My Life As A Gamer: The Importance of Testing Your Design's Function

Today I'm talking game design.

This weekend, the WOW Classic team shut down the other Beta servers and forced everyone in the Classic Beta to a specific server to test Alterac Valley (AV). All characters are Level 58, with pre-set gear, and all you can do is queue for and play AV. It's been fun to watch the livestreamers with Beta access, many of whom are old-timers who first made their names back in those Vanilla WOW days.

AV is my favorite Battleground because it's the closet the game got to its promise of faction-based PVP, but even then the design is deeply flawed and runs contrary to its stated aims of being a proper battle scenario. To summarize the scenario: there are two factions, and you fight for one of them. Each side has a General and a Base. Winning is solely by killing the enemy General. Between each side there is a forward base manned by a Captain, and four Towers or Bunkers each manned by a Lieutenanat. Wandering NPCs roam the roads. There are Graveyards from start to finish to capture; these allow you to resurrect closer to your objective when killed.

The scenario promises linear, tug-of-war, gameplay. The rules completely undermine this; it is routinely to completely run past early objectives to rush into the enemy base, capture the graveyard there, and then rush the general. Why? Because there is no mechanical requirement to force objectives to be taken and held or destroyed in turn to advance to the enemy general, as there should be. Furthermore, the bases are not properly symmetrical and this has resulted in win-loss biases over time.

The game works when these are fixed. The fixes required are as follows:

• Origin Spawn: As is, you start in a cave and not in your base. That's the first change: you spawn in your General's room. The Graveyard nearest that room is removed, guaranteeing that you can't be forced to spawn outside of your own base.
• Objective Connection: Each base starts off sealed; only friendlies can get in or out. Each forward area is also sealed to the same effect. The middle Graveyard is neutral and open to capture; this forces play to focus at all times at that front line location, with minor play devoted to fulfilling requirements to buff/access useful NPCs (either in doing so, or thwarting same). You have to take and hold each Graveyard in turn to attack the next.
• Connection 2:You have to take and hold the associated Graveyard to attack the Tower or Bunker tied to the Forward Base or the Base proper. You have to bust down the door to get into the thing, and then both kill the commander NPC as well as capture the flag within to take and destroy it. Recapturing a thing before the timer is up resets the thing and the enemy has to start again on breaking it down.
• Connection 3: You have to destroy both Bunkers/Towers to attack the (Forward) Base. Doors are sealed, so you have to break then down also; you have to kill the Captain to get access to the enemy's interior and Mine. You have to repeat this entire procedure to get into the enemy base and kill the General.
• No Victory Condition Changes: There is no time or kill limit. Only killing the enemy General gets you a win; the only other way to lose is for your entire side to quit- that's a forfeit and you get a Deserter Debuff that lasts until the weekly reset forbidding you from ALL Battlegrounds.

While I doubt anything will be done with AV's Classic form, it's current--and thoroughly degenerate--form on Live could be rehabilitated by making it into the first true PVP Warfront. Those who've played the Stromgarde and Darkshore scenarios know it's really a crippled psuedo-MOBA minigame that you have to actively AFK to lose, and I doubt that the upcoming Heroic Modes will change that. By taking AV out and remaking it as a PVP Warfront, the Live WOW team can restore this Battleground to the glory it should have had all along, and that includes new versions of classic AV items like the Ice-Barbed Spear and the Unstoppable Force.

And yes, Warfronts have this same flaw; you should not be able to complete the scenario until you take and hold all of the points between you and the enemy commander. You can, resulting in degenerate gameplay situations that run contrary to the stated intentions of the scenario to simulate an actual battle- situations that don't happen in practice and thus run contrary to the design goal as dramatized here.

That's what happens when the rules and mechanics do not produce the results that you're after; you get someone who sees how to break your game using your design while ignoring its intentions. Yang studied the simulation's rules, paying attention to the win conditions and the rules surrounding what is allowed to attain it; Wideborn, despite his depiction here, is far more practical. In practice, he's right; Yang, to his credit, knows this as he demonstrates at Astarte and thereafter in the series. (The point of the scene here is to show how Yang's focus on winning via applied history allows him to out-think opponents; what we actually saw here is flat-out Rules Lawyering.) If your tests do not produce the results you're aiming for, keeping changing it until it does. You'll always be glad that you put in the work, and so will your players.