WoW
Submitted by Abalieno on May 1, 2008 - 19:05.
Taking a cue from D-One who pointed to a counter-rant of a moderator against those who hate the Arenas in WoW.
The truth is that anyone saying "arenas suck!" doesn't actually think they suck, they're either just trolling, or they have a specific and related issue/problem. I think we're able to break those reasons out though, filter everything down and get to what the issues actually are, see what may need to change or be fixed, and get down to it. If they're not the right kind of PvP for you, fine, hopefully we can address that by giving you more PvP in other places, if you don't like PvP at all and are afraid they're taking time away from the content you do enjoy - don't worry, they aren't, if you want to like the arenas but feel there are inherent issues with them, we hope to address those as well.
Well, the truth is in that my own case I DO think Arenas suck and SHOULD be entirely removed from the game.
Not because every aspect of the game I don't like shouldn't be liked by anyone else, but because the gameplay concept behind the Arenas is inappropriate for WoW. A mmorpg based on some degree of persistence and, in particular, on character progression, doesn't fit with a *good* arena game that is more aimed at competitive, and balanced gameplay and no real "RPG".
My suggestion:
- Strip the Arenas part from WoW. Make it an entirely different game. Make it accessible through the same client, Make it even playable as standalone paying a 1-2 dollars subscription for those who just want these arenas. Then add a tiered system where each tier gives you the choice between same-value armor sets, so that you can combine the pieces freely while also keeping the players in the same tier balanced. And then keep a sense of progression by putting better equipment in higher tiers, but without letting players in different tier compete between each other. Make it that you can even export your WoW-normal character, getting evaluated by a system and then put in the proper tier to compete fairly.
That would please everyone. Those who don't like the arenas, and those who like them and would like a more fair environment in which to compete.
It wouldn't work, though. Because what I think is when the players bought the game, they wanted to play a MMORPG. Not eSport.
Submitted by Innsmouth on April 25, 2008 - 01:35.
Player: Please, please, please release a Season 4 Arena and don't introduce ANY new gear.
Then I think you will have a VERY good indication how popular the Arena is on its own merits.
Kalgan: About as popular as a Sunwell without any loot in it?
Submitted by Abalieno on April 23, 2008 - 18:58.
After this I'm done commenting mmorpgs for a while, because as I already explained it only leads to more and more. And I don't intend to waste my time.
I was reading some news about WoW's arena's system. And those news fit exactly the model I anticipated and that I summarized with this lame image:
Now it all looks obvious, but at the time it was pure guesswork as we were five months before the release of the expansion and the PvP revamp. Everything I wrote in that long post was quite correct and I remember on the forums I had to fight a battle because everyone continued to repeat that Blizzard learned from mistakes and that you could save up arena's points, and so, ideally save up enough of them to buy the best rewards.
While I was saying that no, Blizzard didn't learn a damn thing and that no matter what people expect, the arenas system was made by Kalgan for his need of being l33t. And so they were going to add some kind of reset system to make Arena's reward truly l33t, either by resetting your points after each arena season, or by adding rank requirements.
My point: nothing is going to change. They are maintaining the status quo where a small subset of players have access to the best gear, while the majority sits at the bottom of the pyramid. So making the elite stronger, and the noobs noober(?).
And now I read of the two upcoming changes:
1- They are rising rank requirements for arena loot
2- They are stopping powerlevelling
I never participated in a single arena's match, but I'm sad to see I was right. From what I read you can't purchase arena's loot with points, but you also have to maintain a certain rank. EXACTLY LIKE IN THE OLD HONOR SYSTEM.
From Tobold's blog comments:
This will remove most people below 1500 now from the arena, creating a whole new playing field. And arena ratings on honor gear? Ridiculous.
It seems to me like the Arena has turned into what the honor system was at it's launch. Something for the hardcore players. And of course as usual, the casuals will be steamrolled even if they've got a set two seasons below the current.
It seems that with patch 2.4 and this PvP announcement that Blizzard is returning to the WoW 1.0 model of hiding gear and patterns in inaccessible raid dungeons and behind PvP rating/ranking obstacles.
There will always be teams who win against better geared opponents because they outplay them. But this will get harder and harder. Just think about how much damage a S4 warrior will do to a S2 equipped cloth or leather wearer. With an equipment spiral like that, skill matters less and less.
And I'm writing this because I'd really want to see in the face those that FOR MONTHS argued with me. And then make fun of me if I point out to them that once again I was right.
The morale is in the article:
Saving your points (or even your honor) for Season 4 may not be as effective anymore though, if you can't also muster up the ratings to purchase the gear.
Last Kalgan's move to catassing. You know he is l33t. And you know where he's heading with all this.
Then there's the powerlevelling. Every idiot playing a MMO knows that it would be stupid to let a level 1 player group with a level 60 player and gain the level 60 player's experience.
Apparently, considering they are fixing it now, Kalgan didn't think of this:
Together, these rules (which Tom Chilton alluded to but did not reveal in a recent interview) should mean that a person cannot simply ride a high rating team to victory, but will instead need to fight their way up the ladder to gain points regardless of what team they join.
Because before you could group with the l33t and get their points/ranks. Which created the perfect opportunity to offer RMT to be up there for one turn, grab the loot, and leave.
And with this Kalgan made the last move to make arenas exactly the same of the past honor (catass) system.
Congratulations. You are back home.
Old summary:
- The Honor system is pure catass, players complain for two years
- Blizzard gives up and transform Honor points into currency
- But doing that then every player will be able to eventually get the best rewards! *SHOCK!*
- So they nudge back the Honor system in the food chain
- And add on top an Arena system that is more Hardcore than ever and whose rewards dwarf everything that was in the game till that point
Submitted by Abalieno on April 18, 2008 - 19:01.
This has been my theory since the first hours I've seen WoW's client with my eyes. I was discussing this on the forum today, so I will repeat here the concept, also because I think it's one of the most important aspects that made the game successful and that I've NEVER seen commented.
Outside of Dave Rickey, who wrote in his blog about the importance of tools and how always the worst programmers are put to develop tools, as it is not fun or really gratifying. Can't post the link because it was swallowed by the internet along with the blog.
So look at this sample picture that was posted.
It is nothing crazy, but it explains my idea. See all those tiny hills that make the mountains in the background? Now, do you think that a designer modeled and textured every one, one by one?
So here I repeat my theory.
--
I believe that a lot of WoW's beauty comes from ground textures and terrain modeling.
My controversial opinion is that it isn't about good art, but good TECH.
If you notice WoW's terrain is modeled in a way that is easily recognizable and every zone has the same rounded style. What I think is that Blizzard is using an editor that with a few clicks of your mouse creates pretty terrain while also placing textures on the fly, depending on the height and slopes.
