Wow development philosophy

Community General Discussion
21

They in fact have to throw what legion brought In the bin and that can easily be achieved by chucking off borrowed powers.

By doing so, Blizzard will solve most of the current issues :
-You don’t have to timegate if there is nothing to gate in the first place.
-You don’t have to rework and waste time on reworking some powers if there are none of that in the first place.
-You make the game more accessible if there are no layers of systems that are as complicated as a B737 cockpit simulator.

That being said, class design should be their priority since they’ll have to design classes around classes rather than some kind of unwanted system.

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22

So very much this! Borrowed power feels so horrible. It’s fine in instanced content, like a dungeon or raid if we get buffed by a powerful lore character to help overcome a challenge, but outside of instanced content we really just should be the humble adventurers we used to be.

23

It is possible.
MOP catered very well to most playstyles. As a casual mainly open world player I had plenty of enjoyable content. I only did LFR (a little flex with my guild before it disbanded) and I enjoyed that but I’ve seen many comments from more experienced raiders saying they thought MOP raids were up there in terms of some of the better raids in the game. I didn’t do much PVP either (some for the cloak questline) but I also see a lot of comments saying the last time PVP was good was in MOP.

We had rep grinds (maybe too many or too linked to power) but they were fine. There were other non-mandatory grinds.
We didn’t have convoluted power systems. We had a cloak and some gems and these lasted the entire expansion.

The game philosophy changed in WOD where dailies tasks became the way to play the game. Log in and do your mission table, do your building work orders, clear your garden and mine, check for traders or explorers league visitor to you town hall, check the scouting map for the daily missive, do you Barn traps, Lumberyard logging, stables hunting or whatever.

I hope the era of WOD - Shadowlands will be left as its own era and we move into a new era from 10.0 onwards.

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24

I always struggle to imagine the desired gameplay loop without borrowed powers.

I assume that borrowed powers refers to stuff like The Artifact Weapon, Soulbinds, Renown, The Netherlight Crucible, and so on.

Okay. Let’s say that’s no more.

So now you have a new expansion with 5 zones and storylines, 10 dungeons, 1 raid, 5 reputations and a myriad of world quests. Plus the usual battlegrounds and arenas.

So let’s say the expansion releases and Jito goes through the 5 zones and hits max level. Then he does a mix of dungeons and world quests to get reputation and gear. And then he clears the raid.

Now what?

What more is there?

That’s the problem WoW had in the past, and why these borrowed power systems were introduced. You didn’t have any meaningful character progression at max level beyond getting the gear and clearing the content. Two relatively easy goals to complete given the timeframe of a tier.
People were spending most time idling in the major cities, because there wasn’t any reason to do anything besides the weekly guild raid to farm the bosses for that 1 piece of gear you were missing for BiS.
It was too easy to be done.

If you’re just going to remove all these character progression systems – borrowed powers if you will – without adding anything new to fill the void, then you’re basically just cutting and arm and a leg off of WoW. How’s that improving the overall game experience?!

What am I not seeing here?

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25

The Golden Saucer.

WoW needs more in the game than just character power progression.
Minigames
A proper player housing system
Guild Halls
Better professions and make them meaningful.
Smaller questlines telling other stories and expanding them instead of just hard focusing the main storyline.

I’m sure there are hundreds of fun ideas you guys can think of other than just chasing that ilevel number behind reps, timegates and goldsinks.

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26

Likely there is a new content patch due. Back in MOP first big content patch was the Kasserang Wilds factions with dailies there. This had the story of the Bell being stolen and Jaina kicking the Sunreavers out of Dalaran.
And then we had the Isle of Thunder and isle of Giants. Plenty to do there.
Then we had Timeless isle which kept us entertained for quite a while.

But if you’re fast and there’s not content patch due or it’s the end of the expansion and you have a six to nine month gap, you have:
You do your professions. Level your mining, blacksmithing, fishing, cooking etc. MOP had a lot to do here.
You leveled an alt.
You did the achievements of the expansion, which had finding trerasures, killing rares and other activities.
You farm old raids for mogs and mounts etc.
You PVPed.
You just found things to do. It’s a big world out there, find things to do. That’s the point of an open world mmo game.

