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Lessons to learn from Warcraft

Started by C-Junkie Jun 23, 2005 at 7:12 PM 10 replies 8.5k views

Original Post

Jun 23, 2005 at 7:12 PM

edit: note: this is a primarily NEGATIVE list, meant to point out shortcomings 1. Balance the game around PVP, not PVE. Players do not pay 15 dollars a month to fight unintelligent monsters. 2. Ensure while balancing that every class has a strength powerful enough to offset its weaknesses. "Rock-paper-scissors" is a failure, it only frustrates players to no end. (Rogues are the best class in the game in terms of this kind of balance. High DPS, Stuns, and stealth to compensate for no healing and poor armor.) 3. Remember that no matter WHAT you do, there are three roles: Tank, dps, and support/healing. Ensure that every class has a focus (or is capable of having a focus, in the hybrid case), and ensure that each classes is equally desirable for their abilities. 4. Hire Blizzard's artists. Time for a positive one. This game is beautiful. Bravo. Note also that it's not that "high tech" with its graphics. It's all about artists. 5. Be open. Hiding things that are important secrets is fine, but when doing the rebalancing that you should expect from months of content additions, ensure the players not only feel involved, but are responded to. Note: The WoW CMs are not at fault here; their job description is completely wrong. 6. Be responsive, but don't rush and don't clump. Balancing issues should take a higher patching priority than new content. Make frequent, small adjustments to achieve balance in between the months-long dungeon development efforts. 7. Advance in coolness. Mounts, Epic mounts, cool art for epic gear. Furbolg form, Noggenfogger elixer. Shadow form, walking on water. Ensure that advancing in level goes along with an advancement in the awesomeness of the player. Wow does this decently, but there's room for improvement. Especially with those funny looking McDonalds worker Paladins. This largely comes down to the artists. Remember: stats aren't cool. art is. 8. Create layers to the economy. Every level of a profession should produce quality items for appropriate prices for that level. How many of us have had to grind 200 levels of a profession because nobody wanted anything you could make yet? or at least, make at a profit (over selling the raw materials on the AH) As a corollary, make professions depend on each other. Engineers should need things smithed a lot more than they apparently do. Creating high quality items should involve the services of an enchanter. (example: Enchanted thorium) 9. Keep the Auction House Brilliant, and excellently done. The economy hums along with such mechanisms. 10. Do not punish experimentation. Why does a respec cost 50+g for a player that wants to try out many different things? Why does a player have to be punished for resing at the spirit healer? 11. Think about epic classes early. Hero classes are something that could be very, very cool. My vision of what this might be like always revolves around Hunters that could learn to tame dragons. Or mages that can become fire elementals. Hero classes should be different, not better. And different in an awe inspiring way. 12. Fun before lore. Many players expect to be the bad guy when playing horde. And as a corollary worthy of its own point: 13. Dynamic, player-driven worlds. This cannot be emphasized enough. I probably should have put it first. PERMIT BURNING TARREN MILL TO THE GROUND. Never to respawn unless players rebuild it. It doesn't have to be complicated. Perhaps just an expensive quest that causes peons to run out and begin building again, and require that you escort them. 14. Eliminate the grind. Wow is better about this than some games. My simple observation, however: the game is fun when played with nothing but rested XP. It starts to grind after that. 15. Infamy. Some random player on the forums chose this as a way of fixing ganking. Killing low level players doesn't give you dishonor, it gives you infamy, which increasing the honor gain by killing you (and slowly goes away with each death). The infamy reward can be gained regardless of the level of the killer. (60 on infamous 30? reward!) I have more somewhere, but I think I'll see if this prompts any interesting discussion first. [Edited by - C-Junkie on June 24, 2005 6:11:56 PM]

Arkantis

Jun 23, 2005 at 7:33 PM

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1. Balance the game around PVP, not PVE. Players do not pay 15 dollars a month to fight unintelligent monsters.

Your not speaking for every player. I personally like PVE over PVP, the only form of PVP I've ever really enjoyed was FPS's mainly because it doesnt require the best equipment nor the highest level/best skills... its just pure player skill...

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14. Eliminate the grind. Wow is better about this than some games. My simple observation, however: the game is fun when played with nothing but rested XP. It starts to grind after that.

Guild Wars is the closest to date MMO i've seen to almost get rid of the grind. I think grind is envitable in MMORPG's, theres ways to make life easier but than you have those complain its not roleplaying enough.... its a really bad balance

C-Junkie

Jun 23, 2005 at 7:48 PM

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Original post by Arkantis
Your not speaking for every player. I personally like PVE over PVP, the only form of PVP I've ever really enjoyed was FPS's mainly because it doesnt require the best equipment nor the highest level/best skills... its just pure player skill...

I didn't mean negelect PVE, I meant things like:

Don't count aggro control when doing the biggest chunk of balancing.

Pay attention to things like healing HP/S when in the middle of a fight. Shamans have the best heal in the game. It's big and it's fast, for PVP mana efficiency doesn't matter. Look at the paladin's flash heal. Useless, completely useless in pvp, but hey! it's mana efficient! Who cares....

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Guild Wars is the closest to date MMO i've seen to almost get rid of the grind. I think grind is envitable in MMORPG's, theres ways to make life easier but than you have those complain its not roleplaying enough.... its a really bad balance

I haven't played Guild Wars. My friends predicted an early death, and they seem to be right. (and why shouldn't they? They're typical gamers, it's like they represent the greater population)

But WoW had it, really. Quests give sizable chunks of experience and nice items, so people do them. It's just that there are areas where grinding is necessary.

If you play with rested XP the whole time, you end up doing very little grinding. At least, nothing the gets in the way of enjoyability.

Adraeus

Jun 23, 2005 at 8:23 PM

This thread should be renamed to "Lessons to learn from World of Warcraft".

In case you didn't know, Warcraft did exist before World of Warcraft.

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness
Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal
Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne

Iron Chef Carnage

Jun 23, 2005 at 9:51 PM

In FFXI, isn't cooperative PvE a big part of gameplay? In that case, aggro management is a huge part of your identity within a team.

I'd rephrase that idea to ensure that player interaction is the focus, so that you won't get so excited about your AI and encounter algorithms that you forget to let players play together.

smr

Jun 23, 2005 at 10:55 PM

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2. Ensure while balancing that every class has a strength powerful enough to offset its weaknesses. "Rock-paper-scissors" is a failure, it only frustrates players to no end. (Rogues are the best class in the game in terms of this kind of balance. High DPS, Stuns, and stealth to compensate for no healing and poor armor.)

Bleh. Try being a warrior. My level 51 warrior gets spanked on a regular basis, and never wins duels. I've considered the possibility that I just suck, but my rogue generally whips ass on any other class. Except maybe paladins and to a lesser extent druids. Sometimes they stun or root me then sneak in a heal.

Namire

Jun 23, 2005 at 11:08 PM

I definatly agree with economy, as it seems every mmo to date has that problem. Oh look I'm level 15 at this skill and now I can sell my stuff for like 1 coin! WOW! I definatly agree that the lower levels should be able to make a profit, I don't know how exactly, as the money increase is meant to provoke a player to get his/her's level up. Maybe in some game they'll make it so a shops wares are restocked by players, so that way all the low end stuff could be sold there, or who knows. Hehe you and me both on the hunters and epic class's. I want the taming of dragons....that'd so rock.

pinacolada

Jun 23, 2005 at 11:48 PM

Heh, I think some of these things are a little too WoW centric. The "make PvP a basic part of the game" lesson was something that Dark Age of Camelot showed us first.

But I think you missed the most important lesson that WoW shows us: An MMO is still a game, and a game should be fun!. Why have an enormous death penalty every time the player screws up? Why not a fairly light death penalty, that encourages the player to be adventurous? Why require 500-1000 hours to reach the highest level in the game? Why not make it 150-200 hours, so that a normal person has a chance to see the end-game content? Why make the player earn their very first spells, why not start a new character off with a hotbar that's already set up, so they can jump in and start killing?

In general, why make life unnecessarily hard for the player? In games like Everquest 1, the death penalty was so harsh and the grinding so difficult, that it felt like you were being punished just for playing the game. I mean, obviously we need to challenge the player for the game to have any substance. But we can choose how to challenge them. We can give them challenges that are fun, like "Hey, if you kill this awesome boss, you'll get this cool sword!", instead of challenges like "Hey, if you don't recover your corpse from the bottom of that cave, you'll lose all your stuff!"

I think putting the game back into the MMORPG is what WoW's real success is.

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Remember that no matter WHAT you do, there are three roles: Tank, dps, and support/healing.

This one has become more of a cliche I think. It would be nice to play a game that didn't have these cookie-cutter roles.

