Legion Player Collapse Incoming

Now is that time in the expansion about two months in where all the race-to-raid guilds start to implode.

It isn't terribly difficult to toss together a really strong 10-15 man heroic raiding team that blasts through the content.

However, when you start to hit the Mythic level you need more than 20... you need 25-30.   Raid nights become frustrating because you are at 16 or 18 or 19 players and not enough.   They recruit like crazy but can't find the numbers.

So, better players start shopping up.  Weaker players get left behind and either quit or drop down the ranks to lower guilds.

Guilds go poof.

I've seen this so many times now.

Random Loot Frustration and Social Play Revival in WoW

The biggest complaints I have seen on the forums focus around two core areas with Legion:  

Randomness (RNG) and Prerequisite busy-work.

For RNG, everything in this expansion is random, everything.  Loot drops randomly upgrade. World Quests are randomly selected.   Legendaries are a random chance.   Itemization is so important and so hard to get.

From a frustration point, player have little to no way to focus for success because there is no consolation prize system that players can control.  Even crafting and rep grinding is behind RNG (random world quests and random stats).

For Prerequisite busy-work, it all seems to focus around the game requiring people to do something they don’t want to do (or no longer want to do) in order to get or do something they do want/want to do.

Busy work goes against a Blizzard-enabled play style.  Since mid-Wrath through Warlords, Blizzard created Alt-Play and Solo-Play through Dungeon Finders, Heirloom Gear and eventually with Raid Finder during Cataclysm.   More and more players have migrated away from organized social play into solo activities of the game such as Finders, Pets and leveling more alternative Characters as “content” for them.

The entire fabric of the player base began to wither into solo players.

Legion has pulled an about face here.  Rolling back the clock all the way to BC and Early Wrath (pre-finder).

By requiring AP gathering and ancient mana gathering and rep gathering, Blizzard is bringing back the “main game” instead of the, these-are-my-12-mains game.

There is a group of players that are happy to no longer be so bored that they are playing alts to stay entertained.  But there is another group that is so unhappy they can’t play 12 mains.

There is a group of players that are happy that guildies are grouping together instead of using the finders.  But there is another group that is so unhappy they have to actually “put themselves out there” which can be uncomfortable when a "finder" did it for you.   They have to try to get into manually created groups or join guilds.

Blizzard has done a pretty good job of giving neither positions a “win”.

The Push to Premade Finder

As Legion is about to be released, there is a change afoot and Blizzard isn't flat-out saying it.  That is, the push toward the manual finder tool over the automated finders.

I think this is a great balance that will have a lot of automated-finder players extremely upset because they continue to feel like ALL content in the game should be accessible without ever trying to be connected to players in the game.

However, I think, this is the primary push back from what started the slide in WoW in the first place.  That is, when the automated finders came into creation there were many pros but they came with many cons.

The Pros of course, include no more screaming in trade.  No more hours and hours of waiting to form a group.

The Cons of course, no more group commitment, loss of community, loss of group accomplishment.

I think this new system of Mythics being outside the automated queue system is the perfect compromise and it fits the model they've used with LFR to Normal+ raiding.

Yea, players are going to complain.   But, it brings back some of the old WoW without eliminating the new.

The Silence Penalty

Blizzard recently announced a "new" system called the Silence Penalty.

The forums seem to be up-in-arms about it, but what is entertaining to me is that nothing has changed.

The "violations" as players are the same.

The reporting system is the same.

The only thing that is changing is the type of penalty.  Instead of a verbal and then ban, players will be unable to talk in public channels or through other interfaces that might communicate to strangers.

I know the vloggers and bloggers love to hate on Blizzard, but this really is not a big deal.

No more reports are going out than before, unless more people report.

No more punishments are going out than before, unless more people report.

Blizzard's system has always been a reactive one.  If players don't report, nothing happens.

What do you think?

Cross Realm Zones, Realm Hopping and Server Populations

If you aren't familiar with Cross Realm Zones and Realm Hopping, they probably use the same back-bone of technology which is the ability to make players move / appear / interact on different server  from their "home" server.   All of this added in the midst of server population problems and the established playerbase lacking new blood.

TLDR: Solution thoughts provided at the bottom.

History

Server Population

As the player population ebbs and flows it is mostly in the negative direction.  Servers have less players.  Less players mean less viable guilds.   Less viable guilds means more player migration and more subscription losses.  This is all simple stuff that Blizzard has to understand.

Their "psuedo-mergers" (a different topic) were great to help a little but it's a temporary fix and Blizzard knows this.

Without these cross-realm tools, many players wouldn't even be able to do much of the content which would result in more losses.   Yes, it encourages some to pay the fees and move characters, but I fathom a larger number just choose to quit all together.   Speculation, of course.

Blizzard has a set of tools they created so they wouldn't have to really solve the server population problem completely.

Cross-Realm Battle-Tag Grouping

Blizzard created the ability for players to group with players from other realms and play with their friends from other servers.   It required knowing their real-id to bring them in.    The technology would pull the lower level characters to the server of the high level players.

Pros: Friends could play together even if they are on different servers.  Allows players to participate in content that wouldn't be possible on lower population realms.

Cons: Players cannot trade items or gold.  Cannot join the same guilds.  Cannot participate in most current raid content (this slowly relaxed until it only excludes mythic raiding and only until it's mostly been completed).

Cross-Realm Zones

Using the Cross-Realm technologies, Blizzard decided that playing in the lower level zones of World of Warcraft was less fun because most players, after playing for any amount of time, all end up at the end zones or latest expansion.   That is 99% (made-up) are at max level expansion and 1% all played alone and might get bored and who knows, perhaps quit because there was no MM in the MMO (Massively Multi-player).

To try and improve that experience, they created Cross-realm Zones.  Any Zone below the current expansion, will coalesce players into sets of players trying to bolster the number of characters in those zones.

From a players perspective, there is no telling how many players are in that zone and what server that are from.

Pros: The zone feels alive.  The content is being used as it was designed to be used with a quantity of players.

Cons: You cannot join guilds or trade with players from off realms.  While the content is now being competed at the designed level, many players don't want competition for game rare creatures.

Pre-made Finder (Realm Hopping)

In Mists of Pandaria, the infamous TinySmasher (a player) created a game add-on called oQueue.  This add-on was highly debated, loved, reviled, and contested.  It used the battle-tag / real-id system to piggy-bag communication between realms in a mesh network of inter-server communication.  The purpose he initially created it for was for a community of PvPers to "cheese" random battleground by taking the "random" out of one of the competing sides.  That is, if you could bring 20 friends into your RBG, all on voice against just a bunch of random people, you'd win.   Well, they did.. they'd stomp them.  They did.

The add-on also allowed for people to create cross-realm raiding activities using Cross-Realm Battle-Tag groups of people on various servers all wanting to do the same content.

Essentially it was the predecessor of "Pre-made Finder", but it had no "auto-invite".

Today, we have pre-made finder, largely, I think, because of oQueue.  But the auto-invite feature allows players to quickly join pre-made groups, for whatever purpose and use them to pull their character to different servers.

Players do this for the sole purpose of hunting rare creatures that have long spawn timers, increasing their odds of finding these creatures significantly.

Pros:  Increases odds of finding these creatures significantly.  Players feel justified for doing this because Cross-Realm Zones decreased their odds.

Cons:  Can be disruptive to groups that have people join/leave without having any real intent to participate in the purpose of the group.   Defeats the purpose of Cross-Realm Zones.   Creates a whole new purpose for pre-made finder for which it was never designed.

Where from here

Much debate and argument could go here about Server Population, Pre-made finder Realm Hopping is fine or why Cross-Realm Zones is bad and I probably could agree with many of their points while at the same time disagree with others.

But, what I think, however, is that the whole system is broken because the original intents are not being accomplished and the features are being used for purposes other than intended.

All these partial solution are leading in one direction that Blizzard just doesn't appear to want to go.

Sure, I will use these systems to do similar things while they exist, but that doesn't mean I think it is the right technological answer.

Blizzard wants:

• Competition for resources - Hopping for rares breaks this.
• Pre-mades for playing with people - Hopping for rares breaks this.
• Preserve the concept of realms.

Players want:

• People they can play with.  
• Ability to play with friends
• Servers that are viable

Their solutions aren't working.

• Servers are still getting lower populations and becoming non-viable as more players quit or migrate.
• Cross-Realm zones is a partial implementation to ameliorate low population server problems. 
• Pre-made finder is a partial implementation because it doesn't support ALL content.
• Players can't really play / share / join the same guilds, it's just a band-aid.

Solution

Blizzard needs to fix their broke.  They are creating band-aids that just create more problems.

It is time to free players from their servers.   I have my own ideas on how it could be implemented but this is really something only Blizzard could design.

My basic concept is as thus:

• Realm is just text appended to your toon name.   But servers are only an internal Blizzard thing.
• As players you can join any guild.
• Guilds are listed on a larger web site accessible in game or out.  This system would allow for a large set of search criterion that's not only complex but detailed.
• Players appear on the same server as their guild (irregardless of their "realm" text).
• Guilds are grouped to balance player population by a balancing system.

There are still servers, but they mean much less to the players.  What matters is what guild you join.

Pre-made Groups still can exist.  But they need to have their purpose enforced.  If you are not near the realm leader, you are not on his instanced server.   This stops hopping pre-made groups.

Cross-Realm Zones needs to exclude rares.  Then you no longer need to hop for rares anyhow. 

We could debate this and maybe my solution is the right one.  But the way we are headed isn't better as long as low population servers continue to die the game will suffer.  

Max Zoom Removal

I tend to lean in favor of Blizzard's decisions on many things.  What can I say.... I love the game.

On this particular change, however, I am a tad flustered.  Not because I don't think the change is needed.  The frustration is over being lied too.   I hate being lied to.   If Blizzard really has a reason for the change, they need to be honest and explain why.  Even if the details are left out, they could still be indirectly honest about it.

For example, "Max Zoom is being removed and we hate it because of technical difficulties with the new visibility distance" (made up reason).   I could buy that.

What frustrates me is the disingenuous explanation for the change. I'm sorry, but I don't believe the "fairness" candy coating.

Blizzard says... the UI is so complex they can't show us our full stats.
Blizzard says... you can get an add-on to see your full stats.
Blizzard says... max zoom is an unfair advantage, we are removing max zoom.

Is having an add-on to see your full stats an UNFAIR ADVANTAGE?

• If not, then why is max zoom?
• If so, then why allow add-on for full stats... why even recommend this?

It does not compute.

Blizzard, give us the real reason for the change... or you just plain look like liars.

Guild Features Need Love

As a guild leader, it should not be a surprise that I think guilds are the heart of World of Warcraft.   That's not to say that solo-play doesn't work in WoW, and fun can't be had, but I wouldn't be here if it was a solo game.

Blizzard has definitely dropped the ball on giving some needed guild improvements.   Players should not be required to get add-ons to compensate for some of these core capabilities.

While they tried in Cataclysm with the guild experience and the guild recruitment tool, those were focusing more attention on the wrong areas, in my opinion.

Today, players walk up to any billboard in WoW and the game suggests a litany of solo-play activities.  But, for guilds, all they get is the guild recruitment tool that doesn't really work.

Guild Recruitment Overhaul:

1. Ability to invite people that are offline or alts of your own.
2. Automatically update the guild list to indicate how active a guild is... what activities they have done recently as a guild and allow queries on this information.  How many players that have logged in the last 3 weeks.
3. How many players are in the guild (not characters).
4. Have guilds that are inactive - no guild activities (no one logging into them) are grayed out as inactive.  They have a guild activity tracker system, let the players know when guilds are dead or at least how active they will be before you join.
5. Ability to search on exact raid times, bt times, etc.  Find one that matches your schedule.
6. Give players the ability to filter, search and set criterion to help them find the perfect guild.  
7. Why do players have to know about wowprogress.com or guildox to be able to assess a guilds progress?
8. Have a big block for guild leaders to fully write up on their guild and what it is like.

Handling Players and their Characters

1. Guilds should allow up to 999 account instead of 999 characters.  The number of characters should not impact the number of players that can join a guild.   The more and more character slots Blizzard gives us the more characters players want to bring to their guilds but this limits the number of people a guild can have.   Please fix this!
2. Build into the system to manage players (and their alternative characters) as a unit (by account) instead of having to manage them independently and try to figure out who is who.  Yes, I know this means that players give up some ability to have 2 toons in a guild and be anonymous on one or the other in the same guild, sorry, but I track alts already and have never had anyone have issue.

Guild Permissions:

1. Allow us to have permission sets independent of the ranks.  Ranks usually imply what activities players do or how long they've been with the guild.  But, this doesn't mean they also need privileges.  They might, but they might not.   With permission sets, I could apply different "jobs" to different players regardless of their ranks.     Example:
1. Member:  PvPs set, Raider set.  Bank Manager set.
2. Member:  Raider set.
3. Officer:  Guild Chat set.  Bank Manager set.  Raider Set.
2. (7/6/16) Guild Note Permissions.  Add the permission that a player can only edit their own guild note.

Ranks:

1. I'd like about 5 more ranks.  I probably don't need that many, but it's nice to have ranks to indicate length of service in the guild.   I can do this, but without permission sets, I need different ranks for different bank permissions.   Example:
1. New 
2. Member (> month)
3. Tenured (> 6 month)
4. Senior (> 12 months)
2. Allow ranks to have a sub-titles that guildies can see on name plate.  Today you get "recruit" in your guild tag, but the guild could see guild labels instead.  The guild reputation no longer means anything:
1. New -    Joeman
2. Raider -  Joeman  
3. Officer - Joeman

Guild Calendar:

1. Ability to indicate when players are away and when they will return.  Sort of like a "leave calendar"
2. With #1.  If someone is scheduled on leave, automatically decline for new events on their scheduled away times and link to the "away" notice.
3. Ability to chat/set away notices from the phone app.
4. Ability to give notes when you accept an event like "I will be 5 mins late", "can't make it, cat's on fire"
5. Make calendar notices more "in your face" than just the blinking ?. Like when they log in.   Here are new activities on the calendar.  
6. Allow creating repeating events so I don't have to copy paste week to week for regular raids. Perhaps just a month at a time if they are afraid of forever events.
7. Allow for color coding activities on the calendar.

Guild Bank:

1. Give us the ability to set types of items on a tab and when people donate the items to the bank it automatically attempts to place it on the correct tab.
2. Make the guild bank auto sort.
3. Have the ability to exclude certain items from being added to the bank.  If people submit junk and it's rejected and returned to the submitted ("your item type is not currently requested by the guild").
4. Better API for monitoring suspicious guild bank activity.  People regularly withdrawing gold, regularly withdrawing items, etc.

Voice System:

1. Provide an API for external voice providers to hook in for quicker voice joins.  Yes, I know WoW will have a new voice system soon, but unless it can compete... folks will still prefer Discord, Teamspeak, Ventrilo.   Don't close the voice economy down.    Then, if voice services choose to allow it, they can auto join voice servers in a single click.

Guild Notes:

1. Give US a LOT more space for guild notes.  
1. 1024 characters for the player (per account).  The play can tell a little about themselves, offer up contact information if they are willing, etc.
2. 1024 characters for officers.  A small space to track notes about the players play schedule, teams the participate on, what kind of activities they like.
3. 1024 character for the guild manager.  A small space to track issues or conversations with the player in case of dispute.

Guild Planner:

1. Give guild planners the ability to plan activities.  Quick and easy way to add raids to the calendar.
2. Suggest ideas for guild activities:  Raids, 5-mans, challenge modes, rated battlegrounds, pet battle tournaments, races.   Have a suggestion of the month that pops up.  Keep the players engaged.  Help guild leaders improve their guilds.

Just think of how much better organized a guild would be if we had the tools to make a guild sing.

Guilds didn't need guild perks, guild leveling.   They are nice, but they need tools.

What about your guild?  What would you add?

Patch 4.3 and Another Gear Reset

Greedy posts about a topic dear to my heart in feeling what saps the fun from WoW.  The problem is, I don't know a good solution.

To me, gear resets are a bad simple solution to a complex problem.

There has to be some guiding princples to inspire people to play. This is outside the constructs of the mechanisms created (e.g. quests, 5-mans, pvp, raids, professions, etc.).

Principles of WoW:

1. People like to feel like they are progressing forward (like leveling, getting skill points, honor points).
2. People like to be rewarded for their "play" effort (complete task get item / point / gold). It is the incentive.
3. The amount of "fun" one feels is a ratio to the amount of effort and skill required for the desired reward value (if I do X, I get Y).
4. For the maximum enjoyment of customers, content should be tuned such that majority of players (the bell curve) can complete normal versions of content (including raids) given a reasonable amount of effort. That is, given X hours of trying, they succeed.

Gear Resets Are Bad Because:

1. Deflating the reward, removes the incentive. I can just wait and they'll give it to me for no effort.
2. Since it will just be given to me, I'm not really making progress, it's just being given to me.
3. I'm not having fun because the amount of effort required for the value is also deflated. Deflating fun.
4. No pride in the accomplishment because I will have it given to me regardless of my skill.

Where Blizzard Fails

1. They use Gear Resets to push players forward artificially by having them out gear content and by nerfing content so that more players can succeed. However, the "fun" has been removed because there is no longer any value other than to see "sort of" how the fight used to look. The gear is obsolete.
2. They use gear resets to help players "catch up" that are "new" but it punishes existing players by devaluing their effort -- it becomes wasted.
3. They believe that just "seeing" content is all players want... yawn. Just show me a you tube video.

The problem in the system is that players are interdependent to play this game. One must not only play it, but find people at similar skill / effort / gear levels to achieve the goals. The gear reset is Blizzards effort to help us find those people by creating more of them ... giving content... at the same time, reducing the value of exiting player's rewards.

You have to deal with the noted issues of player "poaching" and having to "gear up" players to catch up. Playing with friends at different skill levels and thus inhibits ones ability to progress because many of the fights are single-mistake-wipe designs. "Your not making an effort" slows "my ability to make progress".

I agree that gear resets are bad because they punish existing players, but I don't think Blizzard has made enough effort in really fixing the problem which lies in the interdependency of multiple levels of skill and maintaining the individuals ability to progress and be rewarded for it in a game that requires collective work.

25 vs 10, 25 = 10 man, Oh Happy Day!

Okay, let the debate begin.  I know there are many 25-man players out there that will just QQ until the cows come home.

Sure a 25-man raid feels more epic when you have 25 people.  But from a balancing perspective, it isn't hard to imagine that raids can be balanced such that the difficulty is about equal.  From my experience, the hardest part of a 25-man vs. a 10-man had absolutely nothing to do with the raid content and everything to do with coordinating, shepherding and lots and lots of waiting for 24 other people.  It was not about how much better they are, but just how much more patient and how much time they have to play.

From a 10-man's perspective, 25-man guilds had their cake, our cake and all the cake.  They got better gear, equal and sometimes less difficult content and they could do 10-mans as well so they could farm both and gear twice as fast.  What specifically makes them worthy of that much advantage?  Harder content?  It isn't that much harder and in some cases is easier.   It's only about putting up with more people and more people's problems.  Sorry, but that just makes you a masochist not worthy of blessings.

Now, I do ponder if this will hurt 25-man guilds to harshly.  That, I can't know.  However, it will end the constant flow of 10-man players abandoning their guilds for 25-man loot because they thought of the epic wait and nausea of a 25-man is pretty hard to take.

I love this change.  I can't wait to see how it works out for 25-man guilds.  Blizzard will have to toss them a bone, but it is my hope they do so only in such a way that 10-man players will say... that's nice, but not nice enough.

Emblems and WoW End-Game

A lot of discussion goes on about gear inflation, content disuse and such and I waxed on the topic only to be chewed on by the forums.  Essentially the problem, I think, with WoW is layered in the loot.  They need to reduce the loot inflation problem by "leveling" out the content.  All content of equa-level should drop from the same tables.  No more loot farming and the content is all relevant.  Gear should only progress slightly and even that should only vary a bit and then the game is about fun and skill more than gear.

My example:

5-man normal (drop varying level of gear to 200)
5-man heroic emblems buy 201.
5-man heroic (ALL drop 202)
10-man emblems buy 203

10-man (ALL drop 204)
10-man heroic emblems buy 205
10-man heroic (ALL drop 206)
25-man normal emblems buy 205
25-man (ALL drop 206)
25-man heroic (ALL drop 207)

VERY LITTLE DIFFERENCE IN GEAR.  HUGE DIFFERENCE IN DIFFICULTY.

All content is still challenging.
All content might drop something you want.
All content has value.

Emblems should still exists as consolation prizes.

Wintergrasp is Broken

Once upon a time, my server was relatively balanced, but not perfectly.  For the most part the Alliance won Wintergrasp, but it wasn't 100% of the time, it was more like... say 60-70% of the time.   I am sure that the Horde felt Wintergrasp was completely broken.

Somewhere after Ulduar became old hat and ToC-10 was the new thing, the Alliance bored of Wintergrasp and Horde moved in.  Rumors say a lot of allies decided to go horde.  The server changed from being 1.8:1 (ally to horde) to being 2.8:1 horde to alliance.   Now, the Alliance wins Wintergrasp twice per week.  Yes, twice, maybe 3 times.    That means the Horde holds it 99.999% of the time.

As a result the Alliance no longer goes.  It isn't fun to be massacred and camped.

So, what's broken here?

First, why do Wintergrasp now anyhow?  The only thing in there is honor points and a chance at the Vault mini-raid.  You can get better gear outside the Vault and there are tons of ways to get honor.  So, essentially, there isn't a reason which makes what used to be a really fun aspect of the game broken, in my opinion.

What seems odd to me is why the most obvious solution Blizzard could do to fix Wintergrasp is one they already have begun to implement in other battlegrounds and partially implemented in Wintergrasp and that is gating the player count.

If you gated Wintergrasp at say the 5's or the 10's, that is 5 from this side add 5 from that side, etc., eventually people would go knowing that both sides would be balanced, the fight would be tougher and the win would be sweeter.

As it is, bleh, picking my nose has more entertainment value.

3.3 LFG (AGAIN)

I said back in January, that I thought 3.3 would hurt guilds.

I think I need to amend that to say, it hurts small guilds.  Big raiding guilds benefit from it.  Members get that daily done in a PuG, don't bother anyone in the guild and get their frost gear, move on.

The people that are hurt by 3.3 are the smaller guilds that depended on each other for their daily quest.  They actually help build a reason to socialize and "hang out".  That was the life blood of smaller guilds.

That's gone now.

Cataclysm Guild Support

I think 3.3 has really hurt casual guilds.  Casual players band together casually.  The more power Blizzard gives casuals the ability to casual outside the guild, the less ability a casual guild has to function.  Sure, some casual guilds are about socializing, but also most are about players with irregular play schedules or lighter raid schedules than bigger guilds.  But the social aspect was the glue and 3.3 damaged it with LFD feature.

I am looking forward to the new guild-based features in Cat.  that will supposedly tie you more to your guild.  Perhaps that will help.

Why is end-content the goal?

I suppose Blizzard knows what they are doing.  But, sometimes, I think a game can be about the journey and less about the destination.  I mean, if the whole point of WoW is to rush to the end, you are just rushing to boredom and quitting, right?

Imagine a model where the journey is the destination and the end is well... the end.  Then, you put your focus not on getting people geared easily and quickly and dumbing down content so you can all be "to the max" but you make content harder where every step is the struggle, every dungeon is beyond elite and required gates to progress. 

I don't know the economics of the whole thing, but I'd imagine they know something $-wise that I don't and are doing the right thing for their bottom-line. 

But, I can lament, that it's not what cranks my tractor.