WoW Deliberately Engineers Mismatches

[stunlawk]

TL;DR: Go away. The adults are talking.

MISMATCH

Since WoW was released, players have asked for only a few common things. Among them was the ability to join balanced pvp matches, whether they be battlegrounds or arenas. More specifically, they want team balance, not class balance, as it is now clear after seven years that class balance, while obviously possible, is sacrilege to the religion of WoW.

The pursuit of a fun, balanced pvp match is what drives many hundreds of thousands of subscriptions. Players want to compete. They want fair opportunities for victory. They want to be rewarded for the skills they have developed over their time leveling and practicing with their character.

But it is these balanced and fun pvp matches that are in shortest supply in WoW. Although every WoW subscriber has enjoyed such games, they are infrequent enough to be the source of sustained nostalgia throughout the playerbase.

What masquerades for competition in the current iteration of WoW is a distorted series of deliberately engineered mismatches which pit one clearly inferior group of players against a team of either well-coordinated pvp veterans or players with gear so far out of reach of the average player that it borders on comedy.

Essentially, the few are being served free guaranteed victories at the expense of the many, while both sides are being charged the same subscription fees. Where this might be a tenable and even sustainable situation in a game with a flat retail price and the option to simply quit playing, it is abusive when the players not part of the favored inner circle are being charged real money for the privilege of being targets for the chosen few.

I feel a deep and abiding sense of betrayal in this. My character, though certainly not at the pinnacle of its class, is certainly no pushover. Well, it would be no pushover were it not for Blizzard's obsession with turning the majority into caged animals tormented for the enjoyment of certain players.

Having now defeated the Lich King, the epic focus of some 12 years of Blizzard lore, and being suitably rewarded with very powerful armor and weapons, my character is routinely bulldozed by players wearing quest rewards for gathering rotting bear carcasses. The breathtaking lack of Blizzard's respect for their own world and the stark hollowness of the title "Kingslayer" is astonishing to me.

A spread of only four levels now is all that is needed to turn a moderately well geared character into a target dummy: destroyed with two five-figure critical hits. No different than the same character 70 levels ago. Worthless. Shameful. Betrayed by a system designed to artificially recycle weakness. Arthas and his father both died for nothing. Bolvar's sacrifice: meaningless. Our hard-won quest to set right Azeroth: a failure.

I recently watched two mid-level bosses in Icecrown repeatedly reduce a group of nine very well geared level 85s to a pile of debris. I can only guess how mind-bogglingly difficult the same fight was for those characters at level 80. The sudden reality of how utterly pointless that fight was leads me to one very simple and very sad conclusion.

This is not a game. And it is not fun. At all.

LEARN TO PLAY

The privileged players in WoW, marked by their maximum levels and inventories of shining top-quality gear, respond by saying the mismatches are the fault of the losing team. After all, the myth goes, if they would only do as we have obviously done, they would enjoy the same advantages over their former teammates and have access to the same unblemished win-loss totals. They would be the ones doing the overwhelming damage.

This position is often summed up by the phrase "learn 2 play."

This is an interesting position to take because it implies that it is actually possible to learn to play the game World of Warcraft. If an inquisitive and enterprising player were to embark on a mission to "learn to play," a project that might be called the ultimate WoW quest, where might they start?

Does Blizzard Entertainment, for example, offer instructions on how to play the game, aside from the simplified and general description of class roles on its web site? Chapter 2 of the "Game Guide" would seem to be a logical place to start since it bears the title "How to Play," but it seems to be more an overview of features than an actual step-by-step set of instructions on how to build skill and succeed. There is a very colorful guide to the user interface and many stylized and attractive sections describing how much fun the game is, but there is little in the way of specific instruction.

Nowhere in this game guide will you find factual data about how a level 75 character can drain a (17 pvp epics-wearing) level 70 character's health pool in less than three seconds, for example.

The words "circle strafe" appear nowhere on the current Blizzard set of instructions, yet this is one of the central skills in both battleground and arena pvp. World of Warcraft's revenues equal that of a movie studio releasing a blockbuster summer film every 30 days. Is it truly beyond their means to publish a complete guide to developing the skills required to successfully compete in a major portion of the game?

This "Game Guide" would seem to be the most recent iteration of the colorful little book that shipped with the original version of WoW some seven years ago. What veteran players know is that aside from that book, the game provided almost no specific instructions to help someone who really wants to "learn to play."

If Blizzard, itself authors of the entire game and world, cannot codify a standard set of actual written rules for their players and further cannot instruct its own paying customers, how can anyone expect those same customers to organically discover the voluminous knowledge required to master World of Warcraft on their own? Are these people really expected to conduct extensive and time-consuming research as a pre-requisite to playing a game they are already paying a subscription for?

Even Backgammon has a set of officially sanctioned written rules.

Therefore, it is unclear the invitation to "learn to play" is anything but a mendacious strategy to replace focus on the balance issue with an ad hominem straw man designed to call into question the skill of those not part of the privileged few.

It is the classic rhetorical strategy of the powerful: put the weak on the defensive while simultaneously casting the accuser as a self-made hero. Unfortunately, reality doesn't reconcile with the elite player's self-image, and common sense doesn't reconcile with their distorted view of fairness.

What is clear is that Blizzard and their privileged players enjoy a mutual support pact, whether spoken or unspoken. The elites shout down any and all who complain their experience of the game is lacking and Blizzard rewards them with ever-more powerful gear and a steady supply of weak, uncompetitive players to take the role of target dummy in battlegrounds and arenas: said targets encouraged with the ever-present but tantalizingly unreachable incentive of a truly balanced and fun pvp match or two from time to time in exchange for their regular subscription payments.

CRY MORE NOOB

What is most curious about all this is the continual drumbeat of the privileged: Anyone who points out the tremendous gap between the common player and their heroic opponents must be nothing more than a whiner who desires an advantage for themselves so they can "win" more often.

But isn't such an advantage precisely what the powerful players already enjoy? Is it possible their shrill, reactionary cries of "whiner" are simply sand-throwing meant to obscure their own built-in advantages in pvp competition? The power they wield is placed directly in their hands by Blizzard itself: a group of highly intelligent people well aware, as the authors of the game system, of what they are unleashing on everyone else as a result.

They know it becomes possible at some point, for one player to destroy another with a single attack, even though those players are ostensibly equivalent in ability by virtue of their identical levels. Yes, it is now possible, (and made possible deliberately) for one level X player to one-shot another level X player.

At this point, don't "battlegrounds" become nothing more than a series of ringer-stacked teams running up the score on those who got picked last in the draft?

With the invention of the "deserter debuff" it isn't even possible for the average player to excuse themselves from a game where they obviously don't belong, as each time they will be penalized for leaving before they have provided their far stronger opponents with sufficient "entertainment value."

One would hope this state of affairs would be a priority for a company with Blizzard's reputation, but after so many years of sustained complaints about the wild and fluctuating imbalances in pvp combat, and their persistence, it is clear this state of affairs is, deliberately or otherwise, meant to be the rule rather than the exception. As such, the common player has no choice but to suspect Blizzard developers high-fiving each other as the small are crushed under the wheels of epic progression 24 hours a day while the cash registers ring.

WHY PVP IS BROKEN

Very early in WoW's development, certainly long before its 2004 release, the game's designers made two fundamental mistakes. All of the balance problems in pvp combat can be traced back to these foundational game mechanics which have been the source of many thousands of legitimate complaints over the years.

Firstly, there is the mathematical issue.

There is an order of magnitude difference, generally speaking, between elite monster health and player health. The very inclusion of "elites" in WoW dungeon instances is proof player offensive abilities were never meant to be competitively brought to bear on a common monster's health pool in numbers. The advantage enjoyed by the player is tremendous and insurmountable by the average world encounter.

Elite monsters were given multiples of the common monster's health so they might survive long enough facing several players to be an actual threat to the progression in a dungeon instance. Bosses were made even more formidable.

But no such provisions were made for players in pvp.

