Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Dissent

First, let me thank Azuriel and Helistar for regularly pointing out a different opinion in the comments. Blogs, like any media, have the tendency to attract only people who like to have their own opinion supported. That's why it's great to have commenters who take the time to say why they disagree. Of course, this doesn't mean that I value commenters less who share my opinions *grin*.

Azuriel and Helistar commented on the last post:
The leveling/10m raiding community I was a part of would not have survived into Wrath if that expansion was TBC 2.0 - we were already bored out of our minds and drifting apart until Wrath came along.
Point taken. But please understand that I might never have stopped playing in the first place if some changes hadn't occurred. These are very hypothetical situations and hard to discuss.

Honestly, you say that you are disconnected from the community and are otherwise unwilling to shop around for another guild. Would being required to have a full Friends List and/or be in a guild to even have the notion of running a heroic kept you occupied all this time? Hell, one could rightly say that this "replacement" was the only reason Blizzard has another month's worth of subscription from you, right? If there was no "LFD experiment" to try out, is there another reason you would have stayed aboard this long?
Would I still be subscribed if Blizzard hadn't changed WoW at all since TBC ? No, of course not. But that's not the question really.

Please understand that I do not think that Blizzard should not have changed/added anything since TBC. I absolutely would have wanted them to move forward. They could have added housing. Or they could have added trade and a more sophisticated player-run economy. Or they could have added more variety when it comes to mobs outside of instances. They could have added a lore-history for items. Or they could have tested procedurally generated dungeons. Or they could have tried more divers battlegrounds and more divers instances, instead of homogenizing every single BG/dungeon into a 20 minute version. And what about at least some experimental areas in the open world that are actually dangerous?

There are many things Blizzard could have done carefully. Instead, they revamped the game dramatically. They replaced the entire endgame character power progression. They replaced major parts about how community works in the game. They completely reshaped the new-player social experience by adding heirlooms.

I said before: Adding some LFD functionality to the game, carefully, would have been alright. A cross-server LFD might arguably help with dungeon runs while leveling in a level-based game, for example.

LFD destroyed nothing; it created activity out of thin air. The people who don't bother talking or saying hello in LFD? They would not be looking for groups or joining pugs in Trade chat. If social "Friends List" people use LFD instead of using their Friends List, that indicates they (or the people on the Friends List) don't actually enjoy being social, but did so out of necessity. Sort of like, hey, Facebook games.
Excuse me? LFD stopped me adding people to my friends list over night. It did destroy something. And, yes, it also added something. Look, we can discuss this. But arguing that LFD is without any disadvantage at all is really not helpful. We both know better.

I am the guy who doesn't bother talking in LFD most of the time. Still, I explained many dungeons before LFD to the players on my server. I made many, many groups in Rift earlier this year and led them to the dungeon entrances I had scouted before. And still I am an asshole in the LFD more often than not. qed.

Blizzard learned that heroic raiding isn't necessarily doubling the content perhaps, but as a method to avoid having a single difficulty level (and shoehorning 25m as the de facto "hardmode") the heroic raid model was a pretty solid success. 
Please don't use straw man arguments. I never said that heroic raids where useless or such. I said that the number of people moving from normal raids to heroic raids, that is, the number of people doing the same narrative for slightly better itemlevels at the cost of a higher difficulty level, is minimal. The same has to be expected for the number of people moving from LFR to normal raid content.

Please don't take this badly, I already had the experience on Tobold's blog, where after endless posts on how bad the current raiding is because of "the dance", I asked to describe how a combat SHOULD BE. I wanted a detailed description. Instead, I got the usual generic answer about "making things fun". Yeah, sure, HOW?
So you are comparing me with such a self-opinionated guy like Tobold? Now, that's a good way to make me write a wall of text :). But do you see what you are asking there? Am I to create the polished version of an alternative WoW for you, from scratch? Last I checked I wasn't paid by Blizzard.

What I can do, is critically point out what is happening and give some reasons why. Also, I can report from my individual experience and, again, give reasons. If Blizzard decides to throw me some money, I might be willing to give more detailed advise that doesn't take the form of short blog posts.

It's very easy to criticize Blizzard, but at least you have to admit they are trying to change things (even if slowly and with mistakes), which is still more than what the competitors are doing....
Just for the protocol: it's also very easy to defend Blizzard's actions.

I don't admit that they are trying to change things. I blame them for it! The changes were not the kind of changes you would make to one of the most successful computer games in history which, at this point, was still running strong. They weren't desperate!

The second team took over a game that was consistently growing at 2 million subscribers a year and brought it to a standstill within a few months. Then they made the next expansion and started to lose subscribers a few months after it had shipped in Europe / North America and after the previous expansion had shipped in China! Many parts of the game are in a sorry, unpolished state: look at that stealth animation in the latest video! Am I ice-skating?

Yes, you can interpret everything differently. You can say that the trend of gaining 2 million subscribers a year had actually turned into losing subscribers near the end of TBC and they managed to stop the loss mid-WotLK. You can say that, if you want. You can say a lot of things, really, that aren't completely impossible.

---
But let me point out where I aree with you: Blizzard, every now and then, did a few things I like. For example, giving background information about dungeons and bosses in a dungeon journal is a good idea for this type of game. I also like the art a lot and the combat mechanics for many speccs are still leading the MMO world by a very large margin.

I also liked their attitude with Cataclysm to make the game more challenging again. But they completely failed by applying it only to the raids and LFD content and making the leveling game extra easy (and that is an understatement). This was a completely predictable issue. Had I beta-tested Cataclysm before (I generally don't do betas), I could have told them exactly what the problem is going to be. I honestly don't know how Blizzard could even think that an anonymous LFD in combination with a daily quest and past experiences from WotLK could work with difficult heroic dungeons. It is beyond me!

14 comments:

  1. they that in real wars both sides prepare for days..weeks even months to fight 30 minutes in the battlefield..

    This is how it should be in raids..like in Vanilla wow. You needed a lot of time to farm for your elixirs, flasks , your resistance gear because it makes sense. You were going to fight with the Fire lord, mages should use frost magic and everyone should use fire resistance gear.

    The fight actually wasn't so much a "DBM Fight"...10 timers covering your screen, messages pop up "MOVE" , "INTERRUPT"...it was a pleasure fight where you had the time to actually look at the environment, to look your character, the enemies, your team mates and not focus on timers and lose all the scenery.

    Long and hard preparations but pleasant fight..also the thing that measure if you are good or not is lightning reflexes right now. Every character have an addon that shows you every second what button to press and you must press it as fast as possible..the faster player is the best player, no strategy no thinking..like you play Guitar Hero.

    So Blizzard send me my money via paypal I found you the solution :P

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  2. @Giannis: long and "hard" preparation because you have to spend a lot of time farming gear, elixirs and flasks? No thank you. Exactly the kind of game I grew to hate in a lot less than the time I've been playing WoW.....

    When I'm in a raid fight, I play with lowest possible graphical settings and the camera so zoomed out I can barely read my character name. And you know what? I would love to remove all the spell effects to be able to see even better my positioning. I'm definitely NOT THERE to look at my character or the environment, that I can do alone (and a lot better than in a group).

    And if you think that you can have an addon which tells you what to do, try again. In any HM fight unless you know what's going on around you and are able to react accordingly, you're almost useless (because you'll be dead). Proof: if it were as you say, everybody would have killed Ragnaros HM, reality is very far from that.

    Sorry, but yours are exactly the kind of suggestion that, when implemented, would turn back WoW into any random pure-grind Korean MMO. And the market is full of them right now (it was not the case in the past, so they could get away with it).
    So, thank Elune :P you're not a Blizzard designer..

    @Nils: from your blog article: LFD stopped me adding people to my friends list over night.[....] I am the guy who doesn't bother talking in LFD most of the time. Still, I explained many dungeons before LFD to the players on my server.

    Reading this, it seems the problem is you, and not the LFD.
    For comparison, I don't add people I meet in LFD to my friends list (and I'm not sure I did it before it was available), but I'm always ready to explain the strats in a LFD group if people ask.
    Anyway: why you changed your behavior with the appearance of LFD? I mean, there's really no reason....

    Thanks for the answer to my and Azuriels' comments, BTW :)

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  3. It is clear that I am more focused on simulation than the game while you are more focus on the game :P there is nothing wrong with this..

    For example what I hate is to see a fire mage sending fireballs to the Fire Lord and damage him :P Hard preparation may seem very grindy if it has no purpose..if you drop some good story behind it and requires team - work then immediately it becoming very interesting.

    There is not doubt that players are separated to the ones that favor simulation and virtual world and the ones that favor the game itself. And actually you cannot really compare the vanilla wow to Aion for example. Vanilla were far less grindy than Aion and other Korean games (lineage for example) are. In my opinion Vanilla had found the gold point between simulation and Game

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  4. The argument that LFD did't destroy WoW because you can still form groups manually through trade chat is just irrelevant.

    We should differentiate between what the game mechanic allows people to do and what people actually do. Only the latter is relevant *). I, too, stopped adding people to my friend list the day LFD hit. That's probably my fault. But it's one thing that made me stop paying. Now it's Blizzards problem, too. Mentioning that I'm free to not use the LFD doesn't bring them nearer to my money.

    *) Actually, the former might be relevant for the "world". I love the witcher 1 and 2 because they let me take decisions. The consequence is that I won't see huge parts of their content and I'm not going to play those games another time. But the fact that this content is there, and can be watched on youtube and read up on the wiki, makes the game a much better game to me. The fact that I'm not getting huge parts of the story line makes my decisions relevant.

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  5. @Giannis: yes, I'm in for the game. As I said, I find WoW's lore to be utter crap, so I would never RP there.

    @Kring: Mentioning that I'm free to not use the LFD doesn't bring them nearer to my money.

    True, but for me the question is:
    - no LFD -> people add friends to their list, they make wonderful (maybe :) communities.
    - LFD appears -> people stop adding friends and just switch to rush mode.

    It seems to me that people wanted rush mode from the start, and were "forced" to build communities to work around the problem.

    The same discussion happens with entertainment TV vs. cultural TV. The entertainment people produce high-audience crap and say that it's fine because "it's what people want" (and show the data indicating a ton of people watching it). The culture people say that culture is an acquired taste and so if the TV provided a lot of cultural programs then people would watch them and become better people.

    So, it's the fault of the TV producers or of the watchers that we don't have a "high-cultural content" TV?

    The difference with MMOs is that players expect the same product to be completely different things (entertainment for some, "cultural"=RP/simulation for others). A company can walk on the line, but in the end they make a choice, and for Blizzard it's clear that they are entertainment. Flash-game-mode click'n'play'n'fun. And in this logic, anything which cuts down waiting time is good.

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  6. But please understand that I might never have stopped playing in the first place if some changes hadn't occurred.

    Oh, absolutely. The question would really come down to which subscription Blizzard wants to go after, and which direction is more likely to achieve better numbers.

    Please understand that I do not think that Blizzard should not have changed/added anything since TBC.

    For the record, when I say things like TBC 2.0, I mean the standard sort of incremental upgrades to the game while keeping the overarching design the same. Linear endgame progression (which encourages guild hopping/poaching), keeping heroics as a niche activity (no full badge sets on vendors, no LFD, extremely long/hard dungeons), and so on. They could have experimented with all the things you mentioned and it would not have particularly mattered as far as I was concerned - the expansion would have lasted about 2-3 months at best for me, and essentially been over. Contrast that to the end of Wrath where I was suddenly running 3-4 heroics per day across my different toons for Frost badges; my activity only increased as Wrath wore on, instead of decreased.

    Excuse me? LFD stopped me adding people to my friends list over night. It did destroy something. And, yes, it also added something. Look, we can discuss this. But arguing that LFD is without any disadvantage at all is really not helpful. We both know better.

    It is not so much that I am making the argument that LFD destroyed nothing as it is that LFD destroyed nothing of consequence. The moment you did not have to explain dungeons, the moment you were not required to be social to get what you wanted, you stopped doing so. What does that say about your social-ness? Not that I am attacking your character or anything, as I am the same way - I rarely even asked guild members to run LFD with me because I had the suspicion they would agree out of implied obligation/loyalty rather than they wanted to.

    I said that the number of people moving from normal raids to heroic raids, that is, the number of people doing the same narrative for slightly better itemlevels at the cost of a higher difficulty level, is minimal. The same has to be expected for the number of people moving from LFR to normal raid content.

    No straw man intended. I was merely pointing out that the whole heroic raid thing is still worthwhile even if no one graduates. Indeed, Blizzard recently acknowledged that graduation is not what happens for a lot of people.

    The second team took over a game that was consistently growing at 2 million subscribers a year and brought it to a standstill within a few months.

    And ice cream causes you to drown.

    WoW would have peaked no matter what Blizzard did; the market for hotkey MMOs is finite and burnout exists. QED.

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  7. I agree with you Nil's and respect your point of view. I'm not sure how Azuriel and Helistar arrive at such extremes to the point that they can't seem to understand that the introduction of new systems has an impact on how players interact within the game. Or at least that's how their responses often come off: deaf to any possible experience other than their own.

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  8. "I rarely even asked guild members to run LFD with me because I had the suspicion they would agree out of implied obligation/loyalty rather than they wanted to. "

    I'd like to expand on this point by Azuriel, cross-applying some opinion from Tobold's recent Facebook social cost post.

    The point is being made that Vanilla-BC WoW forced social interaction on the server level. To do heroics or normals, you needed 4 other able-bodied, motivated human beings. More so for raiding. To reach this event horizon, you need social engagement on the Trade channel or Guild Chat. There were people who developed extensive lists of heroic or raid ready players on their server to contact whenever they wanted to do their group content. Fair summation?

    Now, look at those Friend lists and ask, "How many of these people did I engage on a level beyond my group content satisfaction?" These people are very rarely true nodes of conscious, intelligent conversation. They are tools to achieve your end (not in a creepy Gevlon way, at least, I hope not). The analogy to Facebook friends you made simply for the purpose of Facebook games is apparent. The game demands you reach a quota of fellow humans to play, so you fill this quota with willing subjects. Subjects whom you talk to and interact with solely for the smoothing out of that goal.

    Different people fall on different ranges of the social spectrum, but I'd be willing to wager a majority of PuGs pre-Wrath were formed out of random Trade Chat and Facebook-value Friends Lists. Is this social engagement a true community? Or is it as much a deception as the anonymous LFD?

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  9. I don't quite understand what's so bad about "forced social interaction". Most of the friends I have in game today are people I met through "forced social interaction". They were people I added to friends list because I enjoyed doing dungeons with them or because they were at my level and were good to have around when I wanted a group quest done.

    I would, however, not have added them to friends list had I not enjoyed playing with them, however convenient they would have been. So the people I did add to friends list were people I enjoyed playing with. These "forced social interactions" soon formed into casual gaming friendships, and some of them even turned into true real life friendships.

    In real life, most of the friends I have today are also the result of "forced social interaction". I met them in school.

    In fact, I believe most social interaction is forced at first. I think the people that pursue being social with total strangers for no reason other than being social are pretty few.

    That does not, however, mean that they don't appreciate the friends they gain through these "forced social interactions".

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  10. @Doone: I'm not saying that LFD or other changes didn't have an impact. I simply say that if they stop you from doing something you think it's a good thing, then it's YOUR fault for stopping, and not the fault of the LFD for providing a gameplay shortcut.

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  11. Helistar, I don't care whose fault something is. This is about game design and the developer has to keep in mind how players react to his design decisions.

    The management were pretty bored if you started to apologize like: "Hey, it's not my fault, it's the players' fault". And the management were right, for once.

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  12. I was exactly as helpful and exactly as detached in LFD as in pre-LFD dungeons. I had no friends list (though I used to maintain a small ignore list in TBC) in either case. Whether you or I have a more universal experience is really unclear to me.

    I think most people don't see making real friends online as a possibility anyway. I mean, even the people at google don't understand that an online pseudonym can be a better way to be found by your friends than your real name. As evidenced by Tobold's recent facebook ban, facebook - an internet service to connect to friends - thinks that asking people to be your friend because you found out they share a common interest with you on an internet message board is a banable offense.

    If most people - including people who design online communities - don't understand that online friends is really a possibility then I'm not sure that running into the same people from your server over and over again is much of a benefit. I honestly don't know, though.

    Personally I think the anti-social environment in LFD has nothing to do with being cross-server or random and everything to do with the reward structure. They forced top tier raiders to play, which meant that self-important jerks who tend to credit themselves with all successes and others with all failures got the idea that everything was super easy. Four weeks later when the raiders had farmed out all the badges they needed those jerks were swearing at and booting people who wanted to just play the game.

    But when I hear other people talk about LFD and the behaviour they encounter there, I wonder if we live in different worlds. I ran dungeons with strangers very regularly from the time LFD came out to the time when I stopped playing WoW around last March. The number of jerks out there was actually very small, and people were very receptive to advice and explanations when they were warranted. The worst behaviour I encountered with any regularity was dropping after a wipe, but that used to happen in on-server groups in TBC as well.

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  13. @Nils: I'd say that if you compare the player number curve from WoW to that of any other MMO, the management has very little to say. Just avoiding the incredible drop a few months into the game is an incredible achievement, being able to maintain approximatively the same amount of players over many years (with non-niche market numbers, I mean), is even more incredible.
    No other MMO has reached the playerbase of WoW, so they are navigating uncharted waters. Still, they've decided to choose a direction (accessibility/no downtime) and are keeping in that direction. Sorry, but I just don't believe all the "it would be better if...." people. Especially because Blizzard makes choices on their internal numbers, so they know a lot more than we do about player retention, lifetime and activities. If they did LFD and now are doing LFR it's because it works.

    @Sthenno: my experience with LFD is more or less the same. I've had my share of loot ninjas, incompetent players, elitits, but overall the groups have been good (I'm not including the "we're all overgeared, rush without a word of WotLK").

    The "online friends" thing would deserve a wall of text, so I'll not answer now :)

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  14. Helistar, I am certain Blizzard loves you .. as a customer.

    You are happy whatever they do, because they have been successful in the past. If they introduce a LFR now and not one year ago then because one year ago it would have been a mistake but now is the right time, eh?

    Really, please give some arguments and try not to appear so fanboyish ;)

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