What section is WoW in?

In August and September I reported on two New York Times articles on World of Warcraft or MMORPGs in general which had been placed in the "sports" and in the "arts" section of that newspaper. Now in October the NYT has another article on virtual worlds, this time in the "travel" section. "Travel" to virtual places, get it?

I wonder if there is an internal competition between the NYT editors in how many sections they can report on World of Warcraft. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 10:01 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Rumors confirmed on WoW expansion

The first expansion set for World of Warcraft will be called The Burning Crusade, and as rumored the level cap will go up to 70, and the Horde will get Blood Elves as a new race. The new race for the Alliance and, more importantly, the release date have not yet been announced. Actually the FAQ lists a surprising lot of "we don't know yet" answers.

What I do know is that me and a couple of million other people will buy this expansion, regardless of how we think about raising the level cap or other features. I still wonder how they are going to handle the details on this cap raise, but I guess they will come up with something. And as long as you can level from 60 to 70 in a casual way, even solo if so desired, I think I can live with that. I never liked the high-level expansions of Everquest, but that was because I was unable to get to the high levels myself, and the expansions often didn't offer anything for the casual player. By promoting me and many other casual players to nearly-leet level 60s, Blizzard can offer such a high-level expansion without excluding their core audience.

I'm not impressed with the Blood Elves, I must say. The screenshots suggest that they are simply Night Elves with a different texture. Not very original. But jewelcrafting, the new profession with which you can improve special socketed weapons by setting in magical jewels could be interesting.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:04 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
UPS for the win

I finally ended up contacting UPS directly for the transport of the second computer erraneously delivered back to Dell. And it worked! Today they came and transported the computer off. I hope that is the last I hear from Dell about that, but if there is any problem, at least I got a signed document that I handed the computer back to UPS.

Oh, and fate smiled on me and punished UPS for their earlier inability of getting to me. Because today our elevator broke down, and the UPS guy had to carry the huge computer box down our rather narrow staircase. If he had come on the previous agreed dates, the elevator was working then. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 7:57 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
EVE Online

EVE Online is a strange game. On the one side it is the only MMORPG I know of that is continually growing, recently having reached 70,000 subscribers. This week they reached 17,000 simultaneous players at peak time, which they claim is a world record, because all of these players are playing on the same server. Whenever I see EVE reviewed, the game gets very high scores, just a little lower than World of Warcraft, and usually beating all the other usual suspects.

On the other hand EVE Online is the only MMORPG I bought where I didn't even play through the free month, but gave up after two weeks. And I don't plan a second visit to this game.

Okay, my personal EVE opinion might be negative because of things I experienced in the game, and not because of the game itself. First mistake was playing EVE from day one, after having spent only 2 days in the open beta which just ended. Everybody knows that a MMORPG is not at its best form right after release. Since then as far as I've heard lots of the missing content has been added, and many bugs ironed out. My second mistake was joining a big guild which knew the game from beta, was well organized, and relied on its members "working" for the guild instead of playing. The whole guild would assemble in one sector and start mining. Asteroid after asteroid was hit with mining lasers for hours on end. We didn't even travel back and forth to the space station, we just jettisoned the minerals when our holds were full, and another guild member collected them in a big industrial ship. EVE mining in a guild group is probably the most boring activity I ever did in a MMORPG. Even camping in Everquest for my Mammoth Cloak for 16 hours was more interesting, at least I got to kill a goblin every 23 minutes.

But the final nail on my personal EVE coffin happened when I was not playing with the guild, but was exploring EVE's excellent trading system. Third mistake, I had spotted a great trade opportunity and invested a major part of my personal virtual wealth in a cargo. And although I was transporting the cargo along a path which wasn't all that low security, I ended up getting shot down by a player pirate, who obviously didn't care about the negative consequences to his security status. He even "podded" me, that is shot down my escape pod, which made me lose not only my ship and cargo, but also part of my skills. I know they have been working on the "insurance" system since, slightly limiting the losses to players being shot down, but at that time when it happened to me, it was like losing several levels and most gear in a fantasy MMORPG. Now I'm all for MMORPG having at least a limited penalty for dying, to send you a clear message when you took too much risk. But in that case I didn't consider having taken an outrageous risk, I just had the bad luck of running into a griefer player, and the penalty for that was really crippling. After that I just couldn't stand that game any more.

Trying to consolidate my personal dislike with the fact that some people obviously like EVE Online very much, my conclusion is that EVE Online is a hardcore game, for hardcore players, and although I play *a lot*, I don't like playing *hard*.

The internet is full of great stories which players experienced or rather orchestrated in EVE Online. I don't think there are stories as complex about World of Warcraft, because in WoW killing another player isn't much of an inconvenience for the victim, and trying to scam him out of his virtual riches will probably fail due to lack of plausible "investment opportunities". While EVE makes for a more interesting life with better stories, on the other hand there is always a player victim suffering major hurt. As I can't stand the heat, I'll stay out of this particular kitchen.

In principle you could play this game without partaking in those big stories, without working on the big guild (sorry, corporation) politics. But unless things have dramatically changed since I left, EVE doesn't offer much of an alternative. Sure, you can just mine in safe sectors and do some small trade only following absolutely safe trade routes. But that would make for a rather boring game. Mining is terribly unfun, and profits from safe trading are tiny. Supposedly there is now something resembling "quests", but I doubt that the system rivals World of Warcraft quests in entertainment value. And unlike WoW, even as casual solo player you risk getting caught up in the stories of the hardcore. Unaffiliated players are often accused of being spies, and are shot down when they enter a sector which a big corporation claims as their own. No, EVE just isn't a good place for the casual gamer.

Now I leave explaining why EVE Online is so great for the hardcore gamer to one of them. I can see the principal attraction of being able to shake the world, but the amount of work and dedication required for that scares me off. In a game where the strong rule over the weak, you either need to put in a lot of effort, or you end up being the victim. The assured steady progress for everybody of a game like World of Warcraft is more my style.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:50 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
Walkerings

Just a short link to a cool MMORPG blog called Walkerings. These short posts are my personal mix of virtual post-its for myself, and a replacement for the usual blog sidebars.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:01 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Extracting money from players

Blizzard is said to have very good marketing, and maybe the recruit-a-friend action mentioned yesterday is an example of that. But why are they so bad in extracting money from me? I played WoW for a year, stayed in their world for 1,500 hours, and what did they get? A measly $200 for the box plus the monthly fees. That is only 14 cents per hour of entertainment!

How often did I spend $50 for a game which didn't even occupy me for 50 hours? A book, lets say the latest Harry Potter costing $16.99 at Amazon, did certainly occupy me much less than 100 hours. And if you compare to cost per year, I played Magic the Gathering in both paper form and online for 10 years, at a cost of about $1,000 per year.

My April fool's joke this year was a fake review on Grimwell Online which described a non-existing game I had written about here earlier. While real examples of games based on real world cash, like Project Entropia, or the upcoming Roma Victor, don't look as if they would become smash hits anytime soon, that doesn't mean the business model is flawed. I hear there are already several successful virtual world games in Korea where you buy stuff for real cash.

