If you don’t work in the MMO industry, you probably have a skewed opinion of how live teams operate. On this blog, I often say that I’d much prefer to manage a live game than to create a new game from scratch, and you may be thinking, “Yeah, like you deserve that!”
You might be thinking my request sounds like one of the lazy animals from the story of the Little Red Hen:
“Who will help me code the MMO?” asked the little red hen (… I mean the MMO company).
“Not me,” said the independent MMO contractor. “I’m too busy doing fun easy things!”
“Fine, I will do it myself! Ah, but now who will help me run the MMO?”
“Ooh ooh I will!” said the contractor.
“No no, you didn’t help me make the MMO, so you don’t get to do the fun part! I will run it myself!”
If this is the story that runs through your head, you are definitely not from any of the major MMO companies. For the likes of Turbine, SOE, or Blizzard, making the MMO is the fun part. Working on the MMO afterwards is the terrible part.
You might expect that the people who spent five years making the game would be excited to run it after it ships. Turns out, not really. After five years of working on the same project, they’re so sick of it they never want to work on it again. They want it to be in good hands, certainly. And they want to have some oversight to keep people from damaging their vision of how the game should run. But they sure as hell don’t want to have to do that tedious maintenance stuff themselves. So companies tend to pull the experienced staff off of the live game pretty quickly, leaving behind junior people.
Live Teams Are Not Glamorous
I like the “tedious maintenance stuff.” I actually prefer working on the live team. This makes me very unusual in the MMO industry. I am also a pretty good engineer with a lot of experience, which means I don’t often end up on live teams — too experienced. At Turbine, I had a hard time getting onto the Asheron Call 2′s Live Team, because I was expected to help develop their next generation MMO engine instead. I wanted to work on AC2 after it ships?! None of my managers could understand why I wanted to be demoted like that!
But to people who enjoy the live team, well … there is nothing as good as it. The power you have! The instant feedback! The ability to literally make hundreds of thousands of people happy with just a few weeks of work. It’s very gratifying. There’s also the tedium and frustration and lack of resources and constant fire-fighting and oh my god I can’t keep up with everything… but that’s the price of the deal.
Of course, it doesn’t just happen that you hop onto the Live Team and suddenly you’re making game-design changes. At first there are a lot of smart and talented people at the helm, helping you learn the ropes, making the hard decisions for you, keeping you from doing stupid things. But inevitably they are pulled off to other projects, and somebody relatively junior gets the helm. That’s how I got to be in charge of balancing AC2′s classes.
Fortunately, I had a decade of engineering experience and understood how to tune complex systems. I wrote analyzers, modeled usage patterns, and made corrections.
Unfortunately, my approach did not take the “human equation” into consideration very well.
Learning to Balance the Human Equation
I found that the Feral Intendant class was 30% overpowered, and that’s why so many people were playing a Feral Intendant. Yet somehow, reducing the power of the Feral Intendant to the correct level did not suddenly make the game more fun… thousands of players were complaining and nobody was telling me they were happy about the change. Weird! I double checked my calculations. They were correct. So what had gone wrong?
Turns out that the people who played the other classes available to that race had taken on an “underdog” mentality. The people who played Claw Bearers liked that they were woefully underpowered compared to Feral Intendants. It was like playing the game on Hard Mode. And the people playing Feral Intendants liked playing on Easy Mode. In balancing the game I had failed to understand the needs of the people playing it. I just ham-handedly fixed the equations, instead of solving the problem with the finesse it needed. It was one of my more serious missteps. (And it’s a great example because I think it’s pretty obvious in hindsight. Most mistakes were much more subtle.)
But man, what a fast way to learn! After just a couple years of that, I became a good game balancer. The constant feedback loop helped me learn from my mistakes in a matter of weeks! Compare that to developers on traditional games, who must wait until the sequel ships before they get to try their hand at balance again. That’s why working on a live team is such a fast way to learn your craft: the feedback is so much faster than any other gaming platform, that it accelerates learning by dozens of times.
