Cracks starting to show?

[Fordel]

SWTOR will certainly have the window, but will they be able to not balls it up is the real question!

[Khaldun]

The thing about GC is not that he is somehow an evil maniac who has corrupted WoW. It's just that by saying what he's said as forcefully as he's said it, he's indicated that the devs have a surprising lack of strategic insight into the game at this point in its development. That's Blizzard's hole card--that they are much more professional and polished in their understanding of live management than any other current dev house. GC's ham-fisted responses to players in the run-up and execution of Cata suggest otherwise.

[Tannhauser]

GC is the 'face' of WoW currently, that's why he gets the heat.  Not many folks will look up the credits and scream "Curse you Dale Stockton!"  Or whatever. 

Let's forget raids for a minute.  I parked my 85 mage and started alts in the revamped zones.  At first I was really impressed, but after a few days I cancelled.  The rails were driving me crazy.  It's like the flavor of each zone was turned into a mass market product.  Like mystery was removed and replaced with cold efficiency.  Like.

I miss WoW a bit, but if I went back I'd be bored in a day.  Rift gets my money now and will continue to do so because I feel like I still have fun things to do ahead of me.

[Ingmar]

There was never any mystery in WoW leveling zones to begin with. All Cataclysm did was it took the way the zones already basically worked, and polished them into coherency.

[Paelos]

It is amazing to me you people keep trying to lay every single thing at GC's feet. He's just the mouthpiece for the entire dev team, they're not going to magically start making decisions you like if he leaves. He's not even in charge of half the stuff (or more) that people complain about.

Don't really care. I want to shoot the messenger. We all know he's a smug dick. Isn't that enough?

[Ingmar]

I don't personally see the smug thing myself, but that sort of thing is always in the eye of the beholder.

[Paelos]

I don't personally see the smug thing myself, but that sort of thing is always in the eye of the beholder.

You're from California. Everyone is a smug dick out there. You're just desensitized!  

[Rokal]

There was never any mystery in WoW leveling zones to begin with. All Cataclysm did was it took the way the zones already basically worked, and polished them into coherency.

I disagree. There were quite a few quests you'd find in random places, and it encouraged you to explore. Just some quick examples: escort quests in random places like the Silithid tunnels in Tanaris, the quest to get the Sprite Darter Hatchling that was randomly in Feralas, random named enemy NPCs that were located way in the back of caves and would drop quest-starters. At this point in WoW's lifespan, you'd probably found every quest you were going to find, but exploration was definitely encouraged more with the old quest flow. I don't really mind the new quest flow and it's exactly what players said they wanted as feedback from TBC and Wrath quests.

I'm more disappointed that they removed *all* of the group quests from the old world. Leveling from 1-80 in WoW is stupid easy even if you're solo. I don't know if you've tried doing regular quests in a group with 2-3 people, but it's really boring. Everything dies before you can ever get two spells off, the flow of combat is way off, and it's virtually impossible to die. The only thing that really remained challenging to a group, or felt balanced correctly, were the group quests. Now those are gone and leveling in a group leaves you with no content that actually feels compelling for more than one player. There is only faceroll.

Don't really care. I want to shoot the messenger. We all know he's a smug dick. Isn't that enough?

Funny, it's seems you and GC share that trait in common.

His articles never came across as smug to me. People always criticize Blizzard for not teaching players how to play correctly in groups (which isn't helped by the new 1-60). Blizzard saw that a lot of players were failing in heroics, and GC wrote an article reminding people about what is needed to succeed in heroics that people didn't have to do in Wrath. "Use CC, remember to interrupt, watch out for bad stuff on the ground, etc." I thought it was exactly what Blizzard needed to do, and it didn't come off as condescending to me. By the reaction that article got, you'd have thought it said "Heroics are hard? Well, stop being so shitty then idiots".

[caladein]

I don't personally see the smug thing myself, but that sort of thing is always in the eye of the beholder.

You're from California. Everyone is a smug dick out there. You're just desensitized!  

[Paelos]

People had problems not standing in shit back in the original WoW. They just never got invites to the big boy groups because of it, so they didn't raid. That was perfectly acceptable when the game was new. Now the expectations gap has changed.

[Khaldun]

I think you guys underestimate the value of incoherency for giving a game a sense of being a "world". The rails are most visible when gameplay is most "coherent". Think about the best rides you've been on: they're doing everything to make you forget it's a cart on a train track or that you're walking through a haunted house full of high school performers. Cata pretty much stripped every artifice and contradiction out of the 1-60 game, making it vastly more efficient but also much less organic. Same for what's been done to rationalize and streamline the economy, the class mechanics and so on.

[Ingmar]

Oh I totally agree with that - my point is WoW never felt like a "world" to me in the first place, so revising the leveling experience into more discrete stories was the obvious choice; take what you were already doing, and do it better. If I want to get my exploration on, there are a lot of other games that serve that need better (and always have.)

[Ratman_tf]

Oh I totally agree with that - my point is WoW never felt like a "world" to me in the first place, so revising the leveling experience into more discrete stories was the obvious choice; take what you were already doing, and do it better. If I want to get my exploration on, there are a lot of other games that serve that need better (and always have.)

And that's why I quit. Well, a big part of the reason. Vanilla WoW, I could squint and pretend that it wasn't a railroad. The Goblin starting area... could just be one long cutscene. They streamlined me right out of the game.

[Margalis]

That Cata is too "on rails" is a pretty common complaint, so there must be some truth in it somewhere, or at least some reason for the perception.

[sinij]

That Cata is too "on rails" is a pretty common complaint, so there must be some truth in it somewhere, or at least some reason for the perception.

Yes, its got so bad that unless you rescued critters/bear cubs in one of the zones you'd get quest locked and couldn't progress any further in the zone. Most quests in Cata were well done, but with _zero_ replay value... and some quest were just awful.

[Sjofn]

The save the widdle animals/bear cub quests were awesome, you shut up.

[Malakili]

That Cata is too "on rails" is a pretty common complaint, so there must be some truth in it somewhere, or at least some reason for the perception.

Yes, its got so bad that unless you rescued critters/bear cubs in one of the zones you'd get quest locked and couldn't progress any further in the zone. Most quests in Cata were well done, but with _zero_ replay value... and some quest were just awful.

Heh, I missed that bear quest the first time through, luckily some guildies picked up on it when I wondered why I had nothing to do in guild chat.  This is exactly the problem with the too on rails style.  You MUST do more or less everything in order or you can't progress.  Its all one big chain.  Originally WoW quests were more or less a way of guiding the player to points of interest on the map that they would probably want to explore anyway.   Now the questlines exists to usher you through the zone from beginning to end.   I mean, both can still be called "theme park" MMOs, but Cataclysm lets you go through the park in exactly one order (ok, maybe thats slightly too harsh, but not too far off).  At least original WoW was like getting the theme park map from the kiosk at the front and then running wild.

[Miasma]

Save the wee animals was hilarious.  Having to give the imprisoned demon loving satyr who was 'helping' us a black heart to proceed was a little more rolly eyes...

I really liked the new quests, the on rails stuff didn't bother me because I wanted to do them all anyways but I can understand other people not liking it.

[SurfD]

A large chunk of the "on rails" problem might stem from their new focus on VERY heavy story telling through the zones.  I mean, the way each of the cata zones are set up, you could practically write a short story about the "path" through each zone.  The problem is, when you are trying to tell a cohesive story that starts with the first quest in the zone, and ends with the last one, it becomes kind of difficult to avoid the "rails".  The old approach of "throw a half dozen small to medium sized quest hubs around the zone and populate them with quests that are largely unrelated to the rest of the quests in the zone" does not really work when trying to drive a "story".

I mean, look at hyjal.  The zone basicly goes:
- Protect the world tree from immediate danger
- Rescue the 3 ancients / Protect assorted shrines / Reclaim forest.
- Destroy various twilight facilities after rescuing specific ancients.
- Infiltrate and wreck Major base of twilight operations
- Assault minions of rag outfront of his fortress
- Assault rag inside fortress

yes, you could seperate a lot of those events into independant quest hubs (and many of them were), but to ensure the story flows properly (like, say, preventing you from triggering a quest that involves all 3 ancients before you actually rescued all 3), they had to gate it somehow.

[Paelos]

So, people didn't like being forced along a path that involved telling a story?

God, I hope they told SWTOR.

[Margalis]

Well...it might be ok if the players have some sense of agency and the stories are not terrible.

[Malakili]

A large chunk of the "on rails" problem might stem from their new focus on VERY heavy story telling through the zones.  I mean, the way each of the cata zones are set up, you could practically write a short story about the "path" through each zone.  The problem is, when you are trying to tell a cohesive story that starts with the first quest in the zone, and ends with the last one, it becomes kind of difficult to avoid the "rails".  The old approach of "throw a half dozen small to medium sized quest hubs around the zone and populate them with quests that are largely unrelated to the rest of the quests in the zone" does not really work when trying to drive a "story".

I mean, look at hyjal.  The zone basicly goes:
- Protect the world tree from immediate danger
- Rescue the 3 ancients / Protect assorted shrines / Reclaim forest.
- Destroy various twilight facilities after rescuing specific ancients.
- Infiltrate and wreck Major base of twilight operations
- Assault minions of rag outfront of his fortress
- Assault rag inside fortress

yes, you could seperate a lot of those events into independant quest hubs (and many of them were), but to ensure the story flows properly (like, say, preventing you from triggering a quest that involves all 3 ancients before you actually rescued all 3), they had to gate it somehow.

Its more or less precisely the thing I disliked in the DK Starting zone my first day in Wrath beta.  They've taken phasing and gone just way too far with it. 

[sinij]

So, people didn't like being forced along a path that involved telling a story?

God, I hope they told SWTOR.

People generally did like this, what they didn't like is that even fluff quests were deemed as "core to storyline".

[Rendakor]

I like Cata's phasing-heavy, on rails story experience much better than the alternative. This was one of my biggest disappointments in Rift; there never seemed to be enough quest content for the later level ranges if you just went from major quest hub to major quest hub.

[Soulflame]

I must be weird.  I prefer Nagrand to anything I saw in Cataclysm.   

[Paelos]

I liked Cata's questing just fine. It bothers me when I missed things in zones before because I didn't kill some random spawn that dropped a quest item that lead to an 8 pronged chain.

[Draegan]

I must be weird.  I prefer Nagrand to anything I saw in Cataclysm.   

I liked Nagrand. 

I can't speak for Cata though.  I leveled a Shaman up to level 26ish and quit.  Game has gotten stale for me.  This is because I've played it to much over the last 7? years, not because of any design choices.

[proudft]

Rails killed replayability for me.  I could level umpteen characters in WOTLK because you could do whatever you want in each zone in whatever order you want, mostly.  This time, after getting one dude to 85, my interest in redoing the Cata zones plummeted, and I think it's primarily because doing the same stuff in the same order is too repetitive for me. 

I have no idea why having to do the quests in a particular order, or not having the ability to skip a few quests here and there, made such a difference to me.   I guess I need an illusion of choice of some sort.   

[Paelos]

I wouldn't mind each zone having it's own story, but I'd rather that you did each section of like 4 different sections in any order you choose with the final section that opens upon completion of the four previous sections.

That way there you could have like Help Group 1, 2, 3, 4 in any order you like, then you assualt the base after all four groups have been helped.

[AcidCat]

Vanilla WoW, I could squint and pretend that it wasn't a railroad. The Goblin starting area... could just be one long cutscene. They streamlined me right out of the game.

Yeah, there was before at least the illusion of some choice, player agency, exploration ... now it's just being told exactly what to do and where to go every single step of the way. Just thinking of running my many 80's through that suffocating linearity of the new zones sucked all of the fun out of the game for me.

I must be weird.  I prefer Nagrand to anything I saw in Cataclysm.   

No doubt, that was a great zone.

[Rasix]

I wouldn't mind each zone having it's own story, but I'd rather that you did each section of like 4 different sections in any order you choose with the final section that opens upon completion of the four previous sections.

That way there you could have like Help Group 1, 2, 3, 4 in any order you like, then you assualt the base after all four groups have been helped.

Where have I seen that plot progression structure before?  

[Xanthippe]

It is amazing to me you people keep trying to lay every single thing at GC's feet. He's just the mouthpiece for the entire dev team, they're not going to magically start making decisions you like if he leaves. He's not even in charge of half the stuff (or more) that people complain about.

He's just the mouthpiece with no responsibilities or obligations to represent the developers on the forums?

See, that's it right there.  Because he IS the mouthpiece, he DOES represent the devs on the forums.  His attitude represents the company, whether they like it or not. 

I don't know which decisions he's responsible for, but if he isn't responsible for his shitty condescending attitude toward players, then who is?  If he doesn't represent Blizzard devs, what the fuck is he doing in the forums?

He's supposed to be a professional.  Please don't excuse his nonprofessional customer service attitude - it stinks.

[Xanthippe]

Exhibit A of Ghostcrawler's "L2P and then you'll have fun!" attitude:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2053469

[Rokal]

Exhibit A of Ghostcrawler's "L2P and then you'll have fun!" attitude:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2053469

I just re-read that entire thing, and it seems as reasonable as it ever did. "We understand that some players preferred easier content, but here is why we made the changes. Here is what you need to remember about running dungeons in Cata (don't try to aoe tank every pack, use at least one CC on most packs, interrupt bad stuff, communicate with your group. If you are still failing, try improving your gear elsewhere first (examples)". Again, it seemed like exactly what the dev team needed to do. I also don't think it reads as condescending at any point, personally.

I must be weird.  I prefer Nagrand to anything I saw in Cataclysm.   

One of the things I really loved about the TBC zones is that questing in them was like a game within a game. Every time I leveled a character through them, I'd try to do a faster/more efficient quest order than the time before. Even if the quests didn't change, it was satisfying to find quests that overlapped in objective or location even if you didn't receive the quests in the same place. This is also the primary reason that I enjoy 60-70 more than 70-80 with alts right now (but it certainly doesn't hurt that TBC goes by much faster). At this point I feel like I have the perfect quest order down for HFP, and figuring out that order and seeing the results (level faster!) was fun for me.

[Ingmar]

I also don't think it reads as condescending at any point, personally.

Yeah, this.