Ion Hazzikostas vs. MMO Game Design 🤦‍♂️

Community General Discussion
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I agree with that philosophy. Remember, that Blizzard is a laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarge corporate train where changes has to be “ok:yed” on several placed before they’re even testet.

I do however agree that maybe they’re taking the mmo/story part too serious and on the expense of gameplay. For instance, they could add Chromie and let us play old raids and dungeons on max level for loot. However, the amount of balance this would require is absolutely insane, and most likely the reason they’ll never do anything like that.

Unless, super AI is able to balance the entire game, with every item, spec, class, boss, dmg, hp both for pve and pvp.

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No. Here’s what horozintal game development would do. It would bloat the amount of content you have to do exponentially. Right now, there is one raid you have to do. That’s it. You have to know the mechanics of one set of bosses, you can raid 2-3 times a week and you’ll be fine. You have to know 8 dungeons at a time, with their m+ paths, their weird intricacies. It’s a manageable amount of content. On top of that, it keep the population focused.

If they develop the game horizontally, all content will be relevant. This sounds good on paper, until you realize that for some reason you need to do one dungeon out of 100, and you can’t find a tank for it. So what you need is undoable. You need to do one of 20 raids, and good luck getting a raid for that. It will dilute the population.

You also run the risk of new expansion content dying, simply because the raids and dungeons are more challenging and intricate than old ones. If the development is truly horizontal, there’s never a reason to do new content beyond getting the achievements and moutn rewards. So… no.

Other MMOs add persistent mechanics - they add paragon levels, they add new talent trees, new skills, instanced housing, so many things. Other MMOs keep the amount of skills and talents the players have static, but every now and then, they completely rework the classes to make them feel fresh. What Ion says is simply not true and there’s an infinite number of MMOs that prove him wrong.

The problem is that many of these mechanics and progressions work because other MMOs have restrictions and WoW doesn’t. In Allods Online, there’s a progression system where you get your Greatness. This Greatness unlocks dualspec for you. It only works because dualspec is not a baseline feature of the game. Greatness in that game also means you get the ability to shape land, which leads to a new system where you create your own island in space. It is instanced, with a castle on top and dungeon on the bottom. You can customize the dungeon and other players get to try and clear it. Them dying gives you resources.

In Allods, you also have reincarnations. These are characters contained within your character. It takes a while to unlock reincs. Then you need to level a reincarnation from 1 to max level. Once you do it, your main will gain access to a skill, based on the reincarnation’s class. You can have all classes as reincarnations, and your main (and all reincs) has access to one reincarnation skill at a time. You literally get rewarded for leveling alts. But the balancing factor of this system is that leveling takes quite a while. In WoW leveling is almost instant.

There’s also the “soul experience” leveling. Soul exp. is awarded for doing endgame activities and the soul talent tree consists of small bonuses - some increase your rewards from specific dailies, other talents are just… a mount, there are some fun ones. It’s not for power, but it is there.

But the main point is - WoW can’t have any of those. Because it is an unrestricted game. Because where in other games you have to earn your convenience, in WoW you get everything unlimited and uncapped as baseline. In WoW, you simply have nowhere to progress. Take flying - it could have an interesting progression around it, but it doesn’t. Everyone just gets it at level 40 I think. Then in the Shadowlands, you just get it automatically with everyone else. It’s a HUGE missed opportunity.

There is no other MMO that is as quick, as accessible and as uncapped as WoW. And there’s a reason for that. You cannot have interesting progression when the player can do everything instantly.

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Umm Ion is a lawyer. He is only there because he was a “high end” player in Everquest back then, that makes him a better game designer, than me, who also plays a game?

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I think there’s a happy medium. You make it horizontal enough that a good chunk of content can be relevant at once, but not so horizontal that all content stays relevant forever.

You make it horizontal enough that people don’t get completely thrashed in PvP, but vertical enough that enemies can present an insurmountable challenge that can be overcome with more gear, meaning we get a progression through the world.

tBC and WotLK just got this right. Especially tBC got it right.

And Blizzard is just sitting there like “Well we haven’t changed it since Cata so it’s not worse than it used to be”.

Like… yeah? That’s kindda the point - it’s been messed up for ages.

Each season of modern WoW has as much gear progression as tBC. All of tBC, mind you. The whole lot of it.

It divides players into “have’s” and “have not’s” and creates a really toxic environment. It forces Blizzard to add insane and obnoxious amounts of scaling to everything.

I don’t like the way it works. I don’t think anybody does, really.

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Here we’re in agreement. It’s not really fun that when 9.1 comes out, Castle Nathria might as well be deleted. It will immediately become completely irrelevant. But you know what also got it kinda right? BFA. The Eternal Palace was relevant until the end of the expansion because of the essences that came from it. At the end, it was easy farm, but it was an alive raid that people did for things other than vanity.

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You’re trying really hard to not see my point then. That’s clearly an issue when the new player experience is so overwhelming that they have no idea what’s happening.

