[WoW] Pardo admits arenas are a huge fuckup, probably should never have been added.

[Itzena]

WarCry Network : Five Years of Warcraft: Speaking With Blizzard's Rob Pardo

Q: What was the biggest mistake you think you made?
A: As for the biggest mistake? There's a lot of them that I think, were ... they just "fell out" of things. One example: I wish the servers were more stable when we launched, of course - there's a lot of that sort of thing. We have a lot of excuses for that - we didn't expect nearly the response - but we can't say it wasn't a mistake. If I was going to pick on a game design thing that I look back on and think was a mistake? We really never designed WoW to be a competitive e-sports game; it was something that we decided to start tackling because there was such a desire and demand to evolve it in that direction, to introduce competitive arenas. I'm not sure that that was the right thing to do with the game.

We didn't engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There's constant pressure on the class balance team, there's pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don't PvP don't understand why their classes are changing. I don't think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we'd have to do to balance it in that direction. Either I'd go back in time to before WoW ever shipped and change the rules to make the basic game more conductive for being an e-sport, or if not that, just say it doesn't make sense. Right now, WoW has a bit of a schizophrenic philosophy behind it, and we're trying to figure out how to guide it.

It's tricky, now that we've gone down that road, because we have a passionate, large audience that enjoys it - the Arena, the e-sport - so we can't just chop off that head. We can't just say, "We fouled up and will go back to how it used to be before," because we have a really passionate audience that wants it in the game.

If I could go back in time before we shipped WoW, I would have either made serious changes to basic class balance to facilitate that type of play, or if I went back to when we had the idea two years later, I would have said, "Maybe we shouldn't go there."

There's a bunch more stuff in the interview, but that's about the most interesting thing.

The whole "Oh, but a lot of people enjoy Arenas so we can't just remove them" thing is fucking hilarious, too. No, a small minority of people enjoy Arenas - most of the people there faceroll their way to victory in whatever Cleave-gimmick team is strongest this season purely for the rewards. Change the arena rewards to superficial trophy items, and I guarantee that at least three-quarters of Arena players would fuck off back to running instances & raiding.

[Old Man Potter]

Thanks for the link

You can thank Tom "Evocare Ultima Online" Chilton for the catastrophe that has been PVP in WoW. This guy has been allowed to experiment with various iterations of PVP since the beginning -- none of them have had any business being implemented. I just hope they keep this fool away from their next MMO as he's liable to infect it with his nonesense as well if they are not careful.

WoW's strength has always been PVE no matter how much they've promoted and subsidized that PVP e-sports fantasy of theirs.

Finally, Rob Pardo has the stones to admit it. Good on him.

[Javvo]

Breaking news!

[Zehn - Vhex]

I liked the bit about them renaming the "LFG" tool to "Dungeon Finder" like that's the problem with it, the name. Just yet another in blizzards unending quest to take the simplest goddamn tool in the universe that EQ mastered like 8 years ago and try to fuck it up as much as possible.

[bubblegumbo]

Really passionate audience my ass. I've lost count of how many people I know in WoW who has quit the game after getting Gladiator, including myself. Ironically the ones that are still subbed and remained totally committed to the game are those that only care about PvE.

The only ones that truly care about Arena are those that participate in actual tournaments and the wannabes that dream of becoming one of the members of that "elite community." In the end, not even the best players are stupid enough to believe that the arena will ever be balanced.

If only they actually focused on open world pvp in the first place instead of putting every fucking loot pinata into a cloistered instance.

[Clericnon2boxed]

I don't know if I believe the people will pve if they cant get their pvp loot thing, the only thing worth a damn would be the top end weapon, the rest is crap.

Every time we have some pvpgeared people in a pug raid I know who will be at the bottom on all charts. PvP gear should have its own color - light pink maybe.

[Tolanin]

the arenas arent the problem.. the 4 year long quest to kill off all other forms of pvp and funnel anyone who wants to pvp into the arenas and arenas only is the mistake.

I think wow just lacks a dev who loves pvp so we get these fuckups coming down from people who have no idea why pvp is fun, the pve is good cause the guys who make it love it and know what to do imo.

[Flight]

Let's be clear, he isn't putting arenas down.

He flat out says if he went back to basic design he would change the whole class system to facilitate them.




All he is saying is they have had to bastardize the existing class system constantly to facilitate them. He wins a cupie doll for stating the obvious.

You can bank on there being a similar system in place in their next MMO. If it's a choice between cool classes or maintaining subscriptions from the masses the class system will lose out.

[Bristlebane]

I don't play WoW, and I know this has been suggested probably about a million times, but can they not implement a different balancing system that goes into effect for arenas only? You know, like "X" PvE-centric talent or spell works differently in arenas.

[Foggy]

It makes you wonder why they don't just go the 2-rule systems way if they admit they would change the system if they could start over. They already do it for a number of skills, how hard would it be to do it for everything?

[Jakon Rahl]

In a way, that’s what most people I know have done Bristle. They have their PVE spec for raiding and instances and then they have their PVP spec for the rest of the time. That’s essentially what Dual Talent Specialization has turned into, and may have been what their original plan was for it.

[Brad2770]

PvP lost its fun for me when STA was replaced as the much needed stat with Res. 8 hour long AV's were much welcomed when you were in a hardcore PvP mood followed by AB and WSG if you didnt have much time.

I NEVER had a problem getting owned by the best of the raid geared. They had the time and 'worked' for it. They should get to roll some undergeared noobs.

Arena is a joke. I played it. I enjoyed it, but it really was pretty pathetic.

[Lenaldo]

What I still don't understand is that their huge gripe with arenas is the constant balancing problem between arenas and PvE yet they ignore the easiest fix.

WHY THE FUCK DON'T THEY JUST IMPLEMENT DIFFERENT BALANCE FOR PVE AND PVP - MEANING SPELLS/ABILITIES EFFECT PLAYER CONTROLLED CHARACTERS DIFFERENT THAN NPCS.


To me it seems like they initially said "no it would ruin [insert dumb reason here]" and are now just being stubborn about it.



edit- someone beat me to it.. but the point still stands

[Zaphid]

The problem with dual balancing is that you come into situations where you do both at once, just look at AV, do you use different rules based on whether the target is a player or NPC ? Or based on whether they were attacked by a player in the last 30 seconds ? Having stuff tuned like that can be very dangerous for future content and can backfire at any moment and basically doubles the amount of fine tuning they have to do. That works only in games where pvp and pve are separated with a thick wall, like GW.

[EmiliaEQ]

Originally Posted by Zaphid

The problem with dual balancing is that you come into situations where you do both at once

Moot point, EQ1 had "custom spell specialisation".
A spell doing 6000 no a NPC was capped to 30% aka 1800 for PCs.
(or something like that), doing it is possible.