I think it’s time WOW had a replay code system for M+, raids and rated PVP.
BUT WHY?
- It lets you see how high end players play the specific spec you play.
- It lets you learn new content or improve while taking in content that is especially useful to you.
These are the core reasons, pretty much.
Practical Examples
- You can see how the #1 brewmaster does his route for a dungeon you have trouble in and how they usually use their cooldowns.
- You can see how a fellow destruction warlock positions and decides to do damage in fights that require a lot of moving around.
- You can see how top end PVP players play, how they position, rotate cooldowns and so on.
Why not just watch streams bro?
VODs for your specific class are not always available or relevant. It’s possible there are no relevant videos for the difficulty you’re trying to perform at, and you have to settle for general guidelines
I think that this feature could be added as an extension to the API that 3rd-party websites use to collect data on M+, Raids and rated PVP so that they could also get a replay. This would make it easier to introduce the feature by not having to implement an in-game UI as well, or just have a Blizzard website where you can see the replay. I’m presuming that adding an in-game spectator would be a lot.
I initially thought this would be something good for rated PVP but it occurred to me that PVE could benefit greatly from it. As someone who tanks M+, I find it very useful to watch people’s routes but they aren’t always up to date or the route may be a little different based on the spec you play/players in your party.
There could be some concerns around privacy, and I think we could opt out of the feature. If someone else in the group has the feature enabled, then you’d have an anonimized profile.
If you like this idea like, comment and hit that BELL button or something. Thanks.
I think a replay system could be useful, though it may require a lot of effort to develop compared to a game that had them in mind when it was created.
WoW replay files might be a lot larger than something like Overwatch replays, so storing millions of them might be more problematic for Blizzard. Maybe if that was an issue they could just store them for a week and let you download them to store yourself if you want them. I think accurate replay systems are usually basically a recording of server-side network data though so they may not want to let people have local copies if that lets you reverse engineer something.
For raids maybe they’d just record boss fights since there’d be potentially large amounts of downtime or afking at times that you wouldn’t want to waste space recording.
You’d probably also want a replay system combined with a combat log with neat tools to search through. Log sites have always only given part of the picture but having both together would be neat.
I think its a nice concept but I don’t think it’d be practical. Even if they only hosted the top replays (as determined by… something) that’d still be a ton of content to store and update constantly. To meet what you’re describing they’d have to have a video for every class/spec combination (and each player’s perspective in that combination) in every raid, every M+ instance, every arena/RBG.
There are definite benefits, logs for example have a little bit of a learning curve to read comfortably, but videos remove that barrier. I’m curious how much comp variance would impact the same spec’s play in pvp, I assume quite a bit as an M+ player I use all cool downs but two situationally depending on what omni cd tells me my teammates have available (and what mistakes they/I make).
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If they stored information directly from the server, and perhaps for only a few days, then that load would always have a limit instead of being permanent.
Of course, not a trivial endeavor by any means, but it could be doable if they decided to go for it
This sounds terrible…
We need to watch your video logs before we invite you, you know how this ends.