Celebrate Earth Day EVERY day with Green Daily!
Posts with tag mechanics

How a quirk in the game can steal your loot

There is a mechanic in game that we are all aware of, and one that exists for a good reason: when we attack a mob, we get the mob's loot. That's the mechanic. If you're solo grinding mobs out in Shadowmoon Valley for some Primal Fire, you want to be sure you're the only one that can get the loot. The same goes for groups – if you're grouping and killing Murmur in Shadow Labs, you want to be sure that everyone is going to get his pretty blues.

But what if the mechanics of the boss fight dictate that you won't hit the boss? In fact, what if successfully killing the boss means that you have to stand on the opposite end of the playing field the whole time? You don't hit the boss, you don't get the loot – but you've done everything right. In this, the game mechanic does not represent fair play, nor does it encourage success. In fact, the mechanics are a complete contradiction of each other.

I've recently encountered this problem, and it's a real pain. Read on after the break for what happened, and what can be done to solve it. It's rather long, but this is a serious problem that Blizzard needs to fix, and all the facts need to be laid out completely and in a way that is full of thruthiness.

Continue reading How a quirk in the game can steal your loot

Damion Schubert (sort of) defends the raid mechanic

Allow me to state the obvious; raiding is an integral part of WoW's design. A lot of people think that's a bad thing. They'll say raiding is only for the elite hardcore, and that it alienates everyone else. Here's a shocker; Damion Schubert -- a renown MMO designer whose games have historically been pretty much the opposite of raider-friendly -- is not one of those naysayers.

He recently updated his blog with a strong defense of Blizzard's decision to emphasize raiding. You should read it for yourself, but the gist of it is that there are more raiders than you think, that players of a PvE game want a PvE endgame (as opposed to a PvP one like the Battlegrounds), and that because raids are re-playable content, Blizzard gets more bang for its development buck.

His ultimate point, though, is that Blizzard focuses on raiding content because that's what players want. But I wonder if a lot of those players, especially the more casual types, would want something different if they were aware of other options. And Schubert suggested that there are alternatives. What are they, and do you want them, or are you perfectly happy with working your way up to Black Temple?

All the World's a Stage: Turning stumbling blocks into stepping stones

All the World's a Stage is brought to you by David Bowers every Sunday evening, investigating the mysterious art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.

It is an art to turn any negative situation to your advantage, and no less so when roleplaying in WoW. In the fine tradition of "turning stumbling blocks into stepping stones," it pays for a roleplayer to reconsider a number of in-game situations which seem to get in the way of roleplaying, yet which actually offer a special opportunity to showcase your creativity.

The biggest stumbling block WoW roleplayers trip over is often some aspect of the game mechanics themselves. Your roleplaying may lead your character into a deadly conflict with another player, for instance, and yet even if you kill the other in a free-for-all PvP arena, he or she can just resurrect and be back to normal in a few minutes. Alternately, you may find an epic BoE drop off a Skettis Kaliri and be hard pressed to explain how a rainbow-colored owl was flying around with a huge sword inside its body. You may even ponder why every single ogre you've ever seen is male.

Naturally, of course, there are ways around all these problems -- it's just a matter of finding plausible reasons for things. You may say to your bitter rival, in the event of a deadly conflict: "I do not kill fellow members of the Horde! We shall duel for honor and be done with this!" Likewise, when recounting your discovery of your BoE epic sword, you might explain: "As I killed the strange owl, I suddenly noticed something gleaming in the grass just next to its corpse! This [Blinkstrike] was lying there, sticking out of a stone in the ground!" Your character might even make an effort to explain away in-game oddities: "I have deduced that the entire race of ogres must be hermaphrodites -- both male and female at the same time! They are so ashamed of this that they all hide the fact, pretending that ogre females are hidden away somewhere!"

Continue reading All the World's a Stage: Turning stumbling blocks into stepping stones

Collision mechanics -- yay or nay?

The plight of the prot warrior and other tanks in PvP has been lamented for ages on the forums. DPSers can, of course, kill their opponents in PvP, and healers can help out their team, but the effectiveness of tanks depends entirely on a non-sentient opponent. Illidan and Archimonde apparently can't see beyond attacking the shiny person in the nice thick armor, but even the dumbest player knows not to go for the guy in plate with 15k health. Making taunt work on players is a commonly-mentioned idea, but it would take away a lot of the fun and strategy from PvP.

Prius of Blade's Edge has a new idea for helping out our protection buddies in PvP. He would like WoW to implement collision mechanics in PvP. That way, a prot warrior could "tank" by physically preventing enemy players from getting to his squishies. Warhammer Online is already implementing such a system, whenever it finally comes out (probably bundled with Duke Nukem Forever.)

There are a lot of problems with body collision in general, most of which are aptly summed up in this thread. Total body collision would allow WoW's infinite supply of jerks to block off access to banks, inns, dungeons and whatnot. PvE collision would turn raids into a group of tauren warriors standing around a boss while ranged DPS nukes it down. And, like everything, collision would add lag to the servers.

But a pure PvP collision, done only in battlegrounds or if two players are PvP-enabled or dueling, sounds like it could be a neat mechanic. Of course, I'd feel sorry for the gnomes, but maybe they could get some ankle-biting collision abilities.

Do you think PvP collision could be a viable new mechanic for WoW PVP? What problems would you forsee?

Fear and how to fix it

Draele just started a blog about being a Warlock called Rantings of the Afflicted, and today he's got a post up about that most heinous of Warlock abilites: yes, none other than fear. A touchy subject (to say the least), but he offers three different suggestions on how to make fear fun for everyone.

At its base, fear is actually Blizzard's way of trying to come up with another game mechanic. If you're a veteran MMORPG player, you know there are three archetype classes-- healer, DPS, and tank. All three of them are centered around damage-- either getting rid of it, doing it, or tanking it. Fear, however, plays with none of those rules-- it's a complete damage negator. The reason Warlocks have fear is so they can wear cloth and yet stay alive for a long time against one target-- long enough for their DoTs to come in.

The problem with fear, however, as even the developers have admitted, is that it's not fun for the person being feared-- getting feared leaves you with almost no option but to sit there and do nothing. It removes control from your character, and that's never fun.

So how can we fix it?

Continue reading Fear and how to fix it

Breakfast Topic: Abort, Retry, Fail?

Sometimes, despite our best intentions, we can't complete a particular quest on the first try. Maybe it's a difficult escort quest, or we're trying to kill mobs with some particularly nasty attacks, but there are plenty of moments when we want to just give up--or at least come back later.

Aborting quests has the unhappy side-effect of filling up your inventory with quest items--half-collected drops and special items given to you by NPCs. Retrying again and again often leads to death and armour at 0%; but failing isn't a nice thought. On the occasions when I give up on a quest, I try to destroy the quest items straight away (so I won't start chucking out the wrong thing in the middle of an instance) and I like to think of it as "moving on" rather than "failure".

What's your attitude to the inevitable quest abandonment? Do you try to complete every single quest you pick up, or are you happy to drop them at a whim?


