WoW Interview on Gamergod

Grimwell from Gamergod did an interview with Shawn Carnes, a game developer at Blizzard, about World of Warcraft.

The big news in there, at least for me, was naming a possible date for the first WoW expansion set. As I feared, the projected date is "late 2006", which will horribly disappoint some people who had dreamed of getting it *this* christmas, instead of next. Well, Blizzard was never famous for speed, but for quality. Everquest 2 will release the first expansion this year, and I'm pretty certain that by the time the first WoW expansion will be out, EQ2 will have 2 or 3. EQ1 clocked up 9 expansions in 6 years, and compared to that one expansion in two years seems rather slow. On the other side WoW has more free content added to the game with patches, while other games mostly use patches to, well, patch things.

On Real Money Trade (RMT), Shawn just said that Blizzard is against it. Apparently they are primarily relying on players ratting on others to detect virtual goods traders, as well as some monitoring of in-game activity. Hey Shawn, have a look at the IGE website if you want evidence of major WoW RMT activities. But Blizzard seems determined to ban the little guys, and ignoring the big guys. That's like going after the kid who grows a canabis plant on his balcony with the drug squad, and ignoring the big Canabis Superstore on the other side of the street.

The final interesting bit to me is that Blizzard seems to be well aware that there are less Horde players than Alliance, and equally aware that this is causing problems with the battlegrounds. They are "looking into solutions", but frankly I don't see how they are going to do it. Ask 10 people about why there are more Alliance players than Horde and you get 10 different answers. My personal theory is that this is out of a preference to play the "good guys", but that is just a guess.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:45 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Heartless Gamer Blog

Heartless, a fellow blogspotter and since recently also fellow writer on Gamergod, has his blog at http://hgamer.blogspot.com/. Some interesting articles on World of Warcraft there, which are worth reading. Although I must confess that his extensive cross-posting of his stuff on several sites is confusing the heck out of me. I never know *where* to respond, and I'm certainly not going to reply on all of the forums and places he posts his stuff.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:35 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
A question of ambition

The longer I play my level 60 character, the better I understand the powergamer uber-guilds. Not that I wanted to be in such an uber-guild, but at least I start understanding what they are talking about. It's a question of ambition. They simply follow the game system to a logical conclusion to reach specific goals.

At many points in a MMORPG you are given the choice between specialization and generalization. That starts at the choice of character class, and then goes over choice of talents, up to choice of equipment. For example you can choose to play a warrior, choose defensive talents, and choose the most defensive gear to get the ultimate specialist in defence (which is where Raslebol is heading). A warrior with arms/fury talents and a two-handed weapon or dual-wielding is less good in defence, but obviously better in other situations, like PvP or farming. A shaman is even less good in defence, but still not a bad tank, and having an even wider range of other options.

Jack-of-all-trades are often more fun to play, and easier to solo. But if your over-arching ambition is to raid the toughest dungeons in the game, you need the specialists. You simply wouldn't want a shaman or aggressive-specced warrior as your main tank in a high-end raid, healed by a druid or shadow-specced priest. You would want the specialists. You also wouldn't want just any mix of character classes in your 40-man Molten Core raid, you would want a certain number of this class, a certain number of that class, all of them specialized in what they do best. That would still leave you with a number of "joker" slots, where you could put jacks-of-all-trades.

That means that an uber-guild will need to tell their members what classes to play, what talents to chose, and in extremis even what kind of equipment to wear. That takes a lot of fun choices away from the members, which is bad. But on the other hand it enables the guild as a whole to succeed more reliably in overcoming the toughest challenge.

Now if you make a concious choice between "everybody can do what he wants" and "we want to kill Onyxia every night", that is okay. And I'm fine with the "everybody does what he wants" choice. I just have the impression that many guilds, including mine, are trying to have both. And that is certainly going to end in tears, shouting matches, and general unpleasantness. Lots of frustrating evenings where a rag-tag band of 40 random characters with random talents and equipment repeatedly fails to reach Ragnaros or slay Onyxia. It is easy to get blinded by the light of success of the uber-guilds, and not noticing the hard choices they had to make to get there. You can't have both the ambition *and* the easy life.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:57 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
China and MMORPG

Thanks to John for pointing out www.interfax.cn, a Chinese news site, which reports on some "interesting" new government regulations regarding MMORPG. I have no idea if this is a very elaborate hoax, or the strangest news on MMORPG I've ever read. Seems some Chinese government institution came up with some regulations to make games more "healthy".

One is to forbid games to give out rewards for PvP.

Another one orders game developers to make their games give out diminished rewards after 3 and 5 consecutive hours of playtime. This is to prevent people from playing too much.

What strikes me as very peculiar is that these rules have obviously been made by somebody who understands MMORPG very well. Instead of banning games with PvP, or kicking people out after 3 to 5 hours, these "unhealthy" activities are simply made unattractive by giving out less or no rewards. For PvP that will certainly work, in WoW PvP isn't already terribly popular, and if you removed the rewards, Alterac Valley would never fill up. The policy to diminish returns after 3 hours of consecutive play will simply cause people to have 2 or more accounts under different names.

In a way the latter policy already exists in WoW, with the rest bonus xp. And UO had a power hour, where you gained double skill gains in the first hours every 24 hours. So by telling people they get "double xp in the first 3 hours", you could make that new policy pretty palatable.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:47 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
WoW Journal - 29-August-2005

Lots of WoW action since I came home, let me try to sort this out a bit.

Waldin, my shaman, made it to level 22. Ah, the soft life of a twink! It feels good to level again, it is so frustrating doing a quest with a level 60 and only getting useless xp as reward. Waldin's mining skill is at 128, so if I get high enough in level to go to the areas where iron deposits are, I can mine them. But with some generous financing from my high-level, I already got engineering to level 225. This turns out to be rather useful. I had a quest where I needed to summon a level 20 elite, and putting a goblin mine down first, which dealt him 500 points of damage the instant he showed up was rather useful. So are the grenades and exploding sheep. But in spite of all this exploding goodness, at level 35 I'll go for gnomish engineer and all the fun devices instead.

Raslebol's Alterac Valley expedition last week got him to PvP rank 1, scout, with the progress bar to the next rank already 80% full. So I did some more PvP to get towards rank 3, sergeant, where I can get a useful cloak. I did a few Warsong Gulch battlegrounds. Two without a shaman on our side, which we lost. One with a shaman, which we won 3-0, all three points made by the shaman, carrying the flag in ghost wolf mode. Not really fair. Then on Saturday somebody made a huge effort to collect enough Horde players for Alterac Valley, and I joined there. Playing AV on my desktop with 1 GByte of RAM works a *lot* better than on the laptop with 512 MB. There was still some lag, but in general it was playable. As warrior I still didn't get many killing blows in, but as we were all raided, I still got over 500 honorable kills and lots of honor. As lag was low, I could charge into the enemy lines, hit intimidating shout, and deal some damage and mess up their defences before they killed me. In AV, every second you manage to stun a mage counts.

Sunday was guild raid night, with two raids planned. I showed up for the first one, and found that of the 15 players in the raid, 5 were warriors. Doh! Warriors are essential to have in a raid, but you only need 2, main tank and main assist, with a maximum of 1 more in reserve. A raid needs a 4th and 5th warrior as much as a fish needs a bicycle. So when a 16th guy showed up for the raid, I dropped out.

That turned out to be a very good decision, because the second raid had no other warrior. Okay, "raid" is maybe said too much, only 5 people showed up. But that allowed us to go to Dire Maul east, which I never finished. Very nice dungeon, I don't know why we don't go there more often. Still not trivial at level 60, but playing well we didn't have a single death, and that without having a priest or mage. And we got some quite nice loot, although I didn't win anything special. Well, I won a blue book starting a quest for a very nice trinket, but I got the wrong version, the Harnessing Shadows for Warlocks. I'll give it away to some guild warlock. But as the trinket gives +10 fire resistance, it might be worth doing DM east several times to get the trinket for everybody, it seems it exists for every class, and the fire resistance will be useful for Molten Core.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:09 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Home, sweet home

I'm back from my trip to the USA. From a gaming point of view, being able to play on a laptop in the hotel room was good, much better than the alternatives of watching TV or reading. The airport of Columbus, Ohio, gets bonus points for having free wireless internet access. This was not the case in the other airports, where there was either no internet access at all, or you had to pay for it. But anyway, in an airport you usually don't have a table at a good height to play on, and with a touchpad instead of a mouse you can't really do much.

Back home I find lots of gaming news in my e-mail, reported below. I also got an e-mail from EQ2, inviting me to come back for free 7 days and see how they improved. But I'm afraid in this case they suffer from a negative network effect: I want to play the game that my guild is playing, and they pretty much gave up on EQ2 and are mainly playing WoW. If I ever tire of WoW and there isn't a shiny new game to hold my interest, I could see myself giving EQ2 a second chance. But right now they aren't on my to do list.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:05 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Closing Asheron's Call 2

Turbine finally noticed that nearly nobody was playing Asheron's Call 2, and decided to shut down the game end of this year. Does this surprise anybody?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:40 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Auto Assault delayed

I have Auto Assault on pre-order. Not that I'm eager to quit World of Warcraft, but NCSoft has made some good games in the past, and Auto Assault interested me for being so different from the typical sword and sorcery genre. But now it seems that I'll have to wait a bit longer, the release which was originally planned for October has now been postponed for Spring 2006. No problem, I can wait, I wasn't really in a hurry to see this.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:33 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Editorial: Real Money, In Game Items

MMORPG.COM has an editorial on the first month of the Station Exchange, the controversial SOE service of buying and selling in-game items for real world dollars. While of the people hanging out at MMORPG.COM forums a large majority was against real money trade (RMT), the Station Exchange traded virtual items for $180,000 in its first month. Not too shabby.

Just shows that polls aren't representative, because game forums are mainly populated by hardcore players, people with too much time. And it is pretty obvious that the time-rich are the ones fearing for their status when you introduced RMT. You can see that from typical arguments, where the hardcore players claim that the buyers of virtual goods are just doing it to cheat their way to some status they were unable to earn. In reality I don't think the buyers are interested at all in status. Most of the things bought simply open up the way to new content, which the time-poor would otherwise been unable to reach. Or to speak in a World of Warcraft example: People spend real world dollars on WoW gold to buy a horse *not* because the horse looks nice, but because you can move faster with a horse. If the horse was just for show, and riding was not faster than running, few people would spend dollars on them.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:26 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Turning WoW into a grind

One of the younger guild members complained in guild chat that grinding his way to 60 was bringing him down. World of Warcraft a grind? I tried to tell him that WoW was the least grindy game I ever played, and that he should enjoy leveling instead of just trying to get to level 60 as fast as possible. To which he replied that all the guild events were for level 60 players, and guild groups of lower levels simply didn't exist. He just wanted to play with us, so he grinded. Ouch, he got me there!

Come to think of it, even the first Everquest players probably didn't grind, but just enjoyed the world of Norrath as it was. And the most fun is always grouping with people you know. But people get attached to their characters, and play them even when their friends aren't on, and the next you see is that there is such a big level difference that you can't group any more. That just happened to me on the French servers with my D&D buddies, which are all over the place, level-wise.

That outleveling friends only stops at level 60. Once everybody is 60, they can always play together. So when people claim "the fun starts at 60", they are *not* talking about the rather stupid activity of repeatedly raiding the same few places. They are talking about being able to group with friends anytime. And others who observe that want to join that fun, and get there as fast as possible.

Isn't it ironic when social cohesion and friendship turns World of Warcraft into a grind?
- posted by Tobold @ 12:01 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
Utopia goes digital

More and more articles about virtual worlds pop up in regular newspapers and magazines. This article, titled Utopia goes digital, from USA Today focuses on the non-game virtual worlds, like Second Life.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:59 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
A World of Warcraft World

A World of Warcraft World is an interesting, ironic article about the future of MMORPG. Worth reading.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:57 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 21-August-2005

Raslebol did his first "serious" PvP yesterday, spending several hours in Alterac Valley, and racking up hundreds of honorable kills. That is a lot, compared to his previous lifetime score of 22 honorable kills. The main reason the score was so high was that I was in a raid group, sharing all the HKs in the vicinity. That is a lot fairer than fighting individually, because the classes aren't well balanced in respect to honorable kills and honor points.

But even if the point distribution is fairer in a raid, that doesn't solve the main problem of Alterac Valley: Lag. Of course me currently being on a laptop doesn't help, but most of it is server lag. Often I would press a hotkey and the action from that key only happened a full 10 seconds later. As long as I was in a lonely corner of the battlefield, things were fine. But as soon as I approached the main battle, where over 50 people are usually fighting, action slowed down to a crawl. Anything you did was pretty much random.

And that is a technical problem, which is the responsability of Blizzard. PvP big battles were extremely laggy before the battlegrounds, and making a battleground for 80 players didn't help. No wonder there are rarely enough people to get one started, everybody prefers Warsong Gulch. I hope the next battleground they are working on is also small and lag-free.

After the first raid group turned out to be unorganized, only good for sharing the kills, we split off into a guild raid group on the battlefield. We liberated a mine from the kobolds, stormed and destroyed a bunker, and were generally a lot more efficient than the unorganized players. Nevertheless that only got us to control both graveyards around the Fields of Strife. The next target was simply too well defended by both NPC and players to take. The Horde not always having 40 players, at times going down to 28, while the Alliance always was at full strength, didn't help either.

Well, I'll see what rank this will result in. I want to be sergeant at some point, they get a nice cloak. A first success was that I'm now friendly with the Frostwolf, which is the clan guarding the battlefield. But except for allowing me to buy level 35 potions which I don't use, there isn't much of an advantage to it.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:50 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Portrait of Raslebol

Just to show off the new shield, here is a screenshot of Raslebol:


- posted by Tobold @ 3:09 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
WoW Journal - 19-August-2005

A peaceful and quiet week of WoW. Playing on the laptop from a hotel room in the USA works, but more or less forces me to solo. When I log on in the early evening here, in Europe it's past midnight, and those guildmates who are still playing are already in a group in the middle of a dungeon. Well, no problem, a change of pace is good. I stocked up on herbs, and did a couple of solo-quests.

