Ultima Online Pre-Trammel

6 years after the event people on different MMORPG message boards are still talking about how great Ultima Online was before the introduction of the PvP-free half of Trammel. And for 6 years I had problems understanding this. I only joined UO after Trammel was introduced, and it was blindingly obvious that over 90% of the players were staying in Trammel, with less than 10% staying on Felucca, the PvP side. Today finally somebody on my guild boards explained me what was so great about pre-Trammel UO in words that I could understand: pre-Trammel UO was great, because to protect yourself from player killers, you were forced to band together in guilds. He was talking about him being protected by fear, beat me up and I'll hunt you down with my 100 buddies.

Basically that is the same idea as the Everquest "vision": Introduce harsh and unpleasant aspects in the game, so people band together to overcome them. The joy of playing together makes people love the game. You get far stronger emotions for the game when the consequences of your actions, both good and bad, are stronger. And these stronger emotions are able to overcome the reluctance of people to form friendships with strangers.

This is the reason why EVE Online is steadily growing, albeit from a small base. You can get shot down anytime, and lose a lot of money for your ship and cargo, even with insurance. And you might even be "podded", killed in your escape pod, thereby losing days or weeks of skill development. And the only thing that protects you (besides dumb luck of not running into pirates) is belonging to a powerful corporation which has the ability to punish the pirates. Your game actions, your PvP combat can have big consequences, both positive and negative. There was a lot of buzz recently when some people got hired as virtual assassins, infiltrated a major guild, and managed to kill the guild leader and steal most of the corporations wealth.

If you like things like that, the relative safety of games like World of Warcraft can sure seem boring in comparison. Abalieno calls it a "fake war", and connects the fact that people are exploiting the honor system with the fact that honor rewards are the only consequence of WoW PvP.

Nevertheless I have to observe that boring safety, games in which you can't be griefed, are much more popular in the west than the hardcore games in which you can. It is well known that Trammel was a direct consequence of dwindling subscription numbers of UO, and only the addition of the "safe" version of the game enabled it to survive. Safe WoW is the biggest game in the US MMORPG market, while griefing-enabled Lineage 1 and 2 never took off. But at least I understand the Koreans, and the tiny minority of western players playing by the same principles, better now. There is some positive, community-building consequence to griefing. Not everybody who likes this sort of games is a griefer.

Anyway, I keep opting for boredom. Heart-racing emotions due to colossal consequences of my game actions are not exactly what I am looking for. I'm playing in the evenings after work, and on weekends, to relax, not to pump myself up with more adrenaline. It is good that there are games for both kinds of players.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:25 PM Permanent Link  (7) comments

 
WoW Journal - 30-September-2005

I had a lot of fun yesterday doing PvP, which is unusual. Some days earlier I did Arathi Basin with pickup groups, and it wasn't fun at all. But last night we formed a raid group between our guild and another guild we are allied with, and went to Arathi Basin as a guild group. And that was a lot more fun. We won twice against Alliance pickup groups, and lost twice against the Alliance elite PvP team. Even the losses were fun, because you still get quite some honor for killing a Field Marshall in epic armor, and in the second battle we only lost by a small margin of 1840 to 2000, so at least we made them sweat a bit.

The one advantage those PvP battles had over dungeon raids was that it was perfectly possible to play without healers. In one battle of 15 players we had zero priests, zero druids, and just 2 shamans. You wouldn't raid UBRS with such a group, but on the battlegrounds we did okay. You die often, and resurrect a maximum of 30 seconds later.

That smoothly brings me from World of Warcraft to City of Heroes / Villains. One advantage of CoH over WoW is that your options of forming a group with people of whatever class and whatever level are much broader. And it seems that CoV will be the "next big thing" for my guild. So I already reinstalled CoH, and am considering resubscribing to that, to get back into the controls etc. before CoV comes out. WoW still is fun as long as I can group with my guild, but that happens less and less often. And I'm already bored of soloing my priest, and still have 27 levels to go before 60. I'll just see how all of this is working out.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:20 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
The long tail of digital distribution

I so do like glimpses into the future. NCSoft announced that you can now buy City of Heroes and Lineage II via IGN's digital distribution service Direct2Drive. So I had a look there, and I liked what I saw. One good thing was that I didn't even need to register or install their download manager, they are using the same system as their sister-site Fileplanet. The choice of games on offer isn't huge, but there are some decent games, several MMOs (including Everquest), and some games that would be hard to find in a video games store.

Internet retailers call that the "long tail", and it is part of the business model of successful outfits like Amazon.com. A brick and mortar shop selling books or video games can only offer a limited number of items, due to limits of shelf space. So such shops only sell the most popular books or games. An internet retailer can at very low cost store a much wider range of products. And customers soon learn that their chance to find any non-bestseller is much greater at the internet outfit.

The advantages of the long tail become even more pronounced in digital distribution. As you are buying copies of data, the store is never out of stock. Storing a copy of some old game on a hard drive has a very low marginal cost, and it takes just one customer to buy it to make it profitable. So I expect digital distribution of PC games to grow, especially since PC games are slowly but surely losing the shelf space wars against console games in the brick and mortar stores.

The remaining problems are related to marketing. Game producers might be bound to "exclusive" contracts with game distributors, which forbid digital distribution at least when the game is new. There might also be contracts in place which prevent IGN to sell certain games digitally outside the United States. But the more people get broadband access, and the less shelf space the brick and mortar stores are willing to dedicate to PC games, the more attractive digital distribution becomes. One day we might be able to buy the majority of games digitally, on the day they are released.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:59 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Reverse network effect

During the dot.com years, many people talked about the network effect. A technology like the telephone, e-mail, or internet chat becomes more valuable to its users, the more users there are. Because there are more users, every user can communicate with more different people, and that attracts even more people to buy into the technology. Unfortunately this network effect works in two directions, and right now World of Warcraft is suffering from a reverse network effect for me.

People are leaving World of Warcraft. Some are powergamers that have been level 60 for several months now, and got sick and tired of seeing always the same few level 60 dungeons. Others are casual gamers, but after 7-and-a-half months of Euro WoW even casual gamers reached level 60. And now they find that on a casual schedule of playing an hour here, and an hour there, you can't really do much at level 60. You need longer game sessions to do dungeons and raids. And even PvP takes a long time, due to long waiting queues.

So in my guild the number of people online on a typical evening has dropped dramatically. Some have already said their goodbyes on the guild forum. Some are still subscribed, but play a lot less often. And with every guild member not online, the game gets less interesting for the remaining people. I was online 4 hours in a row yesterday, and couldn't get a single guild group going. The furthest we got was planning a 10-man raid to Stratholm, but we never got more than 7 people into the raid group, already including people from outside the guild, and we never got a healer. So after over half an hour of standing around, the raid was abandoned.

I should level my priest faster, but playing him all alone isn't much fun, and I'm afraid that by the time he is 60, there won't be anybody left to play with in the guild. Seems many people are planning to move to City of Villains, and after our guild leader decided yesterday that we would play on the US servers, I cancelled my pre-order for the Euro version and pre-ordered the US version from Importmadness instead.

Looking at WoW, and my difficulties to get a group going, I notice that WoW is more than other games dependant on guild groups. The "meeting stones" system to find groups for instances simply doesn't work, because nobody uses it. The system only allows you to sign up for one instance, and then puts you totally blind in a waiting queue, with no idea how many other people there are around wanting to group. The /lfg flag system which other games use is a lot better. Especially FFXI had a good group-finding tool, although the positive effect of the tool was sabotaged by the tough restrictions on group composition. In WoW the best way to find a group is guild chat, because it reaches people everywhere, and you are reasonably certain that you can trust those people. To find a pickup group, you need to go to the busiest city and shout, which is a primitive and badly working method. World of Warcraft could really use a better group finding tool.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Democracy against capitalism

One of my rare excursions from games blog to political blog, in this case caused by me reading too many anglo-saxon newspapers and magazines.

If you read the more serious British and US newspapers for a while, you will find two major themes when reporting on world events: A) Many corners of the world don't have enough democracy. B) Many democratically elected governments have problems moving their countries towards a more anglo-saxon economic model, against the protest of their population. After hearing these two things often enough, I wonder why nobody ever notices the conflict between these two notions. What if the population does not want to have a "capitalism pure" economic model? When democracy does not equal capitalism, and you have to decide which one of the two you want, what is the higher value?

In my opinion, democracy is more important than capitalism. What the majority of people in many European, South American, or Asian countries want is "capitalism light", in which the harsher sides of capitalismn are softened by safety nets and welfare. Many of the reforms which stall in these countries are designed to take away those safety nets, to make the economies more "competitive". And if people go on the street to stop those reforms, or vote for parties that oppose them, that is democracy in action, a good thing. Economists can calculate how much a reform would add to the GDP of a country, but that doesn't automatically make that reform the best possible option.

The problem with pure capitalism is that while it maximizes productivity and GDP, the added wealth is not necessarily well distributed. People generally support the move from autocratic economic systems to more capitalist systems, but not all the way to pure capitalism. You only need to look at the USA, one of the most capitalist nations on earth (but still not pure), to see the possible disadvantages of going too far in that direction. For example 0.5% of U.S. residents (including 5% of all U.S. resident black males) are in prison, while European countries with a lot more welfare only lock up less than 0.1%. There is also a lot more poverty clearly visible in the U.S. than in many European countries, in spite of the GDP per person being higher in the USA. The recent hurricane Katrina natural disaster got a lot of this poverty in front of TV cameras, but usually Americans don't talk about the downsides of their economic model. The typical European welfare state might be less productive, but there are a lot less people left behind, to a life of poverty or crime.

I don't claim to know which degree of capitalism is the ideal one. But I believe in democracy, so I believe that voters have a right to decide the details of that. And the best compromise might not be the same for every country. It is not right for the press of one country to complain about the democratic decisions of another country, even if that democratic decision was to stop a reform to dismantle the welfare state.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:11 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments

 
The price of invisibility

I don't have the new computer a week yet, but I already got totally used to it. And come to think of it, I noticed that what I was paying for was mainly the things I don't have any more. I'm spending less time waiting, because the computer starts up faster, starts programs faster, and is ready faster after closing down WoW. In the game there is less lag, and due to running at higher resolution now, less visible pixels. And besides being invisible, the computer is noiseless as well.

I'm not running World of Warcraft with "full screen glow effect" on, because I find it makes the game too fuzzy. But I'm wondering whether it will be possible to turn anti-aliasing on. Not in the WoW options, there doesn't seem to be a switch for it, but somewhere in the Windows Nvidia graphics settings. I'll have to take an evening and experiment a bit.

Another thing I'm considering is running some other benchmark, maybe PCMark04. Because some of the added speed, for example when starting up Windows, I'm not quite sure where it is coming from. I suspect the new hard disk being a lot faster than the old one, but I'd like to have that measured. The old computer's hard disk always seemed somewhat slow to me. I would also like to know how much faster a Pentium 4 640 3.2 GHz is than a Athlon XP 3000+.

Except for the slightly guilty feeling of having bought a more expensive computer than I usually do, I'm quite happy with my Dell XPS 600. I know that as gamer I'm somehow expected to open my computer, fiddle with the components, and spent a week trying to overclock 5% more speed out of it. But I'm afraid that never has been really my thing. I opened up computers and exchanged components when necessary, but I never really enjoyed that. And overclocking, trading a decrease in stability for a tiny increase in speed, I always considered counterproductive. So now having this Dell machine which just works right out of the box, without me ever having even opened the case, is quite agreeable to me.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:22 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
WoW Journal - 26-September-2005

Another Zul'Gurub raid, with pretty much the same result: we killed the first two bosses. The bat lady this time went down on the first attempt, the snake guy on the second. Still no idea what exactly triggers high priest Venoxis holy wrath, which did up to 26,000 points of damage to some players on our first attempt, but didn't kill anybody on the second try. The third boss, high priestess Mar'li wiped us 4 times before we gave up. Anybody got a good strategy for her? She heals herself whenever she kills anybody, and as we couldn't prevent her from killing people, each attempt went downhill from the first person dying. I was on duty to recapture her attention once she webbed the other tanks and ran to kill the mages, but she is moving faster than I do, and often other people kept attacking her, pulling her off me.

In spite of this reasonable success in ZG, I'm already starting to have enough of that place. Raid started at 7 pm and went until nearly midnight, and far too much of these 5 hours was used standing around. The larger the group, the slower it moves. I much prefer 5-man groups, where there is a lot more action and a lot less waiting.

I was in a very good 5-man group with Raslebol on Saturday, doing Blackrock Depths with a group in which most others were there for the first time. So we did the key quest first, moving via the arena and vault up to Incendius. Then we got the key, opened the huge gate, and went via General Angerforge, Angelmarch, the Grim Guzzler, up to Molten Core for the attunement. There still is more to do in BRD, but our trip already covered a large part of the dungeon. I still need to go further to free the dwarven princess, but there you better skip the key part of the dungeon, and bring a mage and warlock for the Lycaeum.

Another fun 5-man group was with Kyroc to Shadowfang Keep. First time I used my priest for serious group healing, and I was having fun. I leveled Kyroc to level 32 over the weekend, still a long way to 60. I also played my shaman Waldin a bit, teaming up with my wife's mage and leveling to 30.

Looking back at the different activities of the weekend, and what I liked more and what I liked less, going on the raid certainly comes out on bottom. I think I will stop signing up for the big raids, and only go if the guild would otherwise not have enough people to go. I'd hate to take the place of somebody who is enjoying raids more than me.

I just wish I could get more 5-man groups for Raslebol. Friday night was typical, there was a MC raid planned which was cancelled due to lack of people, and lack of healers in particular. Then everybody bombarded our only online priest with tells for a 5-man group. But of course not everybody could go, and several people including me were left group-less. More and more "I'm quitting WoW" posts are cropping up on our guild forums, and many people are playing less than before, especially the casual players who can't find anything useful to do with a level 60 character when they only have one hour to play. It's all a bit depressing.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:04 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Taking quests to the next level

My article on how quests could be further improved has been published on Gamergod.

I'm still on a wait-and-see approach to Gamergod. I like it less than the old Grimwell.com, and the layout is pot ugly, with far too little space for text, and far too much space taken up by banner ads. But they are undergoing a complete revamp in October, and often have some quite interesting articles and interviews. So I keep contributing to their content, although their huge gap between ambition and deliverance scares me a bit. Would be great if more people started discussing games on the forums there, I'm missing a lively discussion board since the demise of Grimwell.com.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:55 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Game Over

In a single-player computer game, once you've seen all the content and overcome all the challenges, you arrive at the "game over" screen. Nowadays thats more likely to be an epilogue movie, but the message remains the same: You've done it, you won, this round of the game is over, feel free to start again.

MMORPG, with their monthly subscription business model, have an interest in never letting the player know that the game is over. Not only do they not contain any game over screens or epilogue movies; they are also trying to hide the fact that you've seen all the content and overcome all the challenges. For that purpose they add silly challenges at the end, which are nearly impossible to beat: Organize raids in which only perfect coordination of 40 players can beat the final boss, kill 10,000 foozles for cash or faction, get the magic sword that only drops with 0.1% chance from a mob spawning only once per day, and fight the forever unwinnable PvP.

Of course that strategy doesn't really work. A few players rise to the new challenges, beat all of them, and demand more. But a larger number of players just gets increasingly frustrated. If you only have an hour or two to play, you can't organize or participate in a raid, or make any significant effort towards the other silly challenges. Like ghosts stuck in a limbo between life and death, many a high level player is stuck between having finished the game and getting the satisfaction of being told he won. Unsurprisingly all MMORPG's message boards show that the players most unhappy with the game are those that reached the highest level.

It would be better if a MMORPG on reaching the highest level sent you a clear "you won" message, and gave you "rewards" which are cleverly designed to make you play longer. Raids and PvP can stay, for those people who enjoy them. But other activities are needed for the more casual players. Starting over should be encouraged more, for example by having new character classes unlocked, like some console games do. Give players only the choice between the "pure" MMORPG archetypes for their first character, and on reaching the highest level with the first character, open up the "hybrid" character classes to play with a second character.

Another thing which would be a welcome reward for reaching the highest level would be an option to be able to diminish your level temporarily. So when some friends or guild mates of lower level want to group, you move a slider and reduce the level of your high-level character to that of your friends. Your spells and skills drop down to that of a character of that level, and even the stats of your equipment could be scaled down appropriately. This would make groups in which everybody has the same level much easier to form, and those are a lot more fun than a group accompanied by a single high-level character.

In the end, only adding content will make players happy. But giving the high level players more viable options to continue playing could certainly add to the longevity of a MMORPG.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:47 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
Declining interest

I think my interest in World of Warcraft has peaked, and is now declining. Not that I see any viable alternative for the moment. But last evening I rather spent transferring files, installing software, and fiddling with settings on the new computer than playing WoW.

My guild was doing a UBRS raid. But official start was 20:30 my time, which means that they probably didn't get going before 21:00. And then UBRS easily takes until midnight or so. Not really viable for me on a Thursday, when I need to get up at 6:30 the next morning.

The other problem is that I find raids less interesting than 5-man groups. In a 5-man group, everybody has a distinct role to play. 5-man groups are about teamwork and cooperation. Raids are a lot more chaotic, often more similar to one guy trying to herd sheep (or rather lemmings). Every individual player has a lesser part to play, it is often a Zerg rush with a lot less skill involved than a 5-man group.

Unfortunately 5-man groups are hard to get going nowadays. Even if more than 5 suitable people are online from my guild, often some want to play PvP, some prefer soloing and farming, and a third group says they aren't online long enough to do a dungeon. And then the remaining people are often missing essential classes, like a healer, and can't go.

It seems I'm not the only one whose interest in WoW is declining, there is now a steady stream of people leaving the game. No, no, this is not a doomcast, WoW is still gaining new customers faster than losing old ones, and Blizzard reports people resubscribing after each major patch. But the glorious early time of WoW, where everybody was having fun even if he just could play for half an hour is over. Level 60 activities take more time than that. And leveling your 2nd, 3rd, 4th or Xth character is less and less fun, as you run out of quests and areas you haven't seen yet. I'm still not ready to quit WoW, I'll still try to level my priest to 60 and see if it gets easier to find groups with him. But he has his own particular problems, on an old server like Runetotem it is nowadays nearly impossible to find any low-level groups. The meeting stone system to get groups for dungeons going unfortunately is a flop. :( And soloing is not half as fun as playing in a group.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:31 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
Dual Dell

Either me or Dell have somehow misunderstood the concept of dual core / dual graphics card computers. :) Yesterday UPS delivered the XPS 600 computer I had ordered, and it came in two huge boxes, so that the UPS guy had problems getting them into my appartment. Turns out Dell has accidentally delivered two computers, instead of one. Ooops! Well, I called them, and they are going to send somebody to pick the second computer up, it was a fault in their billing department. They even asked me whether I would be willing the keep the second one at a 300 Euro rebate, but I wasn't interested. I was wondering whether they would have noticed their mistake, or whether I could have kept the second computer for free if I hadn't called. But I'm too honest to even try, and I can't imagine that they wouldn't eventually have noticed and come down like a ton of bricks on me. So, goodbye second computer.

Not that the Dell XPS 600 is not a good computer, I just don't need two of them. The new Dell is lightning fast. I installed Futuremark's 3DMark03 and 3DMark05 to see how fast the new computer is for 3D graphics gaming. Basically it is an astounding 3 times faster than the computer I bought one-and-a-half years ago, easily beating Moore's law this time. In detail:

The new computer, a Dell XPS 600 (Pentium 4 640 3.2 GHz, 2 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX) has a 3DMark03 score of 15,613, and a 3DMark05 score of 6557. Good that I haven't gone for the expensive option of a second graphics card, this is fast enough for now.

Last years computer, a Athlon XP 3000+, 1 GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, has a 3DMark03 score of 5,556, and a 3DMark05 score of 2,494. Although the comparison is slightly unfair, last years computer with 19" CRT screen cost as much as the new Dell without monitor.

The 3-and-a-half year old computer that is going to be replaced, a Athlon XP 2000+, 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9600 Pro, has a 3DMark03 score of 2,540, and a 3DMark05 score of 1,146.

The Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop I bought this year has a 3DMark03 score of 2,536, and a 3DMark05 score of 989. Still okay for a laptop, but I shouldn't install any too graphically demanding games on it.

Besides the delivery problem, I'm quite happy with the new machine. Not only is it fast, it also runs a lot more silent than the computer I'm going to kick out. Dell put in six 120 mm fans, because you can run a hotter CPU and a second graphics card in that case. But as the fans are so many, and bigger than the usual 80 mm fans, they turn relatively slowly and noiselessly. The case is silver and black, with a LED-lit front panel, colors can be chosen (or turned off) in the BIOS setup. It was preset to blue, which I like, so I didn't fiddle with that. Getting the network and internet up and running was a breeze. The only bad surprise I had with the new machine was that it doesn't have a parallel port, so my printer is still connected to the Athlon 3000, and will be used via the network.

I'll still have a couple of hours ahead of me installing things and transferring data. The WoW reinstall and patch already took some time, and then I took the opportunity to go through the list of addons I used previously. I didn't reinstall those I didn't really need, and got the latest version of those I did. I installed Microsoft Office, and set up Outlook so I could get my e-mail. I also uninstalled the Norton Internet Security trial version the Dell came with, and installed Mcaffee Security Center instead, which is a lot less annoying. The last program I installed last night was Prime95. That is a program to calculate prime numbers, but it has a "torture mode", in which I let it run all night to test if there were any hidden faults with the memory or anything. No problem, the computer ran stable without crashing for over 8 hours.

If I remember then, I'll write another piece on the Dell XPS 600 in a year, seeing how it worked out in the long run. As far as I can see from the device manager the components are all good quality, like Western Digital for the hard disk, Philipps DVD RW, and so on, not no-name stuff. I'm not sure whether I could have built the machine cheaper myself, but I'm pretty certain that I wouldn't have enjoyed it. The Dell way, where I can choose the specs, get the computer in a week, unpack, and go, is more to my liking. I prefer fiddling with the software to fiddling with the hardware.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:08 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
The plague hits WoW

Thanks to Martin for reporting this bit-tech.net news on the plague in WoW. People that fight the god Hakkar in Zul'Gurub get a disease debuff which is contagious, so some of them promptly teleported home and infected the major cities. The reaction of Blizzard is brilliant, they are treating it as a world event and report in character about the latest hotfix not working:

It appears that the hotfix remedy concocted to combat the recent Azerothian outbreak has not yielded desired results. At this time, our medical staff is continuing to develop an effective cure. We look forward to ensuring the health and vitality of the citizens of Azeroth in the near future.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:59 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Speed limits

Whenever I buy a new computer, I'm using benchmark programs like Futuremark's 3DMark03 to measure how much faster the new computer is than the old one. While benchmarks aren't 100% reliable to compare two nearly equal graphics cards, they are reliable enough to compare two very different computers. Because I usually buy a new desktop every two years, and Moore's law applies, my benchmarks usually tell me that the new computer is twice as fast as the last one. But that is only one very specific speed measured, in other respects the new computer is as slow as the old one. For example the time to boot up my computer from cold to ready to go hasn't improved at all in the last couple of years. So where are a computers speed limits?

Most people first look at the clock speed of the CPU. That is a bad old habit, which stopped being useful some years ago. When clock speeds were still measured in MHz, it told you something about the computers speed. Since we are in the GHz area, the clock speed is rarely the limiting factor. Also clockspeed has hit a ceiling just under 4 GHz, and isn't going up any more. So even for CPU speed the GHz aren't the important thing any more, two 3.4 GHz CPU's can have vastly different speeds, depending on other features like cache size, hyperthreading, or dual core technology. I usually buy CPU's which are several notches below the best, because you can usually get a CPU which is just 10% slower for half the price, and you'll never even notice the difference. For my new computer I went for a Intel Pentium 640 with 3.2 GHz and hyperthreading.

Far more important for gamers is the speed of the graphics card. Unfortunately that one is the most confusing, as there isn't any good unit to measure it. You have to rely on benchmarks, and then you get into the endless discussion on whether some graphics card producer tweaked his drivers to specifically perform well with a certain benchmark. One helpful thing is that recently there was a switch in technology from AGP bus graphics cards to PCI express ones. That change had a big impact on all possible benchmark values. So when buying a computer now, getting one with a PCI express card is a good way to guarantee a certain minimum performance. Beyond that, the speed of the card is best measured in dollars, the more expensive the card, the faster it is. Unfortunately not a linear scale, the top end cards are all overpriced. I usually take a card a notch or two below the top, but this time I indulged myself and got a Nvidia Geforce 7800 GTX with 256 MB of memory. That is currently the fastest card around, until inevitably ATI produces an even faster Radeon card. For twice the price you can now have two graphics cards working in tandem, but while this SLI technology is faster than just one card, it isn't twice as fast.

The longer you actually use a computer, the more evident it becomes that one major speed limit in your computer is neither the CPU nor the graphics card, but the memory. There are different speeds of memory, but even more important is the total amount of memory you have. There are still computers being sold with just 256 MB of RAM, and these are often horribly slow in many applications. Because as soon as the memory is full, Windows uses "virtual memory" on the hard disk, which is much, much slower. If you are doing something which shouldn't access any files, and the hard disk drive LED is flickering constantly, you got a speed problem there. 512 MB is an absolute minimum nowadays. World of Warcraft now uses so much memory, that with 512 MB you have some speed problems, and 1 GB is preferable. As the memory use has been going up fast in the last couple of years, I went for 2 GB of DDR2 667 RAM, the fastest RAM available. You can get computers with even more, but 2 GB should cover all possible games for the next couple of years, and only people working on graphics applications need more.

So will my new computer be lightning fast with these specs? Well, in the benchmarks certainly, and I will be able to run games at high resolution, anti-aliasing, best graphics settings and still get a very good framerate. But when I boot the machine up, it will still take a minute or so. Getting all the parts of a computer started up seems to take an awful long time, especially network components. And the hard disk is to blame for some of that delay. If you just look at the specs, hard disks are getting faster. But at the same time they are getting much bigger, and files are getting bigger too, so finding a file on the hard disk and loading it still takes some time.

Another big speed limit is the internet connection. I have a 3 Mbit ADSL connection, and surfing the internet is often still slow. First of all 3 Mbit is only the speed limit on my side, if you use an utility like DUmeter you can see that most data arrive at a much lower speed. If the server you are getting the data from isn't delivering at 3 Mbit (and few are), your 3 Mbit ADSL doesn't help you much, except for downloading several files in parallel. 3 Mbit is about 300 kByte per second, or about 1 GByte per hour, so really large files, like game demos or beta clients, still take some time even in the best of cases.

But while surfing or playing online games the speed limit is a different one. Every click needs to travel to the computer on the other side of the line, be processed there, and the response sent back. That takes at least the time described as "ping", usually around 50 ms if the server is on the same continent as you are, a couple of hundred milliseconds if the server is on a different continent. Sometimes your data get into an internet traffic jam, and take much longer.

So while playing World of Warcraft for example, any lag you observe can come from many different sources. You often have lag when arriving in an area with many other players, because lots of players with lots of equipment means lots of data. Your graphics card might be too slow to process them at a good frame rate, your memory might run over and start swapping on the slow hard disk, the server might have problems delivering data at this speed, the data might get slowed down on the way, or your modem might be slow in receiving them. Using older computers I observed some lag which didn't happen on a newer computer, so I'm hopeful that the new computer will pretty much solve all client side lag problems. But the server side lag, and internet lag problems will remain, and there is nothing I could possibly do about them. As everybody's computers are getting faster with the years, this speed limit will remain. If you got half a second of internet lag, it gets pretty noticeable in a twitchy game situation. This is one of the reasons for the "semi turn-based" style of typical MMORPG combat. I wonder if that will stay with us much longer, of if somebody will come up with a better solution to handle the possibility of lag.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:12 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
WoW Journal - 19-September-2005

My guild rocks! Our first guild raid to Zul'Gurub was a great success, we managed to kill both high priestess Jeklik and high priest Venoxis, each on the third attempt. We had some advice on the bat lady, how to pull her into a corner and avoid adds, but the tactics on the snake guy we worked out on our own. Zul'Gurub is interesting in that the developers clearly noticed that people are mainly interested in the boss fights, and designed the place for that. The non-boss mobs aren't all that many, and they don't seem to respawn at all. There is one central path, with lots of side paths leading to the different bosses, so you can chose which boss you want to attack. Each boss has its own tricks up the sleeve, and needs different tactics. A fun place, especially for medium sized guilds.

In other news I finally visited Dire Maul west with Raslebol, with a very good guild group. Tough place, but interesting, although I still think the north part is better. While Zul'Gurub got me no loot, in DM west I won a nice fire resistance cloak for future Molten Core visits.

Besides these two highlights, I had a bad week. Our guild is short of priests, and this week one of them was on holiday. Another guild priest is working late, and I didn't see the third priest around much. So I had several occasions where I tried to get a group together, and never got there due to lack of a healer. That was a bit depressing, and I got more and more convinced that leveling my shaman wouldn't help much. So I stopped leveling Waldin at level 28, and switched to leveling Kyroc, my priest.

Playing a priest first was very hard, I had trouble even with mobs a level or two lower than me. But after asking around in the guild I got advice on a better tactic: Never use Smite, pull with Mind Blast, shield yourself, and finish the mob off with a wand. A guild mate ran me through BFD to get the blue wand quest reward from there, and from then it went much better. I want to have this priest at level 60, but the problem is that I need to solo him there. We got lots of level 60 in the guild, but the alts and lower level characters are distributed widely over all levels, and you never get a low-level guild group together. So leveling to 60 means soloing, pickup groups, and occasional powerleveling help through a dungeon. By far not as much fun as leveling Raslebol to 60 together with the guild.

Wanting to have a level 60 priest, but having less fun actually leveling him, translates into a certain grind. Most of the quests I do I already know, because there aren't many quests left that I never did at the lower levels. I leveled Kyroc from 26 to 29 mainly in Ashenvale, and then moved him to Thousand Needles. After a while I got bored of casting shield every 30 seconds, and installed the Autobuff mod, which casts all buffs automatically on yourself. One more step towards the dark side, I have certain reservations against installing macros that play the game for you. But if you are mainly grinding, wanting to automatize it comes naturally.

So the plan for the future looks like this: Whenever there is a guild group or raid which Raslebol could join, I'll play him for fun. When there is nothing going, I play Kyroc, in the hope of getting him to 60 fast, and having more possibilities for guild groups. Waldin, the shaman, takes over the old job of Kyroc to play in duo with my wife, when she wants to play her mage. Mage / shaman is probably a better duo than mage / priest anyway, as we gain better tanking capabilities.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
Future Play 2005

I'm famous, or something. At least the promotions manager of the Future Play 2005 conference sent me an e-mail about the list of research papers to be presented at Future Play 2005: The International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology. So I'll dutyfully blog it. Not that I'm going to travel to the USA to attend the conference, but reading a list of academic papers on game design is certainly interesting. As is the fact that you now obviously can make a living by writing academic papers on MMORPG design.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:01 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Arathi Basin

Testing the new 1.7 patch, I played some PvP in Arathi Basin. Two complete battles, both won, although the second one was close. The principle of Arathi Basin is simple enough: On a smallish map there are 5 buildings, farm, mine, stables, lumber mill and blacksmith. Each building has a flag, which can be claimed by Alliance or Horde, going through a "contested" phase of about 1 minute. Every building which is controlled by one side produces resources. The side that has reached 2000 resources first wins.

So basically it is a game of territorial control, you need to control more buildings than the other side most of the time to win. Taking control takes a couple of seconds, and can be interrupted, so any defender first has to be eliminated. The 5 buildings are arranged with several paths between them, with 1 building close to each starting point, and 3 buildings on a line of equal distance from both in the middle. So unlike Alterac Valley neither side can just put all players together and move forward, the other side would just walk around you and take all the buildings where the big army isn't present right now. You need both some sort of attack force, and some people to defend what was already gained.

Territorial control makes gameplay to resemble a bit to that of Alterac Valley. Only its a lot faster, buildings change hands more often than AV graveyards, and with 15 players on each side there is less lag. Battles form quickly, last maybe half an hour, and resolves with both side having won a good amount of extra honor, plus a resource crate to hand in for the winners. It is hard to imagine who would still want to play Alterac Valley when Arathi Basin is around. AV will probably only open rarely, on holiday weekends or such, at least on the server I'm on, where AV already only happened on weekends before the patch.

In comparison to Warsong Gulch it is hard to say which will be the more popular, as the play style is different. There is no territorial control in WSG, the whole battle is about the two flags, which are moving. A single player can rush in, grab the flag, and run away, even if there is one or two defenders present, as long as he has some movement speed advantage. This isn't possible in AB, just running or sneaking in to grab a flag will only work if the flag is totally undefended. As a warrior, I like AB better than WSG, because being able to defend a spot without dying is more valuable in the new battleground.

Last night on Runetotem, we had up to 4 instances of Arathi Basin up, but that was because it was new and shiny. I don't know how the long-term interest will work out. I doubt the new battleground will be open all the time, every day, although it could well be up every evening. WoW's localized servers cause the population to vary strongly with the time of day. Few players are online at 3 am in the morning, because it is 3 am in the morning for all of them, with little time zone variations. And whatever the new battleground does, it will still have more Alliance people waiting in a queue than Horde players, because there are so many more Alliance players.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:56 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Dell XPS 600

For a number of years my computer buying habits followed a fixed schedule: I would buy a new computer every two year, give my 2-year old computer to my wife, and throw out the 4-year old computer. My wife being new to computer games was mostly playing older, slower games, and thus didn't mind using a computer that was slightly outdated. But since a couple of months we are both playing WoW. Her computer is now 3-and-a-quarter years old, an Athlon XP 2000, 512 MB RAM, with a ATI Radeon 9600 Pro graphics card. And in spite of WoW being less demanding than EQ2, that configuration isn't powerful enough any more. In monster-hunting mode, with graphics details set low, the game runs fine. But using the auction house and mail box in Orgrimmar is a torture. By running the same scene simultaneously on both computers, I was able to make 100% certain that it is really a hardware problem, only the older computer was lagging badly. The newer Athlon XP 3000, 1 GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro only had little lag, even in Orgrimmar, with graphics details set to high. Both computers are on the same ADSL router, so it wasn't a connection problem either.

Now I could have bought for about €1000 a computer about as powerful as mine and just replaced the wife's computer with that. But that would probably result in both computers being outdated simultaneously in 2 or 3 years. And even on my 1-and-a-quarter year old computer I do experience hardware related lag sometimes, for example in Alterac Valley battleground. Due to the development of PCI-Express replacing AGP, graphics cards have made a big leap forward. Processors haven't gained all that much in clock speed, but have learned new tricks like hyperthreading. And memory requirements have shot through the roof, the 1 GB that I considered generous one year ago I would now think of as essential.

So I decided to buy a new, more powerful computer, and give mine to the wife, as usual. So next question was where to buy it. Now I was quite happy with the laptop I bought from Dell, and a friend of mine bought a desktop PC from them and was satisfied as well. Furthermore Dell hits my sweet spot of ability to configure my PC. I do get options on their website, but I don't have to choose between millions of options. I neither want a pre-built computer I can change nothing in, nor do I want to assemble the thing myself out of the components. Dell is a good compromise there, and they do give good value for money.

So looking at the Dell website, I noticed that here in Europe they have a new offer, a special computer for gamers, the Dell XPS 600. You *could* put a dual-core CPU in there, two Geforce 7800 graphics cards working in tandem, 1.5 Terrabyte of hard disk, and buy it with a football-field sized flat screen for measly €5000. *Cough* Fortunately you can also get it with just a normal Pentium 640 3.2 GHz CPU, a single Nvidia Geforce 7800, 2 GB of RAM, and 250 GB of hard disk, no screen, for €2200. And that is what I ordered.

That follows an old philosophy of mine that I would rather spend more money on the "infrastructure", as in power supply, motherboard, cooling, and not take the most expensive CPU and graphics. Then I can always add more stuff later. The XPS 600 comes with a 650 W power supply, and lots of cooling fans. By not using the most heat-producing CPU and only one graphics card I will never run into power problems, and the fans will run relatively silently.

Nevertheless, in spite of taking nearly the minimum configuration of the XPS 600, the thing will be a lot faster than my current one. The Pentium 640 is a bit faster than the Athlon 3000, and its hyperthreading is supposed to help with firewalls and virus scanners running in the background while you play games. Doubling the RAM from 1 GB to 2 GB should help with WoW lag. And the Geforce 7800 is one of the fastest cards available right now, should be more than twice as fast as my Radeon 9800 Pro. I expect Dell to deliver the machine in about 2 weeks, and will probably be unable to keep myself from bragging about its incredible speed then. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 7:58 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
WoW Patch day

EQ2 isn't the only game patching, patch 1.7 of WoW is coming today to the European servers, and has already been installed in the US earlier this week. Blizzard has a much slower approach to balancing things, they only rework one or two classes with every monthly patch, this time it's the hunters. And most of these changes are about the talent trees, with the goal of making all the three branches of every classes talent tree equally attractive. As I don't play a hunter, it is hard for me to judge how good or bad the hunter changes in this patch are, anybody care to comment?

But the major impact of this patch is the added content. One added battleground, Arathi Basin, adding another nail in the coffin of Alterac Valley. And one new raid dungeon Zul'Gurub, for 20-player raid groups, which should be ideal for mid-sized guilds. Also added is some fishing event, but in my opinion they need to completely redo the fishing to be more of a mini-game, right now it is too boring to contemplate.

The only problem I have with these monthly patches is that they are making WoW more resource hungry. I have two computers, an Athlon 2000 with 512 MB RAM and a Radeon 9600 Pro, and an Athlon 3000 with 1 GB RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro. World of Warcraft used to run equally well on both computers, but since the 1.6 patch the older computer has problems, especially in Orgrimmar. I already did all the sensible stuff, like turning all graphics options down, which slightly improved the framerate. But now data handling and storage seems to become the limit, on the older computer it takes a lot longer to empty your mailbox or search the auction house. These are things where I often thought they were caused by server lag, but as both computers are on the same ADSL router, and one is visibly faster than the other, it must be a client side problem. Main suspect is the memory, although the other components aren't exactly up to date either. I'll have to look into replacing that one.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:52 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
EverQuest II announces major changes

In a producer's letter, EverQuest II announces major changes to all skills, spells, and how combat works. It seems that groups are only fighting red mobs, everything else being too easy, so combat will be made a lot harder. Especially stacking of different buffs will be limited. Many people will probably consider the whole combat upgrade to be a huge mega-nerf.

Or as the announcement says: "We understand that changes of this magnitude, even when many of them are positive, can be disconcerting."

To me it reinforces the impression that EQ2 wasn't anywhere close to ready when it was released. EQ2 has 400,000 paying beta testers, which were subjected to major "disconcerting" changes from day one. I just hope that all these changes end up making the game better, although I have my doubts that making combat harder will win them many fans.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:18 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
WoW Journal - 12-September-2005

I finally got around to play my shaman, Waldin, a bit more. Leveled him to 28 over the weekend, at an amazing pace, fueled by rest bonus xp and twinking. One weakness of the shaman class is that they have less mana than other casters of the same level, but twinking with +intelligence gear helps there. The other weakness is a lack of area effect spells, I only got a magma totem dealing 22 points of damage repeatedly. But by chosing engineering as profession, I can deal huge amounts of damage with explosives.

My special favorite are goblin land mines. Sure, they need 10 seconds to be armed, and can be destroyed before. But if you take care to hit all the mobs at least once before dropping the mine, they'll ignore it completely. And seeing how at my level a spell deals 100 to 150 points of damage to one target, dealing 500 points to several targets around me is awesome. Explosive sheep and iron grenades deal only 150 points, but are easier to use. Using lots of explosives gets expensive for a level 28 character, so I'm living from the income of my level 60.

That level 60, Raslebol, I only played Sunday afternoon and evening. First helping some guild mates with the attunement to the core quest, so they can enter Molten Core. Then doing another MC raid with the guild in the evening. The way *to* Lucifron is getting smoother with every try. But Luci still is too strong for us, he wiped us 4 times, and we never even got close to killing him. Not quite 40 players, not quite enough healers, and not quite good equipment adds up to making him impossible to kill. I hope the 1.7 patch with Zul'Gurub comes out soon, so that we can gather more raid experience and loot there, instead of battling windmills.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:19 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
World of Warcraft Battle-Plan

Read all about Blizzards official plans for the future of WoW here, here, and here.

Much of it, like the addition of mid-sized raid dungeons, and the need to rework battlegrounds, was already known. New is the announcement of paid-for character transfers, which could be a good thing. The current character transfer only from few specific servers to only one alternative server of the same type is lacking. We will have to see what the possibilities and cost of the new service will be.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:51 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Next generation game consoles

We are at the start of a wave of next generation game consoles. The new handheld consoles are already there, the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP, the second generation XBox is announced for christmas, and in 2006 we will get the Sony PS3 and the next Nintento Gamecube. I own a Gameboy SP Advance, a PS2, and a Gamecube, but I still spend most of my playing time on the PC. Will that change?

What I already noticed is that the PC games sections in the stores is getting smaller and smaller, while more and more shelf space is taken up by console games. But I also noticed that of the existing console games the percentage of games I would actually want to play is even smaller than with PC games. Games have gotten a lot dumber over the years, due to faster processors allowing more action, which then replaced thinking. There are lots of action shooters and racing games out there, and even role-playing games and strategy games have moved towards being action oriented. Dungeon Siege II looks good, but in comparison ot old Gold Box AD&D, Wizardry, or Might & Magic games it is downright primitive. Turn-based strategy games are a species threatened by extinction, replaced by fast and furios real-time strategy games, in which quick reflexes get you further than a battle plan.

These games sell because they are graphically better than their predecessors, graphics getting closer and closer to being photorealistic. But I hope that once graphics can't get technically better any more, game developers will have to focus more on content than on appearance. And there are obvious limits to how many different first-person shooters or racing games you can sell, hopefully forcing them to develop more different games. The average age of gamers is rising anyway, and middle-aged gamers like me aren't terribly interested in games which require the reflexes of a teenager.

Before I bought the laptop, I toyed with the idea to buy a PSP. Good thing I didn't do it. The laptop can do all the things the PSP can do, play games, play movies, play music, and have wireless internet access. But while the PSP might have a slight edge where pure gaming is concerned, the laptop wins in the other categories. PSP screen size diagonal of 4.3 inch, 480 x 272 pixels might be big for a handheld, but it isn't exactly suitable for DVD quality movie watching. Then there is the question where the movies are coming from. The PSP can't read DVDs, only small Universal Media Discs, of which the choice is rather limited. You can theoretically use a PC to rip a DVD into a format the PSP can play, and transfer it to the PSP via an USB cable. But that requires you buying a Memory Stick Duo. The "value edition" of the PSP comes with a laughable 32 MB Memory Stick Duo, and the 1 GB version cost $199 at the Sony online store, although you can probably get compatible memory sticks from other brands for half that. You aren't likely to carry a collection of ripped DVDs with you on your PSP. So unless you want it for carrying a collection of low-resolution porn you downloaded from the internet, the PSP isn't really useful for watching movies. Internet surfing with the PSP is possible since the v2.0 firmware upgrade, but again the usefulness is limited. Most webpages don't work well in 480 x 272 resolution, and only having a "virtual" keyboard makes internet activities that involve typing a pain. I think I can live without a PSP.

The first of the next generation living room consoles, the XBox 360, I'm not going to buy either. The first XBox had very few games that would have interested me, and most of these (KOTOR, Fable) got eventually ported to the PC. But what I will probably buy is the PS3. The PS2 games were more my style, having a lot of role-playing games and interesting strategy titles, often of Japanese origin. On a PS3 the old PS2 games will still run, and there will be lots of new games, most probably closer to my taste than XBox games. The Nintendo console I don't know yet, I basically bought it for playing Legend of Zelda, the Windwaker. I still only have a tiny collection of Gamecube games, and don't know if buying the console for so few games is worth it. Main advantage of the Gamecube for me was that it is small, so I sometimes took it on holidays with me. But now I'd rather take the laptop.

I don't think PC gaming will ever totally disappear. But with the new consoles offering online possibilities, sooner or later we will see major MMORPG running on them. There are already some MMORPG on the PS2, but console online gaming hasn't really kicked off yet. That will change with the next generation of consoles, online gaming is generally considered as a major selling point.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:04 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
World of Warcraft article in New York Times

You might have noticed that one of the things I often blog is the appearance of MMORPG articles in main-stream media. There is an interesting article about the impact of World of Warcraft on the games market in the New York Times. Not really news, it reports both the point of view that WoW expanded the market, and the opposing point of view that people playing WoW neither have the time nor the money to play other games. (Agreed on the time thing in my case).

Thus I only blog this because it means another bunch of serious people who never heard about World of Warcraft will read about it in their newspaper. By the way, this time it is in the "arts" section. Last time it was "sports", but this particular article might as well have been "business". I wonder if reporting on video games will end up having its own section, or will permanently settle in one specific section.

And why not? Face it, playing World of Warcraft is not more childish or useless than playing baseball, or some other sport. Gaming is taking up an increasing slice of the lifes of ordinary people, and reporting on it in newspapers is just a natural consequence. Media write what people want to read.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:05 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Battleground dilution

The upcoming patch 1.7 of World of Warcraft will add a third battleground at Arathi Basin to the game, a 15 vs. 15 battle where both sides try to gather resources faster than the other side. There are some "leaked 1.8 patch notes" circulating on the web, which might well be fake, but they announce another battleground at the Forlorn Ridge in Azshara. Even if this battleground doesn't come in patch 1.8, the Forlorn Ridge is obviously a site for a future battleground, it already has two entrances marked with Alliance and Horde flags. So the number of battlegrounds is definitely increasing. And I wonder if that is a good idea.

Now I'm principally all for adding content to this game. Blizzard's idea is obviously to retain people in the old battlegrounds, and get additional people to play in the new ones. But while that will most probably happen in the first weeks after the new addition, in the long run the number of players on each server interested in PvP might be constant. The problem with battlegrounds is already that they aren't available all the time, the bigger the battleground the rarer it starts. If you have 4 or more battlegrounds on offer, Alterac Valley will open only once in a blue moon.

Heartless proposes an interesting way to fix battlegrounds on his blog, clustering several servers together for the purposes of battlegrounds only. I don't know how easy or difficult that would be technically, but if this could be done, at least all battlegrounds could be open every day. At which point the second problem would kick in with full force: The fact that there are twice as many Alliance players as Horde players. The number of battlegrounds open is determined by the number of Horde players signing up for them. So even if you cluster enough servers together to have battlegrounds all the time, Alliance players will still spend only half of the time in the battlegrounds, and the other half of the time in a waiting queue. Blizzard said they are aware of the problem, but I don't see how they want to solve it.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:40 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
Happy anniversary, WoW!

You might think I'm a bit too early for this, World of Warcraft having come out in November. But one year ago I played WoW for the first time, in the Fileplanet beta. A few days later I wrote a two-part review of how the game works, and what I think about it. And except for a small Everquest 2 interlude, I've been playing WoW all the time since then.

In my original review I echoed a widely held opinion that WoW was not a very social game, which made its longevity doubtful. This was also the basis for Geldonyetich's famous doomcast of WoW, and it seems that Brad McQuaid from Vanguard still thinks so. But if I look at myself, and why I'm still playing after one year, in spite of having seen over 90% of the game's content, it is the social nature of the game that keeps me there. I couldn't possibly leave the game and start a new game without my guild.

So lets have a look at the theory of longevity, dating back to Everquest, which I still call "the vision". "The vision" says that a game has to have slow advancement and forced grouping, so that players band together against the difficulties of the game. This creates social cohesion, which makes the players stay in the game forever. According to "the vision", a game which offers fast advancement and soloability, like WoW does, will find people reaching the highest level without having made any lasting friendships, at which point they will quit, and the subscription numbers will tank.

Now obviously World of Warcraft has fast advancement, has soloability, but its subscription numbers are still growing, having reached 1 million Americans, and about 4 million players worldwide. Where is the forced grouping and glacial pace of advancement which according to "the vision" is needed for this longevity?

Don't worry, Brad McQuaid, your "vision" is safe and sound. Because looking at my level 60 warrior, Raslebol, I am forced to group (even raid group) to advance any further. And my pace of advancement definitely is glacial. World of Warcraft simply managed to offer both modes of gameplay in the same game. Theoretically you can solo up to 60 and then look for a guild to start raiding, but in reality the transition is a bit smoother than that. You need a group even for the lowest instances, and starting from level 40 the instances often require several visits to finish them, which makes going there repeatedly with the same group a really good idea. Thus guilds form long before level 60, and you rarely see unguilded high-level players. And while switching from fast advancement mode to raid mode isn't always easy, few players just quit at level 60.

In fact even the old Everquest was built on the same model, you could solo and advance relatively quickly to level 10 or so. World of Warcraft just moves the transition to a later point in time. And moves more smoothly from soloing, to advantageous grouping, to forced grouping, to raids. And even the fast leveling has its justification: Not only do players enjoy it more, but if your real hook is the high-level raid content, then it doesn't make much sense to prevent the slower players from ever getting there.

So is World of Warcraft headed for 10 million players still playing in 10 years? Not impossible, but there are some black clouds. Even at my glacial pace of level 60 consumption of high-end content, I still consume it faster than Blizzard is adding it. A new dungeon every 2 months, and the first expansion after 2 years, are just not enough. Blizzard has obviously planned to keep players occupied with PvP and battlegrounds, but that hasn't really worked out that way, as I predicted.

On the bright side I can now see why all of the dungeons to be added by patches are for level 60 players. I first thought that this would never work, as casual players would never reach the raid content, and so Blizzard was wasting time on creating content for a minority. But that was me lapsing into old-school thinking. The beauty of the WoW concept is that even casual players get to level 60. And while not everybody is going to end up killing Ragnaros and Onyxia, a dungeon like the upcoming Zul'Gurub could well be in reach of the majority of players. I still think they should add some more lower level dungeons as well, but that is part of my wish that they add more content faster.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:58 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
WoW Journal - 5-September-2005

Again I only played my lower level characters very little, and spent most of my time on Raslebol. He is already over 250 hours into level 60, and I always find something to do for him. Sometimes I help lower level guild members doing elite quests, sometimes I gather stuff, and often I go on some instance trip.

I did some more Dire Maul expeditions with Raslebol. One quick trip to DM east just to get the keys for somebody, a longer trip from start to finish in DM east, and one trip to DM north without bothering with the tribute, just killing all the named mobs. Which was kind of funny, because we got a tribute chest containing only a roasted chicken and some water. Some of the named ogres we killed only dropped very bad loot, but the captain dropped Kromcrush's Chestplate, which was much better than what I had previously. I also got a very nice warrior ring from the king. Next time we need to try a tribute run and see how it compares, and whether it is worth the added effort.

Another dungeon I visited twice with a 5-man group was Blackrock Depths. Both times we made it to the tavern, which enabled me to get a number of BRD quests done. My guild also helped me do the nasty prisoner escort quest in Searing Gorge, which is part of a BRD quest series. Now the only quest remaining is The Royal Rescue, which is much deeper in, and seems to be rather tough. Would be easy to get there in a raid, but I doubt the quest can be raided.

The weeks big finale was a guild raid to Molten Core. We had nearly 40 people, and we got until Lucifron. Unfortunately Luci beat us 3:0, and we gave up after the third wipe there. We also had a number of wipes on the way, one so bad that we needed to release and run back, and a nasty bug which at this point reset the dungeon and we found all the mobs respawned. So lots of time spent and no loot, but I think we learned a lot about what to do and what not to do. And it already went notably better than the first guild raid there. Maybe we should have watched the training video on how to kill Lucifron a bit closer. We split Luci from his guards okay, but once the guards were dead, everybody rushed him, and he killed us.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:37 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
World of Warcraft Links

Looking for links to World of Warcraft sites? A guy named Tomy has made a pretty extensive list of links on Rawsugar.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:38 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Exploiting WoW PvP

I did a number of Warsong Gulch runs yesterday, all of which I either quickly won 3:0, or quickly lost 0:3. So I began to wonder where the balanced fights were. I noticed that the fights I won where always with the same people, the Horde PvP experts. And the fights that I lost were always against the same people, the Alliance PvP experts. Would be fun to see them fighting each other, experts against experts, wouldn't it?

No chance. Because then I finally realized how they were exploiting the system. On a busy evening there are several instances of Warsong Gulch running. So the experts sign up, and the moment they appear in the instance, they quickly click on the button which shows the names of the players of *both* sides. And if they are paired against the other side experts, the type /afk, which instantly boots them out of the instance, and then they sign up for the other battlefield.

If you think that PvP is a fight of Horde against Alliance, you are wrong. It is a competition of Horde against Horde, and Alliance against Alliance. To get to the highest rank in PvP, you need to make more points than the players on your *own* side. What points the other side makes is totally irrelevant to your progress. So chosing your enemy well, and only fighting disorganized pickup groups, is your quickest way to the top.

I'm having flashbacks here of Magic the Gathering Online, where the so-called Leagues had exactly the same problem. If you manage to manipulate the pairings, and never get paired against the other good players, you are sure to do better. Pretty disappointing that World of Warcraft allows the same sort of exploit.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:13 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
WoW PvP rankings

On the official WoW websites you can now find PvP ranking tables for all servers and sides, and see where you stand exactly. Pretty depressive reading, in my opinion, because it clearly shows the competitive nature of the PvP system in an otherwise non-competitive game. Other people can not stop you from leveling to 60, but they can sure stop you from reaching a high PvP rank. To get a good reward, like a PvP reward weapon, you will need to be in the top 3 of PvP players every week for a couple of weeks. As long as there are a significant number of players which are as ambitious as you, and who have as much time or more than you to spend in the game, you will never make it.

So the only good thing about the PvP ranking tables is that they give you an idea how high you can get. Play as much PvP as you are willing and able to for one week, and the game will tell you your weekly ranking (Raslebol's was 471th last week). Then look up the PvP ranking on the website, where your lifetime ranking will be lower than that (Raslebol is 590th there). If you do the same performance every week, your lifetime score will match your weekly score. Thus you can scroll up the table and see what PvP rank you are likely to reach. Well, I'm headed for Sergeant, and unless I seriously step up my efforts, I won't get much further. As the Sergeant's Cloak was the PvP reward I was targetting, I'm okay with that. But things like the PvP epic mount are clearly far out of my reach.

In a way this is worse than grinding. The worst grind ahead of me is killing 1400 furbolgs to reach friendly status with the timbermaw. But at least that is a fixed number. Somebody else killing more furbolgs than me will not throw me back. And if I don't kill furbolgs for a week, I don't lose any progress either. In PvP, a week of not participating will cost me ranking. And even if Blizzard just adds the new battleground with the next patch, and everybody goes there to try it out, I would need to play more PvP than before just to keep my rank. I'm not a highly competitive person, so I don't like this system at all. Your mileage may vary.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:18 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Google's plans for world domination

When a software company, like Microsoft, manages to place their products everywhere you look, some paranoid loonies on the internet will always claim that the company is evil and is bent for world domination. And it seems as if Google is slowly getting there. Is Google headed for world domination? Well, for small values of "world" maybe. Google has some excellent products, but half of them only work for the USA. Google Maps only shows addresses and driving directions for the USA. The Google personalized homepage, and Google Desktop, only show news, weather, and stockmarket data from the USA.

Then there are powerful forces that are keeping Google from taking over my life. I really would have liked to install and test the new Google desktop, especially at work, to be able to search my work files with the same ease as the internet. But on Windows 2000 you need administrator privileges to install Google Desktop, and I don't have those at work. Our IT servives even asked me to uninstall the Google Toolbar, because it was colliding with the firewall. At home I couldn't install Google Desktop, because it refused to cooperate with my McAffee Security Center. And no, I'm not uninstalling my firewall and anti-virus, just to get Google on my desktop.

All this makes me think that Google's tools are sending a whole lot of data back to Google. I'm pretty sure that if Microsoft software would send as many information from your computer to Microsoft, there would be a huge outcry. But Google gets away with it, as long as you don't have a firewall. Not that I really mind, I'm pretty certain that the data are not read by any humans, due to the sheer mass of them. But somewhere in the depths of our computers is a battle raging between Microsoft, Google, and security program providers, for control of our desktops and data streams.

On the computers I'm using, Google is losing this fight. They would need to become a lot more useful to Europeans before I would be willing to lend their programs a helping hand and resolve the conflicts with the firewalls.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:01 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
The Escapist

Boring day at work and nothing to read? Head over to The Escapist and read some intelligently written articles about gaming culture. For example the one about the reality of virtual commerce. Or Tycho Brahe reporting on how the mainstream is coming.

The Escapist appears weekly, and you can either read it on their site, or subscribe to it and get the pdf version mailed to you, for free. They are trying to finance that with print-style advertising, so no flashing banner ads or pop-ups. If you printed the pdf file out, it would look just like a thin gaming magazine with normal print ads. Worth checking out.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:25 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments