J1M
Arcane
- Joined
- May 14, 2008
- Messages
- 14,626
"Deaths of Chromie" is some fun solo content that doesn't depend on your gear. (The boosts you need to finish it are time-gated, although you don't need all of them.)
To understand artifact weapons and other recent design decisions you need to understand who made those systems and what their objectives were. Unfortunately, the days of designers interested in creating games they themselves find fun to play are over. These days the designers are motivated by two things: a meta-game that they play instead of the actual game that involves trying to coerce player behavior, and reducing their current and future workload.
The latter motivation is pretty easy to understand. It's why you see the push for single-expansion features such as the garrison and artifact weapons. It's also why you see the removal of features like reforging (which complicate stat and item balance), and older features like crafting treated as an afterthought. The fact that your character will lose abilities and an entire talent tree when the next expansion comes out is viewed as a positive thing by the designers. It allows them to hand out the same goodies again instead of designing new ones.
Since the designers don't play the game for enjoyment, their motivations are perverted towards other ends. For example, it was observed that dungeons were only run a couple of times in WoD. Designers decided or were told that making players repeat dungeons dozens of times was desirable, so they created mythic+ and a currency with intentional hyperinflation (artifact power) to insist that players repeat the dungeons long after they stopped enjoying them. Internal verdict: successful design.
Ivory tower design theory/psych says gambling is fun and people respond positively to random rewards. This is how you end up with an abomination like the legendary system that they have been constantly patching since Legion's launch. It's a system to meet the designer goals of people using a variety of items instead of "best-in-slot" and the consumption of all max level content by all types of players (not just what people find fun). The repeated anemic attempts to 'fix' the player backlash by trying to convince people they weren't royally fucked by a random number generator just highlight how out of touch the designers are.
WoW needs two things next expansion: a combat shakeup (preferably via the introduction of a 4th role), and challenging content that doesn't have multiple easier difficulty settings.
To understand artifact weapons and other recent design decisions you need to understand who made those systems and what their objectives were. Unfortunately, the days of designers interested in creating games they themselves find fun to play are over. These days the designers are motivated by two things: a meta-game that they play instead of the actual game that involves trying to coerce player behavior, and reducing their current and future workload.
The latter motivation is pretty easy to understand. It's why you see the push for single-expansion features such as the garrison and artifact weapons. It's also why you see the removal of features like reforging (which complicate stat and item balance), and older features like crafting treated as an afterthought. The fact that your character will lose abilities and an entire talent tree when the next expansion comes out is viewed as a positive thing by the designers. It allows them to hand out the same goodies again instead of designing new ones.
Since the designers don't play the game for enjoyment, their motivations are perverted towards other ends. For example, it was observed that dungeons were only run a couple of times in WoD. Designers decided or were told that making players repeat dungeons dozens of times was desirable, so they created mythic+ and a currency with intentional hyperinflation (artifact power) to insist that players repeat the dungeons long after they stopped enjoying them. Internal verdict: successful design.
Ivory tower design theory/psych says gambling is fun and people respond positively to random rewards. This is how you end up with an abomination like the legendary system that they have been constantly patching since Legion's launch. It's a system to meet the designer goals of people using a variety of items instead of "best-in-slot" and the consumption of all max level content by all types of players (not just what people find fun). The repeated anemic attempts to 'fix' the player backlash by trying to convince people they weren't royally fucked by a random number generator just highlight how out of touch the designers are.
WoW needs two things next expansion: a combat shakeup (preferably via the introduction of a 4th role), and challenging content that doesn't have multiple easier difficulty settings.
