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Doublespeak: Blizzard edition
File this one under Dissonance, Cognitive:
One of our upcoming goals in Mists of Pandaria is to make the gap between the overall DPS/healing of both PvE and PvP items smaller. In fact, we have design plans for new PvP combat mechanics that will make PvP gear and weapons markedly better in PvP than equivalent level PvE gear and weapons.
The overall goal is to reduce the barrier for crossing between PvE and PvP (and vice versa), as well as to also ensure that PvP gear is the best in PvP, and PvE gear is the best in PvE.
I read that, and now feel like I’m losing my ability to understand language.
I mean… okay, making the gap between PvP and PvE gear smaller. Got that, that’s good. But then they’re making “new PvP combat mechanics that will make PvP gear and weapons markedly better in PvP.” So… err… they want the gap to be larger. Even if I somehow imagine that the DPS/healing difference will be smaller between the two gear sets, if these new combat mechanics makes PvP gear “markedly better” in PvP than PvE gear… then what the hell? You are right back where you goddamn started!
Up cannot be Down. We can’t have always been at war with Uranus Eurasia!
The only sort of thing I can imagine is if, for example, each piece of PvP gear reduced the cooldown of your PvP trinket, but otherwise had the same relative DPS/healing as PvE gear. Maybe that would be a lower barrier to entry? But if CC was balanced with lower trinket cooldowns in mind, then a fresh player would still be at a high, relative disadvantage. Perhaps not in BGs or even Rated BGs – respawning and getting back to the fight erodes a large chunk of your timer naturally – but absolutely in Arenas, which was the thrust of the thread the blue responded to.
Regardless, how would Blizzard ensure that PvE gear would be better in PvE in ways that didn’t affect DPS? Having 4000 resilience means you have 4000 less Haste/Mastery/Crit, right? It’s a huge difference.
I am so confused right now.
Class Q&A Highlights
There were 11,786 words in the latest Class Q&A. Here are the more interesting 668 of them.
Q: A lot of warriors feel like the stance mechanic is a bit outdated. Are there any plans to make changes to warrior stances in MoP such as giving the passive stance bonuses to each spec or allowing all of the warrior abilities to be usable in all stances? I say the latter because I know a lot of Arms warriors would love the 10% damage boost over the 5% damage boost and 5% damage reduction. Thank you.
A: At the moment, we are considering Berserker as a +AE damage stance and removing all stance penalties and restrictions. Just use Battle for single-target and Zerk for AE. That isn’t set in stone of course.
The funny thing about answers like this is how many people would leap about with their cries of “Dumbing down!” and “Homogenization!” without examining the actual value of the original design. I do not have a warrior main, but I did have a warrior that I played long enough to be completely baffled as to how the Stance system survived for so long. Simply put: how in god’s name did the designers intend the class to play out? I specifically bought a new mouse with buttons on the side solely for playing my warrior, and it amazes me that there is not an in-game tutorial on macros when warriors essentially require them to function even on a basic level.
Maybe the argument is that Blizzard did not intend for skills like Spell Reflection and Shield Wall to be usable as an Arms warrior in PvP – they are certainly impossible to use effectively (if at all) without macros and addons “out of the box.” Then again… stance dancing to avoid fears as a Prot tank has been in the game since Day 1, and PvP has to be balanced around what happens, regardless of the intention. It just seems like bad design odd to me for a class’s skill gap to actually include completely “new” buttons.
I was waiting for a new talent to make Spell Reflection no longer require a shield, for example. It’s tough enough to gauge the optimal moment to utilize the skill, let alone make the determination far enough in advance for your weapon-switching/SR macro to work. Compare that to using, say, Grounding Totem, a spell interrupt, or even “Vanishing the Death Coil.”
Q: Class homogenization has been problematic in the eyes of the player base. How are you planning to make classes feel unique while still maintaining the “bring the player, not the class” ethic?
A: Homogenization is one of *the* hardest challenges we face. Players become upset if they feel like they are losing what is uniquely theirs, but then they get just as frustrated when they lack e.g. self-healing or mobility or a cool toy that another class gets. With 11 classes and parties, (some) raids and PvP teams much smaller than that, we can’t make every class mandatory and we don’t think it’s reasonable to have 11 (or even 34 if you include specs) spells, buffs and mechanics that are unique but completely equal. We just try to keep the pulse on the community and see when players think we have gone too far or not far enough.
This next bit might start a firestorm of controversy, but we heard from a lot of 10-player raiders who asked “Why make a rogue legendary? We don’t have a rogue.” When we asked why, they said ‘Rogues don’t bring anything we need, so we don’t want them.” That’s not cool. I’m not saying the legendary is the answer for why bring rogues, but you should feel like you have room for rogues without sacrificing something else and that rogues should bring something that makes you happy they are there.
I think the biggest benefit of Ghostcrawler’s more open communication model is to highlight how much of game design is wild-ass guessing. And I do not mean that to be snarky. A designer could be “correct” in saying that change X isn’t increasing homogenization, but if the players feel differently… what does it matter? If a good design leads to decreased revenues, then can we really say it’s good? I would like to think so – what is Good and Right is not necessarily popular in politics and philosophy, for example – but then again games exist to be played.
As for the nonsense about rogues, a better answer to “Why don’t you have a rogue?” would have been “No one picked one/they aren’t fun to play.” Bring the Player is a design model centered around playing with people you enjoy playing with. So to suggest that we should “feel like we have room for rogues” is asinine if everyone you want to play with independently decided not to use one as their main. And it is asinine to make an entire legendary quest-line for a single class anyway, whether it was rogues, paladins, shaman, or whatever.
Q: I’m glad to see you guys are still interested in making the talent system as unique as possible, but it seems like by giving so few choices that cookie cutter specs will be even MORE easy to come up with then now. i know there will always be “the best choice”. but if you guys do all this redesigning just to have the same outcome, what do you have in store to try and fix it from there? and are you concerned the new talent trees might not offer the unique build options players want to have?
A: Since so many of the talents focus on survivability, movement, and utility we are skeptical that there will ever be a talent build that is the perfect build for every PvE fight in the game. It is likely that as players learn specific encounters, each spec finds an ideal set of talents for that encounter. Those will be the “cookie cutter” builds. However, that will mean that players are interacting with the system and picking a unique set of customizations on a frequent basis. This is a vast improvement over a system that is solved once by a dps spreadhseet and then everyone copies that build once and ignores their talents for the rest of the expansion. In addition, there will be likely disagreement over which talents are best for which encounters.
This, to me, is one of the best possible answers they can make in response to a lot of the talent criticisms.
Q: Some of the MoP talents seem really “OP”, is this intended?
A: One of our core design philosophies is “Make it Overpowered”. As much as possible, we like to start with abilities being very strong, and then correct problems as they occur.
I don’t know if this is more amusing as a joke, or if they were serious. Well played.
Q: How will low level balance be fixed in Mists of Pandaria.Right now you can one shot a lot of npcs or players at low levels.
A: We plan to put some additional careful effort into balancing low level combat for MoP.
Balancing the leveling game will be Big News to a lot of bloggers, should it actually occur. We’ll see, although it will likely be much too late for a lot of people who actually care about the fidelity of the leveling experience.
Dailies and “Bad Design”
There is a fascinating conversation going on in the General Forums right now with Daxxarri concerning daily quests and how they are “bad design.” This exchange in particular piqued my interest:
This is just a bad design. A game should not ask for daily commitment to enjoy what it has to offer.
[…] I get concerned when I see players throwing out words like ‘bad design’. Perhaps an individual dislikes a design choice, and that’s fine. We do our best, but World of Warcraft can’t be all things to all people, all the time. That said, making a value judgment about whether the design is ‘bad’ or not is not only un-constructive, but in the vast majority of the cases I’ve seen, such an assessment reveals that the design was not well understood to begin with.
Followed up later with:
That being said, why are you harping on the OP’s use of the term “bad design”?
Because language is important, and also, because it’s often used in the phrase, “That’s just bad design.” to justify why a mechanic or feature is undesirable to the poster in question. It presupposes the correctness of an opinion which may not, in fact, be correct. It also tells me nothing useful, except “I don’t like it”, but it makes, “I don’t like it.” sound more erudite, knowledgeable and sophisticated. It still boils down to, “I don’t like it.”, which isn’t particularly useful without a context.
Point taken, Daxxarri. I have deployed the “bad design” argument here and in comments elsewhere, using it as short-hand for “this feature isn’t catering to me.” It is an open question of whether I should be catered to, and at whose expense. Personally though, I vote for being catered to 100% of the time, everywhere.
This does raise the question of “What can be considered good design?” It would seem to me that we need to know the intention of a design before it could be judged good or bad. Without designers coming out and explaining intentions though, is there any real way to know? Are subscriptions and profit margins the only metrics that matter?
And the further complication for subscription-based MMOs, for me, is that I cannot trust the designers to not include time-sinking as one of the principle intentions of everything they do. Do patches really come out 8 months apart because it takes that long to polish… or because that extra month means millions more dollars at little extra cost? Did Blizzard really feel Molten Front was best paced at 35 straight days of dailies? Why not, say, 25 days?
All that aside, I do want to highlight the original statement again for your consideration:
A game should not ask for daily commitment to enjoy what it has to offer.
To be clear, the poster is talking about World of Warcraft, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. And you know what? I think I agree with him.
The Torticoli Rebuttal
Our goal with the Guardian Cub is to provide alternative ways for players who don’t want to spend real money to add these pets to their collection.
Bashiok, in the explanation for the Guardian Cub being BoE.
I know, right? It’s not like there’s a game where players can obtain non-combat pets through in-game means, such as looting bosses and grinding reputation. Or crafting. Or achievements. Stuff that does not require real world money.
Torticoli’s rebuttal, on the MMO-Champ forums.
Ouch.
Philosophically, I do not see this as the beginning of some slippery slope – it is just, in fact, a slalom flag more than halfway down the ski course. In many respects, the Diablo 3 RMT AH deal was a dry run for this and future F2P-lite experiments without killing the subscription cow outright. The more, ahem, diabolical aspect of the Disco Cub is how Blizzard once again pulled an utterly massive business coup in the rollout. While it is getting some ire in the forums, what is typically being glossed over is:
- Store pet is no longer BoA, meaning more sales to have them on multiple toons.
- The customer base for pets is being broadened to include speculators.
It is pure, insidious genius, when you think about it. Hypothetically, if market for this pet was ~200,000 accounts, those two changes might have just doubled revenue at zero cost to Blizzard. One of my guild officers was/is a pet collector and she has bought every single pet in the store. She might up and decide to buy two, one to keep and one to sell. Or perhaps she will try and buy one off the AH and save money, but the sale itself is exactly the same to Blizzard… except now she won’t have that same pet on all her toons. And if she ever switches mains… cha-ching!
Edit: In case it wasn’t clear, I’m 100% fine with these cash shop shenanigans, and cannot wait until I can buy level-capped characters on the AH like we will be doing in Diablo 3, or perhaps EVE-esque game cards. You cannot fight the future. It’s simply that the “community managing” spin is pretty grating, especially when Blizzard employees treat it as if value is being added to the transaction, when the reality is quite different. If BoE pets converted into a BoA version of itself after “using” it, that would be a different story.
