Content generation

A player of World of Warcraft can play through a zone, do all quests there, and "consume" all of the zones content much faster than in took to create the zone with all the content. That is a problem shared by all MMORPG, but different games have come up with different solutions to generate more content than their players can consume.

One exercise for programmers is to use Markov chains to generate random text, which at a surprisingly low order already much resembles really written text. In MMORPGs the equivalent is using Bryce-like software to generate random landscapes, and random quest generators to produce content for the zones thus created. Anarchy Online has both random landscapes and random quests, so does Star Wars Galaxies. City of Heroes / Villains and Anarchy Online have random dungeons. The obvious advantage is that once you have created the algorithm to produce a random landscape or quest, you have infinite supply and never run out of content. Unfortunately the result is often rather bland. A planet in SWG might have enough landscape to run around for hours, but unfortunately it all looks pretty sameish, and becomes boring to the player very quickly. The same is true for random quests and dungeons, they tend to be all rather similar, and just aren't interesting enough after a while to hold a players attention.

A second way to create content is to let users create the content. The extreme example of that is Second Life, where basically all the content is user-created. Games like A Tale in the Desert (which just started its 3rd "telling") work by mixing developer-created content with user-created content. Unfortunately user-created content suffers badly from Sturgeon's Law: 90 percent of it is crap. Also the number of players willing to create content is a lot smaller than the number of players wanting to consume content, as creating good content is actually hard work. The mixed approach works better than the pure user content approach, and user-created content tends to be better than random content. But neither approach ever produced a smash hit MMORPG.

So in the end the best method of content creation is to pay a lot of game developers a lot of money to create a lot of content, and then try to add content at a rate high enough that you don't lose too many players who have already seen everything. If there is one thing in which the original Everquest excelled even modern games, it is the amount of high quality, developer-created content, and the rate at which is was added over the years. It is no accident that Everquest dominated the market at that time, just as World of Warcraft dominates the market now, because both games are based on having a huge amounts of developer-created content of a very high quality.

Unfortunately that means that games without a triple A budget don't stand much of a chance to contain enough content to keep players happy for a long time. But it is to be hoped that one day game companies learn that infinite monkeys don't write good MMORPGs, and that user-created content can play a part, but not carry the whole load of content generation.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:40 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Why I'll never be a real raider

I did another MC raid last night. As this was the night before the MC reset, the purpose was just to practice killing trash mobs, and to farm for stuff like lava cores. While there were a couple of warriors in the raid, the usual main tanks weren't there, and the warriors present were specced for damage dealing, with a far too low defence to tank. So this time I participated with my warrior, who has 368 defence and 35 points in protection talents, and played the role of off-tank. That was an interesting change from raiding with my priest. But nevertheless it just convinced me that I'll never be a hardcore raider.

First of all going to MC again on Tuesday, after having been there on Friday and Sunday already, didn't appeal to me. Especially since there were no interesting boss fights, just boring trash mobs. Not that the fights aren't tough, but with the bosses gone, only annihilators, firelords, and giants remained (we didn't get into the last part of MC with the lavapacks). Two hours of repeatedly killing the same three different types of mobs, *yawn*! At least as off-tank I had something to do, I would have died of boredom had I come with my priest. Doing the same dungeon more than twice per week isn't enough variety for me. And with places like Zul'Gurub requiring you to go on several evenings in series if you want to get to the end, raiding just lacks variety. There are different raid dungeons, but they are of different difficulty levels. You can't do MC one day, BWL the next, AQ the third day, and finish with Naxxramas.

The second reason why I'll never be a real raider is that I left the raid at 10 pm, which was a bit short for a raid planned for 7:30 and effectively starting at 8 pm. But sorry, Real Life ® for me has priority, I need to get up at 6 in the morning on the next day, and if I don't set myself iron rules to stop playing at 10 pm, I'm tired at work the next day. No can do. Younger people might have the stamina to play until midnight every day and be fit the next morning, but I'm getting too old for that. That effectively limits my raid times to Friday nights, all Saturday, and Sunday afternoons. Raids never start at 6 pm server time, because of the people coming home later than that, or living one time zone away.

The third reason against me becoming a big raider is that I have the impression that I am less interested in epics than other people. For example with the DKP system we have, which heavily rewards attending all raids, and me not raiding during the week, I'm effectively excluded from ever having "first right of refusal" on any epics. I only get an epic when all the other players of the same class that raid more often than me already have that particular item. And I don't mind at all. I know that I'm behind, but instead of that motivating me to attend every raid and gather more points, I just don't care. Part of that is due to the announced level cap raise in the expansion. Why should I work myself to the bone now for level 60 items when I'm pretty sure that in half a year I can get level 70 items with similar or better stats for considerably less effort? Of course tier 3 items might still be good at level 70, but I'd be surprised if the blue level 70 items from small dungeons weren't at least as good as the Molten Core loot.

So my program for World of Warcraft activities remains mixed, I'm not dedicating all of my time for raiding, or preparing for raids. I still want to do lots of trips to smaller dungeons, especially Dire Maul and Stratholme, I did enough Scholomance recently. I was even toying with the idea of doing a bit of PvP for fun, but maybe I'll wait until Blizzard comes up with a better PvP reward system. I'm certainly not willing to do PvP all day every day without pause, just to reach the PvP rank needed to get a blue item which isn't better than what I find in a dungeon. Just like alcohol, raids are best enjoyed in moderation.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:30 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Changes part 2: Items

Part 2 of my series on how MMORPGs have changed between 1999 and 2006 is discussing items, and by extension the virtual economy of games. Actually the most surprising thing when you compare the Short Sword of the Ykesha (Everquest) with the Krol Blade (World of Warcraft) is how little has changed over 7 years of MMORPG development. People still can wield a one-handed weapon and a shield or off-hand item in the second hand, or they can wield a two-handed weapon. They still have a number of slots for armor items, from helmets down to boots. And there are slots for jewelry. Weapons play a role in determining the damage you deal in combat, armor determines your armor class, and all items can have bonuses to your stats.

The biggest difference between then and now is that while the Short Sword of Ykesha (SSOY) dropped from a level 47 Ghoul Lord deep in the Lower Guk dungeon, it was often seen on very low level characters. Everquest did not have a minimum level to use items. So if you had a second character of higher level, or enough platinum pieces, or a friendly guild mate, or you bought the SSOY on EBay, you could equip your level 1 warrior with it. This "twinking", equipping characters with items they couldn't possibly have acquired themselves was very widespread. Needless to say that the difference in power between a level 1 warrior carrying a rusty level 1 weapon and a level 1 warrior wielding a level 47 SSOY is huge.

In World of Warcraft the Krol Blade drops from random level 55ish mobs, but you need to be at least level 51 to wield it. Twinking still exists, and there is still a market for items like the Krol Blade, but the boost to the power of your twinked character has become a lot smaller. It isn't perceived as a big problem any more, and the words twinking and twink have largely disappeared from the vocabulary of modern MMORPG gamers.

The SSOY was famous because it was one of the best 1h-weapons you could twink with. The Krol Blade is famous because it is one of the *few* 1h-weapons you could twink with at the higher levels. While items that could not be traded already existed in Everquest, they have become much more prevalent in World of Warcraft. All quest rewards, and the large majority of rare (blue) and epic (purple) items are "bind on pickup", meaning the person acquiring them can only use the item for himself, or vendor it, or disenchant it, but not pass it to another player, or put it up for auction. Thus Krol Blades are rare and very expensive, and you don't see every level 51+ warrior running around with one.

The introduction of minimum levels to wield, and making most of the good stuff "bind on pickup" has positive effects on game play. It makes questing and dungeoneering the prime source of equipment. Given the time and organizational effort needed to organize a 40-man raid, it is pretty certain that a lot less people would be raiding if raids weren't the source of epic items that can't be gained by any other way. Compare that to a game like Star Wars Galaxies, where the best items were player-made, and there was no compelling reason for people to seek out and overcome big challenges.

On the other side, making the best items come from loot is doing tradeskills and crafting a disservice. Search any auction house in World of Warcraft, and you will see that less than 1% of the items traded there are player-made. Crafting is occupying some niches of the market, notably for bags (which was as true for EQ than it is for WoW), and for some those potions that can't be found as drops. But for crafted armor and weapons there isn't much of a market beyond the first couple of weeks on a new server. Pretty soon there are so many looted items floating around in the economy, that they become better and cheaper than crafted items.

What has changed in the player economies from 1999 to 2006 is the way people trade with each other. Early Everquest did not have any automated trading systems. People would gather at certain places, like the tunnel in West Commons, and just shout out the items they were looking to buy or sell. The Shadows of Luclin expansion added a bazaar for automated buying and selling between players, and different forms of bazaars or auction houses have been with us ever since. Games where the economy is based more on crafted items, and which have player housing, starting from Ultima Online and peaking with Star Wars Galaxies, have houses turned into shops. Instead of a central shopping station like the auction house, people wander around and search shops for goods. Relationships between shopkeepers and customers develop, with players that always have a good selection of items at reasonable prices developing quite a reputation. In spite of Napoleon's opinion of the English, most players prefer to play heroes and adventurers over playing shopkeepers. But as crafting is still quite popular, it is to be hoped that future games will find a better balanced between a loot-based and a tradeskill-based economy.

Related to the changes in trading items, the ways to transfer items between players have also improved. In Everquest you could still drop items on the ground, and pick them up again with another character, and that was the main way to transfer items between two of your characters. Not very safe, as other people could come and pick the item up while you were switching between characters. Dropped items have disappeared from games, but now you can transfer items between players on the same account using shared bank slots (EQ2) or by mail (WoW).

In any game where you can transfer items and virtual currency from one character to another, there exists the possibility of people trading virtual items for real world cash, the so-called Real Money Trade (RMT). Nothing much has changed there from Everquest to World of Warcraft. Officially RMT is against the terms of service of these games, and can get you banned. But the practice is widespread, with a market estimated to be worth an incredible $800 million per year. There are big companies like IGE selling virtual currency in nearly every game and every server. And the game companies are on shaky legal ground when claiming that all virtual items belong to them, not to the players, and are thus unwilling to sue IGE. They just occasionally ban some small fish, especially those gold farmers that use cheating programs or bots, then proclaim the bannings loudly for public relations reasons, but let the majority of the RMT continue. The biggest change since 1999 is that on some servers in EQ2 the RMT is now sanctioned by the game company, and done via a secure trading interface on the game companies website. With the obvious advantage of the game company earning money on the trading fees, instead of third parties. Sanctioned RMT with secure trading also removes a major source of costly customer service calls in which players complained about being scammed. At the moment it is not very clear where RMT is heading. Will it become sanctioned by more companies, or will it be eradicated by disabling transfer of virtual currency in games? My bet is on the former, but many game developers hate RMT with a passion, and so it could go either way.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:25 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
The battle for China

While in the US and Europe the players of World of Warcraft pay a monthly fee of around $15 directly to Blizzard, the situation in China is much different. First of all in China there is no monthly fee, but Chinese players buy pre-paid cards from which the equivalent of 5 US cents per hour is deducted. The other big difference is that the money doesn't go directly to Blizzard, the pre-paid cards are distributed by a Chinese company, The9 Ltd, and Blizzard gets only 22% of the money, that is just 1 US cent per hour per customer.

With 4.3 million players in China, even 1 cent per hour adds up to some serious cash. But as these players on average play 60 hours per month, Blizzard earns only 60 cents per month per Chinese customer, which isn't much compared to the $15 from each customer in the US and Europe. So understandably Blizzard is fighting with The9 Ltd for a bigger share of the pie. But as The9 Ltd is equally understandably loth to part with all that money, Blizzard is now holding the Chinese WoW players hostage.

Blizzard has decided not to release the Burning Crusade expansion in China unless The9 Ltd coughs up more money. They also threaten to look for a different distributor for their pre-paid cards in China.

I just hope nobody blames the problem on the pre-paid cards for hourly payments. Because I'd really, really, would like to see that business model applied to the US and Europe as well. I'd be quite willing to even pay 10 US cents per hour played. With the hours I play on average that would cost me about the same amount of money per month than a monthly fee, but would feel a lot fairer. Blizzard's operating cost for servers, bandwith, customer service, etc., are all directly related to the number of hours played. I always found it very unfair that somebody who plays the game for only 50 hours per month pays the same as somebody who plays for 500 hours per month.

The advantage of an hourly payment model is that you wouldn't have to cancel your account if for some reason you stopped playing for a while. As it is, if your interest in a game declines, and you find yourself only logging on occasionally into the game, you can't justify the $15 monthly fee to yourself, and often just cancel the account. And then something major like a big content patch or expansion must happen before you resubscribe. Thus with an hourly payment model Blizzard could capture the "long tail" of people playing few hours per month.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:04 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
MMOGChart.com updated

Following my advice (just kidding), Sir Bruce updated his MMOGChart.com website with the latest subscription numbers of MMORPGs.

May I draw your attention to the market share chart, which shows over 50% of MMORPG players being held captive by World of Warcraft. Another graph on market share by genre shows 92.6% of players being in a Fantasy MMORPG. Given the much lower market share of Fantasy in other forms of entertainment (books, TV, movies), this suggest the market is ripe for games exploring other genres. Fortunately there seem to be more Science Fiction, Pirate, and Historical themed MMORPGs announced nowadays than Fantasy.

I still wonder if Fantasy inherently makes better MMORPGs, or whether it was just an accident of history, coupled with the natural desire of game companies to clone instead to innovate, which leads to this crushing dominance of Fantasy in the market.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:42 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
The internet is for porn

A major British newspaper, The Independant, made a shocking discovery: the internet is for porn. Well, World of Warcraft players already knew that. In fact I'm a bit surprised that stories like that still hit the news.

I only write about that because The Independant article also talks about internet porn causing problems in people's sex life. I just finished watching the second season of CSI Miami on DVD, and the last episode was so bad that I decided not to buy any more of the CSI Miami on DVD. The story was about an 18-year old who suffered from erectile dysfunction due to having watched too much porn. Quote: "Real women just don't do it for me any more." So he goes and kills his favorite porn star, in the hope that this will cure his problem. An 18-year old who can't get it up any more because of porn? Who writes drivel like that? Pat Robertson?

So that episode and the one episode where the videogame turned students into mass murderers just for "high scores" made me decide that CSI Miami was not the right thing to watch for somebody with a more liberal view of the world. I am sure that both video games and porn can cause problems, but showing them both as causing people to become killers is totally exaggerated. It really seems that there is some sort of religious right political agenda behind sensationalist TV scripts like that, and that is not something I am looking for in my entertainment.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:08 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Changes part 1: Death penalty

I am planning to write a series of posts on how game design elements have changed from 1999 to today. I'll mainly compare the original Everquest with World of Warcraft, as these two games both had a dominant market share in their time. I will try to discuss what changed from EQ to WoW, and more importantly *why* it changed. The first part of this series is about death penalties, how games punish you when your avatar gets killed.

First of all it has to be said that a penalty for dying is absolutely necessary. If whenever your character died you just would need to push a button to resurrect with full health and mana, ready to continue the fight, you could beat any monster, and the game would become pointless. To be able to win a game, there must be an option to lose.

What has changed from 1999 to 2006 is the harshness of the death penalty. In Everquest, when you died, you reappeared alive but naked at your bind point. You could only have your bind point in a city, and non-casters weren't even able to set their bind point themselves without the aid of a caster. So potentially the bind point was very far away from the point where you died. You then had to do a so-called "corpse run", running naked from your bind point to where you died, to collect all the items from your body, your armor, your weapons, and all your bags with all the items in them. In addition to this corpse run, you were also punished by losing xp. If you were just fresh into a level, you could even lose a level from dying.

Unsurprisingly, corpse runs were not very popular. The worst case scenario was that you "lost" your corpse, having died in a place where you were unable to retrieve it, thus losing all your equipment and inventory. That did not happen very often, but it was possible. For example from the Erudin newbie zone to the newbie dungeon The Warrens you had to pass over a ledge. If you fell down that ledge you ended up dead at the bottom of a level 50 dungeon, and unless you had some high-level people help you, your body was irretrievably gone. A more common occurrence was that you retrieved your corpse, but died a couple of more times on the way, losing more and more experience points. A bad evening could set you back weeks in experience points.

One notable consequence of the corpse run system was that there were a couple of dungeons where people of the correct level to gain experience there would never go. If you fight your way into the deepest point of a dungeon and your group wipes there, while the monsters behind you have all respawned, you were all in deep trouble. Thus for example the fabled Frenzied Ghoul at the bottom of the Lower Guk dungeon, a level 42 to 44 mob, was never hunted by a group of level 45 to 50 players, who would have gotten xp from him. Instead level 65 players who didn't have any risk dying there camped the Frenzied Ghoul for the Flowing Black Silk Sash, a rare magic item. As dying deep in a dungeon had a real risk of you losing all your equipment, the reward / risk ratio wasn't good enough for dungeoneering. So people played it safe and went hunting in zones where they were sure to be able to get back to their corpses if they died.

Since Everquest death penalties have become less harsh. Corpse runs where the first thing to be eliminated from MMORPG game design. But also the experience point penalty changed: You lost less experience point for dying, then games started to introduce a xp debt instead of a loss of xp, so you couldn't lose levels any more, and finally World of Warcraft eliminated the xp penalty totally. One game erred on the side of having a too lenient death penalty, Star Wars Galaxies, where people found that committing suicide and repairing the death penalty damage was often faster than running back to the city. World of Warcraft has a reasonable well balanced death penalty system, where you lose 10% of the durability of your items from dying, and you can walk back as a ghost (that can't be harmed on the way) to recover your corpse, or you can speak to a spirit healer at the graveyard and resurrect there, with all your gear, but with an additional 25% durability loss and 10 minutes resurrection sickness.

