WAR was released during a time when I exclusively lived off a WoW diet (quite successfully, as a matter of fact). The last game before WAR’s release I had looked at was Vanguard. That didn’t endear me to playing games at release. And if you didn’t play WAR at release, you probably never played it. And if you did play it at release, you probably also didn’t play it for long… 😉

Your reply (and Harbinger Zero’s farther up) convinces me that I was wrong, and that free buffing vs. group-only buffing is not a question of game age. Even today, both forms coexist.

I still wonder why you would ever want to limit buffing to your own group. It seems like such a no-brainer and wasted opportunity: buffing is a low-effort, low-key, benevolent interaction between people. Shouldn’t MMOs grasp at every straw to foster interactions?

Thanks for listing out the games that don’t do this as it just adds more reasons for me not to waste my time on them.

The thing I wonder though, is: is it really just rough requirements being sketched out, without thinking of the corner cases, and then letting the programmers loose? Aren’t many of those game multi-million dollar enterprises; shouldn’t they have capable game designers working on them? People whose job it is, at least in part, to look at other games, analyze how the different parts in those games work: spells, enemies, group dynamics, world layout, etc., and then make well-founded decisions how their game should look like? And, since it’s a computer game, who have at least a basic understanding of how the technical building blocks of software and communication work, so they can gauge what should work and what’s pretty much out of the question, technically. It just feels like a conscious decision to do buffs either way, if only because there is such a large difference between the extremes of “buff whoever you want, as long as they’re not hostile to you” and “your buff is an always-on aura that only extends to people as long as they’re in your group”, and the alternatives are so clearly laid out by prior examples from other games.

Coming back to your example, I expect requirements gathering to be a very complicated job if you have to extract the requirements out of people outside of your own domain. (Hell, I have a hard enough time understanding electrical engineers at work, and vice versa, and you’d think we’d be at least somewhat close, all working on networks in some way or another.) But in this case, I somehow expected to have professionals doing the design decisions, who are trained in doing exactly that: designing, and communicating their designs.

Maybe I’m overestimating the thought process that goes into a game, and the money spent on thoughtful design, instead of blingy graphics and voice acting…

Most people will tell you the most common way X works. They won’t tell you about the unusual interactions, or the rare cases. If you ask them what to do in unusual circumstances, they’ll tell you the right way to handle it, but it doesn’t occur to them to tell you that the unusual circumstances can occur.

Similarly, if the programmer asks how the designer wants buffing to work, it’s very easy to say, “I want to press the button, and myself and everyone in my group gets the buff”. If the programmer stops there and implements, the game won’t have drive-by buffing.

However, if the programmer asks, “What should I do if the player targets someone outside the group?”, the designer will go, “Oh yeah, in that case if the target is friendly, it should get the buff.”

But the programmer has to take that extra step and ask about the edge case. Sometimes the programmer won’t even realize that the edge case exists, if she is not familiar with the domain. Requirements gathering is a lot more complex than it can seem at first, and can be a bit of art at times.

The Magician class in EQ and EQOA could actually summon all manner of items from gear (in case no repair shop was nearby) to my personal favorite, magic gems. The gems were to be given to a player and had three charges, each of which cast the previous tier power level of one of the Magician’s primary nukes. They worked off of global cooldown, which made for a nice little perk in gameplay or burst DPS for a group.

Nevertheless, it’s probably easy enough to have group buffs and still allow drive-by buffing. As you say, WoW had single-target and group versions of its major buffs for many years before they rolled both into one, while keeping both functionalities. I can’t believe it’s simply laziness on the developers’ or designers’ part that one version is getting phased out more and more.

Also, it’s great to see others enjoy this as well. There’s nothing odd about it! It’s great fun helping others with so little work on your own part.

I know both WoW and SWTOR both allow you to buff outside your group. In fact, when WoW changed how their buffs worked, I actually noted that they kept this functionality:

http://blessingofkings.blogspot.ca/2010/05/cataclysm-blessings.html

“The thing I like best about the new Blessings is that they retain the ability to do “drive-by” buffing. It’s odd, but I enjoy casting Blessings on random people who pass by, especially when out leveling, or when you come across a lowbie questing. One of the best changes in recent memory was when buffs were changed to automatically cast the correct version on lower level characters. I was a bit concerned that in order to get one-click Blessings we would have to give up the ability to buff random strangers. I’m happy to see that this is not the case. Excellent work by the dev team to recognize this corner case.”

I never heard of that kind of ability, giving others temporary abilities. It sounds like a lot of fun! The closest I’ve ever seen to that are the baubles that a healer can summon into other people’s inventories in EQ2 and Vanguard, and that can be consumed to resurrect the healer. That’s limited enough, though, that I never thought of it as a temporary ability and more as a protection against premature ends to dungeon runs because your healer died, can’t run back, and nobody can rez him.