Despite having a now dead account, I still try and keep touch with my friends who are playing World of Warcraft. Yesterday evening the buzz was surrounding the new and improved dungeon finder tool. If you have read any of my recent posts on wow, you know that I consider this tool the “idiot button”, but I figured I would read the details and see if they were addressing any of the problems I had with it. Below is a snippet that sums up the feature. Full announcement can be found over on wow insider.
In patch 4.1 we’ll be introducing Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms, a new system intended to lower queue times. Call to Arms will automatically detect which class role is currently the least represented in the queue, and offer them additional rewards for entering the Dungeon Finder queue and completing a random level-85 Heroic dungeon.
Failing To Understand Motivation
The above description of the new ability sounds great in theory, but it verifies a long held belief of mine. Blizzard simply does not understand the motivation behind certain classes. The classes that we are generally missing from the PUG landscape are the ones that require the biggest social responsibility. It takes a special breed to be willing to take responsibility for other players into your own hands on a regular basis.
In WoW the class that has always been in the shortest supply are the tanks. The tank is controlling force in any party, sets the pull speed, determines the approach, and for the most part directs the success of a run. A good tank knows he has to rely on solid healing, expert dps and utility to get through the instance. However someone has to be the voice of the party and More often than not, in a successful group, that is the tank.
To be a good tank, you need an instinctively protective nature. You need the desire to protect the other players from harm and press yourself against the onslaught of mobs attacking you. Doing this means you tend to develop a special bond for your fellow players, and as a result these players tend to ask you into groups on a regular basis.
Sure there are good tanks that are very reward focused, and chase every shiny new bauble available. However after playing a tank in one form or another for 10 years, I believe a far greater number do it for other reasons. I personally tank, because I enjoy the feeling of protecting my friends from whatever comes our way. I enjoy saving the day in an epic fashion, and when you take away the familiarity with your players, much of that enjoyment goes away.
Failing To Understand Their Game
Kadomi touches on this issue in her post, “Call to Fail”, but I will expand further. As I wrote about in my “Is WoW The WoW-Killer” post, the community of gamers is a much different place than when the game was released. Long gone are the good natured, easy going players that are willing to work through a problem. They have been replaced by the “lolurbad”, “faster!” and “big pulls” wrath genre morons. As a result the tank ends up bearing the brunt of this player abuse.
Frankly, no amount of carrot is worth the stick that the abrasive players already provide. Stepping into a pug as a tank, many times is like stepping into a warzone. The instances themselves are usually relatively simple, dealing with the selfish and socially mal-adjusted are the difficult part. As the tank, you somehow have to figure out a way to steer this bus of constant frustration across the finish line in a timely manner.
The simple truth is, if you are a good tank, you don’t have a need to pug. You have a pool of players that are always willing to run heroics with you. You become a favorite tour guide, that everyone knows will get them home safely. Most nights in wow, I logged in to a sea of purple tells, many of which were friends asking me to come tank something for them. At the end of the day, no amount of loot is worth dealing with the frustrations when you have a stable of “known good” players asking you for help.
This ties back in to what I said earlier, most of your good tanks are not doing it for the “money” so to speak. Most of us actually like to help our friends. We like to be contributing members of the guild and server community, and as a result become keystones in whatever environment we are in. When you have this network of goodwill built up around you, why on earth would you as a player abandon that for an experience you know will lead you to invent new forms of cursing.
Lost Touch
This has been a constant thread I have seen among the various disillusioned players leaving World of Warcraft. We all feel like Blizzard has abandoned us, the players that helped build its empire. My grandfather had a saying, and I hope it will make sense to you non-Oklahomans: “You dance with the one that brought you”. Basically most of the players I know filing out of WoW at this point, are players who like me played from release or near release.
We were the players that brought Blizzard to the throne of gaming it has managed to obtain. Problem is along the way it forgot why we started playing their games in the first place. In this facebook era of games, it is too easy to think it is natural to have millions of users to spare. In doing so however, you forget all the reasons why your game was great in the first place.
I’m thankful to Trion at the moment, because they seem to get it. After years of playing under Blizzard, Sony Online Entertainment, and Mythic I had come to expect a certain amount of distance between the company and its player base. I expect them to not really understand why we cared about the game, and why we were playing it. With Trion, it simply feels different.
In my time since starting Rift, I have seen far more involvement from the company as a whole than ever in my gaming career. There have been 13 hotfixes and 3 patches, with the game only being out about a month and a half. In the past I would have judged a game harshly on those numbers, thinking they were having to bandaid the game to keep it going. Instead Trion launched the most complete product I have ever played, and continues to simply improve the experience with each release.
Magic Dust is Gone
I am not sure it is really quantifiable, but something is gone from WoW. It is like the lid to a box has been opened and whatever magic dust was inside floated away on the wind, and is forever gone. I left quite obviously to play another game, but many of my friends who are now leaving are just doing so because the game no longer holds whatever special property it once did for them. Either they got tired of the hamster wheel, or simply stopped caring about the game play entirely.
I still believe this has been a gradual process of bad decisions that have lead us to this point, and this latest change in an attempt to buy off the tanks only supports that. However I do still feel bad that whatever locomotive is at the head of the train, is most definitely off course. I have many friends still playing WoW, and many that either do not have the systems or desire to jump to another game if WoW fails. I honestly do hope someone will step in to balance the listing ship, before it capsizes.
I probably should have included this in my initial post, but one of the ways you can tell this is a really bad idea is who is complaining about it. Were it the DPS whining that they will never get items, then you might be able to discount it. Problem is, when this was announced, my twitter lit up of players similar to myself who have been career long tanks. Each of us in our own way saying how poorly thought out this was, and how no amount of reward would really dictate our actions.
And on a second note. Healers and Tanks both have an extremely hard lot in games. In wow before I quit, I saw far more good healers vote kicked by bad tanks, than ever I saw a bad tank vote kicked. When the tank is the linchpin of a party, you end up with an odd dictatorship in the groups that get formed. So while, this change almost squarely effects the tanks, I think more often than not it is the healer that bears the weight of the frustration in PUG groups.
Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass about these rewards. However, I know people who have been farming these mounts for YEARS. I don’t think it’s fair for random tanks to have a chance of getting them without going out of their way to farm Stratholme/Sethekk Halls/Magisters’ Terrace.
I also agree very much with Saleny’s comment. As a healer it’s a bit insulting; I think my job is as stressful as the tank’s. Oh and about the “B-team” bit, I couldn’t have put it any better than this, bravo! It feels as if they’re making changes without looking at the long-term side effects (destroying the community thanks to LFD, trivializing the leveling experience… etc).
Anyway, excellent post as usual. I like your view on things, and I’m always looking forward to the next post!
I do agree with a lot of this. While I think what they’re doing has good intentions behind it, you know what they say about good intentions.
It’s like they have a big diseased plant in the middle of their garden, but rather than just uproot and get rid of it, they trim it back and just keep trying to innoculate the other plants with mass amounts of plant steroids or whatever, needing more and more since they become resistant to it. As they do, more plants become diseased, etc…
I do think raids should require more tanks. At least 3 in 10 and 5 in 25s. Any raid guild would be required to have these, plus, naturally, a serious raid guild will have some main spec alternates in case of RL striking. In Vanilla, any raid guild had a pretty ample group of warriors at their disposal if they wanted to run; if not, they risked tank burnout(yeah, it can be a demanding role) and thus not being able to raid. Thinking back, I had no trouble finding a tank in those days(healers were another story). TBC I also had little trouble, especially once bears/palatanks became more popular. LK changed that; tanks became the rarity and healers a bit more plentiful(these days finding a healer isn’t too terrible.)
I agree that Trion has been doing a great job in listening to the players. Now, I understand fully that a dev team can’t listen to every single person on a forum. If they did? Well…MMOs might end up a bit…off let’s say. However, I think a good dev team knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff and might see some good ideas they at least might consider, or be able to tell random QQ from actual, meaningful problem parts. This dev team right now seems to have been getting more and more slipshod in their dealings. I only hope they can see it before it’s an irrevocable case of ‘locking the barn door after the horses have been stolen.’ I don’t think its past that point yet, but if they keep on this path it might well end up that way.
Exactly! When I read that “Call to Arms” idea, as a DPS player I was frankly insulted and as a healer, I was thinking that it’s not going to be motivating me.
You say “I am not sure it is really quantifiable, but something is gone from WoW.” I know exactly what is gone, the real answer is in an article I read the other day
http://www.gamesradar.com/pc/world-of-warcraft-wrath-of-the-lich-king/news/blizzard-titan-mmo-will-eclipse-world-of-warcraft/a-201103091264278077/g-20070803141059985087
Particularly this paragraph: “Sams clarified that Blizzard had no intentions of leaving WoW behind, only that the studio was secure enough in its sustainability to start transferring some of the mega-popular MMO’s top talent over to Titan.”
The people that made WoW the game we love, aren’t working on the game any more, and that coherent vision that guided the game for the first few years is no longer there, leaving the “B-team” to flounder in confusion. Yes they may have worked with the masters and been trained to keep things running, but they don’t have the experience of building a world from the beginning and see how all of it (gameplay, world, players) are all tightly connected. I feel like all these random new “ideas” are coming from individuals without a real overall view of the effects or a real understanding of why we play the game in the first place.