Let's Go Round Again

Kaylriene has a long post up about rotations and one-button mode in World of Warcraft and reading it made me think about the whole twisty topic in something of a different way. I'm not sure if I have enough to say about it myself to warrant a whole post but let's see how it goes.

I used to get quite irritated at the very mention of "rotations". At first it just wasn't a term I was familiar with from MMORPGs I'd played so I was suspicious of it on a purely linguistic level. What did it mean? Was it jargon from one or two specific games, bleeding across and staining the others? Why did people keep throwing it into conversations as though everyone obviously knew exactly what it meant?

I didn't know what it meant, not from personal experience, but it became clear enough from context quite quckly; it seemed to mean the order you cast spells or used abilities in combat. Or, if you prefer, the order you pressed the buttons to make it happen. Same thing.

This seemed weird to me from the get-go. Why would you have any sort of set order for something like that? Surely it would always be dependent on too many outside factors, like where you were, what you were fighting, who you were with and so on? I found it hard to imagine many situations where it would be advisable, let alone necessary, to stick to a pre-defined set of spells or abilities rather than assessing the situation in real time and choosing accordingly, which was how I'd always played.

By the time I'd seen the term "rotation" often enough to take notice of it, I guess I'd been playing MMORPGs for maybe a decade and a half. I'd been through my grouping years and come out the other side. Even though I was pretty much a solo player by then, I had done a lot of group play in my time and anyway it seemed the "rotation" concept applied to solo play, too, although obviously there it was deemed less crucial since if you were doing it wrong, no-one was going to suffer except you.

And that was even weirder; the idea that you could do it wrong. It was strange enough to me that people thought there were sequences of button presses that ought to be followed to begin with, let alone that you could be ostracized for not getting it right. Then again, I was well aware that MMO players were perfectly capable of refusing to have anything to do with each other over things far more ridiculous than that, such as which race they'd chosen at character creation, based not on RP prejudice but on the tiny variation in starting stats.

Whatever, I thought it was affected and obnoxious to tell other people they were playing the game wrong, even if it was true that the way they were doing it was less effective than it might be. It wasn't that I thought it was a bad idea to give people suggestions on how to hit harder or kill faster. Helpful advice is always welcome, or should be. It was more that I'd always felt that it was other people's business how they played and that if I didn't like the way they were doing it the solution was not to play with them.

Which, now I come to write it down, does sound like saying ghosting someone is better than telling them to get lost. But by and large we rarely did either. What we mostly did, all those years I was grouping with friends, guildmates and passing strangers, was to put up with pretty much anything anyone did that didn't get us all killed. 

There were certain names that used to make Mrs Bhagpuss and I groan out loud when they asked to join a group we were in or who we'd see log in and hope they didn't start asking us what we were doing and if we had space, but when the moment came, we pretty much always invited them anyway and worked around whatever their peculiarities or incompetencies might be. I'm sure other people felt the same about us but we all generally just muddled along and had fun somehow.

One reason I was never really aware of any kind of pressure to perform was that I never went near anything that could be called top-end content. I didn't raid and I was mostly behind or just up to the endgame, which was a lot harder for anyone to get to in those days.

The other significant factor was that in all the time I was grouping as a matter of course, roughly from the turn of the millennium to about 2008, in maybe half a dozen or more games, I never had to deal with damage meters. There were parsers in use, particularly in EverQuest. I ran one myself for a while, when there was a fad for them in the guild I was in. It was fascinating to see who was doing what, but everyone treated them more as something to gossip about than an indication anything ought to change. 

That makes it sound as though we were all little plaster saints and we certainly were an easy-going bunch but also gameplay was very different then. If you were down the bottom of the parse for damage or healing it might mean you were bad at playing your class but it could just as likely mean you'd been doing something else equally important like crowd control or debuffing, both of which were abolutely crucial to success in some MMORPGs of the era.

There were two ways you could be welcome in a group back then; one was being good at your role and the other was being fun to be with. The first is self-explanatory. We'd put up with some fairly irritating personal behavior to have a tank who could hold aggro like the tar-baby and knew how to turn mobs, and a healer who could be relied on not to let anyone die was allowed a great deal of leeway when it came to being grumpy and sarcastic (Holds up hand!) 

I imagine that still holds true today. The second, though, I suspect was an artefact of the time. Group combat back then involved a lot more down-time between fights and there was a lot more conversation both between pulls and during combat itself. People talked non-stop, frankly. It was like being in a chat-room where every so often a mob ran in and we beat it to death for interrupting our conversation.

In that scenario, being funny, amusing, witty, sharp-witted and a good conversationalist was about as likely to get you invited back as coming top of the parse for DPS. More so, in fact, since anyone can poke a sword into a monster from behind but not everyone can time a punchline.

In an environment like that the idea of a specific rotation designed to eke out the last few drops of damage seems like a luxury at best and a fantasy in most situations. While it's true that some groups did develop a rhythm that had them killing mobs like shelling peas, for the most part every pull was at least partly a surprise and every fight was likely to turn into a scramble for survival, with everyone living on their wits and their reactions. 

My persepctive as a Cleric in EverQuest also colored my understanding of what a fight was. I only had access to a limited number of spells and I had to choose them in advance. I had a lot more potentially useful spells than I could load so I had to try and predict which I'd be most likely to need. 

That meant a bunch of heals, of course, but also some cures, buffs and utilities, some of which would end up not being used at all. And there were plenty of times when things happened that I hadn't planned for, leaving me without the tools to do the job I'd suddenly been given. Many times I ended up leafing through my spell-book mid-fight, frantically trying to load a spell I never expected to want.

later, when I was playing a Beastlord, something I did for a couple of expansion cycles, I never even knew for sure what my role would be from fight to fight. As a swiss army knife class, I might be off-tanking, back-up healing, debuffing or adding DPS. Sometimes I'd be doing all of them in the same pull. The idea of a rotation would have seemed laughable.

With all of this in mind, later, when the concept became clear to me, I saw it is as restrictive, unintuitive, unimaginative and fundementally opposed to most of the reasons I'd ever played the games to begin with. Why would I want to limit myself to a set pattern of key-presses just to make a few numbers go up? 

My philosophy had always been the same; any fight that ends with the mob dead and the player alive is de facto a good one. The idea that there might be some kind of gold star on offer for doing it faster seemed nuts. TTK is another term I never heard used in those days.

Not that I was against efficiency. As a sit-and-heal Cleric of the strictest order, I used to rate my own success by how few heals I cast and how much mana I had left. A perfect fight for me would be one in which I sat and medded through the entire thing. With an attitude like that, you can see why the concept of rotation wasn't doing anything for me. 

As I was reading Kaylriene's post, though, something occured to me that I hadn't thought of before, whenever the topic came up: when I was playing my favorite class of all time, in any MMORPG, the Disciple in Vanguard, I did have a rotation.

Well, of sorts. It wasn't hard-coded. I did vary it a bit. But in essence, there was an order in which I pressed the buttons and I followed that order in nearly every fight. And it was great!

Why did I do it there, when I didn't do it anywhere else? Because the Disciple relies on builders and finishers and they are displayed on-screen in such a way as to be blindingly obvious and extremely easy to understand. You press some buttons to kick and punch and after a few of rounds of that some other buttons light up and you press those to heal yourself or debuff or do damage. 

It's a very simple system as used in countless games but the Disciple is by a long way the most intuitive and organic version of the mechanic I've experienced. It has an amazing rhythm to it that makes playing the class feel like playing an instrument or dancing. It's very satisfying when you get it right and as I read Kaylriene's post, which goes into great detail on why and how rotations operate, I finally felt a glimmer of understanding as to why people might not just feel getting one right was necessary but also why they might even enjoy it.

That was my epiphany, such as it was and with that insight, looking beyond that one class and character, I can now see elements of kinds of rotation in the gameplay of a number of classes I've enjoyed playing. The cyclical nature, the repetition and the predictability have a kind of zen-like appeal, particularly when you find a rhythm. Rather than being restrictive, the pattern frees the mind from outside interruptions and allows entrance to the fabled "zone".

Or it can do, when it works. On the other hand, when it doesn't, what you get is grindingly dull, slavish drudge-work, the hallmark of one or two classes I can think of (Looking at you, LotRO Guardian...) 

So, in conclusion, thanks to Kaylriene I feel I now have a clearer understanding of the rotational concept and a better appreciation of its merits. I'll try not to be so openly sneering about it in future.

I had something to say about the whole "One Button" thing, too, but that's going to have to wait for another time. Seems like I had more than enough to say about the subject after all.