Patch 7.3.5 in World of Warcraft recently came out and with it came some changes to leveling that were alluded to nearly two years ago, where Watcher mentioned how broken the leveling experience was and saw promise in the level scaling tech that Legion was introducing. This was shortly followed by some small changes to improve the leveling experience a little bit in the meantime. As promised, the level scaling tech and additional tweaks are here in full force and while I don't entirely agree with the direction Blizzard has taken, I will admit it resolves one major problem I had with leveling that I brought up a couple years ago.
Specifically, I think Blizzard addressed power creep fairly well by tuning enemies appropriately, which is most apparent in dungeons. Also, level scaling allows for more freedom to explore zones and complete their storylines, which is a direct response to my gripe with outleveling zones even without using heirlooms. Finally, this change comes at a great time since it effectively rejuvenates old content for players to consume while the next expansion is being developed.
Monday, January 29, 2018
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
The State of Regular Mythic Dungeons
In Patch 6.2, Mythic dungeons were added to the game, which helped to provide some much-needed content during a time when subscriber numbers were dropping heavily. At the time, it was basically endgame content that awarded gear to allow players to comfortably run the Hellfire Citadel raid, the last raid of the Warlords of Draenor expansion. This meant that how Mythic dungeons would be implemented in the Legion expansion would be very different since it would likely be entry-level content that was available for who have done Heroic dungeons. At the start of the expansion, this was indeed the case but was quickly overtaken by Mythic+, which is basically a Challenge Mode-style dungeon with scaling difficulty and rewards. Because of the endless content potential comparable to Greater Rifts in Diablo 3, I praised this feature in a past article that also seems to have gotten a fair bit of positive reception from players.
However, in that same article I pointed out that I noticed that regular Mythic dungeons seemed to be on the verge of being outdated content and while the gear reward item levels got boosted twice along with Heroic dungeons to provide consistent progression towards current endgame content, Mythic dungeons themselves largely seem dead outside of Dungeon event weeks. This might not initially seem like a big deal but there are some quests that can only be done in regular Mythic dungeons such as many Balance of Power quests. Personally, I had a frustrating time finding groups to run regular Mythic dungeons for Court of Stars and Arcway even during an event week to do my quest.
Unfortunately, supplying anecdotes, especially for a couple dungeons that required attunement to begin with, is not a good way to support my argument that regular Mythic dungeons are in a sorry state. That is why in this article I'm going to provide a few reasons why I think regular Mythic dungeons aren't run much or, at least in the future, will likely not be run much.
It's understandable that Mythic, being a step up from Heroic in difficulty, should be more challenging. While it initially started out only a little more challenging, some changes have made that difference greater. The reward difference also initially made sense since both difficulties were mostly known for their gear reward.
However, other fast methods of gearing were made available such as Dauntless and Relinquished gear tokens that made the method of gearing through Heroic and Mythic dungeons obsolete even when the 7.2 and 7.3 buffs came around. This means that gear-based rewards from Heroic and Mythic dungeons were not as worthwhile, meaning both modes needed other worthwhile rewards. I was personally partial to having bosses in dungeons and raids award Nethershards, which would've been a useful secondary reward to earn like with Badges of Justice and similar currency in the past.
Instead, this salvation came in the form of Writhing Essence, which was awarded in small amounts for running a Random Heroic through Dungeon Finder daily. Meanwhile, running Mythic+ had allowed the player to loot a high amount of legendary upgrade currency from the weekly chest. This left regular Mythic, which to this day awards no legendary upgrade currency or other major secondary reward. To make things worse, the most recent legendary upgrade currency can be used to buy legendary gear as of patch 7.3.5, which provides even more of an incentive to farm the currency.
A few years ago, I thought Mythic dungeons in Warlords of Draenor weren't sufficient in terms of encouraging players to run party content with a premade group, which in turn would've cut down on Dungeon Finder reliance, so I wrote an article about it. While my suggestions didn't quite take the form I expected, I can't object to the success of Mythic+ dungeons as content that requires a premade group. However, it seems things have come full circle since once again I feel like Mythic dungeons are insufficient at encouraging players to run party content with a premade group.
Fortunately, with Mythic+ around, the need for Mythic to fulfill the role of serving as an alternative to matchmade group content is not needed as much. This then raises the question of why Mythic dungeons, especially since they're only a bit harder yet not as rewarding as Heroic dungeons, cannot be done with matchmade groups. It really serves as more of a drawback that makes forming a group to do the rare few quests (or whatever objective the player desires) that require a regular Mythic dungeon a frustrating experience that doesn't really have a place in the current game. This is also a different situation compared to the past when Dungeon Finder or Premade Group Finder didn't exist since players had to use chat to form groups for content that was generally worthwhile to do rather than using a convenient tool only to find no interested players.
I alluded to this a little in the previous section but I might as well outright say it: Mythic+ is just better to do the vast majority of the time compared to regular Mythic dungeons. This has a lot to do with the fact that lower Mythic+ levels aren't that much harder than regular Mythic dungeons but they're far more rewarding to do. At Mythic level 2, enemies are about 10% harder and even a few levels up they're not too bad to steamroll since there's a good chance players will outgear the content or have someone in the party who is. Furthermore, players who do a Mythic+ even at a lower level are guaranteed at least one piece of fairly powerful gear from the weekly chest along with some of the aforementioned Wakening Essence. They are also guaranteed keystones to run more Mythic+ for the current and following week.
To contrast, regular Mythic dungeons provide several chances to earn some lower end gear they may not be able to use like with lower level Mythic+ and a keystone to run Mythic+ for that week. Aside from the fact the regular Mythic dungeon basically steers the player to run Mythic+ with its reward, the other rewards are inferior and based on random chance. This also brings up the point that players can effectively run Mythic+ as long as they have a keystone, which will always be the case if they do a run each week. Players also have the option to join an existing Mythic+ run to get a keystone instead of running a regular Mythic dungeon even if they haven't run any Mythic+ recently (or at all).
While resolving the apparent obsolescence of regular Mythic dungeons isn't that urgent, I think it's important to address it since it'll be relevant content in the Battle for Azeroth expansion for a brief time before falling into obscurity once again if nothing changes. Also, I don't think the changes I'm suggesting are major to implement, but they may be controversial.
The first change is to make it possible to queue for regular Mythic dungeons through the Dungeon Finder. My reasoning for this is that Mythic+ fills the niche of requiring a premade group for content better. The keystone system itself is strongly compatible with premade grouping since players are encouraged to create a group to run a keystone. The challenge and rewards also scale, meaning players are able to find a level that comfortably suits them best. Since Mythic itself is a singular difficulty that's a slightly harder version of Heroic it should be provided with similar features. Much like with Heroic dungeons, players can still make a premade group to run Mythic dungeons. My biggest hope is no more existing content needs a Dungeon Finder queue.
The second change is to alter quest objectives that exclusively require regular Mythic dungeons to either be completable in Heroic or Mythic+. Some quests do this already, but as I mentioned, others do not. The reason I don't specify towards one or the other is because I think the direction of quest objective flexibility should be at Blizzard's discretion. By doing so, objectives that are intended to be more or less difficult can be appropriately classified. I think this change should take place even if the first one makes it through since it provides players with more choice of the content they want to do, especially when it comes to choosing between Mythic and Mythic+.
With these changes, hopefully Mythic dungeons will be run a bit more or at least not produce a frustrating experience due to narrow quest requirements.
However, in that same article I pointed out that I noticed that regular Mythic dungeons seemed to be on the verge of being outdated content and while the gear reward item levels got boosted twice along with Heroic dungeons to provide consistent progression towards current endgame content, Mythic dungeons themselves largely seem dead outside of Dungeon event weeks. This might not initially seem like a big deal but there are some quests that can only be done in regular Mythic dungeons such as many Balance of Power quests. Personally, I had a frustrating time finding groups to run regular Mythic dungeons for Court of Stars and Arcway even during an event week to do my quest.
Unfortunately, supplying anecdotes, especially for a couple dungeons that required attunement to begin with, is not a good way to support my argument that regular Mythic dungeons are in a sorry state. That is why in this article I'm going to provide a few reasons why I think regular Mythic dungeons aren't run much or, at least in the future, will likely not be run much.
Mythic is harder than Heroic, but arguably less rewarding
It's understandable that Mythic, being a step up from Heroic in difficulty, should be more challenging. While it initially started out only a little more challenging, some changes have made that difference greater. The reward difference also initially made sense since both difficulties were mostly known for their gear reward.
However, other fast methods of gearing were made available such as Dauntless and Relinquished gear tokens that made the method of gearing through Heroic and Mythic dungeons obsolete even when the 7.2 and 7.3 buffs came around. This means that gear-based rewards from Heroic and Mythic dungeons were not as worthwhile, meaning both modes needed other worthwhile rewards. I was personally partial to having bosses in dungeons and raids award Nethershards, which would've been a useful secondary reward to earn like with Badges of Justice and similar currency in the past.
Instead, this salvation came in the form of Writhing Essence, which was awarded in small amounts for running a Random Heroic through Dungeon Finder daily. Meanwhile, running Mythic+ had allowed the player to loot a high amount of legendary upgrade currency from the weekly chest. This left regular Mythic, which to this day awards no legendary upgrade currency or other major secondary reward. To make things worse, the most recent legendary upgrade currency can be used to buy legendary gear as of patch 7.3.5, which provides even more of an incentive to farm the currency.
Mythic requires a premade group
Fortunately, with Mythic+ around, the need for Mythic to fulfill the role of serving as an alternative to matchmade group content is not needed as much. This then raises the question of why Mythic dungeons, especially since they're only a bit harder yet not as rewarding as Heroic dungeons, cannot be done with matchmade groups. It really serves as more of a drawback that makes forming a group to do the rare few quests (or whatever objective the player desires) that require a regular Mythic dungeon a frustrating experience that doesn't really have a place in the current game. This is also a different situation compared to the past when Dungeon Finder or Premade Group Finder didn't exist since players had to use chat to form groups for content that was generally worthwhile to do rather than using a convenient tool only to find no interested players.
Mythic+ is so much better to do
To contrast, regular Mythic dungeons provide several chances to earn some lower end gear they may not be able to use like with lower level Mythic+ and a keystone to run Mythic+ for that week. Aside from the fact the regular Mythic dungeon basically steers the player to run Mythic+ with its reward, the other rewards are inferior and based on random chance. This also brings up the point that players can effectively run Mythic+ as long as they have a keystone, which will always be the case if they do a run each week. Players also have the option to join an existing Mythic+ run to get a keystone instead of running a regular Mythic dungeon even if they haven't run any Mythic+ recently (or at all).
Solving the Problems
While resolving the apparent obsolescence of regular Mythic dungeons isn't that urgent, I think it's important to address it since it'll be relevant content in the Battle for Azeroth expansion for a brief time before falling into obscurity once again if nothing changes. Also, I don't think the changes I'm suggesting are major to implement, but they may be controversial.
The first change is to make it possible to queue for regular Mythic dungeons through the Dungeon Finder. My reasoning for this is that Mythic+ fills the niche of requiring a premade group for content better. The keystone system itself is strongly compatible with premade grouping since players are encouraged to create a group to run a keystone. The challenge and rewards also scale, meaning players are able to find a level that comfortably suits them best. Since Mythic itself is a singular difficulty that's a slightly harder version of Heroic it should be provided with similar features. Much like with Heroic dungeons, players can still make a premade group to run Mythic dungeons. My biggest hope is no more existing content needs a Dungeon Finder queue.
The second change is to alter quest objectives that exclusively require regular Mythic dungeons to either be completable in Heroic or Mythic+. Some quests do this already, but as I mentioned, others do not. The reason I don't specify towards one or the other is because I think the direction of quest objective flexibility should be at Blizzard's discretion. By doing so, objectives that are intended to be more or less difficult can be appropriately classified. I think this change should take place even if the first one makes it through since it provides players with more choice of the content they want to do, especially when it comes to choosing between Mythic and Mythic+.
With these changes, hopefully Mythic dungeons will be run a bit more or at least not produce a frustrating experience due to narrow quest requirements.
Monday, January 8, 2018
What Classic WoW Can Learn From Runescape
The idea of a legacy World of Warcraft server has likely been around for as long as the game has existed and undergone changes that upset players in one way or another. It is understandable then that one might establish a private server in the hopes of reliving an older time or at least one they have more agency over, even if it's highly illegal to do so. When Nostalrius, a vanilla WoW private server, was taken down, discussion ignited over the possibility of an officially ran server due to the high amount of demand. At the time, I wrote an article about the possible issues of running a legacy server and the motives of those who want one but despite these issues, I wanted to see one come into existence anyways due to the possible benefits and personal curiosity.
Afterwards I largely went dark on the topic until an ultimatum was issued followed by this announcement. While I understand the reasoning for the actions of the Nostalrius team, I found this move to be a large step backwards in terms of encouraging Blizzard to open legacy servers of their own. In fact, the announcement reminded of the ongoing largely one-sided war between the Old School Runescape, or OSRS, and Runescape 3, or RS3, communities where the legacy players behave in a hostile manner born of zealotry. It seemed that later on Nostalrius agreed with this sentiment but the damage was done and I ultimately couldn't see them as the standard bearer for legacy WoW servers anymore.
Despite this controversy, Classic WoW servers were announced during the most recent Blizzcon, showing Blizzard had an interest in trying to open some official legacy servers. In the wake of the announcement, I've found there's a lot of questions about the servers since not a lot of information was provided. While we may have to wait a while to learn more about Blizzard's plans, we can at least learn from a certain other officially run legacy game in the form of OSRS. In fact, I used some of the information I gleaned from that game to make predictions in my previous article on legacy WoW which I've since been using to answer questions about the nature of Classic WoW. Therefore, in this article I will analyze the history of OSRS and how it compares to Runescape 3 and use this information and more to predict the outcome of Classic WoW.
Afterwards I largely went dark on the topic until an ultimatum was issued followed by this announcement. While I understand the reasoning for the actions of the Nostalrius team, I found this move to be a large step backwards in terms of encouraging Blizzard to open legacy servers of their own. In fact, the announcement reminded of the ongoing largely one-sided war between the Old School Runescape, or OSRS, and Runescape 3, or RS3, communities where the legacy players behave in a hostile manner born of zealotry. It seemed that later on Nostalrius agreed with this sentiment but the damage was done and I ultimately couldn't see them as the standard bearer for legacy WoW servers anymore.
Despite this controversy, Classic WoW servers were announced during the most recent Blizzcon, showing Blizzard had an interest in trying to open some official legacy servers. In the wake of the announcement, I've found there's a lot of questions about the servers since not a lot of information was provided. While we may have to wait a while to learn more about Blizzard's plans, we can at least learn from a certain other officially run legacy game in the form of OSRS. In fact, I used some of the information I gleaned from that game to make predictions in my previous article on legacy WoW which I've since been using to answer questions about the nature of Classic WoW. Therefore, in this article I will analyze the history of OSRS and how it compares to Runescape 3 and use this information and more to predict the outcome of Classic WoW.
A Brief History of OSRS
The idea of OSRS effectively started when a number of controversial changes were made to the game starting around late 2007. This eventually culminated into the form of major changes such as the Evolution of Combat, which as its name implies fundamentally changed the combat system of the game, and the (harmful) pay to win, gacha-style Squeal of Fortune. These changes and more likely led to the hosting of numerous private servers (which I will not mention the name of).
Jagex responded relatively quickly to last set of controversial changes and opened a poll in early 2013 that received hundreds of thousands of "Yes" votes. This resulted in the opening of the OSRS servers which initially made a strong showing, but declined heavily in active player count over several months. Over time, the player count slowly recovered due to numerous factors such as the addition of polled content, almost all of which passed by a 75% supermajority. Between this recovery and the decline in RS3's active player count, OSRS active player count surpassed that of RS3 within a couple of years.
Differences Between OSRS and RS3
What often gets brought up when comparing legacy games with their live counterparts is the differences. While the differences between OSRS and RS3 are so extensive to list that I'm highly unqualified to go into such detail, a superficial comparison is sufficient to get a general idea of how much the two games differ and is important to a point I will make later on.
Presentation
When logging into the two games, what will immediately become apparent is the huge difference in presentation. One will consist of ancient, fairly simple graphics befitting a browser game from a decade ago. The other will have a more modern feel as if the older graphics were improved upon but smoothed out and given significantly more detail. Regardless of how one may feel about the graphics of each game, what is clear is that such a span of time had a major impact on the game visually. Personally, I found playing RS3 rather jarring because of this, though the presentation wasn't necessarily bad.
Combat
What comes next is the difference between the combat systems, which was what initially led me to trying some RS3 to begin with. OSRS combat is largely automated in most cases to the point attacking is as simple as clicking the attack option and literally AFKing though there are some rudimentary management options such as eating food to restore health. At higher levels, the game features some intensive situations that involve more dedicated management of various factors such as Prayer and dealing with enemy mechanics.
RS3, because of its Evolution of Combat update, adds an additional layer of mechanical depth in the form of hotkeyed actions that the player has to use to engage in combat. At some superficial level, this makes RS3 comparable to other MMORPGs like WoW since they feature a similar mechanical system. However, I personally found RS3's hotkey-based gameplay to be fairly rudimentary even compared to older versions of WoW due to a lack of procs and other dynamic gameplay. This is understandable since characters in Runescape don't have traditional classes and specializations but are instead defined by their skill levels. Finally, there's some features such as Revolution that automate the combat, though doing so isn't necessarily optimal.
Microtransactions (or Lack Thereof)
When it comes to microtransactions, OSRS has next to none and the most notable one that comes to mind are Bonds, which, like the WoW Token, is initially purchased for real life money but sold for in-game currency. The player who purchases the Bond with in-game currency can redeem it for service-related benefits such as membership time. Since Runescape has long been known for tying character power directly to in-game currency since a lot of equipment in the game is tradeable, Bonds could be considered pay to win. However, I do not think this fact is detrimental to the game as I've explained here.
RS3 also has Bonds as microtransactions and was the derivative source for the OSRS equivalent. It also features some purchasable cosmetics that can be purchased through Solomon's General Store. However, the game features even more in the way of microtransactions since it retained the Squeal of Fortune update in the form of Treasure Hunter. As I mentioned before, I consider this feature to be a form of harmful pay-to-win that has been considered as an article topic for quite a while. Since I may publish an article dissecting the feature in the future, I will instead simplify what I consider to be problematic about Treasure Hunter: It allows players to pay money to spawn in-game items and currency in addition to empowering their character, allowing them to pay to progress their character significantly and skip a lot of the game.
While I consider Runescape's biggest strength in general as a MMORPG to be the relatively slow journey to fully develop a character by maxing out all of the skills, even in the supposedly endgame-centric RS3, the former point of spawning items and in-game currency almost at will is by far the more problematic issue. The amounts that are spawned are seemingly negligible since items can typically be traded in for a few thousand gold, but this alone can add up fast considering the limit for purchasing Treasure Hunter keys is high at a whopping 20,000 per day per player (or ~$4,444 per day). I'd go as far as to say I have no faith in Jagex to regulate the in-game economy, especially in terms of gold inflation, because of this fact. What may also be concerning is that the game has been running Treasure Hunter promotions with extremely high frequency to further encourage the consumption of what I consider to be harmful microtransactions.
Finally, the contents are somewhat randomized (though they can be controlled to a degree), so it even upsets those who loathe loot boxes and systems like it though much like with Star Wars Battlefront 2, I consider this sin among the least grievous aspects. With that said though, the fact that Star Wars Battlefront 2 was rejected so strongly primarily due to its harmful pay to win microtransactions in addition to its loot boxes says a lot about how popular RS3 is and may even explain its declining playerbase.
The Tale of Runescape Classic
While OSRS and RS3 continue to clash in a sense despite both games being very different and likely appealing to different types of players, there is one more version of Runescape that quietly continues to run (officially) in the background. This version is known as Runescape Classic, or RSC, and it lasted 3 years until it faded into legacy when Runescape 2 or RS2, which is the version OSRS uses, released in 2004.
The act of fading was prolonged however since when Runescape 2 was in beta and eventually released, Jagex seemed tentative about fully embracing their new version of the game. They allowed a transfer of items between both games (first to RS2 then back to RSC) and continued to host servers for the older game, which is pretty revolutionary considering OSRS required enthusiastic support from the community for Jagex to even consider hosting servers. Over time, access to RSC increasingly became restricted and while it was reopened for members as recently as about a year ago, the regular playerbase for the game is now very small and doesn't even remotely rival OSRS or RS3. It also doesn't help that the game has received no updates for a very long time.
Personally, I can understand why RSC as a legacy game has a tiny playerbase today. When I was younger and started my journey on RSC, I immersed myself in it to the point of stubbornly refusing to try RS2. However, I was eventually convinced by friends to try it and realized it improved upon the older game immensely. For example, I felt more in control of my character when in the combat state since I could eat food to heal and flee whenever I wished instead of having to wait for three rounds of attacks. Actions also generally felt smarter and were automated to the point of not needing to require as much repetitive clicking to perform actions such as chopping trees or cooking food. This didn't stop the game from having some sense of challenge at the time though since there was more to manage such as Protection Prayers and run energy, which Jagex began to design around.
Ultimately I may be biased in my evaluation since I play live WoW but I think RS2 at the time was so superior to its predecessor that it outshined it on its own merits with actions such as restricting access to RSC being more of a secondary reason for that game's failure. The sheer level of quality of life improvements and reiteration upon existing concepts that RS2 featured is worth keeping in mind when discussing legacy and live versions of games. Note that this doesn't mean I think RS2 would hold up nowadays (in my opinion, it doesn't, but that's a topic for another article) or that more recent iterations of a game are always superior though.
What All This Means for Classic WoW
The first thing that comes to mind immediately is that RS3 was actually doing okay but ongoing development of the game caused a decline. Personally, I think this has a lot to do with the microtransactions since they are some of the unhealthiest for a multiplayer game for all of the reasons I mentioned above. I also mentioned above that there are many players who strongly reject such practices and while consumers of games in some sectors such as the mobile market may not care as much, such a rejection surely has an impact.
In contrast, while I may heavily criticize WoW's microtransactions, my issue lies with pricing more than what they actually sell since it all, even services, has a rather minimal impact on the game or can be regulated easily. Some may not necessarily agree with this assessment, but based on it I'm inclined to strongly believe microtransactions won't be that big of an issue when comparing the two versions of WoW. At the very least, I think there's a good chance Classic WoW may get its own version of the WoW Token in accordance with the Bonds OSRS has.
What comes next is the possible playerbase size of Classic WoW compared to WoW. Nostalrius may have had hundreds of thousands of players, a fair amount of which were active and there's likely a high amount of possible latent players sitting around. Meanwhile, the live version of the game still likely has millions of subscribers or at least potential players that translates to a fairly large population of active players, which is simple enough to deduce from statistics such as Legion's strong sales numbers. This is a fairly significant difference compared to the tens of thousands of active players that both OSRS and RS3 deal in and are more easily influenceable since even minor exposure of the games can increase the playerbase size greatly. What I'm basically trying to say is that live WoW is likely to generally have the larger playerbase since it's difficult to match up against its size.
With that said, while the live version of WoW has gotten better about providing players with enough content to consume, the variety of evergreen content and rate of content renewal could stand to be improved among other changes that'll ultimately leave players seeking a different game to play from time to time. Classic WoW could fill that void and see a boost in active players when the live version of the game is in a predictable lull similar to where it's heading at the moment. This can also work in reverse, which leads me to think that Blizzard should have one subscription allow access to both versions of the game. It also leads me to think Classic WoW will need regular updates of some sort to thrive much like OSRS, though releasing it when live WoW is in a lull will give it a nice boost to start with.
This leads me to my next point on how similar live and Classic WoW are, which makes it easier to transition between the two games at will. While there's many who would disagree, this point is based on what is fundamentally hotkey-based gameplay that is made distinct through details such as the control scheme and determining factors (in this case, mostly through class and spec). Even at more intricate levels there's mechanical tricks that can be used in both versions of the game such as kiting and strategic proc usage that ultimately allows skills developed in one game to be highly transferable to the other. The multiple versions of Runescape could only dream of having this sort of ease of transition since, as I mentioned above, even at a fundamental level there's some major, immediately noticeable differences between the three games.
I ultimately think the similarities are a good thing because it may help to bridge the divide between the two communities. I would rather have that over a toxic rivalry and also hope once the servers are available, that legacy server requests will die down since even Blizzard would likely have trouble hosting so many, especially in the way of types of servers. However, time will tell.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)