World of Warcraft Tips & Advice

I won't pretend I'm the worlds greatest WoW player. But I'm always trying to learn as much as I can about any game, and with time I learn a lot of useful tips on how to play a game "better". This is going to be an ongoing project, a collection of simple tips, and some subjective advice. I'll add stuff as I think of it. But feel free to write me at Tobold@GMail.com if you want to have anything added, including what name I should credit the advice to.

- The shift key is your friend. Holding down the shift key while right-clicking on a corpse or chest auto-loots it. Without the shift key, you only get the loot window open. With shift all the content of the loot window are transferred directly into your inventory, and the loot window is closed. Much faster. This also works for mining, skinning, and herbalism.

- If you hold down the shift key while right-clicking on an item in a NPC vendor buy window, you get a second window where you can set how many of these items you want to buy. Useful for things like spices, or threads, where you are likely to want to buy 20, without clicking 20 times.

- If you hold down the shift key while left-clicking on a stack of items in your inventory, you can split the stack. You get a window where you can set a number, and then the split amount sticks to your cursor and can be put into another inventory slot.

- All items are color-coded. Grey means that the item is pretty much trash, and can only be sold to a NPC vendor. White indicates items that are ingredients for something else, usually for some crafting recipe. Depending on how rare these items drop, and how much in demand they are, they can sell for considerably more money in the auction house to another player than if you just vendor them. Green / blue / purple items are magic, and give stat bonuses. These should only be vendored if they are soulbound to you, otherwise you always get more for them in the auction house. If you happen to have the enchanting tradeskill, you could also disenchant these colored items into components, even when they are soulbound.

- Far from the auction house? No problem. Make a new character on the same server, station him at the auction house, and send him all the loot you want to sell by mail. The cost of 30 copper is tiny. Even low level green items can easily be sold for twice what a vendor pays, so its sure worth doing this.

- Every character class in WoW can solo, which is wonderful. *BUT* the fundamental laws of MMORPG still apply, a group can kill much higher level monsters than a solo character. You can often get quests which are far too difficult for you to solo, but would give a nice reward of your level. Do these quests in a group, and get the nice items now, instead of waiting until you can solo the quest, and the reward is outdated. Of course you absolutely need a group for the instances and the quests marked as elite.

- The basic functions in a combat are dealing damage, receiving damage, and healing. If you solo, you need to do all three (healing with potions for those classes who don't get healing spells). In a group you need to reconsider your tactics, and concentrate on one of these functions. The warriors and paladins are best at receiving damage (tanking), and should try to hold the monsters aggro (hate) on them with taunting abilities. Priests, druids, and shaman should heal. Everybody else tries to deal as much damage as possible, but without drawing the aggro on them, so they have to attack the same monster that the tank is taunting.

- Don't neglect consumable items, they can make a big difference, especially when you are soloing. Cooking produces food that gives you 15 minutes of increased stamina and strength. Blacksmithing produces stones which increase the damage of your weapon for 30 minutes. And many potions can buff you for up to 1 hour, increasing your armor, strength, agility, and more. Potions can also heal you in combat, restock your mana, or increase your rage as a warrior, but you can only use one of these potions every 2 minutes. Engineering produces lots of items useful in combat, grenades, target dummies, and exploding sheep (yes, really, I'm not kidding you). Unfortunately most of these items can only be used by engineers themselves.

- Alan sent a tip by way of comment: Shift-clicking on one of the names in square brackets in the chat window is equivalent to a /who command on that name, and shows you that characters class and level. And did you know that if you click on the name without shift, you can send a tell to that person without having to spell his name? Quite useful if you see a good offer in the trade channel from a guy named Grywllytsqwyx. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 1:00 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
EverQuest II - Producer's Letter

In the EverQuest II - Producer's Letter SOE promises to make EQ2 more solo friendly. Applause all around for the good idea. And a bit of sceptiscism on their ability to deliver. Solo content isn't exactly the core competency of EQ2 up to now, just the opposite. A far too large proportion of the monsters is marked with one or two arrows up, indicating "group only". And as quests aren't labeled in any way, you often find yourself stuck in your soloing efforts, because the monster you want to kill is too hard, in spite of the quest being ostensibly for your level.

