Systems for systems sake

When a new WOW patch comes out there are always new systems and currencies.  It isn't necessarily a problem to introduce these things as people do like having new stuff to do, and you need to gatekeep your new material to some extent.  If you don't, people will stockpile resources before the patch, buy all the new stuff in the first 10 minutes, and then complain that there is nothing to do.

Sometimes, however, they miss the mark badly.  In the latest 9.2 patch a new currency was introduced that is called Cosmix Flux.  CF is acquired from everything - dungeon runs, raids, treasures, rare monsters, pvp, all these things give it to you.  It isn't rooted in lore anywhere either, it just rains from the sky for no reason.  I like stuff that is rooted in the world - silverleaf is an herb found in a few starting zones, has a particular look, and is used for particular things.  I like that.  CF, on the other hand, comes from everywhere and has no lore or meaning.  Given that it totally fails from an immersion standpoint, it needs to be excellent on some other front.

It is not.  The main issue is that there isn't much you can do with it.  In the first week of the new patch I determined that I would need at most 12,000 CF for the near future, and that might rise to as high as 20,000 under some odd circumstances.  By the time I had calculated this I had already gathered 10,000 CF without making any attempt to hunt for it.  At the current moment I have 30,000 CF sitting around and there is literally nothing I can do with it.  I can't specifically gather it and it has no use - why does it exist at all?

If a new currency is rare and is useful for something specific that can be a good thing.  People enjoy hunting for ways to build new stuff or acquire cool toys.  A generic currency that is worthless is a total waste though - it irritates veterans as it is just one more damn thing I need to scroll past, and new players get overwhelmed by new systems.  For a system to be worth learning it has to have redeeming value, and this one has none.

Last week I concluded that Blizzard would end up using CF to patch up mistakes they made in this new patch.  Anything that was too hard to get and which players complained about would simply be put on a vendor with a cost of CF so that people would be able to get tons of it (but not infinite amounts).

Lo and behold Blizzard just announced that two old currencies which people were complaining about got added to a vendor for a cost of 3,000 CF.  It feels extremely kludgy and immersion breaking to me.  They screwed up the values badly, added a pointless currency and system creep, and now are trying to fix other issues they created (which could have been neatly solved in other ways, I might add) using their screwup.

One thing about systems in games is that every system has cognitive overhead.  To justify this overhead you absolutely must have a good reason that the system exists.  Just adding in stuff to be adding in stuff is a terrible choice, and one they should stop doing.  My currencies tab is already bursting with one hundred old, pointless currencies, and we don't need to be adding a few more every couple months.

A game is complete when there is nothing left you can trim out, not when you have added every damn thing you can think of.

Big armies

In my DnD session lat night we had a gigantic battle.  The scenario was us defending a small fortified keep against a swarm of zombies.  I think the people designing the scenario thought we would try to defend each entrance separately and prepare elaborate traps and such, but we decided on a simpler plan.  We sat in the highest room in the tallest tower that had a single trapdoor as an entrance and waited for the zombies to come up the ladder one at a time.  That seemed like the easiest possible way to smash a mindless swarm.

Of course this would be a terribly boring battle to run.  It is an excellent plan in terms of winning, but not much of a plan in terms of being entertaining.

Thankfully even though my character is excellent at coming up with tight plans, he has a tendency to throw away the plan to PEWPEW some enemies.  I flew away through the air and chased down some zombies with fire spells, and the combat became the chaotic flowing mess through the keep that the designers had surely intended.

One issue with this sort of combat is that it can involve way too many combatants and have a lot of boring math.  Our side summoned eight giant owls, and we could have spent hours rolling attacks for the owls and the zombies as they slowly clawed each other to death.  While this would have been correct by the rules, it would have been a tragic waste of our time.  Sometimes Naked Man has run fights on a big scale like this and we have gotten bogged down in endless slogs between summons and enemies that simply aren't fun or interesting.  This time though he nailed it because we refused to roll and came up with a decent approximation.

We decided that given the stats on the owls they would do about 45 damage a round, which is enough to kill 2 zombies.  The owls flew over a pile of zombies and every round 2 zombies were removed.  This solution is quick and accurate enough to preserve the flow of advantage in the battle.

Shoving this sort of thing off to the side is quite useful.  Some of the zombies were fast and deadly, with weapons and special powers.  Rolling out the combats between those zombies and us is worth it, because each attack is meaningful.  Naked Man managed to set up the fight so that the owls and slow zombies had a huge battle off screen (helped by a fireball or two), and the real fight against the tough, interesting opponents got to take centre stage.

This sort of thing is not the easiest to manage.  The game doesn't provide aproximations for these sorts of things, but they are a key component in having a big battle and not having it be a chore.

In the end it was an enjoyable time.  Still, if I were building the game, I would find more ways to make enemy turns quicker.  Fixed damage and singular attacks would definitely figure into the list.  If only somebody had made a game like that... oh wait.