Richard Bartle explains in great detail exactly what goes through an MMO designer’s mind when playing one of the more painful zones in WoW. Except he rather likes it, see.
So, my view is a bit different. As I noted, I actually see Stranglethorn Vale (STV) as one of Blizzard’s less well designed zones. To wit:
- It’s too large, and until very recently there was no easy way to move from one end of the zone to the other. While ideally, as Bartle noticed, there is a slow progression from one end of the zone to the other, realistically players will not play through the entire zone in one sitting. This is especially annoying for Alliance players – they have a small NPC hub, without a “innkeeper” resting area, in the northern end of the zone, while Horde players have a more central location, with an innkeeper, to work from. This is really the largest problem with the zone – it’s just too large. And because it’s too large, it keeps you there far too long. What may have given you a sense of place and wonder at level 30, to put it mildly, no longer does by level 45. (Another zone, Dustwallow Marsh, was recently revamped specifically to give players a place to escape to during that level range.)
- The quest design relies far too much on “kill 10 of these. OK, kill 10 of these! OK, hey, kill 15 of these.” Yes, that’s inherently what WoW (or any Dikumud PVE) game play is. But those sorts of concentrated kill quests, while gravy to powergamers looking for the easiest way to leverage the mindless button pressing that destroys them of everything that makes them human, really highlight the artificiality of the enterprise. And that’s what most WoW quest design manages to hide very well. You’re not just killing 10 wolves, you’re saving a troll village from starvation or whatnot. Sure, it’s just a storytelling veneer, but it’s important veneer. It also helps break up the inherent tedium involved in “kill 10 of this, fetch 5 of that” questing. And because WoW is usually so good at this smoke-and-mirror hand waving style of quest-driven storytelling, when it breaks down, it’s notable. And STV is an excellent example of where this breaks down.
- Hitting more on the specifics of faulty quest design as opposed to the content, STV is where players begin to be punished in earnest by poorly thought out world design. When you have too many players hunting the same thing in the same area, you either encourage cooperation or competition. However, WoW by its very nature as a solo-friendly MMO rabidly discourages cooperation (at least until it’s hit forcibly over your head when you switch to end-game raiding), so very few people actually think “Hmm – we’re all hunting for 10 panthers, we should group up and kill them together!”. Instead, they think “Hmm, we’re all hunting for 10 panthers, I BETTER TAG THEM FIRST!”. Other poorly thought out mechanics include the “Green Hills of Stranglethorn” mega-collection quest (which the author himself is on record as regretting as “the worst quest in WoW”) which usually serves as a focus of inventory-related frustration for the intended new player audience and as powergaming grist for those already familiar with the zone, and some quests with an insanely low drop rate for quest-related drops that, again, encourage frustration over fun.
So, that’s generally what I think of when I remember that zone – long, tedious, lots of panthers, and an abiding hatred for Hemet Nesingwary. A hatred, by the way, which Blizzard gave a knowing wink to in Northrend – after Nagarand, aka STV 2.0, reuses the kill-20-panthers quest design yet again to even more wretched excess – when you can actually start killing off Hemet’s buddies. Generally, if a well-regarded part of your content involves killing off a quest giver, that may be a sign people didn’t like those quests.
A lot of what Bartle writes on STV is interesting, especially as it relates to its quest design. He definitely comes at looking at STV from a different angle than I do. Specifically:
Well no, because these quests are stepped: the levels appropriate for the tiger mastery steps are 31, 33, 35, 37; for the panther mastery steps they’re 31, 33, 38, 40; for the raptor mastery steps they’re 34, 36, 41, 43. The final boss is also 43, but elite (so "bring friends"). This interleaving allows for variety, and it despatches the players off to various different parts of STV where the target creatures lie, thereby causing happy interactions with other quests relating to areas they pass through. However, even though this is very well done, it’s basically just well-accomplished craftsmanship. No, what we also have here is some actual art.
The stepped nature of these hunting quests mean that whatever level you first encounter the Nesingwary camp in STV, there’s going to be a quest of an appropriate level for you. It’s like a net, spread wide to catch players.
Well, no. Thanks to how WoW quest chain dependencies work, you actually have to start at the beginning no matter what your level, and work your way through the chain. It would be awfully nice if the quest givers did actually recognize that, yes, thanks to being Level Awesome you can dispense with the Somewhat Mighty Junglecat slaying and move straight on to the Fiercely Mighty Junglecat part of the quest. (Which Warhammer Online also tried to implement, by the way.) At least, it would be if you were playing the game as designed. Players, who are playing the game to win much of the time, would then resent the loss of experience and faction and gold and everything else, and hammer away at the lower level quests despite their being level-inappropriate, because they don’t want to lose any rewards due them at all. (The fact that they will then kvetch about that content being tedious is entirely beside the point.)
Bartle’s primary point, to move away from nitpicking semantics, however, is that the entire Hemet Nesingwary saga is an artful storytelling device which funnels you through the wonder of the jungle, forcing you to ask if you were predator or prey, as you travel down a road which mirrors your character’s growth and confidence. And as designed, the core of STV – which can easily be a metaphor for WoW’s character development model itself – does indeed work that way. Proper game design (at least as one cynical wag put it) doesn’t present you with a complex challenge, but tricks you into believing you’ve conquered a complex challenge. And in WoW, that “complex challenge” is the investment of time. Invest enough time in STV – or WoW itself – and you will eventually win. That’s its inherent promise, and to a large degree the polish in which that promise has been delivered is why WoW is so incredibly popular, even years after its release.
And yet, even with that well-executed promise, there are problems along the way. Server queues. Lack of meaningful social gameplay. Class imbalance. Lack of meaningful PvP. Same old diku, different day. And STV mirrors that as well – even with all of WoW’s promise, and even with STV’s world design and immersive environment, there are times when it falls flat on its face.
And so we have Dustwallow Marsh. Which is everything STV isn’t – a hub-spoke model of world design, less immersive world crafting, more attention to detail and interesting quest mechanics. And with a game and community the size of WoW’s, this is really the solution to STV’s problems – simply create so many options that everyone can be happily grinding their way to virtual nirvana.
#1 by Changling Bob on May 19th, 2009
So he claims its artful design, and you say it sucks to play. Is these directly contrary positions? Why can’t you both be right?
#2 by Changling Bob on May 19th, 2009
s/is/are/
Note to self: proofread comments, even if they are only three sentences long.
#3 by The Claw on May 19th, 2009
They didn’t call it Ganklethorn Vale for nothing!
Also there should be some mention of the fact that Nesingwary’s “kill 10 panthers” quests were so the apotheosis of the “kill 10 x” quest style that he was gleefully added to Outland to reprise his role (with even more ludicrous numbers – “kill 30 clefthoofs! kill 30 clefthoof bulls!”) and not only returned in Northrend, but we also encountered a whole mini-faction of druids dedicated to opposing him and his depopulating ways. Your players are going to kill thousands of mobs while questing anyway, might as well play it for laughs.
#4 by dartwick on May 19th, 2009
This reminds me of an author claiming his 3000 page book is wonderful because it contains all the his favorite elements of story telling.
The author totally misses that good story telling isnt boring by the end.
