2004 Blog Review

Today being the last day of 2004, I checked Sitemeter for the statistics of this blog, in an act of pure vanity. And the result did not disappoint me, 2004 was a year of solid growth of readership for my blog. There was the spike of being slashdotted, but also a strong underlying growth.

On this happy note I'm ending this year with my best wishes for 2005 to all of you. Happy new year!


- posted by Tobold @ 10:40 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Gamespy EverQuest II vs. World of Warcraft

Gamespy did an EverQuest II vs. World of Warcraft comparison point by point. WoW comes out slightly ahead, but the interesting part is how the games are compared feature by feature. I pretty much agree with most of the points, just that in their comparison EQ2 is said to be more stable than WoW, and I experienced just the opposite. But of course I wasn't there on WoW release day. Right now EQ2 has daily server downtime, and WoW has server maintenance once a week. Guess which one I prefer.

I cancelled my EQ2 account yesterday. I have reached my target of level 25 as carpenter and wasn't really motivated to keep on crafting. At that level one combine often just gets you 0.4% of xp, so you need 250 combines to go up another level. And there is absolutely nothing interesting before level 30, you could even say level 35.

Life being full of little ironies, today, one day after cancelling EQ2, Amazon finally sends me the EQ2 strategy guide I ordered 2 months ago. As I already got the WoW strategy guide, I'll write a comparative book review for a change.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:02 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Ding 40!

No, no, not level 40 in EQ2 or WoW. I "dinged" 40 years in real life today. Man, I feel old, and a bit depressed. Of course I'm only one day older than yesterday, but somehow these round numbered birthdays feel as if you aged 10 years at once. As a gamer, age makes me afraid of two things:

First is games getting twitchier. My reflexes are getting slower. A game that challenges the reflexes of a teenager is impossibly hard to me. I had to play all the difficult parts of GTA:Vice City with the slow motion cheat on, and not many games even offer that as an option. I used to like strategy games, but that was when they were still turn-based. The modern real-time strategy games are often simply too fast for me. MMORPG are still relatively slow games, but as CoH showed that is just a matter of technology advancing before they too become twitchier.

Second problem of age is the "been there, done that" feeling. A major part of the fun of new games is discovering new things. But the more games you already played, the less new things you discover in a new game. Most MMORPGs of the last years have been described as improved Everquest clones, and there is some truth in that. Developers "borrow" ideas from previous successful games. And some concepts, like MMORPG combat, have evolved very little in the last 5 years.

Where am I now with my games? In Everquest 2 I used the xp bonus times, one offered as compensation for the server outage, the other as christmas bonus, to level my carpenter up to 25. That is the level where he can make bank boxes with 16 slots, one of the hot-selling items in the EQ2 economy. Unfortunately getting to level 25 was incredibly boring. It turns out that carpenters only get two new recipes for every level beyond 20. So leveling up becomes slower and slower, for a rather meagre reward. The next thing to look forward to would be 20-slot boxes at level 35, and I simply refuse to grind 10 hard levels for that.

That is a typical thing to happen in these grind-based games: At some level progress slows down to a point where the reward doesn't seem to be worth the effort any more. Of course I could now start leveling my adventure level in EQ2. But as I'm now subscribed to WoW as well, there isn't much point in adventuring in EQ2. In direct comparison WoW adventuring is far superior. EQ2 monster-bashing is less fun because of the stupid encounter system which marks half of the monsters as being "group only". Quests beyond level 10 more and more often send you against these "group only" monsters. At that point you either turn back and go for the next quest, or you try to find a group. Finding groups for a quest is annoying, because often the group splits up after having done the quest. The quest-driven gameplay doesn't mix very well with enforced grouping.

World of Warcraft manages that a lot better by specifically marking those quests in your quest journal already as being "elite", that is group only. And there are a lot less group only encounters in WoW. Plus they are then concentrated in one group-only instanced dungeon. So when you gather a group for these, you do the complete dungeon together, which is a lot of fun. So I guess I will be playing more and more WoW, and less and less EQ2, until I cancel the latter eventually.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:40 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
2004 – A MMORPG year in subjective review

The year 2004 is drawing to an end, and looking back I can say it has been a good year for MMORPGs. So from my personal perspective as player and blogger, I would like to give a review of 2004 how I experienced it. What did I play, and what were the major themes of the year?

I started the year playing the game I had started in late 2003, Final Fantasy XI, which I stopped in early April. I tried a free trial of Horizons, and the betas of Lineage II and City of Heroes, ending up subscribing to CoH until August. In May there was the first GuildWars preview; in June I started playing Puzzle Pirates, and in July I played Real Life, going on a three-week holiday without broadband access.

