No point in blaming the designers.

#0 - March 16, 2009, 10:33 p.m.

Between the classes changes, the "cater to the casual" attacks, the 10 man 25 man dilemma etc, it seem we are really fast at blaming the designers.

I will be honest I really think it is not about the designer it is business. Wow is an established franchise, there is very few chances to grow it significantly now, and as all game companies Activision/Bliz is now in the "milking" mode. Part of that mode is to reduce the development costs.

I would argue that every single design changes was just meant to reduce dev cost and not to make this or that class happy, casual or hard core, etc... etc...

The 25-10 man paradigm, is just there to reduce the number of instance to develop, less molder, less animators, less sound, smaller tunning and QA crew. Any sensible designer would prefer to get unique content, they know really well it is Boring like HELL to run the same content twice a week once in 10 once in 25. It's a resource issue.

Bring the player not the class + Itemization ? Same deal, smaller set of abilities to tune allow for smaller designer staff, coupled with the new DPS/Heal share gear, or No feral druid stuff. Less item to worry about, less model, less design etc.

Hard mode to keep Hard core Busy ? It's just a way to try to retain some player without spending 1 dime of model , animation, and with a very small design and testing overhead compared to creating a tough encounter from scratch.

All in all, I think it is unfair to blame the designer, this look to me a lot more like production cost and crew reduced to the bare minimum to milk as much money as possible while Activision/Bliz is working on new MMOs.

I'm sure the current live team and its designer do the best they can with the limited resources Blizz left on the project. Any amount of whining will do no good , all we can do is enjoy what we can of the game, while we are being milked.

Ghostcrawler

#4 - March 16, 2009, 11:30 p.m.

Q u o t e:
The 25-10 man paradigm, is just there to reduce the number of instance to develop, less molder, less animators, less sound, smaller tunning and QA crew. Any sensible designer would prefer to get unique content, they know really well it is Boring like HELL to run the same content twice a week once in 10 once in 25. It's a resource issue.

We offer two levels of content because some players just like to raid in smaller groups. It also got pretty boring to run Karazhan every week after the 20th or 30th time.

Q u o t e:
Bring the player not the class + Itemization ? Same deal, smaller set of abilities to tune allow for smaller designer staff, coupled with the new DPS/Heal share gear, or No feral druid stuff. Less item to worry about, less model, less design etc.

Ulduar has more items than all of BC's raids put together, and that's with gear consolidation. Bring the player not the class was to allow groups more flexibility in inviting their friends and to make room for say Demonology warlocks, Balance druids, Marksman hunters and other specs that couldn't be fit into a Sunwell raid because of the inflexibility of the mandatory buff jigsaw puzzle.

Q u o t e:
Hard mode to keep Hard core Busy ? It's just a way to try to retain some player without spending 1 dime of model , animation, and with a very small design and testing overhead compared to creating a tough encounter from scratch.

Hard modes are designed to give very skilled groups something to do while still allowing more casual groups to see the content. Ulduar has 14 bosses. We haven't done an instance of that size since the original Naxxramas, and Ulduar has a lot more unique content than Naxx had. You are imagining a world in which if we had not done hard modes, you would have gotten another entire raid. That is a bad assumption. You would have gotten Ulduar, cleared it quickly, and then been bored again.

Yes, we know players given the choice will always want more content. If we offered 6 levels of raid content, there are still players who would clear it quickly and be looking for something new. Welcome to the challenges of MMO design. :)