Then I discovered the hidden benefit of having done Scholomance several times in a 5-man group, doing all the Eva Sarkhoff quests. This had allowed me to buy the Transmute Water to Air recipe from the ghost vendor in front of Scholomance. And it turns out that essence of air is two to three times more valuable than essence of water. Buy essence of water for 7 gold, transmute it into essence of air, and sell it for up to 20 gold. And the cooldown for the transmute is only 24 hours, so I can do this once a day. First time alchemy brings me real fat profits.

The first of such transmutes I did because I wanted to have the icy chill enchantment on my weapon, which slows down the enemy when it procs. That needs both essence of water and air, but also several small brilliant shards, which I couldn't get hold of. And the enchanters of my guild all said that icy chill wasn't much good, and that I should go for the fiery enchantment instead. So I spent 20 gold on the ingredients for that. Well, the fiery enchantment *looks* good, but I'm not really convinced it is good. Seems the proc rate is about 10%, and then it deals 40 points of fire damage. That calculates to +4 damage per hit on average, which I could have gotten with a much cheaper enchantment. And as lots of the raid dungeons are fire based, I'm afraid the fiery enchantment doesn't do much there.

Speaking of looking good, I got a new shield, the Crest of Retribution. The stats aren't strictly better than those of the Husk of Nerub'enkan it replaced, but it looks much better. It's all spikey, and has a metal shine effect. I got our guild smith to add an mithril spike on it, and now it deals 21 to 55 points of damage every time I block. And it seems that this damage isn't reduced by armor. Combined with the improved shield block talent it gets pretty wicked.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:08 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Test passed

My laptop passed the test, I'm able to play World of Warcraft in a hotel room with it. Obviously the ping from the US to Europe isn't great, and the lesser specs of the laptop cause some additional lag. But all in all it's playable, and a lot better than no WoW at all.

This didn't start well at all. Yesterday the hotel's ISP had a problem, and there was no internet. Today it was supposed to run, but I still couldn't connect. The manager said it had something to do with me using a Dell. Turns out that the standard setting for Dell network card wasn't compatible with the ISP. If you are staying in a Marriott hotel, and want to use a Dell to connect to the internet, go to the properties of your local area connection, click on the configure button, and on the advanced tab set Speed & Duplex from "auto" to "10 Mb half". Complicated, but it works. And hey, it's free highspeed internet access, so I'm not complaining.

I had installed Sid Meier's Pirates! on the laptop, in case there was no internet. Not an inspired choice for a laptop, the control system is based on using a num-block, and a laptop doesn't have one. I managed to sail my ship and fight my fencing duells with the mouse, but trying to win the governors daughter by dancing with her proved pretty much impossible with the mouse. Well, still a great game, need to find the time to play it on a regular computer. Or buy an USB num-block attachment for the laptop. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 11:11 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 15-August-2005

Last night we tried to organize a raid to Molten Core, with two guilds. But during the summer holidays even game activity is lower, and only 29 people showed up. As we knew that you shouldn't even try MC with less than 40 people, we split up into two groups of 15 and 14 instead, each doing Upper Black Rock Spire.

The UBRS raid with 14 people went like a breeze, we did it in less than 3 hours, without any wipe. I only died once, in the final fight, to the General's Conflageration ability. I wonder if that one can be stopped by decursing. I won some minor green treasures, but the other warrior in the group won both the blue mace and the blue shield I had wanted too.

So the only blue item I got was one Brilliant Chromatic Scale, of which 10 are needed for the epic breastplate. The previous 2 of these I had let have another warrior in the guild, because it's useless to let everybody try that quest on the same time. You never get more than one per raid, and that not always, so you need over 10 raids for just one breastplate. So I sent a tell to the other warrior, who was in the other raid group. But he was angry that some hunter had rolled for and won the scale on that group, and didn't want mine. I wonder what to do with it, I don't really like quests like that which need 15 people to do over 10 raids to get one item for one guy. I think I'll try to sell it on the guild forums, that way I get at least some reward, and it isn't lost to the guild.

In other news, my shaman Waldin is now level 16. And as he reached engineering 150 by making lots of Whirring Bronze Gizmos, I did a second trip to the Darkmoon Faire after all. The faire had stopped accepting Copper Modulator after 5 hand-ins, so for 25 modulators I got 5 tickets. Now the gizmos were accepted 6 times a bundle of 7, each time giving 4 tickets. So I ended up with a grand total of 29 tickets. I didn't plan to save them for some bigger prize, but wanted to know how good the Minor Darkmoon Prize was, which one can get from level 15 on. What I got was one Lesser Moonstone, one Shadowgem, two white shoulder items level 17 and 19, a level 17 green sword, and a level 19 green cloak. Not bad as rewards for a level 15, but nothing I couldn't have gotten easier with my level 60.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:26 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
Doing more sports now

Quote on how to defeat Ragnaros, the end boss of Molten Core: "(W.O.W. players, here are some tips that worked for us: get basic fire-resistance above 150 for each raid member, load up on damage-enhancing and fire-absorbing potions and lay down frost area-of-effect spells on Ragnaros's protectors, the Sons of Flame. And if you don't get Ragnaros below 45 percent health before the first Sons phase, you're probably in trouble. As always, your mileage may vary.)"

No, me and the guild I'm in are nowhere near even thinking about defeating Ragnaros in Molten Core, we will be happy if we kill the first boss, Lucifron, without too many wipes on Sunday. So what's so special about the above paragraph that I need to quote it?

Well, it appeared in the New York Times on the 6th of August, in the sports section. Wow! Or should I say WoW?

Obviously even serious newspapers have reported about World of Warcraft as a business phenomenon. The NYT had an article in the tech section about it. But advice on how to defeat Ragnaros in the sports section is new. Talk about MMORPG going mainstream. Hey, I always wanted to do more sports, and now it seems I'm already doing it without having noticed. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 3:24 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Ultimate test of my laptop

In March of this year I was on a business trip to the USA without a computer, and it was annoying. After some deliberation, in April I went mobile and bought a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop, a mid-prize model.

I'm using the laptop nearly every day, but not exactly as one would think. It rests fixed next to my keyboard at home, and while I play World of Warcraft on my desktop, I'm looking up quests at Thottbot, prices at Allakhazam, or maps at Worldofwar.net. I could have done that with a machine of half the price.

I did take the laptop to several shorter business trips in France. No complaints on the "business productivity" side, taking notes during a meeting on a laptop makes writing the minutes of meeting later a lot easier. But why the heck am I doing that on a laptop my company didn't pay for? And using the laptop for playing WoW in the hotel wasn't a big success either. In one hotel room I didn't have internet access at all, they only had that in the lobby. And then when I got on the internet via WiFi in France, it wasn't for free. Charges ranging from 5 to 20 Euros per hour, compared to 45 Euros per month via 3 MBit ADSL at home.

But now the ultimate test awaits my laptop, I'm going to the USA again. Starting next Tuesday, I will be gone for nearly 2 weeks, visiting two different cities in the USA. Both hotels promise "free high-speed internet", although that might not be wireless. I hope it works with the Ethernet connection my laptop has. Spending evenings and weekends at business hotels is not my favorite pasttime, usually its horribly boring. So if the laptop passes this test, and I will be able to play World of Warcraft on it, the resulting improvement of my quality of life will be worth the cost of the laptop. Here's hoping.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:17 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
WoW Journal - 11-August-2005

Raslebol did two Stratholme raids this week. One to the living side, and one to the undead side. The one to the living side netted me nothing, but yesterday's raid to the undead side was quite profitable.

Irony of ironies. It is now a full 4 months that I am using the Blackskull Shield. Purple items are hard to replace. :) And the few times I saw a better shield drop, somebody else won it. So I was very happy to win the Husk of Nerub'enkan from one of the minor bosses in Stratholme, being the only one interested. I equip it, and think there must be something wrong. I switch from one shield to the other several times, until the truth dawns on me: The two shields have absolutely identical 3D graphics, only their 2D icons and stats are different. So while I now have a good 200 armor more, better stamina, and my blocks absorb more damage, I still look exactly the same, shield-wise, as I looked 4 months ago. Minor niggle, but still a bit annoying.

I also got the Band of Flesh ring from Ramstein, so I happy with my loot. And I finally understood the how the sets of armor system works. The final boss of Stratholm (undead side) could have dropped the legs of valor, but didn't. But he *did* drop the legs for another class. And it seems that one of the items he drops will always be part of a set for a class, and it will always be the legs. So it is only semi-random. I need to kill a specific boss to get a specific body part, regardless of class.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:04 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Peeling the MMORPG onion

A MMORPG is a product with many layers, a bit like an onion. At it's heart are the basic repetitive units, like combat. The next layer can be for example quests. One quest consists of several combat units, plus the bit that ties them all together. Then there is the level layer, do several quests and you gain a level. Then the zone layer, gain several levels and you are strong enough to move to the next zone. And the final outer layer is the whole MMORPG world.

The problem with game previews is that they often look mainly at the outer layers of the MMORPG onion. Whether you get the information from game developers or from game reviewers, they often tell you about the wonderful world the game is playing in, but rarely about the details in the heart of the onion.

For example the official introduction to World of Warcraft starts with the paragraph "Four years have passed since the aftermath of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, and a great tension now smolders throughout the ravaged world of Azeroth. As the battle-worn races begin to rebuild their shattered kingdoms, new threats, both ancient and ominous, arise to plague the world once again." Which tells you exactly nothing about the game World of Warcraft, it might as well be a real time strategy or first person shooter game.

Okay, now we can play WoW or get reviews from people who played it, but what about games that don't exist yet? The Tabula Rasa website tells us that "Tabula Rasa™ is a massively multiplayer online action game that takes you into the heat of battle at the frontlines of an epic war between a xenophobic alien race bent on galactic conquest and the coalition of rebel soldiers who’ve traveled across the galaxy to stop them." Again, the emphasis is on telling you that the game plays in a Sci-Fi setting. It's left to you to guess what exactly a "massively multiplayer online action game" is. Will combat in Tabula Rasa be "twitchy", and depend on your reflexes? Or will it be standard MMORPG combat fare, and depend on the stats of your character? I don't know.

Peeling the onion, and digging deeper, is sometimes possible when you can find interviews with game developers. The quotes I reported yesterday from Vanguard are typical mid-level information. They talk about leveling and zones, and are already much more interesting than information about the world in general. But they rarely go much deeper than that. Any developer asked about the combat in his game will swear that it will be "exciting", but everybody claims that, and it doesn't really tell you much.

Once you get actually hold of the game and play it, your impressions move the other way, from the inside to the outside of the onion. If the combat is boring and the interface cumbersome, that will be one of the first things you notice. It takes a while to find out whether the leveling speed is okay or too slow. And if the worst flaw a game has is in its endgame content, some people will never notice.

I would like to be able to play any MMORPG for one hour before I decide to buy it. Unfortunately that isn't possible yet. It isn't always easy to get into a beta, especially if you live in Europe and the beta is restricted to North Americans. There is a trend towards free trial versions. These used to be a sign of a game's decline, but nowadays even successful games offer them. But again these free trials aren't always easy to get hold of. With games getting bigger there is often no download option, but the free trial version is packed on a CD that comes with some game magazine.

So in the end I'm often forced to take a $50 bet: Buy the game and risk to find out that I don't like it. Now is that a deliberate strategy of MMORPG companies wanting to sell me dud games, or is it bad marketing of companies that could sell more good games if they just let people try them?
- posted by Tobold @ 11:13 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
WoW Journal - 10-August-2005

My level 14 shaman Waldin took up mining and engineering as professions, because engineering is one of the funnier things in World of Warcraft. To gain engineering skill, he made a lot of copper modulators, which aren't much good for anything, except as components in more engineering stuff. But I did remember that copper modulators were on the list of items you could hand in at the Darkmoon Faire to gain tickets. So Waldin packed his copper modulators, and started the long voyage from Orgrimmar to Elwynn Forest.

At level 14 that isn't a trivial undertaking, but doing long trips through dangerous territory is something I enjoy since running from Freeport to Qeynos with a level 10 character in Everquest. Knowing the way helps a lot. Waldin took the zeppelin from Durotar to Grom'Gol in Stranglethorn Vale. There he jumped into the ocean and swam north, until he reached Westfall. And from Westfall is was easy to get to the Darkmoon Faire south of Goldshire, I just had to carefully avoid the guards.

I would like to report that this trip netted Waldin lots of cool treasures, but that wasn't exactly what happened. First of all I only could hand in copper modulators 5 times, gaining me 5 tickets. The more stuff you hand in, the higher your reputation with the faire gets, and you need to hand in better stuff for getting tickets. The other problem was that I was only level 14, and the prizes you can get for the tickets are limited by level. I would have needed to be level 15 to get the first random treasure prize for 5 tickets. As it was, for 5 tickets I only could have bought a useless flower, so I kept my tickets. I did visit the fortune teller, and by answering his questions in the cruelest possible way managed to get a 2-hour buff that added 10% to my damage. With my alliance warlock I had tried answering the questions more compassionate, which got me stuck with a useless spirit buff. Well, I think I'll wait until the faire comes to Mulgore next month before I visit it again.

There is considerable outrage at the moment about the Darkmoon Faire having been "nerfed". What happened was that Blizzard observed that the 1200 ticket reward was so good, that lots of people farmed stuff on the test servers to get it. So when they moved from the test server to release, they put in less good rewards for 1200 tickets. I wouldn't call changing things when going from test server to release a "nerf". That's what test servers are for, testing if something is overpowered or not working. But some people had already started early with the farming, hoarded lots of stuff to hand in for tickets, and now found that their 1200 tickets only got them a blue item instead of a purple one. A typical case of people trying to be clever, and ending up shooting themselves in the foot.

