Mistakes WoW has made (and how TOR can learn from them)

[Lheim]

I realize that this post is very likely to get bumped way down, just now, by the sheer waves of posts from people upset that they can't get into a game before it's even launched - but hope springs eternal.

 

I know there are WoW vets out there. I don't want to create a wow-bashing session, but I'm just going to list a few of my frustrations with WoW, just in the sheer hope that Bioware has learnt something from that game - and will try to take a tweaked, different approach to the same issues.

 

Feel free to add your own thoughts!

 

1. Current content matters; all else is obsolete.

 

This is a big one for me. In WoW, the window dressing on the hamster wheel has become way too threadbare. I'm not saying that there should be content that only a few measely percentage points of the population get to see, but instantly obsoleting 'old' content by handing out better gear like candy isn't good either. What'd be wrong with having to work your way up through content, as you develop through skill and gear?

 

2. Grind, grind, grind.

 

Valor points. Daily quests. Reputations. Nothing kills enjoyment more than forced repetition. Of course, some repetition is absolutely necessary, but I would adore if Bioware could be be sure to include content that a) isn't absolutely necessary to advance your character's gear level, and b) doesn't need to be run 307 times to garner any benefit.

 

3. The difficulty curve.

 

WoW's is out of whack. Plain and simple, going from a god-mode leveling experience to a crushing heroic instance experience is disasterous. WoW has made some strides in creating different difficulty settings, lately, with their raiding game, and I won't diss that - except to say that they've created another layer of content (LFR) that people will, since it hands out upgrades, feel is absolutely necessary. Goes back to point #2; am I wrong to feel that simply getting to SEE and KILL the bad guy should be enough motivation for very-easy-mode?

 

4. The UI.

 

Yes, I'll say it. Wow's default UI sucks. It wouldn't be such an issue if the gameplay didn't require monitoring so many timers and procs, but it does; and so addons become absolutely necessary. In my opinion, WoW's gone a bit proc-and-timer mad, and I hope SWTOR doesn't go so far in complicating gameplay. Yet, I know that UI features are very important.

 

5. Change with your player base..

 

.. but don't roll over.

 

I know folks are going to criticize me for my points. Feel free to. But please don't get bogged down in that; list things you think and hope TOR can do better!

[Lheim]

Kinda thought it might be .. swept off the main page in literally seconds. Er, second try?

[Abfalter]

I am surprised there are no UI mods.

 

I think a lot of WOWs UI improvements were Blizzard taking inspiration from popular mods and doing their own version.

[FotonUrth]

They've mentioned UI customization as a priority, and a planned feature, what that means, I don't know. I agree about content though. I'd like stuff not to roll out of usability.

[DarthPantyhose]

i only played the cata launch (didn't play wow until a few months after wotlk). the only good thing about cata is that we knew exactly when we all got to play it at the same time together.

[SideByEach]

You forgot one key and huge mistake that Blizzard made with WoW: PvP. PvP in WoW was a total after thought. it was bolted on and became the albatross that hung around the developers necks. Having to balance every ability around PvP generated a lot of resentment from those players who could care less or viewed PvP as secondary to their game play choice.

 

I'd really, really like to see the UI mature a bit faster though. Blizzard left the UI up to the player and the community. Not a terrible idea. I just wish BW would make up their mind on which direction they are going. Either don't support UI modification and give us a flexible UI like Rift or go WoW's route. You can't sit on that fence forever BW.

[Kettlestick]

Hey something to talk about other than release waves! I'll bump this.

1. Current content matters; all else is obsolete.

Absolutely agree here. I played vanilla wow, and spent a long time leveling. I hung out in the 49 bracket PvPing for a long time, but if I were to go on the forums and have an opinion, no matter what it was, the response was "the game starts at 60." I find that ridiculous. Yes, there are a lot of things to do at max level, and that's a good thing, but I think wow created low-level content, and then basically forgot about it.

 

And that's just low-level content. I'm not even talking about the old max-level content that gets completely skipped by new players. They have such a vast wealth of content that they've made over the years, and some of it is pretty cool, but nobody sees it. It's a huge loss for new players who don't get to experience the epic-ness of some of the old instances and raids. Let's not even talk about cataclysm, either. Basically with cataclysm they've scrapped all of their old ideas, and any nostalgia that a player might feel when playing the game, and replaced it with a new experience that is generically easy.

