What I hope to see in patch notes pt.4

Topic 4 : Cooperative Abilities and Mechanics

Woop, I found some free time again, so let’s keep this train going!

(Links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, just in case you want to catch up.)

Today I want to talk about cooperation in group play and how the game itself could encourage that and reward players for participation.

This is not a new concept at all, it’s something we’ve seen tons in the past leading up to our current gaming landscape, Chrono Trigger had itsTechs, fighting games have longsince seen group attacks, and we’ve even seen this done in MMO games like FFXI. We've also seen MMO games implement this in a way that I felt missed the mark. Put in its simplest terms it’s a way to reward people for working together. 

Having played ffxi for a few years, I’m quite familiar with their implementation of the system. This game had a third, resource called TP that was built during combat, upon reaching a set amount of TP the player had an option of spending their accumulated TP for a powerful attack called a weaponskill. After a weaponskill was used on an enemy, there was a small window where if another weaponskill (with the appropriate elemental property) were used, it would chain together and add bonus damage, then cause another window for a third participant. The more attacks that were chained, the more powerful each step became. This system was extremely rewarding and allowed for involvement from all party members, even healers and tanks could get involved in to the chain by casting spells of the appropriate element at the right times.

Chrono Trigger on the other hand was a single player game, but using the techs allowed for special abilities to be completed by having your party members attack in tandem. You could have the caster character imbue the fighter’s sword with flames and proceed to unleash a large and powerful flame attack on all of your enemies. They called them “techs”, and you’d be hard pressed to find a chrono trigger fan who didn’t have their own, personal, favorite techs from the game.

Regardless of how it’s implemented, the general concepts of “two or more people working together is stronger than a single person’s actions” remains a pretty enjoyable thing to participate in as well as being extremely rewarding to execute. So my question is, why don’t we see this in more mmo games? By their very nature mmo games seek to make group play center to their worlds. There are group activities, and a group is unquestionably stronger than a solo players. You could argue that group play by it’s very nature is creating this team work and that simply by having a healer you’re making your tank and dps classes more effective. While that is an unquestionably true statement, it’s also pretty boring. Being in a group in most modern mmo’s you’re still only really doing things that your able to do solo, you’re stabbing the boss, controlling the monster’s positioning, or keeping healt hbars in the black, all of which is general gameplay that people can and do while playing solo. What these cooperative systems add is a new layer of involvement focused around what your group members are doing and what they are capable of.

Plus, it’s awesome. It feels good to see your character doing something cool and powerful. It’s rewarding to see the completed result of something you know you contributed too. It’s fulfilling to know you’re your group couldn’t have done that without your involvement.

There are so many ways it could be implemented. Why can’t we go the chrono trigger route and have a mage jump on a warriors back and both of their attacks become enhanced for a few seconds? Why can’t a healer launch an orb of energy that attaches to a player and mimics one attack before moving to another ally at random, then after bouncing to 5 or 10 allies the healer can redirect the orb to unleash its latent energy (multiplied by number of successful jumps) on a boss? Maybe a tank opens up a “window of opportunity” debuff on a boss that only responds to a fire attack, once hit with a fire attack, the window changes itself to requiring a poison attack, if each person in the group participates the debuff explodes with a massive amount of damage.

These abilities could also be quite interesting in a pvp environment. If a tank were able to apply this “window of opportunity” to an opponent, suddenly the target’s defensive priorities change. “Oh crap, if I get hit by that mage in the next 3 seconds, I’m in trouble.” Forcing the player to reassess the threat from each member of the opponent’s team and change their play to appropriately handle the debuff. Or in the case of tandem attacks (the mage jumps on the warriors back), people are forced to go into a risk v reward decision. This could be a dangerous mave as now two members of the team are in the same place, sacrificing any ability to flank or misdirect the opponent and making your own team more vulnerable by putting two health bars in one place. But ooh that big damage might be worth it.

