Why can't Blizzard be the Bad Guy?

Shortly after my son was born he and my wife were still in the hospital. The day we were supposed to leave we were approached by a doctor we had never met before. He explained that a test that newborns had to have had not been done, so it was possible we would have to come back to the hospital the next day.

Going back was irritating. But what struck me most was how the doctor came and delivered the bad news. I'm sure he wasn't the one who was supposed to make sure the test happened -- it would have been a nurse who mucked it up. I'm not even sure the test was missed on his watch. But he was in charge, and he was the one who would deliver that bad news.

I guess I was surprised because it seems like there are so few adults left in the world -- people who are willing to be "the bad guy" when some unpleasant but necessary task presents itself.

Gevlon was blogging about a recent dilemma -- what to do when a DPS player is not performing in a 5-man. If you'd like to guess, he suggested only one of the three following responses :

1. The Morally Correct Response (see if you can help them privately)
2. The Most Efficient Response (just ignore it and slog through the dungeon)
3. The Most Repugnant, Sociopathic, Narcissistic Response Imaginable, Which Is Then Portrayed As The Morally Correct, Most Efficient Response

I won't tell you which option Gevlon suggested. I don't want to ruin it for you!

But it does raise the question -- what do you do about players that aren't performing? Most of the time it doesn't even matter -- if you are a fairly good dps player with good gear you don't really need the other dps to be great because you can pick up the slack. But what if you start failing because one player isn't performing?

You could kick them, but I avoid this unless people are asking for trouble. I'm an internet veteran -- I have the scars to prove it. I've been called about every name and had everything bad done to me, and I can blow it off. Grandma, who picked up WoW to play with her grandchildren, has not had terrible things said to her nor done to her, and would probably be reduced to tears if told off and kicked.

That's why if people aren't performing I try to ignore it, but when we get to the third or fourth wipe I say something diplomatic ("I don't think this is going to happen today, thanks for group") and drop group -- that's kind of the weasel way out of the problem, though. Then again, you probably aren't wiping because only one player is bad.

But I'd rather not be in the difficult position to begin with. A tank should know how to tank before they step in a heroic instance, a healer should know how to heal, and a dps player should know how to do decent damage. When they don't everyone else is left holding the bag.

Why not have a "test" for players before they get the keys to heroic dungeons? For DPS it would be trivial -- give them a target dummy with 90,000 health and 60 seconds to burn it down. Tanks could have a little "exercise" where they had to hold aggro on a few mobs while mitigating enough damage to stay alive. Healers could be given a little bit of a run for their money too.

If players failed, a specialized trainer could give them advice on what was lacking.

It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be better for everybody. New players would probably take the "criticism" better from Blizzard than they would from a group kick. Blizzard makes a better "bad guy" because any obstacle they present is seen as another challenge in the game. Blizzard would be showing some "corporate responsibility" -- taking charge, and cleaning up the mess they made when they created all these players who made level 80 but don't know how to perform in a dungeon. Veterans would appreciate it on both ends -- both in passing a test and in having better rookies.

And I would never, ever have to be the bad guy.

Ten Things I Hate About WoW : Inventory

So I've been back in Molten Core lately -- running it with my wife for reputation and some engineering recipes. Molten Core was the original 40-man raid instance, and it's now easy enough that me and my wife can do most of the bosses by ourselves.

Inevitably I'll trek to the instance, go to loot my first or second corpse, and then get that message every WoW player hates to see.

I'm seeing this because I have a three and a half bags filled with things I always need, and the other bag and a half is filled up with stuff I forgot to get rid of.

Why. Why am I still dealing with this malarkey in 2010? I think I remember one of the exhibits from the 1932 World's Fair : the MMO inventory system that totally worked and wasn't a hassle.

WoW's inventory system is not that bad. WoW, if you've never played it, has what we could call an icon inventory system. Every item you have is represented by an uniform-sized icon in your inventory. It's easy to understand and far better than the other MMO/RPG alternatives, which is either a giant list of items or a bunch of miniature items that look like the real items. The list doesn't give you as much information as icon inventory, and the mini-item system is just plain annoying. You're either playing tetris or unsuccessfully trying to click this spear in your inventory that's hard to click because it is long and narrow like a real spear. I realize this is more realistic (since Roman soldiers had to get really good at clicking the spears in their inventory) but it is not fun.

