Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[RiyahArp]

Riyah - You claim no one ever posts any ideas for alternative solutions, but when someone does you ignore it? Why did you ignore my responses to you?

I get four or more people responding to me on posts sometimes, each with multiple points. I cull my responses so I'm not writing massive books each time I make a post.

This revisionist history stuff is silly. If you don't like WoW, that's fine. Claiming it's a bad game and got lucky because reasons is nonsense. By any objective measure, WoW is the most successfull MMO ever made by an order of magnitude. You have to do something right to be that successful.

PC gaming over the WoW era increased due to accessible broadband, and internet use in general boomed over that period. And yeah, it was popular, a lot of the consoles then had success because they could port pc games and copied them; Xbox in particular. And WoW is a bad game, because all those decisions destroyed what people liked about MMOs and replaced them with stuff that was inferior. And i feel the genre never recovered from that, because not all games can focus on convenience and survive. WoW is the Fallout 4 of MMOs.

This is not necessarily accurate. Weeping City was a noticeable step above Void Ark yet people "got over it" despite plenty of whining. Likewise, Nidhogg and Shinryu Normal were similar hurdles with equals amounts of crying about its difficulty. Both remained untouched.

Gear Ilvls rose enough to trivialize both. In a week most people jumped 20 ilvls, and people had no choice but to throw themselves at Shin. Weeping could just be ignored after an initial clear, like I said; it was actually better to do hunts because you could gear up faster. but I do remember both being unpleasant enough that if for some reason they had been harder, would have been a nasty experience for everyone.

We also have a pretty good upper limit to what people can't adapt to, zurvan ex and soar. All the raiders went on and on about how easy it was, but it was a nasty affair in general.

[Zojha]

PC gaming over the WoW era increased due to accessible broadband, and internet use in general boomed over that period.

And why exactly did people go to WoW with their new PCs and internet, rather than to the games that were supposedly better...?

The old games were already established. They were already well known and didn't need as much marketing efforts, they already had friend circles playing that the new guard could join and their product had more time to mature and develop, with less bugs and server outages. Yet, people went for WoW. Because it's worse. That just doesn't quite make sense.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Gear Ilvls rose enough to trivialize both. In a week most people jumped 20 ilvls, and people had no choice but to throw themselves at Shin. Weeping could just be ignored after an initial clear, like I said; it was actually better to do hunts because you could gear up faster. but I do remember both being unpleasant enough that if for some reason they had been harder, would have been a nasty experience for everyone.

We also have a pretty good upper limit to what people can't adapt to, zurvan ex and soar. All the raiders went on and on about how easy it was, but it was a nasty affair in general.

Spoken like someone who never ran Weeping City when it was relevant. The mechanics were never trivialized week one. Even several months in, people were still struggling because you couldn't just burn Forgale or Ozma. They forced you to pay attention. Likewise, you were not jumping 20 ilvls unless you're playing an alt job. As for Shinryu, having to throw themselves at him has no bearing on the argument. Granyala cited, when people are opposed with an obstacle, they cry until its nerfed. Why weren't Shinryu, Ozma and Nidhogg nerfed then? All three cause plenty of backlash—Shinryu even being mentioned on a Kotaku article. Evidently, some people sucked it up and got better.

Don't omit context. Zurvan EX had numerous flaws in design, hence its criticism. They were...

- Five DPS was always superior. The OT had virtually nothing to do.
- Skipping Soar was essentially "do your opener". The fact people couldn't shows how poor such information is relayed to players in this game.
- If you did skip Soar, Zurvan did essentially nothing except autos until 50%

Skip Soar or disband may have become popular for meme-ing, however Zurvan had numerous design flaws—something the devs even acknowledged was due to an inexperienced designer.

[DrWho2010]

- Skipping Soar was essentially "do your opener". The fact people couldn't shows how poor such information is relayed to players in this game.

I mean tool tips can only take you so far. The devs aren't going to hold your hand and say "to do a proper burst opener follow this rotation". This is an MMO, you're supposed to discuss with your fellow players and the community at large to figure that out.

[Remedi]

They did, and they were. I think the only content that was nerfed because of community outrage was the Steps of Faith.

I also have this nagging sensation that it also scared SE about doing anything other than boss trials in the future, but don't quote on me on that

[Hestzhyen]

I mean tool tips can only take you so far. The devs aren't going to hold your hand and say "to do a proper burst opener follow this rotation". This is an MMO, you're supposed to discuss with your fellow players and the community at large to figure that out.

That's all well and good but the vast majority of content in this game will not require you to perform well. Unless you're going into the latest Savage or Ex fights within a few months of release, you could be doing terribly and still get rewarded with a clear (provided your healer is healing and the tank is at least trying to hold aggro). People get a rude awakening with fights like release Shinryu NM because you can't just Netflix and chill through the whole thing, you have to actually pay attention and try. At that point they feel frustrated and blind-sided because the game never forced that on them before. For those of us who do the hard content and have already sought out how to be good at what we do, it's no big deal. For the people who have no interest in high-end content, it's a rude awakening because not once has the game even hinted that they might want to seek self-improvement. You just get echo stacks until you brute force your way through it with stats.

SE should do a better job of telling DPS players how they're doing. What standards to use, and how to do it, are definitely up for debate. But there needs to be more feedback beyond eventually killing your target before everyone dies of old age.

[Granyala]

Increasing difficulty needs to come through smaller increments. Many games make the mistake of simply beefing up numbers to especially high values all at once.

Wise words, definitely true. I think Cataclysms dungeons would have fared much better if Blizzard had taken several tiers in order to slowly up the difficulty again b/c at 330ilvl these dungeons were quite hard. Definitely way too hard for pugs.

Not even remotely accurate. [...] It doesn't need to be meaningless. It just needs to reward you for making good decisions and stress you for making bad ones. Stress =/= wiping. Stress can be running low on MP, having several members at consistently low HP, etc. Players will try and find their own ways to improve to reduce stress, then you supplement the paradigm with encounter design that builds on itself and keeps a player engaged and learning.

It depends on the implementation of course but healing is difficult enough for most people. If you now design the classes in a way that a healer can acutally f*** up in a different manner than "forget to heal", you will make it harder for a lot of people that are already at their limit.

People like you and me would most likely cope and maybe eventually like the changes.
Though I do not want to be weak as a healer, WoW did that and it feels utterly frustrating, I play a hero damn it I want to be strong and powerful and not constantly go "yeah you just gimped, sorry, meaningful heals are on CD, nothing I can do now".

In WoW, most of the time, the only thing I can say as a healer is "You are not supposed to take so much damage, play better if you do not want to die". That sucks. Here, I just toss more healing, take the hit on DPS and save incompetent butts (within reason). Feels much better. :P

[Remedi]

This reminds me of that guild where I was who insisted that bringing 3 healers in there was the only way to do them........

[RiyahArp]

SE should do a better job of telling DPS players how they're doing. What standards to use, and how to do it, are definitely up for debate. But there needs to be more feedback beyond eventually killing your target before everyone dies of old age.

The feedback is failing.

I mean, the DPS cause a wipe due to not enough dps and fail an encounter. Thats it. There isn't really much other way to get that feedback. And on this you really depend on the patience of others to ensure the failing isn't negative enough to turn people off the game. It's not a risk that is easy to take, especially now that console mmos aren;t a captive market and many other types of mmo games exist.

[Hestzhyen]

The feedback is failing.

Only really applies to duties with enrage timers and punishing DPS checks. You won't encounter them outside of Savage and EX for the most part, so why shouldn't players just keep being terrible since most things die eventually anyway? The only ones who really suffer for mistakes in dungeons, normal 8 man raids, trials, and 24 man raids are tanks and healers. Tanks who run out of CDs, healers who run out of mana, both who run out of emergency buttons... DPS just keep plugging away and complain when the tank dies and everyone else goes down like dominoes. The game does not tell people to monitor their aggro, read tooltips for use cases, be aware of positional advantages, or even how the targeting circle works. It just plunks you down and lets you go Blizzard things to death for a very long time without punishment. Hall of the Novice, for the little it's worth, is not required either. So we end up with people trying hard end-game fights not knowing some basic stuff like "sing songs at all times" and "know which moves do more damage from flank and rear".

The only pressure to improve DPS face in the majority of content comes from their own motivation. This places the highest visibility and responsibility on tanks and healers. It's not until people try the hard end-game stuff that they have a serious chance of causing a wipe.