Comment by slm_HN | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slm_HN | Hacker News Reader

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>As balance improved fun went down.

I don't think balance ruined WoW, I think it was that Blizzard just kept dumbing it down.

Once they decided that every single player gets to do every single thing in the game it was ruined because you have to make everything so accessible. I remember killing C'Thun... we had a diagram on where to stand, responsibilities for which stalks to kill and in which order, hell, even running into the room wrong could wipe the raid. We were the only guild on the server who could clear AQ40. It was challenging and it was fun. Now 25 strangers can queue up in raid finder and just mow down every boss, usually without even knowing a strat. Just move out of the fire and cycle your 3 buttons.

All of the complexity has been relentlessly striped out of Wow. What's left is a game where you can logon, join a raid, kill the biggest boss in the game, and logoff all within an hour or so.

They took chess and turned it into tic-tac-toe.

Actually the high end fights now are, in general, far more technical than they were in vanilla WoW (BWL, AQ40, Nax). They just offer dumbed down versions ("LFR") for the masses -- which is fair enough. Everyone pays for the content, why shouldn't they get to see it? It's no different from "please don't hurt me" difficulty levels in FPSs.

My big problem with WoW is the reduction of classes to three roles (tank, healer, DPS) where class is really just a skin on the role, and the reliance on repetition. (We must have cleared some 40-man raid zones over fifty times.) Scripted technical boss fights are, in my opinion, the equivalent of shooters where you need to memorize where every enemy will appear -- it's "challenging" but it's not interesting.

What's wrong with their changes? You sound like a nutcase if you think that having to coordinate diagrams on where to stand, and discussing the required method for "running into the room", are fun whatsoever. Video games are not chess... except maybe video game versions of chess. Excluding 90% of the population from enjoying these areas of the game would be a horrible plan. When the amount of time and effort needed to play a game requires one to be unemployed and without any worldly responsibilities... that's just going too far. A game like WoW should not encourage people to drop out of school or lose their job because they need to spend 3 months of 18 hours a day trying to figure out how to defeat C'Thun.

>Excluding 90% of the population from enjoying these areas of the game would be a horrible plan.

Welcome to the golden age of Entitlement where everyone thinks they deserve a trophy no matter how badly they perform.

This is the attitude of a generation of kids raised on participation trophies who expect rewards just for showing up rather than for accomplishments.

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