Say it with me, Time Played Metrics. There ya go
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Ah, you want to make a world feel even less alive by making players into ghosts. The irony.
MMOs are about interactions with other players in the world, even if you dont want it. That makes the a world feel alive.
Yea and the dark souls system lets you interact with players in the world, and makes the world feel alive.
But now random people canât ruin your game. Are you going to argue that letting random players ruin your fun is a core part of MMOâs?
The beauty about MMOâs is that you can play it solo, coop, with 3 friends, 4 friends, 5 friends. If your friends go online you can switch to solo stuff. If you have 60 friends you can even create a guild. The only reason players ever group up with random people is because they have to.
M+ is such a good idea, small group end game content, the problem I think , is the timed aspect. I understand thatâs a HUGE part of it but itâs a lazy way of scoring players to create challenge. Itâs perfectly doable to create a system that measures multiple factors in a run and scores the run as a whole. A system that looks at not just completion time but player death count, total DPS, total HPS, interrupt count, damage taken, etc.
Itâs actually really unfortunate because a more balanced approach like that would have the wonderful effect of creating more well rounded players who understand something besides âgotta go fastâ
This would allow for a slower M+ pace and would justify increasing the difficulty and rewards of reg, heroic and mythic dungeons. Every difficulty level could and should play the same, just with stricter standards. That rating system could be in EVERY dungeon mode and for non M+ have it tied to bonus loot/rep/currency/whatever
It would encourage players to polish their skills and get better, it would justify slower more challenging content thatâs rewarding to complete at ALL levels, and it would create players who are fundamentally better at the game by the time they reach endgame.
I donât dislike M+ and I even enjoy it early in a season but I dislike it being used as a tax for raiding when moreover it feels like theyâve kept raising that tax over time with the great vault/valor and now the upgrade system.
Which also escalated the gearing speed way further when if the problem was that there was no catchup for raid gear then they could have added that catchup in raids, I know thatâs insane as you wouldnât have to farm a 100+ dungeons just to catchup.
I think one of the greatest problem of content like M+ and pvp to some point is the lack of new content patch to patch. For me making us do old dungeons is one of the decision I hate the most and Iâd rather they use the timewalking Legion model to bring back old m+. Old content is fine to a point but doesnât really interest as much players.
No they canât, because thatâs not profitable.
Yeah, this is what I mean when I refer to wowâs âDisposable contentâ issue. Dragon flight was the end game for nearly 2 years (not quite, falling just shy of two full years). The effort to develop that content and the experience of DF, is no longer being put into ensuring DF stays relevant as end game content.
It has now become the 10-70 leveling experience, replacing BFA, when Kul Tiras and Zandalar became the 10-50 leveling experience in Shadowlands. While this ârolling into base gameâ and ânew leveling experienceâ are ways to keep the game somewhat relevant, it displaces the entire experience they were before, resetting the game after each expansion (unecessary).
Yup. They have a desire to get you to participate in something (metrics gathering, to have find a design direction to go in), so they grab whatever already exists, tweak it, and proudly thrust it into the hands of players, hoping nostalgia and FOMO get players to ignore the lipstick pig long enough to give them precious data.
Maybe⌠Instead. Hire people who believe in design philosophy adherence, give them an IP full of great design opportunities (you, opportunities to live up to these philosophies), and they will design a much better game than anything you will produce from Metrics.
Yup. Thatâs the point I keep making. The Gameplay loop is 'New Content displaces old content > players flock to new content > new content is power creeped by design > Players run out of new power creep to acquire > players struggle to find reasons to continue playing > Subs fall off > Blizzard panics and releases more new content⌠which displaces everything before it.
You will have people flocking to what I am saying here, insisting that âthis is the way games have to be in order to remain interesting and relevant.â Admirassil (plz forgive my spelling) was the last raid content in DF. The tiers of raid content prior, werenât even being played anymore, during the same expansion.
Literally, the power creep was acquired, no reason for 99% of players to go there. Can acquire stronger gear through catch up mechanics. (Why do you need catch up mechanics, when players could just⌠do the recent raid teir to be prepared⌠less work to have players play the game the correct way⌠than designing a new aspect of the game so they donât have toâŚ)
The moment you ask for a blizzard designed game experience where there is meaning and long-term play value, they fall apart: instead giving you a new expansion with a new play location and all new play activities⌠while they ignore everything that came before it.
Blizzard forgets that play=/=work, proceeds to artificially gate content behind âdifficultyâ so only players âpreparedâ for higher challenges can participate⌠and then they get upset when participation metrics donât meet expectations.
I promise you, if a leader materialized in Blizzard HQ, and set expectations for adherence sound design philosophies, rather than trying to get design spaghetti to adhere to the wall, this might be a game, rather than an internship one has to pay for.
