The value of friends

... on Facebook appears to be less than 10 cents, according to Australian company USocial, who will happily sell you thousands of Facebook friends and Twitter followers for that price. Or used to, because now Facebook threatened USocial with legal action, and USocial at least temporarily suspended their Facebook activities. You can still buy Twitter followers in bundles up to 100,000. USocial also started this month to sell YouTube video views. As I recently had another blogger bragging here about his higher visitor numbers, I now wonder if USocial is also selling blog visitors and RSS feed subscribers. If not, I'm sure that service is just around the corner.

I woke up this morning to the 1973 Roberta Flack version of the song "Killing me softly with his song", which tells the story of her feeling that a young boy is "killing her softly" with a song text that too closely resembles her innermost feelings. How did we get from that notion of innermost thoughts being very private to the idea that innermost thoughts should be posted on the internet, and buying in people to read them if not enough of them show up on their own?

Ultimately I hope that companies like USocial will help to destroy the cult of "eyeballs", which is an artifact from the dot.com era. The more people realize that for anything which is free the number of visitors can be manipulated by various techniques, like "search engine optimization", or buying followers from USocial, the more sceptical everybody will hopefully become of those empty numbers. I do think that people vote honestly with their wallets, but for anything where you can sign up for free, a visitor is worth not even the pocket change that USocial will sell them to you for, even if technically those visitors are called "friends" or "followers".
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Welfare cooking skill

Pretty regularly Blizzard nerfs some challenge in World of Warcraft and makes something which was previously hard to get a lot easier. That usually makes the people who couldn't do the hard achievement happy, but those who already did it on hard mode unhappy. And I must admit I'm not quite happy with the way Blizzard nerfed acquiring cooking skill in the current Pilgrim's Bounty holiday event.

Basically there is a "quest line" for the holiday event which requires you to cook various Thanksgiving types of food in various cities. And the recipes are of increasing difficulty and stay orange/yellow for a wider than usual skill range. So if you start out with zero cooking skill and just follow the quest line, making 60 food of each type plus spice bread, you'll end up with 350 cooking skill, at which point you can make a Bountyful Feast which is better than the currently best food, Fish Feast.

I used this quest line to get my paladin up to 350 cooking from zero, and it was extremely cheap, and took very little time. Well, except for the part where I absolutely wanted to have the Turkinator achievement for killing 40 turkeys with less than 30 seconds between each two turkeys killed, which is a very annoying achievement, as it fails every time you cross path with another player. I recommend Ridgepoint Tower in Elwynn Forest, as by the time you make the tour around, the first turkeys have respawned. The achievement gets slightly easier if you first do all the Pilgrim's Bounty quests, leading to you receiving the Turkey Caller.

But compared to previous methods of leveling cooking to 350, which either involved lots of farming meat, or fishing, or spending a fortune on the AH, the Pilgrim's Bounty event is giving cooking skill away far too easily. Where is the fun in leveling a tradeskill when you can level it for a handful of silver in an hour? Even if the event, and the food, only lasts for a week, the cooking skill lasts forever.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (51) comments Links to this post

 
Gravity on the tank ratio

Gravity from pwnwear, a Death Knight tanking blog, asked on my input on the ratio of tanks to other classes in a guild. Basically the problem is that in a 25-man raid encounters require only 2 tanks (8% of players in the raid), or at maximum 3 tanks (12%). But in a 10-man raid or 5-man heroic, you would always take 20% of tanks in the group.

So a guild which has 20% of tanks and was doing fine gearing up in heroics and 10-man raids will have a tank surplus the moment they start tackling 25-man raids, and will have to bench half of their tanks. But a guild with only 12% of tanks which is perfect for 25-man raids will not have enough tanks to do many 5-man and 10-man expeditions.

While I would agree with Gravity that this can be a problem, I think the solution is a simple one, especially for Death Knights: The guild just needs to always invite 5 characters with tank potential to 25-man raids, and then let them organize a rotation in which half of them are doing dps with the help of dual spec.

So while the tank ratio is contributing to the general tank shortage problem, I don't think it is the main culprit. The two main tank problems are:

• Tanking is a high-stress job with significantly more responsability than dps.
• Gearing up a tank to the same level of "acceptable" gear as a dps is a lot harder, due to the relative scarcity of tanking gear.

Now of course some players enjoy the added challenge of raiding with a tank. But in general it boils down to some roles carrying more responsability in a raid than others, and the combination of higher responsability with lower probability of an epic reward is not a good one. Adding another "tank class" in WotLK hasn't helped, or even just increased the competition for plate gear. You don't need to be much of a prophet to predict that one of the weak points of the upcoming new LFG system will be lots of groups waiting around for a tank. Or a healer, who do share the "high responsability" problem, although they usually are better off than tanks for gear.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:24 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Thought for the day: Persistence part 2

Even a MMORPG ends one day, either by us quitting or by the servers shutting down. If we don't play to enjoy the moment, but play to achieve a certain level and quality of gear, what exactly remains from all of our efforts the day the servers shut down?
- posted by Tobold @ 11:12 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
Phishing alert: Jade Tiger e-mails

Please be warned that today somebody swamped the internet with an extremely well made phishing mail, which looks very much like a genuine mail from Blizzard, and promises you a Jade Tiger in-game pet if you just fill out a survey. Of course to do so you'll have to type your Battle.net login and password on the fake website us.blizzard-survey.com. And the next time you log in after that, instead of finding a Jade Tiger, you'll find your characters naked and all your gold and possessions gone.

Braving the dark corners of the internet I gave a fake userid and password to the phishing website, which led me to the survey (note that if the website wasn't fake, I wouldn't have been able to "log on" with the fake userid). I was surprised how extremely professional this phishing side was, it looked exactly like a Blizzard site, even the survey looked real, and after thanking you for participation you get forwarded to the real World of Warcraft site. Scary stuff, this.

Now excuse me while I run a virus check on my computer.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:09 PM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Dragon Age: Origins - Review

FTC disclaimer: I do have a material relationship with EA Bioware insofar as they did send me a free review copy of Dragon Age: Origins. Nevertheless the copy of the game that I actually played was a “Digital Deluxe” version bought via a Steam pre-order, thus including all existing additional downloadable content. I'd claim my opinion isn't influenced by a second free copy, but I'm disclosing this information so you can decide that for yourself.

This review of Dragon Age: Origins will include several comparisons of DAO to MMORPGs in general, and specifically World of Warcraft. That might seem a strange comparison to some of you, as obviously these are different genres of games. But there are common problems and solutions in single-player and massively multiplayer role-playing games; and by comparing them I hope to show up some inherent limitations of the two genres.

Dragon Age: Origins is the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate. Although DAO isn’t based on a D&D license like Baldur’s Gate, the game system used is quite similar to D&D, with some clever additions adapted from MMORPGs, e.g. warriors having a taunt command. So like Baldur’s Gate you start out the game alone, but quickly pick up various colorful companions. It’s not quite “go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes”, but your companions do have a mind of their own, leading to sometimes funny interactions between them and you, or each other.

A RPG consists of two building blocks: Combat, and a story which happens between combats. In Dragon Age: Origins combat happens in real time, but by hitting space you can at any time pause the game and give commands to your characters. You can control one character directly in real time, and give a series of tactical instructions to the other characters. Note that even on “normal” difficulty, the second lowest of 4 difficulty settings, doing combat only in real time will get you killed in any harder fights, and every boss fight. Thus pausing and working in pseudo turn-based mode is pretty much required.

In comparison to World of Warcraft, combat in Dragon Age: Origins is generally harder, and far more tactical. Some basic principles are the same: You put a heavily armored tank in front, taunting the enemy to attack him; heal said tank with a healer or potions; and use the remaining party members to deal damage. There is aggro management, crowd control, and the necessity to watch both health and mana of your characters. Only that in WoW you only play one character (unless you multi-box), and you can’t pause to give commands. As in DAO you can save before the combat and then replay any failed attempts, and as you can pause in combat to have time to think and give commands, combat can be harder and still be doable. As you control all characters, there is also the possibility of friendly fire, which as a concept in a MMORPG would cause all sorts of problems.

The story that happens between combats in Dragon Age: Origins is mostly told in the form of dialogues, plus a few cutscenes. In the dialogues you have several options, which do have some influence on how the story unfolds. But much of that choice is an illusion, as the main storyline will progress with only minor variations regardless of which options you chose. DAO has a rather dark story, and the choices you have aren’t of a simple good or evil nature. For example a recurring choice is dealing with children possessed by demons, where you are given the options of letting the evil demon loose, or killing him by killing the child, neither choice being very pleasant. In other cases the dialogue has much simpler choices to make, which basically boil down to “do the quest” or “refuse the quest”, with doing the quest being the obviously better choice, to get more xp and rewards. The world of DAO features orcs, ogres, dragons, and many other mainstays of fantasy RPGs, only that for some reason the orcs are called hurlocks or genlocks, the ogres look like horned demons, and the dragons are referred to as archdemons. That is the sort of “creativity” I could have done without.

In comparison with WoW, the main difference is that as a single-player game DAO has a beginning, middle, and an end. That is the classic structure of storytelling in general, and thus the story of DAO follows a classic narrative structure, with you starting out as an unknown, and ending up saving the world. World of Warcraft doesn’t have an end, nor a story per se, but has “lore” instead, which is told in non-coherent bits and pieces through quest texts and books you find on your journeys. One consequence of that is that the world of WoW is relatively static and only changes with patches, or through tricks like phasing. In Dragon Age: Origins the world is changed by your actions, so that a village isn’t the same before and after you saved it from an evil undead invasion.

While you do interact with NPCs, and especially with your companions, this interaction of course is much simplified in DAO compared to the interaction with real other players in WoW. While you might do an action that displeases one of your companions in DAO, you often have the option to reload a previous save game, do the same action again with a different group composition, and thus keep everyone happy. Your companions in DAO are also suspiciously fond of gifts, so if you committed a heinous act in the presence of a good character, you can just bribe him with a trinket to completely compensate for the loss of esteem. I haven’t played the game through yet, but it is reported that if you do enough positive actions and gifts to a companion, you can even have cybersex with them. Not sure if that applies only to members of the opposite sex, not to mention the dog. Given the sex and copious amounts of blood splatter, I wonder why the game is only rated M. Your characters in dialogues and cutscenes after a combat are often covered in lots of blood, and there doesn’t appear to be an option to switch that off.

Character development in Dragon Age: Origins works by gaining xp and leveling up. While I would recommend to always have a healer, a tank, and two dps in your group, you will with time get enough different companions to choose from so that your main can be any class and specialization. However taking a mage character with a healing spell as your starting character will make your first game go a lot smoother. Characters have a kind of a talent tree, but as the tree is very wide and only 4 talents deep, you can quite well mix various specializations, and for example have a mage who heals, deals area damage, and does crowd control to boot. The rogue and warrior talent trees are somewhat less varied, but still interesting.

Depending on what version of Dragon Age: Origins you buy, different methods of “digital rights management” (DRM) will apply, that is either Steam DRM, or a simple disc check. EA did not put a more invasive DRM like SecuROM in Dragon Age: Origins. However every version of the game comes with at least some codes for downloadable content and these codes can only be used for one account to be created on the Bioware website. Thus if you buy a second-hand copy of DAO (or pirate one), you will miss out on at least part of the game, or you will have to buy the missing downloadable content. So in a way the DRM of Dragon Age: Origins is rather similar to the DRM of World of Warcraft, where you need a valid account too to enjoy the totality of the game. Of course Dragon Age: Origins has no monthly subscription fee, but Bioware will sell you additional content for the game in the future, with the first DLC called Return to Ostagar just having been announced to cost around $5.

In summary, in my very personal opinion, I do enjoy Dragon Age: Origins for its very tactical combat. Other people like the epic story of DAO, but I found the story to be rather stereotypical, linear, and cliché-ridden. I did however appreciate the “origins” part of DAO, which results in the first hour or two of your game being different depending on which origin you chose for your character. I’m not a huge fan of DAO’s dialogues, which are often long, and ultimately have only a small effect on the main story. But I must admit the story is well told, and not limited to simple good vs. evil choices. And you could always click through dialogue fast and get right back into the next fun tactical combat. So overall I do recommend Dragon Age: Origins.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (38) comments Links to this post

 
Thought for the day: Persistence

It is claimed that a MMORPG is fundamentally different from a single-player RPG in that the MMO game has a persistent world: When you log off, the world continues to exist and things happen while you are away. In a single-player game the world freezes when you save it, and starts exactly there when you load that game. But is that really true? When you log back into a MMORPG, has the world really changed in your absence? Or isn't the change limited to other players having gained a level while you were gone, and the content of the auction house having changed?

In the current common model of eternal respawns, where it doesn't matter if somebody else killed the monsters you need for your quests while you were gone, because they came right back 5 minutes later, can we really talk of a persistent world? Or is a stupid Facebook game like Farmville, where somebody fertilized your crops while you were away, ultimately more persistent than a classic MMORPG?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:36 AM Permanent Link  (29) comments Links to this post

 
Mirkwood vs. Cataclysm

Technically I am subscribed to both Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft, only that the LotRO subscription is the "lifetime" deal. So I should be playing both games, and I should be equally interested in both both upcoming expansions, LotRO's Siege of Mirkwood coming out in two weeks, and WoW's Cataclysm coming out next year. But in reality I'm highly excited about Cataclysm, while Mirkwood leaves me cold.

Now you could think that this is because I'm actively playing WoW, but haven't played LotRO at all this year. But there is more to it than that. Imagine my situation was reversed, that I had high-level LotRO characters, but only low-level characters in WoW. In that case the Cataclysm expansion for WoW would still be quite interesting for me: I could start a new Worgen or Goblin, or I could use my existing low-level characters to explore all the massive changes to Azeroth. But for my low-level LotRO characters, the Mirkwood expansion offers nearly nothing, certainly not enough to encourage me to come back to LotRO.

In short, Cataclysm is an expansion which is quite interesting for ex-WoW players, regardless of when they stopped and how far they got into the game. Mirkwood is an expansion which is only interesting to players who already have a LotRO character at the level cap.

I do think that Blizzard is onto something here. We talk a lot about the number of WoW subscribers, are there 11 million, or should you just count the 5 million players who pay a monthly fee, and so on. We talk very little about the number of ex-WoW subscribers. If you look at PC games sales charts over the last 5 years, you'll find that World of Warcraft continues to outsell quite a lot of other PC games. But as the subscriber numbers have stopped growing, that influx of new players must be balanced by an outflow of burned out and bored players. I am pretty certain that by now there are more people with an expired WoW account than people with an active one. And a solid number of those ex-WoW players never made it to level 80, so they wouldn't be all that interested in an expansion which only offered post-80 content.

If you want to be extremely cynical (and hey, I know you want to, this is the internet after all) you could interpret it like this: The active World of Warcraft players are going to buy the expansion anyway, so it is better to design an expansion for ex-players, and even completely new players, than to just concentrate on your existing customers.

And I think that would work on other games than just World of Warcraft. Siege of Mirkwood? No, thanks! If I came back to LotRO for Mirkwood, with my highest level character being under level 30, I'd be stuck all alone, without a guild, without friends, without even a pickup group to be found, with only the announced change of making previous group content somewhat soloable so I could do the epic quest line to comfort me. But if LotRO had a Cataclysm-like expansion which added lots of low-level content, and thus breathed life into the low-level zones, I'd be back.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link  (47) comments Links to this post

 
Do not buy gold guides!

Earlier this year a fellow blogger named Markco asked me to have a look at his WoW economics blog, and whether I would allow him to do a guest post on this blog. I had a look at his blog, which looked interesting enough, and allowed his guest post, which created a lot of traffic on his blog. Once he was well established and got lots of visitors, Markco transformed his blog: It was now not only offering WoW economics advice, but was also selling Markco's gold guide. Markco then repeatedly pestered me to promote his gold guide, promising I would make a lot of money. I refused. I do consider gold guides to be the very worst deal you can make on the internet, as you are basically paying for information which you can easily get for free at many places. Buying a gold guide is actually more stupid than buying gold. I am not promoting gold guides, and I considered Markco's bait-and-switch blog to be a clever, but shady and underhand way to quickly attract lots of visitors.

Now you would never again have heard of Markco on this blog, if it wasn't for Gevlon. Markco approached Gevlon with several shady offers designed to promote Markco's gold guide. And Gevlon, while probably not considered the most upstanding citizen of the MMO blogosphere, is intelligent enough to see through scams like that. Actually being anti-social makes scam detection easier, as they are based on social engineering, which is something which simply doesn't work on Gevlon. Gevlon posted his experience with Markco here, and called me as a witness, after Markco mentioned my refusal to cooperate in a mail to Gevlon. I am happy to comply. Selling gold guides is bad enough by itself, but using various underhand ways to promote them, and promising affiliates unrealistic sums they'll never receive is downright repugnant.

Do not buy gold guides! There are dozens of WoW economics blogs which are considerably more up to date, and give better information for free than you are likely to find in any gold guide you had to pay $20 for.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:11 PM Permanent Link  (67) comments Links to this post

 
How big is the US market for MMORPGs?

Bigeyez alerted me to a Gamasutra article quoting a NPD study saying: "14 percent of U.S. consumers have a subscription to an online game like World of Warcraft." The US has about 308 million citizens, so if this study counted each of them as a possible "consumer", there would be over 42 million people with "a subscription to an online game like World of Warcraft". I have a hard time believing that.

I really wonder what exactly their definition of consumer is, and what their definiton of a subscription is. The report talks about consumer spending on these subscriptions, so did they count only active subscriptions with a monthly fee? Or did they count anyone with a free account to any Free2Play or "social space" online game too?

If there are between 2 and 3 million World of Warcraft subscribers in the US, then what exactly are the other 40 million subscribed to?
- posted by Tobold @ 3:51 PM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Spice of variety

Let me tell you how a typical play session of mine goes: Usually I first log on those of my World of Warcraft characters with a daily cooldown, like the alchemist transforming a rare gem into an epic gem once a day. Send the epic gem to my jewel crafter, who not only cuts the gem and sends it on to the bank alt, but also does his daily jewelcrafting quest, to get the tokens to buy new recipes. Then comes the general bank alt, followed by the glyph bank alt. The glyph bank alt can take up to one hour, as even with addons, getting 1,000 mails with either sold or expired glyph auctions from the mailbox and reposting those that expired will take a while. Then comes the inscription alt, who will now buy herbs, mill them to pigments, make inks, and then make those glyphs which sold out.

As several of these characters are guilded, and I'm watching guild chat, it is possible that I join a guild group doing some heroic dungeon or other activity. If not, I'll play one of my leveling alts, for example my paladin. But I'm usually just playing him an hour or two, and never past his rest xp. On other days I play other games instead of leveling a character, for example Dragon Age at the moment. Again I'm just playing an hour or two, finishing one chapter or section and then stop.

As you can see, I'm playing a *lot* of different characters and sometimes even different games in the same play session. The direct result of that is that I'm leveling quite slowly. I started that paladin when Cataclysm was announced, and today I'm only level 41. Measured in "level per week" that is rather slow, although I'm probably not faring that badly in "level per hour /played", given that I'm always on double xp from resting. My level capped characters are also developing either slowly or not at all. My "raiding" priest is only used as jewelcrafter or for helping out a guild group as healer, but as I don't raid for the moment he's not likely to get much in gear upgrades. In Dragon Age I'm also advancing quite slowly, I only reached Denerim this weekend, being less than 20% through the game (not counting having tried several starting "Origins").

Now I know that some people play games, especially MMORPG, to *arrive* somewhere. Some people even say that leveling a character in World of Warcraft is just a tedious obstacle towards the true goal of having a level capped character for the "true" game of raiding. If somebody who thinks like that looks at the way I play, he'd probably tell me that I'm playing it wrong. By dispersing myself among different characters and even games I'm not progressing very fast or very far with any character. But, as so often, the "you're playing it wrong" comments are based on a faulty assumption of us all having the same goal. But I'm not standing here scratching my head and wondering why my pally levels so slowly, and what I'm doing wrong. Rather I'd say that I'm playing it perfectly right, only my goals are diametrically opposed to the goals of the achievers.

Basically I'm working 8 to 5 every day, and when I come home I play games to relax. My goal is maximum entertainment, preferably with not too much stress and effort. My periods of low raiding activity for example coincide with my periods of higher job stress. As I put a strong priority on real life over virtual life, I'm rather reducing my game progress when I need my energy for my job, or my family, instead of the other way round. Playing a lot of different things in one play session for me has a higher entertainment value, as doing the same thing for several hours tends to bore me. Thus splitting my time up between different characters is perfectly rational and wanted. I actually enjoy the leveling game, in many cases more than the end game. And playing different areas of the game, leveling different characters, trying different tradeskills, and exploring different activities from playing the auction house to running low-level dungeons brings the spice of variety to my gaming sessions.

Now I'm certainly not telling the people with different goals that it is them who are playing it wrong. Yes, I sometimes wonder why people try to "win" a game which by definition is unwinnable, spending a lot of effort on getting gear which the next expansion will make obsolete. But I just assume that this is what is most fun to *them*. For me a MMORPG is not just *one* game, with a defined set of rules and a victory condition; for me a MMORPG is *many* games, and even has some aspects which are more correctly described as "toy" than as "game". So just as there is no way to play LEGO wrong, you can't really play World of Warcraft wrong either. As long as your activities are in line with your personal goals, you are playing it right.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:52 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Paladin charger

My paladin reached level 40 today. As I had read that epic mounts are available at level 40 since patch 3.2, I looked around for the quest that would give my paladin his epic charger. Turns out Blizzard has been lazy: You can *buy* epic riding skill at level 40 as paladin. But if you want to do the quest, you need to do the old quest line, which is level 60. I love epic quest lines, but I'm not riding slowly for 20 more levels, just because there is no level-appropriate quest line for this.

Thus, being human, I followed the instructions in the letter the riding skill trainer Randal Hunter helpfully sent me, and traveled to the Eastvale Logging Camp in Elwynn Forest. There I bought the Journeyman Riding skill for 42 gold 50 silver. Then I went to the paladin trainer, and bought the Charger spell for 1 gold 80 silver. Alternatively I could have bought an epic horse for 8 gold 50 silver, but that doesn't make much sense for a human paladin: The charger and the epic horse have very similar models, with the charger looking better and costing less. For paladins of other races there is a choice to be made between a racial mount and the charger.

Man, I remember an epic mount being 1,000 gold, now it only costs 50. Times have changed.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:18 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post