Saga of Ryzom Open Beta

Yesterday the second open beta of Saga of Ryzom started. And I must say the game has much improved over the first beta, where it was still unplayably slow. But now the game is highly playable. It has good-looking graphics, an innovative skill system which allows you to construct your own skills, and a very nice tradeskill system. I will play this for some time, and then write a review before the live version is released.

Of course, if you live in North America, you could participate in the one-week stress test open beta of World of Warcraft instead. Well, semi-open. They have a large, but limited, number of open slots. If you want a guaranteed spot, you need to subscribe to Fileplanet.

I am already a Fileplanet subscriber. That offers me preferred high-speed access to lots of game demos and trailers, as well as frequent preferred spots in MMORPG open betas. I consider the service well worth the subscription fee: If I find only 2 game demos per year, where playing the demo prevents me from buying the game, I'm already saving money. But I admit that I'm a bit angry about the tendency of offering open betas only to residents of North America. It is the game companies fault, not Fileplanet's, but it is often badly handled. In the case of World of Warcraft, I had already downloaded and installed the 2.3 Gigabyte client, before I read that I wasn't eligible as beta tester, due to living in the wrong place. Well, they learned and put that info on the front page now.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:39 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Puzzle Pirates Review

"Hey, I have an idea: Let's make an MMORPG based on Tetris!" Sounds totally crazy, but something like that must have happened when Three Rings Design conceived Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates. The result is a fun little Java-based game for the whole family. Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is innovative, but is a far cry from a full-blown classic MMORPG. Time to pull out the cutlass, don the eye patch, place the parrot on the shoulder, and sail the Indigo ocean for a review.

Game Mechanics

The first thing you notice when starting Puzzle Pirates is the colorful 2D graphics. Characters have round heads, making them look like Playmobil® figurines. The developers wisely decided that well-made low-tech 2D sprites are cheaper and look better than anything a low-budget 3D engine can deliver. The graphics instantly give you a sense of being in a not-quite-serious pirate world, and are bright and pleasing to look at.

The game starts with a tutorial which covers everything you need to know at the start. The basic idea is simple: You are a pirate, crew member of a pirate ship, and you have to work on several different tasks to help your ship sail the oceans and plunder treasures. There is sailing, bilging the water out of the hold, fixing holes in the ship with carpentry, or loading the cannons. Officers can also navigate the ship and fire the cannons in ship battles.

What makes Puzzle Pirates unique is that each of these tasks is some sort of puzzle mini-game. For carpentry you have to solve Pentomino puzzles. Bilging consists of a 3-in-a-row style of puzzle. For sailing, you need to direct falling pieces into slots of the same color. When loading a cannon, powder, wad, and shot pieces roll over the deck of the ship, and you have to direct them into the cannons in the right order. But the highlight for most people is the sword fighting, which is a multi-player Tetris variant where you need to build blocks of the same color and destroy them. Every block you destroy causes annoying "sword" blocks to appear on your opponent’s screen, until one of you is out. On land the game also offers a "drinking puzzle", which is a sort of multi-player Reversi. And there are several tradeskills, which are supposed to become puzzles as well, but up to now there is only one puzzle.

Ship puzzles generally run against the clock, and the better you are, the faster your ship moves. Then if your crew wins a ship combat puzzle against another crew (usually against non-player crews), you get money (called pieces of eight), and some cargo from the other ship. You might also win maps, which open new routes for the ship to travel on. If you lose, it's not a big thing, the ship doesn't sink (unless the fight was to take over control of an island), your crew just loses some money. At the end of the voyage, the plunder is distributed, and you can spend you money on new clothes, a new weapon, or ultimately your own ship.

Once you are have a certain experience with all puzzles, you can become officer, allowing you to open a shop, and buy, craft and sell goods. There are inhabited islands where you can open shops and meet other people in the taverns, and uninhabited islands where you can find resources such as hemp, which can then be turned in cloth in a weaver shop, and then into clothing by a tailor.
While you can always go jobbing on other peoples’ ships, to make a career from cabin person to pirate and officer, you need to be member of a crew. Crews are player associations, like guilds in other games, and all the ships of their members are shared as a common fleet. Besides playing with your crew, or fighting other players in sea battles, you can also meet other players on the islands, chat, duel, wager, and organize or participate in sword-fighting or drinking tournaments.

The Good Points

Puzzle Pirates is easy to learn, but hard to master, which is generally a good principle for a game. There are no character statistics; your player skill alone determines how good you are at, let’s say, sword-fighting. (The type of weapon you use does offer a minor combat modification). Instead of stats, a ranking shows how experienced you are with the different puzzles. The game has a variety of puzzles, and very little downtime.

The game being easy to learn, colorful, and fun makes it suitable for children. But adults can have a good time too, as long as they are not too serious about it. Puzzle Pirates offers very little to the power gamer, and is much more targeted at the casual gamer.

The game’s economy is nearly completely player-driven, and runs remarkably well. Prices fluctuate with supply and demand. And if you can't get hold of some resource for a reasonable price, you can always set sail to a lonely island where you might be able to harvest it, giving your voyages an added goal besides plundering treasure.

Using mini-games and puzzles in MMORPGs is an old favorite idea of mine. Bigger games would be well advised to have a look at Puzzle Pirates, and implement some sort of mini-games for their tradeskills. Solving a small puzzle to craft a virtual item is a lot more fun than mindlessly repeating the same series of clicks, the current model of crafting in most MMORPGs, with very few notable exceptions like A Tale in the Desert.

The Bad Points

Puzzle Pirates is designed to be a fun little game, not a classical MMORPG virtual world. There are no levels, and no character stats, leading to practically no character development at all. You can buy more expensive clothing, but it just looks nicer, and has no game function. You can buy an expensive sword, but you need to master the sword-fighting puzzle rather well before the type of sword you use makes a difference. A newbie fights equally bad with any sword.

As a social multi-player game, Puzzle Pirates suffers severely from a "too many chiefs, not enough Indians" syndrome. For a big ship you would need one captain or officer, and lots of humble pirates doing all the menial work. Officers get to play more different puzzles, are the only ones able to trade and craft goods, and often get a bigger share of the plundered treasure. So it is not surprising that everybody wants to be an officer, which is easy enough to achieve in a week or so. The oceans are full of the smallest ship type, with only one player officer and three non-player pirates on board. The largest ship in the game could theoretically hold 150 player pirates, but in practice it is rare to see a ship with more than 5 players on board.

Puzzle Pirates is a small game of 5,000 subscribers, but unlike other small games is not developing very fast. The addition of new puzzles for the tradeskills has been slow. There are also a number of minor annoyances in the game design, like how your cash is buried on a lonely island if you have to log off in the middle of a voyage, making it difficult to recover.

Summary

While Puzzle Pirates is not perfect, it is very playable right from the start. As long as one is willing to take oneself not too seriously, the game offers a lot of fun for some time. Lots of players just relax there, try to role-play speaking piratey language and enjoy the various puzzles. But if you are looking for a virtual world in which to develop a long-term career, Puzzle Pirates is probably not the right game for you.

The client can be downloaded for free, and you have a free trial period. After that you pay a $9.95 monthly fee, not too bad in comparison with the big games that are all charging about 50% more than that now. Chinese players can play a localized version at www.puzzlepirates.com.cn and the localized German version can be found at www.puzzle-piraten.de. I am really much in favor of the free client, free trial approach, that lets everybody judge a game on its merits, not just some review, so I recommend you try it out.

This article has also been published on Grimwell
- posted by Tobold @ 10:03 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
Windows XP Service Pack 2

Just like a MMORPG, Microsoft has customers that love it, and others that hate it with a passion. And as usual, I'm somewhere in the middle, trying to report a balanced view.

Yesterday I downloaded the new Service Pack 2 for Windows XP on both of my computers. That took a while, even on broadband, because a couple of million other people are doing the same. I was a bit annoyed that I had the choice of either downloading a 270 MB network version, or two 108 MB single-computer versions, which more or less ends up being the same. I did order the CD, but was told it could take 28 days before it arrives. Still useful for the next time I reinstall Windows XP. So I downloaded the two single-computer updates using the Windows Update function, letting it run while going to work, and when I came back home the download was done.

Microsoft warned me that multiplayer online games might stop working with SP2, but no such thing happened. All MMORPG currently installed on my computer still worked. There was also no problem with my Norton Internet Security software, because I had updated that one before installing the SP2, to get the SP2 compatible version.

Will SP2 make my computer safer? Not really. I use an ADSL router which works like an in-built hardware firewall, I got Norton Internet Security, and my Windows XP firewall was already turned on. Testing my computer with Shields Up! had already declared my computer to be on maximum security. And the Google toolbar I'm using already blocks pop-ups, which is one of the features of the SP2.

But I do like having my computer updated to the latest version of the operating system. I do believe that the Service Pack 2 is a good idea, which will prevent some of the virus and worm outbreaks in the future. And I do like Windows XP. It is certainly far from perfect, but it is the best operating system Microsoft ever produced, and I had considerably less problems with it in the last couple of years than I had with previous Windows versions.

And the SP2 runs with all of my MMORPG games, being less annoying about it than the Norton firewall. Thats all I wanted.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:53 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Achieving Goals

The average MMORPG gamer plays his favorite game for over 20 hours per week, a small minority even playing over 50 hours per week. But at the same time, players often complain that the gameplay is repetitive, feels like work, or is even a treadmill. What motivates people to play a game consisting of repetitive tasks for so many hours, long after the fun has stopped? For many it is the achievement of goals: "Hey, I don't enjoy killing orcs, but if I kill 100 of them, I will go up a level, and learn a cool new combat skill." This article looks at goals in MMORPGs, where they work, where they fail to motivate, and how games could be improved by using them better.

Goals? What Goals?

MMORPGs being open-ended, goals are not provided by a story line, but are usually set by the players for themselves. Goals are what a player hopes to achieve when he starts the playing session. A goal could be to reach the next level, or to get a new skill or spell in some other way. It could be recovering a special item from some monster, or making enough virtual money to buy that item from somebody else. It could be finishing a difficult quest, or gathering a certain amount of faction / reputation points with the non-player characters. For the purpose of this article, I will limit myself to goals that are measurable, and leave out goals like "impressing my fellow players".

To be a source of motivation, the goal has to be achievable within some medium-term timeframe, such as a single play session. Anything that takes just a few minutes and no skill does not lead to much satisfaction. But if the goal is too far away on the horizon, like for example reaching the highest level possible in that game, the player easily loses sight of it. The best goals are in the middle ground, require some effort to reach, but can be achieved within a couple of hours, or a few days at most.

Goals should also be accompanied by some sort of reward. Players respond positively to rewards, even just some sort of medal which does not actually make his character stronger. One can be satisfied by reaching a goal without reward, just from the knowledge of having done something difficult, but something more than bragging rights surely helps.

Character Levels

The biggest success in motivating the players with goals, and perhaps the greatest legacy of 30 years of Dungeons and Dragons, was the invention of character levels. Having your character get stronger in easily measurable chunks is a driving force few players can resist. Level-based advancement is far more motivating than skill-based systems where you progress in tiny steps; "You have become better at axe wielding (37)", is easily ignored, unless you know you need axe wielding (40) skill to equip your new battle axe.

Unfortunately something went wrong in the translation from D&D to modern MMORPGs. Looking at a D&D rulebook, one can see that the experience points needed to go up a level progress exponentially. What isn't that obvious is that the experience points gained each level in D&D also go up by the same rate, and so the time needed to gain one level remains more or less constant. In MMORPGs, you gain the lower levels much more quickly than the higher levels. Often the low levels seem to rush by far too quickly, allowing you to gain 10 levels on your first day, while at the high levels it can take weeks to progress.

The high level slowdown of advancement is one of the prime sources of people complaining that a game feels like a treadmill and quitting. Different people have different tolerance to treadmills, reflected in how long they are willing to toil to reach a goal. By making each level harder to reach than the last one, you push your players one by one over that patience limit. A goal that does not seam to be reachable in a reasonable amount of time is not a source of motivation, but of frustration.

Especially damaging are strong increases in the experience point curve at certain levels. If every level is just a little bit harder than the last, people get used to this. But if one level is much harder than the previous, frustration strikes with full force. A good example for this are the "hell levels" of Everquest, where due to the experience point curve having steps, levels 30, 35, 40, 45, etc. are much harder than their preceding levels to reach.

The underlying theory behind this experience point curve in MMORPGs is that players have to be prevented from actually reaching the highest level, as they would then have nothing to do, and would quit. Instead you now get most people quitting before reaching the highest level, which is not an improvement. It would be better to have the time to advance from one level to the next more evenly distributed, and hope that people have so much fun leveling that once they reach the highest level, they will start over with a different character.

Quests as Goals

Knowing that players like goals that can be achieved in one play session, the big trend in recent and upcoming MMORPGs is to present the player with ready-made goals in bite-sized portions, in the form of missions and quests. Quests have moved from being the icing on the MMORPG cake to becoming the very backbone of the game.

But if you are practically always on a quest, these quests stop being goals, but fade into the background of basic game mechanics, just like combat did. The goal is then more likely getting the known quest reward, and not pursuing the quest in itself. In some games, quests also give some sort of reputation points; people will then often repeat the same quest over and over, to reach the goal of a certain reputation level. Needless to say that the plot of the quest itself becomes totally unimportant at that point.

Nevertheless these quests are a useful help for the undecided. The more powerful motivation comes from the goals you set yourself, but if you happen to have none of those, a quest with a ready-made goal is better than random monster killing.

Other Goals

The best thing a game can do is to offer many different ways of advancement, each with different rewards. Players can then chose what goals they want to accomplish for themselves. One player just wants to level up as quickly as possible, another wishes to become rich with virtual gold, while the third is striving for reputation with the non-player characters.

One relatively common goal is to try to get some piece of equipment such as rare items. Obtaining such items drives players as much as leveling does. By offering better and better equipment with advancing levels, the player always has either the next level or the equipment for his new level to chase after. The difficulty lies in balancing the power of the equipment versus the power of the character in such a way that good equipment is desirable, but you are not excluded from groups for not having the very best of it.

Skill gains work best as goals if they are not part of the normal combat routine. If you have to do something special, like crafting, to improve your tradeskill, this becomes an independent path of advancement. You "level up" your skills instead of your character level. Reaching a higher skill is rewarded by being able to craft better items. Many people enjoy this parallel career. In comparison, a combat skill that goes up automatically during fighting does not add much to the primary motivation of fighting for experience points and levels.

Examples

Let's look at some games and see how they manage to motivate their players with goals. We'll look at where these games succeed, and where they fail.

In City of Heroes, leveling up is practically the only goal, but is strongly rewarded. Every two levels you get a new power, and during the first twenty levels or so progress is relatively quick. Furthermore the powers you gain have a big impact, compared with the skills you gain in other games. Beyond level 20 the powers often offer nothing fundamentally new, and are achieved increasingly slowly. This results in most players having many low level characters, as those are simply more fun to play than advancing one single character into the high levels. Money and equipment is not a separate goal in City of Heroes, it is practically impossible to gain those without leveling up at the same time. In the end, you are likely to have more fun leveling in CoH than in most other games, but you burn out quicker, because there is nothing else to do.

In Everquest, leveling up is toughest, and often not fun beyond the mid-levels. But EQ makes up for that by offering more rewards for reaching the high levels, opening up much more content to you. The game is full of "epic" battles and treasures, for which getting to the high level is just seen as a necessary requirement. Many people never get there. But fortunately Everquest also has a very wide range of alternative activities, each with their own goals and rewards. You can hunt for thousands of different treasures, advance in tradeskills, try to become rich in a tough economy, or collect "faction points" to improve your standing with many different non-player groups.

Final Fantasy XI is very similar to Everquest in goals, but with some extra twists. Advancing in levels not only makes your character stronger and able to reach new zones, but it also opens up additional game mechanics. For example, at the start you can only walk, but at a certain level you are allowed to do a quest that enables you to ride chocobos, making travel much faster and safer. At even higher levels you will be able to take flying ships that transport you from one city to another. Another example is that at level 18 you can do a quest enabling you to take a sub-job, and at level 30 you can do quests which open the advanced jobs to you. Thus FFXI creates "key" levels, which exercise an even stronger pull than normal leveling. On the items and equipment side FFXI does less well. Equipment is too important, and too hard to get, as money is not easy to earn. Instead of a second source of motivating goals, FFXI creates a second treadmill, forcing players to repetitively mass-slaughter harmless monsters for cash, just to be able to afford the most necessary spells and items.

A Tale in the Desert suffers a bit from not having levels, and from making your ascent of the tech tree difficult to measure. It is more a game of collective achievements than of individual goals. That can be very motivating, but usually appeals to a different kind of people than those who like leveling up. The big plus regarding goals of ATITD is that there are hundreds of different goals, each requiring a different activity to get there.

Star Wars Galaxies suffers even worse from the lack of levels, because your total advancement is capped at an relatively early level. From then on, to advance in one skill, you need to unlearn another one. Giving up previously achieved goals does hurt, and you sometimes feel more like regressing than progressing. (Ultima Online had a similar system with the same problem). SWG is also very badly balanced in many respects. Some careers are much easier than others, and some are so boring that people macro them. The economy is often crazy, making it very hard to earn your first money, but then suddenly tipping, ending you up with huge amounts of money and nothing to spend it on. On the positive side, the different careers are varied enough, with not all of them requiring you to kill monsters to advance. But not all careers in SWG are equally rewarding.

Room For Improvement

Goals and achievements are driving forces that motivate players to spend their time in an MMORPG. The best approach is to offer the players a variety of activities, each with its own rewards, and let them chose their goals for themselves. The job of the developers is to make sure that the player at all times has the opportunity to pursue some goal which is not too far away, and is attractive because of a meaningful reward attached to it.

The most difficult part in this is to get the difficulty level right. With quests or treasure hunts, there is some room for variety, allowing players to choose between easier and harder goals. But with levels and skill trees, the requirements are the same for all players, until somebody invents the MMORPG with variable difficulty levels. The concept of making each level harder to achieve than the last one only works if there is enough low and mid-level content, so that players don't burn out before they reach the fun part of the game. But a better concept for leveling up would be to make it easy enough for the average 20-hour-per-week gamer to reach the highest level in a couple of months, while giving the power gamers some alternative advancement methods, so they don't "finish" the game in a few weeks.

In the end everybody has to remember that MMORPGs are just games, a form of entertainment. Players like to "win", so a MMORPG has to be slanted towards letting the players win, just like a single-player games do. Frustrating the players with goals that seem impossible to achieve, and then only carry a meager reward, is not helping anybody.

This article has also been published on Grimwell
- posted by Tobold @ 8:24 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Crystal Ball Journalism

At the Leipzig Games Convention, which just finished, the winner of the award in the category "Best Online Game" was World of Warcraft. Okay, Blizzard was there and presented the beta version. But how can you give an award for "best game" to a game that is not yet available?

I'm subscribed to only one games magazine, the official PS2 magazine, for the simple reason that this is the only possible way to get playable demos for the PS2. But I occasionally buy other games magazines, to keep myself informed about all sorts of games. And I noticed an alarming trend: Previews are taking over. You get 2-page previews and half-page reviews. Most magazines I've seen this year had the preview section over twice as big as the review section. And not just once, but all the time! How can there be always more games in the future than in the present?

I don't like previews. Most of the time they are simply a bunch of lies, glued together with marketing hype. Games like Daikatana or Black & White get hyped for months and months, and then they come out and are a big disappointment. Even worse, lots of games first get hyped, then don't come out at all. UO2, UOX, Mythica, Warhammer Online, are just some examples in the MMORPG genre.

This crystal ball journalism has obvious advantages for the writers, and for the game companies that supply them with freebies. The writer can go wild with conjectures and assumptions. Writing about something that doesn't exist is much easier than writing about something that does exist, because reality doesn't get into the way of your imagination. And for the companies its free advertising.

But for the readers those previews are just bad. Even if the journalist had a very good crystal ball, and described the game accurately, it still doesn't help the reader at all. He can't go out and buy the game based on that recommendation, as it doesn't exist yet. The official PS2 magazine in its 50th UK edition boasts that it wrote about the EyeToy a full 3 years before it actually came out. And that has achieved exactly what for their customers? Especially since that accurate prediction of the EyeToys greatness is probably the result of praising 100 different games, and getting it right once by pure chance.

I'm making things artificially hard for me here, but I will try to keep this blog in the present, not the future. Of course I will occasionally mention games that are about to come out. But I don't review anything of which I haven't at the very least played the beta. A crystal ball belongs into a gypsies tent on the fun fair, not on a writers desk. You can predict trends, but not how good an individual game will be.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:58 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
MMORPGs in Europe

One could easily think that playing a massively multiplayer online role-playing game is the same everywhere. But there are some subtle differences. I'd like to point out some of the difficulties you could have if you play your favorite MMORPG in Europe, which is where I live.

Internet Connection

Broadband penetration in Europe used to lag behind North America and Asia, and is only beginning to catch up this year, expected to reach 20%. Many European countries had state companies with a telephone monopoly, ending as late as 1998, and those were slow to introduce new technologies. On the positive side, these monopolies had often invested heavily in good quality copper cable, now enabling DSL speeds up to 3 MBit/s in many places.

The cheapest forms of broadband flat rates cost around $25 per month in Europe. Dial-up is relatively expensive, at around $1 per hour (and usually no flat rates offered), so broadband is really a necessity for European MMORPG players. That explains why the European market for MMORPGs has been comparatively small up to now.

Game availability

The European Union has 20 official languages. Of course many people are able to speak English, but not all, especially not the kids, and that limits the market for games that are not translated. Some MMORPGs are translated, like Dark Age of Camelot, or A Tale in the Desert, but that usually means that every patch has to be translated as well, and thus arrives with a delay. Other MMORPGs are sold in Europe in their English versions, sometimes just with a translated manual, like Star Wars Galaxies. And some MMORPGs are simply not sold in Europe at all, like City of Heroes.

You can get US versions of games in Europe, either from special import stores, or by directly mail-ordering them from North America. Import stores usually charge much more for imported games; for example City of Heroes costs $60. With mail order, a European customer has to carefully check the shipping conditions. First-class UPS shipping gets you a game from the US to Europe in 2 business days, but cost $33. Some mail-order shops offer free worldwide shipping, but then you will wait 2 weeks before you finally have the game in your hands.

Server Location and Time Zones

MMORPGs that are not localized (translated) also often do not offer European servers. Playing on a US server is not really a big problem, but of course your "ping", the time it takes for a signal to travel from your keyboard to the server and back to your computer, increases if the server is on a different continent. On ADSL, a typical ping to an European server is 30 ms, but to a US server it goes up to 200 ms. A ping of 200 ms means that when you see an enemy before you and press the fire button, it takes 0.2 seconds longer before you actually fire. If you are playing a twitchy game, in which every fraction of reaction time counts, that is bad news, as you will never be the "fastest gun in the west". Fortunately in most classical MMORPGs it doesn't matter all that much, because it is not your reaction time that determines how fast you attack.

An additional problem when playing on a US server is that there is a time zone difference of 6 to 9 hours. Scheduled server downtimes for patches are often scheduled for morning to noon in the US, as the technicians prefer to work during the day, and in the morning there are less Americans that want to play. But 8 am to noon in Seattle is 5 pm to 9 pm in continental Europe, and thus the patches often fall in the European prime time.

The same time zone problems make participation in events difficult for Europeans, whether scheduled by GMs or by non-European guilds. Everything scheduled in the afternoon or evening US time happens in the small hours of the morning in Europe. Who wants to get up at 4 am to participate in a game event? Even some European games suffer from this, as long as the majority of players are from the US.

A European MMORPG gamer will often play at times when the US servers are relatively empty. That has both advantages and disadvantages. There is less competition for scarce resources or mob spawns, but it is more difficult to find people to group or to trade with. It gets even more complicated when more than two time zones are involved. For example, Final Fantasy XI runs on Japanese servers, with many of the players being American, but the game not yet even distributed in Europe. A person that would only consider grouping with other Europeans would find FFXI impossible to play, but if he doesn't mind grouping with Japanese in the morning and Americans in the evening, the game is nice enough.

Outlook

As you can see, it is not always easy being an European MMORPG gamer. But things are improving, as the rise in broadband connections makes Europe more attractive, and Europe is already rivaling the US for the title of largest market for computer games. The two big MMORPGs scheduled to come out at the end of 2004, Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft, both will have localized versions and European servers.

This article has also been published on Grimwell
- posted by Tobold @ 11:55 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
ATITD2 Review on Grimwell.com

I feel honored that I have been invited to write for Grimwell.com. My first article that made it to the frontpage there can be found here, a review of the A Tale in the Desert 2 Beta.

Writing for Grimwell does not mean that I will abandon this blog. Any article that I write for Grimwell will also be copied here. The first one is an exception, because it was written by 4 Grimwell writers at once, and I don't want to claim all of it, so you just get a link. And of course I will continue using this blog for my more bloggy comments, which aren't Grimwell material.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:45 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Forced to play

Yesterday I increased my MMORPG vocabulary by learning what a "catass" is. A catass player is somebody playing so much, that he forgets his real life duties, like emptying the cats litter box (thus making his place smell like a cat ass). The term has a certain overlap with "powergamer", but is more negative, describing only the time spent in game, not the success had with that. But both terms are somehow opposite to "casual gamer".

Myself, I'm falling somewhere in the middle between those. I don't neglect my job or family, so I'm definitely not a catass player. But I don't have children, and I don't have any other major hobby than games, so I still have up to 40 hours per week (5 evenings of 4 hours plus the weekend) for playing the MMORPG of my choice, which is significantly more than the average casual player. But by acknowledging that other things in my life are more important than games, I sometimes run into the same problem as casual gamers. And one of the major problems there is how the games try to dictate to you when and how long you should play.

Part of this is just peer pressure. Before City of Heroes invented the sidekick system, keeping up with your friends levels was really important, and still is in many games. But by playing with friends that play similar hours as you, and some juggling with alts, one can usually get around the social aspects forcing you to play.

Much worse is if the game design itself forces you to play. In many games you have a house or other structure which requires an upkeep. Go on a summer holiday, and you house in Ultima Online crumbled to dust, your sheep and camel in A Tale in the Desert starved, and you got evicted from your shop in Puzzle Pirates. In SWG, if you don't check your harvesters regularly, they will stop working, because they are either full of resources, empty of energy or maintenance money, or the resources under them moved. All of this makes you think: "I need to log on, otherwise something bad will happen to my virtual property", while at the same time resenting to be forced to play, instead of playing voluntarily. And of course, once you log on, you don't do what you want to do, you do what it takes to keep your virtual house standing, or your virtual sheep fed, or your virtual harvesters running.

A related big problem for the casual gamer is lack of control over the length of his play session. When real life intrudes, like lunch being ready, games often do not make it easy for you to log off. Again there is some social pressure. It took an hour to set up this group, so leaving after 15 minutes is frowned upon. But again real friends will be understanding of the importance of real life. And it is the game play consequences that you are starting do dread.

In many games most of the area isn't safe. If you log out in the middle of nowhere, you might well log back in directly in front of a monster that is stronger than you are, and start your gaming session by dieing. In other games, logging of prematurely means that you don't reach the goal you were currently pursueing, and wasted the time you already spent. For example if you camp a monster for some special loot in Everquest, if you log off, somebody else will take your place, and all the waiting was for nothing. In Puzzle Pirates, if you log of in the middle of an extended pirating tour, all the money you plundered gets buried on the next lonely island, and you will need to do the same tour again to just get the money back. And in all the group oriented games , logging off means you are out of the group, and will spend considerable time finding a new group when you log back in.

All of this means that classical MMORPG require a certain dedication from their players, both in how often they log on, and in how long they stay once they logged on. But the holy grail of game marketing is not just to attract the few hardcore gamer, but to attract the far bigger number of casual gamers. And we can see the consequences in some of the new games.

Prime example being City of Heroes. If you don't log into CoH, nothing bad happens. Your friends might gain levels on you, but who cares? It doesn't prevent you from playing with them, they can always sidekick you. Setting up a group in CoH is fast, as no special character classes are absolutely required. Playing missions divides your game session in reasonably sized chunks of between 15 and 75 minutes, so there is ample opportunity to get out of the game again. And if real life forces you out of the game, you haven't lost all that much time. And if you know your play session will be short, you can always solo, nobody is forcing you to group.

And from all what I read, World of Warcraft will be similar in game flow, having lots of missions dividing your play time into chapters, thus offering natural exit points. And again making a game soloable makes it attractive to casual gamers.

Nevertheless I hope that not all games will be going down that route of having the content easily available for solo players, and sized in small chunks. Because having a game which requires people to band together in groups, and stay together for some larger amount of time, also has its advantages. You can achieve larger goals, which feel a lot more epic. Raids with 50 and more players are immensely popular in EQ. The game forcing you into groups and guilds is both negative and positive: You lose personal freedom, but you gain a much closer bonded community.

The MMORPG market becoming bigger, there is room for both, hardcore and casual games. But even if you prefer the hardcore end, do yourself a favor and don't neglect real life too much. No game is worth losing your job or wife for, caused by your neglect. And change that cat litter box sometimes.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:05 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
And the winner is ...

I already mentioned how difficult it is to judge MMORPG if you constantly compare them to your expectations, and those expectations are growing. So I don't give ratings in my reviews, I just say what features I liked and what I didn't like. But today I'm going to give some sort of relative rating: Of all the games on my hard disk, which one did I end up playing this weekend. In the best tradition of award ceremonies, I'm going to list the games that I didn't play, or didn't play much, first, and the winner at the end.

Ragnarok Online I was still in my free 15 days trial period. But RO hadn't fascinated me at all. I think it is mainly the lack of quests, the lack of goals. You just run around at random and try to hit monsters before somebody else gets there first. So I uninstalled RO and don't plan to ever go back there.

Puzzle Pirates I have paid for 6 months, because it is comparatively cheap. But all I did this weekend was log in, check out that everything was okay with my shop, and log out again. Another game where I have run out of meaningful goals. You are supposed to collect money for bigger and bigger ships. But for bigger ships you would need a bigger crew, and those simply don't happen. It's a case of too many chiefs, not enough indians: Everybody wants to be an officer and command his own ship, as that is simply more fun. I am also a bit disappointed about the lack of development, the number of puzzles is small, and hasn't grown in the last couple of months.

City of Heroes, my account is cancelled, but I can still play until the end of the current billing period, which is in 2 weeks. I played this for maybe an hour or two this weekend. But unfortunately many of my guild mates have either already quit, or are at least not playing that much any more, and I was the only one from my guild online. It is possible to have fun for some time playing solo, but it is not as exciting as group combat. It is still a game I recommend to everybody to check out, both for new players to the genre and veterans. But don't take more than a 3-month subscription, it doesn't have more staying power than that.

Asherons Call, I think I wasted my $12.95 on. My main motivation in buying this was that I have always regretted having "missed" one of the major games of the early era. I played it for a few hours this weekend, but it didn't really enchant me. Graphics are bad, but that was expected. Unexpected was the curious experience of getting too much loot. You leave the newbie training as level 5, kill the first grunt in the vicinity, and it drops several useful items, including 1 or 2 magic ones. After half an hour of killing you are overloaded with magic goodies. Now I've always claimed that loot is important, but that is a bit too much of a good thing. Especially since the inventory and equipping interface is a bit chaotic and fiddly, sorting out what to use isn't easy. Buying AC included 1 month of free play, as usual, but I won't pay any longer than that. I am probably missing the major selling point of AC, allegiances, a much better guild structure than most games. But I only met 1 other player in my whole play session, even the town was deserted, and there was a message stating that there were only 400 players on the server. I'm happy that I finally played it, just for the sake of not being ignorant, but I obviously missed Asherons Call heyday.

So the winner is ... A Tale in the Desert II. With some interuptions, mostly due to the server being brought down (it's still beta), I played ATITD2 nearly all weekend long. It is interesting to play this from the start, my previous ATITD experience was already higher up the communal tech tree. What ATITD has in abudance are goals, you always know what you are working on. And because nearly all goals have multiple requirements, the game is varied enough, as practically each resource is collected and processed differently. In spite of the community being small (breaking an all time record of over 700 simultaneous players this weekend), it is very close and friendly.

The really awe-inspiring feature of A Tale in the Desert is (and always has been), how close the developers are to the players. ATITD is the brain child of Andrew "Pharaoh" Tepper (also called "Teppy"), and he is present in the game often. Look at the following exchange which happened this weekend: Pharaoh asks on the system channel to send him /tells where we players see major bottlenecks and problems. I send him a /tell that leather is in short supply everywhere (leather comes from sheep and camels, of which a fixed amount appear every game day, a number that doesn't scale with the number of players. Lots of players => bottleneck.) Other players tell him the same. Pharaoh says on the system channel that he will work on leather, and asks about details on whether sheep or camels are in shorter supply. Turns out it is both of them. He increases the number of sheeps spawning every day IMMEDIATELY. The fix for the camels (they work a bit more complicated) is introduced half a day later. Most of the changes occur without the server having to be stopped.

That level of customer support is really unheard of in other games. People reported bugs in EQ in 1999 which are still present in 2004. In most games you are lucky to get hold of a GM (game master, not a developer but a in-game customer service representative, often volunteer, always very low level in the company hierarchy), and the GM won't do more for you than getting you unstuck if you fell through a world geometry bug. Before another game doubles the supply of a resource, it would take months of developer internal discussions, with not much player input. Of course that is partially a question of game size, ATITD is a much smaller affair than EQ. But it is also a question of developer attitude. No other game feels as if it was developing FOR you, and WITH you, but A Tale in the Desert does.

A Tale in the Desert 2 open beta opened yesterday. Find out more on the official ATITD site, or download the client from Fileplanet. If you can imagine yourself playing a game without combat, but lots of other things to do, check it out.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:02 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
How to keep your customers

I am a bit peeved right now about Star Wars Galaxies. They have decided to do a big character purge, deleting all older characters, including mine. And they will do that BEFORE the next expansion comes out, and before they even start fixing the combat system. So if you want to come back to SWG after half a year, and give it another chance, because a new expansion came out, or a big patch happened, your characters will be gone. If you want to buy a spaceship for the Jump To Lightspeed expansion, you either have to beg money from old friends if you can still find some, or re-do the whole tedious money-earning procedure from the start. Needless to say I have decided NOT to buy the SWG Jump to Lightspeed expansion, which I otherwise might have.

In other, related news, MtGO released a new expansion last month, and I found myself drawn to buy some of the new cards. And I'm reading the news about the FFXI Chains of Promethia expansion, wondering if I should buy that. I'm nearly certain I'll buy the City of Villains expansion of CoH next year, although I just cancelled my account there. Which brings us to the interesting question of MMORPG business models and customer retention.

Many people focus on the "monthly fee" part of the business model. If Everquest has 400,000 customers paying $12 per month on average (depending on pricing plan) for 5 years, you get a whooping 288 million dollars, which is tempting to many game company executives. But it is well possible that EQ is not a role model, but a statistical fluke. It enjoyed a near-monopoly situation for years, and it is not clear if any future game can achieve that. FFXI and Lineage are doing better, by tapping the vast Asian market, but in US/European subscriptions EQ is still king, in spite of so many games trying to surpass it.

But something that can be learned from EQ is the importance of expansion sets. EQ has 7 expansion sets now. And most players paid full price of $30 and more for each expansion, just when it came out (They are much cheaper now, of course). 400,000 customers buying 7 expansions at $30 is another 84 million dollars, and of course each expansions directly causes some customers to either stay longer, or even come back, earning you more monthly fees than you would otherwise have.

Now imagine that Everquest really was a fluke, and modern MMORPG games will not have a significant amount of customers staying for over a year, but have an average retention time of just 3 months or so. Then expansions become more and more important. In the extreme you end up with the Guildwars business model, where there are no monthly fees at all, and you make all your money by selling the game and its expansions. Or the Magic the Gathering Online model, where you also have no fees, but sell the game components. Games without monthly fees have the big advantage that people are less inclined to uninstall them, they can stop playing without "cancelling their accounts", and so coming back is a lot easier.

Besides luring them back with expansions, it is obvious that you should avoid anything which prevents your old customers from coming back. The cost of keeping old characters on some hard disk should be minimal to SOE, unless their game database is really, really badly programmed. I just bought a new hard disk and it cost me $1 per Gigabyte, and character information takes only a fraction of that. And if keeping them in the database would have been such a problem, they could at least have made a backup on tape of the character itself and his immediate possessions, and just deleted any buildings he might still have had in the game world. Telling your customers that it takes a few hours to get their characters back from the backup is still more acceptable than telling them that the characters are gone forever. There certainly will be some players buying Jump to Lightspeed that were unaware of the character purge, and they will NOT be happy with SOE.

The only good idea SOE had to improve customer retention is their All Access subscription, and they bungled that one. The idea is that the customer pays $22 per month, and has access to several different SOE games, so he can jump from one to the other whenever he gets bored with one of them. That is something that I might be tempted to pay if the "all" in the all access wasn't such a blatant lie. You do NOT get access to Star Wars Galaxies, and I don't think EQ2 will be included either. You only get access to 3 different versions of Everquest (for PC, for Mac, and for PS2), and to Planetside. Plus some stupid browser games that nobody plays. If the all access subscription really offered several playable games, I might be lazy enough to pay for it, even if paying each game month for month, and not playing stuff in parallel, is obviously cheaper. But as it stands it is just a bad deal.

So all around black marks to SOE for their customer retention policies, both with the SWG character purge and the not-so-all-inclusive all access subscription. The above mentioned near-monopoly unfortunately blinded SOE to what is necessary to keep your customers. Already EQ1 subscriptions are going down, and SWG was never the success it should have been. We will see how SOE fares in the second round, with their new EQ2 having strong competition from Blizzard and NCSoft. The more competition you have, the nicer you should be to your customers, because they tend to vote with their feet and wallets.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:48 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Approaching the ideal game?

The MMORPG genre now exists for a couple of years already, and many players have by now played more than one game. Every new game promises not only better graphics, but also improvements in game play. One could suppose that by making games better and better, we would approach some sort of ideal game. But I think that instead with every step we approach the ideal game, the ideal game is moving away by two steps from us. And I see tendencies of veteran players becoming less satisfied with the "better" games than they were with the old games, while at the same time being unable to go back to them.

The problem is that MMORPG have lots of components. The "ideal game" that is forming in each of our heads is a mix of the best components from all of the games we played before. Lets say the massive content of Everquest, the excellent combat of City of Heroes, the excellent item crafting of Star Wars Galaxies, with the excellent auction house of Final Fantasy XI. And it gets more and more difficult for a real game to live up to that combination of excellencies.

I'm fully aware that I fall into the same trap with my reviews, and that it is sometimes rather unfair. Every single game after Everquest has been critisized by many people for not having as much content as EQ. And for the next couple of years everybody discussing character generation will compare whatever he reviews unfavorably with City of Heroes costume creation.

So could we some day reach the ideal game, by somebody copying the best parts from the best games and putting them together? Unfortunately not. Many parts that we like individually are mutually exclusive. We like the fact that in City of Heroes everybody can solo, and that we can mix a group out of any character classes, with no "must have" requirements. But we also like how our "must have" character shines, and performs an important role, in combat of games like EQ and FFXI. Obviously we can't have both.

EQ is praised for the strong friendships it evokes between the players, and we would like to have that back in our ideal game. But once you look why people form these personal bonds in EQ, and not in CoH, it turns out that it was because of EQ's failings. EQ is harsh and brutal to its players, and it forces players into annoying downtime after each fight, in each "camp", and on many other occasions like boat travel. That gives people both a motive ("lets beat this game together") to band together, and the opportunity to chat, thus you end up with guilds that are strongly bonded. City of Heroes is rightfully praised for practically eliminating downtime, and for allowing players to be heroes instead of underdogs. But thus CoH players don't need other players all that much, and they have less opportunity to chat, and we end up with the community being a lot less coherent. And it seems impossible to combine these two approaches in a way that gives us the best of both worlds.

Similar incompatibilities exist in the field of tradeskills and economics. A crafter wants both a fun system to craft things which is not too tedious, and he wants customers from which to earn a healthy profit. But the more fun the crafting system is, the more people craft, and the more supply drives down profits. And the same is true for items that are looted and not crafted: If getting the loot item is not tedious, it will not be valuable, because more people will prefer to get it for themselves instead of paying others to do it.

The earlier games like Everquest had it easier to keep customers. The people who played it hadn't experienced anything better yet. Games like SWG or CoH succeed by drawing in totally new players to the genre, who come because they want to play a Wookie, or a comic book hero, not because they already played other MMORPG and are looking for the ideal game. It is only we veterans in which the experience of many different highlights has damaged our ability to see a new game on its own merits, without comparison to previous games. And if we go back to the old games, we compare them unfavorably with the new ones. This is our loss. It echoes on every message board of every MMORPG.

I wish I could turn it off in my head, this comparing, and just enjoy every game as new and fresh experience. But of course I can't. So I am seriously beginning to doubt whether any of the future games will make me so addicted as the original Everquest did. Fortunately I'm being saved by the large number of MMORPG games coming out: They might not keep me for as long as they did, but a shorter time in many different games still means I have a packed schedule.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:17 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
A Tale in the Desert 2

More than a year ago I reviewed A Tale in the Desert 1 here. Yesterday, as subscriber of Fileplanet, I received an invite to the closed ATITD 2 beta. So I downloaded the client and jumped back into the peaceful world of Egypt.

The first important thing to explain is the meaning of the "2" in ATITD 2. Because this "2" is significantly different from the "2" in EQ2. Everquest is a game without an ending. But as I pointed out in my previous post, the graphics of old games are starting to look outdated after some time, and drive away customers. EQ subscription numbers have peaked some months ago, and are now declining. The developers were aware of that in advance, and created a completely new game, which they call Everquest 2. EQ2 will in many respects be similar to EQ1, but it is not just the same game with new graphics. All the quests, hunting spots, etc. will be different, many game mechanics will be different, and EQ2 will basically be a different game than EQ1. For some years to come you will have the choice of playing either EQ1 or EQ2, or even both if you have that much time.

ATITD is unusual in that it has an ending, and ATITD 1 is about to end now. There was an over-arching story line in which all players participated, and after 2 years the story ends and the game is over. Soon you can't play ATITD 1 any more, either you switch to ATITD 2, or you stop altogether. The "2" means that it is the "second telling" of the story. The story and game will be different, evolved, but not as different as EQ2 is from EQ1.

That is already noticeable when you first log in. The graphics are improved, with nicer looking avatars and landscape, but the graphics engine and user interface are basically the same. Many things still look exactly like they looked before, or just had their textures slightly improved. ATITD has always been about climbing up a tech tree, a bit as if you turned Civilization into a MMORPG. And at least the lower part of that tech tree is still exactly the same as in the first telling. But later there will be technologies that were not in the first part. And the "tests", ATITD's version of quests, also are a mix of the old and the new.

There have been some changes to the map, which look minor, but have major consequences. For example there are now far more trees than before. Wood being one of the basic building materials, that changes the game flow enormously. People used to teleport into the Sinai, just because there was a "forest" of 9 trees there. The forest is gone, and even if it were there, it wouldn't be such an attraction any more, wood is now easier to get. Another small change with big consequences is the placement of the schools and universities. They used to be evenly distributed over the map, so player settlements also were found everywhere. Now the schools and universities are more clustered, and you have to cross quite some space to move from one cluster to the next. That results in there now being "cities", "suburbs", and "rural" areas, evolving naturally.

The biggest change to basic game mechanics is that most production tools can't be placed into the wilderness any more. You first need to build a "compound", a house, and only in there you get the option to build those production tools. Right now all houses look the same, but there are some intrigueing looking "change blueprint" options, which look as if by providing the material you can change the look of your house. In any case you now see lots of houses, especially in the "city centers" (the middle of the school/university clusters), and that makes the world look a lot different than before. You can turn the walls of any house off, fortunately, so your own house wall doesn't get into the way when you are working on the production tools.

I have only played ATITD for a few hours up to now, so there are more changes which I haven't seen yet. It seems there are now "chariots" going from one city to another, for easier travel. But the old travel system, where you can have several teleportation points earned by learning several levels of the navigation skill, still exists as well.

What hasn't changed is ATITD is the game which feels most like "working". For example I would like to learn the first level of navigation. For that I need to collect 1,000 thorns, which at 5 thorns per plant per minute means picking 200 yucca plants (attention old ATITD players: the old purple thorn bushes have been replaced by new yellow-green yucca plants). And before I can do that, I need to make 200 bricks and 100 boards to make the chest in my house big enough to hold the thorns. 200 bricks means picking 66 grass at 1 grass per picking, the mud and sand for them I can get all in one command, and laying out 6 bricks to dry 33 times. 100 boards means cutting 100 wood, 20 times 5 per tree, and clicking on the wood plane 100 times to cut them into boards, not to mention replacing the stone blade of it several times. As you can see, I have my work for the next play session cut out for me.

Of course this "work" is not principally different than slaying 1,000 orcs to get up a level in a classical MMORPG. You could even say it is a lot more varied, as different raw materials are gathered in different fashions, and different advanced materials have different "mini-games" to produce them. But one can see how many people would prefer killing 1,000 orcs.

ATITD (1 as well as 2) is a very social game, with a lot of player interaction. Move a bit up the tech tree, and the amount of work to build a production tool goes up into regions where co-operation seems a much better choice. Especially at certain choke points of the tech tree: For example jugs of water are very important and needed in large quantities, but to make them you need a pottery wheel, and to make the pottery wheel you need a stone saw to produce the flywheel part of it. The stone saw is very hard to get to all on your own, but once you built it, you are not going to use it all that often, as having something like 12 pottery wheels is largely sufficient. So players group together in guilds, and the whole guild just needs one single stone saw. Further up the tech trees are improved production tools, like a carpentry shop, making 50 boards in one go, instead of 1 like the wood plane. But those too are expensive to build, and doing it in a guild and not alone makes a lot of sense.

Beyond guilds, the whole community is working together on bigger tech advancements. Some technologies are learned not by an individual paying a fee of resources at a school, but by many people donating large amounts of resources to an university. Once the required amount of resources is donated, the university is giving out the skill to everybody who passes for free, and the whole server is advancing.

On the other hand, for a game without combat, ATITD has a mean form of PvP. Things you do often affect other players in negative ways. Build a mine, and it pollutes the environment, making somebody elses sheep sick and his flax wither. Tests often pit you into direct competition with other people, for example forcing you to "build the highest obelisk in the region", an ever-increasing requirement that makes you curse the other players who came before you. Some resources are rare, and you might find the whole vein of that rare metal you need blocked by other peoples mines. Camels are distributed in some form of hidden "auction", going to the person in the region who left the most straw in his stable. And so on, lots of sources for conflict. And that is deliberate. The whole game is about a society having both positive and negative interactions, and how they are dealing with it, with the ultimate target of reaching Utopia. Which is a nice and interesting idea, but people not being all that selfless naturally, there is some pain involved playing this.

I like ATITD, and am happy to play it again for a while. This is the sort of tradeskill system I wish some other MMORPG had. But I am not an Utopist, and know that me and most other people are easier motivated by individual achievement than by collective one. We are already living in Real Life ® in a peaceful world where many of us are doing work that is just a small cog in a large machine. For my games I prefer something different to that. But of course even mundane simulation games like The Sims have a big following, just the online version was a flop. So ATITD 2 is at least worth checking out if you are looking for something completely different. ATITD does what is does well enough, I just wish they also had levels and monsters and the other classical MMORPG stuff.

ATITD has a fine tradition of giving away the client for free, and having a free trial period. I assume that the same will be true for ATITD 2 once the beta is finished. So trying out if there is a peaceful side in you is not a financial risk, well worth trying.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:26 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Computer graphics

Recently my thoughts are turning around the importance of computer graphics. Many people dismiss graphics quality as not so important, in a sort of counter reaction to computer game marketing hype, which tries to sell you bad game with pretty screenshots. Even in good games, players have a tendency to admire the nice graphics for about 5 minutes, and then forget about them. But by getting used to them so fast, our level of expectation is rising without us noticing it.

I just cleared out a cupboard of old PC games, some of them more than 5 years old. And when I look at the graphics of a typical game where the requirements say "Windows 95/98", they look downright unplayable to me. I downloaded the 5 year old Asherons Call yesterday (more on that another day), and the graphics are just plain ugly. I already made fun of how ugly the EQ1 characters look in comparison to EQ2 in an earlier post.

I buy a new PC every 2 years, and I always do a 3DMark benchmark on them. And those benchmark pretty much follow Moore's law. The 4 year old computer I just gave away had a score of 1100, the 2 year old one is at 2650, and this years model scores 5550. And while my computer graphics power quintupled in the last 4 years, the graphics engines also improved. As far as I can make out from the screenshots of EQ2 and WoW, hills will actually look round, and not like the rough polygons we are used to. The strange thing is that we never complained about the rough polygons, because they looked better than what we had before. But once you played in a virtual world where the trees are not just two planes in a cross setup, the old graphics look quaint. And when I review such a game with outdated graphics, I tend to downgrade it for its looks. (Currently fighting hard to see the merits of AC behind the uglyness).

Nevertheless I'm not absolutely insisting on photo-realistic 3D graphics. Graphics that achieve a more comic look, like cell-shading, are okay with me. Even pretty 2D graphics are good, even when they are old, as 2D graphics didn't undergo much of a technological change in the last couple of years. It is just the old, bad, 3D graphics that seem ugly to me now. And I wonder how this years games will look to me in 5 years. The more you approach perfection, the less room there is left for improvement, so maybe the future change will not be that obvious as the change of the last 5 years.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:01 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Gladius

It is not very often that you can find a treasure in your computer games stores bargain bin. But I picked up Gladius for $20 during my holidays, and this is such a rare gem. I got the Playstation 2 version, but the game also exists for the XBox and Gamecube, for around the same low price.

Gladius is a game from a very small niche genre, a tactical RPG. Most other games of this genre have "tactics" somewhere in their name, like Final Fantasy Tactics, or Dynasty Tactics. The backbone of the game is more or less a classical RPG, with character development, skills, and equipment, but battles take place on a chessboard-like grid, and the tactics of how you place your units there are very important.

In Gladius your main character is either the son of a gladiator in a pseudo-roman empire, or a barbarian princess with magical powers. Their stories become intertwined later in the game. In either case you are managing a school of gladiators. You start out with two gladiators (one of them being your hero), you can get up to 8 gladiators in the first quarter of the game, and up to 30 at the end. There are lots of different types of gladiators, in 6 different classes: light, medium, heavy, support, arcane, and beast. You can walk with your group on the world map, but the main action happens in the cities, where the arenas are.

In each city arena there are several leagues, each of them having several battles. Win all (or nearly all) the battles to win the league, win all (or nearly all) of the leagues to qualify for the local tournament, win all local tournaments to qualify for the regional tournament, which then opens up the next region for you. I'm 12 hours into the game, and I'm only half way through the first region, so this is not a short game.

The number of participants which you can put into an arena battle is fixed, and there are often additional conditions. You might be forced to use one male and one female gladiator, or only light and support gladiators, or only gladiators from a certain region. So you need to keep a mixed group of gladiators in your school, although you can hire some additional help temporarily for just one battle, if you can't meet the requirements otherwise. Winning a battle gives xp for the participants, and a few xp to the other gladiators in your school. You also get money, which you can use to hire gladiators or buy equipment. Win a league and you get even more money, and some equipment as prize. Some leagues also win you a special medal, which serves as entry ticket for other leagues. Other than that you can usually fight most battles in a region in any order.

There are different sorts of battles: A simple death match, king of the hill matches where you get points for keeping a certain position on top of a hill, a capture the flag like mode where you need to destroy the opponents monument, point fights where you get one point for every point of damage dealt, and a battle where you need to destroy more barrels than your opponents in a limited time. Up to now all my battles had 2 to 4 participants per side, with 2 to 4 schools participating, but that might get bigger later.

Heavy gladiators get a bonus against medium ones, medium gladiators have a bonus against light ones, and light gladiators have a bonus against heavy ones, in a classical rock-paper-scissor configuration. The other classes have other abilities, like throwing spears, or casting magic. Every time one of your gladiators gets up a level, he not only increases his stats, but he also gets skill points, with which he can buy special attacks and abilities. There are so many different abilities, that chosing the right gladiators makes all the difference for the different battles. Fortunately you can see what gladiators the other side is fielding, and if you lose a battle you can either reload, or just pay the entrance fee again to replay. Gladiators don't die in arena fights, local healers patch them up after the fight, but there might be random encounters later on the world map where you could actually lose them.

Combat is turn-based, but lighter and faster units get to act a bit more often than the heavier ones. Gladius is not an action game, there is a lot of thinking and tactics required. There is a small action component in that your attacks use a "swing meter", like in a golf game, and you can do bonus damage for stopping the swing at the perfect point. But I think I've seen a switch in the options that enables you to turn that feature off, if you don't like it.

Graphics are pretty enough, but not really special. Unfortunately the PS2 version needs several seconds loading time every time you switch from one screen to another, which gets a bit annoying in the management phase of the game. But there is only one loading screen at the start of a battle, and somebody had the brilliant idea to put random questions and answers from the internal FAQ on that loading screen. As not many people read the manual before playing, being forced to read that FAQ really helps you to discover features you weren't aware of.

I'd recommend Gladius even at full price. For around $20 it is a real bargain, many hours of fun for little money. But of course you must prefer turn-based tactical combat to twitchy button mashing, there are probably a lot of people out there who don't enjoy this. It's a thinking man's game. Which explains the lack of publicity, and the low price.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:48 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Ragnarok Online

Ragnarok Online is a Korean MMORPG, but it has some international servers and is available fully in English. The good news is that the client is free, and you can download it and play for free for 2 weeks. That was good enough for me to at least give it a try and play it for several hours this weekend.

The first thing that strikes you are the curious graphics in 2.5D. Not really 2D and not really 3D. The landscape is in a simple 3D, but the characters and monsters are 2D. You will see your character always as just a flat sprite, but 8 different views exist, and if you rotate the camera you can see your character from different sides. Looks very much like a Japanese Manga comic in pastel colors. The monsters also look comic style, including one bouncing pink blob with eyes.

You start as "novice", without a class, and start whacking monsters. Your character has 2 level indicators, a base level which determines stats and hitpoints, and a job level which determines skills. Once you hit job level 10 as novice, you can become one of 6 basic character classes. But that involves taking a test, a quest. I made a swordsman, and the test was rather simple, just walk through a mace without falling into a hole, but it seems other quests are more difficult.

Once you have a character class, you are back at job level 1, while your base level rests as it is. You continue whacking monsters, increase your base and job level, and now get job skills. For example the swordsman gets passive skills for faster hitpoint regeneration or better use of his sword, and active skills like Bash to do additional damage to the monsters. Unfortunately using active skills is a two-part process, activating the skill and clicking on the target, and it interrupts your auto-attack, so it is kind of annoying. Combat is a simple affair of clicking on the monster. You can either hold the CTRL key while clicking to auto-attack until the mob is dead, or use the /noctrl command at the start of each play session to make all attacks auto-attack.

Every monster gives a fixed amount of two sorts of xp, one that counts for your base level and one that counts for your job level. And that is a Bad Idea ®. Most other games have a point where monsters that are much lower than you give you no xp at all, but not so Ragnarok Online. Sure, the amount of xp you get from whacking a low level mob is low, but it is risk free. I've seen high-level mages in low-level dungeons, clearing a whole room full of monsters with a single fireball. Kill-stealing is rampant. Furthermore item-stealing is rampant, as dead monsters simply drop their loot on the floor, and everybody is free to pick it up. So your main activity in RO consists of searching for isolated hunting spots where nobody is interfering with your fights and loot.

Besides the job quests there are unfortunately no quests. And while there are groups, most people just solo, because finding mobs is more difficult than killing them, and groups don't help you much there. Loot is plentiful, but random, and most loot consists of things you can't use, like various monster body parts. Some loot drops are useful for other players for crafting, like empty bottles needed to make potions. But there is no bazaar, no automated trading. Merchants can stand somewhere afk and sell stuff, the main city is full of them, but for selling your loot you often don't bother to find a trading partner and just sell it to an NPC.

Ragnarok Online is a very simple game, it didn't hold my interest all that long. I won't even play the full free 2 weeks, after 2 days I have the impression to already know the game. The lack of quests and the way combat works makes this a game of randomly wandering around and whacking cute monsters, with no strategy or planning involved. I appreciated being able to test it for free, but this is not the game for the MMORPG veteran.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:58 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Everquest II Starter Kit - Part 3

I played around with the 2 CDs from the EQ2 Starter Kit, and as I thought, the most interesting thing are the Journeyman Boots for your character, which you get by entering a code on a SOE webpage. Well, you are promised to get them, no way to find out before the game is there.

CD 1 has some videos, and music scores, but I've seen most of them before. It also has a button to "scan your system", but that only directs you to this webpage. The scan is very basic, with no benchmark performed, but it will give you an idea if your computer is powerful enough for this game. Happily my computer even meets the "recommended" stats.

CD 2 is to install the EQ2 character creation tool on your hard disk. And then it still only runs when the disk is in the drive, heaven knows why. Character creation is very detailed, but somehow not so much fun as in City of Heroes. That is maybe because in CoH you mainly play with your costume, which is highly visible. In the EQ2 character creation, you only have minimal control over your body, you just set the size, skin color, and clothing color. But then you have very intricate control over your head. There are a total of 17 sliders to set for your head, 3 of which are just for the nose. You are extremely unlikely to meet somebody in the game who has exactly your head.

So how does it look? As a premiere in this blog, I'll add two pictures for comparison. The first is from the dwarf I created with the EQ2 Starter Kit. The second is a little reminder how dwarves looked in EQ1 (pre-Luclin):



Graphics have sure improved in the last 5 years. As you can see, the newly created characters are just wearing some rags. And the background is a ship. And the video showing parts of the tutorial is also playing on a ship. I think it is reasonably safe to assume that your character in EQ2 will start ship-wrecked, and the tutorial ship will save you and get you to your starting city. See you there in November!

Now what the heck will I play until then?

- posted by Tobold @ 10:21 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Everquest II Starter Kit - Part 2

"You always get what you pay for", is an old dictum I use sometimes when discussing the quality of free and budget games. I just tend to forget that sometimes it also holds true in cases where you paid more than you wanted: Ordered on Thursday evening, my Everquest II Starter Kit arrived on Monday at noon, shipped from South Dakota to Europe in less than 2 business days.

At least I know now why it costs $33 to ship. The speed is impressive. And I'm actually looking forward to getting Everquest II itself shipped the same way when it comes out. Although that might still be some time ahead. Earlier expectations of end September have been too optimistic. SOE now targets a release date of somewhere in November. Which happens to be the same as the release date of World of Warcraft. With not much chance of any of those 2 dates slipping much further, because obviously they have to be out in time for christmas shopping. It will be a clash of the titans come November, and I'll probably play them on a first come, first serve basis. Still hoping to an invite to the open beta for both as well, so I can put up a review here in time once the NDA is lifted.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:30 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Everquest II Starter Kit

MMORPG addiction can lead to seriously bad ideas. Now I'm usually rational enough to avoid the worst excesses, and I haven't quit my job or my family to get more time to play. But I just tricked myself into paying $125 for Everquest II, two-and-a-half time of what most other people will be paying for it.

It all began with the announcement of the Everquest II Starter Kit. You pre-order EQ2, and you get the Starter Kit for free. The Starter Kit contains 2 CD's with bonus material, including a character generator which allows you to already create a character before the game is released. But the reason I wanted this Starter Kit is that it also contains a code which would give your character a pair of journeyman boots in game, increasing his running speed. This was one of the highly desirable and hard to get items of EQ1, and I never got any. Sure, my main character was a druid and had the Spirit of Wolf spell that worked even better. But those boots really made me want to get my hands on the Starter Kit. Hey, it's supposed to be free, what could go wrong?

First thing to go wrong was the world-wide distribution of the Starter Kit. EQ2 is distributed by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) in the US, but by Ubisoft in Europe, where I live. And while SOE distributed the Starter Kit in the US from the 1st of August, Ubisoft did no such thing. You simply can't order the Starter Kit in Europe right now, and it isn't really sure whether there will be any, and then if there will be enough of them to go round.

While a first announcement from SOE had said that if I bought the US version of EQ2, I would not be able to play on the European servers, and vice versa, they then had an unprecedented attack of customer friendliness, and decided to make an optional patch available so every version could play on every server.

So as I couldn't get the Starter Kit in Europe, I decided to get it from the US. My usual import place, DVDBoxoffice, with it's free world-wide shipping, unfortunately didn't offer the Starter Kit, probably because they are in Canada. So I decided to get the Starter Kit directly from the Station Store of SOE. As SOE is well known for giving preferential treatment to people giving money to them, that might even increase my chances to get into the beta.

I go to the Station Store and click on the EQ2 Starter Kit "add to cart". I get a message that I would need first to pre-order EQ2 before I could order the Starter Kit, fair enough. I add EQ2 as pre-order to my virtual shopping cart, price tag $49.99, and proceed to the checkout. The usual pages of entering shipping and billing address, and my credit card number. Then the shipping page: Ouch! Only option available for Europe is UPS first class worldwide shipping for $33. Well, seeing how late Ubisoft is with the Starter Kit, getting EQ2 from the US with first class shipping might at least get me the game faster than I can get it here. The confirmation page adds another unpleasant surprise, value added tax (sales tax) of 17.5%, bringing the total price up to $92. This is the point where my brain should have rung an alarm bell, but didn't. I wasn't thinking too clearly and just acknowledged the order.

Finally, I get a message to "click here to order the free EQ2 Starter Kit". It is added to my shopping cart for $0.00. Then the same series of pages follows as in the pre-order of the game. And I find myself on the same page with the shipping options. Yes, I will have to pay $33 for shipping of the "free" Starter Kit. I'm trapped: If I don't pay, the whole exercise was for nothing, and I don't see the option to cancel the EQ2 pre-order. So I ended up paying a grand total of $125, of which $66 are for shipping.

And I should have known that. Because I had an invite to the Star Wars Galaxies beta last year, and didn't accept the invite because that would have meant paying $5 for the beta CD plus $30 shipping. And knowing my luck, Ubisoft will probably get around to offering the Starter Kit for the European version of EQ2 next week or so, and I paid all that extra money for nothing. Sometimes I'm just stupid.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:04 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Guardian Unlimited Gamesblog

The Guardian is a British newspaper with a daily circulation of around 400,000. A general mainstream newspaper, reporting daily news and politics, with a left-of-center view. And they have an online edition, and in this online edition there is the Guardian Unlimited Gamesblog. Okay, its not a MMORPG blog, but other than that it is more or less exactly what I'm doing here.

This needs some mental getting-used-to. I played my first computer games over 20 years ago, on a ZX81, and I'm very much used to being considered a geek because of playing computer games. But now a newspaper like The Guardian reports on computer games the same way as it reports on other forms of entertainment, like movies, sports, or TV. Even my TV magazine has a page with game reviews in it nowadays. Video games are becoming mainstream. In a few years every newspaper will have a video games section just as naturally as they have a movies section. If somebody asks you what your hobbies are, saying "computer games" might no longer elicit that strange stare, but an intelligent response along the lines of "have you played ...".
- posted by Tobold @ 9:31 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Does Longevity Matter?

Here is a conundrum: I sincerely believe that City of Heroes is the best MMORPG currently on the market. And I just cancelled my account for it, as it is becoming boring, after having played it for little over 3 months. Does a MMORPG have to keep you playing for a year and more to be good? Does longevity matter?

Take single-player games for comparison. I am sure you can remember several great games that you consider shining examples of what makes a game fun. But how long did you play them? Even great role-playing games can often be finished in less than 100 hours, and you are not that likely to play them twice. But does that make them bad games?

The previous business model of MMORPG seemed to be one of fun dilution. You could achieve great things, but it took ages to do so. Kill rats for a month and sell their furs, before you can replace your pointy stick with a rusty sword, and got enough levels to kill an orc. Continue for a year before you reach the level where you have a shiny sword and can kill something really impressive like a giant. You'll never be powerful enough to kill a dragon, but with great effort you can organize a group of 50 players that do this together. And by making everything take so long, the game company continues to recieve monthly fees from their players for a long time.

But that business model went out of the window once the market became flooded with games. Why play game A for a year, just to be able to reach the high-level content, when you can instead switch to game B, and get instant access to lots more of new content, even if it is low-level?

And then City of Heroes comes, and offers a game which is undiluted fun right out of the box. Even at level 1 you can already take on a typical group of 3 criminals robbing an old ladies handbag. And after 2 months of playing, at only level 19, I had already killed my first arch-villain, the evil Dr. Vahz, who is responsible for infesting Paragon City with zombies. After 3 months I am already at the sort of content that in other games is reserved for high levels, even if I am just over half way to the maximum level. I did super-quests (called Task Forces), where a group remains together for a string of quests lasting several hours. And so I've "been there, done that", and ready to move on to the next game.

And that is not necessarily a bad thing, not even for NCSoft. Because I am leaving them as a happy customer, willing to recommend their product, and willing to buy their next product. They got my money for the CoH box and then around the same amount again for a 3-months subscription. If I leave and somebody else takes my place, they earn as much as if I had stayed for another 6 months.

By not diluting the fun, by offering it immediately and not only after several months, CoH is also attracting the sort of customers that the other games just can't reach. The mass market, the casual gamer, the player who is either not willing or not able to spend hundreds of hours on the level treadmill before getting anywhere interesting.

I sure wish that City of Heroes would have remained fun for longer than 3 months. I would have liked more different tile-sets for the instanced dungeons. I would have liked other things to do than just combat, for example tradeskills. But that doesn't substract from the fact that the content that CoH already has is of excellent quality. If you haven't played CoH yet, and you are looking for something to play before EQ2 or World of Warcraft comes out, there is no better game than City of Heroes. Just don't expect to be playing it for years.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:47 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Grimwell Online

Grimwell Online is an interesting website about MMORPG and some other things. It's a curious mix of "news" style, "blog" style, reviews, and a message board. But it's good to read and seems to be quite active.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:50 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Everquest

From 2000 to 2001 I played Everquest. I started when the first expansion Ruins of Kunark came out, and stopped shortly after intensely disliking the third expansion, Shadows of Luclin. If I remember correctly, I played EQ for 19 months (free month plus three 6-month subscriptions), making EQ the MMORPG I played the longest. No other game has captured me for even a year since. And I still don't know why I stuck to it that long.

EQ was not even my first MMORPG, I had played Ultima Online before, but EQ was my first 3D MMORPG. I played EQ quite a lot. My main character had over 1000 hours played, and I guess adding up all the alts gives me another 1000 hours of playtime. That is 100 hours per month, over 3 hours per day, way beyond what you could really call casual gaming. Nevertheless my highest character level was only 42, out of possible 60 at that time, and I never reached that high-level content EQ is famous for. You could probably say I "suX0r", but I simply wasn't all that interested in gaining levels in EQ, which was a terrible treadmill. I was far too busy with other occupations: I had a successful taxi business teleporting people for money, and another business buying bear skins, transforming them into large bags, and selling the bags with a good profit. I did several tradeskills. I did all the quests I could find. I spent a lot of time collecting faction points. I played around with some good friends, a nice guild, chatted, and was generally having fun.

But if you ask me if EQ is any good, I wouldn't recommend it. Most things in the gameplay of EQ seem to have been designed with the whole purpose of annoying the players:

• 
  When you died you were teleported back to your bind point naked, your equipment stayed on your corpse at the feet of the monster that killed you. Your bind point was often far away, as you could only bind in cities (and non-casters couldn't even bind themselves). So you had to do a naked "corpse run", trying to get your equipment back. During that corpse run you often died again, suffering from the harsh death penalty, sometimes even losing a level. If you ultimately failed to reach your corpse, all of your equipment was gone.
• Due to the danger of losing your corpse, fighting at a hard to get to place like a dungeon was unadvisable. Most dungeons were utterly deserted, except for people being many levels above the monster level in those dungeons, and those were just there to "farm" items.
• Many quests and desirable items involved "camping" a monster that either spawned very rarely, or spawned a bit more often but then only rarely dropped the item you needed. For example a mid-level cleric/druid/shaman quest for a book to raise your wisdom involved killing an NPC that only spawned every 8 hours. And getting myself a "mammoth cloak" involved killing a certain ice goblin every 23 minutes, until he dropped the cloak after a grand total of 16 hours.
• You spent much of your time doing nothing, the dreaded "downtime". For example at level 42, when my druid was out of mana, and did not have an enchanter to enhance his mana regeneration, it took him a full 15 minutes of rest before his mana was full again. If you missed a boat, you had to wait 20 minutes for the next one.
• Most character classes were utterly unable to solo anything once they were not low levels any more. The hardest monster they could kill all alone, would give 0 xp, and the easiest monster that would give them any xp would rip them apart.
• More than 20% of the players, including me, played druids as their main character, because that character class avoided travel downtime with teleports, and was able to solo monsters with a very special technique called quad-kiting (which was fun).
• The difficulty level of EQ was very high. You needed a group with just the right composition, and if somebody goofed, you often all died. That lead to even more downtime, trying to assemble a good group. Gaining levels took forever, and mainly involved killing the same monster over and over.
• Customer service was often abysmally bad. For example there was an official policy, posted on the EQ website, that if you reported that your account had been hacked, you would be banned. Thats right, not the hacker, but the victim. The reason given for that was that if you got hacked, you must have given your password to somebody else, which was against the EULA, so you got banned.
• Items neither decayed, nor had level restrictions. Many low level characters were equipped with high-level equipment they could never have reached themselves, the so-called "twinks". Twinking slowly turned from being rampant to being necessary, as un-twinked characters had difficulties finding a group.
• Tradeskills were not very good, requiring lots of repetitive clicking. Reaching a decent skill level cost a fortune, as the components cost a lot more than what you were producing. And many components were only available as loot drops from monsters. Even wood was only available from killing a treant, and for many of the better ores you needed to kill high-level goblins.

And with all these short-comings, Everquest was highly addictive, and kept you glued to the screen. In 2000 it was the MMORPG with the best graphics, enjoying a near-monopoly of the market. Money kept flowing in, and was re-invested into creating new content. Every zone was distinctive, and usually very well done, not just some random monsters on a random landscape. People still use the term "crushbone factor" to describe interesting content (or the lack thereof), based on the excellent EQ zone Crushbone. The game was hard, and punishing, but up to a certain point that challenge just added to the fun.

And because the game itself was so much against them, the players worked closer together, just to beat it. The game forced you to rely on other people, just to survive, and undergoing that common hardship forged stronger bonds of friendship than in any other game. Many people played on, even when they already hated the game, just because of their friends.

I wonder if I will ever be able to recapture that fascination that I had with EQ playing another game. Does a game HAVE to be player-unfriendly, to ultimately bind people with social bonds, and would I be willing to play such an unfriendly game now? Did I just play EQ that long because it was a first of its kind, and that initial magic is something that is gone forever? I visited EQ some time ago, part of a free trial come-back offer from SOE, and of course the graphics now seem horribly dated, the friends have all gone, and there was nothing left to keep me there except nostalgia, so I left after a day.

EQ2 is supposed to come out in two months time (well, take release dates with a grain of salt), and I am going to play it, come what may. It is possible that I won't like it and throw it into a corner before the free month is over. But the lure of the word "Everquest" is still so strong that I'm willing to pre-order it without waiting for the reviews. And I guess there will be many people like me. What a strange love-hate relationship.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:40 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
XP per Kill

I found another MMORPG blog, with an interesting post by Jeff Freeman: XP per Kill. And somewhere in the middle is his brilliant realization what is wrong with giving xp for every kill in MMORPG: In a traditional pen & paper RPG you received xp for finishing a complete session, an adventure, and the number of xp depended on how hard the session was, measured by what you killed. But if you reduce that to giving people xp for every kill, and give them complete freedom to do as they like, with no dungeon master guiding them, they will simply camp the monsters ad infinitum, and skip the rest of the adventure.

One could solve that by having a MMORPG give xp only for quests. The quest would involve killing monsters, either as direct part of the requirement, or because they drop the item you need, or because they block the way to the quest item. But killing the monster would not give any xp, only finishing the quest would. And the quest would involve other other parts, like information gathering, or traveling somewhere. But I am not totally sure if that system would be better, even if it sure would be closer to the original pen & paper model. The disadvantage is that it would force every player to do only pre-defined quests, follow fixed story lines. By hunting mobs without quests, there meeting other players and interacting with them, players now often create their own stories. The "do you remember how we ..." stories current MMORPG players tell, rarely involve pre-defined stories, but rather what happened accidentally, as interaction between players and the virtual world.

Maybe the solution is not to abandon XP per kill, but simply make quests more attractive. Right now, quests often give a too small award. If the quest involves 1 hour of running around, and 1 hour of killing orcs, it often gives more xp than 1 hour of killing orcs, but less xp than 2 hours of killing orcs. So by stopping to kill orcs, and following the adventure story line, you receive less xp than if you just stayed there and camped them. Only if quests give the most xp per time unit, including all travel times, and the time it takes to get the quest, will following an adventure become more popular than camping. MMORPG players are simple creatures, they mainly follow the optimum reward/risk ratio. If you want to discourage a certain behavior, like camping, and encourage another one, like questing, you just need to modify the rewards.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:49 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments