A Skip Button for Boss Fights
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From experience, there will always be people who fail to get irony or sarcasm. Some People thought A Modest Proposal was a good idea. UnironicallyWrex Brogan said:
Logical fallacy, a huge one. Correlation does not imply causation.Kerg3927 said:With WoW, there are certainly other factors involved, but on the graph below, you know what happened in Cataclysm, right about the same time that graph starts going downhill? LFR (Looking for Raid) was implemented, trivializing raid content, making it faceroll easy, accessible to everyone, everyone could get all the loot, no need to learn to play, just hop in a queue and go, faceroll to fat loots. And then what happened? Most of the raiding guilds disbanded and all the hardcore and hoping to become hardcore players left. The game's evangelists left.
Millions more got bored and left afterward, and now they return only for new expansions, to spend a few months facerolling through the new content before they leave again.
The casuals wanted the phat loots that the raiding guild members had. But once everyone was able to get it, the phat loot ceased to have any meaning. An Olympic gold medal doesn't mean much if everyone is able to get one for no effort. Turns out, it wasn't the loot that they really wanted. It was the community respect and prestige that it represented.
If you try to show an specific cause, in this case, give a randomized sample of the about million subscribers more or less lost in the Cataclysm expansion. An article and talking to a couple of Youtube personalities is not a proof. You are impying a causaltion out of a correlation, one based on a graph with no actual numbers and no real proof. Ask the players. Maybe the 6 year time means those players where bored of the game, maybe they had financial difficulties (maybe having to buy a new expansion after a recession made some players think it wasn't the financial investment), maybe it is related to other changes and not LFR (for example going for Metacritic User reviews, http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/world-of-warcraft-cataclysm/user-reviews amore people site the levelling restructure than the LFR, for a dip in challenge, and many siting lore changes or burnout or simple unenjoyability anymore), maybe it is related to real life, mybe obsolete hardware, maybe moving out. UNless you can significantly can point a real study and not an interview, you have only some correlation (and a horrible graph that tells very little, as the axis are incorrectly labeled, without a correct scale in the x-axis and inconsistent amount of sampling points, like having almost no data between early 2009 and 2011 bwith three data points ut having six points between 2011 and 2012) and is no baiss to have a real conclussion.
I'm not trying to prove a theorem and win the Field's Medal. I said in the first sentence that "there are certainly other factors involved." Some people indicated that it is a poor/stupid business model to produce game content that the majority of the subscriber base won't be able to experience upon release. I disagree, and offered some evidence to support my opinion. No more, no less.kurokotetsu said:Logical fallacy, a huge one. Correlation does not imply causation.Kerg3927 said:With WoW, there are certainly other factors involved, but on the graph below, you know what happened in Cataclysm, right about the same time that graph starts going downhill? LFR (Looking for Raid) was implemented, trivializing raid content, making it faceroll easy, accessible to everyone, everyone could get all the loot, no need to learn to play, just hop in a queue and go, faceroll to fat loots. And then what happened? Most of the raiding guilds disbanded and all the hardcore and hoping to become hardcore players left. The game's evangelists left.
Millions more got bored and left afterward, and now they return only for new expansions, to spend a few months facerolling through the new content before they leave again.
The casuals wanted the phat loots that the raiding guild members had. But once everyone was able to get it, the phat loot ceased to have any meaning. An Olympic gold medal doesn't mean much if everyone is able to get one for no effort. Turns out, it wasn't the loot that they really wanted. It was the community respect and prestige that it represented.
If you try to show an specific cause, in this case, give a randomized sample of the about million subscribers more or less lost in the Cataclysm expansion. An article and talking to a couple of Youtube personalities is not a proof. You are impying a causaltion out of a correlation, one based on a graph with no actual numbers and no real proof. Ask the players. Maybe the 6 year time means those players where bored of the game, maybe they had financial difficulties (maybe having to buy a new expansion after a recession made some players think it wasn't the financial investment), maybe it is related to other changes and not LFR (for example going for Metacritic User reviews, http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/world-of-warcraft-cataclysm/user-reviews amore people site the levelling restructure than the LFR, for a dip in challenge, and many siting lore changes or burnout or simple unenjoyability anymore), maybe it is related to real life, mybe obsolete hardware, maybe moving out. UNless you can significantly can point a real study and not an interview, you have only some correlation (and a horrible graph that tells very little, as the axis are incorrectly labeled, without a correct scale in the x-axis and inconsistent amount of sampling points, like having almost no data between early 2009 and 2011 bwith three data points ut having six points between 2011 and 2012) and is no baiss to have a real conclussion.
No ome is asking you to proof a theorem (which is pure deductive reasoning and nothing to do with statistic inherently) or much less do something for a freaking Field's Medal (which basic statistics would be far from a result) but you brought math to the table so be prepared to defend it. Beacuae if you want to claim it is evidence, then it has to be robust enough to defy basic scrutiny.Kerg3927 said:
First, the quality of data. As mentioned before the seemingly random nature of the points where data is taken makes it hard to decern a real pattern for movement in player base as it severely reduces our resolution of data for almost two years.
Second, correlation vs. causation. You at most shiw a correlation between Cataclysm and the decline in subscribers, which you do mot do at any moment of time. That is why I provided mutliple other interpretations (and can probably find even qierder correlations if I wanted to)
Third, actual cause. While you try to shield with it "amongst other factors" the meat of the post and your argument is that a specific feature in the expansion caused the decline. As such first you have to proof point 2 and then show that the LFR feature is the main motivator for that decrease and not other thing in the expansion, as I also provided above.
If you want to bring "evidence" be ready to defend it. Beacuse I am not asking for a study here, but that it isn't ao flimsy it falls under the most basic scrutiny. This is no evidence and just a logical fallacy. You made the bed by quoting numbers and math, now you have to lay on it.
Edit: Hell I am not even disagreing with the point (which I do) I disagreing with the "evidence".
No, I didn't. The only information one needs to draw from that graph is more subscribers then, less now. A lot less. And if you don't think that graph is good enough evidence of that, then google it. There are countless other graphs and articles out there talking about the decline in WoW subscriptions. It's fact.kurokotetsu said:
And that's enough to get you to correlation. Maybe not enough for you, but I don't care. I'm not going to jump through hoops to obtain your approval and meet your arbitrary threshold of statistical proof.
As far as causation, it is my opinion that LFR was part of the cause of the decline, and I didn't offer any math or data to back that up. I didn't intend to. It's my opinion based upon playing WoW 40 hours a week, every week, for 7 years, most of that as a GM organizing and running a raiding guild. I knew hundreds of raiders over that time, and the topic of the WoW raiding environment was often discussed. Most of them were not a fan of LFR. I also provided that article, which is not the only source on the internet making a similar claim, which states...
And that's all the evidence I've got. Take it or leave it. I don't care. I'm headed to go see a Texas football game. Hook'em Horns!
You kind of did do more . Let me quote the postKerg3927 said:
That sentance, which starts your post is clearly implying a causation of the LFR feature with the decline of players. If you wished to say there was a decline there is no need for that graph, as ypubsay it is quite common knowledge amd easy to optaim information that there are less players now, and then in a separate sentamce state your subjective hypothesis regarding your subjective experience of it being related to LFR, but how you talk about it, you brought the math.
You provided an article amd your personal experiemce, but after attempting to quote numbers and not doing it correctly I both doubt your experiemce (especially simce you say raiders for the people that ypu kmow which means your sample is deeply biased, aside from.beim purely recollection based and filtered through a number of possible cognitive biases) and the article that quote two people, possibly with similar bias to ypur own. I leave your evidence, as it is week an unsustainable.
And I didn't even set a correlation coefficient, so although ot is arbitrary it would be on you to show what coefficient you ised, why amd why this is high for that type of study . You quote numbers and I will treat your numbers as they deserve, it is that simple. Don't want to do it? Perfect. But don't be suprised you are called out om it.
Enjoy you Longhorns.
...Well that's just factually wrong. I thought WoW was at it's best during Mists of Pandaria, if we're going by 'it doesn't matter who you ask'. Well, ok, MoP was the best until we were stuck doing Siege for a year and a half, oh boy talk about burn out. But besides that, it was good.Kerg3927 said:
And I mean, opinions are opinions, but if we're throwing out 'how long I've been raiding' then I've been raiding and part of raiding guilds for... oh, almost 13 years now. And LFR was hardly the issue for a lot of people - oh, sure, it caused a lot of people mad about their lack of E-Peen to bugger off since the raids were no longer 'prestigious' enough, but 6 years on there's still plenty of raiders pushing Heroic and Mythic difficulties, so the prestige is still there. And given LFR both a) is an entirely optional mode to queue for and b) gives you gear that is barely adequate enough for NORMAL raid difficulty... well, let's just say I'm of the mind that LFR, despite a few hiccups on the way, was actually one of the better implemented 'easy modes' in a game, despite it being an MMO. And if people bailed on WoW simply because of LFR, then... maybe they just weren't hard-core enough?
Now, the Dungeon Finder, on the other hand...
The graph in question is tracking subscriber numbers, indisputably subscriber numbers peaked at the end of BC to the middle of Wrath and have mostly (expac launch honeymoon periods aside) been in decline ever since. Blizz used to include sub numbers in their quarterly earnings report, a practice they stopped in November of 2015, so we have reliable numbers from launch to near the end of 2015.Wrex Brogan said:
It's not a matter of when the game was "best", it's a matter of sub numbers peaked at point X and started declining at point Y which correlates with when change Z occurred. As has been pointed out, correlation does not prove causation, and no one is really going to seriously argue that WoW's sub numbers declining can be laid at the foot of any one factor in isolation anyway.
