Altitis

As you will have noticed, I’ve had a couple of things to say on the whole PvP loot distribution system and its perception by the playerbase.

From the other side of the issue, Rohan has been using about as much virtual ink over the matter pointing out the flaws of the arena rewards system and why he believes it should be “fixed” or removed altogether.

The most interesting thing is that judging by all the comments, the issue is pretty much one-sided, in the sense that the only people seeing one are the ones focusing almost exclusively on raiding (and who are probably pretty good at it). As we have seen, the core of their problem is centered around cosmetics and recognition – they feel others getting epics too, through other means, cheapen their game experience. Some of them believe the fact that they downed raid boss X should automatically make them the center of a server-wide admiration for their accomplishments, and that the likeness of arena gear to raid tiered sets deprives them of that admiration (I think there’s a term for that, attention whores). Others, probably the more mature among them, regret that all in all, status symbols (like titles or rankings) are now very heavily favouring PvP.

Another common complaint is that PvP gear allows people to skip part of the raid progression, as if going straight from normal instances to SSC or ZA was some kind of criminal offence (never mind that PvP gear is, for most classes, badly suited for raiding, and that there’s only a limited amount of arena-geared people a raid can support before becoming too inefficient for its purpose).

Finally, an ever-increasing worry is the fact that PvP in its current implementation is slowly killing PvE. It becomes harder and harder to find players willing to go through the hoops of gearing themselves up, even in normal instances.

One thing all these complaints have in common is that without any exception, and in the typical nerf calling mentality I hate and despise, even if they admit PvE has issues at the moment, they will try by any means to get PvP rendered less attractive. What is really happening in the game at the moment is that PvP, in its current implementation, serves as a looking glass for end-game PvE, and the image sent back is not pretty at all.

PvP has changed a lot in the three years since WoW got launched. Raiding, on the other hand, has only undergone one minor change, the introduction of token-based loot. The mechanisms are still exactly the same as in 2005, though. And while some believe TBC raiding is a lot better than before, in the sense that the fights have all become more technical and less prone to slacking (like MC who was said to be played while watching TV by some players), the only other major transformation was the size of raids. Whether 10/25 is actually better than (10)/20/40 is open to to interpretation. I would rather rejoin Foton’s opinion on the matter though. Had they made TBC 10 /20, the first 6-8 months would have sported a lot less guild drama and guild shattering than what it is now, those extra 5 men are the particularly costly element here, but that’s only my tuppence on this.

Currently, PvP is the more attractive proposition for many players, and moreso for the casual gamer, for obvious reasons. It requires less advance planning, less logistics, less organization and costs a lot less than raiding. It’s current most important flaw is the AFK leechers, something Blizzard will have to address in a much more drastical manner. But it is not by tweaking PvP that you will revive the currently lackluster raiding experience.

Tobold has recently reposted one of his raiding reader’s proposition to fix PvP (essentially by segregating it from PvE a lot more), but then approached the issue from the other end, looking at where PvE currently falls short of attracting players, and proposing a couple of solutions. I concur that widening the gap between PvE and PvP would be a big mistake. The key to WoW’s success is mass appeal, not catering to the hardcore, and this is a design philosophy which is even manifest by the extremely low hardware requirements to run the client, even by 2004′s standards. Brian Green ponders whether catering to the widest audience is a good thing, I’d argue that Vanguard is a good example of how catering only to the most hardcore players can result in a commercial train wreck of a game.

But how to fix raiding to render it more attractive? As stated, Tobold has a few ideas on the matter, making raids PUG-friendly by toning it’s “normal” settings down while turning today’s setting into a heroic mode. I don’t fully agree with this, but it certainly resonates with an old request from the o-boards, to create a story mode for raid instances for the casual player to access, if not the battles, at least the lore elements involved by downing Kael or Illidan. At the core of that request is the fac that there’s a lot of content in the game that the average casual or semi-casual player out there has never seen nor will ever see (and Blizzard recognizes it insofar they want to relocate Naxxramas to WotLK).

What I believe to be the most important issues limiting PvE today are:

• Barriers to entry (attuning, rep grinding)
• Trash respawns (which basically hinder casual guilds most, preventing segmenting a raid accross several evenings)
• Cost to Play, mainly consumables and repairs
• Healer and tank burnout
• Unreliable loot distribution system

Barriers to entry are an issue because reputation grinds in particular, but long and convoluted, 5-men based key quests as well, obviously serve more as a slowing down mechanism than anything else. Rep grinds are incredibly boring, and unfortunately it looks like the Tigole-mentality is still prevailing for accessing both the 5-men and 25-men Sunwell Plateau instances – Early patch 2.4 reports talk about an opening effort reminiscent of the War of the Shifting Sands, the server-wide grind and farmfest which is probably the best example of just how fatally flawed and unfun you can make a world event. For the record, several realms launched on TBC didn’t ever bother opening AQ, but more importantly, some realms launched in Summer 2006 didn’t bother either and have had their gates closed for 18 months.

Removing key quests altogether isn’t something I would like, but the grouping part has to be rethought. When nobody wants to run Shadowlabs ever again, it’s hard to get a group together which will bear making it to Murmur to get your Kara fragment. More soloable or duoable paths to the keys need to be used, and soloable should be a quest chain, not another rep grind, thank you so much.

Trash Respawns doesn’t need much explanation, but basically forcing a raid to re-clear every night before being able to resume their previous progression is also adding to the raid weariness of the less hardcore players out there, and needs to be rethought.

Cost to Play is the most important one which concerns all player classes. Repairs are a major issue which only mounts as your raid progresses – the better your gear, the higher your repair costs. There’s also the added penality tied to the type of armor you’re wearing – a warrior or paladin tank will typically spend more on repairs than anyone else (which also participates to burnout when you combine it with the fact that they are the least suited to farming, prot warriors specifically). And there’s the cost of consumables.

Regarding repairs, adding (more) free repair NPCs along the path in a raid instance would immediately alleviate this problem. For consumables, adding more flasks and elixirs to the loot tables could help as well. This way you eliminate a big part of the gap between PvE and PvP, reducing the costs tied to the activity and the farming time necessary before you can participate.

Tank and Healer burnout is probably the most difficult one to address. Healers had at least some work cut out for them by adding free spell damage on their healing kit, which simplifies farming and diminishes the amount of gear they needed to carry around. Tanks are next, but there’s a lot less simple fixes in there: how do you turn mitigation and avoidance into damage?

And beyond that, many tanks and healers burn out because they feel too much of a raid’s success is burdened upon them. To alleviate this is unfortunately something totally out of the reach of armchair designing on a blog. Still, this issue is also at the heart of dying 5-men instancing, and specifically PUGs. Continuing to trust perfect strangers to do their job, at the expense of big repairs and often random abuse and unwarranted advice can quickly turn you away from PUGing ever again.

Fortunately, loot distribution can be changed to the better. I would favour turning all current boss gear drops into tokens, which can be exchanged for the gear at a specific vendor. Further, the tokens from one tier should be redeemable for the higher tier after passing a certain threshold, like killing at least one boss in the next tier or similar. Yes, this would give people more room for the free-riders to get access to some gear from the next tier without actually putting an effort into it, but it would nevertheless revitalize the whole tiered food chain, since you’d still need to get a wealthy amount of tokens from the lower tier to get the next one. We could imagine that T4 tokens would be stackable to 100 only and redeemable at the rate of 3:1 for T5 tokens, for instance, with T5-grade kit costing 15-25 T5 tokens you would still ensure a waster pool of T4 players working on progression and eventually moving on to the next tier.

There’s one last thing we have not addressed, the need for recognition some raiders feel. As long as the Armory doesn’t implement a kind of guild ranking like WoWJutsu currently provides, the only other way I can think of is giving, at least, more titles based on accomplishments – each raiding end-boss enabling a new title (how does “Demonslayer Gwaendar” sound for killing Magtheridon?).

These are of course only a few ideas, but none of them require any nerfing of PvP at all. Will some people find it cheapens raiding? Most definitely. But at some point in time, you will have to make up your mind. You’ll have to choose between a hardcore raiding experience which attracts less and less players and eventually only happens on a handful of servers where the Nihilums reside, or a healthy raiding progression with a broader player pool. You can’t have it both ways.

And with this, I close my own contribution to the 2007 edition of the Welfare Epics debate, which is only another avatar of the good old casual vs. hardcore religious war. Will the new year quiet it all down? No chance. Still, as time passes it will become harder and harder to add new meaningful things to the issue. My hope however would be that in the future, more brainpower is spent on the constructive, game-improving solutions rather the destructive nerf calling knee-jerk reaction. One can only hope…

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