League of Legends Lead Content Designer 'Morello' Scott talks about World of Warcraft

[deathstar878]

Being a game designer himself does not really validate his opinions any more or less, other than being appreciative of the scope of work and challenges of other lead game designers.

It does, being a game designer gives him insight on methods and methodology which all designers share. This makes his insight more interesting than that of an average player because its focused on the macro rather than the micro. And yes, completely different games, but the same kind of analyst way of looking at things in realistic detail

[Jaylock]

If the goal was to have less players and make much less money than they did, then yes, he's right of course.

I think the sub numbers in vanilla wow, and TBC speak for themselves, and blatantly proves that your statement here is false.

I think the game would be just as successful and retain as much, if not more players than it currently does, had they stuck with the raid design and direction they had for TBC. Exclusivity. Players come and go, and if the philosophy of the game stayed the same, you would still get casual players playing for fun with aspirations of getting to the exclusive raid content.. and you would also have those hardcore players perfecting their PVE raid game in that actual content.

A few changes would have made life a bit better for those with alts such as account wide attunements, but the core of what made TBC great staying the same for future expansions would have not seen huge declines in subs, on the contrary, they probably would have continued to rise.

[Deleted]

If driving Wow downward means driving the wannabe hardcores out of the game I'm all for it.

That's why you are WRONG as FUCK and GC and his incompetent team will continue to be in the wrong side of the moon....

Look the difference of viewers on Twitch between LoL and WoW. What is the difference ?

Answer : Your " the wannabe hardcores " are models for 100 000 average people, daily !

It was the same for WoW. And now there is TOO MUCH RAIDING FORMAT.... how can this be balanced or even correct.... ?

WoW is still alive thanks to the PvE competition, with sites like World of Logs and WoW Progress, mmochamp, ONLY... Because people always want some models and landmarks, they need to look up at the pyramid's eye....


Elite are those who push the game testing it beyond Dev's capacities, searching for bugs and those who are making the game balanced...

Elitists Jerks > Devs naïve nude spreadsheets


That's how you can build a strong community.

If you are like this " Bash your c'onsumers " ( bashiork ) asshole, screaming that you have to shut up and quit the game because you are the 1 % whom everybody asked infinite questions on how to perform and PLAY THE GAME.... then you have to quit it first... because you are clueless and toxic for the game.

So pliz calm down and face the truth.

[melodramocracy]

He's absolutely correct.

A portion of content being exclusive by design has never been a hurdle to this game's success historically.

[Yriel]

A chef's opinion on food means more than yours, a writer's opinion on a book means more than yours, a director's opinion on a movie means more than yours, an artist's opinion on art means more than yours. It's all blatant opinion, but in mine, his is far more valuable than a regular player.

Valuable in what regard ? When i read a book and i don't like it and Stephen King says it's the best book he ever read then that doesn't change my opinion about the book.

[Deleted]

He's never worked on an MMO of WoW's caliber, that is for sure. I work for a game developer working on 3 different genres right now. If the teams switched mid-development, there would undoutably be serious issues with what came out afterwards.

Ok dude its pointless trying to explain how the real world works to u... ill leave u in your sheltered existence.

Ur welcome to dismiss a well respected opinion in the gaming industry... just dont expect everyone else to be so naive.

[potis]

This has been said many times before, when people say it, they are "elitists".

When a developer says it, no one calls him anything.

Vanilla/TBC/Wrath was successful and had an increase of players because the game was a carrot on a stick with occasional sugar cube fed by the developers in the form of exalted mount reputation like the Arakkoa sting rays, the netherwing mount, and higher level item gear from heroics.

People need to thrive to be like someone else to push them to do things..When everyone is the same because everything is given then you get Cata/MoP sub losses.

I had been reading WoW forums ever since the game came out, i never remember no matter how hard i try someone saying "I pay, i wanna see Naxx and Sunwell too!" , forums were filled with random stuff that no one cares about, 95% of them lore and next raid speculations.

Then Arena appeared and the forums got filled with QQ, somewhere after season 2 were every Retri was crying "I wanna do Warrior dmg", every caster was crying "I wanna do warlock dmg!" and every healer was crying "I wanna do Lifebloom healing!", but never any post about "I wanna raid too!".

The game no longer has any logical carrot on a stick for players to chase.

Back then there were tiny carrots on a huge stick that you could reach slowly and at the road to reaching the carrot, a sugar cube popped to make casuals even happier! Now there are 100 carrots gathered very close to the level cap and then one massive carrot at the end of the stick MILES away, making people not interested at it, why would you go for the hard to get carrot at the end and not eat the 100 in front of you and then unsub, which is whats happening to WoW.

People sub for a month or two, finish the 100 carrots gathered near the level cap in a few weeks, and unsub, the next carrot is heroic raiding, and thats very very far away compared to everything else, there is simply no scaling.

[PuppetShowJustice]

I think it's interesting and kind of telling that Blizzard goes to great length to try to maintain some of that exclusivity (but very little). Look at Sinestra in Cata. Or Ra-Den in Throne of Thunder. Blizzard clearly, on some level, still wants some degree of exclusive content. But the delivery method and the amount of it is staggeringly different than it was in the old days.

[Theendgamelv3]

The "He doesn't know what he's talking about because MOBAs and MMOs are different!" crowd is kind of...off.

Morello is the lead content designer. A huge part of his job is to have an accurate understanding of why people play his game and how to reinforce the points that his audience cares about. This kind of crap is right up his alley. This is literally what he does for a living.

I don't always agree with Morello but I have a lot of trouble shooting his opinion on this issue down simply on the basis that he doesn't run an MMO. I don't think there's a good way to prove his words right or wrong on this particular issue; but it seems very unfair to dismiss it as nonsense for no good reason.

That is the thing, he knows what to do for HIS game. Yes he may have an idea on how content design works in theory for other games, but that doesn't mean he know 100%. Also you are talking about two different genres of game. If I want to know about MOBA game design I go to Morello like how I would go to a car mechanic for my car. If I want to know about MMORPG game design, I go to the folks at Blizzard like how I would to to a motorcycle mechanic for my motorcycle.

[Paarthurnax]

I'm with Morello when he said:

"I'm saying i don't think raids should be inclusive, as the exclusivity of content creates a psychological trick in your brain that makes the game feel endless. Basically my direction would be that all content is not for everyone."

I've always felt (having played/raided since vanilla) that having content just out of reach gives the game the feeling of being huge with lots to do. No matter what your personal skill level or time commitments there was a level of content available to you and for most of the games population there was always MORE stuff to do and harder challenges to conquer. The game grew quite a bit during that time of exclusive content model and while that kind of thing may not fly in todays MMO Market it was the preverbal lighting in a bottle at the time.

This style worked because there was allot of time between major content patches and with the slow pace of progression for most people it gave people time to slowly chew through the content and really immerse themselves in it all. This also has the added benefit of enriching everyones experiences as well.

Everyone back then WANTED to see all the content and complained about not being able to do so, but once LFR became a thing and everyone could instantly see and kill all the content in the game at a rather accelerated pace people stopped having those challenges to overcome and the epic and large feeling the world once had is gone once you can see all the game has to offer with a bunch of knuckleheads in LFR in a few hours.

[Deleted]

Today GC is giving the /Flex shit, while back in April 2010 : There should be no circumstances under which you kill a boss more than once per week on the same character.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...n-Refinements/

This guy is so bad....

[chrisisvacant]

Ok dude its pointless trying to explain how the real world works to u... ill leave u in your sheltered existence.

Ur welcome to dismiss a well respected opinion in the gaming industry... just dont expect everyone else to be so naive.

Except, as this thread shows, his opinion isn't as respected as you feel it is. I know it hurts, but it's okay! You don't have to put someone else down just to make yourself feel better, babe.

[Ghâzh]

It was blizzard who said after vanilla "great we have 10mil players BUT only 0.01% went inside nax and we have to change that"
and I totally agree with them and if you had a brain you would too - whats the point of game content if you block someone
from seeing it just because a person like you have to feel like a binary special snowflake?

You don't block anyone from doing the end content, you just make it hard enough that you actually have to put in a lot of effort and hard work to progress. And it's not only about me enjoying being that special snowflake (and I do) but also about you wanting to become one. When everyone gets to be the special snowflake, with no effort at all, it loses it's value and no one gets to be special.

There's no drive for me to keep going because I don't get enough fullfillment by doing hard content just for the sake of it being hard and no drive for you to keep doing the lackluster content just for the sake of seeing it. I'd go as far as saying that it was never about the content itself that kept people interested. It's not like the end game ever was so fun and engaging that you did it just for the pure "fun factor" or seeing the artwork or lore. No, it's the sense of progressing your character and getting rewarded for actually doing something that was/is the driving force and like he (Morello) said it created the sense of the game being endless because if you weren't the best of the best there was always something else to move to.

[vesseblah]

A portion of content being exclusive by design has never been a hurdle to this game's success historically.

And yet the expansion with most inclusive content to date (WLK) had the highest sub numbers. Exclusivity always by definition means you say to some of your potential customers "fuck off, we don't need your money".

[kaikoraimi]

The economics of game design matter as much, if not more than, design philosophy. In order for exclusive content to be economically feasible in a subscription-based game, it either needs to have a very low cost of development (i.e., in hours of labor) or it has to motivate excluded players to continue playing. Raids, from what I understand, are not low-cost projects to develop -- therefore, it is crucial that exclusive raid content motivates enough of the player base to be worth the cost.

I think Throne of Thunder and Bastion of Twilight both have solid examples of exclusive raid content (Ra-den and Sinestra). Adding a heroic-only boss to a raid tier with 12 bosses is a (relatively) marginal increase in cost with sufficient returns. These bosses motivate people like me and my guild -- progression-minded raiders in between "casual" and "hardcore" who usually get some heroic bosses down before the next tier -- to keep progressing through normal and heroic modes (because how awesome/satisfying it will be/is to finally get that bastard boss dead).

[Belisaurio]

He's never worked on an MMO of WoW's caliber, that is for sure. I work for a game developer working on 3 different genres right now. If the teams switched mid-development, there would undoutably be serious issues with what came out afterwards.

Blizzard doesn't have game-developers to know what people need or want. They've got specialized people in market-sales (My job is similar).
So, Morello has better qualification than most of wow players, because he knows (or think that he knows) what market needs.

Only to a certain extent. He is, after all, comparing apples to oranges. That he is an apple farmer doesn't make him more qualified to tell the orange farmer how to grow his fruit.

That's not a good point.

Orange farmer can tell to Apple farmer how to rise up his sales in too many ways. The product is one variable, but there are a lot more.

Exclusivity always by definition means you say to some of your potential customers "fuck off, we don't need your money".

Exclusivity in sales can be a lot of things: Status, quality, market-breaker, point of interest...yeah, it can be "fuck off, we don't need your money" too.

[ro9ue]

There's nothing surprising or new about what he said. I read like 40 posts a day from average gamers right here on these boards that reflect those same opinions.

[SamR]

This is like when people who've only developed single player games talk about what WoW did wrong and how they know how to do it right. In Bioware's case, we can see how that turned out. Anyone expecting an amazing PvE endgame from ESO?

Luckily for Scott, he won't ever be developing PvE endgame content for LoL so we won't be able to see his grand ideas about exclusive endgame content keeping casual players around fall flat.

[Merite]

Valuable in what regard ? When i read a book and i don't like it and Stephen King says it's the best book he ever read then that doesn't change my opinion about the book.

No, it shouldn't change your opinion, but it's a stronger opinion than yours. As in, while you may disagree with Morello Scott (I do on some points), his expertise simply makes his opinion worth more than yours, maybe not to you, but to anyone else.

[vesseblah]

You don't block anyone from doing the end content, you just make it hard enough that you actually have to put in a lot of effort and hard work to progress. And it's not only about me enjoying being that special snowflake (and I do) but also about you wanting to become one. When everyone gets to be the special snowflake, with no effort at all, it loses it's value and no one gets to be special.

But the reality is that the progress was blocked in vanilla and TBC by the unrelenting progress train without catchup mechanisms. If you started vanilla year late the fact is you'd never see any raids past MC and first few bosses of BWL. All guilds capable of breaching that barrier had done so already, and those who couldn't, were stuck. And as a player in a MC guild there was no way up. Exactly same happened in TBC. Once you had completed TK and later BT attunements the players who weren't attuned were essentially worthless to you, end result being players who joined TBC year after release were stuck doing Karazhan and nothing but Karazhan without any progress path, and those players who started on day one were doing Black Temple and later Sunwell. The amount of guilds in the middle was close to zero.

No amount of hard work you do will help when the ladders end up halfway between floors and you can't climb higher. That was the biggest failure of exclusive raid content of early WoW.