I tend to prefer games with UI mods support. AFAIK GW2 won't have it, let's see how nice they can keep the UI
After playing WoW for 7+ years (still have 2 active accounts), I definitely prefer gamers WITHOUT third party UI addons.
I can live without having to download a dozen of addons before being able to participate in specific parts of the game (and have to update them all each patch too).
It sure bothered me the 5 seconds it took to update them, you also never needed any specific UI to play the game, enforcing any sort of UI was always up to the player or guild you join depending on your situation.
Regarding PVP Blizzard can shutdown parts of the exposed API which they have done constantly it adds another layer of development but I can't really believe some people are saying that having less options is better hehe, I like to mod my UI because I like it a certain way, a certain size, displaying in a certain schema, not having UI support is a step backwards after WoW made it really well and allowed people to customize their experience so well.
SW:TOR has many flaws, but the UI modification mode they patched in is one of the best of the industry - you can move, resize and customize everything - and you do NOT need third party crap to do it.
No need for insecure crap coded by amateurs when the original developer can do it.
Respect, walk, what did you say? Respect, walk Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me? - PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
SW:TOR has many flaws, but the UI modification mode they patched in is one of the best of the industry - you can move, resize and customize everything - and you do NOT need third party crap to do it.
No need for insecure crap coded by amateurs when the original developer can do it.
Sure and you can have that, and the ability to code in whatever you want, there is pretty good addons for WoW probably better than some developers can put out there, there is third party crap, there is also third party awesomness.
People fall for emails telling them to put in their username, password and bank details, "insecure" addons that run on a VM that is tightly controlled by blizzard is the least of their problems, if you dont know what it is or can't drop a couple of .lua files into an addon folder then you should stick with the default UI.
The point to me about add-ons is that when the playerbase feels a specific 3rd party app is missing, it means the game's dev team haven't been doing their job. Either critical information is missing, or something is designed horribly. An Anet emplyee said the same thing in an interview a few months ago, and I was SO happy to hear that. I've always felt Blizz's take on things was "Who cares if players want that functionality? They can make it themselves, we don't need to bother"
The level of customization is always nice, but I hate the cycle that UI mods forced games like WoW to have. Look at KTM (used to be a popular threat mod until better ones replaced it)
-Threat control was sometimes a tricky thing in vanilla wow.
-Players developed add-ons to compensate.
-Gameplay became MUCH easier, to the point of trivial.
-Since everyone uses KTM, Blizz tweaks raids to take that into account. No the few people that don't have KTM HAVE to have it just to keep up.
The point to me about add-ons is that when the playerbase feels a specific 3rd party app is missing, it means the game's dev team haven't been doing their job. Either critical information is missing, or something is designed horribly. An Anet emplyee said the same thing in an interview a few months ago, and I was SO happy to hear that. I've always felt Blizz's take on things was "Who cares if players want that functionality? They can make it themselves, we don't need to bother"
The level of customization is always nice, but I hate the cycle that UI mods forced games like WoW to have. Look at KTM (used to be a popular threat mod until better ones replaced it)
-Threat control was sometimes a tricky thing in vanilla wow.
-Players developed add-ons to compensate.
-Gameplay became MUCH easier, to the point of trivial.
-Since everyone uses KTM, Blizz tweaks raids to take that into account. No the few people that don't have KTM HAVE to have it just to keep up.
-Rinse and repeat.
Only because a certain group of players lack the skills to handle the game and need tools to help them play better does not mean that the Dev team did not do there job.
Take FF11 for example we never did need any of this tools everyone knew there job and how to play it a tank knew how many hate points he builds up with a Provoke a healer did know the formulas for all there heals to know which one was appropriate to cast Black mages and melee dps knew when to use what ability to not break the hate of the tank and if they did not they learned the hard way and made it better next time.
The reason ppl want add ons that help them is cause they cant handle it otherwise and cause they forgot that they play a game they simplly forget to have fun first all that matters to them are some numbers some add ons tell them and how that affect certain game situations.
All you need is an HP/MP bar for you and your team members a HP bar for the mob you fight amd your ability bar everything else is just a means to make the game easier nothing more nothing less.
The point to me about add-ons is that when the playerbase feels a specific 3rd party app is missing, it means the game's dev team haven't been doing their job.
Exactly.
Respect, walk, what did you say? Respect, walk Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me? - PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
How exactly do you get 34 active skills with an ele?
You can actually have MORE than that if you count weapon change skills and all the skills you've purchased with points which can be changed out. You have to remember that elementalists have 4 elemental modes that EACH have different skills and that EACH have weapon skills that vary as well. Elementalists are kind of mind-dizzying to play, actually (to ME).
The point to me about add-ons is that when the playerbase feels a specific 3rd party app is missing, it means the game's dev team haven't been doing their job. Either critical information is missing, or something is designed horribly. An Anet emplyee said the same thing in an interview a few months ago, and I was SO happy to hear that. I've always felt Blizz's take on things was "Who cares if players want that functionality? They can make it themselves, we don't need to bother"
The level of customization is always nice, but I hate the cycle that UI mods forced games like WoW to have. Look at KTM (used to be a popular threat mod until better ones replaced it)
-Threat control was sometimes a tricky thing in vanilla wow.
-Players developed add-ons to compensate.
-Gameplay became MUCH easier, to the point of trivial.
-Since everyone uses KTM, Blizz tweaks raids to take that into account. No the few people that don't have KTM HAVE to have it just to keep up.
-Rinse and repeat.
KTM was pretty much guess work, if Blizzard did not want it they could have stopped it fairly easily the same way they stopped addons they did not like, your last point is just a lie, you do not need any threat meter addon, because when they made the decision to take players seeing their threat level into account when tuning raids, they added threat as part of the default UI so no, you never needed any addon to keep up.
When you say it was tricky you just mean tedious and still not a challenge at all right? Not having threat did not add anything to the raid, the whole difference between having KTM back in vanilla and not having it was the raid leader calling people in and out of the fight based on gut feeling and us making the boss before, so you would end up with 2 healer groups swapping in and out to keep threat down, and DPS doing the same thing with rogues vanishing on cooldown.
It was tedious, it wasnt challenging at all cause you did the same thing for every boss fight, there was nothing more challenging about not seeing the threat you were doing.
The point to me about add-ons is that when the playerbase feels a specific 3rd party app is missing, it means the game's dev team haven't been doing their job.
Exactly.
You can certainly see it that way, but the way I see it, the community used the tools that were given to them and came up with more interesting improvements, without UI addon support you will never know what is missing, or you will but chances are you are just gonna bitch about it on the forums and be told that you are the minority or whatever.
There are thousands of addons I never used, but I bet you they were useful for someone, so that someone is a happy customer, if he felt that a little feature is missing and just coded it or someone else with the same mindset coded it for him, instead of him feeling frustrated about it.
KTM was pretty much guess work, if Blizzard did not want it they could have stopped it fairly easily the same way they stopped addons they did not like, your last point is just a lie, you do not need any threat meter addon, because when they made the decision to take players seeing their threat level into account when tuning raids, they added threat as part of the default UI so no, you never needed any addon to keep up.
When you say it was tricky you just mean tedious and still not a challenge at all right? Not having threat did not add anything to the raid, the whole difference between having KTM back in vanilla and not having it was the raid leader calling people in and out of the fight based on gut feeling and us making the boss before, so you would end up with 2 healer groups swapping in and out to keep threat down, and DPS doing the same thing with rogues vanishing on cooldown.
It was tedious, it wasnt challenging at all cause you did the same thing for every boss fight, there was nothing more challenging about not seeing the threat you were doing.
Actually the gap between the earilest use of threat meters and the inception of the built in meter was quite a lengthy period of time.
The point I was trying to make is Blizz actually tooled encounters around the belief that most players would have addons. There are blue posts flat out saying they did. That should never have to be the case.
KTM was pretty much guess work, if Blizzard did not want it they could have stopped it fairly easily the same way they stopped addons they did not like, your last point is just a lie, you do not need any threat meter addon, because when they made the decision to take players seeing their threat level into account when tuning raids, they added threat as part of the default UI so no, you never needed any addon to keep up.
When you say it was tricky you just mean tedious and still not a challenge at all right? Not having threat did not add anything to the raid, the whole difference between having KTM back in vanilla and not having it was the raid leader calling people in and out of the fight based on gut feeling and us making the boss before, so you would end up with 2 healer groups swapping in and out to keep threat down, and DPS doing the same thing with rogues vanishing on cooldown.
It was tedious, it wasnt challenging at all cause you did the same thing for every boss fight, there was nothing more challenging about not seeing the threat you were doing.
Actually the gap between the earilest use of threat meters and the inception of the built in meter was quite a lengthy period of time.
The point I was trying to make is Blizz actually tooled encounters around the belief that most players would have addons. There are blue posts flat out saying they did. That should never have to be the case.
Blizzard only said they tuned encounters with threat meters in mind shortly before they introduced them in-game. So unless you have any inside information other people dont, its just speculation.
Not only that but yeah, MOST players had the addon, wether they tuned it for it or not, no one forced players to use it, it was just a good addon.
Either the developer has to be able to make an insanely awesome UI and have excellent support for it and be willing to change it if it's not addressing the needs of the playerbase,
Either the developer has to be able to make an insanely awesome UI and have excellent support for it and be willing to change it if it's not addressing the needs of the playerbase,
OR
Addon support.
I agree with this, and the only viable option is addon support, it takes wayy too long to have the kind of developer side addon support equivalent of just giving players an API, a small feature could be implemented in a couple lines of Lua but from a dev standpoint even if the new intern coded it in 2min, it has to go through the whole integration process, which is already long on a good day, then the small change is gonna be batched up with another set of changes so its not going in until the whole patch is to whatever standard the company considers shippable.
The turnaround is just too long, for sometimes minimal things, then you find a bug in it, which will inevitably happen, and the whole process starts again, give this to someone willing to maintain it outside of this corporate process and you will get this much sooner and the ability to do it yourself if you wish.
Then there is the fact that everything needs to be fairly general purpose and has to please everyone, so when a new improvement releases, bob is disappointed cause he wanted flashing colours instead of just the ability for it to be black or white, jim wanted his to move around the screen everytime he gets hits and is also dissapointed, with player made addons, there are always lots of variations, its guaranteed you get a lot of shit aswell, but those usually end at the bottom of the pile, but there is usually something for everyone. Customizable to everyone's taste.
I have met many people still thinking a GW2 build consists out of just 10 skills?
well, not really, i have a defensive Elementalist crowd controll build, that has 34 active skills, from which 12 are crowd controlls. Every class has atleast 16 active skills, and some can have a lot more.
The game allows people like me, that love gameplay consisting out of a long chain of tactical dessigines to go really wild with things.
actually tha game forces me to not onty use skills but and continius change positioning so on the keyboard i have to dance in comparison to other MMOs with 20+ skills on the UI were actually i use 1/3 of them ...
Originally posted by Raven I like to mod my UI because I like it a certain way, a certain size, displaying in a certain schema, not having UI support is a step backwards after WoW made it really well and allowed people to customize their experience so well.
Having more control over our UI is a good thing but I think that WoW went a bit to far with that control. Add ons allow you to automate a lot of task and basicly change the way the game is played in a lot area of the game. In some case having an addons give you an advantage over other player that do not have the add ons and that should not happen.
Getting back to the subject of the thread (numbers of skills).
In GW, I think that they did a good job with the way skills are handled. You have acess to a lot of skills( definitly more then 10) while using the same set of button. It prevent the UI to be bloated with abilities and reduce the need to use macro and keybind to be able to use your character to its fullest.
Don't forget either that most skills in GW2 have a different structure than other MMOs. Usually skills are like this "does effect X" and then you get another skill "does effect X with more magnitude".
GW2 skills have more complexity. They usually have multiple effects and not of the same type (skills buffing while debuffing, damaging while protecting etc.) allowing to be used differently depending on the situation and some are sequenced.
Good example of sequence skills : the engineer's shield.
Engineer shield skill 4 : create a bubble around the player reflecting projectiles. Sequence : the bubble can be shattered to knock back and damage enemies in the area.
Engineer shield skill 5 : charge the shield, the next blow will be blocked and the attacker stuned. Sequence : throw the shield like a boomrang, enemies hit are dazed.
These 2 skills can be used in many ways, you can defend yourself, use it as a counter offensive, support, area control etc. it's not limited to one situation.
I have met many people still thinking a GW2 build consists out of just 10 skills?
well, not really, i have a defensive Elementalist crowd controll build, that has 34 active skills, from which 12 are crowd controlls. Every class has atleast 16 active skills, and some can have a lot more.
The game allows people like me, that love gameplay consisting out of a long chain of tactical dessigines to go really wild with things.
Yup...rolling Elementist, really enjoyed the support roll myself. Cycling through all 4 attunements to every advantage.
I'm happy about having modifiers I was able play my Elemenelist to the fullest extent.
Comments
It sure bothered me the 5 seconds it took to update them, you also never needed any specific UI to play the game, enforcing any sort of UI was always up to the player or guild you join depending on your situation.
Regarding PVP Blizzard can shutdown parts of the exposed API which they have done constantly it adds another layer of development but I can't really believe some people are saying that having less options is better hehe, I like to mod my UI because I like it a certain way, a certain size, displaying in a certain schema, not having UI support is a step backwards after WoW made it really well and allowed people to customize their experience so well.
SW:TOR has many flaws, but the UI modification mode they patched in is one of the best of the industry - you can move, resize and customize everything - and you do NOT need third party crap to do it.
No need for insecure crap coded by amateurs when the original developer can do it.
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
Sure and you can have that, and the ability to code in whatever you want, there is pretty good addons for WoW probably better than some developers can put out there, there is third party crap, there is also third party awesomness.
People fall for emails telling them to put in their username, password and bank details, "insecure" addons that run on a VM that is tightly controlled by blizzard is the least of their problems, if you dont know what it is or can't drop a couple of .lua files into an addon folder then you should stick with the default UI.
The point to me about add-ons is that when the playerbase feels a specific 3rd party app is missing, it means the game's dev team haven't been doing their job. Either critical information is missing, or something is designed horribly. An Anet emplyee said the same thing in an interview a few months ago, and I was SO happy to hear that. I've always felt Blizz's take on things was "Who cares if players want that functionality? They can make it themselves, we don't need to bother"
The level of customization is always nice, but I hate the cycle that UI mods forced games like WoW to have. Look at KTM (used to be a popular threat mod until better ones replaced it)
-Threat control was sometimes a tricky thing in vanilla wow.
-Players developed add-ons to compensate.
-Gameplay became MUCH easier, to the point of trivial.
-Since everyone uses KTM, Blizz tweaks raids to take that into account. No the few people that don't have KTM HAVE to have it just to keep up.
-Rinse and repeat.
Only because a certain group of players lack the skills to handle the game and need tools to help them play better does not mean that the Dev team did not do there job.
Take FF11 for example we never did need any of this tools everyone knew there job and how to play it a tank knew how many hate points he builds up with a Provoke a healer did know the formulas for all there heals to know which one was appropriate to cast Black mages and melee dps knew when to use what ability to not break the hate of the tank and if they did not they learned the hard way and made it better next time.
The reason ppl want add ons that help them is cause they cant handle it otherwise and cause they forgot that they play a game they simplly forget to have fun first all that matters to them are some numbers some add ons tell them and how that affect certain game situations.
All you need is an HP/MP bar for you and your team members a HP bar for the mob you fight amd your ability bar everything else is just a means to make the game easier nothing more nothing less.
Exactly.
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
You can actually have MORE than that if you count weapon change skills and all the skills you've purchased with points which can be changed out. You have to remember that elementalists have 4 elemental modes that EACH have different skills and that EACH have weapon skills that vary as well. Elementalists are kind of mind-dizzying to play, actually (to ME).
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
KTM was pretty much guess work, if Blizzard did not want it they could have stopped it fairly easily the same way they stopped addons they did not like, your last point is just a lie, you do not need any threat meter addon, because when they made the decision to take players seeing their threat level into account when tuning raids, they added threat as part of the default UI so no, you never needed any addon to keep up.
When you say it was tricky you just mean tedious and still not a challenge at all right? Not having threat did not add anything to the raid, the whole difference between having KTM back in vanilla and not having it was the raid leader calling people in and out of the fight based on gut feeling and us making the boss before, so you would end up with 2 healer groups swapping in and out to keep threat down, and DPS doing the same thing with rogues vanishing on cooldown.
It was tedious, it wasnt challenging at all cause you did the same thing for every boss fight, there was nothing more challenging about not seeing the threat you were doing.
You can certainly see it that way, but the way I see it, the community used the tools that were given to them and came up with more interesting improvements, without UI addon support you will never know what is missing, or you will but chances are you are just gonna bitch about it on the forums and be told that you are the minority or whatever.
There are thousands of addons I never used, but I bet you they were useful for someone, so that someone is a happy customer, if he felt that a little feature is missing and just coded it or someone else with the same mindset coded it for him, instead of him feeling frustrated about it.
Actually the gap between the earilest use of threat meters and the inception of the built in meter was quite a lengthy period of time.
The point I was trying to make is Blizz actually tooled encounters around the belief that most players would have addons. There are blue posts flat out saying they did. That should never have to be the case.
Blizzard only said they tuned encounters with threat meters in mind shortly before they introduced them in-game. So unless you have any inside information other people dont, its just speculation.
Not only that but yeah, MOST players had the addon, wether they tuned it for it or not, no one forced players to use it, it was just a good addon.
I want one of two things.
Either the developer has to be able to make an insanely awesome UI and have excellent support for it and be willing to change it if it's not addressing the needs of the playerbase,
OR
Addon support.
I agree with this, and the only viable option is addon support, it takes wayy too long to have the kind of developer side addon support equivalent of just giving players an API, a small feature could be implemented in a couple lines of Lua but from a dev standpoint even if the new intern coded it in 2min, it has to go through the whole integration process, which is already long on a good day, then the small change is gonna be batched up with another set of changes so its not going in until the whole patch is to whatever standard the company considers shippable.
The turnaround is just too long, for sometimes minimal things, then you find a bug in it, which will inevitably happen, and the whole process starts again, give this to someone willing to maintain it outside of this corporate process and you will get this much sooner and the ability to do it yourself if you wish.
Then there is the fact that everything needs to be fairly general purpose and has to please everyone, so when a new improvement releases, bob is disappointed cause he wanted flashing colours instead of just the ability for it to be black or white, jim wanted his to move around the screen everytime he gets hits and is also dissapointed, with player made addons, there are always lots of variations, its guaranteed you get a lot of shit aswell, but those usually end at the bottom of the pile, but there is usually something for everyone. Customizable to everyone's taste.
actually tha game forces me to not onty use skills but and continius change positioning so on the keyboard i have to dance in comparison to other MMOs with 20+ skills on the UI were actually i use 1/3 of them ...
Having more control over our UI is a good thing but I think that WoW went a bit to far with that control. Add ons allow you to automate a lot of task and basicly change the way the game is played in a lot area of the game. In some case having an addons give you an advantage over other player that do not have the add ons and that should not happen.
Getting back to the subject of the thread (numbers of skills).
In GW, I think that they did a good job with the way skills are handled. You have acess to a lot of skills( definitly more then 10) while using the same set of button. It prevent the UI to be bloated with abilities and reduce the need to use macro and keybind to be able to use your character to its fullest.
Don't forget either that most skills in GW2 have a different structure than other MMOs. Usually skills are like this "does effect X" and then you get another skill "does effect X with more magnitude".
GW2 skills have more complexity. They usually have multiple effects and not of the same type (skills buffing while debuffing, damaging while protecting etc.) allowing to be used differently depending on the situation and some are sequenced.
Good example of sequence skills : the engineer's shield.
Engineer shield skill 4 : create a bubble around the player reflecting projectiles. Sequence : the bubble can be shattered to knock back and damage enemies in the area.
Engineer shield skill 5 : charge the shield, the next blow will be blocked and the attacker stuned. Sequence : throw the shield like a boomrang, enemies hit are dazed.
These 2 skills can be used in many ways, you can defend yourself, use it as a counter offensive, support, area control etc. it's not limited to one situation.
Yup...rolling Elementist, really enjoyed the support roll myself. Cycling through all 4 attunements to every advantage.
I'm happy about having modifiers I was able play my Elemenelist to the fullest extent.