Geeky Game Design and Automated Character Audits

My guild fell in love with be.imba and wowheroes a while back. Look, they have gear scores! Trum­pets played through­out the geeky core of the guild: “Finally! A way to grade and com­mu­ni­cate to peo­ple their rel­a­tive progress in the endgame!” For exam­ple: “Hey, you’re not ready for X because you don’t have Y score. Go hit some instances and heroics.”

Unfor­tu­nately, some time cud­dled up to these tools have exposed why they can’t be used for this reason.

The pur­pose of these scor­ing sys­tem is to make gearing/raiding prob­lems sim­pler. There is a great desire for tools like this, as I say above.

How­ever, Bliz­zard designs these sys­tems to be obtuse on pur­pose. The rea­son that “+12 hit rat­ing” and “+12 crit rat­ing” trans­late dif­fer­ently to raw per­for­mance isn’t an acci­dent. It’s to add more lay­ers to the onion.

How does this onion affect play­ers? Glad you asked!

• Geeky play­ers are aware that there are dif­fer­ent lev­els of per­for­mance, and duti­fully hunt down every arti­cle on the inter­nets. They read EJ forums, class weblogs, mmo-champion, and so on. They find mods like Rat­ing­Buster and fall in love with them. This is me.
• Geek­ish play­ers are aware that there are dif­fer­ent lev­els of per­for­mance, and do every­thing they can to get bet­ter short of learn­ing much out­side the game. My wife is one of these peo­ple. She’ll never visit EJ, but she wants to play bet­ter, and is glad to take direc­tion on how to do so. She just wants to learn from other people.
• Non-geeky peo­ple might or might not be aware that there are dif­fer­ent lev­els of per­for­mance, but they aren’t going to go learn on their own or lis­ten to any­thing peo­ple say. I know plenty of peo­ple like this. I have no idea how they think, because I’ve been a geek since my ear­li­est mem­ory: wak­ing my father up at 4:30 in the morn­ing so that we could do math flash­cards. (Not kid­ding) I don’t know what it’s like to not want to know everything.

I under­stand the moti­va­tion behind obtuse game design. A game that is too sim­ple won’t retain the geeks, and we geeks are the buzzing bees.

Imag­ine that your char­ac­ter had just two stats: Body and Will. Every piece of gear only buffed those two stats. Easy enough for every­one to under­stand, but bor­ing! The games we enjoy are more com­pli­cated on pur­pose. A game can be com­pli­cated and still fun to play. This is the fine line that all of these MMOs try to walk: deep but playable.

So hav­ing said all that, let’s look at these two tools.

Wowheroes

The Wowheroes char­ac­ter sheet is much more beau­ti­ful than be.imba’s. It’s sexy, and it com­pletely scratches my itch called “I really wish that I had a D&Dish char­ac­ter sheet for WoW.”

How­ever, the wowheroes gear score is total crap.

All it does is sum up item level (ilevel). Not matched to build, not even whether an item remotely makes sense for your class or not. So if your fire mage grabs an ilevel 141 stab­bing dag­ger, wowheroes says: Wow, nice upgrade over your nuk­ing sword!

Hon­estly, it’s like a numer­i­cal trans­la­tion of “zomgepics!!!”

It’s hor­ri­ble, I wish they didn’t include it at all. It’s like a beau­ti­ful Art Deco house with a big pur­ple and yel­low mail­box. I guess that you needed a mail­box, but what the hell?

be.imba

be.imba is bet­ter. It’s not as sexy, but it has more and eas­ier infor­ma­tion to find. More impor­tantly, its score sys­tem isn’t as trans­par­ently bad.

You get a score, and you click on a link next to your score, and it breaks down the con­tri­bu­tion per item that you’re wear­ing. It’s all opaque, but there seems to be some thought as to scor­ing pvp/pve dif­fer­ently, so it’s not just an ilevel sum. I’m guess­ing that for priests (as an exam­ple), there’s a grad­ing scale that makes +heal­ing worth more to PvE score and +resilience more to PvP, and does that for each build of each class.

But it still doesn’t do things right. Here’s an example:

A few weeks ago, I was help­ing another holy priest in my guild along, and the sub­jects of trin­kets come up. He men­tions that he’s really look­ing for­ward to upgrad­ing his last blue trin­ket. I look at his trin­kets, then ask him, “Why?” Well, be.imba told him that his blue trin­ket is the weaker of his two trin­kets. Here’s his rel­e­vant snip from be.imba:

Ban­gle of End­less Bless­ings 4.58%

Rib­bon of Sac­ri­fice 5.90%

I’m a holy priest geek. I know that this out­put is wrong. Any sim­i­larly geeky holy priest will tell you that this is wrong. It’s not just wrong, it’s very wrong. Ban­gle of End­less Bless­ings is bet­ter than most every­thing you can get until SSC. It’s far bet­ter than his zomgepic trin­ket. I then spend fif­teen min­utes explain­ing why, start­ing with:

Me: “Yes, I know we said to refer to be.imba, but it doesn’t seem to always be right. Now let me explain–”

Him: “Wait. When do I know if it’s right?”

Exactly.

I mean, look at base­ball. Peo­ple live in those stats, they love to numer­i­cally rank peo­ple and break stuff down a ridicu­lous num­ber of ways, and judge play­ers accord­ingly. But the guy who gets up with two outs in the ninth to hit a come-from-behind home run to win the game? You just can’t break a character/player down to a sin­gle value, and I say this as a life­long fan of sta­tis­tics and num­bers. This isn’t a prob­lem, this is part of the appeal.

So Are They Worthless?

No! Both web­sites make fine recommendations/reminders on enchant­ing and gem­ming and so on. “Did you for­get that you dropped a cheapo gem in that beau­ti­ful badge armor piece because you didn’t feel like going to the AH? Go fix that, you’re embar­rass­ing your class lead.” Whoops!

That alone is worth the price of admis­sion, and I check my own toons every now and then to make sure I’m not miss­ing some­thing easy.

Con­clu­sion

Geeky Game Design wins via knock­out in round one.

Will there ever be an easy and cor­rect sub­sti­tu­tion for doing a min­i­mal amount of actual geek­ing out? No. Addons like Rat­ing­Buster can help, resources online will help. But ulti­mately, if some­one fig­ures out a triv­ial way to cir­cum­vent Blizzard’s entire game sys­tem, and that solu­tion is easy enough to bring to the non-geeks… Blizzard’s devs will spread around some obfus­ca­tion Mir­a­cle Grow, and the onion will mag­i­cally grow another layer. As they should.

More Words!

• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Solo Dif­fi­culty vs Group Difficulty
• Emblem Strat­egy for the Super-Casual
• Raid­ing does not mean Skilled
• Max level does not mean Skilled
• Fools, Silence, and Dam­age Reporting–supplemental