How can Blizzard become a better teacher?

[Deleted]

Now, could we make it easier for players who want to become more proficient to get their hands on helpful information? Absolutely. We think the upcoming Dungeon Journal in 4.2 will be a huge boon to players when it comes to jumping into new encounters (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2456449381). We also think that the game could do more to prepare players for those situations -- in terms of actual gameplay -- and have a few ideas regarding how we might be able to accomplish that in the future.

A common issue popping up on a regular basis is the lack of "teaching mechanisms" the game provides players, making it hard for them to learn and improve their group- and playing skills.

The crux is, that you can easily level from 1 to 85 by just randomly mashing your most basic attacks. Mobs generally die within a few seconds and there is a very small chance of actually dying, unless one becomes overzealous. Until a player reaches 85, he literally knows nothing about tanking, how it works and which mechanics are relevant to it. Healers might have a vague grip on the healing spell triage, but that's easily ignored.

Basically you don't start learning to play the game until you've actually reached the level cap. And that's a flawed design.


So that begs the question, what can Blizzard do to improve in this regard? How can Blizzard better teach and challenge their players, prior to reaching the level-cap?

It's brainstorming time...


PS: How do I make these cool Blizzard quotes?

[Focault]

I wish you the best man as this thread actually has potential. If it was a thread bitching about something it would be at 7-8 pages already. Most of the MMO-Champion posters would definitely rather bitch than actually work towards a constructive solution.

-- Just to start things for you something that is brought up in similar situations is the old vanilla hunter class quest chain and how awesome it was and how you really had to know your class to work your way through killing those demons, although to be fair it was cheesable and I made plenty of gold having the other hunter FD and then doing it for them but the general idea was really good it just lacked a bit in implementation. Most fun quest chain I've ever done in my 5 years of playing WoW too. Something along these lines maybe every 10 levels would definitely help imho.

[brandon7evin]

they create trolls, they are worse than the devil.

[madyrn]

PS: How do I make these cool Blizzard quotes?

blizzquote="GhostCrawler"Trying to get the online community to engage in intelligent debate is a tall order./blizzquote

If you wish to have that SOURCE link up top just put a ; right after the poster name and then put the url of the source. You will of course need to enclose the blizzquote parts with [ and ]

[candystars]

While leveling with alts I noticed that certain mobs have become a little smarter. They have special attacks rather than run up to you and automatically start meleeing. These new mobs are sporadic in the game, but I think it would be great if they were more constant. It would help new players for example to avoid purple on the ground in a dungeon if they encountered it while leveling and died from it.

[Nefarious Tea]

The problem is that by and large, the optimal method of playing each spec is determined by the more math-oriented community members. That means 3rd party sites which Blizzard can't show you to w/o looking partisan and which they also cannot oblige you to go to.

[apepi]

Huh, I personally like the Socratic method.....Who says people need teaching?Who says they want to be taught?Why would it make them better if taught?If they needed help wouldn't they try to look for it?Why should blizzard care about teaching them?Some people are just bad at video games.how can you teach that?Who says they care about how they play?Maybe that is how they want to play?

[statlerthegreat]

So that begs the question, what can Blizzard do to improve in this regard? How can Blizzard better teach and challenge their players, prior to reaching the level-cap?

Ok. This is bothers me for the same reason as those "new penalties for standing in fire" threads.

You are expecting Blizzard to take responsibility for its players. They shouldn't. If a player wants to learn how to properly heal, there are plenty of ways to do so. Websites, forums, other players, reading tooltips and experimenting on target dummies... Same for tanking and dps. Every aspect of game play has a guide or community that you can get tips from. It is the player's responsibility to make use of them, not Blizzard's. If someone is unwilling to invest the minor amount of time it takes to do so, they aren't going to bother going through a blizzard tutorial.

[Deleted]

Ok. This is bothers me for the same reason as those "new penalties for standing in fire" threads.

You are expecting Blizzard to take responsibility for its players. They shouldn't. If a player wants to learn how to properly heal, there are plenty of ways to do so. Websites, forums, other players, reading tooltips and experimenting on target dummies... Same for tanking and dps. Every aspect of game play has a guide or community that you can get tips from. It is the player's responsibility to make use of them, not Blizzard's. If someone is unwilling to invest the minor amount of time it takes to do so, they aren't going to bother going through a blizzard tutorial.

Relying on external resources to make up for the games short-comings ins;t good design. That's the whole point of the Dungeon Journal and the whole point of the blue post.

[Kenerek]

Hmm. To teach... well, they could have some sort of mini-Recount thing that, after killing any mob, would show you how you ranked up against people of the same level/class/talent tree/gear level - so a player would be motivated to move up the "rankings".

Then, with this, maybe they could make it so you could click on the bars or portrait or link of the players you're compared to, and it would show you their armory profile in some sort of fun, visual pop-up thingie majigger. This is all assuming the player has become dissatisfied with their current position on the list and is willing to take the time to look at all this info, hence the "fun, visual" aspect. I know I like seeing my data rather than reading all of it (like this).

On top of that, maybe it could show you, like Recount, those similar-but-superior players' damage breakdown per ability, or even their most common rotations with ability thumbnails on a timeline. Maybe a little mock-up battle showing player-vs-monster, and showing the mob's health bar go down and the abilities pop up above the player's head when they use them.

WAY TOO IN-DEPTH dang.

One last note: Saying something "begs the question" is not the same as saying something "raises the question". Saying something begs the question is basically a logical fallacy where the conclusion is based on a faulty premise. I still love you.

[madyrn]

Relying on external resources to make up for the games short-comings ins;t good design. That's the whole point of the Dungeon Journal and the whole point of the blue post.

Actually, the role of the dungeon journal is to give an overview of encounters. It won't even be revealing how much damage a given boss ability can do.

If you look back on the history of games, all genres, there is always an initial tutorial phase that accustoms you to the general interface and its use as well as the more helpful features. Beyond that, the user is expected to apply that basic general knowledge in whatever way suits their character and play style best. With the ever-growing complexity of todays mmo ui's it's not realistic to expect a developer to dedicate an entire to team to the development of some sort of "how to play this toon" system.

If you'll consider the number of class/role combinations along with the number of abilities each could potentially need to use in any given situation, it's somewhat mind-boggling. You would essentially need to develop an entire software package just to facilitate such a system and that would, above other things, increase the cost of the game. I agree it is not ideal to have to go to outside sources to learn the ins and outs but, having an in-game system just is not realistic.

Blizzard could, however, utilize their web presence for just such a thing. Their current website really does not do much to educate on these sorts of things and it would certainly be a much more cost-effective solution.

[herpecin]

Relying on external resources to make up for the games short-comings ins;t good design. That's the whole point of the Dungeon Journal and the whole point of the blue post.

there are guides on the official website

[Hottie4Hire]

Huh, I personally like the Socratic method.....Who says people need teaching?Who says they want to be taught?Why would it make them better if taught?If they needed help wouldn't they try to look for it?Why should blizzard care about teaching them?Some people are just bad at video games.how can you teach that?Who says they care about how they play?Maybe that is how they want to play?

This isn't what the socratic method is and it's not correct anyway. You are implying that anyone that would want to improve themselves will go out of their way to do it. You ignore a very common scenario in wow in which a player that would want to improve himself if he knew that he was playing suboptimally. It is this second scenario which Blizzard is seeking to rectify.

[Deleted]

I think they should expand on the training dummies in Org and SW and add some sort of daily training quests there. The healing quest would be an endurance test on healing multiple targets without running out of mana. The tanking quest would send a number of mobs at you, you have to survive as long as you can and stop them agroing your NPC healer or dps. The dps quest could just be a mob or group of mobs that have to be killed within a time limit.
They'd probably need to be instanced or phased to prevent outside interference. And you could have multiple levels of each quest, so people have an incentive to improve, or go look for info on why their buddy can complete DPS Level 3 but they can't.

[xxAkirhaxx]

I've said it before, I'll say it again. Blizzard should make instances (maybe 1 or 2 per tier of content released) that gives you entry level gear into heroics. For this tier it would be 333 gear. For the next tier, it would be 353.

These instances need to be solo instances and before beginning the instances you pick a role; tank, healer, or dps. You then work through the dungeon with 4 npcs that perform in a scripted manner, but rely heavily on your actions.

A tank would be responsible for holding threat, managining CDs when "events" happen, taunting when a dps pulls agro, and boss positioning.

Healers would have to keep there group alive, heal through mistakes other players make, focus on keeping the tank alive through events.

DPS would be responsible for working on there dps(if the mob is alive to long, maybe the group dies), interrupting, CCing. All of these things could be given ques "interrupt X" or "CC Square" done by the NPCs.

Each instance would have to be individually scripted for each type of character. This, along with the journal being implemented could help players move along and be more prepared for dungeons with actual players, who, in general, have less time to teach people.

Of course this goes back to the old debate of, "This is an MMO, learning with your peers is part of the game." To which I agree, but it is still very hard for people new to the genre play in this style.

[Vetali]

While this doesn't fix the issue as a whole, a good addition to the dungeon journal would be to have a new tab in the combat log that tells you what damage you took (much like how recount lists how you died). Then you can click on the spell and look it up in the Dungeon Journal or something.

Or just implement Crabby.

[Blessyoself]

I have said for a long time Blizz should apply some sort of generic techniques tool in order to help players along in rotation and explaining the geekiness behind the stats. They should also do see in an ingame tooltip sort of way I believe. I am excited about the Dungeon Journal's in 4.2 as well I mean we all get the strats fairly quickly off the PTR before content even drops Blizz should give a heads up their selves instead of torchering guilds on the PTR to develop strats from scratch.

[Arrashi]

The problem is that unlike vanilla/tbc leveling is not challenging. Mobs u encounter while leveling are way more "interesting" but arent really dangerous. U dont need to use CDs u dont need to pull carefully because your selfhealing spell can keep u up even against 5+ mobs. Also insances even reneved are way too easy and revamped bosses in 1-60 dungeons are just loot piniatas. Blizz should definetly make leveling harder seeing how pretty much everyone is rolling in heirlooms. Without it people will still faceroll 1-85 and then hit the wall being unable to do simplest heroic not talking about raids.

[Deleted]

The problem is that unlike vanilla/tbc leveling is not challenging. Mobs u encounter while leveling are way more "interesting" but arent really dangerous. U dont need to use CDs u dont need to pull carefully because your selfhealing spell can keep u up even against 5+ mobs. Also insances even reneved are way too easy and revamped bosses in 1-60 dungeons are just loot piniatas. Blizz should definetly make leveling harder seeing how pretty much everyone is rolling in heirlooms. Without it people will still faceroll 1-85 and then hit the wall being unable to do simplest heroic not talking about raids.

I didn't learn a thing about raiding from leveling up to 70, though. Most of my raiding skills were learnt from...raiding. That and doing endgame 5 mans.

[statlerthegreat]

Relying on external resources to make up for the games short-comings ins;t good design. That's the whole point of the Dungeon Journal and the whole point of the blue post.

Wrong.

First, thats not what the dungeon journal is going to be for. Second you asked what blizzard can do for a tutorial to teach its player base how to play the game.

Which is what I addressed. They have tool tips which explain what each ability does. Beyond that, they have official forums and resources to explain the roles. Which means they did their part. If players want to learn about being "THE ABSOLUTE FUCKING BEST THERE EVER WAS!!!", then they have resources to lead them in that direction. Adding an in game tutorial is pointless. Players who will not invest 10 minutes to read through the healing forums will not invest the 20-30 minutes an in game tutorial will take.

Just because the official forums are not in game, it does not mean blizzard did nothing to help provide a guide for effective play. Their design with out the Dungeon Journal is just fine. The only real deficiency comes when they make changes to actions/abilities and fail to note them in the tool tip at the time.