Flex Raiding Q&A, Blue Tweets, LoL Lead Content Designer on WoW, News Recap

[Adalace]

That LoL developer dialog was the best thing I've read on here in a long time.

[Deleted]

I am happy with FLEX raid,
i Raid 25m HC and i raid 10 man with friends.
its really frustrating to play with friends and not being able to kill horridon.
with flex im hoping this will change, that this content is my friends target and we can enjoy rolling trough it

[Bulliwyfthetank]

Who did that LoL interview? The guy comes across as a raging asshole b/c he couldn't do everything solo... in an MMO... Not to mention he contradicts himself multiple times. I dont like to raid, so I tried to get a raiding spot. I like to do solo stuff, but now there is to much solo stuff...

I do not like to raid, I occasionally enjoy partying but by and by I like doing solo content or hunting for rare materials. So pretty much WoW has nothing for me because Riadrz want their super op weapon drop and god forbid you have allow a plebeian solo player farm mats to craft a weapon even 1/10th the quality of that thing.

...But yes, recently there's a huge amount of content that is not raiding, that you can certainly do. There's actually a staggering amount of things you can do in WoW that isn't raiding.

I spent 3 months playing as part of a guild in the hope to get into a raid group with no success.

Kudos to the LoL dev for giving good answers that answered the question, but didn't bash other games/devs.

Can you please teach Ghostcrawler how to properly balance the game then? Instead of throwing Hunter's under the bus like the "Redheaded Step Children Who Lives Behind The Staircase" that we are made to be.

I have a ton of sympathy and respect for Ghostcrawler; he's the face of an entire design team also. I don't think their balancing is really bad, either, I'm not in agreement with their overall high level design philosophy - not that it's bad, I just have a different conclusion. Within that philosophy, though, I think their balance methodology is really appropriate.

[Azax]

confused as to why the LoL interview was conducted by a butt hurt child ? can anyone shed some light on this?

[theturn]

Kudos to the LoL dev for giving good answers that answered the question, but didn't bash other games/devs.

What good answers were those? He said nothing through that entire interview. It was all "Yeah I don't agree with them but I think they are awesome, but I would this do this nondescript thing differently, but they do a really good job." If you are going to tackle this issue, which he clearly wanted to, don't be worried about offending someone. Speak your mind, bring your intelligent thoughts to the table, who knows instead of being offended they may appreciate the insight. I learned nothing, nothing specific that he didn't like or thought could be changed. LoL is free to play if I understand correctly, so comparing that to WOW is like comparing an orange to a baseball.

I have a ton of sympathy and respect for Ghostcrawler; he's the face of an entire design team also. I don't think their balancing is really bad, either, I'm not in agreement with their overall high level design philosophy - not that it's bad, I just have a different conclusion. Within that philosophy, though, I think their balance methodology is really appropriate.

Translation, I feel they are doing it wrong but they are cool guys and I'm more worried about being professional than actually saying something interesting or helpful.

Just so you know where I am coming from, I actually enjoy mists with wrath being my fav expansion so far, cata being the worst. I started playing in BC.

[Teebone]

Anyone who says BC was a sweet spot never had to backflag and gear up a new tank or healer only to have him/her poached by another guild. BC was a fucking nightmare of guild vs guild drama that I never want to experience again.

[yurano]

What good answers were those? He said nothing through that entire interview. It was all "Yeah I don't agree with them but I think they are awesome, but I would this do this nondescript thing differently, but they do a really good job."

This is called good PR: sound like you're saying something without stepping on any toes.

[Sathen]

confused as to why the LoL interview was conducted by a butt hurt child ? can anyone shed some light on this?

He was responding to a forum thread made on Reign of Gaming. So yeah, butt hurt children were asking the questions. Never knew how he could stand those people, on the official site or unofficial sites.

[Ryme]

Anyone who says BC was a sweet spot never had to backflag and gear up a new tank or healer only to have him/her poached by another guild. BC was a fucking nightmare of guild vs guild drama that I never want to experience again.

Never mentioned that, it was in reference to raiding exclusivity.

[sandbenders]

What good answers were those? He said nothing through that entire interview. It was all "Yeah I don't agree with them but I think they are awesome, but I would this do this nondescript thing differently, but they do a really good job."

I think what he was trying to make the points that: 1) Their decisions were good decisions, given their goals and 2) He, being a different designer, would have gone for different goals. The subtext being that it's ok and understandable to be different designers with different goals, otherwise games would all be the same, and the sub-subtext being that it's easier to make these judgements in hindsight. But that's just my take on it.

I also thought his comment on Ghostcrawler was classy. Ghostcrawler is a decent guy doing a good job (even at 8million players, WoW dwarfs the competition). Yet he's the constant target of tens of thousands of angry armchair quarterbacks with no game design experience (or software experience at all). This guy is in a position to really understand what Ghostcrawler's life is like, and it was cool of him to acknowledge that.

Having played since Vanilla- I hit 60 right before AQ opened, and raided MC and BWL off and on at 60- and I haven't always loved the WoW team's decisions, but it has been interesting to see their cycle of improvements. But man, they take a lot of hate for it.

[Aekero]

Nice to read a little from the LoL devs on WoW...I have to say though, really I feel like the turnover they're seeing is more from time than anything. I used to raid hardcore in vanilla, I stopped playing for BC entirely, came back and raided casually in wotlk, and pretty much did raid finder in Cata and Mop for about 1-2 months each.

It's impressive to me that WoW has even held my attention this long...it's been 8 years! There's not a single other game that I'd care about putting any significant time into for that long, even if it was just over the course of a month or two. (quit again shortly after MoP) I feel like at this point the game is pretty damn amazing, if I had logged into MoP in 2005, it would have absolutely blown my mind. Hell, vanilla blew my mind, I was in the _world_ of warcraft, and it was magical. You don't really get that magic back, and honestly it's more because I've been in the mmo scene long enough to know what it is. WoW was the first mmo for most of us or close to the first when it first came out, and it did plenty of things right.

imo Blizzard tried to do too much i.e. make every single role type have the same damage, utility _and_ pvp ability, how is that even really possible without the insane amounts of class homogenization that happened. Even then though, even if classes felt more unique, even if somehow they moved away from the "holy trinity"... it's still been 8 years, and many people have just grown out of it, not really much you can do. I'll probably be back for a month when the next expansion comes out, and I'm sure I'll have fun with it, but I can't imagine playing WoW year round ever again.

[6kle]

I also felt like BC was the best in terms of raiding model because there was a progress path to follow and only a few guilds ever made it far enough to clear it all. For players and guilds it was a motivation to learn. It felt awesome when you cleared an instance and could progress to a new one. There was also reason to go back to old instances to gear new guild members. Of course BC sucked if you never got past the first obstacle (i.e. Karazhan) so many who didn't want to (or couldn't) learn to get better hated it. Now we have this "flat" raiding model where you only go to do one raid and if you accomplish that... you go back to the same raid with a higher difficulty. That's when it got boring to me. I wanted to progress to new instances like in BC and I wanted the work to clear the previous instance mean something in the big picture.

I also loved 5 man heroics in BC, they were not all the same. Some were much harder than others but most of them required you to stay awake and use more tools than just damage (mainly CC). They made heroic 5 mans a grind where you bunch mobs together and aoe them down. I get it that the CC requirement was a problem for classes who couldn't CC but again, I felt it wasn't a great solution to turn the once challenging heroics to a grind that more closely resembles a gathering profession than a step towards raiding.

The long progress path caused interguild drama (stealing a geared tank from another guild for example) and it took a lot of work to recruit a new player and gear him again but that was a player created problem, not the fault of the game itselft, unlike this boring raid model.