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Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Bad design by bad testing
If you wondered why all of Blizzard's recent development on World of Warcraft favors the hardcore player and the excessive grinder so much over the casual player, this bad game design might be caused by a bad method of testing. Blizzard just announced a World of Warcraft Test Realm Contest in which people are invited to test the 1.10 patch between now and the end of March. You get rewarded if either you reach level 50 in 3 weeks, or you farm the most honor in Warsong Gulch, or you level the largest number of characters to 25. The prize is a beta-slot for the Burning Crusade expansion, which should tempt quite a lot of people.
Winning is easy, you just need to play over 100 hours per week for the next 3 weeks, starting with freshly made level 1 characters. How that could be relevant for testing the big changes to the level 60 dungeons in the patch 1.10, nobody knows. And of course that is a contest to which people with a life outside WoW don't need to apply. If you reward grinding and farming like that, all the players in the test will grind and farm to the best of their ability. Any data that Blizzard can learn from observing them will be complete skewed towards a grinding behavior. It scares me that this is what they are basing their future development on.
The longevity of a game is *not* based on how fast the most motivated player can level up. Longevity comes from keeping the average player motivated at the leveling speed his Real Life ® allows him to achieve. If you test for all the wrong things, no wonder that bad game development results.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:30 PM Permanent Link
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Grinding! ugh!
It seems that modern MMOG design is stuck in a rut here. To often designers fall back to what basically is a "kill 1 million rats to level" philosohpy. IMHO its a lazy design pattern thats repeated far too often, and it doesn't suit the "lower class" WoW gamer ;) at all.
Grinding is easily tested and developed, and understood. Reach the threshold (be it xp, items collected, mobs killed) and trigger the reward action. This can be unit tested simply by changing values in a database. The "business logic" is very very simple and easy to develop and leaves more time for the time consuming task of creating the graphics instead.
Even doing Molten Core is grinding one you have got to that position people refer to as "farm status". Keep on returning until you get all those epic items, once the challange of killing the bosses has faded its no longer a challenging place to be, its merely a "grind".
Unfortunately, I certainly don't know the solution. But I do reserve my right as a MMOG player to "whine" about it ;)
It seems that modern MMOG design is stuck in a rut here. To often designers fall back to what basically is a "kill 1 million rats to level" philosohpy. IMHO its a lazy design pattern thats repeated far too often, and it doesn't suit the "lower class" WoW gamer ;) at all.
Grinding is easily tested and developed, and understood. Reach the threshold (be it xp, items collected, mobs killed) and trigger the reward action. This can be unit tested simply by changing values in a database. The "business logic" is very very simple and easy to develop and leaves more time for the time consuming task of creating the graphics instead.
Even doing Molten Core is grinding one you have got to that position people refer to as "farm status". Keep on returning until you get all those epic items, once the challange of killing the bosses has faded its no longer a challenging place to be, its merely a "grind".
Unfortunately, I certainly don't know the solution. But I do reserve my right as a MMOG player to "whine" about it ;)
At least we know for sure, that future BC beta people, will have enough time to invest into ... well the testing. Thats actually a pretty neat method they are using now. For one, a shitload of people will grind for the beta spot wich lets Blizzard test out the new hardware thingies under actual circumstances, and two they will get the people with time at their hands to be valuable testers.
# posted by 
: 7/3/06 17:06
: 7/3/06 17:06
chrismue then we end up with a BC expansion tested by a majority of hardcore gamers. This game is already skewed heavily in favor of the hardcore.
If all they test with is hardcore then none of the casual concerns will get heard. The hardcore will be like "It only took me 1,000,000 rat kills to reach level 70." The hardcore is going to ignore the vast majority of content in favor of the path of least resistance... whatever gets them to 60 first.
Blah.
If all they test with is hardcore then none of the casual concerns will get heard. The hardcore will be like "It only took me 1,000,000 rat kills to reach level 70." The hardcore is going to ignore the vast majority of content in favor of the path of least resistance... whatever gets them to 60 first.
Blah.
This is ultimately what doomed EQ1 to a niche title, and what helped propel both WoW and GW to stardom as a result.
Catering to the hardcore is a rear guard action.
At the same time though, it shouldn't be assumed that casual MMOGers want to stay in a single game perpetually either. There's too many games to be blind to the options out there. Given that all other genres have churn through titles, which drives evolution of innovation, it should be expected that people leave WoW.
So really, the only people that get aggravated by over-pandering to the hardcore are those who are almost-hardcore, the folks who also want to maximize a singular experience but have the sort of real life constraints that prevent them from doing so. In other words, they want to like the game the same way forever, even knowing logically they cannot.
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Catering to the hardcore is a rear guard action.
At the same time though, it shouldn't be assumed that casual MMOGers want to stay in a single game perpetually either. There's too many games to be blind to the options out there. Given that all other genres have churn through titles, which drives evolution of innovation, it should be expected that people leave WoW.
So really, the only people that get aggravated by over-pandering to the hardcore are those who are almost-hardcore, the folks who also want to maximize a singular experience but have the sort of real life constraints that prevent them from doing so. In other words, they want to like the game the same way forever, even knowing logically they cannot.
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