It gets late early out there

The (half) weekly roundup:

Spinks mounts a nice defence of TotC as a raid trainer, given “it’s not possible to really learn how to play your class in heroics any more” - and bemoans Blizzard’s lack of in game mechanisms for player to player coaching.
Alison Roberts, still the best wow.com writer by a mile, on how hard it is to learn to tank given the high expectations of LFD: “Everyone wants an experienced professional. Nobody wants to be there for the learning process”
Chastity at Righteous Orbs likes the ICC buff and doesn’t care about the boasting: “it seems that somehow, in the minds of a great many people, the moment somebody gets the World First Arthas kill that’s it, and Wrath is all over bar shouting”
Rob Pardo, Blizz Supremo, presents an interesting insight into Blizzard’s design processes: “Easy to learn and almost impossible to master / Make everything overpowered”. Worth flicking through all the slides at the end.
Ferrel at Epic Slant wants to slow down the levelling race: “MMORPGs need to adopt the Dungeons & Dragons model once more where the game is less about reaching the next level and more about enjoying the ride”. Ties in with his earlier argument to stop level cap increases as the higher the cap the bigger the mountain facing new players: “Additional levels also stratify the player base and create a level disparity”
For all of y’all DKs out there, Gravity is taking a stab at creating the definitive DK forums

In other news, Civ V was announced, and at the GDC Civ creator/god Sid Meier discussed why everything game devs know is wrong.

Comments:

Regarding leveling - I think Blizz should code-up the law of diminishing returns. Some kind of asymptotic XP scale would still allow the crazies to continue and get some type of recognisable benefit - but not a game destroying one. Resetting the gradient every few months would give the stragglers (i.e. 99% of players) a chance to catch-up before the crazies pulled ahead again.

I think the main problem is how it discourages new players, and even stops existing players rerolling. I’d love to have a go at a Tauren Paladin, but would struggle to face 80 levels (soon to be 85) of questing. Then again, if it is about “the journey”, then the distant level cap shouldn’t matter. I actually enjoy the questing (until you hit railroad zones like Hellfire P.), but it would be a lot more fun if other people were around.

The problem is the lower levels are empty, which I guess is his point. If you can keep everyone at 80 (say), but expand content horizontally, they it becomes more feasible - gearing not withstanding. There’s more likely to be people all over the horizontal range then, from EJs to us :-)