Logic And Psychology in WoW

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/GregMcClanahan/20110508/7579/Logic_vs_Psychology_in_World_of_Warcrafts_New_Gear_Advancement_System.php

I found this an interesting read. I didn't agree with it entirely but it did explain some of the dissonance I feel towards Cataclysm. I think that the tier gear shares the same model as the random pieces always has irritated me for as long as it's been in the game, it ruins it when somebody wearing an item off the first boss has the same look as a character who's wearing something off the last and much harder boss.

I'd be interested in seeing if anybody in guild has any comments, because I KNOW WE HAVE GUILDIES READING THESE THREADS, just none of you post :<

In before Junik asks where the boobies are.

Tiered gear sharing same model as random gear of same ilevel bothered me a little, but doesn't keep me from sleep. Most of all, I miss the uniqueness of things in this game. More and more things are homogenized. It used to be that even within the same tier, the gear looks a bit different for different specs (eg. Resto shaman would be wearing kilt and ele would be having those pants showing off my skinny troll legs).

Homogenisation of gear was really a huge problem for T9, but really it's the homogenisation of classes and dumbing down of playing that gets me down the most.

A lot of the challenge used to be in managing multiple spells in addition to the boss fight, at least when I tanked. Now the only thing to focus on in a boss fight after the first minute is the boss's abilities and while that'd be fine if more bosses were more complicated, at this level the bosses aren't interesting enough to care about and neither is my rotation.

The only exception is Nefarian and that's because of a mod problem :p DBM doesn't let me only show Shadowblaze and Electrocute in p3, which means I'm failing to keep track of the only two things I need to keep track of due to the low c/d of Blaze after a while.

I want to go back to TBC and DPS, it was a lot harder then to excel... And shadow priests didn't win all the time

I slectively skimmed through it and didnt see any mention of priests and the need to buff them!

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2011/05/world-of-warcraft-suffers-post-cataclysmic-drop-in-subscriptions/

So apparently the information on sub dropping wasn't just anecdotal

WotLK > Cataclysm.

To me, what keeps me coming back to WoW is the social and open world aspect of it. There are so many ways to play this game and people just tend to focus too much on raids/pvp. Pet/Mount collecting, socializing and hell, even RPing is part of the game.

I do enjoy the fact that it's easier to get gear in LK. 'Hardcores' can QQ and whine about the glorious days of Vanilla/BC, but seriously, 99.99% of them are just sore losers who cant stand the fact that people can get better gear in half the time it took them back in BC.

Cata tried to bring back the 'epic' in epic gear. Look at the state of the game now. It's just bleh.... Blizz was like "Oooo we make it so healers have to pay attention to mana. Yoo R hardzkore nao lulz". No Blizz, I LOVE the fact that I don't have to pay 100% attention to yur game in WotLK. I like listening to the radio, watching TV and chatting with my friends while raiding. That's how I relax and enjoy myself.

I'm a huge fan of WarCraft lore (I'm talking about being a 3-time Loremaster here), but even I'm not interested in Cata's. The raid bosses are so random. Even Burning Crusade had a better storyline.


In all honesty I've given up on 5/10/25-man content in Cataclysm unless they bring back WotLK style raiding. I'm just waiting for patch 4.3 or 4.4, then just buy my way through the achievements (Have fun trying to lecture me on how achievements are supposed to be achieved. They're just 'collectible cards' in my book.).

I think a lot of people are confusing the fact that

Because Blizzard did X, this is why Y happened.

Correlation doesn't necessarily mean Causation.

I don't think people are going 'bleh' because raiding is that much harder. It isn't. I'm sure some people are but I'm not sure it's the majority of players who actually are leaving.

From the people I've talked to who've quit, it's been people who've been around since Vanilla. People who essentially wanted this challenge back, people in guilds who were doing M'uru when it was relevant. And it doesn't amount so much to "oh the game is too hard now" because it isn't: it's still easier than ever, being able to bring almost any class set-up even in 10 mans and beat most fights.

The difference is that the game is 6 years old: none of the stuff at the moment is particularly innovative. They dressed the mechanics up with silly new features like Archimedes and his sound meter or CHo'gall and his sickness, but we've seen it before. It's essentially the same as what existed in Yogg Saron or even just the idea of standing in fire too long will one shot you. Nothing is particularly new and exciting any more and this isn't something they can do much about. Where they fucked up I feel is they re-used bosses we've seen before, model for model or at best, name for name. People have fought Nefarian and Onyxia, we've killed most of the ZG/ZA bosses. Hell in the latter case, the tactics are the same almost identically except the damage has been ramped up to be 'challenging'. That could be widely applied to the raids: there's more unforgivable attacks which might one shot you but fewer mechanics overall unless you're on heroic. I'm sure that's by design but it leads you in a weird in-between state if you're not in a heroic guild.

I'm on the other side of the fence on achievements. I dislike achievements which are luck based or grind-based, so a lot of the holiday achievements really strike me as crap design. I think they missed an opportunity for making worthwhile things to occupy yourself when not raiding or hardcore pvping. Some of the achievements, not even including the raid ones or the heroic ones, were actually quite fun to do and I could do them alone. Others, like taking Noblegarden recently, are excruciating in that you have to collect hundreds of eggs which is just a testament to how much time you have to stand in one spot and click every 30 seconds. It's wonderful in that it allows you to do something else like watch a movie while doing it, but really, I'm paying $15 to do something as excruciating dull as that when I could just not be paying the money and watch the movie all the same.

But really, what it is is a glorified pissing contest between people who can sink the most amount of time into stuff most people, even the ones doing it, don't actually find -fun-. They do it for the sake of completionism, just like Pokemon. There's no ultimate aim to collecting them all, you don't get anything for it, just a digital pat on the back for doing something in a video game. You saying they're just collectible cards is spot on, and that's what depresses me. If there was a more blatant way of telling me that this game isn't worth my time, I don't know it.

IMHO, that's again over simplifying the reason people leave.

Each person plays this game for a different reason. Some for social aspects, some just like the levelling experience, some like raiding (and the challenge of boss fights), some like to farm/mine/collect gold, some collect things (pets/achievements/mounts)... and most, usually a combination of some of these.

Players may leave due to their favourite aspect(s) of the game getting suckier. So you could be right that some leave because Blizzard dumbed down some encounters, or homogenized the abilities.

Or they may leave because they are simply bored. If you've been playing since Vanilla, you'd probably see past the whole "gear" or "achievement" pissing contest, since its just a repeat of this cycle in every expansion. No matter how good your gear is (or how nice it looks), you'll probably ditch it one day for some dorky green in the next expansion. It's all an illusion of grandeur for as long as it lasts. Realistically, you can't expect a 6 yr old game to excite people all that much (except for the really hardcore players).

IMHO, don't get bothered too much about the looks of the gear, or how the game plays, because in few patches or next expansion it changes again. Don't get too upset about pissing contests since its all pretty much a moot point. For me, I just find it relaxing to weed/mine, and I enjoy raiding with friends, and to improve my toon. But the urge to grind has pretty much dropped to a very low level. I play this game much like how my wife plays her FB games.

Yeah you're probably right, there is no one answer to it :p

HOW LONG BEFORE TITANVILLE IS RELEASED. We all know that Titan is going to BE a facebook game :<

No it's going to be an iPod app!

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6360/the_cake_is_not_a_lie_how_to_.php

Discussion on achievements I found rather interesting and semi-relevant to this topic!

Motivation