In August, I tried out Ragnarok Online and A Tale in the Desert 2. In September, I was in the Saga of Ryzom beta and the World of Warcraft stress test. In October, I was in the Everquest 2 beta, and also played the second GuildWars preview event. November brought the World of Warcraft open beta, and the EQ2 launch. I ended the year being subscribed to both EQ2 and WoW, although getting into WoW as European was complicated, due to stupid anti-European restrictions from Blizzard.

I have never played so many different MMORPGs in one year before. This is one of the defining features of 2004: an abundance of choice in the MMORPG market like never before. While a few games, like Earth and Beyond and minor independent ones, closed their servers, most games from previous years are still available. With more and more people now having broadband internet access, the total number of MMORPG players is rising as well. But not as quickly as the number of games is rising, thus there is a tendency of players hopping from game to game, with what appears to be ever shorter subscription periods on average. That is visible for example in the CoH subscription numbers on Sir Bruce's famous MMORPG subscription charts.

While SOE dominated the western MMORPG market from 1999 until last year, with Everquest and then Star Wars: Galaxies, 2004 was the year where this domination was seriously shaken. Korean company NCSoft used the capital and experience acquired with Lineage 1 in Korea to push mightily into the world market. While Lineage 2 was a bit of a dud outside Asia, City of Heroes was a great success with both the critics and the players, and achieved surprisingly good sales for a game with an unknown brand from an unknown company. And with GuildWars, Tabula Rasa, and Auto Assault, NCSoft has a strong line-up for the coming year(s).

The big showdown on the MMORPG market came in November, where the two biggest games of the years were released just two weeks apart. Both Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft had reasonably good launches, despite some problems due to server overload. But in direct comparison World of Warcraft was far more successful than Everquest 2, selling more than 240,000 boxes on launch day, making it the most successful PC game release ever. SOE is keeping mum on Everquest 2 sales, but anecdotal evidence, and the much lower number of servers, suggests that it wasn't selling half as well. Reviews on sites like GameSpot or MMORPG.com also come out strongly in favor of WoW over EQ2. Everquest 2 was further hampered by technical problems, with up to two days of server outage, and daily server downtime for patches.

The question why WoW is more popular than EQ2 smoothly brings us to the next big trend of 2004: massively multiplayer online role-playing games have become more friendly to the average gamer, the casual player. Even Everquest has made a huge step forward towards user-friendliness from EQ1 to EQ2, but where SOE made one step, the competition made two, three, or half a dozen. Games like City of Heroes or World of Warcraft are instantly accessible to the average gamer, and provide instant fun right out of the box, without hundreds of hours of grind required before reaching the fun part. This pushes a game like Everquest 2 into a market niche for the more seriously dedicated power-gamers and fans of the more complicated game mechanisms.

Another trend of 2004 is instancing, having several copies of one zone on the same server to avoid overcrowding problems. City of Heroes has instanced city zones, plus instanced random dungeons for a single player or group. Everquest 2 instances all zones, except the city zones, with the number of players per zone ranging from 40 to 400, depending on the size of the zone. Only World of Warcraft uses instancing sparingly, applied to some hand-crafted elite dungeons for one adventuring group. It is not quite clear what method works best, but hand-crafted dungeons, instanced or not, seem to be more popular than random instanced dungeons. Especially when there is only a small number of different "tile sets", the building blocks from which the random dungeons are created..

A final trend of 2004 I would like to mention is the game speed. The games of 2004 are generally faster than previous games, with City of Heroes holding the "fast and furious" crown. Downtime between combats has become very short in many of today's games. In-game public transport either appears instantly on demand or has a much reduced waiting time. And the times when some spawns only appeared every X hours on a server seem to be over as well. As nobody is mourning the demise of downtime, this is good news indeed.

So what will 2005 bring? Several new games are expected for 2005: GuildWars, Tabula Rasa, Auto Assault and the CoH expansion City of Villains are all going to published by NCSoft. Turbine, the makers of the two not-quite-so-successful Asheron's Call games, are developing Dungeon and Dragons Online and Middle Earth Online, counting on strong brands bringing them more success. Other games in development are Dark and Light, and The Matrix Online, plus undoubtedly a number of expansion sets for different games.

It is impossible to say what the trends of 2005 will be. There is a smell of licensed games in the air, bringing brands like D&D, the Lord of the Rings and the Matrix to the MMORPG world. With SWG kept alive more by its Star Wars brand than by the game itself, and with the success of WoW partially built on the Warcraft brand, this isn't really surprising. The trend of games getting faster and more accessible to the average gamer will probably continue, driven by technology and market forces. Looks like another year to look forward to for MMORPGs.

This article also posted on Grimwell.com
- posted by Tobold @ 10:08 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Under false flag

Bugs, lag, game inbalances, griefers, idiots, the life of a MMORPG player is full of annoyances. And one gets used to nearly all of them, and plays on regardless. The only thing that makes a MMORPGer really crack up is: Not being able to play.

Everquest had a rather bad weekend. The Friday morning (PST) patch introduced some really serious bugs. 4 hours later all the servers had to be brought down. The server downtime thread was updated every hour (good!) with the news that the servers were still all down and they didn't have an ETA for them coming back up (bad!). The first servers then came back up over 24 hours later on Saturday. The last servers will come up on Sunday morning (PST), 2 days after the bad patch.

Of course a weekend without servers is bad for business. SOE is trying to calm down their customers by giving them each 3 free days of playing, plus double xp from Sunday to Tuesday morning.

But I had already broken down on Saturday morning. I reneged on my earlier decision to wait for the European release of WoW. I had found a website which sold WoW access to Europeans. Game as possible download (didn't need that, the beta client worked), and the seller was setting up the account for me, so I didn't need a US credit card. Bought a 60-day game card as well, and so I'm all set for playing WoW. Worked like a charm, in less than 24 hours, and totally anonymous as far as Blizzard is concerned.

Right now the plan is to play both games for a while, until I really had enough of EQ2. I'll have a lot of time for playing in my end-of-year holidays starting on Tuesday. Sooner or later I'll ditch one of the two games, and right now it is more likely that it's EQ2 which gets the boot.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:30 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Everquest II Status Page

The official EQ2 status page is downright useless. It always shows all servers as being up, when in fact they often are not. To see what is really going on, which servers are up, and what the latest patch notes are, go to this page instead. This the same page that is seen in the lower window of the EQ2 launcher.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:00 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
MMORPG Justice

The legal system in most MMORPG worlds is a rather clunky affair, with banning as the only possible punishment. Could that be improved?

Now this discussion is pretty meaningless if you consider a MMORPG to be just a game, a form of entertainment. If you behave drunk and disorderly in a cinema, you get kicked out, and most people would consider that an appropriate way to deal with the situation. But if you consider yourself to be "living" in a virtual world, as 20% of Everquest players said they did (in page 22 of this pdf document), that sort of justice seems kind of harsh. And if somebody paid a 6-month subscription and gets banned early in that period, he might resort to real world legal action to get his money back.

If seen from the view of a "resident" of a MMORPG world, banning is kind of a death penalty; you are being removed from the world you live in. There are certainly crimes which deserve such a penalty, but being put on the virtual death row for repeated use of swear words is overkill. Other kinds of punishment must be possible.

One very easy case is people breaking the naming rules. In the past, people have been banned after years of playing for using a stupid name like Cupid Stunt. But this is a case where there already has been some evolution. Nowadays you are far more likely to be renamed by a GM for such an offence than get banned. And that is a much better response.

Another case of letting the punishment fit the crime can be applied to people using offensive speech in public chat channels. They could simply be muted for a number of days, as if all players had set that player to ignore, and thus can't hear anything he says for the time of the punishment.

We had a big discussion a while back on SWG banning people for receiving duped credits. The real criminals had duped credits and then given a part of these credits to both accomplices and random players with the /tip command, against which the receiver has no defense. SWG reacted by banning all people that had come into contact with that tainted money, with the possibility of an appeals process, which was long and complicated. One would have thought that if they were able to trace the duped money, they could just as well have deleted it, and determined who was guilty of duping and who was just an innocent bystander later.

In response to the bannings of these innocent bystanders, players decided to stage a protest rally. The GMs saw that the protest was causing serious lag in the city where it took place, thus disrupting the game of other players. As a result, the GMs of SWG actually invented an unpopular but creative form of punishment: they teleported the participants of the rally to random points of the universe, which got them made fun of by Penny Arcade. But at least the response was more appropriate than banning.

Other forms of MMORPG punishments are certainly possible as well. Your character could be stuck in a jail cell for some amount of time. Or your ability to gain xp, skill points, money, and items could be blocked for a specified period. Just as the laws of physics don't apply to virtual worlds, justice could be a lot more creative than in the real world.

There are few games which offer a player-run justice system. You could call unlimited PvP a form of justice, but that is only some sort of wild west lynch mob justice, and thus not a real improvement. A Tale in the Desert has a player-run legal system, which even allows the players to vote on the banning of another player. But that obviously only works for rather small communities. How is a player supposed to vote on a proposal for banning somebody for griefing if he only gets to hear the accusers story?

Will we get advanced justice systems in the future? Unfortunately that is not very likely. The current trend in MMORPGs is for them to become more game-like, and less like a world to be inhabited by residents who have rights and obligations. Residency in MMORPGs is more fleeting, with so many alternatives around. A player who has decided to cancel his account anyway could very well decide to have some sort of dangerous "fun", not caring how that disrupts the game for the other players. And how would you want to punish that? But it seems game companies are well aware of the problem.

This article published on Grimwell.com
- posted by Tobold @ 1:18 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
GuildWars Final Beta in January

On Fileplanet, subscribers can now get a beta key for the final Guildwars beta, which will start on January 7th. Some thoughts:

• Fileplanet has become the major access path to MMORPG betas. Of course some people object to having to pay for a beta. But if you were having a subscription anyway, for downloading PC games demos and other files, the MMORPG betas are a nice added bonus.


• Often you don't need Fileplanet to get into a beta, it only provides preferential access. I'm pretty sure the Guildwars Final Beta will not be limited to Fileplanet subscribers only.


• Announcing a final beta for January means that GuildWars will probably be released by February or so. Official release date is "early 2005".


• GuildWars was highly playable already in the "world preview event", but you started the game at level 15 then and could only level up to 20. I wonder if the final beta goes all the way from level 1 to high level, and how this larger level range is balanced.


• The main claim to fame of GuildWars is being the only MMORPG without a monthly fee. It will be interesting to see how that business model works out. Is it really the monthly fee that stops MMORPG from greatness, or is it the nerdy gameplay?

- posted by Tobold @ 9:12 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Crafting profit was a bug

I talked just yesterday about how nicely the EQ2 economy was humming. Some crafters made goods that sold well to other people. Other crafters were at least able to sell to NPC vendors at a small profit, thus financing their crafting progress. Turns out that SOE considers that as a bug. A serious bug. So serious that in a hotfix they turned off all selling of crafted items to NPC vendors. They were so eager that they even accidentally turned off selling most loot items to NPC, and then had to issue a second hotfix to turn it back on.

The reason given is that if people are able to sell to NPC, they won't sell to other players, thus NPC hurt the player economy. A typical case of the devs getting things backwards: In reality players would much prefer to sell to other players at a good profit, than to NPC at a tiny profit. Only if they are producing items that no player wants to buy, like food, potions, or furniture, they are obliged to sell to NPC to cover their cost. They can't do that any more. A lot of provisioners (the crafters making food) are heading for the exits, cancelling their accounts.

The correct response to a lack of player market for food would have been to make food more attractive, so adventurers would want to buy food from provisioners. The NPC vendors just provide a bottom to the market, and SOE just pulled that bottom out under the crafters feet. They promised to "review" the prices and then turn vendor selling back on, but that can take a while, and if they lower the prices much more, they don't cover the production cost.

Seems SOE hasn't lost its uncanny ability to shoot themselves in the foot. Whether making large groups of your player base unhappy at a time where there are sufficient good alternatives to playing EQ2 is a good idea is doubtful.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:05 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
More on EQ2 tradeskills

I was told my first EQ2 tradeskill review sounded too negative. My fault, I was talking about the "difficulties" you have to overcome to craft something, but I should have used the term "challenges" instead.

One month into EQ2 and I'm practically doing nothing but tradeskills, so the system can't be that bad. I have two major characters, adventuring level 11 and 12, but crafting level 18 both. Tobold and Raslebol, on the Runnyeye server, if you happen to run into them. So what does EQ2 have that other MMORPG don't have in tradeskills?

First thing is the mini-game in the actual crafting process. The game is rather primitive, but still better than just clicking on a single combine button. People complain that due to the game each combine takes too much time. But that is actually the advantage of the system, as the time restriction allows to make each combine more valuable, in terms of profit and crafting xp.

The second thing is the fact that crafting is profitable, even at low levels. There are tons of games where a crafter spends his early career grinding stuff nobody would ever want to buy, and the sells those below cost to an NPC, or salvages them to recycle part of the resources. In EQ2 you can make useful intermediate products starting from the very beginning, craft your first container at level 5, and your first app3 spell/skill upgrade at level 6.

Is it the perfect system? Not quite. Intermediate products, containers, and app3 spell/skill upgrades are about the only really profitable stuff. Weapons and armor are too easy to get from quests, and quest equipment is often better than crafted equipment of the same level. Crafters can make food, potions, and totems, all of which are beneficial for adventurers, but their effects aren't that noticeable, so there isn't much demand. Furniture can also be made, but as it is purely decorative and doesn't have any function yet, demand is close to zero.

So the whole crafting economy is held up by the few items that are in demand, but the demand is strong and up to now it is working very well. Crafters depend on other crafters of different classes to make them some intermediate items, and if they can make highly profitable stuff they often also "outsource" the production of the intermediates they would be able to make themselves, but don't have the time for.

My main complaint in the first EQ2 tradeskill review was the harvesting system, where you had to level up for many, many hours in the newbie zones, to be able to gather resources in the next higher zone. The developers listened and lowered the minimum skill needed for harvesting in the tier 2 zones from 40 to 20, a significant drop, as you already start the game with 15 skill. The effect is very visible, the newbie zones aren't overcrowded with crafters any more, and the resources in Antonica are now disappearing at a much faster rate. Gathering resources is now a lot more accessible to a lot more people, and that is good.

Resource gathering is popular not only because of crafting, but also because of wholesaler quests. The quests ask you to gather 15 tier 2 resources for a reward of 12 silver. I thought it was a bug that you don't have to gather the resources, buying them from the broker counts as well. Turns out that it is a feature which is working as intended. That effectively creates a minimum price for tier 2 resources of 80 copper, with resources that are sold for less on the broker often bought by people which just want to make a quick profit by turning them in for a quest.

So the crafting economy is humming, and just would need a bit of balancing. There are resource nodes like fish and mushrooms which yield resources for which there is no wholesaler quest, and which don't transform into anything profitable. So many people just leave them standing. But the resource respawn system works in a way that if you gather one resource type, a new node of any other type could spawn, and so the unpopular resource nodes are multiplying and the popular ones are getting scarce. A typical "tragedy of the commons" type of problem, if you gather the unpopular thing for the common good, you help everybody, but your part of that common good is so small as to be not worth the effort, if you are the only one doing it. Could be easily balanced by adding wholesaler quests for these resources as well, making them worth 80 cp.

I have no idea how long this crafting will keep me occupied. Some people deliberately grinded crafting, making unprofitable stuff for faster xp gain, and then found that beyond level 30 there aren't many recipes implemented, and that they burned out from the grind. I'm trying to avoid that, making only things that either sell well, or are needed by my guild. Slower xp, slower leveling, but more purpose, more profit, and more fun. Doesn't feel like a grind at all.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:48 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
EQ2Craft

From the useful link department: EQ2Craft is a database with crafting recipes and components from EQ2. It allows you to search for a recipe and find out what components you need for it, or for a component to find out what recipes it is used in.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:29 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
EverQuest II and World of Warcraft Reviews at GameSpot

Gamespot reviewed EverQuest II and gave it a 7.8. Readers reviews are currently giving a score of 6.9. In the World of Warcraft review, Gamespot gave WoW a 9.5, with the readers currently at 9.1. All these are out of 10, so 9.5 is very, very high. But what do these numbers mean?

Somebody asked me which game was better, and I answered "If you are in doubt, play World of Warcraft". And that is what Gamespot is expressing with their numbers. For the majority of players, World of Warcraft is the better game. But there are certainly some people that will like Everquest II better. And this minority of players will probably be aware of EQ2 being the game for them, as they are most likely veterans of the first version of Everquest. If you are an avid Everquest fan, it is possible that you will find World of Warcraft too shallow, or too easy.

Here in Europe there was a World of Warcraft Pre-order box release last week. The Pre-order box contained not only the pre-order, but also a beta key for the European beta. And one day after release of this "strictly limited" offer, it was sold out everywhere. I tried EB games, and even Amazon was sold out after just one day. In the US, WoW sold 250,000 copies on the day it was released. SOE doesn't publish numbers, but judging from the numbers of servers, EQ2 isn't even half as successful.

So if you are just counting the numbers, World of Warcraft "wins" the battle of the MMORPG giants against Everquest 2, in review scores and in sales. There is still a possibility that EQ2 has a better player retention, but I doubt it will be enough to make it financially more successful than WoW. This isn't totally unexpected. EQ2 is very much a MMORPG geek niche product, while WoW is specifically designed to get new players into th genre.

But that doesn't mean that EQ2 is a bad game, or unplayable. Unless you commit credit card fraud, or have a close friend in the US who would borrow you his credit card, Everquest 2 is the game of choice for us Europeans. And even if you can play World of Warcraft, you might get bored of it in a couple of months, at which point it might be a good idea to check out Everquest 2. Two games are always better than one. I'm looking forward to the European WoW release early next year, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm perfectly happy playing EQ2 until then.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:47 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments