Pandas As iPads, and Target Audiences
Simply put, I see the sort of backlash against Pandaren the same as the backlash against the iPad, when that was first announced. A tablet computer? Called an iPad? The jokes write themselves. Steve Jobs was clearly out of his mind.
A year later, making fun of the iPad’s name was like making a Your Mom joke.
To be clear, I do not expect Mists of Pandaria and pandas in general to take off and sell 15+ million copies like the iPad; this is not a full analogy. Part of that is because WoW has already peaked subscriber-wise, and it’s tough/impossible to break out of a decline when each lost sub severs social threads that kept people logging in long after the novelty of the game experience has ran out.
That being said, the absolute histrionics going on in the blog world regarding pandas has taken on a surreal, manic intensity. Look at this post over on Wolfshead Online:
If I wanted to kill a serious MMO, I don’t think I could find a better way than introducing a playable race of goofy looking walking bears. Any credibility that Blizzard had in the MMO realm has vanished with this horrible decision. What we are witnessing is the unprecedented transformation of an adult MMO into a children’s MMO right before our very eyes. (emphasis added)
I’m sorry, but if you can write something like that or agree with it without being a tad bit embarrassed later, I have a paper bag you can breath into. Credibility? Here is the credibility Blizzard has in the MMO realm:
That's called expanding the base.
According to MMOData.net, the entire MMO field basically only grew by 4 million subs in the seven years WoW has existed. If even a tenth of ex-WoW players move on to try other MMOs, WoW will have done more for the genre than any MMO, ever. Credibility? Christ, how many times have you described something as an EVE-clone, or a Warhammer-clone? I guarantee you there are some very serious men in some very serious suits over at MMO boardrooms that will be seriously considering iconic animals in the future, simply because WoW is doing it. “Dammit Jim, they usurped pandas! How about… elephants? No, no: hippos! Make it so.”
I get it. Pandas happened. I was utterly convinced Mists of Pandaria was going to be an iOS game, perhaps a combo Fishing slash Archeology slash Sudoku premium app that would interface with the Mobile Armory so that what you caught/found/solved could be redeemed for in-game WoW items. Then follow that up with an announcement of The Emerald Nightmare expansion, which could be tone-appropiate sequel escalation to Burning Legion summoning –> Undead Scourge unleashing –> Corrupted dragon world-breaking pattern of WoW expansions.
Hell, considering the established lore of the Emerald Dream as a mystical pre-Sundering continent, complete with fantastical and extinct species mobs, that expansion practically writes itself. And they could even work in the (leaked) Horde vs Alliance war heating up as fueling the Emerald Nightmare’s destructiveness by the power of unhappy thoughts.
If you think about it conceptually, Mists of Pandaria is doing just that. You have the Sha, which are the physical manifestation of bad things, having hitherto been kept in check by the Taoist Pandaren before the two superpowers came and turned the island into a fantasy Vietnam. They also have the mystical continent with fantastical and extinct species mobs. Having mined the pseudo Gothic/Norse mythology to death, going East was simply a matter of time – even the “generally fantasy” Magic: the Gathering went to Kamigawa (aka Japan) eventually.
And now? They still have Emerald Dream as a follow-up option.
Target Audiences
Before I wrap this up, I wanted to touch on some bloggers’ mistaken notions that Blizzard somehow changed their intended target audience with this new expansion. I am not quite sure how else to put it than this: the target audience of WoW has never changed; you changed.
There is no actual indication that Pandaren are going to be a joke race in the expansion; they existed in Warcraft 3, and would have replaced draenei in TBC had the dice fell the other way. If you want an example of an actual joke race, roll a gnome. No, seriously, sign up for a free trial and play a gnome 1-20. There is no bigger joke race than gnomes, and they have been a joke since Day 1. I would argue that Tauren are also a joke race, but that is at least a case of a joke race with /seriousface lore. Gnomes never had serious lore – even the flooding of their capital with radioactive poison, killing off 80% (!!) of their entire race, cannot be presented without a wink from atop a smoke-belching Mechanostrider.
Don’t get me started on goblins, who deviate from being walking euphemisms for capitalistic greed long enough to establish they got their intelligence from mining rocks and turning it into Coca Cola on a volcanic island (that exploded). Or how about the Taunka, Tuskarr, or Tol’vir, all of whom are so cliche as NPC animal races that it would have been jarring if they did not exist in their respective cliche habitats. Remember the Wolvar and Oracles in Sholazar Basin? 90% of that entire zone was a total joke in a Serious™ expansion.
What I will not say is whether WoW was ever objectively serious or not, because that misses the point. WoW was, is, and always will be taken as seriously as you want it to be. MMO-Champion will be posting world-first T14 hardmode kills and hundreds of thousands of people will care, pandas or no pandas. There will be 6+ year veteran players who declare a Pandaria raid boss as their favorite encounter. Tankspot will likely be posting Challenge-mode dungeon guide videos. Petopia may completely transform into a Wowhead-esque database to handle the influx of traffic from the Pokeman battle system. Some of these features won’t be for you, just like new raids only appeal to less than 20% of subscribers. That doesn’t mean the target audience is changing any more than your mother giving a sibling candy first this time (or at all) means she stopped loving you.
If this is the way you normally act, though…
The ultimate bottom line is once you get past the echo-chamber sticker-shock of OMGPANDAS, a month after the expansion releases the game will be exactly as it is: fun, or not fun.
If fun, would pandas actually stop you from playing?
If not fun, did the pandas actually matter?
