Upcoming Addon Changes Will Break Healer Playstyles

[Ishayo-tarren-mill]

@Uda-uldum

But you said most quests were yellow. And not intended for cooperation.

That’s not how vanilla works… ?

@Uda-uldum

Thing is. Sharding was put in place because most servers were underpopulated.

No, most servers were underpopulated because of a migrationary effect called urbanisation.

If you make the cost of moving to the big city low (such as through paid character transfer), people will move there until it fills up. In WoW, the urban city was split in two but congested like one city, leading one to drive out the other (faction imbalance). When they removed the congestion through CRZ/sharding, which is the actual reason for sharding, all remaining disadvantages fell away. Nearly everybody migrates to the big city leaving the countryside (aka small towns) a proverbial ghost town.

This isn’t a good thing, but people do it due to chains of chains of friendships, especially in a world where you can’t play with friends from other servers. If they hadn’t locked down playing with people in other servers that you already knew, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened, but it did.

So when it happened, Blizzard didn’t close down any servers, and here we are.

@Uda-uldum

Please clarify. Are you talking about the first element (bumping into players) OR the second one (doing something with them).

You need both of them to work, it’s… I’m not talking about any one of them in isolation when asked why the current open world system isn’t working. It would be an incomplete explanation. Both have to work for the system to work, if one of them fails they both fail, and worse still one of them failing actually causes the other to slightly fail, too. For example, if your server is empty there aren’t anybody in the world to group up with, which kills elite quests and social bonding, and if there aren’t any elite quests or tagging then you don’t need to bond up with them anyway and other players just start being in the way.

@Uda-uldum

83% of players simply pay a sub and dont play. Sounds weird.

They played. They just didn’t play for 240 hours on a single character

Remember also that in vanilla the subscription numbers went up over time because Blizzard stopped selling the game several times due to a lack of servers. A lot of players bought it in the last few months of vanilla!

@Uda-uldum

Stop comparing the year 2004 with the year 2025. You cant. You simply cant.

Oh yes I can, and I will. Those are two numbers, not two different universes. The world did change, but humans are still humans.

Anyway, Blizzard announced about a day ago now that they’re closing SoD and making “new photographs” for a vanilla experience.

Which basically confirms they’re doing Classic+. Good chance of exactly the way I wanted it, too.

Finally, the levelling we all deserve. I’ll play retail for its endgame and classic+ for its levelling, and not the other way around. The other way around sucks.

[Dorphin-argent-dawn]

@Uda-uldum

Its not a correct comparison in any way. Plus… all this philosophy bores me.

Brushing off what I said as “philosophy” or nostalgia fluff is super reductive. You’re responding to a critique of design ethos (which is inherently a philosophical discussion btw) with tech trivia and a strawman about Aztecs.

I’m not asking for 2005 to return (lol), I’m pointing to a directional shift in how the game relates to players. The “vibe” is not a static historical artifact. It is about intention: a world that feels alive vs one optimized for throughput. Now if that bores you, fair, but it’s definitely not beneath the conversation.

@Uda-uldum

With out specific examples, specific quest-lines… and a PROOF that its not YOU that plays like a “treadmill” in Retail but the game that forces you to play like that… then whatever metaphysical concepts you talk about are useless.

By dismissing this as metaphysical you actually unintentionally acknowledge that we are talking about something super fundamental here. Also, you are asking for proof in a discussion about vibes… It is like asking for a blood test to prove someone enjoyed a sunset. The data that is valid here is community sentiment, gaming trends and design patterns over time, which I touched upon.

@Uda-uldum

What events that happend out of the blue?

I did not even mean the in-game calendar or planned events like Gates of AQ. I meant spontaneous events that just took off from people getting together, like lowbie escort caravans through contested zones, cross-faction duels in Hillsbrad, roleplay nights in Goldshire (yes! on every type of server!) etc. These are not scriptable.

@Uda-uldum

The pool water did not turn into Red Bull. The pool was simply torn down and replaced with a pool that meets modern standards. With regular water in it. And people feel nostalgic for the old vintage pool “vibe”.

And now I am arguing with people trying to explain to them that Asbestos in the ceiling needed to be removed, and you cant continue to heat the pool water with coal. None of that meets modern standards.

Great imagery actually

You say it’s still a pool with water, okay, but when the so-called modern standards involve Adderall- or Concerta-infused water jets, blaring achievement horns announcing the swimmers, and every swimmer flailing like they’re in a Jacuzzi ad having a panic attack, yeah, technically it’s still swimming, but is it? It’s more like drowning… in sensory overload.

The greatest swimmers are great breathers. So yeah, there is no longing for asbestos ceilings – good riddance! It is just that somewhere along the way, the pool became a wild rave… and the game (and the players along with it) forgot to breathe properly.

Remember to breathe! Diaphragmatically! (they should have that as a loading screen tip!)

@Uda-uldum

First, game-play is not “efficiency”. Its gameplay.

The transfer topic is too long to take on right now so I’ll just comment on this:

In modern gaming, efficiency and gameplay are pretty much the same. Throughput and viability/balance matters more than narrative immersion and “sensation”. Some have said something along the lines of “the soul has been optimized out of the game”. Even the joy of mastery seems to be missing, as we just follow the guides, sim-tools and highest parser logs.

And the counter-arguments in the style of “it is your choice to play like that” are like “you do not have to wear a suit to a job interview”… Yeah, you don’t, but your social (or vocational) capital decreases. You often get vote-kicked, derided and mocked.

The game rewards conformity with what the upper echelon dictate, through speed-based content, performance metrics and social approval. They are all intertwined. Failure to comply means that, yes, you can BREATHE at your own pace, but now you are not allowed in the pool and cannot swim, and get labeled a casual, noob, baddie, etc.

Also, delves did not heal anything, only delayed the inevitable.

But I hope: Soon™.

[Nazak-silvermoon]

While I don’t use an addon for healing like vuhdo or cell but I do believe that people who rely on them should be allowed to use .

We are all build differently so more choices is always good .the notion that one size fits all is wrong .

Let people use whatever they want to .

[Uda-uldum]

@Ishayo-tarren-mill

No, most servers were underpopulated because of a migrationary effect called urbanisation.

OK I agree. You gave a reason as to why Urbanization happened. Makes sense. It happens in the RL as well.

And the result was 40 min waiting list in some servers, and no players to play with in others. And the more time passed, the more the problem became more extreme with less “grey zone” servers. And faction imbalance just added more to the problem.

So. You described the cause for population imbalance in servers. Agreed.

But we are not discussing the cause (at-least I am not). We are discussing what solutions to that problem were implemented. Which in this case is Sharding.

And in a world where everything you do (even not doing anything) has consequences, both good and bad… Sharding has overall better “good” than “bad”. Because all the “playing with others” philosophy of old Vanilla is useless if you got nobody to play with. Either because you wait 40 minutes to log in. Or because the server is empty and there is literally nobody there.

@Ishayo-tarren-mill

For example, if your server is empty there aren’t anybody in the world to group up with, which kills elite quests and social bonding, and if there aren’t any elite quests or tagging then you don’t need to bond up with them anyway and other players just start being in the way.

Step 1: Find someone. If you don’t find someone, its irrelevant how many elite quests there are. Or if the game encourages you to party up or not. Blizzard can make the game super “social incentivized” but if you don’t find people to play with, all that is worth nothing.

Step 2: Do something with that “someone”. That is where Blizzard can design the game. And I agree. More elites, more dungeons, stuff like that. And there are plenty of those in Retail as well. And you are incentivized to party up in quests as well.

And then there is the “player factor”. Even IF blizzard designs its game with parties in mind… its up to the player to type in the /say that they want to party up. If they dont want to, regardless of how many people there are… there is nothing blizzard can do. And FORCING people to socialize to achieve a goal never ended well.

So there is a bit of responsiblity to the player to actually engage socially. And all those M+ “toxicity” posts kinda prove it. People do dungeons as if they were SP games treating others as NPCs. That is what I mean by “forcing people to socialize when they dont want to”. And there is nothing blizzard can do to prevent that.

@Ishayo-tarren-mill

They played. They just didn’t play for 240 hours on a single character

You said 17% of PLAYERS. Not 17% of characters…

Thanks for clarifying though. The number makes sense now.

But even then. What this means is the following: People made 1 main. And then did some alts that they never actually managed to level up. Because leveling is so annoying.

That was the #1 complaint people had in Vanilla actually. People liked questing once. But twice? Too much work. They saw the quests already. The panoramas were seen already. And now, they wanted to power level an alt really fast because they initially chose a Hunter but turns out that a Warrior plays better in level 60 content. For example.

It happened to me. I initially played a Warlock. And quickly figured out that Vanilla was all about Rogues, Warriors, Priests and Mages. Everyone else was “accessory” at level 60. So I leveled up a warrior a 2nd time. But this time, the experience was not as “incredible” as it was for the warlock. The cracs started to show.

And that is what Blizzard addressed. That is how we got to the Retail you know today.

@Ishayo-tarren-mill

Oh yes I can, and I will. Those are two numbers, not two different universes. The world did change, but humans are still humans.

Oh yes they are different universes. And humans do change over 20 years.

You are still you. But today you are 40. Before you were 15. They could have been 2 different people.

Someone born in the 2000s that “grew up” with a 2010 society has nothing to do with me. Born in the 80s growing up in a society of the 1990s.

We are not better or worse. Simply. Different. That’s it.

[Uda-uldum]

@Dorphin-argent-dawn

It is about intention: a world that feels alive vs one optimized for throughput. Now if that bores you, fair, but it’s definitely not beneath the conversation.

You misunderstood me. When we talk about blizzard “systems” those “systems” will apply to every single player. Every single one of us.

FIRST: And the problem with “philosophy” is that people (you included) put too much of their own personal opinion and tastes into it. And that is no grounds to have a debate at all.

Because what it turns into is “I like red, you like blue” type of discussion. While we are pretending on discussing about something as fundamental as “game design”.

SECOND: You have no idea how easy it is to talk about “non-specific” topics. And we can do that all day. But if we were to imagine their implementation in real quests. Real dungeons. Real systems with currency and mechanics… one quickly realizes that its not as easy to implement as the “philosophy” thought it was. So we essentially wasted our time!

And believe me. I see these type of discussions in RL ALL THE TIME. To give you an example, there are elections for Mayor where I live. And people are debating if there should be a 2nd swimming pool in our neigborhood.

People talk about “wellness of the elderly” and “sport for the community” and things like that. But turns out, the pool we already have is empty, nobody goes. AND… WHO will pay for that 2nd pool? With what money, and WHERE would we build it… cause someone’s house is getting expropriated to build that pool on…

You cannot have a debate like that. You have to see: WHY are people not using the 1st pool, and if maybe something can be done about it. And 2nd… people have to be aware of the real-world consequences of debating things based only on “philosophy”. Because once you decide on the topic, there is no way back out of it with out a hefty price to pay.

@Dorphin-argent-dawn

I did not even mean the in-game calendar or planned events like Gates of AQ. I meant spontaneous events that just took off from people getting together, like lowbie escort caravans through contested zones, cross-faction duels in Hillsbrad, roleplay nights in Goldshire (yes! on every type of server!) etc. These are not scriptable.

And they still happen today in Retail. ON TOP of scripted events.

Why dont you make a toon in an RP server and see it for yourself. Your point being?

That is why I always say that people put too much of their subjective opinion on “philosophy” and the actual facts get blurred out.

@Dorphin-argent-dawn

You say it’s still a pool with water, okay, but when the so-called modern standards involve Adderall- or Concerta-infused water jets, blaring achievement horns announcing the swimmers, and every swimmer flailing like they’re in a Jacuzzi ad having a panic attack, yeah, technically it’s still swimming, but is it? It’s more like drowning… in sensory overload.

Sensory overload according to YOUR personal opinion. According to everyone else… its OK to have a SPA in the pool. My grandma appreciates it.

That is why you should be careful not to include your own personal opinion when describing things about the whole game which affects everyone. Cause not everyone shares your opinion.

@Dorphin-argent-dawn

In modern gaming, efficiency and gameplay are pretty much the same. Throughput and viability/balance matters more than narrative immersion and “sensation”.

That is literally players themselves that do this.

You think I play RShaman to optimize the minute details of this game? NOPE. I play RShaman because I wanted a healer that fit the “Orc Thematic”. And an Orc Priest is literally the worst thing I can imagine. A perversion. That is why there is a Cathedral in Stormwind and not in Orgrimar.

Its also maghar orc with white hair because Uda is supposed to be the mother of Zavia (green orc, and my former main) that stayed behind in Nagrand while her daughter crossed the portal in WC1. She was compelled to help the Horde in BFA cause her daughter was captured by the Alliance.

And simultaneously I min-max this toon for M+ keys. So what is it? I min-max or I dont? You see how we can spend all day arguing about “non-specific” philosophical and metaphysical arguments?

So I insist. You are not taking into account that others have a different opinion to you. Or all they grey zones in between.

Therefore. Whatever argument you give to describe a system that affects us ALL, has to be exempt of your own opinion. OR… you have to argument it in such a way such that it makes individual opinion irrelevant.

[Dorphin-argent-dawn]

I think you might be missing the point about what “philosophy” here is. It’s not just random opinions or “I like this and you like that”. That’s not what is going on here or in any real discussion about foundational aspects of the game’s forums. It’s about asking why things are the way they are. What kind of play is being encouraged, what kind of experience and world is being created and what are the side effects. It’s all absolutely foundational. Philosophy precedes the very systems we take for granted, it is not just useless yapping.

And of course, obviously I have a subjective view, so does everyone, including you. That’s literally why we’re having this conversation. Not to pretend to be objective gods of game design, but to reflect on what the design is doing and how it’s shaping the players and so on. And the difference between an opinion and reflection is huge. One is an impulse-based discussion terminator, the other is rooted in pattern recognition and analysis of experience which facilitates further discussion and the presenting of more different viewpoints. I believe I have done well in that regard and have not stifled the conversation in any way so to just tell me I am being subjective and am being too philosophical speaks more about your inability to offer counterpoints or lack of desire to carry on, not about the weakness of what I said.

And this idea that “real systems” make reflection useless? That’s backwards. Systems come from philosophy, as I said before. People design based on what they believe is good, fun, viable, fair, engaging (important concept these days in gaming and elsewhere). So by ignoring that layer, that part where we question those very beliefs, the crux of the matter I should say, makes the whole conversation come to a standstill.

If anything, I would say the problem is not too much philosophy, but that people have this distorted simplified idea of what it is: how in Monty Python Socrates did not know whether to hit the ball or not, Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” and yada yada… But in actuality, and in our current context of discussing WoW, it enters the stage when discussing design goals, reward systems and the values they encode in players… And what are the trade-offs of opting for one design approach over another. Philosophy ALWAYS operates in the background.

It is far from being abstract babbling here. Unless you think the following questions are irrelevant:

what kind of world does this game create?
what kind of player is it meant for?
what, if anything, is being optimized and at what cost?

So actually it is super far from being a “I like red, you like blue” discussion, but rather something like “why are all the walls painted gray now?” while the answer offered is “That’s just how it is”.

[Tah-earthen-ring]

@Dorphin-argent-dawn

but rather something like “why are all the walls painted gray now?” while the answer offered is “That’s just how it is”.

More like “why did the staff (Blizzard) let the lunatics run the asylum for so long and why did they actually institute systems to support them?”.

[Uda-uldum]

@Dorphin-argent-dawn

what kind of world does this game create?

The one you see. What is wrong with it? Specifically? Orgimmar needs a revamp? YES it does. Storyline of TWW is lame with lame characters? YES it is…

Is M+ generally speaking in a good state? Yes it is.

@Dorphin-argent-dawn

what kind of player is it meant for?

For those playing the game. And yes. I do say it that way.

Because you can be a min-max swetlord and have something to play. Or you can be the most uber-casual solo player on the planet and STILL have something to play.

What’s the issue? I dont get it.

@Dorphin-argent-dawn

what, if anything, is being optimized and at what cost?

Optimized what exactly? Dungeons? Raids? I dont feel any of that is optimized.

As Tah sais so many times, its up to YOU to spend time optimizing stuff. The only content I am prepared to admit that its designed with “swetlord min-max” in mind is super high en content. High keys, Mythic Raids… those things.

Everythign else? NOPE.

@Dorphin-argent-dawn

I think you might be missing the point about what “philosophy” here is. It’s not just random opinions or “I like this and you like that”.

Let me simplify here. Lets go back to the analogy of a pool full of Gator-Ade and how that is not “swimming” according to you.

Maybe.

But I am pointing out that the pool is full of people swimming in Gator-Ade and if I ask them what their opinion is on the new “water” they love it. And give some XYZ reasons.

So if Gator-Ade is so bad. Why are people swimming in it? Because maybe the solution to the problems you pointed out is to simply change the flavour of the Gator-Ade in the pool. It dosent have to be water.

And that’s my point. And have you seen that nowhere on that statement did I mention my own opinoin? I never said that water or gatorade is better or worse. I just stated that people swim in it.

Because I am discussing about what other people do and dont do in the pool. Not what I do or dont do on that pool.

[Ishayo-tarren-mill]

@Uda-uldum

But we are not discussing the cause (at-least I am not). We are discussing what solutions to that problem were implemented. Which in this case is Sharding.

Yes, and in my opinion it was the wrong solution. In my opinion the best solution is to just not allow it. At all. If a server has more than a 60/40 imbalance, you can’t join the 60% faction at all. If you wanna play on a different server, you make a new character.

Blizzard can, at their discretion, merge servers if needed. But it wasn’t needed at that time at all.

If you want to play with a friend from another server, you can invite them and see one another in dungeons, and that’s it.

This make the barrier to migrate extremely high, and the requirements to do it extremely low, solving the problem.

@Uda-uldum

Step 1: Find someone. If you don’t find someone, its irrelevant how many elite quests there are.

Making sure you can find someone is part of the game design. This is something people overlook, but the ability to find someone is the very reason for things like the size of a server, the size of the world, etc.

@Uda-uldum

You said 17% of PLAYERS. Not 17% of characters…

I did, and I stand by that. 17% of players had at least one max level character.

I don’t care if you think it makes sense or not. I know it’s the case, because I asked people who actually had the data. tBC was developed to split the playerbase into 3 servers; that obviously wouldn’t have made sense if nearly everybody had max level characters, now would it?

@Uda-uldum

And humans do change over 20 years.

No. Not really.

@Uda-uldum

You are still you. But today you are 40. Before you were 15. They could have been 2 different people.

Oh, like that. I meant humanity, not individuals. If WoW was still as good as it once was, they’d have new 15 year olds playing it. Look at Pokemon!

[Chigabiga-silvermoon]

Instead of banning addons it would be better to provide proper optimisation of the game, make better storytelling, fix all bugs and glitches, maybe do better work with class balance, add some new character customisation (for example body type, I mean not “one”, and “two”, but I mean add some body size changes (not about only, plus size models)

[Broduin-silvermoon]

@Chigabiga-silvermoon

make better storytelling

Storytelling is not something they can improve by throwing more money at it. Based on experience the opposite even happens often, where a corporation becomes really big, and then their stories are overly sanitized and lame

[Chigabiga-silvermoon]

There are tonns of characters from previous addons, which still kept in “sleeping mode”, and they just non-stop adding new ones, if to speak about them, let’s look 30 years ago, there were characters (not all of them, but still plenty), which were used in expansions 10 and 20 years later, maybe it’s time to find place for fresh blood and stop parasitism on old names?
I don’t remember, if Alleria existed in WC 2 beyond the dark portal, but Turalyon was

[Exiasee-eonar (Exiasee)]

@Ishayo-tarren-mill

Yes, and in my opinion it was the wrong solution. In my opinion the best solution is to just not allow it. At all. If a server has more than a 60/40 imbalance, you can’t join the 60% faction at all. If you wanna play on a different server, you make a new character.

On the other hand, I am of the opposite opinion, that the use of more aggressive forms of the “Tenacity” buff in Wintergrasp and the current Warmode buff is the ideal solution. Allow players to join any faction and create a larger imbalance, even 99%. In response to that, buff everything the underperforming faction does that isn’t related to combat (exp gains, gold gains, gathering material gains, Hearhtstone cooldowns, reduction in repair costs etc.), spawn NPCs of the underperforming faction in the overworld that defend players who get attacked by the overrepresented faction, implement “world buff” type of buffs for the underrepresented faction etc.

In general, make it so that if the faction imbalance becomes large, the underrepresented faction gets so large bonuses that players flock to it for those bonuses, evening out the difference.

[Ishayo-tarren-mill]

Don’t mess with or make the gameplay unfair. Just lock it down.