Innovation in MMOs, WoW and Ghostcrawler's perspective on it

[Ielenia]

I mean, it's ok to get duplicates, when you flip a coin. But it's not ok, when your card pack has ~20 cards. Because chance to get duplicates drops exponentially - 100%/(N^K), where N is number of cards and K is number of duplicates. Do you understand, that even 20^2 is already big number? I don't even talk about 20^3 and 20^4.

Unfortunately for us devs don't want to invent new ways to make game better for us, but they invent new ways to make it worse.

So you're saying it's okay to get the same result twice in a row when flipping a coin, but it's not okay and "they're out to get you" when you get the same results when you roll the die? Just because RNG works as RNG should and you've been unlucky, it doesn't mean Blizzard is "out to get you".

2) Uneven drop rates. Situation becomes even worse, when drop rate is shifted from one item to another. You should understand, that all items share total N * 100% drop rate, where N is - number of items, dropped at once. Fair drop rate is N * 100% / M, where M - is amount of items in loot table. But devs can set drop rate of one item to 10%, while other can have 1%. This makes things even worse. I still remember this belt's disaster, when it's drop rate was reported as 12%, while actual drop rate was around 1%.

Your entire argument is defeated by your own earlier claim that you don't care for stats. Just get any belt of the same armor type and item level and you're good. Why would specific items allegedly being a lower drop rate (and I don't see nor recall any evidence of this so-called "disaster" you claim existed) be of any importance to you?

3) New feature! Duplicate fest! That's when there are 5 possible RNG sources of gear: daily quest, WQ, weekly chest, random chest drop, random rare drop. But all drop exactly the same item, picked on daily/weekly basis.

Yeah, no. You're dead wrong in there. Rares have specific loot drops. Rare X will only drop the 'belt of whining', rare Y will only drop the 'staff of complaining', etc.

And I don't even talk about trinkets. Do you know, that BIS is only possible as WF/TF for them?

Why do you care about best in slot, if item level is the only thing that matters and stats are meaningless? Also, did you really play Shadowlands? There was no WF/TF in Shadowlands.

But anyway. I still miss 2 str trinkets after playing ZM for months before DF release, when I focused on leveling new race-class combos.

And my entire guild at the time (alts included) played TBC from start to end and we never saw a Dragonspine Trophy from Gruul. So what? Again: RNG gonna RNG.

Flying caster mobs? Terrible idea. Some classes have ranged abilities, that serve pulling purpose only, as they don't deal any damage. Dreadlords' ability, that relies on classes/specs having interrupts? Not all f**king classes/specs have interrupt!

In Shadowlands, every class and their mothers had interrupts or silences. Did you actually play Shadowlands?

[NineSpine]

So you're saying it's okay to get the same result twice in a row when flipping a coin, but it's not okay and "they're out to get you" when you get the same results when you roll the die? Just because RNG works as RNG should and you've been unlucky, it doesn't mean Blizzard is "out to get you".


Your entire argument is defeated by your own earlier claim that you don't care for stats. Just get any belt of the same armor type and item level and you're good. Why would specific items allegedly being a lower drop rate (and I don't see nor recall any evidence of this so-called "disaster" you claim existed) be of any importance to you?


Yeah, no. You're dead wrong in there. Rares have specific loot drops. Rare X will only drop the 'belt of whining', rare Y will only drop the 'staff of complaining', etc.


Why do you care about best in slot, if item level is the only thing that matters and stats are meaningless? Also, did you really play Shadowlands? There was no WF/TF in Shadowlands.


And my entire guild at the time (alts included) played TBC from start to end and we never saw a Dragonspine Trophy from Gruul. So what? Again: RNG gonna RNG.


In Shadowlands, every class and their mothers had interrupts or silences. Did you actually play Shadowlands?

I'm not sure about this, but if Blizzard has some bad luck protections they can absolutely have problems that caus the reverse effect under certain circumstances. I'm not saying that this is what's happening, but your insistence that their RNG must be foolproof and as simple as a random number generator is actually not a good arguent.

[WowIsDead64]

So you're saying it's okay to get the same result twice in a row when flipping a coin, but it's not okay and "they're out to get you" when you get the same results when you roll the die? Just because RNG works as RNG should and you've been unlucky, it doesn't mean Blizzard is "out to get you".

Things can happen. Question is - how often? "Anecdotal evidence" - is common justification for all RNG problems. I.e. that "you're just ultra-unlucky to collect all super-rare problems". Broken RNG is more probable, than RNG God just hating me so much.

[Biomega]

Nothing to do with that. If you made great quality, people will buy it, lowest common demoniator means nothing and is usually just an excuse.

But that's a bit tautological. "Good games are good", yes, yes they are. But "just make good games duh" is as helpful as telling a poor person "just get a (better) job duh". Yes it's technically a way to solve something, but it's also so, so, so missing the point.

Bottom line is investors in the industry a shit scared, so they veto anything that isn't guaranteed a a succes by their statistcal models.

I get that this is hyperbole, but let me just play devil's advocate here: why shouldn't they do that? They're putting their money on the line, so wouldn't it be the responsible thing to go with the option that gives you the best evidence for success? There's never any guarantees of course, but someone going "here's all this data telling us this is likely to do okay" versus someone going "I have this crazy idea...!" - who are you going to entrust with millions of your dollars?

Sure it's better for the players if they get a hit out of it, and some big, artistic vision comes to life successfully. But players aren't risking millions of dollars trying to make it happen. Investors and studios are. You can't blame them for hedging their bets.

If there was some formula to just manufacture originality and success in entertainment, everyone would do it. But there isn't. It doesn't work like that.

It's stifling, great ideas that truly bring something new a shot down because of uncertainty.

I agree. And as a consumer, I'm annoyed that they're not taking more risks and trying to be more original, more innovative, more daring.

But as a level-headed critic, I understand why they're not. It's easy to go wild with OPM, not so easy when it's your own dime.

This is why the creative industry in the US is STAGNATING and is full of sequels and remakes rather than new IPs.

It is, but you have to remember the key part in all of this: it works.

That's why they're doing it.

If consumers refused to put their money behind the latest Call of Battlefield: Modern Royal 17 shooter game every year, they'd stop making them. But they don't refuse. They keep paying. It keeps working.

All we can do is put our money where our mouth is, refuse to pay for remake/redo/reboot/re-X content and instead support original and innovative products. Money talks, not ideals not ideologies and not ideas. Those're all well and good, but if they don't result in green they are not going to win it.

[Orange Joe]

Exactly. Classic's huge success is proof that a simpler, more social game is still viable and great.

Retail would be way better if it stopped being an anti-social solo player game.

Odd, most people I played classic with just enjoyed it cause the game was overall easier than retail. No 10-15 button rotations. had nothing to do with the social part.

[Ielenia]

I'm not sure about this, but if Blizzard has some bad luck protections they can absolutely have problems that caus the reverse effect under certain circumstances. I'm not saying that this is what's happening, but your insistence that their RNG must be foolproof and as simple as a random number generator is actually not a good arguent.

I'm not saying RNG is "foolproof'. Hell, I've even admitted that it's possible to get unlucky and don't get the drops you want or get repeats. The problem is that the poster is claiming that Blizzard intentionally fudges drop rates against players and the only evidence he has for that is "omg I've had the same drop four times in a row!" That Blizzard is "out to get them".

- - - Updated - - -

Things can happen. Question is - how often? "Anecdotal evidence" - is common justification for all RNG problems. I.e. that "you're just ultra-unlucky to collect all super-rare problems". Broken RNG is more probable, than RNG God just hating me so much.

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal evidence for a reason.

When you get allegedly unlucky with drops but everyone else is getting an average of the normal drop rate for that item, this isn't evidence that the RNG is broken or that Blizzard is out to get you.

[Johnjohn]

I honestly find these takes strange. To me, WoW solved this problem Vanilla through WOLK. It was pretty obvious by its success. I am generalizing as I cannot say what 100% of what everyone wants, but I don't think people don't want a single player mmorpg for the most part. What they do want, is to progress in a meaningful way if their friends are not online or they cannot get a group right at this moment. If that cannot be done, make the dungeons or most of the group content fairly easy so that everyone can partake without having to download 50 addons, watch endless youtube videos, get yelled at by people who live in the game, etc etc. Keep the skill gap in check between players by not making the twitch responses for every single thing make a massive difference, ensure rotations are never complicated, never do different modes of difficulty for the same content.

Also, make the best gear not that much greater than gear that an average person can get in a normal dungeon. This keeps everyone in the same ballpark. Yes that means some diehard elitists will get bored and quit, but who cares they are in the vast minority.

WoW up until WOLK honestly nailed this. Cata onwards the slow rot of elitism ruined the game. The entire game is built around the top 5-10% now. It was never this way. Stop catering to these people and you will get more interest. This is exactly what pulled people from other mmorpgs to WoW in 2004.

[Relapses]

WoW up until WOLK honestly nailed this. Cata onwards the slow rot of elitism ruined the game. The entire game is built around the top 5-10% now. It was never this way. Stop catering to these people and you will get more interest. This is exactly what pulled people from other mmorpgs to WoW in 2004.

If WoW solved this with Classic through WotLK, why aren't there 12 million people playing WotLK Classic at the moment?

[WowIsDead64]

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal evidence for a reason.

When you get allegedly unlucky with drops but everyone else is getting an average of the normal drop rate for that item, this isn't evidence that the RNG is broken or that Blizzard is out to get you.

I would want to say something like "Am I the only one, who whined about constant duplicates back in SL?", but I won't.

I don't care about others. I don't trust to RNG because it has clear signs of fraud. So, I don't want to deal with any RNG without bad luck protection, sorry.

[Kallisto]

Also, the global creative industry has always been and will always be dominated by sequels and remakes. I wish people wouldn't act like this is a 21st century or western problem, like movie studios weren't vomiting out sequels and adaptations non-stop in the 70s and 80s, and the music industry wasn't built on innumerable copy cats and soundalikes as far back as it has ever been an industry.

Let's face it, everything has "been done." and been done even back in the 1980s even new IPs are deep-down copies of something else with a twist. Like hell even in the 1930s remakes and sequelitis was going on in media. 1939 Wizard of Oz Musical was not the first version of the movie. The book it came from was adapted into film 4 or 5 times prior to its release.

[Tyris Flare]

The genre is dying because people don't care about MMOs, not because of stagnation. Taking chances isn't going to suddenly return it to its heyday anymore than taking chances is gonna suddenly make RTS or 4X games center stage again, or bring back rail shooters.

Also, the global creative industry has always been and will always be dominated by sequels and remakes. I wish people wouldn't act like this is a 21st century or western problem, like movie studios weren't vomiting out sequels and adaptations non-stop in the 70s and 80s, and the music industry wasn't built on innumerable copy cats and soundalikes as far back as it has ever been an industry.

Yeah but it is worse now because you barely get exceptions, whereas in the 70s-000s the sequel shit helped studios finance riskier projects, like how entertainment news used to subsidize actual news.

[Triceron]

So you're saying it's okay to get the same result twice in a row when flipping a coin, but it's not okay and "they're out to get you" when you get the same results when you roll the die? Just because RNG works as RNG should and you've been unlucky, it doesn't mean Blizzard is "out to get you".?

Pure RNG is also not indicative of good game design. It's not fun.

How much fun are you going to have trying to flip 5 Heads in a row a dozen times?

Ultimately the RNG in the game has to be filtered through checks and balances to ensure people are able to get the dozen or so upgrades each tier, and not just be left to pure randomness. So even if you are trying to point out that RNG works as intended because of the nature of being random, it should be equally pointed out that it's good design if the randomness gets in the way of the fun of obtaining new gear. There has to be a balance, and Blizzard has full control of those checks and balances.

[Ielenia]

Pure RNG is also not indicative of good game design. It's not fun.

How much fun are you going to have trying to flip 5 Heads in a row a dozen times?.

That's not what he's saying, though. He's saying that Blizzard intentionally secretly rigs the RNG to the detriment of the players. That him getting "four duplicates in a row" somehow means that Blizzard is "out to get him".

I've fully admitted in this thread that RNG is not perfect, and, as RNG does as RNG does, you can get quite unlucky with drops, and I know it's not fun. But it's a whole different thing to claim that Blizzard "rigs" things against players.

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I don't care about others. I don't trust to RNG because it has clear signs of fraud.

You being unlucky with your drops is not "clear signs of fraud". Literally, the only "evidence" you have for your claims is your own experience, which is anecdotal at best, and suspicious at worst, considering the heavy bias implied by your username, and how you constantly post negative things about WoW.

[Relapses]

Ultimately the RNG in the game has to be filtered through checks and balances to ensure people are able to get the dozen or so upgrades each tier, and not just be left to pure randomness. So even if you are trying to point out that RNG works as intended because of the nature of being random, it should be equally pointed out that it's good design if the randomness gets in the way of the fun of obtaining new gear. There has to be a balance, and Blizzard has full control of those checks and balances.

If people like @WowIsDead64 had their way, everything would be deterministic and there wouldn't be any RNG at all. I feel like that's way more boring than RNG. Measures to offset bad luck are good but MMOs are, in essence, Skinner box delivery systems and advocating to remove the RNG element completely is absurd.

[Bladesyphon]

That's the ideal, but in practice one of the biggest problems is people not correctly diagnosing why something failed. They'll point to all sorts of things that may have been contributors, but unless they're actually correctly and enthusiastically identifying the primary points of failure, the devs aren't learning anything - and a lot of the time neither are people watching, who put a lot of stock in their opinions.

That's one of the fears at the forefront here, when reading commentary like GC's in this thread. It speaks to problems that go deeper than just "doing it wrong", because there's underlying thoughts and principles that aren't being properly addressed and/or simply taken as true and obvious. You can polish all you want, but if you're building on a flawed premise then that polish won't have any of the leverage you need it to have. And if you then point to the polish and go "guess we didn't polish it enough!" you're missing the point, and you aren't learning.

Now, I'm not saying this will necessarily be the case here - I have no idea. We don't know what they're doing or how they're doing it, and more importantly, GC might just be right and I might just be wrong. I obviously don't think so, but I'm not deluded enough to not consider I might just not have it all figured out the way I think I do. But I've observed these effects in the past where people didn't correctly post-mortem their own mistakes, and then went and learned nothing from them. And not just in gaming. It's way more common than people think, and it's a big problem in many industries.

Agree with you pretty much 110% here, and GC/Street's twitter post more or less sums up literally what it is you're talking about. Going back to the whole "Yeah, I made the Dungeon Finder, sorry guys for making one of the most popular features in the game ,and effectively keeping the MMO genre alive, my bad!" thing, it honestly does paint the picture you're saying, and shows he's not even fully aware of why WoW became popular in the first place.

One of the game's biggest selling points to people like me who played other MMOs like EQ and FFXI (my choice at the time) was that you could solo in the game. Yes, there were still going to be times when you would need to group, such as for dungeons, raids, and elite quests, but the fact was made very aware to everyone in the early lead up to the game that if you wanted to solo all the way to the level cap, without needing to play a specific class or use a specific build, you could! That fact alone is what made WoW become the juggernaut it is today, and why every MMO after copied that formulate.

Hell, only a few months after WoW came out, Anet was already trying to one up them with Guild Wars, which offered a lower level cap so you could get straight into the end-game, but also gave you the ability to use NPC Henchmen to complete quests and play through the game, so you didn't feel like you were a lone wolf the entire time (a system that only got more innovative with Nightfall and Heroes, and would be used in other MMOs down the road as well, including both Ever Quest and Final Fantasy XI, two games that were notorious for being incredibly solo unfriendly and required grouping for pretty much everything).

Street going off on how no one wants to play an MMO solo is so backwards ass thinking, that it's a wonder why he ended up leaving Blizzard and Riot both. People don't want an MMO to be *entirely* solo, but they want the option to be able to play the game whenever the hell they log in, rather than having to spend time hurrying up and waiting in town to find a group in order to play said game. It's also incredibly disengenous and flat out ignorant to think that automatic group finders or the ability to solo somehow kills communication in the game. Even before the advent of the Dungeon Finder, most people in pickup groups were there to go in, clear the dungeon, and leave. I farmed Stratholme religiously back in 2004 for my Lightforge set pieces, and I can promise you I didn't run with the same people every day. I grabbed together a group as quickly as possible, charged in, got that done, and then did it again the next day with a brand new set of random people I'd probably never see again.

The connections I *did* make were in my Guild, which surprise surprise, is still the way the majority of people make connections today in retail WoW, or any modern MMO. Street is basically a living Seymour Skinner meme at this point, and it's why his game is going to probably crash and burn, and rather than understanding the reasons why it burned, as you said, he's going to blame everything *but* the reasons why it failed, and continue to believe that matchmaking and solo gameplay is the reason why is MMO failed, even though the latter was the original selling point of WoW, and the former has become a staple of the genre that's kept it alive to this day.

[Triceron]

If people like @WowIsDead64 had their way, everything would be deterministic and there wouldn't be any RNG at all. I feel like that's way more boring than RNG. Measures to offset bad luck are good but MMOs are, in essence, Skinner box delivery systems and advocating to remove the RNG element completely is absurd.

I think there simply needs to be a balanced since WoW is not built on the same RNG fundamentals that say a Diablo or a Roguelike is. Every tier, you're expected to get a full set of a dozen or so pieces that constitute your progression. I do believe in 'bad luck protection' in some measure to alleviate that. I wouldn't be specific to any one route here, but just having more than just 'luck of the draw' would be good. And I'm sure the game has some measure of that, so I'm just iterating this as a basic principle, not as a criticism of the current game.

[Relapses]

I think there simply needs to be a balanced since WoW is not built on the same RNG fundamentals that say a Diablo or a Roguelike is. Every tier, you're expected to get a full set of a dozen or so pieces that constitute your progression. I do believe in 'bad luck protection' in some measure to alleviate that. I wouldn't be specific to any one route here, but just having more than just 'luck of the draw' would be good. And I'm sure the game has some measure of that, so I'm just iterating this as a basic principle, not as a criticism of the current game.

Modern WoW has been iterating on this for awhile. The Creation Catalyst is one of the better additions in the last few years and they're finally opening it at the beginning of the Tier in 10.2. Big W in my book. I do think we could still get more: The return of Bonus Rolls or a deterministic vendor locked behind a currency earned in the raid would improve things even further.

[Merpish]

The entire game is built around the top 5-10% now.

You're right, Renown, Dragonriding races, Torghast, Mage Tower, pet battles, transmog, Fyrakk Assaults, Dream Surges, Time Rifts, Primal Invasions, world bosses, holiday events, achievement hunting, mount collecting, and timewalking are all for the top tier players of WoW.

[Relapses]

You're right, Renown, Dragonriding races, Torghast, Mage Tower, pet battles, transmog, Fyrakk Assaults, Dream Surges, Time Rifts, Primal Invasions, world bosses, holiday events, achievement hunting, mount collecting, and timewalking are all for the top tier players of WoW.

Careful, you're being elitist. :^)

[Soon-TM]

You're right, Renown, Dragonriding races, Torghast, Mage Tower, pet battles, transmog, Fyrakk Assaults, Dream Surges, Time Rifts, Primal Invasions, world bosses, holiday events, achievement hunting, mount collecting, and timewalking are all for the top tier players of WoW.

Considering that all that stuff provides almost zero (0) character progression, it's safe to say that it isn't going to hold anyone's interest for any given amount of time.