Failure to adjust: whose fault is it?

Being that I am still level 84, I have not yet had the "pleasure" of stepping into Cataclysm's heroics, but if Allison Robert's look at the unbearable suckhood of pugging is anything to go on, I'm not missing much. I can't say I'm all that surprised that in the wake of Blizzard making some pretty significant changes to heroics in Cataclysm--crowd control is necessary, DPS can't be healed through avoidable damage, triage is more important that fast healing, kill order and interrupts are important again--it seems the playerbase has been less than willing to adapt to these changes. Now, we are still in the first few weeks of the expansion's life time, and given time, players might learn and change their ways (especially when their current ways deny them their epic loot). But if Allison's post and other horror stories I have heard from other players and other bloggers are anything to go on, people really aren't do well in adapting to the changes made to heroics in Cataclysm. But does the fault really lie with those who "refuse" to adapt to the times and the demands of a new era? Or might the fault lie elsewhere?

When heroics were introduced in Burning Crusade, they were difficult, and wiping was common. When Wrath of the Lich King came out, that changed. Heroics were not all that difficult, especially as the expansion wore on, and the fact that we kept running heroics long after we outgeared them lead to players developing some pretty bad habits for running them. It was bad enough when Wrath heroics allowed us to ignore kill orders, not interrupt spells, and AoE down trash at the beginning of the expansion; once the emblem system allowed us to get amazing gear without leaving heroics, it was all downhill from there. Runing heroics took the same amount of skill as doing old-world quests for Loremaster; that is to say, it took none, but people still did it, and as a result, they developed some pretty low expectations for how difficult heroics should be. Players who try to run heroics now using the strategies that they used in latter Lich King era heroics are like level-80 players who try doing Cataclysm quest content using the strategies they use to do low-level quests for Loremaster (which, if you've ever killed low level enemies for any reason, you know would end in disaster). I don't know for a fact that those players exist, but if they did, they'd be comparable to today's heroic runners.

But let's look at Wrath's heroic dungeons more closely. You had heroics, which took almost zero effort and a minimal investment of time and awarded great gear, and raiding, which took a great deal of time and effort and award superb gear. Considering that heroics took infinitely less ability and commitment to run and awarded gear that wasn't much worse than what raids awarded, it's no wonder players flocked to them, even those without the skills that are usually necessary to succeed in group content. And when they went there, they obtained gear that trivialized the very content that awarded it, but they kept playing because they liked these shiny epics they could earn. Because of this design, players associated heroics with zero-effort rewards and started playing under the assumption if their zero-effort approach did not yield victory, it meant someone was playing badly, an assumption which hampers their ability to adapt to today's heroics. The expectation of reward for zero effort also keeps players in heroics who have no business expecting to succeed in a cooperative environment, further hindering our efforts. And whose decision was it to design Wrath's heroics to start out easy, become even easier when the gear they awarded trivialized them, and thus create this mess in the first place? Blizzard.

Now let's fast forward to the development stages of Cataclysm. Wrath of the Lich King is coming to a close, and many non-raiders (a category which includes a startlingly large players, if a poll I ran a while ago on my blog is anything to go by) continue running heroics because that is the only thing they have left to entertain themselves, thus further cementing the bad habits they have developed over the course of the expansion pack. Meanwhile, in all of their interviews and press releases, Blizzard makes clear their intention to make heroics challenging again, to make them require crowd control, kill order, interrupts, strategy, etc. They make this clear at BlizzCon, in miscellaneous interviews, and as a result, us players who keep up with WoW news online are well aware going into Cataclysm that things are going to be different, that the strategies we used for old heroics won't work in this new expansion, and that we're going to have to change the way we do things. We knew this, but the players who don't follow WoW news online didn't.

I don't know exactly when I started following WoW news online, but if I had to put a guess to it, the earliest I would be willing to guess is November of 2008. Now, I started playing WoW in September of 2005. That's sixty three months I have been playing, and I have only been following WoW news online for, at the most, twenty five of them. That's less than half of my time spent playing WoW, and it means it took me more than three years to realize that WoW had an online community. Now, I'm sure the community has grown more robust as the game's popularity has grown, meaning someone who started playing after I did would probably have an easier time discovering WoW's online community than I did. But I bring up the duration of the time during which I was oblivious of WoW's online community to illustrate that not every player is privy to the information we often take for granted. For anyone who did not keep track of news about Cataclysm, the sudden rise of difficulty in heroics is something they had no way of anticipating.

So, we have Blizzard creating a situation that leads to players developing really bad habits in heroics, and then doing nothing to convey to players who don't follow news about WoW online that they are increasing the difficulty of heroics come Cataclysm. It's beginning to look like the fault for these players who didn't adjust to Cataclysm's heroics is resting on Blizzard's shoulders. The question is, was it Blizzard's responsibility to prepare players for this change?

Blizzard hasn't exactly been transparent when it comes to information about their game. When they expanded the armory to include a wowhead-like database of items, it was a big break from convention, to say the least. They have put other detailed information, like boss strategies or walkthroughs, on the official website, the kind of thing you would get on other sites. Sure, they'll release general information about the game, like overall descriptions of the classes and zones, but they've never been one for revealing specifics. This is especially the case in-game, where we go into most situations blind without any of the information we take for granted because we know so much information about the game that we acquire online. We may pick up on general patterns that can help us in entirely new situations (such as, one should generally not stand in the fire), but those assumptions are formed in response to general patterns of game design; they do not influence the game design itself. In other words, we know not to stand in the fire because developers usually make fire harmful; they don't make fire harmful because we usually don't stand in it.

What this means for heroics is that just because we players grow accustomed to certain facts in game (fire is bad, heroics don't require strategy) doesn't mean Blizzard owes it to us to keep those facts consistent or to warn us when they change. They can design the game however they like--within reason, of course, or else they'll lose subscribers--and its our responsibility to adapt. Part of that adaptation process is assembling information in online databases with boss strategies, item statistics, etc., which results in websites like wowhead and WoWWiki, as well as blogs that detail changes to the game, like heroics being made more difficult) This is all part of the process of adapting to changes made to the game, and knowing heroics were going to become more difficult by following Cataclysm news was part of that adaptation process. By taking that knowledge for granted, we took our adaptive abilities for granted, but some players haven't learned the process of adaptation as well as others. Those are the players who struggle in heroics now, and while it might not seem fair that we have to suffer for their inability to adapt, that's just the nature of group content.