The Ramifications of the Insta-90

Recently the Warlords preorder hit, and with it came a deluge of instant level 90s flooding LFR queues with the dumbest play in recent memory.  I saw an Enhancement Shaman who’s highest dps attack was lightning bolt and a resto shaman who’s highest hps ability was Healing Wave.  I died a little.   It’s not like Icy Veins is more than a google search away.  <shrug>  Alas, that’s too much effort for the average player apparently.  Let’s talk about what an instant level 90 means for the game.

Accessibility

In BC, a new player had 60 levels to muscle through before they could start on the expansion’s content, unless they started as one of the new races.   In Wrath, they had another 10 levels and a whole other continent to quest through before they could start the good stuff.  This probably explains a good bit of the popularity of the DK who started at 55. Each expansion adds another bundle of levels a new player needs to grind through and a new set of zones to navigate.  Of course the amount of xp required for each level has been reduced several times over the years.  Still, the daunting task of leveling a new player’s first toon from 1 to max is becoming ever more daunting with each passing expansion.  This continually makes it harder for a new player to commit the cash to buy all the necessary expansions to get started.  Having an instant high level character means new players have no worries about the trek to max.  They start there!

The upside: New players have no excuse to buy the game.  Our friends and coworkers are no longer safe from our recruiting efforts.  This may help to slow the inevitable population decline soon to follow during the long wait for Warlords.  Perhaps this explains the fortunate timing of the preorder; i.e. right after they announce a fall release for Warlords (a solid year with no new content).

The downside: New players are inexperienced.  They haven’t played their insta-90 at max level before and probably haven’t raided before at all.  Raid guilds are going to need to train them from the ground up.

My read on it; the upside outweighs the downside here.  New players are a necessity for the health of the game.  And you just aren’t going to get new people to slog 100 levels before they can raid.  That’s too big of a number!

How much do you really learn about your character during leveling?

When leveling a new toon, it always strikes me how differently they are to play at max level compared to leveling them.  If you quest to level and you end up raiding as a dps, then it would be most similar.  But if you happen to be a tank or a healer at max level and quested to level up, your end-game playstyle has almost nothing to do with your leveling playstyle.  The difference is on par with trying out a new talent specialization.  You’ve only played as a resto druid but feel like giving tanking a whirl?  Ok, try out your new bear spec on a dummy, maybe do some normal 5-mans, or better yet, proving grounds.  Proving Grounds do a great job of acclimating you to the new role.   Or they would, if insta-90s bothered with them at all.

That’s the good news; with proving grounds becoming a requirement for random heroic queues, insta-90s are going to have no choice but to learn their new spec.  Too bad it’s not a requirement now.  That would make LFRs far less painful than they are currently.  Or would it?  How much of the current LFR debacle is because boosters are inexperienced and how much of it is because, as always, players don’t care enough to put in a real effort?  The world may never know.

My position is this; leveling teaches you nothing about your character that can’t be learned better from a google search and a Proving Ground.

Is this “dumbing the game down”?

Many forum QQ posts about the boosts carry an indignant ere.  Almost as if a character being instantly boosted somehow diminishes their own efforts.  I have a few problems with this line of thought though.

1. Leveling is not hard.  It can be done by anyone. Making it to max level, even with no heirlooms, requires little time compared to what it used to require, and it requires almost no skill whatsoever.  Making it to level cap is not an achievement.  It wasn’t hard during vanilla either (I did it with two toons).  It was tedious and time consuming.

2. Tedium does not equal depth.  To make the argument that not having to level dumbs the game down is to make the argument that the leveling experience adds true depth to the game.  I would contend that it does not.  There is no challenge or finesse required to follow the dots on your minimap from hub to hub.  Healing a raid requires finesse.  Tanking a boss requires finesse.  DPSing a raid encounter requires finesse.  PvPing effectively requires finesse.  Leveling does not.

3. The real game begins at max level.  This is an old MMO adage that remains true.  Your day-to-day playstyle while leveling bears almost no similarities at all to what your day-to-day playstyle is like after you reach max level.  This is where any true challenge awaits.  On the contrary, allowing players to skip leveling funnels them toward the challenging content faster, eliminating a ton of easy content for them and sending them straight at challenges.  If anything, this makes the game more challenging.