In the beta SOE has turned complete dungeons like Vermin's Snye from a solo-friendly place into a group-only place. Seems they noticed that these dungeons are deserted now. Or they simply noticed that the much solo-friendlier competition sold twice as many copies as they did.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:04 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
PC Gamer Reviews of WoW and EQ2

Old news, but I only picked up the January 2005 issue of PC Gamer UK yesterday, because it had World of Warcraft all over the cover. Turned out there was not only a WoW review, but one of Everquest 2 and EVE:Exodus as well.

The World of Warcraft review was interesting insofar as it was written by somebody who had tried, but never liked MMORPG. Then he started with WoW (Euro beta) and got totally hooked. So WoW got a fantastic 94% score, and "must buy" label, in spite of not even being out yet.

Everquest 2 got a distinctively cooler reception, and a mediocre 74% score. Quote: "In the final count, there's no doubt that EverQuest II is a good game. But why play a good game when there's a brilliant one available as an alternative?" I couldn't agree more. It is only a rare species of power gamer, seeking much more challenge, for which EQ2 is the better game. But as this challenge is only one of dedication, and not of brains, I'll stick with WoW.

Surprisingly even the EVE:Exodus free expansion got a better score than EQ2, 88%. I might have underestimated this game, it keeps growing, and now has 55,000 subscribers, all on the same server. But again this is a game which only shines if you dedicate a lot of time to it. For a quick playing session it isn't suited at all, with very little short term activities on offer. I'll still pass, and wait until somebody publishes another form of "Elite Online", with lots of quests. After the distinctive success of WoW's quest system it is only a question of time before all new MMORPG will be loaded with quests.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:56 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Server move - wrong game

My EQ2 account ran out 10 days ago. And this weekend I got an e-mail from my European guild, The Order of the Rose-Croix, that they are participating in the server move, leaving the Runnyeye server for a new European server. Bad timing, that. I currently have no desire whatsoever to play EQ2, and I'm not going to pay $15 to renew my subscription, just so that I can log on once to give a /movelog command.

But if I ever change my mind and want to come back to EQ2, my characters will still be on the Runnyeye server without a guild. I'd probably ditch them and start over at level 1 on the new servers. They weren't all that high in adventuring levels, but I'll lose all the time I grinded doing tradeskills. Well, maybe better that way. While I did like the EQ2 tradeskills, it became too much of a treadmill in the end.

Sid Meier defines a game as a series of interesting decisions, but I think in Everquest 2 I made a wrong choice in the major decision of whether to concentrate on adventuring or on crafting. For once I was playing with a European guild, most of them playing at the same time as me. So I *should* have gone adventuring with them, instead of doing the more solitary tradeskill path. Well, one lives and learns. While this error certainly influenced my decision to quit EQ2 and play WoW instead, at least I don't regret playing WoW now.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:01 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Compensation

In a message from the president of Blizzard Entertainment more free added playtime was handed out to those unfortunate enough to play on the quarter of servers that keep crashing. I opened my account on the 18th of December, and with the free month and the 60-day game card the billing period should have ended on the 18th of March. But with all the free days I'm already up to 27th of March, with no idea how many more days will get added.

The strange thing is that the last 4 free days announced above I received for a crash I slept through. 6 pm PST is 3 am where I am, and if Blizzard crashes their server only at that time, I'm a happy customer. Unfortunately the announcement said they would try to crash at times which were more convenient for Americans.

Well, kudos to the Blizzard management for their information policy and the compensation. And a big BOO to whoever is responsible for the cluster of 20 servers which has all these problems. I don't know why they take so much time to announce a character transfer solution. Blizzard is losing customers over crashes and queues, and with their policy of not selling any more copies of the game until they can handle the masses.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:52 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Azeroth Economics

Should you buy rare items in the World of Warcraft auction house now, and sell them for a higher price later? Or would it be wiser to stock your virtual savings in gold pieces while prices tumble? While apparently you can become associate professor by writing about virtual economics, many players are interested in the subject on a more "armchair economics" base. In this article I would like to explore some concepts, and have a short look at the economics of World of Warcraft in comparison to earlier games.

