EQ2 The Tower of Dreams

Thanks to Rygar for pointing out EQ2 The Tower of Dreams, another very good site with Everquest 2 information. Nicely labeled maps, and you can search these labels. So in case you are looking for "Fippy's Hill" for a quest, this site will show you where it is.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:02 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
EQ2 Arcane

Everquest 2 is what I call a knowledge based game. In many cases the difficulty you have in achieving your goal is that you don't know something. Once you got the knowledge, by either having done it yourself before, or by having seen a solution or map somewhere, the task becomes much easier. Which makes web sites like EQ2 Allakhazam so popular.

So I'm using to blog to note Everquest 2 information sites that I found. One of them is EQ2 Arcane. It has quite a number of maps of Norrath, plus some guides, a list of all quests you can find in the Antonica zone, and miscellaneous other information.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:58 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Second Look: Everquest 2 Tradeskills

Crafting in MMORPG games is about using resources to create useful items . The crafting economy is always in some sort of competition with the economybased on monster loot, requiring the two to be balanced. If creating items and making money through tradeskills is significantly easier than finding items and money from monsters, monster loot becomes irrelevant, and the MMORPG loses one of its major driving forces for adventuring. Thus a good tradeskill system makes crafting as difficult as slaying monsters, although the difficulties are of a different kind.

In Everquest 2, there are several difficulties you have to overcome before you can craft an item. The first is that each recipe for the creation of something has a level. Your artisan skill level has to match the recipe level to make the item. These recipe levels are sorted into tiers of 10 levels, tier 1 being level 1 to 9, tier 2 being level 10 to 19, tier 3 being level 20 to 29, and so on.

The second difficulty is that you need to have a recipe for the item you want to create. Basic recipes can be found in books; for example the book "artisan essentials volume 5" contains the basic level 5 recipes, which you can learn when you reach artisan level 5. There are also books with more rare recipes based on rare resources, and these books are sometimes found as loot from monsters.

The third problem is the need for resources. Unlike the beta version of EQ2, very few resources can now be bought from NPC vendors. In most cases you need to go out and harvest the resources before you can craft an item. This is where the tiers of recipe levels come into play: all tier 1 resources use the same bundle of resources, for example elm as wood. These tier 1 resources can be found in the newbie zones of the two big cities, where they spawn in resource nodes.

Starting from tier 2, there are additional difficulties to resource gathering: One is that tier 2 resources are found in Antonica and Commonlands, zones which are higher in level, thus more dangerous than the newbie zones. But more importantly for the harvesting of tier 2 resources you need a minimum skill level, for example foresting skill level 40 to collect the tier 2 wood named maple.

Once you have the skill, the recipe, and the resources, you still need to actually craft the item. To the great credit of Everquest 2, this involves a simple mini-game rather than just hitting a button and waiting for the item to be finished. For each tradeskill, you have three buttons with different symbols. During the crafting process, accidents happen, indicated by a symbol and a short description. And, you guessed it, the three possible accident symbols correspond to the three button symbols, and you need to hit the correct button in the 2 seconds after the accident happens to repair the mistake.

But that fortunately isn't all. When you start the crafting process, the quality of the crafted item (called durability) starts at 100%, and your progress starts at 0%. Every few seconds, you see your progress going up by a bit, but the quality often going down by a bit. Your goal is to get your progress up as far a possible, before the quality drops too low. There are 4 different quality levels which describe your final success in this: crude, shaped, good, and pristine. If you manage to reach 100% progress before the quality drops below the first marker, you made a pristine item. If it has dropped by one marker, but not yet two, you make a good item, and so on. It is highly unlikely that you fall below crude quality, and if it ever happens, you only lose the cheapest part of your resources, the so-called fuel, which can be bought for a mere 6 copper pieces. You never lose rare resources or hard to get intermediate products.

You can stop the crafting process before it ends at 100% progress and voluntarily make a lower quality item. But usually you will want to make as high quality as you possibly can. A pristine quality weapon might deal more damage or have stats bonuses a lower quality weapon of the same type doesn't have. Pristine armor protects its wearer better. A pristine container has more slots. And even with intermediate products, the quality can be important: the first ingredient of a recipe limits its quality. If you cut your elm wood into shaped elm lumber instead of pristine elm lumber, any item you make with that lumber as primary ingredient cannot have a better quality than shaped. Furthermore, for some basic chemical ingredients, higher quality will also result in increased quantity.

The three buttons are used not only repair mistakes during crafting, but also help you to advance your crafting skills. This usually comes at a small cost, some cost magical power to press, others trade a small loss in quality for a gain in progress. But all of them are usually helpful, so you generally achieve better results by using the buttons as buffs as well as to repair mistakes. That will keep you on your toes, because if you just mindlessly mash the buttons, chances are that you hit the wrong button just as a mistake pops up.

Once you reach level 10 in crafting, you will need to specialize into one of three subclasses: scholar, crafter, or outfitter. At level 20, each of these further splits up into two or more specialized classes. And it is possible that to make an item you will need an intermediate product made by a crafter with a different specialization. This gives room for some player to player interaction, be it by trade or by organization inside a guild.

This tradeskill system has quite a number of advantages over crafting in older games. The mini-game during crafting means that the crafting itself is a bit more interesting than elsewhere. It also means that you cannot simply program a macro to do the crafting for you, endlessly hitting the same button(s). Furthermore, your actions do have an influence on the final quality of the item produced. And the need for resources and intermediate products means that the total process from zero to finished product takes some time and involves different and varied steps.

Unfortunately the Everquest 2 tradeskill system also has significant problems, most of which are probably caused by the fact that the system was never beta tested in its current form. Huge changes were made in the last week of beta, and again in the two day period between beta and release. This resulted in a system which is very badly balanced.

Probably the worst problem is the way in which harvesting skills are leveled up, and in how you need higher harvesting skills to harvest the tier 2 and higher resources. There are several different harvesting skills, foresting, gathering, mining, trapping, and fishing, each of which you have to increase separately.. You start with a base level of 10 or 15. From this base, you need to reach 40 to be able to harvest in Antonica. So there are 5 harvesting skills, each of which you need to gain 30 skill points in. But gaining skill points is not easy. I don’t know the exact formula, but my rough estimate based on experience is that you gain a skill point every 10 to 20 harvesting attempts.

That means you need to harvest resources in the newbie zones 1500 to 3000 times before you have skilled up your 5 harvesting skills to the point where you can gather tier 2 resources, thus enabling you to make recipes at level 10 to 19. This would already take a long time if resource nodes were plentiful. But they are not. Resource nodes spawn slowly, and the newbie zones in which they spawn are packed full with people that have at least some interest in crafting, and thus immediately harvest them on sight. In the newbie zones you gain maybe 1 or 2 skill points per hour, because the resource nodes are so hotly contested, thus taking you about 100 hours before you reach the tier 2 resources.

This is not only hard, it is badly balanced with the time needed to increase your adventuring level or your crafting level to level 10. Everquest 2 has a quite fast level progression through these very low levels (although it slows down considerably in the teens levels). In 10 hours you could be level 10 in both adventuring and crafting, and then find yourself blocked by your inability to gather the resources you need to make tier 2 items. After a couple of frustrating hours trying to gain harvesting skill, the crafting career of most people ends at this point.

There is a work-around for this problem, with which I managed to increase at least mining, foresting, and gathering to 40 in less than 20 hours, but it is likely that it wasn't intended this way by the developers: resource nodes are considerably more frequent on the Isle of Refuge, the tutorial area of Everquest 2. Add to that the fact that most people on the Isle of Refuge haven't realized yet how desperately they will be searching for resource nodes later in life, plus the fact that in this early days there are many instances of the tutorial area between which you can travel, and you will see how staying on the Isle speeds up your harvesting skill gains considerably.

Once you leave the Isle, you cannot go back. And unless you leave, you cannot advance your adventuring level beyond 6 or your crafting level beyond 9. So I actually made a second character with the express purpose of having one harvester, after having made the mistake of leaving the Isle of Refuge with my first character and finding my crafting career blocked.

Unfortunately the harvesting skills are not the only problem of the tradeskill system, although it definitely is the one real showstopper. The tradeskill system simply isn't finished. Some obvious bugs still exist, like resources selling for "free", which then can't be bought. And some recipes seem to have been hastily added, without making much sense. There is a highly elaborate branch with lots of cooking recipes, but food effects haven't been implemented yet. Every expensive and hard to make food has the same effect as the simple bread you can buy from any innkeeper for a few copper pieces. There is also lots of different furniture, but it doesn't have any function yet. You can use it to decorate your house, but you can't even sit on a chair, and the quality of the chair makes no difference. Quality also does not make any difference in the creation of skill upgrades; a crude skill upgrade does exactly the same thing as a pristine one.

The introduction of tradeskill societies is a mixed bag. In beta, you could craft in any tradeskill. Since release, you have to join one of them as member. You can call up a societies window and see the level and number of members of each society. Levels are gained by the members doing resource gathering tasks, thus gaining points, with a graphical display of the points gained and still needed for next level. When the crafting society goes up in level, the vendor in that tradeskill instance supposedly sells a wider variety of items.

And suddenly we are back to the problem of there not being enough resource nodes in the newbie zones, and few people having the skill to gather resources elsewhere. Because resource gathering is so difficult, nobody does the crafting society resource gathering tasks. Most people did one or two, decided that the 3 silver pieces reward was laughable in comparison to the effort, and moved to something else. In spite of my crafting society having 500 members, the level display shows up completely empty, with not a single pixel width of xp gained towards the next level two weeks after release. This might be a rather slow process, if it works at all.

Up to now, crafting makes economic sense. There are some recipes where if you gather the resources yourself and buy the fuel component, you can sell the resulting product to the NPC vendor without losing money. The profit is tiny, less than what you would make if you looted monsters instead, but even such a tiny profit is unusual in MMORPG games. In other games it is often feared that by making crafting profitable, somebody will come up with a macro that creates money out of nothing and then crashes the economy. But fortunately the EQ2 system is quite resistant against this, as the resource gathering can't be macroed at all, and a crafting macro would only produce unprofitable low quality stuff.

But where the real money is, is the crafting of things for other players. As weapons and armor from quests are plentiful and have good stats, there isn't a market for them. Food and furniture are sold so cheaply by NPC vendors that there isn't a market for these either. But containers and skill upgrades are money makers, at least up to now, where very few players actually are able to make tier 2 items due to the harvesting skill barrier. And to make these containers and skill upgrades you have to craft so many intermediate items that your crafting level goes up without your having to grind useless items. I can't craft fast enough to even fill the demand from my guild, which is a definite improvement over other games.

So in summary, I am happy with the Everquest 2 tradeskill system. It is quite elaborate, thus fitting well into this relatively complicated game. I wish it were better balanced, especially with respect to the harvesting skills. And it would probably have been a lot better if it had been introduced a month before the beta ended, so that more of the bugs and problems could have been ironed out by now. But behind the sloppy execution lies a very solid system, which is surprisingly fun. And at least the bugs will certainly get fixed sooner or later. What probably won't be changed is how time-intensive the system is, which will limit crafting to a few serious enthusiasts. But that too fits well into the achiever mentality of EQ2, which simply isn't the game that offers quick rewards to casual players.

This article has been posted on Grimwell.com
- posted by Tobold @ 7:52 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
EQ2 Artisan

I'm deep into EQ2 tradeskills. Currently writing a tradeskill review / guide piece, which I will post here in a few days. Meanwhile you might want to check out EQ2 Artisan, if you are looking for EQ2 tradeskill recipes and information.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:15 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Getting worse through improvements

MMORPG are getting better all the time, due to improvements of game design and technology. Unfortunately many people don't experience this that way, often complaining that the current crop of games isn't as good as the first MMORPG they ever played. Why do so many people think games are getting worse, in spite of all those improvements?

The problem is that people tend to compare the game they are actually playing with an ideal "dream" MMORPG, which has all the best features from all the games they ever played. Every new game they play adds to this list of dream features, and so the ideal improves faster than the actual games, and actual games seem to become worse.

For example look at quests. Compared to the early games, many improvements have been made. Final Fantasy XI invented cut-scenes, in which the story of the quest was told. Everquest 2 introduced voice-overs, telling the story not only with written, but also with spoken words. And World of Warcraft did huge improvements in the way quests were directly integrated in the core gameplay, instead of tacked on as an optional extra. And once you played all three of these games, none of them makes you totally happy, as each is missing the improvements of the other two. World of Warcraft seems too silent, the quests in Everquest 2 are too randomly distributed, and both games are missing the cut-scenes.

The worst thing is that this is irreversible. You can't simply go back to Ultima Online, or Everquest 1, and recapture that old magic. You will think that these games have fundamentally changed since the good old times you remember. But in fact it is you who has changed.

