Are Hero Classes just totally off the radar now?

[Slagar]

WoW needs remorts

[Jovec]

Originally Posted by softwillow

Hero classes would only work if they didn't impact the overall game balance, so either make them a very minor upgrade over existing characters and abilities and more common, or stronger/better than your typical character but extremely rare/hard to achieve.

For the latter case, something like maxing out every PC reputation on your side (a hero's reputation proceeds him), achieving the top rank in PvP (a leader on the battlefield), and defeating all the dragons plus Kazzak (heroic achievements) should all be requirements...a quest would be nice too. And since a hero is not afraid to take on anyone who would challenge him, the title also makes you perma-PvP on.

When you see someone who has the hero adjustments, you know it is someone that deserves respect for his/her accomplishments.

Go further and make only one Hero per class per side at any one time. Soandso is the Horde warrior hero for the month, and anyone who wishes to challenge him has to meet the prerequisistes and beat him in a duel. Something like this appeals to me because I would like MMOs to move to a model where not everyone has the same opportunities at all times. MMOs in general, and WoW in particular, shy away from this, preferring equal opportunity for all. You can't have a large divide between the haves and have-nots, but you can have more than currently exists. I say this knowing that in such a case I personnally would have very, very little chance of being a Hero.

Edit for those who can't make the inference. I'm not talking about the Hero classes as we think Blizzard envisions them. Call it the class Champion or something. I'm proposing the concept that not everyone has to be equal.

-Jovec

[Hateyou]

Originally Posted by Jovec

Go further and make only one Hero per class per side at any one time. Soandso is the Horde warrior hero for the month, and anyone who wishes to challenge him has to meet the prerequisistes and beat him in a duel. Something like this appeals to me because I would like MMOs to move to a model where not everyone has the same opportunities at all times. MMOs in general, and WoW in particular, shy away from this, preferring equal opportunity for all. You can't have a large divide between the haves and have-nots, but you can have more than currently exists. I say this knowing that in such a case I personnally would have very, very little chance of being a Hero.

-Jovec

Haha, worst idea ever.

[blindeye]

Originally Posted by Jovec

Go further and make only one Hero per class per side at any one time. Soandso is the Horde warrior hero for the month, and anyone who wishes to challenge him has to meet the prerequisistes and beat him in a duel. Something like this appeals to me because I would like MMOs to move to a model where not everyone has the same opportunities at all times. MMOs in general, and WoW in particular, shy away from this, preferring equal opportunity for all. You can't have a large divide between the haves and have-nots, but you can have more than currently exists. I say this knowing that in such a case I personnally would have very, very little chance of being a Hero.

-Jovec

thats such an awful idea. how do you honestly expect to beat the hero in a duel? he was strong enough to take it from the first idiot and has the dramatic advantage of hero abilities.

[Itzena]

Originally Posted by forge

I would love to see a audit of where all that money goes.

www.vivendiuniversal.com

[Jovec]

Hateyou, Blindeye, et.al

I'll admit I should have been more clear and not used the term Hero in my above post....call it...class Champion instead. What I am saying is that current MMO designs allow for everyone to have equal opportunity to acheive the same success. I am suggesting that it's okay for some to achieve things that others can never. The initial PvP ranking was sort of like this, but had its share of flaws. Custom EQ titles are another example. The Sleeper. Artifacts. The AQ scepter quest is close. Warchief's Blessing and Dragonslayer. I'm saying there should be more of this, and while it shouldn't be game altering, it is okay for it to be game impacting.

-Jovec

[forge]

Originally Posted by Itzena

www.vivendiuniversal.com

Haha, No shit right! Anyone happen to remember how much Vivendi was in debt before the blizzard deal? At one point I remembered them being in massive debt and attempting to sell/dismantle off half their assets.

[Digits]

Originally Posted by forge

Haha, No shit right! Anyone happen to remember how much Vivendi was in debt before the blizzard deal? At one point I remembered them being in massive debt and attempting to sell/dismantle off half their assets.

They are billions of dollars into debt as of a month before WoWs release. I remember doing the math of a million subscribers and it barely put a dent into the amount Vivendi was in debt. I was really worried, and rightly so, that Vivendi would just suck off all the revenue from WoW and dick over the development team with no end in sight.

Course that's all changed with 5 fucking million subscribers, and I'm sure they've had a turn around with other companies as well, so hopefully things are more in order and Vivendo realizes that WoW must be treasured like a wife with perfect tits and a good work out.

[Mippo]

Mippo has brought up the concept that there are simply too many variables in WoW to parse or get a good understanding of how to balance raids around them, and to that I also say bullshit. If there are tools that can parse hundreds of thousands of user-testing matrices for something like cellular phone user segments, I feel confident that there is a tool that can take the relatively small (relative to trillions of nodes of customer data that other media congloms handle) item spreads and create parses based on expected time investment averages. The key to remember is that every single item in the game can be measured and balanced by time averages to obtain said item, based on drop rates, number of clears and guild spread.

It is quite undermining to the entire idea of designing anything to claim that it is so impossible to understand how it will function within itself years down the road. It is not a guessing game, no matter how much you'd like to believe that since it isn't catering to your playstyle it means you've clearly been wrongfully neglected.