As soon as you create a virtual world in which people can trade virtual money for virtual items, you create an economy. And just as real world governments need to look out for money supply and inflation in the real world, game developers need to balance the economic system of their virtual worlds. This is important because there are two economic systems in parallel: a player economy, in which supply and demand lead to ever-changing prices, and a much less flexible game economy, where the prices on NPC vendors and the effort required to receive loot items are more or less fixed.

To achieve a stable economy, the game has balance inflation and deflation. Inflation occurs when more virtual gold flows into the economy than goes out via money sinks, thus people have more and more gold available, and prices for items go up. Ultima Online was a typical example of an inflationary economy, where people would spend huge amounts of gold for rare items which just served for decoration.

A bit more confusing is the term "mudflation", which dates back to the text-based multi-user dungeons of the early days of the internet. In general, mudflation describes the effect of loot accumulating in the economy over time. The "sword of uberness", which is dropped by a very hard to kill dragon, will be rare and expensive at the beginning of the game. But with time more and more people manage to kill the dragon, and more and more swords of uberness flow into the economy. But in most games, very few of these swords ever leave the economy. Even if somebody who used it found something better, and doesn't need the sword any more, in most games he would just sell the sword to another player, or give it to a guild mate or twink. The sword never decays or breaks, and so has an infinite life. Supply is thus constantly increasing, leading to a drop in price for the sword of uberness.

Everquest is a typical example for mudflation. When an expansion introduces new items, their price on the player market is usually very high, and then gradually decreases, as more of them drop, until the market becomes saturated. While Everquest also has an increasing money supply, the money supply increases at a slower rate than the item supply. In proper economics terms the EQ mudflation is thus a "deflation". Deflation is harmful because it destroys content. Many of the original EQ quests have become increasingly irrelevant, because you can cheaply buy much better equipment from other players than you would get as a quest reward.

Now how does World of Warcraft look in these terms? Interestingly WoW not only has money sinks to remove extra money from the economy, but also item sinks to prevent mudflation. While WoW has common items that can be eternally repaired and handed to other players, these "grey" pieces of equipment do not have stats bonuses, and thus do not play a major part in the player economy. The interesting items, which are uncommon (green), rare (blue), or even more exotic, all share one characteristic: they become "soulbound" to the character, either when he picks the item up, or when he equips it. Most quest rewards and some dungeon boss loot have a "binds when picked up" property, while most random lucky finds and green/blue player made items are classified as "binds when equipped". Once an item becomes soulbound, it cannot be traded to another player. It can only be destroyed, sold to a vendor, or disenchanted into magic dust components needed for the enchanting tradeskill.

Items in World of Warcraft thus have a limited life expectancy, which goes a long way towards preventing mudflation. So the main danger to the WoW economy is inflation, and there are signs of this already. Up to level 40, there are sufficient money sinks. At level 40 you can learn to ride, and buy a rather expensive mount. You also spend a good amount of money every two levels to train your new skills. Other money sinks are the cost of flying transport and the repair cost for fixing items that have become damaged in combat or from dying. Training tradeskill recipes and buying vendor components also costs money. But once you are level 60 you don't have any training costs any more, because you learned everything you can. And the higher you are in level, the easier it becomes to "farm", mass-killing relatively easy monsters just for their loot.

Where inflation is showing up is in the prices for rare items in the auction house, and these prices are rising. People with high-level characters and too much money start a new character and transfer lots of money to him. The new character can then equip himself with the very best items he can find in the auction house, and easily outbid other players who do not have a high-level “sugar daddy”. Prices are also rising for tradeskill components. The effort to go out and gather herbs or mine ore is more or less fixed for everybody. So when money sits loose in your pocket, you are tempted to save yourself the work of gathering components yourself, and you buy it in the auction house instead. That way the money trickles down from the high-level characters to the low-level ones, and increases the money supply for everybody.

So where should you invest your virtual gold pieces in World of Warcraft? As long as WoW does not add any more high-level money sinks, the value of gold will keep dropping, thus holding large amounts of cash is the worst possible strategy. As inventory and bank slots are in limited supply, holding many uncommon items for sale later is not very practical either, even if we can expect their value to go up with time. The clever money is thus in rare items. If you are lucky enough to find rare items as loot drop, it might be a good idea to hold onto them, if you don't need money urgently. Buying rare items in the auction house for later resale is far more tricky, as it requires a good knowledge of what would be a low buying price; still rare items are always going to be in strong need so they will assume good value in any market condition making them the solid answer.

The soulbound items from World of Warcraft are a good solution to mudflation, which future games should consider to balance their economies. But that alone doesn't balance the economy, there is still work to be done on the money supply balance.

This has also been posted on Grimwell.com
- posted by Tobold @ 8:13 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
BlogShares

If blogs where publicly traded companies, where would that leave me? Being worth not very much on BlogShares apparently. :) Blogshares is a fantasy blog stock index, on which my blog is trading without my knowledge. Seems I'm worth $3,519.04, with a current share price of $1.10, based on the values of the blogs linking to me.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:47 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW's liberal approach

While Gamespot reports Everquest 2 having 310,000 subscribers now, the number of subscribers of World of Warcraft are twice that, and would be even more if the servers could handle more, and WoW was released in Europe. But if you do a feature by feature comparison, it is hard to explain just what makes World of Warcraft so much more popular.

One possible explanation I was thinking about is that WoW has a more "liberal" approach to letting people play the way they want to. I told you how my level 31 druid got the staff he wanted by doing a dungeon together with a level 60 guild mate. Yesterday I completed another dungeon, the Stockade, in a pickup group in which levels ranged from 28 to 41. And the remarkable thing is that I got decent xp in both cases, and good loot. While in many other games if you group with somebody much higher than you, you don't get xp any more, and there might be restrictions on the loot as well. FFXI was especially bad in that respect, with groups only getting reasonable xp if they were within 2 or 3 levels of each other. EQ2, while having a group level range of about 6 levels, will not drop treasure chests when the slain monster is grey to the highest level member in the group. And even in CoH you need to "sidekick" the lower level members to enable xp for everybody.

Of course the restrictions on group level range are there for a reason: they are supposed to prevent powerleveling. EQ2 is especially fanatic in trying to eliminate this supposed evil; besides the group restrictions they also prevent players from helping others with a quick heal, by making all encounters "locked". You can only heal group members, and people not locked into an encounter. This effectively prevents a level 60 cleric from standing behind a low-level character and helping him to level extra fast. But is such a restriction necessary?

World of Warcraft doesn't seem to think that people have to be slowed down from leveling. It basically offers a fun way to level at quite a reasonable speed while doing quests. This basic leveling speed is already much faster than all incarnations of Everquest and Co., I never felt as if I was grinding a treadmill, but was often surprised that I already leveled again without paying attention. But if I *wanted* to level even faster than that, WoW wouldn't prevent me from doing so. There just wouldn't be any point to it. There is no special reward to reaching level 60, especially not on a PvE server. You can powergame as much as your heart desires, and ignore all the quests and content. But why would you?

While Everquest was a continuous arms race between the developers and the power gamers, and EQ2 continues that tradition, World of Warcraft deals with power gamers in a much more intelligent fashion. It lets them reach level 60 in a month, then they realize that unlike EQ there is no special "raid" zones exclusively for power gamers, they whine a bit on the message boards, and then they quit. Problem solved. The average casual gamer doesn't even notice anything, he is too busy having fun with quests. Furthermore the casual gamer who just happens to want to group with a friend of his who is 10+ levels higher or lower isn't hampered by a stupid restriction which was originally targeted to slow down power gamers.

As long as you keep within the confines of the game (and don't try to hack the client or something), you can do pretty much whatever you want in World of Warcraft. There are much less restrictions which seem arbitrary than in other games. And this liberal approach makes WoW so much more less annoying than its competitors. And up to now it is a success. Very few people have quit the game because it was too easy to level, and a lot of people prefer it because it is not too hard. Now if Blizzard can grow their hardware resources fast enough to keep up with their success, I'm pretty sure they are here to stay and grow. There would need to be a major setback for them not to reach one million subscribers by the end of the year, worldwide.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:23 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
D&D System Reference Document v3.5

Unlikely as it sounds, I do have other hobbies than online role-playing games. Namely *offline* role-playing games. :) I've been playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for 20 years now, in many different versions, plus a couple of other rule systems. But the last 3 years I was playing in a AD&D 1st edition campaign, which just ended. And I'm rather excited about the new D&D v3.5 campaign we will start now. Thus some links:

System Reference Document v3.5 is a site which basically has the information of the D&D v3.5 Players Handbook online. While in the early days of the internet TSR would serve you with a cease and decist order for copyright violation if you even mentioned "magic missile", the new owners Wizards of the Coast have an Open Game License system for their d20 system.

This makes a lot of D&D resources online possible. So many in fact, that they are hard to find sometimes. Which makes a site like DnDResources.com very useful. One thing I found there while trying to create a spellbook for my new mage was a huge monster of a character sheet generation program called PCGen. But I think I'll use the SDR v3.5 link to copy and paste my spellbook in MS Word. Unless one of you knows of a better way to create a real "spellbook", with all the rule text for all of your spells.

[Addendum] Zonk sent me another good link via the comments: Andargor has an offline searchable version of the SRD 3.5, in case you want to have the D&D rules on your laptop. I recommend the HTML version, which is easy enough to use for anybody, unless you are an expert and prefer XML or MySQL databases.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:45 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW sold out

Even in the Blizzard Entertainment - Online Store World of Warcraft is sold out. The explanation given on the official forums is "We are limiting restocks until we can be sure that those who purchase the game will have an enjoyable experience." Or to translate that into normal English: World of Warcraft now has more players than the servers can handle, so they aren't selling more games until they added more hardware and fixed some server problems.

Unfortunately I'm on one of the more populated servers, Icecrown. That was one of the servers that had an extended maintenance downtime of 16 hours this week. And even that didn't fix much, the server is currently down again, and there were some minor server crashes all weekend. Blizzard also says they are working on a one-time possibility to allow players to switch to less populated servers, something known from Everquest as "/movelog" command.

But there are some happy news to report as well: My druid finally got his Rod of the Sleepwalker from Blackfathom Deep, on the sixth run through that dungeon. Thanks a lot to Relluc, a guild mate, who baby-sitted me through the dungeon with a level 60 mage. I've heard people saying mages were gimped, but once you see a high-level mage killing half a dozen mobs with a single spell, you stop thinking so. My druid doesn't have a single area-of-effect spell, and being able to damage several monsters at once is a rare and valuable ability in this game.

The other good news is my dwarven pally reaching 150 in engineering, and now being able to create explosive sheep. This is basically a pet on a short fuse, which will run towards the closest enemy and explode. :) Engineering is a rather expensive tradeskill, but it produces a lot of fun items like that. I like it a lot.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:46 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Supersize Star Wars Galaxies

Yahoo reports "Star Wars Galaxies Added to Sony Online Entertainment's Station Access Subscription Plan", the official site confirms that this will happen on the first of February, and Raph Koster himself announced it on the Grimwell.com forums. For $21.99 you can now play all different versions of Everquest on all platforms, Planetside, and Star Wars Galaxies. You will also get 4 more EQ2 character slots, and access to all Adventure Packs which came out after you subscribed for at least 2 months.

That turns the Station Access Pass, which was a bit of a joke when it first came out, into quite serious value for money. Monthly fees for one game nowadays cost $15, so for just $7 more you can "supersize" the game you're playing. Not that I'm tempted right now, I'm still too busy with World of Warcraft. But I never played Planetside, nor the PS2 version of Everquest, and I don't feel as if I "finished" Everquest 2, so this is an offer I might come back to.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:46 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
World of Warcraft sells 600,000 copies

In a Blizzard press release the makers of World of Warcraft announce that they sold more than 600,000 boxes of WoW up to now. During the christmas holidays up to 200,000 people were online simultaneously.

Good news. Because numbers like this make dollar signs light up in the eyes of game company executives, which means that there will be more MMORPG to come. Some undoubtedly being bad, or cheap rip-offs, but some certainly also being quite playable. Until another big hit comes and starts the cycle anew.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:12 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
My World of Warcraft Characters

I've been so busy playing WoW, I haven't had much opportunity to blog about it. :) So now I want to talk a bit about the two characters I'm playing on the Icecrown server:

The higher level character is Waldin, the night elf druid. The name is a historical artefact, my wood elf druid in Everquest, 5 years ago, was called Waldin, so since then all my druids have this name. Unlike EQ, in WoW the druid is not the easiest character to solo. But he is the most versatile by a large margin. This is due to his ability to shapeshift into different animal forms.

The bear form is a classical tank, with a big bonus to armor. When in bear form, the druid works exactly like a warrior, having rage slowly build up during combat, which then can be used for different special moves. In cat form the druid transforms into a rogue, having an energy bar and hitting enemy with combo points and finishing moves. He can also prowl, that is moving slowly in a nearly invisible form. As sea lion the druid can breathe under water. And soon I will gain a fourth animal form, a cheetah which has a higher run speed.

Besides his animal forms, the druid has different spells. On the one side he can heal, and it is the healing where I put my talent points in to specialize. Some of the healing talents, like harder to interrupt healing spells, are useful in solo play too, but otherwise this is a more group friendly specialization. Another branch of spells is of the root and nuke type. And finally I got buffs and debuffs. These, plus the potions I brew with my alchemy tradeskill, make me a reasonably good melee fighter. So all in all I have some skills or spells for every situation. I'm missing the teleport spells the EQ druids had, but at least I got one more teleport than most characters, which brings me to a special druid place, Moonglade, which is conveniently connected to the night elf homelands by gryphon flight.

My second character is Tobold, the dwarven paladin. He is a lot less versatile. His spells are basically limited to different buffs, and a minor heal. Before I learned to throw bombs with the engineering tradeskill, he didn't have any possibility to pull at range, neither with weapon nor spell. He only does one thing well, and that is melee combat. But boy, he is a hard nut to crack there. Wearing good mail armor (partially financed by the higher level druid), with an armor buff aura, and some talents that make his self-heal spells harder to interrupt, he is the archetypical tank. Only his taunt skills are lacking a bit in comparison with the warrior.

Now at level 18, the paladin did his first major group effort and joined a group for the Deadmines instanced dungeon. Although being on the low level side for that dungeon, and grouped with people of much higher level, he wasn't relegated to the side lines, but efficiently worked as main tank, even against Van Cleef the end boss.

Tobold the paladin also seems to be the more lucky one, winning a roll for a rare (blue) two-handed axe in that dungeon. Waldin, at level 28, is a lot less lucky. I'm trying to get a rare staff for him, which drops about half of the time from another boss mob, Lord Kelris, in the Blackfathom instanced dungeon. I've been through the dungeon four times now. Twice he didn't drop the staff, twice somebody else won the roll for it. And with me in a different time zone, getting a group there during the off-peak hours I'm usually playing during the week isn't easy. But I'll try again, until either I get that staff, or an even better one.

Both Tobold's axe and the staff Waldin wants are "binds when picked up" items. That means that whoever gets them in the loot is stuck with it. He can't sell them, or give them to another character. Either he uses the item, or he sells it far below worth to an NPC. But these rare items are the best a character of my level range can hope to achieve. The second best source for equipment is the auction house, where you can equip yourself with uncommon (green) items. You also find uncommon items as loot, or quest reward, but these are usually a bit lower in level than you are, unless it was a particularly long and hard quest. Only if you are really poor should you use the common (white) items you buy from NPC vendors or find often enough a loot from monsters. Common items don't give bonuses to your stats, and it is the stat bonuses which really make your characters more powerful. The system in which items become "soulbound" either when picked up, or when equipped, prevents the so-called mudflation, where people flood the market with their old equipment. That is working well enough, hunting for equipment is enjoyable. Even if one isn't always lucky (see above).
- posted by Tobold @ 10:55 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Strategy Guides – A Book Review

MMORPGs are complicated games. Thus companies like Prima Games or Brady Games sell strategy guides, which are supposed to make players’ lives easier. This is a comparative book review of the two strategy guides for Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft. Are these books worth the money?

If you have never read a strategy guide before, you might be asking what they are good for. For the most part, they contain compilations of data from a game, organized in a way that makes it easier to find and compare information than in the game itself. For example, instead of having to create a warrior of every race in game to find out which race has the most suitable stats, a strategy guide will an easy to read table. If you have a typical question while playing, like "where can I find monsters of my level to fight?", or "what would be a good two-handed sword for a warrior of my level?", you look the answer up in the strategy guide. That saves you running around to find out the answer yourself, or having to ask other players in chat.

Strategy guides also often contain hidden information, such as maps if the game doesn't offer any, or exact numerical values of how many hit points an orc has, which you would otherwise have to find out by adding up all the damage it took to make him keel over. Finally, strategy guides not only have lists and tables, but also more guide-like descriptive text, for example describing the relative merits of the different character classes, or explaining game etiquette. You are supposed to read the text part of the strategy guide once, and from then on use it as a reference book.

There are two general arguments against buying a strategy guide for a MMORPGs. The first is that these guides rarely contain any information, which could not be found for free on the internet. The second is that MMORPGs change with every patch, so some of the information in a printed book is necessarily outdated.

On the other hand, the free information on the internet is not always easy to find, and, unless you have a second computer, often difficult to access while playing. While standing in the middle of the orc camp, you do not want to Alt-Tab into a browser window to start looking up the orc's hit points. And while patches can change a lot, many things like maps and races remain unchanged over the whole lifetime of a game. You might also say that strategy guides are spoilers, which take away the fun of exploration and discovery. That is certainly true, you should only read the two books I describe below if you don't mind spoilers.

The Everquest 2 Prima Game Guide costs $24.99, and seems to be targeted towards the veteran Everquest player. It starts with a chapter on the differences between EQ1 and EQ2, but does not offer much basic introduction for people that have never played a MMORPG before, except for a walkthrough of the tutorial and the Isle of Refuge newbie part of the game.

Besides the usual descriptions of races and professions and lists of the items found in the game, the book has two highlights. The first is the detailed description of game mechanics that are not well explained in the game itself or its manual. EQ’s complicated mechanisms for upgrading your spells or skills are well explained; these are really helpful if nobody told you before. The second highlight is Brasse's Atlas, with beautifully handcrafted maps of all zones, together with quest lists and descriptions of the zones. As many of the zones in the game either have poor quality maps or no maps at all, the atlas is very useful.

On the weak side, the crafting section of the book is rather vague, which is probably due to crafting being one of EQ2’s least finished features. And curiously missing in the book is a bestiary. Some mobs are mentioned in the atlas part, but if you are looking for a list which shows you the levels of the different types of orcs, you are out of luck.

The World of Warcraft Official Strategy Guide from Brady Games costs $22.49. Just like the game it covers, it is very welcoming to players that are completely new to the genre. It starts with a chapter giving an introduction to MMORPGs in general, a walkthrough of your first day in the game, and common tactics and roles of the different classes in a group.

Just like the EQ2 book, it has descriptions of the races and classes, lists of equipment, and a chapter on crafting. It also has a chapter on PvP, an interview about future raid content, and the bestiary the EQ2 book was missing. There is an atlas, but the maps are just screenshots of the (useful enough) in-game maps. The atlas also has descriptions of the zones, with lists of quests, NPCs, and resources to be found there.

The best part of the book are the comics from Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade fame. Those are really funny descriptions of the many humorous situations that can happen in a game like World of Warcraft. The weakest part is that there are no maps or descriptions of the instanced dungeon zones, which are the games strongest group-based content and the source of the best loot.

If you were playing both games but had the money for only one of the books, you should probably buy the Everquest 2 one. The World of Warcraft book is in no way worse, but the game of WoW is a lot more helpful than the game of EQ2, thus the EQ2 strategy guide ends up being more useful. WoW not only gives out a lot more information in the game itself, it also has one single website as alternative source for all information you are likely to want to know.

If you are only playing one of these games and you don't have a second computer for looking up information while you play, buying the strategy guide for the game you play is a good idea. Both books contain useful information, which could save you a lot of running and searching around in game. Neither is absolutely necessary to succeed, but both are good to have on your desk next to the keyboard.

This has also been posted at Grimwell.com.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:13 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Tomorrows GuildWars beta event isn't the final one

ArenaNet mailed me to ask me to correct an error I made reporting here and on Grimwell.com. I called them and had quite an interesting discussion about the game.

Seems that Fileplanet was trying to produce a bit too much hype when they offered a key to the "final" beta. The beta event that starts tomorrow, on the 7th of January, is *not* the final one. There will be at least one more, in February. Release date is "early 2005", but probably not February as I assumed from the mistaken "final" tag. Beta events will continue every month until release.

GuildWars is a game that I look very much forward to, as it breaks several of the paradigms of the industry. Especially by working without the monthly fee, which should get a lot more people into massive multiplayer online gaming.

Another new approach is that success in GuildWars is not just based on how many hours you played the game, as it is in most other games. Your level is capped at 20, and you can always have only 8 skills on your hotkey bar. That should give players the equal footing needed to do PvP which is balanced and fun. And you can still go questing and adventuring for new skills, and equipment. But these will be more specialized rather than higher level. You end up with more strategic options, but you need the brains to combine them effectively, you aren't simply stronger from having played more. We will see how that works.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:23 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoWCensus

WoWCensus.com is a site which lets people install a World of Warcraft user interface modification program which with scripted /who commands makes a census of all the characters playing in that game. According to them, WoW has 750,000 characters. They call it "players", but it is really just characters, not individual accounts. Still three quarter of a million characters is quite a lot. With Blizzard having announced 350,000 copies of the game sold by the 1st of December, that number of characters should be not too far from the truth.

Interestingly WoWCensus then also mines the data to give information about sides, races, and classes. With the most significant result being that nearly two thirds of people play Alliance, and a bit over one third play Horde. That disequilibrium could cause problems for PvP in the long run.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:55 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
World of Warcraft Experience Bonus

In spite of the growing readership mentioned in my last post, I get precious little feedback, by mail or by comment. So I was quite happy when Grog actually asked a real question in the comment to the post below: Why does World of Warcraft has an experience bonus for being logged off?

Unlike games like chess, success in a MMORPG has very little to do with skill, but is mainly based on how much time you are able to invest. If you had twice as much time on your chess clock, you still would not be able to beat a grandmaster. But if you had twice as much time in a MMORPG, you would probably be able to outlevel anybody.

So sometimes the people we can call "casual players" get a bit frustrated. They aren't necessarily playing the game any worse than other players, but as their job and family leaves them less time for playing, they advance at a much slower pace than the other players. Game companies realized that early, and some tried to placate the casual gamers. After all, they pay the same fee per month, and use less bandwidth, and thus are arguably the most valuable customers.

Ultima Online had the "power hour". The first hour you played every day had twice the usual skill increase. So if you played only one hour per day, you gained all your skills at twice the normal rate. While somebody playing 12+ hours a day did hardly notice the bonus. So casual players profit more from the bonus than power gamers.

EVE has skill gains in real time. It takes for example 1 week of real time to advance a certain skill. Regardless of whether you are online or offline. In that case the casual gamer advances at least his skills nearly as fast as the power gamer.

And finally World of Warcraft has an experience bonus which accumulates while you are offline. For every 8 hours you are offline with you character resting in an inn or a city, you gain one "bubble" of bonus experience, 5% of a level, up to a maximum of 30 bubbles, or one-and-a-half levels. If you log off in the wilderness, the experience bonus is only one quarter of this. The bonus experience is not actual experience points added to your current xp. Rather it is given out only when you gain xp by killing monsters. As long as you have bonus xp left, for every xp you gain from a kill, you get another xp from the bonus pool added. Thus you earn xp at double the normal rate. The bonus is smaller than it looks: One level of bonus xp doesn't mean you get two levels for the price of one, you only get one level in half the usual time.

The effect is the same as the power hour: If you are a casual gamer who can only spend little time in game, you profit from the bonus the most. The more you play, the less significant the bonus becomes. The bonus is still not enough to enable a casual gamer to level as fast as a power gamer, but it helps. You need to be offline for a week to get one level full of bonus xp, and if you had played during that time you would have gained many more levels than that.

One small tip for WoW players who want more bonus xp: Create several characters. Bonus xp are accumulated per character, not per account. You just need to play your alts a bit at the start to get out of the trivial level gaining range. Afterwards you could play them as little as only every ten days, and gain one-and-a-half levels in half the time it would usually take.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:11 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments