Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Blizzard makes us optimize the fun out of it

Once again a Blizzard post. There is much to say about Blizzard prior to Cataclysm. I will, however, keep it short this time:

One of the main problems with Blizzard is that they want all their games to also be played professionally. That would be ok, if the games would live up to that challenge; but at least WoW does not.

Rated battlegrounds make the players think about
- using >60% healers to never lose a Warsong match again
- elitist behaviour that segregates the community (even more)
- stack 10 moonkins with Starfall to slaughter all and everything in the vicinity

Just three examples of optimizing the fun out of it.

Point is: If you want your game to be played professionally, it has to fulfill some standards. WoW does not right now. Even more class homogenization will need to be done.

How much fun was simply playing your class some years ago and finding other people to play together with instead of optimizing the fun out of a game that encourages elitist behaviour !

2 comments:

  1. I thought you didn't intend to do rated BGs? If you don't, how does this count as "optimizing the fun out of it" when "it" is something you don't participate in?

    I would also like to point out that, at least for some players, the fun is largely contained in the investigation, analysis, theory-building, testing and so on that falls under the umbrella of "optimization". Just as forcing players to play according to optimized methods spoils your playstyle, so does trying to keep optimization out spoil the fun of that playstyle. In short, different strokes for different folks.

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  2. Lujanera,

    if I wrote only about the things I actively do, I would hardly be able to critizise anything.

    I would like to play rated BG and thus I point out what I think is wrong with them in my opinion.

    Min/maxing is certainly one thing I love. But if a game allows and encourages min/maxing more than it can sustain it runs into problems.

    This is the very same problem WoW ran into with arena. You could probably have removed the latter and kept it on a per-server basis and it would have been a lot of fun.

    The system was not good enough to allow for the kind of massive min/maxing that was encouraged by Blizzard.

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