Sure, if you were talking about how it would fit in to society at large, you cannot possibly know that even with an army of psychics and scrying tools and future computers or whatever.

It is all entirely plannable, barring "exploits" or "bugs," and executable. What isn't plannable is how people will respond to it. The endgame itself is a blank slate...

Segmentation is quite a bit different then balancing a raid. You can't compare the two.

You can easily segment the MMORPG market if you wanted. Off the top of my head, the three main segments are basically Social, Competitive, and Achievement.

You can further break down the segments into usage patterns. There are types of players in each category that have various amounts of playtime and there are characteristics associated with players in each category, and each relative playtime. That's information you can use to decide which type of content to create to appeal to the greatest number of customers or if you want to go after a particular niche in the market.

It's no different then segmenting the cell phone users. The information you describe has nothing to do with designing a challenging raid. The factors that go into that are the parameters within the game. Basically what's available in the game that affects the encounter. In WoW, the parameters are large enough that you can't accurately "predict", no matter how many people or supercomputers you have working on it, how the encounter will actually play out.

The capabilities of one single raid based on items/abilities in the game are so large, that you can't predict that information for an encounter.

Let's say a boss fight lasts 10 mintues. Can you tell me when that priest will run out of mana?

What if the Priest uses major mana potions, and what if he doesn't?

What if the Priest casts every 5 seconds, or what if the Priest casts a lot, then sits back and regens for a while?

What if the Priest uses his wand and gains back mana through the Paladin buff?

What if the Priest has the meditation talent, and what if he doesn't?

You can't accurately answer when the Priest will run out of mana, the parameters that are involved with the question are too large. My point was, in contrast these factors were controlled in Everquest.

When players can do things that directly affect the outcome of the encounter, your ability to accurately predict it goes out the window.

A proper comparison would be to compare it to football. There are tons of computers out there, and analysts that spend their whole life doing nothing but studying football. They have every single statistic, and every minor piece of information involved in the game. Yet they can't predict the outcome of a football game. You can get analysts with a high percentage of successful predictions, but you aren't going to find someone who can accurately predict every winner because there is a random factor involved that can not be measured by a computer.

The more random those parameters are, the harder it is to predict the difficulty of a raid until you see it in action.

[Tuco]

Like Darph says, hero classes soon would be stupid with level 70 around the corner.

I was personally hoping for Hero classes in the expansion, but it doesn't matter to me. 10 more levels is actually better in my mind.

I really don't care about character progression as much as getting big things dead. And new big things means more fun for me.

Of course, if they fixed PVP that'd be nice too.

[Terant]

The whole idea behind a hero class should be that the person who attains it is indeed special. A way to make this feasible would be requiring a rare drop off multiple major raid targets in the leauge of nef and rag. Only one necessary item would drop for a specific class/heroclass combo (if any at all) then a certain combination would be needed to become a particular hero class (in addition to previous rigorous requirements that were class specific.)

Therefore the high end guilds would need to choose who would attain the rank of hero in that guild. Maybe that would be considered a time sink, but if someone wanted to be a hero wouldnt it make sense to need the full support of the guild they belonged to? But still, I think way more high end targets should be introduced before a hero class can even be implemented.

[Rezz]

Right around the corner means 6-10 months though, that's not exactly in the near future. The projections I've seen state fall, given a little leeway means probably october-november, though I really wouldn't put it past em to hold off till a December release to cash in on the christmas rush. If the expansion was within the next 3 months, sure I'd say hold off, but that's a long way to hold off if it's fall, considering heroes were supposed to be a behind closed doors project deal since beta. With weather being implimented soon, they've actually almost finished the laundry list of expected features and content that was supposed to be in for release, hero classes being the one glaring exception. I would wager rather heavily that a good portion of reason they haven't been implimented yet (regardless of any upcoming expansion level cap raise) has to do with the clusterfuck that is trying to balance a "small" range of classes to do both pve and pvp in a reasonable manner, without adding in any game defining abilities that aren't already there. Not to mention the diversity that hero classes would demand would simply magnify the already crazy imbalances in play.

[Kodylan]

Hero Classes were a cool idea when the game was in its conceptual/early development stages, but I'm not too sure they'd work well with how the game has turned out. It would cause a lot more balancing problems than they'd probably be worth to the gameplay.

[Clericnon2boxed]

Here's another way to do it:

Have a portal that ports you into an instance where you take on the role of a hero of the past.

You get awesome hero abilities, you have basic hero equipment and whatever you achieve in that instance will be somehow stored (alas if you enter the instance again you can continue your progress there). If you beat that instance you will granted a title (+ whatever quest rewards that involve beating that instance) and maybe have the chance to do harder versions of that instance or get access to other heroes.

Okay maybe not what they envisioned.

[Peacecraft]

Originally Posted by Clericnon2boxed

Here's another way to do it:

Have a portal that ports you into an instance where you take on the role of a hero of the past.

You get awesome hero abilities, you have basic hero equipment and whatever you achieve in that instance will be somehow stored (alas if you enter the instance again you can continue your progress there). If you beat that instance you will granted a title (+ whatever quest rewards that involve beating that instance) and maybe have the chance to do harder versions of that instance or get access to other heroes.

Okay maybe not what they envisioned.

monster missions?