#5 by Jeremy Preacher on May 19th, 2009
Game designers need this kind of criticism just as much as novelists do.
Incidentally, I find your faith in the production process… amusing.
#6 by Drakks on May 19th, 2009
The best part of STV was that it was the first area with ally and horde quest hubs, as well as the neutral Nemit and BB quest hubs. This was likely the first place you saw any semblance of pvp if you played vanilla wow — and when everyone on both sides was around the same level it was really kind of fun.
I was always amused at the Hemmingway reference personally, but I never hated the zone.
#7 by Mark Asher on May 19th, 2009
Yeah, I played on a PvP server and Stranglethorn was interesting because of that, some good and sometimes frustrating PvP.
I think the biggest problem is the one Scott pointed out — the zone is a bit too big. The quest chains I didn’t mind. Sometimes I’m in a mood for a simple kill X number of things. I’m not really a completist either so I never cared if I finished a quest chain. Blizzard doesn’t really penalize you for not finishing a chain; there’s always more quests than you need to level.
#8 by Einherjer on May 19th, 2009
“Proper game design (at least as one cynical wag put it) doesn’t present you with a complex challenge, but tricks you into believing you’ve conquered a complex challenge.”
Well, that depends on what the game is trying to aim at, doesn’t it. If in doubt, apply that concept to music.
As for STV, I hated it in my main which was on a PvE server but I loved in my Alt, which was on a PvP server. I would add that STV made me find the PvP’er in me and I’m sure that the same STV might have killed the PvP’er in others.
#9 by xzzy on May 19th, 2009
I only went through the zone once, was just about the most terrible experience in an MMO I ever had (and I’ve done Everquest epic weapon quests!). I have never had a character of mine finish that stupid Green Hills quest, either.
Every time I was bringing up a new character, I’d plan for the 30-45 level range by hitting level 30 and camping for 10 days to maximize rest xp, then head to the other continent and work on the sprinkling of quests that were available. Would run instances when opportunity arose. Once I got into the 40’s I’d start working on orange quests in the zones I wasn’t technically ready for yet.
STV was so un-fun for me, it ended up being more enjoyable to find some way to game the system and completely skip the place.
#10 by Palaso on May 19th, 2009
I didn’t experience STV as described my first time through at all. I was a NE hunter that landed in Booty Bay first and worked my way up from the bottom. I could see it better the 2nd time through as a human paladin from the top but then the quest rewards weren’t as interesting.
#11 by Yeebo on May 19th, 2009
To me STV really highlighted the weakness of the launch horde game compared to the launch Alliance game in terms of replayability. A typical horde character (3 of four races) will spend levels 10-25 in the Barrens, and then spend levels 30-45 in STV. That is 50% of your levels (and a good 30-40% of your overall 1-60 playtime) in two zones. While I appreciated the zones as intricate pieces of pixxelated architecture (they are huge and have a lot of interesting little areas), I just just don’t enjoy being in different areas of the same zone for that long. And being sent repeatedly to run back and forth across such huge zones is absolutely soul crushing. I did barrens before they broke it up with flight paths…”shudder.”
Like the above poster, after one time through STV I jumped trough all sorts of crazy hoops to level past it on alts. At least with the Barrens it’s not that hard to opt out of it eventually. Leader quests send you to Ashenvale and Stonetalon by around 18. Although the lack of a smooth leveling progression on either of those zones is another gripe. Watching quests go from green to red (i.e., “come back in 2 levels”…have a good flight!) at the hubs you are working is frustrating.
#12 by Vajarra on May 19th, 2009
For more than three years, Alliance didn’t even have that northern flight point, making STV even more horrible.
#13 by Stabs on May 19th, 2009
I loved the zone for many of the reasons Richard has stated. Stalking through the jungle watching my back, ah ha a trail of dead mobs, let’s be vewwy vewwy quiet I’m hunting Alliance. There he is, got ya, now let’s get on with my quests while wondering when the Rogue I just ganked will pick his moment.
#14 by Jeremy T on May 19th, 2009
PvP was assumed to be a small niche at launch, and only later did it become apparent that the PvP gameplay mode would become popular. Was STV really designed to any large degree to support what was presumably assumed to be a tiny portion of the playerbase? I personally doubt it, but who knows.
But then, as I read what Bartle writes, it becomes apparent that he values the impact of the STV experience over the actual intent of the original design process. Whether or not Blizzard actually intended STV to function as it does is not nearly as interesting to him as the fact that he can see how a designer might have intended it to do so.
Of course, where he sees art in STV’s design due to his own interpretation of its nuances, I (and many others) see it as a design failure due to personal negative gameplay experiences.
I’m always fascinated by Bartle’s assertions, even when I don’t entirely agree with them.
#15 by Cliff on May 19th, 2009
Jeremy,
I think you missed his point entirely. He is actually saying what you say he is not saying. He is saying that these things in STV were intentional, (because the Blizzard Devs are clever and good enough to do these things intentionally) and is musing as to WHY they were intentional.
He is actually saying the direct opposite of what you are implying he said.
He is talking about how the design implies certain intents…
#16 by Bonedead on May 19th, 2009
If it really was intentional (because when I think WoW I think originality) then I would have to agree with Mr. Bartle on the reason for designing it that way. It just makes sense. Welcome to PvP. Better group up. Oh you don’t know how to? Well here, play nice with these guys while you all try and kill the same mob, hopefully you will realize that grouping can make these quests (and subsequently levels/time spent in STV) fly by. If not, enjoy getting raped sideways and having a miserable time.
Don’t forget about the Arena with the Treasure Chest too. That’s near the bottom of the funnel and is also a PvP hotspot which just reinforces that they possibly really thought it through when designing the zone.
Personally I am a huge fan of STV. I can only view it from the design perspective while seeing vicariously through Mr. Bartle’s eyes. But as a player I have always enjoyed it. I love how big it is and how many different camps of mobs there are. Plus, it’s the first time you get scared because you don’t want to die. It’s also the first time you get raped while stabbing a panther. If you’re lucky, it could also be the first time you triumph over your enemy. It has the potential to be memorable, and for most it is. One of my best MMO memories is from STV, killing a ?? Warrior as a Warlock, awhellyeah.
#17 by Slyfeind on May 19th, 2009
Wow yeah, it is very interesting that the rare praise from Bartle about WoW is for what players perceive as all the “wrong” reasons. This is probably the first time I disagree with his philosophical musings. I can’t even comprehend what he’s seeing here, and I seriously doubt that it was intentional as he described. I do know that the general focus of the classic WoW experience was for the player (maximum fun all the time) rather than for the designer (interesting themes of design philosophy). To have such meta-themes going on in WoW is as out of place as, well, as out of place as a torture quest for the Alliance.
#18 by Wanderer on May 19th, 2009
I disliked STV a lot less on a PvP server (at a time when my class was big walking gank targets) than on a PvE server (different class). At least the PvP provided some interest to break up the monotony, although as Horde, it made questing somewhat more difficult because you had to wait for a rare time when Alliance 60’s weren’t camping Nesingwary’s. One of my favorite PvP stories, even today, involves me chasing a paladin down the coast half the length of the zone. However, no amount of PvP goodness can make “kill 10 X … now kill 10 bigger X … and again …” into actual fun. And don’t get me started on those freaking pages, especially before they stacked. Even when you weren’t on the quest, you still got them off nearly every kill, so any time I stopped to eat, I used that time to destroy pages. Dozens of them. (I like big bags and I cannot lie)
And in response at length to Richard:
And what is Hillsbrad? Chopped liver?