When game is linearly designed and new content is slotted in place alongside old content, things like power creep are meaningfully prevented and all content stays relevant, regardless of whether or not players are willing to continue playing it. The main difference being: evergreen game design doesnât require constant updates AND the content is always there VS âwe have this new thing coming on our improved update cadence, bear with us folks, as we work really really hard to crunch out another set of new content for you to Locust Swarm for a month.â
Then when the new content is no longer offering power creep⌠players go play other games, rather than finding reasons to play the rest of the content this game has to offer.
Sure, you get Timewalking events to help bring back old dungeons and Chromie Time while leveling prior to the most recent content (chromie time doesnât allow you to level current content leveling range, so 70-80 canât use it at all, canât play with friends using it), but nothing meaningful that allows you to find value in⌠normal activities.
Or rather, activities that already existed in the game (dungeon was already there) without being reworked to be âappealing.â The blatant incongruence of Blizzardâs wow design with even their other games⌠SC2, D3, both champions of their time in terms of meaningful game play design and relevance.
D3 is on so many platforms, there was a major release of it for NINTENDO SWITCH of all things, in 2018. The only platforms not able to run D3 natively are android and IOS. So you canât play D3 on phones (would have been a good reason to port D3 to phones instead of making Diablo Immortal). But you can play it on a potato so long as it runs Windows or Mac.
Unsurprisingly, Neither d3 or SC2 have the problems wow has. They just exist as games people can play at their own pace, on their own time, and make value judgements over in a vacuum. They donât need new content to have reasons to keep playing (hell, check out SC1 scene in Korea).
Itâs not a casual vs hardcore design issue, itâs a forced power creep vs hungry locusts issue, and the player base needs to recognize the fault in these stars. Players need to tell blizzard âhey man, I donât new content at the expense of everything I was oriented to before. Period. I will go play another game before I commit to this game long term, under that poor game design.â
Then Blizzard can be like âhey guys, youâre right. Weâve had to squish stats and levels enough times to prove we have a fundamental games design issue here.â
Blizzard would like for things to be easier, less resource intensive. Blizzard is stuck trying to make sure players continue to find relevance and reasons to buy this game and stay subbed.
Thatâs not a sound business model, in any industry. This industry is bleeding from the cracks in 2024. Stardew Valley and Baulderâs Gate 3 are representative of the games players want.
Imagine my surprise when a $15 game, solo developed in a guys garage, has more concurrents on steam than a game build by a billion dollar studio. D4 has like 5-7k concurrents daily average rn. Stardew Valley has 50k average daily.
Before anyone is like âdifferent games are from different genre are different pricedâ I will put a pin in all that, remind you that Blizzard designed D4 with hundreds of people and Stardew is developed with one guy.
Must be something about the development process, leading to a higher number of players concurrently engaging with it. Probably isnât the game genre or the company making it, at this point.
PoE represents a far more expensive product (when making meaningful purchases in game) and maintains approx 100k daily average players. Blizzard needs new leadership. Not a new figurehead. Blizzard needs to adhere to sound industry standards and design philosophies.
The first one being: Make a good, completed game, and players will just play it. Until the end of time, so it would seem (mario on NeS in 2024, looking at you). Blizzard has a long way to go before they represent a company I am willing to invest money into again.
You mean: âIt isnât profitable to let 600+ people spend time working on a game, without selling them a product every 2 years and charging them a sub fee.â
Which we legally canât do without having something to offer them.
Haha. I mean, thereâs âputting the cart before the horseâ and then thereâs Blizzard entertainment.
Speaking on design philosophy Iâm certain for years now (since the Activision takeover) the profit model has been âPlanet Fitnessâ style
That is release a product designed to get you interested, let the good content run out after a month, replaced by grinds and slogs that are designed not to be fun, but also not to be unfun, just kinda meh
What this does is it causes plater interest to drop off slowly until itâs gone, with the intention being to keep players subbed without actually using the service thereby making money effectively for free.
If you told most players that weâll be doubling the monthly sub cost but content would be better and more enjoyable in all the ways discussed here I bet almost no one would care
But then the content has to actually be better and Iâm not sure they have the ability to do that anymore
Edit: that isnât to say that it canât be done, but rather that Activision cut out the expenses associated with that kind of development philosophy and now the people left donât have that skill set.
The problem very well might be an HR and finance issue where the projected cost of firing, hiring, and training exceed whatâs considered financially allowable
That tends to be the major sticking point in any design process⌠you need to create something that stands on itâs own merits, that is good without you needing to keep propping it up with bailing wire and gafferâs tape.
TWW does not represent anything compelling to me, as a long term wow player. The last 20 years have taught me: Blizzard will release something new. That release will displace everything Iâve done up to this point. To the degree I donât even have to do any of it in the first place. It was more work than fun, anyway.
I mean, if the problems of designing a better game arenât taking precedentâŚ
Every companyâs primary concern is profitability. Making good high end products is one way to do that
But so is cost cutting, streamlining and pruning
And the latter is less risky and works well in a power vacuum where you have no real competition. There are other MMOs but thereâs nothing else like WoW
Always remember the only people a publicly traded company is beholden to are itâs investors because they have a legal fiduciary duty to them. They owe us, the consumers, nothing
100% agreement here.
If the problems of designing a better game arenât taking precedent in a gaming studio employing such a large number of staff, they probably should be.
In a game studio, where customers pay you for⌠games. I mean, I can always sit here and justify cost cutting, itâs a mindless exercise of number crunching, doesnât justify long term decision making and doesnât help⌠make a better game.
Or product/service, should one wish you extrapolate to a different companyâs profit motive.
The first rule of business: In order to be profitable, you must sell your product. Not advertise it, not sell people on it. People must actually buy what you have. Which typically (but not always, people can be mindless too) requires your product to stand on itâs own merits.
The moment you try to sell meritless products and services to people, is the moment you deserve to answer to your shareholders and suffer the natural consequences of your actions⌠up to and including going out of business.
Just because you develop games under the prestigious title of Blizzard Entertainment, does not magically ensure you get a free pass to publish whatever and continue to make money. The obvious fact Blizzard is design emphasis is placed entirely on new players coming into the game, first and foremost.
This is the Amazon problem all over again⌠if you hire the lowest available fruit (seasonal workers) and then term most of them at 90 days, with the goal of always hiring new people, you will in fact run out of people to hire.
Likewise, you will run out of content to sell, and start a special alpha test server open to the public under an RP nomenclature, disguised to be âa new SEASONAL way to enjoy Classic Wow!â
Talking about season of discovery, in case I was being too hyperbolic. I am not an alpha tester. If I were, Iâd be getting paid by Blizzard. Not paying them to try out new game modes that are not meant to be anything more than metrics gathering tools to inform design for the rest of the game.
I canât take anything like that seriously if you:
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Donât pay me.
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Expect me to pay you.
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Have 3 other versions of the game competing for my time already.
Obviously, as an alpha test server, it only needs some players to participate, and if they donât have to pay anyone⌠free games development resources!
I mean, if only making Wow better were the priority⌠probably wouldnât have to engage in the rest of this circus.
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If you talk about the quests of Dragonflight, I agree. Shadowlands Quests already keep interrupting you with forced NPC RP you have to stand through, Dragonflight has that too but allot less.
Ion said that the âlessonâ they learned is that people donât want to play through a âstoryâ and mainly want to reach endgame and grind gear. Well the earlier Expansions had great story, but two things. First the story being told was all in-game and didnât require the player to consume outside content to understand it. Second it was optional. If the player wished all story could be skipped, which was ideal in an MMO where you possibly play more then one character.
I read all story in Quests the earlier Expansions, when they started to heavily retcon, write a big parts of story in Books and write nonsensical story I stopped. Of course I am no longer interested in reading anything, because it all makes no sense. However there is the occasional diamond in the rough, with quests at least.
For me in Dragonflight there is to much waiting around on events. I realize I could run all the Heroic Dungeons to gear up, and then either let it be(I donât Raid), run some low level M+ keys or run LFR and call it a day.
If there is something I learned with all the Artifact grinding and Warforging, Titanforging & co it is that you as player better limit yourself how far you want to go. Or like an addict you end up in the treadmill. For some reason it feels like WoW is setup by a Psychologist that knows how to set up stuff so players do it without knowing theyâre in the skinnerbox. But that is probably just me.
The problem will always be that making things better, improving them, will always be more expensive and riskier than maintaining the status quo. Itâs easy to believe that the people making decisions are stupid, but thatâs not the case.
People making the decisions for a $75 billion company arenât stupid. Theyâre making these decisions on purpose, because for their intentions theyâre the right decisions.
My biggest concern is that the two futures for WoW are to continue as is, or if subs fall below whatever threshold that theyâll just shelf the game and relegate it to the legacy product bin. I genuinely donât see a future where major improvements happen. Maybe AI will help make that possible but Iâm not hopeful
Assuming you need to continue to make them better. Having people with talent and skills to make a good product to begin with, and not need to continue updating it, always, will be a better position for a company.
Always.
This is why games as a service tend to fail, always. These studios arenât positioning themselves with a quality product/service, one that organically grows into a stable subscriber base.
Instead, itâs âwe gotta stay open, we gotta keep the lights on, we need new contentâ and I realize there are always more complexities to finances than I am giving them credit for, but priorities need to be unwavering for longterm success.
It canât be âhey letâs put out a solid product this patch cycleâ and then âwe need to cut costs this patch cycleâ and then have the cost cutting happening more and more frequently.
A downward trend like cost cutting is not going to yield upward trends like higher concurrent subscriber counts. The two metrics are unrelated. Also, when you cut costs, the first place people feel it is in the product/service. Then they contribute to that downward trend of subscriber count, contributing to another trend: refunds.
Blizzard needs to ignore shareholders if they want to be profitable, because shareholders arenât game designers, nor players. If that isnât the response in shareholder meetings, would explain why we continue on this path of empty products designed for new players.
Rather than⌠enjoying a stable concurrent subscriber count, which then gives shareholders⌠stable dividends. If a company can issue itâs own findings for an investigation, they can fire their own shareholders, if needed.
At this point, I expect Blizzard to be the Industry leader they pantomime. Oldschool Runescape seems to be setting the standard here, in 2024.
Check out concurrents. They add new content to OG version of the game according to player suggestion, players themselves have a direct hand in how the game shapes up (basically, the classic + model we asked for, but didnât get, because Blizzard would have to surrender control to someone else), and their concurrent player counts went from D4 numbers to Stardew Valley numbers.
Must have something to do with actions the studio takes to honor and respect the players⌠despite the dumpster fire that is RS3. Retail wow and Cata classic shaping up like RS3, despite all the efforts they can muster to avoid it.
Itâs old hat at this point but the issue stems back to the Activision takeover because Activision doesnât have to care about WoW nearly as much as Blizzard did as an independent company.
People act like time sinks werent in vanilla, Its an MMO they have and always will have time sinks.
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Um, the problem isnât âtime sinks.â People expect to sink time into playing this game. âTime Sinksâ as a goal tend to be bad for anything. Adding goals that players are willing to sink time into⌠insert drake meme here.
Imo the issue is HARD time sinks that you canât interact with. Older incarnations of the game had soft time sinks that you could work through or get lucky about.
I remember farming furbolgs for weeks for the enchantment, but I had control over that. I remember farming crafting mats for weeks during TBC too. Both of these were activities that took a lot of time and created an effective sink but because I had a say in it I didnât care that much. You could even being friends! Imagine that, an MMO where you can improve your experience by working together!
Probably just me, but I liked it more when the game used currencies and loot didnât Warforge or Titanforge. That way you had a clear goal on the horizon and didnât get 3 times the same piece on the same character in the same week from Dragonflight events.
I get it it is an incentve⌠however you have to balance every class/spec to a point that they are not way bottom of the barrel. WoW famously undertunes class/spec combos and the devs state âweâd rather have you not play that specâ.
I agree with you. Even if you have a Mythic Raid, they will tend to not take the âbadâ classes, unless it has a healer spec that allows to get the other benefits of the class. Look at Shaman, I would guess a Mythic Raiding Guild rather take a Restoration Shaman then Elemental or Enhancer.
I agree with you here too. But this is the design philosophy nowadays âwe need to nudge players to do what they donât want to doâ aka Stepping out of the comfort zone.
I find players should choose what they want to play, and this is greatly influenced by⌠nostalgia because they just like the background of a class, or the kind of gameplay it provides. I would not disregard people stopping to play a class because it is undertuned to the point where it just sucks playing it.
Yeah class stacking. I find that is for the most part a problem of the system of personal loot and being able to trade it.
I agree. But then you canât put players into the hamster wheel of a grind.
Things I dislike at M+ is the modifiers and the timer. I guess because there are 10 levels of M+ it is hard to turn that into a challenge. Way to many difficulty levels for that to work without Modifiers.
I fully agree with you here. I ran in the M+ hamster wheel in BfA and there you had the same 8 dungeons for 2 years to run for M+. Yay. PvP especially is notorious for not getting stuff each major content patch. While there is a new Raid added, sometimes a new Dungeon or two, for PvP it is to often zero.
WoW has such a wealth of content. If you look at Final Fantasy 14, in there you can(and are encouraged to) still run all the content there is, and in a similar state as it was. Thought the system FF14 uses to scale the level down for players is not ideal, as it is annoying to not have all skills. But on the other hand it encourages you to try your hand on content for the live Expansion.
I do not say that WoW has to follow suit, but it would be rather easy to create just one big M+ Dungeon pool of all Dungeons that where M+ since Legion. You would not even need to do allot work, scale up the mobs and balance it some for the new skills that are in the game since then.
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