[Deceax]

When Gevlon steps out of his Ayn Randian fantasy world where the poor are ground up into food for the rich he still can write a good article on game design. We talked about this yesterday but here's a good bit on how "dance progression" is unsatisfying.

http://greedygoblin....nce-bosses.html

[Sobeyet]

Deceax, on 13 December 2011 - 10:18 AM, said:

When Gevlon steps out of his Ayn Randian fantasy world where the poor are ground up into food for the rich he still can write a good article on game design. We talked about this yesterday but here's a good bit on how "dance progression" is unsatisfying.

http://greedygoblin....nce-bosses.html

Not sure I'd agree with him, for reasons stated in a lot of comments. Definitely disagree that dance raids have no progression, even in the fake chart he posted. Yes, there's some variation, but multi-phase fights (which tend to be more complicated and "dance-y") are designed for people to learn segments at a time. Once you can consistently complete the phase, you can count on seeing the next part more, etc. Al'akir is one of the notable exceptions where the first part is the hardest, and some bosses have the last phase as EZ-mode and peak on the phase before.

Also, even a patchwerk fight doesn't necessarily guarantee linear progression. Just because you got him to 50% last attempt doesn't guarantee that you'll get <49% the next attempt; shit happens. Seems like a pretty weak argument to me, if anything there's a hint of whining about RNG.

My point was that turning WoW into a twitch-platformer and continually raising the bar is going to squeeze out more and more casual players, and it's bound to cause friction at some point. A lot of guilds not too far "below" us struggled on T11/T12 content. I know it's started to impact us - players get harder to find and we have to keep raising our recruiting standards.