#0 - Oct. 18, 2006, 9:29 p.m.
I am not sure what this will do except encourage people to work outside the system or move on to other less carpal tunnelous twitch happy games. WoW is supposed to be an mmo*RPG*. Personally I'd prefer it were turn based. If I liked FPS I would PLAY them.
I have a published mod Sheepsafe and several unpublished ones. One of the reason I write these things is so my mom, who is 60ish, can enjoy playing. Since she's far away it's one way we can interract, but she just doesn't have the twitch ability to play this game without some help. She's never going to run BWL, but with mod help she can hang in places like scholo or UD at least.
Similarly my girlfriend uses mods to take some of the tedium and twitch out of the game. She like it but her level of interest is NOT such that she will do it no matter how tedious or click happy it became. Several mods were written specifically for her, to make it enjoyable for her. I enjoy WoW enough right now that I will write mods so that everyone is happy. But if she doesn't play then I am not going to play.
My friends I play with enjoy the FRPG aspect like me, not the FPS, they mostly play because I do. I brought a whole crew from EQ because WoW promissed to be different. If I cannot play with my mom and gf anymore I doubt I will stick with WoW myself, and if I can find something comparable and less twitchy, my friends will follow me too, they always have.
I'm really confused what this is trying to address. Why is it DESIRED for this to be a twitch happy game? To me a RPG is about strategy & tactics not twitch. Have you guys given up on making strategy interesting so much that you have to make it more difficult in a PARTICULARLY tedious way, by adding MORE twitch?
There are older players who just don't have the ability to twitch that much.
There are disabled players who just don't have the ability to twitch that much.
There are females (sorry for the generalization but it's valid) who just don't have the interest to twitch that much, and mostly play because their partner's play.
I'm all against botting. I'm all against cheating. But for example a mod that simplifies healing choices so my mom can hang doesn't seem to me to be a huge game imbalancing problem.
These sorts of mods do not make an unskilled player into a top guild player. They let someone hang a little better. My mom depends on these mods to play, she will never hit an end game raid instance. My gf's priest can hang in MC or BWL but she doesn't usehealing mods, they aren't as good as doing it by hand, but then she doesn't like doing MC or BWL much because it's too much hassle and NOT fun work to do them.
So which mods are so imba right now? What's the point of all this? Seriously, has anyone thought this through?
Clearly there's been a lot of thought on HOW to do this, but I haven't seen much evidence of the thought about WHY, except that people have figured out some clever ways to work in the system to do some nifty things that were not expected. Unexpected != Bad.
There is such a thing as serendipity. Variously disabled people have been drawn to WoW over other similar games BECAUSE mod writers have taken twitch out in various ways.
Honestly, I see a train heading off a cliff and no one willing to take a step back and have an objective look at the situation.
