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.You used to suspect eBay when you met someone at the level cap with decent gear who did not know what half his abilities were, how to function in a group, or where common locations were. Now that is normal.
: Zubon
As a LotRO Hunter, I have contributed to that. Why find the dungeon when someone can summon from the campfire?
Is it just me, or do the unique class mechanics stand out more in Warhammer Online than in most other games? The more I reflect on it, the more I see it in other games, but it just seems more prominent in WAR.
By “unique class mechanic,” I mean the special feature that guides many of a class’s skills/abilities. (They are not truly unique in WAR, because one class on each side has it.) The orc and elf tanks tier up, the chaos and dwarf ranged DPS summon turrets, and the human and dark elf healers have an energy pool they can refill with melee combat. The mechanic mattered to different degrees based on your class and spec line; it never felt all that exciting on my chaos healer, while my dwarf ranged DPS had turret- or gun-improving talent options.
My unsubstantiated feeling is that the earlier in the design process that the mechanic was added, the more vital it feels. City of Heroes gives every class something special, but it does not feel terribly special. City of Villains mechanics do feel special, because the classes are built around them. Brutes, Stalkers, and Dominators are defined by their special mechanics. Blasters and Defenders? Eh, it’s a bit of a bonus.
You get a reset on that timer if you completely re-do the class. Then you can re-build around a new core. I expect a bit of that to happen in Cataclysm, so that there is less feel of “mana or something slightly different,” although you do get rather different effects from bars that build up during combat and those that empty out. Or I could be completely wrong, because what do I know about WoW, but you have certainly seen classes re-done so that they fulfill the same role with radically different mechanics.
Unique class mechanics create additional balance issues, but for the moment I am wondering which I would prefer: designing classes entirely around the mechanics or just using them as a bit of flavor on whatever else they would do. There is a delicate balance in the latter, sometimes done well with race: if you can be a dwarf cleric or an elf cleric, you want there to be some interesting difference in how they play without making it an effectively forced choice because one race synergizes so well. “Sometimes” because there is that narrow range between “doesn’t matter” and “forced choice.”
: Zubon
or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the grind.
(Our sponsors would like to apologise in advance for the slightly more personal and self-indulgent nature of this post. Thank you for your custom.)
To achieve competence in sport necessitates training. Training involves doing the same thing over and over and over and over again: to build up strength, endurance and capability; to learn about your team-mates in co-operative games; to learn the rules; to perfect your technique.
If you want to run a marathon, you don’t just turn up on the day and do it. You train for it. You go out running. You start small; 5km, then 10, 15, up to half-marathon, work your way up to 20 miles and then you’re probably ready. You go out, 3 to 5 times a week, trudging around the same routes that were stunning and interesting at first but soon lost their charm after the 18th time, or, when the weathers bad and you’re a fair-weather runner, in the gym, pounding away mindlessly on the treadmill, getting the miles into your feet, conditioning your body and your mind ready for the challenge. There will be times when it will hurt, times when you don’t enjoy it and times when it goes badly and all these times will make you question why you’re doing it to yourself. And you won’t have a good answer.
Continue reading On the treadmill
Improvements can take place through natural evolution as long as each previous design is studied and the craftsperson is willing to be flexible. The bad features have to be identified. The [designers] change the bad features and keep the good ones unchanged. If a change makes matters worse, well, it just gets changed again on the next go-around. Eventually the bad features get modified into good ones, while the good ones are kept. The technical term for this process is “hill-climbing,” analogous to climbing a hill in the dark. Move your foot in one direction. If it is downhill, try another direction. If the direction is uphill, take one step. Keep doing this until you have reached a point where all steps would be downhill; then you are at the top of the hill–or at least a local peak.
— The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
Local peaks are not bad things. They are, within a certain range, as good as it gets. But if you want to go higher, you need to go down to go up. Many have seen the local peak and noted only that all paths away lead down, so we can do naught but muddle about at this height.
Ideally, you are not hill-climbing in the dark and your vision is leading you in the right direction. Some people will head in the right direction but not go far enough to get higher. Some will not even make it to the next hill, backtracking towards the familiar local peak, perhaps getting tired and falling short. You could break your legs trying to straddle the divide. People atop the local peak will point to the failures below.