2 Likes
27

A few things worth noting here.

It costs a heck of a lot more development resources to make a player housing system than a soulbinds system. So it’s not like you can just say to Blizzard that you want player housing and guild halls instead of soulbinds and renown. That’s not a 1 to 1 trade.

Borrowed powers add a lot of gameplay value for very little development resources whereas these art-heavy content additions like player housing or guild halls would quickly eat up the entire development budget for an expansion (as The Garrison did).

Secondly, where’s the evidence that players are actually interested in doing minigames? I mean, WoW already has a lot of minigames littered around here and there, but I’m not exactly seeing people engaging in them much at all.
Even something like The Darkmoon Faire – which is minigames incarnate – has always been more of a lukewarm afterthought than something players were really invested in and excited about.

Players are driven by rewards. That’s why they keep chopping through the same Shadowlands Dungeons and Raids every week instead of going back to Mists of Pandaria and doing some Scenarios for the cute storylines and quirky minigames.

I can’t.
I mean, over the past 17 years Blizzard have tried quite a few different things. We have everything from The Darkmoon Faire and The Dance Studio to Mini Holidays with Balloon Rides and some old Pandaren singing on a beach, and players don’t really care much about any of it. It’s the character-power-driven content like raids, dungeons, arenas, and so on, that drives the engagement. It’s always been that way.

But those content additions were structured around grinds. You would just take the Artifact or Azerite grind that revolved around a weapon or necklace and replace it with a currency or reputation grind that revolved around your gear. That’s MoP. And that’s effectively also what you’re getting in Korthia in Shadowlands. You go there every day, do the objectives and quests, and get a little more reputation and currency that ultimately gives you gear and gear upgrades. Just like MoP.

So it’s the same design, just with a different appearance.

But do you seriously think that today, if someone gets through endgame and there’s months until the next tier comes out, that they’ll be satisfied to just do a bunch of old and fairly irrelevant gameplay?!

If that was the case, then why wouldn’t players be happy to do that today when they’ve got nothing to do in Shadowlands?! Evidently it’s not enough to say that people can just go and fish or farm old raids.

Because they’re quitting! So clearly those things don’t count for much at all as far as keeping players engaged in the game.

28

I never said it’s 1 to 1, and frankly I don’t care. As a player I give feedback on what I like and what I don’t like. It’s not my problem how much dev time or resources Blizz want to budget to each aspect of the game. Simply if they want to make a good game then they should put in the work and resources to do so and not cheap out behind arguements like if we do x we can’t do y because resource… pft weak arguement.

Quantity over quality, and again I don’t give a crap about budget. Just cause something is easy to do doesn’t mean you should do it.

I’ve seen pleanty of evidence over the years on the forums that people like it. I’m sure you have too. I like minigames/. Darkmoon fair is a sorry attempt at proper minigames. Take FF14 for instance, card games, mahjong, jumping puzzles, chocobo racing, last one standing competition, weekly lottery and much more. All very popular.

They don’t have to be, it’s just that that is all WoW offers.

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29

But then there’s no point to discussing the topic if we just ignore everything that detracts from our argument.

I mean, I can also easily imagine how WoW could have more gameplay value without relying on borrowed powers. Just make 10 zones instead of 5! And 20 dungeons instead of 10! And 2…no wait, 6 raids instead of 1!

But that’s ignoring the reality of the situation, namely that WoW’s development team has a fixed size and their combined resources amount to a WoW expansion with roughly the number of stuff we’ve had in the last many expansions.

Alas a new WoW expansion is going to be roughly the size of the ones before, and if you want some new feature added, then it sort of has to come at the expense of something that already exists. It’s unrealistic to assume that Blizzard can just magically increase their productivity when there’s no precedence for assuming that.