Also I got a little lost reading this list. When you got to number 10, it looks like you stopped praising WoW and instead started listing its shortcomings.

makeshiftwings

Jun 24, 2005 at 12:09 AM

From the title I thought you were going to talk about reasons that WoW was a success; but it seems like instead you're trying to say "Here's why WoW sucks!", which isn't really very useful, seeing as how it's the most popular MMORPG ever and most of us think that's a pretty good thing to accomplish. It's tough to read sarcasm over the 'net, I don't think anyone can tell whether you're trying to say WoW is bad at each of these or good.

C-Junkie

Jun 24, 2005 at 5:53 PM

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Original post by makeshiftwings
From the title I thought you were going to talk about reasons that WoW was a success;

It's made by blizzard and has teh name 'warcraft' in it. OH yes, and the artists. I've got to give a lot of credit to the artists.

I should also credit one other thing: this is not a hardcore RPG. You always know where you are. Some quests SHOW you where to go. There's a once an hour "take me home I need to go to work now" button.

This game does a away with a lot of the "we need realism" crap that gets in the way of a fun game. That also needs to be credited. They did a good job of copying most of the good parts of everquest while seamlessly getting rid of the bad parts.

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but it seems like instead you're trying to say "Here's why WoW sucks!", which isn't really very useful, seeing as how it's the most popular MMORPG ever and most of us think that's a pretty good thing to accomplish.

And hopefully the next one will fix its shortcomings rather than copy it, flaws and all, blindly. Blizzard did a good job taking lots of good from everquest, I'd like to see the next game do a good job taking lots of good from WoW.

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It's tough to read sarcasm over the 'net, I don't think anyone can tell whether you're trying to say WoW is bad at each of these or good.

I'll reread them, but I think I kept the sarcasm to a minimal, especially in the bold points.

C-Junkie

Jun 24, 2005 at 6:05 PM

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Original post by smr
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2. Ensure while balancing that every class has a strength powerful enough to offset its weaknesses. "Rock-paper-scissors" is a failure, it only frustrates players to no end. (Rogues are the best class in the game in terms of this kind of balance. High DPS, Stuns, and stealth to compensate for no healing and poor armor.)

Bleh. Try being a warrior. My level 51 warrior gets spanked on a regular basis, and never wins duels. I've considered the possibility that I just suck, but my rogue generally whips ass on any other class. Except maybe paladins and to a lesser extent druids. Sometimes they stun or root me then sneak in a heal.

And my statement is in support of your case. :)

I'll elaborate. There seems to be several important features that might be in a good PvP class.

High damage
Stuns/spell interruptions/immobilization/ability to control the other player
Healing
Misc support abilities

Warriors have: moderate damage (until arcanite reaper!), few stuns, no healing, and the support abilities are pvE only, for the most part. I've never won a duel with my warrior before either.

To rant a little bit, Shamans have: moderate (HIGH if they're using shocks and get any luck at all with windfury) damage, HUGE control over the other player (no casting (ES), no kiting(FS/EB), no stealthing (FlS), no running(FS/EB), oh yes, and no buffing yourself. at all. (Purge)), an AMAZING heal for PvP (1.5 sec heals or less are almost all that matters), and several slightly more minor support abilities (like the ability to run away really fast as a wolf). (and of course, they wonder why everyone wants them nerfed)

The only excuse for most of this is that using these abilities only has minimal effect when fighting PvE. It's not until you're in a PvP battle that the shaman shines. But I digress, I'm off topic in my own topic. Maybe I'll turn this into another point:

Make sure that your class designers don't develop wry smiles when people approve of their design. I'm convinced the Shaman is a result of a very, very smart designer that wanted to create something that looked fair and balanced for PvE that he could go home to and slaughter the helpless paladins by the thousands.

C-Junkie

Jun 24, 2005 at 6:09 PM

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Original post by pinacolada
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Remember that no matter WHAT you do, there are three roles: Tank, dps, and support/healing.

This one has become more of a cliche I think. It would be nice to play a game that didn't have these cookie-cutter roles.

The problem is that it's impossible to avoid.

You need someone to keep monsters off of the cloth wearers.
You need someone to keep the above alive.
You need someone to kill the monsters.

I think that it's unavoidable.

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Also I got a little lost reading this list. When you got to number 10, it looks like you stopped praising WoW and instead started listing its shortcomings.

It was meant to be a mostly shortcoming list.

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