And then someone proves that the next hill over is higher. They climb and keep climbing. It often seems to be the next guy who makes it to the top first, while the trailblazer was tired from trying all those false paths along the way. And, of course, there is a rush from the last local peak to this one, which is now proclaimed to be the greatest summit ever, the greatest summit possible.
: Zubon
After several tries, with my prior best being level 41, I have finally reached level 80 in World of Warcraft. It only took using the refer a friend program for triple XP up to level 60 and a total of 9 days, 16 hours, 6 minutes and 26 seconds to get from 0 to 80 but I finally reached the cap. Thus, we had a party.
Hard core brother (HCB) came over and we went to see “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”. Awesome movie, go see it.
After that, we had Horde Cake.
Later the HCB took the wife and I out for some delicious Greek food, complete with belly dancing. When we got back home I spent a while showing him all the cool Guild Wars 2 videos and he actually seemed excited to see more. It was a good party.
– Ethic
Ravious (and the Fifth Telling) have me missing our camp from way back in the original A Tale in the Desert. It’s funny that guilds felt so much more meaningful in the game where you could have more than one, although maybe raiders appreciate their guild ties more.
An essential difference, as Ravious says, is collective rather than individual advancement. If I get a piece of armor, my character has a piece of armor, but if I make a charcoal furnace, everyone in the guild can use it. If we felt like it, we could set it up so that any passing visitor could use it; some guilds built public camps so that new players would have access without starting from zero. I made something and everyone benefited, even after I logged off.
Yesterday I accepted the suggestion that design should lead users to the right action. If what feels intuitive is wrong, change whatever part of the game is encouraging failure. I was talking about interface design, but this is how we get theme parks, isn’t it?
The trail of bread crumbs leads you from ride to ride. Follow the big symbols over NPC heads and then arrows to whatever they want. One ride sends you to the next. “The right thing to do” is so obvious that we strongly notice sub-optimal ordering in quests and trip combinations.
We can complain about dumbed-down design, but it is good design in the sense that it provides good guidance, works with users’ intuitions and expectations, and is a big improvement over games that have one “right thing to do” but hide it behind an illusion of freedom. We expect games to have a goal and a victory condition and something to do, rather than toys or worlds where we expect to make our own fun.
EVE Online is a wonderful sandbox with entirely user-defined victory conditions. Those design decisions go well together: there is no way to “win,” so there is limited guidance about the “right” path to take. (It is an improvement that certificates help you figure out the steps on common paths.) World of Warcraft is a wonderful theme park with very clear paths and velvet ropes to make sure you stay on them. The middle ground is harder to establish.
: Zubon
In World of Warcraft, the shared world is where you complete the leveling game. It is organized by and dominated by quests. The goal of the leveling game is to earn experience points and to complete it as time-efficiently as possible. The end game is the real game, and it takes place in instances. The goal is to improve your gearscore. Completing achievements and collecting pets and mounts are shared mini-games between the two levels of play.
Or at least that is how I see the majority of hardcore players. If you disagree, the question is not whether it is true for you but whether you think I have mis-assessed the majority. You could also make the case that the real majority is casually making its way through the leveling game. Those people are less likely to be engaged in MMO blogs or the meta-game, so I don’t know if they are part of the conversation.
In City of Heroes and The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, the leveling game is the game. There is a veneer of end game, but people who think that the game begins at the level cap are severely disappointed. There is some harder content at the cap, along with the chance to farm for best-in-slot gear, but the games are designed for the journey. If you power-level to get past the leveling game, you are just missing the game. The end game is pretty much more of the leveling game, without experience points. (Completing badges/deeds and collecting costumes/mounts are shared mini-games between the two levels of play.)
Going from the latter two to the former, I was constantly annoyed by “the game begins at 80.” Meanwhile, the population in the former is much larger and therefore is a constant source of complaints as visitors in the latter two. “I left WoW because I was bored, but this game sucks because it isn’t more like WoW. I need you to change it for me now, because I’m going back to WoW when the next expansion drops.”
: Zubon
Puzzles have a long and proud tradition in single-player computer games. Quality has varied dramatically, but then Sturgeon’s Law applies. (Feel free to commiserate in the comments about your favorite horrible guesswork “puzzles.”) Puzzle bosses are a classic implementation, although these are often a thin candy coating over the BIG RED GLOWING EYE that you shoot.
We seem to want to replicate this in MMOs, and I do not think it has gone well. Problems are both because you expect to fight the bosses multiple times and because you will not be bringing the same people.