 

2. Grind, grind, grind.

 

This is such a mainstay of MMOs that I don't think Bioware will be able to avoid it. Scratch that, I know Bioware isn't even trying to avoid it. I played the beta, and I can feel the grind. It's okay, I'm used to it by now, but I think there must be a better way to keep things entertaining while still giving a drawn-out sense of progression. SWTOR is not going to be the game to revolutionize this (other than maybe leveling through pvp only, but that doesn't count).

 

3. The difficulty curve.

 

WoW's is out of whack. Plain and simple, going from a god-mode leveling experience to a crushing heroic instance experience is disasterous.

The problem with wow is that it is set up to go from a solo experience to a group experience, and there are no mechanisms in place to facilitate the change. You can take down even-level creeps in no gear, but you can't do so in instances. The simple fix for the difficulty curve spike at max level is a clear progression of gear and content that each character must go through. You aren't rewarded very much in lower levels when you do instances. Yes, you get gear, but so what? Your time would have been better spent questing, if your goal is getting to max level asap. If there were a clear progression path which wasn't skippable, you wouldn't run into the difficulty spike.

 

That said, I think people WANT to skip all of the content and go straight to whatever the newest thing is. They want to be sitting in the best gear there is, and they want this to happen as quickly as possible, but don't realize that this mentality is part of what is keeping them from having a lot of fun.

 

There is enough content in wow that I'd be really happy to just be able to run every dungeon once to get to 85. Personally, I'd be a huge fan of strict blockades a la FFXI style genkai level caps to force people to see the content. There is a great amount of story and whatnot hidden in wow, but nobody ever sees it because they jump over it just to get their characters maxed out. I'm guilty of this too, but I think the experienced would be vastly enriched if players were more or less forced to experience all of the content before progressing. However, for the fanbase, it's not logical. People would be up-in-arms if that were to happen, it's just the way I would like things to be.

 

4. The UI.

 

Yes, I'll say it. Wow's default UI sucks. It wouldn't be such an issue if the gameplay didn't require monitoring so many timers and procs, but it does; and so addons become absolutely necessary. In my opinion, WoW's gone a bit proc-and-timer mad, and I hope SWTOR doesn't go so far in complicating gameplay. Yet, I know that UI features are very important.

The default UI isn't an issue in wow, because you can customize it through mods. However, I will agree that the increasing number of skills has made wow classes feel like they're spread too thin. And it's just going to keep snowballing from here. SWTOR needs to take a cue in this area definitely. Players do not need 50 different skills to bind to every possible key combination there is. You need a few core skills that differentiate your class from others, and then you need to be able to customize those skito work the way you want to match your playstyle. You can achieve great depth of strategy with only a few skills.

 

5. Change with your player base..

If by "change with your player base" you mean "take suggestions," I disagree. MMOs need to evolve over time, but the creators need to be the driving force, not the players. Players are short-sighted. Players don't understand the subtleties of balance, no matter how much they think they do. Developers can get a lot of information from census data as to how they should proceed with the game, and also by playing it themselves, but with 8 classes plus 5 talent trees per class, the average player has NO idea what is good for balance, all they know is that they died twice in a row to the same tactic, and that naturally requires a nerf.

[Antipiety]

only point of yours i really agree with is #1. I would love it if SWTOR has a tiered raiding system similiar to rift in that you cant just bypass content completely. If you want to raid the tier 3 raid you probably need a couple drops atleast to be viable from the tier 1 and then the tier 2 raid etc.

[Juumanistra]

What, no frothing about the Random Dungeon Finder? Or the corrosive impact of Recount?

 

I'm surprised. In a good way, mind you. Too many of these threads tend to boil down to gauzy-eyed remembrances of the "awesomeness" of Vanilla and The Burning Crusade, back when you had to walk uphill in the snow both ways to get your attunements, and you were darn grateful for the opportunity to inflict a setback upon Kael'thas.

Edited December 14, 2011 by Juumanistra

[Acron]

In WoW if you do normal dungeons you get the learning curve that you wish, the problem is that they dont force you to do them, so you dont.

 

Please SWTOR force ppl to run every heroic before going to operations, better yet add pre quests to operations on that

[Kettlestick]

What, no frothing about the Random Dungeon Finder? Or the corrosive impact of Recount?

