Quote from Bagstone»As I mentioned in another thread already, I really don't get why some people feel it's an absolute necessity to identify the one difficulty, the one zone, the one class, the one spec, the one gear set, to maximize efficiency. Go full DPS WW barb MP10 Crypt farming in full group only, or you're a stupid inefficient noob. Sigh...
Sadly, I think this is more an evolution of the internet and the Information Age than a reflection on games.
Ghostcrawler talked a lot about it regarding early WoW versus later WoW. People always claimed the game got "dumbed down" over time - it's a cliche phrase on the internet like "slap in the face" - and, while certain aspects of the game had been streamlined, it's hard to argue that MOST people in WoW still aren't clearing the hardest content which mostly deflates that whole train of thought. But there is that undeniable aspect that comes with social changes. When I first started playing WoW there was no armory. There was no wowprogress.com, there was wowjutsu.com which was infinitely less accurate. There was no twitch.tv, there was no Elitist Jerks, there was no noxxic.com, there was no Icy Veins.
The resources (websites, and even in-game addons) that we used in Burning Crusade circa 2007 were much more rudimentary and much less accurate than the resources I used in Mists of Pandaria. I remember for all of Vanilla and most of Burning Crusade the only way to measure "threat" on a mob was for people to test various abilities and figure out what threat values they generated. KLH threat meter was basically giving you an educated guess as to your threat on a monster, and it wasn't always right. Then sometime in BC they decided to let the API open up and report threat. In comes Omen Threat Meter and it's giving 100% accurate, very responsive, threat calculations.
You could argue that Blizzard "dumbed down tanking" by making this change, but I'd argue that all they really did was give us access to more accurate information that prevented us from wiping due to an addon making an incorrect guess... and that dying in that manner is decidedly not fun for the average gamer anyway, and even the hardcore gamer.
I think this applies to D3, and every other game out there. The information I can go and find about D3, particularly character builds and items, is significantly more than I could ever find about D2. To that point, it's not that the game is dumbed down, it's that there's such a ridiculous proliferation of information that the players are simply more educated (even the uneducated).
With that massive spread of information comes that level of min/maxing, though. In vanilla and even in BC, there was less emphasis on having the "perfect" spec. We didn't scrutinize players quite as much over that stuff. There was never a feeling of "if Joe Blow spent those two talent points differently then we'd win, but he didn't so we wiped all night." At some point, though, people who didn't take the absolute 100% best cookie-cutter talent build became "noobs" because the information became so available. It became expected that anyone with a pulse could google "WoW Death Knight specs" and eventually find some information that would make them successful in a raid.
And I think that's exactly what's happened with D3... and PoE... and most games. Hell, I remember playing TL2 and checking some sites, and reading about how "this is really the only viable spec for X class in Y difficulty" and such. That mentality pressures developers to balance choices on a pinpoint. If you're 1% behind in farming speed... why bother? Just take the best path then blame Blizzard for not making EVERY SPEC IMAGINABLE have the same efficiency as a WW barb.
My only current wish regarding bounties is that I'd like the "rare" events of each act (like the Wheel of Fortune on Act 2 and those less common Act 1 dungeons/towers) to be more frequent in that particular game-mode.
More events, period.
There are plenty of places off the top of my head that could have events added:
- Caverns of Areneae - Tower of the Cursed/Damned - Weeping Hollow - Cathedral 3 - Old Tristram (they could get really inventive here, even if it's very small, it has tons of potential) - ZK sub-zones - Sewers/waterways - Keep Depths - Most of Act 4
And, honestly, some of the larger zones (Fields of Misery, Dahlgur Oasis, Desolate Sands) could use a few more events randomized in.
Ghostcrawler talked a lot about it regarding early WoW versus later WoW. People always claimed the game got "dumbed down" over time - it's a cliche phrase on the internet like "slap in the face" - and, while certain aspects of the game had been streamlined, it's hard to argue that MOST people in WoW still aren't clearing the hardest content which mostly deflates that whole train of thought. But there is that undeniable aspect that comes with social changes. When I first started playing WoW there was no armory. There was no wowprogress.com, there was wowjutsu.com which was infinitely less accurate. There was no twitch.tv, there was no Elitist Jerks, there was no noxxic.com, there was no Icy Veins.
The resources (websites, and even in-game addons) that we used in Burning Crusade circa 2007 were much more rudimentary and much less accurate than the resources I used in Mists of Pandaria. I remember for all of Vanilla and most of Burning Crusade the only way to measure "threat" on a mob was for people to test various abilities and figure out what threat values they generated. KLH threat meter was basically giving you an educated guess as to your threat on a monster, and it wasn't always right. Then sometime in BC they decided to let the API open up and report threat. In comes Omen Threat Meter and it's giving 100% accurate, very responsive, threat calculations.
You could argue that Blizzard "dumbed down tanking" by making this change, but I'd argue that all they really did was give us access to more accurate information that prevented us from wiping due to an addon making an incorrect guess... and that dying in that manner is decidedly not fun for the average gamer anyway, and even the hardcore gamer.
I think this applies to D3, and every other game out there. The information I can go and find about D3, particularly character builds and items, is significantly more than I could ever find about D2. To that point, it's not that the game is dumbed down, it's that there's such a ridiculous proliferation of information that the players are simply more educated (even the uneducated).
With that massive spread of information comes that level of min/maxing, though. In vanilla and even in BC, there was less emphasis on having the "perfect" spec. We didn't scrutinize players quite as much over that stuff. There was never a feeling of "if Joe Blow spent those two talent points differently then we'd win, but he didn't so we wiped all night." At some point, though, people who didn't take the absolute 100% best cookie-cutter talent build became "noobs" because the information became so available. It became expected that anyone with a pulse could google "WoW Death Knight specs" and eventually find some information that would make them successful in a raid.
And I think that's exactly what's happened with D3... and PoE... and most games. Hell, I remember playing TL2 and checking some sites, and reading about how "this is really the only viable spec for X class in Y difficulty" and such. That mentality pressures developers to balance choices on a pinpoint. If you're 1% behind in farming speed... why bother? Just take the best path then blame Blizzard for not making EVERY SPEC IMAGINABLE have the same efficiency as a WW barb.
More events, period.
There are plenty of places off the top of my head that could have events added:
- Caverns of Areneae
- Tower of the Cursed/Damned
- Weeping Hollow
- Cathedral 3
- Old Tristram (they could get really inventive here, even if it's very small, it has tons of potential)
- ZK sub-zones
- Sewers/waterways
- Keep Depths
- Most of Act 4
And, honestly, some of the larger zones (Fields of Misery, Dahlgur Oasis, Desolate Sands) could use a few more events randomized in.