WoW’s original UI had a very distinct goal: do not display anything that every player would not absolutely need to know. If it’s class specific, it’s out. If it could be confusing in any possible way, it’s out. Let the players handle it. Said players have done a very fine job with this task over the years while the default UI remained largely unchanged.
At some point earlier this year, I’m guessing that new management forced a change in direction, or maybe everybody collectively realized that the game was mature enough that they didn’t have to worry so much — maybe it’s okay to have possibly confusing class-specific stuff, maybe it’s okay to show information that you don’t absolutely need to know. And that’s when we got the new local map tracking options and shaman totem timers and the ability to mail multiple items at a time and other stuff like that. And oh my god, a number on your backpack to show how many empty inventory slots you have! And an on-screen clock (and SWG’s alarm system)!
There’s more to come in the expansion. Here’s a nice comparison between the original UI and the Wrath UI. The most recent changes are largely convenience features for established players, with stuff like pretty much anything that ever took up space in inventory getting its own UI instead. The mount and vanity pet change, in particular, is convenient but highly unintuitive.
Imaginative types might take all this to mean that the team is now officially prioritizing retention over recruitment.
Blizzard’s statement in the Blizzard/Glider lawsuit says that players take an average of 480 hours to reach level 70, and they play for an average of two hours a day. (Links to statements, concise quote.) Part of Blizzard’s argument was that botting robbed them of subscription fees because of increased leveling speed. That’s pretty funny.
Playtime is a metric that companies don’t often post. I’m so sick of “20 hours a week” — Nick Yee’s eight-year-old Everquest 1 figure, determined by self-selected survey. Is it true? Was it ever true? Who knows?
It seems that differing animation cycles in the game have resulted in an unforseen side effect: female avatars do less damage then male ones [previously at WCFTWD]. At the time, the Funcom developers said they’d let us know as soon as they could about a fix. Today they let us know, but the news is mixed. The good news is that ’straight damage’ (what they call white damage) has been fixed. Simple autoattack routines use few animations and they’ve all been fixed and pushed to the live servers.
The problem comes in with the much-vaunted realtime combat system, which requires heavy use of combos and unique animations. There are almost a thousand of those animations, and every single one will apparently have to be tweaked by animators and then retuned by a designer.
Wow.
Truth: live teams can’t depend on anything but design time, because artists get moved to other projects and coders are busy fixing shit. Even if you’re so sure that your project will be better!, just play it safe. Design data should always be the final arbiter of anything that may change during live.
I don’t care that your animation was painstakingly handcrafted to look great at a four second cast time — I will change that cast time someday, and I do NOT want to ask for art time to do it.
One of the commenters asks why female characters’ DPS couldn’t be fixed with damage multipliers. That would be a nice quick fix, but I would guess they can’t do it — the ability system would need to be able to check gender, which would require code and data format changes. One would assume that they don’t have a lot of code time to spare! And then it’d be a huge amount of crap for designers to maintain in the future.
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