Legendaried
As you may or may not have seen on MMO-Champ, there was an interview with J. Allen Brack, Lead Producer of World of Warcraft, in which he dropped a Legendary bomb:
Brack: There’s one more piece which is an announcement that we’re releasing a rogue legendary weapon. Specific for rogues, so it will be a dagger. There will be some sort of quest, traditionally we’ve done these quests that players need to participate in order to create the legendary weapon in this case we’ll be focusing on rogues that will try to make that happen. […]
We haven’t decided on the name and how it’s going to work, we just know that we really want a legendary weapon to come out of this tier and we really want it to be a rogue dagger. That’s really all we know at this point. As time goes on we get a lot more lore, a lot more story, an “in” to the creation of all the legendary weapons. We really did a lot with the legendary axe that you got out of Lich King and then we’ve had other legendaries with the Cataclysm tiers that have had these storylines, we’re hoping this one’s going to be the most exciting, the most epic legendary quest line.
what is this I don’t even
Where do I start?
- Did no one in the design meeting raise their hand and question how “the most exciting, most epic legendary quest line” can even happen if you don’t have the least-played class in WoW in your raid team? Hey, Brack, you know that cool quest line you did for Shadowmourne? People saw and participated in that because THREE HUGELY POPULAR CLASSES were capable of taking it. Same deal Dragonswrath, same deal with Val’anyr, same deal with every single crafted legendary¹.
- At what point was it decided that legendary weapon quests were good uses of design time while class quests were not? Is the idea that legendary quests are like class quests that only a handful of classes even have access to?
- Legendary quest lines never really made any sense to me in an MMO setting to begin with. Is the collection of fragments of an ancient weapon cool? Yes. Is infusing them with the souls of your fallen foes awesome? Yes. Is a quest line that takes dozens of people weeks to accomplish epic? Yes! Er… unless you aren’t the guy getting the legendary. Don’t get me wrong, it feels great being part of something bigger than yourself. Problem is that an item to just one person is NOT something bigger than yourself. Legendaries in WoW, aside from one brief flirt with sanity in TBC, are designed for RPGs, not MMORPGs. If it has “worked” in vanilla and Wrath and Cataclysm thus far, it is working in spite of the terrible design.
I get that it was forewarned (in the tank Q&A of all places) that the 4.3 legendary “will have much more narrow appeal.” But… really? Remember the blue post back in June that speculated about why rogues are the least-played class? I am almost wondering if this legendary dagger is a cynical attempt at rectifying that discrepancy.
¹ Meaning more than one class could use it, not that all of them had 3 popular classes or whatever.
Culpability of Questionable Design
Is Blizzard responsible for players doing unenjoyable activities for rewards? Or is the player responsible for wanting something they shouldn’t?
For the context of this question, consider the Zul heroic dungeons in Cataclysm. These represent a second “tier” of heroics that offers better gear drops and double the amount of Valor Points, at the cost of a higher level of difficulty and being longer in general. In the last 4-5 months of their release, a number of players have complained about fatigue and burnout from having run these two specific heroics seven times a week for months, as opposed to the nine (9) other heroic options available because those, while easier, offer a sub-standard amount of VP (and leaves you short of the weekly cap). The fairly common counter-argument comes in the form of Bill’s comment in this MMO Melting Pot post:
Nobody is forcing people to do ZA/ZG all the time. In my battlegroup, normal heroic queues are 2-3x faster and less stress than ZA/ZG ones . So I can do half and half. For raiders, they have the option to knock of a few nerfed farm bosses from T11 to help them reach cap.
Also, even at this point in the expansion, not everyone is ZA/ZG ready. Yes, really.
You want choices? You have choices.
I would argue that the “choice” is between efficiency and inefficiency – not a particularly meaningful choice – but it is somewhat worse than that because I get the impression most players do not have fun running heroics for VP in the first place. Is “enduring unfun things because the end result is fun” Blizzard’s fault for designing the game badly? Or is it the player’s fault for choosing to bore themselves for a treat at the end? And even if it is the player’s fault (masochism is a real thing), does that abdicate Blizzard of any responsibility in their game design?
