[WoW, D3] Stacking-stags
In the advent of patch five-something of WoW, an hilarious bug was found and smashed. For a day or so, druids in stag form could climb on top of each other and overpoweredly fly above the sky limit. Blizzard saw this as unacceptable and crushed the druids' dream to reach the moon. When the ruling hand of Blizzard smashed this flimsy bug, I felt a pang of sadness and disappointment, as if it had been a nerf. Well, it was, in some way: it nerfed the player's creativity. Here's the bug, if you're curious:
In the last few years, Blizzard has been nerfing here and there not just for balancing reasons, but for streamlining ones as well. In Diablo 3, game that brought me a lot of joy from its polished mechanics, and a lot of sorrow from its design decisions, Blizzard's hand has been as unwavering as if it were an MMO, if not more. The playstyle that I usually adopted since Diablo 2, the glass cannon, was made extremely inefficient through the rising of repair costs and nerfing of attack speed. It was not the intended way to play, mind you. Diablo 3, being a gear-based game, would prefer you didn't "cheat" by using a cheap 0-resistance DPS set. It is all business, you see, players are not allowed to progress through skill, they have to buy their way through.
But this was not the only thing they streamlined: farming Siegebreaker was too popular, so they nerfed the chests, the nearby dungeons and boosted Siegebreaker with some nasty reflect damage affix. Resplendent chests had been too lucrative for the effort they required (although they forget that in order to get to most of those, you have to fight your way through a couple of "real" loot-pinatas), so they nerfed the chests, and the community sarcastically baptised them as "supply chests" because they only drop potions and gems. Oh, and let's not forget the preposterous thought of weapon racks always dropping weapons - that had to go away!
Back to bugs. I don't see the reason why some of them had to be deleted from the game. Take for instance the glitch that allowed rogues to enter Karazhan Crypts with Shadow Step back in TBC. It did not harm anybody or destabilized the game in any way. Hyjal was also a touristic spot that the most dexterous players bragged about having reached. They did not only nerf (or more politically correct: fix) wall-jumping, but when the virtuosos of jumping still made it, they installed a teleport that bounced them back where they should be. Wall-jumping in itself is a controversial subject, since it was used for actual harmful exploits such as jumping off the battlegrounds' fences before the race began. But I can think of other ways of preventing that that do not involve hijacking an interesting game mechanic (raise the walls, make them insurmountable, make a faux invisible ceiling, etc).
Why such rapacious reaction against creative bug-employing (not exploiting, there is no benefit made from it)? I believe it goes hand in hand with Blizzard's authoritarian policies of hyper-balancing. The game is supposed to be played/farmed *this* way and none other, which leads to the ever-nerfing of out-of-the-box ideas that the players come up with, such as 5-man rogue tanking of Gruul in TBC. My rogue friends drooled upon watching this video, and dreamed about being able to do that one day. It bespoke of the classes' possibilities beyond what was "common knowledge." It was all nerfed, since rogues are not supposed to tank. Raid encounters have gotten a similar treatment as well. I remember TBC encounters as being much more tolerant of different strategies. No, I don't just remember, I have seen it in action just a few months ago: King Maulgar could be handled in different ways depending on your raid setup. Enough tanks, and there was little need for hunter-kiting. Fewer healers? Then you may kite Maulgar around instead of face-tanking the whirlwind.
On the other end of the spectrum, developers such as Bethesda, which will always hold a little piece of my heart, and will probably be mentioned in my testament, have taken a much more laid-back approach to bugs. If it is funny and not game-breaking, we leave it there for our players to smile. My favourite one so far was the skyrocket sabercat. I encountered a sabercat in the wilderness, drew my bow, shot an arrow at it, and it just blasted off to the skies like a veritable rocket, leaving me there agape and loot-craving. Such wondrous world, Skyrim. You can be anything, even an astronaut.
Summing up: This bug fixing triggers in me some reluctance, because it reminds me too much of other creativity-nerfs, so abundant these days with Diablo 3. When will they learn that the more unique a player feels through her actions and decisions, the more attached she becomes to her characters and her individual game experience?
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I think this type of control is tied with the grind-to-play model (which translates in pay-to-play in most cases) that multiplayer games have been adopting as of late. I could have drawn a very close parallel to your D3 / WoW article while talking about League of Legends.
I feel like developers want players to experience their game through a series of specific passages one is supposed to grind through. Those who deviate are simply doing it wrong, no matter how much fun they’re finding outside of the track.
And that’s not really much of a crippling issue in PvE games as much as an ethical question, but what about competitive settings, where player creativity should be marked as a strong – or even a selling point?
It is crippling if players can no longer find the fun they used to have. My father for instance found great enjoyment in collecting recipes from various sources (quests, mob drops, raids, etc) and detests the grind that professions have become in current WoW. This philosophy of homogenising everything for the sake of making it more accessible to daily-completists has turned an enjoyable, different aspect of the game into another grind.
“Back to bugs. I don’t see the reason why some of them had to be deleted from the game. Take for instance the glitch that allowed rogues to enter Karazhan Crypts with Shadow Step back in TBC. It did not harm anybody or destabilized the game in any way. Hyjal was also a touristic spot that the most dexterous players bragged about having reached. They did not only nerf (or more politically correct: fix) wall-jumping, but when the virtuosos of jumping still made it, they installed a teleport that bounced them back where they should be.”
How about the simple fact that Blizzard wasn’t ready to release it and it wasn’t meant for public consumption?
Blizzard likes quality. If something isn’t ready or done, you don’t understand them not wanting people to do it? For them, it’s like someone visiting when you’re not ready at all and the house is a mess.
Or if a friend decides to poke their head into a room you’re still working on despite the fact you locked the door because you don’t want to reveal it until it’s ready.
yet somehow blizzard manages not to punish creatve player strategies in starcraft 2….
Kishmet recently posted..The eternal lie of perfect class balance in a multiclass-system and how to solve it
How can ANYONE not love stuff like this?? I showed this to my wife and we both had tears in our eyes. Too bad we wont see this on live :) Good find!
Doone recently posted..The First Jury on Guild Wars 2
Well creativity in Boss-Fights is still possible. As an example take Deathwing heroic. The way your group handle the impale (an Debuff which inflicts 1200000 Physical damage on the target, cast on the player with the highest Aggro in meele range) depends completely on the Setup. (all before 5.0.4)
We have a two warrior tank setup, so we use Shield Wall, Intervene from the other tank and the old Fireland Trinket Stay of Execution which absorbs 20% of incoming damage, up to 56980. If all three effects where used correctly the tank survives with approximately 20k HP left. So the other tank had to taunt instantly after applying Intervene. Intervene was an talent which was normally not skilled.
If you don’t have two warriors or where faster and the tank didn’t had the equip and hp necessary for this strategy you could also use a shadow priest. Shortly before Impale all the DD’s and Tanks run out of the meele range and the shadow priest get the impale. The priest use Dispersion and survive the attack. When you use this tactic you could one-tank heroic Deathwing and compensate the dps loss through the running.
Two completely different strategy’s, the second simplify one aspect of the fight extremely, but made the last phase more interesting.
So in my opinion, Blizzard don’t take a action against creative tactics, as long as they are not trivializing the complete fight.
Reason for the dodge Nerf (reducing Dodge and introducing a dimishing return on dodge) was not that “rogues are not supposed to tank” or that they could kill Gruul with five man. The problem was, that with this mechanics still active rogues would be the best tanks. They where unhitable by physical attacks. No raid would have let paladins, druids or warriors tank in sunwell.
“The problem was, that with this mechanics still active rogues would be the best tanks. They where unhitable by physical attacks. No raid would have let paladins, druids or warriors tank in sunwell.”
Then make the mechanics accommodate to the circumstances instead of throwing them off the window entirely. Rift included a rogue tank for a reason: it was something that the players had been asking for. Instead of nerfing dodge, make the rogue-tank viable. It is such a cool concept that it might have helped with the tank shortage in LFD.
That Deathwing fight seems pretty interesting, thank you for bringing it up. I like that there are these two options, and certainly, with some imagination and savoir-faire there will always be alternatives to the main strategy that Blizzard had had in mind. Actually, I think that is the main issue here, the older encounters were designed with less emphasis on *that particular strategy* to defeat them, leaving more room for whatever the players could come up with. There were also less complex fights that involved less events and which allowed for a broader range (and quantity) of mistakes. Then experimentation ensued. The design focus changed to account for players using addons such as DBM/Big Wigs and for sites that disclosed the most efficient strategies, so that figuring out how to do a boss was no longer part of the learning process, and instead the learning process would be a matter of muscle memory.
It was only natural that there would be a nerf to creative output from players in raids. Such rigid system cannot make room for whatever flashy strategy the players would try, as it has to shower them with reflex-based mechanics to make up for the loss of strategizing.
It would be really interesting to know if blizzard design the encounter with a specific strategic to kill them or throw a bunch of cool abilities together and make sure, that there is at least one possible way to kill the boss.
And in my opinion, the main problem is the increased knowledge, information base and better addons.
As an example, for MC all we had where a few hand-drawn paint picture how the raid should be positioned in the different phases. We get them from a friend from a more advanced raid. Every ranged was happy, because as a ranged pulling aggro was not possible. (This was the time before Threadmeter). You had to know the threat output of the tank and watch your dps to estimate your standing. Boss-Modes for the different phases did not exist, we watch for the boss emotes.
I would estimate, that this was the normal way for maybe 50% of the raiding player base. Finished and polished tactics for MC came when BWL was almost finished by most of the raiders. So the raids where forced to invent there own tactics. There was no wowhead where everybody could read how much damage attack FOO from raidboss BAR cause.
Today maybe 5% of the raiders are forced to invent there own tactics. And even they can look in the dungeon journal and look up which role (DD, Healer or Tanks) has the task to deal with a specific ability. Additional Blizzard has stated, that they expect the players to use boss modes, when the are designing an encounter.
In my opinion, this factors are to blame, not some sinister intentions from blizzard to nerf the players creativity.
The complexity of the encounters is increasing, because bossmods exists and the support from bossmods is getting better and better. Since Black Temple bossmods are able to show you where to go.
(The first encounter i noticed this was Mother Sharraz, a few player get a Debuff and where ported to one place, they had to spread really fast. The bossmod showed a different direction for every player and the arrow changed colour according to distance. Red = deadly, Yellow = dangerous, green = relatively safe, no arrow = safe)
And in my opinion this development is to blame. There is no place for creativity, if there is a program, which tells me what to do…
Well while I think you are right about the spread and avaivability of information through wikias, as well as the requrement for DBM addons being the main villain in blizzard’s boss encounters, blizzard still has the ultimate responsability. They could just design their encounters without bossmods in mnd couldn’t they? But then we come into the discussioon that twitch-type, fast paced gameplay seems to be the new black in the industry. As for Blizz having a sinister plan to stop player creativity? MAybe if you look or in this case read what’s going on inside the company all I get s avery hierarchial system whith a “just follow orders no questions asked” feeling (especially after reading one off Doone’s posts on T. R. Red Skies about the schism with the new and old Diablo devs. If there is such a culture iin the company itself I thnk it’s very reasonable to assume it infects their games as well
Kishmet recently posted..The eternal lie of perfect class balance in a multiclass-system and how to solve it
“In my opinion, this factors are to blame, not some sinister intentions from blizzard to nerf the players creativity.” That is true in the case of the raiding department, but it was a divergent topic from my main point of the post, that this bug-smashing reeked of streamlining. You are not supposed to do that, go there, attempt this. Then I got reminded of how mechanical fights have gotten, and suggested that this is just another way of hampering our creative input, derived from whatever factors it might be, or on purpose.
What would be your top five “non-mechanical” fights that allowed great creativity?