If you honestly would not play an otherwise fun game because of its tone or tenor, then ironically, maybe it is you who needs to grow up. Or at least breathe into this paper bag until you stop losing your shit, and remember why you play videogames to begin with.
Pandas Aside…
…here is what you may have missed concerning WoW’s next expansion:
Return of Wrath-era Heroics
Difficulty:
In Cataclysm, Heroic dungeons were intentionally designed as gear and difficulty checks on the progression to raiding. In Mists of Pandaria, the Raid Finder will be the appropriate transition from running dungeons to Normal raids. Heroic dungeons will largely be tuned to be about as difficult as they were in Wrath of the Lich King, allowing players to fairly quickly down bosses in PUGs and hit their Valor Point caps. Valor Points will follow a new philosophy with 4.3, as a parallel way to gear up alongside the Raid Finder, but not as a fill-in for boss drops.
Length:
Keep the experience short and focused. Dungeons should be short enough to let you run a couple of dungeons when you feel like it, not just one.
As I may have mentioned before, I am a player that absolutely believed it was a mistake to go towards longer, harder heroics in Cataclysm. Not only was that incongruent with the concept of LFD, harder/longer heroics actually removed content for me. Whereas I would routinely belt out 2-3 heroics on different characters as soon as I logged on in Wrath – before I even got started with whatever I planned on doing for the day – Cataclysm meant I had just the one heroic to “look forward to,” as it would likely take 2+ hours assuming we finished it at all. Yes, they were nerfed… three months later. And nothing quite washes out the taste of a spectacularly failed Stonecore run.
A side-benefit of going back to Wrath-era difficulty is I predict the number of tanks will increase as a result. I feel the same way today as I felt back in April when Blizzard started bribing tanks with BoA goody-bags. Hopefully Challenge runs will satisfy the people looking for non-faceroll content (or at least marginalize their complaints) in the same way Heroic raids (sorta) did.
Reduce “the Dance”
The goals for dungeons and raids in Mists of Pandaria are to create epic and challenging experiences, but Cataclysm also helped us learn where we can improve with the new expansion. The Raid Finder will help with taking that first step into endgame content, and it will be available for all Mists of Pandaria raids. Beyond that, we want to create more easily understandable encounters and move away from mechanics that simply set up groups to fail, while still keeping them challenging.
While I suppose that can be read multiple ways, what I like to imagine Blizzard means is not so much that “the Dance” is eliminated, but rather you can choose who does the dancing. The Lich King’s Defile ability sets groups up for failure, because if it targets your weakest player, you are likely to wipe immediately. I couldn’t tell you how many times I /facepalmed in Professor Putricide when someone who couldn’t kite worth crap got targeted by the orange ooze, or when the panic-under-pressure member dragged Omnotron’s Acquiring Target (or Lightning Conductor) through the raid. If you can imagine that the outcome would have been different if a boss ability targeted someone else instead, how can you really say the encounter was challenging at all?
Obviously that logic can be reduced to an absurd degree (if the quarterback threw to the other receiver they would have won, etc). I guess what I want to get across is that I miss epic boss kills like this one. “Epic” in the sense that despite everything falling apart, we were still able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. In Cataclysm’s raid environment, the guy dying to Mimiron’s landmines would have blown up the raid, or failing to interrupt a 1.5 second cast would be an insta-wipe.
And, hey, I’d also like to move away from bosses that take longer to explain on Vent than they do to fight, e.g. Omnotron, etc.
Harder Leveling?!
Probably not. However:
Q: Will you be making any changes to how stats work?
Yes. […] In practice, this means that upon the expansion’s release, the numbers for Strength, Health, Intellect, damage, and so on will be significantly lower than you’re used to seeing across the board, from level 1 to level 85. It’s all relative, of course — enemies’ and bosses’ stats will be reduced as well, and it should take a level-85 warrior roughly the same number of many sword-whacks and ability uses to kill a level-85 monster as it did before. However, this also means the difference between each level between 1 and 85 will be less significant, so you may find that an enemy 5 or 10 levels below your own will be a little tougher to deal with than it was before.
If grey enemies are “a little tougher to deal with than before,” that is actually a pretty big change. I was looking forward towards a tank with 750,000 HP, but I suppose this will be fine.
Instanced Group Content for ~3 Players
- PvE Scenarios are a way to give new interesting content that doesn’t make sense in a dungeon content.
- Scenarios are more about reusing parts of the world in interesting new ways, and introducing new types of PvE gameplay that we’ve never seen before like PvE battlegrounds.
- They are short instances for a few players, the amount of players can vary depending on the scenario, some of them can be for 3 players.
I am excited for Scenarios in a general sense for that first bullet point, because theoretically it means they could release Scenarios more often. Admittedly, this is Blizzard we are talking about, but I can see some devs whipping up a few extra for when such-and-such MMO gets released without having to bother with justifying it in a lore/progression-sense. I am excited about the 3 number specifically because that was how far my in-game group shrank towards the end of my subscription. We always struggled with things to do other than AFK chat in Stormwind, as LFD with two pugs did not quite excite us in any possible way.
In any case, I think that wraps up my thoughts/reactions to BlizzCon 2011. Now we just have to see how many of them get implemented.
Answering Nils’ Criticism
Nils made a comment in response to yesterday’s post, and I feel a rebuttal is important enough for its own post.
Ok, so in BGs where you can blow people off edges you take typoon. In the others you take Fearie Fire. Was that a hard choice?