My advice: Don't farm 1200 tickets, it's not worth it. All the other prizes cost only between 5 and 50 tickets, and people report having found nice things in the random treasures, for example level 50 items or 16-slot backpacks in the 40-ticket random treasure you can get at level 45. 50 tickets buys you a 14-slot bag, which you can get at any level. And even if you don't like the ticket prizes at all, you can still get a free 2-hour buff from the fortune teller. So checking out the faire is good idea.

I'm not so happy about the trinkets you can get for handing in suits of cards, because that is just another high-level grind. And I wished that alchemy and tailoring were covered in the professions that can hand in crafted items for tickets. But otherwise the faire is nice enough.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:24 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
The Sims are porn

Emboldened by their success of getting GTA:San Andreas pulled off the shelves for containing a hidden sex game, which was only accessible with the "hot coffee" mod, censors are now attacking other games. The unlikely target this time is The Sims 2. While The Sims are generally well behaved and puritan, they are nude when taking a shower or bath, oh my god! And the "blur" designed to hide any indecent exposure can, you guessed it, removed with a mod. Not that there is anything to see under the blur, EA states that the sims have no genitals and appear "like Ken and Barbie". But due to the particular American sensibilities regarding full frontal nudity, this is enough for some people to call for the game being banned.

Now you need to remember that characters in video games don't actually wear clothes. In most cases they just wear "textures", that is the clothing is painted onto their body. And the files containing these textures reside on the users hard-disk, and with more or less technical expertise can be accessed and modified. Which means that nearly every video game on the PC which has humanoid figures in it can be modded to change these textures to something pink, thus showing the game characters naked. And if the video game character is an attractive looking female to start with, chances are that somebody actually bothers to do such a "nude patch", a tradition dating back to the first Lara Croft Tomb Raider game.

The surprising thing is that some people think that nude video game characters, accessible only through a mod downloaded from the internet, are a threat to the public morals. Somebody should point out to them that an underage teenager able to find a nude patch on the internet will also be able to find huge amounts of free porn there. Or that cutting somebody into pieces with a chainsaw in a video game might be more harmful than seeing a naked sim.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:20 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Vanguard at Gamergod

Gamergod has an interesting article on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Unfortunately the interesting part is that it answers the question "What if dinosaurs could design MMORPG?". Brad McQuaid and Jeff Butler, who have both worked on the first Everquest, are trying to stem back the tide of modern MMORPG development. Their new company, Sigil, is trying to put the genie back into the bottle, by making Vanguard: Saga of Heroes go back to the hardcore roots of Everquest, but with modern day graphics.

Some choice quotes: "Jeff marveled at the artistry and polish of WoW, yet lamented the fact that the leveling was much too fast, leaving many players with nothing to do at the level cap. We discussed our mutual game play experiences conquering beautifully crafted outdoor areas like Desolace in WoW in a day or two. Content like this would have occupied a player for weeks if not months in EverQuest. He vowed that Sigil will not make the same mistake."

and

"Jeff Butler mentioned at the demo that downtime will be making somewhat of a comeback as it's an important factor in socialization and community building."

Ouch! One doesn't know if one should applaud their courage to make a game so solidly target at the hardcore minority, or whether one should laugh about their stupidity.

Sorry, but even if they delivered a game with the same polish as WoW, as long as they stick to their plan to make leveling slow, make one zone last "for weeks if not months" by having player kill the same mobs over and over, and put several minutes of downtime between fights for "community building", they will only get a tiny number of players. Also a game preview which mentions the word "community" six times, and the word "solo" not at all, will probably have forced grouping for much of the game.

They *do* have some good ideas for Vanguard, like the rumor system where innkeepers give you hints to where you can find quest NPC for your level, and an interesting sounding diplomacy system. So if the game ever comes out (it is designed to run on Microsofts *next* operating system, Windows Vista), I will probably end up buying it and testing it for a month. But the chances that slow leveling will induce me to stay with a game for years are slim.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:14 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
World of Warcraft at 60

I do enjoy playing World of Warcraft with my level 60 character. But I realize that this is mainly due to my guild, The Order of the Rose-Croix, which manages to strike the fine balance between being casual enough to be friendly, and being professional enough to be efficient. So while I enjoy the endgame, I can see how others might be turned off by it. WoW at 60 has a number of serious problems:

The main problem is that WoW at 60 is clearly a different game than WoW from 1-59. It is like participating in a marathon, and finding that instead of a finish line at the end there is a soccer field, where you are expected to team up and play. If you are lucky, you like both games, the leveling game of 1-59, and the raiding game at 60. But if you only like the leveling part, level 60 feels like game over. And if you only like the raiding part, then being forced to level to get there is a grind. In my opinion WoW could learn from the console role-playing games, where finishing the game would often unlock new, more exotic character classes, and thus encourage you to start over.

The second big problem of WoW at 60 is that it isn't accessible to everybody. That might come as a surprise to some people. After all, getting to level 60 is easy enough in World of Warcraft. But when you can't gain experience points and levels any more, an alternative advancement game kicks in, which consists of improving your equipment, and getting the high-end recipes and resources for crafting. And while from level 1-59 you could always chose between soloing and grouping, the level 60 alternative advancement gives you only the choice between grouping and raiding. The only thing you can solo is farming money for your epic mount, or resources and items for your alts. People who enjoyed WoW for it's soloing possibilities, and there are a lot of those, will quickly feel blocked and unable to improve their character further at level 60.

Practically the only way to play at level 60 is with a good guild. Doing high-level instances with pickup groups is a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately good guilds are few and far between. There are lots of small and ineffectual guilds in World of Warcraft, which have problems getting enough people together to regularly raid even just the smaller instances, and who will never see Molten Core. On the other extreme there is at least one uberguild on every server, with a strict military organization, raiding every day. But in such guilds you are quickly reduced to a small cog in a big machine, built for coughing out phat loot. Such guilds are often cold and unfriendly, some even kicking people out if they don't show up for raids every night. Then "playing" World of Warcraft quickly turns into "working", and soon stops being fun.

It is ironic how some people complained about World of Warcraft being too soloable, not fostering social cohesion like Everquest did. But in the endgame WoW is turning more and more into Everquest, a game where you need a huge organization to get 40 people for a raid together, and then need to be able to play for several hours in a row. The casual game, where you can log on for one hour and do something useful, ends at level 60, and that is a shame.

I don't believe that World of Warcraft will ever raise its level cap to over 60. Raising the cap would clearly cause some big problems with the current game design. The talent system is based on you *not* having enough points to get all the useful talents, and adding 10 or more points to that would unbalance it. Many of the current high-level instances are designed to be raid content, and would suffer if they could be done by smaller groups of level 70. And in the end, raising the cap isn't really a solution, it just recreates the same problem a bit later.

So what is needed is other forms of alternate advancement, which are open to casual players. Activities which you can do for one hour every evening, without a group or guild, and which still improve your level 60 character. In my opinion Blizzard made a big design blunder by tying high-level crafting to high-level instances. It shouldn't be necessary to raid to get all the high-end recipes, long multi-step quests for them would have been better. And being able to craft certain items only in the middle of a dungeon is just plain stupid.

But it seems that right now Blizzard is only planning to add more of the same type of raid level dungeons. The next patch will bring a dungeon for medium size raid groups of 20 players, which was missing. Nice for me, and whoever else has a chance to get 20 players together. But not solving anything in the fundamental problem.

If it was up to me to design an expansion set, I would add a new continent, inhabited by two races, one Alliance and one Horde, to get people to start new characters. The continent would have lots of new content for level 1 to 59, especially dungeons level 10 to 50. And it would have only very little content for level 60 characters, maybe one raid dungeon or so. World of Warcraft is a great game, which achieved a tremendous success by being accessible to the casual player. But even a casual player can reach level 60 in a year and find himself facing a different game that isn't for him. Blizzard needs to reach out to these casual gamers that make up their core audience, and stop listening to the vocal minority of hardcore gamers. Unfortunately there is no expansion set announced yet, and nearly everything on Blizzard's under development page is unsuitable for casual gamers. I'm far from doomcasting WoW, but this isn't a viable long-term strategy.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:01 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments

 
WoW Journal - 8-August-2005

Plans are made to be changed in the event. My idea to play less with my level 60 warrior Raslebol and more with my alts is one of these plans that didn't survive contact with reality. It is astonishing how much there is still to do with a level 60 character. All those high-level dungeons, or helping guild mates through low and mid-level dungeons. Farming gold, resources, and magic items for all your characters, because it is faster than farming with low-level characters. And then the high-level quests and exploring places where the lower level characters can't go.

So again this weekend I played my warlock, shaman, and priest very little, and Raslebol a lot. I already mentioned the Dire Maul north runs, but I also farmed Scarlet Monastery and the Deadmines solo, helped guild mates to kill the courier in Eastern Plaguelands, went on a 5-man group to Scholomance, and finished the weekend with a big raid on Upper Black Rock Spire.

Scholomance with just a single group of 5 wasn't exactly easy, but we managed quite well. We finished two quests, the one to kill the butcher (first quest in the Eva Sarkhoff series), and the one to kill the dragon hatchlings. We killed Ras Frostwhisper, who dropped a really good shield, on which I lost the roll. Need to go back there and get one for me, but Thottbot says the drop chance is only 7.2%. He also dropped another Flask of Supreme Power recipe, who said these were rare? We killed Rattlegore, and the butcher. And then we got wiped out by Alexi Barov, and one group member had to go, and we didn't finish the Barov family fortune quest. We tried to distract him and quickly grab the last deed, but his Unholy Aura interrupts grabbing the deed. So I deleted the other three deeds, no use blocking valuable inventory space with them, they are easy to get again on the next run. I don't know whether we would have been able to kill all the bosses of the last part of Scholomance, Alexi seemed already rather tough, and we didn't have time to try the others.

The UBRS raid started slow due to organizational problems, but then went rather smoothly. I was main tank, and managed the pulls not too bad, I got some nice comments on it. We did the rookery without problems, also smoothly dispatched Rend in spite of me accidentally falling from the stone seat into the arena and starting the event before everybody was ready. We killed the beast without a single death, although the combat was a bit chaotic, the dog refused to stay in one place. On General Drakkisath we used a strategy which consists of one hunter pulling him far away, while the others kill his bodyguards. Never have seen it done so well as this time, by the time the General came back the guards were long dead and we already were worrying whether he got lost somewhere. :)

The raid netted me the Shoulders of Valor, so I got the third part of the tier 1 warrior armor set. My very first set bonus in this game, I never got three parts of the same set on anything before. For the valor set this is +50 armor for three parts, I'll work on finding the other parts. One day I want the complete set, even if I already have some other parts which are better than valor. I know Thottbot has a page with all the set bonuses, but I'm not looking them up, I'll keep that as a surprise for me. I also got the Bloodmoon Cloak, which has 5 more stamina and better armor than my previous cloak, so I was happy with my share of the raid loot.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:43 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
WoW Journal - 7-August-2005

I'm a bit depressed about the big amount of effort I spent doing Dire Maul North this weekend resulting ultimately in failure. Don't get me wrong, that probably isn't Dire Maul's fault. I've rarely seen a dungeon so tricky, and it was fun to overcome all the obstacles. But getting wiped out twice by the end boss wasn't that much fun, and then some people left the group, and two evenings of work came to nothing.

The boss of Dire Maul North is an ogre king, who is said to have a chest full of tribute from his underlings. So the challenge is to arrive at the end boss without killing the other named mobs in the instance. Well, the first one we couldn't avoid killing, because he has the key for the door leading to the king, and we didn't have a rogue. The second named is drunk, occasionally falls asleep, and can then easily be bypassed. The third named is patrolling around a chest, but with good timing you can grab the key from that chest without aggroing him. The fourth named needs you to have brought frost oil and a thorium widget, to repair a broken trap that freezes him. For the last named you need to bring 8 rugged leather, 4 bolts of runecloth, 2 rune thread and some ogre tannin you find in DM to a goblin who will tailor you an ogre suit out of it. Then disguised as an ogre you pretend that you are bringing the other group members as prisoners to the king, very funny.

We needed two evenings, and lots of retries to find out all of this, and to get it to work. And then we were supposed to kill the king while draining the mana from his advisor, without killing the advisor. And failed twice. The king was hitting me hard, the advisor hit the healers and kept them from healing me properly, and we got wiped out twice without having even remotely scratched them. And you can't bring more than 5 people there, so unless later I'll come decked our in full purple gear, I don't know how to overcome this. Not having killed the other named ogres, our loot was obviously thin, except for a highly valuable purple cloak pattern that I didn't win. I think I'll stay away from DM north for a while, I haven't done east and west yet, and I need to get a lot better equipment to be able to do the final part.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:12 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
Darkmoon Faire

The Darkmoon Faire was added with the last content patch, but hadn't been seen yet. Rumor has it that the faire only appears one week per month in Mulgore, then one month later in Elwynn Forest. So each side only gets the faire for one week every two months, although you can try to sneak into the faire when it is in enemy territory.

Well, right now the Darkmoon Faire is setting up tents in Elwynn Forest, just south of Goldshire, can't miss it. And yes, they are setting up tents, you will see NPC's working on unpacking. The faire event itself will follow a bit later, I sure hope they start this afternoon, this being Saturday.

Once the Darkmoon Faire is up, there will be NPC offering "tickets" as rewards for gathering various monster parts. With these tickets you can then buy various equipment. This quest type is available to everybody, even lower levels. Then there is a high-level type of quest, which has already started. High-level mobs above level 50 all over the world are now dropping blue playing cards as a rare drop. You need to collect all cards from one suit for a deck. At the faire you can turn them in and transform them into a powerful trinket. For example there is one which at every death gives you a 10% chance to be resurrected. Unfortunately the cards are really rare, and sell for crazy prices at the auction house, so I personally won't bother.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:44 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
The Economist defending video games

If you have the PC version of GTA:San Andreas, you can use the hot coffee patch to unlock a sex mini-game which can be accurately described as virtual porn. That led to the game's rating being changed from "mature" to "adults only", and major retailers not stocking it any more. Politicians like examples like these to point out how video games are evil and corrupting our youth. Last month an 11 year old boy stabbed a baby, whose crying disturbed him from playing on his Playstation, and only the fact that he was playing "The Incredibles", and not GTA, prevented that from becoming major news.

Now video games are being defended by an unlikely champion: The Economist is defending video games on it's cover and lead story. This is not some games magazine, but a quite serious weekly news magazine, published first in 1843 to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress”. Their motto might be over 160 years old, but for the defense of video games against politicians it is strangely appropriate.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:27 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Virtual marriage

Yesterday my character on the French server, Honey, was attending a marriage between two guild members. There was a procession from Goldshire to the cathedral in Stormwind, a marriage ceremony there, and a party in one of the taverns afterwards. Fun guild event, but it got me thinking about virtual marriage.

This is only the second virtual marriage I attended. In the first one I was the priest performing the ceremony. That was in DAoC, my character was a friar, and I was the guild master, that's how I got that job. Well, I found the right words to say somewhere on the internet, managed to type them fast enough to make the ceremony go smooth, and the thing was a success.

I never was tempted to get married in a MMORPG myself. Mainly because I do not believe that the characters I am playing have something like a virtual life, I am not an extreme role-player. My avatars have their special character abilities, play styles, and maybe different in-game needs and goals. But when I chat, it is me speaking, not my avatar. I don't say things differently when I'm a troll warrior than when I'm a gnome warlock. When the game has some sort of alignment system, and I'm playing an evil character, that doesn't make me behave less nice than if I'm playing a good character. The quest descriptions might be different, but it doesn't make a difference to me whether I collect 10 spider venoms to save the life of an elven child, or whether I collect the same 10 spider venoms to mix a poisonous potion to kill somebody.

As my characters don't have a virtual life independant from my real life, they also have no love life independant from my love life. My wife does play World of Warcraft (but less than me), and I do have one character reserved to play with her. And she is the only one on who I would use a /kiss or /flirt emote. If she would suddenly want a virtual marriage, I'd do it. But I wouldn't flirt, marry, oder have cybersex with anyone else. That would feel like cheating on her. I mean, what would your real life significant other say if she/he found out that you married somebody else in a game?

The other problem with virtual marriages is that you never know who is playing your virtual significant other. In an old study on Everquest it was shown that half of them female characters you meet in the game are in fact played by men. There are a lot of reasons why you might want to play a character of the opposite sex, for example what you see when playing in 3rd-person-view. But whatever your position on gay marriage is, you might not be happy to have accidentally entered into one, even if it is just virtual.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:25 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
My guild

The guild I'm in, The Order of the Rose-Croix, currently on the Runetotem server in World of Warcraft, has a new website.

You are welcome to check it out, especially if you are playing on the Horde side on Runetotem and are looking for a guild. But mainly I'm posting this for myself, in case I forget the URL. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 7:13 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Epic struggle, now open on Tuesdays

Some guys on the inofficial Runetotem forums are trying to get enough Horde players to sign up for the Alterac Valley battleground to make it open up not only on weekends. Yes, interest in PvP is now so low that on a normal weekday evening there aren't enough people from the smaller side signing up to even get the Alterac Valley battle started. There was a special effort last Tuesday with people shouting in Orgrimmar to get more people into the battleground. Or as one of my guild mates commented: "Alterac Valley, battleground of the epic struggle between good and evil (now open on Tuesdays)".

Warsong Gulch is running more often, due to it needing much less people. But the same forum reports big problems there as well, caused again by the fact that there are so many more players in Alliance than Horde. Basically a battleground opens up when there are enough Horde players for it, pairing them with whatever is available in the long waiting queue on the Alliance side. So powerful Horde guilds like Ad Nauseam just need to form a 10-man raid group, sign up for Warsong Gulch, and get most often paired against random pickup groups from the Alliance side. Easy win, easy PvP rewards for the Horde side, but not much fun for the Alliance. People leaving the battleground immediately when they see they are paired against Ad Nauseam further aggravate the problem.

Blizzard's solution? They want to add a third type of battleground. Sure, we have problems finding enough players interested in the battlegrounds, lets distribute them even further and make matters worse. I don't know how they can think this will work. The new battlegrounds will be populated for two or three weeks, and then the shine will have worn off and the situation will be worse than before.

My advice? WoW is a wonderful PvE game, but if you want PvP, go and buy Guild Wars.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:40 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Official World of Warcraft website

The official World of Warcraft website (link goes to the European version) is a strange beast. It just added a very useful talent calculator, and its game guide is a lot more useful than most official sites for other games. Another important feature is their account management part of the site, which works well. No "you have to call customer service on the phone to cancel your account" nonsense like in The Matrix Online.

The official WoW site is also graphically pleasing, and offers a lot of publicity stuff, like wallpapers, screenshots, fan art, and in-game movies. The "under development" part has a good record of only promising things that are then actually delivered. The site has all the usual features you would expect from the official site of a successful MMORPG, and then some. So all is well? Not quite!

You see, all that the official site reports well is non-news information. When it comes to reporting what is going on with the game right now, Blizzard is doing an abysmally bad job. As I already said yesterday, the Realm Status page is reporting servers as always up, but if you try to log into them, you will find that they aren't even listed on the server list. Runetotem was down the whole evening yesterday, with hundreds of people bombarding the forums, but the Realm Status page showed it up and running.

But the worst part of the official WoW site are the forums. Can you believe a multi-million dollar company running a forum on which the search function doesn't work? Furthermore most posts aren't archived longer than a couple of days, so even if you manage to find them on Google, the link will just lead you to a blank page. The WoW forums are linked to your game account, you are supposed to use your main character as avatar on the forums as well. So what happens when there is a problem with the servers? You can't log on into the forums, because the game login server is down. Furthermore the capacity of the forum servers is quite small. When there is a problem, and thousands of players look on the forum to find out what is going on, the forum servers simply can't cope, and deliver lots of error messages instead of useful information. Other games had forums which were often badly managed, but on the WoW forum it is mainly a problem of bad software on inadequate hardware. It is a mystery to me how Blizzard can allow them to continue like this.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:00 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
European WoW servers down

The European version of WoW patched to v1.61 today, and something went very wrong. All servers seem to be down, and communication by Blizzard is bad. They have the world's most useless realm status page, which always shows all servers up, even when they aren't. And you can't communicate via the official forums either, because they use the same login server as the game, and you can't write anything on the forums when the servers are down.

I must admit that server outages happen to WoW less often than to other games. But the way Blizzard handles them is not up to industry standards. It is pretty sad when SOE can do advertising inviting WoW players to switch to EQ2, because the customer service is better. SOE used to be the absolute pit in customer service, but they improved, and Blizzard didn't.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:28 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW: Effect of armor

I took Raslebol to a lonely corner of the world and started removing and putting on armor pieces, each time noting the armor class and the damage reduction resulting from it. The result is plotted in this graph: This is basically what I expected, a curve with diminishing returns. If I mentally extrapolate the curve to AC 10,000, I only arrive at about 60% damage reduction.

What still remains to be done is to calculate the effect of 1% more or less damage reduction for a single combat. I have the numbers for my last Scholomance raid, where I took nearly 300,000 points of damage at 57% damage reduction. Meaning that without damage reduction I would have taken 700,000 points of damage, and each point of damage reduction was worth 7,000 hitpoints over the total raid. But I need to know the numbers for one fight, not one raid, so I can see whether for example a helmet with 200 armor more but 5 stamina less is better or worse than the alternative.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:37 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
MMORPG.COM - Tabula Rasa : Interview with Richard Garriott

MMORPG.com has an interview with Richard Garriott about his new game Tabula Rasa. Interesting read, especially the comments that the needs of players are more like the needs of citizens of a virtual world than those of ordinary customers. I'm personally not highly excited by Sci-Fi settings and action combat, but if the game delivers everything that Richard Garriot promises, then it will be pretty good.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:07 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
Gigabyte's i-RAM

A gadget to watch is the new i-RAM from Gigabyte, reviewed here. This is a PCI-card to put into your computer which accepts up to 4 GB of conventional DDR memory, which can be accessed like a hard disk. Install Windows on this virtual harddisk, and your computer boots up in a few seconds. Install your current game there, and your loading screens will rush by a lot faster. Put your Windows swapfile there and have an expensive solution for a problem which you could have solved much cheaper by adding memory directly on your motherboard. ;) The data will remain stored as long as your computer is plugged in, and in case of a power failure there is a battery backup for up to 12 hours.

Still too small to hold both Windows and World of Warcraft, and right now probably impossible to actually get hold of, the Gigabyte i-RAM is probably something which will evolve further. We will see 8 GB and 16 GB versions, or other solutions based on solid state disks which have the same function. Think of it whenever you are waiting for your computer to do something, watching the hard disk LED blink.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:47 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
WoW Journal - 2-August-2005

This is getting embarrassing, Raslebol did another raid, Scholomance this time, and again won far more than his fair share of loot. I was the only warrior, thus the only one interested in plate (as Horde doesn't have paladins). And then I got lucky and won a bunch of rolls for stuff others could have used as well, two high-level alchemy recipes, the shards from disenchanting garbage nobody wanted, and a lockbox. Okay, I then gave the content of the lockbox to somebody needing it, and it's not my fault if I'm the only plate user, but I guess I didn't make myself very popular on this raid.

A difficult issue was the potion recipes. A recipe for flask of supreme power (adds 150 to spell damage), and a recipe for major mana potion. I got some comments about me rolling for these, as the potions are obviously not useful for warriors. But I think that this doesn't mean that I shouldn't roll for the recipes, just because some caster alchemists are also interested. I can always make the potions and send them to the people needing them, neither of the potions is bind-on-pickup (but one of the recipes is). I spend a lot of time gathering herbs, and had 53 dreamfoil to burn on these potions. I just need to gather more icecap in Winterspring for the major mana potion, only had 10 of those. My goal as alchemist is to know *all* the recipes in the game, and not just those where the potions are useful for warriors. Making flask-type potions is a guild effort anyway, you can only create them in the alchemy lab in Scholomance, so you first need to raid your way there. And they need 40 high level herbs, plus one "bind on pickup" rare Black Lotus, so there won't be any mass production possible, regardless who has the recipe. You can have only one flask buff on you, but there are rumors that the buff lasts the full duration, even if you die, which I need to confirm. No use of taking huge effort to make such a potion, and the mage drinking it dying 5 minutes later and losing the buff.

Scholomance is a great place, I should go there more often. This was only my second time there, and the first time was with a horrible pickup raid group, where everybody wanted to pull, even the priest. Raid groups for Scholomance are limited to 10 players, and then it is easy enough. But there are several important quests there, which require to do it in a 5-man group, and that will be challenging: The warlock epic mount (Dreadsteed) summon quest, and a quest that makes you able to see the ghosts in front of Scholomance, enabling you to buy from the ghost vendors there.

Whether raid or 5-man group, Scholomance is an excellent instance for getting loot. The last part of the dungeon has a boss mob in every room, making Scholomance the instance with the most bosses per square meter. These drop an impressive range of phat loot. Recommended.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:32 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
WoW Journal - 1-August-2005

If you ever spent several hours with a group in an instance, or going on a raid, you probably know that "I never win anything" feeling. To find an item which is better than what you are wearing, first it has to drop, and second you need to win a roll against the other people in the group interested in the same item. With all these random factors, it is perfectly possible to spend hours and hours without getting anything but vendor fodder. Then again, sometimes your luck turns.

I was with Raslebol on a UBRS raid with 14 guild mates last night. And while the last couple of raids only dropped cloth, leather, and mail armor, this time the plate was dropping heavily. With only 2 warriors in the raid, and the other one already having this or better equipment, I got it all. Skull of Gyth, Warmaster Legguards, Handcrafted Mastersmith Girdle, and Brigam Girdle. Three blue items, and one green, all of them better than what I had. My lucky day!

The only problem that these items are causing is that the Skull helmet and the Mastersmith girdle belong to a class of objects which have a very high armor class, but relatively mediocre stats. If I put on these in a raid, with the usual level 60 buffs on me, I reach an impressive armor class of 7059, giving me a 56.2% damage reduction. But with the other gear, with better stats, I have about 5% more hitpoints and damage per second. So it seems I need to find room in my bank for a alternative equipment: One set of "raid armor", with the highest possible armor class, and one set of "soloing armor", where I'd rather have a better damage output and more hitpoints. For lower level monster farming I can switch from sword and shield to wielding the huge two-handed mace, and further increase the damage output at the cost of armor.

What I should do is sit in a corner and put on and off different pieces of armor, noting every time my armor class, and the amount of damage reduction that gives. I have very much the impression that this will give a curve of diminishing returns, and I'll have to see whether AC 7000 is really much better than lets say AC 6000. And I need to determine with the DamageMeters utility how much damage I take in a typical fight, and how important it is to have 1% or 5% more or less damage reduction.

A similar question mark is the Medallion of Grand Marshall Morris, which I found in Stratholme. It only gives +7 stamina, but also adds +15 to defense. Now is that better than my previous amulet, which just gave +15 stamina? With the amulet I have a defense of "300 (+15) / 300", does that count as 315? The description of defense says that this would make me "harder to hit", but I have no idea whether that is worth giving up 80 hitpoints. Anyone know a site which explains the exact effect of the defense skill?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:43 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments