tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-826986957606858027.post1147141302429089280..comments2023-06-19T10:45:56.724-04:00Comments on Player Versus Developer: Blizzard Pays For Overemphasizing Item LevelGreen Armadillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15564045048380177626noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-826986957606858027.post-54777830685453253642013-01-23T10:30:25.990-05:002013-01-23T10:30:25.990-05:00If it's not worth upgrading a 496 to 500 &...If it's not worth upgrading a 496 to 500 & 504 subsequently, there is no need to pursue Heroic 502 gear, is there?<br /><br />Upgrading is worth far more than a 2% increase or heroic content wouldn't require a higher gear score. Furthermore, players wouldn't expect a smaller margin for error in the event itself - which is the exact point of harder content.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09473584457694759831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-826986957606858027.post-27312617475033931232013-01-14T20:32:56.855-05:002013-01-14T20:32:56.855-05:00"But the aim of a business isn't simply t..."But the aim of a business isn't simply to lower production costs. If a games company, particularly Blizzard with its reputation for quality, chooses an inferior route because its cheaper the profitability of the product may be reduced."<br /><br />And if Blizzard devoted itself completely unto quality over cost, they would become Copernicus and WoW would never have been. Saying cost should not be a factor because cheap things are bad is as false as saying quality shouldn't be a factor because people need tons of content.<br /><br />The answer in game design, as in food service and airplane parts, is the happy balance of cost and quality.Thurgallnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-826986957606858027.post-49750743693275917052013-01-14T17:29:04.575-05:002013-01-14T17:29:04.575-05:00Bashiok has confirmed that it's just going bec...Bashiok has confirmed that it's just going because they'd rather people spend VP on new items for the new raid tier. The item upgrade vendors will be back in 5.3.<br /><br />http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7592242035#1Talarianhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17684944568000522986noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-826986957606858027.post-76117408280534585232013-01-14T08:13:14.501-05:002013-01-14T08:13:14.501-05:00Also posted in the MMO champion article linked to ...Also posted in the MMO champion article linked to in your article is this:<br /><br />"we all know that even on live things can still change [...] so if a change is urgently needed, we do our best to apply it as fast as possible"<br /><br />If Blizzard has finally decided that the NPC upgrade vendor has to go, perhaps they'll remove him even earlier than 5.2. What would you do if you woke up after the next restart to find him gone?<br /><br />I have some VPs in my pocket that I was saving to buy a new item. I think I'm going to spend them tonight on upgrades instead, while I still can.Dàchénghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02994982502333811797noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-826986957606858027.post-60411859525181185782013-01-14T07:43:46.777-05:002013-01-14T07:43:46.777-05:00Upgrades are a simple answer to a bigger problem: ...Upgrades are a simple answer to a bigger problem: what to do with VPs after you start raiding?<br />When you make all the VP-buyable gear worse than raiding gear (so that it's not "needed"), you have a problem to keep people running dailies and dungeons.<br /><br />Of course, the problem runs deeper (as you have written). The problem is that we're seeing a "return" to cross-pollination across activities, i.e. you need activity 1 to perform in activity 2. Not only this is bot-bait, but it's also a design failure. WoW had been advancing towards activity separation in previous expansions, but did a step back in this one. Other MMOs seem to follow suit (or more precisely, they never advanced in the activity separation). The genre will not implode simply because it still provides very good entertainment for the cost (even more so with F2P).<br /><br />@Bhagpuss: <i>The prevailing winds are blowing in other directions</i><br /><br />Ah, really? All I see in the new F2P trend is an even more grindy gameplay, which can of course be convenently skipped by paying....Helistarhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01435861741164342377noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-826986957606858027.post-31438341381383422352013-01-14T05:52:35.539-05:002013-01-14T05:52:35.539-05:00But the aim of a business isn't simply to lowe...But the aim of a business isn't simply to lower production costs. If a games company, particularly Blizzard with its reputation for quality, chooses an inferior route because its cheaper the profitability of the product may be reduced.<br /><br />They've always used the argument that content is expensive and I've never quite believed it. If it's too expensive to make new dungeons for a game which has 10 million people paying an average of, what?, $7 a month then how to games with 10,000 players produce new content? But they do.<br /><br />Also some of WoW's new content has had a very lazy feel to it. The second ZulGurrub was pretty much just the first one edited to put an extra 0 on the end of all the numbers. Instead of hitting for 200 the mob hit for 2000. Same art, same AI etc. So, as a proportion of millions of $15/month subs plus Chinese fees how much did doing that one cost? 0.00001%?Stabshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08716211705647213383noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-826986957606858027.post-61108988087238410782013-01-13T17:23:56.976-05:002013-01-13T17:23:56.976-05:00Imagine a feature that increases content for a low...Imagine a feature that increases content for a lower cost of production than item upgrades. I would argue it is impossible. Making a new item with a new skin, while case-by-case a better feature, is far more expensive than allowing all items to be more valuable, given time and effort.