Blizzard announced in a blue post how they’ve retracted their decision for the Valor Point downgrade for the upcoming patch. It was a good move on their part since, as I had mentioned in a previous post, it wasn’t a well thought out plan that differed too drastically from previous expansions.
However, this move doesn’t solve a long term issue in Blizzard and games like D3 and World of Warcraft, which is that they essentially have become massive grind fest. In the case of D3, it’s apparent that they’re slowly moving away from that model with the introduction of account bound crafted gear. However, you still end up dealing with RNG.
With World of Warcraft, the situation is pretty bleak overall. The blue post described the original move as being “mean.” Indeed, it was but for what purpose? More grinding? More carrot on the stick scenarios where people’s work became invalidated on release day? I mean, at the end of the day, who comes up with the math for these things? What are they based upon?
As I mentioned in my other post addressing this situation, the decision making process is just too schizophrenic from Blizzard. Do you want people to grind or blaze through content? I think what ends up happening is that they look at data and forum posts to make all their decisions. However, I think from a gaming point of view, this isn’t such a great thing compared to say an online store. The problem in not having a great vision/model of what you want to do is that you end up setting incorrect expectations.
Obviously, games do need to evolve along with the player base. But World of Warcraft is one that has a pretty strong brand and probably can benefit from better overall and long term vision. The game does have a fairly long history with several expansions that has provided tons of data and feedback from the community. However, the game feels like it’s such a state of flux all the time, it becomes really frustrating.
Specifically, in this instance, it comes back to the whole “blazing through content” that the parts of the community and Blizzard perceived in Cataclysm. I think the concrete problem with Cataclysm was the emphasis on rebuilding old areas as opposed to focusing on new ones. That expansion had very little life in it on a whole so “blazing through content” was going to be the end result no matter what. I mean, let’s face it: people wanted more content faster. That doesn’t mean they want the content itself drawn out. They simply want to see and do more things.
With regards to patch 5.2 and the previous downgrade idea for Valor Points, it feels that Blizzard just wanted everyone to move at the pace of turtles. If that’s the case, why even bother putting out a new raid and new zone this early into the expansion? Patch 5.1 didn’t have much consequences as patch 5.2 because there’s no real pressure for a new raid. We simply got more dailies and a few gear upgrades.
Patch 5.2 offers a new raid and gear, which puts pressure on the community to move into a higher tier of progress. However, I read one post which mentioned that only a little over 1% of the population has cleared Heroic Terrace of Endless Spring. I know quite a few guilds that barely can get through Heart of Fear. And in seeing the new raiding content, I suspect that most guilds will end up struggling for a while.
As a result, the downgrade in Valor Points pretty much was a proverbial middle finger in everyone’s faces. It’s a horribly mixed message that essentially caters to only the most hardcore players. And it again shows Blizzard’s inability to decipher their true audience.
Now, people will say, “Isn’t their true audience the hard cores?” Not if they’re just 1%. You can’t support a monthly subscription based game on 1%. We saw that with Sunwell. There’s a precedent that’s been established. And I’m not talking about just raiding mechanics. I’m talking about how gamers are expected to behave in this game.
Despite all the criticism, I thought the model for patch 4.3 was pretty good. The assumptions made about the player base was mostly fair. The three Hour of Twilight instances were done well (although monotonous after a while) and were based on the idea that you can do them over a lunch break. That’s a good basic premise (although it’s skewed in that people shouldn’t really be playing a game during lunch if they’re working). Also, LFR was good and the general VP system was good. It had really good balance for someone who had limited time and needed to schedule their play time to weekends.
The current model is not good. It’s quite punishing in fact. With Blizzard admitting the Valor Point downgrade being “mean,” it reveals that perhaps there’s some malicious people in the company who enjoy forcing people to play the game 24/7 like some of those streamers.
But the thing is that a model like that isn’t sustainable. You really have to allow people to get away from the game otherwise it poisons them. The people vouching for a system like the one currently implemented in Mist of Pandaria are those that seem to have this nostalgia for being immersed too heavily into the game. There’s a high probability that these people were indoctrinated into the game before work (if they are working that is) and live in that world.
However, that’s still not going to scale in the end. You can capture certain moments once but in truth they’re only going to be there for so long. The game engine is aging and the model that started the game has to evolve. The grinding aspect in particular is just too painful and Blizzard needs to wake up and realize that there’s no reason to enforce such a brutal system on it’s players.