Long time lurker, just had to get around to registering an account and pipe in on this dicussion.
I have never been a big mod guy or add on player, until WoW. I don"t use cheats but Titan panel and the Loc mod, gatherer, and some others, I find immensely useful. The mod that gives vendor values on drops is one I find incredibly useful the minute I am on a machine I don"t have it installed in.
I guess my question is whether or not the games should provide this or allow players to provide it? Players will always mod, that"s a cool thing, some of the UI stuff players come up with is pretty incredible and from what I have seen a lot of players have used that path to get a job in the industry. The more I see how the mods work the more things I see and think the publisher should have included in the game. Now that treads into the arena of development priorities and feature creep. The cost vs reward aspect of development is something we drill very deep into with everything we are doing now, and will continue to do in the future.
My opinion on this is rather two-fold. If we use World of Warcraft as an example, I can point to several mods that were actually incorporated into the base User Interface by Blizzard (enemy cast bar, raid target icons, etc...). So in that sense, there does need to be a base level of information or services that the User Interface should provide. I"m not going to go into some stuff like Grid or the various mods that tweak how something looks, that"s more of a preference factor, but I do want to go into some functionality.
Some basic functionality that I think publishers should put into the User Interface are:
* Maps. I love how you talk about Titan Panel and the coordinate mods. What I don"t get is why coordinates can"t be something already put into WoW. They don"t need more than just zone coords since all of the zones are clearly described and layed out. Gatherer is another one... in my eyes, it makes perfect sense for someone who is a miner or herbalist to mark spots on their maps to where they previously found materials in both RL and "in-character", so why do companies not provide this sort of functionality on their maps? Make it some sort of toggle, so if maps get clogged up by node markings, players can toggle off certain nodes, or certain materials. This would be a huge boost to enjoying a game.
* Chat. I loved Prat. This mod provided a multitude of options above and beyond what was offered by the Blizzard default UI. Some of the features I found in Prat that I believe should be put into future interfaces are: being able to copy a URL straight out of a line of chat by clicking on it, and coloring player names based on the class they played. In addition to those, provided an option of removing the scroll bar and being able to use your scrolly wheel on your mouse, which I prefer.
* Voice Chat. I think some sort of basic voice chat functionality is a good thing to include in a game, but I wouldn"t say it"s a deal-breaker for me. Having grown so dependant on Ventrilo for communicating with party members and raid members has made me hate typing out instructions for people in PuGs. Hell, it got to the point that before I stopped playing WoW I wouldn"t group with anyone who wasn"t willing to hop on vent and listen to what the group leader had to say.
* I found LotR"s system of letting people type their character background or whatnot into the UI to be a rather refreshing take from people having to download specific mods to be able to do such things in World of Warcraft.
As far as what players should provide, to me modding an Interface is more about looks than anything else. Sure, there are other mods I find useful but don"t expect a developer to provide (namely stuff like Auctioneer or KLH Threat Meter), but overall people should be able to tweak interfaces for their own tastes. I loved changing my UI after each patch, sometimes you just get tired of the default interface and want something different.
UI is just one area of this and imo is almost it"s own topic, apart from the other mods out there, but some of the other mods work for me on a lot of levels and I wonder how many others are really into the mod scene. I can remember the EQ days where I"d see screen shots and wonder what the hell the game was I was looking at, because the mobs and PCs looked like EQ stuff, but that was it. It"s a game I was late to the party for sure, but it"s a pretty significant market now and I am curious what you guys think.
I was a pretty big WoW mod junkie. I"ve used about fifteen or sixteen UI compilations found on the internet, and tried tweaking them all. Back when Discord was the "big thing" I tinkered with that for a while too. I think because of WoW, more and more people are going to be going into the mindset of UI modifications for future games, but not necessarily for utility mods, I think more and more people enjoy being able to have something different from the default UI and make any screen shots they take look different.
3-4 years from now we will be looking at some vastly different stuff, but I am one of the people that believes no matter how different the experts think this space is going to be, it"s still going to be centered on games, great games. Change the revenue streams, change the access to the product, change the markets, change it all, but at the end of the day the game will still be the key piece to all the changes that are going to happen.
I agree with you, but I"m still going to add that I think that even though a lot will change in three years, there will be a lot of basic fundamentals that are going to be necessary in order to have that solid game. Looking at WoW, I absolutely detest their guild interface. Yeah, they are finally getting around to guild banks, but that"s something that should be in at launch. Basic functionality like that, or like a solid party and raid interface (*coughVanguardcough*) are things that will remain constant over the years I believe.
To address a few points after Curt"s post:
Finally, and this is more of a personal complaint, make a robust and intelligent logging system. Granted, game data logging can be used to facilitate macros and bots. However, I"m of the opinion that if someone was going to create a bot or macro for the game, they"d go the far more efficient and precise route and just use memory and packet hacks. When developers cripple logging I believe they hurt more legitimate users than they stop nefarious ones.
I agree with this 100%. And as far as macros or botters go, more legitimate players are going to do their part to try and notify the developers about botters than not. I think a lot of people want to play these games to legitimately compete with other players and to hinder that because of the bad apples really sucks.
The problem is, any information that is important enough that it affects the user"s experience in a significant way - like aggro mechanics, mob loot tables and locations - will be found empirically if your game becomes popular. WoW doesn"t make aggro mechanics or mob loot tables available through the UI or scripting in any way, and as far as I know there has never been any documentation available as to how aggro (for example) works. However, players are able to experiment and record enough data to have an encyclopedic understanding of it nowadays.
Also, I find some of your mandatory information odd. Why should players get exact numbers for mob HP or EXP gain, but not aggro? I haven"t played WoW post-TBC, but in 1.X you couldn"t get exact numbers for mob HP remaining, just percentages, and things were OK. What about mob stats and abilities? (Some MMOs give that, some don"t.) It seems to me that where you draw the line is mostly just tradition and convention.
As far as the aggro mechanics in WoW go, I believe most have come from trial & error type formula creation. Whether or not the numbers are 100% accurate in any threat mods are irrelevant, they just need to be close enough in order for the mod to have any sort of efficiency. Speaking in reference to loot tables and mob locations, I don"t see where that"s an issue when looking at websites like Thottbot or Wowhead. Do I necessarily agree with mods like AtlasLoot where each dungeon map in game will detail every good boss drop? Absolutely not, I think that"s a pinnacle of laziness reached only in WoW. I mean, FFS, it only takes three seconds to type a name into a search engine on one of those database sites to pull up the information.
I guess I"m a bit more old fashioned, and would rather see the quality database sites get some traffic (although with all of them going under the psuedo-IGE banner, maybe mods that have loot tables built in are better after all
).
Mob Health data is borderline to me. I think it should be in-game, but it should be something that"s earned. For example, you are Rick the Ranger and you run up on your first Rabid Rabbit. Okay, you kill it. Now if Rick kills 50 more Rabid Rabbits, hey, maybe he gained some knowledge about the mob. Maybe he knows how strong it is, or what abilities it has, so on and so forth. To me, mechanics like that would add to a game more so than they would detract from it.
Now, as far as:
D) To balance raid encounters to be difficult but achievable, you need to assume that the players doing them are fairly skilled and able to fulfill their roles near the best of their ability.
Blizzard was balancing pre-2.0 raid content based on one mod and one mod alone, Decursive. This is not what raid content should be about, but at the same time it"s Blizzards fault for having that shit go on for so long, and for balancing the encounters around it. Thankfully TBC content that I"ve done is a bit better tuned around player skill and knowledge rather than the skill of your Paladins spamming one button on their keyboard for four hours a night.
But remember, if you"re aiming high, you have to be appealing to everyone...and in some cases, this may mean a large amount of UI-modding freedom. Vanguard tried to go the "looks-only" route, and people still clamored for more functionality and mods - the "I want it like WoW" problem.
However, Vanguard"s UI modding community developed very nicely, with one or two Sigil employees interfacing well with the community and the ui developers...at least for the first few monthes of the game and the last few monthes of open beta. After that, things sorta went downhill.
I disagree re: Vanguard. I found the Vanguard UI to be one of the worst UI out of most of the recent MMOGs, which is pretty insane considering the budget. That game almost HAD to have mods to make the default UI somewhat usable, and lets not forget lack of raid frames.
Personally, I loved the way the EQ2 UI behaved. I liked the modularity of it, the ability to resize any window, the right-click menus, all of it. It felt responsive when you used it (unlike the VG UI). I like that the default UI had very few frills, just simple functionality.
I do agree with you here Traldan, the EQ2 UI was pretty good.
Anywho, just my thoughts and such on the matter.