I don't think inventory needs to be a hassle. All inventory falls into one of two categories : stuff you want to keep and stuff you don't. We could further subdivide those categories (you want to keep quest items, rep items, certain tradeskill items, etc.) but basically we know what we want to keep and what you want to get rid of, and the game has some insight into this as well.

There's also this issue of the economy of bag space -- we can't have infinite bag space, both as a design constraint (it would be too unwieldy for players) and as a technical constraint (too taxing on blizzard's servers). That's why I run out of space when items drop in an instance.

I shouldn't be running out of space so easily. For starters, none of the three-and-a-half bags worth of"take everywhere" stuff should even be taking up bag space. I should not have to deal with gear in my inventory -- either I can use it, in which case it only makes sense in the context of an outfit on my paper-doll, or I can't use it, in which case why give it to me at all. Blizzard doesn't need to provide infinite gear space, but the game expects you to have at least two sets of gear if you do PvE and PvP, so storing at least two outfits would be a start. And neither of the "infinite space" limitations come into play here, as players already have to deal with gear so it wouldn't be unwieldy (it would actually be a bit easier to understand) and it wouldn't be a technical constraint, since Blizzard's game design is mostly what dictates how many sets of gear we need to have.

We could say the same about all the other things we like to "have" -- quest items, rep items, consumables, etc. We don't need to have them in our bags, we don't need to deal with organizing them or making sure we don't have too many -- we have as much stuff as the designers wanted us to have. Automatically store all this stuff in custom containers where I don't have to deal with sorting and swapping.

That leaves the stuff I don't want. A tiny piece of the "I don't want this" pie is subjective -- if there's gear that I can wear I might want it and I might not. I'm ok with making those decisions. Everything else that I don't want the game knows I don't want. The first 10,000 times I clicked on gray (junk) gear to sell it to a vendor that was cool. It's no longer cool. Just give me the option to automatically convert it directly to money at loot time and be done with it. Or better yet, just drop more money and get rid of gray items (and white junk items) completely from the game. I still like WoW after four years but I'm tiring of the "sorting inventory" mini-game.

That leaves tradeskill items. I don't think they should be fungible, or at least not as fungible as they are now, so the bag space issue is kind of moot. But I guess that's something to hate another day.

Raiding is like that Twilight Zone Episode with the Pig-Faced people

Remember that? They did face surgery on a guy, and when the bandages came off everybody thought he was a monster because he had a human face, instead of the scary rubber pig-face masks that everybody else was wearing.

That's the perfect metaphor for my raiding lately. I'm just not sure how. But I am really enjoying raiding with my guild and it's something I actually look forward to. If that doesn't make me a rubber pig-faced monster, I don't know what does.

It's hard not to enjoy the raids. The encounters are fun, and they are challenging but not guild-breakingly hard. My guild is mostly adults instead of college-aged or teenagers. We have a limited raid schedule (three nights a week) opposed to my original "every night" raiding schedule. I'm not an asterisked member of the guild that can sort of raid but sort of not raid and I'm only in the guild because I played with the guild leader before -- did that before too. Never do that.

Mostly though, I think it's nice to have an end-date. Icecrown Citadel (or ICC, as the kids call it) is the last raid dungeon before Cataclysm, so there's only four or five months of serious raiding left -- after that both Arthas and Heroic Arthas will have been dead a number of times, and raiding will taper off while everyone waits for the new expansion.

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.

How LFG might change the 5-mans of Cataclysm

Blizzard has mentioned that the runaway success of the new LFG system will affect the 5-man dungeons in Cataclysm but didn't specify how. So I thought I would guess.

Attunements, Attunements, Attunements

Patch 3.3 slipped in Blizzard's first ever attunement for a normal-mode 5-man dungeon -- Pit of Saron cannot be entered until the player has beaten Forge of Souls, and Halls of Reflection cannot be entered until Forge of Souls has been completed by the player. Normally this might be a little controversial, but I've heard nary a word complaining about it. Fact is, it's just so easy to get a group for the dungeons (even as DPS) that there's not much reason to complain.

I think we'll see attunements return in a big way in Cataclysm. They were always a good idea, but the difficulty of finding groups made them so difficult that Blizzard abandoned them in Wrath (until now).

Fewer Better Instances

WoW is no longer about running 5-mans : it's about running 5-mans over and over again. In both TBC and Wrath Blizzard felt obliged to include a lot of 5-man instances (both eventually had 16 5-man instances). The instances tend to get a little boring once you've run them a dozen times.

So how about having 10 5-mans instead of 16, and going all out on the new ones? Players, I think, wouldn't tire of 10 dungeons quicker than they tired of 16 -- it would just mean you ran every instance 30 times over the course of the expansion, instead of 20.

So I hope we'll see neat, gimmicky instances in Cataclysm. Sort of like Occulus, only without being awful group-killers.

Either CC Isn't Coming Back, or Every DPS Gets Viable CC

Blizzard is on record lamenting the exit of Crowd Control from 5-man instances that was so necessary in TBC. However, if it were to return in Cataclysm random groups might find themselves without a CC-capable DPS player.

One of two things will happen. Either CC won't return (which I'm totally cool with) or Blizzard will start handing out CC to every class that can DPS -- which is all of them.

There is precedent for this -- every healing and tanking class now has a standard "toolbox" that allows them to be viable in every circumstance. Blizzard could make sure every class has a suitable CC ability.

Blizzard will finally make demo warlocks into viable 5-man tanks

It always bugged me that every healing and tanking class can do decent DPS with the right spec, but no DPS class can heal or tank with any spec.

It will never happen, but one can hope.

The Mystery of Designing Difficulty

Back in the heady days of mid-2005 there was an interesting exchange on the official WoW forums. Some players began posting about the upcoming raid, Blackwing Lair, and how, well, the players were good enough to beat anything the devs could throw at them.

A blizzard poster responded in disbelief : did players really believe that the existing raid content was an unsuccessful attempt to best the players? It's not difficult to beat the players if that was the intent. It's hard to challenge the players, and of course that's the goal of Blizzard's raid designs.

Yet, the same exchange takes place every time Blizzard reduces the difficulty of an encounter.

Forum Poster : Blizzard changed the difficulty of encounter X from 9 to 6! 9 wasn't that hard, but blizzard had to make it 6 because of all the noobs crying.

Blizzard Poster : The difficulty of encounter X was supposed to be a 6 (or at most a 7) like every other boss in the raid instance except the last one. It was 9 only because we forgot to change a variable.

Forum Poster : Blizzard just wants to make it easy so every noob can walk in and do raid dungeons.

I recently started raiding and I think Blizzard is getting very good at setting the difficulty of the bosses. We're an average guild and we've not spent more than three nights on any single boss. They avoided violating one of my biggest game design pet peeves (a challenge can be different or hard, but not different and hard) and the "different" fight (Blizzard calls them "gimmick" fights) is fought on rocketpacks across two airships, which is a nice change of pace, but it is not too difficult.

I just wonder why it's so difficult to understand, that Blizzard might like to tweak difficulty to get it right just like they do with everything else in the game.

Tanks and Healers, the Spoiled Idiot-Children of Azeroth

So I was reading Gordon's (of We Fly Spitfires fame) recent guest post at World of Matticus. In it he proposes that healers and tanks should receive "extra" rewards for the same amount of effort because dps players are "dime a dozen".

I then thought of an inflammatory title I would use for my response, but later reconsidered and settled on the "make-nice" title you see today, Tanks and Healers, the Spoiled Idiot-Children of Azeroth. Aside from all the technical errors in Gordon's article, you wonder why tanks and healers need extra rewards : has there been a tank/healer exodus of which I am unaware?

Now this reminds me of a story. Let's go back in time to 2005 or 2006 or so, right before The Burning Crusade expansion was released. TBC was WoW's first expansion, and before the expansion Blizzard had a closed beta. Almost everyone who played WoW really wanted to get into the closed beta but only a few ended up getting invited.

I was information-starved enough that, denied a chance to play the expansion, I would read the forum for the beta test server. That was a little frustrating, and it didn't help that the forum was filled with stupid questions -- Blizzard's pool for random invites was everyone who had ever played WoW, and many people on the expansion test forum said that they had only played retail WoW for a month or two (or not at all).

What disturbed me most was a topic that would show up in a new thread around twice a week. It went something like this :

Dear Blizzard, we are testing your BETA for free! You better give us some special reward when the expansion launches, like letting us keep the levels we earned in the beta.

This would be followed by three pages of comments agreeing that Blizzard owed the beta testers big time and the testers "better" get something in return.

Blizzard, of course, didn't give the beta testers anything in return but did learn a lesson : invites to the second expansion closed beta mostly went to current subscribers that would appreciate (and could make use of) a beta invite. But this notion that "I should be rewarded for being rewarded" shows up all the time in MMO-land.

Another old story : in classic WoW I played my warlock, but also made an alt-hunter and then tried to switch classes to warrior. I spent a ton of time on the hunter and managed to get in enough groups to collect what I thought was pretty good gear.

And then I played my warrior and it was a whole different world. Not only was it far easier to get in groups, it was far easier to get in raids for more difficult content. My warrior outgeared my hunter in probably a quarter of the time /played at 60.

That's the "reward" for playing a tank or healer : it is a little higher-pressure than playing a dps, but the entire "meta-game" of finding groups for dungeons and raids is a cakewalk compared to what dps go through. It's hard to spend an hour in Dalaran without seeing a raid group advertise that they just need one more -- a tank -- to run their raid. Not only is that group available for tanks while DPS is sitting, all the DPS in that raid have already been sitting around for half an hour or so waiting for a tank to be found. The tank doesn't have to wait.

As for my blog title, well, please take it in the spirit in which it was intended : I will probably be a tank or healer come Cataclysm. Right now I'm not sure which. It's just that I've decided a little extra responsibility is well worth all the time I'll save finding groups.

My Predictions for 2010

If you aren't an MMO blogger you might be wondering why every MMO blogger insists on doing predictions for the year. And why boat, avante-garde as I am, would copy everyone else in doing so.

Well, it's an easy blog topic, and if other bloggers are anything like me, they are starved for blog topics. The guy who has it good is Tobold, because he has this "open Sunday thread" going where people suggest topics for him.

1. Every new MMORPG in 2010 will be bad

There's a story that I heard recently but can't, for the life of me, find anywhere on the internet. A person, some sort of Brit government or diplomatic type, was discussing his career that spanned the early to mid 1900's. And he said that every year people would ask him if there was to be war, and every year he said no, and that he was only wrong twice.

"Every MMORPG launched in year X is bad" is a pretty reliable bet. There's also this.

2. Nearly every existing MMORPG will continue to be bad.

3. The only significant MMO news by the end of the year will be "Blizzard's new IP has been announced yaaay!"

4. Everyone will think Blizzard's new-IP will be coming out in 2011 even though we won't see it until at least 2013.

As I explain here.

5. Blizzard's new IP will be a pizza restaurant with an arcade and ambulatory mechanapandas. The arcade will not have any Blizzard games.

6. The Old Republic will be bad, and I'll play it and tell you why.

I do have this theory though -- WoW made Blizzard a better developer. You can see it in the plans they have for Starcraft 2 and Diablo III. I'll play Mass Effect 2 and I'm sure it will have a great story but still be just slightly less irritating than the first. But I think that Mass Effect 3 will really shine because of the experience gained from making TOR.

7. I don't know how yet, but I _will_ be the one who blows up STV.

8. When 4.0 goes live in WoW, either 1) Blizzard will cheat and transport players to safe zones, or 2) half of your characters will either fall to their deaths or be buried alive on their next login.

9. 4.0 will go live in 2010, Cataclysm won't with the features that have been promised.

It's just too big -- either they hold it up or (more likely) something big is left for the first patch.

10. The launch event for Cataclysm will be unbelievable

11. Mass Effect 2 will be awesome but will make me angry.