My hopes for the WoW endgame.

Shinrai · 03-23-2004, 05:15 PM

I titled this my hopes and predictions for the wow endgame because
I'm sure at this point Blizzard has already decided and largely
implimented there approach. But I can't resist the urge to play
amateur game designer

The first thing is that I have never seen a solution to the
essential problem in progression based games. The basic drive
in all RPG's has been to watch your character, once challenged
by a field mouse near the city gates, to the upper ranks of
hero-dom. This motivation to gain power for your character is
an immensely potent psyhcological motivator. Sure, the purist
game designers rabbit on about roleplaying politics and living
as a humble part of a virtual world but most people don't find
that motivating enough by itself.

The problem is that the reward must be sufficienctly useful and
powerful that they can notice a gain in their characters power or
they will deride the task. Yet an endless sequence of minor
additions leads the game to, eventually, escalate to the point
where the game mechanics groan under the strain. You can see
this in the ridiculous mobs and large rewards of EG's GoD
expansion. An expansion that shows a game mechanic reaching
towards the limits of what it can cope with.

If blizzard solves this problem, being able to give rewards
without imbalacing the game they are geniouses of the highest
order. I don't expect they can though, but it's worth thinking
about how you can temper the rewards so that the game has a
long and fruitful life before being eclipsed by WoW2.

*No Multipliers*

The fastest way to let progression explode is to have a multiplier
effect involved. Cumulative multipliers are even worse. A simple
example is the character HP growth. Items went from +100 hp in top
end luclin to +300 on some top end GoD items, which is pretty
staggering. But this gain is multiplied by the number of pieces of
gear a character can get +hp on. This is why mob DPS has to climb
so fast. This is why LDoN +40hp augments had to be nerfed.

Other famous examples include slow, which reduces a mobs DPS by
division rather than subtraction. This represents such a massive
reduction in damage that it is impossible to balance an encounter
that can be slowed.

Haste is another example, as is worn ATK, both acting as multipliers
of melee DPS. Thus any balanced upgrade in the base DPS of the weapon
will be multiplied by some number. SoE solved this by adding a
multicaplicative modifier for casters (focus items) but it would
have been better if both had linear progression.

Mez, snare and avoidance, while not naturally thought of in this
way, can also be considered as divisions. A mezzed foe is doing
100% less damage, a snared foe is doing 100% less melee damage,
an avoided blow is doing 100% less damage. This is why the absence
or presence of these abilities can make such an immense difference
to the danger of a mob.

Blizzard has screwed this up before. In diabloII some abilities
have cumulative multipliers and some do not. Players quickly work
out that as you enter the late game those abilities with linear
increase start to be dominated by those with exponential
(multicaplicative) growth.

The WoW team seems well aware of this however. Slow exists but is
extremely short lived, haste the same. Snare seems to be non existent
and fast movement appears to be largely incompatible with ranged
attack. I applaud the foresight in these base mechanics and hope
none slip by.

*A raid event*

I would hope that WoW continues it's quest based approach into the
raiding domain. I would hope that each event has some story of its
own and marks progression towards a larger goal. There can be multiple
story lines going, but the target should not exist simply to carry
loot.

Each raid zone should be instanced. Within it will be a sizeable
number of mobs that cannot be single pulled. To succeed a raid force
will have to act as multiple single groups controlling the area
rather than focusing all their attention on a single target. Being
able to focus all your DPS on a single target is another multiplier
effect after all. Rather groups will work together and try to back
up / re-inforce / support the other groups. A really good raid force
should operate such that if a group is being overwhelmed the other
groups will be able to share the load / perform a rescue.

At rare occassions a mobs death will trigger a named to spawn nearby.
This named will have some identity within the larger story and may
well have a script of his own, for example summoning assistant mobs.
These will auto-aggro the raid as a whole (no pulling!) and provide
a nasty and challenging surprise to the groups who thought they new
what to expect. On the positive side should they prevail the named
will have a piece of superior, but progression appropriate loot. These
items will be drawn from a relatively large but shared pool unless the
story indicates the named has a known loot.

This approach has several advantages. Even a relatively trivial
section of the event can turn deadly at any time. You can not farm
the names, use invis to get to the names, or use a skeleton crew
just to trigger the named.

