Slashdot Mirror
Greg 'Ghostcrawler' Street, Lead Systems Designer For World of Warcraft
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.
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.
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.
Living With a Nerd
Ctrl+F, "pony"... nothing. I'm not reading this until he makes with the goods
Agreed. I like knowing what's going on, but marketing-spun interviews are a waste of my time.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Blizzard is feeding them to him to get free press for the upcoming Cataclysm launch.
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.
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.
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.
go away you miserable contrarian.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
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".
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.
I just deleted my page long reply. Instead I'll just post myself (and whoever else) a reminder/warning:
Don't feed the trolls
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
Nonsense. All Blizzard products are the same. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to play some World of Diablo: Starclysm.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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?
If they gave Tauren players plainsrunning then people would want to be able to ride Tauren players as mounts, which would be... awesome!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
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.
Seriously, how much of a hardcore WoW fan do you need to be to read the whole thing?
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.
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.
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.
or dump the combatlog to a text file and parse it with a perl script.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
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.
"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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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...
'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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.