Put simply, I really want to be able to do some cool group moves that I can’t do while I play solo. I want to feel my group in my gameplay. I want to be rewarded for participating in group game play. I want to piggyback my classes specialties on those of my group members. I don’t want to feel like I’m playing alone, even when I’m in a group. 

What I hope to see in patch notes pt.3

Hey, You’re back! Thanks for that.

(If you’re interested, here are links to Topic 1 and Topic 2.)

Topic 3 : Questing for Me. Not for everyone. 

*Let me apologize in advance if anything here is poorly written or hard to follow. I've been coming down with something past 48 hours and it's making me cloudy. I'll likely make some revisions to this as I feel better.

                OK, so we've talked about a few QOL tweaks (only a few, that list could be massive on its own) and dabbled into a bit of reward for veteran players. Those all sound fine and dandy, but what would trying to do something with what we already have? Let’s talk a bit about questing.

                My readers may recall (both of you) that I've touched a similar topic in and old post back during Cataclysm. While a lot of what I was saying there is still quite applicable, I want to go in a bit of a different direction this time. That previous post was focused a lot more on the mechanics of quests and the play involved. While this post is more about the mechanics of questing zones, and the experiences taken away. 

                One of my personal gripes with questing in general is the static nature of it. If you've quested through the world once, your next trip is going to feel pretty damn similar. In truth, it’s nearly identical. Quests have traditionally been built as a way to tell the story of the zone and guide a player through the experience. This works well, and it makes for each zone to be a nice little self-contained game of its own. But going back and playing that game again gives you almost nothing new. It looks like they are trying some new and exciting things with the upcoming Warlords of Draenor expansion, which is awesome. Hopefully the WoD changes don’t invalidate this post entirely. We’ll see.

                For quests, I’m talking about class and racial quests and/or modifiers. We can plainly see that the quest system knows what class and race I am, tons of quests refer to me as an orc, and the new quest reward system just gives me the most appropriate item for my class. But the quest itself remains static and dull. Let the quest have modifiers based on my class and race that factor into gameplay. After all, as a player I want this to be the story of me and my hero. Not the story of the zone.

                To be clear, I’m not asking for huge sweeping crazy quests like the warlock green fire, or anything that big. I’m asking for small quests that are inserted into other quest lines that are specific to either class or race. I love the idea of two people going through the game and having different experiences. Let’s say everyone does Quest A that asks to kill 10 boars. But quest B is flagged as a “racial quest” if the player in question is an elf, the next quest will be to put the bodies of the boars to rest peacefully in the garden. If the player is an orc the next quest would be to butcher the boars and feed them to the wolves. In essence it’s a “dispose of the bodies” quest, but how you do it could be slightly tweaked. Quest C now has us going to a new camp, and Quest D is a “class quest”. A class quest is based on, of course, our class. If you’re a hunter it’s to snipe these birds from the trees, if you’re a warrior it’s to chop down the trees, if you’re a druid it’s to heal the damage to the trees.

                This could be tough to navigate at times, as it would have to still navigate the zone and tell the story of the zone. But it’s the forks in the road are what make the road interesting.  Have an area full of were-rats? Awesome! Let’s have warlocks steal their souls, priests heal the infected npcs, shamans try to purify the were-rats, while warriors go fruit ninja and just slaughter them all. This could even be expanded into combinations of the modifiers. Let’s say priests heal, and warlocks eat souls. We are heading into a questing area that is full of npcs from an evil blast-mining operation. If I’m an orc, then my goal is to heal orcs to save them (as a shaman) OR to eat the souls of humans (if a warlock). Yet if I’m a troll, then I need to cleanse trolls (shaman) or consume dwarven souls(warlock). This would allow for essentially the same quest to present a huge number of variants. While one or two quests this way wouldn't make a huge impact, think if you leveled a troll warlock and an orc shaman back to back, while you go to all the same areas, and interact with the same world, you would get two significantly different experiences.

                Better yet would be to make these quests pop up somewhat randomly through play. Quest A has a Monk only variant while Quest D has a Troll variant. By sprinkling these in at a seemingly unpredictable interval, you could make it harder for players to define the pattern and attempt to mitigate the prediction of “ok, this next quest is a class quest because it was last time”. The end goal here is simply to make questing through a zone feel like it’s unique to me, and that it’s different from the last time. Let me make the world my own.

                I’d also like to see some varying rewards in the areas of art and animation. I’d love to have a bank of two or three casting animations for my character, and being able to assign them myself. Maybe my paladin reads his libram while casting a heal spell, but Ted’s paladin meditates for while casting. Maybe my troll uses an over-the-head style cleave while Ed’s troll cleaves with a low sweeping motion. On the art side you could award new hair styles through quests, or facial features. “I earned this scar fighting off the rebellion under the world tree” while a healer gets to say “I read from this book that I obtained while healing the fallen draenei under the world tree.”  

It could be very tricky to navigate this with the concept of group play in mind, as many people do play and quest together (we are talking mmos after all). But I tried to provide examples that could allow for multiple people of different roles to act simultaneously. If you have a mage and a warrior both questing together and they have different objects, but all of which are in the same general area, they can most assuredly quest together and stay a team in the process.

Sadly, this also results in an extremely expensive investment for a studio, I know it seems like little details here and there to most of us, but as someone who’s built even very small and simple games, I can assure you this would be a ton of work for any studio. I suppose the million dollar question is whether or not this would be worth exploring from a studio.  Would this breathe enough life into a world to make people want to re-experience it again, but differently? I can’t really say. But, what I can definitely say right now, is that I dread the idea of leveling alts because everything I’m tasked with doing feels like I've already done it over and over again. Maybe, just maybe, letting that experience be just  unique enough would make me want to see what the world looks like from the eyes of a warlock or a gnome. 

What I hope to see in patch notes pt.2

Welcome to Topic 2 of my "things I want to see in WoW" series. If you want to go back and read part one, you can do so here : What I hope to see in patch notes pt.1

Topic 2 : Veteran Reward Systems

This is one of those things that I keep expecting to see. It seems like a no-brainer to me. Let’s take a look into sales a bit for this one.  I’m sure that everyone reading this has at least one “rewards” type card within reach. Whether it’s a credit card that gives you points back, or a 10^th cup of coffee free punch card for your favorite java dispensary, or maybe it’s papa john’s website, where after spending 250 bucks you get a free pizza. No matter how you do it, it’s worth doing. That’s the reason these companies do these reward programs. It builds repeat business. It rewards loyalty and continued use of your product. As a consumer, it also feels pretty damn good. I personally seek out reward systems like this in credit cards and eateries. If I’m going to give you money, I want to get as much back as possible. I always love the feeling of getting that free pizza, or spending those amazon points that I’ve accumulated on a shiny new video card at no cost to me.

World of Warcraft has a lot of players. Like… a whole lot… so many that it would be impossible for us to even think about defining the whole player base in one broad stroke. Some are new to the world, exploring it for the first time. Some are veterans who are leveling their 10^th character. Some love pet battles, some love to raid, some just like to get on and chat with their guilds. No matter how you break it down, I guarantee you that some would feel far more valued if they got some veteran rewards. I can say this confidently, as I am one of them myself.

I’m going to confess something here, that I think backs this and probably tells you too much about my personal insanity. Final Fantasy XIV came out with their reboot “A Realm Reborn” on August 27^th 2013. Being an MMO junkie, I picked it up and played it hard until I’d reached max level and consumed all content the game had to offer at that point. I maxed out multiple jobs and crafting professions and hit the ceiling on what I felt like the game had available to me. All of this happened well before Christmas 2013. I honestly could have walked away at the end of my free month, feeling like there weren’t many stones unturned for me. But I decided to pay for a month to keep in contact with some buddies and give me more time to help friends catch up. After the second month, I was pretty much done, as much as I really enjoyed that game, there just wasn’t much content. I eventually decided NOT to cancel my subscription due to veteran rewards and the possibility of coming back a few patches down the road. I’ve given these guys 13 bucks a month for 4 months simply because I felt they deserved it, I might come back, and if I do come back, I want the cool stuff. It makes me feel special.

As someone who’s played wow off and on for 10 years now but never let my subscription lapse, I feel like my loyalty is granted me pretty much nothing. In fact, I feel like there have been promotions in the past that actually reward a LACK of loyalty. Look at the scroll of resurrection promotion. If someone hadn’t played (or payed) for X amount of time, they were given an option to come back to the game with free game time and a free boost to level 80. (To be fair, this promotion has since been discontinued as character boosts are now here) This was enticing and great for people who were on the fence about coming back, and I felt it was a slick promotion for sure, but what about the people who never left? Where is my incentive to stay? As a veteran who’s never left I felt like my loyalty was less valuable than someone who’s been flaky. To be honest, I felt taken advantage of. Here I am, being a good customer, sticking with a product I believe in through thick and thin, and mister quitter gets a free level 80.

I believe the game world should seek to reward the behavior that has been deemed favorable. Play for 2 years uninterrupted? Here’s a cool transmog item. Play for 3 years? Here’s an awesome vanity item that makes you big and sparkly.  The reward possibilities are endless, from a free month here and there, to a free transfer, or boost, or mount, or vanity items that give no player power, maybe even a slight discount on a subscription after 4 years of play? You could even take a page out of old pvp-ville and build a veterans lounge area that is only accessible by people who have 5 years on their account.

I’ll never forget the Champion’s Hall in Stormwind. Originally access to this room was barred to anyone who had not reached rank 6 in pvp. While it was just a tiny room, with a few vendors in it, I’ll be damned if that didn’t make me want to pvp my heart out to get in. Just the simple fact that there was somewhere I wasn’t allowed to enter drove my behavior to get me in there. This is tangential for sure, but it illustrates that exclusivity can be a very powerful motivator, even if the reward itself is small. The topic of exclusivity will undoubtedly make a return over this series of posts, as it’s something I personally hold pretty dear.

That’s enough for now, as I’m running out of time and need to head to work here. But don’t worry, I’ve got quite a few more topics to cover over the next few days. ^_^

What I hope to see in patch notes pt.1

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what I want from WoW lately. Not so much about the content specifically, but more along the lines of features and systems that I feel would improve my overall experience and enjoyment in WoW. Some turned out to be simple quality of life improvements, some ended up being drastic changes to existing systems, some ended up being entirely new features. The end result was a notebook full of doodles and scribbles that I decided I wanted to write about.

This is going to be far, far too much for a single post, so I’m going to post my thoughts here over the next couple of weeks. Currently I have about 8 primary topics to touch on, but as I write I tend to have more things pop up, so who knows how long I’ll be ridding this train.

To get us started, I’ll include topic number one with this post.

Topic 1: Quality of life in Azeroth:

This topic alone could probably fill a whole blog. From big complex systems like making mounts BOA, down to super fine details like where to place your items in your bags, this topic alone is massive. With that in mind, I’m just going to cover a few topics that I think could have fairly significant impacts to my experiences as a wow player.

1) Effects Dampening / Filters

When I stepped foot into my first Molten Core, I remember being in awe at the sight of 40 people nuking the crap out of a molten giant. I’d never seen anything on a 40 person scale before and it truly made me feel like I was part of something much bigger than myself. Going from 5 and 10 player instances to 40 felt like a huge leap and the visual experience of it was intensely rewarded.

As wonderful as that was, the game has significantly changed since those days. There are so many HUGE effects that fill our screens and the world now, that it feels excessive at times. I can’t tell you how many times I've heard people in raids blame failing a mechanic on the inability to see the mechanic, or heard healers yell at people to get in the healing rain only to have a dps respond with “WHERE?!”.