Not only it allows them to keep that style consistent, but I also think they can make the terrain very quickly (and a new zone is just a set palette of new textures). Even the grass placeable are probably added by the editor itself.
What I'm saying is that this editor must have some preset brushes that do everything on their own (mostly). You give a general direction, a few mouse clicks and the terrain comes to life with all the textures placed and blended following a precise formula. That ALSO makes all the game, everywhere, look consistent (because they turned textures and modeling conventions into RULES, then applied by the editor itself).
Even *YOU* can make a pretty zone in a very short time, if you had the right tools.
--
You can import WoW's textures even in NWN2, so what?
I'm talking about tools that let you manipulate objects. Not the objects themselves. You can let someone make a picture pixel by pixel, or you can give him some broader tools. What you are saying here is that MS Paint is the exact same program of Photoshop.
SURE IS.
But can't you see that doing what Photoshop does into MS Paint would require years of work?
Tools.
So: try to use NWN2 editor to make a small zone with the terrain that look similar to WoW. Even use an existing zone as a model. I'm sure it will pass six months and you are still tweaking things.
And I'm sure it would only take a few hours to make a good looking zone with the editor Blizzard is using and that is giving that consistent look to ALL the terrain in ALL their zones.
You think this is the result of awesomely awesome art direction, or that maybe there's one slave who's doing all the terrain in all WoW. I say it's because a multitude of designers are using the same tools, so producing similar results.
And I know this because I did use tools in various games, and I know that the most difficult thing is to actually make things look DIFFERENT from everything else in the same game and produced by the same tools.
--
In short: WoW's designers are using Photoshop-level tools, all other designers doing other MMOs are using MS Paint-level tools.
Generalizing and simplifying a lot, that's why everyone else is behind.
--
Follow up here. In the same way Warcraft 3's editor as the "apply cliff" tool, WoW likely has an "apply rounded hill" kind of tool that automatically shapes the terrain AND applies appropriate textures. With no effort at all.
Submitted by Abalieno on April 15, 2008 - 05:53.
So saddening:
Tom Chilton, Lead Designer: The big objective is to build WoW into a viable eSports game platform.
And then worse:
Tom Chilton: Before this, we didn't really have a good forum for competitive eSports. WoW PvP was just kind of there. For example, our battlegrounds always had the limitations of the Horde having to play against Alliance, it was very themed toward the conflict within the game itself.
So the "eSport" is a way to surpass the "limited" form of factional-themed PvP.
This is surely a new drift that wasn't there in their original plans. Subjectively: for the worse.
Tom Chilton: I'll tell you, it's been a slow evolution. When WoW first came out, we didn't really have any semblance of organized PvP. We had Tarren Mill versus Southshore...
GameSpy: Which was awesome!
Tom Chilton: That's nostalgia speaking! I remember you were interviewing me at E3 a couple years ago and you not thinking that it was so awesome.
We kind of slowly went from there, to trying to bring some organization to it with the Battlegrounds. Giving the game a little more capability for players to feel like it was a fair, controlled encounter. Then it was (the arenas) a natural evolution from that.
Natural evolution.
Submitted by Abalieno on February 9, 2008 - 19:51.
Cosmik on WoW's Honor Points, about one year ago:
The first curious thing is that you don't get your honor points immediately. Instead you get an "estimate", which tends to be far too low, and then get your real honor points the next day. Imagine experience points worked that way! "We estimate you have gained experience for two more levels today, but come back tomorrow for the exact value and the actual reward." I wondered, if honor points are given out on an absolute scale now, why would it take one day to calculate the honor points? It's better than the previous once-a-week calculation, but still not very logical.
My reply, one year ago:
Yeah. That question is gold. That's exactly what I was wondering a week ago on Q23, we are on the same line. No one could really understand this and the best guess is that it's all STILL because of those FUCKING diminished returns. My god, sometimes Blizzard is so absolutely stupid that isn't believable.
This can really make sense only in Kalgan's mind, because for the rest of the world this is blatantly flawed. And at this point isn't anymore just flawed, but also completely unexcused.
NO ONE STILL HAS A CLUE ABOUT HOW THIS SYSTEM WORKS.
THAT "best guess" was the friggin cause of all the fucking mess the Honor System was.
Proof coming from TODAY's patch notes (currently 2.4).
* Diminishing returns on honor for kills is being eliminated.
HENCE:
* Honor will now be instantly calculated, and available for player use.
My point still stands:
I'll tell you what you should do: you should demote that designer who is responsible for all this and replace him with someone who has at least half a clue. I do not want Kalgan fired. But I DO want him REPLACED. At least. Take his own responsibility for all this shit.
But, even more important, why the fuck PvP has to always receive this treatment? I mean in general, why the fuck PvP has always to be the afterthought? Why it always has to have the worst, careless design?
If your average bloggers figure out game design better than a team of senior designers who are paid to do that job professionally and have better insight about how the game works, then something is wrong.
Admit your failure on this system, and face your responsibilities.
Submitted by Abalieno on January 30, 2007 - 03:46.
The "collection quests" (meaning those that require you to loot "x" objects that may or may not drop) are a quest type that is often criticized by everyone because it feels grindy and frustrating. Many also wonder why they just don't all get replaced with the more straightforward kill-quests.
I don't think that collect quests are bad but the players don't like them. Still I believe these types of quests shouldn't be removed as they fill a different role than simple kill quests. They should be tweaked, though.
While playing in WoW's Outlands and even the starting zones I noticed plenty of quests that weren't well balanced. In particular those that require you to collect different kinds of items are usually badly balanced. Often there is one object type that is ALL OVER THE PLACE, while the other much more rare. This tends to feel frustrating.
The point is: it's not the quest type to be bad, it's the balance. The quest type just exposes the quest to this vulnerability.
Rule for collection quest and non-grindy gameplay: It's ok till you don't push players to kill respawns.
That pretty much guarantees that a collect quest is a good one. It also feels better from the point of view of the immersion. "Respawn" is a workaround mechanic to refresh the world, but it should be as invisible as possible from the player's perspective. In the case of collect quests the "respawn" becomes an ACTIVE mechanisms of the quest itself. This is all kinds of WRONG.
As an example, one of the first quests in the Outlands (Alliance side, but I guess mirrored even for Horde) asks you to collect 12 badges from the fel orcs in Zeth'Gor. The place is big enough, but with just a few players around and about a 50% (or less) chance of getting the badges you'll HAVE TO kill respawns at some point. In my case I killed the orc in the forge five times before I was able to complete the quests. This is grindy. Players should be presented new challenges, even with minimal variations, but at least some. If I have to kill the exact same mob, in the exact same location, then the game starts to feel grindy. And I shouldn't be put in the condition for this to be required.