Do we even need levels?

This is the real question I think.  What are levels even for in a modern MMO?  In the old days, a huge portion of your playtime was spent leveling to max level.  In fact, there wasn’t much to do at max level in old-school games like SWG; some pvp, a few pve encounters.  For me, it wasn’t long at max level before I wanted to try a new template out and so I started leveling again.  The genre is no longer like that.  There is a ton of stuff to do at endgame now.  In fact there are a ton of things that you can’t do while leveling but can do at max level.  I’ve made this point before but it bears repeating.  At MoP’s launch, my shaman was level 85.  In three days, he was level 90.  Three days!   How much of a difference would it really have made if at the MoP launch, I logged in to find my character level 90?  It would have meant three more days at max level for me.  That’s it!!

No, the truth is, we see leveling as necessary because it’s always been a part of our MMO.  No other reason.  Just because it’s always been there.  If it was removed tomorrow and everyone was just effectively level 90 at character creation, the game would be basically unaffected.  You would still have braindead masses filling LFR queues until Proving Grounds became a requirement, just like we did before the boosts were active.  The power level jump from level 89 to level 90 is smaller than the power level jump from 90 in blues to 90 in Heroic Tier 16 gear anyway.

This has been attempted to varying degrees by other games already.  In GW2, you can pvp at max level from the get-go.  You didn’t see QQ about this from the GW2 community because it started like this from launch.  It’s always been done that way.  As Blizzard continues to erode the importance and necessity of the leveling experience, players will continue to QQ.  But what they’re really QQing about is that it’s always been done a certain way and now it’s being done differently.

Change isn’t always a bad thing.  I think this is actually a good thing.

>luvbacon<

P.S. thanks to Stoic – Zul’jin US, for my epic Hearthstone card.

 

 

The Evolution of WoW Healing in WoD

Blizzard’s watercooler about the healing changes for WoD (http://tinyurl.com/kcgjcsh) sparked quite the QQ from the healer community, as was to be expected.  For future reference, whenever Blizz is going to implement some changes, I would avoid highlighting how the changes are similar to something extremely unpopular.  This would be like Obama announcing Obamacare like “It’s going to be very similar to the healthcare program used by the 3rd riche during Hitler’s regime.  You’ll love it!”.  I can think of more favorable comparisons than the period of highest Healer turnover in WoW history.

The Cliff Notes

1. Absorbs are being made less uber.

2. Smart heals are becoming less smart.

3. Single target heals are being improved and aoe heals are being toned down.

4. They’re getting rid of the efficient single target heal for each class like Nourish, Holy Light, Heal, and Healing Wave.

5.Higher health pools, less spike damage, more of a triage model.

6. Lower gear levels will have much better mana regen than in Cata.  No more “DEAR GOD, I’M OOM AGAIN, WE GON’ DIE!!!!” through the first set of Heroics like in Cata.

7.  Many instant cast heals will now have 1.5 second cast times.

Obamacare coming to WoW

Since Cata’s healing fiasco, triage has been a bit of a dirty word around the forums.  For the uninitiated, triage just refers to a style of encounter design and healing that favors less spikey dmg and a relatively higher health pool.  Healers would then need to focus on efficiency as apposed to the current model of spamming your aoe heal and waiting for the moment of “RAID’S GONNA DIE!”>Pop big CD>Raid’s at full health health.   This model of healing has some distinct advantages over MoPs rather binary healing model; more careful and measured playstyle, mana matters, absorbs won’t naturally just be better than direct heals, classes with more aoe options aren’t automatically gods.  The problem was that the conversion to the triage style of encounter and healing design was coupled with mana starvation, the likes of which healer’s had never seen before.   This created punishing Heroic 5man runs and a first tier of raiding that still haunts my dreams at times.  I sometimes wake my wife with my nightmare screams of “I’m Lightning Bolting for mana!!!!  Use a healthstone!!”.  It is indeed regrettable that Blizzard didn’t ere on the side of too much mana during the implementation of triage because I honestly feel there were some very good things about it that were overlooked due to the chaos created by the poor oom healers frantically making for the door.  That was quite a run-on.  At any rate, it would be a mistake to summarily dismiss these healer changes as hairbrained because of the first attempt at them.  Also bear in mind that the reason for the problem in Cata was abysmally low mana regen on early gear; a problem that Blizzard has stated they will not let happen again.  If handled correctly, this could work out to a more methodical healing playstyle.  I don’t know about you but I’m a little tired of just keeping a blue circle on the floor, and using my CDs.  I’d like to think again.

Too Much TV Rotted Healing Rain’s Brain

I think it’s safe to say that smart heals are out of control.  Take a look at this recent log of my healing.  Only Chain Heal and Riptide are player directed.  Even Chain Heal, since I favor the glyph, is largely smart healing as well.   Healing Rain requires me to paint the floor blue, so not a ton of player control required there either.   Most of my healing is done by the server.  This just doesn’t feel quite right to me.  The raid should live or die based on my correct choices along with their correct choices, not based on the correct choices of the server picking the lowest health player.

To combat this problem, Blizz is making smart heals dumber.  This will make it so that Healing Rain and HST won’t be the end-all-be-all that they are right now.  I may have to actually hotkey a single target heal or two to spot heal if I want everyone to keep breathing.  Nice!!  I’ll have to dig through my spellbook to find a few things again.  Truly, I am looking forward to a higher skillcap.  I felt that the huge buffs to HST and Healing Rain were clearly meant to be a bandaid till WoD.  But I’m hoping they don’t just plan to make all those smart heals suck to coerce us into not using them.  I say, if you don’t want us depending on the smart heals, remove some of them.  I’d rather just have the extra space on my bar.  My one gripe about stupid smart heals is that no one likes relying on rng.  Yet here we are with even more of it in game.  I like to control my abilities.  It’s what I’ve never liked about the new Shaman abilities since Healing Rain.  HR, HST, HTT, Ascendance, AG; all smart heals that just magically do my job for me.  Spirit Link Totem is the only new ability that requires any thought or decision making from the player.  As a side note; Spirit Link is going to be god mode in a triage model.

I can play Hearthstone on my Ipad while I’m oom in WoD

Mana regen is always the hot topic.  With the triage model coming back, it’s even moreso.  Inherently in the triage playstyle, mana is more important.  The problem here is that going oom is extremely punishing and UNFUN!   Why does it have to be this way?  When a hunter runs out of focus, they cast a steady shot then resume their rotation.  When a Warrior runs out of rage, they do…..whatever it is that Warriors do to gain rage >.>  When a Rogue runs out of energy, they autoattack for a second or two, then resume their rotation.  When a caster runs out of mana……..casters don’t run out of mana.  The point being, running out of your resource means basically nothing to every other role, except healers.  Going oom is a BIG problem that will often result in a wipe.  It doesn’t have to be this way.   Here are a few ideas to make going oom less punishing;

1. Give each healer a very weak heal that regens mana.   Make sure solid damage will outpace it, or healers will just use it alone.

or

2. Go with the Lightning Bolt to get mana thing.  Give every class an equivalent.  Remove the glyph requirement though.  Make sure every class can do their damage-for-mana ability on-the-move.

or

3.   (This one’s a bit wacky) Make all heals replenish mana along with health, but only for other players.  This would add a whole new level of strategy and balancing headache to the game.

The point is that going oom should not be as punishing as it is.   THAT was what made Cata such a fiasco for healing.  With a triage model, even if the mana regen is more forgiving, going oom is still inevitable.  It MUST in some way be made less punishing than it currently is.  That is, if Blizzard doesn’t want a repeat of the Cataclysm “all-the-rats-off-the-ship” healer evacuation.

Instant Casts Sminshtant Shmashts

Now this change is a tad perplexing for me.  Had they said they were adding a 1.5 second cast time to some of the instant cast spells that ranged dpsers have, that would make sense.  It would help to offset the inherent advantage to ranged and disadvantage to melee.  But healers aren’t really stealing anyone’s raid slot by being mobile.   Though, with Shaman being left off the list completely, because we don’t have much instant healing, it looks like me and my fellow totem ploppers may soon have our day in the sun.   But the thing is, I can’t imagine Blizzard backing down on the floor poo.  You can’t easily put the raid mobility toothpaste back in the tube in a world with heroic fights that carpet the floor with acid and electricity AND dishes out high spike damage that requires us to keep the healing comin’.  One of these things is going to have to go.  Less mobility with equal raid poo would be a frustrating recipe.  Especially when you couple it with the adjustment to triage.   That would not be good.  I’m hoping they either give healers some safe zones to turret in a bit, or they do something to offset the mobility requirement.

Magic 8-Ball Says

Outlook good.  I am pulling for Blizzard to get the balancing right this time.  Though I’m still not happy about a solid year+ with no new content, I am looking forward to the game we’ll have once it gets here.   Cause I really do believe Blizzard has the goods here if they pull it all together right.

>luvbacon<

Only 262,974.5 More Minutes of SoO………at the Earliest

Well folks, I’m as astonished as the rest of the internet, but Blizzard has announced September as the earliest possible release date for WoD and as late as December.  Unless some content is added, this will give us the largest span without new content in the history of WoW (check the dates you ICC naysayers).  The surprising thing for me though is that Blizzard isn’t really speaking to the fact that something huge must have changed since Blizzcon’s talk of “You’ll be amazed by how much is already done”.  In fact, throughout MoP there has been a lot of talk about faster content updates.   I’d like to talk through some of the implications of this announcement.

Faster Content

This is the part that bothers me.  We all enjoyed the idea of faster content while it was being touted as a prime feature of MoP.  Admittedly, we had no time to get bored thus far.   But my guild didn’t even kill the Sha of Fear Heroic before ToT was released.  We, like most average to slightly above average guilds had just barely cracked into the heroic bosses of tier 14 and BOOM, here comes ToT.  I know there are many guilds out there that were done with Heroic Sha of Fear and were parked waiting for the next patch, but completion rates don’t lie.  Most raiders fall into my camp.  My guild could have happily trudged along in tier 14 for another two to three months, easily.  Maybe more.  Months later, we were all now merrily toiling away in ToT.    My guild was farther along this time.  We had about half the tier cleared on heroic when ToT was released.  But again, we could have easily stayed in ToT another month or two while we mopped up (*giggle*) the remaining heroic bosses.  Let’s add those two spans together.  Assuming Blizz had waited another three months to release ToT and another two months to release SoO……we’d have five less months of slogging through SoO before WoD is released, which would have made it the shortest stint between a final patch and an expac in WoW history.  Incidentally, this whole year+ fiasco was predicted in multiple forum posts while the patches were being machine-gunned out.

As it stands, we are staring a solid year with no content updates in the face, all in the name of faster content updates   <——- irony.  Five months of downtime is a pretty steep price to pay for a bullet point.   My concern here is for the stability of my guild, as well as all the other guilds that form the WoW community.  As burnout sets in, filling raid slots is going to become a big problem.   Between ICC and Cata, the guild I was in disintegrated and the server I was on went from a constant bustle to a ghost town.  The server has stayed that way until now too, necessitating a server transfer.

Who was Blizzard pacing this fast content for?  It wasn’t my guild, or the average guild.  It was for the best of the best hardcore guilds who, now that they’ve killed Heroic Garrosh, are all unsubbing until WoD as a thank you for Blizzard’s deference.  The rest of us peons are left in the unenviable position of trying to fill out 25 raid slots with a playerbase that has checked out mentally until WoD because of the enormous stretch of time ahead.

Blizz, I love you baby but please learn from this.  It’s the third time we’ve had a huge gap between the last patch and the expac, each time taking a bigboy bite out of our playerbase.  Playerbase isn’t even my real issue though.  Each time this has happened, it has cost me many good friends who no longer play the game.   These friends are why I log in.  You are eroding the thing that keeps me logging in.   Please, for the love of the old gods, learn your lesson!

Rushed Content

The two counterarguments to the forum QQ  I see is “but you don’t want them to rush it out, do you?” or “go ahead and unsub.  Nothin’ wrong with a break.”.   No, I don’t want Blizzard to rush it out.  They should make sure they have a solid expac ready to ship before they ship.  But no one asked them to rush it.  Anyone can see that there are a lot of enormous systemic changes to the game slated for WoD.  Common sense dictates this will take some time.  Again, the problem the players have is twofold.

1.  If the development cycle is going to end up longer than it has ever been, please do not talk about releasing content faster throughout the expansion.

2.  We would all much rather wait a little longer for individual patches than to wait a year+ for the expansion.

No one benefits from rushing out content.  That’s not what the players are asking.  In fact, the players aren’t asking for anything at all.  They are just trying to bring to light the fact that Blizzard ‘made love to the canine’ this time.  Many feel lied to because of the talk as recently as Blizzcon implying that the release will be sooner than it has been in the past.  At least with the previous two pre-expac lulls, Blizzard had not talked for the entire expansion up to that point about faster content, then announced at Blizzcon that the expac was farther along than we think, only to release a year after the previous patch (at the earliest).

My point here is this, the ship has sailed.  It is too late now to rush any content out.  We’re all going to have to just deal with a year+ of SoO and Blizzard will have to just take the time they need to make something good.

As to “go ahead and unsub.  Nothin’ wrong with a break.”  Yes! There is!  The ‘something’ wrong with a break is that it will leave the guilds left behind decimated and struggling to progress.  That’s a big problem!  Especially when it could have easily been avoided this time.

What Does It All Mean?

What can we expect over the next six months?  Well, I expect the completion rates to slow down considerably and for recruiting to become harder and harder until late summer, when it will pick up slightly.  That is, unless Blizzard announces a release later than September.  In which case it will run into large console releases, giving players even more reason to stay unsubbed.  This delay could be a huge coupe for a couple competing MMOs out there.  Namely, The Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar.  I tried the beta for ESO and wasn’t really terribly impressed.  However, I am told that the experience greatly opens up at slightly later levels.  I would expect many players will give it a go now that the SoO wind has been taken out of our collective sails.  The real danger for WoW though is Wildstar.  Wildstar has an art style that is very clearly in the same vein as WoW.  It has a colorful and diverse setting as apposed to the more standard setting of ESO.  Lastly, the Wildstar devs seem to have avoided the pitfall that has plagued every new MMO released in recent memory.  They are focusing heavily on the endgame, including providing several different options for progression for different types of players.  Let’s be honest, every game that has been proclaimed as the WoW-killer has failed to make a significant impact.  This is all due to the developers succumbing to the temptation to backburner end-game in favor of early game.  A fatal mistake.  End-game comes faster than anyone would guess and if there’s nothing their for the first few hardcore players who make it, they will loudly make this fact known, scaring off many of those who hadn’t even made it to max level yet.  SWTOR, WAR, GW2; they all slipped on this same banana peel.    Wildstar is clearly avoiding it.   How will WoW fair during the longest content lull in it’s history against a triple A MMO with an interesting setting and action oriented combat who is not tripping itself out of the gate with no endgame?

We shall see.

>luvbacon<

WoW’s Secret Sauce

After an extended hiatus from both WoW and my blog, I thought it would be a great way to mark my return with an entry about what makes WoW so special.  If you love something, let it go.  If it’s really yours, you won’t be able to stay unsubscribed for long, after all.  During my break I played a sheeps-head-load of Hearthstone and I also had the chance to try out a few MMOs, some in beta, some long since released.  So let’s take a minute, just sit right there, and I’ll tell ya what I think makes WoW … so special.

We’ve all attempted it.  A new MMO comes along with enticing sparkly gimmicks in tow; be it personal story, action combat, cinematic storytelling, or just a unique setting.  So you take the plunge, slap down your purchase price and start into your free month.   You notice all the nuances that make this new game special.  “Oh man! I love how this dodge feels!”, “The abilities feel REALLY powerful!”, “The depth of the storytelling is really impressive.”.  But there’s a nagging feeling the whole time.  There’s that extra element that’s missing.  Maybe you can’t even put your finger on it right away.  Over the next few days or weeks you feel like logging in less and less.  You don’t quite know why, but the new game doesn’t have the same pull that good ole’ WoW has.  So, probably before your free month ends, you unsubscribe and come on back to momma Blizz’s loving arms.   Why?