Nope, because there always was one relevant at a time. What you offer is to keep everything available on the same level, which means rather than farming the current thing you pick out of dozens of options the one you want to farm. Why bother doing the new content is the old one is faster and offer better rewards ? You’re “unique” argument doesn’t work if everything is unique.

That’s basic logic right there and yet you fail to see reason.

This kind of thinking is so disconnected from reality that it doesn’t surprise me that you can’t understand my point.

Blizz moved that they could barely balance the game with a few unique items added to the mix. What you offer is to have dozens of lot hundreds of “unique” items relevant at any given time, of course there’ll be synergies between then and an absolute best set for any given spec, that’s a given with today’s community tools.

Unique is yet another word for unbalanced.

If the current game is unbalanced because players find synergies between their spec, covenant abilities, soulbinds and Legos, I can’t wait to see what a full set of unique items with cherry picked progression systems in a world of “everything relevant” would look like.

You’re just adding layers of complexity with barely any control over the output, just for the sake of it.

It wasn’t removed for balance concerns tho

Yeah let’s insult all those raiders who struggle to down a boss at first but which made it easier over the course of progress thanks to the gear they got from it…

Are you pruposefuly acting like a fool ?

Because yes, for example a 200h time investment to get started in a game is not a good design. That’s a player concern.

Yeah you’ll just need to farm those 15 “unique items” spread across a dozen instances and grind a few cherry picked systems. Wow that’s so much easier than merely farming the current tier ! /s

Once again you’re selling a utopia without taking into account what it actually means to have dozens of raid currently on farm, with hundred of “unique” items.

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Disagree. It was a lucky streak and the farm was too easy for its own good.

The expansion also shouldn’t open with just 1 raid. MoP got that one right. But if it opens with more than 1 raid, then this season system will make it very stressful if there is more than one - which is why this whole season thing should be a PvP thing.

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Yeah, nah.

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Everytime i read a thread like this about the ideas of these self proclaimed saviors of WoW, i’m just glad that Ion is the lead designer and not them.

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My main issue with gear seasons is that they make the game too game-y and less of an RPG. They have their benefits and downsides. The benefit is that you can join in the middle of the expansion and soon you’ll hit a “reset” on endgame progression. The downside is that gear seasons kill content too quick and encourage too much gear progression within one expansion.

Blizz absolutely did not intend to keep TEP relevant, it was an accident. But I liked it. I love raids, to me they’re the main attraction of the game and more raids would be very nice. Parallel progression can be part of the raid and progression design, too. Where you kill some bosses in one raid, take that gear to the other, where you kill some more bosses, then you go back to the first and finish it off, etc. I think the one raid is for seasonal structure purposes, race to world first, focus and it’s basically too… game-y. I want an RPG. I don’t want arcade game modes and ranking and all that.

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You can be sure that Ion is aware of the sinking ship. Don’t be surprised if he leaves Blizzard soon.

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Yeah, WoW is dying since Classic we all know it. This will be the last expansion, just like TBC was, WoTLK was, Cata was, also MoP killed WoW, and after that WoD killed it as well, etc… This time it will definetly happen.

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You are very good at logic. You got accurate conclusion from people’s words.

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Thanks mate <3

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Not really, you just fail to use language to communicate properly and deliver your point :man_shrugging:

New player experience doesn’t start with all the systems and content being dropped on their head confusing them. Instead, the new player experience is based on a gradual introduction into “endgame” content and systems.

Besides, almost any amount of content accumulation can be confusing to a new player so complaining that someone might get confused is not really a valid argument because there is always someone who gonna get confused regardless of the amount of content while most people will just research games and learn what to do.

You are literally doing strawman argument…

For example:

Who said everything will be unique? I didn’t so who did?

Regardless of what I say you just invent your own narrative and then you are defeating that false narrative but acting as if you were defeating my argument :rofl:

There is nothing disconnected from reality about various enemies having various vulnerabilities which players need to find and exploit.
If you forgot WoW initially did had a small system revolving around player elemental resistance which to this resides in race passives. Mob elemental resistance is just another part of that system that was never used in this game but was used in other games.

So I’m not disconnected from anything but rather you have a limited point of view.

So? Even 1 stat item can be unbalanced :man_shrugging:

Right, because someone lacking skill is an insult. What are you, a SJW agent?

Idk, you tell me since your response is kinda foolish since we talk about dev time investment and you suddenly bring up player time investment which wasn’t the point at all.

Just because some items are cool and some aren’t it doesn’t mean that you need to get all the cool items just to progress.

See, this is the issue with you. You just assume the worst things as if nothing else could happen or straight up invent a negative narrative just to make a response and disagree about something.

Such a waste of time to talk to people like you.

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I’m gonna keep it very short.

The reality is that you cannot have everything relevant.

If you design a set that increases your defenses, and also offense, and you have another set that does only offense, then it’s pretty clear which is better.

If you wanna dps, and you can choose between a defense set and an offense set you will ofc choose offense.

About interactions, i am all for it, specs need more interaction between abilities, and to reinstate at the very least the artifact abilities as baseline.

But about no vertical progression? Yea, no thanks.

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I’ll simply return your own words

But let’s at least finish that one properly

And how long would it take for a new player to “gradually” be introduced to 15 years of content and features ? How much time and investment will be necessary just to get an overall idea of what’s available to them ?

Are you seriously arguing that a singlet raid per tier is even remotely comparable to 15 years of content ?

So that’s perfectly fine to spread the playerbase across dozens of raids and confuse players with more than an hundred instances because some will be confused regardless ?

How is that a straw man ? Unless every item has the exact same stats there’ll be a mathematically “best” solution, just like there’ll be a faster or easier raid. No matter how you may sell it as “various vulnerabilities”, there’ll be a bloat of instances and thus a best solution to get whatever is offered against whatever vulnerability you may offer.

That’s not a strawman, that’s logic.

And if there’s one thing to know about the wow community, it’s that they’ll find a way to optimise everything and this will become the common practice of the playerbase.

The WoW playerbade built dozens of add-ons to optimise their performances, down to paying 3rd party websites to get the simulation of their entire character in various setting in order to obtain their theorical DPS and the impact of every single piece of gear in their gear… Just to tell which item is an upgrade and to which extent.

To expect that playerbase to not focus on the most efficient farms or best items and instead make full use of your “everything is relevant” version of the game is indeed disconnecte from reality. And since that reply had nothing to do with my point, congratz you used a strawman right after crying about a fictional one.

… Vanilla raids were all themed around a given resistance and every vanilla mob had handcrafted resistances values, up to complete immunities in some cases.

Nice try with your “if you forgot”.

Back to my initial point them : You want to keep all content relevant with unique items, which means that there’ll a bunch of synergies that will scale far higher than any other and completely outshine all other rewards. That and the previously mentioned playerbase and you have most of the content ignored in favour of a selected few which drop these items.

You’re the one bringing Dev time in the table as if it had any meaning when we’re taking into consideration a decade of work.

I’m talking about how much time is required in your idealistic game to just be relevant, with the items you need being most likely (because that’s what you expect right ? Can’t have everything in the same raid) spread out among multiple instances, all with different strats to learn etc.

You asked for issues in your suggestion and that’s a glaring one. Progressing through a single raid takes weeks for a guild, how many players would go through a dozen so that a single player is finally up to speed ? That’s basically where BC failed with attunements, most guilds didn’t bother to run every heroic for new players so that they could join them in the raid progress. And that’s why attunement were mostly removed from the game.

And then add a bunch others to the list because another spec needs a slightly different item from another raid and you’ll end up having to learn dozens of boss starts from multiple raids…

Now just how hard would it be to get the items you need on an alt with the entire playerbase spread thin across dozens of instances ? It’s hard enough for some specs to find a slot in the current tier, just how hard would it be with a drastically reduced number of players interested in the raid you need to clear ?

There’s only so many hours per week a player can afford to spare and an overwhelming amount of content is not the solution.

Especially if that content is there to be grinded for years until everyone is sick of it.

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My problem with WoW is that the game is not really expanding, at least I can’t call this expanding…

Instead of building a world of Warcraft I feel like they are just putting new stuff over it, not developing the world… They are making expansions matter too much instead of the whole game.

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Not really, these days you just run the hidden system check. It will give you an error code and you google it. Or you buy one of those fancy computery devices that mechanics have and get even more data.

I can already hear people cry “That’s only for new/expensive cars”… mm’yeah even my janky 12 year old Opel Astra has a ‘hidden’ menu. And last summer it told me exactly why the car couldn’t start anymore. :>

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I do not speak for anyone. I simply stated an obvious fact and a flaw in your logic.

yet you state

Vertical power gain is not most important nor even required for people to want to play and enjoy the game.

But you clearly do attempt to pretend to speak for others. Whatever you spout is quite frankly far from anything resembling a fact. Vertical power gain is the most important part of the game for a large part of the playerbase. Just because you cannot comprehend that doesn’t mean it is not.

What people think they need is not necessarily what they actually need so your claim that is somehow essential is completely out of your bum pal :sneezing_face:

And who tf are you to tell others what they “necessarily” need instead of what they feel they need? You’re no game dev expert, you don’t even play the game at a decent enough level to comprehend half the mechanics. Get off your high horse lmao.

That’s why in horizontal power progression you are introducing ways to modify power to achieve different playstyles and thus different gameplay experience rather than play one predetermined set up all the time :roll_eyes:

And it would still get boring because there would be no long term powergain. People plays MMOs to progress and get stronger, not be at the same powerlevel forever. Except games like GW2 where transmog is the real endgame.

You keep repeating it but so far all your conclusion are based either on a lack of understanding of the topic or a very naive and narrowminded point of view.

It’s funny you talk about lack of understanding with the experience you have with the game. And don’t even get me started on being naive and narrowminded. You’re the one who’s set on your own agenda and everybody else appears to be wrong while you fail to see outside your own bubble that whatever you proposed for the game is straight up idiotic and will not work.

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