ill keep this short:
you are wrong mate.
edit. but ill write a long version if you wish so. All for the community! ,p
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Il wait patiently to know why you need 50 keybinds to do +10s and a couple of mythic bosses.
People generally don’t ask for help. They do stuff to invite people who want to try to help.
It’s like when I see someone struggling I just help them. I don’t want to stand there thinking “Well they didn’t ask for help.”
On my Holy Priest I think I have ~35 abilities. I’m not a keybind person or a Mythic-level player, so I just use the default 1-9 hotkeys and click the rest. It works for me.
But it is a lot of buttons.
On top of those ~35 abilities I’ve got another ~25 buttons for mounts, potions, Hearthstones, food, Healthstones, toys, and other things that are often-used.
It’s a lot of buttons.
I struggle to think of any game I play or have played, that has utilized as many buttons as WoW does. Even in RTS games it’s very rare that you operate with that many different buttons that do different things, regardless of whether you’re playing the Protoss, the GDI, or the Persians.
And I mostly just play my main character in WoW! It turns into a rather ridiculous scene once you factor alts into the mix. I wouldn’t know how to even go about playing my Druid right now, not because the gameplay would be more challenging than on my Priest, but because I wouldn’t remember what the buttons are and where they are. There’s just too much to easily remember, especially if you don’t keep up with it on a daily basis.
Pershaps rather than asking why a player needs 50 keybinds, the better question is to ask Blizzard why they need to design the game to include so many buttons. Why is that?
What most games do today is that they have a design limit on buttons. You see that in MOBAs and ARPGs. You can have a total of 4, 6, or perhaps 8 buttons or something like that, and then you’re typically allowed to choose from a greater pool of abilities and talents. That’s where the customization comes from. That design allows for infinite expansion, because you can always add more abilities and skills and talents, because for the player it only translates to more customization as the number of abilities they can use at any time is unchanged.
WoW has never defined its own design space in this way, so whenever Blizzard adds an extra ability or talent, then that directly translates to an extra button for the player because our characters can use an infinite number. There is no limitation.
That’s also why Blizzard themselves have gotten so hesitant to add more stuff to our characters in recent years, because even they recognize that stuff just piles up on our actions bars if Blizzard don’t clean house every once in a while.
It’s ultimately not a very good design. It’s reflective of a time when Blizzard were just trying to one-up EverQuest by having more of everything – more zones, more quests, more abilities.
But today that kind of “piling on” design is not very elegant.
At this point I’m getting flashbacks to this wonderful episode of Johnny Bravo from Cartoon Network when I was a kid:
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I’m sure you’ll still like Johnny Bravo as an adult. I still like the show.
Have you seen the one where he accepts it’s time to just let go and move on? It’s a classic.
Globber…I’m not sure why you feel the need to stirr the soup. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with seeing someone write that they have pain in their hand and telling them that you’ve experienced something similar and dealt with it by investing in a particular mouse. The good Samaritan behavior? You do you.
What I said was that telling people to quit the game because they voice any kind of criticism about it is crude and absolutist in approach, and is about as helpful as Johnny Bravo above.
There’s a difference between the two, and I think I’ve extended enough olive branches by now to allow you to place yourself in the former and be happy about that.
So stop stirring the soup.
That’ll be $25.
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Its not about the amount of buttons. Its about the APM.
Now that you mention RTS and MOBA games, you are aware that Starcraft and LoL is played professionally at 1000 APM. Its such an insane speed that professionals are like football players: After 30 they are physically destroyed.
Its a design that requires brain. Pressing AAAA 300 times per minute requires reaction time. Pressing ABCD 60 times per minute requires brain. And THAT is the tradeoff. Because it IS a tradeoff.
And that is where you are wrong about all this. You consider these things in isolation. And the games that have few buttons usually require high reaction times. And if you think raids and M+ are “hecktick” and full of stuff to react to you should play some of those games you give as examples.
Like Darktide. Its a game with 4 buttons. Literally. But you have to spam them 400 times a minute, and if you miss-calculate a dodge by 0.1s and you are instantly dead and the game is lost.
So I disagree. 50 buttons is so much better than ALL the other alternatives. My wrists appreciate it. And its much less frustrating to play.
I think it’s a combination of the two.
Cookie Clicker has insane APM, but it’s hardly an overwhelming experience because of that.
Over time WoW has only advanced toward having more buttons and more abilities, and it’s also increased the pace of combat. That’s obvious if you compare Classic WoW gameplay to Retail WoW gameplay.
[quote=“Uda-uldum, post:48, topic:569951”]
Its not about the amount of buttons. Its about the APM.
Now that you mention RTS and MOBA games, you are aware that Starcraft and LoL is played professionally at 1000 APM. Its such an insane speed that professionals are like football players: After 30 they are physically destroyed.
Why must all discussion with you always center around who’s right and wrong? Why can’t it just be an exchange of opinion? I have my conviction and you have yours, and then we exchange thoughts and see where we differ and where we think alike? Why must you always be 100% right and everyone you reply to be 100% wrong? Doesn’t it get tiring to operate that way around here? Every thread and every discussion you have to tell other people how wrong they are and how right you are, again and again.
Anyway, I said that the design wasn’t very good because it’s not built to last. That’s obvious by the way that Blizzard have approached it. Even though the design allows for infinite expansion, then Blizzard actually doesn’t utilize that aspect themselves – because even they seem aware of the fact that button bloat and homogenization and complexity become more real as the number of abilities grow. So what they tend to do is to rework classes and specs and talent systems and prune or redesign or consolidate abilities so the total class design is kept relatively contained.
Power creep, basically.
The way to avoid that is usually to define a design space that you work within. Blizzard have never done that. They just go by their gefühl, but as a consequence you don’t know what you can expect your class to look like in the next patch or expansion. It’s completely random.
In other games the design space tends to be defined, so you always know you can expect to have 3 lives, 30 cards, 6 abilities, or similar.
Of course with WoW the genie is out the bottle, so to speak, so Blizzard can’t just massively change the game – it is what it is. That is after all the lesson they’ve learned since they did try.
Here’s how they outlined their own pruning plan back in Warlords of Draenor:
"Over the years, we’ve added significantly more new spells and abilities than we’ve removed, and the game’s complexity has steadily increased. We’re to the point now where players are starting to get overwhelmed, sometimes feeling like they need dozens of keybinds (in a few extreme cases, over a hundred). While the game is loaded with niche abilities that could theoretically be useful in some rare scenario, in reality, many of these are barely used at all—and in some cases, the game would simply be better off without them.
For Warlords of Draenor, we decided that we needed to pare down the number of abilities available to each class and spec in order to remove some of that unnecessary complexity. That means restricting some abilities to certain specs that really need them instead of being class-wide, and outright removing some other abilities. It also includes removing some Spellbook clutter, such as passives that can be merged with other passives or base abilities.
This doesn’t mean that we want to reduce the depth of gameplay or dumb things down. We still want players to face interesting decisions during combat, and we still want skill to matter . . . but we can achieve that without the needless complexity in the game now, and we can remove some of the game’s more convoluted mechanics while maintaining depth and skill variety."
So they recognized the problem back then, but players ultimately didn’t like the solution, so now they’re stuck in this no-man’s land where their design is perhaps best described as being random in nature. They go by gefühl.
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No one told OP to quit as far as I remember. They said take a break and that they didn’t need to play.
Quitting WoW isn’t absolute. Even if one deletes their account they can make a new one.
Tomorrow I could quit WoW forever and then make a grand return on Thursday. Then delete my account and be back on Thursday evening.
We’re not moving into a discussion on semantics Globber. We’re just not.
Have a good night, and thanks for the chat. For all it’s worth, I did appreciate it. 
You are correct. There’s no “we”. You and you alone did that from the start.
I hate semantics. Most of conversation is based on context, pretending to not understand the context in which something someone has said is something that I don’t do.
In one of the languages I speak both subject and object can be omitted if context dictates.
I feel like in my last 2…3…4 replies to you I’ve tried to end on a somewhat positive note to close out the conversation in a respectful manner, but you are strangely persistent in being confrontational to a point.
I respect that.
And it’s Gloober, not Globber. Sorry about that.
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I didn’t notice the typo. It’s said brains autocorrect for us.
From me it’s all love. It seemed like you wanted to clash swords and that’s what we did. No ill will on my part and hopefully people reading enjoyed the show.
Big ups everyone. OP I do think an MMO mouse will help you, your casts will still stop when you move though.
Yes. And when Vanilla was a thing you had Age of Empires with its 10 APM play-stile. And now you have SC2 with 1000 APM.
Times change. Players change. Its not surprising. And its not “good or bad” like you claim. Its simply “old and new”. Thats all.
And be careful when comparing classic. Because it EXISTS. So if that playstile fits to a particular player more, he can always play that. No need to change Retail.
You post your opinion as if it was a fact. With a whole analysis of Retail and a historical trip “to the past” and how things were better back in the day.
Here is an analogy:
- I like M+. You like Raids. Thats OK. Its simply an opinion.
- I like M+. And because of that everything should be like M+. And I claim the game would be 100x better if raids were more like M+. That is not OK. Its not an opinion anymore. Why? Because the statement is false! You like Raids just the way they are. So how would making them like M+ make it better for you?
I simply hate making debates about changes to the whole game, a game where millions of us play, using as an argument what would be better for ME the individual. Our singular opinion that is extrapolated to the whole playerbase. And the excuse to do that is “its my opinion”.
WoW is a seasonal game. Of course it has power creep. Like ALL seasonal games. Forget about talents and ilvl for a second. Think simply of levels. We would be level 250 by now if they did not prune the power creep every once in a while.
And why is it seasonal? Because like ALL multiplayer games it requires constant changes. Otherwise it becomes stale. What does stale mean? It means that it dosent matter how many buttons you press. If you press the same ones for 2 years in a row it becomes boring for anyone and people stop playing.
Its not surprising. It has happened in the past. And it will happen again. Its built into the system. And its OK. Not according to ME. But according to you. Because you claim it was “better” in the past. Well in the past we also had power creep. And it also got pruned. No issues there.
The design is not random. Its just not committed. Because the playerbase will not accept compromises, and are too centered on their own personal PoV of the game.
You see it in the recent balance tuning changes for next week. Those changes are 100% focused on Raid performance. And they try to compromise with other game modes.
But there is only so much they can do. Now, and in Vanilla and all expansions in between.
And the main issue is the player-base. YOU and people like you. That are never satisfied with any compromise. And never want to evolve, where “everything was better in the past”. And the funny thing is… that Blizzard tried to compromise even that. Giving Classic WoW.
A game mode that the “classic was better crowd” refuse to play. And are still here. In retail. Pressing their 40 buttons and paying their sub every month.
I think what’s different with WoW is that the players don’t change. Or rather, they do – they get older.
WoW isn’t a game filled with zoomers. Most people who still play WoW are veteran players, the average age probably being somewhere in the 30s.
Blizzard’s balance is to make Retail WoW a modern game, but also a familiar and recognizable game to those who’ve stuck with it. Blizzard can’t deviate too far from WoW’s origin, or they risk alienating their core playerbase. And that goes both ways – it’s also why Blizzard can’t redesign the game to be console-friendly under the guise that “times change”.
I’m not arguing changes. I said as much in my last reply, that Blizzard have learned their lesson from last time they tried to make changes (Warlords of Draenor).
My argument (as I agree with the OP on this) is that WoW has a problem with ability bloat and homogenization and complexity and power creep and a lot more that falls under the umbrella of buttons, and that it simply is so.
There’s no solution, there’s no fix, there’s no change, there’s no reverting or changing course or anything. It simply is. WoW is stuck with being what it is, warts and all.
But what I would also make a point of, is that it is an issue. WoW is not a hallmark of game design in the industry because it has excessive button bloat across its class design. Other games aren’t copying WoW’s design here. There’s no round of applause for Blizzard’s designers. Other games’ gamers aren’t looking at WoW with envy and wishing they had our action bars.
It’s not though.
A Seasonal game that has it built into the system would be Hearthstone. It has a defined design space. The deck size and health pool is fixed and the amount of cards introduced in each Season is fixed, and Seasons are part of Years, and after each Year cards rotate out to make room for new cards, and you have a standard format and a wild and so on.
The design of new content basically slots into the above system of systems and it all follows a natural designed progression where cards to go into the game, stay for any period of time, and then cards go out and new ones come in.
WoW is less of a system and more, as I said, a gefühl sort of entity where Blizzard’s designers feel their way into the unknown on a case by case basis. Because they don’t have a defined design space (with regards to class design and buttons). It’s pretty random what happens in patches and expansions. Good or bad, there’s little system to the approach.
It’s why people beg for class changes on the forum, because they don’t know what to expect from Blizzard.
That makes it random then, if only by consequence.
Suggesting that I am the whiner who’s held Blizzard back for years forgets the fact that I’ve been their biggest fanboy and whiteknight for decades. And it was the same then as it is now. So that’s simply not true.
But I will agree so far as to say that the player reaction to the pruning Blizzard did in Warlords of Draenor was overly negative, and that surely caused them to reevaluate their approach, ending up with – as I said – something more based on gefühl.
Yes. Its players that generally have “brains” but dont have the APM they used to have. Those are their “core players”.
And they are players with money. If you dont offer entertainment they will do something else. Because they have plenty of options.
So YES. They should deviate from the “WoW’s Origin”. As much as possible. Because those 30 year olds are not 15 years olds anymore. You give them what used to be and they will play something else. They changed. So should the game.
And why is that something bad? Because it is not.
But EVERYONE wishes to have a game that has been alive for 20 years. And they tried to copy that formula. MANY times. And they all failed.
Now wow. Still alive and kicking. Because even though they have done mistakes in the past, it remains a dynamic game that offers long term entertainment.
The season in Hearthstone is different because Hearthstone is a different game. WoW is a different beast. We have gear. We have talent trees. Tier sets. Borrowed power… ect…
It is built into WOW. And if you want to make a proper analogy you have to use similar games as well.
No. Choose a random integer between 1 and 10. That is random. Trying to choose integer 4.5 with a convoluted equation using 4 and 5 is not being committed.
There’s a balance between innovative and conservative design, but the criticism levied here at Blizzard is that they’re adding more buttons to the game and increasing the pace of combat when what’s desired by an aging playerbase with less appetite for stress, is the opposite.
The fact that Blizzard leans more into the APM spamming combat anyway, is because they want to appeal more to the 15 year old gamers. And then they simply hope that their veteran players will tolerate the change. They want to have their cake and eat it. Understandable from a business perspective, less admirable from a game design perspective.
Because we’ve been through it in the past and it was generally seen as bad.
I would wager that’s why Blizzard don’t hurl 15 new abilities at every spec in every new expansion. They know where that road leads, because they’ve been there. We all have.
If that wasn’t so, then they wouldn’t act with restraint with regards to class design, but they do.
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zero playability.
Therefore, new players do not join.
First, you are assuming that “the pace of combat” is somehow high. 60 APM is NOTHING compared to other games out there. Especially the popular games. And second you are extrapolating your PoV to the “player-base”. This APM/button discussion is absurd because they are intertwined, and because its a personal choice. NOT general design.
But either way. This is the gaming market right now: If you want to use “your brain” with low APM then you get wow. If you want high APM with low brains you do Darktide, CoD, LoL, ect… And if you want neither you have Farmvile.
So you cant have a “farmville wow”. Or should not want one. Because the playerbase, while “old” are still gamers. You cannot entertain a 30 year old gamer with Farmvile. If you could, they would already be playing Farmvile.
And as I said many times: Those few that do want a “wow farmville” can always play in Classic. If indeed its such a draw to the wow playerbase blizzard would notice a million players in the classic servers and do a 180 in design.
But just by comparing classic server population estimates (including all its versions) ONLY with how many M+ keys are being run… I can already see that those who prefer a “stress free” game are orders of magnitude fewer than those who do.