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  1. #1
    Herald of the Titans Marxman's Avatar
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    Lessons From MoP

    So, that time of year again. MoP is coming to a close with the excellent SoO raid on farm now for many of us. Time to look back at the expansion as a whole and try to decipher what we can from the successes, mistakes, and downright stupid decisions over the last 17 months.

    I'll start this discussion off with one of my own.

    Patch 5.0. Blizzard learned very, very quickly what players are willing to do for raid progression. If you put a carrot in front of a hardcore player, he/she is going to grind for that carrot whether they want to or not. Nothing is more important than the team, and not doing everything you possibly can to help improve that team, by improving your own character, is letting those people down. So, 5.0 dailies. The lessons we learned from this are many.

    1. You cannot put such a hellacious grind into the game with no alternatives. Valor gear was locked behind this tremendous fortress (gate just doesn't do it justice!) of rep grinding through dailies. There was no other choice. There were no tabards, no rep from dungeons, no rep from raids. Just the daily grind which seemed to last an absolute eternity.

    2. Gating content that is already gated is a really, really dumb decision. You had to do the Golden Lotus dailies whether you wanted anything from them or not, jut to gain access to some of the other reps.

    3. Dailies are good content, but they quickly become VERY, VERY bad content when you give no alternatives. This was further compounded by the sheer amount of them that were available in 5.0. I spent literally 2-3 hours a day grinding dailies on 2 characters. I stopped having fun after about 3-4 days of this. The other 2 months were basically torture. Yet, I soldiered on because I wanted to be the best I could, both for my team and for my own ego.

    What lessons do you think (or hope!) Blizzard has learned from Mists of Pandaria that can help them make the game better in the future?

    Edit: Just to be clear, this thread is about lessons BLIZZARD learned from MoP, not you or the community as a whole. We don't need a thousandth thread regarding LFR or the like. Stay on topic as best you can. Thanks.
    Last edited by Marxman; 2014-02-12 at 12:34 PM.

  2. #2
    Abandoning ship when it came to making dungeon content. Scenarios are definitely not the same as a 5 man dungeon, even the heroic ones. Blizzard said they plan to make dungeons harder when you chose a hard mode (Like heroic) in Warlords of Draenor, which makes me believe they are going to produce more of them. I hope they learned dungeons are actually fun at max level, albeit they eventually become repetitive and boring with time (Just like any other content).

  3. #3
    Immortal FuxieDK's Avatar
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    Lessons learned from MoP:
    - Don't give raiders 3 bad, 1 terrible and 1 fairly OK raid, in an entire expansion.
    - Don't restrict flying, as it breaks gameplay for more people than it helps.
    - Don't make a legendary item take more than a single tier to obtain.
    - Don't force people to do PvP to get a PvE item.
    - Too few, too easy heroics is NOT acceptable.
    - Scenarios are boring. People only use them for valor, as they don't drop loot, and drop rate for the claimed epic in the box, is 0% or less..
    Fact (because I say so): TBC > Cata > Legion > ShaLa > MoP > DF > BfA > WoD = WotLK

    My pet collection --> http://www.warcraftpets.com/collection/FuxieDK/

  4. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by FuxieDK View Post
    Lessons learned from MoP:
    - Don't give raiders 3 bad, 1 terrible and 1 fairly OK raid, in an entire expansion.
    - Don't restrict flying, as it breaks gameplay for more people than it helps.
    - Don't make a legendary item take more than a single tier to obtain.
    - Don't force people to do PvP to get a PvE item.
    - Too few, too easy heroics is NOT acceptable.
    - Scenarios are boring. People only use them for valor, as they don't drop loot, and drop rate for the claimed epic in the box, is 0% or less..
    Agree with everything but that. Timeless Isle restricted flying and was a huge success and well-received by people.

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Les Grossman View Post
    Agree with everything but that. Timeless Isle restricted flying and was a huge success and well-received by people.
    I don't know if this was a thing learned from Mists of Pandaria. A lot of the content we got in MoP was designed with the idea you didn't have a flying mount and had to use a ground mount at first. I see it more as they wanted to observe how it panned out in Cataclysm (I personally think it is amazing for CATACLYSM zones, not so much classic zones), than fixed it up in MoP.

    Felt like pointing that out, just because.

  6. #6
    I think they finally learned what a large portion of the active playerbase thinks of dailies.
    Scenarios aren't great in terms of dev time invested to time spent playing.
    Challenge modes are neat, but don't fill the gap for difficult 5 man content.
    LFR doesn't bring players back for long.
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  7. #7
    Immortal FuxieDK's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Les Grossman View Post
    Agree with everything but that. Timeless Isle restricted flying and was a huge success and well-received by people.
    Who? I have never heard anyone say "Oh, this island is so nice, now that we are forced on the ground."

    On the other hand, I've heard MANY people complain over, you cannot reach e.g. Ordos, Ship or Golganarr in time, simply because you are slow and need to go detours when riding..
    Fact (because I say so): TBC > Cata > Legion > ShaLa > MoP > DF > BfA > WoD = WotLK

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  8. #8
    Dailies are okay, when you have alternatives
    Isle of Pvp (Quel'danas & Timeless) is a great thing
    Quest legendaries are better than drop legendaries.
    RNG is still a bitch
    Pet battles are amazing (haters gonna hate.)
    Solo scenarios are fun and can be challanging.
    Rares that can kill you are a good thing.

    there's probably more, but can't think of any this early in the morning.
    I like my coffe like my mages.

  9. #9
    Herald of the Titans Marxman's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Danmakus View Post
    Rares that can kill you are a good thing.
    I'll take this one a step further and say they've learned that making the world an interesting and exciting place is extremely important. Whether it's rare spawns, chests, or special events (world bosses, spawned rares like the Brew rare on Isle), these things make the world seem more alive and more interesting. I'm very glad they're continuing this trend into Warlords.

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by FuxieDK View Post
    Lessons learned from MoP:
    - Don't give raiders 3 bad, 1 terrible and 1 fairly OK raid, in an entire expansion.
    - Don't restrict flying, as it breaks gameplay for more people than it helps.
    - Don't make a legendary item take more than a single tier to obtain.
    - Don't force people to do PvP to get a PvE item.
    - Too few, too easy heroics is NOT acceptable.
    - Scenarios are boring. People only use them for valor, as they don't drop loot, and drop rate for the claimed epic in the box, is 0% or less..
    -Subjective, I think the raid content has been pretty solid. The first raids were pretty mediocre, but Siege of Orgrimmar was pretty damn good, and Throne of Thunder is among the best raids WoW has ever had imo.

    -Already confirmed to be heavily restricted in WoD, and I'm very happy, flying takes the adventure out of WoW imo, and should never have been allowed to be done everywhere at all times to begin with.

    -Since you could get it from LFR, it was necessary to make it a very long chain quest to not make everyone run around with the legendary cloak. I'd agree if the legendary wasn't obtainable by doing LFR.

    -Definitely agree, not sure why they'd ever think that to be a good idea with the current PvE and PvP relations. Might have worked in Vanilla when everything wasn't restricted to only PvP gear, but intertwining them hasn't worked since TBC.

    -Agreed. I don't mind the less heroics in MoP, but only because the initial ones sucked ass. If they could make many heroics and not give in to the Wrath crowd like they eventually did in Cata I'd be happy.

    -Agreed, I don't think anyone was excited about 5.1 or 5.3 just because they brought in more scenarios. They're okay at storytelling, but at that point they become something you only do once, and aren't worth the resources.

  11. #11
    Immortal Pua's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MasterOfKnees View Post
    -Agreed, I don't think anyone was excited about 5.1 or 5.3 just because they brought in more scenarios. They're okay at storytelling, but at that point they become something you only do once, and aren't worth the resources.
    I could be wrong, but I think we're stuck with scenarios because they're cheap and easy to make. Every one of them already has the entirety of the art done, it's simply a case of slotting in some mobs and a couple of objectives. They're crap and nobody I know likes them very much, allied to the fact it'd make more sense to see them earlier in the game, but I'm expecting more of the bloody things.

  12. #12
    well, toes was terrible, the only intereseting boss in msv were spirit kings and only the first and the last boss in hof were fun

  13. #13
    Titan Arbs's Avatar
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    Never judge a game by its cover.
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  14. #14
    Brewmaster Nivena's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ryme View Post
    Scenarios aren't great in terms of dev time invested to time spent playing.
    Scenarios were only a success because it was the most efficient way to get valour points. 150 points per 10mins is awesome; if there were no or less points to be had I wouldn't have done them apart from once to get the achievements.

    I seriously hope they implement more single player scenarios (Troves of the Thunder King) where you can discover the storyline without the rush of other players. Or not even implement them at all, I don't care.

  15. #15
    Pit Lord Doktor Faustus's Avatar
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    The Garrison is replacing dailies... the same timesink, just repackaged.

  16. #16
    I wish we'd move in a direction that involved far less raid difficulty tiers, but I don't see it happening.

  17. #17
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by FuxieDK View Post
    Lessons learned from MoP:
    - Don't give raiders 3 bad, 1 terrible and 1 fairly OK raid, in an entire expansion.
    - Don't restrict flying, as it breaks gameplay for more people than it helps.
    - Don't make a legendary item take more than a single tier to obtain.
    - Don't force people to do PvP to get a PvE item.
    - Too few, too easy heroics is NOT acceptable.
    - Scenarios are boring. People only use them for valor, as they don't drop loot, and drop rate for the claimed epic in the box, is 0% or less..
    You must be pretty damn high if you think raiding was bad in this expansion....
    Maybe the first 3 were mediocre but ToT and SoO?

  18. #18
    I'd love to have story focus switched from damn orc&human boring theme to other races, pref. Undead and Draenei. Tired as hell of world of orccraft, tbh.
    I'd also love to have:
    - less difficulty modes,
    - no currency caps,
    - way less trash in raids (or, at least, more % of drop from that trash),
    - smaller loot tables,
    - less CC in pvp (ideally I'd love to have one DR for all CC),
    - no self-healing abilities on classes without healing specs,
    - no dispel cd,
    - no more 15% shadow word: pain nerfs lol,
    - better art! please give us back artists that worked on BC art!
    - really hard 5-man instances lol. Like the Cata's prenerfed. CMG is not interesting, because it is zergrush without incenitive to repeat it once you've got your set.

  19. #19
    MoP was a big time experiment on how to do reputation/valor/etc grinds.

    5.0 was straight daily quests with several factions.
    5.1 was the war zone in Karsarang - daily quests that buid up with significant milestones along the way to progress the story.
    5.2 was the Isle of Thunder - still daily quests, but which quests there quests change up on a daily basis, solo scenarios and story progression, and a lot more free-form
    content.
    5.4 was Timeless Isle - no more daily quests, few milestone quests with some story progression, but big time free-form content and randomness.

    In the end, they learned that people generally don't like daily quests, but also don't like not having any sort of direction to the content. In WoD, they're going to take the best features of the Timeless Isle and merge it with the storyline progression of 5.1/5.2, sprinkle in some daily quests without going crazy with them, and end up with a system that feels more natural.

    Also, I think the legendary quest was an experiment. I don't know if there's going to be a legendary of the same type in WoD (although I hope there is - the cloak is kinda a ho-hum legendary, but the *idea* of the legendary is a good one, and it's the only one that has not significantly upset game balance for one reason or another), but I do hope they learned that content that spans expansions is a good thing that gives you a goal to work towards and a reason to at least experience older content and the overall storyline from the expansion, even if you start late.

  20. #20
    For me,

    Daily quests too much was gated behind them (reps gated behind other reps via dialies URGH!) I don't mind there being dailies with some cool rewards for unlocking it all, just dont make it like they did in 5.0 Have some dailies and an option like we have now to do rep via a dungeon as well.

    Scenarios - pleasantly surprised by these thought they would suck but I found my self enjoying them. Heroic ones from when I got the chance to do one were pretty cool as well.

    Crafting - I liked we had a fair amount of crafting stuff but I feel we could get more out of it especially at expansion launch. We should have dungeon pattern drops/quests which can be used to make slightly better than heroic 5man gear and then when you get into raids more drops there that are either equal to or slightly better than the raid drops (hoping for equal to and BOE as there is a market for it!).

    Flying appears to be addressed.

    Heroics/5man too few still hoping we see some brought in during expansion life cycle.

    Raids - I enjoyed all the raid tiers this expansion. MSV had one of the most fun bosses (will of emp) for a tank. loved the dance mechanic. SoO being the best raid tier they released in mop.

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