evolution creations

There was a post today on MMO-Champion from Ghostcrawler, one of the lead system designers for World of Warcraft, talking about stats and their continual progression upward.

What’s really interesting about this, is that in both my former and previous guild’s as Cataclysm came out, I raised this same point. With the stats jumping as high as they were with the gear that came out in Cataclysm, it just seemed to be way to much of a jump. If in each subsequent expansion, we saw a similar jump, wouldn’t that mean that at some point we’d see DPS dealers who do a million damage?

But the general reaction was fairly plain. Yes, the numbers are going up, but if you’d played the game since Vanilla, you’d have seen that it happened in every expansion.

Now this is comical to me because obviously this is now concerning to Blizzard that they make sure the game remains viable for a few more expansions to come.

My view back then and what I think today is relatively the same–the expansions should give you better gear, but the steps upward should be little steps, so that each bit of gear gives you just a bit more chance, instead of a jump from 345 to 364 ilevel gear giving you a make or break difference in the instance.

But looking at gear in general, I think there’s a fundamental issue here. The difference between normal and heroic gear isn’t that great. First mistake. The difference between normal and heroic should be night and day. Why? Because heroic modes are brutal in Cataclysm. I look back at Wrath of the Lich King and the heroic modes and pretty much they were a face roll. You could get 25 random people into a raid and put it into heroic mode and there was maybe 1 or 2 additional mechanics that they had to worry about–other than that it was business as usual. Now heroic modes in Tier 11 and Tier 12 will push your raids to the breaking point. In fact, if you look at moderate to hard core guilds pushing Heroic Ragneros, they are hitting breaking points that they had never experienced before in any expansion pack. Some could say that the point of heroics is to provide content that is challenging, but the rewards have to be commensurate to the challenges. But if the only thing to look forward to in heroics is a small bump in gear effectiveness, it sort of takes the rewards of heroics and puts it on the back burner.

So let’s take a look at the gear coming out of WotLK. You had normal raid gear at ilevel 251, sanctified gear at ilevel 264 and heroic gear at ilevel 277. Additionally from the vendor you could only purchase main set gear up to ilevel 245.

Now lets fast forward to Cataclysm and you can purchase most of your gear by valor. What?! We’ve just marginalized things immensely!

How should the gearing situation be in Cataclysm?

First let’s take a look at the gear you get in dungeons. Yes this should help you gear up, but it shouldn’t make you raid ready. This mentality is just wrong. Additionally valor points shouldn’t be able to get you your tier gear. It should get you gear right below tier gear. Let’s say that Cataclysm dropped again and gear was done differently. Assume that you have ilevel 264 gear out of WotLK.

Going through each of the zone’s you should be able to get gear up to ilevel 280. It should only be slightly better and in some cases a side grade or down grade to the sanctified gear. Why? Because all those people who raided late and furiously through WotLK to get their heroic gear should see that gear shine through the regular drop gear in the next expansion. Then once you start running the dungeon’s, the gear should start to get better. Gear out of normal dungeons should be ilevel 285 and the gear out of the heroic dungeons should be ilevel 295. Why? Again, dungeons are to get better gear than what you have, but not make you raid ready.

In the case of the ZA/ZG dungeon’s, the normal should drop ilevel 295 and the heroic ilevel 300.

Vendor gear? The highest gear you can get out of a vendor should be ilevel 300. Also in terms of pieces of gear, you should be able to get only some gear out of ZA/ZG, and other gear out of vendor and world drops, but all together, pre-raid you shouldn’t be able to get more than ilevel 300 with all the gear together. PvP gear should also NOT be allowed in dungeons or raids. This removes the dependency that some users will get their gear via PvP and substitute that for PvE gear.

Let’s look at the raiding situation. Normal raids should give you raid gear. Gear that will greatly help you while raiding. The ilevel of this gear should be 315. Then when you go from normal to heroic raids, the ilevel should jump again to 330.

If you take a look at this model and compare it to what was actually released. By the time you got raid ready through gearing in dungeons, vendors and world drops, the average ilevel is 340!!!! Of course it’s no surprise then to see why developers are concerned about the ilevel of the gear and overall damage. Why? Because EVERYONE has an ilevel now of over 359! Holy crap! And the number of guilds that have gotten through heroic content isn’t that high still–post nerfs (the numbers till of heroic Ragneros is even less).

Additionally gear that drops out of dungeons SHOULD NOT be bind on equip. Why because that depreciates the gear that the non-raiders get and puts them on the same level as raiders.

The TL:DR version of this is that if you raid, you should get the top gear. And the difference between a geared raider and a geared player should be substantial. Is that fair? Maybe. But what it does is provide ample rewards for people who do things at the next level and are willing to put in the time and effort to fight the good fight. Going through a 5-man dungeon while sometimes painful shouldn’t be anywhere near the same level of stress as raiding. But in this expansion we saw quite the opposite. Dungeon’s should be fun but challenging. They should provide adequate gear for the average player, but if you take a look at the stats between an average non-raiding player and a raiding player, it should still be night and day. For example, if an average player does 7k damage, the raid player should do 10k. That’s a huge difference! Now today it doesn’t seem like that, mainly because people are on average doing over 20k!!!

But then doing this, brings up another problem. Let’s say for example, you have your tank stats. Using a paladin it’s all about block. The question becomes how does a tank gear to become raid ready if they can’t get anywhere near the amount of block that they need to survive? The answer: bring in more healers. Now this is an interesting concept. There’s been a bit of chatter these last few weeks about the current raid composition. In most if not all cases, you want more DPS and less healers or less tanks. But what if when you first start out the raid is actually harder for you to accomplish with the ideal raid configuration? So for example, let’s take the Shannox fight. Typically in the current gear and nerfs you’ll bring 2 tanks, 2 healers, and 6 DPS. But at the start, you may need 2 tanks, 4 healers, and 4 DPS. Now whoa! This changes everything! This means that instances have to scale such that their recommended and required starting points are going to be fundamentally different. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Let’s say you start out and have to bring in another healer and lose a DPS? Well that means forget the enrage timer. Blizzard’s main concern should be cause the raid do what it needs to do to survive the encounter. But what happens when you get better gear? Well that’s obvious isn’t it? You move up in the encounter! And once the content gets to a point where you get better raid gear and can do it more easily, then you can reconfigure your raid to say bring in 3 healers and then to a point where you may only need 2. But at that point, your raid should be heroic ready, and can start working on bosses at that level. The rewards become commensurate for the work required for the content. Additionally top tier bosses, should drop significantly more gear and points and tokens. Yes tokens. You should be able to improve your gear but only at top tier bosses like Ragneros. On normal you get 1 token in 10 and 2 in 25. You can take those tokens to improve one piece of gear (sanctified) by 5 ilevel. So if your normal gear is 315 you can bump this to 320 with a token (only once) and if you have heroic gear at 330 you can push this to 335. Additionally the token should add a special feature to the item, such as a percentage bonus. You only get a few, so make it special. When you move to heroic, you get 3 tokens in 10 and 6 in 25 and their bonus will push the sanctified gear by 10 ilevel.

In the end, if you raid heroics and you complete the end boss (only end bosses reward tokens), your gear can max at 340. Even with this, that would equal today’s pre-raid gear that averages at 345 and most of that gear you can get with points and from dungeons. Also the delta between players that are able to push those high numbers and those that push average numbers becomes that much more clear.

The lesson here is that if you raid, you should be visibly different in terms of stats than a non-raider. Period. If you down heroic bosses, your stats should again be visibly different than a normal raider. While Blizzard seems to have gone against the idea of a caste system, I personally enjoy this idea as it does mean that there are people who others look to and say, “wow!!!! I want that!” and go out and try to join guilds that they can progress through the content with. It pushes players to look at their current guilds and say “well if we can’t get through normal content and I want heroic content and I feel that I’m able to play to that level, I need to move to a guild that pushes heroic content”. In the end, the gear level in Cataclysm jumped exponentially high and for no good reason. It has normalized gear across average and above average players so by this point if you aren’t rocking 359 or higher gear your way behind the pack.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything related to WoW (granted I’ve been away from the game now for a few months). But I can’t help myself to just keep up with things and to see how the game is progressing. Over the last few weeks, news from BlizzCon had the WoW community foaming at the mount. Some good things, some not so good things. Others like a new class that is a new hybrid class, the jury is still out as to whether or not this is a good thing or bad thing for the game.

But lately I’ve been reading a few posts on dungeons and raiding, posts that got me thinking, what is really wrong with the game? I could tell you with absolute certainty when I was actively playing that the issue with the game falls to bad players and stupid players as did The Grumpy Elf feel this way in a recent post.

But I will throw this out instead, that while this is valid, there are certainly bad players or stupid players, or troll players who act stupid just to get onto everyone’s nerves, the real issue is the focus in Cataclysm to get. Yes, everything is now related to ilevel. It’s so very methodical. Let’s actually take a step back and look at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. Back then, I remember how everything was focused on Gear Score (yes you all remember that!). People in trade would be spamming their Gear Score (GS) and based on that and class you would either be taken or not into a raid. For example, to do VoA you had to have a minimum GS. Higher GS players would be taken over lower GS players. What ended up becoming out of all this GS talk was that GS = ability to play the game. A higher GS player meant that you’d seen the end game content, had the gear, and presumably had the experience and skill to not be a complete waste of pixels on the screen. This wasn’t always the case, as we all knew back then that 25-man raids were a lot easier than 10-man raids (meaning they were much much more forgiving) so a lot of top geared players were geared because they were part of 25-man raiding guilds and they themselves weren’t that great of players, but just out of luck or lack of competition they got the gear.

Fast forward to Cataclysm, and Blizzard took things over with the introduction of ilevel. Gear based on ilevel and average ilevel was the break between getting into the higher level random dungeons or not. So what did players do? They stacked higher ilevel gear just to get in, figuring that they would be carried by a good healer or better DPS and there was just that chance of getting better gear, and if nothing else, tthey could get their valor points.

When I left the game, ilevel was EVERYTHING! Your ilevel was the new GS. And yet the focus is still on gear. But what’s the fix? Obviously going from GS to ilevel wasn’t the fix, but what can be done so that it just doesn’t seem like ranting and raving from a former player?

My answer, Reputation. Let’s take a look at this. Whenever I say reputation, naturally players get that sinking feeling cause they know what is usually meant by reputation. Grinding reputation is probably the least favorite activity within the game, and for many end-game raiders, reputation grinding from the lower zones or obscure factions is a badge of honor. But why reputation? Well looking back at the times in a dungeon or raid, I always thought to myself that while someone is good geared, why is it that they always die in the crap, can’t soak damage worth a damn, isn’t healing a butterfly, or couldn’t hit the broad side of the barn if they drove Oacha’noa into it head first! We all know how to tell if someone isn’t making the cut, but why is what drives more aware players, raid leaders, or guild leaders into the loony house (or in my case but I’d assume isn’t all that rare, for players to quit the game all together). So why Reputation?

I’ll summarize that Reputation of the player (not a faction or zone) is calculated based on several factors:

1. Number of successful dungeons. Dungeons where the player doesn’t die give a higher weight, whereas dungeons that result from many wipes has a negative impact to reputation. If you keep wiping, your reputation continues to be driven down bit by bit. 
2. Completion of all dungeons at level gives a bonus to your overall reputation. This rewards players for doing dungeon’s while they are leveling up. I find that it’s important for players to learn how to play before they reach the end game. I dislike players who buy their toons at max level and then go into a dungeon to “figure out how to play”. Honestly your leveling process should be focused on different situations and figuring out how to make the most out of that situation given what you’ve got. Sure you get a lot more toys at max level, but if you don’t get certain end game talents at lower levels, you have to learn how to play your class using whatever you have available to you at that level. This makes a better player. 
3. During each of the dungeon or raid encounters, were mechanics followed? Going back to The Grumpy Elf’s post, clearly mechanics are one of the things in the game that will take a mild mannered player who wouldn’t want to hurt a fly, to go out and use a shotgun to shoot the wings off a ladybug! Players who fail mechanics have a more sever hit to their reputation, where subsequent attempts during the same period will result in a more sever hit to reputation. Let me setup an example to this. For instance, let’s say you are in Grim Batol and facing off Drahga Shadowburner. This is an optional boss in Grim Batol and one that MANY people skip (for which I have no idea why as this is a very simple boss). The main mechanics here are that when an Invoked Flame Spirit appears that A) you don’t stand on the circle of fire and B) that all DPS switch to this and burn it down before it reaches the player it’s linked to, C) the player that it’s linked to runs away from the spirit (kite baby kite!). Additionally when Valiona appears, don’t stand in her flame breath. So what Reputation would be calculated here, if you get hit by any of this mechanics, i.e. you die to the Supernova & the Spirit was linked to you, you alone would get a hit of Reputation. If you stood in the flame breath you would take a hit to your reputation. If you didn’t switch to the Spirit and your DPS logs only show that you were attacking Drahga or Valiona you’d take a hit in your reputation. Basically if you don’t follow the mechanics you lose reputation. The more times you die and your the one that is being affected by mechanics, the more sever your penalties are. These penalties reset after an hour of you logging out (or something like that).
4. Raiding would be similar in terms of mechanics, but also taking into account of things like raid start times. For example, tie in the calendar directly into the reputation system. If you sign up, but show up late, reputation is lost. If you don’t sign up, but are available and are asked to join the raid, you are added to the calendar as a stand by and subsequently you gain reputation! If the raid time is for 3 hours, and you stay on for longer than that period during that period, you gain reputation. 
5. If you are in a dungeon and wiping a lot, so as long as you aren’t the one that is failing at mechanics, you get a bonus for sucking it up and being patient through the end! If you desert or leave the dungeon before it’s completed, you lose reputation.
6. If you are a tank, the system will track tanks of similar gear level and compare to see where you are in your particular stats. For example, Paladin’s are all about Blocking with dodge and parry right behind that stat. If you are an 85 paladin with a ilevel 355 gear set, you will be compared against paladin’s in a +/-5 ilevel in similar dungeon’s to see if you are on par with their performance (on average). If you aren’t blocking or your other stats are resulting in you taking more damage, then your reputation goes down–you were carried or aren’t playing your class properly. So you get points taken away. Obviously. The same goes across healers and DPS. Since you are being compared across players of the same class and talent tree, i.e. a discipline priest wouldn’t be compared against a holy priest, the assessment on your top stats and how they fair in combat should tell whether or not your worth your salt and deserve reputation or should have reputation taken away. If you are a Retribution paladin with ilevel 359 gear, but you are not doing as much DPS as another Retribution paladin in the same encounter with 354 gear, you will have a more significant amount of reputation hit. Why? Because you are being carried! 

The bottom line is you gain reputation whenever you do the right thing–all of the time. It’s not just a race to 85 now, but instead it’s a constant fluid moving scale that says when you start slacking off or being a d-bag to other players, you lose reputation. So why reputation?

Going back to my original thought, if I’m looking for a new guildy or a PuG or just doing something with another player, I want to know their reputation. It’s their badge of honor that says, I enjoy to play, others enjoy playing with me, and even though I don’t know you, we’re going to have fun playing as well! The higher the reputation, regardless of gear, the better that player really is. It means they are patiently completing dungeons. Remember, if they aren’t hit by the mechanics, even if they wipe a bunch of times, if they finish, they will gain reputation and that gain will outweigh any lose that was incurred by the wipes. Also if you hit 85 but then just do all the wrong things, i.e show up to a dungeon under geared, get others killed because you go ahead and pull the boss, basically doing all the stupid things, you lose reputation.

All in all, I quite like the idea of judging players on multiple dimensions even if it becomes a mountain of data to consider, when it results in players being generally happier because at 85 they play with others who have similar reputations. For example, let’s just take the random dungeon finder. Imagine if you had a setting where you could queue up and the LFD only put you in groups that have your reputation +/- some difference? That means that everyone you get queued with should be a similarly minded player. What if you have bad reputation? Well that means that when you join you have to make it clear with the others that you are looking to improve your reputation and that means you just have to work together to help each other along. Staying out of the fire, and finishing the dungeon. The more times you do this, the better your reputation is and the better players you will eventually start playing with.

And keep in mind this is a sliding scale. If you start acting up or doing a-hole type stuff, you start losing reputation. This isn’t like leveling where once you reach 85 you can’t slide back down and lose XP. You can always risk losing reputation. The more bone-headed things you do, the faster you lose reputation. It would always be the case that it is faster to lose reputation than it is to gain it back. I would even consider making raids reputation based, where you can’t enter the zone unless you have a certain level reputation.

Let’s look at a few scenarios. Let’s say for example, your in a dungeon with people who are at the same reputation (more or less). And there is one person who keep standing in the poop and killing the party. Currently you have a few options: 1) you nerd rage at the person until either you quit or they quit or miraculously you make it through, 2) you try to be patient and help them out, 3) you give it a few pulls and if it doesn’t work out you quit. All in all your stress level goes up. Either your a DPS who’s already waiting a long queue and feel that your time is being wasted by sub-par stupid people, or a healer who can’t keep their mana cause DPS is either really bad or really good and the tank can’t hold threat, or a good tank with crappy DPS who can’t kill stuff fast enough for mechanics, or a bad tank who just can’t hold onto the threat of a pussy cat waving a ball of yarn in front of it’s face. We’ve all been there, and trust me, it’s not pretty. Even if your the patient type and stick through it giving suggestions and encouragement, by the end your wiped yourself.

In the above scenario, the players who are bad will continue to have reputation deducted. Why? Because they failed at mechanics. Or they aren’t playing their class to averages based on gear. Or you nerd rage and quit. But let’s say you don’t quit, after a few pulls the system will detect what you are doing and prevent you from zoning in! So automatically without a vote kick, you are removed from the instance and another player is sent in to take your spot. No more vote kicks, no more hard feelings. Also that player that was removed, is not able to queue with the same level reputation so they have to put in more work to learn the mechanics and work with players to work their way up.

What this system does is reward players for doing the right things and penalize players for doing the wrong thing. And for players who want to play with better players, they have to work their way up, so the ownership is on them to improve verses to be carried by others.

I guess the only thing that I’d be concerned about here is that a system like this will destroy the novice player or player who doesn’t play their class, or just play to have fun regardless of the damage it does to other players. But something like this I think would change the welfare within the game by creating a balance and system that continues even at the top levels, to reward players for doing the right things in game and helping one another.