 

I'm surprised. In a good way, mind you. Too many of these threads tend to boil down to gauzy-eyed remembrances of the "awesomeness" of Vanilla and The Burning Crusade, back when you had to walk uphill in the snow both ways to get your attunements, and you were darn grateful for the opportunity to inflict a setback upon Kael'thas.

Vanilla wow was awesome because it was immersive. People talk about the awesome times they had because it was new and exciting, not because it was objectively better (though I would argue that it was). Now, wow is just work. People who play it are tired of it. They've seen all there is to see, and blizzard isn't giving them anything new. When I say "new" I don't mean "rehash of the same boss themes and mechanics we've seen for the past 5 years."

 

But what is blizzard to do about this? They really can't do anything. They've painted themselves into a corner. They can't change what needs to be changed to keep the franchise feeling fresh without alienating the conservative fanbase that their own methods have helped create.

 

Recount is a great tool, people who dislike it or disagree with its use are *******. Pure, simple. Power drills are not inherently evil because you could feasibly murder someone with one.

 

The random dungeon finder would have ruined any sense of community in wow, if one existed. However, the changes over the course of the life of the game have already torn down that wall, so adding the dungeon finder was an awesome idea that just added convenience where it was needed. But the dungeon finder didn't kill the sense of community, no. THAT happened when shaman and paladin were given to both factions. To me, the day blood elf and draenei arrived, blurring the lines of horde and alliance, was the day wow started to break down. No longer was there any difference between the factions. Everything one faction had, so did the other. Faction choices are now truly cosmetic.

 

This is one area where I think SWTOR is making a mistake: faction and class homogeneity. The classes have the same skills on both sides, just wrapped in a slightly different package. While I could very much anticipate the outcry of gaming conservatives at the notion, having classes function differently on different factions is something that would add a great sense of depth and community to SWTOR, even if the kids would kick and scream.

 

Then there's cross server BGs. No longer can you have a fierce rivalry against a player of the opposing faction. If you see someone in a BG, it's unlikely you'll ever see them again. BW is getting this right. Combining all of the levels and disallowing choice of warfront, while logically unsound, is the right call. It lessens queue times, but still promotes a sense of faction loyalty. Except huttball, but they have a valid rationale for that, even if I don't quite buy it canonically.

 

Then came paid server changing, and then faction changing, and then the dungeon finder. The dungeon finder isn't the biggest offender when it comes to the decline of wow, it's just the last nail in the coffin of immersiveness and community.

 

I could almost literally go on about this forever, but I have to be going.

[Rivanwarder]

No cross server BGs or dungeon finder.

[Taroen]

WoW's is out of whack. Plain and simple, going from a god-mode leveling experience to a crushing heroic instance experience is disasterous.

 

Crushing heroic instance..? Really..?

 

Cata sort of returned to a more challenging heroic system, but then some people whined that it was just too hard to get their *epix*, so they nerfed the hell out of them.

 

Now you can sleepwalk through the damned things in greens.

 

It made it so boring that I finally dropped my sub, and if there is one thing that I hope Bioware learns from WoW it's that people won't value any of their stuff if it takes no effort at all to get it.

[Taroen]

In WoW if you do normal dungeons you get the learning curve that you wish, the problem is that they dont force you to do them, so you dont.

 

Please SWTOR force ppl to run every heroic before going to operations, better yet add pre quests to operations on that

 

Well, they kind of do force you to do normals first. Unless they changed that. You couldn't queue for certain heroics unless your gear was a certain level...

[noctivagus]

If by "change with your player base" you mean "take suggestions," I disagree. MMOs need to evolve over time, but the creators need to be the driving force, not the players. Players are short-sighted. Players don't understand the subtleties of balance, no matter how much they think they do. Developers can get a lot of information from census data as to how they should proceed with the game, and also by playing it themselves, but with 8 classes plus 5 talent trees per class, the average player has NO idea what is good for balance, all they know is that they died twice in a row to the same tactic, and that naturally requires a nerf.

 

Parsing through rage for legitimate concerns is part of being a dev. Dismissing it all as rage is part of being a jerk. I've been playing video games for over 20 years. I have learned a thing or two about game design principals in that time. I can't speak for other people, but I know there are a lot of really smart gamers who have given MMOs really good advice.

 

Second, even when there is a lot of rage, sometimes it really is because something really is that badly broken.

 

Thirdly, the players' desire for balance is the driver for balance. If devs could make an MMO without balance, it would be a lot easier for them.

Edited December 15, 2011 by noctivagus