But AC2 cost millions of dollars to create. Turbine didn’t create it as a tool to help me hone my design skills, that’s for damned sure! How did I get to do it? Simple: the designers who would have done it were burned out of working on AC2, and were called away to work on the important New Project. AC2 wasn’t a blockbuster hit, so it didn’t make sense to use the rock star designers on it. Better to let the B team step in.
The Steady Hand Has Left The Rudder
But here’s the weird thing: WoW is exhibiting the same symptoms as AC2 did when I was doing the designing. The B team is in charge.
In February, we learned that lead designer (and part-time producer?) Jeff Kaplan had stepped away from WoW, off to work on the next big Blizzard game. However, if you were watching the game before that, it was obvious that major leadership changes had already happened months earlier. My guess is that Jeff Kaplan started moonlighting on the new project long before February. And many of the other key WoW live team people have also switched over, or are working on WoW only part-time.
Now, I am not being alarmist. The ship is still in intelligent, capable hands… but clearly not as experienced ones. Just as I did when I took over AC2, WoW is making newbie design mistakes that seem like a benefit on the surface, but are really not good decisions. There have been scores of examples… I’ll pick just a few.
“It’s always been stupid, and we just need to fix it!”
A few months back, the powers that be decided that Hunter ammunition didn’t work right. Hunters have to carry an arrow for every single shot they take, and in order to get the full benefits from them, they have to carry them in a special quiver — which doesn’t let you store other items in it, only ammo. All that ammo costs money, too. Plus, it leaves the designers unable to give out awesome “raid arrows” because you’d just shoot them all and then where would you be? Even though ammo had been a fine and fun distinguishing quirk of Hunters for years, it was time to Fix It.
The first plan was announced: WoW would no longer have consumable ammo. Instead, you would just need a single “infinite arrow” that you stuck in your ammo slot, and this would let you shoot your bow forever. Problem solved! No more quivers, no more pack space wasted, no more costs. And now raids could drop “loot arrows” that wouldn’t get used up! Perfect!
Whoops, turns out that plan would be hard. So they announced their backup plan: now ammo just stacks to very high numbers. Instead of having stacks of 200, now you can have stacks of 1000. This at least addresses the “pack space” issue. Call it a win! And they removed the magical benefits from quivers, so you no longer needed to use them. So they fixed the immediate emergency, and they’ll get to the “correct fix” later.
The thing is, there was no emergency. Sure, Hunters were happy to have a few extra pack slots. But the change threw all sorts of other things out of whack: magic quivers are still given out as quest rewards… they just aren’t magical anymore. And leathercrafters can still make them! They just can’t sell them to any sane Hunter. And so on… the game wasn’t really cleaned up after this change.
But I’m sure it felt so pressing, so urgent. So they had to address the issue, side-effects be damned.
Without somebody experienced at the helm, the voice of the myopic designer tends to be the loudest. “WE HAVE TO FIX THE HUNTER” they said. Maybe they said, “Hunters have to spend 65% more on bare essentials than any other class. I will never be able to balance class expenditures like this!” Or maybe they said, “Hunters have to waste more inventory slots than any other class. It damages quest completion rates!” Or maybe they just said, “It’s SO STUPID. It’s always been stupid, and we just need to fix it! Do it now!” Obviously, nobody thought very hard about the ramifications, and nobody spent any time easing players into the idea. And nobody stopped to make sure they did a good job.
So some tiny little mistakes crept into the game. Nothing huge. Nothing that will sink the Titanic. But mistakes nonetheless… “magical” crafted quivers that aren’t magical and can’t be sold are clearly a mistake. These little bugs accumulate, like lint on a hardwood floor.
The Lint Accumulates
When we say that WoW is “polished”, what we mean is that it is surprisingly clean of linty little bugs like these. But that’s changing.
More and more little mistakes have crept into the game recently — changes that are positive on the surface, but have not been implemented with the finesse that makes them worthwhile. Mana expenditure rates have changed, rules for dungeons have been tweaked, the cost of items has fluctuated. It all seems useful. But it’s usually full of little side effects. Worse, it doesn’t take the human equation into account: it doesn’t counter-balance for the actual needs of the players very well. There are ways to meet both goals, but you have to try a lot harder at it than WoW is.