It is only a question of time when a first successful MMORPG with a real cash based economy is going to hit the western world. Trading card games proved that people aren't principally opposed to games in which you can buy your way to victory, as long as skill and luck also play a role, and the game is fun. One could even argue that the much discussed RMT, buying virtual items for real money, is due to the desire of players to spend more money on their games. After all, the demographics of gamers shows that the average gamer is getting older, and that invariably means that the average gamer now has more money and less time. Games which reward you mainly for time spent are just bound to go out of fashion.

Besides selling you virtual stuff for real money, what else could virtual worlds offer for more money? I think Everquest once tried offering "luxury servers", but I would be hard pressed to think of anything I would be willing to pay for on a WoW luxury server. Since I found out that most lag is caused mainly by lack of RAM or graphics power on the client computer, I don't think Blizzard could sell special lag-free service to anyone. I wouldn't pay for in-game GM-run events either, as those would require me to be online at specific times. Out of game events like BlizzCon I would pay for, but only if they happened somewhere I could travel to in not much more than 2 hours, which unfortunately doesn't include Anaheim. WoW merchandise I wouldn't buy, because outside a gaming convention there isn't a place where I could reasonably wear a WoW T-shirt at my age. So I'm waiting for Blizzard to come up with a better idea to extract money from me. Their current efforts are just not sufficient.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:57 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Gold farming

Some people hate gold farmers, but I personally think that people trying to sell "game secrets" over the internet are a much lower life-form. A gold farmer sells his time, a game guide seller is selling information which is usually available for free elsewhere. It is therefore with some reluctance that I link to a game guides site. But this article on the realities of gold farming is good, and is quickly becoming a must-read piece for everybody interested in the discussion of RMT.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:20 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
$20 per WoW Player

How much is each player worth to a MMORPG company? Well, Blizzard is willing to buy them for the equivalent of $20 each, but for US players only, the rest of the world must be worth less. :) It was announced that every one of the 1 million US players will receive a code by e-mail which will allow a friend to play for 10 days. At $15 per month, 10 days is worth $5. Then if the friend buys the game and upgrades his buddy-key account to a real account, the player who gave him the key will receive a free month of WoW, worth another $15. Thus $20 per new player.

Given that the US version of WoW is now 11 months old, and even the more casual players should be able to reach level 60 in WoW in a year, this is probably a good move. While predictions of a 75% rate of subscription losses are probably exaggerated, it is pretty certain that people are leaving World of Warcraft every day. WoW was still on place #2 of the PC games sales charts in the US last month, but with lots of new games coming out for christmas that might not last. Better let your current players spread the word while you still have current players. Given that most of WoW's problems are concentrated at level 60, and other problems are caused by people getting bored of WoW, it is probably easier to make new players happy than to please the people that already played a year.

I wonder if the European version will follow with the same marketing strategy in 3 months, as the Euro version came out 3 months later than the US version. Doing it now would be better timing, so people could still put WoW on their christmas wishlist. Not that I would have any use for such a buddy-key, all my friends are already playing WoW, and since this is their first MMORPG, they haven't lost interest yet.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:19 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
Guild projects

If you ask people that stay with one game longer than the average player why they are still playing, they inevitably answer that it is because of the friends they made in the game, their guild. But guilds being such a strong point of attraction to players, it is curious that game developers do so little to support them.

Blizzard doesn't even seem to be trying, their guild tools and activities are identical to games from 5 years ago. SOE had some nice ideas in EQ2, but EQ2 is such a jumble of good and bad ideas that every good idea is usually neutralized by a bad idea and two bugs. City of Villains has PvP based on guild headquarters, but I have my doubts about some of the concepts there. The game which has the best guild projects is A Tale in the Desert, but that one isn't really a MMORPG, it is a social experiment.

What I would like to have is guilds being able to work all together on a project, and all the guild members feeling part of that project. And no, I don't mean raids, because for a raid the guild members have to be of the same level, at the same time, at the same place, and those requirements already exclude a lot of people. The City of Villain bases come close in that all the members continually contribute points to the base, but there are two major disadvantages: One, points are level-based, and one hour contributed by a lower-level character is worth much less than one hour contributed by a higher-level character. Two, everybody contributes points, but only the guildmaster, and maybe some selected officers, can spend those points. Well, theoretically you can enable everybody in your 100-player guild to be able to edit the base, but that is just increasing the chaos. And it wouldn't solve the problem that one guy could spend the points gathered by somebody else.

A better approach would be to require the guild to gather materials for their guild hall, with a good part of the materials being stuff which a high-level character could collect at the same speed as a low-level character. For example in WoW mining copper takes the same time for a level 20 than for a level 60. And the reason that the level 20 can't mine iron is not lack of mining skill or anything, but just the fact that iron spawns in areas with level 30ish mobs, which are too dangerous for the level 20 character. Now if a WoW guild hall would need lots of copper, lots of tin, a bit less iron and mithril, and just a bit of thorium, all the miners in the guild could contribute equally.

Games which don't have levels, or in which resource gathering is not restricted by level, like ATITD or SWG, have it easier to implement guild projects. But most players seem to prefer level-based gameplay, and guild interaction in those building games isn't perfectly either. For example in ATITD lots of guild times is spent on doing repetitive, unproductive work, like growing onions to feed the sheep. And it is up to the guild themselves to organize the gathering of resources for a project. Often players are asked to gather resources in some chest, and when the chest contains all the necessary materials, the guild master comes and builds the building with one click. That doesn't really give the guy who contributed several hours making bricks the feeling that he was working on a collaborative project. And often you run into problems of people taking materials from the community chests to work on their own pet projects. It would be a lot nicer if the project planning phase came first, the game would erect a building site, and everybody who unloaded bricks into that site would A) see the project grow a bit, and B) have his contribution to this particular building recorded for eternity in some list permanently attached to the building.

It is fun to achieve something together with friends, and common projects could be the social ties that hold a guild together. It is time that games give guilds more to do than going on a raid together.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:13 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Sugar was sweeter

"In my days, sugar was sweeter and the sun did shine brighter.", is an old sentiment jokingly ascribed to old people. Well, I actually did know an old lady claiming the part about the sugar was true. But looking at it realistically it is more likely that here taste buds had deteriorated with age, and modern sugar tasted less sweet to her now. It was her who had changed, not the sugar.

Reading around for information and comments on games beyond WoW, I am astonished how many "sugar was sweeter" people there are around among gamers. They claim that the old games were the best, new games are void of innovation and creativity, and that the whole gaming industry is going to hell in a hand-basket, due to their hit-based business model. But in reality it is their minds playing tricks on them, it is well known that the brain modifies memories, making you able to "remember" things that never happened, or editing out the less pleasant bits. The fun you remember having had with a game 20 years ago is impossible to compare with the fun you have with a game now, because you changed so much in those 20 years.

Retro gaming, people playing very old games on original machines or emulators, exists, but it is just a small niche of the gaming world. If you find the old floppy disks of your favorite game from long ago back, and actually manage to get them working somehow on a modern PC, you will quickly be turned off by the bad graphics and technical shortcomings of the old games. In most cases you are better off with the modern remake of the old classic games, playing Civilization IV instead of I. "Innovation" is not really a value that games should be judged by, because it depends on what games the reviewer played before. If World of Warcraft is your first MMORPG ever, and subscription numbers suggest that this is the case for several million players, it is innovative *for you*. That somebody else considers it an Everquest-clone doesn't change that, and having been there first doesn't make EQ a better game than WoW, as much as it deserves credit for kick-starting the genre.

The new games aren't so bad as old gamers give them credit for. There is a lot of innovation still going on. It is just sometimes hard to find among the 20 different first-person-shooters or real-time-strategy games on the retailers shelf. Someone has a good idea, then maybe somebody else takes that idea and improves it, but given the huge size of the video game market nowadays, there are always also a number of clones with just minor variations. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it might be just one of those variations which makes the clone more attractive to you than the original. Even sequels which don't change much from the original can be a good thing. If you liked a game, but played all of it already three times, the sequel with identical gameplay and a few minor improvements at least offers you more content of the same type that you liked. Obviously some companies overdo it, especially EA is often trying to sell you the same trash several times, but just because a game has a sequel number in its title, it isn't automatically bad.

Another 20 years on, some people will write about the great old games of the first decade of this millenium as a shining example, compared to the garbage games of 2025. That is just part of human nature's response to all sort of evolution. But I'm more optimistic than that, games will continue to improve technically, and innovate in gameplay. And if one day I'm not having fun with games any more, I'll have a good hard look at myself, and maybe I just got old, and it isn't the new games' fault.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:52 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
Breaking up is hard to do

I've been caught with lipstick on my collar, I must admit that I've been seeing other games than World of Warcraft. :) It's not quite the divorce yet, but the passion of our earlier relationship definitely has gone. Breaking up with a game I played for a long time is always hard, and makes me a bit sad.

Yesterday I logged on all of my characters to count how much time I had /played with them. All characters on the European servers together have over 51 days of /played time. Add another estimated 10 days for the US server I played on earlier, and I end up with a total time of 1,500 hours spent in the World of Warcraft, about 30 hours per week. That is a looooooong time to be playing a game.

Given that most single-player games offer less than 100 hours of gameplay, replacing a game that took 30 hours per week is hard. But I still have a stack of unplayed games around, and I got Civ4, X3, Black & White 2, and UFO:Aftershock ordered from Amazon. All of which are sequels, which tells you something about the gaming industry of today. On the other hand, I don't mind games that are sequels or use brands like Zelda, Final Fantasy, or Mario, as long as they are markedly different and improved over their predecessors. I don't play sports games, but even if I did, I wouldn't buy a new version with just some updated player data every year. But with games like Final Fantasy every sequel has a markedly different gameplay than the previous game. And even if the gameplay of a sequel remains the same, I'd rather play the modern version of Pirates! than the original one, whose blocky pixel graphics are far too outdated by now.

While I have ideas how World of Warcraft could be even better, and I'm not always supporting all the decisions Blizzard did on that game, the 1,500 hours I played WoW show very well that I consider it one of the best games around. Maybe even *the* best game in existance. But MMORPGs, like books, films, and other sorts of entertainment, have a limited amount of content. And while World of Warcraft, unlike a book or a film, is still continually adding content, this addition isn't quite as fast as my consumption when I play 30 hours per week. So I'd rather take it slow, cut my WoW hours way down, and just level my alts using their rest xp bonuses.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Level 70

Next weekend is BlizzCon, where Blizzard is expected to reveal more information about the World of Warcraft expansion set for 2006. Rumors are flying, fueled by the widely distributed cover of an italian game magazine which "leaked" (or just plain invented) that the expansion set would increase the level cap of WoW from 60 to 70. What if that was true?

Assuming that levels 61-70 are gained pretty much like levels 1-60, a raised cap would be good news for the casual players. It would simply make the game longer, with more zones, more quests, and simply more *game* to level up in. Add to that the other rumors about one new race for each side, presumably with new low-level zones as well, and life is good. A bit silly that according to the rumor the Horde gets sexy blood-elves as new race, and the Alliance gets pandaren, a kind of cute panda-colored Ewoks, but the purpose of that would be to make the Horde relatively more attractive and get the two sides more balanced. Obviously doesn't work on everybody, *I* would rather play the panda, but there is a wide-spread theory that sexyness plays a big role in the Horde/Alliance imbalance, and I couldn't blame Blizzard for trying.

For the more hardcore players, level 70 would presumably have new raid dungeons as well, so they'd just make the 10 levels in record time and start tackling new raid content.

But a raised level cap also would have downsides. Most importantly you basically lose all motivation to continue playing your level 60 from now to the release date of the expansion. The way the game works now, you level from 1 to 60 at a pretty steady rate, and then you get stuck at 60. Your only way to advance further before the cap is raised is improving your equipment, which is relatively slow. To get the best level 60 equipment, an immense effort is required, organizing raid groups of up to 40 players for a tiny chance of finding something you need. Raise the level cap, and the reward for all that effort will become pretty much meaningless. The epic level 60 equipment from Molten Core will be considered as junk at level 70. Whether you did Molten Core fifty times or never will not make much of a difference on the power of your character at level 70. Oh, and if you continued questing at level 60, you will have "lost" all the experience rewards from those quests, and will wish you had waited until the cap was raised.

I really wonder what will happen to the current raid dungeons if the level cap is raised. They are designed for large groups of level 60 players. And just like today you would be hard pressed to find 40 level 50 players on any server, after the cap is raised there soon won't be many level 60s around. If players are level 70, they can go to places like Molten Core with much smaller groups, or with groups which are a lot less well organized. The previous pinnacles of achievement will become rather common.

Blizzard might need to adjust some things if the level cap is raised. Monsters that are currently nominally level 61, but hit much harder, could be changed to display their "real" level. The current levels are often set just for things like skinning, where you need 5 times the level of the mob as skill to skin it, and getting beyond 300 is rather difficult. Another thing which might need to be reworked are the talent trees. With another 10 talent points the three different branches of each tree would have to grow, because otherwise everybody could more or less cover two of the three branches, which would be rather boring.

If Blizzard really announces next weekend that next year the level cap will be raised, your best strategy would be stopping to play your level 60 character, and either cancel your account until then, or level up some alternative characters for more choices. I am sure that there will be lots of re-subscriptions because of the expansion set, but right now I wonder if the announcement of a raised level cap wouldn't actually result in many account cancellations. And with Blizzards famously being rather slow to get things out, the subscription numbers might actually dip for quite a while before going up again. You can hear anything from May to December 2006 as rumored release date for the expansion, with the second half of the year being more likely.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:20 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door

I didn't play World of Warcraft this weekend, but about 10 hours of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door on the Gamecube. I finished the epilogue and the first chapter, plus some side-quests, and am now at the start of the second chapter. Part of the fun is certainly just playing something different, but I couldn't shake off the feeling that in spite of the childish look, Paper Mario is more intellectually challenging than World of Warcraft, or other MMORPG.

In Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door you play the title hero, the world famous plumber Mario, who like the other characters in that world is basically two-dimensional in a three-dimensional world. Well, he does have a third dimension, but that one is paper-thin, thus the name. Most of the time you just see Mario and the other characters from the front, behaving like 2D sprites, but you can move in all three dimensions. And during the game Mario learns some new abilities which are based on his paperyness, like the ability to turn sideways and slip through bars, or the ability to fold himself into a paper airplane and fly.

Mario is not alone in this game, but he is gathering other party member as the game progresses. There is always only one active other party member, but you can switch between them. That is necessary, because all the other characters have different special abilities, and only by using these abilities can you overcome the challenges of the game. While the game is fairly linear with its "chapters", you can go back to places you already visited, and by using the new abilities that you gained, or which you got from a new party member, open up new areas. All very well done.

Combat is basically turn-based, although you can do extra damage, and prevent some damage done to you, by pressing the right button at exactly the right moment. Mario has two basic attacks, jumping on enemies or hitting them with a hammer. Some enemies can be hurt by either attack, but some wear a spear or some spikes, and if you jump on them you get hurt. And some enemies are immune to the hammer or other ground-based attacks, because they are flying. During the game you find "badges", some of which allow you to perform special attacks when equipped, like jumping on several enemies in a row. All simple enough, but already more complicated than the typical MMORPG combat. When did your MMORPG warrior last change his weapon from a blade to a blunt weapon, because the skeleton he was fighting took less damage from sharp weapons? WoW has very few monsters with immunities, and then it is often things like immunity to physical damage, or immunity to magical damage, which simply makes some character classes useless, instead of forcing them to attack differently.

Mario is traveling through a colorful world with many obstacles. Some minor "jump and run" is required, but Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door isn't really a platformer game. But it does have features of that sort of games, like switches to hit, keys to collect to open doors, and other simple puzzles like that. Again that is more than the typical MMORPG has. I know exactly 1 secret door in World of Warcraft, opened by clicking on a torch, and the door only leads to one extra boss mob which isn't even needed to complete the dungeon. Where are the places where several people have to stand on switches at the same time to open a door? Where are the puzzles in MMORPG? Well, WoW has Dire Maul North, which does have some puzzle elements, but even those are optional, and you can chose not to do the tribute puzzle and just kill everybody.

What MMORPG do have instead of puzzles is a world which you can learn about. I sometimes call MMORPG "knowledge-based". The longer you play, the more you know about what items can be found where, what level of monsters are in which region, or even how to solve a quest whose explications aren't too specific. The disadvantage of that is that much of this knowledge can't be achieved by logical thinking. You know the level 12 wolves are in that corner, because you passed by them earlier. If you don't know, you surf the internet for a database like Thottbot or Allakhazam, where all that knowledge is stored. And not everything is logical, for example to get wool you need to kill humanoids of a certain level in WoW, while sheep only rarely give wool, and then only if you have the skinning skill. Of course if MMORPG had puzzles, the solution for all the puzzles could probably be found in the databases as well, but nevertheless I think online role-playing games could require a bit more thinking.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:07 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
Players affecting worlds

Once upon a time the internet and MMORPG didn't exist yet, and I was playing play-by-mail (PBM) games. That is basically the same as a MMORPG, only that you play by sending a series of commands to the game company by mail (normal mail, not e-mail), and every 2 weeks or so the game company enters all the commands of all the players into their computer, produces a printout for everybody, and mails it back. Very slow, but you planned every move very carefully, because you didn't get all that many moves per year. And just like MMORPG there were many different games, from simple to complex, with many different approaches to the influence that players could have on the game worlds. This is the story of a game which had a "player-run economy", and how I personally ruined the game.

The game was called Trangrad, and was a very complex simulation of a medieval world. It mixed a political game with a military game and an economic game. As trader, the job I chose, you could buy and equip a medieval craftsman's workshop, hire worker, buy resources, transform them into goods, and try to sell those goods. And the market was supposedly fully dynamic, so if you bought lots of resources which other players weren't providing at the same speed, the prices would go up. And if you produced lots of goods that few people bought, the prices would go down. You only had a limited amount of commands per play period, and doing just about anything was so complex that it took up lots of commands, so progress was very slow. And as not everything was always well explained, I could try out some things only by trial and error, and some of those errors further threw me back in my quest for virtual riches.

One of these errors was that for pulling a cart you needed horses, and somehow I ended up with a horse too much. Not wanting to keep that horse around, and finding that horse prices for some reason were so low that reselling it wasn't an option, I decided to try an obscure command I had found to slaughter the horse. The next printout came back and I had successfully slaughtered the horse, and produced 10 units of meat out of it. That was insofar strange as all other methods to create anything needed a lot more resources and commands. What was also strange was that at current market prices one unit of meat sold for more than the cost of one horse, so getting 10 meat out of one horse was a huge profit.

Now I got creative. Instead of giving my normal orders for my workshop, I dedicated all the commands of my next move to a repeating series of three commands: Buy horses with all my money, slaughter all horses, and sell all meat. I thought that this way I could make a good amount of money, while driving the horse prices up and the meat prices down to more normal levels. What I didn't know was that while prices were calculated from the amounts that people bought and sold, that calculation wasn't done dynamically, but only at the end of the turn. Thus I bought lots of cheap horses, slaughtered them all, sold 10 times more of expensive meat, and repeated that several times on the same order form without the market reacting. When I got my printout back, I was rich beyond my wildest dreams, I was a virtual millionaire.

A day later I got an angry letter from the gamemasters, who after sending out the results had noticed what happened. They basically accused me of being an evil exploiter bent to destroy their world. They had programmed in a limited supply of money for the non-player characters, and my move had got me a full quarter of the worlds money supply, with catastrophic consequences for many parts of the player-run economy. They didn't quite kick me out of the game, but I left voluntarily, part for being angry about the gamemasters, part for the career as trader having become pointless now I was so rich.

Since then, whenever I hear of player demanding to be able to to affect game-worlds more, I think of Trangrad. Software is never fool-proof. Lots of online games were found to have duping bugs or other exploitable bugs, and there will always be players who either are searching for exploits, or are just wanting to know what happens if they use a creative unusual series of commands. The more the players are able to affect the world, the higher are the chances that they will manage to break it.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:32 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
Kill Ten Rats

Just a link to a nice MMORPG blog, Kill Ten Rats. Most blogs have a sidebar with links to other blogs, and I feel a bit impolite of not returning the favor and linking to the blogs that link to me. But the internet being such a transient place, a link page or sidebar requires constant maintenance and checking if the places you linked to are still alive. And I'm simply too lazy for that, sorry. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 2:44 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
Know any good trading games?

Nearly 20 years ago now I was happily playing Ports of Call on the Amiga. Elite was even earlier, I played it on the Sinclair Spectrum. But since then, games which are based on buying, transporting, and selling goods have disappeared. The only modern trading game I can think of right now is EVE Online, but that one has a really nasty form of PvP, where traders are often victims to player pirates.

Curiously in multiplayer online games, many people find trading morally questionable, while "killing" other players is morally okay. If you want your character to have a really, really bad reputation on a WoW server, you just need to buy blue under-priced stuff on the auction house cheap and sell it back with a profit. Soon people in Ironforge / Orgrimmar will curse your name on the general chat. That is probably the result of the transporting part of the trading game missing in these games. It is easier to accept for others that you make a profit from trading if you had to actually do an effort transporting the goods. If you buy and sell at the same place, you are portrayed as exploiting the gullible.

Can anybody suggest a good modern game which involves trading to me? Doesn't have to be a MMORPG, but should involve transport, not just buying and selling on a stock market equivalent.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:55 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments

 
Top-heavy WoW

The French PvP server, Sargeras, on which I am playing my rogue is listed as "full" on the realm list. So yesterday I ran Census+ to count how many players make a server "full". At 9 pm local time there were just over 1,100 players on the Horde side. Given the typical Alliance to Horde ratios, "full" seems to translate to 3,000 players online simultaneously at prime time.

But the real surprise was in the details. A full 51% of the players were level 60, with the remainder being pretty evenly distributed over all levels. No wonder I can't find a group, when there are on average only 10 Horde players at every level except level 60. Pretty unbalanced.

That also explains my observation that it is very hard to find anything "low-level" on the auction house. I looked for daggers, and the lowest level dagger in the AH was level 33. I trained my rogue in blacksmithing and supplied myself and some guild members with level 18 pearl-handled daggers.

I don't think this top-heavy level distribution is good for the game. And in my opinion Blizzards reaction to it is wrong. They are argueing that as so many people are level 60, they need to add more high-level content. But I think it is the fact that the game is skewed towards high-levels which makes people prefer playing their level 60s instead of lower level alts. Somebody starting WoW now is practically forced to solo up to 60, and then will suddenly be expected to know how to play and behave in a 40-man raid.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:17 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
No Advertising

Now that blogs have become so popular, people developed special search engines for them, like Technorati or Google Blogsearch. These enabled me to find some other MMORPG blogs. And looking at them I noticed that most are having advertising on them, powered by Google AdSense.

Now I am not against advertising, and I am not an anti-capitalist. And the idea to have targeted advertising appeals to me, which not offer the visitors of a blog about lets say goldfish some unobtrusive ads for aquarium equipment? But my blog doesn't have advertising, and I have no plans at all to put any of them up, for several reasons:

1) The MMORPG companies I endorse don't use Google Adsense. And many of the companies that do use Google Adsense, I don't want to have anything to do with. Some Google ads I saw about MMORPG I would consider to be scams, especially those that offer to sell you all kind of secrets to easy leveling and gold. These "secrets" are either illegal exploits and will get you banned, or are just a worthless compilation of information you could have gotten for free elsewhere. Many Google Ads are about selling gold or accounts for real money (Real Money Trade, RMT). Now if you want to buy 100 gold in WoW for your level 40 mount, I have no personal problem with that. But be aware that such a transaction can get your account banned in WoW and in several other games, so I definitely don't want to have ads about RMT on this blog. And the last type of MMORPG ads are advertising small MMORPG games, most of which are frankly not very good. So as I would require that ads are useful to my readers, and MMORPG ads generally aren't, I don't use them.

2) Economics. Both Blogger and Blogspot are free, so neither managing nor hosting this blog costs me anything. I can easily recover zero cost with zero advertising revenues. :) Of course receiving large amounts of money for a small modification of my blog sounds tempting, but I have serious doubts that would work. I get just over 100 hits per day at the moment, and even if Google paid me $1 per CPM (thousand views), I'd only earn 10 cents a day. Google doesn't say how much exactly they are paying you unless you actually start putting up the ads, so if you have better information about how much you earn from your blog, I would like to know. But I have the impression that there are many blogs out there which never ever got over Google's $100 threshold, and thus never received any payment at all.

3) Credibility. I am not a journalist, I am "just" a blogger. The disadvantage for my readers is that whatever I write is just my personal opinion, and that I only write about what I play or think about at the moment. But the advantage is that whatever I write is my honest opinion, and not influenced by financial considerations. You can be sure that whatever I write about a game or a company is not influenced by them paying me. Mind you, what I write could still be wrong or just a mule-headed strange opinion, but at least it isn't bought. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 10:33 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments

 
The Horrors of Dell Logistics

Four weeks ago I ordered a computer from Dell, and they accidentally delivered two of them. The good news is that the one computer I unpacked and which I am using to play works perfectly. The bad news is that Dell hasn't managed yet to take the other computer back.

First I agreed on a date with them to come and take the computer. I took a day off work and stayed home all day, but they didn't come. Then I called them again, and they agreed to come on another day on an evening, so I wouldn't have to take a day off. That we tried twice, but Dell didn't come on either of those evenings. Then they called me to tell me that their logistics is unable to come in the evening, but offered to come one afternoon. I took a half-day off yesterday, and guess who didn't show up. I called them again, and they are now trying to sort out things with their logistics before trying again.

Well, it is a bit annoying, and the huge box is taking up space in my appartment. But on the positive side they didn't even try to charge me for the second computer, and if they did I would just contest the charge with my credit card company. So it is their money sitting unproductively in my hallway. If this takes much longer, by the time they get the computer back, they will be unable to disassemble it and sell the components in the next computer, because they will be outdated.

The funny thing is that if I think where to buy the next computer in 2 years or so, I would probably choose Dell again. Dell logistics and customer service might be horribly bad, but if I built the computer myself and it didn't work, I would have no customer service at all. And the other alternative, buying the computer in a shop to which you can bring it when it doesn't work, means higher prices and less choice. I really like the way you can assemble your own computer on the Dell website. Of course in 2 years time there might be some competition for Dell over here in Europe, but right now I have a lot less options than if I lived in the USA. And I'm not sure if the customer service of other mail-order computer companies is much better.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:37 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
www.Tobold.com

Every blog is only partially about its subject matter, the other part is always about the blog's author. So excuse me, while I go on another ego trip. :)

I'm not ashamed to admit that sometimes I like to look how well received this blog is. For example I recently discovered that I come out on top of a search for the term "MMORPG" on Google's new blog search engine. That made me a bit proud, although I'm quite aware that I'm probably cheating on this particular score by using Blogger, which is owned by Google. But normally I just look, and don't do anything special to promote my blog or my name.

That doesn't mean that the name "Tobold" isn't important to me. The name has come to represent that part of my life that is related to my hobbies, computers and games. But as I stole it 20 years ago for my first AD&D character from the annex of the Lord of the Rings, I was never the exclusive holder of that name. When I wrote my first website, I found that other people had taken all possible www.Tobold.somethinguseful spaces, and had to use another name for it. This blog carries my name, here I ran into grammatical difficulties. Tobold.blogspot.com sounded just awful, and Tobold's.blogspot.com wasn't possible, so I had to ditch the apostrophe and go for Tobolds.blogspot.com.

Today I visited GoDaddy, my domain name provider, to look when the domain registration for the website I don't use any more would run out. And just for fun I typed "Tobold" in the search field to see with what they would come up. And to my surprise www.Tobold.com wasn't taken any more, whoever owned it before must have given it up. So I spent $72 for a 10-year lease of www.Tobold.com, and linked the adress to this blog. That is pretty much useless, but somehow owning that domain pleases me immensely. Talk about owning virtual property, it doesn't get any more virtual than a domain with your name on it.

So, if you have trouble remembering Tobolds.blogspot.com, you can use www.Tobold.com from now on, and it will get you to the same place. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 5:34 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
Upcoming MMORPGs

Getting lost between all the announced new MMORPGs and expansion sets? Then head over to Virgin Worlds, a blog specialized in gathering information about the MMORPG of tomorrow. Good to know that somebody is covering those, because I'm too much stuck in the here and now and I dislike searching the rumor mills for useable information. Virgin Worlds is offering well written summaries of what is to come, and has a useful sidebar with release dates.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:44 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments

 
City of Villains Review

This weekend I was among thousands of players stress testing the City of Villains beta. And as the NDA now has been lifted, it is time for a review. City of Villains is a curious mixture between a stand-alone game, and an expansion set for City of Heroes. You don't need CoH to play CoV, but certain features are only accessible if you own both. And the monthly fee is the same $14.95 whether you play CoH, CoV, or both.

The main part of City of Villains is a slightly improved version of an evil-flavored City of Heroes. You create a new character, a supervillain, and start leveling from level 1 in a new city, Rogue Isles. All the zones are new, looking like darker, dirtier versions of the zones in Paragon City. The tutorial has you breaking out of prison, and from there you follow the trail of missions given to you by your contacts. Most of these missions lead you into instanced dungeons, which are created randomly from building blocks of one of several tile sets. There are both new tile sets and all the tile sets already available from City of Heroes, so with the number of sets about doubled, the missions are slightly less repetitive.

The whole quest system is pretty much identical to the one of CoH, with the small addition of a newspaper, which allows you to chose between three mission objectives. Rarely you are asked to rob a bank or a casino, most missions only differ in flavor text from the City of Heroes missions. You "kidnap" the guy at the end of the instance, instead of liberating him, or you "steal" the drugs instead of destroying them. And like in CoH, you only have a very limited number of contacts, forcing you into a nearly linear story progression. There is no way to skip or abandon a mission, if you get stuck with a too difficult mission you can only solve the problem by leveling up in the city zones, or by getting somebody of higher level to help you. Grouping with people of equal level doesn't help you much, as the number of mobs in the instances simply scales up with the number of people in the group.

The highlight of City of Villains is the character creation, which has even more different options of costume creation than the already rich City of Heroes. Besides all sorts of clothing items you can now also have monstrous body parts. CoV offers 5 new character classes, of which 4 are variations of CoH classes. The 5th class, the Mastermind, introduces the first pet class into the game, giving you the choice between ninjas, mercenaries, zombies, or robots to fight for you. I played a Mastermind to level 12 in the beta weekend, and found him to be very powerful. I chose ninjas as primary power, and dark as secondary, which gave me a debuff which healed me and the ninjas standing close to me every couple of seconds, so my pets only very rarely got killed. At level 6 the first ninja summoning spell produces 2 ninjas instead of 1, and at level 12 I got a second spell, which allowed me to summon an additional ninja of a more powerful type. So at level 12 I already had 3 pets fighting for me, which made most missions rather easy.

The only other class I tried was the Brute, which was depressingly similar to the Tanker I used to play in CoH. The Tanker has defense as primary power and melee as secondary, while the Brute has melee as primary power and defense a secondary. The melee power sets of the Brute are different from those of the Tanker, but the defense power sets are identical. The other three classes are the Stalker, which is a kind of Scrapper, the Dominator, which is a kind of Controller, and the Corruptor, which is similar to the Blaster. Each of the new classes offers some new power sets and abilities, but except for the Mastermind there isn't anything radically different from City of Heroes.

What is new in City of Villains is PvP. Unfortunately there was no way to test PvP during the beta, so I can't say much about it. The only thing that was already available was building bases. A base is a kind of guild headquarter, to which all guild members can contribute. Whenever you fight in supergroup mode, you earn prestige points for your guild. These prestige points can then be spent by the guildmaster to construct rooms in the base, with the ultimate purpose of creating all the rooms and infrastructure necessary to hold an item of power, which gives a bonus to all guild members. But once your base is big enough for that, it can also be attacked by players of the opposing faction, heroes can attack villain bases, and villains can attack hero bases. There is a sort of raid calendar built into the game, so the attackers won't find the base undefended. So the PvP will take place in the bases, between good and evil guilds. I wonder how balanced that will be, especially since leveling in CoV/CoH is relatively slow, and the heroes have 18 month of advance over the villains.

There is now also a kind of crafting system. While you kill mobs in supergroup mode, you can now earn salvage items. These can be transformed in the bases workshop into components, from which new items for the base can be created. This offers another possibility for the guild members to contribute to the base. On the one side having a big project for all guild members to participate to is a very good idea, as it binds the guild closer together. On the other side base building is not a straight-forward process, mistakes can easily be made, and lots of prestige points can be wasted. In the default setting only the guildmaster can edit the base, but he can give that right to other ranks in the guild. But however you set it up, one guy can waste prestige points earned by other people. You might want to contribute to get some defense guns installed, and then whoever edits the base buys decorative items for the base instead, or vice versa. It's a sort of multiplayer The Sims house building game, which will require a lot of planning and organization in each guild to get it right.

All in all City of Villains is a good game. If you haven't played City of Heroes yet, you should pick up a copy of CoV, it offers some improvements over the original. Especially the bigger number of tile sets for instances is essential. On the other extreme are the fans of City of Heroes, which will definitely want to pick this one up. Unfortunately I fall squarely between these two groups. Last year I got bored by the pseudo-linear mission system in repetitive instances of City of Heroes after only a few months. And City of Villains mainly offers more of the same, so I am not going to buy this. City of Villains is what you would expect from an expansion set: Additional content and improvements. But if you didn't like the original all that much, the expansion will not change that.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:07 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
WoW Patch v1.8

I was on a business trip all of Wednesday, so I downloaded the v1.8 WoW patch only today, and haven't had the chance to see anything of it yet. But according to the patch notes there isn't anything world-shaking in there.

I do like their new approach to Alterac Valley battleground, starting it with 20 people instead of 30, and not letting more Alliance than Horde into it. I have to see how the other changes of that battleground work out in practice.

I couldn't care less about the new epic dragons. I find monsters on the world map which need a raid group to kill rather stupid. That only leads to problems if different guilds want to kill the mob at the same time.

Silithus I will have to check out, can't say yet if the changes there are good or bad. I'm a bit sceptic of their idea to create ways for solo players to achieve epic items by quests. Either the quest is easy enough that a casual solo player is actually able to do it in a reasonable time, and then you get an epic item mudflation. Or the quest is as difficult as the reward is epic, and then a casual player needs many weeks to grind something to achieve it. I hope they have gone for the mudflation version.

The changes to weapons are minor, and good in my opinion. I never liked the idea of rogues going for slow, heavy weapons and then using some sort of weapon switch macro for abilities that need a dagger. My rogue has a very nice level 20 blue dagger, received from a guild mate, and I don't plan to use swords in my main hand, only for the off-hand.

Druids got reviewed and are able to respec. But just by reading the patch notes the changes seemed minor to me. Long time I haven't played a druid, so I might be mistaken here.

All in all the v1.8 patch came very quickly after the v1.7 patch, but adds a lot less new content. Obviously I much prefer patches that add new dungeons and stuff. I still have to check out Silithus, but I had the impression that the amount of new content with this patch was limited.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:06 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Teamspeak

The French guild I'm in uses Teamspeak voice chat to communicate in groups. So Saturday I bought a headset with microphone, and yesterday I finally got it working correctly. Setting up a microphone in Windows is not a trivial task, it isn't exactly plug-n-play. The Teamspeak program itself is well done, and works without problems. It is rather the sound card with its drivers and the mixer that is hard to set up.

So my new rogue went on a guild group to Wailing Caverns, using Teamspeak. I can see how that is attractive to people who don't like typing. But personally I'm not convinced. The headset was pressing on my ears, so after a couple of hours of wearing it they hurt. And worst of all, my wife doesn't like me using the headset, she feels locked out somehow. So I don't think I'll be using this system much. Maybe a switch-activated desktop microphone would be better.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:50 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
Terminator against violence

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California signed a bill that is supposed to protect minors from violent video games. For somebody who based his career on making violent movies, that is pretty strange. Why should the same scene that is legal in a movie be illegal in a video game? I think that the Terminator still has a lot of friends in the movie business, and they would like to have a monopoly on violence, because it sells so well.

Now how much violence should be available to children of what age is a matter of endless debate. I wouldn't let a 12-year-old play GTA:Vice City or San Andreas. But neither would I want him to see a typical Quentin Tarrantino movie, and some of the more violent Schwarzenegger movies. Video games are media just like movies, and should be treated equally.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:45 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
WoW Journal - 10-October-2005

So as my D&D group started over on a French PvP server, Horde side, I created an orc rogue there and played him all weekend long. As it was a long weekend, I made it to level 18. And playing the rogue was fun, but it made me think about the replayability value of World of Warcraft.

Because the origin of the fun was the different play style of the rogue class, getting new abilities every two levels, and approaching situations differently, e.g. by stealth. But at the same time I just couldn't stand most low level Horde quests any more. Having played a Horde warrior to 60, priest to 35, shaman to 30, plus a bunch of lower level characters, I simply did every available quest at least once. And the Barrens I already did two or three times. The WoW quests are all very nice the first time you do them, but the second time is boring, and the third time round you just don't want to do them any more. So I did some quests that I had looked up for specific rewards I wanted, some quests together with friends, but others I just refused.

I still haven't played all classes beyond level 10. I'd really like to try mage for example. But the replayability for me is not limited by a lack of character classes, but by a lack of new quests. I sure hope the expansion set, long as we have to wait for it, at least adds new low-level zones with new quests, and not just high-level raid dungeons.

The alternative to doing quests is grinding, killing the same mobs over and over. That is less interesting than doing a new quest, but not much less interesting than doing a quest you already know. You don't get the quest reward xp and items, but in return you lose less time running around. So in comparison to a quest that gives some item you can't use anyway, you're not worse off if you grind.

One nice spot I found for my rogue was the murlocs in Silverpine Forest, along the lake. Now murlocs are unpleasant to kill with some classes, like the warrior, because they tend to run away and alert others. But with a rogue they are easy enough, because you can either kill them quickly with Eviscerate when they are low on hitpoints, or backstab them when they turn to flee. Sap takes care of the places where there are several murlocs at once. And because few people hunt murlocs, and they have a high chance of having a treasure chest in their villages, the loot isn't worse than typical quest rewards at that level. I even got a rare potion recipe for potion of swiftness from one of the chests. And as these potions sell for 70 silver for a *single* potion, with the recipe selling for 15 gold, that was quite a find. I gave it to my alchemist friend, who made me some of those potions. Quite useful on a PvP server.

The trick with grinding is to chose mobs that are 2 to 4 levels lower than you are. You can kill a lot more per hour of those than you could kill mobs of equal level to you, and the xp per kill are only slightly lower. As an added bonus the murlocs drop small barnacled clams, which contain either small lustrous pearls, or clam meat. With the clam meat I skilled up my cooking, while the pearls were useful to make pearl-handled daggers. Yes, I did blacksmithing with my rogue, an unusual profession, but necessary in this case. The server I am on is one of the old ones, and on the AH there are simply no items below level 30 sold. So smithed daggers are the best weapons I can get hold of at the moment. The pearl-handled daggers at level 18 are especially nice. Unfortunately the next daggers that can be smithed are from a rare level 20 recipe, and then the next are level 31. So I hope I can get something good from the dungeons in the meantime, there are some nice dungeons in the 20's, Wailing Caverns, Shadowfang Keep, Blackfathom Depths.

I don't know yet how much I will play this rogue. Up to now I had no non-consentual PvP problems, but those will start at level 20. And in the new guild lots of people took rogues, for PvP, so making balanced groups for dungeons won't always be easy. We did Ragefire Chasm with 3 rogues, 1 mage, and 1 druid, not exactly a perfect mix. But for the moment playing the rogue is nice enough, I enjoy being a damage machine for a change.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:00 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Not a good week

I'm having a decidedly bad week. Lots of stress at work. In spite of that stress I had to take a day off yesterday, so Dell could come and take the second computer back. And, you guessed it, they didn't come. Although I don't usually shout at people, I guess I was rather unfriendly to a hapless Dell representative on the phone yesterday evening. Well, at least they promised to come today, after work hours, which they don't usually do. I don't know yet what to do if they again don't come.

My virtual life isn't much better. Our guild continues, in spite of all officers having left or resigned, but obviously there are now even less people available to group with. Yesterday we joined with another allied guild to do some Arathi Basin battles, but unfortunately we lost all 4 battles we tried. Anyone got any good tactics for there, which would allow you to win against a bunch of unkillable paladins in epic gear? Well, at least I got enough honor points to keep my Sergeant's rank.

It isn't exactly a consolation to me that my French speaking friends from my D&D group had even worse luck with their guild. They had found a guild not unsimilar to mine, large, but friendly. But then that guild merged with another guild to form an uber-guild, going on raids every day. For a while that was great, they killed up to 9 bosses in Molten Core on a single Sunday and got 25 epic items. But now there was some internat conflict, and the uber-guild dissolved. So now the members of the large but friendly guild are going to start a new guild on a new server, PvP this time, and restart from zero. They asked me whether I wouldn't want to come, but the problem is that due to different family situations they rarely all play at the same time, and as they play different numbers of hours per week, they tend to level at different speeds. Maybe I'll create a character there and at least have a look.

The alternative would be continueing to level my priest, who just hit level 35. At level 35 I discovered that while I now was able to visit the master trainers of tailoring and enchanting to lift my skill cap from 225, that visit isn't that easy. The master enchanting trainer is *in* the instanced dungeon of Uldaman, a you need to kill lots of level 39 to 42 elite mobs, and hordes of scorpions, to get to him. A friendly level 60 guild mate guided me there, through the Uldaman back door, but I died a couple of times. And while I now have no more skill cap, I will need to go to the trainer again to learn his recipes. Other than that the priest is fun enough to play now, fully shadow specced. Soloing most of the time, but sometimes I meet people somewhere hunting the same mobs as me, and it's easy to persuade them to group when you are a priest. I can see me leveling Kyroc, the priest, slowly to level 60, always using up the rest xp. I don't think I want to play him all the time, and level without the xp bonus.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:46 PM Permanent Link  (6) comments

 
Slowly drifting out of WoW

My guild imploded this weekend, with all of the officers and the guild master resigning, and many of them leaving. That was pretty much inevitable, the guild had been drifting for some time. A guild is a complex structure balancing personal freedom against the need to cooperate, and my guild was leaning more and more towards the personal freedom part, until it tipped over. At level 60 there are several different activities one can pursue, raiding, doing 5-man groups, or PvP, but each of them requires other people. Some guilds specialize in only one activity, for example a guild I know on a French server is specialized in raiding, and does not allow their members to waste too much time in PvP. If you want to do everything as a guild, the trick is to rotate, doing raids one day, PvP the next, and 5-man groups to equip the members on the third day. In our guild there were not enough people ready to do anything else but their favorite activity, and the guild policy was to not exert any pressure on anybody. So we had lots of situations where for example the only priest online was doing PvP in a pickup group, while the players who wanted to visit a dungeon couldn't go without a healer. Saturday we even had a 4-man group with healer and tank, but of the 20 people online nobody could be bothered to leave whatever he was doing to make a guild group of 5 possible. Of course if there are no more guild groups, people quickly lose any interest in the guild, and then in WoW itself, and either leave the guild for another one, or quit the game.

Now I'm not a big fan of military style uber guilds where everybody only does what he is told. But I think successful guild leadership consists of exerting gentle pressure on the members to cooperate more. Unfortunately that is a rather stressful job, and I don't blame anybody if he doesn't want to do it. I ran a guild in Dark Age of Camelot pretty successfully, until all the members came to me with their personal or inter-personal problems, expecting me to sort it all out, and in the end it was too much stress and I quit the game. And of course how much leadership is required is also a function of the game design. Blizzard with World of Warcraft is to blame in making level 60 content so dependant on having the right group composition, and the raid content dependant on having so many well organized people.

So the current plan for the guild is to wait for City of Villains to come out, and play that. Sure, I'll be there, at least for a while. I resubscribed to City of Heroes already, but found that the game hadn't changed all that much since I left. A nice addition was that besides sidekicks (temporarily raising somebodies level) there are now also exemplars (temporarily lowering somebodies level). But the mission dungeons seem still to be the same old tile sets of sewer, warehouse, abandoned warehouse, office building, abandoned office building, cave, with laboratories added at higher levels. I left because I was bored of seeing these over and over again, and they are still boring. So I'll only play a bit of CoH to get into the controls again, and then see how CoV is when it comes out end of the month.

I'm not quitting WoW yet, but I plan to play a lot less. No more spending whole evenings with my level 60 logged on waiting for a guild group that never happens. If there is something announced on the guild forums, I'll be there. And I might play my cleric occasionally, or my shaman teamed up with my wife's mage. My D&D group is thinking of forming a permanent WoW group on a French PvP server, which plays at a fixed time during the week, always together. That could be fun too. But the WoW addiction is gone, and that leaves me more time to have a look at other games too.

I'll play some of the games I bought during the last year, and never had time to play. Sunday I started Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, on the Gamecube, and it is fun. Fun because it is mainly "turn-based", not requiring the reflexes of a guy half my age to succeed. And for me the most important thing is gameplay, I don't mind if the characters are overly cute and childish. Whether you kill a cute Goomba or a hellish demon doesn't matter, what matters is what exactly you have to do for that kill, whether there is thinking and strategy involved, or how twitchy it is. I'm not old enough yet to regress into childishness, but I found that games designed for children are often more fun than games designed for teenagers, because the teenager games are often just offering needless graphical violence and hyper-fast action instead of good gameplay. I like a game like Legend of Zelda Wind Waker more than I like the Doom or Half-life family. But maybe that is just because I was able to finish Legend of Zelda, while in a first person shooter I die around the first corner.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:37 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments

 
ROSE Online mini-review

ROSE stands for "Rush On Seven Episodes", but it might as well be "Ragnarok Online Second Edition", both being from the same Korean company, Gravity. The gameplay is the same as in Ragnarok, only that ROSE has beautiful 3D graphics, instead of pseudo-3D sprites. The game is very cute, but simple. But the biggest difference between ROSE and European games is how crowded it is.

In European games, you or your group can often hunt in a lonely corner of a huge world, and not meet anybody for some time. There are places where you are more likely to meet people, and then there are cities, some of which are crowded. In ROSE, any area you go to looks like the place between bank and auction house in Ironforge or Orgrimmar, teeming with people. Monsters respawn every couple of seconds and combats are all over the place. Accidental killstealing happens often, but isn't really a problem, because the first guy to hit a mob tags it, and gets its loot. Other people doing damage to it just share the xp proportionally. And combats only last a few seconds anyway. But it all feels a bit like having a swordfight in a shopping mall, there are so many people around you all the time.

You start as visitor on a newbie island, and start killing jelly beans and other cute looking mobs. At level 10 you can do a quest to chose one of 4 possible primary jobs, and at level 100 each class divides into two secondary classes. The highest level seems to be 150. Every level you get points to distribute between your stats. The current world is small, but they are planning to have 7 different "planets" to chose from later.

Combat consists of clicking on a mob and autoattacking. You can also use skills, which use up mana points. Then you have food and drink, which you can consume *during* the fight to regenerate hitpoints and mana. Using lots of food and drink during a fight allows you to kill tougher mobs, but you risk spending more money on the fight than you earn from it. You can also form groups and hunt together, but I didn't really see the point of doing so in this game.

Loot often consists of materials. One of the 4 classes, the dealer, can learn skills to turn materials into items. Or you sell the stuff to other players or NPC and buy weapons, armor, and other stuff. There is no auction house, but any player can open a mini-shop anywhere, buying and selling goods. Thus like in Ragnarok, all cities and often passed places like bridges are littered with shops. It is very difficult to find things, as you need to click through dozens of unsorted shops, not a very good shopping experience. Items have minimum levels and stats, so only if you put lots of points in e.g. strength will you be able to wield that huge axe.

Sound I usually don't mention, but it this case it was so bad that my wife asked me to turn it off. There seemed to be just one short tune on autoloop ad infinitum. In addition there are a couple of combat noises, and that's it.

This is certainly not a game I would be paying for, but playing it for a day was strangely relaxing. Very simple, cute, and a bit mindless. Apparently a lot of kids playing, from all over the world. Ragnarok has a free trial, I hope ROSE will have the same. Worth having a look at.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:53 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
ROSE Online open beta

ROSE Online is offering an open beta via Fileplanet. No, I don't know much about ROSE Online. But how could I resist downloading an open beta to a game where the mobs look cute like this?

- posted by Tobold @ 7:57 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
Word verification

Sorry for the inconvenience, but I had to turn on comment word verification to keep my blog from getting spammed with comments like this one (fake comment at bottom of page). It seems that badly programmed bots are adding comments to people's blogs, trying to direct readers to the site they are marketing.

Blogger prevents that with a method called "word verification". Basically when you enter a comment, they shows you a word which is shown as image, so a bot can't read it. You need to type that word in the verification box before sending your comment.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:12 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments