Children, Media, and Sex

The New York Times has an article on "Impact of the Media on Adolescent Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors". Now that wouldn't usually be something I'd write about, if the article wasn't so totally idiotic. The article cites "sexual references and images from television, in movies and video games, in music, in magazines and on Web sites" as dangerous influences on teenagers, but mostly goes on discussing television.

About the internet it only says: "As for the Internet, one national survey of 10- to-17-year-olds found that one in five had "inadvertently encountered explicit sexual content, and one in five had been exposed to an unwanted sexual solicitation while online." What it fails to mention is the other four in five teenagers had voluntarily encountered sexual content on the internet while searching for it.

In my humble opinion it is absolutely useless to worry about a risque joke in an episode of "Friends", or Janet Jackson's boob hanging out during Super Bowl, while your kid has free access to the internet. Sexual content on television, in movies, video games, music and magazines tends to be very harmless in comparison to the hardcore freely available on the internet. The internet has no limits to any sort of sexual perversion, a fact jokingly referred to already long ago in the creation of the newsgroup alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.bestiality.hamster.duct-tape. Most filtering software simply doesn't work, and any healthy teenage boy will be motivated and clever enough to find sexual images on the internet. Especially if you just sent him up to his room because you didn't approve of him watching a scantily dressed Britney Spears on MTV.

Pretending to a 17-year old that there is no such thing as sex, and trying to keep all possible information about it away from him simply won't work. Parents should brave the difficult but important challenge of talking with their children about sex, and that includes talking about porn, and the use of sexual images for marketing purposes. These are facts of life, and it is much better to provide some guidance for your children than to let them find out for themselves. Having talked with your daughter about Playboy magazine now might prevent the nasty surprise of finding her being the centerfold during her college years.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:45 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
EQ2 and the dangers of expanding

In November 2004 two major MMORPG were released, Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft, and that was widely seen as some sort of head-on battle. Now EQ2 is quite a successful game, having reached as many subscribers as the original Everquest. But of course in direct comparison with World of Warcrafts success, many people regarded EQ2 as a failure. Nevertheless, in one aspect EQ2 is clearly leading, beating WoW 2:0 in released expansion sets. And now this expansion is causing some trouble, which might serve as a warning to WoW.

Basically what happened was that the number of zones in the game nearly doubled, you might call it "Tobold's 40% per expansion rule". :) But while the number of zones grew, the number of players per server staid constant. Thus the average number of players per zone dropped, and the lesser populated servers began to feel empty.

In a producer's letter SOE is now announcing countermeasures. There will be first some free voluntary character transfers, and afterwards some emptier servers will be closed and the characters from them moved to other servers.

World of Warcraft will be expanding its number of zones as well, when the Burning Crusade expansion comes out in the second half of 2006. And with servers being limited to about 3,000 players, adding zones will also dilute the average number of players per zone. In general we can expect older zones to become deserted, while newer zones might be overcrowded at the start. I remember visiting Everquest after some years of inactivity, and finding all the zones that I remembered as being most popular now being totally void of players. While there is little risk of Blizzard adding expansion sets to World of Warcraft too fast, in the long run the thinning out of players per zone is something that will inevitably happen.

Now I believe that 3,000 players per server is a limitation that might be overcome with new hardware. My favorite solution would be to increase the total limit to 4,000, and then introduce separate limits of 2,000 players for Horde and Alliance. Thus the Alliance would experience no change, and the Horde would get some room to grow, for ultimately a better balance between the factions. That would make PvP a lot more viable, and even enable Blizzard to introduce a more interesting DAoC RvR type of PvP. And at the same time adding 33% more players to each server would counteract the dilution of players caused by the addition of new zones.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:06 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
WoW Journal - 30-Jan-2006

I had quite a nice weekend in World of Warcraft. I'm trying to concentrate on leveling Kyroc, my priest, who made it to level 47, unfortunately using up all of his rest xp bonus. But often there are guild activities that require a level 60, so I'm still playing my warrior a lot.

The greatest thing was a guild mate organizing a LBRS 5-man for me, so I could get the remaining gems for the UBRS key, and the first quest in the Onyxia key quest chain. That was one of the best groups I've been with for some time, we totally owned the place. 3 hours in LBRS and not a single wipe. We took a couple of shortcuts to the end boss, and arrived there is record time. There I got the first of two missing gems, but we couldn't find the documents for the Warlord's command quest. So we went back to the start and killed the other two bosses that normally have the documents, found the other missing gem, but still no documents. Meanwhile monsters had respawned, and we had to kill the pyromancers and spiders again. Passing the ogres for the second time I finally found the documents there. They must have despawned elsewhere and respawned there, I'm sure they weren't there when we first passed. On the whole trip we were quite lucky with loot, found a libram and a codex, a couple of nice blues, and a recipe for greater fire protection potion that I was missing.

The really interesting thing with that group was that I was one of two warriors, the other members being a priest, a mage, and a rogue. Two warriors turned out to be a lot more useful than I would have thought. True, when fighting only one mob, the second warrior is only a mediocre damage dealer. But during a long dungeon trip, there is always something going wrong, a surprising patrol, a resisted or breaking spell, somebody accidentally targeting a sheeped or sapped mob. And then when you fight more than one mob at a time, having a second warrior buys you the time to get everything back under control. As I said, 3 hours and not a single wipe.

On Sunday I participated in a raid to Molten Core. That was actually part two of a raid that I hadn't participated in on Friday, so Lucifron and Magmadar were already dead. Magmadar dead meant no more patrolling doggies, which enabled us to reach the next boss, Gehennas, in a very short time. That was the first time I fought that boss. We killed him on the first try, although at the end 90% of the group was dead as well. Lets call it a draw. He dropped two epic items, one of them being plate boots for warriors, but with 8 warriors in the raid I ended up losing that roll. I didn't mind that, it was nice to have at least had a chance to roll on it.

But what I did mind was that as one of eight warriors in a MC raid I felt like a sheep in a big herd. Although technically 2 warriors in a group of 5 is a higher concentration than 8 warriors in a raid of 40, in the group of 5 I was feeling as if I had a big contribution to the success of the group, while in the raid I was just chugging along. So when another guild mate logged on and asked if he could have a spot in the raid, I left, and let him have my spot. Which turned out to be a wise decision, as the raid had difficulties killing the next boss, Garr, which lead to the usual unpleasantries: repeated wipes, lots of waiting, and bickering between the participants. I was happy I came and had a look at Gehennas, but equally happy when I got out again. These big raids are just not my thing, even if they go well.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:01 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Lunar Festival

Yesterday the Lunar Festival holiday event started in World of Warcraft. That is basically the WoW version of the chinese new year, with fireworks and chinese clothing. And that in itself is a good thing. More than half of the WoW players are Asian, so why should only Anglo-American holidays like Halloween and Christmas be celebrated in the game?

I did the main Lunar Festival quests with both Raslebol and Kyroc. With Raslebol because the quest is about killing a level 63 elite boss mob with 100k hit points. Then with Kyroc, because it turned out that in this case you just need to jump around over the mobs dead body, regardless on how much you actually contributed to killing him. The reward is a lantern that turns solid stones into Elune stones. Unfortunately it seems that the Elune stones don't do anything useful, they just produce a column of moonlight for show. Not very useful for Raslebol, but at least Kyroc got a big bunch of experience points for the quest.

Another part of the Lunar Festival is to visit the Elders, which are stationed in pretty much every village of Azeroth. Each one gives you one coin, and you can exchange 5 coins for chinese style clothing, a pant suit or a dress. I took a blue pant suit for Raslebol and a pink dress for Kyroc. :) Kyroc is running around in robes all the time anyway, he might as well wear dresses.

The last feature of the Lunar Festival are the fireworks, but unlike the other fireworks in the game they can only be used at specific points, where there are firework launchers.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:19 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
WoW warrior blues

I had the impression that the class mix on a typical WoW server is changing with time. To test this theory, I logged onto old and new servers, and ran Censusplus on each of them, and there is a clear trend: Classes which are most sought-after for forming groups are increasing with time, while classes which have problems getting a group invite decrease with time.

The most striking examples are priests, which double their population with server age. For example on the relatively young Bronzebeard server only 5% of players play a priest, while on the much older Runetotem server the number went up to 10%. At the same time the hunter population went down from 21% to 14%. At first I thought that this is simply an equalizing effect, making all classes equally popular in the long run. But the numbers for warriors disprove that, going up from 19% to 21%.

Unfortunately that makes warriors the most popular class, one in five players in playing a warrior. Every group wants to have a warrior, but they usually don't want to have two of them. On our last 15-man guild raid, 5 players had a warrior. That is not only inefficient, but also means that any warrior loot is highly contested. You end up with a class that is often superfluous, heavily dependant on gear, and at the same time having the most difficulties to improve its gear.

In spite of the number of priest rising quickly, there are still only half as many of them around as there are warriors, which makes them clearly the better choice for getting invited into groups and raids. And priests are less dependant on the quality of their equipment. Another good choice is mage, which due to crowd control by sheeping and AoE spells are often needed in groups. If you want to go off the beaten track, the least popular class is Warlock, and due to teleports and soulstones, plus some AoE, they are good for groups as well.

Me, I'm having the warrior blues with Raslebol, and am thinking of semi-retiring him again, to concentrate on getting my priest to level 60. But currently I'm playing both about half of the time. That has clear advantages of giving the priest more rest bonus xp for faster leveling, more variety of play styles, and the opportunity of gaining stuff with the higher-level that can be handed down to the lower level one. It just is frustrating sometimes when you can't get into a group because there are too many warriors already, or you do get in but are clearly superfluous.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:19 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
DDO release date

Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach has announced a release date for North America of February 28. But I will wait for the European release. DDO is all about going to instanced dungeons in a group, which means your enjoyment of the game will much depend on your ability to find a group. I have no idea whether I could somehow import the US version of DDO, but I am pretty sure that the time zone difference would make it very hard for me to find a group. So I'd rather stay local on this one, even if it means that I have to wait a couple of months longer.

My advice to American readers: Play a priest! I haven't played any group-based MMORPG yet in which healers were not the most sought-after class for forming groups. And unlike WoW, the D&D priests can wear plate armor, making them a reasonable choice even for the occasional solo adventure.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:07 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Prediction of time to 70

Taking the data from Playon, it is relatively easy to extrapolate the time needed to level 70, with the big caveat that this presumes that the leveling curve remains the same. We just plot all the data points of the measured accumulated time to level from 1 to 60, and do a power law regression of order 2 through the points. Checking whether this is reasonable is done by calculating the R² factor, the closer to 1 the better, which in this case gives us an excellent 0.9995.

Then we just need to extrapolate the trendline to level 70. The result is that it will take the average player about 8 days (200 hours) to level from level 60 to 70. The total leveling time from 1 to 70 is about 28 days, or 700 hours.

As always in statistics, extrapolation is dangerous. And in any case there will be a wide variation between the most hardcore players and the most casual players, the data on which the calculation is based is just an average. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the first person to hit level 70 does so only one week after the expansion comes out.

But for the average casual player the interesting point is that by adding 10 levels from 60 to 70, you don't add 1/6th or 17% to the game, you add a full 40%. If it took you 5 months of casual gaming to reach level 60, the expansion will add another 2 months of content to the game. Now that would be an advertising slogan to print on the expansion box:

"World of Warcraft : Now 40% more fun!"

- posted by Tobold @ 4:25 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
Meta-level

Last night, playing World of Warcraft, I was on a 15-man raid to UBRS. All 15 were level 60. But some had just reached level 60, and their equipment was mostly green. Others, like me, had done already numerous dungeon runs to the minor level 60 places, like Blackrock Spire, Scholomance, Stratholme, or Dire Maul, and thus their equipment was mostly blue items. And a third group was regularly doing raids to ZG and MC, and they had already a couple of epic purple items. Furthermore the most dedicated players had the most expensive enchantments on their equipment, and who knows what from other rewards you receive when you just grind enough.

In short, while we were all level 60, our relative strength varied over a wide range. And then I realized that this isn't something limited to level 60, although it is most visible there. My very first level 30 character, with little knowledge and even less money, was much less well equipped than my level 30 twinks on Runetotem, who benefited from the experience I had with WoW by then, and had the money handed down from the level 60.

Theoretically one should take all the stats of a character, assign a weight factor to each of them, and arrive at a complicated formula to calculate your "meta-level". Somebody with character level 30 and very bad equipment would arrive at a meta-level of maybe 28. The average casual player would have character level equal to meta-level. And the power gamer twink would maybe have 3 or 4 meta-levels more than his character level is.

The interesting thing is that your meta-level determines how easy it is for you to kill a monster of a certain level. But the rewards for killing the monster depend mostly on your character level. If your meta-level is higher than your character level, you gain experience points faster, and you character level catches up to your meta-level. If your meta-level is lower, then you advance slower, which gives you more opportunities to improve your gear and get your meta-level up.

The "what to do at level 60" discussion is often simply about continueing to raise your meta-level. That is possible, but compared to the speed of advancing character levels and meta-level more or less in parallel from 1 to 60, raising your meta-level from 60 to 61, 62, or maybe at the most 63 is extremely slow. That would not matter if that was the only thing to do. But unless the leveling curve in the Burning Crusade expansion is extremely different from the 1 to 60 leveling curve, it will be a lot faster to advance to character level and meta-level of 63 in the expansion. Extrapolating from the scientific measurements of Playon, the average player will take between 50 and 70 hours to go from level 60 to level 63 in the expansion. Right now, staying at character level 60 and gaining a meta-level of 63 (full epic gear) easily takes ten times as many hours. So your choice is basically "climb the mountain now", or "wait until the cable car is installed". You can get a head start with the climbing option, but it will cost you a lot of effort. Most casual players will probably prefer the much easier cable car option, which will get them to the same point later, but with a lot less effort.

As usual I'm caught a bit in the middle. I would estimate my meta-level on Raslebol to be about 61 to 62. Seeing the cable car under construction I really don't want to spend too much effort on advancing my meta-level further by raiding. On the other hand, raiding is what the other guild members want to do, and I would rather play with them than alone. So I do sign up for the occasional raid, but I don't do the PvP and farming solo grinding part of advancing my meta-level. I'd rather level up another character, my priest, to level 60. Because that maximizes my chance of being able to play with my friends, being able to provide either a tank or a healer.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:55 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
More WoW at 60

Gamespy has a "WoW at 60" page listing the major quests and dungeons to do at level 60 in World of Warcraft. Seems to be a hot issue at the moment, showing that more and more casual players reach level 60, and feel kind of lost there, due to not having the time and social network required for raiding.

I still think Blizzard should introduce advanced character classes, encouraging you to start over with a new character class, which only opens up when you reach level 60 with one standard character. Final Fantasy XI does something similar, though there the advanced classes open up from quests performed at level 30, and work with their class switch system.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:39 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
WoW Journal - 23-January-2006

After a week of absence and very little play, I relaxed this weekend and played a lot of WoW. For the moment I have three "active" characters: My level 60 warrior Raslebol on Runetotem, my level 45 priest Kyroc on the same server, and my level 31 hunter Waldin on Bronzebeard.

Basically Raslebol is my "main" by default, him having the highest level. What he probably *should* do is trying to get better gear by going on raids with the guild. But unfortunately my guild has a large excess of warriors, and as I am not the worlds most avid raider, I tend to sign up for raids a bit too late. We have a system in which we raid together with other guilds, and the first X people to sign up get a spot, with the remaining spots going to people with classes that are needed, which usually means healers. I would have liked to go to Molten Core with the guild this weekend, but having signed up only on Saturday after I came back from the USA, I was too late for a guaranteed spot, and there were already more than enough warriors, so I didn't get a "needed class" spot either. I can probably forget about raiding under this system, because I can't always say much in advance whether I'll be available on a specific date, thus I'll never get a spot with the warrior.

Which explains why I am leveling my priest. Priest is not the most fun class to solo level. He is efficient enough, but only if he uses one specific strategy, based on being a shadow priest, shielding himself and shooting with a good wand. That works quite well, but is a bit boring. On the positive side, the priest is only my second character who got as high as level 45, so I now manage to find some quests I never did with Raslebol. Finding a group on Runetotem, on the Horde side, is hard, because there are just not that many players below level 60 left. But once I managed to hit level 60 with the priest, and re-specced to holy, I should be useful and needed for my guild.

The last character, the hunter, is for fun. Hunter is a lot more varied than priest in soloing. And in spite of not being a good group class, the fact that I am on a much more younger server, with more low level players, and that I'm on the more populated Alliance side, means that I can often find a group when I want to go to a dungeon or so. This weekend the hunter was doing some quests in the Wetlands, gaining level 31, and using up some of the accumulated rest bonus from my week of low activity.

With the priest I did quests in the Swamp of Sorrows and the Hinterlands. Next stop will be Feralas, as I didn't do the quests there with Raslebol. I'm avoiding all elite quests, as finding a group takes too much time. Dungeons I occasionally visit, but usually in some sort of guild group, often including people of much higher level helping out. That gets the dungeon quests done, but is often not quite as exciting as a group of the correct level.

With Raslebol on the other hand, it is often me who is the high level player helping out lower level guild mates with a dungeon. Yesterday, after having missed MC, I went with two guildies and two other people to the Sunken Temple. That went pretty well, even though our healer was only level 45. I still had the level 50 warrior class quest, which was added recently by a patch, and was able to finish it in the temple. The quest gave me the choice between two pieces of armor, and a trinket. The armor would have been great at level 50, but was worse than what I am wearing now, so I took the trinket. Not a bad choice, the Diamond Flask has a strength buff plus healing effect lasting 1 minute, with a cooldown of only 6 minutes. Still I would have preferred if the level 50 class quest would have already been in the game when I was level 50. I need to check whether the level 50 priest class quest is already implemented.

Other activities of Raslebol this weekend fall under the heading of "farming". I needed Runecloth for the priest, so I farmed Blood Elves in Azshara. I wonder if that is the best spot for Runecloth, I didn't get as many as I would have liked. On the other hand I used Telo's Infobar to count how much money I earned there, and it worked out to 13 gold per hour, not bad. The other farming activity was grouping with my wife's mage character and killing Deadwood Furbolgs to gain Timbermaw faction. Her for being able to pass the tunnel to Winterspring, me for advancing from my current level of "neutral" slowly towards "friendly", at which point I could buy an alchemy recipe from them. In this case I gained double faction points, both Timbermaw faction and the even more important wife faction. :) But farming is something I can only do when I'm tired, because otherwise the mindless repetition gets on my nerves.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:28 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
WoW high-end content

Blizzard posted a new page outlining all the options you have once you reached level 60. Besides farming faction or raiding, they *do* recommend leveling an alt, which is my preferred option.

On the WoW messsage boards there is an interesting thread on that issue.

In January 2004 (when you were just an Associate Designer), Jeff Kaplan (Tigole) stated this:

"The single most important thing to remember when creating a game is that it must be FUN. When someone sits down to play your MMO, they are doing so to be entertained. An MMO should not feel like a job or obligation. It's very important not to fall into that trap of trying to manipulate your community, as if you're trying to run an ant farm. As a designer, it's your responsibility to create a world that's exciting, challenging, and FUN. It's not your job to play god over someone's play experience."

Now that you are Lead Designer for WoW, the vision and direction of WoW have changed since its release. The Level 1-59 game certainly lived up to the philosophy you espouced. The game seems to have changed direction since its release under your watch.

In the 1-59 game, players have fun choices for advancing their character. WoW never felt like work, and never felt like you were forced into any particular direction. Conversely, there are only a few options upon reaching the endgame: 1) Raid, 2) Grind for Reputation, or 3) Grind for PvP Rank. Most people agree that neither of these three are fun.

I'm not sure that the vision for WoW has changed. I'd guess they are just trying to make all sorts of player happy. But I do have to agree that I don't find raiding or end-game grinding for reputation or honor fun. I would like to have more low- and mid-level content added, instead of every content patch adding another raid dungeon like in the past. I am looking forward to the Burning Crusade expansion, which basically adds another 10 levels to the fun part of WoW, and pushes the unfun part further back. Nevertheless it would be great if somebody came up with a new idea of what to do at level 60 which neither involves gathering 20+ people nor is an repetitive grind.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:39 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
Hacking a DVD player

Following instructions from Amazon, here is how to make a Phillips HDRW720 / DVDR725H DVD player with hard disk region code free:

Make sure no disc is in the tray
Press the disc menu on the remote control
Press play,1,5,9 (dashes will appear in the display)
press 1,2,1,2,1,2,0,0,5,2,5,5
Press play

Worked on mine, so now I can watch US DVDs. Seeing how in the USA the DVDs are often cheaper and the choice much greater, that is useful.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:49 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Pros and cons of traveling

I'm on my way home, waiting for my first flight at the airport of Columbus, Ohio. That is one of my favorite airports, because it offers free wireless internet access on all terminals. I hope that is a trend that catches on.

I'm not a big fan of traveling, especially business trips to the USA. You basically spend one day going from Europe to the USA, and two days going from the USA to Europe, due to the time zone difference. So I ended up with a 6-day trip for 3 days of meetings. That is just enough to get used to the jet lag when in the USA, and then you get the reverse jet lag back home.

On the positive side I quite like *being* in the USA for a while. While you might doubt their sincerity, people are outwardly a lot more friendly than in Europe, especially in shops and restaurants. Talking of restaurants, once you have identified the places to avoid, you can eat quite well in the USA. Especially steaks are very good, and restaurants are generally a lot cheaper than in Europe for the same quality of food. I also like eating bagels, which although supposedly of European origin are very hard to get in continental Europe. Mmmmh, freshly toasted cinnamon-raisin bagel with strawberry cream cheese! :)

With shopping in the USA I had mixed experiences. On a business trip I have neither the time nor the luggage space to shop much, but I do like visiting American malls. In Europe it is surprisingly France where you are most likely to find a mall which just looks like an American one. Other countries usually have much smaller shopping centers. Over the years the exchange rate between European currencies (now the Euro) and the US dollar fluctuated a lot, and so shopping is sometimes very interesting, and sometimes not so. Some goods like jeans are always a lot cheaper in the USA, but when buying other sorts of clothing you risk getting "made in China" stuff which is cheap, but falls apart the first time in the washing machine.

I used to buy PC games in the USA, but with WoW taking up all of my play time, I didn't buy any games this time. Console games I couldn't buy anyway, because just like DVDs they have regional coding, and you need a console modified with a custom chip to play them, which is less easy than modding a DVD player, it seems. You also need a TV able to display NTSC, but many modern European TV sets can do that.

I did end up buying a TV series on DVD, Will & Grace, just because I heard it was funny, I've never seen it in Europe, and the complete first season was just $25. With the help of some freeware program named DVD Region Killer I was able to get this to run on my laptop. I also found a site offering instructions on how to remove the region code check on my DVD player at home, have to test whether that is working.

Anyway, I'm happy to be heading home again. Live on the road has its advantages, but after a week I've had enough.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:25 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
TV thoughts

Still in the USA, I find that after a hard day of meetings I don't necessarily want to play WoW on my laptop, but switch on the TV instead. Either zapping to see the wide spectrum of US TV, or watching my currently favorite TV series CSI and NCIS. And I have some observations on TV, especially US TV:

While I was still in Europe, I couldn't understand what the fuzz about HDTV was about. Sure, some game stores had an XBox 360 hooked up to a HDTV and that looked great, but I'm not really interested in buying an XBox, and for watching TV in Europe a HDTV never seemed useful to me. The image I get on my standard TV is crisp and clear, with no apparent need for "high definition" and more resolution. But once I start zapping TV in the USA, I immediately see why an American might want to buy a HDTV set, provided he can get a HDTV signal. The current US NTSC TV signal is pretty bad, fuzzy, and with shifting colors. And the resolution is worse than the European PAL TV signal. Thus HDTV would be a much more noticeable improvement in the USA than in Europe. But I guess it will be still some years before the average hotel room in the USA is equipped with a HDTV set.

I already mentioned that I'm a big fan of the American TV series CSI and NCIS. That's 4 series, the original CSI, CSI : Miami, CSI : New York, and Navy NCIS, which is actually a completely different show, which just happens to have a similar acronym. Now in Europe I can see these series in English, but with Dutch subtitles, on some Dutch TV chain. I could also watch them in French or German, but usually TV series suffer a bit when translated. Of course watching TV "live" is a bit outdated, mostly I record the episodes on the hard disk of my DVD recorder. As I didn't know I would like CSI right from the start, I missed the early episodes, thus I was looking around on how else I could get hold of them. I could buy season 1 of all three CSI series, and also got season 2 and 3 of CSI, with season 4 of CSI and season 2 of CSI : Miami announced on DVD for spring 2006. CSI : New York is newer, and season 2 isn't out yet on DVD, but that is actually the series I like the least, the New York version is a lot darker than the others. NCIS isn't out on DVD at all, although it is already in its 3rd season on TV. But there are rumors that it might be released in spring 2006 as well, but that would be in the USA, and who knows when it comes out in Europe.

Buying the DVDs over here, or mail-ordering them, is an obvious possibility. Unfortunately unlike PC games, DVDs are protected against being viewed on other continents by a region code. It exists because US TV series are shown first in the USA, and come to other continents often a year or two later, so if I could buy the US DVD of last years season, I would get the same episodes as this years or next years TV in Europe. Bad for the TV business. Of course there are ways around the region code, with software of dubious legality like AnyDVD. But then I could watch the DVD only on a computer, my DVD player in the living room is hardwired to the European region. I would need to have a custom chip installed to remove the region code protection, which would void my guarantee, or I would need to use software on a PC to make a copy of the DVD with the region code removed. I think I'll just wait that year more.

While I was here, I also checked out Google Video, which recently started with an announcement that you could watch CSI or NCIS streamed to your computer with it. But I had already remarked upon that the service wasn't offered in Europe. And now that I have a look at it in the USA I notice that there is only 1 episode each of these two series, and not all the episodes as I had assumed. Video quality is passable, and if I hadn't already seen the episodes on offer, I would have been tempted to pay $1.99 for them. But it seems that it will take a couple more years before they have a decent library of videos on offer.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:18 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
Traveling this week

I'm writing this on my laptop, I'm on a business trip to the USA this week. So I have very little time to play, and even less time to write about playing. My excuses if this blog isn't updated very often this week.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:17 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
I don't understand the internet

The internet is a really strange place. This blog got up to a hundred visits a day in the last year. But the "hidden quest" post got over 2,000 hits on Friday, due to being linked to by IGN (WoWVault). Why that post, and not one of the others? Frankly, I don't consider it to be one of the better ones I've written. It wasn't exactly news, just a compilation of stuff already known.

Well, that was just a short episode, and as the link drops of WoWVault's front page the hits are getting fewer and fewer. And interest was short-lived anyway. According to Sitemeter the average visitor read nothing more than the hidden quest page, didn't even look at what else was available on the blog main page, and left after 45 seconds of reading that short post. I just hope that one or the other found the post interesting enough to come back and read the other stuff.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:50 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
Auto Assault preview

Having pre-ordered Auto Assault, I got an invitation to participate in this weekends beta event. So based on one weekend of play, this is my preview.

Auto Assault turned out to be pretty much what I expected it to be: A standard MMORPG on wheels. You have a character with stats, experience points, and levels, who is doing quests and killing mobs to level up and get better loot. Only that instead of running around in person and swinging a sword or wand, you are driving around in an armored car with a gun turret, shooting at stuff. Both you and your opponent tend to be in constant motion, with you either auto-targeting him, or keeping him in your mouse-controlled firing arc. That works rather well, and has the big advantage that combat looks a lot more realistic than two guys swinging swords at each other without moving from their spots.

At the start of the game you have the choice between 3 races, human, mutant, or biomek (cyborg). Then you chose between 4 classes, which are named differently for each race. The biomek versions for example are called terminator, constructor, mastermind, and agent. The 4 classes correspond to the 4 stats combat, tech, theory, and perception, with each class being strongest in their corresponding stat. Starting stats are fixed by class, and rise with level, but with level you also get some bonus stat points which you can distribute yourself.

Both your class and your race give you access to skills, with you gaining skill points when leveling. You can use these points to learn new skills you have access to, or to improve old skills to a higher rank. As biomek constructor I had a self-healing skill from the start, and learned three bot (pet) skills afterwards, a flying laser bot, a static flamethrower bot, and defensive nano-bots.

At the start of the game you can chose the look of your character, but you only see him when in a city. Outside you only see your car. But you can "pimp your ride" with paint, and lots of pipes and vents you get as loot. That doesn't change anything in the cars combat characteristics, but allows for a more individual look. But your car also has lots of slots for a motor, armor, weapons, and other gadgets. In the early level you only find turret weapons, which fire in all directions, but there are slots for front and back weapons that have a more limited firing arc.

The world is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with the big advantage of being mostly destructible. It is nice to have good-looking trees, but even nicer to be able to shoot them and see them go up in flames. :) Many building can be destroyed too, either by shooting at them, or ramming them with your car. That is not just for fun, but there are quests that might require you to not only shoot mobs, but also destroy specific building, or shoot crates to get something from them.

You can get quests from people or from terminals. The quests are varied enough, but I had some frustrating ones. For example I was told to jump with a ramp over a mob lair to make it spawn, but had to give that up when after one hour of jumping I still only had one of the four mobs I needed. You always only have one "active" quest, with helpful blue dots on the mini-map, or even a waypoint arrow showing you where to go. I had some problems of the game switching between quests when I didn't want it to, but otherwise the system is easy enough.

There is a highly complicated crafting system, which I didn't explore much. You learn crafting disciplines, reverse engineer items you find to break them, fix them up with some enhancements and salvaged parts you found, and end up with better items. Of course during the beta I didn't have a manual, and could only half figure it out. But it seems as if finding the right salvaged parts is just a matter of luck, you can't gather resources in a controlled way. Didn't appeal much to me.

All in all not a bad game, I'm certain it will have some success. Only I had to cancel my pre-order, because Auto Assault turned out to be one of the handful of games that cause video game motion sickness in me. I don't regret it much, post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi isn't really my cup of tea. I think I would prefer slower moving battle mechs in a MMORPG to fast moving armed cars.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:36 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
Taxing virtual worlds

On Legalaffairs.org Julian Dibbell writes about whether gold pieces are taxable income, even if you don't sell them. Quoting some hilariously inane rules of the US tax code ("If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless in the same year, you return it to its rightful owner"), the article is funny, but not very realistic. In a Michael Moore moment Julian tries to get the IRS to give him a definitive answer, but then doesn't pull it through due to the cost involved.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:57 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
A queueing idea

I came home a bit later from work yesterday, so I logged into World of Warcraft a bit later, closer to prime time. And promptly found myself in a waiting queue when trying to get into Runetotem. Just 5 minutes or so, but I got the clear message that the server was full. So I asked myself "how full?".

I ran Censusplus, and found that there were about 900 Horde players online. Switched to an Alliance toon and ran the program again to find 2,000 Alliance players online. Ouch, more than 2:1 imbalance. :(

The relative popularity of night elves and humans over gnomes and dwarves supports the theory that a good part of that imbalance is due to the Alliance having the sexier character models. So Blizzards solution is giving sexy blood elves to the Horde. Yeah, sure, and what will that change on the older servers? We would need to assume that over 500 players on Runetotem ditch their old Alliance characters and create a blood elf after the expansion comes out. That is extremely unlikely, because good looking or not, they would probably prefer to play the new Alliance race instead, because in that case they could easily twink their new toon. If an Alliance player switches to a blood elf, he really has to restart from zero, with 0 copper pieces to his name. (Unless you have a second account, in which case you can use some neutral auction house trickery to transfer money from Alliance to Horde.)

Standing in the waiting queue to get into the server, I was thinking that such a queue is a good means to "persuade" people to not play on overcrowded servers if they don't absolutely have to. So why not use the same utility to fix the Alliance / Horde imbalance? Instead of having the waiting queue when connecting to the server, you immediately get to a screen divided in two, showing your Horde characters on that server to the left and Alliance characters on that server to the right. Instead of letting in 3,000 players in total, you let in 1,500 Horde and 1,500 Alliance. And the length of both queues is displayed on that split character selection screen. "Do you want to wait 15 minutes to play an Alliance character, or do you want to play a Horde character immediately?" Now *that* would fix the Horde / Alliance imbalance in no time.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:09 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments

 
WoW server management

I couldn't play World of Warcraft yesterday, because most of the servers were down, and consequently the few servers that were up were overloaded. Runetotem and Bronzebeard were both down anyway.

The good news is that this downtime was done to reorganize the servers in the different datacenters, with the goal of improving performance. I don't know if the amount of data is growing with each patch, or if it was just more people playing, but performance on many of the older servers was bad in the last week, mainly noticeable in the city, mailbox, and auction house. By the way, you can reduce your personal WoW city lag by moving away from Orgrimmar and Ironforge into the other cities now. Since the 1.9.0 patch the other cities also have a linked auction house, but they are still a lot less populated, and thus less laggy. For the Horde I can recommend Thunderbluff, the AH, bank, and mailbox are very close together there.

Everybody whose server was down yesterday received 2 days of free WoW play, plus another 2 days if you had characters on one of the servers with performance problems. I don't know if the poor guys whose server was up but overloaded yesterday will receive any compensation.

Now of course performance problems are annoying, and a day of server downtime is even more so. Nevertheless getting hardware sorted out just one week after the patch causing the performance problems is remarkably fast. While some people will still be complaining, I find that fast reaction plus compensation is all that you can ask for in cases like these.

Where Blizzard scores less well is in having chosen such an antiquated design of unflexible servers with a limited number of players on each in the first place. It doesn't take much of a crystal ball to foresee massive problems when the Burning Crusade expansion comes out: Every server has lots of inactive players by now, and if many of them resubscribe for the expansion, the servers will be overloaded. On the other hand, if you don't allow new players to create characters on older servers, during times of low interest the server is underpopulated, and it gets hard to get other players together for groups, raids, or battlegrounds.

The fixed server model is as old as Everquest or Ultima Online. And if you think it works badly when the number of players is growing, you should see it fail completely when the number of players is shrinking. It is easier to open new servers than to combine old ones. At least Everquest offered the possibility to change server for a fee. Blizzard has a much more restrictive server move policy, where you can only move from one specific overloaded server to one specific less crowded one, and that only during a very short time. I do *not* recommend that for anyone active in a guild, because the system practically guarantees that half the guild will be left behind on the old server while the other half moves.

It is too late to do major changes to the server architecture of World of Warcraft. But a system where you could on your account management page move your character from one server to another, losing everything except soulbound items, for a fee of $10 or so, would be a big improvement over the current situation. As you could neither take money nor items you could sell, that wouldn't do any harm to the economy of the server you move to. And the cost and loss of virtual stuff would prevent people from using it except when really necessary.

For the Burning Crusade expansion release, I'd recommend to Blizzard to improve the hardware as much as possible, so the servers will be able to withstand the rush of renewed interest. But I don't even know how they will manage to get the expansion into the hands of 5+ million customers at the same time. I still hope for some download option, but even that would be problematic, with so many people wanting to download it at the same time.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:04 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
Not-So-Inter-net

One tends to think of the internet as a very international affair. Obviously I also use it to find local information, but much of the discussion going on for example on games is pretty much international. Most of the content of the internet is text and images, and even if the text is about something local on the other side of the globe, at least nothing keeps me from reading it.

But with the increase in broadband connections, the content of the internet is changing in nature. There is more music, and especially more video to be found. Google just launched a video on demand service, and iTunes already outsells traditional music stores. But what iTunes and Google video have in common is that I'm not allowed to use them, because I live outside of the USA. Legal downloads of media have some sort of "digital rights management", and rights are national affairs. Google can't show me episodes of US TV shows because of contracts between the studio that made the TV show and distributors outside the US, who often get the same shows a year or two later.

The same unfortunately applies to digital distribution of games. While the first services selling games as downloads were usually just selling older games and wasn't restricted to any location, now you often find download services even for new games like Civilization IV. But these are then often restricted to North American residents only.

I remember paying about $10 to a company for pretending they were me, and getting me a US account for World of Warcraft, when the game wasn't out yet in Europe. Makes me wonder if soon there will be "pretend to be American" kits sold on the internet, which by redirection of the IP address and the credit card number enable e.g. Europeans to access and pay for media on the internet that are usually restricted to North Americans only.

But in the long run, companies have to sort their digital rights management out to be less restrictive. If iTunes taught the industry anything, it should be that people are eager to give them money, if only you let them. A big part of the earlier success of P2P networks was that they offered access to media for which no legal way of online purchase existed. When given the choice between illegal or not at all, people often chose the illegal way. But if the choice is turned into either "free but illegal" or "cheap and legal", people often prefer the legal option. I'd gladly pay Google video to watch for example old episodes of NCIS, as I can't seem to find these offered on DVD anywhere. Why would Google or CBS not want to accept my money?
- posted by Tobold @ 12:55 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Dungeons & Dragons Online First Impressions

I participated in a short stress test of Dungeons & Dragons Online : Stormreach (DDO) in November. At the time I couldn't talk about it, due to the NDA, but now the NDA for all beta and stress testers has been lifted. Fortunately I wrote down my first impressions:

DDO is a thoroughly modern MMORPG. It isn’t quite an action game yet, but it is moving in that direction. You climb crates, jump, smash barrels, run to avoid traps, and swing your weapon by clicking your mouse. But in spite of all that action, Turbine has pulled off a nearly impossible trick, and made the game feel like Dungeons & Dragons. That wasn’t easy, because unlike other licenses for MMORPG (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings), Dungeons & Dragons is not a world, but a rule set. Transforming rules that were designed for a slow pen and paper game into rules for an action MMORPG was a challenge. Purists will probably scoff at the result, but for the average D&D player, seeing the dice rolled for your attacks makes you feel right at home.

Where the influence of the pen and paper rules is felt most, is in the spell system, which is half way between D&D and classical MMORPG. A first-level wizard on character creation selects 7 spells to inscribe into his spell book. While resting in a tavern he memorizes 3 of these spells. When he then enters a dungeon, he can only use these 3 spells, and not the other 4, until he comes back to the tavern. But unlike D&D, a DDO wizard also has spell points, and he can cast the 3 spells he memorized more than once. The spell points do not regenerate over time, you need to find a resting shrine to recover them, and each shrine only can be used once. Which means that just like in D&D, if you cast too many spells, you will find yourself out of spells in the middle of the dungeon, with no way to recover them, except for leaving the place. Oh, and fighters don’t fare much better, because hit points don’t regenerate either during an adventure.

All of the adventuring in DDO happens in instances, in quest dungeons or instanced outdoor zones. But that doesn’t mean that DDO is a single-player game in disguise. Once you finished the tutorial and gained access to the city of Stormreach, many instances are designed for groups or at least small teams. DDO isn’t quite as solo-able as World of Warcraft, but then the dungeons in DDO are shorter, so even casual players can form a group and do a complete adventure in a short playing sessions. Finding a pickup group is made easier by tools which are so simple and easy, that you wonder nobody else has thought of them. You can either put up a simple "looking for group" flag, or you put up a kind of "wanted" ad, where you can specify which levels and classes you want, and where your group will be heading.

Rewards in the form of experience points and loot are given in a unique way in DDO. There are no xp for killing monsters. Yes, you heard that right, grinding by killing mobs is technically impossible in DDO. Instead you get xp for finishing the quest objectives and sub-goals, which obviously include killing mobs. But if you have to kill 200 kobolds and quit after 150, you haven’t earned a single experience point. Loot is also unique, because mobs practically don’t drop any, so there is no mob farming for loot either. Instead loot is found in treasure chests. Each chest contains a number of items for *each* group member, and these items are reserved for them, nobody can ninja loot the items reserved for another group member. Advancement in DDO is slow, I only made it to level 2 in the stress test, but that is because the highest level you can reach in the release version will be only 10. Then an expansion set will increase the level cap to 20, and that is it, that is the highest level possible in the D&D system.

Combat in DDO is semi-twitchy: you target the mob with the left mouse button, then hit it by repeatedly clicking the right mouse button. You can theoretically use an auto-attack mode, but that one is slow and deals a lot less damage. Nevertheless each weapon swing takes a certain time, so clicking faster doesn’t increase your damage output. Faithful to the D&D system, combat is mainly a matter of hitting or not hitting, not a matter of dealing more or less damage. That feels a bit strange when fighting lower level mobs, because you don’t see their to hit rolls, only yours, and when they repeatedly miss they seem not to do anything.

DDO doesn’t have many bugs in this beta-version. I got stuck once, and once was unable to finish a dungeon due to some trigger malfunctioning, but for a beta the game was solid enough. What was a lot less stable was the servers, but that might be expected for a stress test. Turbine will have to work on making the servers more stable for the release version, because experiencing several server downs and roll backs in one evening won’t be acceptable to the paying customers.

DDO is very accessible and easy to pick up. Having played another MMORPG or D&D or both helps, but isn’t necessary. But both veteran MMORPG players and players of single-player games might have problems with the game’s group-centered philosophy later on. Most classes are highly specialized in what they are doing. That makes them very hard to solo, but very good to have in a group. And even when grouped, players need to communicate a lot more than usual. With resting points in dungeons being few and far between, running blindly into a combat or a trap can mean the whole group needs to turn back and try again. And you need to stick with your group until the end, as the xp are given for finishing the adventure.

In the end the success and longevity of this game will depend on the amount of content that Turbine will offer. Some quests are repeatable, but then they give less experience points. Right now there is only one starting zone, and if you make several characters, they all go through the same series of quests and dungeons, so the replayability value of DDO is low. But if you like to stick to one character, and like to go adventuring in interesting dungeons with a group of friends or strangers, there isn’t a better game out there to do so than Dungeons & Dragons Online.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:06 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
Who needs Slashdot?

Warcry linked to my hidden quests post on the same day that WoWVault linked to my WoW board game post. I only noticed because the page hit counter went through the roof, and I thought I had been slashdotted again, which wasn't the case. :)

Welcome to all new readers, feel free to browse around. There is about a hundred hours of slow-day-at-the-office reading material in the archives. ;)
- posted by Tobold @ 10:29 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
Hidden quests in WoW

Recently I've been talking about areas not covered by quests, but there is also another case: Quests that do exist, but few people do them, because the quest is hidden in some way. Here are some that I found:

As Alliance, there is a dwarf quest giver hidden in a niche in the western bridge column [edit: of the bridge between Wetlands and Arathi], who has an urgent delivery of moonshine for Southshore. As that part of the bridge is destroyed, and the column is standing unconnected, you need to jump to reach him. I managed it easily with my hunter, jumping from the Arathi side. But I was using Aspect of Cheetah for higher speed, and I've heard that without some sort of speed enhancement, like a swiftness potion, the jump is difficult or impossible. Of course there are a couple of ways to levitate or teleport there, if you have the right class for those spells, or if you are an engineer with parachute cloak.

For Horde, there are several quest givers and other NPC hidden in the right eye of the large stone skull that represents the entrance to the Wailing Caverns in the Barrens. You need to go a bit around the mountain to climb up on the top of the skull, the jump down to the nose, and into the eye socket, which turns out to be a cave full of Horde NPC. Especially interesting for leatherworkers, as the recipes and quests for the deviate scale leather armor is found there.

At a much higher level, but for both Horde and Alliance, there is a hidden quest at the Darkmoon Faire. A woman is missing her pet frog, Jubjub, and tells you that the frog likes to drink dark iron ale. This ale can only be bought in the bar in Black Rock Depths, and you need to buy at least 2 (preferable buy an extra). Then when you see the small boy chasing his frog approaching, you need to place one of these ales on the ground before the woman (when you "use" the ale by right-clicking on it in your inventory, you can place it). Then her frog approaches, and she gives you a quest for more dark iron ale. You give her one, and she gives you an unhatched jubling egg, which hatches after 7 days into a non-combat pet frog. And yes, I know that frogs don't hatch from eggs.

Another hidden quest for a pet gives you a chicken, but only for Alliance. You need to go to a farm in Westfall and buy chicken feed from the farmer. Then target one of the chicken running around there, and repeatedly use the /chicken command. After many tries, the chicken will talk back, demanding to be fed. When you feed it, it lays an egg, which you can pick up for your pet.

Do you know any other quests where the quest giver is either well hidden, or you need to do something else to make the ! appear over his head?

Sometimes you just need to not follow a quests instructions to make it more fun. I did the long Raene's Cleansing quest series in Ashenvale (Alliance), during which you receive a rod which transforms you into a furbolg. As the last step you are supposed to hand in the rod, and get your quest reward. But the rod is far cooler than the reward, and my hunter couldn't need any of the reward items anyway. So I just deleted the quest without getting the reward, and kept the furbolg disguise rod instead. Unlimited charges, but only keeps 3 minutes. Still fun to run around as furbolg in Ironforge. And I was wondering whether a guild could all get that rod, and then go fighting PvP battles on battlegrounds, all disguised as furbolgs.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:03 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments

 
WoW Journal - 8-Jan-2006

I noticed I haven't written any WoW journal entries lately, although I mentioned what I was doing sometimes. I'm still playing World of Warcraft, nearly exclusively, but with less determination. I switch between characters often, and spend a lot of time with other things than just leveling.

Waldin, my night elf hunter on Bronzebeard, is level 29 now, and is finishing the last quests in Ashenvale. The early 30s levels I'll probably do in Hillsbrad, but then comes the dreaded late 30s / early 40s hole, where most quests in the game are in Stranglethorn Vale. I've done those so often, again just recently with my priest, that I really don't want to go there any more. The alternative, Desolace, I also already know inside out. Having only one character beyond level 42, there are still lots of quests I can do after this. But in that level range I feel I've exhausted the content that WoW has to offer.

Going onto a new server with Waldin was a good idea. Much easier to find groups when everybody else is of the same level. Although hunters are a bit too popular and too numerous, next time I'll try a mage or paladin.

Kyroc, my level 42 undead priest on Runetotem, is often soloing, because finding a group there is hard. But I did got to Scarlet Monastery with a guild group of 4, and got a nice staff from Doan in the library. Still need to do the armory and cathedral. Kyroc is now at 300 tailoring skill, and can make Mooncloth bags. Unfortunately creating 2 mooncloth for one bag takes 8 days, don't know if it was a good idea to buy that recipe for 25 gold, although it seemed cheap at that time.

My main, Raslebol the level 60 warrior on Runetotem, is still semi-retired. But I did Blackrock Depths with a guild group, and finally managed to get to the emperor at the very end of the place, and finish my last BRD quest. Otherwise I'm still mostly traveling around gathering herbs, or crafting components. I don't want to do too many quests with him, as I prefer to do them when the level cap is raised. So I just do quests where I can use the reward. My guild has grown a lot lately, so finding guild groups and going to dungeons is again a possibility. Just two problems: Most people prefer raids, and we have too many warriors in the guild. That's why I'm still interested to level Kyroc.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:07 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
World of Warcraft Re-Review

World of Warcraft is now over a year old in the US, and out for nearly a year in Europe. The hype has cooled down a bit, and playing the game for a year has given everybody a much clearer view of its strengths and weaknesses. So this is a second look at the game, a re-review, describing how the different features played over the long term. With World of Warcraft being such a big game, be warned that this article is going to be long.

I’m not trying to give a score to World of Warcraft in this review. WoW has 5 million subscribers now world-wide, most of them playing this game already for many months, and it would be difficult to pretend that WoW isn’t a very good game. Nevertheless, while a point could be made claiming that WoW is the "best" MMORPG out there, by popular vote, it is definitely still far from perfect. WoW does a great job of being accessible to the broadest audience possible, but it is not necessarily the best game for everybody.

Let’s start with a discussion of technical features. The graphics of World of Warcraft have a unique style, which isn’t liked by everybody. On the positive side the graphics are functional, you can usually easily identify every item and monster in the game, and you don’t need a $500 graphics card to play. On the negative side World of Warcraft is definitely not the best looking game out there, and risks looking horribly outdated in 5 years time.

When discussing technical features like bugs, lag, and downtime, one has to be careful with what to compare World of Warcraft. WoW scores generally well in these areas if you compare it to the other available games, because the "industry standard" is abysmal. Compared to a hypothetical perfect game with no technical issues at all, WoW still has room for improvement. The number of bugs is low, both absolute and relative to the competition. Lag is a problem whenever a large number of players assemble in one place, like in cities, battlegrounds, and raids, but this lag can be significantly reduced by running on a more powerful computer with more RAM and a better graphics card. The most annoying technical flaw is server downtime. There is a weekly maintenance of several hours, which is scheduled at a time of low traffic. But some servers experience occasional unscheduled downtimes, connection problems, and crashes. And as these tend to be caused by overpopulation, they happen during the busiest time. World of Warcraft has hundreds of servers, and these are not totally identical in hardware, so some servers or server clusters have more of such problems than others. On the positive side, the most server problems happened during the early days of the game, when Blizzard was overwhelmed by the success of their game. As the number of players stabilizes, the situation improves. The servers are up more than 95% of the time, if you count the scheduled maintenance as downtime, and more than 99% if you don’t. Obviously it is still highly annoying if the 1% downtime happens in the middle of your raid, but sometimes you just need to remember that a game server doesn’t need to have the same sort of reliability as a life support system. Another technical feature to discuss is the modular user interface, which is easy to modify with add-ons. Wherever the standard UI has shortcomings, such add-ons become quickly available from third parties, and Blizzard sometimes even integrates the best ideas for modifications into the standard UI by a patch.

Moving from technical features to game design features, I want to start with a general observation: World of Warcraft is a relatively "easy" game. A big part of its success is due to the fact that it is accessible to a large number of people who have never played a MMORPG before, the famous "casual" gamer crowd. That does not mean that playing well is not rewarded in World of Warcraft. The best rewards in the game are reserved for the small group of players who are the most dedicated and best organized. But if you don’t belong to that group, you can still advance at a reasonable speed and up to the highest character level in the game, even on a casual play schedule. The big improvement of World of Warcraft for the new players, in comparison to other games, is that the tutorial never really ends. If you just take every quest you see, you will always have something to do, you will always know where to go, you will always be adequately equipped, and you will reach level 60 one day. Another important point of WoW game design is the presence of lots of carrots, and very few sticks. You are rewarded often, and punished only rarely, and lightly. Dying is no big deal, causing only a small loss of time and money. Forming a group with a weird composition of classes, or a wide range of levels is possible. Soloing is possible. Obviously there is an optimal way to play which would advance you the fastest and give you the best rewards, usually a well coordinated group having tanks, healers, and damage dealers of similar level. But if for some reason you chose or are forced to play in a sub-optimal way, you will still get some advancement and some reward out of it.

The major feature that makes World of Warcraft so accessible is the quest system. With an emphasis on the word "system". Other games have quests, but nowhere is the quest system as pervasive as in WoW. Quests not only cover nearly every corner of the game world, but they also serve to send you on to the next zone of the appropriate level. Many players spend most of their time on quests. Other games often see players killing the same monster for hours, because that is the easiest way to gain experience at that level. In World of Warcraft the quest reward of experience points, money, and items is so interesting, that it is better to only stay in one area until you finish your quests there, and then return to the next settlement and get the next bunch of quests for the next area. Thus players are distributed over all areas more or less evenly, and there is no conflict over favorite "camping" spots. The disadvantage of this system is that you sometimes seem to be playing on rails. You have the freedom to stray from the path of quests, but it takes some mental effort, and not everybody is willing to do so. Getting a group together for an area or dungeon for which there are no quests for your faction is very hard. Most quests are for soloing, so forming groups is not as much encouraged as it could be. Elite quests often require a group, but then the group often disbands after the quest is finished. This mode of play suits many casual players just fine, but leaves MMORPG veterans yearning for more social interaction.

World of Warcraft offers all the basic tools for social interaction: A chat system, a system to find a group for dungeons, a group system complete with different loot modes, a raid system, and of course guilds. But of these, only the loot distribution system is modern and innovative. The chat system is basic, and advanced options like setting up your own chat channel or opening additional chat windows are badly documented and not obvious. The group finding system with meeting stones is so bad, that it is hardly ever used. Raids are only bearable with special user interface mods. And the guild system only offers the basic functions like a guild chat, tabard, and ranks, and is a far cry from the web-supported guild management system of Everquest 2. Blizzard promised some improvements for the social interaction tools, and the latest patch 1.9.0 is already a small step in the right direction, but this area is definitely not one of the strong points of the game. Especially a better group finding interface would be sorely needed.

In the early days of World of Warcraft some people predicted that a lack of social interactions would ultimately be the doom of this game, as making friends in a game is known to add significantly to a MMORPGs longevity. Fortunately it turned out that WoW isn’t that bad. On the way to level 60 people are already encouraged to form groups through elite quests, and instanced dungeons, where the highest concentration of the best items in the game is found. And at level 60 the casual soloing play style comes to a screeching halt, you stop advancing by quests, and you either start over with another character, or you organize yourself into a guild to attain the high-level raid content of the game. Over 90% of all players over level 43 are in a guild. As forming a group, and especially a raid group, requires some effort, it is only logical that this effort is rewarded more than easy soloing. It is possible to play a lone wolf in World of Warcraft, but that will keep you from reaching all the content and getting the very best rewards. The desire to see everything and get the best stuff encourages people to overcome their reluctance to form social bonds with strangers. Friendships form, and at the end WoW isn’t that much less social than other MMORPGs, thus saving its longevity. Of course that system has its disadvantages too: People who can’t or don’t like to go on raids feel excluded from the high-end content, and reaching level 60 becomes kind of a disappointment. And lower level people who join a guild often find that most guild activities are for level 60, and then they feel a need to grind through the lower levels quickly to get to the point where they can play with their friends.

When discussing the possible longevity of World of Warcraft, one major point is the huge amount of content this game has. The world is large, and unlike some games that advertise their huge world size, it is well filled with landmarks, things to explore, monsters to battle, and treasures to attain. Every zone has a distinctive flavor, everything is handmade, there are no endless, boring, randomly created landscapes. There are over 3,000 quests, over 30,000 items, and a huge number of different monsters to fight. Leveling one character up to 60 takes about 500 hours, and with 9 classes and 8 races distributed over the two factions there is a lot of replayability. All the classes play very differently from each other, and the talent system gives every class at least two viable ways of further specialization. The classes are well “balanced”, not in the sense that they are all equally good for everything, but in that classes which are better for one play style are less good for another. For example a defensively specced warrior might not be ideal for PvP, but you sure want to have one in your PvE dungeon group. All the character classes and specs are interesting in one way or another, so most people have several characters on their accounts. After playing for over a year, I still haven’t played all character classes beyond the newbie levels. On the other hand the type of content I feel I’m running out of is dungeons and quests, after about 1500 hours of play. Fortunately Blizzard is adding more content, with regular patches, and the announced Burning Crusade expansion. By having made the time needed to reach level 60 relatively short, in comparison with other games, they have left themselves a lot of room for expansions that raise the level cap. But with the first expansion only coming out a full two years after the game was initially released, Blizzard is a lot slower than their competitors, and they need to speed that process up.

One game design feature of special interest to me is a game’s economy. Here World of Warcraft is holding up reasonably well. Previous games often suffered from "mudflation", items becoming worth less and less, because more of them were added to the game world every day, and few if any ever were destroyed. Items in World of Warcraft have a limited life, because once they are equipped they become soulbound, and can’t be handed down or sold to lower level players any more. WoW is doing less well on the second part of the economy, money supply. The higher in level you are, the more virtual gold you earn per hour. On the older servers over half of the players is level 60, and money is plentiful. The resulting inflation is most visible if you look at the black market "exchange rate" between WoW gold and real world dollars. While selling gold in WoW is a bannable offence, there are nevertheless lots of gold farmers selling on the internet. But while in the early days 100 gold went for over $100, prices are now down to less than $10. Related to the game economy is the crafting system. Other games often made crafting a rather tedious chore of thousands of identical mouse-clicks. World of Warcraft has made crafting much simpler and more accessible. The difficult part of crafting is now the resource gathering part, once you got the resources the crafting itself and gaining skills is very easy. The downside of this is that with money being plentiful and many people wanting to skill up tradeskills quickly, resources are now often worth more than the items you craft from them. Nevertheless crafting is an interesting alternative occupation for times when you just don’t feel like killing monsters.

I’ve kept the discussion of the most controversial WoW feature for the end, player-vs.-player (PvP) combat. In spite of being based on one of the world’s most successful series of multiplayer real-time strategy games, PvP is not the strong point of World of Warcraft. When WoW was released, there were no PvP rewards at all, which caused most players to quickly lose interest in such an unproductive occupation. Then Blizzard introduced PvP honor points, and a PvP rank system with rewards. That resulted in huge PvP battles in areas where Horde and Alliance had settlements close to each other, like Hillsbrad. As there are no negative effects for killing players of a much lower level or number, a lot of griefing and ganking happened on the PvP servers. To make PvP more fair and organized, Blizzard then introduced battlegrounds, of which there are three types now. Unfortunately the honor point system was created to give out points relative to the performance of all other players of the same faction on the server. Casual players quickly learned that they couldn’t compete against the hardcore players, and would never get to the higher ranks and the interesting rewards. So nowadays the battlegrounds are mostly empty, only the small ones being occupied by a few PvP fans “farming” honor points. During low-traffic hours the battlegrounds are completely empty, and even at prime time they hold less than 5% of the players. There is no obvious solution to make WoW PvP a success. One fundamental problem is that there are about twice as many Alliance players than Horde players, presumably because the Alliance has the better looking character models and starting zones. Blizzard is trying to fix that by giving the Horde a sexy looking race in the Burning Crusade expansion set but it remains to be seen whether that works, and how long it will take to repair the huge imbalance. With the player-vs.-environment (PvE) part of doing quests, slaying monsters, and visiting dungeons being so excellent in World of Warcraft, it seems that PvP is forever condemned to being a minor secondary activity.

In summary, World of Warcraft is a very good game, with a particular strength in PvE questing for the casual player. It is probably the ideal recommendation to anybody who wants to play his first MMORPG. With a huge subscriber base, one expansion announced, and others planned, World of Warcraft will probably be the market leader for several years to come. But with several new MMORPGs on the horizon that either cover different genres than fantasy, or have strengths in areas where WoW is weak, it’s market share will probably erode over time, while the market size is growing.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:35 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
WoW patch 1.9.0 comments

Patch 1.9.0 arrived in Europe yesterday, with some problems. That resulted in the patch not being available for download already during the downtime in the morning, and I had to spend half of the evening downloading the patch with Blizzards slow peer-to-peer system, the Euro version of the patch not yet being available for download from Fileplanet. So what did the patch change?

The major content added in patch 1.9.0 is "The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj". This is a combination of a world event to open said gates, and then a 20-player and a 40-player raid dungeon behind it. A "world event" is something that only happens once on each server, once the gates are open, they presumably stay open. To open the gates, all players of all levels, Horde and Alliance, can contribute. In Ironforge and Orgrimmar there are "war effort commanders" instructing players what to do. Basically players will need to collect a huge amount of resources of many different kinds, from 90,000 copper bars to 17,000 cooked yellowfish. There are three different types of metal bars to collect, three types of herbs, three types of leather, three types of bandages, and three types of cooked food. You get the idea. You hand in the items in stacks of 10 or 20, and receive a number of commendation signets and a box with a random magic item. The level of the magic item corresponds to the level of the resource you handed in, copper bars give lower level stuff, thorium bars higher level stuff. The commendation signets you can hand in for more magic items, or exchange 10 of them for 75 reputation points with one of the major city factions.

On the positive side, the event involves all players. Even if the lower level players aren't terribly interested in opening the gate, they might well be interested in the rewards for handing in resources. And being able to contribute to "changing the world" is nice too. On the negative side, the event is totally messing up the resources economy. Prices for the kind of resources that you can hand in immediately shot through the roof in the auction house, so that lower level resources you can hand in are now worth considerably more than higher level resources which can't be handed in. For the next couple of weeks, trying to find copper ore for mining, or buying copper bars for low level smithing will be impossible, and the same problem will apply to many other levels of many tradeskills. I just hope that Blizzard knew what they were doing when they set the numbers of resources to collect. With a stack of 20 thorium bars already being worth 9 gold, I wonder how long it will take to hand in several thousands of them. Although my personal favorite for "last resource to be completed" is the cooked yellowfish, I think there aren't all that many high level fisherman around. Actually I'll try to produce some of those with my level 28 hunter, that could earn me some nice magic items for use or sale.

The second patch feature is that all the cities of one faction are now linked, sharing a common auction house, trade chat, and looking for group chat. Being able to use the auction house without having to travel to Ironforge or Orgrimmar is very useful. The linked chat channels will take time to get used to:
[2. Trade - City] Me: WTS [Toughened Leather Gloves]
[Elfhunter] whispers: I'll buy. Where are you?
To [Elfhunter]: On the bridge in front of the AH in Ironforge.
[Elfhunter] whispers: Doh, I'm in Darnassus. Forget it.
Insert your similar scenario for the LookingForGroup chat here. With time people will get used to doing more trade by cash-on-delivery mail, and traveling more between cities to find a group.

There have been numerous changes affecting different character classes, but mainly warlocks and paladins. Warlocks now get soul shard bags, the common version holding already 20 of them, with rare recipes from Scholomance and Molten Core leading to even bigger shard bags. For paladins it was their turn to get their talent tree reworked. I don't play a paladin, so I can't really say much about the changes, but previous changes for other classes were generally positive, leading to more viable talent builds. As usual all paladins got their talent points refunded for free, so they can choose new talents at no cost.

In PvP there have been some changes, Blizzard is still trying to get a viable PvP system running, with little success. You can now sign up for several battleground queues at once, which hopefully will cut down waiting times. But if you leave a battleground before the battle is finished, you can't sign up again for 15 minutes, which should prevent people quitting whenever their oppenents look stronger than they. Battleground reputation rewards have been improved.

Furthermore there are lots of minor changes of details, some of them very welcome to me. For example slimes now drop decent loot, they were my least favorite mob up to now because even the highest level slimes only dropped worthless junk. Some new recipes have been added to tradeskills, most notably oils to temporarily enchant weapons for enchanters, special schools of fish for fishermen, and the ever popular mechanical yetis for engineers. The highly annoying timbermaw faction gaining has been made easier by adding new quests. The guild interface has been slightly improved. Most visible to all players, tips have been added to all loading screens. The mail you get from the auction house whenever you buy or sell something now lists more information, like the sell price, fees, and who bought/sold your item.

Some bugs have been fixed, notably the popular bug that allowed players to traverse steep terrain by walking slowly. That bug had allowed people to reach places like the Ironforge airport, which weren't supposed to be accessible. Now you can only visit these places out of the game with a WoW map viewer program.

Handling of add-ons has been changed, as have some commands in the language that they are written in. Unfortunately the result of this is that you will manually need to reactive loading of add-ons in the character selection screen. And many of the old add-ons will now produce error messages due to the changed code. Just hope that your favorite add-ons are still well supported, and that new versions compatible with 1.9.0 will come out soon.

All in all a nice patch, but nothing that would knock my socks off. It will take some weeks before the gates of Ahn'Qiraj open, with lots of bragging from the first server to do it. Then it will be time to judge the two raid dungeons there. I'm not too fond of the last addition, Zul'Gurub, because I found it too hard for smaller guilds. It doesn't help if a raid dungeon needs only 20 players to go in, when you still need Molten-Core-like equipment and skills to conquer it. There are a lot of guilds that aren't powerful enough for Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, and could use something a bit easier.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:05 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
A missing quest

Playing the World of Warcraft board game, I noticed an area on the map called Purgation Isle, off the coast of Hillsbrad, which I had never visited in the online game. So I checked it out in WoW, and the isle really exists. It consists of a hill with a spiral hill leading to the top, and a ruined tower on that top. It is populated by level 30ish undead, with a level 35 boss mob at the end. But there is no quest to go there and kill either the undead or the boss, neither for Horde nor for Alliance, and so very few people ever went there.

That made me think how remarkably well covered every corner of the World of Warcraft is by quests. It is hard to get people to go anywhere for where they don't have a quest, so pervasive is the quest system. For example my night elf hunter is now level 28 and already did Blackfathom Deeps and the Stockades. I really would like to go to Shadowfang Keep, because that is a great dungeon for that level, but with the Alliance not having quests for there, it is nearly impossible to get a group together.

If you stumble upon a place like Purgation Isle for where there are no quests, you automatically think that you have "missed" a quest to go there. Makes me wonder how many corners of the world I haven't seen yet, because no quest ever sent me there. What are your favorite "lost" places without quests?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:31 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
World of Warcraft has 5 million subscribers

Old news, Blizzard did a press release two weeks ago, announcing that they passed the 5 million subscribers milestone. The game is still growing, but going from 4 to 5 million already took a good bit longer than from 3 to 4, so I'd say that at least growth is slowing down.

I'm only mentioning it because I stumbled upon a curious article in The Inquirer about the 5 million WoW subscribers. Quote: "What drives the WoW-factor, this mad fad? Tobold suggests it's the hand-holding and ease of play, but maybe it's marketing, or the artwork. Or maybe it has the blessing of Saint Isidore of Seville." How come that I'm mentioned on a commercial technology news site like that? There isn't even a link to my blog or the article mentioned. I doubt I'm famous enough for the average The Inquirer reader to know me.

I mailed the author, and it turns out the link has been lost in the editing / publishing process. Nobody is perfect. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 11:49 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
The games of 2006

On request by a reader, I had a look at the upcoming games for 2006. I'll list them here in alphabetical order, giving some comments on announced features. As a general remark, World of Warcraft is still the 800-pound gorilla of MMORPGs, with 5 million subscribers, and the Burning Crusade expansion coming out in late 2006. So most of the new games are trying to be different, and either offer a different genre, new features, or get by with the support of a strong license. All of the games listed here are currently announced for 2006, but release dates are notoriously untrustworthy, so don't blame me if you have to wait until 2007 for one or the other of them.

Auto Assault by NCSoft is a post-apocalyptic MMORPG in which every player drives an armed car. So combat consists of driving and shooting at the same time. This is supposed to be semi-twitchy, with you having an arc of fire, and as long as you keep your target in that arc, your stats determine hit rate and damage. Could be interesting.

Dark and Light is a more classic fantasy MMORPG, with a focus on PvP and politics. Players can band together and build a city, with one player elected ruler of a region. There will only be a single huge server, with a zoneless world. New technology allows an unlimited view distance, so you can see a mountain miles away and actually travel there. Unfortunately the news from the beta isn't encouraging, there seem to be massive technical problems. I'm not really fond of the huge world concept, it usually means pretty, but empty and boring landscape. And with the focus on PvP with solo PvE not supported, this isn't the game for me.

Dungeons and Dragons Online by Turbine is also classic fantasy, transforming the Dungeons & Dragons v3.5 rules into a MMORPG. This game is all about group PvE in instanced dungeons. Another semi-twitchy combat system, where a mouse-click swings your sword, but a dice roll determines hit rate and damage. I really do like group PvE, but the limited possibilities for solo play might scare off some people. What is interesting in DDO is that killing monsters does not give any experience points, only finishing quests does. I'll definitely check this one out.

Gods and Heroes : Rome Rising is a MMORPG in a historic setting, in Rome around 300 B.C. . You play a hero, child of a god, leading a squad of NPC soldiers into battle. You do quests, based on instances, and build up a camp which houses your army. Several players can group their squads together and form larger armies, but it seems that solo play is well supported. I'll definitely have a look at this.

Lord of the Rings Online is the other Turbine game with a strong brand. The game play will be classic MMORPG, solo or group play, mostly public areas with some instanced dungeons. The Tolkien license is both the strong point and the possible weak spot of the game. On the one hand you will be able to play a hobbit and travel from the Shire to Rivendell, and all over the area of the first book in the LOTR trilogy. On the other hand the world of Middle Earth is very well known, which puts up limits to what players will be able to do. For example the use of magic will be very limited, there are only 5 known wizards on Middle Earth, and no, you can't play Gandalf or Saruman. This is another game I will definitely have to try, I'm a big fan of the world of Middle Earth.

Pirates of the Burning Sea, as the name suggests, is a pirate MMORPG. Think of it as "Sid Meier's Pirates! Online", just without Sid Meier, and you get a pretty good idea of the game play. Every player commands a ship, either of one of three nations, or a pirate. There are lots of ports, in which you can trade, and which can change hands by PvP battles. I'm a bit sceptical of the PvP part, but I do like pirate games and ship combat, so I'm undecided on this one.

Tabula Rasa by NCSoft is a Sci-Fi MMORPG designed by Richard Garriott. This game will be very twitchy, a cross between a first-person shooter and a MMORPG. One interesting idea is that the monsters aren't patiently waiting for the players to come and farm them, but the aliens are actively attacking and the players will need to fight them back. As I don't like first-person shooters, and am not a big fan of Sci-Fi, I think I'll give this one a miss.

Tactica Online is a strange beast. It is described as turn-based strategy MMORPG, but you might well think that it isn't a MMORPG any more. There are no AI monsters, all combat is PvP battles between players, squad based. You don't level up, but you have a score just like a chess ELO score, which is used to pair you against opponents of equal strength. The business model is just like Guild War's, there is no monthly fee, with expansion sets being supposed to bring in the money. I'll probably give it a try, although I consider it more an online strategy game than a MMORPG.

Vanguard : Saga of Heroes by Sigil, published by Microsoft, is the most old style of the new games. Sigil is a company founded by EverQuest veterans Brad McQuaid and Jeff Butler, and Vanguard is basically trying to be the new Everquest. They claim to have learned from the previous generations of MMORPGs, and now being able to make a game without grind. But their design concepts are still very much in the hardcore PvE corner of EQ, with a strong focus on group play. Unfortunately all I read about Vanguard is extremely vague, promising fun for all types of players and all play styles, without explaining how they plan to pull that off. Could be a great game, could be a horrible treadmill, I simply don't know yet.

That concludes my list, but this is only the games I'm aware off. Please use the comment area to list any games of 2006 that I forgot to mention. In any case, there are significantly more MMORPGs being published in 2006 than in 2005, so it promises to be an interesting year.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:17 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
World of Warcraft Board Game review

The World of Warcraft Board Game is published by Fantasy Flight Games, and comes in a huge box. Over the holidays I had the opportunity to play it twice, so here is my review.

The game is for 2 to 6 players, with 4 or 6 working best. Every player plays one or two characters from the WoW MMORPG, with equal numbers of horde and alliance characters on the board. The goal of the game is to win as a faction, players of one faction have to work together against the players of the other faction. The game is decided either after 30 turns in a big PvP battle, or by one faction vanquishing a big overlord boss mob, who is chosen randomly out of three possibilities at the start of the game. One game takes around 4 hours.

Surprisingly the board game manages to feel very much like World of Warcraft. The board depicts the northern part of the Eastern Kingdoms, from Tirisfal Glades to the Plaguelands, and from Hillsbrad to the Hinterlands. The 16 different characters cover all 9 classes and 8 races. The game play is quest-based, and features many of the spells, abilities, talents, monsters, and items from the online game.

The character you are playing is represented by a plastic figurine on the board, and a character sheet in front of you. Items, spells or abilities, and talents are represented by cards on your character sheet. Every character has 12 possible spells or abilities, and 12 possible talents, but can have only 4 of each in play, forcing you to make some choices. Just like in WoW, you can for example either specialize your priest in healing, or go for a shadow priest, or mix. You start with level 1, and can reach a maximum level of 5, but level 5 in the board game gives you powers you would only get at high level in the online game.

To advance in levels, you need to gather experience points, and these are usually gained by quests. At the start of the game each faction gets 5 quests, and whenever somebody finishes a quest, a new quest opens up. Every quest card places one or several green and red quest monsters on the board, which you have to slay to finish the quest. Quest cards can also place blue "independant" monsters on the board, which you have to kill if you want to get past them, although they don't give any rewards. When you finish a quest, you not only get experience points, but also gold, and often some items. Quests can either be soloed, or tackled in a group, in which case the reward has to be divided between the group members.

The game is organized in faction turns, and in each faction turn each character of that faction has two actions, out of 5 possibilities: Travel, rest, fight, train, or do a bunch of things in a town. Traveling is done by moving up to two spaces on the board, with the possibility of taking a flight path in one of these two moves. Resting restores some of your hit points and energy (mana). Training is possible everywhere, and consists of buying spells or abilitys from your character deck, provided your level qualifies you for it. In the town you can do both resting and training at the same time, plus you can buy items from a merchant.

Fighting is done with 8-sided dice of three colors: Blue dice represent ranged attacks, red dice represent melee attacks, and green dice represent defense. You start with only few dice at level 1, but your spells and abilities, talents, or items can add more dice to your dice pool, up to a maximum of 7 of each color. Other spells and abilities, talents, or items might give you ways to modify your dice rolls, like rerolling some of them, or added effects for good rolls. Every monster has a "threat value" of 4 to 8, which represents the minimum you need to roll with your dice for a success. Different monsters have different special abilities, and some damage, curse, or stun you for bad rolls. The combat system is fun, a represents well the different character classes. For example a hunter would mainly roll blue dice and do a lot of ranged damage, while a paladin would roll lots of green defensive dice.

At the end of each faction turn the turn marker advances, and that can cause new items to appear at the merchant, or events can happen. There are a range of events, from "wars", where a faction can gain extra xp and gold by holding specific regions, to auctions where players bid for rare items like mounts, to a range of miscellaneous random events. After turn 30, playing with standard rules, the game ends with a big PvP battle between the two factions, unless one side has killed the overlord first.

Unfortunately PvP using standard rules is a very slow affair, as hits neutralize each other. I recommend to play with the "deadly PvP" rule variant from the rules book, which speeds up PvP considerably. Or even better, use the "defeat overlord" rules variant, where the game has no PvP and can last longer than 30 turns, ending only when the overlord is defeated. You might say that by having a bad PvP system the board game accurately represents the online game. :)

I really liked the board game, but I also have to mention its disadvantages: It isn't cheap, you need a huge table to play it, and it takes 4 or more hours to finish. There are hundreds of figurines, tokens, and cards to set up at the start of the game, and preferably sort into separate boxes at the end of the game. And reading, understanding, and explaining the rules for the first time will take some time too. The game system is pretty well balanced, but it has a lot of luck elements, so you might find your faction losing because it has quests too far from each other, or because of bad dice rolls.

But if you have the friends at hand and the place and time available, it is a lot of fun. The rule book mentions that expansions for the game are planned, but even without that, the different characters and options give the game a lot of replayability. And there is no monthly fee. :) Recommended!
- posted by Tobold @ 8:34 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments