World of Warcraft: Current Year
- Thread starter hodj
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earthfell
Golden Knight of the Realm
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As much as everyone likes to shit on humanities/liberal arts majors, WoW in its current state is what happens when your game is run by people who only took STEM classes. The future of gaming will be a giant spreadsheet. The only good thing coming out of WoW right now is the stuff being churned out by people who went to art school.
Khane
Got something right about marriage
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WoW is not a spreadsheet game at all. In fact people put so much stock in bad information just because it "sims" well that it shows it's not a spreadsheet game. They hit a button, relying on a program another human being created, and furthermore APL's written for each class by different human beings, and expect it to be exactly how the wow engine works. It isn't. And they can still perform well even with bad information. The devs also keep removing all interesting choice and put very limited functionality into character builds these days. Anybody who thinks you need to spreadsheet and study formulas is clearly not taking the time to just read the 5 tooltips that matter for their class. It's mind numbingly simplistic.
If you wanna see a spreadsheet game go look at PoE. Except that game is excellent and people love it and its art team arguably sucks.
If you wanna see a spreadsheet game go look at PoE. Except that game is excellent and people love it and its art team arguably sucks.
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I'd argue you need a good balance of the two to make a good game, but yeah, I agree. The current approach to the game feels like the user metrics team is designing things with an Activision suit looking over their shoulders, with all of their numbers suggesting that the game should be keeping players, and they can't figure out why they're actually losing them in droves.
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a c i d.f l y
ಠ_ಠ
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Brings up an interesting thought. They generate art assets by the truck full, most of which doesn't make the software bloat quota, and what they ultimately decide on, while generally acceptable, always seems stifled, suffocated, minimized. They have this massive art department and budget, and unfortunately most of what we see is the resulting animations. Not new armor. Not new models.
The spreadsheet gaming is not to be discounted in wow, either, though if you know what you're doing, you know you can't reliably play at the level required to align all the crazy shit that goes into generating those sims, so a normal player like me picks the shit that is more consistent. Mage is disgusting in that manner. I could add three skills to my hotbar and drop them at ideal times during my rotation to gain an extra 500 dps, or I could stick to passives, ability to move during an encounter, and do similar dps.
They've done a lot to break sims, and depending on the class they've been successful, but at the same time nullified any intrigue or experimentation when a rather simple math equation negates it. Gear matters so little now. Press 1 2 3, sometimes 4 and 5. Better than spamming Frostbolt, but sometimes simplicity works when you have 40 different boss mechanics to deal with.
earthfell
Golden Knight of the Realm
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Oh, I meant like they are overly focused on the number crunching, and none of them are actually playing their game to see how it all connects and feels as a total gaming experience. So the spreadsheet metaphor I meant as in they are mistaking the numbers in the spreadsheet for reality.
Edit: same idea as Dom is saying, like something is designed by committee. Like how when you watch a movie and can immediately tell Hollywood execs gave the director no creative freedom, or when you see a political candidate and can tell all of their responses/interactions were screened by a focus group.
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I have an idea of what earthfell is talking about and it's sort of my line of thinking as well. It's as though they have this big spreadsheet of data entries that they're using to design the game. Not talking about gear formulas and the like. More like, X players put Y number of hours into Z game element so produce ZA content and limit ZB content to YA hours per period. Disregard any common sense that might arise. Things like the excessive amount of daily or weekly limitations to what a players are allowed to do, exactly how close every single DPS spec needs to be within range of the other, amounts of gold per hour that is acceptable, amount of time per hour that a toy costume can be worn etc... All of the adjustments seem to be about confining every single little thing into acceptable data ranges rather than "Is this shit fun for these people?"
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Arbitrary
Tranny Chaser
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I just started playing PoE a couple of weeks ago and with WoW's mechanics fresh in my mind still I was dumbstruck how different they were in philosophy.
So, WoW got a lot of Diablo 3esque mechanics to it when D3 devs got moved over to the WoW team, and they announced today that they're shifting HotS devs to other projects. Anyone that plays HotS have any suggestions of what(if any) elements me could see bleed over?
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I watched a video on Classic Wow yesterday and what it made me realize is not that I care so much for Classic but that I want to play an MMORPG with an emphasis on the RPG part. Forgetting all the additional elements like talent trees, weapon skill, spell rank, and countless other lost elements. I miss just being in a world, there was no little queue guiding me to grind out this currency or run this dungeon 20538 times in this 2 year expansion window.
You were simply plopped out into this world and you made your own way through it. I don’t need a single player cut scene every time I run an instance, or some god awful bullshit story written by retards. I don’t need chores in a game period. I want to play in a fucking sandbox world and I’ll choose the shit I want to do with it.
You were simply plopped out into this world and you made your own way through it. I don’t need a single player cut scene every time I run an instance, or some god awful bullshit story written by retards. I don’t need chores in a game period. I want to play in a fucking sandbox world and I’ll choose the shit I want to do with it.
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earthfell
Golden Knight of the Realm
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Exactly! The game is just overly produced. It micromanages the player, almost like a hyper-controlling, overbearing parent. There is no room for the unpredictable, for risk taking, for adventure. Anything not intentionally designed is a mistake that must be corrected. This means players cannot generate their own fun, or play the game in any other way than what was formulated in the Vision (which is just a euphemism for 'my way or the highway').
My favorite thing in GW2 are the Hero Point trains. Those were not designed by ArenaNet. In GW2, you have to collect hero points to learn skills, and these points are clickable items in the world that have to be discovered. Some dude mapped them all out and memorized the most efficient way to collect them, then started advertising that he would lead groups of noobs to harvest them all. So you have these trains of 40 people following some guy for over an hour to collect these, and it's just so much fun, and in return he asks for donations. It feels like Lemmings, and you are one of the Lemmings, and people die, get lost, it's great. It also means you can have a fresh level 80 character completely master all of their skills in about an hour.
If this were Blizzard, they would immediately destroy that by capping how many hero points you can harvest in a day, or they would have made Hero Points from older expansions unusable for the new skills. They would gate it. They would justify doing this because it was "not intended" for people to advance skills so quickly, so they are "fixing" the "mistake."
They are like a police state, and what they are policing is fun itself, but instead of fun they call it progression, because they can measure it in exp/gold/artifact power, which reveals it really is all just a numbers game. I imagine they have data scientists creating charts on the causal relationship between progression and subscriber retention. You can measure progression, but you can't measure fun. It's like quantitative data analytics took over all of their decision making and game design.
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xzi
Mouthbreather
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Member when you actually saw members of your own guild in major cities instead of a bunch of strangers?
Member when a mage could just cast fireball regardless if he was fire or not?
wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiild
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I've been mentally using the word "sterile" when thinking about their game design for some time now. It's like those parents that coddle their child in a completely germ free environment. Anything that's not pure or according to design is thrown away as being impure. Deviance is not acceptable.
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Khane
Got something right about marriage
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OneofOne
Silver Baronet of the Realm
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I was not aware of that, regarding pre-patch Az gear. Probably 10 pieces were pre-patch. Still, 3 coin out of 6-7 scrapped pieces is stupid, and yet there's nothing else to do with them, since you can't vendor them anymore. Assholes.
a c i d.f l y
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xzi
Mouthbreather
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This is what I dislike the most about the direction of the game. They don't even "correct" the problem, just the solution players came up with. It's most evident by the recent changes to Underrot making it completely impossible to skip the first set of trash, because they just see through stealth now. Instead of reevaluating why players are choosing to use their 10min pot cd on this trash pull, they just make it so they players have no choice instead.
Or my alltime favorite is movespeed sets. Legion was an amazing time for running old content because you could speed up everything SIGNIFICANTLY. It also made things like soloing the first boss in mythic hellfire possible as a paladin, whereas even now it's 100% impossible to solo because you're just too slow. I get that you can make legion twinks for runspeed sets but why even remove them? It's not like someone in a movespeed set could even do anything in pvp unless the other person was very undergeared so it's not a balance issue really. It's literally just that they want to slow the game down with no given reason. They even nerfed bear tartare.
Oh they also just nerfed BFA gems so they only work on gear that is level 111+, further nerfing movespeed sets lol. They unnecessarily nerfed even more old content 4 months into the new expansion cycle.
AND FOR WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?
FOR WHAT?
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a c i d.f l y
ಠ_ಠ
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Was anyone else not able to bonus roll on the Darkshore world boss? Gold rewards can go fuck themselves.
Big_w_powah
Trakanon Raider
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All this discussion is why I have referred to WoW as a "zero sum" game for some time. Emergent Gameplay, Creative use of Mechancis, etc. are all squashed. If theres a Plus one here, there must be a minus one there.
The equations must be perfectly balanced.
The equations must be perfectly balanced.
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a c i d.f l y
ಠ_ಠ
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Once upon a time they didn't even want to allow run speed as something that could be changed. And the reason they slow things down should be obvious -- because it now takes longer to complete something, there's an increase in play time. Blizzard, "This is how we fix releasing limited content, by arbitrarily making it take longer to get through."
Also, folks were glitching shit with too much move speed.