Today I'm bringing to you 2 ideas. The first is not mine, but that of Gevlon. himself, I'm a regular reader of the Greedy Goblin and have been since I began researching gold making. He stopped blogging mainly about gold making and focuses on the social engineering side of the game. I admire some of his ideas, The PuG, Undergeared, his ganking project and even his beliefs on M&S but I do question his motivation and his propensity to over analyse the situations at times (maybe its just advanced thinking that I cant follow) e.g. his recent post on guild and progression.
However, his post The Ghosts of Progression, really hit me as a stroke of genius. For those of you that don't follow the link, the idea is
"a game feature when you can talk to an NPC who offers "practice with helpful ghosts". You choose a boss, your role and off you go with 9 bots. The ghost boss acts exactly as the real one, the bots are doing their job, you have to do your own. The practice is over when you or the boss is dead. Of course you can get no loot from the ghost-boss, but you get an achievement what can be demanded by every guild before raid invite."However, his idea is only half way there, you see while a raiding simulator is good for all potential raiders there are other uses for this as well. One of the reasons I believe there is a shortage tanks and healers is because the game encourages you from the get go to be a DPS class. At no point during the game does one of the tanking classes get quests to go tank mobs to nor do the healing classes get asked to heal NPCs to ensure a quest is completed. Its just one of those things that has to get learned the hard way usually in an instance and if you suck badly at it on your first attempt (which is most likely to be honest) you'll probably get kicked from the pug that you're in and being a normal human being feel bad and link that bad feeling to you tanking/healing and sign up only as DPS in future cos you dont get kicked for being the fail tank or hopeless healer when you DPS.
This is someting me and a few guildies have discussed without really coming up with a solution to the problem other than to get people doing the role live just in an all guild group to protect them from the puggers (although it helps protect the puggers from them also). Enter the "The Ghosts of Progression" simulator this would allow potential tanks and healers to learn their craft in a controlled environment and make mistakes without being mocked.
As well as giving young Gevlon a tool to make better raiders and rid the game of the M&S, such a toll would help boost both their ability and their confidence in the truly challenging roles within Warcraft and at the same time boot the numbers of people actually tanking and healing.
Of course, the gogogo guys could just learn to be more patient and more careful in their own play and make the jobs of the healers and tanks less stressful.
What do you think?
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I think something like this would be a godsend. From the beginning we are all taught to just go out and kill, kill, kill. There is no introduction to mob management or life saving anywhere within the leveling experience. Escort type quests used to offer the ability of a small sort of practice for those roles. You used to be able to heal the NPCs being escorted or had to tank all the attacking mobs to keep the NPC alive. Now, the NPCs being escorted are so tough all you have to do is just stand there and attack the attackers. More often than not, the escorted NPC can kill the mobs themselves while you just stand and watch. So, that small form of practice disappeared.
ReplyDeleteTanking and healing can be, and are, fun roles. But when you have to deal with the "gogogo-ers" & the "constantly stand in bad stuff-ers" in dungeon runs to fine tune your abilities, it rips the fun right out of it. Which in turn makes you want to do them less often. Which then impacts your ability to learn those roles better. Having some sort of "tanking/healing simulator" would be a wonderful addition.
On the other hand, a dps simulator could work as well. If the simulator were to be set up where aggro was easy to pull and the "simulated tank" had no way to get it back would help dps manage their output better. Or if "bad stuff" popped up often to train the dps to stay out of it because the "simulated healer" could not heal you through it would work too. In both cases the dps would end up dying and would have to restart the simulations over and over until they got it right.