Sometimes complexity is a good thing, sometimes it isn’t.  WoW has had issues with this concept since launch, though the recent expansion has really focused more on the increase of this concern.

When the game initially launched, the variable DPS loads were less based on gear and more on rotation. Certainly raid gear helped but resistances got you through.  Rotations were key and a lot of classes simply sat out entire raids because they were non competitive.  The rotations themselves were fairly simple too, 3-4 buttons.

Add on a few expansions and we get to Lich King with some additional mechanics (hit/armor penetration, expertise) and the distribution moved onto gear rather than actual rotations.  Hunters topped DPS charts not because of their rotations (though it helped) but because they stacked armor penetration to absurd amounts.  Most classes were at a 6 button rotation, heck even paladins had a meme about it.  This was a simple time.

Cataclysm removed armor penetration and implemented Mastery – a stat with differing effects, per class and spec.  Rogues either increased poison damage, increases off-hand attacks or increased finishing move damage.  Some were better than others, some were completely ignored.  Skill bloat, more talents, more stats brought out optimal rotations not only based on talent choices but on gear levels.  At specific levels of mastery or crit, you changed your rotation for some classes.  Some specs were optimal in area effect fights, some were mobile, some were burst.  A single class might need to swap between them on each boss.

This added layer of complexity is confusing at first and frustrating later on.  If I say you have 5 things to remember in a fight and they are all DPS related, how do you manage to move out of the fire, turn around, attack the adds and press the clicky too?  This is why the Looking For Raid tool was so effective, it brought down the bar for DPS requirements to a point where people could press 1-2 buttons and get through content.  You could do 50% less damage than you would in a heroic raid and succeed.  Swap to the heroic raid though and each attack was required.  Drop 5% from optimal and you were nearly assured a wipe.

I won’t argue for or against complex/simple systems – each has their place.  What I will argue against is using both systems on the same target audience.  Shamans have it fairly easy with 3 things to remember. Good players and bad ones tend to group near the same DPS numbers.  Warlocks (as in the link) have 12-15 things to remember.  This means that there is a huge difference between the bad ones and the good ones.  This variance makes the class less attractive on the whole and specifically less attractive if the best played are still sub-optimal.  If I have to press 10 buttons to do X DPS and a mage only has to press 5 and does more DPS than I do, why am I playing a warlock in the first place?  Taking it a step further, if a hybrid class can heal and DPS at the same level as I can, why play a DPS only class?

It must be quite the challenge from the design point of view.  You need to put in the right amount of complexity to make a class attractive (not boring), competitive (+/- 5%) yet not so overly complex that you need to practice 8 hours a day to come close to optimal.

Mists of Pandaria is taking an interesting approach of providing more diversity between classes – essentially expanding the issue while trying to simplify it.  Warlocks are being practically re-written.  Monks will heal by punching people in the face.  If you’re only optimal while attacking, what happens when you can’t attack (a Rogue issue for years)?  When do you say “the line is here, we will not cross it?”

MMO-Champion has a huge writeup of the next expansion for WoW.  The quick summary.

• LFR now lets you roll per boss, individually.  If you are in the top 30%, then you have a chance at loot designed for you.  If the boss doesn’t have loot for your class or you lose the roll, you get cash.  Sort of how TOR does it.  Should be in the LFG tool as well…
• Can now have 11 characters.  Makes sense since they are adding a new class.
• AoE looting is in game.  Thank god.
• The proposed item squish of a few months back is out.  I can’t see how this would have been balanced for the 1-70 bracket.  This does mean additional system requirements for MoP due to the huge calculations.
• Race model updates aren’t in.  You’re still stuck with a 7 year old Dwarf and 5 year old Blood Elf.  This really needs to change…
• 9 heroics, 3 raids with 14 bosses, 2 world bosses.  This is good.
• Scenarios are world PvE quests (instanced though) that can work with only DPS.  Sort of how Instant Adventures work in Rift.
• Challenge modes are timed versions of dungeons with stat caps.  All bronze gives an achievement, all silver gives transmogrification gear, all gold gives a nice mount.
• Cloud Serpents are the Panda’s mounts.  Everyone can get them through dailies.
• Farmville is in the game.  Sort of.  You can run your own farm.  Why this is in and not new models is beyond me.
• Warlocks get big changes and new pets.  They were in dire need.
• More mounts, less palette swaps.  Kinda tired of seeing the same dragon model everywhere.
• 7 zones, given the progress path more similar to WotLK.  Less linear.
• 1 arena, 2 BGs.  Ehh…they need to change the size of the BGs first.
• Pet battles are casual. Only tracks wins, each pet can use 3 of 6 skills.  100 pets available.
• Pets are shared across the account.  Not sure if Companions are the same though (I hope!)
• Everyone but Goblin/Worgen can be a monk.
• Monks are melee heavy.  Tanks, DPS and Healers need to be in melee range.  This is to counterbalance the 3 roles in one class I guess.  I am going to guess most will tank/dps as a healer in melee range is plain stupid.

There’s some good stuff coming as it seems to be a throwback to the rather open world of Vanilla WoW.  Cataclysm’s focus was split on the 1-60 world and the new stuff, with some pretty crappy side effects.  This time it’s 100% on new content so here’s hoping the actual mechanics of it all works better.

Most interesting to me though are the quality of life improvements.  There is more than the gear grind.  Pet battles, farming, pet acquisition, scenarios, challenges are all new items that should fill in the time gap for the casual-minded player.  AoE looting is a big one for me  too.  Finally, the LFR loot system should be the default group loot system for boss drops.  This will remove the Disenchant option though and therefore increase the price of enchanting as a whole.

On that last item, there’s no news on crafting, which has huge bloat right now.  Assuming the same path as previous expansions, you’ll train to 600 skill and everything from 1-575 will be vendor trash.  That’s one hell of a hurdle for alts/new players.  Maybe add some transmog gear along the road…

All in all though, it’s a decent path.  We’ll see in a few months how it pans out.

The internet is full of interesting things!

Total Biscuit has an interview with the lead designer on end game content for SWTOR.  The answers given are great I’m just curious as to why they aren’t currently in game.  Just more fuel that the game didn’t launch when it was ready.  Still, it’s nice to hear stuff is planned and those plans make sense.

WoW news again!  Blessing of Kings (a hardcore raider) has a nice post about how Blizzard tried to appease the hardcore and lose 2 million subscribers.  Ipso facto, hardcore raiders are not the target demographic for WoW from a business perspective.  My previous post explaining how the LFR (looking for raid) tool has helped WoW players see content (and thus provide value for effort for Blizzard) is a shinning example of this.  Sort of like a company that spends 90% of it’s time developing something that only 1% of its clients will use and sells it at the same price.  Stupid.

World of Warcraft released its final patch for this expansion (4.3) on November 30th, 2011.  So we’re a few days short of the 2 month mark.  MMO-Champion has break downs of the success with data charts and whatnot.  Let’s go over the recent one.

First, some basic numbers.  WoW has about 10 million active players, based on their financials.  A guild attempt at a raid has 10 or 25 players, with the latter usually being a bit easier.  100 guilds have defeated Heroic Madness, the most recent hard-mode raid, after 2 months.  So in the best case, 2500 people out of 10,000,000 have completed the content.  That’s 0.025% of all players.  Ok.

Just the basic raid itself has interesting numbers.  1 month after the raid launched, 4% of players had completed it on normal and 34% had completed it on easy-mode (LFR).  The previous raid tier didn’t have easy mode and after months of it being 0ut, and nerfed to heck, only 17% of the entire population’s characters (players can have more than 1 character) had completed it.

All of that to say that Hard Mode raids are statistically a non-issue.  One quarter of a percent of people actually bother with them.  Less than 15% bother with normal mode, even months after release.  Easy-mode however gets 1/3 of all players, seemingly a worthwhile investment.

I’ve said it for a bit but hardcore players are dead and hardcore gaming is not mainstream.

A nice doc on the elite raider mentality.  The first 40 minutes are about the people while the last 20 is an actual account of the race to world first in Cataclysm at launch.

Two items of note.  First, you can see a large difference in between the Europeans and Americans social skills and values set.  The former is dedicated yet quiet while the latter is boisterous and conflicted.  Second is the amount of time EU players have to invest in order to progress.  Either their social system is more conducive to getting the time off from other engagements or there’s something in the water.  I think it might have more to do with the social stigma attached to extreme gaming that exists in NA.  Asians have schools for Starcraft and some of the best FPS players are in the EU.

Some of the highlights for me are:

– geek saturation is well past the point of social acceptance and worn as a badge of honor

– the prime age of a extreme gamer seems to be under 30 due to real-life constraints.  Akin to the 40 year old football player.

– the sport is in flux.  Hockey has been around 100 years but WoW certainly won’t.

– fame is international at the gaming platform.  Maybe 500,000 people know who Max Keeping is but millions know of Paragon or Ensidia.  Strange to look at that measure of scope.

Not sure how long the video will be free to watch though.

Race to World First from Looking for Group Productions on Vimeo.

So WoW has a new expansion coming out and it’s all about Pandas.  Jump the shark much?

•  level to 90 (5 more levels)
• re-using existing dungeons, making them heroic
• new race (Pandas), new class (Monk – melee DPS, healer, tank)
• new talent system (18 total instead of 40)
• scenarios (1-3 players, timed combat with medals)
• timed dungeon runs
• pet battle system (Pokemon!)
• 3 new raids

reasons to get a rogue now are things like poisons, interrupts and stuns

Just so everyone is clear on this, every class has an interrupt and a stun.  Every last one.  Poisons only affect the rogue  (increased damage) and provide no benefit to the group.  Take a look at their new talents and see how out of 18 talents, there are maybe 4 you’d take if you were not actively PvPing.  I guess they want to remove Rogues from the PvE game.

Blizzard has, for a while now, offered vanity pets on their website that can be used in game.  10-20$ per item and the catch was that once purchased, it only worked on the characters linked to your account.  That’s changed.

Blizz is introducing a pet that can be traded.

Why the change of heart?  To quote:

Since the introduction of the Pet Store, many players have been asking for ways to get the companions we offer there without having to spend real-world cash. By making the Guardian Cub tradable (much like the BoE mounts from the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game), players interested in the new pet will have fun, alternative in-game ways to get one. In addition to trading the pet, players can give the Guardian Cub as a gift to another character for a special occasion; guild leaders can use them to reward members for a job well done; and so on. We also hope this change will help reduce the number of incidents of scamming via trading for invalid pet codes.

Basically, they want people to have the change to legitimately buy in-game gold with real world cash.  Of course, the actual value of gold in-game will vary depending on what people are willing to spend and it is guaranteed to be a much worse deal than buying from a farmer.  The difference is that Blizzard takes your money.

I have reservations about a sub+item shop game.  I pay X amount of dollars for all content, why should I be paying more?  In most cases, the items are not game related, in that they don’t give you some sort of edge or benefit.  WoW is similar in this regard while games like Star Trek Online (going F2P in few weeks) is the opposite.  Diablo 3 however is a pure item shop game, but it’s not planned to be a competitive game, so the impact should be negligible.  Then again, Blizz is making money on trades.

It really is an interesting market we see nowdays.  Blizzard is moving more and more towards the casual, time-restricted crowd that has disposable income to bypass the grind that people with more free time are willing to blow through.  Sadly, they are also trying to keep raiders around and that honestly died a year ago.