalk of catering to the 95% of casuals is that I think people are trying to answer the question of where to put their resources without thoroughly considering the prior question: what is it that casuals really WANT?
Do casuals want more small group instances and mini-raids? That could be done, but designing and tuning a 5-man is not a trivial task, and content like that tends to be chewed through and stripped bare within a matter of days, not months–how fast would the content shovel have to be? Do they want more compelling field PVP? That could be done too, but how do you handle faction imbalances in, for example, population, and how do you prevent the hardcores from taking it over with their time and gear advantage? You run into the basic problem that players want to go where the cheese is. If the best cheese is on “casual turf” the hardcore players will take their advantages and invade. We know very well what hardcores want and that’s why they get stuff that’s made for them. They thrive in a world of punishing raids and ladder-style PVP. But what casuals want is not so well-understood.
about 2 years ago
“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…
about 2 years ago
Just a question for those talking about ROI and designing for the elite:
What is World of Warcraft doing wrong vis-a-vis the other 95% that should be fixed? Would doing so attract casuals back to the game and thereby increase subscription rates? It’s very hard to argue with 10 Million subscribers for one product in a market that was originally thought to be “saturated” at 1 Million…
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
Legume- I second that. In fact, that is the reason I have almost never been in guilds (and when I have I quickly quit). Lum’s Secret MMO ™, take heed!
about 2 years ago
“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.
about 2 years ago
“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.”
Sure, I guess I may be victim of poor phrasing. 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. That basically makes the development time invested to create all those dungeons increase in value, as you have people using all of your content, not just a portion of it (respective to dungeons/raiding, I mean). After a while, removing the restrictions allows other people to utilize the same content, again making initial development time more valuable. That’s all I meant, really. Making the time spent developing dungeons worth it by trying to maximize usage. While it may not be the greatest or most seamless method of extending shelf life of some content, it does extend the shelf life of some content.
I promised myself I wasn’t going to post about WoW ever again. Now look what I’ve done. And in a hardcore/casual debate, of all things. Sorry, I mean raider/non-raider debate, heh.
about 2 years ago
“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.
about 2 years ago
I am a regular. I have never played an MMO other than WoW. I have never PVP’s at all and have no interest in doing so. I have 3 70′s and 3 other alts between 40 and 70. I probably play 20 hours, or so, a week, I could be hard-core, I just don’t want to be.
I am in a little vanity guild with a few of my RL friends. I have been lucky enough to find a loose group of players that meet in a made up channel who I group with for 5 mans pretty regularly and have recently joined them for a casual Kara raid. (I think Heroics are too hard!) We have run Kara two nights a week for a couple of months and have never see Prince, Nightbane or whatever the other dragon’s name is. This is mainly because different players have floated in and out and we never skip Attuneman or Maiden and always clear the library if anyone needs to talk to the NPC’s for quests.
I will never see BT, Mt. Hyjal, SSC or any of the other mythical high end dungeons.
I like the game. I want to wear the robe that is prettier not the one that gives me an infintessimal advantage that is ugly (and yes I am a girl). Right now my main goal is to get a Riding Nether Ray for my main. So I farm. Alot.
I find this hard-core / casual discussion very interesting.
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
Really, raids above Kara have repeated gear checks. So while you may not have to go through a quest step by step, you are still well advised to progress normally. Particularly since each new fight is an opportunity to work together as a team. Or to die horribly because someone didn’t stand in the beam. Or did stand in the fire. Or… well, you get the idea.
Dropping entry requirements on BT doesn’t mean guilds that weren’t in BT will be in there next weekend. While it’s possible to “gear up” via badges and ZA, raiders are well advised to run at least a little bit of T4 and T5 content for the rest of their gear. And given the randomness of loot, you could be running it a -lot- for those last three pieces you need.
For myself, I’m glad the attunements were dropped. Getting Kara attuned was interesting… once. I can hardly imagine trying to do it a second time, particularly since quite a lot of it is 5 man content. I would imagine a lot of guilds are relieved, as they don’t have to attune new members to T4 to get T4 loot, to then attune to T5 to get T5 loot, to finally attune to T6, so they can all do the content they want to do. Particularly since you could be stuck getting 24 people, who’ve already gotten sick of Mag or Kael, together to attune one guy. Good luck with that…
about 2 years ago
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…
about 2 years ago
Ben, is the market then not competitive? Is it already so ossified that even if you do come up with an innovative idea, it won’t lead to financial success? If so, what’s the good of being innovative? It leads nowhere. If not, why haven’t those few great ideas that DO get past the “rest of the bell curve” steamrolled their unimaginative predecessors?
Surely, a concept that provides fun, long-lasting gameplay for the great mass of casual players can be considered the holy grail of MMO design. When Blizzard is raking in well above half a billion in annual revenue, and numerous other mediocre ideas are finding plenty of funding, can a person who has found that grail really not find someone with $20 million to mount a challenge?
about 2 years ago
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…
about 2 years ago
Ben said: “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…[snip]”
If you think you found the Holy Grail, I won’t argue with you. I would simply want to play your game and form my own opinion. But, as you say, you haven’t made it…
P.S. – You didn’t answer Viz’s question(s)
P.P.S. – Do you really understand the collaborative, creative process; or do you think genius spouts from one fountainhead?
(apologies to Ayn Rand; that bitch)
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
Oh, and that’s what she said.
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
Viz sez:
“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.”
If casual players comprise 95% of your customer base and if casual players don’t respond well to being cockblocked, then maybe it might behoove game developers to do something different than just throwing their hands in the air and saying “oh well — we don’t know what they want and they don’t like the whole cockblocking thing!”
I also don’t think its a fair statement to say that casual players burn through more content than any other. I think it might be fair to say that casual players burn through the content aimed at them (not necessarily faster than dedicated players) and then feel frustrated becuase they cannot proceed at their own pace — the higher end content taking weeks and maybe months to finish if it can be done at all and there being no where else to go. And that whole taking weeks and months to finish a thing? Really very boring after a week or two.
So I can see where it might challenging to continually crank out content for the mid-levels, but if that’s where your bread and butter is, why wouldn’t you do that?
I guess I just don’t understand the sentiment that casual players are hard to cater to and therefore the prevailing answer is to just give up even though they comprise 95% of the playerbase.
I can kind of understand designing uber content for the uber players and it remains uber until it is dumbed down to make way for the next uber development and to create psuedo content for the casuals (but it isn’t really cause its still too hard for them) but then I cannot understand the uberfolk bitching about it as they are the only people really being designed for.
about 2 years ago
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.