Yes. Because I want Typhoon all of the time… but Faerie Swarm could be useful in Arena… but what if I get Dalaran Sewers where the shock value of a Feral druid knocking someone off the edge would be priceless… but endlessly kiting people DK-style would probably be fun too… and hey, would Typhoon be more or less powerful on Magmaw than the AoE root… etc.
The consequences of choosing Typhoon over Faerie Swarm is that you won’t have Faerie Swarm even when there may be a good situation for it. In a raid, there is probably a clear-cut answer of which is more useful, and if it is EotS weekend, then Typhoon would likely be the answer. But that’s not a problem between the Typhoon vs Faerie Swarm choice, it’s a problem with encounter design. And I would still take Typhoon in an encounter where Faerie Swarm is more optimal, as long as Typhoon wasn’t completely useless (i.e. the delta between their usefulness wasn’t too great).
I think everything has been said there. Choices have to have consequences, otherwise they are meaningless. Blizzard repeated attempts to get around this is ridiculous. The reason you have a few choices left in the current talent trees is because it doesn’t matter where you spend your last points!
And it didn’t matter because up until now they were treating the first ~31 talents as “choices” when they really were not. If you are a Ret paladin, you take 3/3 Crusade, period. You take 2/2 Long Arm of the Law, period. And so on. Now, they can give you choices that matter (in the sense I’m talking about), as evident by the druid talents you went over and all the other classes.
You say that there is an optimal, cookie-cutter EJ solution to these problems but I am saying that that is irrelevant. Yes, there will always be an objectively optimal choice assuming the choice has a measurable impact on anything. The only relevant thing though is the distance between the EJ solution and the 2nd best (or 3rd) solution. As long as they are close enough, I can choose which of the two is more fun for me (Typhoon) and still feel happy about that decision even if the “correct” answer is something else. My fun, enjoyment, familiarity, stylistic inclination, ease, etc, will make up the difference.
The only change of note with the new talent trees is that you can change them on the fly. This makes them a mandatory part of the preparation before you do anything of importance (boss fights, arena games, rated BGs …)
Other than every spec of each class having access to cool abilities that were hitherto restricted to individual specs, right? Hell, a Resto druid can have Typhoon and summon treants! Nevermind Assassination rogues with Shadowstep, Arcane mages with Cauterize and Ice Barrier, etc etc. And by removing the ~31 redundant talent “choices” that each spec takes regardless of PvE vs PvP vs leveling vs raiding, this should allow Blizzard to focus on keeping the six actual talent choices we have now interesting and difficult to choose between.
And just based on the rough draft we saw at BlizzCon, I would say they are off to a good start.
More Cookies, Less Cutter: MoP Talents
The Grumpy Elf is not convinced that MoP talents are less cookie-cutter. Neither is Nils. The Elder Game thinks fiddling with talents at all is a waste of time.
All miss the point, I believe.
Let me begin with a quote from Bashiok I posted a few months ago:
Diablo (1) did not have skill trees, it was a feature added to Diablo II, and then more or less copied by World of Warcraft. Some could say to World of Warcraft’s detriment as it’s been struggling with how to cope with a skill tree system, which has huge inherent issues with very little benefit, for years. Diablo III, like Diablo II, is an evolution of the series and game systems.
I agree with that characterization of talent trees, specifically that they have huge inherent issues with very little benefit. Talent trees, as the way they are set up in WoW currently, give the illusion of choice. There is a good Extra Credits video called Choice and Conflict which talks about this issue. Essentially, the “choice” being presented in WoW’s talent trees are really calculations, not actual choices.
If you look up the EJ builds for your spec, chances are you will actually see where the Blizzard designers tried to give you choice in Cataclysm’s revamp. Here is the EJ build for a PvE Retribution paladin:
If you’ll notice, you have 1 extra free point floating around (technically you have 3, but nevermind) – this means there is literally nothing else that will increase your DPS. Choice, amirite? Well… no. Your “choices” are:
- Guardian’s Favor = HoP’s cooldown reduced by 2 minutes, longer HoF.
- Selfless Healer = Stronger WoG’s for teammates.
- Acts of Sacrifice = Cleanse removes snares.
- Divinity = easier to heal you.
- Eternal Glory = sometimes a free WoG.
- Last Word = WoG more likely to crit on low-health targets.
You may not be familiar with Ret paladins, but hopefully that comes across as outrageously boring, because it is. But what about PvP? Here is Ret in PvP:
Know what changed? We got rid of Divine Storm (just AoE for trash), a talent that makes Crusader Strike scale with haste, and then just picked all the WoG-boosting talents and a faster HoJ cooldown. In other words, there is no differentiation there at all. There is technically another PvP build that sacrifices the faster HoJ cooldown for even more WoG healing, but that’s basically it. Ret’s Cataclysm choices are DPS vs HoJ vs WoG-boosting. Pick only one! Just like this new system, except only one choice instead of six.
For fun, I took the paladin tree and blacked out all the talents you either couldn’t get, or were identical whether you chose PvP or PvE. This is what it looks like:
Choices!
Ret paladins are actually a terrible example to use in the Mists of Pandaria talent scheme, since Blizzard essentially took 9 talents from the Ret tree and are asking Rets to “rebuild” the spec with only half as much as they had before. Hopefully that will change before things go Live, but I’m used to the idea of paladins being nerfed into the ground and/or Ret getting screwed, so whatever.