This is bad. A quests that makes you kill respawns is bad. It's a very simple rule. And in the classic game there are more than one quests where not only it happens that you kill respawns, but in some cases YOU HAVE TO. As there aren't enough mobs to complete the quests if you don't wait for respawns. It even happens that you exterminate a zone, but the quest requirements still aren't complete (concrete example: it happened me two days ago collecting venom sacks in Stonetalon near the lake).
Come on. This kind of balance and game design is very easy to understand and to execute. WoW could use some tuning. It's not hard.
Submitted by Abalieno on January 19, 2007 - 17:30.
The title is appropriate.
Now I'm not anymore so upset of having lost the honor points bonus of the last month. And all those players who ground honor points for two months now see the result: some less fun playing the expansion. The same applies to raiders. You get some fun before, and some less fun after. A compromise.
I'm quite happy of my own. The very first two introductory quests in the Outlands are already offering me upgrades to my relatively crappy gear (and I even did some raidin'). I'm taking this veeeeery slowly so that I can play for a bit longer before hitting the raiding wall again.
But this is also the main topic now. The mudflation. Raph wrote a few things about this. But he talks about the economy, where in WoW this aspect is completely IRRELEVANT. He obviously speaks a bit in general, but WoW has other problems, concretely.
It's not necessary to make a big list, because WoW's economy is the one that works better. And it works well because it's very simple (and we can argue whether this is good or not). It's all ruled by money sinks and, imho, applied even too diligently. My 60 warrior never got more than 40 gold during his lifetime and I also had to go farming (something that I really despise) in a few cases because I was completely broken and couldn't even afford repairs. Epic mount? No thanks, I despise buying money more than I despise farming.
What are the main money sinks in WoW? Training skills as you level up, repairs and "maintenance". Maintenance including all the added money required to support high-end activity such as raiding.
That works. The economy works even too well. But, again, it's pretty irrelevant for the player. What instead matters in WoW is the CONTENT mudflation. And the content mudflation works on different premises.
Mudflated content (in my own definition) is content whose functions overlap. Two pieces of content have the same function in the game, one is clearly better then the other, and it replaces the other. The result is: content is removed from the game.
Also: path of least resistance. When we have two paths, one is preferred over the other. Such are games.
We design games with content reduction in mind. I already underlined the absurdity of this concept more than two years ago, the week that Blizzard announced the expansion. I also pointed out what was going to happen and why:
The rise of the level cap is a quick "fix", both in the sense of game-drug and as a functional and effective way to give back to the players that experience that they loved along the way and that faded when they hit the top, when they had to adapt their habits to the bigger raids and guilds. It works basically like the nostalgia. It's like if you are warped back ten levels without even remembering to have gone through them and have to repeat the experience like if it was the first time. In this genre the possibility to refresh the sense of awe and achievement is definitely something precious and satisfying for the players. So: why not?
While we can argue whether the current content will go or not right in the toilet, what is sure is that the current *progress* will.
We could assume that the players will retain their current gear for most of the hike to 70 but if this is true Blizzard would lose one of the strongest "fun" points: the sense of achievement. In the current game levelling is fun because you acquire new skills, spend talent points, get access to the mount and acquire progessively and constantly new gear. If the next 10 levels become just a grind with each level just giving out higher stats and nothing else, the "magic" would vanish easily and the expansion would finally feel rather dull. A game where you retain the same sword for 10 levels is a game that isn't fun. So what could happen? Where is the line that will part the brand new level 60 character ready to move to 70 and those other players that have been at 60 for more than one year and collected all sort of powerful items? From my point of view the expansion will HAVE TO replace the gear for *all* the players.
And the implicit contradiction: why we burn and remove content when content production is the bigger problem we have today? Scott Hartsman offered the answer to this:
All of that “database deflated” content is called “shared experiences,” and they’re critical to a game’s success in the era in which they’re relevant. In the long run it loses value. That’s a given.
However, it’s absolutely critical to have it there in the short term, in order to get a game to the point where it can actually lose that value. That’s a problem of success. We should be so lucky to have that content beginning to lose its original value.
What happened in WoW with the expansion? The first result is obvious. It completely erased all the content from level 58 and above. Every instance past BRD is now completely USELESS. And I'm not exaggerating.
In particular. The most useless piece of content of the whole game is now that "tier 0.5" they added about a year ago after all the protests against the raiding game. Completely. Useless.
The point is: the mudflation from the perspective of those who build these kinds of games isn't THE PROBLEM. The mudflation is THE SOLUTION. Read Raph with this in mind.
P.S.
And if you are a good game designer you would also notice that for a new player the quality of the game is inversely proportional to the mudflation. The more you open the gap between the early and late game, the less players around, the more the solo grind is prolonged.
Submitted by Abalieno on January 18, 2007 - 17:56.
It was discussed these days that Blizzard didn't offer a digital download of their expansion (I commented this on Brandon's blog).
Well, they are going to. Or at least I read it and I'm sure. It's just that these days I read things and then forget where. So go find the link yourself.
Now. If only they offered it in time for the release I could have spared the ~$60 for taxes+shipment of my US copy.
Yes. $60 for importing, $40 for the actual game.
Submitted by Abalieno on January 18, 2007 - 05:18.
I collected some statistics about the new server caps on WoW as I anticipated in one of the previous posts. I wish I could quote the original plan where they wrote in detail about these new server caps but it is gone (and here you hear me swear, as it always happen when I cannot fucking find what I'm searching). This is taken out the server split FAQ:
Are any other measures being taken to avoid forcing a realm split?
Yes. One measure is to raise the player caps for all realms when The Burning Crusade launches. This will be possible in part because of the hardware upgrades that we’ve worked to put in place since the original launch.
So I went checking how many players they allowed on a single server.
Before this expansion the server caps were set between 3200-3400 players. Counting alliance + horde. From my new surveys it looks like Blizzard didn't go all that far. The new cap seems to be between 3700-3800 or so. I'll run more tests to see more precisely if little more or little less, but that number should be already fairly correct.
So we have a +500 players more or less. On the Silvermoon server there was a queue as I logged in to take the numbers and when I was done the queue was still there. I counted 2600 alliance characters and 1200 horde. So around 3800 overall.
About the two new races: usually 2/3 of Draenei are Shamans, and 2/3 of Blood Elves are Paladins.
