Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Gear and Centurion Xö

by Oozo


One thing I've come to realize in my return is that gear really does matter. Yes, that's my tongue you see in my cheek. I find it curious (not really) that many people, who claim to seek competition, fight so hard to keep others from getting equivalent gear. On one hand, they say BGs are boring because of all the undergeared opponents and on the other hand they say those people don't deserve gear because they are all "bads." They seem to lack the self-awareness to recognize the logical dissonance of their position.

Why should they care if the "bads" have the same gear as they do? I mean, they are bad, right? A good player with great gear beats a bad player with great gear, so why the dire concern?

In Beta, Blizzard stated that there would be PvP areas in the game with special rewards. They said that those rewards would be no better than items you could get through other aspects of the game, but that they would have special, cooler looking models. And, that is exactly how it should have been.

People who excel at PvP should be rewarded the most badass looking gear in the game for the bragging rights. They should not be given a huge gear advantage over the people that they already crush. And to those who bitch about not having enough geared opponents while at the same time arguing that those opponents should not have gear? You fail, IRL. And, that is much worse than failing in-game. Because that kind of fail stays with you no matter where you go or what you do.

I've taken some of the feedback from the Iwl short movie and applied it to the following short preview. I've moved the player health to the bottom center of the screen and removed the opponent health, since you can track their health via nameplates. I couldn't do anything to fix the buff/debuffs issue and the SCT feedback can get really obnoxious when you are doing 1v5s. ;P

So, I'll have to work on fixing that as well.


2 comments:

Kensai said...

Gear was one of the things that Guild Wars made me abandon WoW several months. The only thing that one set of gear was different than another in GW was looks. Mind you, some elite armors really look elite and it would take quite the involvement to get to craft it - the equivalent of finishing say, ulduar or something. More than that, one would have the option to outright create a max level char and unlock upgrades and armors using faction (honor) points.

So what did they do right ? Eliminating mindless grind ? It's a big part of it, yeah. But more than that, for me, what matters the most is the choice. You can choose to pvp only, or to both pvp and pve. You can choose to spend 2 whole days for an elite armor. You can choose to buy the upgrades you need or unlock them. But if you choose not to do any of those things, you're not a bad player, the gap is not that large and essentially what matters is your skill.

I just don't see why you can't choose a gear pack in wow for your pvp needs. Sure WoW is about grinding and gear, but to the extent that gear becomes the sole purpose of playing, and the center of a vicious circle, it's ridiculous. Get gear so you'll be more successful in pvp, so you'll get more gear and so on and so forth.

In the last year or so, i am less and less inclined to seek FUN in WoW. Ultimately, everyone forgets that a rpg, even a mmorpg is about choice first and foremost. So those that say "what, you can't lose 10 matches a week to get gear and do the daily blah blah" are completely missing the point. It's not about gear being hard or easy to obtain, it's about choice, it's about doing something that you like in a game, not having a second job, full of the same frustrating shit like my real job.

But, i could be wrong, and maybe i'm missing the point of WoW. Maybe it's really an e-sport and i didn't get the memo.

Raggok said...

Agreed on all points.

Something is wrong when you can step into the 70-79 BGs as a 70 and kill 79s because of PvP gear.

And, it's disturbing how much more effective a decked out 80 is compared to a more casual 80.

It's bad game design.