Horde gets sent to Hillsbrad at 20-25, to get chain-ganked by Alliance in the 30-35 range, so I wouldn’t say that STV is where the two populations come together for the first time.
Also, the map size of STV is not really its functional size. Large areas are blocked off by extensive mob camps, such as the troll ruins. In the early part of a player’s time in STV, those and other populations of mobs severely limit mobility and use of the area. There are basically two routes through the zone, and for characters in the lower end of the level range, even the safer of those — the main road — is risky, due to several places where aggro is almost inevitable (worse for Horde, actually, who get tend to jumped by raptors right outside of Grom’Gol). If you look at the zone in terms of where you can actually move without excessive hindrance (having to stop and kill that thing that’s gnawing on your ass counting as hindrance) it starts looking very much smaller.
Someone at Blizzard thinks that holding down arrow keys is fun. Actually, someone on every game development team thinks that. The folks behind Age of Conan were the worst in recent memory.
As for “close enough”, remember that Darkshire, Redridge, and Blasted Lands, though nominally multi-faction zones, still have no Horde flight path or quest hub, and Hinterlands had none for many years. Alliance players coming in from Darkshire arrived almost directly at Nesingwary’s camp; Horde players coming up from Grom’Gol had to run a gauntlet of higher-level mobs (and, if PvP, gankers) and travel half the length of the zone to get there. The difficulty of doing this led to Horde usually arriving at Nesingwary’s at a point where the initial quests gave reduced exp.
Because you’re a game designer.
Players know, from looking at the dirty end of it often enough, that not all designers’ decisions were made in ivory-tower perfection. Some content is just stuff that got shoved in at the last minute to fill a gap and get the game out the door on time. See: Age of Conan. Like, all of it post-Tortage.
Also, with the Picasso comparison, remember the audience. Indeed, art critics and connoisseurs understand the deep meaning of a Picasso painting. Or they claim to, anyway; I sometimes wonder about what clothes they see on the Emperor. But most of the rest of us would rather hang a nice Boris Vallejo or Clyde Caldwell print on our walls, because it’s enjoyable to look at. To you, a quest to kill 10 rats (or tigers, or whatever) might be the master touch of a great artist; to the other 10,999,999 of us, it’s another #@$%$ boring quest to kill another 10 #@$#% rats.
No, it has something to do with the fact that they had a release date coming up, and needed content, so they stuffed in whatever they could do in a hurry.
Is that the real reason? Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s the reason the players believe, and it makes them unhappy. Their dissatisfaction is real, and that makes the “real” reason buried in the developers’ minds totally irrelevant. The players aren’t having fun. Remember, you’re not selling pixels and bytes; you’re selling fun. When people pay for a bag of fun and get a bag of boredom instead, they feel cheated.
Appreciate art all you want. The rest of us just want to play a game.
I’m put in mind of an episode of Trading Spaces I saw (blame my relatives). One participant’s bathroom walls were totally covered in hundreds of dollars worth of fake flowers. Just try to imagine the mildew farm that was doomed to become. It was “design”. It was “art”. What it wasn’t, however, was a functional bathroom. When a functional object is “arted” to the point where its function is interfered with, whether that be a flower-covered bathroom wall, or an elaborate hamster cage that cannot be cleaned, or content in a MMORPG, it’s broken. No matter what great art it might be, it doesn’t function as a bathroom or a hamster house or entertainment anymore.
It’s most likely they did it for the same reason anyone else does a half-assed job: they were in a hurry. Hand-waving takes time and skill. Telling the intern “oh, and throw some quests together for this zone” might not be ideal, but this is the world of milestones and ship dates.
What you did was art. You were (at least I gather from your book) doing it for artistic and creative reasons. You didn’t have investors, you didn’t have a marketing department, and you didn’t have hundreds of people’s ability to buy their groceries depending on your ability to meet deadlines. That’s what has changed: You created for the sake of creation. Blizzard developers don’t have that luxury. They have to create what sells, they have to create it within the limits of their budget, and they have to complete it in the specified time. If they have only X number of man-hours to devote to the quest content for STV, and in that X hours they can make a handful of true masterpieces or a few decent quests and a bunch of filler, the filler wins. That’s real life.
This is a zone where groups from the opposing faction will walk around looking for easy ganks. You are a designer. You know this will happen. How would you encourage people new to the zone to group up, so they don’t get ganked?
I should point out that most of the gankers are 10-20 levels above the gankees, at a minimum. Five on one odds doesn’t matter at that point, and if it does, the gankers will just pair up.
That’s one of the problems with open PvP: the fighting is rarely between people of equal level. In general, zone-appropriate characters are not PvPing, they’re trying to level; fighting the guys from the other faction who are leveling next to them would waste time that could be used to gain experience points, and give them nothing of value in return. Ideally this wouldn’t be so, but ideally people would enjoy levels 1-79 as much as they do 80, too, instead of trying to burn through them as fast as possible. It is when a player reaches maximum level, or is in the long and slow homestretch approaching it, that they are most likely to be less focused on exp grinding and and more interested in doing something, anything, that isn’t more grinding — and PvP, of course, comes right to mind. Since it is human nature to prefer fights that one can win, they don’t seek out fellow 60’s or 70’s or 80’s, as the case may be; they head for a zone full of easy prey. In vanilla WoW, that was STV. A 60 with halfway-decent gear can tear any number of 40’s apart. Therefore, grouping didn’t help. The only truly viable strategy, when faced with overwhelming odds, was not to be in their sights. (nobody ever went to the zombie troll camp, for instance; I must have ground out two or three levels there)
I think you had it right earlier: you’re seeing patterns that aren’t there. This is the Virgin Mary on a pancake, not great design.
The emperor is stark naked with his junk flapping in the breeze.
If a game sucks, or some element of a game sucks, no amount of “but it was art!” can redeem it. A game (or an element in a game) is a functional object: an object that generates enjoyment. If an artistic design decision causes it to not generate enjoyment, or causes it to actively destroy enjoyment, then it is broken. It is no longer capable of fulfilling its purpose. A spiked chair might be art, but it’s not any good as a chair, and you’d be pretty ticked if you bought one, unaware of the spikes, intending to sit on it.
Most people didn’t like the Nesingwary quests the first time they saw them. Running them 6 times, by the way, only requires two characters, since there are three sets of the wretched things.
It’s boring. And the exp is minimal, due to the quest level, so you’re being bored to no end except to unlock a further way to be bored.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Sometimes suck is just suck.
So long as you don’t mind when we respond honestly. It’s how we see MMOs, from where the rubber meets the road (or where the face meets the dirt, as the case may be) and we can’t do any more about it than you can.
#19 by Guy on May 19th, 2009
Perhaps the kill 10 “x” quests were simple and numerous in order to give people straigtforward but time consuming quests in that forced them to maximize contact with the other faction.
