Comments on That's a Terrible Idea: There's Something in the Water

Imagine if you could do things with your gear othe...

2011-11-06T10:08:31.073-05:00

Imagine if you could do things with your gear other than raid. Oh what a world it would be.

Gear matters. Witness many people quit raiding, sa...

2011-11-06T05:48:57.837-05:00

Gear matters. Witness many people quit raiding, say they are tired and taking a break, or just becoming much more irritable once they get their "bis" set and have absolutely no hope of getting any upgrades until next tier. Or legendary wielders jumping ship.

I definitely enjoy challenge and flow states, but i'm not immune to this effect either. They are not mutually exclusive, so it's weird when people essentially say "it's one or the other". It's both.

Order of numbers does matter, but it is not at all straightforward, involving lots of illogical approximations used by human brain, so it would be quite interesting to see basis on which GC claims that "lower numbers" don't work.

Did they used things like 49.99 marketing trickery? Did they try numbers going _down_ to make your character better instead of up? Perhaps having "balance" points where you want your gear to stay to be optimal, so that you can mix and match + and - stat gear to reach them?

And as for EVE example, 40m vs 80m isn't huge advantage if i understand it correctly (having never played EVE). Specific areas can be capped fairly quickly, and in them 40m will have absolutely same power as 80m.

They may come across as arrogant in completely dis...

2011-11-06T03:58:29.377-05:00

They may come across as arrogant in completely dismissing the suggestion that gear shouldn't inflate so much but I am arrogantly going to state that they are right....

For years there has been a phenomenon in the wow community where it is considered only the lowest of the low to be motivated by gear. There have been hundreds of threads over the years where people argue that they raid for the challenge and the gear is only a tool to overcome this challenge.

I'm sure for some people this is true but I suspect for most people this is bollocks. They may play for the challenge but a significant part of wow is improviing your character and the only way of doing this at max level is gear.

The fact that gear can make a significant difference also helps with raid tuning. For example paragon kiled heroic rag with an iLevel of around 380 the last guilds to kill him before the first nerf will of had 4/5 weeks of farming heroics and an iLevel of around 386/387. Imagine if after that 5 weeks of faming they had an average iLevel of 381 and that was as good as it was going to get. At current tuning only 3/4 guilds would of been able to kill heroic rag pre-nerf. Alternatively they could nerf heroic rag and the top 30 guilds would of killed it in week one. This continues all the way down an instance. For example my guild spent a month wiping on the heroic Rhyolith soft enrage and only kiled it once we had farmed better gear to make up for the skill gap between us and the best.

If gear didn't improve so much blizzard would lose this natural tuning mechanism which would create much more wall bosses.

But why is that bad? Isn't that the point o...

2011-11-05T19:42:39.440-04:00
But why is that bad? Isn't that the point of getting uber gear--so that you can trivialize content?

Well, there are a few problems.

1) Questing is literally less rewarding, and subsequently less fun when uber-powered. I mean, this is the exact argument people use in "the leveling game is assaulted," right? After all, you can still do the gray quests if you want to.

2) As Hagu mentions, you don't really want to be in a position where someone's advantage lasts forever. That's fun for early adopters, but less fun for everyone else.

3) The uber-gear doesn't exist to trivialize things so much as it exists to give meaning to killing hardmode bosses more than once. We can imagine a scenario in which hardmodes rewarded nothing. Is Paragon beating that more than once? Probably not.

Hardmode gear does (generally) trivialize the normal-mode content of the next tier, but that is more of a feature than a bug. It would likely be trivial content based on hardmode raiders' skill regardless.

The gear reset certainly helps the longevity of a raiding game, and it makes the most business sense. But because they've increased the rewards so greatly, they've backed themselves into a corner. That's the point of GC's post.

No doubt. But what I am suggesting is that item inflation is the least of the possible evils. Especially since it is rather easily fixed (by squishing stats later).

I'm gonna borrow a page from Nils: what happen...

2011-11-05T19:26:40.103-04:00
I'm gonna borrow a page from Nils: what happened to the journey? Why is everyone in such a rush to get to the 'end game'? Once upon a time, people enjoyed leveling. That's almost a horror story today.

Blizzard should eliminate leveling altogether, and let players roll level-capped characters. Too bad the vast majority of their revenue is from people who get mesmerized by the pretty light show.

Yeah, it's a bit unbalanced that someone in EVE could have 5 years of Skill Points on me, but they've been playing for 5 years--they should be rewarded with an upper hand. MMORPGs are not supposed to be fair and balanced.

I do not think that Blizzard is doing a great job ...

2011-11-05T17:55:15.805-04:00
I do not think that Blizzard is doing a great job on the leveling game.

However, I think you are being unfair to them with your 71-80 comment. I.e., Blizzard has a philosophy that getting to the level that begins the current expansion should take a set amount of time or at least not be level dependent. E.g., if WoW 10.0 is going from 120-125 then they would want getting from 1 to 120 to take approximately as much time as getting from 1-80 is when the current expansion is 80-85.

Do you really prefer the EVE way where if I have 40m SP more than you when you start then in a couple of years you will have 40m and I will have 80m?

Should it take a new-to-WoW player the same amount of time to level to 80 that it took someone who did it when TBC & LK came out?

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I can understand the argument that "good games" should be like chess. However, all MMOs I know of reward, whether by levels or skill points or gear, players. It could be real-time subscription like EVE or Asian grindfests, or leveling or RMT stores.

People run dozens of raids / heroics to upgrade one piece by 13 iLevels. Replacing that with a systems where someone could do level 90 dungeons with all gear 70-90 iLevels less than level-appropriate would be bizarre for a themepark MMO or at least would be shocking to me.

Azuriel, yes, players who were decked out in gear ...

2011-11-05T17:46:06.796-04:00
Azuriel, yes, players who were decked out in gear had to wait awhile for upgrades. But why is that bad? Isn't that the point of getting uber gear--so that you can trivialize content? I know I was still wearing 4 pieces of T3 well into BC raiding, and I certainly did not mind.

The gear reset certainly helps the longevity of a raiding game, and it makes the most business sense. But because they've increased the rewards so greatly, they've backed themselves into a corner. That's the point of GC's post.

I could only assume it's so players do the ...

2011-11-05T17:17:19.117-04:00
I could only assume it's so players do the leveling "content" first. Yet they constantly assault the leveling game [...]

There is a difference between the 71-80 leveling game and the 80-85 leveling game. The former has been done by everyone in the endgame multiple times already, and the latter is what is being sold to you in an expansion box.

If you are already 85, they could add a patch note stating "leveling speed 1-84 has been decreased 100%" and it wouldn't impact you in any way. Other than discouraging alts and stymieing WoW growth further, of course.

Ignoring the arrogance, what metrics could they possibly have to discredit this simple solution?

The TBC --> Wrath transition when people cleared Naxx in the first 3 days of expansion release in nearly full T6 and Sunwell gear. Hell, I didn't even raid that much outside of 10m in TBC and it wasn't until well past Dragonblight that I started getting upgrades to what I had on.

If you had the Apolyon, the Soul-Render from Sunwell, your very first upgrade would not have been until the De-Raged Waraxe from the level 75 Champion of Anguish 5m quest in Zul'Drak. And even then, it would have been just a 3% upgrade. And the difference probably would have been bridged by the weapon enchant.

Once you get past your confirmation bias ("Blizzard is so arrogant in this blog post explaining the pros and cons of a development idea and asking for suggestions and reaction from the community. Like, totally."), the actual issue is fairly straight-forward. Look at even the Vanilla --> TBC transition. Do they balance Hellfire Peninsula around players in Naxx 1.0 gear when everyone else is mostly in blues and greens? Do they NOT balance around Naxx gear and essentially sell those advanced players a shitty leveling experience for $40?

The option they went with was C) do an expansion gear reset. They backed off between TBC and Wrath and saw what happened (people questing for 5-8 levels getting zero upgrades), and they came back around for Cata's release. Problem is, gear resets increase inflation. So that is where we are.

Most of this post is speculation, but I really wan...

2011-11-05T16:48:44.947-04:00
Most of this post is speculation, but I really want to know what they are looking at and what correlations they are forming.

I don't understand why it would be so terrible to stop the intra-expansion mudflation. Would it be so bad if fresh level 85s skipped all the other raids and jumped right into fighting Deathwing? Isn't this what happens when expansions are released?

The 25-man flavors have become unpopular because it is easier to field a team of 10. Could GC be referring to this?

And players finish Heroic versions of raids today for slightly better gear.

> Silly plebes with your naive remedies; I have...

2011-11-05T16:39:00.495-04:00
> Silly plebes with your naive remedies; I have
> data to dismiss your predictable suggestions!

They have data that people do things if the reward is good enough. I assume he thinks that the reverse is automatically true too: People need good enough rewards to do things.

Or it's just to ensure that "his guys" (aka raiders) will continue to have much better gear then the LFR crowd which pays his salary.

> they increased the attributes on T5 tier
> to make them more "worthwhile" than T4

T4 was "partially" 10 man, T5 was pure 25 man. Every conclusion drawn out if this data is worthless.

You just wrote the post I planned to write ;)

2011-11-05T14:09:40.318-04:00
You just wrote the post I planned to write ;)