The main target will be a more complex version of the above. Possibly
scripted, certainly tougher and in a more complex environment. And
while the named should be tougher it need not be personally godlike
in its abilities. At no point should the entire raid depend on being
able to focus solely on this one character to win. Nor should they be
able to.

The boss will drop one or more items that further the progression of
the story, not neccessarily the character. And unlike quest items not
everyone on the raid gets a copy. It sucks, but blizzard simply cannot
supply enough content that doing the event once is all that is ever
needed. The event boss will drop 1-n items / flags that allow progression.
The number will be balanced so that a guild is required to do the event
multiple times but will have sated its needs before times it becomes
boring. Needless to say these items are bind on acquire (no-drop).

The eventual goal of the story will result in some form of character
progress. It might involve gaining new abilities, gaining access to new
areas and / or improving current abilities in some way. These
improvements would probably not take the form of items. Otherwise
everyone in the guild would eventually be using the same uber item, or
replacing the uber at some point. A one use process to permanently add
abilities to an existing item is possible, but less motivating because
it will at some point be outgrown.

Players will, IMHO, crawl over each other to make permanent improvements
to the base abilities of their characters. Imagine something like run3
in EQ, or something like the skill gift in DII.

The biggest quest of all, ideally, should be growth aimed towards a hero
class. If a character can progress to the hero class by XP grinding blizzard
have failed big time. Instead the hero class should be a sequence of events
that slowly grow the character towards what they want to be. These might
involve trophy victories (a hero of the orcs must deliver the coup'd'gras
to the leader of our enemies), items (a hero of our people must have these
items), abilities (the only way you can learn the secret skills grasshopper).
But basically there should be useful rewards along the way (think of AAXP)
with the eventual goal of becoming a titled player (major ego boost).

Blizzard will cop heavy criticism. The solo gamers are going to be annoyed
if they cannot solo grind the path to being the ultimate character. They
should, however, be ignored. A hero of the people is not created in
isolation. Looking closer blizzard has promised that you can solo to the
maximum level, which is charmingly ambiguous.

Likewise there will be criticism that some guilds will progress through
the quests in an incredibly short amount of time. They'll do the work,
but they'll do it so fast and so ordered that some will call it cheating
and exploiting. They're wrong, and they're right, once again no MMORPG
company can keep the extreme powergamers sated without putting some
constraint on them.

So here's my last suggestion. Place a personal timer between steps on
any given quest. This means the entire guild cannot work to push a single
person through. This means that even the most capable guilds are restricted
to blizzards pace of progression and content creation. There should be
multiple threads of progression though, so that while they cannot rush one
path there will always be stuff for them to do.

This sucks, but once again it must happen in someway. No MMORPG can
afford to keep the extreme forward edge of its players supplied with
content. There must be some delay. It could be the difficulty of the
encounter, but that will cripple the progression of the rest of the
playerbase. It could be artificial timesinks, or broken progression,
but this isn't really much of a kindness. Better to say something like,
"The high council is considering your victory, and will soon authorise
you another task young hero" and know that the council will take a month
real time to authorise the event and thus activate the next part of the
quest.

The timing will be such that players will be able to reach a plateau,
perhaps a new title, a new power and a conclusion to the story arc
a short time (1-2 months?) before blizzard is ready to release new
material. Effectively blizzard must restrain players to the pace it
can produce quality content. Otherwise you will see the feeding frenzy
followed by long periods of whining and boredom that exist in high
end EQ. (I'm not in the local uber-guild, but damn their whining was
getting tedious).

Anyone who got here, thanks for reading. I'm impressed at your powers
of endurance

I'm hoping this will be my last post on WoW till it's
released because i'm wasting way too much time trying to sniff out
info on a beta game I won't be playing for months.

(I also posted this at Graffe's under another user name.)

OopsICrappedMyPants · 03-23-2004, 05:24 PM

Most of that is very well thought out and written, but it unfortunately seems like a waste, as others have done this several times and to a much greater extent. I agreed with most of what was said, but one thing that stuck out to me:

Quote:

Each raid zone should be instanced.

I won't get too in depth here due to lack of time to write an essay, but I'm sure there are others that agree there are more cons than pros to this idea.

