This is not a good system for any game that wants to have a competitive scene. All it means is that the top tier of players have to play 16 hours a day farming up materials and they are miserable, and the players below that tier feel obligated to farm less, but still too much to be fun. It is fine and well to let people grind up power increases, but there needs to be a low cap on that so that the competitive players can actually enjoy their time.
Blizzard agreed with me, and they tightened things up a lot many years back. They made it so that you can only have 1-2 potion buffs at any given time, which prevented massive stacking of buffs. You have to pick the buff you want and go with it. This was a good change, and I won't criticize it.
In the old system healing / mana / temporary potions had a 2 minute cooldown, so in a 10 minute fight you would get to drink 5 of them. Blizzard felt this was too much, so they made potions not cool down if used during combat, so that players could only use one per combat. This new one potion per fight plan was better than the old system of chugging potions like crazy, but it really missed the point, and like most kludgy fixes it created new problems.
The first problem is that led to pre potting. These days everyone drinks a potion one second before the fight starts, which allows the potion to cool down, and means you can still drink your one potion per fight later. If somebody pulls a couple seconds early by accident, you all just drank your one potion per fight right at the start, which is often not what you would want at all. Having countdowns so that everyone can drink right before the pull feels immersion breaking and silly. It also means that everyone is still drinking two damn potions per fight.
Secondly this feels bizarre. Why does my potion cool down during combat, but only if I drank it before combat? Why do potions have this cooldown if their actual cooldown is realistically restricted by getting out of combat? What is the point of layering these cooldown restrictions on top of one another?
In the new expansion they are finally ditching this dumb ass kludge that has been dogging us all for a decade. They are simply making potion cooldowns 5 minutes, and there is no restriction on that cooldown based on being in combat or not. It is simple to understand, intuitive from a UI standpoint, and makes sure that people are still using roughly the amount of potions that Blizzard has decided is reasonable.
This is the solution that should have been implemented in the first place. Naturally I have seen people calling this a nerf because they can break combat more often than once every five minutes in a dungeon and they want to drink potions faster than one every five mintues!
What fools.
Everyone will be under the same restrictions, so it isn't a nerf, just a change. One which will reduce their overall consumption of resources, leaving them more time to play.
This change is a good lesson for anyone aspiring to be a game designer. Don't try to get too complex and clever with your designs. The players will always hunt for ways to gain power, and if your system lets them ruin their lives to win, they will do it. (And then they will curse you for 'making' them do it.) Build systems that are intutive and simple, but which end up with challenging optimization choices. Players should always look at their options and understand what each of their choices will do, and then find that making the *correct* choice is challenging, even if the result is easy to calculate.
Any time you have to write tons of extra text on tooltips, have hidden effects that casual players are affected by but don't understand, or need complicated math to understand, you must be extremely cautious. Is this thing so great that it is worth the cost?
It usually isn't worth the cost, and simplicity is generally the best way. Is isn't always easy, but it is absolutely worth it.
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