Blizzard, we have to talk a bit about WoW and its "learning curve"/explanations for the game

Community General Discussion
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Disclaimer, long read ahead!

I am daily present in the games “Newcomers channel” which is for new/returning players and guides alike. And I have to say that I see so often simple questions about silly things such as “how do I emote/wave at that NPC for a quest” and such things.

From my own experience as a new player back in BfA (pre-Isles tutorial) I know that the game experience to learn things can be rough. And I say that as someone who has played MMORPGs before. I had some trouble understanding how WoW works (and I am still learning new things every few weeks by now). Now imagine how horrible the experience is for a new (or after years returning) player.

We have a Newcomer Channel with voluntary Guides like me that do what actually is Blizzards job. Explaining the game and how it works.

And honestly, I (still) wonder why do we, as voluntary guide players without any compensation, have to do your Job Blizzard? Isn’t it in YOUR best interest to have players that keep playing the game by explaining how your game (the product) works?

We Guides have additional helping tools at hand such as community websites and things like the Adventurer guide to check. But let me be honest. If you (Blizzard) would actually spend effort into making the game more understandable and teaching for new players, we as Guides wouldn’t really be needed.

Players shouldn’t rely on external sources such as WoWHead and IcyVeins and YouTube to understand your games content. Players also shouldn’t rely on Guides to have it explained it to them.

You as a developer should simply do a better job at explaining the game to new players. Treat new players not only as new players but as new players that are playing their very first game on PC with WoW. Only then you can make sure that almost every player understands the game. Even if it is annoying for some to be treated like a first-time gamer.

In a well designed game your players would actively be guided by quests and goals to learn game mechanics and enemy behavior, not just by observation only and other players telling you where you make mistakes.

For example, why is there not a real dungeon tutorial ala Final Fantasy 14 that literally grabs the player by their hand and teaches them in detail how dungeons and group content works and what is important to do in an optional, solo instanced quest line with optional leveling rewards? In that quest the game literally tells the player every relevant info STEP BY STEP before encouraging them to even use the dungeon finder…

Meanwhile on the Tutorial Isles you just queue up, steamroll through the tutorial boss dungeon that not at all requires the players to even stop for a second and think what to do next. It is basically a roller coaster ride with 0 challenge and player skill required. A literally push-over for quick “yeah, you did it chumpion!”-feeling. That’s not good.

Also WoW even could have explanation tutorial cards as simple as a picture slideshow or a (voiced) trailer with interactive UI elements displaying a full detailed explanation of enemy (bosses) skills of how they work and when they us it, for each dungeon and raid encounter. Those picture cards/trailers could be viewable in the Dungeon Tab of the Adventurer guide. Some people really learn better visually than with text-only as we have now.

You can do it similar like Bungie did it in one of their weekly articles before Witch Queen to explain the most relevant story ( VOD - https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/51028 )

WoW would also benefit a lot from optional UI design for Boss Frames. Why do we still have no good old “boss fight bars” with smaller cast bars beneath them as “Edit Mode” options?

Looking at one of your other games, Diablo IV, you seem totally able to design good boss bars. They show a “Stun-Mechanic” meter, checkpoints for Heal Potions and the bosses HP. ( https://imgur.com/a/gvodcrh )

Yet in WoW, we do not even have the option to change their display direction from vertical to horizontal. We can’t even resize them. For such an important feature, that is a big oversight. - ( https://imgur.com/Bz6PFzg )

Also the boss frames only show the bosses HP and the mechanic trigger bar (btw. ALSO not explained to new players at all). There are no specific HP bar segments that would be relevant for indication to encounter behavior like damage phases or ads spawn (or similar).

For example in BfA Freehold - Harlan Sweete (M+ dungeon S2 DF) there should be a (if we had well designed boss bars) brackets on 60% and 30% of the HP meter for the boss, because that’s the point where the boss buffs itself or calls minions to aid for AoE attacks.

In raids that is even more important. Take for example the first boss of Aberrus… Here we have “Kazzara, the Hellforged” at 80%/60%/40% remaining HP shacking off armor plates, making her cast attacks more violent. Also here we have no good boss bar with HP brackets.

Such info should not be required to read up and remember all the time by hovering with the mouse over boss frame HPs and reading that info out from numbers showing up then. In general a player should be able to see that visually presented to them on the boss bar in a boss fight. Also as a sidenote, we don’t even have UI/Combat options to have ressource numbers be displayed at all times on the Unit frames…

In that area of bad design within WoW, I can absolutely understand that people rather use the Addons over the games default UI provided.

Aside of this, the Adventurer guide should have not just “small summaries” of the enemies abilities but fully explained details and an in detail explanation of the fights without relying on ability links. ( https://imgur.com/brrocKE )

The abilities functionality should be directly written out at the bottom of the list as a glossary or legend of the fight summary because I can imagine new players (and even some veteran players of MMORPGs) don’t necessarily know about item and skill links in this game right from the beginning.

I myself learned about that feature in Shadowlands S1 first and only by reading it in a loading screen tooltip. And remember, I joined in Season 2 of BfA. That’s half a year at least it took someone like me with former MMORPG experience to learn about item and skill linking functions due to different game design practices between Game Developers.

That’s so far all I can quickly summarize that makes it hard for new players (and for some returning veterans) to have it easier to get into the game.

To make as conclusion a visual comparison here…

Imagine WoW is meant to be a book for learning how to read. The new players don’t (necessarily) know how to read the book yet. WoW in its current design as a teaching-book, requires you to know how to read so it can teach you how to read itself.

That’s the level of problematic design decisions we have with WoW in regards of new players. If new players rely on asking us guides on such a simple thing as how to execute a certain emote (/wave) on their tutorial quest lines, then you can imagine how troubling more complex problems can become for them.

And new players not understanding the game are players not staying for the game.

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Stares at the big offending quest

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More a case of people typing wave in the newcomer chat rather than asking how to do it which then gets answered by one of our macros but ye.

If the channel isnt being spammed by a certain individual who happens to get reported every time but still returns like clockwork that is.

Tbh the “guides” I’ve seen from Blizzard have been anything but actual guides. Wouldnt trust them with anything regarding properly explaining stuff.

Alas if you want anyone from Blizzard to read your thread then I’m afraid you will have to post it on the US forums.

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You dont have to do it, you choose to do it.

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That may be. But if no one does it, the game gets less players to stay, meaning less new players that become longtime players. And that is what every MMORPG needs to survive.

I am not saying WoW is about to die. But I am saying that we shouldn’t get used to it happening in general…

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Blizzard gave up on Heroes of the Storm but I blame it partially on Blizz never teaching/including reasources that teach how to play the game in the game. So the game “died” because people were frustrated with players not understanding basic game mechanics like soak experience from all lanes at the early game or don’t engage in a fight when the enemy reached a talent tier that you haven’t. So yes they were always pretty bad at teaching their games.

And yes, WoW is ancient so it also lacks stuff that even other Blizzard games have like a visualization of projected DoTs and HoTs on healthbars or proper status effect visualizations.

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I think today’s generations is addicted to (unnecessary) youtube guides that only exist because some guy wanted ad revenue.

If someone enjoys a game, they’ll figure out how to play it or find the necessary info. And if not, no amount of tutorials will change it.
Speaking of which, we still have the proving grounds but people simply ignore it because it’s no longer mandatory for random HC. And the reason for that is -wait for it- because the community whined that it’s a brickwall for some.

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I just disagree with so many things in this post it’s actually surreal while at the same time being in the very same chat as you and helping probably the very same people and having the same concerns.

WoW’s UI is perfectly fine for the game that it was designed for, and that game is not this game, and now they’re changing it and breaking it in various aspect ratios and things like that.

This UI cannot handle players having 20 buffs and debuffs on them at the same time. It cannot handle having 50 talents and 40 abilities and 30 cooldowns. It wasn’t designed for this gameplay because this gameplay, at its core, is not WoW. Not really - it’s masquerading around as WoW but it’s not.

WoW is an MMORPG and being an MMORPG means community, world, content, and combat.

So what does Blizzard do?

They make the zones empty by putting nothing of value in them except for the player levelling

As you go through World of Warcraft you are unlikely to encounter any player that is of any value to you. You do not need them for anything. You can’t use them for questing, you can’t use them for grouping for dungeons, for talking, for guilds - they’ll come from other servers - there’s just nothing going on here.

And once you walk away from them you’ll never see them again because all the servers are merged.

On top of that, the game actively encourages you to roll your character on a dead server. It even auto-selects one for you so you don’t even know what just happened.

It is a terrible and lonely experience top to bottom.

They pigeonhole you into a single questing experience and blocks you if you fail to do some particular thing - in this case it’s often the slash commands

It doesn’t matter what you want to be or what you choose at the character selection screen - you are sent to that blasted island. You get absolutely no connection to your race or class, no feeling for what and who you have chosen to become in Azeroth. It’s such a lazy zone it is almost surreal.

On top of that this zone is linear and blocks you repeatedly. If for some reason there’s something you can’t figure out you just can’t do anything at all. Doesn’t matter if you’re great at 10 button rotations - you can’t figure out how to do /pet? You’re locked out of the game permanently. That’s it, goodbye.

So in order to fix this Blizzard fills the UI with tons of yellow boxes and alerts, holding the player’s hand to such a degree and in such an unintuitive way that it becomes irritating.

They have you play very old content before you get to the new stuff

Once you’re finally done with this awful introduction experience you dumped straight into a mountain of outdated content that has received no love and care for up to 15 years.

Playing “the new stuff” doesn’t have to mean the Dragon Isles. It just has to mean that Azeroth isn’t left in absolute tatters. I’d much rather these .7 patches were spent improving the core experience of playing the game outside Dragonflight instead of giving me a zone I’ll enjoy for 6 weeks.

They make the combat incredibly difficult to grasp.

The keybinds are very bad by default. The interface cannot deal and cope with players getting 20 buffs, the visuals are a compelete mess to work out.

If you want it easier or you want it harder you have no options. Every mob is scaled to your level and that’s that. There is no sense of progression or power growth.

If you are not the sort of player that Blizzard were thinking of then you just don’t get to enjoy yourself.

You know what happens when you give players 29 effects on the class and 25 on their spec tree? And then a bunch of baseline abilities and trinkets and set bonuses? What happens is people have 60 things going on, and everybody’s confused. How is a new player supposed to figure this out?

It’s so, so bad.

I hope nobody seriously thinks that boosting is going to fix this.

They’re also not going to fix this with more crazy UI elements and weird overhauls with a few exceptions. If it could be fixed that way we’d all have fixed it with addons, but we can’t fix it.

They can’t block the player with a linear gameplay loop. We’ve got this giant open world - we should use it!

Blizzard should give us some explanation as to our origins - what and who we are. Give us some world, update it.

Why all this tutorial stuff? Why all this handholding? Don’t any of you here realise that all this handholding is how we got here in the first place? You’re blocking the player to hand hold it, making it impossible for that player to do what it wants to do.

Also, what’s the sense of discovery here? Why are you telling Blizzard to tell the player everything opponents do? I just had someone a few days ago tell me how I was probably against reactive combat because I wanted to get rid of a few procs because obvious the bosses weren’t going to do anything surprising? Well, obviously not - the game tell the player exactly what they do before they even meet them!

It’s time to OPEN UP this game and its world and draw people in without blocking them all the time and to make things clear and understandable.

What about our UI panels? Why is the spellbook so big? It’s just wasted space. It worked perfectly fine in vanilla though I do like the professions tab. Talents is way bigger than it needs to and it’s got accessibility problems. Achievements, same thing. The quest log is the map. It actually shows up as the quest log! How are people even supposed to discover the map? I guess they’re just supposed to be lucky and randomly press L or M. Hey let’s have some group finder stuff. 3 tabs on the bottom, 3-4 tabs within the first two, 4-5 selections within each one. Where’s the world? Why are we fiddling around with all these panels? Collections panel is HUGE.

I completely disagree with your approach. Your approach is Blizzard’s approach taken to the next level. It hasn’t worked for them, and it won’t work for you. It doesn’t matter how far you go.

The reality is that this game is confusing because it is confused. WoW has lost its way, and so anybody who plays it lose their way, too. The problem is not tutorials…

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This game needs a pvp and pve tutorial as soon as you hit level 70.

And combat addons need to be disabled, instead in game ui improved.

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That’s a silly take.

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Random HC dungeons became very easy when that was implemented compared to before it was implemented, lmao.

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Look how badly arena is taught, trinket, CD and DR tracking which is the essential core of the game is not in the default interface at all, despite Blizzard making a great interface for AWC, and PvP modifiers aren’t on your tooltips. How are new players meant to get through that

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The silly take is thinking a primitive game like WoW needs guides and tutorials to be playable, or that their presence makes a game more engaging.
Tutorials are a failed concept btw. They mean a game isn’t intuitive enough for players to figure out while playing it.
The only teaching experience for most people is when they fail, but content like that was deemed elitist and banished into endgame, so KEKW.

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I don’t think it’s Blizzard’s job and if you are being a guide for a reward it’s the wrong reason all together.

I am a guide because I like to help people and it’s more than teaching people how to wave to Gor’groth. Yes that quest needs rewording so it’s more clear what players have to do.

There are a huge amount of resources out there for players and guides frequently point new players in that direction.

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Hc was always easy lol

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I didn’t say I want to be a guide for a reward, Puny. I just say we shouldn’t be there to pick up the shards of what Blizzard is too lazy to fix.

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:joy: :joy: :joy:

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“UI is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.”

Same goes for gameplay. If I see a game that starts with “finish this tutorial before you can play” I hit alt+F4 :rofl: :rofl: :joy: :laughing: :sob: :sob: :face_vomiting:

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The whole point is that blizzards design sucks, which is why we need properly tutorials :nerd_face:

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Such a great post. I could not agree more especially about the UI, which is the biggest offender.
Some roles like healing are impossible to perform without addons like healbot