Shinrai · 03-23-2004, 05:32 PM

Oh, it certainly is a waste, like most fanboi kibitzing. It's extremely unlikely that Blizzard doesn't have things approaching their final form. Nor is it likely i'll ever have any chance to apply these thoughts.

Was still quite fun to write though.

03-23-2004, 05:15 PM	#1 (permalink)
Shinrai Registered User Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Melbourne Posts: 592 +0 Internets	My hopes for the WoW endgame. I titled this my hopes and predictions for the wow endgame because I'm sure at this point Blizzard has already decided and largely implimented there approach. But I can't resist the urge to play amateur game designer The first thing is that I have never seen a solution to the essential problem in progression based games. The basic drive in all RPG's has been to watch your character, once challenged by a field mouse near the city gates, to the upper ranks of hero-dom. This motivation to gain power for your character is an immensely potent psyhcological motivator. Sure, the purist game designers rabbit on about roleplaying politics and living as a humble part of a virtual world but most people don't find that motivating enough by itself. The problem is that the reward must be sufficienctly useful and powerful that they can notice a gain in their characters power or they will deride the task. Yet an endless sequence of minor additions leads the game to, eventually, escalate to the point where the game mechanics groan under the strain. You can see this in the ridiculous mobs and large rewards of EG's GoD expansion. An expansion that shows a game mechanic reaching towards the limits of what it can cope with. If blizzard solves this problem, being able to give rewards without imbalacing the game they are geniouses of the highest order. I don't expect they can though, but it's worth thinking about how you can temper the rewards so that the game has a long and fruitful life before being eclipsed by WoW2. No Multipliers The fastest way to let progression explode is to have a multiplier effect involved. Cumulative multipliers are even worse. A simple example is the character HP growth. Items went from +100 hp in top end luclin to +300 on some top end GoD items, which is pretty staggering. But this gain is multiplied by the number of pieces of gear a character can get +hp on. This is why mob DPS has to climb so fast. This is why LDoN +40hp augments had to be nerfed. Other famous examples include slow, which reduces a mobs DPS by division rather than subtraction. This represents such a massive reduction in damage that it is impossible to balance an encounter that can be slowed. Haste is another example, as is worn ATK, both acting as multipliers of melee DPS. Thus any balanced upgrade in the base DPS of the weapon will be multiplied by some number. SoE solved this by adding a multicaplicative modifier for casters (focus items) but it would have been better if both had linear progression. Mez, snare and avoidance, while not naturally thought of in this way, can also be considered as divisions. A mezzed foe is doing 100% less damage, a snared foe is doing 100% less melee damage, an avoided blow is doing 100% less damage. This is why the absence or presence of these abilities can make such an immense difference to the danger of a mob. Blizzard has screwed this up before. In diabloII some abilities have cumulative multipliers and some do not. Players quickly work out that as you enter the late game those abilities with linear increase start to be dominated by those with exponential (multicaplicative) growth. The WoW team seems well aware of this however. Slow exists but is extremely short lived, haste the same. Snare seems to be non existent and fast movement appears to be largely incompatible with ranged attack. I applaud the foresight in these base mechanics and hope none slip by. A raid event I would hope that WoW continues it's quest based approach into the raiding domain. I would hope that each event has some story of its own and marks progression towards a larger goal. There can be multiple story lines going, but the target should not exist simply to carry loot. Each raid zone should be instanced. Within it will be a sizeable number of mobs that cannot be single pulled. To succeed a raid force will have to act as multiple single groups controlling the area rather than focusing all their attention on a single target. Being able to focus all your DPS on a single target is another multiplier effect after all. Rather groups will work together and try to back up / re-inforce / support the other groups. A really good raid force should operate such that if a group is being overwhelmed the other groups will be able to share the load / perform a rescue. At rare occassions a mobs death will trigger a named to spawn nearby. This named will have some identity within the larger story and may well have a script of his own, for example summoning assistant mobs. These will auto-aggro the raid as a whole (no pulling!) and provide a nasty and challenging surprise to the groups who thought they new what to expect. On the positive side should they prevail the named will have a piece of superior, but progression appropriate loot. These items will be drawn from a relatively large but shared pool unless the story indicates the named has a known loot. This approach has several advantages. Even a relatively trivial section of the event can turn deadly at any time. You can not farm the names, use invis to get to the names, or use a skeleton crew just to trigger the named. The main target will be a more complex version of the above. Possibly scripted, certainly tougher and in a more complex environment. And while the named should be tougher it need not be personally godlike in its abilities. At no point should the entire raid depend on being able to focus solely on this one character to win. Nor should they be able to. The boss will drop one or more items that further the progression of the story, not neccessarily the character. And unlike quest items not everyone on the raid gets a copy. It sucks, but blizzard simply cannot supply enough content that doing the event once is all that is ever needed. The event boss will drop 1-n items / flags that allow progression. The number will be balanced so that a guild is required to do the event multiple times but will have sated its needs before times it becomes boring. Needless to say these items are bind on acquire (no-drop). The eventual goal of the story will result in some form of character progress. It might involve gaining new abilities, gaining access to new areas and / or improving current abilities in some way. These improvements would probably not take the form of items. Otherwise everyone in the guild would eventually be using the same uber item, or replacing the uber at some point. A one use process to permanently add abilities to an existing item is possible, but less motivating because it will at some point be outgrown. Players will, IMHO, crawl over each other to make permanent improvements to the base abilities of their characters. Imagine something like run3 in EQ, or something like the skill gift in DII. The biggest quest of all, ideally, should be growth aimed towards a hero class. If a character can progress to the hero class by XP grinding blizzard have failed big time. Instead the hero class should be a sequence of events that slowly grow the character towards what they want to be. These might involve trophy victories (a hero of the orcs must deliver the coup'd'gras to the leader of our enemies), items (a hero of our people must have these items), abilities (the only way you can learn the secret skills grasshopper). But basically there should be useful rewards along the way (think of AAXP) with the eventual goal of becoming a titled player (major ego boost). Blizzard will cop heavy criticism. The solo gamers are going to be annoyed if they cannot solo grind the path to being the ultimate character. They should, however, be ignored. A hero of the people is not created in isolation. Looking closer blizzard has promised that you can solo to the maximum level, which is charmingly ambiguous. Likewise there will be criticism that some guilds will progress through the quests in an incredibly short amount of time. They'll do the work, but they'll do it so fast and so ordered that some will call it cheating and exploiting. They're wrong, and they're right, once again no MMORPG company can keep the extreme powergamers sated without putting some constraint on them. So here's my last suggestion. Place a personal timer between steps on any given quest. This means the entire guild cannot work to push a single person through. This means that even the most capable guilds are restricted to blizzards pace of progression and content creation. There should be multiple threads of progression though, so that while they cannot rush one path there will always be stuff for them to do. This sucks, but once again it must happen in someway. No MMORPG can afford to keep the extreme forward edge of its players supplied with content. There must be some delay. It could be the difficulty of the encounter, but that will cripple the progression of the rest of the playerbase. It could be artificial timesinks, or broken progression, but this isn't really much of a kindness. Better to say something like, "The high council is considering your victory, and will soon authorise you another task young hero" and know that the council will take a month real time to authorise the event and thus activate the next part of the quest. The timing will be such that players will be able to reach a plateau, perhaps a new title, a new power and a conclusion to the story arc a short time (1-2 months?) before blizzard is ready to release new material. Effectively blizzard must restrain players to the pace it can produce quality content. Otherwise you will see the feeding frenzy followed by long periods of whining and boredom that exist in high end EQ. (I'm not in the local uber-guild, but damn their whining was getting tedious). Anyone who got here, thanks for reading. I'm impressed at your powers of endurance I'm hoping this will be my last post on WoW till it's released because i'm wasting way too much time trying to sniff out info on a beta game I won't be playing for months. (I also posted this at Graffe's under another user name.)

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03-23-2004, 05:32 PM	#3 (permalink)
Shinrai Registered User Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Melbourne Posts: 592 +0 Internets	Oh, it certainly is a waste, like most fanboi kibitzing. It's extremely unlikely that Blizzard doesn't have things approaching their final form. Nor is it likely i'll ever have any chance to apply these thoughts. Was still quite fun to write though.