Setting

It’s easy to overlook how interesting the setting in WoW really is.  On the surface, it’s standard Orcs and Elves.  That’s how a sitcom episode about a WoW clone would show it.  But it’s not really.  Don’t forget about the large steampunk stylistic touches all over the world.  From Ironforge to the Barrens, to any of the Airships that seem to be issued to the landlord of most raid zones.  Whenever a hunter’s gun fires, and the sound kills a portion of your soul,  that’s not something you would hear in a standard Orcs and Elves mishmash.  How many giant robot bosses have we killed over the years?  “Time to play!!”  Or who can forget the pant-poopingly-panic inducing stomp of the first fel reaver that strolled through your path to pwn your toon flat.

It’s not just the steampunk flourishes though.  There are some places that are just plain weird……in a good way.  Take Outland.  It’s floating continents and wild geometry are not really something you see on the cover art of a DnD source book.   From the foreboding gloom of Shadowmoon Valley, to the steak-knives-in-the-dish-washer peaks of Blade’s Edge Mountain’s, to the etherial enclaves of Netherstorm; there couldn’t be a bigger difference between these zones and the standard Tolkien derived me-too zones of your newest would-be WoW heir.

Another great example is Pandaria.  When first announced at Blizzcon, it was met with a collective gasp from the community with forum posts saying things like “April Fool’s joke becomes the Next Expansion”.  I must admit that even I was skeptical that Blizz could make the Asian inspired world of Pandaria make sense within the world of Azeroth.  But dude, they did it!  We don’t think twice about any of the Kung Fu throwback tropes and color splashed throughout.  Take the Kung Fu training montage questline in Valley of the Four Winds as an example.  It plays out just like you would expect a training montage in a Kung Fu film to play out.  It’s satirical and fun, and it works!  Somehow, it just works!    Another great example is the entire Mogushan Vaults raid.  It has stone warriors and dogs throughout the thing, asian inspired carpet in the four kings room, and it finished up with an endless army and two Giant sword wielding warriors unleashing their devastating combo on us.   Nobody could have made Pandaria work the way Blizz had.  And now it’s an essential part of what makes Azeroth so unique.

The unique blend that makes up Azeroth’s setting is so enticing and special that it has kind of become it’s own thing now apart from the Tolkien inspired fantasy settings that have spawned movies, comics, and books for generations.  Watch a stream of Guild Wars 2 or Wildstar and see if you notice anything familiar.  These games both look and feel fantastic, but it’s crystal clear to me that they are at least partially trying to get in on Blizzard’s fun in creating a mishmash universe of fantasy/scifi/steampunk/whatever-else-they-think-is-cool.  I don’t blame them, either.  Blizzard has essentially created a playground for them to make ANY story they want.  I mean, at this point, what COULDN’T Blizzard do in WoW?  They could go pretty far scifi and still have it make sense, they could go nearly modern day, victorian era, anything is fair game.  This is the ideal setting to keep players interested for say…..15 years or so.  I played SWTOR.  I love Star Wars in an unhealthy way.  But even with my offputting romance with the Star Wars universe, the setting grows stale over time.

Gameplay

So, if you’re in the know on MMOs, you’re aware that the last few years has seen the launch of several MMOs whose prime selling point is action combat.  What this boils down to is that the enemies attacks can be dodged in realtime.  You have access to a dodge button that scoots you out of the way of these attacks and gives combat a feeling of immediacy that WoW does not have.  The other common element is the lack of sticky targetting.  For example, ESO does not allow you to click on an enemy and have your subsequent hotbar abilities cast on that enemy regardless of where your mouse is pointed.  Your mouse has to stay on the enemy to perform the attacks.  Often these games will have no autoattack either.  You will have to manually execute each attack.  This  exponentially increases the visceral feeling of combat, and for a time I was convinced that it was the wave of the future.  But when you add this style of play to a questing system that utilizes your standard kill/fetch/fedex style quests that tend to become quite repetitive, I often would rather just be able to target and click hotkeys.  To me the essence of an RPG is the choices you make; strategic combat choices, character customization choices, story choices.  Not the action. I do not believe this is as large a disadvantage as one may think, if at all.  There are already threads cropping up on the beta forums about how players are tiring of the constant requirement for gymnastics.  Sometimes a dude just wants to vege out and kill boars, ya know?

What WoW does so well in the vein of combat, is the feeling of immediacy on your attacks.  You feel very much in control of your actions.  A good while back I gave LotRo a whirl and found it unplayable by my standards.  The setting was cool, the art was compelling.  But when I clicked a hotkey, there was a few extra milliseconds of delay.  Doesn’t seem like much, but it was enough to make me feel like I wasn’t in total control.  And that was all it took for me to uninstall.  Back in the days of Vanilla WoW, playing a Rogue was a thrilling experience.  Especially PvP.  Stunlocking was the ultimate feeling of control.  Timing the gouge or blind so it just clips the previous stun to keep the player locked up.  This type of play would not even be possible in many games.

The other gameplay element that WoW does extremely well is the interaction within a raid team.  The current raid environment, primarily heroic raids,  requires the right amount of skill from the players of each role.  A tank must control the mobs, maintain threat, manage their personal survivability, do dps, and obey the specific fight mechanics.  A healer must manage his mana, obey fight mechanics, stay out of fire, prioritize the proper targets, choose the appropriate heals.  DPS must dps the appropriate target and switch as neccessary, stay out of fire, obey the fight mechanics, interrupt, kite, etc.  That’s a good bit of gameplay.  Games that have tried to iterate on the tank/healer/dps trinity, perhaps even eliminating one of the three, haven’t seemed to have much success.  I’m looking at you GW2.  You end up with classes that are completely useless and classes that are basically mandatory.  This is because of the lack of depth and interdependence between the roles.  There is just something special about the trinity.  When you get it right, everyone feels vital, and if anyone isn’t carrying their weight, you fail.

Accessibility

This is the big one.  By far, WoW’s most important innovations have been in this area.  Random Battleground Queue, Dungeon Finder, Raid Finder, Flex Mode, Scenarios.  Even things like faster leveling.  All of these serve to provide an easier point of entry for new players.  Likely, when you start out you won’t have a guild of chums to group with and you won’t have a regular raid team.  But with all of these innovations to accessibility, you’ll still have stuff to do to progress your character.  In fact, many folks find their guild through a random LFR or an Oqueue Flex run.  Other games have launched without some of these features and paid dearly for it.  SWTOR launched without a Dungeon Finder and hemorrhaged subs once people started hitting end-game.  This was largely due to the fact that gamers don’t want to go back to painstakingly forming a dungeon group through global chat just to knock out their dungeon quests.  We don’t live in that world anymore!  Why not?  WoW.  That’s why not.   These features require a lot of time and manpower to develop for a new MMO.  They also generally don’t make much of an impact until the player hits end-game.  That makes it pretty enticing to backburner them in favor of things your players will need during their first few weeks of play.  The risk is that if most players hit endgame before you get at least a Dungeon Finder into the game, you are going to lose a ton of subs.  This is all thanks to WoW.

The lack of these features in a new game feels jarringly offputting to me.  I’m used to these things now.  Sure, it took WoW a decade or so to get all of these in the game, but now that we’re used to them, we expect an MMO to have them.  These expectations are setting us up for trouble.  New MMO developers can’t hope to put all of this stuff into their games at launch.  Players expect them, so they don’t stick around after endgame and they come back to WoW.  New MMO fails.  This is why I’m predicting mostly failure or subdued success from all upcoming MMOs until Blizzard puts out a new MMO.  They’re the only ones who could hope to implement enough of the features we now expect, to keep the players through endgame.

WoW’s Secret Sauce

All of these elements come together to make a truly one-of-a-kind experience.  WoW has officially ruined me for other MMOs.  I even find myself comparing the character progression of non-MMOs to the character progression in WoW, usually to the other game’s peril.    WoW isn’t just one-of-a-kind though, it’s special.   Being unique isn’t enough to generate a /played that looks like mine does.  It has to be special.  WoW’s secret sauce is a blend of addictive character progression, both before and after endgame, addictive guild progression through raiding, multiple layers of deep character customization, skill based success/failure, and lots of silliness and fun.  Add to all of this that other x-factor.  The mystery element.  The secret spice.  Heart.

>luvbacon<