Remember when WoW class balance happened every six to eight months? Players were actually excited when their classes’ turn came around. I remember being so astonished to see players that were actually happy to have their classes redesigned. But now, every class is fiddled with every few weeks. It’s not exciting anymore. Instead of sitting on the changes and carefully honing them, the designers are just firing out every new idea they have, willy nilly, until they get it right. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter if you get it right. It matters if players are excited and having fun. Balance changes are happening too fast, and for too little benefit overall.
Back in the day, QA held the game to a higher standard. Consider that there never used to be skill changes that would invalidate the client tooltips about a skill (unless it was an emergency exploit-fix). If the designer wanted to tweak a skill, they had to wait until the client could be updated. But the QA bigwigs are off doing something else now, so it’s easy for the designers to slip this stuff in. And they do. All the time. Skills are routinely incorrectly displayed now, as the designers’ need for perfect balance far outpaces the ability to do client updates.
Who’s In Charge Again?
You would never let your lead artist drive decisions for your game. Chances are, they would say “This dungeon is too brightly lit! We need to hotfix it now or the mood will be ruined forever!”
But unlike artists, designers get a free ride. They’re supposed to know what’s best for the game. If the producers are busy, they trust the designers will do good things. But designers, especially young ones, get myopic. They tune into little issues — like perfect class balance – and turn them into epic quests. If the designer could just fix this balance problem, people on the boards would stop complaining, and the game would be perfect!
No. It will not happen. Perfection will not be achieved, ever. But there’s nobody around to rein them in anymore, so they try and try and try. And leave little messes everywhere they go.
Suddenly Communications Are Open
Another surefire way to tell that upper management has left the building? The systems designer “Ghostcrawler” has suddenly started posting a lot, even about… well, nothing. For years developers were nowhere to be seen, which was a shame. And then suddenly the lead systems designer has time to play the forum game? Yeah, whoever was making employee policies just doesn’t have time for WoW anymore. Not a bad thing, in this case, but certainly a dramatic shift of policies.
Nowadays it’s common for WoW to tell people to “check the forums for game updates.” This is a total newb mistake. Only your loudest and most annoying users will check your forums for updates. So every “update” is met with derision because only assholes post on game forums. (Statistically speaking, anyway.) Game updates are specifically what the launcher’s update screen is for. If you’re outpacing the ability to update the update screen, chances are you’re changing too much too fast. Slow down and get it right the first time.
It’s likely that Ghostcrawler started posting shortly after the upper management started wandering off to other projects. Ghostcrawler’s a good guy… in fact, his posts remind me a lot of what I sounded like when I was posting about AC2′s skill balance. He knows how to balance things. But he is completely unable to see the big picture. Every tiny imperfection seems like a ruinous problem. He feels assaulted on all sides by problems, too, and doesn’t think there’s time to do things the right way. But this is an illusion that happens to Live Teams because they get so close to the product. He needs someone checking over his decisions and making sure they’re worthwhile. He doesn’t have that.
WoW: No Longer Big Kahuna at Blizzard
Ghostcrawler and the rest of the team will learn their craft soon enough. WoW will survive the experience. But what’s interesting is that it tells us quite clearly that WoW is no longer the most important thing at Blizzard… in fact, it might be third or fourth place. It’s really interesting that this happened so soon. I didn’t expect it to happen to WoW while it still had 10+ million players or more still paying. But a company has only so many top-notch people, and you always want your most-experienced people on the new thing, so it makes sense.
To be clear, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When the game stops being in the spotlight, the live team suddenly gets a lot more flexibility to make the game fun, instead of being forced to stick to now-outdated “design visions”. The dramatic increase in WoW’s mobility options is certainly due to the lack of oversight. But without that safety-net of supervision, they need to exercise a lot of willpower and a lot of wisdom.
Ghostcrawler, and anybody else on the design team of WoW right now, I have a little unsolicited advice from somebody who’s been there: convince your bosses to let you play a different MMO for two weeks. On the clock. Don’t touch WoW. I know it feels like there’s a disaster every day and you can’t possibly stop focusing on WoW, but you can. After you get back, play WoW with a different class than you normally play. You’ll see so many new things! Your priorities will do a 180. I guarantee you it will help your perception.
There are many issues to be discussed in the debate of ‘balance’ and developer influence. However, I would like to approach this from a different angle. In my opinion, 90% the problem is inherent within the game itself and 10% of the problem is in the ‘live’ developers hands.
For instance, let’s take a look at the nature of WoW (it is, of course, todays standard):
1.)When creating a character in WoW, you begin with choosing a race and then choosing a class. Already what do we have? …we already have a pigeon hole that puts you into a defined category.
2.) We then build our character. Take a look at the choices on skills to take and you will see skills that everyone else of this class gets.
3.) Talents. Talents lend us a tiny bit of customization, yet they are still very inflexible within themselves in terms of how many different levels of power each skill contains.
4.) Re-picking talents. If you want to rebuild your character, your option* is to re-pick talents. The process to accomplish this is paying a certain amount of gold and …well… picking talents.
Now, take a look at the nature of AC2:
1.) Pick your race. Yes, this is a feature that will stay with you throughout the game, yet it still holds many options to choose from within each race.
NOTE: there is no choose class step.
2.) Go out and play your character in order to build it. The experience that you earn, you put directly into any skill available to your race in each base skill tree. You can put as much or as little experience as you wish, within the min/max constructs of the skill.
3.) Do you want to specialize? choose one specialization and continue to pick only desired skills and raise them as you wish point by point. You can also continue to choose a complimenting base skill tree to use or whichever one you wish.
4.) (this is where things start to get different) If you want, you can never spend one point of experience and have no skills. If you want you can go for one skill and pump it up as high as you can. If you want you can learn many skills and never spend more than a point in them. If you want, you can make the perfectly balanced build of power / number of skills / number of options.
If you want*
5.) You can un-train your skills. Do you pay a certain amount of gold and click yes then repick? No.
You have to earn each point of experience back to unlearn it. You can then choose any new skills you desire. The only limitation is race.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Which of these two systems gives the player more options? AC2.
In the case of AC2, the player creates the combination of skills, the power of the skills (within constraints). This in turn tips the scale of balance into the hands of the player rather than the developer. Yes, the developer creates the constraints which are much looser than those of WoW, but the player has more room to move within them. Players can now constantly tweak their characters (not just class) and build them how they desire.
Developers are no longer responsible for minor tweaks to balance, yet now have a responsibility to control the area that the players balance themselves within.
With the WoW system, players rely heavily on the developers decisions. These changes may be tiny or huge, but the player is locked into a class and doesn’t have the option to tweak their own build with a tiny or huge personal tweak. They only have the option to tweak their character with the very limited options provided by the developers.
This creates the problem that we have with developers over working details.
…aaaannnddd AC2 wasn’t perfect or even close, it really did have some of the worst balance issues out there. The thing is, the game was still extremely enjoyable due to the PLAYERS ability to tweak their characters minor details point by point or completely overhaul their class in response to the developers decisions rather than forced by them.
Eric: If you read this let me know you think.
All good points indeed.
I remember my time in AC2 fondly for just that reason, and thinking back on it, it is something I found hard in WoW, since I was rather unhappy with my first couple of characters, but after leveling them to the mid 20′s, I just couldn’t be bothered to start again.
I remember I played several mixed classes, Melee Elementalist (Sword and shield and pets, good times), Melee Sage (didn’t like it much, but talk about tank, sword shield, and healing spells), and for a VERY long time, Missle Elementalist (throwing hammers at range even though I should be a mage, which gave me pets and a knockback and armor debuff), that class was great in both PvE and PvP. And the best part was, I was rare, I was custom, no-one knew exactly what skills you might pull out. I remember being struck with the magic tree stun once, and thinking oh great, either I’m fighting a healer, or it’s a Elementalist that didn’t pull his pets out to surprise me, then he put the staff away and pulled out two swords. Turns out he was a Berserker (melee DPS for the WoW people), but trained the base magic skills high enough to get Stun, sacrificing some other skills, but gaining a sneaky advantage I wasn’t expecting, awesome stuff.
And again, re-classing was so easy, and kind of a game in and of itself, I played almost every class available to me as my main toon, including some hybrids as mentioned above, all without having to start over from scratch. It sounds simple, but that’s a really powerful advantage in my book.
Yup, you were finally allowed to be attached to and identify with your character rather than your class.
That’s something missing in current day MMOs.
The majority of them gravitate towards fixed classes with a minor subset of skills to specialize in, whereas in yesteryear it was more broad, driven on a single character’s development.
I assume this move was mostly done to increase profit margins, as people would play the game longer when they have multiple characters to invest time in, etc.
[...] when he got married), we were talking about Blizzard and I mentioned the recently popular phrase “WoW’s B-Team” when he shook his head and laughed. He said that wasn’t the case from what he could tell at [...]
Thanks for an interesting and insightful article, Eric. As someone who’s played WoW from release, I have to wholeheartedly agree. There are just so many little things now (described as “lint”, but I think “splinters” or “broken glass” would be more accurate) that A) didn’t need fixing (e.g. hunter ammo), or B) are obviously just the whims of designers/artists on the team (e.g. the “I didn’t like the old druid models…” sentiment), or C) Overlooked/dismissed as unimportant (e.g. mismatched tooltips and the like).
From my point of view, the primary reason the B Team can only be described as “Epic Fail” right now: In spite of all their hard work, all the constant tweaking and patching, they continue to miss the point: They should be making the game more fun to play, but ultimately the game is just not more fun to play!
Certainly most of the more recent changes aren’t more fun; I’d consider them to be more like “distractions” than actual fun. Achievements? Distraction. ToC? Distraction. New druid models? Distraction… It’s 95% smoke and mirrors anymore, “You WILL continue to play OUR game and you WILL like it because… Look, here some new stuff… and it’s super-neato fun! Because WE say it’s fun!” =P
[...] truth about WoW and the ‘B Squad’ Back in July, Eric@Elder Game posted a thought provoking article about how development teams had been organised at Turbine. They had a development team (A Team) and [...]
[...] recently came across an article on Elder Game regarding World of Warcraft and how the many of Blizzard’s employees had shifted onto new [...]
These comments leave out one of the biggest screwups in WotLK: gear inflation has zoomed out of control. Street has admitted this is because they hadn’t planned hard modes when planning for the expansion, and when they changed the plans to include them the inflated gear they were to drop had a devastating cascade effect on later content. What this means is that right now, for most raiders who don’t do hard modes, the relevant raid content consists of a single room with five encounters in it. Gear from Ulduar normal modes is DE fodder now.
This and the other problems (those mentioned earlier in the article and replies, and others) have led me recently to cancel my WoW account. I don’t plan to return (or to get suckered into playing any future Blizzard MMO).
Well said Eric.
This is an important post, everything is well put and to the point. We need more people to come forth and voice there views on this subject.
I have played wow for close to five years now, and i have played every class at endgame. My recent main was a Feral Druid who was my first “Hardcore Raider” and we as a guild progressed very well (Uludar 25 hardmodes).
Back to the topic, having played this game for so long i have noticed alot of the things mentioned in this post, such as hunter ammo (76 alt). I love this game but reciently (like the last year lats say) things changed, the love of wow had diminished like something is missing. Back in Vanilla when it was hard to obtain an epic item, the game felt WORTH playing, worth farming that instance for the one epic in there. Now they give away epics for nothing, Heroic in BC were hard, and it was a treat to clear one. Now tho… Soloing heroics your level is possible, to me this is over the top. Where did the developers go wrong? Itemization? Spells/Skills? No they went wrong with the team, “the B team” (Not saying anything about you guys i know your role is important and i support you). Its just that nothing feels right anymore, the game feels fast paced and boring. Now like i said earlier i am a diehard, this game is a part of my life, so i am excited about Catcalysm. But am i in for the dissapointment of WoTLK, or the excitment of Vanilla/BC? I hope this expansion brings back the love of WoW.
The assessment that a fundamental shift in project steering for WoW development have occured seems obviously clear after reading this article. The effects of this change of viewpoint, focus and development team management is probably not as clear cut as you,Eric, write in this article. You bring out good points and observations regarding the nature of how change is implemented in the game but I think your conclusions are based on too little evidence to support your specific opinions.
