Shouldn't WoW teach you how to play as you level up?

[Crimson Spears]

Doing so would make people think it's a job instead of a nice experience..like a game.

I think we drastically disagree on the concept of what a game is.

What your describing is a toy. Don't get me wrong I like toys to.. its a shameful secret I have that once my son gets bored with his pokemon figures I secret them away and decorate my computer desk with them. That said the major difference between the two is a game is designed to challenge you in some way. You can lose a game unless you follow its rules and either by skill or chance and sometimes a combination of those two you win.

A toy is a more passive experience. I would argue a game you can't reasonably lose is far more a toy then game. Now there isn't anything wrong with that but they are two separate things.

[Greevir]

There are 2 types of people when faced with challenge.

1. People who get better until the challenge is conquered
2. People who cry until the challenge is nerfed

3. People who pay someone else to complete the challenge.

[Crimson Spears]

3. People who pay someone else to complete the challenge.

It saddens me how common that group has become... the wow token was a mistake. Yes carries existed before it but once it was introduced and the negative stigma of buying gold was removed the market for carries exploded. I recall before the token heroic raid carries were almost unheard of instead of being every third post in trade chat.

[Azerox]

It saddens me how common that group has become... the wow token was a mistake. Yes carries existed before it but once it was introduced and the negative stigma of buying gold was removed the market for carries exploded. I recall before the token heroic raid carries were almost unheard of instead of being every third post in trade chat.

It was all intentional, why do you think blizz does nothing about those Nova spammers?
Alot of Tokens are being bought to fund such things. Blizzard is just milking the cow as much as it can.

[Crimson Spears]

It was all intentional, why do you think blizz does nothing about those Nova spammers?
Alot of Tokens are being bought to fund such things. Blizzard is just milking the cow as much as it can.

I know its the same reason why they removed the abilities of addons to filter out titles from group finder. Have to let people see those sale posts..

[jellmoo]

I think the levelling experience does a decent enough job of teaching you the core methods of doing DPS. You ay need to fine tune, but by and large you get the picture whilst leveling. I think for DPS classes, the game does a poor job of teaching utility. When and how to use Demonic Gateway, for example.

The real issue comes from playing a tank of healer. The game does a really poor job teaching you these roles. It might help you piece together the right abilities to use, but it doesn't teach you anything about mana management or positioning a boss.

[DarkAmbient]

The levelling process, including the dungeons, is one long tutorial. That's where you're supposed to learn from.

[h8ryan]

Put an in game damage meter so that everyone can realize how terrible they are and seek to improve

[Minikin]

The problem is that there are a lot of systems working against each other. Back in the day, not everyone ran dungeons, raided, ran heroic content, etc. Blizzard these days is pushing everyone in PVP, dungeons, raids, heroic dungeons and mythic +. That is what they consider "content". If you ain't doing or working towards "end game content" you ain't playing their game. So levelling is rushed, massively under tuned and aside from all that, you just get skills thrown at you while you level up. How many even bother to check their spell book or read their skills? Back in the day when you had to visit a trainer, you actually had to read what you were upgrading and figure it out.

You rarely use stuns, snares, interrupts, etc while levelling so people often times don't know they have to or have those skills. Then you have people that go into tunnel vision and are so caught up with the DPS meters, they forget everything else.

I was playing Classic recently for the first few levels, you really learn to use all your abilities every pull cause its hard. You can't get away spamming 1-2 abilities. I was levelling a Warrior and a Rogue and I was being forced to use my CDs almost every pull. There is no real incentive or reason for players to do that. You can pretty much reach end game spamming a single ability with no real fear of death. That's basically the main reason as why most players don't know their class.

I agree with the initial part of the post but not completely with the classic part.

In classic there are more buttons but there is a certain simplicity. For example. Not every class has a stun,.interrupt or cc. Now however pretty much every class has that. I think the only difference remaining is purge, dispell, curse removal, cure poison etc.

Back then interrupt was still a commodity but now everyone has it. But still they don't use it unfortunately.

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Doing so would make people think it's a job instead of a nice experience..like a game.

I think it's a bit deeper than that. For example. As nice as Microsoft flight simulator looks I wouldn't be able to play it because I like the competition of an MMO playing higher mythic keys, raids or PvP.

[uuuhname]

they have entire YouTube Channels for this, for pretty much every spec, the talents, the gear and rotation.

[Lex Icon]

the basics are fine. everything else is for advanced play and for that it's really on the player to figure out what to do if that's what they want to do.

[clevin]

You all are using varying definitions of 'teach how to play'. The game could pretty easily introduce each concept to new players in a scenario that illustrates why you would want to interrupt etc. THAT would be easy. But is that really the issue?

If the 'how to play' issue is really 'how to coordinate interrupts during a boss fight' that's almost impossible to teach in a scenario in any meaningful way. I mean, on my Rogue, Kick is on a pretty short CD. On my boom kin, the interrupt CD is much longer and thus coordination will be different. I can get most interrupts on my Rogue, but rarely on the druid.

I do think they should do what I described on page 1 and take you through scenarios for each new type of ability (DPS, interrupt, snare etc) just so everyone explicitly gets that baseline training. Make them skippable if you have a toon that's leveled.

[T-34]

WoW's greatest strength, and weakness, is that a considerable part of the in-game experience is player-driven compared to other MMOs:

1. The extensive ability to create your own UI = you can customize your interface to reflect your taste in art and playstyle
2. And all the other addons, from questing addons, crafting to an addon like raider.io that creates its own game within the game.
3. A very detailed combat log that allows you to create advanced dps-meters and compare your performance to your peers = one of the reasons why competitive people prefer WoW
4. Blizzard has a almost full hands-of approach to teaching you how to play the game in a group setting. All of that is player-driven, both in-game and out of game.
5. This has led to a wide array of websites that cover all aspects of wow.

So we have a game that has a depth of in-game customization and out-of-game resources that no other MMO can even dream of.
On one hand that gives a player that wants to customize his experience and learn more about the game a plethora of avenues to pursue. On the other hand this leaves a part of the player-base behind.

Would you trade all the player-driven web-sites and addons for Blizzard made info and addons? I wouldn't.

[Thirtyrock]

I think this is a nice concept but I don't see how it could happen.

Ideal rotations change drastically with new abilities. It's not "oh, just add this ability into your rotation" it's more "forget everything you knew about your class for the last X levels and start over"
And if you DO decide to give everyone all their abilities up front, then you run into the issue of mobs that die before you're through with the rotation. Ok, so let's fix that. Now you have mobs that are really strong and last a long time. Either 1) they kill you or 2) they're no real threat and it's just tedious to kill them. Ok, so now you've decided to go that route. you need to up the XP on every mob but probably drastically lower the xp per quest, which means why even quest at all? Just farm mobs...

It's a chain reaction of "fixes" that probably don't result in a satisfactory leveling experience.

LFD/LFR teach the average player enough to push them into lower level m+ & normal raiding. If they want to improve after that, they need to do the research, whether it's from Icy Veins, wowhead, discords, or friends.

[Alroxas]

Then don't make it based around that? I'm not suggesting a mage tower just a basic check.

Wasn't Proving Grounds supposed to be that basic check?

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What is there that u need the game to teach u? Its all there

Ok, without looking it up, what is the rotational opener for a Fire Mage in an AoE setting as NF in SL? Or rotational priority queue for Arms Warrior?

Some information just isn't there in the game. We (now) rely on external sources to provide that kind of information which is easy enough to find.

[Oneirophobia]

Biggest issue is people DO NOT read tooltips and WILL NOT read tooltips.

My own brother-in-law, the absolute mook of a man, does this. He will spend hours and hours finding addons and macros to streamline his rotation to one button without ever reading an ability. He told me the other day he got "kicked out of a dungeon by a bunch of idiots because they kept telling him to interupt.. demon hunters don't have interupts, morons!"
Mother fucker, I don't play a demon hunter and I can tell you right now you've got an interrupt.

[Mentacyde]

I think we drastically disagree on the concept of what a game is.

What your describing is a toy. Don't get me wrong I like toys to.. its a shameful secret I have that once my son gets bored with his pokemon figures I secret them away and decorate my computer desk with them. That said the major difference between the two is a game is designed to challenge you in some way. You can lose a game unless you follow its rules and either by skill or chance and sometimes a combination of those two you win.

A toy is a more passive experience. I would argue a game you can't reasonably lose is far more a toy then game. Now there isn't anything wrong with that but they are two separate things.

video game...toy..same thing

[korijenkins]

The game has never been easier to pick up and learn and we somehow have someone complaining that it's too hard.

Absolutely unbelievable.

[Crimson Spears]

The game has never been easier to pick up and learn and we somehow have someone complaining that it's too hard.

Absolutely unbelievable.

You don't read threads you post in do you?

[ellieg]

Wasn't Proving Grounds supposed to be that basic check?

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Ok, without looking it up, what is the rotational opener for a Fire Mage in an AoE setting as NF in SL? Or rotational priority queue for Arms Warrior?

Some information just isn't there in the game. We (now) rely on external sources to provide that kind of information which is easy enough to find.

Lol the game isn't supposed to teach u that. Might as well have the game play for you