Even though I’m not playing WoW at the moment, I have been attempting to keep pace with what is going on. And there have been a few interesting developments this week. The first is the general player moaning with the constant state of balancing in the game. It seems that Blizzard is on a constant mission to retweak core abilities from one week to the next, leaving players scratching their heads when trying to work out their rotation.
The other development is the news that the two old Zul raids are to be repackaged as heroic 5 mans. Most bloggers seem to be looking at this as scoring a full 10 on the lame-arse scale, something which I myself would not disagree with. It smacks of desperation on Blizzard’s part. Could it be that Blizzard are purposely fiddling with balancing abilities to keep us distracted from the fact that there is very little end game content? In Burning Crusade we simply concentrated on the raids and trying to make our way through them. In Cataclysm we seem to have to concentrate on what our abilities are doing this week as opposed to making our way through the end-game. One of these is fun, the other is not.
To be honest, as far as the three new rogue abilities go for this expansion I couldn’t name all three of them for you off the top of my head. The only one that I can positively identify is ‘smoke bomb,’ and I use that about as often as I see my dog brushing his teeth. There comes a point where you simply have too many abilities to choose from. Fluid gameplay goes out the window as you struggle to remember not only when to use these abilities but that you actually have them at all. Why does Blizzard have to keep introducing new abilities anyway? I mean, if they go on like this, in another couple of expansions you’ll probably have to buy a specialist keyboard just to bind them all.
Smoke and mirrors, my friends, smoke and mirrors. Keep them blinded and dazzled with the smoke and mirrors to disguise the fact that there isn’t really very much at all. The whole thing smacks to me of a once great gaming organization having been taken over by the bean-counters. I’ve got nothing against bean-counters per se. Only that when I become supreme dictator they will be the first ones up against the wall.
February 26, 2011 at 8:57 am
that is all
February 26, 2011 at 10:01 am
To make such a kind of patch so suddenly is desperation. I know, because usually you would hype it. 3 months before. 6 months before.
But this feels like a senior manager went down the stairs and told the developers that they’d better do something… now!
February 27, 2011 at 4:55 am
We should try and predict the next act of desperation on their part. Get a competition going!
February 26, 2011 at 11:17 am
Tweeking will become ever more hit and miss and desperate as Blizzard fails to realise that you cannot simplify a self elaborating system.
Look at Mother Nature, she set down a few simple rules mixed in the variables and WOOMPH! of it went and puddled its way up from single cells up to MMO gamers (or is that “down to”).You can’t stay simple for too long nad you can’t micro-manage a very complex system, it has to find its own balance.
WoW needs to let loose, let the classes evolve and grow new ones, the train track syndrome that has come to the fore this expansion will constrict to the extent of causing an internal rupture.
Put the “world” back into WoW please,please,please….I’ve enjoyed it too much over the last five years to see it in such pain.
I think right now the AH/economy (whiptail episode aside) aspect of the game is the nearest to a free and natural player driven but dev supported system that WoW has.Look how vibrant and happy the gold making community is.Its running along under its own steam and evolving/elaborating well, maybe there is something to learn from that ?
February 27, 2011 at 4:53 am
I’ve mentioned that in the past also, about the gold system. It’s the one area of the game where they set it up to be player driven and then they didn’t meddle.
February 26, 2011 at 11:34 am
Fear the RIFT blizzard, fear the RIFT…
February 27, 2011 at 5:58 pm
nah… rift is no wowkiller.
February 27, 2011 at 8:55 pm
Wow doesn’t needing killing, it’s already dead.
February 27, 2011 at 8:57 pm
*need, stupid phone…
February 27, 2011 at 8:40 am
Not to fanboi it up or anything, but… bitter much?
1) Constant class tweaking is annoying, to an extent. Then again, if we had to wait for content patches before broken abilities get fixed, you would see just as many complaints the other way. The only legitimate gripe is that Blizzard basically came out and said they ignored some PTR feedback because of “the small sample size.” That’s dumb.
2) Very little endgame content? Err… no. There is plenty of endgame content, artfully segmented so you don’t get tired of the same 12-boss dungeon week after week. Normal-mode raid bosses are probably overtuned based on completion rates however.
3) The ZA & ZG reveal intentionally occurred on the Rift head-start day. It was not released “early” nor is it “desperation” – it’s business, just like any game company would do to their competition regardless. Blizzard didn’t pull these out of thin air either, as there has been all manners of foreshadowing vis-a-vis the original removal of ZG, allusions to the ZG mounts/pet making a return, etc etc.
It’s an open question as to whether reintroducing these 5m counts as recycling or nostalgia, but if they happen to make it on the level of Deadmines, I don’t think it can be argued that it’s “running out of ideas.” The entire expansion is predicated on turning the old-world upside-down, and this is very much in-character.
4) All 3 new rogue abilities are PvP oriented, so unless you play PvP you really wouldn’t have them on your bars. Hotbar creep is a definite concern, as any warlock/hunter could tell you. Like they did with Cata though, it’s a fairly simple matter to reorganize downward… assuming you don’t call that “dumbing down the game” too.