Man the Flamethrower: Why World of Warcraft is Badly Designed
The arguments and analysis from this article will surely generate significant agreement and disagreement. I must admit that I found the points well made and well argued.
Why World of Warcraft is Badly Designed
I particularly agree with the sections on Quest Grinding (surprise, surprise), Time over Skill, terrible class balance, poor UI that relies too much on user made addons, and pure gear grind gameplay. I think Simon leaves out another major problem and flaw, which is the design obsession with raiding.
Read the article and then share your own opinions here. Let it rip.
Raiding = Endgame.
This terrible equation is what became of the emergent raid gameplay of EverQuest. I am pretty sure 75% if not more of the people out there outright loathe raids and do them just to get the next shiny loot in the progress scheme.
Simon Hill is right, and the terrible thing is that WoW became almost synonymous with what a MMO is and how it has to be. Not everything is WoW’s fault, some problems are typical MMORPG flaws like the grind and time over skill.
Class balance for PvP is something that is always a problem, but it is interesting how much imbalance people are willing to accept in WoW. Right now we have the “Age of Hybridcraft”, and that my Warlock was and is and more and more became ever easier prey for Rogues was apparently never a problem either. By now it is the least played class, not only for this reason.
I unfortunately see no progress, nobody breaking off this scheme. Aion is a nice game for example, but despite a different endgame (PvP-RvR mixed with PvE factions) it still follows the same, empty hollow quests scheme. Kill 11 grizzles, bring 10 foozles. Raids also have a focus on tank and spank.
One thing that Simon Hill did not make that clear is the forced grouping. I think the issue is rather that after a game that consists of 100% selfish solo-play people are suddenly meant to cooperate as a team and form 10-25 man raids to get the next gear carrots!
This is really sad, but true: “It is based on a constant striving which can never be satisfied because if you reach the pinnacle it is instantly pointless and deathly boring. There is no grand finale. You will never get that carrot dangling at the end of the stick and if you ever do you’ll realise what a waste of time it was getting there.”
Indeed, the journey is the destination here. It is time to think of a different progression model and endgame.
Either everyone agrees that WoW is badly designed, or nobody is reading this blog anymore. I am going to hope it is the former rather than the latter.
There are also those of us who read this blog but have never played WoW. Hopefully ‘us’ is accurate, I can’t be the only one!
I’m pretty interested in the MMO mentality. While I’ve never gotten too into the graphical ones, I have a friend who was addicted to several (sometimes simultaneously). What interests me is that it seemed like he was always trying to find the joy that the original Star Wars Galaxies brought him. Inevitably he’d get into raiding, guild nonsense, grinding… and be oblivious to how tedious it all was. In the end, some guild-related drama or general burnout would cause him to take a break before moving onto the next game.
I wonder how much of general MMO discontent comes from not being able to recreate the wonder of the first game that got you hooked. That’s not to say there isn’t bad design at work too, of course. I’ve certainly gotten that impression, though instead of ‘bad design’ I think of it as ‘designed for someone other than me’. (Apparently, millions of other people who are not me)
I’m not sure what I can add that I haven’t already bloviated about at length over at my place.
Other than that the subscription model aids and abets these bad design decisions. Most of these nasty design habits come from the need to string players along with a dripfeed of “fun enough” or “rewarding enough” to keep getting them to pay up, without giving them reasons to quit.
After spending almost a year now really digging into MMO design, I really like to play games that END, that I only pay for once, and that I can play whenever I please, rather than being tied to an internet connection.
They are a gigantic waste of time, all similar, and all shite – my short summary of the results of our mmorpg design brainstorming. Yeah, we are repeating ourselves. It is about time something revolutionary shows up.
One problem he missed that I think is important is the tank and spank playstyle. Pve grouping in WoW(and mmos in general) amounts to herding idiots through mindnumbingly predictable and boring squaredances. I’ve had precious few pve group experiences that I actually look back upon as fun. There’s two that really stick out.
One actually happened in WoW. It was the end of the first Burning Crusade dungeon. The boss(a dragon), swooped down and for some reason targetted our healer first, taking her down nearly instantly. We fought it out according to the typical tanking and spank ideal, except without the healing. Once it was clear that we wouldn’t win that way, I threw the plan out the window and started pulling aggro off of our warrior with my rogue. I tanked the dragon for probably a minute and a half via cooldowns and consumables, and vanished when I was about to die. We ended up winning due to me taking the heat off the warrior for a while, and were already looting the corpse by the time our healer made it back.
The other time was when I went through the ‘respec trial’ in City of Villains with my Brute. Basically, there’s this boss you have to beat down, and two waves of adds showed up when you got the boss’s hp down to certain points. Our group had been sucking pretty bad throughout the quests, so the group leader basically said we should just try to bring the boss down, ignore the adds on the off chance we actually managed to win somehow. So, that’s how we played it. My room mate was watching me play, and when we had the boss down to 30%, he pointed out that the rest of my group was dead. I kept fighting, finishing the boss off by myself, ignoring the adds as I was instructed to. Once I finished the boss, I turned around to check out what I was dealing with. There was a group of about 30 mobs there, trying to kill me. So, I started fighting them too. I killed about 15 of them before my buffs wore off and my inspirations ran out. Once that happened, I teleported away. 5 of the remaining ones followed me, so I killed them too, and waited for my team to get back.
Playing by the seat of your pants like that is INCREDIBLY fun, and allows individual skill to shine through. The tank and spank playstyle is ridiculously boring in comparison, and it needs to be thrown out.
> Playing by the seat of your pants like that is INCREDIBLY fun
EXACTLY! That is what I missed the most in WoW. Almost every boss encounter had to be done a certain way, and as soon as something went wrong, the wrong person died, etc. then basically it was a wipe and everyone just had to die. I got so sick of this comment on vent/ts:
“Ok, healer down. Its a wipe. Everyone die, we have a soul stone up.”
or “everyone die, we can run back before trash respawns.”
Are you talking about the Tree boss in CoV? The first time we did it we chose that method in advance, simply because we like trying to destroy content. It worked for us at a time when people were acting like that boss was nigh impossible. It was a great and rare feeling to know we were doing it “our way.”
Yep, the tree boss. And yeah, everybody on the forums at the time was complaining about how hard it was. Which, evidentally it was for most people, as I was the only one from my group to survive.
It was funny, as I knew nothing about the quest and didn’t know what to do after killing the tree. I was chilling in a corner over a pile of circle of thorn corpses, asking what to do next. Everybody was like ‘wtf you’re still alive and you managed to kill the thing?’
IMO WOW doesn’t deserve to be called a real “game”. It’s a giant virtual hampster wheel/social networking site that gets people hooked with periodic rewards/dings which require no skill but plenty of time to get. From this viewpoint I think the design is brilliant. Most MMORPGs are little better, usually involving more time or a slightly more advanced version of “simon says” raiding.
I agree with Outsider, I love games where I can come up with tactics on the fly and accomplish things through skill that most others would call “impossible”. But if you find this in traditional MMORPGs, it’s an accident of coding the devs will do their best to stamp out when they find it. I find mostly even games that start out differently here drift more towards “WOW” over time.
I don’t think we’ll see a revolution in terms of “MMORPGS” that is really meaningful. These games will never get any better as long as anything with a pulse can level and raid.
As for “recreating the magic” I think a great many of us got hooked on games that were still heavily skill based (MUDs or single player RPGSs) then took a long time to notice this element was absent from the otherwise very similar looking MMORPGS.
“But if you find this in traditional MMORPGs, it’s an accident of coding the devs will do their best to stamp out when they find it.”
Yeah, this is the hardest part of mmorpgs for me. When you do something that’s not intended, you can bet it’ll be removed quickly. Even worse, it’s often nearly impossible to determine what the devs will decide is an exploit, and what is just a smart play. If you explore the mechanics too deeply, you run a very high risk of being punished as a cheater. This makes me hold back from utilizing various grey area mechanics I discover that I know would give me an advantage, but I’m not sure that the devs would say is cosher.
I’m not actually a big WoW basher. I recognize its flaws, but I wouldn’t have played it for a year and a half if I didn’t think it was a good game.
1) Devs nerfing unintended solutions: Ugh. Horrible. I understand this temptation, from a dev’s perspective. But unless it is a gross violation of the general risk/reward balance, you gotta just let it go and applaud it.
2) On the fly skill: I miss this so much. I like being able to react to a situation as it is presented, and try to figure out what to do in the heat of the moment. Watching raid videos and reading boss strategies is lame in the extreme.
