Cataclysm

[Lantyssa]

Just because they were lucky before doesn't mean they weren't always the C-team.

[Kail]

I don't get why Blizzard thought harder heroics were a good idea in the first place.

Personally, I don't mind the idea of hard Heroics.  It gives the game more of a feeling that 5-mans are something you can do as endgame content, rather than just being a step on the way to raiding.  The problem is that the public perception is (justifiably) that Heroics are something you have to do to gear up, rather than an optional "extra difficult" mode.

If they changed Normals to be the Cataclysm equivalent of WotLK Heroics (good gear, quick faceroll AoE fest), they could pull Heroics off the LFG system, which they really, really should do because "the most challenging five man content in the game" is not something you should have a reasonable chance of success at with five literally random guys who have never met before.  Let normal modes be for the masses/casuals looking to gear up or kill a few minutes, and let heroics be an extra challenge for the people who want the achievements, or organized groups looking to gear up quickly.  The problem isn't just that they're too hard per se, it's the triple threat of "everyone needs to run Heroics to gear up", "random pugs are full of retards" and "Heroics are the most challenging 5-man content in the game".

[Ingmar]

Yeah to me the issue arises when the prerequisite for raiding is heroics, but heroics are actually harder to get done than raids. If normals were the prerequisite for both, and there was a fork where you could go to either the raiding or the 5 man heroics it would be more sensible. Something like normals drop 333s, heroic 5s and regular raids drop 346s, and then heroic raids get the 359s (or 353s if you would rather go a half tier on heroic raids) would seem like a more sensible model in a heroics-are-meant-to-be-really-hard world.

[Evildrider]

I liked the harder heroics, however now that most of us are getting geared up, they are becoming pretty trivial.  Most of my guild are in the 350-359 ilevel range and we aren't even using CC anymore for any of them.  We just pull and burn, not much different than we were doing in ICC.  The only thing is that most of the dungeons in cata are a bit longer than they were in wotlk.  I will admit at the start though they were a pain in the ass, but after learning the dungeons and adjusting our styles away from the ICC days its become just as easy.

[Sheepherder]

C-team and trying to design for the customer they wanted instead of the customers they had.

Except being lucky for six years and counting is stretching credibility.

Really, for the most part the game is better than it's ever been until you start hitting the Cataclysm dungeons, at which point you discover that Blackrock Caverns and Lost City are the only dungeons that aren't overly long, full of bullshit trash pulls, or contain ridiculously punitive boss mechanics.

[Merusk]

C-team and trying to design for the customer they wanted instead of the customers they had.

Except being lucky for six years and counting is stretching credibility.

Except said C-team weren't in charge that whole 6 years. They took over midway through WOTLK's dev, when things for WOTLK were already plotted out, planned and in development.   Ghostcrawler, for example, wasn't hired until 2008 and took over when LK was already in beta. 

We can't say anything about who else worked on it, because guess what.  Cata is the first game Blizzard hasn't released game credits for.   You can't find it listed at Moby, there's no credits in the box and I can't find 'em on the web.  That's just plain weird but it sure doesn't scream A-list.

[Sheepherder]

Try the "Credits" button on the login screen.  Alternatively, you can save yourself the time and take my word that only a few people have appeared / disappeared between Wrath and Cataclysm, it looks like none of the dungeon/level/encounter design people have changed.

But hey, I bet it was Pardo and Kaplan who were driving the newbie-friendliness of Warcraft, amirite?

[Paelos]

It's not a mystery guys, and it's not "C team" or whatever crazy thing somebody thinks when the game doesn't go their way.

The reality is they fixed a lot of the things that needed fixing. Questing up was dull as shit and didn't make sense. They fixed it. Healing was horrifically spammy and repetitive. They fixed that. Heroic dungeons had lost all meaning. They fixed that. People were guild hopping like crazy. They fixed that.

The only problem with fixing the problems is that the fixes because the new problems. Somewhere in process of improving the game they never stopped to ask themselves if they should try to improve those areas.

[apocrypha]

I don't get why Blizzard thought harder heroics were a good idea in the first place.

Because the forums were full of people screaming that heroics were faceroll. This forum is no exception, I distinctly remember people wistfully hoping for more challenging experiences and bemoaning brainless zerg-fest AOE heroic pugs.

[Paelos]

And we were right. Players on this board could handle it quite simply. The problem with harder heroics was the drag it put on everybody else, and that was noted by people on this board as well. In fact, well before it came to pass, almost everyone here agreed that making heroics harder was a terrible idea, even if they were faceroll boring right now, because of the pug dumbass factor.

[Lantyssa]

I don't bother to analyze the comings and goings on at a low level.  I don't pay that much attention to the companies which produce games I love.  Why would I do so with a massive studio for a game I don't play?

I've commented where I think they've had missteps.  C-team is just a way to generalize in a derogatory fashion that they've lost their way.  Don't read too much into it.

[Paelos]

I don't bother to analyze the comings and goings on at a low level.  I don't pay that much attention to the companies which produce games I love.  Why would I do so with a massive studio for a game I don't play?

I've commented where I think they've had missteps.  C-team is just a way to generalize in a derogatory fashion that they've lost their way.  Don't read too much into it.

I guess my counterpoint to that is I don't believe they've lost their way. I think they've managed to correctly identify issues and address them in a manner that created new holes in the hull. I believe their logic was sound, and they have every chance to move things in the right direction.

That being said, I also believe that any idiot could have told them that the logical fix wasn't going to be the correct one when you have illogical players.

[Lantyssa]

That being said, I also believe that any idiot could have told them that the logical fix wasn't going to be the correct one when you have illogical players.

Not accounting for that is why I don't think they made the perfectly logical choices and why I keep bringing up taking your customers into account.

[Paelos]

That being said, I also believe that any idiot could have told them that the logical fix wasn't going to be the correct one when you have illogical players.

Not accounting for that is why I don't think they made the perfectly logical choices and why I keep bringing up taking your customers into account.

True. While it's an admirable goal to design a better mousetrap, it won't work if your mice don't like the bait or are too stupid to fall into it.

[Azuredream]

People were guild hopping like crazy. They fixed that.

I don't really get this one. I don't remember seeing people hopping guilds like crazy, and even if they were, who cares?

[Shrike]

The reality is they fixed a lot of the things that needed fixing. Questing up was dull as shit and didn't make sense. They fixed it. Healing was horrifically spammy and repetitive. They fixed that. Heroic dungeons had lost all meaning. They fixed that. People were guild hopping like crazy. They fixed that.

Not sure if fixed is the right word for all of those. Yeah, the low level questing was redone and done damned well. Cool as hell. Better like alts, though. I could care fuck less about healing, so we'll leave that alone.

Fixed heroics? Yeah, whatever. They were broken as hell in TBC. How many actually did them? None of my friends did. Only a few in my guild did (those with CC). If you didn't have CC, you fucking well didn't do heroic dungeons in TBC. In Wrath, you did the hell out of them. Too easy? Eh, when you had T9+ gear, yeah. I remember what they were like in blues, though, and they weren't that easy.

Fixed guild hopping? Maybe among the most rabid of progression raiders, but they did a lot of damage to guilds below that level. All that guild rep and such means jackshit when you can't play the game how you want. Ask me how i know. I'd been in the same guild since vanilla--5 years. I had to dump that guild--which I was exalted in--to try and find someone I could play with. Since January, I've been in four guilds trying to find a new guild. I might have found a new home last night. Been three months of pure frustration until now, though. They fixed my wagon but good in Cata.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Q: Is it possible to let the players create/edit their own looks? - Zed Loft (Taiwan), Vysha (NA/ANZ), Ráchel (EU|German)

A: As we said in an earlier Q&A, we definitely hear loud and clear from players that they want more customization for their character. This is something we want to provide, but we want to do it in the right way. Consider the Barber Shop feature. It lets you change your character's hair, but there’s not a lot of gameplay to it. We're not sure that feature really added a lot to the game in retrospect. Is WoW more fun for you now that you have a Barber Shop? Are you more likely to keep playing because of it? Maybe, but it wasn’t a cheap feature to add in terms of development time. Dumping a bunch of dyes on the game might have a similar effect, where some players might have fun playing around with the system for a bit, but a lot of players might change their colors once or twice and then forget about the feature after that. Now, not every aspect of the game needs a ton of depth and a lot of interesting decisions, but we tend to attract more players to a feature the more robust the feature is.

We also think it's fair to argue that the game just needs more armor and weapon art. As we said above, we deliver a lot of art these days, but we also produce an enormous number of new items every expansion or patch and it’s understandably disappointing whenever items use the same art. It would be really cool if not every mage or priest converged on the same look after a given expansion or patch.

This answer from the Q/A is very telling for me because it really brings out the Mcdonalds attitude that was seems to have adopted where they try to please the most possible people with the least effort.  No longer is the blizzard motto "but is it fun?" it has shifted to "Can we profit the most from this?"

[Rendakor]

That's not a new attitude from Blizzard; I remember time and again seeing Caydiem (sp?) on the vanilla forums saying that Feature_X wasn't likely to be implemented because it only provides content for a fraction of players and is thus an inefficient use of dev time.

[Paelos]

That's not a new attitude from Blizzard; I remember time and again seeing Caydiem (sp?) on the vanilla forums saying that Feature_X wasn't likely to be implemented because it only provides content for a fraction of players and is thus an inefficient use of dev time.

Every time I hear that, I roll my eyes that they tried to implement their own voice chat. Or that they continue to push arenas. Or that they created Archeology.

Fixed heroics? Yeah, whatever. They were broken as hell in TBC. How many actually did them? None of my friends did. Only a few in my guild did (those with CC). If you didn't have CC, you fucking well didn't do heroic dungeons in TBC. In Wrath, you did the hell out of them. Too easy? Eh, when you had T9+ gear, yeah. I remember what they were like in blues, though, and they weren't that easy.

Short answer? In TBC it was, LFM tank and CC. If you ran heroics you brought a tank, healer, warlock, mage, and a filler dps. In Wrath you brought whatever you want because it didn't matter. What we have now is something in between, but not as bad as TBC by any stretch. Nor did you have the enforced attunements that ran right through the bad heroics.

[Rokal]

New blog is out about the "Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms" feature in 4.1 that will bribe more tanks and healers into the queue with mounts, pets, and gold. It's nice to have more incentive to tank a PuG Heroic after you have already geared up your tank, but it doesn't really change the fact that these dungeons have gotten pretty stale since Cata's Launch. My guild is eagerly awaiting 4.1's new heroics, as it will be something new to do on the 5 nights that we do not raid.

Edit: and of course people are already complaining about how this will unfairly only benefit tanks, completely ignoring that it is intended to lower DPS queues and that these mounts and pets are available elsewhere through normal gameplay. This game's community is awesome.

[caladein]

Ideally population balance should just arise naturally from the game's design, but bribery is an effective kludge.

[Sjofn]

We also think it's fair to argue that the game just needs more armor and weapon art. As we said above, we deliver a lot of art these days, but we also produce an enormous number of new items every expansion or patch and it’s understandably disappointing whenever items use the same art. It would be really cool if not every mage or priest converged on the same look after a given expansion or patch.

FFFFFFFF

If you assholes keep sticking with the tier gear system - which is FINE from a carrot standpoint - WE ARE ALWAYS ALL GOING TO LOOK THE SAME. PERIOD. It doesn't matter how much goddamn art they poop out, people are going to be wearing THE TOP TWO TIERS OF SHIT and ALL LOOK THE SAME.

It isn't rocket surgery, RARGH.

[Merusk]

Bribery runs into the same problem as Valor points.  Once I have all the pets and mounts (which I'm damn near to on my DK, never mind the tanks who are 6-year vets)  what's keeping me in the queue?

Also, since it's only Dungeon Pets and mounts it's not even that deep a pool of incentives.   I'd rather do the 33 strath runs it took me to get the Deathcharger than PUG Tank 33 heroics for it.  It took less time, was a net gain of money and I didn't have to deal with idiots.

Ed: Note that I discount gems, gold and flasks because, fuck'em.  Gold is more common than water, gems are of limited use once you're equipped which only leads to more gold and flasks are trivial for anyone who actually needs them, aka those in a raid guild.  (Hello Cauldrons & Guild Perks.)

[Fabricated]

oh god...please, please tank and heal, we don't know what to do, what can we give you fuckers so that you'll play a role that's either boring-yet-demanding or stupidly difficult?

[Paelos]

Edit: and of course people are already complaining about how this will unfairly only benefit tanks, completely ignoring that it is intended to lower DPS queues and that these mounts and pets are available elsewhere through normal gameplay. This game's community is awesome.

The dps absolutely shitting a brick over this is hilarious. Also:

We don't feel the tanking and healing roles have any inherent issues that are causing the representation disparity, except that fulfilling them carries more responsibility. Understandably, players prefer to take on that responsibility in more organized situations than what the Dungeon Finder offers, but perhaps we can bribe them a little.

While I agree with them on tanks that the social problems are what causes them to stop, I don't believe simply throwing your hands up and bribing them is a really good solution. Also, I totally disagree with them that the reason there are less healers is due to the responsibility, and not the fact that they made healing much harder to perform correctly.

[Rokal]

Bribery runs into the same problem as Valor points.  Once I have all the pets and mounts (which I'm damn near to on my DK, never mind the tanks who are 6-year vets)  what's keeping me in the queue?

It's not a given that you will get the pet or mount that you want, unlike VP, so the carrot in this case probably has much longer legs than the VP grind. If you do get all the pets and mounts (which will probably mean you have done a *ton* of PuG Heroics, and already have helped to lower DPS queues), then all you have left is the gold/gems/flasks. You might as well just say gold/gold/gold, really. If tanking a daily heroic granted me 500g worth of gold instead of 75g (or whatever the number is now), I'd still be more inclined to do it. Maybe I use that money to buy mats for my guild cauldron, fund some items for an alt, power level a profession via the AH, or just throw it at other mounts/pets I'm missing that aren't available in LFD.

[Merusk]

While I agree with them on tanks that the social problems are what causes them to stop, I don't believe simply throwing your hands up and bribing them is a really good solution. Also, I totally disagree with them that the reason there are less healers is due to the responsibility, and not the fact that they made healing much harder to perform correctly.

It's both.  Nobody likes getting yelled at, which happens to the healer role most often because stupid people heap responsibility for their survival (unfairly) on the healer instead of their own shoulders.  I sure don't want to be responsible for most of the jackasses I was tossed into the RDF with.

On top of that the likelihood of getting yelled at was increased with the changes to difficulty of healing, mana and heroics.  It was easier for people to die, which is of course the healer's fault because "zomg I'm the best player ever. It's clearly you who suck!"


Ed:  Roq, yes it's got longer legs but how much longer, really?  If it's too small a chance those who really want them will just say "fuck it" and go farm them instead of queuing.  If it's too great they'll burn through the list quick enough it won't matter.   Either way the end result is tanks not queuing again.

As for gold, I keep forgetting how many people still have gold problems.  I quit the game with over 15k gold even after raising 3 characters tradeskills to cap.    I was also one of the 'poor' ones  in my raiding guild.

Also, considering the game has very little to spend gold on anymore, to minimize RMT impact, is gold really that big an incentive?

[Lantyssa]

Cue DPS queuing as tanks and healers in 3... 2... 1...

[apocrypha]

Cue DPS queuing as tanks and healers in 3... 2... 1...

People only do this a few times though. Because heroic groups just don't work with DPS tanks & healers, so queuing inappropriately now is 90% likely to just give you a repair bill and a dungeon cooldown.

I think tank & healer bribery could work to reduce DPS queue times, but not with such pathetic bribes. Give special currency as rewards, remove the randomness and make the currency redeemable for decent rewards, but maybe from previous tiers. 100 heroics tanked gets you a Protodrake. 500 gets you an Ironbound one. 2000 gets you a phoenix.

Razzashi Hatchlings and Raven Lords? Yeah get bent. DPS queue here I come.

[Zetor]

This also means that hunters/warlocks/rogues/mages are screwed... at least until WOW steals riftstalker / chloromancer design from rift. 

[Rokal]

They aren't getting screwed, they still get shorter queues with this change. If they want to tank or heal, they can always roll a tank or a healer. That would also effectively reduce DPS queues, and was the community-suggested "natural fix" prior to this change. The 1-60 stuff is much improved now, it's a great time to try out a new class (if you somehow haven't already in the last 6 years+). Between heirlooms and faster, more-efficient questing, 1-80 really flies by.

If hybrids queue as a tank and go with the intention of dpsing or just don't have any tanking gear, they aren't going to be rewarded for it. The group with either fail, or the 'tank' will be kicked if they really aren't willing or ready to tank. In either case, they aren't getting any reward out of it, the reward is only given upon the dungeon's completion.

I'm sure this will entice some people to queue as a tank when they don't have a lot of experience tanking, but that is a good thing for the game. It is another chance for people that might have been afraid to tank, or didn't know how to approach tanking, to learn how to tank. Considering that solo-queuing is a requirement to get the bonus, there is a good chance your group will have the +15% hp/damage/healing buff, which will go a long way towards making the dungeon smooth with a fledgling tank.

The most recent raid in LOTRO has pre-marked targets, just like the 'lucky charms' markings used in WoW. I wouldn't mind seeing this implemented in WoW heroic 5-mans, with the option to turn it off if it breaks your immersion or whatever. I think a "mark this shit for me" button is another thing WoW needs to make the tank's role in dungeons a little less demanding on the tank.

[caladein]

Razzashi Hatchlings and Raven Lords? Yeah get bent. DPS queue here I come.

Going by the things they listed, there's probably four (or six, if they include the new drakes) mounts and every rare drop/reputation pet in the cards.  About the only thing I'd add is making them BoA but still one-time-use so I could swap over to an alt for CoA but move the rewards over to another character.

[apocrypha]

OK, if the stone drakes and proto-drake are included that might be enough to tempt me.

[Lakov_Sanite]

A good point was brought up in the wow forums that tanks will with this system be less inclined to group up with people on their own server in order to get the rewards so that if a tank has a couple friends he plays with he would actually get less for playing with them.

[Paelos]

A good point was brought up in the wow forums that tanks will with this system be less inclined to group up with people on their own server in order to get the rewards so that if a tank has a couple friends he plays with he would actually get less for playing with them.

It's one of those unintentional consequences that Blizzard doesn't seem able to grasp so far with this expansion. Sort of like the guild rep thing.