If you reread your article and some of the comments you might be able to admit that, while you put in the caveat “this might not be a bad thing”, your basic asumption from the beginning was the new team is not only doing something differently but also doing it worse or under poor guidance. The price of adaptability might be lack of coherency but it’s not a given and all evidence must not point towards a lack of control. Ghostcrawlers forum posts for all their strengths and flaws doesn’t not equate reigns having been cut lose from the WoW horse. He is one developer, hardly a stastical significance by himself. One Austrian basement family doesn’t imply a fundamental change to Austrian legal system. (hmm, did I just equate GC with Fritzl?)
Changes put out at a quicker pace does not equate more proverbial lint on the floor. Maybe the reason you only see lint is because they removed the dead cow carcasses that used to litter the floor? The errors and problems so often associated with any ingame change of earlier WoW years are minor and often cosmetical in nature these days. Tooltips slighty asqew is nothing compared to diseases killing entire towns or servers down for a day or two that were not uncommon a few years back.
Yes the focus has changed and yes this seems indicative of shift in management. But to go as far as your analysis might be a bit bold and apparently a bit controversial. To state that the loss of control is typical and it’s causing myopic views seems more of a projection than the given analysis of the situation. Unless you are privy to information from inside WoW development we aren’t?
But I’ll give you that, the article is a hell of a lot more interesting with the conjecture and the chance of you being an Cassandra by crying foul without “watching the tape” might be worth it. Conjecture doesn’t need to be wrong.
Great job folks, awesome thread and comments. Just a couple things I’d like to add.
1. First time playing Alterac Valley battleground, when the sides could summon the giant elemental and tree bosses, was pretty epic. I wish blizz had put it’s resources into more epic BGs. Using tactics and planning in AV premades was incredibly fun. It was the best example of actual “Warcraft”.
2. Giving the horde paladins? I’m still wtf over that. Shaman were fucking cool in vanilla WoW. Having differences between the two factions made the game more interesting. Blood elves??? You know, the chicks who would play “ugly” horde races were cool way before the influx of Tiger Beat refugees.
3. Raiding was a lot of fun in Burning Crusade. IMHO the 10/25 WLK heroic thing dims the whole fun factor of learning new fights. Zerg AoE pulling fails… if anything Blizz should have improved/upgraded PvE enemy AI. Make stray mobs run into the next room to call for reinforcements, spread out, use cover, basic combat tactics and scripting, etc.
4. WoW would have been vastly better without arenas. If they spent development money on more varied and interesting BG maps, and tied them into a dynamic world where BG wins translated into domination of PvE zones, it would have made for a more interesting story environment.
5. The chase for dollars with the name changes, transfers, faction changes, etc… well it just encourages the internet+anonymity=dickwad phenomenon. I think there is something to be said for being able to keep a friends/ignore list intact in regards to building community.
6. The whole Death Knight thing is like the male version of tween fantasy. We all knew that kid who would draw DKs back in 8th grade all over his notebooks. Seriously, if you really want to be a fucking lich maybe enable control of bad guy bosses like I’ve heard is possible in LOTR online. Open up a can of whup-ass on all the players nearby and get your rocks that way. But a player class who is a lich?… “Tomb of Horrors” anyone?
Anyways, thanks for listening to the rant of an old paper-n-dice D&D kid. It’s threads like this that give me hope for a better future. Wootzers.
I’m a gamer(1 of the first rl girl’s here), this is a rant.
B team, maintain wow at the very least. animal/mob npc’s stuck in walls & tree’s, npc’s not working, the quest turn-in npc is no longer there, etc. Make sure what we have works before throwing out all this other junk we don’t want or need. And QUIT dumbing down the game!!
WoW has dumbed down so badly that the only thing that matters is gear. Skill is non-existent, 1 – 80 in 9 days .. of course they cannot play, so hey … solution dumb the game down and make armor all important (it should be important, so should Skills, a total package). Now even dweebs watch movies/play bejeweled while raiding, does this tell you something? Yes you hear the dweebs on forums whining about how hard it is, but they don’t say they never really learned to play their toon and they are also watching movies/playing bejeweled while doing this. Have you noticed that more WoW clients have been taking VERY long leaves from wow (other games). We come back to see, if maybe, just maybe (please, please, please) WoW got its direction straight again. WoW is rated “Teen”, but is getting dumbed down to much less then teen.
We (hunters, I have 7 on different servers) don’t care about arrows/bullets becoming 1 item. Hunters are different, its part of the package, just like druids ( I have 5 on different servers) carry more then one armor set. We cared more about the pet changes to all being pretty much the same, we understand it takes major code to make a rare (silver elite) pet be different in all the areas wow is now, we whined about it and accepted it had to be. But when the newest raids is so easy that the hardest is being farmed 2 weeks after it opened??? Get over it and do what made WoW great and everyone want to play it. Why? Because THAT is no longer true.
My friends and I change to partial wuss armor (except tanks) just to make it interesting. My hunters/druids are all hybrids to make it more fun. We are still with WoW after all these years because we developed friendships and the game was fun, we could brag to each other about defeating XXX and it meant something. Almost every gamer knew the name of the guild that 1st defeated the new boss/raid; now who cares, it means nothing.
We are all (us and the newer wusses you are trying to pacify) trying almost any new (and some old) game(s) that comes out to replace wow’s new boringness. btw, we are 115 wow players who are looking to leave (think wow dev team, if we are telling you, how many (and did you read trade tuesday?) are just going? Cataclysm better fix this vanilla stuff you’ve done, because if it is still a wuss game, we’re gone. WoW was the best, its pretty sucky now.
signed
“One of those who never complained, but had enough of YOUR lost direction”
PS
On a business note: businesses last as long as their “bread and butter” customer base is happy. When making changes, attracting new clients, etc .. remember to take care of the clients who are the ones who stick with you and whose income you can count on. Blizzard, fyi
Very insightful post, and I’ll try to keep this from being a rant!
As you said, WoW was going off the rails before Kaplan officially jumped ship, it’s been said before in this thread and a thousand times elsewhere but the biggest issues with the game come in the form of gear; its level of importance, its availability and its use as a tool for judgement.
In “Vanilla” you had to run the same instances time and time again to gear up your character and while this was partly a chore due to repetition, for most players it never felt like a chore because when you finally obtained the items you were ecstatic because you’d really earnt them. I remember getting my Warrior full Might (Tier 1) gear in Molten Core and then full Wrath (Tier 2) gear and it was incredible. I had a status symbol, looked awesome and it was a testament to the fact that I really knew my class – I had more days /played on my Warrior at level 60 than I care to admit.
Flash-forward to WoW today – I made a Rogue, levelled it 1-80 in a few days played and then entered heroics (no need for Non-heroic runs at 80 in any dungeon) and within a week I had full Tier 9. Great? Except I was still learning my class fully and everyone and their cat had Tier 9 because it was so easy to obtain. I long for the days where “an epic was Epic”.
Moving on from this is it’s importance, and the above mentioned Inflation. With my new rogue with 10 days played I’d already gotten all the gear I could get outside of full-on Raiding, and decided to do a few quests to make some gold. I was utterly appauled that I could run through Icecrown and just spam Fan of Knives. At no time in WoW’s history has a player been able to gear up through non-raiding and become a God-Mode player in terms of non-raid PvE, it’s SO incredibly boring.
Finally: Hard Modes ruined WoW. I’ve ranted (which I didn’t intend I promise!) but this is my final quibble. Part of WoW’s attraction, whether players acknowledge it or not, was defeating huge characters and difficult enemies, finally over-coming a challenge and being greatly rewarded for their sweat and tears. Now we can defeat Arthas as “casuals”. Arthas, one of Warcraft’s most famous names. But it’s ok, if we want a challenge then do “Hard Modes”. No, blizzard, thanks very much, I’d like Arthas to be incredibly tough as a stand-alone fight. I wouldnt like Arthas to have an Easy Mode and then arbitrary factors make it more difficult. Killing Nefarian, Vashj, Kael’thas, Illidan and many more was amazing – an actual adrenaline rush. Killing WoTLK content was pretty fun, but with the constant get-out-of-jail card that is “Hard Modes”.
I really hope Cata fixes at least some of the main issues, else I’m just waiting for Diablo III and not touching Blizzard until that point.