The importance of jumping revealed

Considering how often I jump in WoW you would believe that I had become rather good at it by now. I never used the jump-count-addon, and probably that’s just as well.

99 percent of those jumps are completely uncalled for. (The final 1 percent is when it's needed, such as jumping over the Thaddius gap. Unfortunately I fail unless I buff myself with slowfall. Many facepalm moments there, I assure you!)

I can’t come up with any reason for this excessive jumping that makes sense. For someone looking at it from the outside it probably looks like a nervous twitch of some sort. It’s a tic, like tapping your feet, picking your nose or clicking a pencil. I suppose it can even become a little annoying.

But somehow jumping fills me with joy and energy. If Larísa is bouncing around, looking happy and excited, a little bit of her merriness spills over to me as a player. It’s contagious. Having a few good jumps before a raid begins is almost as essential as buffing up and having a flask drink.

The only thing that bugs me a little is that the droprate on gnome flipping is so low. I keep trying and trying and trying, refusing to accept that they just can’t. For heavens sake, I’m a merrymaker! The entire purpose of gnomes is to spread happiness and smiles around them. As opposed to night elves, which in my world are way too grown-up to engage in such pointless things. The vulcans of Azeroth.

Anyway: I haven’t given up entirely. The flip thing for nightelves comes randomly and it’s the same for gnomes. It’s just that the droprate is much lower. The bigger reason to keep jumping!

Blizzard’s view on jumping
Blizzard themselves obviously thinks jumping is a big deal too. Cory Stockton talks about it in a recent interview in the British newspaper The Guardian, where he appears along with Greg Street and Tom Chilton. (Part 1, Part 2).

Cory says that the reason why we like to jump so much is that they “tuned the living crap out of it”:

“When we do something in WoW, it's got to feel instantly reactive, it can't feel laggy, it can't feel confusing. Something as simple as the jump – you see people jumping about in WoW all the time and the reason they do that is because we tuned the living crap out of it. The animations are tuned exactly right, the way we send those commands over the server, we have prioritisation on stuff, so certain animations will play smoothly. And we have randomness built into that, in the way the night elf does an occasional front flip. A jump animation isn't just that, it has multiple alternatives. And no one would think that a jump animation matters that much, but we put in so much effort because we knew players would be doing it all the time.”

I think it’s interesting because it highlights how important the details are. For how much we love to experience cool, advanced, multiphased endbosses as Yogg and LK, it’s all for nothing if the basics doesn’t work.

Don’t put all your resources into working on the perfect endboss before you’ve gotten the jump right.

WoW as an ecosystem
Back to the interview in The Guardian. It’s one of the better I’ve seen – finally someone is asking about the stuff that I’m interested in hearing, and the developers are giving interesting answers. I really recommend you to read it all. I’ll give you a few more highlights here though.

Greg Street shows his background as a marine biologist, talking about WoW as an ecosystem.

“A slight perturbation in one slot can have unintended consequences. And then things evolve over time and you have players trying out things you never would have thought of, or thought they could do, and suddenly they make it work. It's fun, you learn a lot and it surprises sometimes. WoW is very hard to control, it's often running off on its own. We try to influence it, but I don't pretend for a moment that we have it captured!”

One example of when the player takes the game in a different direction than the developers had planned is Wintergrasp. Cory Stockton talks about the group mentality, which turned out to be very different when it went live, compared to how it was in the beta testing.

“We had a system where you had to get a certain amount of honourable kills to get vehicles, but the players ended up doing something completely different to get vehicles so we modified the whole system. The way that they were attacking the bases was way different to how we had planned. The problem with something like that is, with the beta it’s hard to get critical mass of people to play it, but when it goes on the server and you have a thousand people going on there at one time, a group mentality works very differently to a small number of players. Definitely, with things like that, we just make updates with every patch.”

Player personalities and sandbox games
I think we hear the biologist speaking again when Greg Street categorizes player types. It’s incredibly stereotyped, but I couldn’t help giggling at it.

“There are definitely certain types of players who gravitate toward certain types of character. The guy who wants to be the hero, to come in and save the day, that's often a paladin; the guy who wants to cause grief to other players, they'll be a rogue, they'll hide and get someone as they go pass; the mage wants to be a loner, but still very useful. Also, when presenting bad news you need to do it in different ways – for a rogue you can present it very mathematically, because they like to number crunch a lot. Paladins have often felt oppressed, very defensive, so they want you to take their feelings into consideration. You go through a lot of, well, I feel your pain, I know what it's like to get nerfed!”

Hey, Ghostcrawler, have you been spying on me and my guild?

The last part I’d like to mention from this article is where they’re taking a look at the next generation of MMOs. Tom Chilton calls sandbox games “interesting from a study standpoint”, but is worried about the quality that becomes unpredictable when players are creating the content and the fun by themselves, doing “random stuff you can’t control”.
This said though, he says they’re looking closely at it.

“It's too early to make any announcement about that, but sandbox gaming is something we look at and explore and think about a lot. There are good elements of these styles of games that we'd like to integrate.”

That sounds hopeful to me. Maybe this interest will have an impact on Blizzard’s Secret Next MMO-project. How much I love the amusement park and the rollercoster rides, I think the sandbox elements in a game can keep you entertained for a longer time. My ideal MMO doesn’t contain one thing or another, but both.

On the other hand there’s the statement by Core Stockton that points in another direction, towards the console platform.

“When I look at WoW, that's what I think of, the action adventure genre. You've got to get the MMO part of it out of your head. For a player, when they're doing a dungeon or a quest, there's no reason that you can't do things you can do in a console game. It's the idea of erasing those barriers.”

Hm. I don’t’ quite get this thing about “getting the MMO out of your head.” Is that so wise if you’re actually working on an MMO? Wouldn’t it be more natural to look in the opposite direction: “What does an MMO bring to the table that a solo-player console game doesn’t, what’s our unique selling point, what is the core idea that we should develop and refine to perfection?”

But what do I know? I’m just a simple innkeeper in a far distant corner of Azeroth, an average player thinking aloud.

After all: Blizzard still knows how to make a good jump. And that’s what matters most. Now if they only could tune up the drop rate for gnome flips a little…