But quantity is also quality in WoW. The expectation from the players is certainly that WoW is a game that you should be able to spend a lot of time on, so it’s not enough if WoW just has 1 really high-quality dungeon. Players expect to play the game for more hours than a single high-quality dungeon can support. So 10 decent-quality dungeons is kind of preferable, because you get more gameplay value out of it, without sacrificing all of the quality.

What evidence have you seen that WoW players have enjoyed and heavily engaged with minigames in WoW over the years?

The only one that remotely comes to my mind is the weekly fishing tournament that used to be quite popular. But that wasn’t so much because of the joy of the fishing tournament itself, but rather because of the reward it provided if you won – which was very unique and lucrative.

Other than that I can’t recall anything.

But what are your examples?

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30

If borrowed powers wasn’t a thing i’d focus on alts but the amount of stuff you have to do too even get started makes me not even wanna bother.

They’ve also already laid the foundation for both guild housing and player housing with garrisons. Imagine if they actually improved on it and combined aspects of both garrison alongside the farm from MoP and focused on the customization and player expression.

31

I do think borrowed powers make my raiding and M+ experience worth, by taxing my time outside of those content to get in there. It’s like I have to play 8 hours of openworld content so that I can raid 6hours. What the hell is that ???

I can. This one being aboot adding more permanent content rather than desining disposable activities.

Yes, borrowed powers is being used to point what are temporary character powers that are being thrown away once the follwing expansion pre patch launches.

Now ? Hum, they could have added more permanent features in Legion, BFA and SL, so that you get to do more content. For instance, I do wish Blizzard does not kill thorgash, I want them to iterate upon.

That’s improving the experience because players would then play alts. I used to maintain multiple characters, which I no longer can’t, because the time I used to spend to maintain 2 to 3 chars is now equal to 1.

Content can get better longetivity if players can play alts. Nowadays, because of those taxes and barriers, players are just quitting upon being done on their main, because they have nothing to do but they’re not willing to play alts because it’s too damn obnoxious and unfun.

Also, I do think it feels bad to grind for something, to grow a power to then being stripped off. It kinda reminds me of adults taking a way a toy from a toddler’s hand in a creche, he would cry, rightfully so. It’s quite the same with Legion borrowed powers, I feel like that blizzard took a toy away from me for no valid reason.

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32

I can’t imagine that. I’ve read a ton of threads about player housing and I’ve never been sold on the idea. And neither have Blizzard. That’s why they made The Garrison and not player housing, because housing without gameplay-driven design doesn’t make sense in WoW – which is a gameplay-driven game! The notion that players will happily ignore and discard any pursuit of character power in favor of getting a new sofa or putting up curtains for their player house is – to me – ridiculous.

I choose to believe that what drives WoW players is the pursuit of more stats, more epics, more talents, more stuff that makes their character powerful.

If others choose to believe that WoW players are driven by the pursuit of Sims-like housing customization and social roleplaying interactions, then fair be it.

But we’re going to disagree with each other on that.

Like I said to a previous poster, then this assumes that development resources grows to your needs. They don’t. They are finite. Blizzard makes expansions of the size we’ve been given for the past many years. That’s what they’re capable of making with the resources at their disposal.

Those resources allow them to make a handful zones, a dozen dungeons, a single raid, and one major and medium gameplay feature.
That’s what Blizzard can make for an expansion.

If you say that they should just make Torghast (medium feature) and Covenants (major feature) permanent, then guess what? That’s it for the next expansion. That’s the entire development budget right there. Then you just get the Shadowlands palette of stuff all over again.

That’s why Blizzard chooses to make features like Warfronts and Torghast into expansion-specific features, because then they can have new features for each new expansion!

They can’t just keep piling on with more permanent features, because they’re limited by the development resources they have available. And they are not infinite!

Power creep is a thing. I know Blizzard have said that they want to lean more into permanent power additions, but there are still limitations.

Imagine for a second that you had kept your Artifact Weapon and all that came with it.
And your Netherlight Crucible.
And your Heart of Azeroth.
And your Soulbinds.
And your Renown.
And whatever comes with the next expansion.
And the next one.
And…

It quickly turns into chaos and our characters end up as amalgamations of crazy powers and perks and abilities and a mish-mash of random crap.

That’s not good design.

All Live games that revolve around character power have to deal with power creep somehow.
Most games do it by having resets. Either as WoW where the reset comes in the form of a new expansion, or as Path of Exile and Diablo III where it comes in the form of a new Season.
But you can’t just pile on infinitely. The underlying design isn’t built to handle that. Guess why WoW had to implement the number squish to begin with? Because of power creep! The numbers just get bigger and bigger. There’s no stop. It’s the same lesson Blizzard learned with class design. If you keep giving each class a couple new abilities each expansion, then what is that class going to look like in 5-6 expansions down the road? Like an obese design disease. It doesn’t work.

And what about the players who aren’t interested in playing alts? You’ve just cut their game experience in half so it’s easier for you to play it twice on different characters.

You’re just sacrificing the enjoyment of one player segment for the enjoyment of another player segment. That’s not a net-positive game improvement. That’s just catering to self-interests.

I agree and I know Blizzard (Ion) has said that they’ll lean more toward permanency for the next expansion, because it does feel more rewarding and satisfying.

But as said earlier, then there are limitations. WoW is not a singleplayer RPG with a definitive ending that Blizzard can balance the game around. It’s a Live game with God knows how many expansions yet to come. So Blizzard has to ensure that the game’s design doesn’t explode in complexity and numbers in 10 years because players just want to let it rip today.

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33

What I’m saying is that they should not dedicate this amount of ressources and dev time to disposable features. In IT, we thrive to make our applications to last long, rather than maintaining those for a couple of years only.

I imagine they could merge teams, so that let’s say covenants teams for spells could be just merged with class teams and features being merged with other features teams.

Yeah, but they could still iterate upon, add content and update those things, instead of just letting those rots.

Which is sad because both warfront, thorgast and visions could have expanded into greater things to do outside of raids.

Then they should learn how to assign ressources.

I don’t think we need major spells every single expansion. Just some minors tweaks.

Yeah, but what if instead classes were designed to work on their own, without those systems ? I feel like the question of powercreeping by stacking systems is asking the wrong question.

They can remove some spells from time to time. I actually liked WOD class design, because even if classes were weaker than during MOP, the amount of spells and the way classes play were actually fine.

I could have said that many players gave up on playing their mains because they gave up on being done. And if I were to be honest, many of my former guild mates gave up on the game on their single char because they just couldn’t take sl systems anymore, from grinding covenant to korthia.

Those systems also negatively impact those that only play 1 single toon.

If at least the current design was actually sastifying for single char players like me…Which it ain’t. The game would have been way better for me without korthia, without conduits ranks let alone shards.

They have to find a balance between the amount of added spells and removed ones. That could be achieved by changing talents every expansion. I don’t know, I ain’t a designer, therefore is not my job to come up with a good workflow to ensure that adding spells won’t create power creep.

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34

yep used to have friends just casually doing casual normal raids, world bosses, challenge modes…uff

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35

I agreed with most of what the writer said up until the point where they lied: “The annoying RaiderIO addon ranks players based on their time spent in-game and luck in groups, rather than their individual skill.” If it was about time spent in-game, I would be one of the top ranked players in the world.

The core problems are:

  • ignoring feedback from the community
  • lack of class balance (which most likely stems from lack of financial investment in development)
  • ignoring feedback from the community
  • sluggish pace of new content release (which again most likely stems from lack of financial investment in development)
  • and did I mention ignoring feedback from the community?
36

I think what Blizzard are starting to do more of, is to make old content relevant to max level players.
We’re seeing that with Timewalking and the recent Mage Tower update.
And there’s been talks of updating Island Expeditions for max level and what not.

But expanding on existing features like Warfronts requires a lot of development resources. Making a new Warfront is a big task. And then the question is whether players wouldn’t prefer something entirely new, rather than more of something they’ve already played extensively?

And Blizzard’s modus operandi is to bet that players would prefer entirely new things to experience, rather than more being added to something they already have experienced.

And I personally like that approach. When I buy a new expansion I want new things to experience. I’d be incredibly disappointed if the next expansion just contained more Torghast. I kind of feel like I’ve had my fill of Torghast by now.

I am not going to speculate on how Blizzard manages their resources or structures their teams. It’s a bit arrogant to sit here as a nobody and do some crazy arm-waving and pretend that I am a know-it-all on matters relating to the internal workings of the WoW team.
I know nothing of that and I don’t think any of us do.

All we can conclude is that a WoW expansion is given size. The size we’re pretty accustomed to by now.
It can get a bit bigger, like Legion, if Blizzard cuts the previous expansion short. So maybe the next expansion will be slightly bigger because Shadowlands is getting cut short.
But otherwise the size of the expansion seems fairly given. So the player wish-list – if realistic – should sort of fit within the constraints of what appears to be Blizzard’s development resources.

It’s a bit of a cop-out to just say that Blizzard should learn how to manage their resources better.

Don’t we already get that? I mean, every single expansion Blizzard tends to change talents and spells and animations and icons and what not for each and every single class and specialization. Some get bigger revamps than other, but everyone certainly gets tweaks and changes.

What I’m saying they can’t do is to add a handful new abilities and a new talent row every expansion. You add that up over 4-5 expansions and it gets overwhelming. That’s what they learned by the end of Cataclysm that just adding more resulted in bloat and homogenization and complexity.

In my opinion, as someone who’s played a Priest since release, then I would bore myself to death if my Priest was unchanged throughout an entire expansion – let alone multiple expansions!
The only reason why I can keep finding my Priest enjoyable to play is because stuff like Covenant abilities and Artifact abilities and tier set bonuses change up the way it plays from patch to patch and expansion to expansion.

Sure, but at the same time, when they did that during WoD the forums were filled with posts about unpruning the classes. So it’s not like there’s consensus in the community on that approach.

Without Korthia I’d have quit 7 months ago.

Again, what works for one isn’t necessarily the same for another.

I suppose that’s Blizzard’s challenge to struggle with.

Just to complicate matters even more, then the concern to adding and removing abilities every expansion is that you end up changing something that some players really like.
I mean, when you think about Blizzard removing and adding spells, then you imagine that they remove something you don’t like and add something super exciting. But it may just as well be that the thing they remove is something that’s really liked by a lot of players (hello Eye of the Beast!), and that the thing they get in return is not very exciting at all.

And there’s certainly no consensus here either. I’ve had discussions with players who consider less than 60 abilities to be catering to the casuals, all the while I feel the game is unnecessarily complex by having even half that amount!

It’s hard to please all.

37 
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/28/#dataset=95

Honestly is not bad, class balance lately has been decent. Enha might look bad but dps meters do not display the 5% dps gain they give on warriors. Destro needs a bit of a buff but the rest is decent. Even then we had destro on our sylv kill so it’s viable.

Balance doesn’t matter if classes are boring. Boring classes is a bigger issue than their numbers.

It’s better, they showed more care with the latest PTR, like a lot. Tier set fixes, redoing systems and rewards etc. Still A LOT more room for improvement so let’s hope they continue on increasing their communication with the playerbase.

38

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/28/#dataset=95&class=Tanks

Honestly i think this is a much bigger issue in terms of balance. Only 6 specs yet the difference is that big and this is not even talking about m+ where paladin damage is so ludicrous and over the top while dks struggle to maintain threat when holding more than 5 targets.

Although there are many fundamental issues with blood dks, like how they play and how they they are reactive.

39

Tell that to the people who play feral druid.

40

This so much!

That article is a diluted, phoned-in mashup of a few random forum threads on any given week.

Considering the source, I might perhaps have expected some insight based on Microsoft’s previous treatment of games. No such luck.

“True” is definitely stretching it. I’m not even sure there are enough statements capable of clear True/False categories to matter. Opinions? sure. Facts? ehhh, not so much.

1 Like