I would post all the graphs but they aren't all that interesting. The level 60 wall is starting to cascade on levels 61, 62 and 63. While the graph only hints at some more activity between level 1 and 20, but still very flat. Only around 1/4, 1/5 of players are starting new characters, while the others are storming the Outlands in the race to 70.
EDIT: I ran more polls today and I can count between 3750-3850 players. So the new cap is probably 3800.
Submitted by Abalieno on January 17, 2007 - 22:21.
So the first level 70 was a french player on euro Archimonde. I have already reported this yesterday on the forums but what I find amusing is the subtext of the whole thing.
It reminds me the scene in Forrest Gump, where he goes running back and forth between the two US coasts. And there are all these people following him like a prophet, waiting for the final revelation. Then he stops, turns and says "I'm pretty tired."
And here it's the same. The race to 70. First player worldwide (assuming) to reach the top. And we expect words of wisdom. Something engraved in history.
What will our hero say? What's the meaning of life?
"je ding"
Priceless.
Submitted by Abalieno on January 16, 2007 - 04:37.
I'm taking screenshots as if I'm playing for the first time. I like.
I confirm what I wrote in the post below. World design and art are excellent.
Blizzard has surpassed itself once again. What they did with this expansion is amazing.
Submitted by Abalieno on January 16, 2007 - 01:44.
I'm level 4 on my dranei shaman (as I don't have any 60 to go see the outlands on the euro servers) and having fun.
The zone art is awesome and one step higher than classic WoW, while I have some complaints about some minor details and character art (like hairstyles, blood elfs in particular). I also didn't like the running animations, but after playing more I like draenei's animations overall (and voices too!).
The launch here was absolutely smooth, or at least it was from my personal perspective (and I also play on one of those servers branded "full"). The expansion was activated without even requiring downtime, just a relaunch of the client. The server is working without an hint of lag and the starting zones have players without being overcrowded (but it's night here).
I'm speaking way too early, but for now it's a flawless victory. We'll see in the next days.
Tomorrow I'll try to take out some statistics with Census to try to figure out what's the new population cap.
EDIT: When even on FoH you read it was a flawless launch, then maybe it's true. But we still have to see how the population increases in the next days.
P.S.
Notice how the "secret" of WoW's art is all in the colors. Every screenshot and zone seems to have an unique palette. And really close to a painting effect.
Submitted by Abalieno on January 15, 2007 - 22:20.
I got the EU copy and already registered/patched it. While Gamestop is kaput (so no US copy for a while, I fear).
Three things:
- The opening screen with the portal has a great impact. The screenshot doesn't give it justice.
- The musics. Wow. I love the rearranged theme. Epix!
- I gave a look to the credits. The full trio (Pardo, Kaplan/Tigole and Chilton/Kalgan/Evocare) is credited as design lead. While Furor was also promoted and he is now "Lead Quest Designer". And... Sachant works for WoW? Huh? Last I heard she was with Shadowbane, but the credits list "Danielle Vanderlip" as one of the community managers. That's her name, right? Or it's her or someone else I already know. That name isn't new at all.
Submitted by Abalieno on January 15, 2007 - 13:15.
I'm not 100% sure but I think that the 2.0.5 patch removes from the TOS the point that made illegal playing from outside the US.
I hope it was recognized as a mistake.
If it's true, thanks.
Submitted by Abalieno on January 11, 2007 - 21:05.
Reporting this because they give us relevant infos:
more than 2 million players in North America, more than 1.5 million players in Europe, and more than 3.5 million players in China.
My previous considerations were both right and wrong:
if nothing changes we would see the subscriptions climbing at above 8 million just by the end of September.
If that's true it would be a safe bet saying that the NA subscribers will climb above 2M BEFORE the launch of the expansion. Again, I doubt it. We'll see if I'm wrong but I'm not so sure that the NA subscribers are even above 1.5M. That would disprove the data we have now, though. But that's my suspect.
An average of the two and we are there.
What I can see now is that the growth is still rather constant. This would mean that by the end of 2007 WoW would reach 10M worldwide, but this without counting the effect of the expansion (and the competition, but I don't think there are any real competitors yet).
It's possible that the expansion alone will give the game another 1M in our market (US+EU) easily. That 1/3-1/4 growth is what I would expect. We'll see.
Also interesting to consider that both US and EU market seem to grow at a similar pace. About half a million every year.
August 2005 - 1M in the US
January 2006 - 1M in the EU (with US probably at 1.5)
January 2007 - 2M in the US, 1.5M in the EU
Those being official numbers.
My suspect here is that the growth slowed down during the 2006. But the imminent launch of the expansion already gave these numbers a boost. The 2M in NA would already include some returning players that are getting ready for the expansion launch. So the point is: how many more subscribers, beside those already back, the expansion will bring to the game?
Submitted by Abalieno on January 10, 2007 - 18:46.
If the news of the forced server splits below your ass wasn't enough (my opinion is here), now we have this.
I still remember when Blizzard repeatedly promised to european players official support to play on the american servers. But "only after the european launch".
Then the european launch arrived and Blizzard completely ignored questions about this issue if not repeating that they didn't want european players on the american servers FOR THEIR OWN INTEREST. Because they were worried to provide a quality service and they didn't want us to experience too much lag or receive support in a language we don't understand. How cute.
Giving players the choice of course was above them.
With this last patch in preparation for The Burning Crusade they modified the TOS:
4. Limitations on Your Use of the Service.
A. You may only access the Service from within the territorial boundaries of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or Singapore. Any access to your Account, whether by you or anyone else, from any location outside those countries is a breach of this Agreement.
So if you are an european player playing on the american server from today you are considered in the same league of gold farmers, exploiters, cheaters or hackers. You are breaking the terms of service.
Fuck you Blizzard.
One day you won't be anymore "king of the hill" and you'll start to pay one by one for all these fucking stupid choices.
I don't think that treating legit customers as criminals will payback. But till you are in a dominating position then you can afford just everything, even this shit.
P.S.
LOL. Someone remembers that in my proposed LFG tool I had suggested to use an animated demon eye to appear when the LFG flag is active? Well, after this last patch when you are flagged LFG (but only for the auto-join option) an animated demon eye appears near the mini map ;)
No, really.
Submitted by Abalieno on December 31, 2006 - 17:22.
Contrarily to what I expected, The Burning Crusade has Gone Gold and will be ready for the January 16 launch:
The expansion has already gone gold. We see no reason why the game isn't going to be on the shelves at the planned date.
January 16th, in case you forgot.
With the release not being delayed I wonder if the expansion is actually complete.
I do expect the servers to have problems and bugs to come up, but there isn't much you can do about that. Those are issues that I consider tolerable because you can never be ready about everything. In those case you can only have patience and I'll always excuse Blizzard (or any other company) for that.
