Removing burst, removing CC, removing disarm, removing stats, etc etc.

#1 - Feb. 28, 2014, 2:18 p.m.

It's true. I'm not. I'm willing to bet most other people aren't either.

But yet we're being treated that way. Removing burst, removing CC, removing disarm, removing stats, etc etc.

Blizzard thinks we're just meat with eyes and a wallet who can't handle anything more complex than pushing one or two buttons. By the time they're done here, WoW will be no more complex than one of those hand held Tiger games from the 80s.

Stat squish is fine. That's not changing how we play, it's just changing the scale of the numbers we see.

I left this game a year and a half ago before Mists because I was extremely unhappy with the preschool talent trees they robbed from Diablo 3(where they make sense) to give to us here(where they don't). But apparently that wasn't enough. They haven't removed enough stats or abilities yet, nope.

Blizz has a funny way of releasing an "expansion" which, by it's very name, seems like it would "expand" the game. But that's not the case. These are shrink packs. Every time you buy one, you shrink the complexity and depth of the game. Sure there's new content to look at and explore, but that's not a part of game complexity, that's purely aesthetic.

Pretty soon they'll have removed so much from this game that the only option left to do is just delete the game altogether. They'll release an expansion pack that one installed just uninstalls the game from your computer and opens Windows Solataire. But they'll have edited Solataire so that all the cards are transparent because Solataire as it stands now is still too complex for Blizzard to think it's meat-with-eyes-and-a-wallet customers can handle it.

Bashiok

Community Manager

#87 - Feb. 28, 2014, 9:17 p.m.

02/28/2014 12:24 PMPosted by Mavrosed
Scary? Why would it be scary to have less things to do, less choices to make?

A wise man once said a game is a series of interesting choices. For some the takeaway from that is more choices mean a better game. In general I see the Blizzard approach as a focus on emphasizing what an interesting choice is. Interesting choices can offer depth and complexity without needing to be numerous and overwhelming for the sake of being overwhelming. It's easy to throw all of the paint on the floor and say it's done. It's far more difficult to properly mix, and restrain, and balance elements. Looking at chess, there are relatively few pieces with few "abilities", it's a near-infinitely deep and complex game, and strategies for it continue to evolve even hundreds of years later. Certainly someone could introduce dozens of new chess pieces, dozens of new choices, and there would be some subset of players who would enjoy it more purely due to an increase in complexity.

Over time as new systems are introduced to WoW, others are removed, and iteration happens on current mechanics, these things tend to become more complex at no fault of their own. I think any designer would agree that it's not the fault of the player that the game's systems get more and more complex over time as changes are made. It's a snowball effect for sure, and it's not the player's fault when things get out of control over years and years of patches and iteration and inflation of complexity. It's just difficult to predict what the game will be like a few years from now, and only approaching design from that future-angle would likely mean less active design to help address current issues (something we wouldn't want to do). But at the very least we can recognize when we need to reevaluate the corner we've painted ourselves into, can enact that change in an intelligent way that makes the game better, and ideally be able to explain clearly why we're making it.