WARNING: This post may bore you, or you may be completely uninterested in the topic. I suggest that you read it to better understand the way games are made and developed, and why developers can never please all players. If you still don't want to read it then piss off, hoser.
There are three kinds of FFXI players, ones that don't follow anything about FFXI and just play the game, ones that follow all information about FFXI but nothing about other MMO's, and ones that follow all information about FFXI and also keep abreast of other MMO's. The first group are pretty insular, so they probably don't even read this blog. The second group might read this blog, and I think this post might still be interesting to them. The third group will love this post. This post is about a recent series of announcements made by Blizzard about WoW. Just let me explain.
Over the past weekend Blizzard made some major announcements regard it's newest expansion (which I might have mentioned before has some striking similarities with Wings of the Goddess), and for the most part these announcements weren't very good. Now, I don't play WoW very much, but I play it enough to be abreast of changes to the game. To a WoW player many of the announcements for this new expansion were orgasmic. To a non-WoW player, the reactions seemed really familiar. There were to be limited expansion areas, but mostly redone but still recycled older areas. The level cap was to be raised again, but no new talents were to be added. There was to be an "alternative advancement" system akin to merits. There was going to be a new crafting system which wasn't a new crafting type just a sub-crafting system (synergy anyone?). There was also to be "Guild leveling" where in your guild gets points for doing guild type events that can then be spent to get bonuses for the entire guild.
As I said, most WoW players were in love with this new expansion, but someone looking from the outside might wonder what they were so excited about compared to what they have gotten in the past. I could go over everything that was to be added but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that over the weekend, they announced that they were scrapping or substantially cutting down a whole lot of what they were planning on doing. They are keeping all of the game world changes, but a majority of the character customization is being cut out or replaced with a much less expansive system. Many of the frills that were supposed to come with the expansion are now gone. This needs to be considered with the fact that outside of the pretty radical reorganization of the game world.
Why does this matter to FFXI? Well, it has a lot to do with the comparison for how Blizzard deals with their players versus how SE deal with FFXI players. SE has definitely made promises to players about content in the past and failed to deliver. The Colosseum is famous as being one of those things that SE wanted to give to players but eventually gave up. The latest round of Summons that took over two years to deliver is a case where they might have promised something far before they were ready to deliver it. The saving grace for SE is that these were marginal goals. The Colosseum was supposed to be a kind of PvP system, which is not all that interesting to most FFXI players. Summons are something that SMNs care about patiently but it doesn't effect over all game content. Blizzard made promises to add several large game systems and has now had to back down on those promises.
Blizzard is famously known for their commitment to quality, often quoted as saying that they will not released content until it is ready to be released. Usually that has meant that it would take longer than expected to get content out the door, but it appears in this case that it means that they are ditching new content. I don't think this speaks well to the planning that is going on at Blizzard. When SE announced the level cap increase for FFXI they also mentioned that a new merit system was going to be coming with it at the end. While this may take some time, I do not believe that it is even an option for SE to cancel this content at anytime. Blizzard currently has very little and limited alternative advancement. Yes, they do have a system that is baked into the game, but that system is very cookie-cutter. There is a "best" allocation, and it has limited flexibility. In SE, for one job the same could be said, but as players can level multiple jobs there can be much more variation in how players choose to allocate merits.
From someone looking from the outside in, I would not appreciate SE dumping their new merit system. I would not like it if SE bagged other major promises. A lot of WoW players don't even know that other MMO's exist, so I have to wonder what they think about these things. Is there a problem with setting your target too high then not delivering? Blizzard used their standard response when talking about dropping their new "merit" system. They didn't want to rush out something that wasn't "fun", they didn't want to have to fix something later just to have it out now, and no they were not cutting it so they had to rush out their new expansion. But I have to ask if the lady doth protest too much... It sounded like everything that was announced this weekend was a scrap or a toning down of previous plans. At least SE didn't lie to us about moving their FFXI people over to FFXIV, but Blizzard assures us that they are not moving people over to their new MMO. How could that even be possible? They have to be moving some people over out of realistic necessity. Even Blizzard doesn't have infinite resources.
With all of Blizzard's chopping and scrapping it seems that they are begging off an awful lot. I have to wonder if this is the first big blunder that Blizzard has made? SE has made a lot of blunders, but right now there isn't as much space for Blizzard to make mistakes. Around the launch of Cataclysm (the new WoW expansion) there will be several other MMO's cropping up. With all these new changes to remove the things that were supposed to be added, I have to wonder what the WoW players think they are getting besides some new versions of things they already have?
Maybe it is just the right time to be playing FFXI. We are getting a real level cap increase, we are getting a whole new end-game, new relic-style weapons, Magians, new HNM, end-game content, and a refocused development team. WoW seems like it is going in the opposite direction.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Promises Unfulfilled.
Monday, April 05, 2010
You got your Rage in my TP! You got your TP in my Rage!
While I might reference other games like WoW in columns it is not that often that I dedicate a whole column to the issue. But today Blizzard made an announcement that I think is interesting enough to include here.
The best thing about this is that I KNEW it was coming. I almost wrote a column about it before, but decided you might not care.
A bit of background: In WoW, Warriors uses a mechanic called Rage to use abilities. Rage is usually gained through one of two ways, either doing damage or taking damage. This is one of those things that sounds good on paper, but in practice you have to wonder how Blizzard let this mechanic exist through the base game and two expansions. The problem? Well, Warriors can either be melee DD (DPS) or tanks. For melee DD, if you are undergeared, then you are going to be doing less damage, and if you do less damage you get less rage, and if you get less rage you can do less abilities and thus do less damage to get less rage, and on and on. But there is a point at which you get enough gear to do enough damage to always have rage to always do more damage to get more rage, etc. It isn't well balanced at all. Tanks have the opposite problem. They get rage based on the damage they take. When you are fighting something really hard, you take a lot of damage, so you have a lot of rage. But as your gear improves, you take less damage and gain less rage, so you aren't able to hold hate as well because you can't use your abilities. So when you aren't doing high level events, you actually have more trouble holding hate than you would against something that is pounding your face in.
Now, this might seem slightly familiar. FFXI has a mechanic that is similar but applies across all melee DDs. Well it just got a whole lot more similarer.
Check below to see how Blizzard is now changing Rage into TP.
Essentially, Blizzard's new plan for Warrior (and Druid) Rage system is the same as SE's system in FFXI for TP. After their new expansion Warriors will gain rage based on their base swing speed, and that gain will be adjusted for all weapon speeds. Does this remind you of something? That is exactly how TP is determined in FFXI. Blizzard did add a little flair to the system by making Crits gain double the normal Rage and off-hand swings only getting 50% that weapon's normal Rage. Then again FFXI has Store TP to increase your TP per swing. Also, Blizzard is changing the way that tanks will get rage from being hit, so that they will get rage more equally from lower damage mobs. In FFXI, players still get TP from getting hit, but it is not fundamental to their jobs. PLD does get a large benefit from their increased TP gain from being hit, but it is not critical to doing their job.
Blizzard's system is also different in how Rage functions and is used, like Rage caps at 100 and abilities only cost a set amount but those amounts vary depending on the ability. So how a WoW Warrior spends their TP is more like how a Dancer uses their TP, instead of how a normal WS works. WoW Warriors spend little chunks of their Rage at a time, while a melee DD in FFXI spends all of their TP at once.
I have to say right now, that I was thinking this was Blizzard's only real solution to the problems they were having with Rage, and it was my idea and they totally ripped me off! :) The reason that it works in FFXI and the reason that Blizzard needed to use it for WoW is that it is based on something that is external to the gearing of a player. All of the other jobs in WoW just get their "resource", or their "stuff" to use their abilities, for free. Warriors had to take damage or do damage to get their "resource". This wasn't very stable at all to determine if you could use an ability or not. The only stable factor that exists across all jobs (even across both games) is swing speed. The faster weapons get less Rage/TP and the slower weapons get more Rage/TP. It all equals out in the end. SE figured this out pretty early on, and hasn't had to change the system all that much (there was one tweak when they removed the TP floor for low delay weapons).
Blizzard doesn't have a decrease weapon delay function outside of haste, and haste is going to function the same way that it does in FFXI for Rage gain purposes (i.e. it isn't going to effect it at all). They also don't have a "Store TP" function either, but they do have a much larger spread of swing speeds, so I think that even if they don't have a system that allows for an "X-hit build", they might want to consider how much rage they get from a weapon swing. If they can get to a round number faster with a higher delay weapon that might just be beneficial. For example, if one weapon gives 24 Rage per swing, and another weapon give 25 Rage per swing, and one of their abilities takes 25 Rage then it may be better to go with the slower weapon because you will be able to use your 25 Rage ability first. I would not be surprise for Warriors to quickly discover this "trick" in much the same way that melee DD in FFXI try to get to "X-hit builds".
There really aren't that many more differences between how the two systems functions. I think it was a good decision for WoW because it means that how a players chooses to use their abilities and when they use them will be more reflective of their potential damage output than just getting the best gear and having infinite rage. If you know about how things were before the "TP nerf" was implemented in FFXI, then you can imagine it in slightly the same way. The problem is that SE fixed the TP issue (getting full TP from multi-hit weapons) really early in the game, but it took Blizzard two expansions to figure it out.
Of course you are going to have some WoW people complain about it because they had the best gear and could do anything they wanted because they never had to worry about getting Rage because they already had it. But those people are dumb, and don't understand why fixing broken things is good for the game overall.
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