Another of the large "discussions" on the forums is about content consumption and who deserves to see what content. I'm going to state right now that I do have a clear bias towards hardcore raiding but I'm going to try and be as neutral as possible.
First, a couple of analogies that have been thrown around the forums make me kinda sad. The blue posts included something to the effect of: once a guild kills the boss you can't get to it any more. I think this is overstating the opinion being presented. The counterpoint is that casuals are getting the same rewards as raiders without putting in nearly as much effort. I think this is a complete misunderstanding of guilds that are not as good as those making the comments.
I'm going to throw out my own analogy. You're really excited for a brand new game, lets say Final Fantasy 13 or Space Marine or Mass Effect 3. The night these things launch you pay 60$ or so for them. They really good games and you're super excited to have them, but you have to pay a pretty hefty price for them. A couple months down the road, the game has been out for some time now and usually the price drops a bit. Some games down to 40, others all the way down to 20 depending on the popularity. This is a bit like the nerfs. Are you upset that someone else only paid half the price you did for the same game? Sure you are, that's the same experience for less money, it's unfair on some level. The counterpoint is that you got to enjoy that game first. There is a lot to be said about having things before other people. You gained a lot by getting that game early but you also paid for it.
I think that analogy works pretty well. Both players may want that same experience and the same game, but to get things earlier you have to pay a higher price. That price may not specifically be dollars. It could be time invested in the game, as can be seen in one of the raid documentaries that have been produced, or it could be money in a new gaming rig. Whatever that price is you're going to have to pay it to get your things first. There's a bunch of benefits that others don't have. A lot of guilds are now selling runs and fattening up their personal or guild banks. There are benefits but when people see that someone else has killed the same bosses it throws up red flags, and I don't think that's fair to either party.
Something that comes up in recruitment is how far you may have gotten before the nerfs kicked in. It's not huge but it definitely puts you somewhere on the list. People who get the bosses down pre-nerf really do have benefits.
The second thing that comes up is that players feel invalidated when others who are, to their view, less skilled kill things they have. This is simply misguided. You got it first, you worked very hard for it, that's not to say the other people didn't but you got it earlier. This timing thing I feel is being very overlooked. Secondly, time to farm gear. For killing it earlier you will have a lot more gear than those that simply wait for, or can't kill it until, the nerfs. To put it this way, I'm sure there are some people that can kill heroic madness right now with their guild but since they are really close to it, they may opt to buy a run from another guild that has it on farm for a much better chance at a 410 weapon.
I do like the nerfs in that it makes re-clearing things easy. After 4 months of farming 8/8 H I don't really feel like putting all of that effort into the raid. This is where I enjoy the nerf.
Now, I still disagree with the way the nerfs are coming in. In many cases it feels like the nerfs "rob" you of the legit kill. For example, we were almost done with ultraxion when the 5% nerf came in. We had a couple soul-crushing sub 5% wipes. The nerf comes in before we get back into the instance, and we take 3 attempts and kill it. It didn't really feel like we overcame that last 5% hurdle that we'd been fighting against for the previous week or so. It just felt like we were handed the kill. This is the problem I have with the nerfs. The second problem I have is that it interacts with rankings due to how early in the week people raid. These ranking websites are important to many people, the competition between guilds and between all wow players is what drives a lot of raiders to raid. So being ahead of a guild you've been pacing for some time only to lose in the rankings to them because they raid earlier in the week is a bit demoralizing.
I get the impression much of my raid team feels the same however I can't actually speak for them. I can say however that I would much rather be progressing for another week or two without the nerfs than to get the nerfs to make things go by a bit quicker for the new content, if that is even the tradeoff. So here lies the crux of the problem. What solves both sides of getting people through the content before new content comes out (at least in terms of the final raid tier) while ensuring that those who progress through the raid for realm firsts or even at a fairly regular pace, don't feel like they are robbed of the kills they have worked so hard for.
When it comes to non-final tier content I think the t11 method worked really well. New content came out and the old stuff got nerfed pretty hard to make it available to everyone and to help people get into the new stuff. I think that was wonderful. Another option is targetted nerfs. Try and get a feel for what is really tripping people up. Going back to ultraxion for an example. Maybe his hour cast time is slightly too long, maybe his health is slight to large or maybe the armor debuff on the tanks should be smaller. I'm not saying these are the targetted nerfs I'd go for but they are options. Find out what people are having the most issues with and fix those. Also, while I'm on the subject, please fix bugged encounters. Gunship has been extremely bugged for us since about the 15-20% nerf. The fire just doesn't despawn at all. We've adjusted but it's not how the encounter worked when we reached the fight but please, bugs shouldn't be part of the encounter difficulty. But I digress. Another example would be gunship, perhaps increasing the gunship's health or slightly reducing the number of barrages cast or reducing the sapper damage to the ship.
In any case targetted nerfs are a real option and I think it might take a bit more effort and may not be the best option. I would put forth a somewhat more complicated notion that may not work in reality. Nerf the bosses sequentially instead of the whole instance at once. Imagine seeing morchok all the way up to hagara being nerfed over the course of a couple weeks. More people get stuck at ultraxion, he's up next week for a nerf. It allows those progressing ahead of the nerf to stay ahead of it, and those behind it to ride it's wave and experience fights at their own difficulty. Now there are some problems especially if you fall into the narrow waves where you kill a boss during one nerf and have to wait from nerf to nerf to get your appropriate boss difficulty, this is a problem even though it sometimes feels this way with the current nerfing mechanism.
My conclusion is that there really is no good way of handling the nerfs. I think that they do need to happen at some point and the best solution is to find out when that point is. I appreciate the effort to wait for a large number of guilds to get "stuck" on a boss, that is to say the number of new boss kills a week drops below a certain threshold, but the analysis done on mmo-champ clearly showed that those most impacted by the nerfs were guilds already in heroic working on 3-5/8. At the time I feel those were not the people who needed the nerfs. Alternatively nerf normals before nerfing heroics to give us some time. Perhaps just wait longer in general before nerfing the content.
In the end the content is for anyone who wants to play the game, and in my opinion not getting to experience content while it's current is tough, but it happens. I narrowly missed sunwell by 1 boss (guild collapse with our best illidan attempt around 30%) and I wish I had gotten there, it would have been an experience I was not likely to forget soon. However, that being said I can always go back and check it out. I mean some people just can't play the game for the time that content is there, and while it's unfortunate for them that's not something blizzard should really take steps to help with. I'd rather they didn't nerf the content at all, and let the gear inflation fix those problems after the content is old. While it may be another problem looking at DS type raids where it being old means a new expansion, that doesn't stop people from going back later and having fun in it. Sure, turn down the mount drop rates to give us something special, but please don't ruin our experiences because we happen to fit into this middle ground in raiding where we don't finish the content before the nerfs, but don't require the nerfs to finish it. To put this into perspective, I raid at roughly the same level as those in Elitist Jerks. We finished gunship maybe a week after they did at most. We're looking at, while not the top, a very competent and skilled group of players.
The "you can turn it off" argument sucks and I'm appalled that blizzard still puts that forth. Competing in this game is what makes raiding fun. I raid because I know I'm good at what I do there and it makes me feel good to have some form of measurement that can equate to some form of prestige. Turning off the buff will do nothing for this because the only thing that matters in those ranks are kills. This isn't something the community can change either because you can go and get amazing gear with the nerf active, and then fly through the content again with 410 weapons for example. "You can turn it off" is something nice to have to go back to to experience the content un-nerfed after clearing it but for the most part I think it's a very weak argument that feels like a last resort for a bad solution to content consumption.
Final thoughts:
Nerfs serve an important purpose. I feel that they've been implimented too soon and scaled too quickly to avoid unwanted side-effects. I ask of blizzard, slow it down, give us players a bit more time to work on these things and let us go through them before forcing on us a helping hand.
UPDATE: Apparently there was a formatting error where a bunch of text was white on a white background, this has been fixed.
28 July, 2012
22 July, 2012
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a...wandering island?
So after watching some videos on youtube I decided that a specific release schedule for this may not be the best for me staying on top of things so from now on it'll be mostly as I feel like writing. However back to the warcraft related topics.
With the excitement of 5.0 being on the beta realms and a lot of hinting at a launch date being released soon there's a couple things that are pretty important. There are three major phenomenon that crop up when a new expansion is around the corner.
1) Burn out. It's really easy to burn out at this point in the expansion. In fact I'm pretty sick of raid nights as it is. We do a pretty good job of running through DS in a couple hours, especially since the 30% went in. That doesn't stop me from really not wanting to go to raid on tuesdays simply because it's relatively boring. It's not difficult anymore because we outgear it and it's been nerfed, but we still have the chance to wipe on pretty basic things. I think ever week we die at least once to ultraxion because of people not soaking the appropriate hour.
Another form of burn out which may not seem quite the same is taking a break from the game. A lot of cases crop up at this point in the launch cycle where people take a break until the X.0 patch or the actually expansion launch. Often these people do not return these breaks or just lose any interest in the game at all and disappear.
What's the solution to this? Well if you really like warcraft and plan on playing for a long time (or have a huge log of play time stocked up due to D3 CE or long term subscriptions) there's a couple things you can do to continue to enjoy it.
The first is to just play less. During progression it's very likely that people will be on nearly every night trying to do something in the game and it's still very exciting. Farming mats, doing some dailies for new gear, getting some gold for whatever reason, etc. Cutting back on your game hours will make it feel less like you have to log on and more that you're getting on to accomplish something. Now don't reduce your hours to no hours or you're very likely to just stop playing the game altogether.
Second point. Keep active in the game doing things other than raid. Sometimes this is hard since to a lot of people raiding is really the only thing they do in the game. For the most part raiding is why I play the game and without the progression stuff I do get pretty bored, however finding fun things to do like getting a group to go back for a second round of "Herald of the Titans" can keep you in the game without making you sick of it. Levelling new characters can do this as well, just pace yourself. Similarly don't stop raiding, even if it's just the 2-3 hours a week clearing 8/8 H it's something that will keep you in the game and make it less likely you'll just leave.
Lastly, try picking up something new in the game. If you don't pvp try getting into it. I know this can be daunting and there's some real problems with entry-level pvp. However, this is something new to do that may get you excited about a whole new aspect of the game. There's some other points regarding sticking to the game but I'm going to address that later since it works better for another section.
2) New/returning players. You will *always* have a wave of new and returning players every time there is a major patch or expansion. 4.2 Saw the biggest resurgence I've seen in a long time, with a smaller one during 4.3. With mists I can garuntee there will be armadas of new or returning players. This poses a lot of problems including crazy economies on the server, lots of raiding roster inflations and a lot of lower end players. A lot of those lower end are that way simply because they aren't used to the game changes or are new to the game as a whole so I'm not saying that the people are bad I'm just saying that they are new and can sometimes pose problems when dealing with them.
So what are the major problems with them and how do you deal with it? Primarily you have to be aware that things are in flux and there's almost nothing you can do about it. Just ride the wave so to speak. You're going to find a *lot* of things like really low dps or tanks that can't hold aggro in LFR/D. Healers that have trouble with mana or with keeping people alive. It's just going to happen and you can't get upset at them. I know it's tempting and I'm guilty of making fun of people in LFD from time to time but it's impotant to remember that they are playing the same game you are and more good players isn't a bad thing. In fact it's probably the best thing for the game and for the raiding environment.
Try to help out people who may not know better. If you see someone undercutting you by 50% on the AH just let them know that everybody loses when they undercut that much. I know plenty of people who, once told, stopped halving their posts and instead started undercutting by a gold or two. Also if you see someone posting something for crazy expensive when it's the only one of it's kind up, try helping them find a better price and don't be afraid to try and haggle them down a bit.
When running LFR/D don't just point and laugh at people pulling 3k dps on ultraxion. If you someone who plays the same class/spec as you and they are under performing try to help them out. I've met other players in BGs who did some silly things that only seem silly when you understand the game better. Fury warriors with daggers for example, or enhancement shamans with FT MH and WF OH. It happens, especially since sometimes the way you get skills while levelling don't always direct you to the optimal setups. Don't be mean about it, but try and help those who may not be aware of things. Pointing people to common resources like elitistjerks or femaledwarf is extremely helpful if you can do it in a constructive way. Be nice people, it only helps. Think about one of those players actually learning how to play the game really well and eventually finding their way to your raid roster. You'd rather they knew what they were doing and helped out your team than the raid roster scraping the bottom of the barrel because there are so few good players you can't get a hold of them anymore.
3) New xpac excitement. This isn't so much of a problem but I do have one major caution to people who are very excited about mists. Please check your information and the information of others. There are some great resources out there that digest the information for you. Try the beta yourself, or if you can't/haven't gotten into it try the PTR. In addition to the problem of information knowing that it is just around the corner can lead to an increased incidence of burnout. A lot of people will give up for now and wait for the X.0 launch.
I know I get really really excited about the new content and it's often hard to keep track of it all. I highly recommend places like wowhead/Zamofficial or MMO-champ as they make it a lot easier to keep track of all the changes. Don't try and keep up with all the beta changes to every class/spec/zone/etc you will give yourself an aneurysm. Just wait until the 5.0 patch and check out the patch notes there. Alternatively if you are very interested in it, and I highly recommend you keep up with the changes just don't run yourself down with it, please participate in the beta and give feedback. The only way to make the game better is to give feedback.
The absolute best way to give feedback is to play the game, post on the forums and do it as constructively as you possibly can. Posts like "Ret pallies are useless" is itself useless. Posts along the lines of "In PvP we don't have a good answer to problems x, y, z which will completely shut us down" are very good. The objective is to provide a couple major things with the feedback:
-Your opinion. It's important to tell them how you feel about it, but that can't be all you're doing.
-The problem. Try and identify the problem or at least where you think the problem might be.
-Numbers if you have them. Not always the most useful but they can't hurt.
-Experiences. Tell them what you did and what your reaction was.
There's some more to it but it's really hard to nail down exactly what makes good feedback because basically all feedback is generally considered helpful in one way or another. If a hundred thousand people all say something there's really good reason for the developers to, at the very least, look into it. However, and this one is big, you have to refrain from posts like "I'm underpowered, I need a buff." Without data to back up things like that it's mostly clutter.
If you're wondering how else to provide that sort of feedback there are places on the internet where people may be asking for data sets. This means something like running up to a target dummy, doing your rotation for a half hour, logging it, and emailing or posting it where they can collect extremely large amounts of data to compare.
In any case I hope that helped some people in some respects. Remember this is everyone's online world and a better player base means a better game.
With the excitement of 5.0 being on the beta realms and a lot of hinting at a launch date being released soon there's a couple things that are pretty important. There are three major phenomenon that crop up when a new expansion is around the corner.
1) Burn out. It's really easy to burn out at this point in the expansion. In fact I'm pretty sick of raid nights as it is. We do a pretty good job of running through DS in a couple hours, especially since the 30% went in. That doesn't stop me from really not wanting to go to raid on tuesdays simply because it's relatively boring. It's not difficult anymore because we outgear it and it's been nerfed, but we still have the chance to wipe on pretty basic things. I think ever week we die at least once to ultraxion because of people not soaking the appropriate hour.
Another form of burn out which may not seem quite the same is taking a break from the game. A lot of cases crop up at this point in the launch cycle where people take a break until the X.0 patch or the actually expansion launch. Often these people do not return these breaks or just lose any interest in the game at all and disappear.
What's the solution to this? Well if you really like warcraft and plan on playing for a long time (or have a huge log of play time stocked up due to D3 CE or long term subscriptions) there's a couple things you can do to continue to enjoy it.
The first is to just play less. During progression it's very likely that people will be on nearly every night trying to do something in the game and it's still very exciting. Farming mats, doing some dailies for new gear, getting some gold for whatever reason, etc. Cutting back on your game hours will make it feel less like you have to log on and more that you're getting on to accomplish something. Now don't reduce your hours to no hours or you're very likely to just stop playing the game altogether.
Second point. Keep active in the game doing things other than raid. Sometimes this is hard since to a lot of people raiding is really the only thing they do in the game. For the most part raiding is why I play the game and without the progression stuff I do get pretty bored, however finding fun things to do like getting a group to go back for a second round of "Herald of the Titans" can keep you in the game without making you sick of it. Levelling new characters can do this as well, just pace yourself. Similarly don't stop raiding, even if it's just the 2-3 hours a week clearing 8/8 H it's something that will keep you in the game and make it less likely you'll just leave.
Lastly, try picking up something new in the game. If you don't pvp try getting into it. I know this can be daunting and there's some real problems with entry-level pvp. However, this is something new to do that may get you excited about a whole new aspect of the game. There's some other points regarding sticking to the game but I'm going to address that later since it works better for another section.
2) New/returning players. You will *always* have a wave of new and returning players every time there is a major patch or expansion. 4.2 Saw the biggest resurgence I've seen in a long time, with a smaller one during 4.3. With mists I can garuntee there will be armadas of new or returning players. This poses a lot of problems including crazy economies on the server, lots of raiding roster inflations and a lot of lower end players. A lot of those lower end are that way simply because they aren't used to the game changes or are new to the game as a whole so I'm not saying that the people are bad I'm just saying that they are new and can sometimes pose problems when dealing with them.
So what are the major problems with them and how do you deal with it? Primarily you have to be aware that things are in flux and there's almost nothing you can do about it. Just ride the wave so to speak. You're going to find a *lot* of things like really low dps or tanks that can't hold aggro in LFR/D. Healers that have trouble with mana or with keeping people alive. It's just going to happen and you can't get upset at them. I know it's tempting and I'm guilty of making fun of people in LFD from time to time but it's impotant to remember that they are playing the same game you are and more good players isn't a bad thing. In fact it's probably the best thing for the game and for the raiding environment.
Try to help out people who may not know better. If you see someone undercutting you by 50% on the AH just let them know that everybody loses when they undercut that much. I know plenty of people who, once told, stopped halving their posts and instead started undercutting by a gold or two. Also if you see someone posting something for crazy expensive when it's the only one of it's kind up, try helping them find a better price and don't be afraid to try and haggle them down a bit.
When running LFR/D don't just point and laugh at people pulling 3k dps on ultraxion. If you someone who plays the same class/spec as you and they are under performing try to help them out. I've met other players in BGs who did some silly things that only seem silly when you understand the game better. Fury warriors with daggers for example, or enhancement shamans with FT MH and WF OH. It happens, especially since sometimes the way you get skills while levelling don't always direct you to the optimal setups. Don't be mean about it, but try and help those who may not be aware of things. Pointing people to common resources like elitistjerks or femaledwarf is extremely helpful if you can do it in a constructive way. Be nice people, it only helps. Think about one of those players actually learning how to play the game really well and eventually finding their way to your raid roster. You'd rather they knew what they were doing and helped out your team than the raid roster scraping the bottom of the barrel because there are so few good players you can't get a hold of them anymore.
3) New xpac excitement. This isn't so much of a problem but I do have one major caution to people who are very excited about mists. Please check your information and the information of others. There are some great resources out there that digest the information for you. Try the beta yourself, or if you can't/haven't gotten into it try the PTR. In addition to the problem of information knowing that it is just around the corner can lead to an increased incidence of burnout. A lot of people will give up for now and wait for the X.0 launch.
I know I get really really excited about the new content and it's often hard to keep track of it all. I highly recommend places like wowhead/Zamofficial or MMO-champ as they make it a lot easier to keep track of all the changes. Don't try and keep up with all the beta changes to every class/spec/zone/etc you will give yourself an aneurysm. Just wait until the 5.0 patch and check out the patch notes there. Alternatively if you are very interested in it, and I highly recommend you keep up with the changes just don't run yourself down with it, please participate in the beta and give feedback. The only way to make the game better is to give feedback.
The absolute best way to give feedback is to play the game, post on the forums and do it as constructively as you possibly can. Posts like "Ret pallies are useless" is itself useless. Posts along the lines of "In PvP we don't have a good answer to problems x, y, z which will completely shut us down" are very good. The objective is to provide a couple major things with the feedback:
-Your opinion. It's important to tell them how you feel about it, but that can't be all you're doing.
-The problem. Try and identify the problem or at least where you think the problem might be.
-Numbers if you have them. Not always the most useful but they can't hurt.
-Experiences. Tell them what you did and what your reaction was.
There's some more to it but it's really hard to nail down exactly what makes good feedback because basically all feedback is generally considered helpful in one way or another. If a hundred thousand people all say something there's really good reason for the developers to, at the very least, look into it. However, and this one is big, you have to refrain from posts like "I'm underpowered, I need a buff." Without data to back up things like that it's mostly clutter.
If you're wondering how else to provide that sort of feedback there are places on the internet where people may be asking for data sets. This means something like running up to a target dummy, doing your rotation for a half hour, logging it, and emailing or posting it where they can collect extremely large amounts of data to compare.
In any case I hope that helped some people in some respects. Remember this is everyone's online world and a better player base means a better game.
10 July, 2012
Skipping a week
The storm of blizzard posts this week has covered everything I had intended to up to this point so I'm going to point anyone who's interested over to mmo-champ to check out the blue tracker or just digest the news posts there. I'll be back next week with a new topic.
02 July, 2012
How to serve raider.
Similarly to previous topics I wanted to take a look at what exactly makes an encounter hard, and I thought I'd start much broader than WoW encounters.
So at it's most basic level the concept of difficulty comes via the choices you make. The ability to make the right or wrong choice is often what defines most games. Look at something like chess or checkers, or even go as an extreme example. There are a finite number of moves to make. These choices make the games complex and difficult, especially if you're playing against other people. Slightly different story playing against a computer but the concept is the same.
To take an extremely simple example to allow us to really consider what I'm talking about I'm going to use Tic-Tac-Toe. If you have examined the game closely you can begin to see that it's impossible to lose if you follow the "right" pattern. Consider all ways the game can play out using the 3 different starting zones. Once the first few moves are placed the rest of the game falls into place. You can pick the corner, the middle, or the edge. Because it's a square and identical in all transformations all games can be considered to have these 3 starting moves. You don't have a lot of choices and the game breaks down pretty quick, and it's easy to see that there are clearly "wrong" moves which will cause you to lose. Connect four is another game that's got a slightly higher complexity level but has the same basic concept, you can make wrong moves that make you lose.
Tetris is another example of moves that make you lose, or at least set you back drastically. A friend of mine once said, regarding a game called "Lumines," 'There are no wrong moves, only series of moves that end in you losing." The simple idea here being that a single move wont be your finishing blow, but any given move can be the descent into one.
A step up is checkers, it's an 8x8 grid with a much larger moveset from which to choose. The game is still relatively simple compared to games like chess, go, or any modern computer games. These get more complicated and the idea isn't always restricted to which moves you can make. In some of the previously mentioned cases, once a move is made everyone locked out of that space, which isn't necessarily true for other games.
Moving on to other games, and sticking to turn based briefly, picking the timing of some moves is also important. Warcraft has good examples in many situations such as interrupts in pvp or major cooldowns of all sorts in pve, and pvp of course. Timing is extremely important and choosing the timing of things is also a choice and adds to complexity. Looking at something like chess, you often have to be careful of when or how fast you set something up to avoid being either countered or caught in a bad position.
With warcraft we have an extremely large skillset for each and every player, in addition to a fair amount of RNG that must be dealt with on the fly. So while no single action will really be considered "right" or "wrong" you will still find "better" choices that allow you to more comfortably handle other aspects of the fight. In some, many even, cases this is a right or wrong choice. Many DPS rotations will tell you what is right or wrong in terms of maximizing your numbers, however often things will crop up that cause you to alter what's going on.
So what do we have so far in terms of things that create difficulty:
1) Choices - Right/Wrong choice and the number of them
2) Reaction - Not knowing exactly when something happens and reacting to it ties back into choice but is sufficiently distinct
3) RNG - Things you can't necessarily prepare for but can minimize and deal with.
4) Timing - Again related to choice you have to pick your timing to really shine.
The next step is to ask how this relates to warcraft and encounter design. Because you've already constructed a ruleset for the game, which is essentially the game client and functional parameters of the game, you can refine this list to add/remove some of the less relevant options.
Revised set:
1) Placement - Warcraft is a graphical game where your position is important, don't stand in the fire.
2) Reaction - Many abilities can require you to react to anything that may happen in the game, e.g. interrupts.
3) RNG - You can't always control where the deckfire spawns but you can deal with it afterwards.
4) Choice - Mostly in your ability usage but this also includes things like which direction you choose to run when you get tethered to people etc. Also margin for error is related to choice.
5) Numbers - Technically out of the power for the player to deal with but is an avenue for difficulty scaling.
6) Time Limits - Enrage timers, burst dps sections (see tendons), running between places often must be quick as well.
There's probably more but that is a fairly good list for the purposes of this discussion. When designing an encounter there are these and many more things to take into account to create a sense of how difficult the encounter is, here are some examples, many of which will include spine of deathwing and the lich king.
Defile took up a pretty large part of the not-so-large platform by the frozen throne, each person in the raid also had to be ready to react to it being case especially since it didn't always follow the same pattern with respect to the valkyrs, there was a lot of healing to be thrown around in addition to the boss having relatively tight timers especially when you consider healer mana as a sort of enrage timer. Deathwing's spine is pretty narrow, and if everyone ends up on the same time he scares the crap out of people by telling them he's about to roll, jumping on the tendon asap is extremely important. Getting the numbers out for spine are incredibly important, which lead to some class stacking for the world firsts.
Those are often considered some of the hardest encounters in the game, spine being the hardest I've had the fortune to have access to and complete while it was considered "current," heroic ragnaros is one I reached but didn't beat that fits the bill pretty nicely. However the question here is how can we bring this into being related to the topics discussed in previous weeks. How do we look at encounter design and try to find a solution to the normal vs heroic problem. Let's ignore the Dev time consideration for this simply because I'm not really familiar with how much dev time goes into these sorts of things and how much additional time would need to be considered.
Usually it's adding onto the encounter that really makes the difference between heroic and normal, but it's also often a modification of normal mode mechanics to varying degrees. So lets look at taking a sample normal mode from before the days of heroic modes and imagine the sorts of things that we can do to increase difficulty without the addition of mechanics.
1) Increase spread range of splashing attacks. It makes your placement extremely important. I'm including things like frost tombs picking 6 instead of 5 like hagara.
2) Jack up all the numbers. Make the core parts of the game (dealing damage and healing specifically) more difficult strictly with numbers. Tanks get the same numbers thing but in an entirely different manner. I'm including enrage timers here.
3) More frequent use of abilities. Imagine if Nef used crackle every 5% instead of every 10% not technically a new mechanic but it would ramp up the difficulty even if the numbers were tuned right. Also consider timing of abilities. Modifying when bosses throw out certain spells could really rough up a raid. Imagine a dragon boss breath attack followed closely by a cleave followed closely by a tank related special abilitiy. Far more dangerous that the cooldown mashing behaviour most bosses seem to have these days.
Most of these types of changes are really uninteresting and should really be applied as necessary to specific fights to make them feel right. After that though you really need to mess with mechanics, for a variety of reasons the foremost of which is really give players a new encounter instead of a ramped up normal mode (sidenote: if blizz or anyone else reads this doing the exact same fight on normal and heroic with just different numbers is *not* very fun).
So lets look at mechanic changes. You can add, modify or subtract mechanics from bosses to change them. Many abilities you should just let stand as they are and tweak some of the previously mentioned metrics. It also feels really strange to remove a mechanic from the heroic mode without a really good reason for doing so (such as redesigning the fight in it's entirety). Which leaves the majority of hard mode fights being rehashes of normal modes or normal modes that got new mechanics that drastically changes the fight.
I'll likely continue this later in the week instead of waiting until next weekend since I am technically late this week, though I'm going to claim asylum under Canada day holiday. It's a complicated topic and am always excited to hear feedback.
So at it's most basic level the concept of difficulty comes via the choices you make. The ability to make the right or wrong choice is often what defines most games. Look at something like chess or checkers, or even go as an extreme example. There are a finite number of moves to make. These choices make the games complex and difficult, especially if you're playing against other people. Slightly different story playing against a computer but the concept is the same.
To take an extremely simple example to allow us to really consider what I'm talking about I'm going to use Tic-Tac-Toe. If you have examined the game closely you can begin to see that it's impossible to lose if you follow the "right" pattern. Consider all ways the game can play out using the 3 different starting zones. Once the first few moves are placed the rest of the game falls into place. You can pick the corner, the middle, or the edge. Because it's a square and identical in all transformations all games can be considered to have these 3 starting moves. You don't have a lot of choices and the game breaks down pretty quick, and it's easy to see that there are clearly "wrong" moves which will cause you to lose. Connect four is another game that's got a slightly higher complexity level but has the same basic concept, you can make wrong moves that make you lose.
Tetris is another example of moves that make you lose, or at least set you back drastically. A friend of mine once said, regarding a game called "Lumines," 'There are no wrong moves, only series of moves that end in you losing." The simple idea here being that a single move wont be your finishing blow, but any given move can be the descent into one.
A step up is checkers, it's an 8x8 grid with a much larger moveset from which to choose. The game is still relatively simple compared to games like chess, go, or any modern computer games. These get more complicated and the idea isn't always restricted to which moves you can make. In some of the previously mentioned cases, once a move is made everyone locked out of that space, which isn't necessarily true for other games.
Moving on to other games, and sticking to turn based briefly, picking the timing of some moves is also important. Warcraft has good examples in many situations such as interrupts in pvp or major cooldowns of all sorts in pve, and pvp of course. Timing is extremely important and choosing the timing of things is also a choice and adds to complexity. Looking at something like chess, you often have to be careful of when or how fast you set something up to avoid being either countered or caught in a bad position.
With warcraft we have an extremely large skillset for each and every player, in addition to a fair amount of RNG that must be dealt with on the fly. So while no single action will really be considered "right" or "wrong" you will still find "better" choices that allow you to more comfortably handle other aspects of the fight. In some, many even, cases this is a right or wrong choice. Many DPS rotations will tell you what is right or wrong in terms of maximizing your numbers, however often things will crop up that cause you to alter what's going on.
So what do we have so far in terms of things that create difficulty:
1) Choices - Right/Wrong choice and the number of them
2) Reaction - Not knowing exactly when something happens and reacting to it ties back into choice but is sufficiently distinct
3) RNG - Things you can't necessarily prepare for but can minimize and deal with.
4) Timing - Again related to choice you have to pick your timing to really shine.
The next step is to ask how this relates to warcraft and encounter design. Because you've already constructed a ruleset for the game, which is essentially the game client and functional parameters of the game, you can refine this list to add/remove some of the less relevant options.
Revised set:
1) Placement - Warcraft is a graphical game where your position is important, don't stand in the fire.
2) Reaction - Many abilities can require you to react to anything that may happen in the game, e.g. interrupts.
3) RNG - You can't always control where the deckfire spawns but you can deal with it afterwards.
4) Choice - Mostly in your ability usage but this also includes things like which direction you choose to run when you get tethered to people etc. Also margin for error is related to choice.
5) Numbers - Technically out of the power for the player to deal with but is an avenue for difficulty scaling.
6) Time Limits - Enrage timers, burst dps sections (see tendons), running between places often must be quick as well.
There's probably more but that is a fairly good list for the purposes of this discussion. When designing an encounter there are these and many more things to take into account to create a sense of how difficult the encounter is, here are some examples, many of which will include spine of deathwing and the lich king.
Defile took up a pretty large part of the not-so-large platform by the frozen throne, each person in the raid also had to be ready to react to it being case especially since it didn't always follow the same pattern with respect to the valkyrs, there was a lot of healing to be thrown around in addition to the boss having relatively tight timers especially when you consider healer mana as a sort of enrage timer. Deathwing's spine is pretty narrow, and if everyone ends up on the same time he scares the crap out of people by telling them he's about to roll, jumping on the tendon asap is extremely important. Getting the numbers out for spine are incredibly important, which lead to some class stacking for the world firsts.
Those are often considered some of the hardest encounters in the game, spine being the hardest I've had the fortune to have access to and complete while it was considered "current," heroic ragnaros is one I reached but didn't beat that fits the bill pretty nicely. However the question here is how can we bring this into being related to the topics discussed in previous weeks. How do we look at encounter design and try to find a solution to the normal vs heroic problem. Let's ignore the Dev time consideration for this simply because I'm not really familiar with how much dev time goes into these sorts of things and how much additional time would need to be considered.
Usually it's adding onto the encounter that really makes the difference between heroic and normal, but it's also often a modification of normal mode mechanics to varying degrees. So lets look at taking a sample normal mode from before the days of heroic modes and imagine the sorts of things that we can do to increase difficulty without the addition of mechanics.
1) Increase spread range of splashing attacks. It makes your placement extremely important. I'm including things like frost tombs picking 6 instead of 5 like hagara.
2) Jack up all the numbers. Make the core parts of the game (dealing damage and healing specifically) more difficult strictly with numbers. Tanks get the same numbers thing but in an entirely different manner. I'm including enrage timers here.
3) More frequent use of abilities. Imagine if Nef used crackle every 5% instead of every 10% not technically a new mechanic but it would ramp up the difficulty even if the numbers were tuned right. Also consider timing of abilities. Modifying when bosses throw out certain spells could really rough up a raid. Imagine a dragon boss breath attack followed closely by a cleave followed closely by a tank related special abilitiy. Far more dangerous that the cooldown mashing behaviour most bosses seem to have these days.
Most of these types of changes are really uninteresting and should really be applied as necessary to specific fights to make them feel right. After that though you really need to mess with mechanics, for a variety of reasons the foremost of which is really give players a new encounter instead of a ramped up normal mode (sidenote: if blizz or anyone else reads this doing the exact same fight on normal and heroic with just different numbers is *not* very fun).
So lets look at mechanic changes. You can add, modify or subtract mechanics from bosses to change them. Many abilities you should just let stand as they are and tweak some of the previously mentioned metrics. It also feels really strange to remove a mechanic from the heroic mode without a really good reason for doing so (such as redesigning the fight in it's entirety). Which leaves the majority of hard mode fights being rehashes of normal modes or normal modes that got new mechanics that drastically changes the fight.
I'll likely continue this later in the week instead of waiting until next weekend since I am technically late this week, though I'm going to claim asylum under Canada day holiday. It's a complicated topic and am always excited to hear feedback.
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