Greetings, glorious adventurers! If you're joining in our Alpha One spot testing, please follow the steps here to see all the latest test info on our forums and Discord!
Options
"Why it's Rude to Suck at World of Warcraft"
elahrairah
Member
Just found and watched this video about how World of Warcraft very quickly found itself consumed by the social pressures of "playing the meta". I think a lot of warnings/lessons could be gleaned from this analysis: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU
Long video, but very worth watching!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYULong video, but very worth watching!
2
Comments
Can you please summarize what it says?
In WoW, you join a group purely for content completion. You aren't in groups to meet people, nor to form or strengthen relationships (LFG/LFR specifically).
If you suck at the game - which can be defined by not being as good as your class and gear would suggest - then you are literally wasting the time of everyone else present.
That, to many people - myself included - is rude.
You are in the group or raid to perform a function. We don't care about you as a person, you may as well be an NPC.
This is why automated group forming systems are bad, it leads people to not care about each other. Make a game where people need to pick who they group with and form said group manually, and all of a sudden people care about each other. All of a sudden you see people joining pick up groups for content they don't care about, just to meet new people that they may group up with later.
More to the point, all of a sudden, your performance is secondary to your personality.
Noaani's post is covered in the first part of the video. Most of what I got out of it is the community homogenizating into if you don't do this get lost noob. Even where there is no evidence it support the view or is counter to the evidence.
The end part covering addons made me happy Intrepid said no to such things.
For WoW and other PvE games yeah meta is king, one reason i stopped playing PvE games your force to play the same thing because the numbers dont lie and i realky dislike that part i find it boring and tedious
For Pvp though its a bit different your play meta its a solid proven method however theres more aspects when it comes to player interaction, people get use to fighting meta builds so being an off meta build can throw a spanner in the works and confuse people and if you capalise on that confusion you win the fight that way. i dont have a great example but lets say a warrior vs a ranger. Warrior charge toi close the gap and slow the ranger because he gonna wanna stay range and kite me and so on however if that range spec off meta and went full melee and started meleeing the warrior in the face instead of kiting can draw confusion and and when hit with that unpredicatbility moment some people dont adapt to it and causes them a fight that they win 95% of the time because every other ranger does the same thing and they learnt how to deal with it the moment somone does something unpredicable it can mess there strastergy up :P
from what i got from the video you need to have the option to hide your boots :P so wallace can wear shoes and still live out his fantasy of being barefooted hobbit :P
Yeah but the finer points on implementation and impact on behavior is what could be seen as interesting in the video.
For example... it provides a strong argument as to why threat/dps meters are bad... *grabs popcorn and gets out of the way*
hahaha but in all seriousness, I think the most interesting thing I extracted from the video was that the presence of information allowed for optimization which caused the game to change with the expectation of optimization removing all alternative playstyles/decisions/choices. This general idea can go in 2 directions: not balancing the game around the top performers and obfuscating data required for precise and testable theorycrafting. Both of these echo a lot of other threads on these forums alone though so I'm not sure either is a string worth pulling on here.
Personally I don't think the video provides anything really new to someone who is frequently engaged in regular & common conversations about MMOs (like most people on the forums here). The only ~new thoughts I had after watching it is that if characters playing the same class are somehow not the same, then you can kind of delay the optimization problem for as long as possible. This can be achieved by...
(1) having a solid player-driven crafting system for the best gear where variables like the quality of the materials and the crafting skill checks do not allow for 100% replicated gear (having identical gear pieces is part of the problem). ARPGs do this well, forcing players to exercise personal choices and creative solutions even when following a build guide since exact items cannot be found.
(2) having players have access to un-equal kits/skills. This can be achieved by making access to some augments gated in some way by either RNG, reputation with some organizations, node progress, professions etc. Having unequal kits is also justifiable since the balancing of the game is being done in a party-based manner instead of 1v1. It can also be done through gear, e.g. random modifiers on a specific skill's CDR like in NW or having some stat requirements for certain augments that may be hard to hit.
Essentially, anything that prevents your ability to port over someone else's theory crafting to your character 1:1 + obfuscation of exact information about monster modifiers, DPS meters etc should avoid/delay some of this behavior and allow for individual experimentation and agency. I honestly think if we get to a place similar to ARPGs, it would be a huge step up from most MMOs.
It is a pretty central theme to a lot of the video but chp 4 (~40min to ~57min) is the strongest argument against them I think. It's not going to be anything you've not heard before though. As mentioned, these are the same arguments a lot of people articulate online and in these forums too.
If WW3 breaks out, we now know who's responsible
I REALLY wish this worked, but I don't think it's possible because in the 3 games where I've seen it:
- in Monster Hunter Tri: each save game had an RNG-determined type of pool of enchantments they could roll on their accessories - like your pool of possible enchantments would probably be different to mine. When players discovered this, there was a lot of "why? this is so dumb." and "I'm going to recreate my account until I get the best pool" and "these are the best enchants for your pool". I'm pretty sure they moved away from the idea in later MH games and everyone was given the same pools.
- in DnD/Pathfinder/<other tabletop game>: where you have to roll your stats in front of a bunch of witnesses so you're forced to accept the result because you can't back out for social reasons. This "can't back out" is not present in video games coz there's no social pressure to roll with it, and add to that "point-buy" which gives players the ability to opt-out of the system completely.
- in Pokemon: where any pokemon you catch has hidden DNA numbers (called Individual Values or IVs) that are (*were) permanent to that pokemon. This led to min-maxers catching 28957 pokemon until they rolled max stats, followed by people using the breeding system to generate max stats pokemon, then the devs made it easier to breed, then the devs were like "you know what? now you can just buy an item to max the IVs". And now IV's are an after-thought (AND the breeding system is mostly superseded). Players asking for QoL features will eventually destroy this, sadly.
I think initially this works, but it has the same vibe of "obfuscating information to slow down optimization" without properly solving the issue.Maybe we need to make a thread about meaningful choice...
Not getting into the DPS Meter thing here OTHER than to say a specific thing that MIGHT hopefully piggyback on yours to PREVENT discussion on it.
As a person who has no negative experiences with meters generally, I perceive things that way because I have experiences with BAD GAMES and the Meters just help you figure out that the game is bad, more quickly.
That IS a problem for people who want to be able to play/enjoy bad games for longer, though, so I accept it as a negative for a subset of the population.
And that in turn is the feeling WoW gives when it comes to these things. Meters tell you that WoW is badly designed and then the people who were just trying to enjoy the game get exposed to all the 'tryhards' who don't want to 'waste their time' messing around in the Bad Design Options end of the pool.
All good, no need to waste my time watching the video at all then - since that argument can be dismantled by replacing "combat tracker" with "gear upgrades" or "levels" and the argument still holds the same weight.
The common thread between all the examples you gave is that the variability was RNG driven. If you add some agency in there, I'm not sure it would be guaranteed to fail. I do not think the game should hard prevent players from achieving the same builds/items. But for example, the longer it takes you to unlock all possible augments, the longer you expect to go before you can match a guide you follow, and the more you benefit from being creative and coming up with your own solutions given your resources. Like if doing weekly quests for the mage's guild randomly unlocks one of 10 augments, it would take you 10 weeks to get all those 10 augments, and if your 'online guide-approved BiS' doesn't unlock for 2 months, you'll have to figure it out yourself until then won't you?
The best example I can give is PoE. In PoE, most players, especially new ones, will follow build guides. In terms of gear, the guide may contain a couple of legendary items that are more-or-less identical copies of each other but the rest of the gear is extremely high variability. Trivial processes like maxing out your resistances or meeting your stat requirements means a piece of gear is worth more or less to you based on your other pieces of gear. And the more experienced a player gets, the more comfortable they will feel to flexibly adjust gear and even veer off from the guide. Now, for late game upgrades, very few guides describe how to craft best in slot items (mostly because crafting in PoE is dogshit RNG-fest) but it leaves even players following this guide a lot of opportunity to explore based on what they find/is available on the market.
Now a lot of the PoE example can't/doesn't apply directly to AoC but you can see how even the lack of identical gear options forces more player agency, even when the player is actively following a guide. There are already a couple of things AoC has going for it that promote unequal players. Just stretching the leveling experience and giving players meaningful content to interact with while leveling is huge. In most games, guides may help you level faster but focus on telling you what to do at 'end game' where all players have ~equal kits as a starting point. If a node siege happens and you are level 23 but your buddy is level 35, you will both want to take part and contribute your utmost, you have vested interest. But, there is not likely to be a guide for an optimal build @ lvl 23 or 35, so you will have to wing it based on your experience thus far and collective community (e.g. guild) knowledge.
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced the best way to do this for 'end game' is high gear variability and stat requirements. Imagine if you play a spellsword (fighter primary and mage secondary). Your mage augments will require some stats to be used. Some may require int, some will etc. Some particularly powerful augments may require more int than others. If this was the case, even if you have a best meta build, you are gated in your ability to follow it based on your gear. At end game, you will eventually gather enough gear with the stats you need @ the appropriate gear score to slot in all the augments you want but until you reach that point, you have to be creative and are constantly having to make interesting gear choices.
Well I disagree that the argument posited by the video is identical to what NiKr said. And maybe I'm selling the video a bit short here, it may be some variation of arguments you've heard before but they still provide really good empirical evidence to support their arguments (you'd hope so in an hour and half long video haha). It's hard for me to judge because I already agree with most of their arguments but I still think it's worth a watch.
poe.ninja is my favourite in that game hahahaha
I'd argue it's still RNG driven (coz drops), but you're right that everyone's second build is based on what they find.
Yeah, I think the big nono is making things permanently out of reach. A lot of people hate that (myself included haha). But even if you make things gated behind a lot of time/effort, it suddenly becomes acceptable.
I will say, you've inspired me to flesh out my thought, I'll make a thread about it soon