On the fly skill is what’s fun about games. Nothing is better than having a tonne of abilities at your disposal, and being forced to decide incredibly quickly which is the best ability to use from moment to moment. PvE very rarely forces you to do that. It’s much more common in PvP.
I’d like to see a mmo take a few hints from Diablo. For example, you know the random Unique mobs in Diablo 2? A random monster with boosted stats and a few random special abilities on top? I’d like to see a raid boss like that. Completely unpredictable what it’ll be until you get to it. Not just a random choice of like 3 different monsters. A random choice out of 50 different monsters, with 3 randomly chosen special abilities out of a pool of 200. Now -THAT- will reward adaptability and skill.
Yeah, but taking hints from Diablo is hard. I mean… no MMO developers out there have any idea how they did any of that programming for Diablo.
Oh wait…
Variable design like that works in Diablo because the clientele is more tightly self-sorted, and the skill level is self-selected. You don’t have those luxuries in a mass market MMO. Of course, if you could select your “dungeon difficulty” level, or if the instance automatically scaled to your party level, that would help.
I’ve had discussions with Ferrel over at Epic Slant about what he thinks is the appeal of raiding, and more than anything, it sounds like they like the puzzle aspect. But they only like it for as long as the puzzle needs to be solved. Once a raid is on “farm” status, it’s a menial chore to gear up for the next raid puzzle (and a speedbump to keep the pace of content consumption down).
I can’t help but think that a more dynamic system that rewards tactical flexibility would have more staying power and more interesting gameplay. (And Ferrel agreed; they like the fight and conquering a worthy foe.) Trouble is, that’s tricky to program, and these MMO things operate on a shoestring budget.
Wait…
This article is 100% agreed with. I am so tired of the same old thing from every single MMO out there. I’ve yet to see the “perfect” MMO or anything close to it. The endgame for WoW is all around, well, lame. I’d like to see a game which is all around challenging, fun to do, but not impossibly difficult. Honestly, once I hit 80, WoW was kind of over for me. The constant grind through raids for gear, just to do more raids was extremely boring and had no other rewards.
“Ok, healer down. Its a wipe. Everyone die, we have a soul stone up.”
WoW does have some situations where that is not the case. I have thoroughly enjoyed groups where we have our healer/tank and then a spellcasting Shaman/Druid for dps (I’m a mage, they help my dps a TON, but that’s not the point) because when the healer goes down we have two characters thats gear is very well suited for healing. They may not have the talents or the mana regen that a healer would, but they work in a pinch and in some of the max-level instances there have been some great moments where the healer goes down halfway through the fight and we can muscle our way through. Having a spellcasting druid tank is always fun too (for some reason they get an armor bonus that makes it as if they were wearing plate…) just because it mixes stuff up a bit.
Now having said that, those situations happen far to rarely- and a lot of times when they do the people I’m playing with are too thickheaded to make it work. Doh.
I have also come to grips with the fact that for most people, myself and those that I know personally offline particularly, WoW is an all-consuming beast. We don’t watch our favorite TV shows and play our NUMEROUS other games together anymore. It’s just WoW, WoW, WoW. I’m trying to get them to stop… but I don’t think it’s going to happen.
I agree that endgame raids are just a square dance that requires a fine balance of healing, tanking, and dps. I hate how if I die on my resto druid that it generally means a wipe. I love working with a team and downing bosses, however in this expansion it seems very lack luster compared to bc. I remember fighting in hyjal and being excited and nervous and cheering when we downed the bosses. Now I seem just to be gritting my teeth because I have to cover for the other healers so often or put up with stupid mistakes. It seems I can longer enjoy raiding like I did in bc. It’s rare when I do a raid now and I can laugh through the whole thing and enjoy myself. I can’t decide if the raids are just hollow to me now, or it’s the players.
The last thing that is killing me is gear and what people itemize for themselves. Doing the new instance ToC(the 5 man) in regular or heroic, I don’t think I’ve done one without someone taking/ninjaing an item over another player. Most common is dps taking the black heart over tanks. For me on heroic it’s either a ret pally or dk taking marrowstrike over my hunter or feral druid. I’ve lost that polearm 3 times to dks and ret pallies. If it was a warrior I’d be more tolerant or if they were a dk tank, but no… The last night a ret pally and I were in an agreement; the axe was his, the polearm was mine. But he took the polearm anyway and called me a crybaby when I said “We had an agreement =(”(he was a guildie too…)
It’s the players now that are killing me it seems. I can’t even trust another player with gear now. And I constantly fear of losing upgrades that are itemized for my dps classes to dks and ret pallies. DKs take spell power (LOL) or tanking gear over tanks. Ret pallies/dks take agility gear over my enhance shaman, feral druid, or hunter. And I know agility is still good for a dk, pally and warrior, but… I don’t know. Taking an agility ring over a rogue seems pretty low to me when a strength ring drops off the next boss. More so because that rogue won’t take the strength ring and you just screwed him/her over for that run.
I really miss playing with players who play for the game and their guild. Who do their best to help guildies and I don’t need babysitting. I’m the type of person who passes upgrades to other guildies, who helps people level, etc. It seems now the game is a free-for-all. Everyone just downs the boss to get purples and it only matters if they get the purples first to squeeze out another 100 dps on the meter. It doesn’t matter who you step on to get the gear. I’ve only been in two guilds ever that preached “Help your guildies. Pass loot if it’s a minor upgrade!”
Sigh… I guess I’m a carebear. More like an emobear now. But maybe I should just cry more since I’m a noob right? Or quit the game? Sigh.
I feel your pain. MMOs have their roots in the internet, and as much as we would love everyone to be the (at least relatively) morally and socially aware people that they usually are online we end up seeing all sorts of behavior pop up out of seemingly nowhere when people get online.
The fact that “carebear” is an insult like “noob” is concerns me. MMOs accept this namecalling behavior because there is never a single situation in which someone saying things like that can suffer any kind of retaliation or retribution. Quit simply there is little to no accountability. Since when has it ever been wrong to care about someone or their feelings? I actually had someone send me abusive /tells in World of Warcraft while I was on my Night Elf Druid alt. Keep in mind I have never seen this person before, they were not one of my friends that would know the alts name, and they were even on an entirely different continent than I was.
Out of the blue this person says to me “Why are you a NE? Don’t you know that they’re Gay? What a gay noob” You can imagine my surprise, but since I genuinely want to understand exactly what motivates a person to do something like that I continued the conversation for about ten or fifteen minutes. They were like a broken record. I would say something like “So if I’m gay why do you care? Why does it matter?” and he would just keep saying, “So you’re gay! See you’re such a noob. NE’s look so gay! Why would you play a NE?” Of course I reported him to blizzard because I know for a fact that a ton of kids play WoW and I am very glad that I was the target of the abuse because that is not something that I would want my own children, or anyone elses children, to experience.
This was an extreme case, I know, and retribution may have been enacted eventually (due to legal issues Blizzard cannot tell me what the end result of my petition was, but they thanked me for helping keep their game “abuse-free”) but most other things slip under the radar. Stealing loot, while it is part of a game and has no actual bearing on real life for most people, can affect people negatively- and yet there is absolutely no means of social regulation. Keep in mind that if someone considers something to be real then the consequences can be real, so when someone takes abusive action against another person in the context of playing a game there can be consequences that feedback into real life. Without any kind social regulation mechanic or lasting consequences for inappropriate behavior everyone in MMOs is basically operating without a safety net and that has a lot of nasty consequences.
I think I got a little off-topic, but after I understand a little more I think I’ll have to write on my own blog about it.
Sigh:
There are many “games within the game” in World of Warcraft. Raiding, crafting, and PvP are just the obvious ones. There are other less obvious ones such as economics, guild politics, and loot distribution(which you are observing). They intentionally design the loot system in order to make it competitive, which means there are going to be winners and losers.
Should Blizzard be doing this? Absolutely not. The social games in WoW have nothing to do with skill at the game. But, I guarantee you they are doing this intentionally, especially on the raid level. They could design the system so that everybody gets fair treatment in the loot department. They chose not to.
This is one of the big reasons why I tend to be anti-raid(and somewhat anti-pve in general).
I do not think guild politics and loot distribution qualify whatsoever as mini games. Those are annoyances at best.
And crafting… borderline.
Raiding, PvP, and PvE are it, and non-raiding PvE ends once you get to level cap basically.