In summary, the death penalty of a game is a powerful tool which strongly influences how much risk the players are willing to take. Theoretically you could make a game with permadeath, where when your character dies, you need to roll a new one. Obviously in such a game you would see people not even daring to attack to bunny without a group. Given how many fights you do in a MMORPG, even a 1 in 1000 chance to die would be far too dangerous. In games with corpse runs and lots of xp loss, people will play safe, and avoid getting too many monsters between them and their bind point, which makes dungeon design difficult. At the modern level of death penalty people are willing to be "heroic", as failure isn't too harshly punished. But you can't possibly make the death penalty much lighter than now, because then people would just play foolhardy and not care about dying at all, which then becomes silly.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:51 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Kranky Kraut

Did I ever mention that this blog is a honey trap? I get people to link to me or to comment here, and then I follow their link back to their own MMORPG blog. Made my life finding other people's blogs so much easier. :)

My latest find is the blog of Kranky Kraut. Not a big blog, but excellent compilation of leaked Vanguard beta information, among other things. I hope Kranky forgives me for linking to him, his first blog post complains about "circle jerks", blogs commenting on other blogs. :)

Do you remember when WoW wasn't out yet and all we had was this incredible hype leaked from the beta testers? It turns out Vanguard is just the opposite: all the beta tester leaks are either rather negative, or do a bad job of putting a positive spin on uninspiring game play aspects. The more I hear about Vanguard, the less I'm looking forward to it. I do believe that a "hardcore" MMORPG could be viable, if its quality is as good as the more casual friendly alternatives. Imagine WoW with 4 times as many xp needed for each level and a harsher death penalty, and you would have a more hardcore game which would still be very playable. Quality is not related to hardcoreness. Unfortunately in spite of all the promises from the Vanguard team, it seems that it doesn't score very high on the quality axis, so where exactly it is on the hardcore axis becomes irrelevant.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:13 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
DKP systems

I have a relatively unique view on DKP systems, the different loot distribution systems using some sort of points to determine who gets what loot. The average WoW player is not very interested in math and statistics, but is very interested in getting epics. I happen to be good at math, and for me epics are not the most important thing in going raiding. That allows me to take a step back and look at DKP systems from a more statistical point of view, what is a particular system likely to achieve, as opposed to "what's in it for me". I already talked about the principal problems in an earlier post.

The DKP system that most people who compared different systems consider to be the most fair is the zero-sum DKP system. It has definitive advantages in evening out the distribution of epics. Statistically speaking, that means over a large number of raids, two players participating in the same raids will end up with the same number of epics, while two players where one plays twice as much as the other will end up with the player participating more getting exactly twice as many epics as the other.

Unfortunately the zero-sum DKP system also has disadvantages. Imagine a guild not being able to beat Onyxia / Ragnaros / whatever boss yet and scheduling raids to repeatedly try to beat that boss, with a low chance of success. You sign up several evenings, each evening you wipe against that boss several times, you never succeed, but you advance the knowledge of the guild in the correct strategy and coordination. In a zero-sum DKP system you get absolutely no points for that effort. If you work out the strategy for Onyxia in 5 evenings of wipes, only beating her on the last attempt, a player participating in all 5 raids gets exactly as many points as a player only present for the last, successful attempt. That seems unfair. A zero-sum DKP system earns you more points for stupid farming runs than for trying to achieve raid progress for the guild among sweat and tears. Also a zero-sum system is unable to integrate reward points for desirable behavior (like being on time) or negative points for undesirable behavior (like not showing up when you promised to), unless you can come up with a complicated formula that balances rewards and punishment to still result in a zero sum.

So many guilds run systems which are not zero-sum. Obviously a system where the sum of points is negative, that is after a number of raids the average DKP score is negative, wouldn't work very well. A negative-sum system would favor people who go on raids less often over people who go more often, which is counterintuitive. As a result the majority of DKP systems is positive sum.

The advantage of a positive sum system is that besides giving people points for every boss killed, you can award them points for valiantly getting repeatedly slaughtered by a new boss, for being punctual, for bringing a field repair bot that helps the whole raid, and for whatever other things you want to reward. And you can even hand out penalties for bad behavior, although you obviously shouldn't overdo that like the famous Onyxia raid leader Dives handing out -50 DKP left and right.

Unfortunately such a system works well for a couple of weeks, but over the long run the disadvantages of a positive sum system become apparent. The further away the sum of points earned minus points spent for epics deviates from zero, the faster the system becomes a source of problems. Imagine an epic item costs 100 points, but on the average 40-man raid every member receives 100 points, while they find 20 epics. That means that on that raid everybody gets the points to "buy" one epic, but only half the players can spend their points, while the other half can only accumulate the points. As long as the same 40 people participate in every raid, that is no problem at all. But we all no that this practically never happens, due to Real Life ® constraints. Two players of the same class, with one player participating twice as often as the other, with the point distribution explained above ends up with the player playing more often getting *ALL* the items, and the player playing less often getting nothing. That is because in two raids the first player accumulates rights for two items, and the second player only for one item. As in two raids only 1 items is found for them (statistically), the first player always has more rights than the second and always gets first choice.

Of course if an item drops that the first player already has, he passes and the second player gets it. Now the result of this in practice is that you get a ranking of players of each class, with the most frequent player always having the most points. The first item always goes to the first player, the second item to the second player, and so on. If you happen to be the 5th player in line, your chances of getting anything become practically zero. And if you join a guild with such a system already in place and everybody already having accumulated lots of points, even participating in every raid will take months before you get your first item.

Such a system has one advantage, but only for the tanks: You automatically create a "main tank" with the best equipment. There are good arguments for such an arrangement, as a well equipped main tank is important and helps the whole guild. But for the other classes the same distribution will happen, you effectively create a "main druid", "main hunter", "main priest", etc., which isn't necessarily optimal for the whole raid. Especially if the guild is able to beat both MC and Onyxia, you end up with the "main" of a class replacing his tier 1 stuff with tier 2, while somebody behind in the ranking is still running around with tier 0 items.

Thus a positive sum system can create lots of problems: For example recruitment is difficult if the new recruit learns that he only gets his first epic after somebody else gets his next 10 epics. Another possible problem are guild alliances, where a non-even distribution tends to cause lots of inter-guild political strife. But probably the worst disadvantage of the system is that it creates a growing gap between the first player(s) of each class and the last players of the same class. There is a substantial risk that after you have your main tank equipped with full tier 2 gear, while the other warriors are much less well equipped, the main tank either gets fed up and quits the game, or he switches to a more uber guild, and sets back the development of the whole guild in the raid circuit by several notches. Of course people hate setbacks, which causes lots of guild drama, more people leaving and starting a death spiral of setbacks, so the main tank leaving is one of the major causes of guild death.

So personally I would prefer either a zero-sum system, or a system with bonuses and rewards where the average number of points given out during a typical raid is very, very close to the amount of points spent during each raid, thus being nearly zero sum. One way to achieve that are systems where the cost for an epic is not fixed, but where people can bid points. If people are honest, such a bidding system tends to make players spend more points when they have more of them, thus automatically correcting the positive sum imbalances. Unfortunately the disadvantage of bidding systems is that players have a tendency to collude. For example all the hunters agree not to outbid each other, but work out a separate distribution system among them, and then if the warriors and rogues don't do the same sort of collusion, the hunters end up with more points on average, and are able to outbid the other classes on multi-class items like the famouse hunter weapons. No system is perfect.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:48 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
How to be popular in WoW

If you want to gather a group for a hard dungeon in World of Warcraft, which two classes are you looking for first? Most people will probably answer "priest and warrior" to this question. If the dungeon is not so hard, or it is a lower level dungeon you visit with higher level people, all sorts of class combinations can work. But when the going gets tough, you better don't rely on a voidwalker tanking, healed by a shaman. Mages are probably the third most popular class for group invites, but priests and warriors are the "must have" classes.

Now that would suggest that priests and warriors are equally sought after. Unfortunately that is not the case, because of the 8 races in World of Warcraft only 5 can make a priest, but all 8 can be warrior. I don't know if that is the reason, or whether people just prefer warriors to priests, but warriors do outnumber priests on every server. On my server, Horde side (Horde only has 2 priest races), during the morning and early afternoon when people do mostly soloing and small groups, warriors outnumber priest 2:1. During prime time people log on their raid characters, and priests being very necessary in raids the number of priests goes slightly up. But still warriors outnumber priests 3:2.

So if you crave to be popular, with lots of people sending you group invites, you getting easily into any guild, and you being able to get a spot on your guild raids even if you weren't among the first to sign up, play a priest. I'm playing my priest more frequently now, he has basically become my main, just because it is so much easier to get accepted by other people when I play him. In the much rarer cases where people already have a healer and are still looking for a tank, I can always switch to my warrior. If my two level 60 characters were lets say a hunter and a warlock, it would be a lot more difficult for me to find groups, and I don't think I could have joined my new guild that easily, and getting taken to MC raids two days after I joined.

Now if your main purpose in life is getting lots of epics from raids, choosing to play a warrior becomes even less good an idea, unless you run your own guild or manage to become the "main tank" of your guild. In the list of popular classes for raids, warriors due to being so numerous are falling behind not only priests, but also druids and mages. Furthermore most guilds operate a loot distribution system which heavily favors one or two warriors over the other warriors present. That is simply a reaction to how the game works, the gear of your "main tank" plays a large role in determining the success of a raid. Thus if half a dozen warriors regularly participate in raiding, giving the main tank(s) the lion share of the loot advances the success chance of the whole raid more than distributing the loot evenly over all warriors. That might seem rather harsh and unfair if you happen to be a non-MT warrior, but most guilds prefer to kill more bosses in every raid by favoring a main tank.

All this makes me feel slightly uneasy. Playing a priest feels like me social engineering the World of Warcraft class system. It is totally understandable for a guild to selectively invite more needed classes, or for a group or raid to preferably invite the must-have classes. But that means that nobody looks at you as a person, but only as an avatar, a class / level combination.

Fortunately I do like playing priests. And as I play MMORPGs since 1999, always having had a preference for tanks and healers, I play my characters competently enough. But sometimes I really wish I could play my warrior more, for example in 5-man dungeons, in a good group, it is the warrior who sets the pace by pulling, while the priest is far more passive, reacting to the group members health bars and not taking much initiative beyond that. As I said, often I like staying back and healing, but sometimes I'm watching some less competent warrior pulling very slowly and / or badly, and wish it would be me running the show. So I can see the dilemma for somebody who starts on a new server and happens to like other classes than me. Do you choose the class you prefer for soloing, or do you play the class which will get you into groups / raids / guilds most easily? If you have the time, I'd recommend leveling up a priest first, getting your network established, and then making an alt of whatever class you really like to play when alone. That is the disadvantage of massively multiplayer games, the best course of action doesn't depend only on you, but is a compromise taking into account what the other players do as well.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:15 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 29-May-2006

I spent a very nice weekend in World of Warcraft, fun, and for the first time since long with the impression that my characters were advancing again. This is mainly due to the new guild. Not that the new guild is nicer, or the players are in any way more competent. It is mostly an effect of the new guild being bigger, and in a bigger alliance with another guild. During prime time the two allied guilds this weekend had over 60 players online, which makes finding a group very easy. There were even groups running in parallel to a big raid! Sometimes bigger *is* better.

Actually there are two effects at work there. One is simply the guild chat as a replacement for the lacking looking-for-group functionality of WoW. But as many people pointed out in my post about group xp vs. solo xp, the group xp has an invisible factor in it where "competence" or "reliability" or as I'd rather call it, "trust" is rewarded. For example I was in a pickup group, where shortly after a wipe I got disconnected from the server. Took me two or three minutes to get back online. By that time one other group member had left the group, and one had hearthstoned out, assuming that I had quit because of the wipe. In a guild group the players would have had more trust in me and waited 3 minutes.

Perversely my network of trusted players to group with has grown because of me leaving my old guild. As the old guild was set up more as a community, where players with all sorts of different guild tags can remain member even after they quit that guild, I'm still part of the old network, plus I gained the new network of the new guild and guild alliance. I think such a transverse community could work very well. A group of friends with a chat channel and a website, distributed over many different guilds, and being able to gather groups using many different guild chats. So everybody in the group knows at least somebody else in that group, creating trust, but the network stretches much further than a single guild would allow. Maybe the only fault of my old guild was to try to do both the transverse network and the classical guild setup at the same time, creating problems of mixed loyalties and goals.

So this weekend I mainly played my priest and got a lot of things achieved, and saw a lot of new content. I participated in part two of the MC raid I already reported about. Having gone until Shazzrah in the first raid, part two saw us killing both Sulfuron and Golemagg on the first try. As I had never seen these bosses before, that was interesting. We had less success with Majordomo, wiping four or five times on him before giving up. I'm not quite sure where the problem is, I think that fight requires even more coordination between the 40 players than the other MC bosses.

With all these MC raids my faction with the Hydraxian Waterlords is now honored, and I started with the quest series that will give me the water to extinguish the runes in MC, to summon Majordomo and Ragnaros. I killed the elementals in the Plaguelands and Silithus, with the small problem that I didn't read well the description of the quest for the Plaguelands, and ran around a while not finding the discordant elementals. Doh! You need to use the quest item from your inventory to turn a normal water elemental into a discordant elemental, before killing it.

Next I joined a raid to UBRS, mainly with people from my new guild. That went very well, we cleared out the whole place in a bit over 2 hours. That gave me both the eyes of the Emberseer for the Hydraxian Waterlords quest series, and Drakki's blood for the Onyxia key. Another successful dungeon trip was me helping guild mates to do Warlords Command in LBRS, where I got a very nice staff with +25 int from the final boss, Wyrmthalak. So while I still had some dungeon trips this weekend that didn't succeed, my rate of successful dungeons to abandoned attempts has gone way up, compared to my guildless pickup group period.

And that was all I was shooting for. I don't mind if the DKP system of the guild alliance means I'll probably never get any item unless everybody else already has it, or that we wipe on Majordomo, or that we are unable to tackle Onyxia. I'm happy that I am in a network where I can visit MC one day, Scholo the next, and LBRS or UBRS the day after. The raid dungeons just enter into the circuit of other high-level dungeons, creating more variety of things to do.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:12 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 27-May-2006

Due to wisdom acquired during the last guild drama, there will be no more names of guilds and characters other than my own mentioned on this blog. Unless of course I *want* to badmouth somebody intentionally for causing me grief, as a weapon of last resort. :)

So I am in a new guild, which is a bit bigger than the old guild, and has a more powerful alliance partner. Thus even with just two guild the MC raids get more than 40 signups regularly. Luckily it seems that priests are in low supply in these guilds, and on my first signing up for a MC raid with the new guild, I get chosen first from the waiting list. At that point the raid has 3 priests and 6 druids, although later a 4th priest joins. I'm more used to raids with half a dozen priests and only one or two druids. There are also tons of warriors, and few hunters, another situation I know the reverse of better.

On this first raid with them we kill Lucifron, Magmadar, Gehennas, Garr, Geddon, and Shazzrah. With having seen Geddon only once (and lost), and never seen Shazzrah at all, I considered that pretty good, especially all in one evening. All bosses died on the first attempt, except Shazzrah, who needed two attempts due to some repops in the first fight. Teamspeak helps to speed raids up considerably, even if not every last member is using it. And this guild alliance wouldn't even be considered to be "uber", never having even killed Onyxia yet. But they sure do have MC down pat. Fortunately I managed to keep up with that kind of performance, and never messed up my healing. I was "the bomb" three times at Geddon, but managed to run to a wall far away from the others, and even survive me exploding all three times.

The only thing that I was a bit disappointed of was that besides being faster, the raids was exactly the same as raiding with the old guild. Two completely different groups of 40 people using *exactly* the same strategies on all the bosses. There are fine nuances in the exact raid mix, success, and speed of execution, but it is more like comparing two different theatre companies performing Shakespeare's Hamlet than two different armies fighting battles against the same enemy.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:55 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Pickup group lottery

In the last two weeks or so I went to Scholomance with a pickup group 5 times. In 4 of these 5 cases we either abandoned before reaching the first boss, Rattlegore, or directly after that fight. Yesterday was the 5th attempt, and we totally cleared out Scholomance, killing every boss including Jandice and Kirtonos (in the correct order to get me 2 quests done). I felt as if I had won the pickup group lottery.

But of course it wasn't a *real* pickup group. While technically we had 5 different guild tags, I came because I knew the guy organizing it, and he knew the other players in the group as well. A network of online friends is as good, if not better, than a guild for forming groups.

The third quest I got done in Scholomance was Dawn's Gambit. I don't know if I did it wrong, or if there is a random factor. But when I placed the item that was supposed to destroy all undead in the room, it only turned the students into skeletons, which swarmed us en masse and wiped us. I think staying outside the room while placing the item might have been a good idea. :) Or the "with a little luck the item will destroy all undead" part in the quest description was meant literally, and we just didn't have a little luck. Anyway, the reward is a *very* nice staff, Dancing Sliver. But I was a bit sad that I lost the roll for the Skullsmoke Pants, because they are very rare, and I don't think you can kill Vectus without having the Dawn's Gambit quest.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:32 PM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Ding 100,000

In February 2004 I added a Sitemeter counter
to this site, to find out if anybody was actually reading my blog. Today this counter hit 100,000 visitors, which is a lot more than I would have ever imagined. Time to celebrate, pop the champagne!

With economics being my second hobby after gaming, I obviously asked myself what my blog is "worth", in the post-dotcom era. Admoolah is telling me that a blog like mine could bring about $2.86 per 1,000 page views when using Google's AdSense. Sitemeter tells me that my 100,000 visitors had 125,000 page views (so not many people get past the front page). So I theoretically could have earned $357 dollars in the last two years from my blogging. Fortunately I have a Real Life ® job in which I earn more than that in two *days*. So I'm still not going to put advertising on my blog. Ask me again when I get 100,000 visitors per month, and I might be tempted. :)

It is not that I am against advertising or earning money. The problem is rather that Google's AdSense would see me writing about WoW and MMORPGs, and promptly plaster my site with ads for WoW gold, powerleveling services, and "inofficial guides". I'm neither really for nor against buying WoW gold, but wouldn't want to promote it. I find powerleveling services stupid (what's next? I pay somebody to watch TV for me?). And most "inoffical guides" are primitive scams where you are sold information you could have gotten for free from a number of gaming sites. Add it all up and AdSense would get me to a point where I earn money only when my readers are being lazy or stupid. As I'm assuming, based on the quality of their comments, that my readers are rather intelligent, the earnings would probably be lower than what Admoolah predicts anyway. If I were blogging about something different, like model railroads or so, and the ads would direct my readers to local hobby shops, I'd probably be willing to run AdSense. But with the "secondary market" for the MMORPG hobby being decidedly seedy, I think I'm better of without advertising on my blog. What do you think?
- posted by Tobold @ 2:12 PM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
The Gap on AFK Gamer

Must-read article on AFK Gamer about The Gap developing between average and hardcore raiding players.

What was news to me is that attunement to the new patch 1.11 dungeon for people not revered with Argent Dawn will be "5 arcane crystals, 2 nexus crystals, 1 righteous orb and 60 gold", or about 300 gold. At revered the cost goes down to about 100 gold. Now I totally understand concepts like the UBRS key, Molten Core attunement or the Onyxia key, where you have to do a series of quests, and visit one or several minor dungeons before you can access the raid dungeon. But having to buy your way into a raid dungeon sounds rather stupid to me. Unless you happen to have chosen the unlikely combination of mining and enchanting as your professions, it isn't even technically possible to get these items yourself without using the auction house or guild bank. You might want to buy righteous orbs now and sell them at a profit when the patch comes out. ;)

But the real issue explained in the article is that people who are already raiding a lot will be able to get even better loot, while people who aren't in a good raiding guild yet will not get any stronger. Thus when a raiding guild loses members to the dreaded Real Life, there aren't even people around that are marginally equipped and keyed out well enough to be able to join them. The "minimum requirements" for being hired by a raiding guild are constantly going up, with the potential candidates not being able to reach that level, because they can't get everything just with pickup groups. Unless raiding guilds spend a lot of effort to raise potential replacments, and I don't know any guild doing that, they are going to paint themselves into a corner.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:43 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 24-May-2006

I leveled my shaman to 41 yesterday. As I'm still avoiding the horrible Stranglethorn Vale, I'm discovering level 40 quests in other places, some of which were even new to me. One very nice, hidden, level 40 quest is in the Dustwallow Marsh. There is a hut with a guy named "Swamp Eye" Jarl, who gives very bad quests (best avoid doing those), but in his garden is a freshly dug grave. When you click on it first, you find a hand. Bring the hand to Brackenwall Village gives you a reward, but no clue that the quest isn't finished. You need to go back to the same grave, and by further digging find a head. From that starts a quest where you boil the head in a troll voodoo cauldron in Grom'Gol to make him speak, which then gives you a quest to find a necklace from crab men in Dustwallow Marsh. After handing the quest in at Brackenwall, you are sent to Orgrimmar, where you get the choice between two very nice blue rings. Well worth it, and I guess not many people did that quest.

From there I moved to Arathi, going to another area which is a bit hidden, Faldir's Cove. You can only get there by swimming from Hillsbrad or Wetlands, or by jumping off the cliffs near Stromgarde. In the cove is a stranded pirate ship with the crew giving you lots of level 40 quests, many of which you can do together by fighting naga under water a bit further out at sea. No problem for a shaman with a water breathing spell, but other classes are advised to bring a water breathing potion.

The reason I'm playing my shaman is that my level 60 characters can't find a group to where they want to go. I joined a new guild, but it has few level 60 chars. So besides helping them do Uldaman or Sunken Temple, I'm not dungeoneering any more. Yesterday people from my old guild asked me whether I could help them in UBRS, but it turned out they only needed somebody to unlock the door for them, and already has a priest, so I couldn't join with Kyroc to get my Drakki's blood. I was joking about my career development in my old guild, from guild master to doorman. :) I could probably have joined their Onyxia raid, but I didn't want to go with my warrior, and the priest, as mentioned, still needs the last step for the key.

What I noticed is that in the virtual "hierarchy" from the top uber guilds, to raiding guilds, to non-raiding guilds, down to the non-guilded people, the class mix changes. Basically in WoW there are too many people playing solo classes like hunters, and not enough people playing healers. Thus all the priests are very sought after, and quickly get recruited into raiding guilds. So if you try to gather a group from small, non-raiding guilds, there is never a priest to be found. That is rather annoying, because while I could just play my priest, I still need to go to the bar in BRD with my warrior. I grinded Thorium Brotherhood faction to honored some time ago already, but that doesn't help me much if the recipes sold as reward for having achieved the faction are in the middle of a dungeon I can't find a group for.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:09 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Consumable nerf

I found the following paragraph in the 1.11 test server patch notes, and I'm not happy about this:

We have re-evaluated the mechanics of consumable items in the game and concluded that these should work in a more intuitive manner. As such, most items that can not be equipped with right click abilities have been streamlined into one of three categories. Using an item of
a particular category will trigger a shared cooldown among all other items in the same category. The categories break down as follows with category cooldowns as listed.
Potions 2 minutes: This includes items such as Health Potion, Mana Potion, Invisibility Potion and Mighty Rage Potion.
Aggressive 1 minute: This includes items such as explosives, Really Sticky Glue and Discombobulator Ray.
Non-Aggresive 2 minutes: This includes items such as Healthstone, Night Dragon's Breath, Whipper Root Tuber and Target Dummy.

I'm a big fan of consumable items, but this change makes them a lot less useful. For example my warrior not only uses healing potions, but crystal restore from Un'goro, Night Dragon's Breath, and Whipper Root Tuber to heal. Plus healthstones when I could get one. These are currently all on a different timer, but after the patch they will all be on the same timer, and I will just be able to use one of them, and can throw the others away.

But while this is just annoying for my warrior, the change is devastating for my engineers, the shaman and the pally. Grenades and explosive sheep, or goblin mines, are now on different timers, so if I'm willing to spend the money on the materials and spend the time creating all these explosives, I can blow up a group of enemies with several bombs. Given the low damage output of my paladin, that is really useful, and the main reason I spent lot of effort to learn engineering to maximum skill. But after the patch 1.11 consumable nerf, all explosives will be on the same 1 minute countdown, and again I'll be forced to just chose the best of them and forget about the others.

I don't know yet how it will work with the "buff" type potions, but if these are on a 2-minute timer now too, it will be annoying. Much easier to quaff all the buff potions at once than to have to wait for a long cooldown between each of them.

This change makes the game poorer, because many consumable items that are currently used because they can be used in parallel with better items will in future just become totally useless. Who will use a fun, but not especially effective, explosive sheep, if that prevents him from using any serious bombs?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:45 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Lord of the Rings Online Europe

The European website of Lord of the Rings Online just opened up. You can sign up for the European beta there now. I did. I'm not certain how good LOTRO will be in terms of gameplay, but of course walking on Middle Earth has a strange attraction that places like Norrath or Azeroth never will be able to offer.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:22 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Sir Bruce's E3 MMOG report

"Sir" Bruce Sterling Woodcock did an excellent write-up of the MMOG games presented at the 2006 E3. So if you want to know what the MMORPGs of 2007+ will be, Sir Bruce's report gives you a good idea which games to look forward to.

Sir Bruce is more famous for his MMOGChart.com data on MMORPG subscriber numbers. Unfortunately his last data are from November, and could use some updating. But if you look at the chart of games with more than 120k subscribers, it becomes clear why nobody bothers to look at the numbers any more. Just mentally update the number of WoW subscribers to 6.5 million, and then consider that the only two other games with more than 1 million subscribers are the two Lineage games, which only have a tiny market share in the western world. World of Warcraft is the Microsoft of MMORPGs, with a market share that makes all the other games subscriber numbers look like background noise.

On the one side the millions of dollars that WoW made are certainly encouraging some companies to develop a MMORPG. But on the other side the complete dominance and near-monopoly of World of Warcraft isn't a healthy situation. It doesn't exactly encourage Blizzard to improve the game's shortcomings, or to add content at a faster rate. And there is a risk that other game companies hold the wrong parts of WoW responsible for the game's success. So instead of saying "we need a well-programmed game with lots of quests and content, accessible to many people", they might come to much shallower (and wrong) analysis like "the market wants elves and orcs".

Of course the WoW monopoly won't last forever, just like the dominance of Everquest didn't last forever. But in Sir Bruce's E3 line-up I fail to identify a "WoW-Killer". There are some nice games I would like to try, but nothing remotely likely to get even a million subscribers in the USA and Europe.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:47 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
A theory of grouping

I'm not quite ready to publish my own scientific paper on "social dynamics" of MMORPGs, but I do have my own theory of under which circumstances people group or don't group. The basis for this theory is that while of course everybody is different and has his own goals, the behavior most commonly observed in a MMORPG is the one that maximizes the amount of reward per play session.

I'm bundling gear rewards with experience point rewards here, because better gear ultimately ends up in you being able to earn xp faster in the future, so it is just a more indirect method of getting you experience point rewards. And of course all this is only true below the level cap, we all know how much for example WoW changes at level 60.

So if you look at the reward for solo play, it is relatively easy. You log on, you play, and you get rewards which are more or less linear with the time you spent during the play session. So

Solo session reward = Solo session time x Solo reward rate

with the solo reward rate being the rate at which you earn rewards like xp and gear during a typical solo session, from killing mobs alone, and from quests.

The reward for group play is slightly more difficult. After you log on, you first need some time to actually find a group, and to gather at the same spot. During that group finding time your rewards earned are zero. Only then does reward earning start, thus

Group session reward = (Group session time - Group finding time) x Group reward rate

So if people are trying to maximize the reward per session, they would prefer soloing if the solo session reward is bigger than the group session reward. But they would prefer to group if the group session reward is bigger than the solo session reward. As the term of the group finding time is always greater than zero, if the solo reward rate is equal than the group reward rate, the group session reward is diminished by the group finding time term, and people prefer soloing, because it gives greater rewards.

So what can developers do to persuade people to group? Well, the devs are in control of many of the parameters in these equations, especially the reward rates. One crude, but working approach, taken by the original Everquest, was to diminish the solo reward rate from a certain level on to be zero or near zero. Some classes were simply totally unable to gain any experience points while solo, as the lowest level of mobs still giving xp was too tough to kill. Obviously players resent that sort of "forced grouping".

So a subtler approach is to make the group reward rate slightly bigger than the solo reward rate, so as to encourage grouping, without making soloing impossible. This is something Blizzard definitely at least tried in World of Warcraft. The xp per hour rewards are difficult to compare, but it is very clear that the item rewards from group play are better than the item rewards from solo play. The reason why WoW failed to balance these two better, is in the time terms, which are harder to control. If it takes half an hour to find and gather a group, that is not much if the group stays together for 3 or more hours. But if they stay together for only 1 hour or so, the negative effect of the group finding time on the reward becomes too significant. In World of Warcraft it seems that the average player plays in relatively short sessions (the famous "casual" player), the group reward rate isn't so much bigger than the solo reward rate to balance out the rewards lost during the waiting time, and so many people just go soloing. Changing the reward rates in a patch would be difficult. You can't diminish solo rewards without causing a huge outcry of "nerf!". Increasing the group rewards is possible, for example when Everquest wanted more people to visit dungeons, they simply added a dungeon xp bonus to the game.

But even more effective would be for the developers to introduce tools that diminish the group finding time. World of Warcraft could make huge improvements in their looking for group tools. And meeting stones could be reprogrammed to work like a warlock summoning, so the first three people arriving at the dungeon could summon the two stragglers. The beauty of such changes would be that at first sight they don't change the rewards rate at all. But by cutting down on the rewards lost to a group due to waiting, improved group finding and gathering tools would make grouping relatively more attractive to players, and lead to more positive social interaction between them. We are not a bunch of hermits preferring to play alone, it is the parameters of the game that influence our behavior and preference for soloing or grouping.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:07 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
WoW players as lab rats

I often quote the Playon blog at the Palo Alto Research Center for World of Warcraft related data, for the simple reason that there aren't many other sites giving data at all. But of course if you have people from a research center and Nick Yee from the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab observing WoW together, the result is a scientific paper titled "Alone Together? Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Online Games".

The conclusion of this scientific paper is that "joint activities are not very prevalent, especially in the early stages of the game", or in other words, people spend most of their leveling time solo. Doh! I think every WoW player already knew that. Okay, it is nice to have that fact established with data. But even the data tell you nothing about whether people solo out of personal preference, or whether soloing is simply the pathway of least resistance in this particular game, and people just do whatever it takes to level fastest.

For example in figure 4 it is shown that Warlocks and Hunters spent the least amount of time in a group, and priests the most amount of time. That is interpreted as Warlocks and Hunters being good at soloing, Priests being less good. But that is a commonly held misconception, Priests are actually very good at soloing to 60, as long as they spec in shadow and arm themselves with a good wand. And the third least grouping class is the Warrior, which I would classify rather as a group specialized class than as a solo class. The reason why priests group so much more than other classes is simply that there aren't enough of them. The moment you log on a priest, you get bombarded with tells inviting you to groups. Warriors are much more frequent, and thus have a harder time finding a group.

I tried to find a group to go to BRD this weekend with my warrior, and failed. No healer to be found, as usual. So the guys from PARC, if they were observing me at that moment, would have listed me as "warrior, not grouped" in their statistics. Which tells them nothing about what I wanted to do, but more about the inability to run a high-level group without priests, and the relative lack of priests (especially of priests not being snatched up by a guild and being busy raiding). Even the shortcomings of the WoW looking for group user interface had a bigger effect on my behavior than any "social dynamics" as claimed in the paper.

Still the paper is an interesting read. I especially liked the comparison of WoW with a Skinner box, a device used in a lab where you train a rat to push a lever and get a piece of cheese as reward. The authors compare the smooth WoW leveling curve with such a Skinner box, with the player being "trained" to do quests for rewards, with the challenges continually getting slightly more difficult for slightly better rewards, until the player is thoroughly addicted. Makes you feel like a lab rat when playing WoW. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 9:30 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Stop Playing Memory

Yesterday's post on the repetitiveness of video games made me think a bit more on the subject. I think there are two major game components in video games, but they aren't really easy to keep apart. Let's do a thought experiment, by designing 2 very simple games:

Game 1 I call the reaction game. You and me sit face to face, and we both have a red card in the right hand, and a green card in the left hand. Now I raise one of my hands at random, and your job is to raise your hand holding the same color. We do that 20 times and your "score" is based on your average reaction time, the faster you react, the higher the score. If ever you raise the wrong hand with the wrong color, you're out, and have to restart.

Game 2 works exactly like game 1. Only that instead of raising my hands at random, I always use exactly the same sequence of red and green. I call this the memory game.

It is obvious that your score in the memory game will be equal or better than that of the reaction game. Because if you weren't using your memory at all, you could still simply react to what you see me doing, and the game becomes a reaction game. But the more often you play game 2, the more your score is going to improve over the reaction game score, because you *know*, from your memory, which color card I am going to raise next. Of course playing memory is more repetitive than playing the reaction game, and while your score is higher, the game is less interesting.

Video games often have both elements. The first time you encounter a situation in a game, you will need to react to it. But if you fail and die / wipe, you can reload / rez and do exactly the same situation again. Thus you know what is going to happen, and your memory helps you to overcome the encounter and win. That is true for many games, from first-person-shooter console games to World of Warcraft.

Take for example the Onyxia encounter in World of Warcraft. There are guides for this encounter out there, telling you exactly about the three phases of the combat, what Onyxia will be doing, and how to avoid getting killed in each of this phases. An Onyxia raid is successful if all the participants know this information, and play in accordance with a prearranged plan, based on *knowing* what will happen.

Now imagine what would happen if Onyxia wouldn't react always the same way, but would have some sort of artificial intelligence. You stand there with your fire resistance gear, having quaffed a greater fire protection potion, and Onyxia breathes acid on you, dealing nature damage. Or instead of using deep breath in the second phase, Onyxia sees that everybody is widely scattered, and that the most annoying characters are those cloth wearing, dot casting types, and does a short dive attack, ripping that cloth wearer into pieces.

Why are people so proud to be the first guild to have killed a new raid boss? Because as they were the first, they didn't have the knowledge on the first try, painstakingly acquired the knowledge over several wipes, and then played and won the memory game. The guilds coming after that can worked with borrowed memories, making the encounter a lot easier.

Now the memory game has one distinctive disadvantage. Everybody, including the game developers, knows that the memory makes the encounter a lot easier. So the difficulty level of the encounter is planned in a way that for a person or group *with perfect knowledge of what will happen* the encounter is still challenging. Which usually means that if the player or group does not have the knowledge, but relies solely on reacting to observations during the encounter, the encounter is impossibly hard.

What I would like to see, and what I think could be the future of video games, is better artificial intelligence, and encounters that are different every time you play them. These encounters would be easier, because memory wouldn't help you much with them. Instead of relying on people knowing what will happen, which is by necessity repetitive and becomes boring fast, in each encounter players would need to react correctly to what they see. Ideally the monster would likewise react on what it sees the player(s) doing, so doing always the same strategy would actually make the encounter harder, not easier.

Think of it: Every single guild killing Onyxia would be the first guild to beat that particular encounter, because every Onyxia encounter would be different. Instead of players learning how to beat Onyxia, Onyxia would have a neural network type of artifical intelligence, learning how to beat players that always do the same. The encounter would remain challenging and interesting forever, because it never repeats.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Life After the Video Game Crash

Alan directed my attention towards the Pointless Waste of Time blog, where there is a very interesting article about Life After the Video Game Crash (Post E3 2006 Edition). Only that the article doesn't in fact speak at all about the "life after" part, but only why there could be a crash of the video game market in the not so far future. Interesting read, with a style based on first listing counter-arguments, and then dismissing them.

Now I don't believe in an imminent video game crash, but the author, David Wong, makes some good points that I'd like to quote.

Luke's X-Wing approaches the surface of the Death Star.
"Red Five, begin your attack run."
Luke swoops down into the trench. "It'll be just like Beggar's Canyon back ho-"
Turret laser bolts tear his X-Wing apart.

----------------------------

Luke's X-Wing approaches the surface of the Death Star.
"Red Five, begin your attack run."
Luke swoops down into the trench. "It'll be just like Beggar's Canyon back home!"
Turret laser bolts miss by inches. He skims along the trench.
A Tie Fighter drops in behind him and blows his ship to ten thousand flaming pieces.

----------------------------

Luke's X-Wing approaches the surface of the Death Star.
"Red Five, begin your attack run."
Luke swoops down into the trench. "It'll be just like Beggar's Canyon back home!"
Turret laser bolts miss by inches. He skims along the trench.
A Tie Fighter drops in behind him, shoots and misses. Luke approaches the exhaust shaft... fires a photon torpedo...
...and misses. The Death Star destroys the rebel base.

----------------------------

Luke's X-Wing approaches the surface of the Death Star.
"Red Five, begin your attack run."
Luke swoops down into the trench. "It'll be just like Beggar's Canyon ba-"
Turret laser bolts tear his X-Wing apart.

---------------------------

And:

The first time you play a level, the monster around the first corner is a surprise. After that, it's homework. It's memorizing, via pure repetition, bad guy placement and ammunition deposits and card keys. "Okay, kill the mutant behind the crate. Duck behind the dual doors. Wait for guard to walk out. Kill him, take his key. There's two Hellgoats in this next hall. Pick up the rockets."

And:

We Original Gamers, the hard core, bought every machine that came on the market for two decades. But for most of us OG's, the game consoles we own now will be the last we'll ever buy. There are millions of us, and it's just a matter of time. Literally. I'll pop in a DVD because a movie only requires two hours from my busy schedule of work and home repairs and chasing kids off my lawn. Getting to the end of a video game, however, requires hours upon hours of play. Not because the story is hours long, mind you, but because getting through each scene requires practice and repetition and repetition and repetition, all in the hopes of seeing that exploding Death Star cutscene at the end.

Replace the scene from Rogue Squadron with the last time you got wiped several times when tackling a new World of Warcraft raid boss, and you'll see how the author is a soul mate of mine. Game content taking too much time due to endless repetition is exactly what bugs me about raiding and other WoW endgame content.

The reason why I don't believe that this will cause a video game market crash is ironically World of Warcraft as well. Because the reason why WoW has over 6 million subscribers is that a large part of the content, leveling up from 1 to 59, is *not* too repetitive, and can be done in 2-hour chunks instead of watching a DVD. With one such example on the market, sooner or later other game developers will find this secret formula, and simply make more games for the 2-hour crowd.

And these games might well be MMORPGs. Even David Wong believes that online gaming will change the future. Although some of his arguments for this are more cynical than realistic in the current political climate:

Just think of how porn changes when the user also gets to go in with the toned body of an underwear model. It'll make our current online porn look like just the tip of the assberg.

While the "assberg" made me laugh, I think the political opposition to massively multiperson online porn will be hard to overcome.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:52 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
When the virtual property hits the fan

The only massively multiplayer game that gets more mainstream press articles than World of Warcraft is surprisingly Second Life, which at 170,000 subscribers, and a far lower rate of online users to subscribers than WoW, is a relatively small game. But unlike World of Warcraft, players of Second Life are legally owning their virtual property, paid for in Linden Dollars, which are exchangeable freely against US dollars. So many stories have been reported on people running a virtual business that ends up paying their real-world rent.

Now something happened that many people have been waiting for, a lawsuit over virtual property in Second Life, as Wired reports. It seems that Second Life botched their auctions page, on which you can buy virtual land, having auctions on it which weren't accessible unless you fiddled with the numbers in the URL. Some clever guys did fiddle with the numbers, accessed auctions that nobody else saw, and bought lots of virtual land for $300 a plot, instead of the going rate of $1,000 per plot.

Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life, promptly banned the guy for hacking and closed his account. Unfortunately the guy was a lawyer, and equally promptly sued Linden Labs. Not surprisingly he wants his money back, at least the $8,000 he paid for the virtual land auctions, not to talk of the over $30,000 in Linden Dollars he owns. He might have a point there, if Linden Labs claims that the auctions were invalid because of his URL "hacking", they shouldn't be allowed to keep the money and not deliver the virtual land.

But of course the lawsuit could have much wider implications on the legal status of virtual property. If Linden Labs allows their players to have legal ownership of their virtual property, then what exactly can the company still do or not do without hurting their players property rights. Banning a player obviously makes his virtual belongings worthless. But even changes in gameplay which cause inflation could destroy somebodies virtual fortune. And what if the game company, like Blizzard, claims that there is no virtual property, and accounts and virtual goods can only be traded on a black market, does that change the owners property rights? Can you sue Blizzard for banning you from World of Warcraft, based on the value of your characters and belongings? Questions like these have been discussed for a long time, but now it might be the first time that US law is pronouncing on it. (Not counting a mock trial with a real judge on some game conference)
- posted by Tobold @ 2:58 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King

I've been playing Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King (DQ8) on the PS2 for two days now, enough for a short review. If I had to describe it in a single expression, I'd call it "Final Fantasy Lite". It is a fun game, great graphics, interesting characters, lots of humor, and easy to get into. But it isn't very innovative, instead preferring to step in the footsteps of classic console RPG gaming.

You are playing a hero and his companions, first just one ex-bandit named Yangus who in the European version has a funny Cockney accent, but gaining two further companions over the course of the game. The hero is working for a king and a princess, but as the title suggests they have been cursed, and the king is now a green goblin, and the princess is the horse pulling his cart. The game tells the story of how the hero goes on a quest to lift the curse, but it is a long story with many complications and mysteries. Besides the main story, there are a couple of side-quests, side boss mobs, and other other things to do, like capturing monsters for a monster arena.

DQ8 was developed by Level-5, and published by Square Enix. Level-5 is known for Dark Cloud (one of my favorite PS2 RPGs) and Dark Chronicle, and DQ8 goes with a cell-shaded 3D look similar to that of Dark Chronicle, but with thinner outlines. That works very well, and the graphics can only be described as beautiful and colorful. But the gameplay of DQ8 resembles more the Final Fantasy games from Square Enix, just without the jumping, and a bit less complicated with the character development.

You spend a good part of the game running around in the world or in dungeons, occasionally being attacked by random monsters coming out of nowhere, just like in Final Fantasy. How strong the random monsters are is determined by the area you are in, and the time of day, with monsters being more powerful at night. Unlike Final Fantasy you get an ability early on which "whistles" to attract random monsters, automatically starting a fight, so you don't have to run around in circles if you are looking for a fight. And you also get items and abilities which prevent random monsters from attacking. So you have pretty good control about how much fighting you want to do.

Combat is strictly turn-based. At the start of each round you tell every character what to do, whether it is an attack, a spell, or using an item. You can also try to flee or intimidate the monsters into fleeing. After you have finished your instructions, the characters and monsters hit each other in an order determined by their agility. Besides damaging each other with physical attacks and spells, there are a range of status effects combatants can inflict on each other, from the more classic poison and sleep effects to more exotic effects like uncontrollable dancing. Yangus list of abilities he can get later in the game includes "Underpants Dance: Paralyzes all enemies". :)

While with minor monsters you might have an interest to attack directly to get them out of the way, in longer fights you can also spend a round to "psyche up", up to 3 times early in the game, 4 times later, which gives a huge boost to your attack strength, enabling you to deal a lot of damage at once. So a typical strategy would have one character psyching up, and another one healing, until the big attack is unleashed. But apart from psyching up, combat is a relatively simple affair. And obviously a bit repetitive. That is lightened up by the funny monsters, like the bunicorn, a bunny with a horn on its forehead. The story and dialogues are also on the light, humorous side, which makes a welcome change from the often melodramatic Final Fantasy stories.

By killing monsters you gain gold and experience points, and the xp will raise your level. Character development is a very simple affair, most stats increases are automatic, your only choice is in which of 5 possible areas to distribute your skillpoints. 4 of these 5 areas are weapons, while the 5th is a character specific area, like courage for the hero, humanity for Yangus, and sex-appeal for Jessica. There is no skill "tree", just a linear list, opening up more spells and abilities the more points you put in an area. Obviously the weapon skills only work if you wield that specific weapon, but weapon skills tend to have a major influence on your damage output, while the character specific abilities are useful, but often less damaging. Depending on your style you can put more points into weapons and just beat the enemies into bits, or take a more subtle, magic-based approach with lots of status effects.

Your hit points and magic points don't regenerate between combats. You either need to return to a city and sleep in an inn to fill them back up, or you need to ingest various herbs and potions to fill them. Getting back to a city is easy, with teleport items and cheap teleport spells you get very early in the game. But then you'll need to walk back to where you were on foot. Items can be found from monsters, or in various chests, bags, and cupboards, even if the owner of said cupboard is standing right next to you. You can also combine items in an alchemy pot into new items, based on recipes found in the world, or experimentation (or from spoiler sites).

All in all very classic RPG gameplay. You follow the story, and if ever the monsters you need to kill for the story are too tough, you do some more random fights to gain xp and level up. I've found sites estimating a duration of about 60 hours, don't know yet how long I will take. I like Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King, and I'll probably play it until the end, but I don't think I would play it a second time. It is a more or less linear game, with little replayability. But as long as I have fun during the hours where I'm playing it, I don't mind. I have no need for another game threatening to take over my life, like MMORPGs tend to do. Games with a clear end do have their advantages. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 1:32 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Hackers

This is funny, somebody is trying to hack me. Or rather he is trying to get access to my Google / Blogger account by pretending to be me having forgotten my password. Of course Google isn't THAT stupid, in such cases it just sends an e-mail to my home e-mail address, alerting me of the attempt. The hacker would need to click on the link in that e-mail to reset the password. And even then he would still need to answer some security questions to change the password. I know, because I just did change the password, just to make sure.

I do prefer login systems like World of Warcraft, where you don't have to use your display name as account name. On GMail or on typical PHP forums your username is your display name, so in that cases I'm kind of forced to use "Tobold" to appear as me. But then a hacker only needs to guess / hack the second word, the password, to get access to my stuff. So I need to use different passwords everywhere, and change them from time to time, noting them on a list next to my computer. I guess the easiest way to hack me would be breaking into my house and stealing the list. :) Other than that, I'm reasonably safe, with firewalls and anti-virus protecting me from keyloggers and the like.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:28 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Wielding virtual swords

I've had sessions in World of Warcraft, playing my warrior, that lasted 6 hours or more. Although in the virtual world my character was busy swinging a rather heavy looking sword for hours, the physical effort I had to spend to make him do that was minimal. In fact in WoW, if you wanted to not use the special moves, you could just right-click once on the mob and all the sword-swinging would happen automatically, burning no real calories whatsoever.

Now Nintendo is planning to change that, with their "Wii" (formerly known as "Revolution") console and special motion detector controller. They presented games on the E3 where you played virtual tennis by swinging the Wii controller like a real tennis racket, played virtual golf by swinging it like a golf club. And in a Wii Legend of Zelda game you will be swinging the controller like a sword to do swordfighting.

Now a Wii controller is considerably lighter than a real metal sword. But swinging it will come closer to physical exercise than many gamers have ever been. ;) Probably fun for a while, but swinging that sword for the 50 to 100 hours it takes to finish the usual Legend of Zelda game sounds far too exhausting to me. I think I'll give that console a miss.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:53 PM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Blog bot

Here are some quotes from a gaming blog:

Major Nelson's Xbox - 05/15/06
You would think I had died and gone to heaven when Major Nelson showed up to play. Gamer score stands at 3437. That is a gain of 15 points over last time! He played Battlefield 2: MC, and wished it would never end, but it did and that was sad.

Major Nelson's Xbox - 05/14/06
I saw Major Nelson walk by yesterday morning... I was hoping he would come play and he did. 3422 points and climbing. That is a gain of 30 points over last time! He played UNO gaining 2 achievements, and after that powered me down without even saying good night. I mean what the hell?

Major Nelson's Xbox - 05/13/06
Hmmm... Major Nelson was nowhere to be seen yesterday... maybe he is at E3. If he is, he better bring back some awesome swag, like some hot new exclusive demos.

The strange thing about this blog that it isn't written by Major Nelson, it is written by Major Nelson's Xbox 360. If you have a XBox 360 on the internet, you can sign up at 360Voice with your XBox Live Gamertag. Your XBox already collects all the information about how long you play, what you play, and what your score is. 360Voice takes that information in XML format and transforms it into a blog, written from the point of view of your XBox. A blog bot, so to say.

Depending on your point of view that is either the future of blogging, or silly, and slightly menacing. There is a lot of information collected on you by your XBox, and sent to some Microsoft server. Whether you want to blog it is your choice, but even if you don't, some people have access to those data, and will study them for marketing purposes. Knowing exactly what games your customers are playing, and for how long is pretty powerful, much more powerful than the Nielsen Rating for TV, which just works on a small "representative" sample. And just like the Nielsen Rating today can make or break a TV show, the data collected by the XBox 360 will be used to determine what games will be made in the future, and even how these games will be priced.

From a "future of blogging" point of view, I'm less concerned. I don't see me replaced by a blot bot anytime soon. Of course it would be totally possible for Blizzard to collect that sort of data in World of Warcraft, how long you play, what quests you do, what dungeons you visit, and when you level up, and offer that to you in XML, for use in an automated blog. But compared to me writing about what I did in WoW last weekend, such an automated blog would be lacking the opinions, and rants, that make a blog worth reading.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:10 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
Philips 20PF4121/01 TV

So I went TV buying, and ended up with a Philips 20PF4121/01. I found a competent salesperson, and bought the TV in the shop. I knew well that this costed me about €100 more than if I had bought it via the internet. But buying via the internet has disadvantages as well, having to wait, having to be home for the UPS delivery, and if the thing ever breaks down getting the TV repaired on guarantee is next to impossible. And somehow the salary of the competent salesperson has to be paid. :)

The advantage of the Philips 20PF4121/01 TV is a low response time, 16 ms, which is necessary if my main application for the thing will be playing games on it. With 20" screen size it has the good size for the place where I wanted to put it. And the price was reasonable, on the low end of the LCD TVs on offer. Where I had to compromise was with the resolution, the thing isn't exactly high-definition yet. While a 720p video format is supported, the actual number of pixels is only 640 x 480. More than enough for the PS2 games, but I'm afraid it could be a bit on the low side for the upcoming PS3.

For one minute I was toying with the idea of buying a "future-proof" TV, with HDMI, 1080 pixels of vertical resolution to have the best possible image in 1080p video mode, ready for the high-definition TV (and game consoles) of the future. Unfortunately HDTV is still years away, there are very few channels already supporting it, and then only part of the time. Thus only the top range of TV sets are really offering that resolution and the HDMI interface. The sets on offer were much bigger, and a hell of a lot more expensive. A 40" / €4000 TV certainly has the best possible image, but wasn't exactly what I was looking for. So I bought the small and cheap TV for the small room, and will replace my old CRT living-room TV with something HDTV in a couple of years, when there are more sources of high-definition video signals, and the prices have come down.

The Philips 20PF4121/01 just weights 8.8 kg, or 11.5 kg with the box, manuals, remote, etc., so I had no problem transporting it myself. Setting it up was very easy. I moved the PS2 from the living room to the small room and hooked everything up. Up to now my PS2 had stood flat on a shelf, but where I put it now I was able to use an interesting feature of the PS2, the ability to stand it upright. The DVD drawer is designed cleverly, so you can place the DVD in it without it falling out, even if the drawer is upright.

So now I have a secondary entertainment center in my appartment. I tested watching DVDs there, and it works, only that I'm currently limited to DVDs with an European regional code. I don't want to modify the hardware to make the PS2 multi-zone, and while I've heard you can do it by software, I don't have that software available. The image is sharp and crisp, with a good contrast and luminosity, no complaints. Then I started playing Dragon Quest VIII, and that worked well too. I actually had to *reduce* the brightness, contrast, and color from the initial settings, so I'd say the rumors that LCD TVs are pale aren't really true any more.

I admit that buying this TV was a blatant case of consumerism, buying stuff to make me happy again. But the thing is, it works, provided you can actually afford the stuff you are buying, and don't get into even greater debt-related depressions later. Fiddling with a new electronic gadget, and playing a new PS2 game, took my mind of guild drama and feeling stuck in World of Warcraft. I will just have to see how my interests develop, whether I'll take a full break from WoW for a while, or I play WoW only on the weekends when I have larger chunks of time available and can do dungeon groups. In a way being unguilded is a liberation, you don't get the feeling that you "have to" log on any more.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:02 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
Buying a TV

In my living room there is a big TV set, a CRT so heavy I can barely lift it. To it are connected the video recorder, the HD/DVD recorder, the PS2, the Gamecube, and of course the TV cable. The TV has 2 SCART connectors, so I put the HD/DVD recorder in one, and a switchbox connecting the other 3 machines on the other. Works well, I can use any of these input devices, and thus watch VHS cassettes, or DVDs, or films stored on the HD, or use the TV to play on the PS2 or Gamecube.

The keyword here is "or". Obviously with only one screen, there can be only one form of entertainment at any given time. Since we bought the HD/DVD recorder we use the TV a lot for watching either time-shifted TV programs, or for watching DVDs. I barely get to use my game consoles any more.

So I decided I need a second TV. Obviously a smaller one. But with technology having advanced since we bought our CRT TV, I prefer a flat screen TV now. That should be small enough to install in the guest room, and hook up my Playstation to it. There is no TV cable there, but with the PS2 I can both play and watch DVDs.

Having come to that decision, I looked around for what exactly to buy, and got completely overwhelmed. Man, buying a TV has become complicated, you need a degree in electronics for it now. Do I want plasma or LCD? I guess LCD, because as far as I know it is cheaper and lives longer, even if the contrast isn't quite as good. What size? Now that question is more difficult than I would have thought. I want a small TV set, after all it is only a secondary TV set, and I don't want to spend a fortune. But when I see the smallest LCD TVs having 640 x 480 pixels, and reading about the PS3 supporting "high definition TV" with standards like 720p, I obviously need at least 1280 x 720 pixels if I want to use the same TV set for the PS3 in half a year. And after that specifications get hazy. How much contrast, viewing angle, luminance, and response time do I really need, and what would be a waste of money?

I guess I'll just brave the dangers of a entertainment electronics shop and pray for a competent and honest salesperson. I armed myself with at least a basic knowledge of what I want and don't want, plus a spending limit. I'll keep you posted about the outcome. If this is a success, I'll be playing Dragon Quest on the PS2 for a while, and write a review. There *are* other good games than WoW out there. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 3:23 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
What makes a good guild?

Did you know I am doing blog entries on request? I do, it's just that I rarely get any requests. :) Alcaras from subcreation.net writes:

Hi Tobold,

I run my own gaming blog over at subcreation.net. I've also had my share of guild drama (I used to be in a high-end raiding guild, Nurfed) and have seen guilds evolve and change over time.

I'm curious as to your opinions on what it takes to found a good guild. I've recently written up a charter for a Guild Wars guild I've started, with these seven points:
(taken from here)

--

The Jade Sea Pirates is a PvP guild that is focused on having fun in a mature and intelligent environment. Members log on, group with guildmates, and enjoy the exciting and strategic nature of Guild Wars PvP, be it in Alliance Battles, Guild Vs. Guild, Hall of Heroes or Team Arena. The focus of the guild is on PvP.

We recruit members based maturity, intelligence and skill.

The Seven Tenants of The Jade Sea Pirates
1. Be intelligent -- ask questions to gain understanding; better to ask and learn than to not ask and never know.
2. Be mature -- act in a respectful and civil manner, towards guildmates and towards others. Do not taunt opponents, even if they taunt you.
3. Look forward -- do not despair over a loss; instead, focus on analyzing it to better understand and improve your gameplay.
4. Lift others up -- encourage and motivate your guildmates -- do not assign blame for losses and liberally share credit for victories. Do not criticize, instead offer suggestions as to how to improve.
5. Communicate -- If you have an idea for a strategy, say it. Don't assume others know something if you have never told them. Make sure everyone is on the same page before attempting a strategy. Be creative in strategizing and disciplined in execution.
6. Be friendly -- Be a nice person. Be helpful. Offer advice and support to your fellow guildmates. Help each other out.
7. Have fun -- Enjoy yourself. If you're playing a game, you should be having fun. This is not a job, this is a game. This is not saying that you should goof off while everyone else is focused on winning the battle; rather, it is to say that you should be having fun being focused on winning the battle.

--

I'd love to see a blog entry with your thoughts on what makes a successful guild.

Cheers,

Alcaras
subcreation.net

I don't think creating a successful guild is as easy as setting up good rules. The problem is that a guild has two major purposes, which aren't necessarily always compatible:

1) Trust and friendship. You want to log on into the game, and find the guild chat full of people you consider friends, who are nice and friendly, how joke with you when you are in a good mood, and pick you up when you are in a bad mood.

2) Mutual help. You want to form groups, from 2-man teams to 40-man raid groups, with your guild mates to overcome the challenges of the game which can't be beaten solo. You want the people you group with to be guild mates, because of all of the advantages of playing repeatedly with the same people: You know how competent they are, and you can work out a system for fair loot distribution over longer periods of time with them.

Now I'm not saying that you can't have both, friendship and shared success in the game. But there are factors that make it difficult. For example friendship is obviously easier to achieve in a smaller group, while getting 40 people for a raid together on a regular basis obviously requires a much larger group.

Both friendship and shared success are aided by playing together as often as possible. There are many obstacles to that. One is that different people have different play schedules. That is especially bad on games with international servers, where time zone differences makes playing together impossible. But even if everybody is in the same time zone, different work schedules and family time can make playing together difficult. Another big obstacle to playing together is different goals and play styles. If part of your guild wants to do PvP, part wants to go raiding, and a third part prefers playing in small groups, getting everybody to achieve their personal goals while playing together is complicated, if not impossible.

Thus the Jade Pirate's "the focus of the guild is on PvP" is a good thing, much better than just the non-descriptive "guild that is focused on having fun in a mature and intelligent environment". Nobody believes of himself that he is immature, unintelligent, and pursueing game goals that aren't fun.

But this again shows how difficult it is to get the friendly part and the efficient part of a guild united. Recruitment for a guild is very difficult. The guy who was so very nice turns out to not play very often, and having different game goals than the others. The guy who got invited for being such an excellent PvP player or raid leader turns out to have no patience at all for people playing less well. Conflicts often arise long after people have been granted full member status, and it is hard to kick them out again. People, games, and guilds evolve with time, so even if you are pleased with your guild now, it isn't given that the guild will still be around in a year.

I think if you want to found a "good guild" it is important to be very focused on what the main purpose of the guild is. It is a lot easier to run a guild when everybody in the guild has the same goals in game, and expects the same things from the guild. That might exclude otherwise very nice or very competent people from being recruited, but it is better to stay focused on one goal than to pursue many different goals and never reach any of them.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:55 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
WoW social user interface

So I quit my guild with all my characters, and some of them being in a city at the time I typed /gquit, I noticed that I automatically joined the new "City - Looking for Guild" chat channel, which was patched in recently. That was annoying, because that channel automatically takes over the channel number 5, and my previous private chat channels now all changed to one number higher, which is confusing. But what was even more annoying was the realization how the Looking for Guild channel was useless. With a /chatwho 5 command I could see that there were very few people in that channel. On a server which is over one year old, not many people don't have any guild tag at all. And many of those that are searching for a new guild are still carrying the guild tag of their old guild, often some small guild that went inactive over time. So people recruiting members for their guild don't use the Looking for Guild chat channel, they use the City - General Chat to advertise their guild.

The other social user interface in which World of Warcraft is deficient is the Looking for Group functionality. There are a number of ways to find a group, each of which has its difficulties, and many of the difficulties are just due to the interface being bad:

1) The offical system is the meeting stones which are placed in front of every small dungeon. You can click on the stone, or access it remotely from any inn, to join a group with other people that also clicked on the stone. There is a hidden algorithm which tries to get well balanced groups together, but loosens the restrictions of well-balancedness over time, rather forming an odd group than letting people wait forever. There is absolutely no control, you don't even see who else is waiting. It is a bit of a lottery with bad odds, so very few people use it, which results in few groups being formed, most of them badly balanced, which makes even less people join it. Another disadvantage is that only dungeon groups can be formed that way, and you can't even specify things like whether you want to go to the living or undead side of Stratholme, or which part of the Scarlet Monastery you want to go.

2) So to get more control over pickup groups, people use the Looking for Group chat channel. There you can specify that you are looking for a group for some quest, or some specific dungeon part, and you can say which classes you want, or minimum levels, or whatever else you think is important. The big disadvantage of that channel is that it is only covering one zone. Your best chance is the "City" LFG chat channel, which covers all the cities of your faction. If you don't want to shout yourself, but wait until a group to a place you want is looking for people, you are forced to stay in the city. If you go out to do kill some monster or gather resources solo, you can't listen to the channel any more. Previously you could trick the chat system into still displaying the Ironforge or Orgrimmar chat, even if you weren't in these places. But since the cities of each faction were joined in a common City channel, that isn't possible any more. In the zones, especially big zones like Barrens, you are likely to hear people looking for group for a certain quest, but less likely to hear them shout for a dungeon group, even if the entrance to that dungeon is in that zone.

3) Many groups are formed by using the guild chat channel. Guild chat has the big advantage of reaching people in all zones. The second big advantage is that you have probably a higher degree of trust in your guild members to not play very badly, or leave the group early, or roll need on loot they should have greeded, or show any other negative behavior which is generally associated with bad pickup groups. The disadvantage is that your guild is a much smaller group than all players online, thus finding a large enough group isn't always easy. And you don't get to meet new people.

4) The last method of getting a group together is by sending direct tells to potential members. If you are looking for a level 40 to 42 priest for Scarlet Monastery, you can use the /who command to find them all, and send each of them a tell, asking whether they would like to join. A variant of this is having a friends list and sending tells to them. Obviously asking a stranger, or even a friend, to join your group has a very high risk of them saying no, because they have other plans in the game, or aren't planning to be online long enough. It is a desperate measure usually only used for filling the last spot, when all else failed.

Now compare that to a game like Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO). In DDO you have a looking for group interface with buttons for level ranges and accepted classes. In the comment field you can put exactly what quest you are planning to do, or which dungeon you want to tackle. Finding all groups which would take your class and level is a breeze. And even starting a new group is very easy. The LFG user interface works server-wide, and by not relying on chat channels people that aren't looking for a group aren't bothered by it. This is the sort of functionality that World of Warcraft should have. Instead we don't even have a server-wide LFG chat channel.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:19 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Crash and Burn

My short attempts at guild leadership of the World of Warcraft chapter of the Order of the Rose Croix on Runetotem ended with a crash and burn, me leaving that guild after having been with them since EQ2, and playing WoW with them since the European servers opened.

Now telling this story is going to get me into further trouble, I've been already been told in the past to not discuss guild business in a public place. Especially since I "tell the story only from my point of view". Well, that kind of is the definition of a blog. I'll try to tell this story as balanced as I can. I need to write it, as writing helps me to deal with the stress and unpleasantness. But don't be surprised if you find some nasty flames in the comments section.

The Order of the Rose Croix is much older than my participation in it, having started in Dark Age of Camelot. It is a multi-game guild, currently present in several major games. But given the market share of World of Warcraft it isn't surprising that most of the forum activity is about WoW. When WoW started the guild leadership was already in place. The guild founder isn't playing any more, but Wivelrod, the previous second in command managed the guild. I have the greatest respect for Wiv, he is a very intelligent and nice person, and spent a lot of his personal time setting up the guild website and forums.

Getting along with the other guild officers at the time was less easy, they are a rougher bunch, and they have a different view of the game than I have. The Order of the Rose Croix was set up, by the guild charter and the people that got invited, to be a "relaxed, fun, and casual guild". That suited me just fine, but it turned out that the officers evolved into liking the raid game more than the casual style. That lead to them leaving for a big raiding guild on the same server, Borderland Legion.

The Order of the Rose Croix recovered from that, with new officers inviting new people, and getting a range of activities running, including raiding. As the server got older, more and more people became mainly interested in the raid game. But there were still lots of casual players, so turning ORC into a raid guild would obviously not work. So an amicable guild split was organized, setting up a raiding guild and a casual guild, with a common chat channel. During this reorganization I offered to become officer in the casual half, and ended up as guild master of that half. At that point I got access to the officers forum on the website.

Now due to the split our recruitment rules and application forum was in a bit of a mess. So I spent half a day writing a set of instructions on how to apply to join the Order of the Rose Croix in WoW, for the casual half. During this writeup I omitted putting in a rule we had, that applicants need to quit their own guild before even writing an application. I didn't find that rule very important, but although it is impossible for me to prove intent, I didn't conciously leave it out, it just got lost in the shuffle. So when somebody still in a guild applied, another officer pointed out that this rule existed, but wasn't in the text. So I put up a post in the officers forum saying "my bad, but before I put the rule back into the text, can we discuss whether we really need it?".

I got some sensible replies to that, on why we would need that rule, because it showed the commitment of the applicant. I proposed a formulation, the others agreed, and I amended the text in the application forum. But then I got a nasty text in that same officers forum, saying that I had omitted the rule intentionally, and that I was trying to play boss, changing the rules on my own, without consulting the officers. The strange thing was that this post was from one of the officers who had left the guild last year. So I got upset and basically told him that he didn't have any business in that, him not being in the guild any more. This lead to the inevitable flame war, with me and another WoW ORC officer on one side, some moderates in the middle, and several ex-officers of ORC now with a Borderland Legion guild tag on the other side. I was basically told that I didn't have the right to change any guild rules. So I said that I couldn't be guild master if I wasn't allowed to do anything, with contant interference from people with a different guild tag, and offered my resignation.

Then something strange happened, and I don't know who is behind it. Suddenly a previously invisible section of the guild forums was visible to me. It turned out that there always was an "officers club" forum, visible and accessible only to section of people calling themselves "guild officers", in which all of the ex-officers of ORC were hanging out. People like me and most of the other "chapter officers" didn't have access to that forum. On the forum was a sensible post by Wivelrod, asking the others to take the flames out of the visible officers forum, and to discuss the matter in the privacy of the secret forum. Believing that only they could read it, the ex-officers didn't mince their words. Them being British, I considerably expanded my vocabulary of British slang. I did understand most terms, like "wanker", but am still a bit unsure about the exact meaning of "tosser", not that I suspect it is a polite term. The most polite comment was that I should be allowed to stay because nobody else was willing to take the job.

So that was it. I found my guild had a bizarre leadership structure, with a secret "officers club" of people thinking they were still running things, in spite of having left WoW, or having switched to Borderland Legion. And obviously the name-calling from them was pretty hurtful. I'm sure I hurt these guys as well, with my comments, but you know my writing style, it might be acidic, but I don't generally use swear words as a means to get my point across. Being pretty sure that Dagoon and Cravex would continue to harass and insult me if I stayed, I transfered the GM title of the ORC WoW chapter to another officer with his agreement, sent him the contents of the guild bank, and quit the guild with all my characters. That was hard, because I do like the people that are actually in the guild, I'm just at odds with some of those who left, or rather didn't really leave. There is a subtle irony behind the fight starting with the discussion whether somebody with a foreign guild tag was committed enough for being invited, and the people shooting me down for it having a foreign guild tag.

For the time being I'll stay unguilded for a while. Maybe it is even time to take a break from WoW, such guild drama sure removes the fun from the game. I'd still be curious to find out how it came that I suddenly had access to the secret officers club forum. Was the access there since some time, and I hadn't seen it? Had Wivelrod slipped up when distributing access rights? Or is Wiv a more clever politician than I gave him credit for, giving me access on purpose and starting that thread so I could see what really was going on in the background, with me leaving the inevitable consequence? Or was it somebody else? I'll probably never will know.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:45 AM Permanent Link  (34) comments Links to this post

 
Gamersinfo on Vanguard

Technically it is spam, I get newsletter from Gamersinfo which I haven't subscribed to, and there is no way to unsubscribe. But obviously I prefer game related spam to the more usual sort of Nigerian millions, or herbal Viagra. And the Gamersinfo site isn't all that bad, sometimes they write interesting reviews. So I'm linking the Gamersinfo E3 preview of Vanguard here.

The review shares my mixed feelings about Vanguard. This could either be the next big thing, or it could crash and burn and finally bury the original "Vision" of Everquest. It is impossible for me to tell before I have played it. What it promises is slow leveling, but interesting slow leveling. If you consider that WoW's main flaw is that the 1 to 59 game ends too early, that could be a good thing. But if they lied about the interesting part, and Vanguard leveling is the old Everquest grinding and camping treadmill, Vanguard could be really bad. We will have to wait and see.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:05 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Wowification

Is it just me or is there many game companies out there modifying their games to make them more like World of Warcraft? Turbine just announced that with the next expansion set Dungeons & Dragons Online would add lots of solo content.

Is this wowification caused by customers having become used to the easy, casual, solo style of World of Warcraft and now loudly shouting for the same in every other game? Or was that a decision taken by some management guy in a suit who told the designers to make their game as successful as WoW or get fired?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:03 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Raid numbers

I'm still trying to collect more reliable data on how many people in World of Warcraft are using the raid content. Seems pretty much impossible. But I did find some hilarious quotes showing how hard it is to count things like these, and how unable Blizzard is to read those numbers right.

This is from the Blizzcon 2005 raid panel notes on Goblinworkshop:

Blizzard take issue with the charge that endgame dungeons are designed for the '1% of the game world that will actually see it.'
...
Worldwide, every weeknight during prime time there are approximately 500 Molten Core instances running (15,000 players), 150 Onyxia instances (2,500 players), 250 Blackwing Lair instances (6,000 players) and 700 Zul'Gurub instances (10,000). On the weekend, there are 800 Molten Core runs being made.

Yeah, they are right, the content is not for 1%, if you sum up those worldwide numbers you get 33,500 players raiding during prime time, which is a lot less than 1%. It's just half a percent of 6.5 million subscribers. I imagine Blizzard thinks that if half a percent of players is in raid instances on any given night, you can multiply this number by 30 to get 15% of players going raiding every month. Unfortunately that isn't true, because it is usually the same people going raiding 5 and more nights per week, so half a percent per day is quite compatible with PlayOn's number of 3.6% per month.

Well, digging a bit deeper on where this focus on raid content is coming from, I found this interview with Jeff Kaplan (whose job title when you google him goes from assistant designer, to senior designer, to lead designer, explaining why early WoW wasn't that raid-centric) on Safehouse (or this mirror). So where does Jeff come from? Quote:

In EQ, I joined a guild called "Legacy of Steel" and eventually became an officer of that guild. Legacy of Steel was the top guild on the server I was playing on and one of the top guilds in the game, serverwide, but we didn't have a Web site. So, the guild leader at the time, Ariel, asked me to start posting Web updates, which I did. However, I soon found that just writing about the guild's most recent kills got boring, so I started branching out into other areas, including writing in-depth design suggestions.

I eventually became Legacy of Steel's guild leader because Ariel was
becoming too busy at work, and during my tenure, I led the guild to a number of server firsts as well as a few serverwide firsts, seconds, and thirds. Ariel would still log in and play occasionally, though, and we would often chat about games. Well, as it turned out, Ariel was Rob Pardo, who is now the vice president of game design at Blizzard.

Oh great, the vice president of game design and the lead game designer of Blizzard have been leading an uber raiding guild in Everquest together, proudly being the first, second or third to kill a particular new raid boss. If every night 0.5% of people are having fun in raids, while the other 99.5% have run out of casual fun things to do, at least we know who to blame.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:27 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Ambitions and frustrations

If I currently sound less happy about World of Warcraft it is because I know what I want, but can't seem to get there. And come to think of it, that is also the reason why other people I know are unhappy. It doesn't matter whether you are casual or raider, PvE or PvP, if you can't do what you want to do, you are likely to become frustrated.

I know a lot of raiders who are frustrated because either they can't get raids organized at all, or when they get a raid running it isn't as successful as they think it should be, or they would like to join a uber-raiding guild and don't get accepted. I know PvP players who either are frustrated that the PvP pickup groups they find always lose against better organized PvP groups using voice chat, or they are frustrated that some battlegrounds never open up, or they have to stand in a waiting queue for a long time. Casual players get frustrated with bad pickup groups, or not being able to get a group with a good class mix together.

No wonder that leveling from 1 to 59 in PvE solo is so popular. If you can solo, you don't get frustrated about not being able to get a group of whatever size together, and you don't get frustrated about other people playing badly and making your group "lose". You might still be unsatisfied of not being able to beat some specific encounter, but while you still level that problem solves itself. You just go somewhere else first, level up, gain some better gear, and then come back and beat the encounter you had problems with.

Of course playing with other people has its own rewards, and for example playing in a good 5-man group is my preferred mode of play. But having to rely on other people being there, helping you, and being competent about it has all numbers of pitfalls built in, which can easily frustrate you. So before somebody else adds it in the comments, I quote Sartre with "Hell is other people", which might be even more true in online games than in real life.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:28 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 12-May-2006

One of the reasons that I never saved enough money for an epic mount is that I tend to spend my virtual money spontaneously, to overcome some obstacle or frustration. Since March my priest was blocked in his tier 0.5 upgrade quest, where he did the quest and spent a lot of money during the quest, and then couldn't get the reward because he didn't have the Devout Gloves. The gloves drop in Strat living, where few people want to go, and even when I managed to get a group together for there, the gloves didn't drop for me.

Yesterday for the first time I saw the gloves on the auction house. Overpriced, of course, for 150 gold. But given my frustration, I bought them anyway, and handed them and the devout belt I already had in for the virtous gloves and belt from tier 0.5 (or dungeon set 2, as Blizzard calls it). I'm fully aware that this was stupid. But the advantage of virtual money is that you can more easily justify spending it stupidly. :)

At least the dungeon set 2 for priests isn't as bad as the dungeon set 2 for warriors. For warriors the set is reducing your defense for more offense, which doesn't really fit for the tank role. The priest dungeon set 2 has less intelligence than set 1, I lost 6 Int for handing the belt and gloves in, but in exchange I gained +23 in bonus to healing, and faster mana regeneration. It is hard to claim that the virtuous set is *much* better than the devout set, especially given the money you have to spend on doing the quest. But at least it isn't much worse.

What still annoys me is the set bonus for the dungeon set 2. The dungeon set 2 has the reverse set bonus than the dungeon set 1. So if you had the complete 8-piece dungeon set 1, and replace 2 or 4 or 6 or 8 of them with dungeon set 2, you end up with exactly the same set bonuses. Good idea in principal, you wouldn't want somebody to lose his set bonus just because he has 4 pieces of dungeon set 1 upgraded to dungeon set 2. Where the idea fails is in the execution. There is absolutely no way to earn 2 or 4 pieces of dungeon set 2. The first quest series upgrades one piece, but the second quest series upgrades two pieces simultaneously. So you end up with three dungeon set 2 items. If you had all eight dungeon set 1 items before, you lost the bonus for 8 and 6 pieces, and only regained the 8 piece bonus from now having more than 2 dungeon set 2 items.

I don't think I'll ever get further in the dungeon set 2 collection. Not only would I need to do a 45-minute Stratholme Baron run, which in spite of many hardcore players finding it possible to do, is impossible for me to accomplish, as I simply don't have 4 other people who would be willing to try this repeatedly until perfection. Yeah, yeah, you might think that this is good game design, decent rewards only for perfect play, and I've given up on argueing about that. That doesn't change the fact that I'm stuck at this point of the tier 0.5 upgrade quest, a fate I share with 99% of the players that tried it. Even if I ever overcame that hurdle, the next hand-in is three dungeon set 1 pieces simultaneously, and I don't have all of those 3 pieces.

Getting into a successful 5-man dungeon group has become very hard for me. When the raiding half of my guild is raiding, it draws away all the essential classes into a raid, and it becomes impossible to form a decent guild group covering all needed archetypes. I tried pickup groups, but those have the unfortunate tendency to never finish a dungeon. The last pickup group to Stratholme I joined, we only got to the deed in the first room, when the guy who had organized the group and a mate suddenly realized that they had to go on a raid. The chances to kill the end boss of any dungeon with such a group are slim, and then there is a 89% chance that he drops an item for another class than yours. What I need is a network of people that have the right class mix for tackling a hard 5-man dungeon, play well, and are online at the same time as I am. I'm working on that, but progress is slow.

Since Scholomance and Stratholme are 5-man only, it has become very difficult to find people to go there and actually finish it. With 5 people these dungeons obviously need more time than with 10. Casual groups are notoriously slow, especially since the reason why they go to these places is that the gear they are currently wearing is worse than what they could gain there. Thus the time requirement even for a 5-man dungeon is now often more than what a casual player has available in a continuous block of time. And the not-so-casual people who have lots of time in the game aren't interested in going to the 5-man dungeons any more, preferring to raid instead.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:10 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
CSI vs. CSI Miami

During the last couple of months I watched the first 4 seasons of CSI on DVD. Then I ordered the 5th season, but I had to import it from North America, as the DVD wasn't out in Europe yet. That took a while, so I started watching the first 2 seasons of CSI Miami in the meantime. Now being near the end of the second season, I've seen enough to make a comparison, and I do like the original CSI much more than CSI Miami.

The original CSI, playing in Las Vegas, has believable characters, cases that range from the mundane to the bizarre, but where the science used to solve the cases is always solid and interesting. It's a bit like Raph Koster's Theory of Fun, you always learn something when watching an episode of CSI, and that is fun. And while each episode is good entertainment by itself, watching a season in sequence is even more entertaining, as it shows the development of the characters in the CSI Las Vegas crime lab. Every character is unique, and is shown in a believable way how he balances his private problems with his job, like all of us do. The single mother, the ex-gambling addict, the elder supervisor in love with a younger employee being kept by propriety from acting on his feelings, different people having different degrees of dedication and ambition towards their job, they all seem very real, and thus sympathetic.

In comparison CSI Miami is a lot less good, although it still is quite watchable. But where CSI concentrates on the story, the science, and the characters, CSI Miami is a lot more about emotions, morals, and visual effects. The science is often a lot less solid, and sometimes even plain wrong. When an innocent man searching for his cat in an abandoned house is shown dying from nitric acid fumes from an illegal drug lab, that has more to do with wanting to show how drugs are bad than with science. Nitric acid fumes aren't toxic enough to kill a man on the spot, especially not in the ppm concentrations mentioned in the episode, otherwise I'd be long dead.

But even worse than bad science are the unbelievably heroic characters in CSI Miami. If one of them is ever shown to stray from the narrow path of perfect behavior, you can be sure that it is only to support some less perfect relative. The guy who in the line of work is shot into the eye with a nail gun has as only desire to get back to work as soon as possible (instead of sueing somebody for a multi-million dollar compensation for having sustained a work injury, as any real American would do). But worst is probably the main hero, Horatio Caine, who is unnaturally calm, always nice to the victims and the innocent, and only ever showing anger against the really bad guys, never being wrong in his estimation of somebodies guilt or innocence. He has no character flaw except for spending too much effort to repair the mistakes of his little brother, is never wrong, and only ever gets in trouble when his opponents are corrupt bad people in the police organization. Even Superman must be jealous of Horatio's perfect moral compass. Unfortunately perfect characters make for bad TV. I much prefer Gil Grissom from the Las Vegas CSI, who is a nerd, permanently late with his paperwork, and has problems communicating with less nerdy people.

I have seen a lot less of the third CSI series, CSI New York. But I'd place it somewhere between the two, not quite as good as CSI, a bit too dark for my tastes, but still better in both science and character depiction than CSI Miami.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:33 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Customer support

Once upon a time there was a player of World of Warcraft whose account got hacked. The hacker disenchanted all his items, and the shards and his gold sent to different players by mail. At first our WoW player was terribly sad, and quit his WoW account. But after some time he came out of his depression, decided to fight the evil, resubscribed to WoW, and contacted the Blizzard customer support. And look, in an example of excellent customer support Blizzard reinstated all his items, and banned all the accounts of the players who had received the shards and gold from the evil hacker. And so the player lived on happily ever after.

Once upon a time in a parallel universe there was a player of World of Warcraft who had burned out and gotten bored. So he disenchanted all his items, and sent the shards and his gold to several guild mates by mail. Then he cancelled his account. But some times later he realized that this had been a stupid mistake. He wanted to get back to WoW, but of course he didn't want to restart naked. So he contacted the Blizzard customer supported, invented a completely fictitious story of having been hacked, and the stupid suckers believed him and gave him back all his stuff. The player hadn't thought very deeply about this move, and so half of his guild mates getting banned for receiving stolen goods came as some surprise to him. But well, he said, better them than me, and kept mum. But he told the real story to a friend, who was also a friend of one of the banned players, and the guild learned why so many of them were suddenly gone. They contacted Blizzard customer support, but the customer support turned out to be totally unable to digest such a complicated tale, and the players remained banned. The guild split up and they lived on unhappily ever after.

Not my guild, not even my server, fortunately. But the second version of this fairy tale is how a friend, a member of the guild that broke up, but not involved in the bannings, told it to me. Since several years I cite the official policy that Everquest had for a while (don't know if they still have it), that if a player reported he got hacked, his account was automatically banned, punishing the victim even further. I used to consider that as a prime example for bad customer service, but in this case it would obviously have been the right response. There *are* trojans and keyloggers stealing WoW passwords, so being hacked is a possibility. But how can a customer service representative know if somebody was really hacked, or if he was just stupid and then changed his mind? How can the word of one guy be enough evidence to ban several other accounts? It would seem to me that such a customer service situation is impossible to resolve, and whatever decision the GM takes, it has a good chance to punish the completely wrong guy.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:31 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
WoW numbers

It is impossible to quote any number about WoW without causing a huge discussion. Questions like "how many people are raiders", "what is the ratio of Alliance to Horde players", "what percentage of players play a priest", "how many players have reached level 60", or even just the number of subscribers are heavily debated. Even the lead designer, Jeff Kaplan, revealed in an interview that he didn't have good statistical number on the number of raiders, and came up with a highly doubtful gut estimate instead. The reason for all that uncertainty is actually quite simple: There is a confusion between players and avatars.

In North America and Europe, at least the number of players, or rather of accounts, is known to Blizzard. In Asia, where you play using pre-paid cards, paying by the hour, even the number of players is uncertain. But lets stick to a place like Europe or North America. Blizzard knows that there are lets say 2 million accounts currently active in North America and Europe together. There are 336 servers, each with a capacity of around 3,000 concurrent users. That suggests that even if all servers were full, only half of the subscribers are playing. Generally the average ratio of subscribers to actual players is considered to be about 5 (industry rule of thumb).

If you log on and make an in-game census, 80 of the players are invisible, because they are currently not logged on. So you decide to make a cumulative census, taking a snapshot of the players online every hours for a month, hoping that every player will at least log on once per month. But then you suddenly find that your census sees 4 million or more characters instead of 2 million subscribers. That is because many people have several characters, and in-game your census is unable to tell who is a "main", and who is an "alt".

Furthermore different people play different amounts of hours, and spend different amounts of time in different places. That makes the question (mentioned in the recent NY Times interview) of the relative popularity of the Deadmines versus Blackwing Lair very hard to answer. If you just take cumulative snapshot censuses, you will find that the total number of "man-hours" spent in Blackwing Lair is probably larger than the total number of man-hours spent in the Deadmines. But if you made a poll among players of "have you ever killed Van Cleef / Nefarion", you will find a lot more people have "done" Deadmines than BWL. The Deadmines are much shorter than BWL, and a player tends to visit the place once or twice, while raiding BWL is something that requires a lot more repeat performances.

That inevitably leads to conflict, especially if Jeff Kaplan stupidly announces that he doesn't do more Deadmines type of dungeons, because all his time is taken up by making high-end raid dungeons. Should developers concentrate on the content in which most time is spent, or should they concentrate on content which is available to the most people? In general MMORPG developers have a tendency to favor time-content over people-content. Which is insofar questionable as their salary is paid from income coming from monthly fees, so it is the number of players that determines a games financial status, not the amount of time these players spend in the game. From a business point of view a monthly fee MMORPG should rather have more players, each one spending less time in the game, than having fewer players who play 40+ hours a week. Blizzard is concentrating on the wrong kind of customers, the ones that use up the most resources.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:42 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Titan Quest demo

Fileplanet now has the demo for Titan Quest, so I downloaded, installed, and played it for a while. Titan Quest is the "new Diablo", point-and-click action RPG. You move by clicking the mouse somewhere, and you hit a monster by clicking the mouse on it. You have a red health bar, filled up with red potions, and a blue energy bar, filled up with blue potions. Gameplay is simple, fun, but not very innovative. If you liked Diablo, Sacred, and/or Dungeon Siege, you will probably like Titan Quest, and should at least try out the demo.

Interestingly the developers seem to have played World of Warcraft as well as Diablo. There are quest NPCs with golden exclamation marks over their heads, and a hotkey bar for special attacks. There is a hearthstone, although that one is even better than WoW's, because you can teleport back to where you ported from.

Teleporting to the city and back into battle is unfortunately necessary far too often, because your inventory is quite small. I hope later in the game you get bags or a mule like in Dungeon Siege, because if the inventory stays this small for all of the game, I won't like it. What I find especially annoying in all these games is that one item doesn't take 1 slot, but has a form, being for example 3 slots high and 1 slot wide, or 2 x 2 slots. So if your inventory is full, you have to start reorganizing, spending time to stack your loot in an orderly fashion, eliminating wasted space. As you can't even turn an item sideways, you can't eliminate all wasted slots. In a 4 x 4 area you can only put four 3 x 1 torches, with the slots at the bottom staying empty. The other annoying thing is the lack of an "gather all loot" button, there are only buttons to make the loot visible, and then you need to click on all pieces you want to collect. Which means that you'll spend far too much time gathering loot, sorting your inventory, teleporting back and forth to sell loot, and similar non-heroic activities.

Why will people buy Titan Quest? Well, the graphics are rather nice. And instead of classic elves and orcs fantasy setting, the game plays in mythological Greece, with you battling satyrs and other beasts from Greek mythology. That doesn't really make a big difference, I failed to find a reference to fireball hurling sorcerers in Herod, so many elements of the game are just taken from fantasy settings.

Anyway, the big advantage is that you can download the demo for free, and try before you buy. Fortunately "free trial" offers are becoming more and more frequent even for MMORPGs. No review or test score can replace playing a game a while for yourself, and seeing whether you like it.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:05 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
More WoW E3 in NY Times

I linked to the interview of Jeff Kaplan, and forgot to link the second article in the New York Times about World of Warcraft's E3 announcements. Not that it contains any more information. But did you ever see "Everquest 2 adds Frogloks as new race" in the NY Times? News like that hardly made it in small print into the general news section of a magazine like PC Games. Today "WoW adds Dranei as new race" gets 2 articles in a national newspaper.

Whether we like it or not, our hobby has arrived in the mainstream.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:56 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Jeff Kaplan interview in NY Times

There is an interview with Jeff Kaplan, the WoW lead designer, in the New York Times. Much of it is about the Burning Crusade expansion, confirming the Draenei as new playable race for the Alliance. Some interesting quotes:

Q. What classes will be available to the Draenei?
A. Warrior, Priest, Paladin, Mage and Hunter. We might change that, however, maybe add or remove a class.

Compared to Blood Elves that can be Warriors, Warlocks, Mages and Priests, there seems to be a Paladin class too much in the Draenei list. Or Bloodelves should be able to be shamans to balance it out.

Q. Overall, what percentage of level 60 players do you think have killed Ragnaros?
A. I don’t have firm statistics, but my gut feeling is around 25 percent.
Q. And what about Nefarian?
A. From the gut, I’d say maybe 15 percent.

Yeah, if you don't have data, just make them up. 15% of level 60 players already having killed Nefarian? I don't think so. Even the 25 percent number on Ragnaros seems rather high.

Q. In terms of how Burning Crusade players will be able to handle older content, how many level 70 characters, for example, do you think it will take to kill Ragnaros?
A. I’m not sure because we’re actually about to start testing on that, but I would guess 10 to 15.

Please, please, don't use another made up data to justify lowering the cap for MC raids to 10 or 15 players. Because then you might as well delete the place, who would go there on an ultra-tough 10-man raid with level 70 characters to get level 60 gear?

But the one comment that will get Jeff the most angry comments is probably:

Q. Why not add any new low-level instances like Deadmines?
A. Stuff like the Deadmines and Wailing Caverns is extremely popular and gets a lot of use. But at the same time people skip over and pass that content extremely fast and they never go back. So there’s not a lot of bang for our buck in those dungeons. And Draenei and Blood Elves will be able to do those dungeons anyway. If we put the time into making another Deadmines, it would mean one less instance at level 60 or something when you need it to level up.

Casual players already have the impression that they don't get any more content added, like a new low level dungeon, because the developers are too busy making only high-end raid dungeons. The lead designers stating that this is totally true is *not* a good idea. What he says is that content that is extremely popular, but gets used a couple of times and then not any more with the same character, is going to be neglected in favor for end-game content which is less popular but the players going there will repeatedly grind it for a long time. Repetitive content gives more "bang for the buck". Does it? Well, if so then only for the minority of people that actually get to use it. Which even if you believe the outrageous estimate of Jeff means 15 percent of level 60 players being able to reach Naxxrimas, and 85 percent of level 60 players and all the players below 60 getting nothing. Again, we knew that before, but stating this as official policy in the New York Times is just going to fuel the casual vs. hardcore wars. Expect angry reactions from the WoW customer base, with some statement later promising more casual content from the developers.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:08 PM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Lum on MC

Just a link to a very funny post of Scott Jennings, the man who used to be called Lum the Mad, describing Lum's first visit to MC.

Given that quotes like "I learned that 10 person raids where I could screw up and get people killed and not get anything good were more fun than 40 person raids where I played dogfetcher and got Gauntlets of Lordly Egoism." could have come from me, I wonder when they will start to call me Tobold the Mad. How does Scott call me? "Refreshingly free of angst". Now that's a hard label to live up to, "mad" is a lot easier.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:37 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
MMOz

MMOz is a MMORPG news site, which gathers and displays lots of news about online role-playing games, plus links to blog articles about MMORPG. I found the site because it links to blog entries from me here. I hadn't realized I was "news". ;)
- posted by Tobold @ 1:17 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Have we lost patience?

On a quiet morning this weekend I stood in Felwood and was camping whipper root tubers, night dragons breath, and windblossom berries. These are special plants in Felwood, which you can access after doing a quest there. The windblossom berries aren't really exciting, they work very similar to stamina increasing food. But the whipper root tubers and night dragons breath are highly desirable. The tubers restore health, and the night dragon stuff restores mana and health, and they are on different timers from each other, and also on a different timer from mana or health potions. Map to them is found here, but be aware that these are all just potential locations, plants aren't growing on all these locations all the time.

Many a time the extra boost to health or mana saved me or even my group, so I was stocking up on them with both Raslebol and Kyroc. I knew these plants were on a 25-minute timer, so exactly 25 minutes after picking the fruits from them, they become available again. So I had parked my characters next to a plant each, one in the north moving between two whipper root plants, the other in the south camping a night dragons plant. I had a repeating timer running for one of the plants, and had timed at what times on this 25-minute scale the other plants were spawning. So with little running and switching characters I farmed the plants for something like 2 hours.

The interesting thing was that there was at least one alliance player also looking for these plants, I encountered him several times on the different plant locations. But I beat him every time, because I was just standing still in front of the plant just before I knew it would spawn fruits again, while the other guy was moving far too much, and obviously didn't use a timer. That reminded me of other situations where I was just "camping" something in best Everquest style, and other people weren't able to stand still even 5 minutes, got bored, and wandered off. This is one form of PvP I always win, based on patience acquired in the early days of MMORPG.

I do have the impression that there are few people left with this sort of patience. A 25-minute spawn seems short to an Everquest player, but far too long for the average WoW player. The sort of hour-long camping, or waiting 15 minutes for your mana to regenerate from zero to full, which we endured in Everquest would be unacceptable to the modern MMORPG player.

Now there is a theory that World of Warcraft is a kind of MMORPG-lite, and that WoW players will get bored after some time, quit the game, and switch to new games with a more hardcore attitude. Basically Vanguard : Saga of Heroes is counting on that, designing a MMORPG which combines modern graphics with old-style Everquest game design. And I really wonder if that will work. It has already been announced that leveling in Vanguard will be a lot slower than in WoW, that Vanguard will have more downtime, and that you will have to stay in the same zone a lot longer before being able to move on. Brad McQuaid, the lead designer and ex-EQ developer actually promotes these as features (see quotes here). If people are tired of fast leveling and reaching the level cap too fast, a much slower game might really draw them.

But the other theory is that people never liked downtime, and only put up with it in Everquest because there wasn't much choice. Meanwhile they experienced a game with much less downtime and much faster leveling, and have totally lost the patience that would be required to play a slower game. Which would mean that Vanguard might attract a decent number of bored WoW players on release, but after a short time they would find the game far too slow for their tastes, start complaining loudly, and leave in droves.

Is patience a virtue, or just an artifact of games gone by?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:26 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Burning predictions

E3 is upon us, and soon the gaming news sites will be awash with all the announcements that console and game producing companies made. For World of Warcraft that means more news about the Burning Crusade expansion, including probably the announcement of the new alliance race. Unfortunately much of the announced stuff will be marketing hype, with little or no relevance to the players. So instead of tracking E3 news, I'm giving my personal predictions on the reality of the Burning Crusade expansion, how you will actually experience it:

The Burning Crusade expansion will come out in the fourth quarter of 2006, with the official release date announced at the last possible moment. Blizzard doesn't like to set themselves deadlines, and they are notoriously slow, but their parent company Vivendi won't give them any choice but to get the expansion out in time for the critical christmas shopping period, boosting the sales and profits for the annual report. The release will be simultanoeous in North America and Europe, with Asia coming some months later.

It will be very hard to get a copy of the Burning Crusade expansion CD for the day of the release. People will queue up, shops will be sold out fast, Amazon will announce that they are sorry but can't deliver in time. Worst case scenario is arriving at your local computer games shop at midnight before release day, and finding *two* queues there, in which case you'll have to ask which queue is for the PS3 and which for the WoW expansion. :)

Getting hold of a copy of the expansion CD won't help you much anyway, because the account management server will be down most of the time for at least a week after the release date, and you can't unlock the Burning Crusade content with the CD key from the box. Login into the game, with or without expansion, will be a challenge, because there are already millions of people who have left WoW in the 2 years between the game start and the expansion release, and now many of them will come back, overloading Blizzard's infrastructure. There will be long queues on many servers, in spite of Blizzard raising the caps, because people will come back to their old servers, where they left their level 60's parked months ago when they quit the game. In spite of all promises in the battleplan 3 the servers will not be able to deal well with the increased load of players, and the will be lots of lags, disconnects, and crashes.

If you get into the game, you will find that everybody will be in the new zones, either leveling their level 60's toward 70, or playing a level 1 of the two new races. All non-instanced new areas will be heavily camped, and it will be difficult to do quests there, with accusations of "killstealing" flying in all directions.

About two weeks to one month after the Burning Crusade expansion is released, things will calm down. Everybody will have their copy of the expansion, and got it registered. The login servers will be accessible most of the time. Queues will have gotten shorter. And the players in the game got distributed more evenly over the new areas.

The funny thing is that most of us know that all this will happen, but we will *still* try to get the expansion on release day and participate in all this chaos.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:23 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
More on why we play

I recently posted my thoughts on why we play, with some people looking mainly for the entertainment coming from the game, while others are looking more for the achievement in the game. Of course that isn't a black and white picture. I am mainly after entertainment, but achieving something can be entertaining too. And somebody who is mainly after achievement might occasionally relax and do something in the game just for fun.

But while I was thinking more about achievers and entertainment-consumers, it occurred to me that there is a strong correlation between somebodies attitude towards raids, and his attitude towards RMT (Real Money Trade, the buying of virtual gold for dollars). A hardcore raider is more likely to detest RMT, while most casual players either don't care, or (more or less secretly) participate as buyers.

The reason for that is simple. The more you think that virtual items in a game are a reward for some achievement, the less you like somebody getting these items without the achievement. Cheating in any form, RMT included, is threatening the achievers purpose in (virtual) life. If somebody just spent a lot of time and effort to achieve a certain level of equipment, somebody else getting to the same level of equipment much faster and without the effort makes the achievement look less valuable. For the entertainment-consumer, RMT is much less threatening. Spending more money for better entertainment, for example for a bigger TV, is a widely accepted idea. You might be jealous of somebody else's big plasma screen, but it doesn't invalidate your choice of life style.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:01 PM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
WoW fueling the games industry?

This article in the Seattle Times, in the Business & Technology section, talks about the interest that WoW provoked in the gaming industry. The huge amount of money World of Warcraft is making for Blizzard's parent company Vivendi is obviously something that other companies would like a slice of.

Interestingly the article compares different business models for MMORPG, the monthly fee model of games like WoW, the expansion set model of Guild Wars, and the micropayment business model that some Korean games have. I'm still waiting for a micropayment MMORPG on the western market. Having paid a lot of money for Magic the Gathering, I do think that this business model can work here as well, if you pack it well. The average gamer is getting richer, because on the one side kids are nowadays much richer than I was at their age, and on the other side the average age of gamers is rising. If you consider what adults spend on other "childish" hobbies like model railroads, $200 per year to Vivendi for playing World of Warcraft is a far too low amount. There must be a possibility of gaming companies getting more money out of their often fanatic audience.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:41 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Buying items

I saw a Glowing Brightwood Staff for 400 gold bid, no buyout, medium duration, no apparent bidder on the auction house. This staff usually costs around 700 gold, so it would have been an opportunity to replace my priests much less good Sarah's Guide. My characters on Runetotem all together have about 600 gold, so I could have afforded the staff. But after some consideration I decided not to buy it. The reason was that I had the impression that buying the staff would diminish my fun.

Kyroc, my priest, is level 60 and thus will not gain any more levels before the Burning Crusade expansion comes out. The only way to have character development, to make my character stronger, is improving my equipment. But what is the purpose of making my character stronger? The purpose would be the ability to overcome even bigger challenges, get even better gear, and make my character stronger again. It's circular, I make my character stronger so that I can make him stronger.

Buying an epic item from the auction house is taking a shortcut on this route. It doesn't matter whether you earn the money by farming, questing, and trading, or whether you buy it from EBay or some gold farming company. If I bought the Glowing Brightwood Staff, the next couple of staves I find in dungeons, or earn with quests, become a source of frustration instead of joy, just disenchant fodder. You always compare what you get with what you have, and the better stuff you have, the less likely it becomes that you'll be able to improve it. My current staff is from a quest, and there is another quest line in the plaguelands that will give me a better staff. Earning a quest reward I can use is fun. Buying is a lot less fun, and it would prevent me from having the fun of earning my equipment. I only spend gold for equipment on twinks, because twinking speeds up leveling.

If tomorrow the Glowing Brightwood Staff would drop for me in a dungeon, I would be ecstatic. What a luck, what a joy! If I first bought the thing, and *then* it would drop, and I'd resell it for the same amount gold, the fun would be a lot less, even if the final result would be identical.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:12 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 8-May-2006

The Darkmoon Faire opened this morning in Mulgore. And my level 30 dwarven paladin was there, far from home, but with bags full of whirring bronze gizmo, green fireworks, and vibrant plumes. The former two I made with engineering, the latter I found by chance going cheap on the auction house. And I must say at level 30 the trip to the fair is well worth it. The engineering stuff was worth 52 tickets, of which I spent 50 tickets for a unique 14-slot Darkmoon Storage Box. Always useful, it will be quite some time before I get hold of any bigger bag. Each 5 vibrant plumes got me 12 tickets for a random green item with minimum level 30. The quality of these items varied widely, I got an Aquamarine and two rather common green leatherworking recipes for skill below 200, not worth much. But I also got one pack with two 12-slot bags, some good level 34 mail boots, and even a level 40 pair of plate bracers.

But other than doing some engineering and parking my pally at the faire location, I didn't play him much this weekend. Instead I discovered the joys of questing at level 60 with my warrior and priest. Raslebol, the warrior, found a guild group to finish the Fallen Hero of the Horde quest series, step 19 and 20. The final demon was tough, but we had read how you need to pull him down one step of the mountain and fight him with your back to the wall, so he doesn't punt you off the cliff, and that worked very well and on the first attempt. The rewards were green items, but actually not that bad. An amulet with +10 resistance to fire and fronst, a trinket with +3 defense and faster health regeneration, and a 16-slot bag. And you don't have to choose, you get all three.

Kyroc, my priest, did the Test of Skulls with another guild group, killing 4 dragons. Then he got lucky finding Rexxar the minute he entered Desolace, and now I just need Drakki's blood to have a second character with Onyxia key. I didn't join my guilds Onyxia raid this weekend, because only Raslebol had the key, and he hadn't been all that useful during the last raid. My fire resistance is low, my ranged damage output is pitiful, and being defensive specced but not the raid's main tank my melee damage isn't something to write home about either. A priest would be a lot more useful, for dots in phase 2 and healing. I'll try to get the blood this week, so I'm ready for the next Onyxia raid.

Kyroc also did a lot of soloing in Silithus. I wanted to see how easy or hard it is to gain Cenarion Circle faction. Ideally I want one day to be revered with them, to be able to tailor 24-slot herb bags, which are nearly impossible to find on my server. But as a first step I wanted to get to friendly, which gives the 20-slot herb bags, and the +15 fire resistance cloak enchantment. I did all the normal quests I could find, abandoning those that told me to bring the head of a boss in Blackwing Lair or venom from bosses in AQ and ZG. This didn't get me to friendly, and so I started doing field duty quests, as those are repeatable.

The good news was that as priest you can solo the first step of the field duty, getting your papers signed. For this you need to start an event where a group of soldiers from your faction kills a huge insect boss mob from one of the Silithus hives. You need to help so that your side wins, and the leader of the soldiers survives. With a priest it is relatively easy to keep him healed, while keeping yourself shielded up, and using a lightwell for self-healing. With the signed papers you then get the choice between a tactical assignment, a combat assignment, and a logistics assignment.

Every time you finish an assignment, you get 50 reputation points, a signet, and a new assignment of the same type. I quickly found out that combat assignments were impossible to solo, as they would need me killing 30 elite mobs of level 58+ in a densely populated hive, which isn't really a good task for a holy priest. The logistics assignments require you to hand in items made with different crafting skills, usually of the expensive kind. I got lucky and got the cheapest one, 30 heavy bandages in runecloth, mageweave, and silk, but buying 3 stacks each of theses cloths cost me nearly 10 gold, and I decided that this wasn't worth it. So I ended up grinding tactical assignments, of which there are two kinds. One requires you to summon templars from the windstones, for which you need a group, so I just abandoned those. The other type is visiting a scout in one of the hives, and I found that I could solo those quests. Using my shield and psychic scream I can sometimes get to the scout in one run, sometimes I die on the way, come back as ghost and reach the scout on the second try. Same thing for the way back, although there I rezzed at the graveyard when killed. Fortunately repairing cloth items isn't all that expensive, although I could have removed the more expensive ones and run naked.

So I got to friendly with Cenarion Circle that way, and decided to stop there. The +15 fire resistance enchantment turns out to need 3 nexus crystals plus 8 large brilliant shards and 4 essence of fire, which adds up to something around 200 gold cost of materials. The worst thing with enchanting is that the one character I can't enchant is my warrior, because there is no way to pass the enchantments for the bind on pickup items between characters on the same account.

Getting to friendly needed 3000 points, and that was doable. Revered would need another 18000 points, for a total of 21000 points, or 420 field duty quests. Or I could kill 21000 twilight cultists for 1 reputation point each. Numbers like these trigger my in-built casual players "treadmill grind warning alarm", and make me reconsider the idea. Do I really want to spend over 100 hours to get to revered faction? I don't think so. Especially since if I wanted to get other recipes than tailoring and enchanting from the Cenarion Circle, I would need to do the faction grind all over again with another character.

The field duty quests are also supposed to get you gear. If you do 7 tactical quests, 5 combat quests, and 3 logistics quests, plus friendly reputation, you can hand in the signets and chose one of 3 possible items. Unfortunately the items you can get at friendly are very bad, the honored items still not useful, and for the first half useful stuff you need to be revered, and of course hand in lots more signets. I did have the tactical signets and the friendly reputation, but comparing the effort to get the combat and logistic signets with the quality of the items I could get made me destroy all the signets and remaining assignments, and forget about it. Three different signet stacks and half a dozen different assignments just take too many slots in my inventory or bank, which was the limiting factor in this case, I just couldn't block all these spaces for an extended time, and I didn't want to grind field duty stuff repeatedly to the exclusion of everything else for the coming weeks.

Blizzard is trying to invent more content for level 60 casual players, and the Silithus field duty quests were one attempt to do so, but not a very good one. Fortunately since patch 1.10 there is a much better solution to keep your level 60 player occupied on a casual play schedule: Quests. Since the quest xp reward at level 60 is now transformed into gold, it has become interesting again to go questing at 60. For example killing the 4 dragons for the 4 Test of Skulls quests in the Onyxia key quest chain netted me 4 gold per dragon, 16 gold in total. The Fallen Hero of the Horde quests gave up to 8 gold for one quest step in a 20-step series. That means that basically you can continue playing at 60 the same way as you played from 1 to 59, doing quests solo and in small groups, and the monetary rewards are pretty much equivalent to what you would earn from a much more boring money farming play style, even if the quests don't give you any useful items. Add in the occasional 5-man dungeon expedition, and you get a varied mixture of content with decent rewards all around. Sure, the "very best" rewards, epic items, are still reserved for raiders, but I don't mind them getting those, and I don't desire these items so much that I would be willing play in the much more time-consuming and focused way that would be necessary to earn them. As long as there is something useful for me to do, I'm happy.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:04 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
A guild experiment

My guild in World of Warcraft, on the Runetotem Euro server, is embarking on an interesting experiment. Previously we tried to be everything to all people, and that didn't work very well. The raiders wanted stricter rules for recruitment, raid attendance, and DKP points for better raiding progress, the casual players didn't want to be forced to anything. So now we split the guild, amicably, into two closely related sister guilds, one for raiding, one for everything else.

As I obviously didn't want to raid several times a week, and most officers moved to the raiding half, Order of the Blood Croix, I ended up being the guild master of the non-raiding half, Order of the Rose Croix. I've been GM before, in DAoC, until the guild drama got too stressful for me. But I hope that this time it will be better, as I am heading the less ambitious half. It is often ambitions you can't realize that lead to frustration, and it should be easier to realize the ambitions of a guild that wants to be casual.

Not everybody was happy over the split, and we lost some people over it. But I think it was the "least bad" option we had. We were constantly losing people to other raiding guilds before, because with our previous "casual raiding" approach we didn't make enough progress. Now the raiding part of the guild can implement whatever rules it takes to make raiding a bigger success.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:20 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Carnival of Gamers #14

The Carnival of Gamers #14 is out, bringing you a collection of links to interesting articles on different gaming blogs. I participated with my "dark matter" article, selected based on the large amount of feedback I got on that one.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:25 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Who finances spoiler sites?

As mentioned by Martin in a comment on my WoW Journal from yesterday, the internet is abuzz with news of a merger of Allakhazam with Thottbot and other gaming sites, financed by IGE, the worlds biggest virtual gold selling company. Good summary at Grimwell.com. Great writeup of the history of IGE at this link.

I just didn't bother to report it yesterday, because I wasn't really surprised. The slightly paranoid "the gold farmers are grabbing power over the internet" stories are exaggerated. Honestly, who do you *think* would be financing MMORPG spoiler sites?

