Bashiok comments on WoW's difficulty, accessibility
by Mathew McCurley 
Apr 11th 2011 at 3:00PM
Bashiok -- Old WoW
I understand and respect gaming masochism. But, I think that changing mechanics to be more reasonable and less punishing is an improvement, not a detriment, to games in general. Many of us Original Gamers pine for the days of D&D-based yore when games were seemingly intended to break us down into sobbing masses created by an uncaring necromancer of pain and suffering, or at least didn't try to avoid it. Overcoming all of the obstacles (I CHOOSE NOT TO SHOOT HER WITH THE SILVER ARROW... NOOOOO) was a big part of what gaming (I HAVE 1 LIFE!?), and especially PC gaming (HOW DO I LOAD MOUSE DRIVERS?), were about. But, I feel we're lucky to now be in an age where those ideals (intended or not) are giving way to actual fun, actual challenge, and not fabricating it through high-reach requirements (I NEED A FAIRY MONK WITH A MAGIC LOCKPICK?).
What we've always been trying to do, what WoW has always been about (and to which much of its success is due) is to make an accessible MMO. Anyone that looks back at the game at launch and wishes it was as challenging now as it was then is not aware of the painstaking effort put into making this game accessible as compared to its predecessors. Since release we've refined that intent, eventually evolving the very few masochistic designs WoW actually ever started with, but ideally still offering those same prestige goals that give that feeling of achieving something great if you're able to pull it off. We've made a lot of progress toward striking that balance and continuing to evolve the game, but it's not something we're ever likely to perfect, and we'll be constantly working to hit that elusive goal. Hopefully it's to the benefit of everyone playing and enjoying the game, and they'll continue to enjoy the journey that a living, breathing, persistent universe will take us on.
What we've always been trying to do, what WoW has always been about (and to which much of its success is due) is to make an accessible MMO. Anyone that looks back at the game at launch and wishes it was as challenging now as it was then is not aware of the painstaking effort put into making this game accessible as compared to its predecessors. Since release we've refined that intent, eventually evolving the very few masochistic designs WoW actually ever started with, but ideally still offering those same prestige goals that give that feeling of achieving something great if you're able to pull it off. We've made a lot of progress toward striking that balance and continuing to evolve the game, but it's not something we're ever likely to perfect, and we'll be constantly working to hit that elusive goal. Hopefully it's to the benefit of everyone playing and enjoying the game, and they'll continue to enjoy the journey that a living, breathing, persistent universe will take us on.
People have been bemoaning the rise and fall of difficulty versus accessibility forever, so it is no surprise that posts like this has come up. Cataclysm has made a good number of improvements to the reputation systems and the number of excellent rewards available to players in many different ways, and it has made accessibility a core value rather than a feature.
Bashiok comes from that era of oppressive gaming. Games were hard, in order to keep you playing as well as to provide a challenge. As technology and gaming philosophy change and the MMO genre evolves, the old, oppressive ways make way for the new challenges of MMO design -- namely, growing and holding on to a dedicated playerbase. WoW still has all of the same goals that you have to work hard for and put a bunch of time and effort into. Raiding is still the endgame and is still difficult; prestige gold items are still available and not in everyone's inventories; and, last time I checked, playing your class to a decent degree was still something to be proud of. Believe me, you don't want to go back to the salad days of difficulty.
WoW Patch 4.1 is on the PTR, and WoW Insider has all the latest news for you -- from previews of the revamped Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub to new valor point mechanics and new archaeology items.
Filed under: Cataclysm
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 7)
Shinae Apr 11th 2011 3:10PM
I started WoW as a gaming masochist.. My first 2 characters was a priest leveled as holy and a warrior leveled as prot; both before dual-specs and RDF. But I tell you, it was a great way to meet new people and make friends on my realm, so that's the one part I miss about the "old days."
Otherwise, I've been very happy about most of the "quality of life" changes that have been done over the years. Patch notes tend to make me happy.
oregonienne Apr 11th 2011 4:14PM
I came from FFXI and leveled a holy priest as my first character, at launch. I was thrilled to be able to do damage! and solo! and had no idea what people were talking about when they said how surprised they were that I was able to level a holy priest. I was having a great time, and it was a hundred times easier than FFXI. Then I leveled some alts - a fire mage, a feral druid, an arms warrior - and finally understood.
TonyMcS Apr 11th 2011 9:35PM
I'm very happy with the game improvements, unfortunately the latest improvements don't seem to be cutting it for a lot of people. The elephant in the room is a fall in player participation. Most guilds are having trouble filling raid slots and my own guild now has trouble getting a 10 person raid together once a week.
In hindsight, the reasons are apparent. Heroics are harder and require more concentration and teamwork than a lot of of pugs can handle. I will not pug as a tank - I don't play this game to have to put up with abuse from 14 yr olds for and hour and a half. Heroics with guildies, sure, but even getting a five person heroic is starting to get hard considering it means a 1-1.5 hour committment. This doesn't mean you can't have the occasional great pug, but they're the exception rather than the rule. The latest bribe a tank approach won't work either on me as I could care less about pets and mounts - if they had an epic in the goodie bag maybe, but only as long as it took to get that epic. Currently pugging is like wanting to hit your head against a wall because it feels good when it stops.
There's no denying the facts. There just aren't that many people raiding as before. All the guilds on our server and I assume other realms have the same problems. Not enough people turning up or new people each time. Even the hardcore guilds are starting to poach other members.
The irony of course is that we got what we asked for. WoW is more challenging and requires more teamwork, skill and understanding. Unfortunately, what appears challenging to some of us, is a road block to others.
WotLK was fun, Cata - not so much. It would be fun if we could get enough people to turn up regularly, but that isn't happening at the moment.
A positive change would be to shorten the dungeons. Either nerf em or take out a boss or two. Raiding content is also very unforgiving and has certainly contributed as a deterrent to playing.
I do applaud the conversion of honor to JPs which will allow me to gear up my alts without having to pug, so I see a lot of bgs in my future ;-)
RetPallyJil Apr 11th 2011 10:52PM
Psh. Try being a ret paladin since 2005. THAT is masochism.
Sean Apr 11th 2011 10:56PM
Tony hit it right on the head. I remember the Heroics in Lich King being challenging for a while, but there were also more people around (guildies, friends, and Puggers) to take on the challenge.
Part of it, I think, is because people were still exploring Northrend after they hit 80. My main had never set foot into Storm Peaks, Icecrown, or Grizzly Hills when he hit the level cap. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure he was still in Zul'Drak. And this was at launch, when none of us had heirlooms yet.
So there was a lot of content for a level 80 to explore, never mind rep grinds. Consequently I was playing a lot, as were most of my guild, and throwing together a dungeon run was usually as easy as saying "/g Anyone want to run the Daily Heroic?"
Contrast that with Cata, where I hit 85 in a month and was halfway through the Twilight Highlands. I hadn't been to Wash yet, but Uldum was done and Deepholm was halfway done. My Alchemy was maxed out and there just wasn't that much left to do.
So really quickly I was on just long enough to do some dailies and maybe a random dungeon. With all of my guildmates in the same boat (or already working on alts) there just never seemed to be a lot of us around to put together a guild run of anything.
At first I thought it was just a problem with me and my friends, but looking here and at the Forums I see it's more widespread.
DarkWalker Apr 11th 2011 11:38PM
@TonyMcS
I mostly agree with you. Tanking heroic PUGs is too frustrating, which led me to completely avoid them; besides, I can only have more than half hour of uninterrupted gameplay during weekends (mind you, I can usually play multiple hours per day, only they aren't contiguous). Besides, heroics going for over an hour is just too long; being stuck for a few hours with a single bad group could make me unwilling to play for a few days (I'm too loyal for my own good, so I would stay until the group broke apart even if other players were unreasonable or I was sure the group would be unable to complete the dungeon).
So, I did almost no heroics, which meant no chance to get the needed gear to raid, which meant my guild lost it's tank.
A month after Cataclysm I unsubscribed. No use paying for a game that was more frustration than fun. Other MMOs right now are much more to my liking.
BTW, for me, the two best heroics up to now, regarding both difficulty and length, were PoS and HoR. Loved them. FoS would be nice too, if it had less trash (and either railings on the pathways, or a way to rezz any foolish player that fell; it was tiresome to wait for someone to get back and run the whole instance. How I love the way DCUO lets the player keep all his fast travel options even inside instances).
Grak Apr 12th 2011 4:54AM
@ TonyMcS
"Currently pugging is like wanting to hit your head against a wall because it feels good when it stops."
I think I love you.
Eskarel Apr 12th 2011 8:44AM
Personally I think that in a lot of ways things are more challenging and definitely more interesting these days. Do we really want to go back to the 5 second rule, epic dps gear that was worse than blues because only spell damage mattered, and every single fight being tank and spank or some badly thought out gimmick. Trash in some of the new instances is more interesting than a few vanilla raid bosses.
As for any issues I have I think my biggest issue is that long does not mean challenging. I like a challenge I don't necessarily like spending two hours in any instance.
starphaser Apr 12th 2011 8:53AM
I totally agree with @TonyMcS. Cataclysm is not as much fun as Wrath was, specially when it comes to endgame experience. I think the focus of this expansion was leveling: streamlining the content, balancing all classes in low level content, making quests have meaningful (and apparent, in-your-face) lore, etc.
This left us with not much to explore once we reach 85. Actually, if you think about it, it feels exactly like half an expansion: instead of having all "90" content, we have half of it at "85".
I really miss having a new continent to explore like we did in BC and Wrath.
Tondef Apr 12th 2011 9:58AM
LOL, just thinking. I guess the new challenge for the leets will be filling the raid and paying the $92/month fee to play once all the servers merge down to 3 (RP, PVP, PVE). But hey sometimes they need to step up and earn more RL $$ so that they can play. Or as I like to think l2e (learn to earn) since all us that play for fun have been leaving WoW.
4.1 can't come fast enough, but then I think they released Cata months to soon.
MsJamie Apr 12th 2011 11:34AM
For those complaining that heroics are hard...
FYI, in 3.0, Wrath heroics were hard. Tanks used to beat themselves silly in Halls of Stone for gear. Repeated wipes on a boss were the norm.
Once we had a tier shift, and the emblems could buy ilvl 213 (Naxx 25) gear, things got easier.
When the Dungeon Finder hit in 3.3, and emblems could buy Tier 9, the heroic facerolling was in full force. Remember the wailing of "it's too hard!" when the ICC heroics showed up?
My prediction is that by the time 4.3 rolls around, people will think that the current set of dungeons as being trivially easy.
jfofla Apr 11th 2011 3:11PM
I think they hit that perfect mix in Cataclysm.
I love Tol Barad, how rep works, and most of all the new Heroics and Raids.
This expansion has completely reinvigorated the game for me.
Whyisretgimped Apr 11th 2011 6:49PM
I completely disagree with this. Heroics in Cata are brutal for the casual player. They're also not brutal in a good way. I wouldn't mind a challenging dungeon that takes time to work though, if I only had to do it once. What makes cata heroics so awful is that they're brutally challenging and they're mindlessly repetitive at the same time. Running heroics in LK was less challenging and more mindless, but it was also faster. You could run five heroics in two or three hours and feel a sense of accomplishment when you put on a new piece of gear and didn't feel like you wasted your precious evening before going back to work the next day.
Now you have the wipe fests and meticulous planning that BC heroics required (much the same as classic level 60 dungeons which you couldn't ever out gear unless you raided), and you have to repeat them just as endlessly as the heroics in LK.
Honestly, it was more fun to try and push an LK heroic faster than I should and risk dying on every pull than it is marking targets, dealing with incompetent DPC cc and wiping because a boss has insane mechanics that often rely on luck. Given that the bulk of anything remotely rewarding for an 85 is still found in heroics and raids, WoW still stops dead at 85 if you're not one of the people that enjoys these elements of the game.
As an aside, it was also nice to be able to run heroics with my not-so-awesome gamesauce wife and watch her enjoy getting a mega geared toon that could destroy any wobbly that tried to mug her while she gathered herbs. That is gone from Cata, and that's the player Blizz should want to keep. For every slavering nerd demanding brutality, there are 100 cute little wives wanting to decapitate anyone who gets in the way of their flowers.
You claim you want a game that's accessible... bring back heroics I can play with my wife.
thedoctor2031 Apr 11th 2011 7:42PM
Yes heroics have gotten harder, but not unbearably so. The mechanics are not luck, just no understood by people like you. A group with an average item level of 340 should not even need cc for clearing instances anymore. Yes, if everyone is 329 you will need to cc and if people play like idiots you will need to make some compensations. However, I do agree with you about the length of heroics. For people with limited play time I feel like logging on and taking an hour to do a heroic on top of a 40 minute que time is just ridiculous. They are trying to fix the que time but I wish they would have reduced the size of the instances or amount of trash or something.
kaminari Apr 11th 2011 9:11PM
the debate as i see it is whether heroics should be progression content or not, where i stand in that is; yes, for a while then we should over gear them and and face roll them.
in a couple of months when the firelands raid comes out and everyone is geared on t-11 and the odd piece of t-12 we'll be able to roll trough them like a wrath heroic.
also for those who like heroics to be progression there will be no new heroics only Zul' or something =P
Plastic Rat Apr 11th 2011 9:15PM
@Whyisretgimped
QUOTE "Running heroics in LK was less challenging and more mindless, but it was also faster"
First off, what is with this 'faster' everything? Sit down and enjoy the time you spend in front of the game, whether you play for 5 minutes or 5 hours. How fast you're moving through content should mean nothing to you unless you suffer from severe ADHD, which I'm starting to suspect the majority of players do.
Those high-speed chain-pulling LOLAOE dungeons were also incredibly boring. You ran behind the tank looting everything that sparkled and spamming 1 or 2 spells with no further thought. How is this fun for anyone with more than a single digit IQ?
QUOTE "Honestly, it was more fun to try and push an LK heroic faster than I should and risk dying on every pull than it is marking targets, dealing with incompetent DPC cc and wiping because a boss has insane mechanics that often rely on luck. "
You can STILL risk dying. You will always have incompetent DPS and CC is currently not required on every pull, just a little bit of basic thought. If we nerf the game down to the level that all the 'incompetent DPS' can get through everything we'll have another 'roll face on keyboard' expansion for anyone else who can figure out the basic idea "behind don't stand in the fire." Rather spend a few minutes teaching that newb hunter in your pug how to trap than bemoaning how hard the instance is.
Besides, I quite honestly detested those morons who insisted chain pulling their way through everything in Wrath in a huge hurry. Seriously? Why? Where exactly do you need to get to so fast?
Quote: "As an aside, it was also nice to be able to run heroics with my not-so-awesome gamesauce wife and watch her enjoy getting a mega geared toon that could destroy any wobbly that tried to mug her while she gathered herbs."
Your not-so-awesome gamesauce wife has plenty for her in cata. You can get really decent gear without ever running a heroic. Gear that will at least let you decimate any open world mob.
In fact that's my problem right now. I have a few pieces of high level gear and dailies are quite frankly mindlessly boring. I hit one or two skills and the mob is dead. Next. How is this fun? It's just basically repetition with no challenge.
Spend some time educating your not-so-awesome gamesauce wife so she can play the game with a little skill. She'll thank you for it.
Gods, I still can't believe there are so many people with this mindset that posts like this are getting upvoted. Do you guys seriously all just want something that spews out virtual loot with no challenge? Rewards just for pitching up? Isn't there something inside you guys that gets a kick out of overcoming a challenge as part of a team? Just what the hell happened to people...
Sky Apr 11th 2011 10:18PM
@Plastic Rat
It saddens me to say this but we reasonable people are now the minority after Wrath. Everyone wants the 20 minute dungeon that awards epics instead of the challenge. If Retisgimped posted his opinion when wrath came out, people would be downvoting him telling him he is unreasonable. But I have come to accept that Wrath has fostered this mentality of everything being quick and easy and people like him are now the majority. You and me are now the minority as most of the people who think like us and who actually want a challenge have left the game for other games. I have found myself playing less and less as well and if not for my friends I would not be playing this game any more. It saddens me to see how far this game that could have been the greatest game in history has fallen. It is no longer about the epic experience of going through a dungeon and working towards a goal but more about completing a dungeon as fast as possible and collecting loot. Anything that takes more than 30 minutes is now considered hard, unaccessible or unreasonable. People like us who enjoy the game for its challenge and not because of purple pixels are now called elitists, nerds or worse. It's a game they say. We're already stressed in our real life, why should we put any more effort into a game. A game is supposed to be fun, they say. But I say to myself, where is the fun if we do not control our destinies? Where is the fun if the only possibility is that of success, even if we do not deserve it? Blizzard themselves who created this game originally to cater to people like us who want a challenge have gone away from this philosophy and moved towards designing a game that will retain the most customers. Keep feeding them epics and they will continue to play they say. What Blizzard doesn't know is that easy modes are turning us real fans of the game away and once the allure of epics wear out these people who are just in it for the purples will be gone as well. Downvote me all you want. This is just one man's humble opinion and hopefully there are enough of us out there who share the same views
DarkWalker Apr 11th 2011 11:45PM
@Plastic Rat
The "fast" bit, for me, is making sure I can still get instances done with my very limited availability of contiguous play time. I could do the daily random heroic with more than one character every day in the WotLK era; in Cataclysm, if I was lucky, I would be able to do a couple of them per week with just one character.
Games are a leisure activity for me. They must fit my schedule, not the other way. Cataclysm not fitting my schedule (while the other 3 MMOs I tried out and still play do fit) was a good part of the reason I'm not subscribed to WoW anymore.
Plastic Rat Apr 12th 2011 2:06AM
I'm amazed at the posts that have been mass upvoted and downvoted.
Why did "Jfofla" get downvoted? Because he said he enjoyed the game? We can't even enjoy the game anymore now?
You know, I don't even want them to make the game harder for the casuals. I really wish they could just give the masses what they want. Huge dolops of epic pixels that they so desperately want along with loot pinata dungeons. It's what the masses want, so give it to them.
Just give the rest of us an option. Make a hardcore server where we can go and frolic with our fellow masochists. Where XP is given slowly and leveling up takes a bit longer. Where mobs have more hitpoints and hit back a bit harder. It's perfectly doable. Hell, I believe there are probably private servers that have that already. I'd even play on one if it wasn't illegal.
So come on Blizzard, with your millions of subscribers, isn't it possible to find enough of us 'masochists' to fill one server? And if so, isn't it worth it to keep us paying?
kinnson Apr 12th 2011 2:33AM
What makes Cata heroics so brutal?
What specific mechanics makes Cata so difficult?
If the issue is with CC/interrupting quit complaining. You only have to use it til you have an average of ilevel 346. Heroics are designed for a 329 average. At 346 you're more than a tier above the content.