Having played the devil's advocate yesterday on everybody having to play their class role, today I'm going to argue the complete opposite view: Everybody should be free to spec as he want, and the game should accommodate that. Sorry if my previous post shocked or confused you, it's an exercise in dialectic, arguing both thesis and antithesis to get a more complete view on one subject. It sure worked in getting the discussion rolling. :)
The problem we're discussing is still the same: You want to visit one of the level 70 dungeons, and find that if take a random pickup group of people with some odd class mix, talent builds chosen more for PvP and soloing dps than for group support, and just average playing skill, you are likely to wipe several times before you even reach the first boss, and never make it to the end of the dungeon. That is particularly annoying if going to that dungeon is part of a long quest series, and you end up being blocked and unable to complete the quests.
The one solution I proposed yesterday is that if the group wipes, it's the players fault for not having chosen a better group mix and specialized group talent builds. I stayed away from the even more insulting "learn2play" argument, that the group wipes because the players are bad, but of course several readers brought up that argument in the discussion in one form or another (usually in the form of "but *I* can fulfill my class role without the right talent build").
Today I'm going to argue that if the group wipes, it's Blizzard's fault for making the dungeons too hard. And the solution to that problem is already programmed in: heroic mode dungeons. If it is possible to program a harder dungeon difficulty with better loot, then it must be possible to program an easier dungeon difficulty with less good loot. Why not have "easy" *and* "heroic" alternatives to the default "normal" dungeon difficulty? In "easy" difficulty you'd get less good loot, maybe only greens, but at least you could finish all your quests, and you could go and play with your friends, regardless of what classes and talent builds they are, and whether they are playing very well.
So you're a shadow priest, and your friends are a fury warrior, two retribution paladins, and a hunter. For the sake of argument we'll assume that you're playing very well (*grin*), but the warrior never liked tanking and is bad at it, the paladins think they are dps machines, and the hunter keeps his pet on aggressive mode. (I'm sure you already grouped with these people). Or another example, you're a shaman, and your 4 friends are shamans too, and you decide to rotate the roles of tank, healer, and dps. What I would like to see is an "easy" mode for level 70 dungeons that allows such groups to succeed. Not a walk in the park for a bad pickup group, but still doable after a couple of wipes. Far too easy for a good group with a perfect class balance and specced with the optimum group talents, but then there wouldn't be any reason for them to choose easy mode.
Now I know that for this argument I'll get a lot of angry comments from the opposite kind of people than those who shouted at me in yesterday's post. There are people around who think that a MMORPG is there to provide a static challenge, and that the players have to adapt to beat that challenge. Part of the adaption is learning to play better yourself, and that is certainly a good thing. But if you saw the people proposing to use the armory to kick out badly spec'd people from your group, you can see the dark side of adaptation. A lot of what is wrong with guilds in World of Warcraft is this concept of selecting your "friends" by class, talent build, and play ability. What if you have real life friends, or met people online who are extremely nice, but they play a class you don't need in your group, with a bad talent build, and they aren't playing very well?
I'd argue that the "MMORPG as a challenge" concept can only work for so long. Sooner or later players hit the limits of their abilities, or the abilities of the people they are able to organize as a group, and frustrations start to rise. The "MMORPG as a place to hang out with friends" has inherently a better longevity. But for that to be possible, the game has to make it possible to play with your friends without regarding their class, talents, and skill too closely. Being able to modify the difficulty level of a dungeon in *both* directions would go a long way towards that. It would make a far larger part of the game accessible to a far larger part of the population. The more accessible content you have in your game, the longer people are going to play it. And if by playing the "easy mode" dungeons they get better acquainted with the dynamics of group play, learn to play better, and finally manage to advance to the "normal" difficulty dungeon even with an odd groups, just the better.
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