We do know that a lot of rogues appeared to reroll DK, at least when the class was first introduced. We also think rogues were more popular back in the day before flying mounts and instance-teleportation, where ganking someone out in the wilderness was more common. We saw a surge in the popularity of hybrid classes, especially druids and paladins, as running heroic dungeons became something nearly every player did instead of a more dedicated minority. (source)
In terms of heroic dungeons specifically, I do blame Blizzard. There have been many interesting articles on the subject already, but the short version is that the role of heroics and the equivalent of VP (Badges of Justice, etc) has changed radically since their introduction in The Burning Crusade. Back then, the apparent design goal was to allow non-raiders to have a seperate, but parallel endgame gear progression path of their own to raiders. This philosophy obviously changed in the Lich King era when full tiers of gear began to be offered up on the JP vendors of that day, but I did not have a problem with it back then because A) prior tier gear was required for their episodic content model to work, and B) heroics were breezy, 15 minute affairs. That breeziness did, dare I say, make them fun in a multiplayer Diablo kind of way.
Come Cataclysm, it is clear that the Blizzard designers took the difficulty complaints as personal insults, and tuned Cata heroics up to extra-crispy levels. While they were never particularly challenging to skilled individuals and guild groups, they were absolutely brutal to pugs, whom remain the bulk of the LFD population. Blizzard doubled-down on difficulty with the Zul heroics in 4.1, which sort of makes sense given that they drop 353 gear instead of 346 and more VP besides. No one feels forced to do Heroic raids versus Normal raids for gear, right? Yes… but that sort of demonstrates the disconnect. Outside of a few BoEs, there is no way of obtaining heroic raiding gear other than from heroic raiding. Conversely, there are several ways of obtaining gear from VP (and JP) vendors. That VP gear is orphaned, unattached to any particular method of acquisition. Pressing the LFD button and waiting for the queue to pop is orders of magnitude easier than finding/creating a 10m raid group and downing bosses. And moreover, there is now a pseudo-experience point bar in our faces, reminding us how below the (weekly) cap we are at any given time.
Your life is *this* incomplete
It is in this sense that I feel that it is Blizzard, not the players, who are at fault with the state of the endgame. Blizzard took a mechanic designed to give the “more dedicated [heroic-running] minority” a legitimate progression path, and inverted the design to make heroics the endgame for everyone for an entire expansion. Then they “priced” people out of doing them during the early days of Cata, then relented, then made the same damn mistake again with trying to funnel everyone through the Zul heroics. Given that heroics are supposed to be endgame for ~70% of players… where is the beef? It will soon be four months since 4.1, and while 4.3 is slated to be released at the end of this year with three new heroics, are the two Zuls really supposed to have sustained non-raiders for the better part of a year when their endgame is designed to be heroics?
In An Age 
Of Talents and Cookie-Cutting
Jan 6
Posted by Azuriel
Other than a flippant, out of context quote post on the subject, I have not spent much time musing on Ghostcrawler’s December 8th DevBlog entitled Seeing the Forest for the Talent Trees. In my eyes, there really is not anything to muse over – once you acknowledge the notion that saying something is “bad game design” simply means you disagree with a subjective decision but want to sound like you are an authority on the subject, there is not much left to say.
However, Doone at TR Red Skies touched on a certain subject that is so perpetually misunderstood that I begin to imagine people are being dense on purpose:
The problem never was there being an ideal setup for a specific encounter. The problem was there being one ideal setup for every encounter. What really is the value of a talent system in which you spend an hour looking stuff up, set your talents, and then don’t change them until the next expansion? That is what they are combating here.
To be honest, the problem is probably vague terminology. Just like people define “casual” in different ways – does it mean time played, or level of commitment, or both? – the term “cookie-cutter” has come to encompass both “uniformity” and “theory-crafted best.” There is a nuance there that seems to escape most people. As Ghostcrawler says in the blog concerning the Warrior MoP-era talents:
“On a fight like Baelroc (one boss, no adds), Bladestorm and Shockwave probably aren’t competitive with Avatar. We’re okay with that, because on Beth’tilac (lots of adds) they definitely can be and it will depend a lot on your play style and the role you have in the fight.”
If one talent load-out is better on one boss than another, or in one situation over another, it ceases to be cookie-cutter in any meaningful way. Houses in a suburban subdivision are cookie-cutter; each house is identical in every way. A 5-iron is not a cookie-cutter golf club to a 3-wood; they have different roles, uses, benefits, and drawbacks. The Wrath/Cata-style talents are cookie-cutter because there is only one way to spec as Arms, only one way to spec as Fury, etc (assuming you desire max DPS). In MoP, you can be a Fury warrior with Shockwave if that would be useful, or Bladestorm, or Avatar.
Here is Bashiok:
The difference is that right now there’s a way you spec your character, and then there’s maybe a handful of “Ok now you can do whatever you want with these 4 leftover points.” Those points are leftover because they ultimately don’t matter. You don’t really even need to spend them to do well. It’s not a good system, and the few leftover ‘choices’ don’t feel awesome because… well they aren’t, they aren’t awesome, which is why they’re unimportant points.
With the new system we give you everything you really need automatically, and talents are going to be more interesting ‘style’ and utility choices than a bunch of stat and damage increases. The choice comes, hopefully, from choosing talents that appeal to how you like to play or what you think would be particularly useful for a specific boss, fight, or encounter, and the ability to swap around points freely while out in the world help reinforce that.
I still fully expect for people to devise optimum builds for specific situations, but there’s a difference between optimum and no choice at all.
I think once you see the majority of talent choices you’ll understand a bit more why these choices aren’t really going to be bombarded by optimum build mentality. The choices just don’t have a clear optimal because most of the choices don’t lead to direct output increases.
If that doesn’t seem to be the case then we need to work on it more.”
And here was their response to the cookie-cutter argument back during the Class Q&A in November:
A: Since so many of the talents focus on survivability, movement, and utility we are skeptical that there will ever be a talent build that is the perfect build for every PvE fight in the game. It is likely that as players learn specific encounters, each spec finds an ideal set of talents for that encounter. Those will be the “cookie cutter” builds. However, that will mean that players are interacting with the system and picking a unique set of customizations on a frequent basis. This is a vast improvement over a system that is solved once by a dps spreadhseet and then everyone copies that build once and ignores their talents for the rest of the expansion. In addition, there will be likely disagreement over which talents are best for which encounters.
That is the nuance. Moreover, the way they are setting up the talents makes it more likely that you can choose the 95% optimum + fun set of talents over the 100% optimum + unfun ones. If Blizzard gets to that point, well, Mission Accomplished.
On a final note:
I am *so* over talent trees. I understand the function they have in the scheme of things, but there has got to be a better way to give the feeling of progression than giving us a talent/skill point to slap into +1% damage or other vague, ill-defined “options.”
I have been playing Dungeon Defenders recently, for example, and while it is “fun” being rewarded with skill points each time I level, on an intellectual level it feels asinine. I don’t know how 3 extra points in run speed actually impacts my gameplay. Is that 3% faster? Or can I run through a hallway 3 seconds faster? I want to move more quickly, but there is seemingly little direct relationship between the two. Nevermind how much better +3 Tower Attack Speed could conceivably be (less need to run places because towers kill faster). How the hell am I supposed to make an informed decision, especially when respeccing if prohibitively expensive (if offered at all) by design?
Here is my prediction: once people play Diablo 3, it will be downright painful going back to dumbass talent trees. I already cannot stand games that force you to make a decision on two options you cannot possibly know beforehand. Which do you want? The Kmakljfamns or the Hiagsguygag? I dunno, let me play with them first goddammit and I’ll let you know.
P.S. It’s a trick question. If you don’t pick the Piohqjasbhf, you’re a noob.
Posted in Commentary, WoW
3 Comments
Tags: Blue Post, Cookie-Cutter, Game Design, Ghostcrawler, Talents