STV was fun when I played it, but certainly not for those particular quests; it was fun for all the other, more interesting stuff, like the troll and pirate quests. The physical look was also nice. I was also still on a WoW “high” though, with several new skills to look forward to and some fun grouping. It definitely felt less fun the second time through, but then so did a lot of WoW’s content.
#20 by Informis on May 19th, 2009
It’s funny argument to make. This design choice is so bad, it must have been done on purpose for some good reason. Not all bad choices are made on purpose. It’s possible that:
1) Different people designed STV who discarded (or didn’t know about) lessons learned and/or…
2) Different authorities granted their stamp of approval and/or…
3) Production circumstances dictated a different standard of storytelling
etc.
I am reminded of folks who insist that the human eye was designed by a greater intellect due to its unlikely complexity.
#21 by pxib on May 19th, 2009
I believe the lowest level matchup of PvP Alliance and Horde is actually in Ashenvale, where both sides enter in their high teens, early 20’s… or would, if anybody actually played that huge, quest-starved zone on a regular basis instead of running off to the Eastern Kingdoms.
#22 by Brask Mumei on May 19th, 2009
Odd… Recently saw a statement elsewhere that games can’t be art because they are functional. Functional things aren’t allowed to be Art, by said person’s world view. Well, when Richard Bartle claims this zone is Art, why then is everyone so aggrieved that it isn’t functional? Is not its lack of pragmatism a *prerequisite* for it being Art? Wanderer’s argument that art consists of fake flowers in the washroom seems to only support Richard’s assertion that the zone represents art…
(Personally, I have no problem with functional things being artistic)
I enjoyed Richard’s analysis – I think this is the sort of criticism we really need to encourage of games. The responses to him have all been whining about specifics. The player’s aren’t reading the book for all the typos, if I may mix my own metaphors.
Playing Portal with the Commentary turned on was quite pleasurable, it was nice to listen to what the game designers *did* consider. Those choices of colour and shafts of light are not accidental. Likewise, a bunch of K10R quests sticking out as they do?
Games-as-art can’t arrive until we, the players, start actually *asking* these questions. And not just throwing out glib “must have been friday” type excuses. But giving the other party, the designer, the benefit of the doubt.
One important thought I picked up from literary criticism is that the Author Is Dead. It does not actually matter if this was just a serendipitous accident of rushed schedules or the intentioned creation of an architect. Richard’s analysis of the *message* stands the same either way. The virgin mary in the spilled beans is equally beautiful if it was by chance or by careful positioning by an artist.
So, squint your eyes past technical faults. Recall your first journey and see if Richard’s analysis stands up. Is that a story that fits this zone? Does another story fit better?
This actually, I think, fits back to the whole Alliance Torture Quest. Namely, it sticks out. Which is why Richard Bartle was so affronted when it stuck out for no apparent purpose.
#23 by Owain on May 19th, 2009
Ah, now I understand. Stranglethorn Vale is Art. No wonder I thought it sucked from a game play point of view.
Since so much of what passes as Art today is pretentious crap, maybe that is why so many people are critical of Stranglethorn Vale.
#24 by Bonedead on May 19th, 2009
I’d pick a popular raid encounter to praise next time. You’d probably get fewer people trying to “beat” you for some sort of “iRecognition” without even caring enough to attempt to figure out what you’re saying.
#25 by foolsage on May 19th, 2009
I primarily experienced Stranglethorn as Horde (only visiting as Alliance considerably later in my WoW career), and absolutely none of the flow that Mr. Bartle was so impressed by presents itself for the Horde. I don’t agree that the experiences manifest as “two separate “voices”, although they do ultimately combine to say the same thing” as he contends. Rather, as noted, the experiences are fundamentally different, and are even experienced at different levels. Notably, the road-spark that so excited Mr. Bartle doesn’t occur for the Horde, at least no moreso than in literally every other zone in WoW; quests usually begin close to quest hubs and gradually lead one outwards and away, until one’s covered most of the territory to the next quest hub. Even the newbie zones do this. The unidirectional spark the Alliance experience doesn’t sadly offer itself for the Horde. Perhaps this is intentional, meaning the designers deliberately chose not to share this amazing experience with half of their players, or perhaps the designers didn’t intend the road spark phenomenon in the way that Mr. Bartle appreciated it. I suspect the latter is more likely honestly.
I will also agree with the above posters that noted that both Ashenvale and Hillsbrad usually come before STV, meaning Mr. Bartle’s thoughts about predator vs prey as regards the introduction of PvP are examples of finding patterns where none exist.
I’m also frankly unclear on the manner in which the Nesingwary hub is any more of a content trap than every other quest hub in the game. It’s quite common to offer a range of quests of varying levels, all of course appropriate to the region. Given (as noted above) that the prerequisite quests for the chains are at a set level, I don’t see the magnificence of this design as being any more impressive than, again, every quest hub elsewhere.
The road as metaphor for danger is just as accurately descriptive of the Barrens as it is of STV. Again, I fail to see the uniquely amazing design work in STV that so impressed Mr. Bartle. Perhaps I lack the formal training, perhaps the explanation was insufficient, or perhaps the pattern doesn’t really exist but is being projected. I can’t say. I gather I’m not one of the 20 people who understand this, but I can’t say whether that’s my failure as a reader or Mr. Bartle’s as a writer.
#26 by JuJutsu on May 19th, 2009
“I gather I’m not one of the 20 people who understand this, but I can’t say whether that’s my failure as a reader or Mr. Bartle’s as a writer.”
I can help clarify that; he’s an excellent writer.
#27 by Mahkno on May 19th, 2009
Poo Poo STV all you want. I think STV is hands down the best zone. I loved. The quests might seem boring but they weren’t the point. The PvP was the point. The large diverse map provided many varied opportunities to engage your opponent. The quests were just an excuse to get you there and move you around.
#28 by Bethryn on May 19th, 2009
A minor niggle: the zone isn’t too large. The size of a zone has little effect on its playability; rather, it’s a matter of distribution and efficiency. There are lots of huge zones in the later expansions; they simply have a larger number of better placed hubs.
Can you do lots of quests at once, with minimal travel time between questing areas? Or are you forced to do one or two long chained quests that require repeat journeys back and forth between questgiver and the questing area?
How much journey time on average is there between a hub and a quest? Where is the hub on the map? Is it at an extreme, and as you get further through its quests do the questing areas get farther away? Or is it centralised and all of its quests are nearby, and quests that are farther away are attached to their own nearby hub?
Are quests of similar level consistently the same type of quest (grinding) or are the quest completion mechanics varied?
Do the quests give you enough experience to move onto the next level of quests? This is a really bad one for vanilla WoW. It usually took double digits of quests to gain a level later on, but most quest zones later on only had eight or nine level appropriate quests. You often did a few quests in a zone, then had to stop because the next bits in the chains or new quests on offer put you over the 3-level cap (you’d be fighting ‘orange’ monsters at greatly reduced hit% efficiency). Then you’d have to travel the entire world to get to another similarly levelled zone to do a few quests there. Then back to the first zone to do the ones you’ve levelled up enough for, and so on. And this is a game with non-instant travel and a one-hour cooldown on hearthstone. After twenty levels of this sort of travel time on my druid, I asked my veteran friend which character could make portals and played Mage for the following year with no regrets. Considering the hassle involved in getting the gold for mounts in vanilla WoW, it was the best decision I made.
Thematically, for example, I’d say Duskwood is the best zone in vanilla WoW, but mechanically, it’s awful, with many many repeat journeys along the main road, particularly during the otherwise awesome Embalmer questline.
In general though, WoW has learnt most of its lessons regarding hub/quest distribution and so on. Though I no longer play it, WotLK had some of the most enjoyable levelling in any MMO I’ve played, with frequently varied (and sometimes even interesting) questing mechanics, multiple quests in single questing areas, and good storytelling and myth themes.
Sadly, WAR, while it distributed its hubs very nicely, decided against giving you enough experience in a single zone, so if you chose to PvE your way up for whatever reason (PvP levelling was frankly much more enjoyable, and efficient), you would once again spend half your time travelling between continents so as to fill in the gaps in experience gain.
Did I mention the, “you have to return to your skill trainer in his city halfway across the world from your questing zone to learn your new skills,” problem? That one’s always tonnes o’ fun, and it’s a mistake still being made (hello Age of Conan).
#29 by Gx1080 on May 19th, 2009
Well, the zone it did created the feeling of being in a jungle, the strugle between hunter and prey, and who is more vicious that another player? It was the place where people in PvP servers really got the concept of world PvP (its between the Horde and Alliance territory, duh).
That said, i enjoyed it (selling the book Pages) and the fist thing i did as Horde is run as fast as possible to Grom’gol and start with all the quests in there.
In general, its a “meh” zone, besides the open PvP and the Gurubashi arena, theres isnt something special, good or bad in there.
#30 by geldonyetich on May 19th, 2009
In any case earlier comment confused anyone, I was talking about Booty Bay as being the zone that detailed the game for me. Stranglethorn Vale came right afterward, and that point I was largely disillusioned.
It might be because it’s sort of about that Booty Bay/Stranglethorn Vale levels (30-45ish) that the game has begun the subtle shift from casual-accessible fast-paced to hardcore grind. It might not set in completely until later levels, but my tolerance for the grind is lower than usual.
Personally, I thought many of Bartle’s observations about the zone were interesting. The hunter/hunted observation and th way Hesingway [sic?] springs the trap on you *is* a fairly interesting twist.
A lot of the imitators don’t get it, but Blizzard’s flair for putting those types of twists in quests was far more important than the number of quests they offered. If you’re going to ask people to kill ten rats, you need to make it *interesting*.
#31 by Saylah on May 19th, 2009
I skipped STV on 4 out of six characters. The hunter and shadow priest spent some time there. The horrid quests plus PVP ganking and placing a high level raid instance in the zone felt insane. The first thing I thought when I saw a page of some sort drop off a mob in Runes of Magic was, ‘OMFG please don’t have copied that horrendous quest chain.” They did put made it much more palatable. The pages dropped more frequently and you collected this without concentrated effort while completing other slay quests. STV definitely ranked high on my list for one of the worst zones in WOW.
As far as making quests like those interesting, I’m going to disagree here. They are mildly interesting on your first character, if and only if you’re still reading quest text by the time you hit that level, And even if you were it was only mildly interesting while being obnoxious on the rest of characters that need to make it through the zone. But as for the other characters you have to bring up it was obnoxious.
#32 by Wanderer on May 19th, 2009
If I understand some of the previous posters correctly, there’s a sense of “it’s an Art thing, you wouldn’t understand” here. So, the 20 people in the world who can appreciate the Great Art of STV can enjoy it, and the rest of us should just bow humbly in the presence of our betters, that rarefied elite who understand why gameplay and fun should be sacrificed on the altar of Art.
Nowhere did I say that “art consists of flowers in the washroom.” What I said was that after the designer, the artist, “artified” the washroom by covering the walks with fake flowers, its actual function — the whole reason for its existence — was impaired. It no longer served the purpose it was created for.
Functional things can be artistic, just as artistic things can be functional. But when a functional thing is rendered non-functional by artistic components, the design has failed. Take a teakettle and artistically fill it with layers of lights and colored glass, and you may very well have art. What you don’t have anymore, though, is a teakettle. You have a teakettle-shaped piece of art, and if you need to brew up some tea, you’re out of luck.
The primary function of a game which is marketed to the general public is to bring enjoyment to the people who play it. If “art” (as in those deadly dull quests in STV) impairs the enjoyment of the game for those people, then it, like the glowy teakettle, has failed in its purpose. People want to make tea in their teakettles, and they want to have fun in their games. Being informed that the uselessness of the teakettle or the lack of fun in the game is intended by the artist creates neither tea nor fun.
#33 by Noel Walling on May 19th, 2009
While I’d agree with you that the physical size of the zone isn’t too large (when compared with TBC/WotLK zones in particular), what does make the zone ‘too large’ is the lack of flightpaths, and that most players when they enter STV (at the time when the zone was designed) didn’t have mount till 10 levels after they entered the zone.
I’d suggest that anyone who wants to know what tedium feels go back to STV with no mount. God forbid you’re on a character without a runspeed buff.
I’m still confused as to why there is a thought that STV was designed this way on purpose. The entire concept that Richard is putting forth is contrary to Blizzard’s core design principles, not to mention that it ignores how the WoW team worked on content at that time (quests went in last, over the top of the basic population of the zone).
#34 by Longasc on May 20th, 2009
Nowadays people want to level up faster, to get to the “real game”. A bit sad, but true. Duskwallow Marsh does this much better than STV, which has more interesting quests and a lot more atmosphere.
There is this Vietnam style camp, with Colonel Kurtzen (sp?) or so. Inspired by the movie Apocalypse now and the Heart of Darkness book by Joseph Conrad.
STV provided me with that: HORROR. It was a jungle, there were dangerous, often invisible beasts. And the Horde.
People do not like it, maybe. But at least they felt something in STV. Try to feel the same in the awesomely stunning and maybe even prettier WOTLK zones.
Neither Sholazar nor other zones had such an intense feeling, soundtrack and all that. They all served us easy mobs to kill & loot on a silver platter.
I am not sure how much of this was intentional, but often decisions are made subconsciously. If the designers thought about it or not, it worked out in the end.
I just wonder that nobody bashes the “Barrens” or “Stonetalon Peak”. Boring to hell, but at least nobody is stepping on your toes or even killing you there, hmm? :>
#35 by AMIB on May 20th, 2009
@Longasc
“If you don’t get it, you’re a carebear” is the Godwin’s Law of MMO discussion.
I don’t remember Colonel Kurzen’s story because I was never made to care. You can’t have me kill 10 man-shaped rats (and the Kurzen quests are all “Kill 10 privates, then kill 10 sergeants, etc.”) and expect that that will impart an effective message of horror. What it did do, however, is make me sick of making corse-runs when a mob ran away and pulled three friends because I didn’t have the tools to stop him.
That wasn’t horror. It was horrible, but it wasn’t horror.
#36 by Richard Bartle on May 20th, 2009
@Wanderer
>And what is Hillsbrad? Chopped liver?
Compared to STV, yes.
>Horde gets sent to Hillsbrad at 20-25, to get chain-ganked by Alliance in the 30-35 range
Yes, and Alliance gets sent to Desolace. There are skirmishes and gankages; some people like PvP more than others. STV is where the match is thrown onto the tinder, though.
