Seems like these days people are just throwing around the terms "bad design" without really understanding what makes for good or bad design. For the most part I feel the developers are using it correctly and I really applaud their efforts to continually improve upon the game and really work hard to get the best game possible. Sure they make mistakes, as does everyone, but they do get around to fixing them. They also often break things when they go to fix other things but what more do you expect with a game that I suspect is running off of code 8 years or more out of date.
Enough ass kissing time to get into the discussion here. I'll throw out a disclaimer saying that I don't have any actual formal education in game design or systems design but over the years I've played a lot of games, I make it a bit of a hobby of mine if I have the money to at least try all the big games in my favourite genres and analyse them.
First up, what are the goals of design? When you design anything you're going to have objectives, things you want out of the game and things you want people to take out of the game. For example in designing a game like Minecraft the goal is to deliver a world where, using mining concepts, one can build or create basically anything they wish. That's a bit of a broad concept but something more specific would be like in some Final Fantasy games. I'm going to use 8 as an example, sorry if you haven't played it before. Most people say it was a poorly designed game and I tend to agree with them but maybe not for the same reasons. If the intent of the combat design was for you to do one of two things, being spam summons until you're sick of their animations or draw all the magic in the world and just do your regular attack, then it was a great design, as it was accomplished. They focused on the game outside of combat which had some great depth.
Looking at a game like warcraft there are hundreds if not thousands of directions the game can go, and needs to go. There are so many facets of the game that each needs to have it's own design philosophy and scope. Heroic raiding content can't bleed over into levelling content because the two are almost mutually exclusive in terms of design. However things like class balance or class flavor do bleed over into every aspect of the game and need to be addressed at almost every turn.
Good design promotes you doing things that are intended, bad design is things that you don't want people to do but they'll do anyways because it was either unintended or an easy exploit. An example of this is potions. I don't know what the intent behind it was, but the fact that you can double pot on most fights is, imo, bad design for the simple reason that it forces you to spend double your resources on progression fights for a relatively small benefit. Other examples include things like using holy wrath for fish for divine purpose procs.
The talent trees are a great example of what I think is great design. The concept is that the designers want you to have everything you need for your spec come baseline. This means you can't skip things that are central to your character like moonkin form, shield of the righteous, combustion. These sort of talents were basically required, that means everyone took them because they were so strong. The game was designed with the assumption that you had certain talents and in many cases you didn't even have to choose between your best talents because they wanted you to have all of them. You weren't going to see a prot pally that had to choose between shield of the righteous and word of glory. Prime glyphs were in a bit of a similar situation and I think that's been mostly taken care of as well. I understand that people may not like it but I've not yet heard someone who hasn't presented a good argument for "we like it when you can make a wrong choice." For the most part it's people who do have the "right" spec.
But I digress. A lot of times you use design to promote certain behaviour. For example, a lot of DKP systems don't want you to hoard dkp, they want you to actively spend it to get any upgrades you want to help the raid team. People by nature want to hoard their dkp to win the really big ticket items, so you design systems that discourage hoarding, things like a cap or some form of %age decay. It doesn't have to be those and I'd argue that decay is awful anyways but those are the types of things you might use to promote spending. You can't lose the dkp if you've already spent it, and you can't gain dkp if you're sitting at the cap. This isn't a discussion about dkp systems so I'm going to move on from that.
One more element I'd like to address with design concepts is that you don't want to make people do things they wont enjoy. Farming roughly 2 hours worth of mats per hour of raiding back in vanilla and to a lesser extent TBC was not fun. They made a lot of that better with things like mixology for alchemists, connected AH, guild banks, cauldrons, feasts etc. This promotes collective efforts. That is each person can help a little bit of the time, or for the guilds that want to specialize and focus though they have that option to put a few people in charge of guild resources which means thy don't have to go farm, they just have to manage the resources to being in the required consumables.
There are so many elements of design in this game and I can only really touch on a few at a time especially without having taken a class or anything but the last one I wanted to touch on today was the idea that you want people to see what you produce and you have to design around that constraint. Looking back to examples like Naxx-40 and Sunwell we see that less than 2% of the wow population even managed to step inside those instances before they were considered out-dated. Caveat: the last raid of the expansion is a rough thing to do because of how varied skill levels are. They have changed the way they release content since then which solved most of that issue but we still have the problem of people not getting to see the destruction of deathwing before it's obsolete. This is where things like LFR and the growing nerf comes in. You don't want to spend a lot of dev time on something that only 5% even of your population will observe. It's a waste of time that could be spent on things like making better encounters, fixing more bugs, updating models, or anything really.
So what I ask of the population on the forums. Please stop throwing around good and bad design to further your argument unless you really understand what it means. There are some legitamite concerns with good or bad design I'm sure but that doesn't mean you can use that as an argument for anything you don't like. LFR was not bad design, the way it handled loot was bad design and they're fixing it. Gating content the way they have in the past was, imo, bad design. A certain spec of your class that you like doing less damage than other classes is *not* bad design, as long as it's viable and your class has something competative to play it's not bad design. Adding more things for us to do in the game is not bad design.
And that's my rant on design. I'm pretty busy with 5.0 so this post wasn't really as thought out as my previous ones have been so I'd like to make one last comment. If you're a tank, and still getting 2 impales, we run it pretty close a lot of the time, stop attacking after the first impale to let your other tank get aggro. Impale gives you like 100k attack power, we can't do anything.
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