Posted by Heartbourne on Friday, November 13th, 2009 - 21 Comments
Tags: arena, design, PvP, rob pardo
The Escapist of the Warcry Network had the fortune to interview the VP of Game Design, Rob Pardo, in a sort of retrospective look at the past five years of design of World of Warcraft. Its a great interview, and Blizzard has been doing a lot of these sort of things recently, perhaps to hype up WoW’s upcoming fifth anniversary on November 23rd.
One question that was just asking for trouble was “What are you most proud of over the last five years? What was the biggest mistake you think you made?” Its not an easily answerable question, and there might have been a slight PR disaster with its answer.
When addressing the “biggest mistake” portion of the question, Pardo responded:
As for the biggest mistake? There’s a lot of them that I think, were … they just “fell out” of things. One example: I wish the servers were more stable when we launched, of course - there’s a lot of that sort of thing. We have a lot of excuses for that - we didn’t expect nearly the response - but we can’t say it wasn’t a mistake. If I was going to pick on a game design thing that I look back on and think was a mistake? We really never designed WoW to be a competitive e-sports game; it was something that we decided to start tackling because there was such a desire and demand to evolve it in that direction, to introduce competitive arenas. I’m not sure that that was the right thing to do with the game.
We didn’t engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There’s constant pressure on the class balance team, there’s pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don’t PvP don’t understand why their classes are changing. I don’t think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we’d have to do to balance it in that direction. Either I’d go back in time to before WoW ever shipped and change the rules to make the basic game more conductive for being an e-sport, or if not that, just say it doesn’t make sense. Right now, WoW has a bit of a schizophrenic philosophy behind it, and we’re trying to figure out how to guide it.
It’s tricky, now that we’ve gone down that road, because we have a passionate, large audience that enjoys it - the Arena, the e-sport - so we can’t just chop off that head. We can’t just say, “We fouled up and will go back to how it used to be before,” because we have a really passionate audience that wants it in the game.
If I could go back in time before we shipped WoW, I would have either made serious changes to basic class balance to facilitate that type of play, or if I went back to when we had the idea two years later, I would have said, “Maybe we shouldn’t go there.”
This was really a baited answer. Pardo really highlighted a lot of the incredible design that made WoW so successful, but his brutally honest answer here is a bit of a surprise. He comments later in the interview that as far as PvE goes, they have given up a lot of their preconceived notions of what an MMORPG should do. They stopped catering to “hardcore players” as much as they used to by reducing raid sizes and making content more accessible, among other changes. Going the “e-sports” route doesn’t seem to fit in with the philosophy of recent PvE changes.
Look at the players that get all of the attention. Guilds that get “world firsts” and “server firsts” get a lot more attention than players who get 2200+ rating. The arena reward system seems to get revamped and redesigned every season. WoW doesn’t need to be a competitive PvP game to get attention or longevity. Its already extremely competitive on a PvE front.
Arenas have failed to be accessible or rewarding to new and average players. Talent and class design is now all over the place, with buffs having to be carefully implemented and thought through to obtain balance in both PvP and PvE. Complaints would be quieter if the only PvP mediums were world PvP and battlegrounds, where winning conditions are much less dependent on the intricacies of class balance.
For more, read the interview. Its a very good read and makes you realize how well-designed WoW really is.
Related Posts: Blizzard Returning To Battlegrounds, Patch 3.3: Icecrown Raid Difficulty Makes Raiding Even More Granular, What 3.2 Means for Arenas, Pre-Wrath Patch Glee, Out of the Comfort Zone and Into the Arena,
By Thecakeisaspy on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Gentlemen~ I am le first
By euphony on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
first block
also i think arena is not a bad addition, its more skill based, especially 2’s. Its like duels with team mates
By euphony on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
CURSE YOU
By Togarox on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
I completely agree. When arenas 1st came out it was a great idea and a lot of fun. But over time things started to grow super sour and you started to hear “X class is OP” pretty much on an every day basis.
I think to best solve their problem, they need to bring “Epic Battle” style pvp back to the fore front. They are trying to do that now with WG, but the rewards aren’t as good (unless you do VoA).
By Daemonbane on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
I HATE PVP! that’s all there is to it. I wish it would DIE!
By Essam on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
For fucks sake blizzard, your making everything too casual.
at least make a balance instead of going hardcore casual (see what i did there?)
guess ima have to do arenas now…
By Alayea on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
I don’t object to players enjoying PvP, but I am irritated with the so many nerfs to spells/abilities/talents that have occurred over time because they mess up balance in PvP. Did Blizzard screw up? Absolutely.
By Barishi on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
I think his response is being looked at too hard as a HAHA PvP sucks response. What he seems to be saying is we made something people asked for and just encountered more problems than we expected.
By Uthers on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 1:10 am
I actually enjoy some forms of PvP. It’s one thing to try and out-smart an enemy that’s set up to follow a program, and another to outsmart a thinking being that can pull something out of left field at the last second (you know, or just get really really lucky and try something that happens to work once…)
Still, it’s interesting to get a response like this from a VP level anyone. A veritable admission that the dichotomy of the game is stressful to both playerbase and design staff… These are the kind of things you don’t hear a lot because the average consumer is a cowardly and suspicious type. People tend to think that if the company made one mistake (or more specifically a mistake of this magnitude), they probably made more they aren’t owning up to. Then again, there are reasons I don’t work in marketing nor advertising…
By Innosinned on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 3:29 am
The problem is not whether or PvP is fun or not, it’s that the balancing for it collides with the PvE side, meaning either a class is OP for PvP or will be “too” hard to play for PvE. The choice is where to focus on. Are you, as Blizz, gonna be in favor of PvP and just try to fix PvE weak classes a bit, but never so it makes them stronger than others at PvP, or are you gonna make the PvE balance as good as you can get and just ignore the fact some classes are winning everything in PvP. Without arena, the answer was simple. WoW was a co-op PvE game where some PvP was involved, in out-door PvP areas and BG. With arena, PvP became an eSport, meaning it has to be balanced, or it’s not fair.
Maybe they should somehow disconnect PvP from PvE, making a different balance for each, meaning your spells will do different damage/healing or even work differently in the two different aspects of the game, though that puts extra pressure on the class balancing team and divides the two even more.
By PVE Player on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
I know it’s hard to balance the PVE/PVP stuff, but why can’t they just make different skills for different areas. Other games have done it…cough…Guild Wars
By Kagitaar on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
@PVE Player
City of Heroes does it too and they don’t make the tooltips super long, they just have a tab on each ability in your skills page which shows the PvP effects. We know they already have the tech to do it with DR on players and spells like Repentence, I just can’t figure out why they don’t suck it up and just go for it. Here’s hoping that’ll be a Cata fix.
By Osku on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
PvP was an amazing addition to the game! When your in a fail raiding guild and your server sucks. atleast you can rely on pvp to keep your interest. Arena is a challenging “Sport” in wow. Its much more skill dependant instead of casual playing. A warrior hunter team would fail in comparison to a ret pally and holy pally. Its about team communication and playing to strengths. It wasn’t a mistake.
By BlahbahBlah on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Finally an honest answer from blizzard. I do agree with some previous comments, there should be separate PvP/PvE effects on spells and talents that are too OP one way or the other. I think they’d get a lot fewer pissed off people each patch.
By BlahbahBlah on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Oh and for people saying “Ur just nawt hardcore enuff 2 arena… go back 2 ur PvE u pussy baby, lawls” I don’t play arenas on WoW because the system is flawed at the core. I PvP in other games because it’s better balanced.
By Urziel on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 11:10 am
I do PvP in BG’s and WG on all my toons that can, but I avoid failarena like the plague.
I just wish we could make the arena people have their own server with their own gear and ability sets where they can gleefully kill each other and leave the rest of us alone. Oh wait…
By Semus on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Blizzard is going about PvP all wrong. They don’t need to balance anything at all.
They shouldn’t have designed the game so that there is even a need to balance PvP and PvE content. The system needs to be redesigned so that certain abilities only work in such a way in either PvP or PvE. That way, there would be no balance needed at all. They already do have certain abilities that don’t work in PvP, but do in PvE. THAT’S how it should be designed. Why they ever felt the need to balance between the two is beyond me.
If you are talking about class balance….
that’s a whole other issue.
By Lizz on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
i love wow as it is…i do fail at arena a little because its not easy finding a pro player..loads and loads of noobs in the game:D
By Warlordlock on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Nice to see that even Blizz is admitting to arenes being crap. I’ve pvp’ed since I dinged 80 on my first char (vanilla wow) and it was amazingly fun (a fight was a fight, not a 2 second battle of the cooldowns and trinkets). People say arena is so “skillbased”…what skill? button mashing in the right order vs. the ? Then you end up pulling your hair out, since some class will always have an advantage…then half the stuff you use, is not “legal” and does not work in arena. I find arena plain boring (as much fun as a duel…zzzz). World PVP is dead, as pretty much every char that you may find, outside of Dalaran yelling “LFG” is some twink alt trying to get to 80 before you can say cat-in-a-hat and really couldnt care less about world pvp.
I recall 3 hour southshore battles, people grouped in raids, and allys with respond with incoming high levels. The battle moved back and forth between TM and SS as whomever was having the upper hand. Give me the days of pre TBC, when WoW was fun. Perhaps I’ve outgrown the game, but blizz needs to focus on quality, and not quantity. Perhaps Cataclysm will bring us old timers what is needed to stay.
Scap arena, work on a better ranking system in BGs and ffs let us have pvp weapons outside having to grind a broke and boring arena system.
By Warlordlock on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 11:13 am
EDIT; make that lvl 60 in vanilla wow
By Warlordlock on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 11:22 am
..oh and to you people asking for PVE balance. PVE balance? What is that? There is no balance in PVE, it’s PVE. You fight a scripted NPC with a bunch of other PVE geared people. Oh wait, PVE is no longer a class based thing, it’s a DPS competition. Wait, that’s PVP isn’t it?
What happened to class abilities in PVE? I remember classes were needed due to abilities. Now you’re a) a healer or b) a DPSer. What happened to being a Warlock, Mage, Druid, Shaman…etc.? DPS DPS DPS..DPS..and MORE DPS. Zzzzzzzzz.. /afk