Thursday, May 2, 2013

A bit of a rant

I was pondering the unfortunate state of 5-man dungeons in Mists and it struck me. 5-man raids! I mean now that everyone in the game raids that's all Blizzard seems to care about putting development time into, so why not take this idea to its logical extreme? Single tank, single healer raids. Obviously the gear would be the same level as the 10- and 25-man versions, with fewer [or perhaps zero] "Thunderforged" items so that 10-man raids don't feel like they're putting in all that extra co-ordination work for no gain. That's how it works, right?

Meanwhile, Heroic-Challenge-Epic-mode scenarios! Because the most trivial content in the game is what the really skilled players want to run. Just whatever you do don't let them auto-queue for it or everyone will quit WoW because they died once.

They really need to make some kind of "expert mode" toggle that players can activate to circumvent all the systems that treat the player like a retarded child. Well, it would work until all the online advice told all players to just enable this mode because it's "better". Maybe they could add some kind of gating challenge to unlock it. Because everybody loves gating. You know what? If anything the game just needs more gating. It's definitely my favourite part of the game. Why has Blizzard been so stingy with it since 5.1?

I can deal with the game being designed for a mass audience. They'll make more money which they can use to make the game better. What I can't deal with is the duplicity. The developers pretending that decisions they make aren't coming from an overwhelming paranoia that most players are too stupid to enjoy the game without being told precisely how to do so.

One of the pet peeves of the forum blues is players "lawyering" them because they disagree with something. I agree that it's dumb, but I don't think these people do it because they think the development shouldn't be allowed to change direction or that the people working on the game aren't allowed to change their minds about things. It's that the devs are always often reluctant to give us a fucking straight answer to begin with.

People resort to these methods just to try and figure out what the design intent is, because the reasoning they give us is often transparently, insultingly false. We know they know, and they know we know, but all we can do is dance around each others bullshit until everybody loses.

Okay I think I'm done ranting. Deep breaths...

Now let's all go enjoy the game again. :) If you haven't played a Warlock since 5.0 go try it, they are spectacular. Also the Fel Imp sounds like Invader Zim!

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