The good news in that is that you don't have to take too serious all those doomsayers, the people that claim that games are getting worse and worse. Whatever you may read for example about Everquest 2, the second version is undoubtedly much improved over the first. If you let somebody, who never heard of either, play the two games in parallel, he will definitely prefer EQ2 over EQ1. Whether EQ2 in 2005 evokes the same magic in your heart as EQ1 did in 2000 is a completely different question.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:54 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Everquest II Tradeskills

Not one week has passed since the launch of Everquest 2, and I have already put my first character on hold for a while, because he was gimped. He made the inexcusable mistake of leaving the Isle of Refuge, thereby ruining his crafter career. My only excuse is that I couldn't know that, this is all due to fundamental changes to the crafting system since the beta.

There are simply not enough resource nodes in the newbie zones of Qeynos and Freeport. Crafters now must skill up their harvesting skills, foresting, mining, gathering, trapping, etc., and that separately. And you can only do that by harvesting in the newbie zones, where you will literally need hundreds of each resource node type before you have enough skill to be able to harvest in the tier 2 zones Antonica and Commonlands.

As crafting is pretty essential in Everquest 2, you are competing for these resource nodes with hundreds of other players. You often find two people trying to harvest the same node. So most of the time, you are running around fruitlessly, and if you make 1 skill point per hour you count yourself lucky.

Especially frustrating are the wholesaler quests, where you need to gather a number of resources and bring them to the quest giver. These quests take many, many hours, for little direct reward. But you need to do them to increase your faction with the wholesaler, because otherwise you can only buy the most basic tradeskill goods from him. It is rumored that if you do enough of these quests, you would finally be able to buy the mythical "suspension", which is used to make the basic fighter app3 skill upgrades. But nobody got that far yet, and fighters are now the only class without skill upgrades in the game.

If you want to make a crafter, you need to stay on the Isle of Refuge, hopping from instance to instance, and harvest stuff there until you are maxed out in all of your harvesting skills. Of course that is getting harder and harder too, as more people realize how impossible it is to find resources in the city newbie zones, and make new characters to stay on the isles.

A totally unbalanced system, much worse than the system that was used throughout beta. I simply cannot understand what they hoped to achieve by letting people beta test one game, and then rewriting major parts of it before release. There are some good ideas in the new tradeskill system, but it is realized in a horribly half-baked way, where it only serves to frustrate players.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:57 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Backup plan

November 11th is a public holiday here in Belgium. So I took the Friday off, for a four-day weekend of playing Everquest 2. But on the 11th between noon and 4 pm all EQ2 servers were down for a patch. Same again on the 12th. Now it is past 5 pm, and the Runnyeye server, and a bunch of others are still down.

The good news is that the WoW open beta is running a lot smoother than that. My Tauren Shaman is level 21 now. Isn't it great to have a backup plan? Especially when the server problems are so predictable like the ones of EQ2. I still like Everquest 2, but I can't help but notice how much everything changed in just 1 week since the beta, and it would have been a miracle if that wouldn't have caused any problems.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:25 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Got Everquest 2!

As previously reported I ordered EQ2 directly from the Sony Station store. Good news is that the first class UPS shipping got me the game today, 2 days before the official European release date. Bad news is that somewhere on the way another $45 in import duties and "brokerage surcharges" were added, which I had to pay cash on delivery. That lifts the total price for EQ2 to $170, including the cost of the starter kit with its shipping. Sigh!

Game is currently installing. First rumors I heard was that the release day was unexpectedly smooth, but some people are complaining about lag. If you want to come looking for me, I will be on the only UK server, Runnyeye, playing a dwarven priest with the name Tobold.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:23 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Torn between games

I continue being buffeted between the two big games, Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft. Saturday the EQ2 beta ended. My last deed in there was that I tried to find out how the new catalogue quests worked, which just had been implemented, but I failed to get them working. I already got a mail from the Sony Station shop that EQ2 was "in stock" now, but I guess they won't send it before today. If I'm lucky I'll have the game in hands before the weekend.

Meanwhile I played the World of Warcraft open beta, as this might be my last chance to play the game before the European release in February/March 2005. I'm playing only one character this time, a Tauren Shaman, and a bit over 30 hours into the game I am now level 19. Level 20, with its cool ghost wolf ability for faster run speed beckons. One could probably reach level 20 in WoW in 30 hours without breaking a sweat. But even played less efficienctly, running all over the place to do quests, and doing a bit of tradeskills as well, level 20 shouldn't take more than 50 hours.

Level 20 in EQ takes a lot longer. The first ten or so levels go equally fast, but somewhere in the mid-teens there is a noticeable slowdown. Unfortunately I couldn't correctly measure how long it took me to reach level 20 with my Warden (sort of druid). The /played command says it took over 200 hours, but I did spend some nights away from keyboard (AFK), but logged in, to be able to sell goods in EQ2's semi-automated trading system. But I'm pretty sure level 20 took me over 100 hours in EQ2.

I don't know how the leveling curve continues for these two games, but it is obviously a lot faster to reach the highest level in WoW than in EQ2. I might actually be able to reach the highest level for the first time in a MMORPG before my attention span runs out. And that is a good thing. I would rather reach the highest level, and then start the next character because it was so much fun, than to give up in frustration because the progress has become glacial.

Another new World of Warcraft experience was my first instanced dungeon. These are filled with "Elite" monsters, which corresponds to the double-arrow-up "group" monsters in EQ2. So this is not a place to solo, but to have fun in a group for a few hours. Being instanced means that there is no interference between your group and other players. This makes it possible to create a believable dungeon, where the group first has to vanquish a horde of minor monsters, to finally arrive at the boss monster at the end. In fact there were several different boss monsters at different ends in the Ragefire Chasm I visited, with 5 quests in total attached to them. The group curiously consisted of 5 shaman, level 14 to 16, with 5 being the maximum group size in WoW. This is not something I would have tried in EQ2, where character classes are much more specialized. But in WoW it worked well enough. We had quite a number of deaths, but with shaman being able to resurrect, and WoW not having a death xp penalty, we just needed to wait 2 minutes for the rez effect to go away before being able to continue. We killed every monster in the dungeon at least once, they respawn but slowly, and finished all our quests. Loads of fun, and finished with more than 1 level worth of xp, plus lots of "phat lewt" treasure.

This much calmed my fear that World of Warcraft was not a social game. Right now I like the compromise very much. If you don't want to group, you are not forced to. You simple have to skip the quests marked "Elite". If you do want to group, the instanced dungeons offer a very nice grouping experience, of reasonable length, and with an appropriate reward for the added hassle of having to organize a group. And of course you can alway form short-term partnerships for specific goals, when you find yourself on the same quest as other people. Add a guild with a nice guild chat, the occasional harmless PvP excursion just for fun, and WoW is as social as you could wish.

Which seriously makes me wonder what I will play next weekend, provided nothing goes wrong with the shipping of EQ2. As long as EQ2 doesn't arrive, or if it arrives but has serious server problems (which is definitely in the realm of the possible), I would be more than happy to play WoW instead. World of Warcraft is the better game, at least for me it is. On the other hand, WoW is just a beta, and it will end soon. Official release date is November 23rd, so I guess the beta will end 2 or 3 days before that. And then I'm dry until the European release early next year. So do I really want to level up a character that is going to be wiped shortly afterwards? Or do I want to start with my "real" Everquest 2 character, which I am probably be going to play for a couple of months? If EQ2 has a smooth start, I'm tending towards EQ2. But I guess my frustration resistance will be quite low, so if problems happen, I'll be back to WoW.

I should be thankful to Blizzard, but of course I ain't, that they end my torn state between the two games in two weeks, by not letting me play the live version of World of Warcraft. But for those of you that live in North America and thus have the choice, and are still torn, maybe I can offer some cartoon advice I found.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:00 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Guild Wars Preview

The first thing you do in Guild Wars is to create your character. There are six character classes: Warrior, Ranger, Monk, Necromancer, Mesmer, and Elementalist. In an interesting twist you have to choose two character classes, a primary one, which determines most of your characteristics, and a secondary one, which provides you with some additional skills. Besides character classes, you also choose the sex of your character, his/her name, and you use five sliders to modify your character’s appearance.

There are no stats like strength or intelligence in this game. Instead, there are attributes that describe your proficiency, for example in casting healing prayers or in swordsmanship. At every level, you receive attribute points, which you can use to increase these attributes. Attributes have a direct effect on the efficiency of your skills. There are 150 skills in this game right now, 25 per character class. But at any given moment you can only have 8 of these on your hotkey bar, and you can only change your selection while in a town. You can learn skills from a trainer in town, by stealing them from a boss monster, or by learning them from a skill charm. The skill charms even allow you to temporarily learn a skill from a character class you don't have, but as you don't have the attribute for that skill, it will be at low efficiency.

After character creation, the game puts you into the tutorial mission. Here you learn how to move by using either the mouse or WASD keys, how you attack a monster by either clicking or using the keyboard, and how you use your skills for added effects beyond the simple auto-combat. You are also introduced to a concept that is unique for MMORPGs: NPC henchmen. In the tutorial there is only one, but later you can form groups with other players, NPC henchmen, or a mix of both. The henchmen take a share of the gold you find and a share of the experience points. They can even level up. Henchmen only have one profession, but they play that one surprisingly well. Not as well as an experienced player, but better than some of the bad players I met.

At the end of the tutorial you reach the city, or let’s say one instance of the city, of Lions Arch. Every zone in Guild Wars is instanced. City zones and mission entrance zones hold several dozen players, but in the zones where combat takes place there is either just you, or just your group, or your group and the enemy groups in the PvP zones. As long as you are in a zone, it is persistent. Monsters you kill don't respawn, and you even leave footsteps on some sorts of terrain, which you will run into if you circle back to an earlier location. As soon as you leave, the zone resets, and if you want, you can do the same zone again. Some zones are just for open exploration, others are linked to a quest or series of quests, and others are for PvP. Travel between zones couldn't be easier. You open your map and click on the zone, and you are teleported there. A zone’s content downloads when you first enter it, so if you play this on a 56K modem, zoning into a new place and downloading up to 10 MB will take a good while.

The most confusing thing for most players in the Guild Wars preview event was the loot. Loot gets automatically assigned to one group member, and only he can pick it up. You can find weapons, coins, dyes to color your armor, crafting resources, or salvage items. But you can't find any armor that fits you; the only way to get better armor is by crafting. For this you first need to buy a salvage kit, and to apply it to salvage items and any found weapons that you don't need. This will give you resources, with other resources being found as loot. Then you should trade with other players, because each primary character class needs different resources. Once you have all the resources, you go to a crafter NPC, select the armor piece you want to have made, and pay him a fee for making it for you.

Trading between players works in two ways. The classic way is to shout your offers for everybody in the city instance to hear, and hope to find another player who will trade with you directly. This is the only way in which you can trade weapons. For resources, skill charms, and dyes, there are NPC traders. These buy goods from players, and resell them at a higher price to another player. You can only buy goods another player has sold, so if you need hides and there are none in stock, you are out of luck. The lower the stock, the higher the price NPC traders will pay to buy the good, and the higher the at which the trader will offer the good. You don't have to travel from instance to instance; all traders are connected and use the same stock inventory. This has the interesting effect that people playing less popular character classes will find the resources they need at a much lower price, while popular professions have problems finding any resources for sale at all.

Guild Wars plays differently from other MMORPGs, in that it is much more structured. You play it mission by mission, with each mission being a zone. In the preview event, the missions were consecutive; you needed to finish mission 1 before you could do mission 2, and they formed a sort of story line. But having completed a mission, you had the choice to redo it, or to move towards the next, more difficult one. Either you play this game with a guild, doing the missions and PvP combat together, or you just join some pickup group at the mission entrance zone. You could even solo them, preferably with some henchmen. The game play is fast, and reminds me more of online squad based shooter games than an MMORPG. The worst thing that can happen to you is that you fail to finish the mission and have to do it again. There is a death penalty on your stats if you get resurrected inside a mission, but all penalties reset to zero if you leave the mission.

With missions and zones being such an essential part of the game, one can understand the business model of Guild Wars. You buy the box, and you play for free, with no monthly fees, but there are a limited missions and PvP zones. After a while, NCSoft will release expansion sets, called chapters, which you can buy if you get bored by the content of the original game. The expansion sets will also add new professions, new skills, new items, and so on. You pay for new content, not for the ability to existing content. The more you play the game, the more sense it makes to shell out additional money for it. Buying expansion sets does not make your character stronger, as you will always be limited to just 8 skills at a time, but it does give you more choice in the selection of the skills. The FAQ compares it to Magic the Gathering, where buying more cards give you more choice when building decks. It will be interesting to see whether the concept works. The monthly fee business model is keeping a lot of people away from the genre.

Finally, no preview of Guild Wars would be complete without mentioning PvP. There are different forms of PvP in the game. The one after which the game is named is the guild war. You assemble a group of eight guild members, with henchmen if need be, in your guildhall, and challenge another guild – either by name, or allowing the game to randomly pick another guild. The game pairs you against "worthy opponents", that is another group of roughly equal level. Each side has its guildhall to defend, with the death of the enemy guild lord NPC the target. You also have a flag, which you can try to plant in the watchtower halfway between the two guildhalls, to gain a morale boost for your side. A battle can last quite a while, as every killed player respawns after a short delay, and you will need to push the enemy back to his castle, then storm the castle and try to kill some of the NPCs there before the heavy defenses overwhelm your group. After several attacks, the NPC defenders die, and you can kill the NPC guild lord. Meanwhile, the other players are trying to keep you from doing so, or are even doing the same to your castle. It is surprisingly fun, as both sides have equal strength, and there is no griefing or zerg rushing. And unlike other games, you do not have to be of the highest possible level to participate, as long as there are other groups of your level looking for a PvP opponent.

Guild Wars is a fast and simple game. As there is no monthly fee, it is certainly worth buying the initial box, which gives you the opportunity to "consume" the content at your own pace without added cost. The preview having covered levels 15 to 20 of a game that will go from 1 to 50, it is not yet possible to say how balanced the whole will be, which might be a problem for PvP. But in any case, in Grimwell Online’s own classification, Guild Wars is firmly in the "game" camp, and has relatively few "world" components. A good game to play, even for short play sessions, whenever you have the time. Not the virtual world in which you live all your leisure time in for the next few of months.

This post is part of of a bigger preview on Grimwell.com
- posted by Tobold @ 8:20 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
World of Warcraft Open Beta

You can now register for and download the WoW open beta client from Fileplanet, if you are a subscriber. This is supposed to be another "North Americans only" deal, but there seem to be no barriers whatsoever to keep us barbarians out. I didn't even lie about my European address, and got into the open beta without problems. This Fileplanet subscription is paying off big time, there are now so many MMORPG betas with "exclusive" Fileplanet deals. And thats not counting all the single-player game files yet.

The open beta client file I downloaded was 2.6 Gigabyte in size. And then it wouldn't unpack, showing up as corrupted. Fortunately I was able to fix the problem with a shareware zip repair tool. Now I have heard that other people having the same problem were able to unpack the file with the latest version of Winzip 9.0. Anyway, I was able to install the game, and start playing immediately, getting up to level 6 in an hour or so.

There still isn't an official release date for World of Warcraft, they haven't even announced the monthly cost yet. But rumors are saying that the open beta will run for a bit over 2 weeks, until the game is released on November 22nd.

That means I will probably be able to play the WoW open beta from now until well beyond the Everquest 2 release. Given the state of the EQ2 beta, that might well be the relief valve that preserves my sanity during the first week(s) of EQ2. Lag in Everquest 2 has been much improved, mainly by making Antonica and Commonlands instanced. But the servers are a total mess, causing frequent crashes. Sometimes it is just you who crashes to the login screen or desktop, but often the whole zone crashes repeatedly. Obviously the developers are working on the problem, quite franctic I would assume, but that just causes more server downtime due to hotfixes and patches. With just 4 days to go until release, it would be a miracle if there wouldn't be a lot of this same trouble in the games first weeks.

In spite of its problems, I will play Everquest 2 probably until World of Warcraft is released in Europe. EQ2 has its flaws, but it also has a lot of good points: Basic game play is solid fun, and there is a huge amount of content.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:19 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Welcome to the new readers!

It seems that the short episode of being slashdotted had some lasting impact on the number of people reading this blog.

There are several effects at work here. I probably gained some readers that found my site when it was slashdotted, decided they liked it, and stuck around. But it also seems that me being slashdotted got me linked by some other gaming sites, which in turn increased my ranking with Google and other search engines, and I now get more people coming here after searching for some MMORPG terms on Google or Yahoo.

In any case, everybody is equally welcome here. Feel free to browse the archives, leave feedback, or e-mail me. Suggestions about what to write are always welcome.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:52 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Monsters as scarce resources

Sir Ironheart, complete with lance and shiny armor, galloped on his faithful steed towards the Swamp of Doom. The king himself had promised him half the kingdom if he would just rescue the princess from the swamp monster. Arriving at the swamp, he valiantly searched out for the foe to slay, when he heard somebody calling out to him: "Hey there, what do you think you are doing? If you are here to kill the swamp monster, you have to stand in line with the rest of us. I've been waiting here for hours already, and won't let a newcomer get ahead of me in the queue!"

Silly? No. This or similar scenes happen in nearly every MMORPG every day. And they obviously hinder the suspension of disbelief which makes us feel a hero in a fantasy story.

The problem is simply that in most games monsters are in relatively short supply. Everybody looking for a specific monster for some reason has a high risk of competing against other players looking for the same monster.

Monsters in MMORPGs are not created equal. Many games have "named mobs", which are tougher than the monsters surrounding them, but give significantly better rewards, usually in the form of treasure items. And because players advance in levels, a mob being tougher than the surrounding ones is meaningless. The named level 10 mob surrounded by level 8 mobs gives a better reward than the regular level 10 mobs elsewhere, so killing the named mob is more profitable, and everybody wants to do so.

Another variation of this occurs if there are several monsters of the same level, giving the same reward, but due to some design flaw one kind is easier to kill than the others. For example experience points are often simply based on the level of the monster, not taking into account things like whether the monster attacks on sight. Obviously it is easier to waltz into a group of non-aggressive monsters and kill them one by one than try to pull a single aggressive monster of the same level that gives the same xp.

A very modern form of scarcity comes from the recent trend of games to offer lots of quests. Most players enjoy a quest to kill 10 wolves, with a reward at the end, more than just going out and killing 10 wolves you happen to pass by. But it often happens that lots of people received that quest, either because the quest giver is conspicuously placed, or word has gotten around that the quest reward is good. And then it is possible that the designers simply didn't put enough wolf spawn points on the map. The wait between killing two wolves is suddenly determined not by how fast you can heal up again after the first fight, but by how much time it takes to find another wolf that isn't already claimed by another player.

That is especially annoying if you found a wolf, intend to attack it, spend a couple of seconds to cast a buff on yourself or do some other combat preparation, and then some other player comes and attacks the wolf before you do. Lacking another word, players then complain about "killstealing", although that term was previously used to describe one player killing a monster that was already engaged in combat with another player. While the old killstealing is now often eliminated by coding that locks an encounter to the first player or group attacking, there is no possible code solution for the new form. Two players might well "intend" to kill the same wolf at the same time, and one of them will be faster, and the other one unhappy.

What all these problems have in common is that their origin lies in the way that games spawn monsters. By changing how mobs spawn, these problems could be solved.

One already quite popular solution is instancing. When Sir Ironheart arrives at the Swamp of Doom, he is actually arriving at the swamp_of_doom_17 zone, which exists only for him (or his group). Then only his ability to slay the swamp monster is being tested, not his patience in waiting in line for it. But instancing has the disadvantage that it separates players from each other. If you split the whole game into instances, you create a single-player game, not a massively multiplayer game. So solutions have to be found for monster spawns in public, non-instanced zones.

Probably the best solution would be for the game to measure what is going on, and to react to it, using dynamic instead of static spawns. For named monsters there could be a no-camp code, preventing the monster from spawning if somebody is sitting and waiting at the spawn point. But even better would be to have the named mob not spawn always at the same point, but randomly over an area which is too big to camp.

Monsters being over-hunted because they are easier to kill is not an easy problem to solve. Ideally one could invent a virtual Darwinism code, which makes monsters that are hunted a lot progressively tougher (or reduces the xp award). And the monster that is never hunted grows fat (increased reward) and weak. Thus the monster that gave the best reward for the lowest risk is not the same every month, but changes dynamically.

Monsters being over-hunted for quests should simply spawn more frequently, depending on demand. Right now there are usually static spawn points, at which the monster respawns X minutes after being killed. It would be better if the game kept track of the total population for each monster, and when that population drops dramatically due to player hunting, decreased the spawn timer, thus increasing supply.

But if all these solutions require too much complicated coding, one can always go with the simplest solution: Increase the number of monsters available everywhere, making sure that every type of monster is available in sufficient numbers to avoid scarcity.

This article has been published on Grimwell.com
- posted by Tobold @ 2:01 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments