Saturday, June 11, 2011

Blizzard Forums

Blue post on official forums. I'm quoting it as it really doesn't require much commentary.


While I wouldn't say that leveling from 1-79 is totally "grindy" (I actually had and continue to have a lot of fun running through those zones), I can definitely see your argument. I mean, a lot of current dungeon mechanics are fun, right? They make you analyze the world around you and adapt changing scenarios, sort of like a puzzle. At first glance, having that kind of gameplay accompany you all the way from lower level quest zones to end-game dungeon content seems like it'd be amazing. But that's just at first glance. There's a lot to be said for keeping the leveling process as seamless and straightforward as possible.

For a lot of players, the goal of World of Warcraft is to meet some benchmark, things like leveling up, getting gear, increasing their character's potency, and/or defeating end-game raid content. While questing may be enjoyable activity in its own right for some (like you!), there's definitely a portion of the population where it's really more of a means to end -- a way of achieving those other goals more quickly or with greater efficiency -- and that's an important fact for us to keep in mind.

It's not that quests aren't important; on the contrary, they're a critical part of the game, and we'll continue to work towards making them even more epic and fun. It's just that if we make quests too challenging or too complicated, especially during the leveling process, we run the risk of creating situations where players might become frustrated and feel like they're being forced into a style of gameplay that isn't exactly their cup of PvE.

Now, that doesn't mean there isn't some sort of balance that can be struck, where we're able to create quests that evoke the fun of dungeon encounters, but never really reach that point where they become tedious or difficult (we totally hear your feedback on that). It's a matter of appealing to as many players as possible and making sure that they're engaged, but not overwhelmed with over-the-top challenge as they level up -- which can be tricky, especially when you have such a wide variety of playstyles and opinions to consider.

Even so, incorporating more dynamic mechanics into questing and using quests as a teaching method is something we'd like to do for future content. Whether or not we should invest the time and resources into revamping existing content, though...well, that's something that we'd have to weigh very carefully, as it would require us to focus our attention away from creating new things.

8 comments:

  1. But at level cap, those fears of their go out the window, for some reason.

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  2. Looking at the philosophy behind the leveling game and the that of the end game, it is probably a good guess that there are two very different teams at work here.

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  3. "It's just that if we make quests too challenging or too complicated, especially during the leveling process, we run the risk of creating situations where players might become frustrated"
    Perfectly reasonable, and that's why reducing the number of "kill enemy to the north, and by north we mean way way way east and slightly north". But this doesn't mean leveling should be pointlessly fast by default. If they want to help players level alts quickly, why not buff or add more heirlooms?

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  4. "It's just that if we make quests too challenging or too complicated, especially during the leveling process, we run the risk of creating situations where players might become frustrated"

    "It's a matter of appealing to as many players as possible."

    What I'm reading into these two quotes, which are underlines in the original text is "We are catering to the lowest common denominator who barely have enough brain matter to play facebook games".

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  5. it is probably a good guess that there are two very different teams at work here.

    I have had exactly that thought.

    I wonder if the two groups are at war?

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  6. If that is indeed the case it means that there is no leadership within the team. Elder Game was right when he called in the B Team.

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  7. Once again, the Blizzard view is that playing WoW is all about "getting stuff", and that challenge is a binary switch - it's either tuned to the max, only fully optimised characters that do everything perfectly can succeed (top tier raiding) or "well done for showing up, you're such a special snowflake, here's your party bag, dear one"

    There's no grade between the two extremes, there's no recognition of players who want something to test their skills other than level-cap raiding and (crucially) there's no training path that takes players from the baby steps of soloing to the marathon runs of raids.

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  8. if we make quests too challenging or too complicated, especially during the leveling process, we run the risk of creating situations where players might become frustrated

    More accurately "we run the risk of wasting time on a quest that nobody will do because it will not be listed on their integrated leveling guide add on."

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