But I wonder if the content is complete. Outside of those things that they said won't be there at launch, all the rest is already accessible and working properly in beta?
I'm a bit skeptical. Maybe I'm wrong.
Submitted by Abalieno on December 14, 2006 - 18:09.
There's a part of WoW's PvP system that I still haven't commented but that truly interests me.
Right from Cosmik's comment:
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to joining my team-mates in running past the enemy players in Alterac Valley and totally not killing them just so I can engage in some PvE against the Battleground boss first.
He is obviously sarcastic, but that's an important theme.
I like goal-based PvP much, much more than "deathmatches" and mindless kills. I hate what DAoC became in the last years. With organized 8vs8 skirmishes and almost zero interest in the keeps and territorial control. I like territorial control. That's one soul of PvP.
It looks like in this case Blizzard went too far. The objective (and reward) are so appealing that the players have learnt... not to fight.
This is an old discussion, in part already examined.
One of the problem at the core is that the conflict isn't "real". So the players learn how the game really works and exploit it. They see past the fiction.
But I don't want to talk about that. Let's see the possible solutions.
Well, this is one of the main issues that I tried to solve with my proposed PvP system. The Hotspot idea.
The point is not to find the right balance between the single kill and the objective, the point is to understand better how PvP works. My idea was based around the "convergence". PvP action needs to converge. An objective should be an excuse to meet in a point and fight for it.
In the Hotspot idea the "points" were still gained mainly by killing other players (and without the stupid diminishing returns), but you gained more points the more you fought close to the Hotspot. The idea was basically to think these objectives as "magnets". The closer you are the more points you get, so they make the PvP action to converge in that point and have a conflict.
If there's one Hotspot, then it's in the interest of both faction to control it. The Hotspot, aside the "magnet" effect on the points, had two functions. The first is to slowly build a bonus, like a multiplier to the points earned by the faction that controls it, so in the interest of the other faction to take the Hotspot back as soon as possible so that the multiplier doesn't grow. The second was to slowly build up a "bounty" (for every kills scored in the meantime) that would work as another incentive for the other faction to take it back. When the Hotspot is conquered all the players in the area would be rewarded with the points in the bounty pool.
That was a simple solution to have goal-based PvP while still encouraging the players to fight each other, as you would get almost no points by conquering a deserted Hotspot.
The problem was that the system was designed for the world PvP. So how you "fix" the problem in Alterac?
The scenario you *expect* is: meet in the middle and starting to "push" to slowly gain territory till one of the faction is pushed back and the other can score a victory. The original Alterac battles could last many hours in fact and it wasn't rare than one player logged out before the whole thing was over.
The scenario nowadays is: the two factions rush in opposite directions. Neither of them cares about what the other does. The "defense" is completely discarded and wins who can score a victory faster. Instead of a "collision" you have a parallel competition. Alliance and Horde play at the opposite sides of the map. And a battleground lasts half an hour on average.
Now, the duration of a single match is a design problem, and the "content" in the BG should get tweaked till the results are considered satisfactory. It's pretty obvious that the right choice should be between the too quick current battles and the first ones that lasted way too much. From my point of view an average of 1/1.5 hours should be the target for the Alterac battleground.
But how to fix the problem at the core (the fact that the two factions don't really... fight)?
It's simple. The reason why they don't fight is because the progression of one is disconnected from the other. I mean, if Alliance wins, the Horde could have been 30 seconds away from scoring a victory itself. The real problem is that disconnection.
Company of Heroes could be an inspiration for a fix. Instead of just graveyards and two different, independent battlefronts you add objectives that must be held so that you can score a victory. In short: you force one battlefront instead of two independent ones (or even: you design a more open-ended battleground when you need to hold multiple spots at the same time to score a victory as in Dawn of War).
Let's say (A) is the alliance base and (B) is the horde base:
(A) x1 - x2 - x3 - x4 - x5 (B)
As it is now the alliance can fight at x5 while the Horde is fighting at x1. That's the problem.
The fix: in order for alliance to reach (B), they have to conquer and hold all the "x", from 1 to 5. Same for the horde in reverse.
This forces the action to "converge" in one point. One battlefront. The territorial control is progressive and linear. And the players would fight each other and try to slowly conquer territory and defend it, instead of avoiding each other.
Submitted by Abalieno on December 14, 2006 - 15:21.
Referred to the previous mock up.
I was thinking about the "Auto LFG Elite quests" option that automatically flags you for all the elite quests in your quest log.
The problem is that this is unlikely a default behaviour, so the option isn't all that useful. If you are questing in Redridge you'll unlikely join a group in Loch Modan. Even if it's for an elite quest that sat there from a long time and that you want to finish (and in this case it's more reasonable to flag for it manually).
The idea is to replace that option with a different one "Auto LFG Elite quests in current zone".
This other options would automatically flag you LFG only for those Elite quests in the *current* zone. Also adding your name to the "location" tooltip so that other players can see you without even searching through the LFG matchmaking function.
So if you check both those options in the upper right corner of the panel you would be flagged LFG for the current zone and all the elite quests in the current zone. Which is more likely a "default", useful behaviour for a majority of the players.
Oh, I was forgetting. Blizzard completely disregarded the PvP on their LFG tool (I did as well, but here I am demonstrating that I didn't). Sometimes the LFG chat channel was used to organize PvP raids.
The idea is adding, for all levels, two generic static options to the "raid" list on the LFG panel: PvE and PVP. So that the players can flag for one of the two and then use the comment field to give more details (Azuregos raid, Crossroads raid or whatever).
And it would also be a good idea, when in the appropriate level range, to add to the "dungeon" list also the Arenas and Battlegrounds, so that you could flag LFG even for PvP.
Submitted by Abalieno on December 12, 2006 - 20:51.
Who didn't see this coming? Come on.
Now that the Before the Storm content patch has been live for the past week, we’ve had a better opportunity to track the rate at which players are accumulating honor, and subsequently how easy it's been to obtain honor rewards. In gauging these elements, we've determined that the effort required to obtain honor rewards is more trivial than we had intended. As a result, during today's maintenance we’ve applied a hotfix that reduced the amount of honor gained by approximately 30%. This change allows the honor rewards to be obtained at rate that better reflects the item’s in-game value.
The reason that we decided to reduce the rate of honor gain rather than simply raise the honor cost of each item, is to ensure that everyone’s time and effort participating in PvP since the patch is not diminished. As this change will only affect future honor accumulation.
I'm actually surprised because I expected a MUCH more significant "nerf". Even if I also know that this relatively easy phat loot is going to last just another few weeks (a transitory, deliberate "carrot" to keep bored players interested after the delay of the expansion release), as things will change considerably when the level cap will be raised (I suspect that the level 70 PvP items will have much, much higher prices).
I actually hate the way they did this. If something doesn't work as designed then you block it as quickly as possible. You warn the players right away and inform them that things were expected to work in a different way. You don't let the players exploit it for a week. I HATED when in DAoC there was a design mistake with the spellcrafting that allowed to craft powerful cloaks for a very low price. EVERYONE in the game rushed to craft hundreds of cloaks. People on the forums asked continuously to Mythic if this "exploit" was tolerated or not, but Mythic never cared to answer, while just everyone kept exploiting at will.
And I was the rare "righteous" player who had faith in Mythic to stop all that. I didn't made my own cloak because I thought Mythic was going to fix the problem. Instead when the problem was actually fixed they just said that cloaks couldn't be anymore spellcrafted, but all those that were made in the meantime were tolerated. And I was happily fucked. Because I don't like exploits and I expect them to be fixed promptly.
And I HATE that even in this case Blizzard DIDN'T SAY A FUCKING THING (actually they did say something, see the edit below) before they went and patched the issue. Of course, think what could have happened when the players discovered that it was the golden week of honor points with a +30% bonus.
If anything it's just another demonstration that Kalgan cannot get his shit right. He just cannot.
EDIT: More drama. This whole thing just doesn't convince me. I think it's not over yet, expect more. Cosmik also has a good summary. For two days the blogosphere is resurrected!
EDIT-2: Comment stolen from FoH:
Premades were plowing over pugs all day. They probably got 50k-100k honor last week. I wouldn't be shocked if some got even more than that. I'm sure there were some hardcore catasses that got that much just joining pugs.
So basically they nerf honor because of those people. The problem is those people just got the honor they needed for pvp loot so this nerf doesn't effect them. Blizzard just nerfed the fuck outa casual players or other players who can't/won't join a premade pvp group.
Yeah, that's actually similar to what happened to me in the example from DAoC I brought.
The message is clear: when you see something odd... EXPLOIT THE HELL OUT OF IT TILL YOU CAN.
Submitted by Abalieno on December 12, 2006 - 18:36.
This is a mock-up for a LFG system that WORKS. Based on the previous rants (rant 1 - rant 2).
There should be also a new icon that looks like an eye of a demon (and maybe even animated, for the cool factor). Eye open = LFG on. Eye closed = LFG off. It's a simple toggle that you enable/disable with a mouse click on the icon.
The design idea is: If you make the LFG tool a predominant element of the interface instead of hiding it somewhere, then people more likely will use it.
In my design this icon/eye should be placed near the character portrait or at the upper right of the screen, between the zone name and the icon showing the time of the day. You click on this eye and a radial menu will open with just two icons/options (if you use Trinity bars you have an idea of how this radial menu could look). One will toggle the LFG flag on and off, the other will bring up the LFG panel shown above, where you set all the options and can perform the searches.
The LFG options you set from the panel are SAVED with your character. This means that your preferences will be carried over from session to session and you could log in the game and just toggle the LFG flag. Without the need to reconfigure the whole thing.
Trick: Another idea I got is that if you mouse over the zone name, just above the mini-map, you would get a tooltip that shows on the fly all the players who are LFG in the same zone.
Some more explanations:
- If you check the "Global LFG" option then all the fields below will be checked automatically and you'll always appear in every search that another player performs if he is in the same level range.
- If you check one of the main fields (Zone, Dungeon, Quest and Raid) then all the fields below will be checked as well. Instead if you go check one of the single options while the main field isn't checked then the main field will be checked as well, but not all the other options for that field.
- "Auto LFG in current zone", if checked this option greys out the "Zone" field. If active it means that the game automatically flags you LFG only for the zone you are in. This means that when you move from zone to zone the LFG flag will be updated automatically to your "current" zone. Just remember that even if this option is active, you still have to toggle the "LFG" on (via eye icon) to be actually flagged.
- "Auto LFG Elite quests", if checked this greys out the "Quest" field. It means that you are LFG for all Elite quests in your quest log and when you take a new elite quest it will join the list and get flagged automatically. Same as above, you still need to toggle the LFG on for this option to be in use.
Note: there will be a new option on the quest log that allows you to send a specific quest to the LFG panel. By default only the "elite" quests will be listed on the LFG panel, but you can use the quest log to "send" there even normal quests, and ask for help.
Note 2: When you flag an elite quest you are also flagged automatically for the corresponding zone. This allows you to "see" those players who are flagged LFG for the zone where the elite quest is, even if they don't share your precise quest. This to make easier to ask for help and maybe trade favors (I help you with this if then you help me with mine). For example making visible two players who are LFG for two different elite quests in the the same zone.
Similarly, players LFG in a zone will see also all those players who are flagged for an elite quest in the zone, so that they can offer to help them.
- "Looking For More". This tab is greyed out till you are "solo". As you join another player in a group this tab becomes usable, while the options above the tab will be reset. All the options you set while in the group are "volatile" and won't be saved, and as you disband your default options on the LFG panel will be restored. The purpose of this is to allow simple, aimed searches when you are in a group and going for a specific objective. So without overwriting the default options that you use normally while looking for a group.
For example lets say that you are with three other players going in the Blackfathom Deeps dungeon. Your group needs an healer. So you select Blackfathom in the dungeon tab, then check "1", "Priest" and "Druid" under the LFM tab. This corresponds to the classic "LF1M healer". When you'll perform a search you'll see all priests and druids who are also looking for a group for that dungeon. And all the priests and druids looking for a group in that dungeon will see your group set LFM.
The two major goals of this system are:
1- Allow for multiple choices, giving as much customization and "reach" as you want
2- Provide complete matchmaking results by performing ONE search
In particular I underline the second point. In the current system used in WoW you have to perform one search for each option available. Instead in my system you get ALL the results, sorted by group (first groups, then solo players), number of matches and then alphabetical order.
So you'll get a list of names of all the players whose LFG options match at least one of yours. By mouse-hovering on a name you can see what is the result, or results that were matched.
Summary of the overall UI scheme:
- eye icon (eye open = LFG on, eye closed = LFG off)
(radial menu)
- LFG toggle
- LFG panel (two tabs)
- LFG Options (this opens by default if LFG toggle is "off")
- Search (this opens by default if LFG toggle is "on")
This system has one apparent imperfection compared to Blizzard's one. To be able to perform a search and get "matched" you are forced to set yourself LFG (as the search function will look automatically for all the fields you checked). While in Blizzard's current LFG tool you can search LFG players even if you aren't set LFG. This is a desired effect. As I want the players to flag themselves when they are searching, instead of using the tool passively.
It will encourage more players to turn the LFG flag on and get better used to the system.
EDIT: I revised some smaller parts.
Submitted by Abalieno on December 12, 2006 - 02:25.
I won't really go deep into this because I've already analyzed WoW's PvP from multiple perspectives and all I said is still valid today. There are tenths of links if you want to dig.
I didn't play WoW's "endgame" recently but I heard that a lot changed. Or at least there are "bigger carrots" who are making people crazy. I'm reading this on Tobold's blog:
And I started wondering how exactly the honor points are calculated. Because there are some rather weird things going on around the way you acquire honor points.
Yeah, this is actually one of the biggest flaws of WoW's system since PVP was implemented. Surely NOT a today's problem.
Still today the mechanics that regulate the PvP are mysterious. The exact opposite of something intuitive. And also something that for this reason is different from all the rest of WoW's design, that is usually quite linear and easy to grasp.
Today things improved because they decided to finally cut the part where honor points were calculated weekly based on a ranking system and a very complicated and counterintuitive progress system that no one ever completely understood. It's like black magic. Magic formulas only known to a secret cult. But those latest changes were only a partial achievement as I read that those stupid diminished returns are STILL in the game and that honor points you see right away are only a rough "estimate" on what you'll get the day after.
At the same time the arena system inherited the suck of the honor system: good luck figuring out how the ranking will work. But I won't comment that, for now.
Maybe it's not a case that still today the same designer (Kalgan/Evocare) is working on the system. "The fox can lose his fur but not his cunning."
As Cosmik said:
where r u, DAoC Realm Points?
Really. The biggest problem is that Blizzard continues to use an obscure system that seems completely unexcused. There just is absolutely no reason, in particular after the most recent changes, that justifies that obscurity.
We moved for a very, very stupidly designed system that OBLIGATED players to play as much as possible in order to get more points and climb the ranks, to one that was asked MONTHS before the Honor system was actually implemented. All those HUGE, GLARING flaws were EVIDENT since the first day the system was announced. And today, one year and half later, they finally admitted that the Honor system was pure shit and replaced it with one where honor points can be used as currency. Exactly as EVERYONE ELSE was suggesting and has suggested for all this time.
The first curious thing is that you don't get your honor points immediately. Instead you get an "estimate", which tends to be far too low, and then get your real honor points the next day. Imagine experience points worked that way! "We estimate you have gained experience for two more levels today, but come back tomorrow for the exact value and the actual reward." I wondered, if honor points are given out on an absolute scale now, why would it take one day to calculate the honor points? It's better than the previous once-a-week calculation, but still not very logical.
Yeah. That question is gold. That's exactly what I was wondering a week ago on Q23, we are on the same line. No one could really understand this and the best guess is that it's all STILL because of those FUCKING diminished returns. My god, sometimes Blizzard is so absolutely stupid that isn't believable.
This can really make sense only in Kalgan's mind, because for the rest of the world this is blatantly flawed. And at this point isn't anymore just flawed, but also completely unexcused.
NO ONE STILL HAS A CLUE ABOUT HOW THIS SYSTEM WORKS.
And, at this point, I guess not even Kalgan knows anymore what he designs.
So I did a bit of research, and my fears were confirmed by a "blue name" on the official World of Warcraft forums: "Honor is given at different amounts depending on the opponent you defeat. Doing those calculations on the fly would be extremely taxing on the realms if they attempted to calculate everyone being killed and how everyone involved got parsed out honor and in what amounts. If we are ever able to get to the point where the calculations are able to be done live we would certainly do so."
While that explains why it takes a day to calculate honor, and confirms that honor points gained per honorable kill are still depending on your opponents rank, this confirmation opens up a whole new can of worms: How can you have a PvP reward system in which the points depend on the PvP rank of your opponent, but there is no more way of earning or losing rank? Somebody who only started PvP after the patch and now plays PvP all the time will soon be as skilled and well equipped as somebody who did his PvP before the patch. But he will be worth very little honor points to his opponents, because his rank will never go up from 0. The longer this system is in place, the more illogical it gets. If this continues, in a year on the battlegrounds players will actively hunt down the few remaining characters with a PvP rank, because they are the only ones being worth decent points. We are playing PvP in a league in which all the ranks are frozen, but rewards are still given out according to that rank. Totally crazy!
I think Tobold goes too wild here, but it is certain that this system just cannot work. It's just not tolerable to design a system that is so messed up and unreadable like this one. ESPECIALLY in a game like WoW.
What the fuck is this system calculating that it cannot be done on the fly? It really is above me. There isn't any fucking justification.
If we are ever able to get to the point where the calculations are able to be done live we would certainly do so
I'll tell you what you should do: you should demote that designer who is responsible for all this and replace him with someone who has at least half a clue. I do not want Kalgan fired. But I DO want him REPLACED. At least. Take his own responsibility for all this shit.
But, even more important, why the fuck PvP has to always receive this treatment? I mean in general, why the fuck PvP has always to be the afterthought? Why it always has to have the worst, careless design?
Submitted by Abalieno on December 11, 2006 - 22:58.
Thanks to Lum and D-One to have pointed to this. LFG systems are one of my pet peeves (and, incidentally, something that Blizzard doesn't get, like the PvP system). I already commented all this, but I guess there's more.
From Lum:
The players of World of Warcraft discover the eternal dilemma of LFG systems: until a critical mass of people use them, no one uses them.
It becomes useful only if enough players use it. SURE. But, hey, the opposite is true as well and actually comes first (in particular from the design perspective): More people will use the tool when the tool will be actually useful.
Who's born before? The egg or the hen?
This isn't a fucking problem for game design because you first build the tools so that they are useful, then the players WILL use them. Because they are useful. If they aren't useful then they aren't used.
Especially: if they suck, then they won't be used.
I ideally imagine a LFG system like a "punch card" used on those old mainframe computers. You go around in the game searching for someone else who has a card where at least one hole is in the same position of one of yours. When you find one hole that matches, you are set. You are a winner.
Now. It's OBVIOUS that if you can have just three holes on your card and there are is a total of 1000 possible positions for those holes, then it will be really, really, really hard that you can find easily someone with a punch card with one hole that matches yours. Statistically your possibility to "succeed" are scarce. And things get even much worse if you add the fact that you have to repeat a specific search for EACH of those thousands of possibilities.
There's no cumulative "look for anything that matches". You have to go check MANUALLY one by one.
Now let's make an hypothesis. Let's say that every time you get an "elite" quest you are automatically flagged LFG for it, of course offering the possibility for the players to turn off this option if they so choose.
Right now it's IMPOSSIBLE to find someone currently using the LFG tool and going to flag for that *precise* elite quest that you are also flagged for. If it happens it would be like one of those coincidences that only happen once. You DEFINITELY don't build a LFG system that works on the premise of "RARE COINCIDENCE".
There's a label on this tool. It reads: "WORKING PROPERLY ONLY UNDER RARE CIRCUMSTANCES". Yeah, I suppose it is going to be really useful. Expect many people to use such a wonderful tool.
Instead an automated system that flags you automatically for ALL the elite quests in your quest log right as you log in the game could lead to exact opposite results. It could work wonderfully. You could get quickly a list of all players on the server who share your quest and you could send them messages to ask if they are available for it.
You don't get the possibility to flag, purposely, for THAT precise quest, in that precise moment. You get the possibility to, eventually, turn it off. That's a subtle difference.
This would be as useful at level 60 as it is as you level up. My level 22 mage has elite quests that I will probably cancel or do only when I outlevel them just because I couldn't find other players in scarcely populated zones such as Loch Modan. My level 60 has unfinished level 60 quests that sit in my quest log since more than a year. I have that last step for the Scholo key that wants me to go kill an ugly guy in the middle of the plaguelands but I was NEVER able to put together a group to go kill it. If there was a system that let me see all the others players on the server sharing that quest I'm more than sure than in two-three days I could manage to find someone and go kill that shit.
Hoping to do the same thing with the CURRENT LFG system that Blizzard built is just plain naive.
So don't bitch because the LFG system isn't used. The LFG system isn't used because it sucks. That's different. So bitch because it sucks. Bitch because we have waited two fucking years for a LFG system that is still inferior to some of those used in other games (even if I admit that the overall quality of LFG systems is crap).
From the "blue":
First off, it diminishes the use of the new tool and makes it harder for us to refine it in a way that makes it more useful for players.
I'm sorry. You got your chances. Firstly with those fucking meeting stones, then with the server-wide channel, now with this. You cannot fucking get this right. I really cannot understand how Blizzard can be so completely clueless about something as simple but fundamental as this.
If you didn't get it already then there isn't any fucking possibility that you can "refine" it in the right way. It is just above you.
I have a feeling we'll see a slightly different result in the use of the LFG interface once the expansion launches, but that will largely have to do with the players deciding to use it and doing so.
Yeah, the gates to level 70 will open up and the quest logs of every players will get SWARMED with a number of quests and new possibilities. And you'll have to get along with THREE LFG fields that are supposed to cover all that? Yeah.
The release of the Burning Crusade will only make more obvious how inadequate is the LFG tool. Nothing else.
It's a good tool.
No, it sucks. This WITHOUT A DOUBT. There really nothing at all to argue about. Objectively.
Submitted by Abalieno on December 7, 2006 - 23:25.
An excerpt from a well-written (and entertaining as always), post-patch rant:
I can’t live with that UI. I can’t. I won’t.
I get that Blizz didn’t like the cheese automagic decursing. I get that this was a bit of a rush and jamming partial beta code into a live game is … problematic. What I don’t get is why Blizzard is not pandering to a vibrant, open-source addon developer community when they have to know their default UI is shit. And publishing partial notes of planned changes is not pandering — that’s half assing. Pandering is something like this: We (Blizz) need you (the addon dev community) to have your stuff ready to go on patch day. How can we (Blizz) help you (the addon dev community) do that? Also, thank you (the addon dev community) for fixing our shit UI, you (the addon dev community) really make our game a pleasure.
I know, that’s all too much to ask and unreasonable.
Hey, I’m flexible. I use a handful of addons, but all I really need is a raid addon and boss warnings. That’s my line in the sand. I’m not scanning their shit combat log for boss cast warnings and counting down in my head when BossSpell will hit. I’m not guessing who has boss aggro and asking in Ventrilo 78 times, “who’s he on now?” “how bout now?” “is it a warlock?” “a mage pet, wtf?” I won’t have 1/6 of my view taken up with raid groups (and I play at 1680 x 1050, there’s only so much squeeze room) and I don’t want half of my healers taking a month-long hiatus because the target/spam heal routine isn’t so much a bore as a Chore.
(And really, why does decursing have to be a pain in the ass to fit some game vision? I do not, cannot understand that, but their game, their rules — not like decursing is my gig anyways, but I sure as hell hear the bitching about it.)
I repeat: fuck raiding. I’m going to farm flowers with my herbalist.
Am I the only one to see this as a game design issue?
I underline how Foton repeats that WoW's vanilla UI is shit. But is it really shit?
I remember clearly that when I logged in WoW for the first time during beta not only I was amazed by the environment, but also by how well designed, effective and simple to use the UI was. And I wasn't the only one to notice that as WoW's (vanilla) UI is easily recognized as the very best one in the market by a WIDE margin.
So, there's something that clearly is wrong in this point of view. But, even more interesting, this part that is "wrong" also corresponds to a recurring problem that should hint to something bigger and deeper.
Am I the only one that while reading Foton thinks, "man, this raiding game really does suck". Because it's not a coincidence that all the problems Foton is reporting are pertinent to the raiding game.
I'll say what is my opinion: WoW's vanilla UI becomes BROKEN when you reach the endgame.
That's the point. I see an identity between the first "block" of the game and the virtues of the UI. The level 1-59 experience is the part of the game that was praised everywhere and that made this game successful (or at the very least gave the initial impulse). Through this first block the UI does its work rather well, in the same way every other aspect of game design is well thought. This is the nearly "flawless" experience. Then things change. The endgame, as many have admitted, feels as a totally different experience. And, again as many have admitted, not nearly as flawless as the first block. It's in this other part that most of the problems and limits of the UI start to arise and the user mods become a *necessity*.
UI mods are always useful, but while for the first block of the game they are either an "ease" or a "preference", with the endgame they become *mandatory*. If you don't have CTRaid (and Ventilo) you aren't even allowed to join a raid.
This means that the real problem isn't the UI. The UI is only the most superficial and visible layer. But the problem runs deeper. The UI is a simple manifestation.
This is obviously a problem of game design, and a widespread problem that is pertinent not just to the UI but to this whole second block of the game that we call "endgame" and that Blizzard wasn't able to understand, interpret and polish as the rest.
We'll see if with TBC the designers will steer the game away from those problems, or if those problems aren't seen even as problems and are still part of WoW's goals.
And, in either case, if we'll have to wait Blizzard to figure out and polish even this part, or if another game company, for once, will be longsighted enough to anticipate the trends and do a better work. At least on this front.
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