Game Design Problems

Community General Discussion
1

Hey All,

I am going to just briefly mention some issues I have noticed with this MMORPG.

Specifically, these are issues I see in Shadowlands and want them to be addressed.

  1. Zone Scaling - This removes all sense of power progression to your character for the sake of convenience. I understand it’s nice to not out-level the zone you are in but that is from the power you have earned. Nothing is stopping you from running through the rest of the zone to finish it. The scaled zones are not very engaging because of how trivial the scaling making everything. I don’t have to think about how I want to build my character or what gear I should try to get to optimize my performance. This is all irrelevant with scaling because none of that makes any difference for any worthy amount of time.

  2. Player Scaling - This removes power progression as well but in a different way. There was a viral video from a content creator that shows a character with 100k HP and then they hit that character for 180k damage, the character does not die but is reduced to approximately 5% hp instead. I can only assume this is to stop players who have worked for their power to not 1 shot people who haven’t?

  3. Class Design - All classes have been designed to be balanced however, they are not balanced and never will be. This leaves us with the same problem except boring flavorless classes to play that all have an answer for every situation making no one unique. I hope they nail it with the covenant system because that can add so much depth and meaning to your character. Covenants have the potential to bring back meaningful choice which has been lost to WoW for some time.

  4. Itemization - Weapons are all homogenized and none of them have any flair. Why are all weapons the same damage and speed, how is this fun and interesting? All this seems to do is making for a boring flavorless game that is easier to balance, again its still going to be unbalanced so we are left with boring flavorless game. Also giving epics out to everyone is no longer epic, it is a participation trophy and nothing more. Imagine you had a ball point pen, to today’s standards that pen is not epic but what if everyone else had quills and ink wells? … That pen is pretty damn epic. Epics should be exclusive to people putting in the work to get them, this makes them actually feel epic.

  5. Socialization - WoW just feels like any other randomly match made game just click find match, yell at or get yelled at from your team (if they bother talking at all), finish the match, leave, repeat. This feels so shallow and empty especially looking back at Classic.

This isn’t all of my issues with the game but at least I can feel better getting my voice out there! Thanks for reading, I look forward to reading the comments, Cheers!

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Millions of players and millions of differing opinions.

Thanks for yours though. :smiley:

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I’d say you’re on the same page as most of us that actually play the game.

Not the forum LFR heroes who think this garbage is acceptable, but totally on the same page as myself and people I play with. :slight_smile:

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Way to make stuff up.

Want to tell me the lottery numbers for this week too?

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I don’t really get this complaint.

There is still a big difference between good gear and mediocre gear. Does the color of your equipment really matter so much lol?

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You’re right, BFA being bad was just a lie I started just now. It’s actually the greatest expansion of all time. People love losing everything that made the game fun in Legion.

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Why bother having it then? remove the color if it doesn’t mater.

Edit: Its the design philosophy behind given people things or letting them earn it. For example think about Little League Baseball, They have trophies for first, second, and third after the season is over. These kids feel good about how well they performed which reinforces them to want to play baseball in the future. The kids who did not get the trophies will do one of two things.

  1. Try harder next season to get the trophy because they enjoy playing the game enough to keep at it.
  2. Realize they don’t like baseball enough to try and get better and quit, maybe trying other sports that they will be good at.

This makes sense, the people who enjoy the game will stay and play and try to achieve the trophies, the people who don’t will quit and that is fine.
HOWEVER
In today’s society we have to design the reward system around the people who won’t stick with the game / sport to make them feel included. This is only temporary because soon after they realize they don’t like it anyway and at the same time devalue the achievements of others who love the game / sport and work harder to get their status.

Another example lets look at the Major League Baseball. One team wins the world series, the rest of the teams try hard every year to earn that achievement and love what they do because they love the sport. Imagine at the end of the World Series they said YOU’RE ALL WINNERS!!! YOU ALL GET TROPHIES. Would the losing teams cheer and rejoice? No, they wouldn’t they wouldn’t care at all that they got a participation trophy because its not about the physical trophy its about the prestige and status that comes along with it. The winning team earned something truly epic.

Moral of the story … they are designing a game like we are children in Little League Baseball and everyone is included but no one is special which makes for a more shallow game that alienates the people who care and supports the people who don’t.

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rhetoric, rhetoric, hyperbole, opinion, subjective statement…

:confused:

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Since mythic dungeons became a thing, blue gear is there, just doesn’t last long enough to matter. We’ll be wearing blues maybe 3 weeks into SL before we go purple.

I don’t really mind the color part, theres so many ways to gear up now relative to then.

My #1 issue is the decline with world content and class design. Compare the last three expansions with MoP, Cata and Wrath. The older three did it better, there is no debate.

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my only issue is level scaling…
but bonus XP from quarantine make it bearable

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If you make no attempts to be a part of the community, you are right. WoW’s socialization is just randomly match made games where no one talks.

Weapons do not have the same damage and speed. 2h weapons, daggers, maces. All have different damage and speed.

If the color of the text for gear bothers you that much, I am sure an add on can be made that changes the text to blue.

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This is single biggest reason for many of the problems facing WoW.

“Accessibility”, AKA we’re going to lock borrowed power behind casual BGs and make you carry ungeared players in them, has enabled lazy behavior in all content, not just PvP…

Let’s have a look;

Using the group finder tool, you can easily form a group, use someone else’s hard earned Keystone, and then bail on their run, wasting everyone’s time and energy, without any consequences whatsoever.

Good players try to police this behavior (since Blizzard won’t) using RaiderIO, and that system has been accused not only of being intolerant of players who leave groups stranded, but also of being racist!

In other content where you play with strangers you don’t have to care about, LFR has been enabling this behavior for years! Telling new and progressing players that in order to succeed, they should just ignore mechanics and blame other players for their defeat.

All of this would be less shocking, if the people who built these systems weren’t the ones actively trying to cover up their mishandling of them.

Between not punishing Key leavers, and saddling good players with bad ones in BGs just to grind an Essence, Blizzard has not only made progressing players fend for themselves (either find a good guild or you’re screwed), but also covered up the item level disparity in PvP as well as the horrible gearing system.

The great irony of all this is that the ones who resist group expectation, people who refuse to time keys or complete untimed ones, the sub 100k hp BG players screaming at you if you tell them how to become more powerful, these are the ones calling you intolerant.

After going over all that, WoW certainly does seem accessible…to people who have no consideration or respect for other players

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Your opinion is noted no matter how wrong it is.

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Sorry, let me be more clear.
1 handed weapons including Swords, Maces, Axes are all at 2.6 attack speed. Their damage would be identical if their Item level is the same. nothing makes one preferred over the other they all become simple aesthetic choices and with transmog makes them completely irrelevant.
2 hand - 3.6 attack speed
daggers - 1.8 attack speed
You lose an interesting part of the RPG when you ignore these finer details.

as for color I edited that post earlier explaining the design philosphy behind it. it has nothing to do with color my bad :slight_smile:

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But this is what happens if they make 5 variations of each 1h sword, mace, axe, etc.

People end up getting 100 weapon drops a week, complaining they aren’t able to get armor.

Classes then get designed around specific weapon speeds (as they were before). It makes a large portion of weapons useless, as you are just hunting down a specific weapon anyways. So now you are limited to 1-3 weapons. Just like now. You have 1-3 weapons.

Nothing really changed.

Real life example. When there were more weapon types, as an enhance shaman I could only use 2.6 speed axes/maces/fists. That meant I had 1, possibly 2 options a tier. Now I still have the same amount of options.

1 Like