Blizzards New MMO

[Azuredream]

What are you talking about?  You can level 1-80 by yourself no problem.  If you are really complaining about not seeing 4+ year old mediocre instanced group content while you are leveling, then I don't know what to tell you.  Asking to get run through ZF for a month?  Hell you can level 1-80 in a month without making a big deal of it.  Once you hit 80, if you want to find groups for heroics, there are people doing them all the time, and you'll be able to pretty much gear yourself up enough leveling to 80 that you will be ready for them without having to "farm instances" no one is doing.

What content are you being excluded from?  I really have no idea where you are going with this post.

This might be a new concept for you, but some people play the game to have fun, not to blitz to the level cap.

That said, if we're going with our "alternate paths" theory, I would say you (Lant) should just accept that ZF/ST and those things are not on the solo'ers path. You can't ask for them to make everything this game has to offer enjoyable and accessible to you, because you're not the only one they're trying to please. I totally agree, though, that there needs to be way more emphasis on repeatable solo content at the cap that isn't just running daily quests for cash.

[Malakili]

This might be a new concept for you, but some people play the game to have fun, not to blitz to the level cap.

Um, I hate to say it, but this long after release of the game, the fun is at the level cap.   It has nothing to do with getting to max level just to see the number 80, thats where the majority of the playerbase is, and that is where the fun is.  If you have a group of friends where all the people are disciplined enough not to out level each other, sure, yu can have fun going 1-80 doing every instance you want and more power to you for it.  It sure doesn't sound like anyone is having fun spending a month trying to get a ZF run.  This is just being realistic about the state of the game.

[Azuredream]

Um, I hate to say it, but this long after release of the game, the fun is at the level cap.   It has nothing to do with getting to max level just to see the number 80, thats where the majority of the playerbase is, and that is where the fun is.  If you have a group of friends where all the people are disciplined enough not to out level each other, sure, yu can have fun going 1-80 doing every instance you want and more power to you for it.  It sure doesn't sound like anyone is having fun spending a month trying to get a ZF run.  This is just being realistic about the state of the game.

Sorry, let me say this in a less offensive way - people don't all find the same enjoyment from the same things.

I was just trying to make you understand why someone would be upset with not being able to do something right in front of them. I think level-up dungeons are stupid design for precisely the reason you mentioned, someday everyone will be at the cap and there'll be no one doing them.

[Sheepherder]

So you spend the minimum amount of time in the majority of the content so you can get to the end fast and spend the majority of your time in a minimal amount of content?  Broken system is broken.

The easy way to do a "solo" progression path is just to emulate raids with bots.  You enter the instance, you choose your role, and the rest of the experience is designed to challenge you in a realistic way while eliminating some of the the more RNG aspects that could be problematic while dealing with bots.

[WindupAtheist]

So you can sit there healing an NPC tank for an hour? Yeah, that sounds exciting. You know, there used to be this game that had certain things in common with WoW, but which was much more fun and rewarding to play solo.



But hey, it didn't have dedicated healing classes and "raids" and all that other stupid diku shit. Which is why no one ever played it multiplayer with their friends, amirite? 

[koro]

Fuck Act II. Worst part of the game, in my view.

[DLRiley]

Um, I hate to say it, but this long after release of the game, the fun is at the level cap.   It has nothing to do with getting to max level just to see the number 80, thats where the majority of the playerbase is, and that is where the fun is.  If you have a group of friends where all the people are disciplined enough not to out level each other, sure, yu can have fun going 1-80 doing every instance you want and more power to you for it.  It sure doesn't sound like anyone is having fun spending a month trying to get a ZF run.  This is just being realistic about the state of the game.

Sorry, let me say this in a less offensive way - people don't all find the same enjoyment from the same things.

I was just trying to make you understand why someone would be upset with not being able to do something right in front of them. I think level-up dungeons are stupid design for precisely the reason you mentioned, someday everyone will be at the cap and there'll be no one doing them.

And hence why I always say, the only content that exist is endgame content. 1-79 is tutorial and that's it. Players I think get a feeling that statement is true, but very rarely are they going to come close to putting it in words.

[Sheepherder]

So you can sit there healing an NPC tank for an hour? Yeah, that sounds exciting.

And healing people is jolly good fun?  Or is it the fact that when your raid is composed entirely of people you can't delegate the shit jobs to bots which makes it such a thrill?  It's not like Blizzard is just going to roll back WoW and install D2 on there servers, right?

[Inactiviste]

1-79 is tutorial and that's shit.

Fixed.

Why spend such an amount of money for early content that players are going to rush ? I know they tried to make you come back to earlier zones of the expansions, but why can't the dev find a way to make older content still useful. Maybe I'm bored soloing the same dailies for weeks, but would be pleased to go back to earlier content... Wow has a lot of content. Most of it is mudflated to death. But it doesn't have to be that way. Hell, you don't even have to get rid of the diku mold to solve that, you just need to tweak it in order to let the content be useful : use time travel (when you were level 20, you did this quest : flashback...), instance the zone and spawn bigger and meaner monsters... Be creative with older content, you don't have brute force your designers for them to create new zones from scratch every month... Of course such innovations would be expensive, but we're talking Blizzard here. And I'm not sure reworking older content is that much more expensive that producing brand new raid zones.

There was a problem with the soloing in WOTLK. When I hit 80, I had a shitload of quests remaining. Elite ones, long chains leading to dungeon quests... All of which gave completely obsolete rewards when I finished them. By the time I got to end the Arena in Ice Crown, I had crafted and / or looted much better stuff. I did the quests mind, because I enjoyed them. But the lack of loot meant something : there won't be anything more for you if you follow this path, your character evolution is basically over. Time to join a regular guild buddy.

I just hope in a next gen RPG, that kind of problem will be adressed from the start.

[eldaec]

Healing is more fun for some players than tanking or dps.

You get to make the occasional decision for one thing.

Tanking is a shit job.

DPS is a shit job.


The only roles in an EQ clone that even arguably aren't shit are healing and cc.

But that isn't the problem, the problem is a design based on required classes for raiding that makes everyone sit around till they find them.

Hey look, it's 2002 in this thread.

[Merusk]

Is not, it's 1999.

[tmp]

Um, I hate to say it, but this long after release of the game, the fun is at the level cap.

Why have 79 levels of not fun then, and force people to go through them?

I hate to say it, but that's shit design. Oh wait, i don't.

[Phred]

because I'm apparently one of the only people in the world who doesn't totally hate the Argent Tournament (although I don't think it's really that good, either).

I loathed them when I first tried the quests and I still consider them C team output, but one thing that really is nice is how fast you can gear up from them. As long as you don't care about rediculously overpriced pets or flying mounts getting 25 tokens for a weapon is pretty trivial. I laugh when I see people paying 40 tokens for a blue pet while my alt gets their 25 token weapon after a little more than a week of jousting. The weapons may be sneered at by people with access to Uldaur gear but I'm quite happy with an ilevel 200 hammer for my shaman or a similar axe for my warrior, neither of whom will I be raiding on.

[Draegan]

Well I'm happy Nebu owned up.  As I was catching up with the thread he went from somewhere I was ready to argue with to a place where I was coming from.

I think WOW should implement Zelda like dungeons for solo players at the level cap.

--

As far as leveling dungeons are going, you can't expect people to be doing 4-5 year old content.  Plus you can easily go back and do it yourself at a later date if you wish to explore it.  That or have your friends that raced to the cap help you at that time.  If you can't find anyone, well, tough.

[DLRiley]

1-79 is tutorial and that's shit.

Fixed.

Why spend such an amount of money for early content that players are going to rush ? I know they tried to make you come back to earlier zones of the expansions, but why can't the dev find a way to make older content still useful. Maybe I'm bored soloing the same dailies for weeks, but would be pleased to go back to earlier content. Wow has a lot of content. Most of it is mudflated to death. But it doesn't have to be that way. Hell, you don't even have to get rid of the diku mold to solve that, you just need to tweak it in order to let the content be useful : use time travel (when you were level 20, you did this quest : flashback...), instance the zone and spawn bigger and meaner monsters... Be creative with older content, you don't have brute force your designers for them to create new zones from scratch every month... Of course such innovations would be expensive, but we're talking Blizzard here. And I'm not sure reworking older content is that much more expensive that producing brand new raid zones.

There was a problem with the soloing in WOTLK. When I hit 80, I has a shitload of quests remaining. Elite ones, long chains leading to dungeon quests... All of which gave completely obsolete rewards when I finished them. By the time I got to end the Arena in Ice Crown, I had crafted and / or looted much better stuff. I did the quests mind, because I enjoyed them. But the lack of loot meant something : there won't be anything more for you if you follow this path, your character evolution is basically over. Time to join a regular guild buddy.

I just hope in a next gen RPG, that kind of problem will be adressed from the start.

1-79 is tutorial and that's truth

The funny thing about being the hamster in the wheel is that you never realize that your on a wheel. Maybe the smart rodents would figure out that their not moving but at best their logic would have them conclude they should move faster and try harder. This is where the majority of players in mmo's are at. Some are smart enough to figure out that 1-79 is not the game, but they can't come to a logical conclusion what to do with that data. At best they would figure that having 1-79 is the only logical way to keep players paying $15 a month for a game and are generally satisfied with that reasoning. If more people understood that the game actually shrinks the higher up the ladder you go, having to pay $15 dollars for 1-79 wouldn't sound to reasonable after all.

[Malakili]

Um, I hate to say it, but this long after release of the game, the fun is at the level cap.

Why have 79 levels of not fun then, and force people to go through them?

I hate to say it, but that's shit design. Oh wait, i don't.

It is a glorified tutorial really.  Thats the design they've chosen at this point.  You can argue about whether that is a good choice or not.  It probably isn't.  I mean, I enjoy leveling up new characters still, and I don't necessarily "rush" but I don't wait around looking for a group to do content that I know I won't do in any reasonable time frame.

They've made the leveling process way faster, they've added Bind to Account items that give you more experience points when wearing them, they clearly think that leveling should be as quick and painless as possible while still teaching the character to play their class.

Maybe I have a hard time relating because I did all this content the first time around 4+ years ago, but it just seems like its unreasonable to ask Blizzard to go back and continue to make old content viable this long after release when the vast majority of their playerbase has already done it and/or doesn't care to do it.

[Inactiviste]

We might agree on the fact that 1-79 is a tutorial. That's a damn expensive tutorial tough, and damn long too : if new players need a tutorial, make it 10 to 20 hours, and actually learn them to play their classes in a way that will help them when they reach the "true game".

To be frank, I don't care if they can't change Wow at that point. The game was (and still is) perfectly fine for what it is, but evethough it was a shining success doesn't mean it didn't have design flaws, which can be prevented now that they've been exposed (but as always with success, weren't they obfuscated by the 10 + millions sub ?).

You have two problems to solve when you build an MMO.

First, players who want or sometimes don't want to play together. They're your customers, so the best you can do is accommodate them. Want to play with 2 friends, and only with them ? Fine. It's quite hard to balance, but the first thing a MMO designer has to ask himself is : "How will I help people cooperate ? How will I incite (not force) them to ?" So use scaling, tutoring, whatever to achieve that. Easier to say than to do, I know.

Second, your ressources are limited. Even when you're Blizzard. So use them carefully, try not to waste them. I mean what percentage of Wow's assets are still relevant today ? A lot of work has been thrown away, and is actually useless now. That's a very wasteful design. It's not really surprising, as it is how our consumer society works : if it's too old or broken, don't mend it, throw it away ! Produce more, always more. Actually, it doesn't have to be like this. I don't have a solution obviously, but why couldn't a MMO consider the land it builds as maps rather than actual places... People are perfectly (more or less) happy to play in fucking Warsong four years latter. Instead of making Westfall a 10-20 zone, why don't treat as a map, that you happen to visit when you're 10-20 but have an opportunity to go to at max level ? The zone in itself is pretty interesting, would it be that expensive to tweak it for higher level players ? Same thing with dungeons. Maybe in a game designed as Wow it is, but then I'm not talking about Wow, as I said earlier.

[Musashi]

I bear some responsibility for this.  It's not what I intended.  I realized it when it was already too late.

Soooo.

Casuals and Cats can live together.  Next topic.

---

The thought of a new IP for the next MMO is exciting no?  Please speculate oh how you'd love a 'steampunk' setting.

OH I KNOW WHAT WILL GET THIS TREAD ON TRACK!

Steampunk is stupid.  It's a stupid word.  STUPID.  Why is there a world full of copper tubing and punk rockers?  Do punks have a secrit plumbing society?

[Lantyssa]

1-59 is the tutorial, the real game begins at 60.
1-69 is the tutorial, the real game begins at 70.
1-79 is the tutorial, the real game begins at 80.
1-(n-1) is the tutorial, the real game begins at n.

Funny how that line of thinking causes them to expand the game by increasing the number of tutorial levels with each expansion.

Blizzard themselves recognizes the problem, else DKs wouldn't start at 55 and the refer-a-friend program wouldn't offer triple xp and gifted levels.  Now they may not want to spend the resources to make the old content relavent again, but I can guarantee you that having wasted content (how many years of effort went into the 'tutorial' again?) isn't seen as a good thing.

[Musashi]

DAMN YOU!

[tmp]

You can't even say it's the tutorial, really. Not when the player is told to skip the group content until they're at level cap as way to get through it. Because with this setup the supposed tutorial teaches the player nothing about how to play in group, which is one of the "fun" activities they're expected to take part in, once they hit that l.80 or whatever.

[Lantyssa]

DAMN YOU!

Sorry, when I'm in a grumpy mood I don't stop until the stupid is throughly crushed.

Also we have nothing to go on, so speculation threads are pretty pointless at this stage.  I'd rather analyze where they have room for improvement in the next iteration.

[Ghambit]

Maybe Blizz is making something further along technologically, like an Augmented Reality console.
Perhaps we shall be raiding together in community gyms all over the world with our wooden Bluetooth swords!   

[Nonentity]

I'm curious as to what genre Blizzard is going to cover with this new MMO.

They have two genres of fantasy covered with Diablo and Warcraft, so yet another variation on fantasy somehow seems unlikely. They have sci-fi covered with Starcraft.

They like having total creative freedom, so doing anything based in modern day seems unlikely. Maybe some weird alternate reality modern day?

Lets not beat around the bush - Blizzard needs to make their new IP be a cyberpunk IP.

[WindupAtheist]

And healing people is jolly good fun?

No. Fuck all that shit. The whole raiding/diku dynamic needs to go have a seat. It's a relic. If raids and anything else offered the same level of reward, 95% of everyone would do the "anything else" and forget the raiding game even existed. And we all know it.

"But WUA!" someone will say. "Raiding should offer the best rewards since it requires lots of logistical overhead and organization!"

Who really cares? A game's job is to entertain people, not train them in logistical coordination. What exactly is the rationale behind the idea that using loot to browbeat people into cooperative activities (that they likely wouldn't bother with if all things were equal) is a good idea? If it's a case of "Well then players will form social bonds, and those bonds encourage retention, and the end result is that we'll eventually make more money!" then I'm calling bullshit. That's no different than the rationale behind forced grouping, downtime, and all that other diku-related crap that has already fallen by the wayside.

It's not like Blizzard is just going to roll back WoW and install D2 on there servers, right?

Blizzard isn't going to make any real drastic changes to the status quo this late in the game, so who gives a shit? I'm talking about MMO design in general, and if one game's solo content plays like Diablo 2, or God of War plus loot, or whatever? And the other game's solo content is SimRaid with you plus 24 bots? Yeah, I think I know which one more people will want to play.

[Venkman]

Raids started as dungeon romps. Players themselves brought the desire to endlessly repeat the damned things. And that desire came from the reality that at the level cap, the desire to continue improving a character ran head first into the lack of new levels to attain. What was left was gear that was originally intended to be rare. But long before TCGs reminded everyone, rarity isn't a state as much as it sets up a goal.

Fast forward two decades and you get people wanting to raid but not being willing to adjust their lifestyle and/or expectations to do it. But they still retain the desire to continue improving their character, because that's what a casino does to people. It's never about the current win, but the next one. Just one more job. MMOs are not unique in motivating people like this.

WoW has a solo endgame. It's called faction grinding and Battlegrounds. Oh, yea, BGs require other people, but you don't need to give a shit who shows up, and in some cases, not even really care how well they do their job. So it's solo against NPCs with player names instead. That was before Wintergrasp though, a place I haven't been, so this rule could be different now.

[Sheepherder]

Blizzard isn't going to make any real drastic changes to the status quo this late in the game, so who gives a shit? I'm talking about MMO design in general, and if one game's solo content plays like Diablo 2, or God of War plus loot, or whatever?

Which doesn't answer the statement that you cannot create a "solo" endgame in a DIKU without grind and/or lowered expectations on the players, which mine did.  There's one huge problem with the endgame in D2 though: Blizzard didn't include a CD-Key for my expansion in the battle chest.  Motherfuckers.

[Ghambit]

Personally, I think the most well setup group dungeon experience is DDO.  But, I havent played that game in ages.

Large Raids, however, could easily (to me) just be morphed into elaborate public quests - which is where you see a lot of companies going with design.

And if you really get down to why some folks dont like raiding, it's usually because of the pain in the ass it is to find a nice guild and/or group of people to play with.  Has nothing to do with the philosophy of the raid itself.  That's why PQs are pretty much the future, because they give the option of being guilded or not.  They just need to be implemented a bit more elaborately then they are currently.

[Musashi]

And healing people is jolly good fun?

No. Fuck all that shit. The whole raiding/diku dynamic needs to go have a seat. It's a relic. If raids and anything else offered the same level of reward, 95% of everyone would do the "anything else" and forget the raiding game even existed. And we all know it.

"But WUA!" someone will say. "Raiding should offer the best rewards since it requires lots of logistical overhead and organization!"

Who really cares? A game's job is to entertain people, not train them in logistical coordination. What exactly is the rationale behind the idea that using loot to browbeat people into cooperative activities (that they likely wouldn't bother with if all things were equal) is a good idea? If it's a case of "Well then players will form social bonds, and those bonds encourage retention, and the end result is that we'll eventually make more money!" then I'm calling bullshit. That's no different than the rationale behind forced grouping, downtime, and all that other diku-related crap that has already fallen by the wayside.

It's not like Blizzard is just going to roll back WoW and install D2 on there servers, right?

Blizzard isn't going to make any real drastic changes to the status quo this late in the game, so who gives a shit? I'm talking about MMO design in general, and if one game's solo content plays like Diablo 2, or God of War plus loot, or whatever? And the other game's solo content is SimRaid with you plus 24 bots? Yeah, I think I know which one more people will want to play.

I am entertained by tanking, healing, logistical overhead, and organization.  I am not insulted that you find me batshit insane.  In fact I may well be.  But dude, get the fuck off my lawn.

[Bzalthek]

Everyone wants the next game to be their lawn, though.  And everyone is insulted when someone else wants to change what they perceive as their lawn.

Because people are self-centered shit bags.

[Tuncal]

I don't think it's a matter of solo vs group as much as a matter of accessibility. Raids are incredibly unfriendly to most players because they need heavy logistics and specific class distribution, with all the headaches that ensures. Whereas content that can be approached in a more impromptu manner (by giving one the option of joining alone into a group activity without needed a preformed group) should be much more attractive to the majority of players - public quests and battlegrounds are a good start, just need to polish and scale them properly. After all, why are battlegrounds at least if not far more popular than 5 man arenas, even though they have 2-3 times more players in them?

[Margalis]

To hear you guys talk it's almost as if you believe there is a game buried any place in WOW.

The reality is that levels 1-79 are the tutorial and then the game ends.

[Azuredream]

I enjoyed the tutorial.

[WindupAtheist]

Whereas content that can be approached in a more impromptu manner (by giving one the option of joining alone into a group activity without needed a preformed group) should be much more attractive to the majority of players

UO does this with PVE in what's called the Doom Gauntlet. It spawns a number of bosses proportionate to the number of players present, each of which has a certain chance of horking up an item for anyone who does (or is grouped with someone who does) over X amount of damage. So there's basically havoc as three or four bosses are fought simultaneously by maybe a guild group of 5 people, a couple groups of 2 or 3, and half a dozen loners.

The fights aren't as elaborate (or gimmicky, depending on your point of view) as modern diku boss fights, but the encounters can be relatively unpredictable in a "Oh shit that newb pulled all 3 over here at once, move!" sort of way, which can be fun in itself.

[Teleku]

To hear you guys talk it's almost as if you believe there is a game buried any place in WOW.

The reality is that levels 1-79 are the tutorial and then the game ends.

The tutorial was a better game than the majority I've ever played.  It also kept me entertained longer than any other game has.