Building Better Players With Better Games

Long before Oculus was a group-killing sparkle in Blizzard's eye, the Pristine Hide of the Beast was a verifiable, undeniable group-killer.

The hide could be used to quest an epic item at a time when epics were only available in 40-man raids. It was highly desirable and sold for hundreds of gold, a princely sum at the time.

So naturally it caused all sorts of problems.

It could only be skinned by a skinner with a special dagger that dropped in the same instance and had +skill to skinning. Of course it was a dagger, so Paladins (if they happened to be skinners) couldn't even wield it. Then who gets the hide? The skinner who skinned it, or the group that killed the Beast? As you'd expect, any item which pits player against player arouses a bit of passion.

You can see some of the wreckage from this over in the Thottbot page, and that is positively civil compared to what the WoW forums looked like whenever the topic came up. It was just a divisive issue that made people angry.

There is, thankfully, no Wrath or TBC equivalent to The Hide. Dungeons mostly drop lower level items that are not worth fighting over. The one rare, valuable item that can be found in dungeons was introduced in patch 3.3, of course as a loot drop available to everyone.

I wouldn't say the absence of a hide makes players happy, but it certainly makes them happier. It makes groups more civil and grouping more pleasant. Better itemization leads directly to better groups and better players.

I bring this up because I was reading Spink's piece about PUGs and thinking about 'bad' players. There are a lot of players who don't know the strategies for all the heroic bosses, or optimal talent specs for their characters, or the correct damage/healing/tanking rotations they should be using. We like to talk about how they should know how to play their class, or ask for help when they don't know how to do a dungeon.

We all want the "better" player, but better players don't just appear because we wish them to. Players are a product of the game they play. If there's no loot to fight for in a 5-man, they won't fight over loot in a 5-man. If 5-mans are short and relatively easy, players will stay in their groups and be less likely to leave. If repeated dungeon runs reward tokens that can be saved to buy loot, players will want to run dungeons quickly and efficiently to get better gear.

We're all better players now than we were five years ago, but it's not all us. We are what WoW has made us.

I don't think we can universally expect our fellow players to learn every dungeon. It's doubtful a new player could learn every dungeon. Sixteen dungeons with three bosses each (at least) means 48 fights a fresh level 80 would have to learn before they ever hit the "random dungeon" button.

Players aren't magically going to get better. The game needs to be better about showing players what is going on and what they need to do in fights -- WoW needs to make better players. This doesn't need to affect the difficulty of the dungeons. They can still be difficult, but they should not be difficult to understand.