Jeff Kaplan

[Pua]

Perhaps I misunderstood you. I presented very clear evidence...

No. You see, that's the problem. You haven't quoted a single iota of evidence. Not one. And that's the problem; all we have is conjecture.

... players in 2017 prefer gaming on smaller intervals.

You cannot possibly hope to prove that. Ever. What "gamers" are you referring to? Some? All? A percentage? What percentage?

That's just not how objective evidence works.

I could say "gamers prefer gaming on smaller intervals in 2005" and be correct, depending on what demographic I'm describing.

Additionally, there's something to be said about "classic WoW game design" but it's an important caveat to remember that MMOs in general are no longer the enormous cash cow they were in 2010 2009 when he left so I find fault in any argument which tries to manipulate reality to make a resurgence of the "old philosophy" prescient.

No MMORPG was a "cash cow" prior to World of Warcraft - not a single one of them.

It's now up to you to prove me wrong, in the comparative terms that you've drawn.

[Relapses]

No. You see, that's the problem. You haven't quoted a single iota of evidence. Not one. And that's the problem; all we have is conjecture.

Look around. It's plainly obvious that it's not just gaming moving in this direction, it's everything in society. Everyone has cell phones. Instagram. Twitter feeds. Snapchat. Instant gratification. Consumers want what they want and they want it right away. It should be no surprise that game developers key in on these desires. (The most successful ones are those which resonate best with this philosophy. I mentioned them in my previous post.)

If you really think a game like Vanilla WoW -- which represents a near antithesis of these societal trends -- would be anything other than large scale business suicide in today's gaming climate, it's not me who needs to prove anything. You're clinically insane.

[Hctaz]

And do you know how many guilds actually ever complete mythic raids? Yeah, it's still abysmally low. His design philosophy wasn't healthy for raiding.

You know it's funny... Kungen made a video on the subject of WoD raiding difficulty. I think you should probably look at some facts before actually lying out of your asshole about the completion rates of mythic raids.

Do you know how many people cleared Naxx 40 in the time span of its relevance?

23 guilds. It took the world first guild 3 months to down Kel'Thuzad and 6 months later when TBC was released, only 22 other guilds had done it. He goes into wowprogress for mythic HFC and scrolls through pages and pages and pages and pages and gets to about 2000 before stopping. The number of guilds that clear the hardest content has gone up significantly from Vanilla and TBC. Even Lich King there were thousand of guilds who killed him on heroic before Cata was released.

Completion rates for the highest level of difficulty are pretty damn high considering how few people even attempt the raid. Most people quit after LFR or Normal. More guilds finish the entire raid than those who start and give up or never kill the last boss.

[Relapses]

You know it's funny... Kungen made a video on the subject of WoD raiding difficulty. I think you should probably look at some facts before actually lying out of your asshole about the completion rates of mythic raids.

Do you know how many people cleared Naxx 40 in the time span of its relevance?

23 guilds. It took the world first guild 3 months to down Kel'Thuzad and 6 months later when TBC was released, only 22 other guilds had done it. He goes into wowprogress for mythic HFC and scrolls through pages and pages and pages and pages and gets to about 2000 before stopping. The number of guilds that clear the hardest content has gone up significantly from Vanilla and TBC. Even Lich King there were thousand of guilds who killed him on heroic before Cata was released.

Completion rates for the highest level of difficulty are pretty damn high considering how few people even attempt the raid. Most people quit after LFR or Normal. More guilds finish the entire raid than those who start and give up or never kill the last boss.

Because logistics were more difficult than the actual raid. KT didn't take that long to kill because it was a difficult boss. KT took that long because it took that long to get 40 people in a raid with enough gear to pass all of the retarded gates Blizzard created in the game via Resistances, shitty gear drop rates, ungodly terrible encounter design (4H) and relying entirely on Warriors and Warriors alone to do a lion's share of the tanking. You can wax nostalgic about the content to your heart's content but please don't try to rewrite history to prove a point that Vanilla raids were somehow more difficult for any reason other than plain logistics.

[corebit]

You have some really great debating skills.
You do realise this is a thread about Jeff Kaplan and people will invariably post their thoughts about him?
If you can't or rather won't accept that people will have different opinions about the guy than your own then you should go and take a hike.
You have made it very clear what your stance is on him, parrot.

It seems you didn't get the point of otaXephon's reply. It was a sarcastic reply in order to demonstrate the silliness of putting Jeff Kaplan on a pedestal and waxing nostalgic about the good ol' days. I suggest you go back and re-read it this time with full context.

[Turina]

Jeff Kaplan is a pretty great game designer and director. He's not perfect. He's far from perfect. But he's very good, and he's very willing to work iteratively in order to polish his projects. A lot of Vanilla game design decisions he proposed are outdated compared to the game nowadays (over a decade later) but were way ahead of the existing content at the time, and he was one of the biggest forces behind the paradigm shifts in the industry.

I'm pretty sure if he worked in WoW he would recognize the changes and adapt to them accordingly. As long as Jeff K worked in WoW, the game saw a constant rise in population, and he's been there throughout all the changes. The last of his in WoW was a game that resembles pretty much what we have today - multiple difficulties in raids, patches with catch-up mechanisms, raids that are not gated. All of which iterated on an existing very successful game, which iterated over the existing games he loved and played. No one came and made Legion the way it is from the scratch.

I strongly dislike some of his decisions with Overwatch but it would be disingenuous not to say he hits far more often than he misses. His misses really suck and are often accompanied by a quote that bites his ass later, but his hits are critical strikes.

And most of all, he listens to the players. He constantly replies to what the players think in Overwatch and adjusts his plans when he thinks players are being sensible. He's the same guy who said that he felt 40 people in a raid was the minimum needed for the raid to be fun, and announced and personally talked about Karazhan, an experiment to see if raids with smaller numbers of players could still be good and epic. And he didn't half-ass it, he didn't sabotage it on purpose. For a long time, Karazhan was widely considered one of the best raids in WoW. And its success allowed into a smoother transition into other raid models.

This is the guy that worked on his own for a week to make Molten Core because he found unacceptable that the game would release without a raid, instead of saying quests would cost a raid tier.

Hell yes I'd like to have someone like him back.

[Hctaz]

Because logistics were more difficult than the actual raid. KT didn't take that long to kill because it was a difficult boss. KT took that long because it took that long to get 40 people in a raid with enough gear to pass all of the retarded gates Blizzard created in the game via Resistances, shitty gear drop rates, ungodly terrible encounter design (4H) and relying entirely on Warriors and Warriors alone to do a lion's share of the tanking. You can wax nostalgic about the content to your heart's content but please don't try to rewrite history to prove a point that Vanilla raids were somehow more difficult for any reason other than plain logistics.

Bruh. Check the video out to understand what I'm talking about. You say it wasn't hard from a mechanics standpoint but I'd say you're wrong. The mechanics in Vanilla were 100% unforgiving. The video uses the first boss and the only boss that many people killed as an example. Locust swarm in Naxx Wrath dealt 1300-1600 damage every two seconds and silenced. Locust Swarm in 40 man Naxx dealt 1200 damage every two seconds and silenced. Most players had around 3.5k health back then if they were clothies. Wrath Naxx they had around 8-10k. If you stood in that Locust Swarm and got the debuff you were dead as fuck. And that was the easiest boss.

[Draculla]

He looks like a guy on a caffeine 24/7

[Dracullus]

I think many here would be suprised if they would ask Kaplan about WoW content philosophy again. It's not 2000' anymore, market for video games has expanded, and many former players now have jobs, kids and other stuff to do. Look for Overwatch, you can be casual that play once a week or hardcore and game is designed for both.

Unlike Vanilla, now we have choice, we can stick to organized groups and do Normal/Heroic, play solo with LFR or go hardcore and do Mythic, which is harder than first raids. And it's not like that more and more things are queable - since 6.2 we returned to idea of non-queable dungeons, and Mythic+ expanded that, so even most hardcore will find dungeon at their level.

[Deleted]

I agree, aside from when you have the Kirin Tor emissary and there's only "Like the wind"-quests up... -_-

Those are the best WQ's.

[Akka]

I think many here would be suprised if they would ask Kaplan about WoW content philosophy again.

I think even more would be surprised if they heard what the PERSONAL preferences of designers were. What if they could do the game they actually like instead of having to appeal to "a wider audience".

[Pua]

Look around. It's plainly obvious that it's not just gaming moving in this direction, it's everything in society. Everyone has cell phones. Instagram. Twitter feeds. Snapchat. Instant gratification. Consumers want what they want and they want it right away. It should be no surprise that game developers key in on these desires. (The most successful ones are those which resonate best with this philosophy. I mentioned them in my previous post.)

If you really think a game like Vanilla WoW -- which represents a near antithesis of these societal trends -- would be anything other than large scale business suicide in today's gaming climate, it's not me who needs to prove anything. You're clinically insane.

It's become awfully clear that you don't really know the difference between anecdote and evidence.

World of Warcraft is the exception; not the expectation. What that means is that you're holding the exception up as the rule, when the rule is that MMORPGs can be perfectly successful without millions of subscribers depending on the design team, business model and market. Jeff Kaplan made a game that was already much more casual-friendly than its predecessors, and there's subsequently no reason to believe that he wouldn't understand the market you cite and be able to adapt to it.

Note that I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm simply saying that a game like the original World of Warcraft could be successful if it were funded appropriately given the market of people likely to pay for it (and how they'd prefer to pay).

Nothing, repeat nothing, that you've said disproves this. Like I said, you really just need to get a better grasp of what "evidence" is.

[Deleted]

Do you miss him?

Did he leave?

[Gimlix]

Not at all actually. He's probably one of the last people I want working on a modern MMO. He's way too stuck in the past.

Modern MMO's suck 9 out of 10 times :/

[Sail into the wind]

He looks like a guy on a caffeine 24/7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41w3zsE77cg

So he actually thought that, not only people would spend time in Silvermoon City, but that there would also be enough of a crowd to warrant two auction houses, two banks and two hearthstone spots? Poor guy.

Nice exposition, though. Pretty sure that most MMORPG players of the time were able to relate to this "baggy eyes, too much coffee, not enough sleep" edition of Jeff Kaplan.

[Jngizu]

I think, aside from pure design decision in the sense of LFG etc, people seem misunderstand one huge thing between pre-cata and post-cata. Vanilla, TBC and Wrath had for the most part great writing and lore (well, TBC not so much, it ruined KT and Illidan). Cata and WoD on the other hand, were utter shit. MoP was great if you cared about it but the setting put a lot of people off (I am one of those). That leaves us with Legion, which is honestly amazing in terms of features. Sure some classes are still hit or miss but overall the game has never been better. Problem though, Legion's writing is pretty poor IMO.

In terms of pure gameplay, Legion is the best xpac by a huge margin. But give me Wrath with Legion's gameplay and features and that would be something !

[Relapses]

Bruh. Check the video out to understand what I'm talking about. You say it wasn't hard from a mechanics standpoint but I'd say you're wrong. The mechanics in Vanilla were 100% unforgiving. The video uses the first boss and the only boss that many people killed as an example. Locust swarm in Naxx Wrath dealt 1300-1600 damage every two seconds and silenced. Locust Swarm in 40 man Naxx dealt 1200 damage every two seconds and silenced. Most players had around 3.5k health back then if they were clothies. Wrath Naxx they had around 8-10k. If you stood in that Locust Swarm and got the debuff you were dead as fuck. And that was the easiest boss.

Unforgiving =/= complex/difficult. (In fact, I'd argue it's an incredibly lazy approach which is exactly the opposite.) It was artificial gating through mechanics which meant that if you didn't have a full set from the previous tier that you couldn't even walk into the instance that was one of the biggest cockblocks in Naxx. Again, finding 40 people with the prerequisites was often the most difficult aspect of raiding in Vanilla. None of the encounters were particularly mechanically challenging... you just had to have enough people who'd already spent a metric fuck ton of time raiding the prior tiers to get to the point where downing the bosses in the instance was even a possibility.

Note that I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm simply saying that a game like the original World of Warcraft could be successful if it were funded appropriately given the market of people likely to pay for it (and how they'd prefer to pay).

If you don't think there are people in today's gaming market who are paid to monitor the trends I've mentioned in each of my posts you keep trying to disregard as "anecdotal," I don't know what to tell you. Gaming in 2017 is much different than it was in 2004. The game you're proposing would never make it past the development stage because there isn't a studio in existence who would make a game like Vanilla WoW in today's market. Moreover, if PS participation is any indication, the market of players who prefer that type of game represent less than 1% of the current retail playerbase.

It's a non-starter from nearly every angle and Jeff Kaplan's hypothetical direction has very little to do with whether it'd ever become a reality. If something like Vanilla WoW were to ever come to fruition, it'd likely be Blizzard themselves who make it. And since they're not in the business of competing with themselves, that likely won't happen until retail WoW has wrapped up.

[Cathbadh]

I don't miss back in the day Kaplan, but he was before my time I think. I do think modern Overwatch Kaplan is amazing. His level of communication is awesome. I may not agree with his or his team's stances on buffs or nerfs, but at least they explain them thoroughly. The WoW team seems to have started doing that to a small degree, and I hope it continues in the future.

[Pua]

If you don't think there are people in today's gaming market who are paid to monitor the trends I've mentioned in each of my posts you keep trying to disregard as "anecdotal," I don't know what to tell you.

Sigh.

1) I never said there wasn't.
2) QUOTE ONE.

Just one trend study. It doesn't even have to be Blizzard.

I'm also pretty much out of this conversation from now, unless you start acknowledging what I'm saying rather than completely ignoring it and restating what has already been discussed.

Zealotry is cute, but it's typically worthless.

[fangless]

Yes. Overwatch is coming along nicely, while Legion turned into some wacky mess that Blizzard understands is fucked up but has no idea how to fix.