Point is, the talent tree system has always been bad. There was nothing exciting about leveling up and putting a talent point in something that just increased your damage by 10%. Under this new system, you get the 10% damage talent automatically and then get to decide something that is actually meaningful. Nils used the following example under druids:
Level 45
Feral PvP: Faerie Swarm, for more damage, a ranged snare and against cloakers.
Non-Feral PvP: Typhoon, because it is instant and keeps players at range no matter what damage they take.
Feral PvE: Faerie Swarm, because the rest is completely useless.
Non-Feral PvE: Typhoon, because it is instant. But you won’t use it much.
He thinks the obvious choice for Feral PvP is Faerie Swarm. Are you kidding? One of the funnest things in WoW is popping out of stealth and Typhooning people off of ledges, which has traditionally be reserved solely for Balance druids. I would always choose Typhoon, because Typhoon is fun for me. That singular instance of interesting choice is worth the entire overhaul to me. Nevermind my ability to give Ardent Defender the finger and not be too punished for it. And being able to take Shadowfury as an Affliction warlock. Or getting Cauterize and Ice Barrier as an Arcane mage. Or… you get the idea. Some classes have more interesting choices than others, but hopefully these were just rough drafts.
Overall, as an ex-WoW player I am more excited for the expansion than I was three days ago, almost entirely based on these changes alone.
Everything But the Dance Studio
Once you get that knee-jerk reaction out of your system, the design announcements currently going on at BlizzCon are pretty interesting.
Yeah, Pandas. They really did it. I owe someone $20. But what about the rest?
Monk Reactions
- Every race but goblin and worgen… interesting.
- Does this mean new animations for all those older races?
- GG tank balance, once again. Historically, Blizzard has never balanced tanks correctly, ever.
- “No auto attack! Devs want you to have this street fighter feel where you punch a lot.”
- /facepalm
- Seriously, that won’t work. Blizzard has spent years increasing the passive damage of every melee class because front-loading them in actual attacks leads to 3.0-era Ret paladins murdering everyone.
- Nevermind how Blizzard specifically changed Heroic Strike and other on-next-attack abilities to be more normal abilities specifically because warriors were getting carpal tunnel. Now they want Street Fighter?
Okay, fine:
Panda Reactions
- /facepalm
- Those racials suck. Nothing like how blown away I was at Goblin/Worgen racials.
- Wonder about what their racial mount will be…
- All that aside, I’m one of “those guys” whose overall opinion on the race will be determined by how the females look. My paladin is a draenei female despite it being the worst race in the game simply because I like the look, for example.
- After the disappointing direction of Worgen females, I fully expect to be similarly disappointed here.
Talent Tree Revamp Reaction
- Change is scary!
- Actually, this sounds fine.
- These choices are actually interesting. Some of them will be extremely difficult.
- Here are some examples of good ones:
Those are some interesting choices. The rogue spread boggles my mind with the possibilities, for example. Shadow Focus would presumably let you Sap, use Tricks of the Trade, and so on without any Energy cost. Meanwhile, Nightstalker would also be useful in a more general sense. Subterfuge seems bonkers to me. Can you imagine? You’re healing some dude from the bushes, and all of a sudden you get a Garrote, Eviscerate, and Mutilated before you even see where it came from. And I have to assume that Stealth breaks immediately if you start capping a flag or whatever, otherwise… very OP.
And look at the tanking spreads:
Those… are actually pretty crazy choices. The “obvious” paladin tank choice would be Ardent Defender, but I have never thought it was a compelling button to push every since it was redesigned from its (admittedly OP) passive ability – it was essentially Divine Protection v2, now with triple the cooldown. Now I have choices! Sacred Shield as a Prot tank looks really juicy even with the 60 second internal cooldown, for example. And if I were questing or facerolling through obsolete heroics, Blessed Life would let me unleash some burst DPS with all that extra guaranteed Holy Power.
Here is an example of what NOT to do though:
Yes, I noticed that Repentance technically has no cooldown and is essentially a paladin polymorph. Yes, I also noticed that “Fist of Justice” (lol) is a 6-second stun on a 30-second cooldown, ala early Wrath. Choosing between those two will be absurdly difficult… unless you are Ret paladin, in which case you are just fucked. Holy paladins never could get Repentance, so a “default” HoJ at half its normal cooldown is pure bonus, nevermind the strategic implications of trading it for a spammable CC on a different DR from normal CCs. Similarly, Prot paladins experience pure bonus. Ret paladins though? They lose either their stun or their incapacitate (e.g. their only “gap-closer”), and lose even the lame-ass snare capacity they had previously. More demoralizing is that the mere continued existence of Seal of Justice means there won’t be a snare for Ret paladins for yet another expansion.
There are probably other class examples of options actually being taken away in this revamp, but the Ret one jumped off the page and cock-slapped me. Anyway, back to talent impressions:
- Apparently Blizzard wants you to be able to change talents at any time, ala glyphs.
- Some of those talents are obviously dungeon talents, obviously PvP, etc. Not sure how that eliminates cookie-cutter builds.
- Perhaps a secondary effect of having more difficulty levels in dungeons/raids is that cookie-cutter builds would be less relevant.
- Actually, no, cookie-cutter builds will always be relevant. See: rise of GearScore in late Wrath despite high GearScore being 100% irrelevant to the actual difficulty.
Dungeon/Raid/Scenario Reactions
- “Heroic dungeons [in this expansion] will largely be tuned to be about as difficult as they were in Wrath of the Lich King, allowing players to fairly quickly down bosses in PUGs and hit their Valor Point caps.”
- Told you so.
- Okay, technically I predicted Firelands would be easier, which didn’t happen. Not my fault Blizzard is so damn slow.
- Told you so.
- Scenarios sound interesting. The lack of a trinity requirement is pretty novel, WoW-wise.
- Hopefully Scenarios will be a frequently-updated feature, since it doesn’t technically need lore or even bosses to support it.
- Dungeon Challenges, eh? Good luck.
- Christ, they put Challenges in the LFD feature?! Are they insane?
- Okay, it only matches you up with other people flagging themselves as Challenge. Not quite as crazy.
- Actually, completing a successful gold metal Challenge run entirely via LFD should be a tier higher than doing it in a premade group, don’t you think?
- I think Challenges are a pretty interesting feature, but what’s more interesting is how they “normalize” the gear. Seems pretty dangerous for a MMO to even tangentially introduce a feature that makes gear progression irrelevant.
- After all, if they can make gear irrelevant there, why not make it irrelevant everywhere?
- Other than the obvious “it removes replay value.”
- “We are currently not planning to have 90 normal dungeons in MoP.” Ballsy. Or lazy, depending.
- That seems like a clear signal to solo to cap, then group.
- Or continue soloing forever, by getting VP from questing.
Misc Reactions
- Pet Battling = Path of the Titans, Dance Studio. I predict vaporware.
- Then again… they did play the panda card so who knows anymore?
- “Oh my God. I’m back. I’m home. All the time, it was… We finally really did it. [screaming] You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”
- If Pet Battling is real, $10 says the store pets are more powerful than normal pets.
- “Pets will be account wide.” Really? Huh. Then I guess the BoE Disco Cub isn’t such a rip-off than it was before.
- You know there will be pissed-off people who bought more than one to have on multiple characters.
- “The plan is to get people back into the world, instead of having players roam around Stormwind and Orgrimmar all the time once they reach max level.”
- And yet no real concrete plans on how they expect to accomplish that.
- Hell, Scenarios and LFR and Challenges all push people back into instances.
- Maybe daily quests with VP will get people outdoors, but that certainly isn’t much of “out in the world.”
- Interesting how there was no mention of new Wintergrasp/Tol Barad-esque zone.
In any case, that about sums it up for now. While a lot of these things sound interesting, Path of the Titans sounded interest too. Time will only tell how many (if any) of these features actually make it to live servers.
Fixing MMOs: The Social Solutions
Last time, I talked about the problem surrounding traditional MMO social structures, or the lack thereof. Today, let’s come up with some solutions.
Increase Mobility
One of the most radical ideas (or so I thought) turned out to be top suggestion from multiple people in the comments of the prior post: reduce or eliminate the tyranny of the server. I believed this to be radical because on the surface of things, de-emphazing servers necessarily destroys server communities; something that LFD is almost universally recognized as accomplishing, right? Yes… and no. The problem is Blizzard only went halfway. If a friend plays on Maeiv and I am on Auchindoun, why can’t we play together? RealID is making baby-steps in this direction, but the hemorrhaging community does not have time for that baby to grow up into a paramedic and stop the bleeding.
Here are some methods that could work:
- Free, unlimited character transfers, aka the nuclear option.
Not particularly practical (Blizzard would lose a lot of money besides), but it is technically an option. It may encourage mass migration, give shelter to ninja-looters and the like, and other such social upheavals. Ultimately though, it may be better than to simply allow people to fade into account cancellation when they feel trapped in a server “community” they no longer enjoy (and don’t feel like gambling $25 escaping).
- Free, limited character transfers.
Say, 1 character move a month with the option of purchasing more if desired. This would prevent mass exoduses, while still allowing friends to follow each other around in a measured way. It would also allow someone to “test the waters” of a server in a more meaningful way than making a level 1 toon and observing Trade chat.
- Eliminate named, permanent servers entirely.
Essentially, set up the servers like an ice-cube tray and as each server fills up, it spills over into the next server, and divide it all into game regions. One huge benefit of this would be to allow there to always be a steady population of people leveling in every zone for group questing, etc.
Example: if I went to Borean Tundra right now, there may be 1 person questing there on Auchindoun, and maybe 5 on Maeiv, and 50 on Tichondrius. Under this methodology, there would be 56, up until an arbitrary cut-off. And if the cut-off is 100, I would have it start transferring people to a second zone instance at around ~70 so the 101st guy isn’t off by himself. The key would be to make it subtle, with no load-screen or anything. With phasing technology it should not be a problem.
Of course, if you find you enjoy spending time with someone, how will you ever find them again if there are no specific servers? This brings me to my next overarching social solution:
Introduce an informal ranking system in LFD (and elsewhere).
This suggestion needs its own entire section. Ranking people in the LFD system is frequently suggested on the forums, but the point of my ranking system is different, and it isn’t even technically a “ranking.” On the forums, people believe that being helpful/geared/experienced should be rewarded with faster queues and being grouped with similarly good people. That is actually self-defeating. It is in the community’s best holistic interest for there to be 1 experienced/helpful player in every group – letting all the cream rise to the top simply makes the bottom groups congeal into a hardened lump of terribleness. I believe players need to know what they can aspire towards before they understand what social behavior the designers want to encourage.
So, essentially, my informal ranking system would be the equivalent to a Facebook Like or Google +1. This feature is something that a player will have to initiate themselves (there is no post-dungeon survey), possibly through right-clicking a player’s portrait. What the +1 does is make it more likely that they are grouped with that person in LFD, and/or otherwise present on that player’s server (under a fluid server dynamic) in the future.
That’s it. There are no rewards for having the most Likes, nor any visible indication of how many you have. Giving this +1 to someone does not notify them, nor does it add them to a Friends List (although it will let you easily do so on your own). I briefly imagined something like a title or special effect to occur if you get 100+ Likes or whatever, but it is important that there be no incentive to game the system. It’s not a democracy, it’s not a popularity contest; it is a more generalized form of self-selection.
More Show & Tell
Under the traditional MMO social model, you are frequently limited to appearance, actions, and incidental text to communicate your personality. “Err… but Az,” I hear you say, “isn’t that basically everything?” No, sir or madam! In an MMO, your appearance is limited to the gear you happen to be wearing (or a costume, if you are lucky); your actions are entirely limited to the location and time in which they are performed (typically dungeons or raids); and incidental text just happens to be whatever you have said in a particular channel, on a particular topic, at a particular time.
While you can certainly develop impressions of a stranger, especially if you encounter them in an unique or extreme circumstance, kinship generally requires time precisely because it’s difficult to give an accurate representation of one’s character in a single sitting. Traditionally, the “solution” was enforced grouping and the pre-LFD dungeon situation in which placing voluntary strangers in close proximity for long durations was supposed to spontaneously generate communities. This “worked,” just like placing soiled rags in the the 17th century lab’s corner “worked” at spontaneously generated rats.
Repetition is required for communities – people are more asocial in LFD precisely because you aren’t going to see anyone again (unless you have a ranking system, of course). We can, however, condense the process via Show & Tell. What this means in a general sense is instead of blooming into a flower in front of others over time, you do hours and hours of blooming beforehand and invite others into your garden. Some MMO methods include:
- Player Housing
Blizzard has strongly resisted the demand for player housing because they are afraid of players sequestering themselves away in instanced communities. Which, of course, makes sense in the 17th century spontaneous generation sort of way. How can players envy each other if they aren’t AFK outside banks and auction houses on the Flavor of the Patch mount?
But that’s just it: players generally have a preternatural desire to express themselves any way they can. Player housing would not be about having somewhere to chill out waiting for a LFD queue, or even arranging your trophies and armor sets in aesthetically pleasing ways. It would be about designing and decorating a virtual space for others to look at. You already know the meaning behind that piece of gear that’s been sitting in your bank for the last four years. Other people don’t know, and deep down I believe it is a common human desire for said object or achievement to be recognized and acknowledged as something meaningful.
Player housing is something that can easily be half-assed and end up making the game worse, yes. It will take development time and resources to make work right. If I cannot put that Light of Elune potion I’ve held onto since level ~20, four years ago, under a glass with a little plaque explanation, then I would consider player housing a failure, for example. But if you ever walked into a house with something like prominently displayed, you would see a facet of my personality that you likely never would have unless the topic somehow came up.
- Character/Guild Bios
To an extent, Blizzard already has this in the crippled form of the Guild Finder. Which, incidentally, you cannot even use unless you happen to be guildless.
The idea behind the Bio screen is to have a sort of poor-man’s player housing without the instancing. A simple whiteboard allowing curious passerby the ability to see what you are all about. Beyond the obvious player ramifications on RP servers, I also imagine it as a way to perhaps allow you to highlight which of your in-game achievements are your favorite, or other demonstrations of skill, perseverance, or luck. Or, hell, as a way of passively advertising your WoW blog. Unsavory characters may use it to transmit keyloggers and such, but it really is not so different than what happens in text form already. And besides, Bios would require you to be actively inspecting/looking someone up, rather than getting it forced upon you Trade Chat style.
Conclusion
This is running pretty long already, and about to be buried in BlizzCon news besides. The sort of bottom line here is that most MMOs are woefully stuck in the Dark Ages, and need to catch up to the emerging trends and zeitgeist of the day – specifically in the realm of social tools. For as much as I despise Facebook and “social media” in general (for their nefarious ways), it is worlds easier being able to locate and interact with new people from multiple locations with similar interests as yourself, while flexing your Show & Tell muscles all the while.
The sort of subscriber revolt going on in Cataclysm had many causes, but I strongly believe the #1 reason had nothing particular to do with LFD or difficulty or boring grinds per se, but with the sort of cascade effect that happens when the underlying social structure has been weakened by those (and other) things. In other words, I think LFD and hard heroics and boring grinds can be fine as long as you have the social tools to keep people together in the midst of it. A return to the vanilla/TBC model without a LFD would have been equally disastrous IMO, unless social tools were added too.
If you have critiques or alternative ideas, let me know in the comments below.
Things That Used to Work, Vol. 2
…but don’t anymore.
As with Vol. 1, these listings reflect a personal (d)evolution of sensibilities based on some recent titles I completed.
Stats Games with Invisible Stats/Debuffs
Why It Used to Work: No one knew what they were doing, technical limitations.
Why It Doesn’t Work Anymore: I am much more conscious of questionable game design.
As I mentioned before, many of these categories stemmed from a recent completion of The Witcher, but there have been other games like Dragon Age: Origins that fit into this category. [Edit: for clarification purposes, a “stats game” is one which determines outcomes via visible or invisible dice rolls. God of War and Devil May Cry are not stats games, even if they technically have stats like HP and upgraded items and such. Even Counter-Strike has HP and damage modifiers to weapons (headshots are 3x damage for example), but it is also not a stats game. A headshot in a stats game would deal 3d6+10 damage with a Fortitude save DC 20 for half, assuming you overcame the 7% miss modifier.]
The underlying issue at hand is twofold. The first is when you have a stats game built around stats you cannot see or measure. In The Witcher, the talent trees as filled with “straight-forward” items like Damage +20% in Tier 2, followed by Damage +25% in Tier 3. Are these bonuses additive? Multiplicative? Do they simply replace each other? What is my baseline amount of damage anyway? There is no formal character sheet, so there is no real way to know. Bonus damage is attractive to me as a player, but without the number-crunching followup, it is more cock tease than substance.
The other issue is when a game pretends – or, worse, implements! – debuffs (that) actually matter without giving you a very effective way of understanding them in-game. The Witcher contains debuffs like Pain, Poison, Bleeding, Blinding, Incineration, and the like along with talents that raise your resistance against said debuffs and increasing your chances of inflicting them. Good luck figuring out when they are actually applied though, as the game designers felt that character animations alone should clue you in. Something which is pretty bizarre considering a fair number of talents increase your damage while the enemy is afflicted with a certain debuff. Spending resources debuffing an enemy so as to deal more damage overall than simply bludgeoning them over and over is the first road on the way to strategic depth; the road less traveled, unfortunately enough.
A topical side note comes from scrusi from Procrastination Amplification, who talks about how hiding the numbers can lead to excitement coming from the other direction. I absolutely agree. The point I am making here though is that a game designer cannot have it both ways. By all means, hide the numbers to build excitement… just don’t sneak in Damage +20% and other numbers to get nerd senses tingling without the follow-through.
Amnesia
Why It Used to Work: Built a sense of mystery, allowed naratives to start in medias res instead of always beginning in small villages, gives options for players to reprogram established characters.
Why It Doesn’t Work Anymore: It is almost always nothing more than a meta-narrative crutch.
Amnesia is so cliche a plot element that merely saying it is cliche is itself a cliche. I get why game designers do it, I really do. As mentioned, not having to start every story with a main character at age 17 in a small village is a big draw; not every game can pull off a Fallout 3-style beginning. Amnesia also lets you bypass a large portion of potentially boring but still slightly relevant backstory.
The thing is: none of that has anything to do with actually including amnesia into the narrative itself. Did Geralt having amnesia within the game affect the game in any real way? Not at all. The designers justified it – coming back from the dead! – but it served no other purpose than letting the player choose things Geralt as a historical character with an established narrative might not have done. And that is just damn lazy.
Obviously The Witcher is not alone in this. When I think back to FF7 with Cloud’s amnesia, all I realize is how much that particular plot-point is ostensibly designed to surprise the player, rather than make any real sense. Yes, it is justified in-game – Mako! PTSD! Experiments! – but in almost every single case I can imagine the story being so much more poignant with Cloud knowing the entire time. ¹ And that is what rubs me the wrong way about taking the easy way out via amnesia: all the missed opportunity for legitimate angst.
Nevermind how the amnesia itself rarely becomes more than a sub-plot. I was more okay with the amnesia of Planescape: Torment, for example, because it was not just a plot device, it was the entire plot.
Waiting for Groups
Why It Used to Work: You had to, It Builds Character.™
Why It Doesn’t Work Anymore: Looking For Dungeon, indie games, Steam.
Way back in February, in a post about LFD and difficulty, I just sort of asserted that the WoW LFD genie is out of the bottle and never going back in. I do not think that anyone actually disagrees with that assertion, even those that actively wish LFD was rolled back or limited to specific servers. The thing is, in a real way, I believe the very concept of waiting for groups at all has been irrevocably spoiled for me.
And… I think I’m fine with that.
I played World of Warcraft for ~7700 hours over the course of four years. I started in TBC, not Wrath, nevermind how LFD did not exist until patch 3.3, i.e. Icecrown. In the course of debating Nils on the issue of LFD’s effects on WoW’s social fabric, I keep finding myself examining why it is that so many people say that they went from sociable Friends List-using fellows to asocial LFD dwellers “overnight.” Battlegrounds had this functionality years before you even could form groups for competitive PvP (outside of world PvP of course). Surely battlegrounds are being utilized by more people than heroics are, yes? What made 5m dungeons so pivotal to the community aspect of the MMO?
While thinking on that question, I tried to imagine myself back in a time when what I could do was dictated entirely on the whims of strangers. And I thought: why bother with that? Loaded up on my Steam account right now is Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Audiosurf, Frozen Synapse, Machinarium, Metro 2033, Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, Shining in the Darkness, the two Shadowgrounds games, SpaceChem, VVVVVV, and Dawn of War 2: Retribution. Those are simply the ones installed at the moment², not the 16 unplayed games like Mass Effect 1&2, The Witcher 2, and so on.
It sort of boggles my mind now that I would literally sit in Shattrath for hours trying to fill up a group for heroic Magister’s Terrace, back in the day.
Perhaps LFD did ruin things. Perhaps more people do run heroics than BGs. Perhaps the PvE community’s social fabric was hanging by a thread that was ultimately (and ironically) cut on December 8th, 2009. Academic retrospectives aside, I do not feel there is any going back for me, to blithely waiting for groups in any game ever again. I sat through some 40+ minute DPS queues right up towards the end of my Cataclysm run, either Alt-Tabbed or completing dailies, sure. But the way I look at things now, the content at the other end of those forty minutes of waiting better be damn impressive to justify not simply playing something else.
So if nothing else, the one thing LFD did do is disabuse me of the notion that waiting is required. In a world of $5 indie games and Steam deals, it really isn’t anymore.
¹ Keep in mind that I say this as someone who considers FF7 to be his #2 favorite game of all time.
² And I’m only really playing Shadowgrounds and AC: Brotherhood at the moment. The others are simply there for convenience’s sake.
Things That Used to Work, Vol. 1
…but don’t work anymore.
Many of the items on this list were inspired by my recent completion of The Witcher, although my (d)evolved sensibilities have been been growing this way for the past several years. Let’s get started:
Multiple Endings
Why It Used to Work: Replayability, simulates your decisions as being meaningful.
Why It Doesn’t Work Anymore: I am not likely to play ANY game more than once anymore (few people even finish the first time), and if I do, it will only be because the underlying gameplay was fun – in which case a different possible ending is at most a cherry to the already-frosted cake. Also, this could just be a personal thing, but whenever I am working on a game with multiple endings, my choices actually feel less meaningful rather than more, for two reasons.
The first reason is that nagging feeling whenever I reach a path-branching decision that one of the two options will be more fun than the other, and I will be stuck with the less-fun one. In The Witcher, it was choosing between Order, the nonhumans, or the neutral path. In Fallout: New Vegas, it was choosing between NCR, Caesar’s Legion, or your own way. The tenor and tone of each faction has their own charm, and in setting up a mutually exclusive decision, I am made responsible for picking the shittier option.
Even if I do replay the game, I am double-screwed. If the 2nd path ended up being better, I feel gypped that I didn’t pick it the first time. If the 2nd path ends up being worse, I am stuck playing a shittier game.
The second reason my choices actually feel less meaningful is that they typically are. No matter what side you pick in The Witcher, the final hours of the game are the same (same location, differently textured enemies). No matter what side you pick in Fallout: New Vegas, you are still battling on Hoover Dam. Different dialog from different NPCs is meaningfully different (enough that I feel like I’m losing something by not experiencing it), sure, but a lot of times it feels like Mad Lib storylines where they just switch around the Proper Nouns in the plot blanks. The last RPG I played with actual, game-changing decisions was Tactics Ogre way back on the PS1.
No Quest Hubs
Why It Used to Work: No one had really thought of it, Kaplan talks about how “the Christmas Tree effect” can leads to poor pacing and less engagement in any individual quest, it is more of a metagame issue.
Why It Doesn’t Work Anymore: I hate revisiting areas I know haven’t changed in any meaningful way. The Witcher does have a Notice Board which acts like a Fetch Quest Hub of sorts, but when I talk about Quest Hubs I mean the principle of being able to completely “finish” a particular zone at your own pace and move on. If a quest sends me to the fields to kill something, return to the city, then sends me back out into the fields to kill something else, my immediate reaction is “Time Sink!”
The term “boomerang quest” is an example of this principle, but it is slightly more than that. If I had to sum it up in a single way, it would perhaps be “inefficient questing.” Don’t send me on quests to kill the cave spiders, then a follow-up to kill the poison cave spiders deeper in, culminating in a quest to kill the spider queen in the deepest parts of the cave, without giving me all three quests first. Let me multitask! Whatever Wal-Mart has done wrong in crowding out smaller businesses and being jank-central, being able to make one trip and pick up milk, light bulbs, and spark plugs in a single trip is of immense value, lower prices notwithstanding.
Blind Choices (and/or Rewards)
Why It Used to Work: Puts a focus on the decision itself, more immersive/less metagame, perhaps enhances replayability through obfuscation.
Why It Doesn’t Work Anymore: Thank you, great hero! Please choose your reward:
- A book about vampires.
- Your very own hut.
- Wreath of immortelles.
Err… what? Perhaps I am simply too far down the metagame hole at this point, but how can anyone consider a choice with unknown consequences as meaningful? I mean, fine, all decisions and choices we make technically have unforseen consequences. But these game designers are literally giving you nonsense to choose between on top of said unforseen consequences. I don’t consider the choice between door #1 and door #2 to be meaningful at all – I may as well flip a coin or roll a die for as much thinking as it requires.
The above is an actual choice that The Witcher presents you with, and it is not the first nonsese choice. I picked the wreath de immortalies due to the time-honored tradition of game designers making the most useless-seeming items the most radically powerful. Plus, I figured that my own hut wouldn’t be very important to gameplay if I could choose not to have one, and I was likely leaving the area soon besides. Turns out the wreath let me complete an upcoming story quest faster than normal. Woo… hoo?
It is not as though I want WoW-like quest rewards, because there isn’t really any choice there either: something is an upgrade or it isn’t (and you probably can’t wear the other options anyway). When I think about meaningful choices, I remember back to the original Deus Ex when you’d come across upgrades like the cloaking device. Thermal or Electromagnetic? That was a meaningful decision because it shaped your gameplay in a way that had no “wrong” answers. I liked sniping people, and since I couldn’t snipe robots, easily sneaking past them (and cameras) was way more useful. There were plenty of humans/robots in the later stages so it could have gone either way. I wanted both and yet I was almost as fine with just one.
That, my friends, is a good choice to present to players. And they didn’t hide it behind a door or questionable language. You knew exactly what each did, and more importantly, you trusted the designers to present a scenario in which either would be equally useful.
In An Age 
Real Men Roll Pandas
Oct 26
Posted by Azuriel
Starting the one-man revolution now:
That's right, I said it.
You’re welcome.
Posted in Commentary, WoW
4 Comments
Tags: Real Men Roll Pandas, RMRP