By now, every World of Warcraft player and his (or her) imaginary girlfriend (or sex toy) has heard about the impending removal of auto-targeting type mods from the game, ala Decursive. (Link to a good central thread with other links for you to chase.) Blizzard dripping tree, Drysc, summarizes the official position: “The general run-down is that we don’t want UI mods to be making combat decisions for a player, it should be in their hands and their responsibility to choose who and when to interact with the game. It borders on automation of gameplay, which is something we’re obviously very opposed to. Aside from that moral separation it ends up defeating the purpose of the challenges we’re implementing. With the release of the expansion and the game changing in some huge ways, it was the best opportunity to remove specific UI mod abilities.” Which, to me, could mean either: A. We decided AE curse encounters were stupid and are taking the game in a different direction, chillax noobs, or B. We still don’t learn from our predecessors’ mistakes. Since players are given only half the story … again …, I s’pose we’ll decide either: A. That wasn’t so bad, or B. God, that was stupid. (ALSO, could we get a firm fucking date on this expansion? Six-ish weeks away and we’re still guessing on live date?) (Archive: Player/Blizzard comments on disabling Decursive)
5 thoughts on “Decursing: Another Minigame within the Game!”
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http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=15401595&postId=322120536&sid=1#305
“Sort of off topic, but yes, the designers no longer have to account for decursive-style addons in their dungeon design, which was one of the biggest driving factors for these changes.”
Whether you /believe/ that or not is another question — Lucifron predates Decursive, but you could argue that the anticipation of Decursive predated Lucifron. Kind of chicken and egg, if Lucifron wasn’t designed in such an asinine “haha decurse or die” way, decursive-style addons would likely have been a much longer time coming and definitely had much less of an impact on raiding.
So personally, I think they’re 100% full of shit and will continue to make “haha u r ALL teh bawmb!” bosses.
These shifts in what is and isn’t allowed are excellent examples of the gaming axiom: If you’re not at the front of the curve, you’re at the back of the bus.
Nerfs are just another word for “lack of imagination”.
EDIT: Examples – Removal and/or “tweaking” of mana conserve, out-of-combat rezzing, timer on Lord V. Nefarius respawn and so on …
I’d like to add to this: Can we also get an answer on the availability of digital downloads FFS?
If they are still answering questions about this level of design, then they certainly aren’t testing with any significant fervor yet.
re firm fucking date – i wish my clients would let me run software releases like blizzard gets to. For instance, i am held to a test / revision cycle that is at least 10% of the overall development time for the new release. ITz a bitch of a wad of time, added to the nastiness of user acceptance testing and usually ends up being a nightmare of previously unthought of design cramps that lead to massive development revisions. I wish my clients would let me just release it and work out the bugs during the following 6 mos that it is live, like blizzard does.
Actually if you read the linked thread they note several different ways in which curing could work without being totally manual. Some of them even look more promising to me than just mashing a button over and over to cure everyone possible.
I think the panic level is drowning out the relevant information, and the fact that it’s a forum/thread of primarily LUA and api changes isn’t helping people who don’t understand.
As a priest, the first time I used Decursive and the like I knew that it would be purposely broken. The first hint was the revamp of the mana costs for curing, with this the inevitable next step.
Emergeny Monitor felt so much like cheating to me I stopped using it after a couple of weeks. It was cool from a technical perspective I thought, but it was hardly playing the game and it just upped the boredom level.
Things like pulling your heals at the last moment or assessing just how big a heal you’re going to need to land 3 seconds later would be second nature to a large portion of the player base (well healers anyway) if they had disabled this from the beginning.