<br /><br />You may say that reforging and upgrading make the endgame more tedious. You could also say it's successfully make it a longer event. All those players that reached BiS (or their personal equivalent) and left now have a reason to keep playing week after week. A good enough reason? Not for some. More for others. Enough for me.Thurgallnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-826986957606858027.post-42516594040294629412013-01-13T13:37:57.213-05:002013-01-13T13:37:57.213-05:00Absolutely. Don't get me wrong, I think the it...Absolutely. Don't get me wrong, I think the item upgrade system was a bad idea. It was obviously designed to stretch out content, and delivering NEW content more quickly would be a far better way to go. <br /><br />Thing is, Blizzard development is almost legendarily slow. They aren't Trion; they can't deliver new content every 3 months. Given those constraints, it's easy to see why they decided to implement item upgrades.<br /><br />At least the implementation is sound, unlike item reforging, which forces players to reforge all their gear after every single new piece (or item upgrade) to avoid overcapping two hard-capped stats.Vitolyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16842092088550706334noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-826986957606858027.post-53777448417948833422013-01-13T08:28:16.214-05:002013-01-13T08:28:16.214-05:00Replacing a green magic staff with a golden one of...Replacing a green magic staff with a golden one of different design is much more interesting than increasing the itemlvl by 5%. This is especially true the more often the replacing happens. Numbers become boring much faster than art. <br /><br />In the past an item was a combination of numbers, art design, location where it was found, rarity, (green / blue / violett / orange).<br /><br />Today items are dominated by one single number: itmlvl. All the rest doesn't matter.<br /><br />Iinstead of immersing the player in a simulation, Blizzard today, shows him the technicalities of the gameplay as clearly as possible. They thus make the upgrading process and gear itself much less interesting.Nilshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06468755466492675831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-826986957606858027.post-45264133453487861872013-01-13T05:09:11.418-05:002013-01-13T05:09:11.418-05:00Disregarding the corrections in detail above, whic...Disregarding the corrections in detail above, which soar right over my head as a non-player of WoW, that was an excellent summary of where we are and how we got there for MMOs in general, not just for WoW. <br /><br />Fortunately I do think we have hit the high-water mark of this particular design orthodoxy. WoW, although it was and remains far and away the most successful western MMO, is no longer growing and replicating its success has proved beyond the wit and skill of the industry. The prevailing winds are blowing in other directions now and WoW may be left to plough its own highly profitable furrow (on some kind of Steampunk sail-assisted tractor if that metaphor is anything to go by). <br /><br />I often feel like the proverbial mouse in the wainscot, living in a house whose function and form I barely apprehend, using only the parts that fit my purpose and remaining happily ignorant of the rest. I played WoW for three months, finishing just after the Dungeon Finder was added and I didn't even know iLevels existed. I never even heard of them until maybe a year after I'd stopped playing. I wonder how many of the supposed 10m WoW players still there are in that happy boat.Bhagpusshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03499162165023939880noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-826986957606858027.post-21195492977142747362013-01-13T01:42:55.124-05:002013-01-13T01:42:55.124-05:00Yeah, what rodolpho said above.
The problem was ...Yeah, what rodolpho said above. <br /><br />The problem was that because of quirks in itemization it was often better to hold older pieces and upgrade them than it was to get new pieces. It worked really weirdly with trinkets and often made broken sets. That, and it made inflation of items go even faster than it already had been. It was a poor idea that had to go - but not because it was trivial, but because it was too good. Kalonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05193899462301079034noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-826986957606858027.post-48514368471987820662013-01-12T23:22:43.556-05:002013-01-12T23:22:43.556-05:00"Even if you did eventually get this bump acr..."Even if you did eventually get this bump across the board (I'm not familiar with whether every single slot could actually be upgraded this way), a 2% increase in ilvl for all of your gear does not directly lead to a 2% increase in DPS or other output."<br /><br />This is not actually correct. It's not linear. Due to the way itemlvls work, every 13 itemlvls (a "tier") offers a 10% stat inflation. 8 itemlvls is thus 6% stat inflation. That's worth MUCH more than 2% total performance.Vitolyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16842092088550706334noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-826986957606858027.post-28567516407386942582013-01-12T23:22:32.594-05:002013-01-12T23:22:32.594-05:00"Even if you did eventually get this bump acr..."Even if you did eventually get this bump across the board (I'm not familiar with whether every single slot could actually be upgraded this way), a 2% increase in ilvl for all of your gear does not directly lead to a 2% increase in DPS or other output."<br /><br />This is not actually correct. It's not linear. Due to the way itemlvls work, every 13 itemlvls (a "tier") offers a 10% stat inflation. 8 itemlvls is thus 6% stat inflation. That's worth MUCH more than 2% total performance.Vitolyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16842092088550706334noreply@blogger.com