Klepsacovic from Troll Racials Are Overpowered posted something last week about TERA which corresponds very much to what I was thinking:

I've been trying to sort out quite what is wrong with the Elin. My gut isn't much help, since it just screams "oh god what is wrong with those people!?" and gut-based psychoanalysis of developers isn't usually a successful endeavor. My brain kicks in eventually and says that no children are harmed by the development or play of the game, that is it fantasy events with fantasy characters in a fantasy world. Well okay, but that doesn't make me feel any less sick, so it appears as though my gut has triumphed.

I experience the same dissonance between my gut and my brain. The Elin are sexualized children, and I find that revolting. But I know that the issue of whether drawn child pornography is bad and/or illegal isn't quite as black & white. There are countries where the law says that drawn and photographed child porn are the same, and there are other countries where the legislation makes a difference for the reason Klepsacovic mentions: No children are harmed by it. Which for most people doesn't make it any less revolting.

I can rationalize my disgust by arguing that drawn child porn could lead perverts on to an appetite for the real thing. But then my brain explodes, because by analogy a video game in which you play a terrorist planting a bomb (Counterstrike) or shoot people in the head (every FPS) would be just as bad. If we argue that there is absolutely no risk that playing Grand Theft Auto or Mafia turns us into gangsters, then how do we justify the argument that depiction of sexualized children will turn us into perverts?

In the end, as Klepsacovic does, I can only say that the gut wins. I simply don't want to play a game that has panty-shots of children. Call it gut, call it a difference in culture between the Asians and the West, but the disgust easily beats the rational arguments.

Due to login server problems I didn't play Diablo III on launch day. But this morning I was able to play for 10 minutes, just to make sure the game worked. I got to level 3 and had 438 gold pieces. So I went and checked out the auction house: 400 gold pieces bought not one but two blue weapons (I made a dual-wielding monk), each having over twice the dps of the best weapon I had found up to that point. While some people had posted items for big amounts, there were already hundreds and thousands of low level blue and epic items available for extremely low prices.

The real money auction house doesn't seem to be up yet, I got a message that they hope to get it up and running in two weeks. Kudos to Blizzard for at first blocking my access to the real money AH by default due to parental controls. Back when parental controls were the only way to keep your Battle.net account from automatically using RealID, I had pretended to be my own parent to guarantee my privacy. So if you actually have a child with a Battle.net account and Diablo III, you will be happy to know that by default your child doesn't have access to the real money AH until you deliberately give him access via the parental control web page.

But the gold auction house already gives us a glimpse of what the real money AH will be like. Some people were deluded enough to believe that their experience in the beta AH would somehow translate onto the live servers. They couldn't have been more wrong. Very few people use beta auction houses, and beta AH prices tend to be extremely high. On the live servers people quickly realized that there is no such thing as bind on equip in Diablo III. Every item you find or buy, you can sell back on the AH later, even those that you used and replaced by something better. That means that each players every day is producing a constant stream of blue and better gear to feed into the economy, far more than there could possibly be demand for. Thus prices are quickly converging towards rock bottom. The gold you collect in an hour buys you a complete set of the best possible blue gear for your level for every slot. The value of blue gear is so low, that it won't even be traded on the real money AH, being worth much less than the minimum price.

Now of course I can imagine people buying epic and legendary gear for real money. But right now there isn't much incentive to do so. A complete set of the best blue gear for your class and level for every slot already makes you twice as powerful as if you used only the gear you find yourself. And you can get through the game perfectly well with the gear you find yourself, so even the blue equipment is already being a bit overgeared. Maybe the real money AH doesn't open because it would be of no use whatsoever before people played through the game once and started playing through a second time on higher difficulty. But my prediction is still that there is no serious money to be made by playing Diablo III and trading on the real money AH.

I have lost count of the number of MMORPG launches I participated. Given that sort of experience, I would say that the launch of Diablo III was par for the course: Login servers overloaded. Strange error messages including "you don't own a copy of Diablo III" regardless of whether you bought the game online or retail. Lack of official information from Blizzard. Pretty much what you'd expect for any big MMO launch.

Only problem: Diablo III isn't exactly a MMORPG. A significant part of the people who bought the game will not have played MMORPGs, and would have expected the launch of Diablo III to go like the launch of any single-player game: You buy a box with a disc, you install the game, you play. And Diablo III didn't provide that.

Given how many people play actual MMORPGs in a way which very much resembles a single-player experience, I think that most players of Diablo III are looking for exactly such a single-player experience with this game. A good number of players will either never play multi-player at all, or in a very limited way, occasionally with real life friends. But as everybody is forced to play online, even the "single-player" customers get all the disadvantages of a multi-player experience, all the server problems, overcrowding, and the like. I suspect that isn't going to go down well.

Diablo III Digital Purchase on Battle.net for Europeans today: €59.99
Diablo III retail version at the Media Markt in Belgium today: €39.99

Why does Blizzard think that I am willing to pay a full 50% more for the digital version?

In the last session my group started the Reavers of Harkenwold adventure. They learned of a group of evil mercenaries called the Iron Circle having taken control of the Barony of Harkenwold, and started helping the resistance movement by going after a tribe of bullywugs that was allied with the Iron Circle. In this session their fight against the bullywugs continued. Having dispatched the bullywug guards in the entry part of their cavern the last time, the party now advanced into the interior of the cave.

There a more epic battle ensued. Besides regular bullywugs there was their leader, a sorcerer hiding in a dragon's skull, which gave him cover against attacks by the players. And there were two grey oozes as a kind of surprise arriving only in the second round of combat behind the players. The whole thing was pretty well balanced and challenging, with the group succeeding in the end. But as soon as they had rested a bit and found some treasure, a patrol of bullywugs returned, getting them into the fourth fight of that game day (second of the session).

The main challenge of that fight was two giant frogs, who swallowed characters whole, taking them out of combat until they succeed a saving throw. The 4th edition of these giant frogs has been discussed on other D&D sites and forums, with some DMs feeling that they need to be nerfed. The have the potential to take a character out of combat for quite a while, without him able to do anything but take damage and roll saving throws. But I felt that this would mainly be a problem for smaller groups, while I have a six player group, with enough damage potential to take out a frog that is getting too dangerous. And I distributed their swallow attacks around, so as not to take the same character out of combat repeatedly and make the combat boring for him.

The group succeeded this battle as well, and found a halfling boy who had been taken prisoner by the bullywug patrol. The boy led the group back to his clan, a group of Vistani traveling folk on a barge on the river. The Vistani being travelers not only of this world, but of parallel worlds as well, they could advise the group on their enemy of the previous adventure, the ancient vrock Jaazzpaa. They suggested that if Jaazzpaa's chalice of planar travel had been weakened by centuries of contact with holy water, the demon would need a place where the barrier between the worlds was thin to reactivate the chalice. And they knew of the Keep on Shadowfell being built just on top of such a rift in the barrier between worlds.

Exhausted from a day of fighting, the group decided to spend the night with the Vistani, and we ended the session there.

I recently wrote about my doubts about the New Blogger Initiative, and could have expressed myself clearer. To be absolutely clear, I approve of new people blogging, and it is great to give them support and advice. My doubts were on the part of the initiative where they talked about using the NBI to generate traffic for new blogs. My comment was that if you write a blog with the express purpose of generating the maximum amount of traffic, then there are probably hotter subjects around to blog about than MMORPGs.

Now personally I don't write to maximize traffic, even if that is often assumed. In fact I took measures over the last year which pretty much halved my traffic, writing less regularly and switching to even more niche subjects like pen & paper roleplaying games. Thus I would like to talk about a very different form of blogging: Writing for an audience of one. Yourself.

A blog makes an excellent public diary, as long as you limit yourself to writing about things you don't mind other people reading about. Thus the games you play makes for a good diary blog, your love life much less so. If you keep it up, like I did, you end up with a huge archive of what you thought at that point in time about some game or feature or other. You might be surprised to learn that your opinion might change over time, without you even noticing. Sometimes it is really funny to read your old blog entries and think "What? I thought THAT at the time?".

The main disadvantage of writing a blog for yourself is that other people will not only read it, but often also comment on what you wrote, as most bloggers by some sort of tradition feel they should let other people comment on their posts. Comments on the internet are not universally bad, but you must realize that they come in a huge variety: From thought-provoking and useful, to spam, to hateful rants. A rather innocent remark by you, of how you liked game A, but didn't care so much for game B, is likely to provoke some people into a rage. You'll get comments on how game A was designed for morons like you, while only the superior elite to which the commenter counts himself is able to appreciate the absolute superiority of game B. And many variations of that theme. Write what you did in a game, and somebody will tell you that you did it wrong.

Negative comments are almost exclusively due to the opinions you hold, and very rarely about the actual quality of your writing (even if sometimes they use an attack on your writing to attack your opinion). Personally I have found that blogging with strong comment moderation works best, trolls tend to disappear if you just delete their comments without responding. Writing without comments enabled can also work, but then you miss out on the good comments as well as the bad.

The important thing about blogging for an audience of one is that you shouldn't care whether people agree with your opinions. If you start to censor yourself so as not to provoke anybody, you just destroyed most of the value of your blog for yourself. There are enough sites out there where you can read what the opinion of the majority is, you do not need to feel compelled to echo what they say in a hope to please. Do not be afraid to say what you really think, even if the game you like is considered as trite, or the game you hate is the flavor of the month. Writing for an audience of one can be tough in public, but if you want your blog to have any value as an outlet for yourself, you need to *be* yourself. Don't care what others think, your opinions are as valuable as those of everybody else.

I've had the Kindle for several months now, time to write a bit about my practical experience with it. First of all I have to say that I do not regret having it, overall the Kindle proved to be excellent at what it is doing. The only caveat is that what it is doing is far more limited than for example an iPad or notebook computer.

As I was born in the sixties, and didn't have video games in my youth, I spent much of that youth in public libraries. I'm a fast reader, and I read a lot, so public libraries were ideal for keeping me entertained. Now I don't know how public libraries work where you live, but in my experience they were full of books that were over 10 years old, while getting the latest bestseller was next to impossible, because the library had bought at best one of them and somebody else was always reading it. The Kindle is such a public library in reverse: You can have all the latest bestseller, and all very old books without copyright, but finding a book that is over 10 years old is hard. For example I was interested in re-reading the Dalziel and Pascoe detective novels of Reginald Hill, and on the Kindle most weren't available, or only as audio books (and I prefer reading myself to listening to somebody else reading a book). But if I read a review of a new book somewhere, chances to find it available for the Kindle are good. And I could get a lot of classics for free, even directly from Amazon.

These days I mostly read books while traveling, for holiday or business. For that the Kindle proved to be very suitable. Except for starting and landing, where the flight attendant will tell you to switch off all electronic devices, the Kindle makes for good reading material during a flight. Especially during long flights with no internet connection on the plane the Kindle is better than a tablet computer, as it has a much longer battery life. If traveling to a sunny place, the Kindle shines with another feature: e-Ink with no back-light makes reading on the Kindle possible even in bright sunlight, while you need shadows for back-lit LCD devices. Packing a Kindle also means not packing a stack of books, which makes your luggage lighter. And again the long battery life provides reading all day long without worrying about where the next power socket is.

As a replacement for a tablet computer, the Kindle only has limited usefulness. I don't have the new "Kindle Touch", so using arrow keys and enter for surfing is less than ideal. I have a 3G model, and free 3G is obviously good, but it only works for Amazon and Wikipedia. For anything else I need a WiFi connection. And if I have that, I found that I preferred my iPod to the Kindle for surfing.

So my overall impression is that the Kindle is excellent as an e-book, as a replacement for regular books. The Kindle is not really a good competitor for tablet computers. But then the Kindle only costs a fraction of an iPad, so that is okay. As long as you don't expect much more than an electronic device for reading books, I can only recommend the Kindle.

A reader sent me a link to a video of the Rory Sutherland talk at the Oxford Union, which is a very interesting talk mostly about behavioral economics and advertising. In that talk it is mentioned that the total time humanity spent playing World of Warcraft is about 6 million years. I found that interesting, and googled it to sources like this, where it is spelled out that they mean 50 billion hours played.

Now lets say we would have used those 50 billion hours differently, for some economic activity creating value. Now how much one hour of work is worth is a matter of debate, especially since it obviously isn't worth the same in different countries. But assuming that people who play WoW are more likely to be well educated and living in a rich country than African subsistence farmers, and then lowering the amount to take into account the millions of Chinese players, let's go for an arbitrary number of $2 per hour. Which would be considerably less than minimum wage in the US, but more than a minimum wage in China.

Thus by playing World of Warcraft, humanity basically paid an opportunity cost of $100 billion. Or divided by 10 million players, each player chose to rather play World of Warcraft than to earn $10,000. Again, this is an average, there are people in the US who could have earned much more if they had spent their hours playing World of Warcraft with a value creating activity instead.

At the end of his talk, Rory Sutherland mentions a theory that the Internet has not contributed much to economic growth, but has contributed a lot to the increase of human happiness. How does one measure human happiness? Well, economic theory says that if a person does A instead of B, he must value A equally or higher than B. Thus I am not suggesting that World of Warcraft somehow "wasted" $100 billion. Instead it created $100 billion or more worth of human happiness, because we freely chose to rather play WoW than to earn that extra money. Makes you think, doesn't it?

I do agree with Rohan's theory that smaller groups for endgame activity lead to smaller guilds and ultimately to less interest of everybody in the endgame. He says:

First, and most importantly, there's a lot more room for "grunts" in a large guild. Grunts are average players who like playing the game, but don't really want to take on extra responsibility like the officers. If you take a 30-man raid size, and break it into 10-mans, I think you end up losing the bottom 10 players, just because there really isn't room for them in the subsequent guilds that form. I think a lot of people just want to play the game, and are perfectly willing to follow orders from someone more dedicated.

Now I do think that any division of people into two classes, like "top raiders" and "grunts", is bound to fail. Things are never black & white, there are just endless scales of grey. But the argument still works: A larger raid group allows for a larger guild covering a wider scale of grey tones. And that would create more interest in the endgame, and more social cohesion.

But whatever scale you use, the raid endgame model has the fundamental flaw that whatever the size of the raid, the rational decision is to take the top X available with you on the raid, and leave the bottom Z behind. There are other ways, for example in games like A Tale in the Desert. Not only can you be in several guilds in that game, but also everybody can contribute in his own way to the guild's projects. If the guild needs a huge amount of bricks for a project, for example, everybody can contribute at his own pace. And while the bottom Z contribute much less than the top X, they still make a positive contribution, and thus the guild still has an interest in keeping them around.

If Rohan is right and the endgame exclusion of the "grunts" is causing subscription MMORPGs to decline, just upping the raid size might not be enough to solve the problem. I think we would have better luck with a MMORPG in which the endgame was inclusive, not exclusive. Where everybody would make some positive contribution to his guild, even if some did less than others.

The Internet is full of get-rich-quick scams. And with the release of Diablo 3 next week, a lot of new scams are going to exploit player's dreams of paying their rent by playing Diablo 3. Selling virtual items for real money sounds like a dream job. So scammers will gladly promise you the secrets of making $25 per hour, if only you buy their Diablo 3 secret gold guide for $19.95. Only after you paid that will they tell you that they meant you'll make $25 per week, of which you spend 1 hour on the auction house, not 40 times $25 for $1,000 per week. And all the tips in the gold guide will be so common sense, that I can tell you those secrets for free in this post:

1) Know the prices: Imagine you checked the AH several times per week and found each time several copies of the sword of uberness listed for between $10 and $50. What do you think was the average price of all the swords of uberness that sold that week? You might be surprised to hear that the average selling price probably was around $8! Because what you can see is not the price of the swords that sold, but the prices of the failed offers nobody bought. The highest price anybody paid was $9.99, which is why the $10 sword is still there. Don't overestimate at what price you can sell your stuff.

2) Watch the market: Different populations play online games at different times. The fabled Chinese gold farmer plays 24/7, while the equally fabled casual player with more money than time or sense plays mostly on evenings and weekends. Caricature aside, all virtual economics always have predictable price fluctuations over the week. Just observe the market for a week or two, and you will know at what time you can buy low, and when to sell high.

3) Undercut: In Diablo 3 you will be limited in the number of auctions you can have up at the same time (10 per AH). Thus anything which doesn't sell fast will block one of your selling slots for 48 hours or until you cancel the auction (only possible for commodities). There is no use of putting anything up that isn't the cheapest of its kind if you want to actually make a sale. Putting something up for a price where you think it might sell later, when prices have gone up, only makes sense if you didn't plan to be online for some time anyway.

4) Consider the fees: The Diablo 3 auction houses all work on a fee at sale basis. That has consequences if you want to buy for resale: You would need to up the price considerably for this to work. For example if you buy an item for $7 and resell it on the real money AH for $10 with the proceeds going to your Paypal account, you just barely break even, due to two times 15% being deducted. You need to sell items for 50% more than you bought them for to make a profit.

5) Watch the floor: Sometimes there are considerably more sellers for an item than buyers, and because of undercutting the price drops a lot. At some point the crafting materials into which the item disenchants are worth more than the item. At this point you might make better money by buying and disenchanting.

6) Mind the competition: There are considerably more participants on the regional Diablo 3 auction houses than on the auction houses of other games, where they are only server wide. The more players are on the market, the less likely it becomes that you find a good money-maker without everybody else jumping on it and ruining the opportunity. Do not believe tips that promise endless supplies of free money, e.g. by mass disenchanting vendor bought items. In fact because everybody can and will do that whenever crafting materials get too expensive, there is an effective price cap on all materials which you can get from vendor bought items.

7) Use both auction houses: The real money AH is mostly suitable for the rarer and thus more expensive items, or materials. But don't waste the 10 slots you have on the gold AH! You can always sell a large stack of gold on the real money AH later.

8) Prices will fall: All virtual worlds suffer from the same effect of AH prices going down with time, called "mudflation". During the first weeks some prices on the Diablo 3 AH will still be rather high. Don't take those as your point of reference. After a month or two the prices will stabilize somewhere lower. Do not hoard items for sale later, rather sell everything now, and if you need something later, buy it back for half the price.

Most of this is just common sense, or the result of very basic knowledge in economics. If you have other good tips, feel free to add them in the comment section.

In the 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign I am currently running the group spent level 1 fighting kobolds and zombies. Now at level 2 they got into combat with humans for the first time. Now in previous editions of Dungeons & Dragons you would have created a level 2 human bandit using the same rules as for creating a player character. You'd declare him to be a fighter or rogue, and give him stats and abilities accordingly. 4th edition doesn't work like that any more, there you'll find a human bandit listed in the Monster Manual. Human NPCs you are supposed to fight in 4E follow the rules for monsters, not those for players.

In a way that is inevitable, due to player characters being so much more complex in 4th edition. For a player it is nice to have lots of powers and choices when creating his character. But for a DM who just needs a couple of bandits, it would be quite a workload. So instead the NPC gets a simple monster template with only a few powers. And you can use rules for "solo" or "elite" or "minion" monsters to vary the NPCs hit points way from 1 to much more than a player character of that level could have.

The downside of that is that players will quickly realize that the NPCs don't follow the same rules as they do. The NPCs use powers that the players don't have access to, NPC wizards cast spells the player wizards can't learn, and so on. It makes the NPCs seem less human, less real. But that seems to be a common theme of 4th edition: More game, less believable world. Still beats MMORPGs, though.

As I mentioned in my review, the Reavers of Harkenwold D&D adventure comes with the last maps of the Iron Keep missing. Wizard of the Coast provides these maps only as printed in small in the booklets, or on their website. But they don't look very good when blown up to scale, and they have all the room and encounter numbers printed all over them.

Thus I made maps for the three floors of the Great Tower myself, using Campaign Cartographer 3. The maps are meant to be printed 40 cm wide and 50 cm high to be in 1" = 5' standard scale. On a regular printer that is 2 x 2 pages. You can find the maps I drew here. Tell me what you think!

What is missing from the maps are the arrow slits in the walls. Campaign Cartographer has wall-"cutting" windows and doors, but they were too wide and didn't work all that well with the 5' thick walls of the Great Tower.