Blizzard's VP of Game Design admits Arenas the biggest mistake.

[WindupAtheist]

What I was getting at was this: In today's business environment admitting that you have any weakness can lead to bad things.  It's a very PC world now.  This developer's personal opinion should never been made public.

Tigole got up there at GDC earlier this year and did a presentation on "mistakes we made in quest design for WoW" where he basically went "Vehicles, that major feature of the huge expansion we launched a few months ago? Sucked!" Blizzard doesn't give a damn.

[Fordel]

Yea, I'm not sure how much of that can apply to WoW. Unless you consider being unwilling to re-roll a 'mental block'.

Now that most classes have at least a viable spec I think it brings it a bit closer to the CCG paradigm, since most people could just respec to a potentially viable character rather than having to reroll entirely.

Yea, that's a small consolation prize in the grand scheme of things.


The article mentions how people would be unwilling to use "Throw Cheese" or whatever. In WoW, I would be very hard pressed to see anyone actually do something like that, not use their class abilities because them deem them "cheap". The larger issue is so many spec/comps don't even have the "Throw" ability to begin with.

If anything, the majority of MMO players are more then willing to abuse the crap out of anything that gives them an advantage, be it pve or pvp, hardcore or casual.

[Ingmar]

Oh, the actual article is kind of bullshit, we had a thread back a while about it I think. This is the CoH pvp troll right?

Never mind, I made an assumption without going to actually read it.

In a WoW context, the 'scrubs' he talks about would be the people constantly crying about how OP death knights are on the forums, or whatever. Or maybe the moonkin and protection warrior who steadfastly refuse to go resto/arms for arena.  That they have (or had, or have again, whatever) a point doesn't matter from the perspective of the article.

[Fordel]

No, the article is actually spot on in many regards, especially about how lots and lots of people make non-existent rules for games. I do it all the time myself for lots of games, I generally won't "rush" in a friendly RTS game. Or look at DaoC and all the GankGroup "rules" for what was and wasn't a legitimate group vs group fight.

I don't think that kind of mental block is really holding anyone back in WoW, unless like I said, you want to include the unwillingness to always follow the current patch balance and re-roll (or spec, or gear or etc). We all 'abuse' every damn advantage we have, all the time.

[Ingmar]

No, the article is actually spot on in many regards, especially about how lots and lots of people make non-existent rules for games. I do it all the time myself for lots of games, I generally won't "rush" in a friendly RTS game. Or look at DaoC and all the GankGroup "rules" for what was and wasn't a legitimate group vs group fight.

I don't think that kind of mental block is really holding anyone back in WoW, unless like I said, you want to include the unwillingness to always follow the current patch balance and re-roll (or spec, or gear or etc). We all 'abuse' every damn advantage we have, all the time.

Well, I think you kind of have to include that. When you and I sit down at what is essentially our character select screen for arena, we have (to simplify it to just the 2 characters) 3 options each. But we always pick Dhalsim.  We're shutting off options that we have easy access to because we've constructed our own little game with our own self-imposed rules - let's see if we can do arena with this weird comp. We're not PLAYING TO WIN in the sense of the article.

[WindupAtheist]

If I spent months and months leveling Dhalsim and getting him gear, switching to Ryu required the same, and I couldn't be sure Ryu wasn't going to get nerfed into the new Dhalsim anyway, I'd probably just keep picking him too.

[Ingmar]

If I spent months and months leveling Dhalsim and getting him gear, switching to Ryu required the same, and I couldn't be sure Ryu wasn't going to get nerfed into the new Dhalsim anyway, I'd probably just keep picking him too.

In this specific context I'm talking about respeccing to another spec within the class, that happens to largely share (or is able to share) the same gear for pvp purposes. Fordel would be going from boomkin -> resto druid, I'd be going from protection warrior -> arms warrior. Yeah his gear wouldn't be *exactly* optimal but it is close enough for the purposes of the discussion (and wouldn't take months to get his set bonuses squared away, since we'd be upgrading piece by piece as we went either way). All I'd have to do is get a 2h enchanted. For a couple classes the distinctions between specs are greater (going from feral to resto, or enhance shaman to elemental, ret to holy, or whatever) and no, for those examples the analogy doesn't hold up as well.

[sinij]

Funny to see all these people trying to justify why they are at the bottom 10% of the ladder and not top 10%.  It always, "if not for our gear/addons/classes/whatever, we too could be Gladiators". Instead it always the same crew of people that gets gladiators regardless of class they play any given season, followed by duelists crowd. Only challengers get good turnover, people ether move up or don't come back.

I can understand someone when they say - I got to 1800 but my ilevel200 gear really holding me back. No, its always decently geared perma-noob complaining that they can't get past 1200.

Stop making excuses and spend time getting better, or accept that PvP isn't for you and stay away from it. Very few people are born to be natural PvPers, for most of us it takes research and practice. You too will have to practice to get out of bottom half of the ladder.

[tazelbain]

LERN2PLAY!

[Fordel]

Technically, we are officially "challengers" as far as WoW Arena is concerned.  



-edit- Ing, you are underestimating the impact of Resto vs. Balance gear.

[WindupAtheist]

Who wants to bet that Arena is going to get de-emphasized in the next xpac in favor of rated Battlegrounds, and that we're still gonna be hearing tears from Sinij about it five years from now?

 

[Sir T]

"Hey mom! Why didn't you give me Autism so I could spend days grinding without a stop and be in the top 10% in a computer game?"

Fuck sake, I'm known for never sleeping and being on all hours in Eve. I know it's unhealthy and I'm trying not to do it anymore. If you need to have borderline Asperger's to "be successful in PVP or don't bother" then there is something seriously wrong with the game/genre. Encouraging people to be like that or pretending they are somehow superior is unhealthy.

[Venkman]

Why is anyone surprised? You can unravel the people in the top tier of anything to see the sequence of life events that lead them there, and which keep everyone else out. This is games, sports, politics, economics. I know some people like this idea that games start everyone at a level playing field. But that hasn't been true since before people started recognizing it.

Personality, life station, family, personality, mental differences, it all contributes.

This is why it's so important to know oneself. It becomes easier to recognize what you can and can't get good at so you can focus your attention on what you can do well.

I expect someone to come along and say "you can be good at anything you put your mind to", and that's true, as long as you're using the word good and not the word best.

[Hoax]

Why is anyone surprised? You can unravel the people in the top tier of anything to see the sequence of life events that lead them there, and which keep everyone else out. This is games, sports, politics, economics. I know some people like this idea that games start everyone at a level playing field. But that hasn't been true since before people started recognizing it.

Personality, life station, family, personality, mental differences, it all contributes.

This is why it's so important to know oneself. It becomes easier to recognize what you can and can't get good at so you can focus your attention on what you can do well.

I expect someone to come along and say "you can be good at anything you put your mind to", and that's true, as long as you're using the word good and not the word best.

[Lantyssa]

Why is anyone surprised? You can unravel the people in the top tier of anything to see the sequence of life events that lead them there, and which keep everyone else out. This is games, sports, politics, economics. I know some people like this idea that games start everyone at a level playing field. But that hasn't been true since before people started recognizing it.

While true, there is no reason in a game that certain reasonable balance is not done.

PvP which is gear dependent?  Seriously?  If you had Fordel and myself square off against one another he would crush me.  Sure he's more skilled, but his equipment simply puts mine to shame.  Twice the health, probably multiples of damage output, yet our levels are the same and specs nearly identical.  Skill would be orders of magnitude less significant.

Now if arena really interested me I could put in a lot of effort to improve my gear, but then I wouldn't be doing arena while trying to do arena.  And if arena only vaguely interests me, I won't bother putting in the time to get the gear to make practice worth doing.  It greatly narrows the number of participants before you even get into arguments of skill.  All you have left are the people with enough skill to not be discouraged, enough time to gear up, and enough desire to actually want to go to the arena.

And it's surprising they say the way things are designed have been a mistake?  Heh.  Right.

[tmp]

PvP which is gear dependent?  Seriously?

As serious as a number of car racing sports, i'd figure. Just much, much cheaper to participate.

[Ingmar]

Or CCG/CMGs, which require investment too.

EDIT: I don't think they see it as a mistake because it has fairly limited participation, I think they see it as a mistake because of the balance impact it has had on their bread-and-butter PVE game. At least that's what I took away from the interview.

[Fordel]

It's the way it effected every aspect of the game, even the Arena's themselves.

Each bracket has infected the other brackets 'balance' wise. To the point where they finally gave up on the 2v2 bracket even.

[Gobbeldygook]

"Hey mom! Why didn't you give me Autism so I could spend days grinding without a stop and be in the top 10% in a computer game?"

That would be an accurate description of the old High Warlord system, but it really, really isn't an accurate description of the current arena system.  The process of getting a complete set of PVP gear can be done on less than an hour of play a day over a couple of weeks to months (Wintergrasp twice a week for about ~30k honor/week + play 10 matches a week + do VOA).  You can spend the rest of your time doing PVE to speed up the gearing process, watching movies, playing with your kids, whatever.  Once you're seriously playing, arenas won't eat up that much of your time.  Even top teams typically spend less than 4 hours a week doing arenas, although you'll still want to do the wintergrasp/voa stuff on top of that.  What destroys your time is getting sucked into it on your alts and in multiple brackets.

Slog told me to mention that he rage cancelled WoW after a two hour arena match.  Changes have been made so that doesn't happen anymore.

PvP which is gear dependent?  Seriously?  If you had Fordel and myself square off against one another he would crush me.

All of the same for equalizing gear on entrance to the arena apply equally to BGs and PVE instances.  After all, why should Fordel do more damage in PVE just because he's been at it longer than you?

Each bracket has infected the other brackets 'balance' wise. To the point where they finally gave up on the 2v2 bracket even.

They've given up on the 5v5 bracket too.  Shaman are at over 90% representation on successful teams, paladins and priests aren't far behind at 80% each, and warlocks round out the top 4 at a mere 65%.

[Tuncal]

PvP which is gear dependent? 

I don't think gear progression in itself is the problem, rather the fact that they have that from the start instead of using it to differentiate the top players. Right now everyone lands in mostly the same gear after a few weeks playing and getting gear, while the player who just wants to start pvping is horribly crushed due to no resilience gear. The barrier to entry for PvP is stupidly high compared to PvE. They should give out a free set of resilience capped gear, and start the gear treadmill from there.

[Fordel]

5v5 has always had that issue though. Teams with Bloodlust > Teams without Bloodlust. It's just now you need to make sure that you also have offensive and defensive dispelling AND redundancies for both. Until they spread dispelling and Lust around, there can't be much variation in 5v5, at least not base class wise.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I have yet to see a single armory link.  Don't you just love internet tough guys?

[Ingmar]

Mine is in the WHERE DO YOU PLAY thread, if you really care enough to go look at it. It won't tell you much though.

[Sheepherder]

PvP which is gear dependent?  Seriously?  If you had Fordel and myself square off against one another he would crush me.

All of the same for equalizing gear on entrance to the arena apply equally to BGs and PVE instances.  After all, why should Fordel do more damage in PVE just because he's been at it longer than you?

That's a good idea.

Of course, with ToC, Blizzard is almost halfway there.

[Fordel]

Ironically, my PvE gear is still nothing more then Naxx 10 items!

[sinij]

They've given up on the 5v5 bracket too.

3v3 as well, its RMPs all the way down. Arena under current management isn't doing as well as it was doing in tBC. Rating requirements on all gear made sure various retards like WUAs just gave up and simply mediocre players took their place at the bottom.

This still doesn't change the fact that it is one of the last avenues of skill-driven competition left in WoW.

[Gobbeldygook]

3v3 as well, its RMPs all the way down.
[/quote]
No?  You can go look at SK-gamings statistics yourself.  RMP is only -9%- of the comps in their sample with MLS hot on it's heels.  That is not remotely comparable to the domination of disc priest/holy pal/ele sham/destro lock/+scrub in 5s.  Just the most popular variant, a hunter in the Scrub Spot, is 22% of all comps in their sample - over twice as common as RMP is in 3s.

[Zetor]

Funny to see all these people trying to justify why they are at the bottom 10% of the ladder and not top 10%.  It always, "if not for our gear/addons/classes/whatever, we too could be Gladiators". Instead it always the same crew of people that gets gladiators regardless of class they play any given season, followed by duelists crowd. Only challengers get good turnover, people ether move up or don't come back.

I can understand someone when they say - I got to 1800 but my ilevel200 gear really holding me back. No, its always decently geared perma-noob complaining that they can't get past 1200.

Stop making excuses and spend time getting better, or accept that PvP isn't for you and stay away from it. Very few people are born to be natural PvPers, for most of us it takes research and practice. You too will have to practice to get out of bottom half of the ladder.

I know you're trolling, but I'll feed you as one of 'those people' who thinks gear dependency in arena is stupid... and I'll still readily admit I'm not gladiator material (nor do I want to be). fyi I don't raid, so my characters only have i200 gear currently (except for the 2-3 pieces of badge gear and h-toc drops).

I got 1830-ish in season 3 5v5 (one of the 'most balanced seasons' if you ask an arena junkie) on an affliction warlock starting in blues and kara gear (though admittedly I got a set of pvp gear from points by the end) playing 10 games a week without vent, which was the very bottom for the rival cutoff (rival is top 3% to 10% according to blizzard). We beat plenty of players and teams that later on got duelist (and we were beaten by a lot of them, too) simply because we were a 4dps team that'd kill someone in 3 seconds if I got a healer in a fear. There is your "skill". :p

I also remember winning vs a gladiator pally/shaman/warrior 2-healer team in 3v3 while playing resto shaman - ele shaman - shadow priest (wizard cleave in feb 2008! f yeah!) due to getting crazy lucky with RNG and dropping the defensive stance warrior in 4 seconds with both healers feared (I actually have a screenshot of this if you want proof). I guess that's skill too.


edit: To preemptively clarify for readers with selective quoting skilz - I'm not saying "lol wow arena takes no skill and is unfun" (in fact I rather enjoyed playing arena back then), I'm saying other factors matter just as much (or more), and putting any sort of gear progression to it kind of defeats the point as a "skill game". Like it was stated about eleventy billion times, guild wars does it better, and adopting their model would do WOW arenas a lot of good, imo.

fake edit: I await an armory / arenajunkies account link sinij, or I'll forever think of you as a season5 challenger keyboard turner pally or dk.  

[pxib]

This sort of five page thread is exactly why Arenas are Blizzard's biggest mistake.

[WindupAtheist]

3v3 as well, its RMPs all the way down. Arena under current management isn't doing as well as it was doing in tBC. Rating requirements on all gear made sure various retards like WUAs just gave up and simply mediocre players took their place at the bottom.

Then a bunch of those players quit because now they're not getting any gear either, dragging even more people down into the "no gear" zone in a repetitive cycle where every one person who expects a reward requires X number of other people to play for nothing, until you're left with just an extraordinarily noisy leeter-than-thou minority that does nothing but highlight your intractable balance problems to the point that you find yourself going "YEAH THIS WASN'T A GREAT IDEA" in public interviews.

Which is neither here nor there, really. I don't even play that much WoW lately. I just really enjoy the Trammel parallels and you being on the wrong end of them AGAIN.

[Nevermore]

Blizzard should nuke all the arenas from orbit.  It's the only way to be sure.

[Fordel]

They don't even have to be nuked, just umm... 'de-centralized' or whatever you want to call it, which they are probably going to do slowly between now and Cataclysm expansion. It just needs to not be the end all of the PvP arms race.

[Gobbeldygook]

We beat plenty of players and teams that later on got duelist (and we were beaten by a lot of them, too) simply because we were a 4dps team that'd kill someone in 3 seconds if I got a healer in a fear. There is your "skill". :p

Part of 'skill' on live is recognizing the best comp among what you have available.  You won't necessarily have a good enough mage or resto shaman available to run MLS, or an ele shaman and a holy pal for classic wizard cleave, but if you can find a druid and a warrior you can run WLD.

Not to rip on you, but DPS-heavy comps that just tunnel vision the shit out of something tend to be easier to play - up to a point.  4 DPS can beat up on a lot of comps, but eventually the gimmick stops working and advancement stalls.  It's the same in 2s with double-dps: Much easier to play to Rival, much harder to play to Glad (if it was still available in 2s, anyway).  If your goal is just to get to 1800 for weapons though, rating's rating.

[Zetor]

We beat plenty of players and teams that later on got duelist (and we were beaten by a lot of them, too) simply because we were a 4dps team that'd kill someone in 3 seconds if I got a healer in a fear. There is your "skill". :p

Part of 'skill' on live is recognizing the best comp among what you have available.  You won't necessarily have a good enough mage or resto shaman available to run MLS, or an ele shaman and a holy pal for classic wizard cleave, but if you can find a druid and a warrior you can run WLD.

Not to rip on you, but DPS-heavy comps that just tunnel vision the shit out of something tend to be easier to play - up to a point.  4 DPS can beat up on a lot of comps, but eventually the gimmick stops working and advancement stalls.  It's the same in 2s with double-dps: Much easier to play to Rival, much harder to play to Glad (if it was still available in 2s, anyway).  If your goal is just to get to 1800 for weapons though, rating's rating.

Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with you on that... I don't consider myself some leet paragon of wow pvp (lol), and we played the most mindless compositon at the time (ask an arena junkie about mindless comps now, you'll get anything from wizard cleave to beastcleave to normal cleave to double healer). We didn't even have vent, all matches consisted of the main assist [ele shaman] choosing someone to nuke down and everyone going all tunnel vision on them. I'd toss up curse of tongues on healers + try to fear juggle / spell lock (holy pallies were the healer du jour in 2345/2346 FOTM comps at the time, so that helped), and assist with dots on the main target, but other than that, it was 'do pve dps rotation until someone dies, either from their side or ours'. As an affliction lock, I was ALWAYS the enemy kill target, so I spent a lot of time cheering my team on from the floor.

Keep in mind though that in season3, 2100 in 5v5 was gladiator range easily (there's a huge rating inflation in wotlk with the new system), we weren't THAT far off. Anyway, this is sort of a tangent... off a tangent... off a tangent. WOW pvp threads are awesome.  

[sinij]

Then a bunch of those players quit because now they're not getting any gear either, dragging even more people down into the "no gear" zone in a repetitive cycle

Filtering your usual drivel away, yes that is definitely an issue and exactly why Blizzard needs to remove rating reqs from majority of gear out there.

What you are wrong about is to why bottom quits. They stop participating because they don't get any meaningful rewards out of it, not because of victimization by antisocials or whatever psychobabble you chose to use these days. There has to be ding-gratz type of reward not tied to success to appeal to masses, but that goes contrary to 'even out playing field' requirement when these rewards are only given to successful.

Arena has to reward failure to gain mass appeal. :(