>Also, the map size of STV is not really its functional size.
The same can be said of many zones.
“Size” is a subjective concept in MMOs. Players experience it through travel, so although distances are important, so is the time it takes to get from A to B. The lack of initial flight paths, the terrain obstacles (cliffs, rivers), the kinks in the road, the random combat, the don’t-have-a-mount-yet – all this affects the way that the zone’s “size” is perceived.
There will be areas in STV that are effectively dead once you’ve done them, yes, but they serve their purpose: to absorb players. Sure, those troll ruins take up a lot of real estate, but they can provide content for lots of players in so doing. Once you’ve done the quests you’re not going to be inclined to go back, but you’ll be going to some other area instead.
This is incidental anyway; I wasn’t commenting on STV in general, I was only commenting on that one small quest hub. If you hate the zone, please don’t use me as a proxy for Blizzard in venting your fury.
>Players know, from looking at the dirty end of it often enough, that not all designers’ decisions were made in ivory-tower perfection. Some content is just stuff that got shoved in at the last minute to fill a gap and get the game out the door on time.
Well, you could be right there. Personally, I think there’s enough structure around the Nesingwary quests to suggest that they weren’t dropped in at the last minute, but I could be wrong. If you want to treat every quest you like as evidence of Blizzard’s class and every quest you don’t like as the result of its being added in crunch time, OK, go ahead. You could be 100% accurate in that.
I was saying what I see when I play. I stated at the start that I know there aren’t many other people see it this way, mainly by way of apology for the esoteric nature of what would follow. I now find that I am criticised for this from two directions:
1) Everyone else does see things this way, and I’m an arrogant bastard for assuming they don’t.
2) Everyone else doesn’t see things this way, and therefore what I say is just plain wrong.
>To you, a quest to kill 10 rats (or tigers, or whatever) might be the master touch of a great artist; to the other 10,999,999 of us, it’s another #@$%$ boring quest to kill another 10 #@$#% rats.
Look, I can’t help the way I see MMO design any more than you can help the way you see them. Indeed, I envy the way you see see them – you have an experience that I can never have. You think I revel in my situation?
Oh, and here’s the bad news: if you think about MMOs enough yourself, you too will wind up in the same position as me. Enjoy playing them while you can.
I know K10R quests (I guess I should call them K10FR quests) are boring. Most quests are boring. However, the Nesingwary set of K10FR quests is (because of the set-up) slightly less boring than it might have been, and it has some actual purpose to it.
Jeez, next time I want to describe art in quest design, I’ll make sure I pick one that everyone loves…
>No, it has something to do with the fact that they had a release date coming up, and needed content, so they stuffed in whatever they could do in a hurry.
Let’s assume you’re right. They could have stuffed any quests in there. They could have packed it with FedEx quests, with escort quests, with find-the-object quests, but they didn’t: they put in K10FR quests. Now either they rolled dice and chose that kind of quest at random, or they gave it a moment’s thought first. If they did choose it arbitrarily, OK, then I’m seeing art where there is none; I look foolish, but hey, I got to think about quest design as a consequence so there is an upside to it for me. If, however, they did not choose arbitrarily, then the decision to use that form of quest was made for a reason. Given that positioning 9 different groups of mobile wildlife in different, as-yet-unoccupied parts of STV is not as easy as dumping 9 different stationary ferns or feathers or fishbones in different, who-cares-if-they’re-occupied places, you can’t say that these quests were chosen simply on the basis of their being easier to implement. So why were they chosen?
>The players aren’t having fun. Remember, you’re not selling pixels and bytes; you’re selling fun. When people pay for a bag of fun and get a bag of boredom instead, they feel cheated.
Fun is part of what defines an MMO. If it’s not fun, then it’s not an MMO. However, different people find different kinds of things fun. If you’re asked to do something you don’t find fun, well, maybe it’s not something you should do?
The Nesingwary K10FR chains are not especially fun even for achievers; the way they’re set up, the unfunness is softened a bit, and they’re something you can do in the background while concentrating on other quests, but on the whole they suffer from their basic premise – K10FR. They’re better than many other K10FR quests in that regard, but not as good as whatever particular bespoke quest you personally happen to like.
What’s special about them, though, is what they do in ADDITION to their normal function as quests. That’s why I mentioned them – not because they were particularly fun, but because sometimes designers need to tell players things and this is an example of their doing it.
>Appreciate art all you want. The rest of us just want to play a game.
Then … why are we arguing? I was appreciating the art on my blog, I wasn’t interfering with your playing a game. Why the huge post taking me to task?
>When a functional object is “arted” to the point where its function is interfered with, whether that be a flower-covered bathroom wall, or an elaborate hamster cage that cannot be cleaned, or content in a MMORPG, it’s broken. No matter what great art it might be, it doesn’t function as a bathroom or a hamster house or entertainment anymore.
This is a valid point. The response is that fun is intrinsic to the medium, not incidental to it, and that an MMO which isn’t fun can’t therefore be a work of MMO art. It might be some other art form, but it’s not an MMO.
This isn’t a new debate, but it is ongoing. You might want to read this exchange between Jess Mulligan and Raph Koster on the subject in 2001, as background:
http://www.skotos.net/articles/BTH_07.html
http://www.skotos.net/articles/BTH_09.shtml
>Telling the intern “oh, and throw some quests together for this zone” might not be ideal, but this is the world of milestones and ship dates.
So all that talk we hear of Blizzard’s legendary polishing, of their not releasing product prematurely – that’s all hogwash? If you come across a quest in STV that you like, it’s because it was done on Monday rather than Friday?
Well, as I said, you could be right. Everything could be an incoherent mess that functions more out of good luck than good planning. The cynical view could be the one that best reflects the reality.
That doesn’t help me, though, because I’m more idealistic about it. I see they why, not the what. I can’t help it, any more than if I watch someone throw a tennis ball at a brick wall I see it’s going to bounce back.
>That’s what has changed: You created for the sake of creation. Blizzard developers don’t have that luxury. They have to create what sells
No they don’t. They don’t have to create games at all. They could be writing novels, or acting in plays, or programming nuclear power stations, or feeding the poor, or racing motorcycles. They’re not, though: they’re making games. Why? Because they like playing them? Or because they like making them?
If they do create games, then yes, those games have to sell – that’s part of the deal. That doesn’t preclude their being art, though. The people who make games could be doing any number of other things instead, some of which pay a lot more than game development. However, they chose to do game development. Unless they just fell into it somehow, this means there must be something about the creation of games that drew them to that as a career.
In other words, they are creating for the sake of creation. If they were creating for any other reason, well, there are plenty of other careers that pay much more and have much better benefits than game development.
>If they have only X number of man-hours to devote to the quest content for STV, and in that X hours they can make a handful of true masterpieces or a few decent quests and a bunch of filler, the filler wins. That’s real life.
Why can’t they do both? If you have something to say, and you’re creating filler quests, that doesn’t mean you can’t say it – it merely restricts your vocabulary. People don’t always have to sit around thinking for hours before creating a work of art: if inspiration comes, it comes.
Let’s say there was indeed some time pressure. There was space to fill, there were no new assets available, there had to be 10 quests with a reward budget of 3 greens, a blue and however much XP. So the designer thinks, “OK, spaces, I have to put mobs there; it’s a jungle, so, three K10FR quests and a final boss”. That’s under-pressure, journeyman design, and could well be what happened (assuming there was such pressure here, which I dispute). Is it beyond the bounds of possibility, though, even in this situation, for the designer to think, “Hmm, actually we could use this to encourage people to group”, or “Hmm, I’m writing quests about hunting in a zone about hunting”, or “Hmm, let’s have some fun here”? Any one of those could act as a springboard for turning the mundane into the mundane+art.
>In vanilla WoW, that was STV. A 60 with halfway-decent gear can tear any number of 40’s apart. Therefore, grouping didn’t help.
Fair enough. So designers would have been wasting their time trying to encourage people to group? Yet they did so – there are many quests that are pro-group, from the Kurzon ones on down. You may think that with hindsight this was a bad call on their part, and you may be right. Personally, I don’t think this encouragement did any harm and quite possibily it did some good, but that’s just my opinion.
>I think you had it right earlier: you’re seeing patterns that aren’t there. This is the Virgin Mary on a pancake, not great design.
Possibly. Then again, you could be looking at the Mona Lisa and only seeing clumps of paint.
The thing is, I see the patterns anyway whether I like it or not. Sometimes they make sense out of serendipity, sometimes they make sense because they really are structured. I have no way of knowing which is which for sure without asking the designers. However, even if I see art where there is none, at least I’ve spent some time thinking about it, and have improved my understanding in some small way. Rorschach ink blot tests involve seeing images in random patterns, but that doesn’t mean they’re worthless.
>If a game sucks, or some element of a game sucks, no amount of “but it was art!” can redeem it.
I disagree. It can suck at one level and not suck at another level, and the result be that it’s not overall as sucky as if you only look at that first level.
You didn’t like the Nesingwary hub hunting quests. OK, so for you they sucked: score -10. However, they also carried a message that helped other things not suck as much as they would have done if there hadn’t been any message: score +1. Result: -9. Partial redemption.
>A game (or an element in a game) is a functional object: an object that generates enjoyment. If an artistic design decision causes it to not generate enjoyment, or causes it to actively destroy enjoyment, then it is broken.
Earlier, you expressed the opinion that this was a set of quests added under pressure, and that I was seeing art where there is none. This being the case, that set of quests was always going to suck anyway. Adding an artistic component to it didn’t make it suck any more – in fact, it probably helped alleviate the overall suckiness level in some small way.
I agree that deliberately putting in something “for the sake of art” that is unfun is not generally a great idea. Even so, there could be limited situations where it makes sense (like in every Disney movie, where near the end you think someone is dead but it turns out they’re not).
>Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
But if you don’t look, you’ll never know when it’s something else.
>So long as you don’t mind when we respond honestly.
Not at all. I only mind when people don’t read what they’re responding to.
Richard
#37 by Wanderer on May 20th, 2009
If I recall correctly, the Kurzen quests include a number of item-collecting quests (Jungle Remedy, etc.), and a rather fun trip into that big cave after the Big Baddie. Perhaps not the most exciting and innovative quest line ever, but far above the Nesingwary quests.
#38 by Cliff on May 20th, 2009
I think I could safely be called a “carebear” and I did STV on a standard PvE server, but I get what Longasc is saying. I even agree with it, so far as I am able, based on my own experience.
I also agree with the comments that Bartle made about really wanting a mount after trying to do that long-long run through STV, and I came to really hate the wildlife, due to all the things Bartle mentions. I believe he is right and that these things are intentional, and were done with artistic intent. They were mood setting choices.
As an amateur artist myself, I understand that there is a fine line that moves from viewer to viewer. In story telling, you need to try and get your readers/viewers/players to experience the things the characters do. However, you don’t want them to experience too much! Some emotions are harder to do than others: monotony for instance, or exhaustion. You don’t want to actually bore your viewer, or actually make them feel exhausted, but you DO want them to feel the flavor of those emotions. You want them to think “How horrible for our hero!” NOT “How horrible for me!”
It’s a kind of spell weaving, where you attempt to transport a viewer into a world, but the spell won’t take if it is too weak, and it will break if it is too strong. Great art finds that perfect balance with the most people.
STV gets across certain emotions rather well. Perhaps too well. That, I think, is the real issue. The spell was too strong for many, especially on repeat casting.
The question should not be “Is STV art?” It is art. The question might be “Is STV good art?” Of course, at this point, we then discuss what makes art “good,” and that is a very difficult, if not impossible thing, to nail down to the satisfaction of everyone.
#39 by Vetarnias on May 20th, 2009
A bit late to this conversation, so I’ll try to keep my own contribution short.
What bothers me most about Dr. Bartle’s post is this entire net-to-catch-players-unawares line of reasoning. For my part, I barely recall Nesingwary at all, because I had little to do with this net. This was, along with the yeti cave in Hillsbrad, the most notorious ambush point in the game, especially for Horde players (for the record, I played Horde as well), as others pointed out. I recall turning in a few of the quests that send you to him, but not taking quests from him. That you have quests specifically sending you to him, by the way, is just the subtle equivalent of a big yellow neon sign as to where you should go next, and it’s just plain offensive because you know there’s a net, and it awaits you.
Second, and at a most down-to-earth level, Hemet Nesingwary is a design failure because it is Hemet Nesingwary, another lore-breaking WoW real-life tongue-in-cheek reference that, albeit more literary than dear Haris Pilton, still destroys any immersion you may have had in the game. They could very well have had the archetype of the big-game hunter (a threadbare cliche), but they did not need to include all those winks at real-life identification. They could, in other words, have made one up completely, but they didn’t.
-Reading Dr. Bartle’s blog entry just confirms to me that WoW is just one large hand-holding exercise, so on this point I agree with him, but I don’t see it as a good thing, as he seems to do. Is it really about Stranglethorn specifically? No, I wouldn’t say that. Yeah, sure, I was inside that great funnel that would force me to go to Booty Bay. But I tried to avoid it as much as possible, doing every green-colour quest in Stonetalon or the Thousand Needles that remained in my quest book to make sure I could spend as little time as possible in Stranglethorn. But I couldn’t escape it altogether.
Which in the end speaks of something else: level-limited play. I have very little patience for it nowadays, and WoW was the worst offender in the way it was encouraging instant gratification while fostering a sentiment of overwhelming inadequacy in its players (aka, your gear is the best in the world, until next level where you will suck, or, in layman’s terms, the treadmill). So you might have avoided Stranglethorn (if such a thing were possible) and moved on to Dustwallow or even Tanaris as quickly as possible, you’d still be stuck with the basic problem of getting killed by NPCs seven levels above you, not to mention anything of the ganking on PvP servers.
That’s why Nesingwary is a design failure, too. You cast a net for level-30ish players, and inevitably you get the bored level-80s, who know this, maintaining a watch on the place. If this was an intentional aspect of WoW’s design, it is sadistic (because WoW PvP is all about levels and gear, and not even about RvR despite all the game’s claims to this effect); if it isn’t intentional, it failed to acknowledge what would come out of it. And somehow “this is PvP, go back to a PvE server” doesn’t quite cut it as an excuse.
By all means, there should be some tension. There should be strategic points on the map, which Alliance and Horde should fight over — even though this comes in the most artificial setting, the number of quests being given there. I’m all for the PvP-ambush adrenaline rush, but I don’t think WoW is the game for it; Shadowbane and such are far more appropriate, because of design choices. Sure, PvP-ambush situations in Stranglethorn sound nice, until you realize it just means that a level 80 can show up and kill with one blow all those who came to the zone to legitimately level up. So your own side gets its level-80’s to Stranglethorn to protect its own. And soon it’s a bunch of maxed-out characters duking it out in Stranglethorn while the lowbies turn in their quests. Intended gameplay? I don’t think so. Acceptable gameplay? No, because, as I said above, WoW isn’t the game for this.
Sure, you might say that the WoW player loses nothing in PvP, except his time. True. But this is precisely why WoW is inappropriate for such a purpose. The PvP is gratuitous, and because the PvP loser is no worse off than before, it automatically makes any criticism of the PvP irrelevant, and the developers can just brush it off. (And I could mention here the faction imbalance on some servers, which probably makes the game unplayable for the smaller faction.)
@Brask Mumei
I find that there is much in literary criticism that is hogwash. The author is dead, okay, I’m willing to concede that. But for every dismissal of the author’s intent comes a critic who will impose his own idea of what the work means — and promptly blame the author for it (ie., “I don’t care what you actually mean, because what I think you mean is always better”). In other words, say that the author’s actual intent is irrelevant, and substitute your own idea as the greater truth. It might have been a novel idea when introduced, but why has it not so much made the critic independent from the author as superior to him, in every context, while at the same time blatantly pushing an agenda? (See: Dale Peck.)
I’m all for admiring a Shakespearean sonnet, but the fact that it was composed by a monkey clanking away on an Underwood at random ought to account for something.
As for the art versus fun debate, I’m tempted to agree with Wanderer about “art for art’s sake”, where functionality stops being a main consideration because it’s Art. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then Dr. Bartle is more than welcome saying that Stranglethorn was art, even though its creator might have been the same monkey as above getting an internship at Blizzard. But art and functionality are two separate spheres, and on the second, I cannot side with Dr. Bartle.
#40 by Bethryn on May 20th, 2009
@Richard Bartle
“So all that talk we hear of Blizzard’s legendary polishing, of their not releasing product prematurely – that’s all hogwash?”
Depending on how you define polish, and what standard of polish you’re using by way of comparison, that could very well be the case for vanilla WoW.
I can give one very definite example of poor polish by almost any definition, and that is Mulgore. The zone was designed when Tauren all had the Plainsrunning ability, allowing them to move much faster on foot than other races. It was therefore designed to be of a certain size so as to make travel times comparable to those found in other starting areas. Plainsrunning was removed due to balance issues, but Mulgore was left the size it had been designed as. It is consequently a very unpleasant starting area, and most sensible cows brave the Barrens to move swiftly to Durotar.
There are a lot of other non-functional issues with the original game, but to be fair, many of these are because designing an MMO was still fairly unrefined process at the time, and the target playerbase and their expectations were not particularly transparent.
#41 by Ardanna on May 20th, 2009
@Bethryn
Plainsrunning was the Tauren equivalent of a mount, so they would not have got it in Mulgore.
Because of whatever issues arose Plainsrunning was done away with and their mount became the Kodo.
I don’t think Mulgore is any more daunting in terms of size than Durotar (for example).
#42 by Bethryn on May 20th, 2009
@Ardanna
On release, yes, it was a level 40 skill (trainable from the patrolling Tauren in STV, coincidentally). I read a blue post ages back indicating it was otherwise at design time, explaining part of the reason for the exceptionally poorly distributed (and large) lowbie Kalimdor zones.
Mulgore is roughly the same size as Durotar, but has a much worse layout (see the post about hubs above). On average it takes two or three hours longer than Durotar to hit level 12, most of which is time wasted travelling between the central village and the various questing areas, or time travelling between sparsely populated monsters in the northern half of the map.
Actually, I might as well link MapWow here, since it’s an excellent illustration of just how ridiculously large the Kalimdor lowbie zones are. For all the mention here of STV’s size, you’ll see it’s actually only a little larger than Mulgore.
#43 by Sullee on May 20th, 2009
I see Bartle’s points and also think a lot of the criticism of STV is valid too. The Hemingway K10FR did not bother me in vanilla but BC K30FR is another matter.
Overall I remember hating the forced grouping here even though I played one of the few classes that could solo the group quests (with the better power of new players now I imagine most could). The problem as I saw it (and still do) was that the forced grouping was the main solo quests chains capped off with a group quest. Nothing against grouping but this design of implementing the pivotal encounters of solo quest chains with group events cheapened the experience. Invariably people would form groups just to knock these out and then hastily retreat to solo play as the design of the game demanded that for efficient xp.
The travel here was particularly bad and as noted is better now with more flight points and earlier mounts. I remember staying and farming for xp because going back to the quest hub was too far; I’m not certain that’s the type of play you want to encourage.
#44 by Sheepherder on May 20th, 2009
Ten seconds to “mount up” and dispelled as soon as you are in combat. A normal cast/activation time would have made it obscenely powerful for running down people in pvp (because it doesn’t require you to stand still), and a normal dismount condition (dazed/stunned) would have been brutal against kiting classes.
#45 by Tethyss on May 20th, 2009
I recall leveling up the same scenario, running between Westfall and Redridge, because the quest levels were staggered so far apart in either zone, you could not solo in one zone without moving to the other.
Was this an artful design or to compensate for the solo player? Could be both.
I give credit where it’s due: later on Blizzard did start ’suggesting’ the number of players needed to complete a quest, so you didn’t bang your head too long.
Personally, I think someone in charge cut through the overthinkers and said ‘look, questing needs this to work right in this zone. Period.’
But if you want to pontificate and overthink it, I guess that’s what blogs are for.
#46 by Mark Asher on May 21st, 2009
Players in beta begged for kodo mounts for taurens, and Blizzard finally gave in. That’s what happened to plainsrunning.
It could have been overpowered in PvP anyway, as Sheepherder noted.
#47 by Longasc on May 25th, 2009
@AMIB
AMIB, actually I am a carebear. I always laugh at the “must have pvp, pvp is cool” crowd. The moment they experience what they wanted they usually get cold feet..!
#48 by Jerry on May 30th, 2009
I get the feeling that Richard Bartle tends to overthink things ;^)
A select few people may choose to read the short story “Barn Burning” from an Eskimo perspective (at least according to one of my college English literature professors), but most people are going to take it at face value: it’s a short story, set in the Midwest, about a guy who always blames others for his problems, and takes revenge on them by burning their barns. If you don’t know what a barn is, the story isn’t going to mean that much to you. It’s all about context. And in the context of MMOs, most players aren’t looking for an intricately crafted play experience, they just want to go somewhere, kill virtual things, and get appropriate virtual rewards. It really is that simple, sometimes….
So yeah, Bartle was right when he said that there were probably only 20 other people on the planet who would “read” that zone that way ;^)