Players are left to address a Brobdingnagian array of lethal opposing player abilities with gear and health pools balanced to match literally harmless monsters. With opponents launching offenses meant to hurt monsters with millions of health points, players able to muster only thousands of points of health are ill-equipped to survive long.

Player health in pvp is therefore drained at a rate many times that of anything they might encounter anywhere but the most exclusive raid instance, and even then, they have the support of up to 24 well-coordinated teammates who must cooperate by necessity or face time consuming and expensive defeat after defeat. No such teams exist in at-large battleground pvp.

The result is a jarring forced reorientation of timing and player abilities that is almost universally sabotaged by WoW's own game mechanics. With only seconds to survive, players in pvp are asked to coordinate some 50 different abilities into a series of attacks and defenses meant to defeat an opponent that is perpetually one lucky critical strike away from victory. It is an absurd state of affairs that does nothing but leave paying customer players with a sense of confusion and frustration.

It isn't even possible for those average players to practice against anything but a real opponent as nowhere in WoW other than toe-to-toe with a raid boss will they face the threat of being stunned and then hit for twice their health pool.

But as the level cap has increased, the imbalance has taken on a sour, divisive and bitter tone. It is no longer enough for players to take advantage of the arbitrage between pvp damage and pve stamina: now those guaranteed victories must be accompanied by a full 15 minutes of forced graveyard camping and 100-0 win/loss records on the battleground scoreboard. A series of these matches might persist for hours, or sometimes days as team after team parades through the battleground instance, occupying each 15 minute block with their particular brand of virtual vandalism.

Complaints are met with arms-folded silence from Blizzard and the predictable hoots and shouts from the victors. In fact, pvp items like "Nubless Pacifiers" and "Broken I-Win buttons" are even sprinkled into battlegrounds to egg on the elites and symbolize apparent contempt for the majority, who cannot reach such whimsical treasures from behind the release button.

STUNLOCK

The second glaring issue with pvp mechanics, as if having only 10% of the necessary health to compete wasn't enough, is the problem of player control.

Earlier in this article, it was pointed out that class balance is an offense to the WoW religion. If there is a WoW faith, its one sacrament is undoubtedly loss of character control. In no other game in all the history of video games has any product been more replete with opportunities for guaranteed victory than World of Warcraft. Hundreds of hours of professional quality video have been produced and millions of words have been written in exacting and consistent protest of this single debilitating issue in WoW pvp, yet only (literal) token responses have been offered by Blizzard.

This in the face of the overwhelmingly accepted fact that any game which offers one or the other opponent an opportunity for a self-engineered guaranteed victory is, by definition, a badly designed game. No game designer with any measure of professional dignity could possibly dispute this fact.

It has been remarked that if there were a universal mascot symbol of World of Warcraft it would be a male Undead rogue unzipping his pants behind a stunlocked female Night Elf priest. Even the animations accompanying such a "battle" border on the salacious, with the rogue repeatedly jabbing his daggers into unfortunate places before his helpless opponent's body is literally thrown to the ground in preparation for whatever apparently comes next.

Early in WoW's classic release, the rogue class was despised by many and played exclusively by everyone else, leading to class populations of 50% rogue or more on some of the most crowded servers.

The class' advantages were tremendous and exactingly chronicled in a number of popular pvp videos. So over-engineered was the rogue class that the notion it belonged anywhere in a balanced design was absurd on its face. With five independent stuns and the most efficient, automatic snare in the game, rogues needed no other advantages. Nevertheless, they were given complete invisibility, three means of escape, and the highest overall damage output in the game, complete with a guaranteed critical strike talent.

The results were predictable. Rogues dominated pvp at every level of the game year after year. Complaints about their ability to defeat an opposing player with that player having no control of any kind during the battle were ignored by Blizzard and derided by the same privileged players who support the current status quo. Other classes, like hunters and warriors, were so crippled by self-defeating designs and lack of power that servers were invaded with level one characters belonging to protesting players until they were unusable.

The aftershocks of such an over-engineered class are still being felt in today's game. Attempts to balance classes one with the other have consistently failed, only managing to produce one "flavor of the month" class after another, beginning with shadow priests, followed by druids, paladins and now mages.

Where does that leave pvp now? The combination of out-of-control gear advancement and a growing array of stuns, disorients and spell interrupts has turned World of Warcraft pvp into the video game equivalent of an inflatable doll. The vast majority can only stare at the repulsive spectacle of a spinning circus of overgeared clowns as they jump in circles around the soon-to-reappear bodies of their "opponents," their evident goal being to see how hard they can hump before their new toy explodes.

Attempts have been made to address stamina arbitrage and stunlock. The stamina issue was addressed by including a new statistic exclusive to pvp gear called "resilience." This was originally designed to cut down on the critical strike chance of the well-geared players, which, while entertaining in pve because of the big bold numbers it generated on the screen, was far too powerful when employed against opposing players.

Resilience has since been subtly altered to be just another form of armor, since undoubtedly the lack of big numbers on the screen was simply too much for "competitive" pvp players to bear. As such, it is useful, but negligible when addressing players capable of delivering five-figures in damage each second.

The stunlock issue was addressed by the inclusion of a "pvp trinket" in the game, which allowed players to automatically escape from any ability that caused "loss of control." Naturally the trinket was given one of the longest cooldowns in the game, and had absolutely no other function or statistical significance until very recently. It was an attempt to fix the problem, but to the reasonable player, it was indisputably a grudging and reluctant gesture on Blizzard's part.

U R BAD

World of Warcraft's brand of blame the victim is nothing if not entertainingly hypocritical. Here are players who almost literally cannot lose in 1 vs 1 pvp combat shouting down their complaining opponents by telling them their skills are lacking. Meanwhile they vigorously oppose any battleground or pvp regime that would offer direct enforcement of gear equality. Having risen to the top and pulled up the ladder, they argue, they are now entitled to the perpetual spoils of game-rigging.

Blizzard, naturally, has obliged, promising on the one hand to enforce gear equality in battleground queues while on the other pouring railroad car-loads of new powerful stat-inflated gear into the grasping hands of the "competitors."

"Bring us more plebes!" they shout as they sharpen their off-the-rack swords and shine their epic boots. One can almost hear the echo of Roman Gladiators as they shout "who among you can oppose us?"

The answer is simple: nobody can oppose you, and that's exactly the way you like it. WoW is a multi-billion dollar machine designed to give you exactly what you cannot find anywhere else in life: a free pass; a guaranteed superiority over all comers, regardless of their skill or experience. Your reward for your obsessive pursuit of more gear is a mathematical equation that admits you and bars all others so that you may sit upon your throne and behold your hegemony of one.

It is a system designed to reward dysfunction and obstruct thought and tactics. The more you neglect everything else in life, the more powerful you become. There is no cunning or art involved in a game where upon sighting the enemy, your controls are disconnected before you are treated to yet another series of oversized numbers meant to represent one-and-a-half seconds of ripped flesh and blood splatter before you are teleported back to the graveyard for another 30 seconds of the spellcasting Tauren show, included free with your $15 a month subscription.

You will never know if you are really good enough to win. World of Warcraft isn't designed to make winners of the most skilled or strategically aware players. It is designed to allow you to wear victory, or carry it in your scabbard. Your gear is winning those battles. Not you.

And whatever you might think about your opponent, he or she does not want your self-engineered advantage. They want to play a game where they compete fairly, not join a political party to lobby for buffs and nerfs in an attempt to become the beneficiary of statistical table scraps for a few weeks.

THEN JUST QUIT

Of all the responses to legitimate grounds for complaint, this is the strangest. With months invested in their characters, players are apparently expected to walk away once they encounter some of the most badly designed mechanics in the entire history of games.

There is no option and no alternative for players who just want to enjoy matching their skills against other players. So infected is every pvp venue with autocratic min-maxing and bought-off statistics, that new players face month after month of repulsive dues-paying as they are treated to the equivalent of watching their character dragged by the hair and flung over a cliff a dozen times or more in each game.

Only after this bizarre exercise in compulsive masochism can any player hope to acquire enough stamina and resilience to begin to employ any defenses and even then, they must endure still more months of stun-crit-crit-crit-release before they start to become effective.

One wonders how some of the Blizzard developers might react were they forced to take a new mid-level character of dubious class choice into battlegrounds for a few hours.

Yet it is precisely at these mid-range levels that battlegrounds become inviting for players who want to expand their gameplay experience. Apparently they are expected to recognize their own failure in planning ahead and setting aside three or four months for being stunlocked and delete their hard-won mid-level character as penance. It is obviously their own fault they can't see being one and two-shotted for months is the most fun video games have to offer.

FIXING PVP

World of Warcraft is a game of numbers, designed to operate on some of the most powerful mathematical computation engines in the history of civilization. To state with a straight face that pvp cannot be balanced out to six decimal points or more is patent nonsense.

The two initial fixes are obvious. The only reason they have not already been implemented is anyone's guess, but the unspoken trust of developers and their max-level favored loyalists is a likely source. Pvp damage output should be reduced by 90% immediately and the honor rewards adjusted to provide the same gear advancement as is currently offered.

This would mean battles would go on much longer than they do now. In fact, pvp matches might consist of a single large-scale battle that tilts the advantage to one team or another at a crucial moment. Such a contest would be far superior to the current pvp dynamics, which more closely resemble a group of panicked drunks running through a dark room filled with floating balloons they think are vampire bats.

Secondly, stuns, fears, disorients and the like should be removed from the game entirely and replaced with equivalent temporary debuffs like loss of strength, intellect, stamina or agility.

Giving players time to actually play the game will make pvp far more appealing.

CONCLUSION

World of Warcraft is not a game of strategy and planning. It is not a game for the intelligent. It is not even a game for the adventurous, as there is little adventure to be had beyond what, other than the standard selection, will drop from the next boss.

WoW is a game of dps, tanks, healers and gear. The game is far more about the dungeon finder, cc and trash clearing than it is about orcs, humans and epic conflicts. WoW is about tiers of armor, not the knights that wear armor. It is about mobs, not monsters. It is about disposing of valued treasures, not the search for them. It's quest rewards, not stories; farming, not exploring. It is neither a world, nor is it the craft of war. It is a series of slot machines that dispense progressively bigger numbers with less and less imaginative names attached.

In other words, it is a mind-boggling crashing bore.

I still remember emerging from the Night Elf starting area and the sense of wonder at seeing a walking tree that was 60 levels higher than my character. Perhaps someday, with all the money and talent associated with this game, long-time players of WoW will encounter something truly incredible and unique and for just a moment, experience fun again.

[Barracks00]

Soooo... the new car smell is no longer there. It's just a game. You may need to move on.

[Hakto]

Rated BG's offer you team balance.

Is that adult enough for you?

[stunlawk]

Rated BG's offer you team balance.

And so were regular battlegrounds. Four years ago.

[Drkblade]

Soooo... you read 4000 words in three minutes? Maybe you need to find another thread.

You took the time to write 4000 words on a game? Perhaps your time is better spent getting a Ph. D instead. You seem to have the time.

[pwnshot]

Soooo... the new car smell is no longer there. It's just a game. You may need to move on.

Be it 4000 words or 10000, this pretty much sums it up.

[Wakwazu]

Us adults have better things to talk about than wild conspiracy theories about a video game as a result of you being tired of the game.

[stunlawk]

TL;DR. l2p.

See above.

You took the time to write 4000 words on a game?

Took me a year to level my character. I can write 4000 words in 30 minutes. What's your point?

[Envisionist]

TL;DR: Go away.

LEARN TO PLAY


CRY MORE NOOB

U R BAD


THEN JUST QUIT

This just about sums it up.

[ambigiouslynamed]

bitch more, im sure you'll find enough like minded individuals to create a perfect little world where youre completely correct

[stunlawk]

Us adults have better things to talk about than wild conspiracy theories about a video game as a result of you being tired of the game.

Not a single one of you trolls has even read the post. But you may be interested to know that your slavish defense of Blizzard has now been seen for what it is. You can find remedial reading classes at many local community colleges.

[Chaochamp]

TL;DR

It's 1AM here and my eyes are way too poopy to read that.

[Envisionist]

Not a single one of you trolls has even read the post. But you may be interested to know that your slavish defense of Blizzard has now been seen for what it is. You can find remedial reading classes at many local community colleges.

No I read your post, and it was retarded. Pvp damage nerfed by 90%? I already have healer/dps matches that last 30+ minutes all the time, no thank you.

[stunlawk]

I already have healer/dps matches that last 30+ minutes all the time, no thank you.

So a more remedial game with frequent rewards, bright colors and noise would be more your speed. Fair enough. Everyone is entitled to their opinion.

[Envisionist]

Oh, I'm mathematically correct. I don't need to rig the system for myself. The numbers are right there in the game. Factual data and factual conclusions logically arrived at and indisputable.

But that won't stop the Blizzard loyalists from defending the rigged system for their own benefit.

Right, you are mathematically correct but can't see that a 90% damage reduction would lead to infinitely long arena games with even 1 healer involved in any setting. I would nominate this for worst post of the year if I could, and we are only 8 days in.

[vesseblah]

I recently watched two mid-level bosses in Icecrown repeatedly reduce a group of nine very well geared level 85s to a pile of debris.

You did 25-man instance with 9 people perhaps? Would explain the problem quite easily. Some of the boss mechanics simply do not work correctly unless you have a certain amount of people in the group, and will bug to either too hard or too easy. Also in raid encounters many boss mechanics work on relative health dealing x% damage to you which will scale to any level regardless of gear.

Anyway, it's irrelevant to the rest of the QQ.

PvP is imbalanced, always have be and always will be. Random groups are just thrown together randomly without any regard to the gear level or achievement of players to make the queues faster. That is the price you pay for having 5min battleground queues instead of five hours we did in vanilla. Stop sniffing the glue while building tinfoil hats, and the thoughs of intentionally imbalanced matchups will disappear eventually.

If you want even the odds, stop the crying and start running rated battlegrounds. There the game does try to balance team ratings instead of just pull first random people into the group, which you can easily see from the significantly longer queue times.

[Rakatashi]

Good thing Blizzard is already doing something about the gear-cap with stat crunching.

[stunlawk]

You did 25-man instance with 9 people perhaps?

Nope. 10-man heroic ICC. Nine raid-geared 85s plus one lower level alt. Crushed like a carton of eggs in about 30 seconds.

PvP is imbalanced, always have be and always will be.

So we agree. Why all the sand-throwing?

[TaurenNinja]

This is a mix of nostalgia issues (it was cool when it was new, now it's boring, but it's the game's fault!!!!!111), and a misunderstanding and maybe lack of skill in PvP (damage is actually in a good spot in PvP - it was over the top in WoTLK, but not now. PvP is mostly about coordinating CC and burst to land a kill, and the players who can do this better are better than others).

I agree that PvP balance at low level is bad at the moment, but at high level it's actually not that bad (and it matters mostly at high level, because players don't stay low-level for long anyway). There are a few details here and there but overall it's really not that bad. Certainly the best out of any other MMO.

Also, the OP doesn't quite realize the intrinsic mechanic of an MMO, that new content is constantly added to the end, which means you have to keep your character up to date or others will simply gain better gear/achievements and so on. You seem to want a game that is "finished" at some point where you don't have to advance your character anymore. So go play a single player game which finishes after you play through it. But not an MMO, which cannot be finished (or can only be finished for a short amount of time).


So yeah I'm not sure if this thread is valuable. Well written and a lot of time invested, but you seem to lack some general understanding of the game (especially the PvP part), and you have to turn off your nostalgia.

[Envisionist]

So a more remedial game with frequent rewards, bright colors and noise would be more your speed. Fair enough. Everyone is entitled to their opinion.

Sure thing buddy. I totally mentioned colors, rewards, and noise. Oh wait no, you are just condescending. If games are already reaching their 45 minute time cap frequently with damage the way it is, they would literally NEVER end with your genius 90% damage reduction idea.