RESOURCES

Class Columns
Pimp My Profile (1)
(Druid) Shifting Perspectives (40)
(Hunter) Big Red Kitty (37)
(Hunter) Scattered Shots (13)
(Mage) Arcane Brilliance (38)
(Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It (48)
(Priest) Spiritual Guidance (22)
(Rogue) Encrypted Text (33)
(Shaman) Totem Talk (43)
(Warlock) Blood Pact (26)
(Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors (47)
Gameplay
(Arena PvP) Blood Sport (22)
(BG PvP) The Art of War(craft) (21)
(Casual) WoW, Casually (21)
(Engineering) Hoof and Horn Research and Development (17)
(Guild Leadership) Officers' Quarters (55)
(Professions) Insider Trader (55)
(Raid Healing) Raid Rx (18)
(Raiding) Raiding 101 (3)
(Raiding) Ready Check (19)
(Roleplaying) All the World's a Stage (36)
Hybrid Theory (13)
AddOns and UI
AddOn Spotlight (80)
Macro Anatomy (12)
Reader UI of the Week (26)
Reader WoWspace of the week (29)
The Creamy GUI Center (11)
Lore and Stories
Around Azeroth (470)
Barrens Chat (1)
Know your Lore (57)
Tales from the Lion's Pride Inn (14)
WoW Moviewatch (467)
Features
15 Minutes of Fame (17)
About the Bloggers (23)
Ask WoW Insider (55)
Back In The Day (3)
Breakfast topics (681)
Build Shop (34)
Gamers on the Street (19)
Guildwatch (75)
He Said She Said (4)
It came from the Blog (25)
Phat Loot Phriday (85)
Two Bosses Enter (61)
Well Fed Buff (22)
World of WarCrafts (19)
WoW Insider Show (50)
WoW Rookie (36)
[1.Local] (5)
Classes
Death Knight (51)
Druid (266)
Hunter (258)
Mage (159)
Paladin (266)
Priest (222)
Rogue (166)
Shaman (243)
Warlock (177)
Warrior (179)
News
Account Security (10)
AddOns (237)
Analysis / Opinion (2703)
Blizzard (1477)
BlizzCon (188)
Bugs (215)
Burning Crusade (365)
Contests (205)
Economy (183)
Events (368)
Expansions (566)
Fan stuff (826)
Features (620)
Forums (251)
Guilds (463)
Hardware (23)
Humor (724)
Interviews (134)
Lore (270)
Mounts (131)
News items (1412)
NPCs (186)
Odds and ends (1605)
Patches (1118)
Podcasting (72)
Ranking (51)
Realm News (282)
Realm Status (227)
RP (158)
Rumors (32)
Virtual selves (611)
WoW Insider Business (278)
WoW Social Conventions (137)
WoW TCG (49)
Wrath of the Lich King (259)
Strategy
Alts (86)
Arena (163)
Battlegrounds (108)
Bosses (304)
Buffs (116)
Cheats (69)
Classes (287)
Enchants (29)
Factions (145)
Guides (325)
How-tos (362)
Instances (626)
Items (794)
Leveling (242)
Making money (161)
PvP (697)
Quests (345)
Raiding (673)
Talents (120)
Tips (543)
Tricks (218)
Walkthroughs (75)
Media
Comics (62)
Fan art (33)
Galleries (131)
Machinima (546)
Podcasts (52)
Polls (55)
Screenshots (611)
Races
Alliance (103)
Draenei (62)
Dwarves (15)
Gnomes (39)
Human (14)
Night Elves (42)
Horde (102)
Blood Elves (69)
Orcs (25)
Tauren (41)
Trolls (22)
Undead (21)
Professions
Alchemy (75)
Blacksmithing (55)
Cooking (66)
Enchanting (70)
Engineering (108)
First Aid (16)
Fishing (57)
Herbalism (44)
Inscription (10)
Jewelcrafting (79)
Leatherworking (59)
Mining (42)
Skinning (28)
Tailoring (64)
Retired
Azeroth Interrupted (24)
World Wide WoW (8)
/silly (14)

RSS NEWSFEEDS

Powered by Blogsmith

    Featured Galleries

    Magisters' Terrace walkthrough
    Patch 2.4 Sunwell Isle
    It came from the Blog: Children's Week Gallery
    Children's Week: Stormwind
    Children's Week: Orgrimmar
    M'uru loot
    Children's Week: Dornaa's quests
    Children's Week: Shattrath City -- Horde
    The Darkmoon Faire

     

    Most Commented On (30 days)

    Recent Comments

    Weblogs, Inc. Network

    Other Weblogs Inc. Network blogs you might be interested in: