Greg 'Ghostcrawler' Street, Lead Systems Designer For World of Warcraft

As World of Warcraft prepares for the launch of its third expansion, Cataclysm, on December 7th, the design team is busily trying to finish all the new high level content, the destruction and rebuilding of Azeroth, and major changes to many of the game's systems and classes. At Blizzcon we spoke with Greg Street (a.k.a. Ghostcrawler), Lead Systems Designer for WoW, about Blizzard's goals for this expansion, the problems they're trying to solve, reasoning for the creation of a few new features, and why they aren't willing to simply throw more people at complicated projects. Read on for our discussion about World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.

Slashdot: With the previous expansions, it seems like one of the goals has been to make things more inclusive for raiders. Do think you've reached the end of the road in that regard? Are there still goals for the future?

Greg Street: We've got a lot of players into raiding now. I don't encounter too many players these days who say, "I want to raid but I'm not sure how," or "It's too hard." Particularly, the raids underneath Wintergrasp and soon Tol'Barad are super-easy for any group to just pick up and go do quickly. So I think we're doing a good job of being inclusive there. I think we need to, perhaps, pay a little more attention to the super-hardcore guys who felt a little neglected at times in Wrath of the Lich King.

Slashdot: These days the design team is working on solving social and psychological problems perhaps more than technical problems. What types of those are you working on now?

Greg Street: Something that has come up a lot is that cross-server battlegrounds and then the dungeon finder going cross server has eroded the sense of community within a server. It used to be, "I knew these guys," or "He was the best mage on the server," or things like that. It's much harder to identify that now. And another thing is the ability to hop from server to server so easily now. One of the things we're doing to work against that, a little bit — Tol'Barad will be like Wintergrasp, in that it's just your server, so hopefully you can get to know people a little better there. And then the big push we're making for guilds in Cataclysm. You're going to have achievements, and [you'll be able to] level your guild. It's something you can work together with your closest friends to try to accomplish.

Slashdot: Do you think that will supplement the permanence of guilds, making it easier for people to keep their guilds going?

Greg Street: I think the guild itself will mean something, and people will be reluctant to give up a guild they worked really hard on. I mean, it won't be impossible — we're not trying to fetter people too much.

Slashdot: For Cataclysm you're increasing health pools significantly, not to mention all the other numbers. Is mudflation becoming an issue for you?

Greg Street: We're pretty confident that the curve we have overall can keep going almost indefinitely. The numbers are solid in most cases. We used to have a problem where, say, critical strike rating can't go up any higher, because it's at 60 or 70 percent. The way combat ratings work now, I don't think we're in danger of the combat systems collapsing on themselves because of the numbers. I think we are at risk for them becoming hard to manage. Once players are saying, "I have 17,000,000 health," and everything just has so many zeroes on it, at that point we'll have to do something. I don't know if it's just lopping three zeroes off of everything, or what. I think the human brain loses the ability to parse numbers once they get beyond a certain size.

Slashdot: For heroic dungeons, are you trying to copy what you did in Wrath of the Lich King? How are those evolving?

Greg Street: I think the heroic dungeons will feel a little more like Burning Crusade. Hopefully it will be the best of Lich King and Burning Crusade. Part of what people remember about the Burning Crusade heroic dungeons was the "17 pulls of trash in between bosses," or something like that. Hopefully we can get through that a little quicker, but still have the bosses as a challenge, something players have to learn. We think that the encounters are a failure if players can go through a boss fight, and then when we ask them, "What was that boss doing? What was special that you had to do in that fight," and they say, "Well I didn't notice anything." Then we know that they're just overpowering it instead of having to learn the encounter.

Slashdot: You mentioned in the panel on Friday that a lot of that information — boss abilities, loot lists — are going to be integrated into the game. Where do you draw the line at what's OK to have in the game and what players can be expected to go on a website and look up?

Greg Street: I think the game needs to provide players the information they need to play the game. It's fine if they are trying to improve their damage-per-second (DPS) by one extra percent by visiting a fan site or a news site. It's very frustrating with boss abilities, to use that particular example... we've all been in dungeons where the leader says something like, "He's going to do some kind of fire thing, I think it's called.. Flame..something? I don't remember, but you'll recognize it when you see it." And everybody else asks, "What?"

I think in that example, the game is just hiding information from players that they need to function. Now, you can definitely take that too far. We could get to the point where there are mods that say, "Stand here! OK, now press this button. Now stand over here." And at some point, they're playing Dragon's Lair, or something, instead of having to do a real boss encounter.

Slashdot: Speaking of mods, Cataclysm is introducing some welcome changes to the UI. How do you decide what players need to look at and what you want to integrate with the base UI?

Greg Street: That's really tough, because we want World of Warcraft to be moddable, and we support the community — both the developers who make those mods and the players who use them. We try to look at when the players are saying something is essential. We made a system to manage gear because players were telling us, "I can't play without this mod, now. This mod is so important that you guys just need to offer this functionality." We did the same thing with the big raid frames. Too many players were telling us, "Your raid frames are just not at all functional. No reasonable person is going to do a World of Warcraft raid with the standard raid frames. We won't replace everything. The QuestHelper brand of mods are something else we looked at and said, "We just need to do more here. Clearly, players are asking for it."

Slashdot: Are there any UI elements that are on your radar right now, that you're thinking about revamping?

Greg Street: I think we could do a lot more with the Auction House UI. I think our mobile and cell phone Auction House is probably superior to our in-game version at this point. And there are some mods that have done a great job -- we don't want to automate that whole experience too much, but providing the information and storing it, I think we could do better at. We'd love, someday, to do a better version of Recount, or some of the damage meters. Now, when I say better — our version sucks, which is just the combat log you have to somehow have to keep track of. Players really like to know: "What was my DPS? What could I do better this time? What were my sources of damage?" We'd love to just build something like that into the game.

Slashdot: Yesterday's Live Raid was very cool. (Blizzard invited a well-known guild to participate in set of custom raid encounters. They spawned groups of bosses that were originally designed to be dealt with on their own and had the guild fight them in groups of four at a time. At the end, the main villain of the new expansion flew in, annihilated the raid, and then began nuking one of the game world's capital cities. Longer description, YouTube video.)

Greg Street: I'm glad it worked. That was scary.

Slashdot: Has there been any discussion on getting those events out to more players?

Greg Street: That would be very cool. They require a lot of overhead and testing. One of the things people in the audience couldn't appreciate was how our encounter designer up there was changing things on the fly. He was herding bosses, in some cases killing them, and respawning things, trying to keep it all working. Obviously we can't have a human running that stuff from behind the scenes. We'd have to make sure it's cool enough. But I love this idea that Orgrimmar is being attacked and you have to defend it.

Slashdot: Azeroth is getting a complete redesign. How long have you wanted to do that?

Greg Street: Oh, forever. A really big moment was when the programmers put in a way for the level designers to make cliffs that look like real cliffs. We did that in Howling Fjord, [a starting zone in Wrath of the Lich King]. And that was huge. Up until them, all the cliffs looked like — they would call it a scoop of mashed potatoes. It's kind of this rounded blob that doesn't exist in nature. So once they could make these very sheer cliffs, they said, "OK, we've got to go fix everything, now!" Because we couldn't do this before.

Enough things like that had piled up. Originally, for Cataclysm, we thought of hitting five or six zones that were either never very good — like, say, Hinterlands — or just hadn't stood the test of time well and needed some updating. But by the time we were done, it was hard to make Darkshore look awesome, but leave Felwood looking crappy. So we ended up just doing everything.

Slashdot: That seems like a lot of work.

Greg Street: It was a stupid amount of work.

Slashdot: Compared to the last two expansions, it seems like Cataclysm contains an expansion of similar size, plus all of that revamped content.

Greg Street: That's totally true. Probably, if we had more business sense, we'd have broken it into two expansions.

Slashdot: One of the Diablo 3 team's big reveals was the PvP Battle Arenas, which are clearly similar to World of Warcraft's PvP arenas. Are we going to see more integration for the WoW arenas with Battle.net?

Greg Street: We'll have to see. The big focus for Cataclysm, as far as PvP goes, is the rated battleground system. I think too much attention had turned to arenas, and it was defining PvP for a while. For a lot of people, Warcraft was about the war; it was about the Horde or the Alliance fighting over resources, not three gnomes chasing each other around an arena. We're still supporting arenas. We like them, and there's a lot of players that like them too. We'll just have to see how much rated battlegrounds take off. There are a lot of things we can do to improve the e-sports portion of World of Warcraft.

Slashdot: With Wrath of the Lich King, you tended to schedule major content patches several months apart. Do you have a similar plan for Cataclysm?

Greg Street: Yeah. We would like to get patches out as soon as we can, because players are just voracious for content. I think there's a sense that we finished Ulduar too soon. The 3.1 patch, we could have left on a little longer — 3.2 came out a little too quickly. Whereas the final patch, 3.3, has been going on almost a year. That's too long for players to have to deal with the same content over and over. Ideally, we could get patches out every four to six months. Or, eventually we may scale them down to make them smaller but come out more often. It's definitely something we're looking at. We'd love to be able to get faster at doing that.

Slashdot: Some of the quests and dialog in the beta contain content that's a bit edgier than what we normally see in WoW. Will those things make it to live servers. Are you trying to broaden the age groups the game is designed for?

Greg Street: That's one of the fun things — we do it a lot in quest design and then item naming, too — pop culture references here and there. That's something where the Warcraft world doesn't take itself too seriously. There are some really dark, epic moments too, but then there are places we can cut loose a bit. We know players appreciate it, because the remember it and they mention that kind of stuff. You can take it too far, I think. We've had people playing the game for six years, and it's hard to offer them things they haven't seen before. So, in that sense, we do try to be a little edgier.

Slashdot: Are there any systems in Cataclysm that you'd say have improved greatly over Wrath of the Lich King?

Greg Street: Many things. I really like the new end-game point system, both for PvE and PvP. I has the advantages of the Lich King system without being so confusing and having all these vendors, and down-converting badges, and all that. I think we're really happy with the way Glyphs have ended up in Cataclysm. The original promise of Glyphs is closer to what we're able to deliver now. Seeing that awesome new UI, with the list of glyphs that you can just apply whenever you want, we're really happy with that.

Slashdot: One of your goals seems to be separating the fun choices from the math choices in building your character. Are you where you want to be with that, right now?

Greg Street: I would give us a B+ on that. I think we can still do a lot better. We're at the early stages, still, of that revamp. There are some talent decisions in trees that I think are awesome, and there are some other places where it still doesn't feel great. It feels like the obvious choice is to get this one, and this one's the trap. "Don't take this dumb talent over here." There are fewer of those, for sure, but there are still some, and we eventually need to polish all of those, too.

Slashdot: What's the solution to that? Is it adding more talents? Swapping out the bad ones you have?

Greg Street: It's more of the latter, but sometimes a new talent is the answer, too. We just have to really ask: "We thought this was going to be a compelling choice; did it end up as a compelling choice?" "If it didn't, was it because the numbers were wrong, or was it because the encounters we put players into [made it wrong]?" To use a very contrived example: if there's a talent that makes you take less magic damage, and there's not a lot of magic damage being thrown around, that talent's not going to be exciting.

A lot of our survivability talents are based around the premise that healer mana is going to matter a little bit more, so you're going to care a little bit more about trying to keep yourself alive. If everything works out well at the end of a fight, people might post the damage-taken meter, and say, "Dude, this rogue, he took a lot of damage. He was a mana hog for us." If that doesn't happen, then all those utility talents look dumb, because you don't need them, and you could have gotten something else.

Slashdot: Can you talk a bit about why the Path of the Titans system was scrapped?

Greg Street: There are two parts to that. One is that Cataclysm was an unbelievably ambitious project, and we kept adding more and more to it. I mentioned the original glyph version, and at a panel earlier I mentioned the barbershop as feature that were cool, but we could have done a lot more with them. We want to try to limit that in the future. We didn't want to release Paths and then in 5.0 be like, "OK, now we're going to fix the Path system!" We'd rather just do it right the first time.

