So the Ghostcrawler blog post is interesting. I don’t really have a problem with anything he’s saying. I’m not necessarily opposed to working on harder encounters…I don’t have a lot of time (in wow terms at least!), which means I don’t tend to get much of a chance to do some of the real glass chewing. It may be that I’ll look back on the EZMode LK days as my favorite time…when even a noob with crap skills could gear up to the point of actually being able to run ICC a few times just for kicks.
This, however, is something that I see as being a bit off:
There is only a very small number of people that are going to actually approach these encounters as a puzzle. Most people are going to let the hardcore players/guilds figure them out first, and then as previous posters suggest, they’re going to look them up on Wowpedia or whatever.
By making these encounters predictable (the fact that the fight is essentially set in stone for all players) means that these encounters will almost never function as a puzzle for 95% of the player base. It will function only as a task to be learned.
It’s the difference between teaching yourself how to solve a Rubik’s cube and looking up the method online. How many people have ever bothered actually even looking up how to solve a Rubik’s cube? Even fewer just figured it out on their own.
If they really wanted these encounters to be a puzzle, then the encounter would be different every time you played it! Every time you would have to learn what the boss was doing and adapt. The particulars of the specific parameters of the fight would be associated with the dungeon lockout or whatever I suppose, so you could certainly keep trying it over and over with your group for the week if you wanted. So for instance sometimes the boss would knock you back when he did ability X, sometimes he wouldn’t. If he didn’t then he would probably silence everybody on ability Y.
That kind of design mechanic has several critical weakness though:
- Some of the variations would almost certainly be easier than others
- PUGs would be almost impossible
- RAIDs would almost never get to “farm” status until they learned all (or a significant majority) of the variations, something that would just take even more time.
My point is that you can’t say something is designed to be a puzzle if the foregone conclusion is that a very few people will actually “solve” the puzzle and then everybody else will look it up. Imagine Sodoku being a game where you bought a book of puzzles, then looked up the answers online and simply filled them in yourself. Thankfully wow fights aren’t quite so mechanical as that…even just learning something somebody else already solved is fun and difficult.
But I really think they’re getting to an almost Planck limit to what they can do with the design here given the constraints of the game. It’s almost like you can’t make this content any more fun without making it too easy and you can’t make it any more difficult without making it less fun.
I guess in the end all I’m trying to say is that I think there’s limits to what they can do. They seem to be trying to dial everything in just so and frankly I’m skeptical that it’s even possible.
None of this should be taken as a complaint. I’m having a great time and I’ll play whatever content they’ve got until I stop enjoying it then I’ll quit…just like every time :)
Long story short, no design is going to please everybody. As usual.
