Mentoring Programs

I love it how your title has absolutely no connection to your thread at all, but anyway...

1. Warforged gear in WoW was a terrible system that I hope will never appear in any mmorpg ever again.
2. Here is your ultimate keybinding guide - use whatever is most comfortable to you.
3. If you had a specific "keybinding" sub-forum it would be practically empty. What's the point in having 50 different sub-forums with 1-2 threads in each?
4. Forums have a search function for a reason. If people can't be bothered to use it that is their problem.
5. The best way to gain muscle memory for your keybinds is to use them. In other words, play the game and your muscle memory will improve on its own. You don't need a special mini game to do this.
6. The reason why there are so few raid leaders is because not many people want the responsibility of the job.

Look, I love your enthusiasm and what you want to achieve but you are trying to solve problems that don't exist, with solutions that cause more problems than they solve.

It's like if you see a car that is working perfectly fine and you want to attach jet engines to it to make it go faster.

Jahlon

So honestly, as a raid leader you either are good enough to make the A teams, you have the potential to get good enough and you make the B teams, or you are a scrub casual who doesn't care and you don't even make the roster.

Learning how to keybind is something that you can do in any game. It just becomes about memorizing your rotation and where you have your keys and then making changes based on rotation order. There are times when someone has a usual piece of advice about keybinding, but keybinding is a gamer skill not a game-specific skill.

I do agree with Wandering about search functions. I mean, come on, you can't search for what you need?

Damokles

Okay, i am quiet confused about the thread name in connection with what was written but here i go:
1. Warforged gear was one of the many itterations that Acctivision-Blizzard tried to shift the focus of their playerbase on short term satisfaction. It should have never been implemented in my opinion. (Started with Mists of Pandaria i believe, could have started in Cataclysm but i didnt play during cata)

2. I personally like to bind my keys to q, e, r, f, t, x, Shift q, Shift e, Shift r, Shift f, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Shift 1, Shift 2, Shift 3, Shift 4. That is because i dont have high mobility in my hand and easily get cramps. I also know a few people who can use their whole keyboard and believe that keybindings are specific to the user. Some people may find it more intuitive to use the f1-4 keys and another to use others.

3. If you need to find a specific thing, then just create a new thread where you ask others specifically for that one thing. If others have not the path you seek, then be the pathfinder.

4. I trained for one whole week one a training dummy for 2 hours a day to get my whole rotation + cds + consumables correctly bound and trained. I could do it while i was half asleep, which i occasionally did tbh. There is no "easy" way to keybinds and muscle memory. Ask any professional chef how long they had to train to cut vegetables quickly and they will all tell you that they had to train hard, or that they just did it so many timey that their body learned it automatically.

5. Being a raid leader is an unthankfull job. I was a raid leader for about 4 years on and off. Here are a few things you have to do: learn all strats for bosses, cut the information down to a few sentences per role per boss so that your numbskull raiders can understand it, organize 20 people to get online at the same time, network to have replacements if necessary, organize potions and other consumables, because half of your raiders wont have them themselves, look out for idiots during fights, sift through all the mediocre dps to see if someone doesnt pick up their slack, keep overachieving idiots in line, see to it that not one lerson gets all the loot and watch out that raiders dont roll on unnecessary gear (i had people who rolled on items that were worse than their current gear for offspecs...) while others really needed the upgread. Thats just what i remembered of the top of my head. And do you want to know the best part? No one notices that you do all this. No one thanks you for sh*t. But we still do it, because SOMEONE has to. The show must go on after all.

Geez, how many of the regulars on these forums are long-time raid leaders? I mean, I guess it makes sense... Not many casuals would care enough to talk about general MMO design in the forums of an unreleased game? And being a leader means you're already comfortable talking about detailed stuff all the time.

Sorry to derail. Just thought it was interesting.

1. Warforged gear was one of the many itterations that Acctivision-Blizzard tried to shift the focus of their playerbase on short term satisfaction. It should have never been implemented in my opinion. (Started with Mists of Pandaria i believe, could have started in Cataclysm but i didnt play during cata)

Still not even sure what warforged gear has to do with making players better at raiding, but just to clarify for those who don't know, warforging in a system in WoW where a dropped item could (at random) have a much higher item level than normal So you could kill a boss that usually drops level 450 gear but instead you get a piece of level 500 gear instead. Completely at random.

@damokles is right that it was implemented during the Mists of Pandaria expansion. The official reason given by Blizzard was that players were supposedly getting stuck on bosses despite having the best gear possible up to that point. Now I don't know about anyone else but I never encountered a raid which had everyone kitted out in the BiS gear and couldn't kill the bosses in the raid.

So instead of letting the WoW playerbase get good, Blizzard decided to start handing out free gear to help the players through, which has snowballed to the shitshow that we see in WoW today. Anyway, none of this has anything to do with mentoring programs so.....*shrugs*

(I've accepted that most threads eventually stray from the topic in the title. So uh, gonna continue that.)

I think giving players gear rewards for performing extra well (especially on a individual level) just makes the discrepancy between good and bad players worse. Players who are struggling are the ones who need better gear.

However, it might be okay to give players "Flameforge" bonuses for standing in so much fire that their gear gets tougher from the all the extra heat treatments. The name even fits.

Damokles

leonerdo wrote: »

(I've accepted that most threads eventually stray from the topic in the title. So uh, gonna continue that.)

I think giving players gear rewards for performing extra well (especially on a individual level) just makes the discrepancy between good and bad players worse. Players who are struggling are the ones who need better gear.

However, it might be okay to give players "Flameforge" bonuses for standing in so much fire that their gear gets tougher from the all the extra heat treatments. The name even fits.

This time it got derailed instantly by the thread creator

leonerdo wrote: »

However, it might be okay to give players "Flameforge" bonuses for standing in so much fire that their gear gets tougher from the all the extra heat treatments. The name even fits.

I quite like this idea.

Good players will game it, obviously, but I still like it.

I'm not a huge fan of always giving the best gear to the best players in a competitive game, as that inherently reduces the actual competitiveness. It isn't a problem I have a solution for, but the above is still a good idea imo.

leonerdo wrote: »

Geez, how many of the regulars on these forums are long-time raid leaders? I mean, I guess it makes sense... Not many casuals would care enough to talk about general MMO design in the forums of an unreleased game? And being a leader means you're already comfortable talking about detailed stuff all the time.

Sorry to derail. Just thought it was interesting.

Probably enough where we could ask intrepid for our own separate sub-forum where we can complain about all the cats we have to herd away from the obvious fire that's going to kill you if you stand in it! :P

Wandering Mist wrote: »

leonerdo wrote: »

Geez, how many of the regulars on these forums are long-time raid leaders? I mean, I guess it makes sense... Not many casuals would care enough to talk about general MMO design in the forums of an unreleased game? And being a leader means you're already comfortable talking about detailed stuff all the time.

Sorry to derail. Just thought it was interesting.

Probably enough where we could ask intrepid for our own separate sub-forum where we can complain about all the cats we have to herd away from the obvious fire that's going to kill you if you stand in it! :P

Another good idea from this thread...

An invitation only sub-forum on the official forums (post launch) for raid leaders. A place to share info without all the noise - and complain about stuff...

Damokles

leonerdo wrote: »

However, it might be okay to give players "Flameforge" bonuses for standing in so much fire that their gear gets tougher from the all the extra heat treatments. The name even fits.

The flameforging could be nice if it was a passive on your armor with a limited duration. Say, it gets activated after standing in fire aoes and enhances the player for x amount for 15 sec, with a 30sec cd.

Damokles wrote: »

leonerdo wrote: »

However, it might be okay to give players "Flameforge" bonuses for standing in so much fire that their gear gets tougher from the all the extra heat treatments. The name even fits.

The flameforging could be nice if it was a passive on your armor with a limited duration. Say, it gets activated after standing in fire aoes and enhances the player for x amount for 15 sec, with a 30sec cd.

This would backfire spectacularly if it was implemented. Whenever you have buffs like this the good players will take full advantage of it by stacking all their other buffs and cooldowns on top of it, something that the less skilled players wouldn't think to do. This creates a huge gap between the good and the bad players which in turn makes tuning the fights impossible.

If you tune the fight under the assumption that all the players will optimally use the buff, the less skilled players who don't use it won't be able to kill the boss. If however you tune the fight assuming players won't use the buff, the good players will destroy the boss and complain that it is too easy.

It's a catch 22 situation waiting to happen.

ataulfos

Itai no wa Iya nano de Bougyoryoku ni Kyokufuri Shitai to Omoimasu. this anime is an mmorpg in where the protagonist is not the skilled player in the world and break the game by just being herself and lot of luck, however in this game the players get skills and buffs by doing stuff like get venom inmunity if u recive huge amounts of venom damage, i really like this idea of forge the players skills bc they get shape by the stuff the player do so bad players could had a chance by doing stuff as many times they could getting better in skill and with buffs, the bad part of this is that good players could abuse this sistem too

ataulfos wrote: »

Itai no wa Iya nano de Bougyoryoku ni Kyokufuri Shitai to Omoimasu. this anime is an mmorpg in where the protagonist is not the skilled player in the world and break the game by just being herself and lot of luck, however in this game the players get skills and buffs by doing stuff like get venom inmunity if u recive huge amounts of venom damage, i really like this idea of forge the players skills bc they get shape by the stuff the player do so bad players could had a chance by doing stuff as many times they could getting better in skill and with buffs, the bad part of this is that good players could abuse this sistem too

The exact same problem would happen that I detailed in my last post. Also I have to ask, why do you want to give benefits to bad players? Why should they get statistical advances over the good players?

I don't understand why you are trying to even the playing field in such an artificial way.

Nagash

I'm a fan of MMO Darwinism

noaani wrote: »

leonerdo wrote: »

However, it might be okay to give players "Flameforge" bonuses for standing in so much fire that their gear gets tougher from the all the extra heat treatments. The name even fits.

I quite like this idea.

Good players will game it, obviously, but I still like it.

I'm not a huge fan of always giving the best gear to the best players in a competitive game, as that inherently reduces the actual competitiveness. It isn't a problem I have a solution for, but the above is still a good idea imo.

Nah man, I was joking. It's a terrible idea. Fire should always be bad. People shouldn't get anything good from standing in it.

If you want to buff bad players, you can only give them small consolations after a significantly worse setback. Like FFXIV has a system for some of it's medium-difficulty bosses, where you get a 5% stacking buff to HP and damage every time your party wipes, but only if you spent a few minutes fighting. That way wiping always costs you time overall, but bad players get a little bit of help to eventually clear the content.

leonerdo wrote: »

Nah man, I was joking. It's a terrible idea. Fire should always be bad. People shouldn't get anything good from standing in it.

Yeah, it should always be bad - I was less talking about the specific idea as the general purpose of the idea, and also moreso for a PvP setting than a PvE setting.

While you don't want to reward failure, game developers of a PvP game need to remain aware that if one group of players always beats the other, and thus always gets the rewards, it will become exponentially harder for the first group to then catch up.

This is a situation that is negative for both groups of players. Both groups lose any notion of competition with each other. Obviously just handing the losing side an advantage isn't the right answer (nor do I suggest that I have such an answer), but it is something that needs to be taken in to account.

noaani wrote: »

leonerdo wrote: »

Nah man, I was joking. It's a terrible idea. Fire should always be bad. People shouldn't get anything good from standing in it.

Yeah, it should always be bad - I was less talking about the specific idea as the general purpose of the idea, and also moreso for a PvP setting than a PvE setting.

While you don't want to reward failure, game developers of a PvP game need to remain aware that if one group of players always beats the other, and thus always gets the rewards, it will become exponentially harder for the first group to then catch up.

This is a situation that is negative for both groups of players. Both groups lose any notion of competition with each other. Obviously just handing the losing side an advantage isn't the right answer (nor do I suggest that I have such an answer), but it is something that needs to be taken in to account.

You bring up a good point, which is why I favour static arenas as a place for competitive PvP. Since it is a closed environment you can easily control the power levels by giving each player access to the same gear.

For arenas, I'd prefer just having different gear/skill bands which players are sorted into (i.e. matchmaking). It doesn't have to be perfectly balanced, and I expect that a lot of players will enjoy "getting better at PvP" just by improving their gear. As long as the gameplay and teamwork matter more than the gear in /most/ matches, I don't mind if gear plays a small role.

As for the winners pulling further and further ahead in an arms race, I just don't see that happening realistically, unless arena rewards are incredibly powerful, or caravan materials are important for individual progression and can't be attained in other ways. There might be a runaway arms race in node or guild wars, but it will probably depend more on recruiting a larger fighting force than on gear levels.