At the same time, it was tied into a lot of other features, like Archaeology and Glyphs. Those grew a lot on their own. We realized that we were using the promise of Paths to fix up the Glyph system, when what we wanted to do was just make that system actually cool. But we love the idea of some type of end-game progression that isn't item-focused, and I think we'll return to that in the future, sometime when we can get it right.

Slashdot: We're seeing some interesting new mechanics in Cataclysm — for example, the blind dragon, which relies on hearing and makes you moderate the noise your character makes. How much of that is thinking of a fun concept and going from there, versus trying to think of a brand new, innovative concept and trying to make it fun?

Greg Street: We honestly spend a lot of time on innovation. Players are kind of merciless — "Yeah, that was a fun fight, but we've done it before," or, "This is just like that other guy." So we really try to push the envelope there on things players haven't seen before, new systems. We'll have encounter designers say, "I was playing Final Fantasy last night, and it had a boss that did this, and I think we could make that work for a boss in World of Warcraft with these tweaks."

Slashdot: A lot of players, when they hear you talk about how you didn't have time to make a feature good, their question is, "Well, why can't you just go out and hire more people?"

Greg Street: Yeah. The mythical man-month.

Slashdot: Can you explain why you don't find that to be a viable solution?

Greg Street: The other example that gets used a lot is: if it takes a woman nine months to have a baby, then if you have two women, it'd only take four and a half! Our development process is hugely based on iteration and communication. It's more important — for, say, class design and item design — it's more important for me to have a small team that's totally in sync than to have a large team and have no idea what anyone else is working on. We would end up with Hunter talents working one way, the Priest would work a different way, and it wouldn't feel polished. It wouldn't feel good to players. Often, when we say, "We didn't have time," players say, "You shipped it before it was ready." That's not the way we look at it.

The way we look at it is: we are extremely critical of our own designs. We have very long lists of things we want to fix in the game. Some of these things have been around forever, and some of the things are new that we just added recently. If we waited until we addressed every single one of those things, we would never ship anything. It would be years and years before games came out, and that's just not realistic. That's not what players want; they're not going to wait six years for a new expansion. So, instead, we do what we can and we keep other things on the back burner. We've got Paths — this great idea. A dance studio — we're going to do it some day. Just not yet. We're saving it for the right time.

Comments

Damage Meters built into client

[Fippy Darkpaw]

I don't understand why something like Recount isn't built into clients during development. How do they debug to ensure every client is getting the same combat messages? Yes you can do it server side, but you need to do it client side as well to ensure all clients are synced.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Dashiva Dan]

They're not built in yet due to time management priorities (feature creep prevention).
I thought GhostCrawler made that pretty clear?

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[ByOhTek]

I think the GP meant that it should already be in the client as a debugging / diagnostic tool.

And I wouldn't be surprised if it was. But having something in the client and having it polished to the point where it is end-user friendly, are two different things. The latter is probably the feature creep part.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[KevMar]

Verifying that every client received the same message is fairly easy. You can just collect the logs and compare. A good damage meter does more than that.

With that said, if they would have built a damage meter then the logs would be more accurate and the resulting damage meter would be more accurate.

The early damage mods parsed the combat log as text. So every mob that had the same name was the same mob. single pulls were fine, but double pulls of the same mob was confusing. Then pets were an issue. If 2 people had a wolf named wolf or god help you if someone named the pet after someone else in the raid. Blizzard saw this issue and revamped the logs so there were ID numbers for mobs.

I wrote a damage meter once for another game (when people told me it was impossible to do in AOC). Text parsing natural language combat logs is not fun but it is doable.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Graff]

I don't understand why something like Recount isn't built into clients during development.

Building so much into the client is doing it wrong. WoW has a great API for building 3rd party addons and there's a lot of stuff that should just be left to a 3rd party. The problem is that they don't have a particularly STABLE API so most addons break with every patch. That's what creates the pressure for Blizzard to simply bundle the addons into the default client.

If Blizzard would work on a stable API and a better system for finding and managing addons then there would be a lot less clamor for more features in the client.

As for recording combat messages I'm sure that Blizzard has a much easier way of doing that in the client. They probably have a special development client that allows stuff to directly write out to log files. It would be much easier to do this than build a Recount look-alike to do the job.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[cigawoot]

I think it what it boils down to is Recount is an addon that is already freely avaliable to those who want to analyze their DPS. I'm pretty sure they feel that adding a built-in Recount would be a waste of time, when there is already something out there that already works. The built-in threat meter was a different story, as Blizzard's threat meter uses information straight from the servers, instead of having to guess at it based on damage done, buffs, etc. Just because something is an internal development tool, doesn't mean it would work well for players to use. By all rights their internal tools for analyzing DPS and healing are so complicated a normal player wouldn't be able to wrap their mind around it in a reasonable manner, or provide information to players they don't want players knowing.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Andy Dodd]

Yeah. The Blizzard guy mentioned QuestHelper, but QH has been discontinued for a few main reasons:

1) Developer didn't quest any more
2) Blizzard changed rules on addon financials a few patches ago. Addons are apparently not even allowed to *suggest donations* ingame. They did this mainly in reaction to an "always-for-pay" addon, but a lot of the well known addons have either discontinued or slowed development pace WAY down since those rule changes.
3) Blizzard duplicated 50% or so of QH functionality ingame. Lots is still missing. :(
4) Too much effort to keep QH working properly

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[silas_moeckel]

Combat logs man combat logs. You save them off and parse to you hearts content. I would suspect that they can do nice things like add fine grained timing to them as client to server and UI lag have HUGE impacts on DPS.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[RalphSleigh]

This, if you follow Ghostcrawlers posts on the WOW forums its clear that combat data from dungeons/raids is saved and mined for tuning/balance purposes. Especially the really hard stuff that not many groups attempt. Client side damage meters get pretty much the same data from the combat log sent to the game.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Vaphell]

i don't like the idea that you actually need addons to be successful. Devs have to account for all these addons so the difficulty of the game is artificially inflated, leaving 'casuals' behind. You simply can't raid instances with vanilla client. Addons are not convenience - they are a must have thing or you are just a nub nobody would ever want to team up with.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[rcuhljr]

That's convenient, because you don't. They just make it easier to be successful. I know plenty of people who raid with stock or near stock interfaces.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Luckyo]

You can. It was comprehensively proven when 4.0 came out breaking all major unit/raid frame addons for almost a week.
Additional proof can be found on beta, where people raided some really hard stuff with no addons allowed at the beginning.

It's not that it's impossible. It's just that it's harder.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[AltairDusk]

Combat logs. The damage meters evolved from the idea of parsing the combat log information and presenting it in a more helpful way.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[AltairDusk]

Building so much into the client is doing it wrong.

Keep in mind that there are people who do not use addons, for a myriad of reasons. Some of those may be because they think it's "cheating", or they're worried about viruses, or they just don't know how to get the mods/don't want to deal with the hassle, etc... When Blizzard sees that a certain addon or type of addon is providing an advantage to the point that guilds are demanding it to raid or that people without it are severely disadvantaged they will often either break it (AVR) or add the basic functionality into the default UI (CTRaid, Outfitter, QuestHelper). Is it wrong for them to say "this addon developer has significantly improved the interface in a way that benefits all players" and then decide to integrate the functionality so that everyone can benefit?

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Graff]

i don't like the idea that you actually need addons to be successful. Devs have to account for all these addons so the difficulty of the game is artificially inflated, leaving 'casuals' behind. You simply can't raid instances with vanilla client.

You can raid just fine with the "vanilla" client. Some aspects of it might be a little tougher, such as keeping track of debuffs that need to be cleansed, but I've done it without much problem.

I agree that addons are nice to have but I'd rather have a thin client and then add-in the functionality I need rather than a fat client with a lot of features that get in the way. The only two things missing are the ones I've mentioned: stable API and a in-client way of finding, installing, and managing addons. With these features you wouldn't need to worry about addons breaking every patch and you wouldn't need to be as dependent on an addon author staying active in the game.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Austerity Empowers]

I'm not sure why they want to make a game where they'd feel like they SHOULD have recount. I

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Cinder6]

Your "was" suggests you already know this, but just to be clear: Blizzard has a Threat API. Only disadvantage with it is (IIRC) you can only poll it every couple of seconds.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Anonymous Coward]

That and GearScore can be argued to be the two most critical add-ons for finding people with basic capabilities for raids or guild membership.

Recount is important for a lot of reasons. Raids live or die by DPS, and if you have people not doing 5-6k DPS, they need to be kicked pure and simple in order to save everyone else repair bills and wasted time. GearScore is important because it shows if the person actually has seen actual raiding and has won something.

All other addons are class specific, but knowing what someone is geared with and knowing their capabilities are essentially 100% of what a guild needs for membership.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[DrgnDancer]

Also as Ghost Crawler kind of alluded to, one is more less necessary, the other is kinda nice to have. As long as my raid group has one guy willing to parse the combat logs and tell us what went right and what went wrong in that last attempt, we could mostly do without Recount. It's nice to have. It's a friendly face on a lot of ugly numbers. It's great that I can get information in real time on what I personally did right or wrong in that last fight, while the guild is busy analyzing the bigger picture. All in all though, we could clear content without Recount.

The threat meter is arguably much more "necessary". I need to know, in real time, during the fight, if I'm about to pull aggro. Without that information I'm going to be as shocked as everyone else when the baddie turns around and one shots me. In a fight where things are tuned to the point that I must do very close to my maximum possible DPS in order to beat an enrage timer, some kind of threat meter is critical.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Anonymous Coward]

You're dreaming if you think you can raid "fine" at a high level using stock or near-stock interfaces.

To cite an example, Anub'Arak phase 3, where most of the raid is at 500-1000 health, and at random intervals he places a debuff on 5 targets that deals 5000 damage in 3 seconds time. It takes 1.5 seconds to cast a heal strong enough to avert the impending death, and you have only 5 healers, each only capable of saving 1 person. How do you organize your healers in such a way that none of those targets die? You need a method to quickly assign each healer to a unique target in about half a second, so that they have time to react to the assignment, and then cast a heal. And, you need to do it perfectly 6-8 times in order to defeat the boss. And, unless you do it perfectly on your first attempt on the week, you don't get the high-level loot.

About the only possible way to do this without any mods is to have everyone agree on an ordinal 1-25 for each player in the raid. Then, each healer is assigned to heal the nth target that is affected. So when the debuff goes out, they have about 1 second to scan the entire raid list to find and sort the set of people affected in order to determine their target. Good luck getting 5 people to do that 6-8 times in a row with 95%+ success rate. Good luck even finding 5 people that would consider such a task fun.

I'm sure that you can raid "fine" at a low level with a vanilla client, and perhaps even certain high-level roles can be done with the stock interface. But in general, you absolutely need the conveniences that raiding mods provide for high-level raiding.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Anonymous Coward]

You really should not post about something you're so ignorant about. Any player can get the full combat log output to a text file by typing /combatlog in-game. Combat log messages are sent to the client (and readable by any mod, and then later output to WoWCombatLog.txt if you enabled logging) in a highly machine-readable format like this:
  10/27 14:19:06.220 SPELL_CAST_START,0x0200000000203F7D,"Beria",0x511,0x0000000000000000,nil,0x80000000,686,"Shadow Bolt",0x20

It's been like this since around patch 2.2 or so. And this is pretty much entirely for mod authors' benefit, because Blizzard can just get all the combat data they need from the server side.

Also, there's a thread on the Blizzard UI forums entirely dedicated to keeping mod authors updated on API/UI changes, often posting them several months before they are even on the test realms.

The fact is, Blizzard doesn't think mods should be necessary to play the game, and up until now, the only one generally considered necessary by most players has been the healing raid frames, something remedied in 4.0. By not having any official channels for users to obtain UI mods, Blizzard tacitly does not have to approve/disapprove any UI mods, which I think actually gives them MORE freedom and gives people MORE options than if there was some official channel for third party UI mods.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Graff]

You really should not post about something you're so ignorant about. Any player can get the full combat log output to a text file by typing /combatlog in-game

So ignorant about? As I stated, I thought there probably was such a command, although I assumed it might be just part of a custom client instead of the default client. That Blizzard has this information available in the default client is a good thing. I know that mod authors used to parse the combat log text for their information and I thought they had moved onto a more direct method for obtaining their data but perhaps they are still using log parsing.

Also, there's a thread on the Blizzard UI forums entirely dedicated to keeping mod authors updated on API/UI changes, often posting them several months before they are even on the test realms.

Yes, I've done some rudimentary addon programming for WoW and I'm aware of the communication between Blizzard and the mod authors. The fact is that even with the communication the API is still far too unstable. It's such a moving target, often changing every couple of months, so that addons break if the authors aren't extremely on top of updating them. Even if the addon author is keeping up with the API changes there are often problems for weeks after a new patch.

It's very draining and frustrating to both the users and the addon authors and it doesn't need to be this way. Blizzard should produce a much more stable API and back-support older versions better. Take a look at most modern API such as Java, Cocoa, C++ STL, .NET, etc. They are often stable on the order of years instead of months. Now I'm not saying that a game needs to have THAT stable of an API but Blizzard can certainly do a better job at keeping their API more stable than they currently do.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[meta-monkey]

It depends on your role.

I've got a Kingslayer hunter, priest (disc healer) and paladin (tank). I use very few addons. Really just a damage meter and DBM (mod that tells you stuff like "5 seconds until boss casts {some spell}). But with the priest...I just don't understand how it would be possible to heal with the default raid frames. I use Healbot (others like Grid) which allows you to map spells to certain mouse clicks. So instead of clicking on a player's name in the raid frame and then hitting 1 for a flash heal or 2 for a shield, I have my raid's health bars all arranged in Healbot and I left click for a flash heal or right click for a shield, or shift-left click for a binding heal, or control-left click for a dispell, etc. When you're trying to maximize how you use every global cooldown, having to click and then press a button just takes too much time. I can replace that with one click instead.

I agree, you don't need a ton of addons, even for raiding. But I don't see how you can heal without healbot or grid, and you'll probably get booted from the raid if you don't have DBM.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Anonymous Coward]

That line I posted is actually sent to the client as an "event", with which mods can do whatever they want instantaneously. It's only written to the combat log after the fact. You're just digging your hole of ignorance deeper and deeper.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[DigitalSorceress]

Any competent guild can take any j.random jerk, carry them most of the way through ICC 10, and get them halfway decent gear. With my guild, it's far more important to make sure they're someone we actually WANT to spend time with (in terms of guild membership).

We want folks who show up on time and prepared. We want folks who either know the fights or take a little time to google for them. We want folks who don't bitch and whine about not getting this loot or that. We want folks who have half a clue about how to itemize for their class/role (or who at least care enough to ask the right questions).

Getting back to GearScore for a second:

I've seen very good players with top gear be such pricks I couldn't stand to be in the same raid with them.

I've seen very well geared folks who have no idea how not to stand in bad.

I've seen poorly geared folks use their class to its fullest and stand toe-to-toe with folks 1000 GS higher than them.

GearScore is useful for a quick "what's the POTENTIAL of this person to do their job well?" ... its fine for PUGging soemone in, but I'd care a lot more about ability, experience, and personality if I were looking for a new regular member of my raids.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Rakarra]

[quote]Any competent guild can take any j.random jerk, carry them most of the way through ICC 10, and get them halfway decent gear. With my guild, it's far more important to make sure they're someone we actually WANT to spend time with (in terms of guild membership).
[/quote]

I wish there was a GearScore for asshattery. Or awesome.

"Meh, my awesome meter pegs him at 2000. He's probably going to complain that we're doing it wrong the whole time."

"This guy's at 5000. He'll be agreeable, prepared, and knowledgeable of the fights."

Oh I wish that a mod could tell me that.

GearScore is useful for a quick "what's the POTENTIAL of this person to do their job well?" ... its fine for PUGging soemone in, but I'd care a lot more about ability, experience, and personality if I were looking for a new regular member of my raids.

All of this is very true. GearScore is useful in setting the maximum potential of what someone can do. It says nothing about what that person's minimum performance will actually be, but it can be useful for finding out if it's mathematically possible for a character to pass certain bars that are set. If a tank has 30k health and the boss hits for 35k, that tank won't be lasting very long, regardless of how good a player he is. If a person in Naxx gear joins your Heroic ICC 10 group, he's going to get carried. In some cases it won't matter -- maybe everyone else overgear's the encounter so much that it won't make a difference.

Both of these statements are wrong: "GearScore will tell me if this guy is going to perform well." "GearScore sucks and won't tell me anything I need to know."

So what I would tell people forming raids is that GearScore won't tell you whether or not a person will perform well, but whether it's gear that will be the limiting factor in their performance.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[snuf23]

Uh, at least on the healing side patches for stuff like Vuhdo and Healbot were available on patch day. You might have had to look for the cataclysm alpha/beta versions (which you would have used on the PTR) but they were there.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[snuf23]

Healing addons make for a much more streamlined experience but the in game raid frames can be used with mouseover macros as well. Yes, this requires something beyond the default ui, but it's not a full addon. Clique essentially makes this even easier to implement so there isn't really any reason to roll your own macros.

Instead of using key modifiers you mouseover the persons raid frame and press one of your ability keys. I prefer Healbot myself but I know healers that solely use mouseover macros and the default raid frames.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[scot4875]

GearScore is an incredibly worthless statistic. All it means is that they were present in a raid when a piece of loot dropped, and they won it.

If someone is fully decked out in heroic gear, you don't need GearScore to tell you they're probably a decent player. If someone doesn't have the gear you "want" them to have, you have no idea *why* they don't have it. A good player can generally play well above their actual gear score, and because nearly all fights are more about execution than raw numbers, gear doesn't even matter in most cases.

--Jeremy

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[gknoy]

Any game that has measurable performance will have SOME people who want to know how to Do it Better. Whether that's figuring out how to max their levels in a crafting skill, or do it for the least cost, or whether it's how to kill bad guys faster or heal people more efficiently or minimize the damage they take, someone will ALWAYS be making spreadsheets, simulations, or looking at (or making) logs of combat or experience gain.

On a side note, Recount has more utility than merely being an e-peen measuring tool. The "Deaths" page lets one see a timeline of all the damage (and healing) that someone took before dying. It's extremely helpful to identify whether someone failed to avoid something bad, or wasn't healed soon enough, or didn't get a bad guy taunted off of him quickly enough. It's one of the most informative screens. When looking at damage meters, it also lets you compare a rough breakdown of your skill use (by percent) with someone else's -- which lets me see that I'm doing things differently than the guy that did 20% more damage than me, even if I can't see exactly why that is. (e.g., is he prioritizing X skill over Y, or am I not capitalizing on Z procs?)

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Dashiva Dan]

The actual full GearScore mod also polls a players statistics and will tell you how many (up to 5) kills they have on every other raid boss.
So it'll tell you if that specific character has, say, cleared Ulduar, ToGC, ICC, RS 5 times or more in 25man raid setting, and RS 4 tmes, or whatever they've done.
While they could be playing their partner/friends account, it doesn't say, sure.
That they're some top raid leader's love interest who gets consistantly carried is also true, but neither of these is likely, so it's a good indicator, better than them just having a high GS.
Of course, there can still be someone with 1k less GS and no raiding statists showing for that character who has done them on an alt and knows the fights, and can do it in a superior fashion to the first guy, this, also, is unlikely.
GS is good when you don't know anything else about a person. It's profiling, pure and simple. With nothing else to go on, you take the guy for the role with the higher GS, and you're that much more likely to suceed.
But yeah, It'd rock if there was some new mechanic, like, say, 'MVP' ratings.
Every time a raid finishes, everyone in the raid choses the MVP. That affects those players MVP scores in some algorithmic weighting of how many raiders voted for them (it'd have to be at least, say, 1/5th of the raid to carry any weight) and adds to their overall.
Then, you use that in place of GS, I'm all for it. :)

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually from working on damage meters myself, it became apparent that combat events were often not delivered to all clients involved. That's why the recap of a fight usually differs between participants. You could even drill down to specific events during a fight that were received by, say, 75% of the clients and not received by 25% of them. As far as the client's API was concerned, they never happened. No log entry, no event.

I never figured out if this was due to something like dropped UDP packets, or some insidious bug in the client or server itself.

Maybe Blizzard had some internal verification tool that always worked correctly, but I kind of doubt it.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Luckyo]

Notably in early beta, no addons were allowed. At all.

And personally I found that with some minor tweaking, default blizzard raid frames were superior, and vastly more stable then both addons you mentioned.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[centuren]

As a main tank (retired), my life would have been absolute hell without at least a decent aggro meter. DPS is a fine thing to measure, but in the actual boss fights threat is the more important aspect. Especially for fights where tanks have to be rotated in and out, not knowing how much threat individual players were generating would have lead to the (stronger) DPS holding back most of the time, and occasionally getting one-shotted other times.

Sure, as a warrior I could always intercept then challenge when a DPS accidentally (or idiotically) pulled aggo from whichever tank is up, but if tanking that specific boss wasn't my roll at the time it would throw things into chaos at least. With a threat meter, we were able to remind people to ease up a bit when they threaten to draw aggro, and at the same time get a better picture of which tanks aren't performing as well as they should be.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[centuren]

GearScore is an incredibly worthless statistic. All it means is that they were present in a raid when a piece of loot dropped, and they won it.

If someone is fully decked out in heroic gear, you don't need GearScore to tell you they're probably a decent player. If someone doesn't have the gear you "want" them to have, you have no idea *why* they don't have it. A good player can generally play well above their actual gear score, and because nearly all fights are more about execution than raw numbers, gear doesn't even matter in most cases.

Also, it's worth pointing out that the gear you "want" them to have can easily be the gear you "expect" them to have. When running heroics, I'd sometimes get complains that I didn't have any "tier" gear or other epic dungeon drops (other than my tanking sword and shield). Everything else I'd wear my area gear, with the shoulders switched to PVP shoulders filled with tanking gems and enchantments (switched a few other things out for enchantments also). The point being, I had spent the time gaining PVP points to get duplicate items and gem/enchant them for tanking, during a periods were many others would hang around Shat and try to get a group that would carry them through in the hopes they'd get some gear out of it.

Properly researched and with the right gems & enchantments, I comfortably tanked all the heroics and a few 25 player instances BEFORE I started to see any of the "expected" warrior tank gear drop (and when it rained it poured, thankfully). During that period, though, there was often someone in a pug who'd criticize me about my choice in gear, and it was always someone who'd never played an end game warrior (and they were usually pretty green to end game).

For example, I never told a priest or a warlock how to properly gear and spec (unless that player was joining one of my arena teams), as I felt I had no lecturing someone about a class I didn't play. If a pug kept wiping, it was easy enough to tell where the problem was, and I'd try to commit that player to memory as someone not to group with again.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[stripes]

To cite an example, Anub'Arak phase 3

Stock raid unit frames group by party (5 players) within the raid, put one healer per party and have them heal their group. Doable with stock unit frames. (You could also "cheat" and put groups of five in the same vent channel and have them yell out to their healer, that'll work for a whole lot of things)

I prefer grid, configured to stick a big center icon on for the debuf, but that is a preference, not a requirement.

I'm sure that you can raid "fine" at a low level with a vanilla client, and perhaps even certain high-level roles can be done with the stock interface. But in general, you absolutely need the conveniences that raiding mods provide for high-level raiding.

Sure tanks and healers have a harder time in raids without mods then dps, but you can raid ICC without mods as any of the roles.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[stripes]

So instead of clicking on a player's name in the raid frame and then hitting 1 for a flash heal or 2 for a shield

I use to use grid+clique for that, but with a minor change you don't need addons:

Macro: /cast [@mouseover] flash heal

Macro: /cast [@mouseover] shield

Put flash on the 1, the shield on 2. Mouse over whoever needs that flash and press 1. No "click then press". It works nicely (you can also even set it up to use target or self if there is no mouseover).

I've discarded clique. I still use grid as it can be configured to display a LOT more information in a small space then the built in unit frames, and just as importantly it can be configured NOT to display information you don't care about.

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[stripes]

The threat meter is arguably much more "necessary". I need to know, in real time, during the fight, if I'm about to pull aggro.

The default UI can be told to make a sound and flash the edges of the screen when you get "close" to pulling aggro (90% or so I think). Not at all perfect, but will do in a pinch. The tank is more in need of an addon, as nothing tells them when someone else is getting close (as far as I know).

Re:Damage Meters built into client

[Anonymous Coward]

Your Anub'Arak solution does not work well because the debuff targets randomly, and thus he can choose any number of targets from a single party. In fact, it's rather rare that each party will have exactly one person afflicted. A 2/1/1/1/0 or 2/2/1/0/0 split is much more likely.

Using your plan, the healer would need to be able to identify that nobody in their party is afflicted, find the party who has more than one afflicted (and, if there are multiple parties with more than one affected, pick one and pray the other unburdened healer doesn't also pick that one), and then pick one of the multiple afflicted people in that party and pray that the other healer assigned doesn't also pick that target--all in under a second so that the healer has time to cast the healing spell.

You have to do this perfectly 6-8 times to kill the boss once.

Biff Buff, Extraordinaire

[Anonymous Coward]

These are getting annoying. Why can't they just save up all the interviews and put them in one article so I don't have to hear about them every day?

Re:Biff Buff, Extraordinaire

[Pojut]

Really? I'm thoroughly enjoying Slashdot putting out some original content. I like seeing the news aggregated in the firehose, but every now and then it's nice to seem them produce something.

Personally, I'd like to see at least one interview a week with a figure that fits in with one of their submission categories. I think that would help shake things up around here.

Re:Biff Buff, Extraordinaire

[Sarten-X]

Agreed. I like knowing what's going on, but marketing-spun interviews are a waste of my time.

Re:Biff Buff, Extraordinaire

[Anonymous Coward]

Go crawl up and die beneath a rock, you miserable douchebag.

Re:Biff Buff, Extraordinaire

[Anonymous Coward]

It's better than the other crap the editors let through. It involves some form of actual dialogue with a person.

Re:Biff Buff, Extraordinaire

[JonySuede]

go away you miserable contrarian.

Re

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah Ive wondered the same thing... Id imagine they have some sort of dev tools that allow them to parse out damage easily for bosses but who knows maybe they just use recount also. lol

Re:Re

[cynyr]

or dump the combatlog to a text file and parse it with a perl script.

Before the inevitable

[Norsefire]

Blizzard don't ban people for cheating in singleplayer (they also have their own cheats built in ). They ban people for cheating to unlock achievements on their multiplayer Battle.net account while playing singleplayer. Even with a banned Battle.net account you can still play singleplayer in offline mode ("Play as Guest" from the login screen).

Re:Before the inevitable

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya ya, but what happened to the "normal" single player choice. Diablo / Diablo 2Why am I am guest on my own system (or did I rent that too) with a game I own? Besides, if I understand correctly, I heard that you cannot play "as guest" for long as well. Eventually, you need to connect to WoW to "check in" every 30 days? Please correct me, as I know you will.

Re:Before the inevitable

[Greguar]

A big component of the battle.net service is DRM. Requiring an account to play, even offline single player via check-ins, is the most effective way that they've come up with to prevent piracy.

They made a gamble that it would be something that their playerbase would be willing to swallow, and it seems like they were right: for most folks its restrictions aren't a hindrance, and there are a few benefits thrown in, like being able to download, install and play the game on any computer. It has a lot less ugly pointy barbs than some other (cough Ubisoft) DRM schemes in recent history.

I'm sure there are some people who don't want multiplayer and don't want content updates and don't want cloud-based saved games and don't want achievements and whatnot and who find authenticating to play a single-player game inherently offensive. But seriously, you obviously have an internet connection, and you're only being inconvenienced for seconds to get a month of unrestricted take-it-anywhere play on that (or any other) computer. That one login gets you enough time to play through the whole single player campaign, and then you can uninstall the game to free up its huge disk footprint and move on with your life.

I personally will gladly authenticate every time I play in order to spare the headache of having to put in an original optical disc. I think the latter is far more inconvenient.

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with WoW, though, which has always required authentication for all forms of play. It, like all MMOs, is a 100% online game.

Re:Before the inevitable

[Anonymous Coward]

to be honest i find this method of DRM to be more acceptable than others that various game publishers have used in the past. I don't need the CD, they aren't loading nasty crapware drm drivers, and I am also allowed to load and play the game on multiple computers, and if i logged into battlenet when playing the single player campaign i could hop between my desktop and laptop and it would keep track of what level i was on in the campaign.

so what it calls home on occasion to make sure i am legit. i think they are doing a decent job trying to add extra value so that it isn't just a burden.

Re:Before the inevitable

[Anonymous Coward]

I guarantee if you'd just bitched about being banned for hacking in single player or the lack of LAN functionality in SC2 you'd be modded +5 insightful instead of offtopic even though both posts would have been equally offtopic, redundant, and useless.

Re:Before the inevitable

[Rakarra]

Eventually, you need to connect to WoW to "check in" every 30 days?

Nope, Diablo II required that (and it's one of the things that makes it so difficult for me to get back into multiplayer D2), but in World of Warcraft every character you create along with every item, quest, etc, that entire state, is stored permanently. Even if you cancel your account and resubscribe a few years later, everything will be just as you left it. Characters do not get expired.

The only 30 day limit I know of is the in-game mail system, where mails (including mailed items) get bounced back to the sender if they've been unread for 30 days.

3 Blizzard interviews in 2 days

[Anonymous Coward]

Soulskill is on a roll.

Re:3 Blizzard interviews in 2 days

[crow_t_robot]

Blizzard is feeding them to him to get free press for the upcoming Cataclysm launch.

Re:3 Blizzard interviews in 2 days

[Conchobair]

Keep in mind Blizzcon was this last weekend. /. was probably there and did a bunch of interviews. People complain about this every year. Be ready to be the first next year.

Re:3 Blizzard interviews in 2 days

[Anonymous Coward]

I wasn't complaining. I actually appreciate it. It's a nice change.

Pony?

[Conchobair]

Ctrl+F, "pony"... nothing. I'm not reading this until he makes with the goods

Re:Pony?

[Volante3192]

Not pony; moose.

Re:Pony?

[AltairDusk]

Not just moose, SpikeMoose!

Re:Pony?

[TBone]

But you do have Goblins on Dinosaurs on Sharks with Laser Beams....

http://pc.ign.com/dor/objects/24939/world-of-warcraft-cataclysm/images/world-of-warcraft-cataclysm-20100813113214236.html?page=mediaFull

This is getting close.

Re:Pony?

[Fozzyuw]

I think it was a Moose.

Re:Pony?

[Conchobair]

It's been pony for a long time. http://biobreak.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/ghostcrawler.jpg The moose thing comes from the Canadian Winter Olympics when they didn't add a pet for it like they did for the Chinese Summer Olmypics 2 years earlier.

Re:Pony?

[Anonymous Coward]

A SpikeMoose once bit my sister...

Re:Pony?

[linhy123]

The Internet is very strong, have a lot of search engines, you can search to everything you want to know, such as you enter "cheap supra shoes " or "coach bags" want to buy something,there will be many results, but a lot of results may not be what you satisfied, you feel what search engines can quickly search to you want, Google? Yahoo? Baidu? Soso? Bing?

The game is so tempting

[Anonymous Coward]

But I must resist the addiction. I will not succumb.

I should have known better than to read this interview though, it's like walking by a coffee shop while you're trying to avoid caffeine.

Re:The game is so tempting

[Wyatt Earp]

Its a good game. I've been playing since the day it launched, but took a couple six to nine month breaks.

My fiancée totally got hooked on auctioning and crafting and playing as a healer while I like to gather and do 5 mans with either a warrior or warlock.

Re:The game is so tempting

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to be clear, I'm on such a break myself. Trying to make it lifelong though, not just a short stretch.

Re:The game is so tempting

[AltairDusk]

You may be different but for me the addiction was only bad before I quit the first time (actually sold the account, back when you could ebay them). I was convinced to come back by a few friends shortly before Burning Crusade came out and although I've played on and off since there's no "need" to play like there was before. I just play for my enjoyment, mainly when friends are on and if something comes up or I feel like doing something else I just go do that. My point I guess is that it doesn't need to be an addiction every time.

Re:The game is so tempting

[digitalnoise615]

Its a good game. I've been playing since the day it launched, but took a couple six to nine month breaks.

My fiancée totally got hooked on auctioning and crafting and playing as a healer while I like to gather and do 5 mans with either a warrior or warlock.

Precisely. I played the original Vanilla beta and then picked up the game about a month or so after launch and have had an active account since. I've taken plenty of breaks, weeks, months - whatever - but I come back. It's great for when I need a distraction and nothing else will do.

I would like to see them make crafting both more reasonable (in terms of mats - some things are insane) as well as usability. The best gear in the game continues to be what drops at end-level content; however, crafted gear should come at least a close 2nd or 3rd, but often times doesn't.

Re:The game is so tempting

[Wyatt Earp]

I took my first break when I had some neuralgia and my guild was in trouble going into BC raiding content.

I took my second break when I met a girl, was breaking up with my SO, that kept going into meeting another girl and getting engaged.

I took some time off this summer to play alot of Xbox with a buddy and fire up some Empire Total War.

I'm back getting ready for Cat, will be around for that.

Re:The game is so tempting

[Wyatt Earp]

Gems and Inscriptions are great money makers even for players like myself who don't have end-game recipes, but you are right, blacksmithing, leatherworking and engineering should have viable recipes for end-game.

Re:The game is so tempting

[snuf23]

Some of the current item level 264 crafted items are superior to anything outside of 25 man heroic ICC (which a lot of people will never see outside of lootship). Of course there are only worthwhile recipes for a couple of item slots per tier, so yeah you can't deck yourself out in crafted items alone.

this guy is a dumbshit

[Ryanrule]

ex marine biologist ?? often doesnt even understand the mechanics of the classes he talks about. will outright ban anyone on the forums for pointing out his mistakes/lies

Re:this guy is a dumbshit

[cigawoot]

Blizzard doesn't ban people for pointing out that type of stuff, they ban people for HOW they do it.

There is a difference between.....

"I believe my class does not do enough DPS and here is why... [insert evidence of your beliefs in a non-flambait manner]"

and...

"OMG PALLY HOJ ME FOR 5000000 DAMAGE TEY R OP PLZ NERF KTHXBAI"

The first example contributes to the conversation, whereas the second example does not.

Re:this guy is a dumbshit

[gknoy]

On the other hand, they've been mass-banning people for pointing out (or even asking nicely about) the extreme similarity between the Worgen (wolf people)'s "mount" (the wolf runs on all fours, sans-mount) and the Discarded and Never Implemented Tauren "Plainsrunning" (where the cow-people would do basically the same). If they're adding one, it can't be a tremendous amount of work to add it for the other -- and yet even mentioning it is enough to get a ban on their forums.

It's puzzling, but most players chalk it up as "Oh, Blizzard's so crazy, and no one reads the official forums anyway".

Re:this guy is a dumbshit

[AltairDusk]

They don't ban people for bringing this up, I've seen plenty do it that are still around. The people getting banned are either doing something else to warrant the ban or it's the way they're going about it (furious wall-of-text attacks against blizzard and the "lazy developers who won't do what I want" are not the proper way to bring up an issue).

Re:this guy is a dumbshit

[Greguar]

If they gave Tauren players plainsrunning then people would want to be able to ride Tauren players as mounts, which would be... awesome!

Re:this guy is a dumbshit

[cigawoot]

Plainsrunning was different then Running Wild.

Plainsrunning was "always on" and increased your movement speed while moving over time until you reached 100% (over 10 seconds). Once you stopped or entered combat, you'd go back to normal run speed. It was a completely different mechanic then a standard mount, and it was broken and hence removed.

Running Wild is basically a mount, but instead of a mount model your character just runs around really fast with a different animation. All the other rules of mounting apply, such as being unable to cast, having a cast time to mount, being unable to mount in combat, but remain mounted while in combat, etc.

Re:this guy is a dumbshit

[ildon]

First, they don't ban people for that unless they're obvious bitch posts like the previous poster pointed out or if the person is purposefully spamming the forums with threads about it.

Second, they are DELETING threads about it (not banning) because there are already a lot of active threads about it and if there's already an active thread on the first couple pages it's just useless spam to create a ton of new threads about it.

Don't just make shit up about how Blizzard manages their forums. I could make a plainsrunning whine post right now and I would not get even an hour ban (unless there was coincidentally a concerted thread spam campaign going on at the same time and I just got caught in the crossfire). I could probably find a 20+ page thread about it and bump that with whatever complaint I had and my post wouldn't even get deleted. Blizzard's moderation is EXTREMELY lenient as long as you don't spam or post like a total douche.

Re:this guy is a dumbshit

[BobMcD]

Parent is aware of this. Observe:

If they're adding one, it can't be a tremendous amount of work to add it for the other

The suggestion is they add it as a mount option for Tauren.

Re:this guy is a dumbshit

[gknoy]

To be fair, I didn't know what Plainsrunning was originally implemented as. That sounds kindof neat. I'd only ever heard it as "Taurens run instead of using a mount", and assumed it was otherwise identical to mount mechanics.

Frankly, I'm surprised they didn't add it as a non-combat upgrade to Travel form for druids.

how many WC slashvertizements will there be?

[Anonymous Coward]

They just keep coming.

People: don't contribute to this mono-directional transfer of fair use rights from customers to corporations.

I'd have bought the game *IF* they hadn't gone all control-freak on us, removing LAN play and requiring maps be served through their servers and so on.

Re:how many WC slashvertizements will there be?

[gknoy]

You realize that World of Warcraft (an MMO, where by definition the servers need to be running the maps and encounter AI) is completely different from Starcraft II (both Blizzard products), right? There is no meaningful "LAN" play for WoW, whereas it might have been nice for SC2 and Diablo 3.

Re:how many WC slashvertizements will there be?

[rakuen]

Nonsense. All Blizzard products are the same. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to play some World of Diablo: Starclysm.

Re:how many WC slashvertizements will there be?

[Greguar]

Even then, the "lack" of LAN-play for SC2 and Diablo 3 is splitting technical hairs.

Your computer doesn't host the game and a connection to battle.net is required to play. What real-world difference does this make? How many people set up a LAN party without having an internet connection these days?

I play SC2 with other folks connected via a LAN all the time, moreso than I play with random people online. This supposedly missing feature hasn't affected my LAN-play experience one bit. I don't even get an uneasy feeling that my consumer rights are being eroded by corporations as I do so, it's that seamless.

Re:how many WC slashvertizements will there be?

[AltairDusk]

You may want to read up on what an MMO is. How do you propose they implement a persistent, massively multiplayer online world for LAN play?

Re:how many WC slashvertizements will there be?

[Vaphell]

care to share what you do exactly with your SC2 when the bnet goes down for maintenance? or when the few second timeout of internet connection drops you out of the game?

Re:how many WC slashvertizements will there be?

[Greguar]

Can't say they've ever happened to me yet. I guess if I had a crappy internet connection I'd have an issue, but I would complain to my ISP or change ISPs if I did.

Re:how many WC slashvertizements will there be?

[Skarecrow77]

you keep going with that line of thinking, the "it can't happen to me, so anybody it does happen to must be a target of ridicule" thinking.

My brother and I were on the same LAN, with a DSL connection to the internet. The DSL connection would randomly drop anywhere from once every two or three hours to as bad as 4 to 5 times an hour. We couldn't even finish stupid easy achievements in SC2 such as "beat 5 medium opponents in a row" because the game would decide that if the connection drops for even 2-3 seconds, you need to be disconnected from battle.net.

I used to troubleshoot internet connections for a living, I knew what to do. I replaced the modem. I replaced the router. replaced the noise filters. removed the noise filters. I plugged both into a dedicated UPS. I had the lines checked. I had the local node checked. I had the dsl moved on to a separate physical line in the house (different wiring and everything). Every time, it got a little bit better, but never really got fixed. We had technicians out to check the wiring (the house is all of 2 years old I might add) and it never really fixed the problem.

Finally, in disgust, I called up the local cable company and said "bring me cable internet". They did. no more random drops... no, instead, I get anywhere between 6 and 12 hours during prime time where I'm getting horrendous packet loss instead, with the occasional blocks of ping spikes into the stratosphere. The cable company has obviously oversold the hardware, and obviously doesn't care either.

So what choice do I have here There are two choices for ISPs, and I've chosen both. Neither is an adequate replacement for LAN functionality for games that really do not need an internet connection.

Re:how many WC slashvertizements will there be?

[Greguar]

Yeah, that sounds downright unpleasant, and for your case the missing LAN functionality is a definite hindrance. Hopefully things improve, because those sorts of internet connectivity issues would be disruptive to, well, anything. Maybe I'm spoiled by having a choice of a plethora of reliable DSL providers and one very good cable provider in my local market. You could always move just so you can play a game reliably! Hmm, I think I'd be awfully tempted to move in such a circumstance, but I have unusual priorities.

There are some people for whom the argument of the existence or nonexistence of LAN play is a purely ideological one and not based on disruption from internet connectivity issues, which I find a little bit odd. The case of anyone who is left out by the combination of Blizzard's design choice and lack of connectivity, however, does erode away from my previous statements. For most people, their model is equivalent, but for some it admittedly is not. In some future world where crappy ISPs no longer exist, or there is always a viable alternate choice in every local market, they will become equivalent, and I don't think that's all that far off.

There's not really any stopping game developers from moving towards the fully internet-based model regardless of whether some (potential or actual) customers have prohibitive connectivity issues. They will just blame the ISPs and say that there isn't enough demand to justify dedicated LAN functionality, and that they're not in the business of providing workaround for ISPs who fail to provide their service. They can only get away with that stance because internet connectivity is now practically universal and generally very good quality for large portions of the world and the expectation of consumers is becoming that ISPs *should* provide consistently working service, rather than accepting that connection drops and packet loss are the norm.

Your case is decidedly lame and it would be nice if you had some recourse.

Re:how many WC slashvertizements will there be?

[Rakarra]

Can't say they've ever happened to me yet. I guess if I had a crappy internet connection I'd have an issue, but I would complain to my ISP or change ISPs if I did.

It happened all the time for me in Diablo 2 days. It (and the 30-day limit for not logging in before a character was deleted) were the two primary reasons why my friends and I always played Diablo 2 LAN games even though we weren't physically close together.

It's also why I was leery of World of Warcraft when it first came out, since it was online-only and Battle.Net was so crappy back then. They beefed up the service though for that game.

Re:how many WC slashvertizements will there be?

[Skarecrow77]

as a matter of fact, my wife and I will be moving in about 5-6 months for unrelated reasons, so I'm hoping to god that one or both of my options at our new location (same general suburban area, most likely a different county though) will have better performance. Perhaps the proper amount of hardware in place for the number of subscribers, etc.

I really miss the comcast (yes, really!) cable we had at our old house. I pulled about 20mbps down (4mbps or so up) with consistent 10ms pings to the local node no matter the time of day or day of the week... and that was their basic package.

Re:how many WC slashvertizements will there be?

[VortexCortex]

You may want to read up on what an MMO is. How do you propose they implement a persistent, massively multiplayer online world for LAN play?

By licensing the server source code as AGPL and giving us a copy (instead of having us reverse engineer our own).

Note: You can play WoW as you describe via LAN. Just have your LAN-mates add your WoW private server's IP address to your realmlist.wtf, and away you go.

Also-Note: LAN implies loosing the first M in MMORPG.

Blah

[Anonymous Coward]

GC is a douche who often comments on things he has no clue about in the WoW forums. He constantly makes promises he can't keep. I honestly don't listen to anything the guy says anymore. He has very little knowledge of actual game mechanics and tends to rely on the other forum posters to make his points for him.

How much did Blizzard pay for this advertisement on /. ?

Re:Blah

[Dashiva Dan]

I just deleted my page long reply. Instead I'll just post myself (and whoever else) a reminder/warning:
Don't feed the trolls

w0w

[Anonymous Coward]

erm, screw warcraft.

The game with PvP that is stop motion animation

[Anonymous Coward]

yea, really, and no exaggeration. pvp in wow is so that you go 5 steps, someone randomly cces (crowd control - makes any player/mob lose control of the toon and be passive for a while or rooted in place) you, and you lose the control of your toon for a few seconds (tooo long in a pvp environment), you walk another 5 steps, and again. the appalling part is, the player who have cc'ed you generally has NO idea that s/he has cc'ed you - a lot of ccs are area effect ccs that you can just fire away and cause a lot of players to lose the control of their toon. even the cc heavy classes suffer from this issue in mass pvp.

this situation is due to a design decision they made back before the last expansion (wrath) and placed 1-2 crowd control abilities to talent trees of all classes. apparently, as they later said, they were balancing pvp around 3v3 arena games they were offering. ie, 3 toon team vs 3 toon team. whereas, a huge bulk of the pvp action that goes about in this game, goes on in battlegrounds, the minimum of which containing 10 to 15 people in each team, and the maximum of which containing 40 people in each team, the much renowned alterac valley battleground. so much that, at one point a few years ago, one could find 4000 people playing that battleground alone, and 8000 total playing mass battlegrounds, as opposed to arenas. and this is just one battlegroup's session data, imagine around 12 to 20 battlegroups - 160,000 people actually in battlegrounds, as of 02.00-03.00 at night. (leave aside other parts of the game, raids, realm etc).

one would think, if you gave all classes 1-2 ccs each, and let them play, it would be evident that all hell would break loose and game would be unplayable due to ccs flying about in a mass pvp environment.

well they didnt think that. and since the last expansion, mass pvp is a stop motion animation, in which you are not in control of your toon more than you are, during the course of any given pvp engagement.

moreover, they totally killed the logic of some of the elements of the game, like physical damage, armor, magic damage, magic and so on.

the casters, before this expansion, were either ranged classes, or, cc classes. and, because being casters and having ranged damage ignoring armor (all kinds of armor), they either had escape abilities or cc abilities, and therefore were given light cloth armor or leather armor.

melee classes were given plate armor that reduced physical damage, but, to offset the fact that they are not able to ignore armor on anything, they were given big melee physical damage when in range.

so much logic was balanced, and things worked fairly well.

however come this expansion, the great heads of class design have thought it would be fit to give caster classes all-damage absorbing magic shields, or, boost up the power of the ones that already existed. without effecting any kind of reduction in the abilities of ranged/magic damage and their armor ignore, and the amount of cc abilities for the classes that relied on them.

and now, we have another added oddity in the game, in which the ranged, armor ignoring cc having magic classes having more and better damage reduction/resistance for all kinds of damages, including melee. whereas, the melee classes, which had plate armor and high physical damage, are weaker in regard to toughness than the supposedly ranged, melee-weak classes.

imagine, a class that was designed to wear cloth and therefore be susceptible to physical damage to offset the armor-ignore damage they do, is way tougher than the durable, plate wearing melee class you have rolled and leveled to play.

suddenly makes one think, if a cloth armor class is going to be so tough, whats the point of having a plate class in a game.



this rather intricate example, and the very obvious example before it shows that, one needs at least SOME linear thinking in any kind of design/development. because, even if you are designing intricate systems th

Re:The game with PvP that is stop motion animation

[AltairDusk]

I've been playing since the level cap was 60, and I can't figure out if you're just confused and actually playing a different game or just awful at pvp. Other possibility is that you're trolling I suppose.

AoE cc that causes you to lose control of your character: Fears. The classes that have this available to them are: Priest (Instant, on cooldown), Warlock (Cast time, can be made instant with talents, also on cooldown), and Warrior (I believe this is also instant and on cooldown). As with all types of CC Fear is subject to diminishing returns, the basic concept of which is that each time you are affected by a Fear effect it will be shorter, the fourth time you will be immune and continue to be immune until the timer resets. Each category of CC is on a diminishing return timer, they specifically designed it so that you couldn't be CC'd over and over and over with no recourse. There are also abilities and items that can be used to break CC used on you.

The PvP in WoW has definitely become more balanced over time, back at 60 it was basically rock, paper, scissors. Class design was such that one class was the counter to a few classes, and was hard countered by a few others, the few left were mostly on equal footing. Melee classes have traditionally been more reliant on gear but also scaled better with it. They have also been granted more ways to close the gap over the last two expansions and a well geared melee will tear apart a caster if the caster can't keep away from them. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that Blizzard will make plate have less survivability than casters in Cataclysm but I'm not seeing that at all.

TL;DR: Perhaps there are other players who agree with you but having played for quite awhile myself I have a hard time believing we're even talking about the same game.

Re:The game with PvP that is stop motion animation

[unity100]

yeah have a hard time believing that im talking about the same game, despite the developers of the very game have stated that they were going to remove a lot of ccs and cc immunities come cata. apparently, they dont agree with you.

Re:The game with PvP that is stop motion animation

[AltairDusk]

yeah have a hard time believing that im talking about the same game, despite the developers of the very game have stated that they were going to remove a lot of ccs and cc immunities come cata. apparently, they dont agree with you.

Notice they are removing some of the immunities as well...

Re:The game with PvP that is stop motion animation

[unity100]

'notice' ? i have TOLD that they are. you are telling me to notice it ..

yes, they are removing cc immunities and ccs, because they made the game a stop motion animation.

Re:The game with PvP that is stop motion animation

[AltairDusk]

My point was that they're removing them in tandem, cc immunities counter cc. If you're under cc every 3 seconds you are doing something horribly wrong.

Re:The game with PvP that is stop motion animation

[unity100]

and thats the stupid statement i was waiting for. no apologies, its stupid.

it doesnt matter whether they are removing them 'in tandem'. if, they are both being removed, it means that that 'tandemness' was NOT working.

if it worked, ie, if ccs and cc immunities offset each other, there would be NO NEED to remove them. but, apparently, they arent.

and, they are not. a cc immunity that can be popped up for 5 seconds every 1 minute for only one's own toon cannot counter the ccs that are being spammed from every toon every minute. you use it for 5 seconds, and the 6th second, someone else's random aoe cc gets you.

all these only work in scarce encounters, in which the sides are either 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 or combinations of these. they do not work once you get to an encounter larger than 5v5.

and it kills mass pvp. hence, since they are wanting to concentrate on rated battlegrounds and started 'balancing' the game around 10-15 man encounters, they are removing them.

but apparently you had no clue about either these news, or these issues. yet, you keep making statements.

Re:The game with PvP that is stop motion animation

[AltairDusk]

I BG quite often and as I said at the start of this your statement of getting CC'd every 3 seconds does not hold up in game. You still haven't supported that frequency of not being able to control your character.

As I pointed out AoE CC's that cause you to lose control of your character are all fear effects and usable by 3 classes. You specifically complained of losing control of your toon this frequently which is what I refuted.

Re:The game with PvP that is stop motion animation

[unity100]

i am not going to sit and argue to prove something that the development team of the game have expressed, to a fanboi. this 'discussion' have gone far too longer than it should have already. good evening.

Innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

'We honestly spend a lot of time on innovation. Players are kind of merciless — "Yeah, that was a fun fight, but we've done it before," or, "This is just like that other guy." So we really try to push the envelope there on things players haven't seen before, new systems. We'll have encounter designers say, "I was playing Final Fantasy last night, and it had a boss that did this, and I think we could make that work for a boss in World of Warcraft with these tweaks."'

The Blizzard definition of innovation: Copy Squeenix.

No

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

I can't read anything that GC says.

This is the person that, as far as I can tell, single-handedly ruined WoW. I am not alone in this sentiment.

He's the person who brought us the hungry-hungry-hippos style button-mashing PvP in 3.0.
He's the person who brought us massive cleave teams.
He's the person who made mana to a large extent irrelevant.
He's the person who brought us Naxxramas (revisited) as "serious" raiding content.
He's the person who basically eliminated threat as a mechanic.
He's the person who wanted to make the game "less like Chess" and "more like Poker".

The problem with GC is that he likes to fuck with things. In major ways.

In PvP, this leads to 'flavor-of-the-month' classes/combos - who knows which one is going to be imba and at what time. In PvE, this leads to entire mechanics getting deprecated.

The problem is, many of us liked how the game played prior to GC. No, it wasn't perfect. Yes, there have been some improvements (like the queuing system for daily heroics).

You can't just go and upend everything whenever you feel like it. After a while players get tired of the change and decide, "screw it, I'm going to play something else".

That's what I did. After 5+ years of WoW, GC convinced me that it's not worth it anymore.

Re:No

[rcuhljr]

You can't just go and upend everything whenever you feel like it. After a while players get tired of the change and decide, "screw it, I'm going to play something else".

You can't just leave everything the same or after a while players get tired of the same old thing and decide, "Screw it, I'm going to play something else."

Re:No

[Machtyn]

I agree with both of you. However, with a game as large as WoW, a single person could not experience the entire game within a reasonable amount of time. I've got 5 characters, all Horde, but only two of them I am playing and learning at the moment. I have not had a chance to experience the Allies point of view. I've not had a chance to learn the Rogue's or Paladin's mechanics. I've not even touched my healer druid since it hit 30-something. I've been trying to work my Mage up to 60 so I could finally learn the polymorph-rabbit spell that my Hunter acquired in an Easter event two years ago. He's stalled around 48 because I started a DK so I could have a tank my friends and I can rely on when they want to play a DPS or healer.

I've barely figured out the DK and tank issues when, now, I have to completely re-learn how to play my Hunter (what?! No more Volley!!)

My point is that they could leave well enough alone and people would be able to continue playing the game for several years.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree. Greg Street ruined the game. They brag about the 12 million players. That would be more like 15 to 20 million if GC (street) had not of alienated so many players by doing all the things you mention. Every patch was a whiplash to the way things worked. After a few years of his shoddy leadership, I couldn't bring myself to log in anymore.

Re:No

[js3]

I don't like him either. He's more lawyer than marine biologist, he does anything he wants and justifies it (I know it's funny when I say it too) but frankly there's nothing I hate more than running around in circles and WoW is doing exactly that.

Ruler of a game that has no idea what it wants to be.

Re:No

[digitalnoise615]

I don't like him either. He's more lawyer than marine biologist, he does anything he wants and justifies it (I know it's funny when I say it too) but frankly there's nothing I hate more than running around in circles and WoW is doing exactly that.

Ruler of a game that has no idea what it wants to be.

Well, when you have the title "Lead Systems Designer " you kinda get to do those things. And 12 Million people agree with him. And considering that ACTV's stock price is based over 50% solely on WoW, even though Activision-Blizzard have many other titles would suggest that most people disagree with you.

Re:No

[js3]

ugh same old tired argument. I was part of the 12million, it's like saying 12million smokers agree smoking is good for you. Your fallacy is thinking everyone who plays wow likes to play it. I hated it the last 2 years until somehow I broke the addiction and quit.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

That must explain why WoW subscriber numbers keep falling. This game is definitely on the way out!

I mean they went from 11 million to 12 million users, this is surely a sign of the game dying.

Re:No

[BobMcD]

In PvP, this leads to 'flavor-of-the-month' classes/combos - who knows which one is going to be imba and at what time......After a while players get tired of the change and decide, "screw it, I'm going to play something else".

I'm decently convinced that this is the design. You're supposed to reroll, but if you quit they expect you to return eventually, so you're just 'taking a break' to them. Either way, we as players are supposed to see that the other guy has it better and react. Of this I'm certain.

Re:No

[Kjella]

I don't like him either. He's more lawyer than marine biologist, he does anything he wants and justifies it (I know it's funny when I say it too) but frankly there's nothing I hate more than running around in circles and WoW is doing exactly that.

I think the big news would be a lead game designer that can't justify the design even to himself. No matter what they decided there'd be flak coming because you can't please everyone, and part of his job is to sit there and take it saying "This is what we went with because we thought it was best."

Does it really matter that you're running in the same circles if you're doing them well? Lately I've been playing a lot of Civilization, and in many ways it hasn't changed since Civilization <voice="Scotty">N-C-C-1-7-0-1, no bloody A B C D or E</voice> but the essence of it is fun even though I'm playing it many times over. In fact I'm probably a bit too addictive to play WoW...

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, every expansion is a repeat of the same mistakes. Which, they never fully recover from by the end of that expansion. The pre-expansion patch is always a giant cluster****. Horrible balance. Knee-jerk "fixes" to problems they were constantly told about in Beta but never addressed before patch. Horrible scaling. Every time we hear the same things... "It's balanced for 70, 80, 85." It never is. And it never becomes it. You can't treat PvE and PvP as two separate games and expect them to co-exist.

Lastly, as brought up lately, you can't just ignore older scaling of characters.(goes back to the max level balanced only agenda). What about alts? What about new players? Their idea to fix that is faster leveling so that "it doesn't matter". Then they wonder why people get bored at max level so fast. Leveling isn't the grind anymore. The grind is the max level gear grind for PvE and PvP. Way worse repetition. I think the worst part about all of this idea is that they went through the trouble of changing when some classes get skills/talents but didn't rescale things to be relatively balanced along the journey.

No, I'm not naive enough to expect perfect balance. Balance is something you strive for always, but never truly achieve. Balance is not that there is a best and worst class. That will always exist in someone's opinion. Balance is the gap between best and worst. When worst has no chance at all against best, your balance is bad.

Re:No

[Greguar]

There are a lot of different things that make people quit... for example, I didn't care much for the original herding-massive-quantities-of-cats-into-gigantic-raids-to-get-a-chance-at-one-piece-of-loot model that they used in the original and quit after becoming frustrated with the end game. Some of the changes that have been made since then might have convinced me to stick around if they'd come earlier.

There seems to be a rotating focus on some alienated portion of the player-base with each iteration, now with some bones being thrown back to the uberhardcore raid nuts, the very same group that the original version of WoW catered to and then abandoned progressively with each expansion. While attempting to juggle all of the competing interests of a diverse playerbase, they're definitely dropping some balls. Maybe the next expansion will have something that rekindles your interest, or maybe you'll remain free of the addiction like me and marvel at how much extra time you have to waste on other equally meaningless pursuits.

I took up alcohol.

Re:No

[snuf23]

Except that every class gets hit with the nerf or buff bat over time. So rerolling to be the uber flavor of the week ends up being a waste of time when the inevitable nerf comes along. I'm not talking about huge nerfs, oftentimes a single talent or ability that is overpowered can have a huge effect.

Re:No

[BobMcD]

Actually, I'm almost finished with a 'set' of one of each tank and healer class. Mostly as an educational experience, but also so I can 'easily' switch between them should the need arise.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

pathetic

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Completely agreed...and did the same thing. I've had enough of one person decided the entire game needed to be changed because people were not playing it the way HE wants people to play it. So dumped my account.

Re:No

[vertinox]

You can't just leave everything the same or after a while players get tired of the same old thing and decide, "Screw it, I'm going to play something else."

Hrm... Check this article out:

http://www.massively.com/2010/10/09/gdco-2010-running-mmos-for-the-long-haul/#continued

Basically its devs like CCP and Blizzard on a panel who basically come out and say, if you want an MMO to last more than 10 years, you have to please the core player base.

If you don't do that, then you get bankrupt.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

He's the person who made mana to a large extent irrelevant.
Mana was pretty irrelevant at the end of BC as well.

He's the person who brought us Naxxramas (revisited) as "serious" raiding content.
They never claimed Naxx was "serious". Actually, they said it was a "fun" re-release of an older raid. It was the first raid of the expansion, it wasn't meant to be serious.

If you let some minimal changes affect your opinion of WoW, you haven't played for long. The game has changed it's face several times since release, it has to change to survive.

Re:No

[ShakaUVM]

>>Every patch was a whiplash to the way things worked.

I quit two or three years ago when it became painfully apparent the designers of WoW had absolutely no idea what they're doing.

I've played a few other MMORPGs since then (DDO, Runes of Magic) which were pretty lame, especially since they tried to be WoW, but couldn't do it as well.

Stronghold Kingdoms was the first MMORPG I have enjoyed in years, and the first one that I'm quitting because it is too engrossing. It literally requires you to log in every 10 or 15 minutes in order to optimize your gameplay, and doing that for 100 days (the alpha just ended an hour ago) makes me really really not want to do it again. I came in 175th out of 18,000 people, which I figure is pretty good, and I accomplished all of my objectives (I became the King of Clowne)... so, yeah. I'm done with it. Hopefully when it releases the difference between the F2P and paid versions won't be as painful as it looks like it will be right now (buying levels and skill points = bad news), but if they get their shit together, I'd highly recommend it. Building castles and laying siege to your neighbors? Woot. =)

Re:No

[Ruzty]

That's what I did. After 5+ years of WoW, GC convinced me that it's not worth it anymore.

Hear, hear! I quit and started playing more balanced and fun PvP games like League of Legends. Haven't looked back...

Re:No

[brkello]

After 5+ years, everything become too much of the same or too many changes.

Be that as it may

[Anonymous Coward]

This expansion is just "more of the same."

Guild Wars 2 is approaching combat differently (more action and no dedicated healer class), has no monthly fees (though is still massive), has much nicer graphics, and will make WoW look silly once it is released.

And also coming out soon is Star Wars: The Old Republic, which Bioware is saying is the most ambitious game they have ever made so far.

The days of WoW's dominance over the MMO genre are numbered.

Re:Be that as it may

[Anonymous Coward]

Replace GW2 and SW:TOR with WAR and AoC and you could have made the same post 2 years ago. We'll see how it pans out this time.

Re:Be that as it may

[Skarecrow77]

Agreed. There have been about a dozen games that were supposed to kill wow, and none of them have made a dent. Last I heard, WoW's overall subscriber base was back up again and had broken the record they set a few years ago when they first brought the chinese client online.

Also, to the GP, I LIKE being a healer. When designed well, it's an enjoyable role.

No questions about QA?

[_bug_]

Blizzard has had some crap QA issues before, but 4.0.1 was one of their most atrocious releases to the point that they said some of the Mage glyph bugs just simply can't be fixed right now and that they had to just deal with it. How does crap like that get by their QA? We're not talking about some arcane feature with a small bug, we're talking about a major component of the system that is totally broken.

I think you really see it in the patch notes, which tend to contain about 1/10th of the actual changes made in a given patch. For example 4.0.1 includes a ton of new UI features such as graphical elements used to alert the user that a special ability is ready to be used. However nothing was ever disclosed about it nor were players given a chance to learn what each graphical identity means when its displayed. It becomes trial and error. Watch for the new graphic to appear, now look at your list of buffs to see if there's some new, temp buff there. Wait for it to go away and see if the graphic goes away as well. That's a lot of tedious crap to deal with, especially when you're in the middle of a boss fight.

I wonder if this guy's approach to development by keeping development teams small is responsible for the poor quality of both documentation and product.

Re:No questions about QA?

[cigawoot]

4.0.1 was the largest patch they had ever created. Anyone who has worked 10 seconds in the software development business is that bugs are apart of life. World of Warcraft is the most bug-free MMO in existence. Blizzard does a really good job working as many bugs as they can out of the game, but bugs do creep in.

Re:No questions about QA?

[digitalnoise615]

Blizzard has had some crap QA issues before, but 4.0.1 was one of their most atrocious releases to the point that they said some of the Mage glyph bugs just simply can't be fixed right now and that they had to just deal with it. How does crap like that get by their QA? We're not talking about some arcane feature with a small bug, we're talking about a major component of the system that is totally broken.

I think you really see it in the patch notes, which tend to contain about 1/10th of the actual changes made in a given patch. For example 4.0.1 includes a ton of new UI features such as graphical elements used to alert the user that a special ability is ready to be used. However nothing was ever disclosed about it nor were players given a chance to learn what each graphical identity means when its displayed. It becomes trial and error. Watch for the new graphic to appear, now look at your list of buffs to see if there's some new, temp buff there. Wait for it to go away and see if the graphic goes away as well. That's a lot of tedious crap to deal with, especially when you're in the middle of a boss fight.

I wonder if this guy's approach to development by keeping development teams small is responsible for the poor quality of both documentation and product.

Considering there's at least one more major patch (4.0.3 - The Sundering) before Cataclysm is released, I can see their point of view. The Beta servers are currently running post-Cata patches (obviously) and the Mage Glyph issues doesn't exist there - which would indicate it's been fixed, just not released yet.

Re:No questions about QA?

[Cinder6]

You're right. The patch notes for 4.0.1 were particularly sparse. The only way to know everything that was coming was to read all the blue posts on the WoW forums (or play the PTR). One silly thing was, for death knights: "The way in which runes recharge has been changed." Well, that's vague. Why not spend one more sentence: "Only one of each rune recharges at a time; the second will not begin recharging until the first has done so." Maybe because that way, everyone will see how arbitrary and random the change itself is.

Re:No questions about QA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe because that way, everyone will see how arbitrary and random the change itself is.

Nah, that change is honestly pretty sensible (particularly combined with the new 'random rune activation' that takes out some of the monotony). It takes away from some (though not all) of the "GCD-lock" that Death Knights hit -- namely, needing to push another button every 1.5 seconds or else you're not doing it right. It also adds a little leeway -- if you let a rune sit active, you're no longer entirely 'wasting' that rune as long as the other is still on cooldown.

I think they still need to make a few tweaks, though -- probably dropping the GCD on runic power dumps to 1 second baseline (Rune Strike, Frost Strike, and Death Coil -- and possibly drop the damage of each by about 5%, too) would seriously fix the major issues with being "GCD-locked" in anything but Unholy Presence.

Re:No questions about QA?

[isomer1]

The elephant in the room is that WoW essentially has zero beta testing. Oh sure, there is a 'beta' phase where you can copy over a character and try out the changes, but that system is broken. The reality is that the vast majority of beta players are just practicing the new raid zones so they can compete for world first boss kills as soon as the content goes live. So major flaws in mechanics go unreported & unfixed, while inane boss tuning gets all the attention.

Re:No questions about QA?

[DMorritt]

Mod the parent up if you have any points, working in software is not as simple as most people seem to think, I keep reading "Blizz QA is rubbish because my x is not working" type comments, yet if you worked in software you would realise how hard it is to track down and fix these issues. Cut the guys some slack, after making some really significant changes I'm really surprised how well it is coming, they can't read every bug reported (whined about) on /. or other "popular" forums, and judging by 1/2 the comments in their support forums being "suggestions" etc... I'd work there at the drop of a hat, the turnaround is actually pretty good.

Too Easy

[BuckaBooBob]

I understand That they are making the game easier to appeal to more people... But really the game is getting too easy and as a result there are people ending up in a raiding environment that simply just do not understand how to play their class.. Blizzard needs to start to think about adding Heroic servers that have the new EZ mode turned off so I can play with people that are closer to my skill level and have a desire to be significantly challenged by the content without bumping into someone that is just clueless how to play their class or is just looking for easy loot.

Re:Too Easy

[js3]

I used to raid hardcore a year ago, I keep asking myself why I did it. At the time it didn't seem that strange or wrong at all but looking back the difficulty is what attracted me to it. I wanted to do something hard and that required some amount of dedication put forth to that task.

Once they made it easy the entire thing seemed pointless and trivial.. so I stopped and never doing that again lol. Well i'm doing that in starcraft 2 now.

Re:Too Easy

[cigawoot]

It is called being in a guild that does heroic encounters.

Re:Too Easy

[BobMcD]

Your information is out of date, and not only does Blizzard agree with you, but they've already designed and implemented a whole expansion based on observations like yours. I'm sure you can find out more in the interview above, or maybe even on Google if you're feeling adventurous...

For example, did you know the expected progression path is now:

A) Run dungeons for Normal blue gear.

B) Run those same dungeons on Heroic for Heroic blue gear.

C) Raid on Normal for Normal purple gear.

D) Raid on Heroic for Heroic Purple gear.

E) Move on to the next tier...

Doesn't sound like a lot of fun to me, but your wish certainly seems to have been granted. People will know not only their class but every nook and cranny of each dungeon before they ever set foot in a raid.

Re:Too Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

What?

Raiding execution was always been easy and/or trivial. The problem was finding 39/24/9 other people that had two brain cells to rub together and had halfway-decent reflexes.

I stopped raiding when Blizzard decided that being in a raid crew in the top 5-10% of all raid crews overall still wasn't enough to kill some ICC-25 bosses without the damage buff on normal mode (vampire boss). Leading up to that was the realization raiding had turned into a mashfest instead of a tactical battle.

Re:Too Easy

[tuxedobob]

I'm mostly hoping each level is challenging. Original Shattered Halls in BC was pretty rough. Doable, but rough. In Wrath, there are plenty of dungeons I simply never ran on normal, because my gear from BC was good enough to head straight into heroics.

tl;dr

[loufoque]

Seriously, how much of a hardcore WoW fan do you need to be to read the whole thing?

Re:tl;dr

[mdm-adph]

I'm a hardcore fan, and even I skipped this entire post and went to the comments.

So pretty fucking hardcore. :\

I don't know -- I just don't want want to know anything that goes on behind the scenes with WoW. Kinda takes the fun out of it.

Re:tl;dr

[Amorymeltzer]

Never played, never will, and I read the whole thing.

It's like Starship Troopers or South Park - remove all the brain bug and/or poop talk and you've got serious political and social commentary. Ignore the crap about glyphs and other jargon and you've got an interesting interview about the way games are continuously developed, how feedback is assessed, and what kind of statements are meaningful and noticed by designers. I learned a bit about WoW, but I learned a bit more about a hugely successful company.

Re:tl;dr

[TheGothicGuardian]

Oddly enough, I've never even seen WoW being played, and I read the entire thing.

Raiding

[Mybrid]

"Greg Street: We've got a lot of players into raiding now. I don't encounter too many players these days who say, "I want to raid but I'm not sure how," or "It's too hard." "

Seriously? You can't even get into an Ice Crown raid unless your gear score is 5K and most people are going to want you to already know the fights.

If by "raiding" he means the Dungeon Tool, he's probably right there, but other than that forget it.

It is nigh impossible to reasonably PUG a raid.

Re:Raiding

[compro01]

5K isn't out of line IMO and it's fairly attainable, especially now that you can get full t10 just by running heroic dungeons, though granted, that is a fair timesink. Average gearscore is about 5.3k.

And of course you ought to know the fights. Not necessarily having done them, but at least read up on the fight for 10 minutes or watch a bloody video of it.

The only issue I've had with PUGs on my realm (Sargeras) is getting deep into ICC. Most PUGs come apart at rotface. The new raid lock system seems to be helping with this though.

Re:Raiding

[Mybrid]

". Average gearscore is about 5.3k."

I'm curious as to how you got this number?

Re:Raiding

[argmanah]

With how heroics work now, getting 5k gear score can be done relatively quickly. And no, you can't level up to 80 and join an ICC raid on your first day. But you know what, ICC isn't the first tier of raid instances. It's the last tier. When the weekly raid is Patchwork, no one is checking your gear score. You CAN do VOA with crappy gear. He never claimed you can do ALL raid content while wearing all green sub-80 gear.

Making it easier to get into raiding and trivializing the requirements for the final raid instance in the game are not the same thing.

Re:Raiding

[compro01]

Number is from wtfismygearscore.com. Actual average is 5296.

Look up any character and it will show if they are above or below the average ("win" or "fail") for their level and mousing over it will show by how much. Average is for all realms worldwide, except China.

FWIW, the data may be skewed by the Korean realms, but it seems reasonable going by what I see in game.

Re:Raiding

[Elshar]

Not only that, but it's also impossible to PUG heroics in BC. I know, I've camped for hours (Admittedly, as DPS) with my aff lock waiting for someone - anyone - on any server - to also queue for them. It just ain't happening.

So the only way you can reliably get into the BC heroics is via either a specialty guild, or attempting (ROFL) to convince your guild that BC stuff is going to be "fun" when they're grinding to get >5k GS to go do ICC (hahaha, sure..)

Anyways, that's what really ticked me off right before I quit about 8 or so weeks ago. After a week of queueing while grinding quests, I did a grand total of... *1* BC heroic. yay.

Pretty much the only "easy" stuff is crap that you use to level. Even the drops in the instances totally suck, and as far as I can tell, the dungeons only exist so you have something, ANYTHING to do after you've wasted all the time you could grinding rep/quests/etc trying to get into the final heroics/raids.

Blah, sorry.

Re:Raiding

[Hamo]

Seriously? Icecrown Citadel was introduced in patch 3.3 which came out on December 8, 2009, almost 11 months ago. I really don't think it is that unreasonable for raid leaders to expect raid members to know basic encounter mechanics which have been in the game for almost a year when all it takes to learn them is about 5 seconds of googling. Furthermore, with the current (up to last patch) badge system, you can get a 5K gearscore on a fresh 80 in a weekend by running heroic 5 man dungeons through the use of the Dungeon Tool you just mentioned. So if you mean it is nigh impossible to completely unreasonably get carried in a PUG raid, I suppose you are correct.

Re:Raiding

[Anonymous Coward]

"Greg Street: We've got a lot of players into raiding now. I don't encounter too many players these days who say, "I want to raid but I'm not sure how," or "It's too hard." "

Seriously? You can't even get into an Ice Crown raid unless your gear score is 5K and most people are going to want you to already know the fights.

If by "raiding" he means the Dungeon Tool, he's probably right there, but other than that forget it.

It is nigh impossible to reasonably PUG a raid.

i dunno...don't suk...really 5k is ridiculous easy to get...here's a clue do your home work and someone will want to have you along...QQ

Re:Raiding

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. My realm generally requires 5.5k GS for ICC, which is way over geared. Further, it makes raiding really boring--because everybody is geared so well, all you have to do to beat the raid is stand there and press one button the whole time rather than planning any type of strategy (other than run to the other side of the room when the boss casts some sort of spell). Then there are the people with no real life or job other than playing WoW who are intolerant of even the most minor mistake. Since they changed the raid locking mechanics, it's not uncommon for one of the WoW elitists to leave the raid even if there have been no wipes because he thinks the raid is going "too slow", usually after calling everyone a bunch of faggot n00bs over ventrillo. If it's an important class like a tank or healer, this usually forces everyone to wait another half hour to find a new player to fill the role.

Re:Raiding

[Anonymous Coward]

Idk what server you on but Blackrock-US pugs 11/12HM ICC with our gdkps and lots of /2 pugs regurally clear normal ICC25.

Re:Raiding

[Anonymous Coward]

This post pretty much misses the point entirely, unless it's an elaborate troll.

You can't even get into an Ice Crown raid unless your gear score is 5K and most people are going to want you to already know the fights.

"You can't even race in the Indy 500 unless you are in a professional racing team, and most people are going to want you to not crash."

"You can't even perform a kidney transplant without 15 years of medical school, and most people are going to want you not to kill them."

You have to work your way up to the top level of the game, and once you get there it's still difficult to pull off the hardest fights without a team that you've been working together with for a long time. That's kinda what makes the game so good. It's also the reason really good players keep playing, because there's stuff that's still a challenge even after putting in maximum effort for years.

If you want to put in zero effort, the developers have included content that you can enjoy too. You just have to realise the stuff that was put there for people who have put in 10+ hours a week for 5 years is out of your reach.

Re:Raiding

[Anonymous Coward]

"Greg Street: We've got a lot of players into raiding now. I don't encounter too many players these days who say, [...]"It's too hard." "

Oh, he's going to be encountering a whole lot of them once Cataclysm goes live, given the way they're tuning the PvE content. It's going to be a total trainwreck, especially when the move to mostly 10 man raids will make good raid leaders much harder to find.

Seriously, I don't see where he's getting this notion that people want harder content. Most raiding guilds finished neither ICC nor Ulduar (25 man) when it was current. Tune the content even harder and the bulk of the current raiding population is just going to give up.

Re:Raiding

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on your server, if you have a lot of bad players then don't expect to PuG much. On my server, PuGs have been clearing 9/12-11/12 HMs in ICC25 with minimal effort. It's just who you know and where you play I guess.

Re:Raiding

[Majin Bubu]

If your gear isn't good enough, properly enchanted and gemmed, you don't bring supplies and you haven't bothered reading up ahead on bosses, you have no business raiding ICC, period. Gearing up is pretty easy nowadays, making gold is even easier, so there are no excuses: run heroics, prepare ahead, then step in and by all means most everybody will recognize your effort and help you; if you slack, by all means expect everybody to be shitty about it. Raiding should be for everybody, but ONLY if they are prepared to make an effort.

Re:Raiding

[sundog61]

Gearscore is only one of the requirements. Most of the time, pug ICC raids ask not for just gearscore but achievements too. So, often, even if someone has read up and is prepared, they don't get invited because they haven't already done it once.

Re:Raiding

[Roman Coder]

The parent post makes a great point!

This has happened to me many a time as well. Its not just the gear score, its the achievement check that segregates people out of joining a raid.

Re:Raiding

[tuxedobob]

A 5k gear score is doable with 5-man dungeons. I mean, even before this last patch.

You can "know the fights" by looking them up on wowpedia.org or youtube. Or tankspot. Or bosskillers. Or a half dozen other sites.

ICC pugs on my server routinely clear at least half of icecrown. I've known pugs attempt heroic bosses, and some even kill (normal) lich king.

Re:Raiding

[Mybrid]

You all seem to be missing Greg's point. Greg was claiming that "We've got a lot of players into raiding now."

Maybe what I should have countered with was "prove it".

Link the RAID achievements vs. the number of level 80s and show us that level 80s who play on average 10 hours a week have lots of raid achievements.

"You can "know the fights" by looking them up on wowpedia.org or youtube. Or tankspot. Or bosskillers. Or a half dozen other sites."

"I want to raid but I'm not sure how," or "It's too hard." "

Your statement is directly at odds with Greg's.

Here's how hard it is for me to use video.

1.) As tank I've had to use ALL of the sites you've listed to "know how." No one site works.
2.) Many of the videos are out of date.
3.) Videos are for a class you are not playing. Good luck trying to tank a fight as a warrior when the video is paladin.
4.) Videos have characters far better geared.
5.) Most of the videos have the UI so tweaked and custom rigged it makes them difficult to understand and they require watching repeated times.

So I disagree with him saying that users don't feel the "know how is hard". It is hard, especially for tanks.

And I'm still surprised at how many players do not have Deadly Boss Mod set.

If a player has to spend 30 minutes to an hour scouring the web to "know how", maybe it has been two months since that raid, then this directly contradicts Greg's statement that "I want to raid but I'm not sure how," or "It's too hard."

Why do you think the tank ratio is so low? Because it's too hard.

Re:Raiding

[tuxedobob]

Look, maybe it's you. If you see a paladin in the video and you don't know what to do because you're a warrior, it's not the game. It's not the class. It's not the encounter. It's you.

And no, tanking's not hard. You survive, you did a good job. You die, it was either your gear or your healers. Tanking involves very little skill nowadays. You've got a handful of cooldowns you use every couple minutes, and that's about it. DPS has to manage more at once, and healing is where the challenge really is.

"I don't know how to raid" is sort of meaningless on its own. What part is it you don't know, exactly?

Re:Raiding

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent post makes a great point!

This has happened to me many a time as well. Its not just the gear score, its the achievement check that segregates people out of joining a raid.

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/underachiever.aspx

you're welcome

Re:Too little too late.

[Wowlapalooza]

Mmmm... yeah. That's why my Trade Chat window is always empty and I never see anyone in Dalaran. Dungeon Finder is a waste of time, too, since all the other servers are the same way. Completely deserted. It's sooooo lonely...

Casinos....

[hesaigo999ca]

I always thought a cool place to go was the casino, like las vegas, but owned and operated by goblins, neutral territory...where you can if good at what you do (cards...) you could really make some cash (almost same as in AH?) Anyways, they could add that to interest the older players...and also maybe tweak their AH for the web...so as not to make it too hard to do what you can from the GUI in WoW.

Pissed off ex-warrior here.

[Anonymous Coward]

GC can rot in hell for constantly nerfing the warrior. If i meet him in RL I'd kick his ass. I'd go into details, but I'm not gonna bother, my rage bar is full just reading this garbage.

Damage meters help the Newbies

[gknoy]

When leveling a new character, I was amazed at the disparity of performance between new people and veterans playing alts (alternate characters). People like me start a new character and already have Recount and threat meters running, and look carefully for optimal ways of doing things. New people don't even have a convenient way of knowing that they're performing poorly, because they don't even know that damage meters EXIST. All most people notice is the flashing numbers over the target's head, and more big numbers is better.

Damage meters let you, when grouped with someone of your class, see that "hey, he does 2x the damage I do", and then ask them how they do it. Sure, not everyone wants to do that, but it'd be nice if that capability were built in to the interface. Even more so if players got a tutorial blurb about "You can compare your performance to others by enabling the Damage Meter (Options->Interface->[x]Damage meter)" which showed when they entered a dungeon for the first time, or joined a group. That would at least enable motivated (but inexperienced) players to find out how well they were doing, without needing to start googling on the hunch that they could do better.

This only applies for completely new players to MMOs, or to people who have never played at "high levels". Non-veterans, as it were. When I played Aion (briefly), the first things I researched were how to optimally play my class (Templar), watched videos on weaving 2H strikes, and practiced it in game. A completely new player who picked it up at the store might never even THINK of doing that, unless they'd played an MMO before. The second thing I looked for was a damage meter, so that I could figure out whether I was doing it right. If I were to go play LOTR online, or the new Star Wars: The Old Republic game, I'd go looking for similar stuff too, and that already puts me ahead of a large portion of users.

You don't receive all log messages

[Kartu]

I don't understand why something like Recount isn't built into clients during development. How do they debug to ensure every client is getting the same combat messages? Yes you can do it server side, but you need to do it client side as well to ensure all clients are synced.

At least when in raid you are only guaranteed to get all messages relevant to you, but not necessarily to your party.