That having been said, I think it rather silly to dismiss the directional and structural changes that occurred from BC to Wrath to Cata as, at the very least, a factor in that decline.
to be fair, what I said was directed at a specific quote he was using, which stated 'It doesn't matter who you ask, if they've been playing WoW for a long time they'll all agree that the game was at its 'best' before the release of Cataclysm - and most will point to LFR as the cause for its decline', which given the vague definition of 'best' (game quality? subscriber count? Enjoyment? Challenge?), is factually wrong, since if they asked me, my response would be 'well I thought it was best during MoP'.Myria said:
I ain't questioning the graph he posted, it's just the whole song and dance about LFR being a game-killer has been really, really, really silly, given the dozens/hundreds of other factors that could've caused subscriber loss over the last six years. It could be a result of mechanical and structural alterations, narrative shifts, graphical upgrades forcing it off low-level computers, content burn-out... hell I personally stopped playing in Cataclysm for six months because I found the leveling areas boring.
There's just too many factors and too many individuals involved to reliably quote something going 'most will agree, LFR was the cause of decline'. The only thing a statement like that can be evidence of is confirmation bias. All in all though, WoW is a poor choice to use as an example of easy modes/skip buttons ruining games.
That's good. Glad you are still enjoying it and plugging away. Really. 13 years is impressive.Wrex Brogan said:
But I'd like to point out that here, you actually agree with my main opinion, which is that LFR was a factor in population decline, even if we have very different opinions of LFR itself. And the latter is to be expected. You stayed because you thought the new direction WoW was taking in later expansions was good or at least acceptable. Myself and many of my guild members didn't like it, and it was big factor in us leaving WoW, although another factor was that many of us wanted to try SWTOR when it came out.Wrex Brogan said:
As far as that quote in the article, point taken. Reading it again, I guess it is hyperbolic. But I didn't read it at face value, to literally mean that you could ask every single WoW player that question and they'd all respond the same. More like everyone the writer asked answered that way. In other words, he asked a sample of players.
I think that's the worst idea I've heard all day.maninahat said:
Videogames are going to require some form of skill and/or intellect, same as everything else interactive. Of course, the skill required will differ; Kirby's Epic Yarn is probably a better game for introducing people to gaming than Dark Souls, for example.
Any game that includes boss fights includes them as a test of what you've learned so far. A barrier that reads "you must git this gud to enter". Adding the option to skip these defeats the purpose of including them in the first place and only leaves players unprepared for any further challenges.
It's also lazy on the part of the player. If you're losing at a game, it should be your job to get better. Devs shouldn't have to bend over backwards because you can't be arsed actually trying.
You seem to be equating trying with enjoyment. Yet what happens when the trying stops being fun.CritialGaming said:
Again I tried for hours to get passed the Bulldozer part of LA Noire and it has stopped being a fun challenge, transforming into an annoying frustration.
After skipping it I went on to have fun in the rest of the game and didn't use the skip option on anything else.
In my case the skip option enabled me to continue in the game, to experience more challenges, more fun experiences. I went back to the game recently and did that section first time, but you know what I don't regret skipping it the first time at all.
I played WoW from 1.5 straight through to 4.3(ish?), skipped MoP and most of WoD, and returned for Legion for about...two months. Never really was much of a raider, because that part of the community had zero interest for me. The closest I came to it, was PuG'ing into MC, ZG, AQ, and Naxx on the back of having a great reputation on my server (I played paladin). This was back in the day when paladins were so OP, and paladin gear so whacked, hopping into Naxx in MC/ZG (priest) gear was a pretty regular occurrence.Kerg3927 said:
My favorite expansion was Cataclysm, and I still believe LFR was a symptom and scapegoat for the community as a reason for its decline in sub numbers. Wrath was such a paradigm shift for the game between the introduction of LFG (and the elimination of server reputation), class simplification, the elimination of resource management (especially for healers), sensible itemization for hybrid classes, and the shift towards ilvl as the sole determinant of character viability and content progression, that there really was no turning back after the game's subscription base exploded during the Wrath cycle. Cataclysm brought the game back towards BC-level class and (to a certain degree) itemization complexity, reintroduced resource management as a limiting factor for DPS casters and healers, and in combination with improved encounter mechanics throughout Wrath, the game was all-around harder.
My chief gripe with Wrath was, as a healer player, the game felt like playing a melee DPS in terms of rotations and buff/debuff management, except you made green numbers instead of yellow numbers. Rotation and HPS were all that mattered, instead of triage, mana management, timing and prediction. And, as someone who also played tanks, same bloody thing except you did your DPS rotation in tank stance and had to rotate defensive cooldowns. There was no real diversity in terms of game play between roles, even among classes which could have, and should have, been wildly divergent. Hell, prot paladin (what I spent most of Wrath playing) play was reduced entirely to three buttons: your 9-second cooldown cast sequence, your 6-second cooldown cast sequence, and your defensive cooldown cast sequence. And, I eventually settled on resto druid towards the end of Wrath, because while it was just as button-spammy as any other class let alone healers, at least there was some challenge in timing GCD's and maintaining HoT stacks/AE heals.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Wrath was a faceroll-fest where stats other than ilvl didn't matter because gear progressed in a strictly linear fashion. That made the community, well...stupid. The healer community rioting over having to do something for once that most of us who had played through vanilla and BC had to do as a matter of course, including players who had raided all through vanilla and BC, whose skills had slipped during Wrath -- manage mana and triage -- was pretty telling. Don't even get me started on DPS players pitching a shit over having to CC for the first time in two years, manage their own aggro, and avoid damage. "Get out of the fire" was always a common joke at the expense of bad DPS players, but there's a reason it reached its commanding memetic heights during Cataclysm.
Then you had the fact, because Blizzard hadn't locked down the game balance on the mastery stat, and thanks to the complicating factor of reforging, a gear landscape where higher ilvl didn't always mean "better" and players at least had to do a little of their own theorycraft to get the most out of the gear they had, and actually skip nominal upgrades if it couldn't be reforged into something better than they already had. All LFR did was allow players a means to skip heroics, building/rebuilding two-years-forgotten skills, to brute force the content they were expected to have done sooner rather than later through sheer force of ilvl as opposed to genuine gear optimization. That made LFR and its impact on the game a symptom of the community decline that had already happened over the past two years, not the cause. Enough of the community were just too stubborn and/or in the thrall of of Dunning-Kruger to admit, or realize, it.
Yeah but what you are saying is that you would have liked to skip a piece of the game that was frankly just poorly designed, not really challenging. So again there is a question as to what you allow players to skip and what you don't.votemarvel said:
Now I suppose you could get say that if a player fails the same thing X number of times, then the game gives the option to skip. Which I continue to have a problem with because it tempts people with an easy way out, and utterly fucks with all the other mechanics of modern game design. For example Dark Souls provides a player an achievement for just about every boss in the game right? Well if I skip a boss because it is too hard for me, then do I deserve the achievements for any of the bosses after that one? After all, I never earned my right to face the later bosses, I merely skipped my way to them. Some would say that yes the play DOES deserve the achievement for a later boss because they had to fight and actually defeat the boss to get it. But I say NO they DONT deserve any reward or achievement for any accomplishments beyond the part of the game that was skipped because they didn't earn the victory.
If you want to say that skipping if fine if it just provides the experience of going through the game, then fine. But I still don't see why a cheat code can't simply be used instead of an outright skip. I don't like the idea of people missing core content of a game. I'm fine with ultra easy modes, or god modes, because the player will still have to process through the content, they aren't skipping anything. Erasing the challenge is fine so long as the experience of going through the game isn't lost, and skipping removes entire pieces of that game experience.
I don't understand why this has become a "people should be able to enjoy things however they want" because that doesn't work in ANY other situation. Sure you can read a book back to front, fast-forward through a film, but everything has a limitation. At some point there is some extreme that you aren't allowed to cross.
I feel like skipping is that line for video games.
I don't care if something has a discovery or explore mode I just rarely want that experience myself. If it means other people can enjoy games then great, I hope they enjoy them.
It's like being able to skip forward in a film. you'll miss the bit you're skipping but that's up to you. I don't really get why anyone would care enough to complain about having this as an option.
It's like being able to skip forward in a film. you'll miss the bit you're skipping but that's up to you. I don't really get why anyone would care enough to complain about having this as an option.
How about instead of a button to skip a boss fight, you are given an option to defeat the boss through non-lethal means? It worked very well for the original Deus Ex.
Only if it's sufficiently easy.
After all, we aren't discussing lethal takedowns as the problem, but not being able to progress in that game you bought.
So yeah, if there were a, say, annoying but technically less challenging way to progress, that'd be fine.
I don't even care if you get the same cheevos for it. I stopped caring about high scores back when high scores were your only method of determining how well you did.
After all, we aren't discussing lethal takedowns as the problem, but not being able to progress in that game you bought.
So yeah, if there were a, say, annoying but technically less challenging way to progress, that'd be fine.
I don't even care if you get the same cheevos for it. I stopped caring about high scores back when high scores were your only method of determining how well you did.