As a raider, it feels pretty awful to fail a mechanic simply due to visual clutter. There is just far too much useless visual noise in modern wow raiding. I would kill to see an interface option to disable or dampen abilities from other players. This would free up my visual bandwidth to focus on the ever-important boss mechanics, as well as to focus on what I’m doing at any given time. Of course, this would take quite a bit of exemption to ensure that important effects weren't disabled, but I believe a majority of raiders I've met wouldn't mind having those arcane explosions, pets, totems, and chain lightning’s purged off the screen.

2) Too much junk in my trunk!

On the topic of clutter, let’s talk about bags. We've all seen the devs making efforts to help keep our bag space tangible. I have to give them a lot of credit in slowing down the bag race that we've seen in previous expansions. Let’s be honest, bag space in general is already getting pretty ridiculous. With 28 slot bags (36 if we count professions), and 4 bags equipped at a time, plus a backpack, it’s entirely normal for people to be walking around with hundreds of items in their inventory. While I’m all for giving people a reason to return to town now and then, it’s gotten to the point where I feel it’s unmanageable without some type of addon. And when any part of the game feels like it requires an addon, I believe that’s something that could be improved on.

I think wow is already on the right path with this one. Specifically with the efforts they've made to help here already. We've seen mounts and pets taken from our inventories, as well as word about ‘toys’ and transmog being taken out as well. But the biggest areas where I've personally struggled with bag space is in the area of of gear and professions. The gear manager already does a great job at allowing us to manage gear sets in game, why can’t the gear manager also house the physical items? This would have the added bonus of effectively equalizing the bag space across all classes. No longer would a druid or paladin being punished for playing their classes to its full extent. If I could house 1 set for each spec my class is capable of, I’d be a happy camper. Moving to professions, I really loved the idea of profession specific bags that we saw introduced a few expansions ago. I feel like this was only half of the solution though. Why can’t we have a profession tab that stores 200 of every herb in a single tab? If you want to farm your heart out, you may need to make some trips back and forth to town just like now, but if you want to carry enough mats on you to be able to craft an item for your healer in a moment of need, I think you should be able to do that without sacrificing half your bag space in the name of preparedness.

3) The Macro System

I feel that the core purpose of macros is to help make the life of the player easier. They can automate some of the more mundane tasks that we players need, save us that oh so valuable hotbar space, or even help us to figure out complex math calculations or specific encounter mechanics. Macros are extremely useful and wonderful. If you know how to use them. Which brings us to the problem, they aren't approachable at all.

The macro system feels old and clunky. We've seen so many systems reworked and updated over the years, yet macros stay stale and unapproachable. The simple cause of this is that macros are complex. It’s basically programming in tweet format. You've not only got to know how they are structured, but the syntax as well. Think about trying to explain a macro to a new player. You’d probably have better luck providing tech support over Morse code.

I’d love to see this system updated. First, add in macro sharing (similar to how weak auras allows aura sharing). This could allow a guild to have a single macro-savvy member share their macros out quickly and efficiently. Yes, this is theoretically possible already through external tools, but if you've ever had to stop a raid so everyone could go to the forums and get the macro, you know that being able to do this quickly and efficiently in game sounds fantastic. You could also implement a visual macro building interface, and an in-game dictionary for keywords, commands, and functions. I've seen a lot of “visual scripting” systems online lately and adding a similar system into the macros would definitely make them more approachable and player friendly. Though, honestly, that does sound extremely expensive from a development standpoint, versus simply allowing players to link them and letting the small number of already fluent players do all the work.

OK. So I cheated.

I used a single topic to cover 3 specific features that I've been bouncing around in my head. Sue me. Or better yet, leave a comment. What do you think? What are your quality of life gripes from WoW? With such a broad topic to a game with such a massive audience, there has to people out there who have opinions on this. Or just leave a comment and tell me you disagree and that makes you angry.

Either way, stay tuned, I should have another topic coming in the very near future. ^_^