Small gaming sites, like this blog, don't need financing. Just one or several guys willing to work for free on them. But if you want a site with a database listing every single item, monster, and quest in a huge game like World of Warcraft, you can't expect it being hosted for free and run just by volunteers. Advertising, if you exclude ads by gold farmers and powerleveling services, won't get enough money to finance a site like Thottbot or Allakhazam. Getting people to pay for "premium memberships" or financing with Paypal donations doesn't get you far either. And the game companies like SOE or Blizzard aren't interesting in running spoiler sites.

Gold selling companies like IGE have a natural interest in advertising on spoiler sites. Gaining control of those sites is a logical next step, as they are relatively cheap, and you end up in better control of your advertising. Spoiler sites are not only offering the highest possible concentration of players of a specific game, they are also naturally increasing the desire of players to get hold of all the nice items listed there. Which, if the item is hard to get in-game, but available on the auction house, might often mean that the quickest way to get hold of the Sword of Uberness is a visit to IGE.com.

Of course using bought gold to equip yourself in a game, instead of earning the equipment yourself, is cheating. People react differently to other people cheating. Some people, me included, think that MMORPGs are not competitive, I don't care what gear somebody else has and how he got it, thus IGE only evokes some mild curiosity in me. Other people get royally angry when they spent considerable effort to reach some achievement in the game, and somebody else gets to the same point much faster using cash, and thus they think that IGE is evil incarnate.

It is ironic that people complain about IGE financing spoiler sites, argueing that gold selling is evil, and buying gold is cheating. Because if you think of it, what is a spoiler site if not cheating? Sure, it is a widely accepted form of cheating, but using spoiler sites to solve your quest instead of searching for the solution yourself is not in the intent of the game developers. So cheating sites being financed by a company earning money on cheating seems like a good fit to me.

Now I'll unpack my crystal ball and tell you about the future of spoiler sites in 10 or 20 years: There won't be any left. Spoiler sites depend on bad game design, people given insufficient information on how to solve a quest, on where to find a specific item or monster. It would be perfectly feasible to make a MMORPG in which you can talk to NPCs in-game, or visit in-game libraries to find out more information about quests, some fabled sword, or some dragon to slay. And a MMORPG which doesn't *need* a spoiler site would be more interesting to play, so sooner or later some developers will come up with that concept, and it will spread. So the current outcry is just a temporary storm in a teacup, and not the end of gaming information on the internet.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:28 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
My first guild

From 2000 to 2001 I played Everquest on the Lanys T'Vyl server, using already Tobold, Waldin (my "main" at the time), and Raslebol as character names. At that time all EQ servers where in North America, so all the Europeans played on US servers. Due to the time zone difference joining a US guild as European didn't make much sense. So my first guild was "Die Sonnenkinder" (German for "Children of the Sun").

My first guild was small, but closely knit. I had some online friends in that guild which whom I did hang out in the game practically all the time. We never reached the end-game of EQ, we all got stuck somewhere in the 40's levels, but we didn't mind much. Playing together with friends was more important than "winning" the game. We all had lots of alts, and usually managed to keep close to each other in levels. The two guild masters had strong opinions on loyalty, the importance of helping each other out, and of sticking together against all odds and against the temptations of other guilds promising faster progress.

I guess the time I spent in that guild really embeded a vision of what a guild should be in my mind. Unfortunately nowadays this vision has become definitely outmoded, and if I dare to speak of loyalty on a guild forum I get laughed at. My fault for sticking to concepts that don't apply any more in modern games. I'll have to learn to live with the modern concept of the disposable guild, which only serves as a means to an end. Not that I'm likely to change guilds much, the idea of loyalty sits too deep in me. But I'll better stop complaining about people using guilds as stepping stones to the next guild, and changing guilds with changing requirements. Having strong views on morals and shouting them out loud makes you about as popular as the people standing on a soap-box at the Hyde Park corner in London and preaching ethics to the passing, uninterested masses.

My first guild ended tragically when SOE installed their first European servers and offered free server migration to all Europeans. The guild basically split in half, one half preferring to remain on Lanys T'Vyl, the other half moving to the first European server, Antonious Bayle, and founding a new guild named Wolfsbrut there. I moved, together with my closest friends, but the old guild leaders remained behind, the new guild leadership on the new server had different ideas, and it just wasn't the same any more. Of course the steep leveling curve of Everquest, where in the medium levels you already need to play weeks to level up, contributed to a feeling of being burned out. When Dark Age of Camelot came out end of 2001, many people including me left Everquest. We kept in contact my e-mail for a while, but like all gaming communities, once you don't play together any more, people drift apart, and I lost contact.

So one thing I learned is dreading server splits like the plague. They are causing situations in which you are sure to lose. If some of your friends move to the new server, and some of your friends stay on the old one, you end up with mixed loyalties incompatible with each other. A bit like being friends with a couple that divorces. My current WoW server Runetotem being old and full, and Blizzard continually adding new servers and offering server migrations, I fear that one day my current guild on Runetotem will run into the same problem. My advice for server splits: Stay put and persuade your guild to not move. It is nearly impossible to move *all* guild members, and if anyone moves, the guild splits.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:23 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 4-May-2006

I did several steps of what I think is WoW's longest quest series with Raslebol last night. The series has 20 quests, and starts with the Fallen Hero of the Horde at the entrance of the Blasted Lands. I had done the first steps in the Blasted Lands previously, and now did the steps that play in Azshara. That was fun, because Azshara doesn't have all that many quests, and thus I only visit the place for gathering herbs otherwise. With quests now paying out gold instead of xp at level 60, this high-level quest series now pays out serious cash, I got up to 8 gold for a single quest step.

The downside is that I'm now stuck at steps 19 and 20, which require a good level 60 group. Obviously not many people did an extremely long quest series in a nearly forgotten corner of the world, and it will be hard to get a group together to finish the series. The reward is two green items and a 16-slot bag, which is insufficient to tempt many level 60 people.

Quest series are often a bit annoying in World of Warcraft. Often the level of the quests in the series goes up much faster than you level while doing it. If you start the quest series when you are low in level, you can't do the latter parts immediately, and get them parked for a long time in your quest journal. By the time you can do the end, you have forgotten what the story was about. If you only start the series when you are high enough to finish it, the early steps are trivial and not interesting.

The same thing is just happening to my dwarven pally in the Wetlands. He started a quest series which starts with a level 26 quest to attack some orcs, but ends with a level 32 elite quest for the orc chieftain. At level 29 I couldn't finish it last night, as I didn't find anyone else to help me, and couldn't solo a 32 elite with bodyguards. So I did some other quests in the wetlands and leveled to 30.

As my pally is engineer now, at level 30 he was able to choose between goblin and gnome engineering. So as my shammy is already gnome engineer, and my pally needs more firepower, I chose goblin engineering with him. A level 30 pally loaded with all sorts of goblin explosives is awesome. There is a goblin sapper charge which does up to 750 damage to all mobs around you, but normally also deals damage to yourself. But a pally can turn on his "bubble" that protects him from all damage and still use that sapper charge. One such sapper charge plus one goblin land mine can wipe out a complete group of level 30 mobs. Evil! Of course the method has a lot of cooldown, and costs a lot of money, but now I might be able to solo that level 32 elite, by simply blowing him and his bodyguards up.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:24 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft Battleplan 3

WoW lead producer Shane Dabiri has posted the third battleplan for World of Warcraft, the things that the development team will focus on in the coming months. Due to the official forums annoying habit of not archiving such posts, I'll link to a mirror of his post on Video Game Generation.

There will be new content in World of Warcraft, but the next big content addition after patch 1.11 will be the Burning Crusade expansion, and more details of that will only be revealed during E3. Thus battleplan 3 is nearly totally free of announcements of added content.

Instead the whole text treats infrastructure, which is a refreshing change to what game developers usually announce. Arguably bad infrastructure is WoW's worst problem, and the development team is painfully aware of that and is promising to fix the problems. And they aren't just streamlining the code a bit, the announced improvements include buying a lot more hardware, and upgrading existing hardware to top-notch. In both Europe and North America new sites just opened, with a sixth site planned for America this month. Each site can hold up to 40 realms. By moving whole realms to the new sites, and by doing character transfers between realms, all servers should get a bit less load, and thus less lag and disconnects.

Upgraded hardware even on the old sites will allow Blizzard to raise the player cap per server by 25 percent when the Burning Crusade comes out and adds 25 percent of land mass to the World of Warcraft. Thus the player density, number of players per virtual square mile, should remain constant. Of course that is just the theoretical average, in practice everybody will be at the new places after the expansion, and the old places, especially the lower level ones, will be rather empty.

Also now officially announced is a paid character-transfer service for the summer. There will be some limitations, but neither the exact limitations nor the cost have yet been announced. Assuming the price isn't outrageous, paid character transfers will people help to escape overcrowded servers, or let them join a server on which friends of them are playing. I wonder whether they will allow transfers between PvP and normal servers. I still believe that on PvP servers there are a large number of players who chose this option without being totally aware of the implications, and who would like nothing better than change to a PvE server, where you have exactly the same consentual PvP options, and only lose the annoying ganking.

Interestingly Blizzard is also aware that their login servers, their website, and their forums are inadequate. When for some reason the game servers are down, and many people flock to the website and forums to find out what is going on, these break down as well. And when the realms are back up, and everybody tries to login, the login servers can't handle the load. Blizzard is designing and testing a more robust and scalable authentication system, which is supposed to go live in North America end of this month (and I hope not much later in Europe).

Shane Dabiri says "Resolving World of Warcrafts current performance issues and upgrading our current hardware in preparation for The Burning Crusade is Blizzards #1 priority. Were all World of Warcraft players too, and we know how frustrating it is when you experience loot lag, get disconnected fighting a boss, or miss the beginning of your 8:00 PM AQ raid because you cant log in. Weve been working around the clock to respond to the issues as they arise, and we will continue to do so for the life of the game." While you might think that this statement is blindingly obvious, I've lived through years of MMORPG with "performance issues" that were never addressed, and am quite pleased that this is Blizzard's current priority.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:56 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Mudflation in WoW

In a comment to the "why do we play" post Oz mentioned his fear that World of Warcraft would go down the mudflation way that Everquest did. Interesting point to discuss, so I'm making a post about it.

Mudflation is an inevitable process in which the value of your equipment gets worse relatively to what the others are wearing if you don't play for a while. Imagine you and your friends all have tier 0 armor ("dungeon set 1" as it's officially called), and you quit the game for a couple of months. You come back and you still have tier 0 armor, whose stats haven't changed at all, thus you are exactly as strong as you were before. But your friends have started raiding Molten Core in the months you were away, and are all wearing lots of epic items. So if you play with them again, you *feel* weaker.

The same thing happens between players spending less time in the game and others spending more time in the game. The players spending less time fall behind, there is a growing gap between those players who play most and get the very best gear, and the players who play casually. So although two players might both be level 60, the gap between them might be so big that they can't realistically play together. If they go to easy level 60 content, the better equipped player will find it trivial and be bored. If they go raiding Onyxia together the same deep breath hitting them both kills the less well equipped player who doesn't have the fire resistance gear to withstand it, while the well equipped guy just shrugs it off.

Mudflation is often aided and abetted by developers adding new content. For example patch 1.11 adds the Naxxrimas dungeon to the World of Warcraft. This dungeon is tougher than anything existing, and the loot in there is better than anything existing. Thus the gap between somebody getting the Naxxrimas loot and somebody stuck for some reason at tier 0 armor is growing.

Is this an inevitable fate of World of Warcraft, having an ever growing gap in power level between the casual players and the hardcore players? I don't think so. Think what will happen when the Burning Crusade expansion comes out and the level cap of the game is raised. Presumably even the casual player will buy the expansion and level up to 70 playing solo and small groups in a reasonable time. I have posted an previous estimate that the average player will take 200 hours to get from level 60 to 70. But during this 200 hours his effective power (his meta-level) will grow at a relatively fast rate. At level 70 he will be stronger than a level 60 player who spent twice that time in raid dungeons. Of course the hardcore players will have reached level 70 in half that time, 100 hours, and will already have been raiding level 70 raid dungeons for a while. But because increasing your meta-level by raiding is so excruciatingly slow, the gap between the casual player and the hardcore player will narrow after the expansion, not widen.

So as long as Blizzard will raise level caps in future expansions, the gap between casual and hardcore players can be kept more or less constant. Any patch that adds high-end content without raising the level cap will increase the gap. But every rise of the level cap will narrow the gap again. There is no reason why World of Warcraft can't have a level 100 or even 200 in the far future. Mudflation might not be dead, but there are ways to control it.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:12 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
Why do we play?

Here is an interesting thought, stemming from some discussion in the commentaries of another post. Do we spend time in a MMORPG to gain a reward, or do we spend money and time on a MMORPG to be entertained? What is the value of time and money?

You often hear that time is the real currency of MMORPGs. You spend time, and you receive rewards for that time spent, be it levels, virtual gold, or the fabled sword of uberness. The time we spend is a cost, an effort, work, and for this time and effort and work we are rewarded with status symbols and in-game achievements. The money you spend on the MMORPG isn't important, because it is a constant, not related to your progress in the game.

But the opposite point of view is also possible. You come home from work, it is too early to go to bed, you have time in excess, and you want to be entertained, killing that spare time. Playing a MMORPG is one of many possible entertainment options. But all entertainment options cost money: To read you would need to buy a book or magazine. To play a MMORPG you need to buy a PC, the game, and pay for a monthly fee. To watch TV you need to buy the TV and pay a monthly fee to the cable company. To play golf you need to buy a set of clubs and pay a club membership. All these entertainment options have a different degree of entertainment value to different people, some enjoy more interactive activities, some more passive, some people like to be entertained outdoors, others prefer the comfort of their home. But in the end you pay for the entertainment value, which allows you to kill your spare time. There are some free options, starting from watching your paint dry, but often the options with more entertainment value are also costing more money.

Both points of view are viable, and sometimes they lead to interesting interactions. A gold farmer is certainly under the impression that he is spending his time working in World of Warcraft, gaining rewards in the form of gold, which he then sells for real world dollars. The gold buyer has the opposite problem, he isn't happy with the entertainment value of WoW at the moment, and he is willing to spend real dollars for virtual gold to increase the entertainment value. Maybe he doesn't find walking very entertaining, so he buys gold to buy a mount. Maybe he thinks he needs to buy the sword of uberness from the auction house, which would then enable him to beat the monster that he previously couldn't get past. Maybe he just wants to look as pretty as the other people running around in the game. Whatever it is, he certainly does not want to *lower* the entertainment value of the game by stupidly grinding gold for hours. He'd rather spend more money for the privilege to have more entertainment value in his spare time.

In other cases the different points of view totally clash, making it impossible to even discuss between the two sides. A typical example is the heated discussion about the upcoming high-level raid dungeon Naxxramas in World of Warcraft patch 1.11, which is raging since it was announced. If you think you spend time in WoW to gain virtual rewards, Naxxramas is a great place: It will be the absolute top end of the game for some time, the very best rewards given out to the people who spent the most time and dedication in raiding. A place full of wondrous treasures, made just the more valuable by the fact that so few people can attain them. But if you think you spend money on WoW to be entertained to kill your spare time, Naxxramas is a waste of developers time: For 99.9% of the players, the money they gave to Blizzard for being entertained has been spent on creating a big block of content which they are unable to reach. The entertainment value of Naxxramas for the average player is close to zero, because he doesn't have the power to play in there and can only observe the effects of the Scourge invasion outside. Raiding in general has a low entertainment value, because it is by nature repetitive. And Naxxramas is even worse, because you would first need to repetitively go to Molten Core, then repetitively go to Blackwing Lair, before you finally could go and repetitively see Naxxramas.

The discussion between the two sides on this issue is totally fruitless, because each side just thinks that the other side sees the game in the same light as they do. The "spend money for entertainment" crowd thinks that the "spend time on game rewards" crowd is just wanting to monopolize the entertainment value of World of Warcraft. And in the other way round, the "spend time on game rewards" crowd thinks the "spend money on entertainment" crowd only wants to get rewards without having spent effort on them.

For me personally, World of Warcraft is just entertainment. I spend money on it, it kills my spare time, and I get some entertainment value out of it. I don't see the point in having to do Molten Core a hundred times before being able to visit Blackwing Lair or Naxxramas. Just as I wouldn't see the point of having to read one page of a book several times before being able to advance to the next page, or having to watch one episode of a TV series several times before being allowed to watch the next one. Even in competitive sports like golf, while there are easier and harder golf courses, I could play on a hard golf course and at least see "the content" of it, even if I would score horribly. For me all content in World of Warcraft is on the same level, I feel that for the money I pay I should be able to see it all. There is content with more entertainment value, and there is content with less entertainment value, but for me it isn't necessarily the highest reward that has the most entertainment value. The important thing for me is to be able to interact with the content in a meaningful way. I'm totally happy with my Onyxia raid last weekend, because I got to experience all three phases of the combat several times, and I feel I now "have done" Onyxia. I don't give a damn that I didn't kill her, that I didn't get some epic item from her, and I'm not really interested in going there repeatedly to try it again and again until I do. I am also happy with places like Zul'Gurub, where I can *fight* any boss, even if I maybe am not able to win against them. But I am unhappy with quest chains in which I get stuck, or with linear dungeons like Molten Core, Ahn'Qiraj, or Blackwing Lair, where I can see only a part of the place. It is not about getting the rewards from the raid dungeons, it is about accessing the content, and being blocked from certain content makes me grumpy. I am standing in front of some closed doors in this game, and I'm not willing to batter my shoulder repeatedly against the door until I bash it in, because I think that I have already paid the entrance fee (in money). The day I think that I have seen all the accessible content in WoW, and only the repetitive way to Naxxramas and beyond remains, I just quit the game and buy myself some other form of entertainment.

Of course if your personal opinion is that money doesn't count and the only entrance fee in WoW is time, of which you need to spend X hours to open certain doors, you will never even understand what I am talking about.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:24 PM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 3-May-2006

I logged on my level 60 priest yesterday night and flew to Silithus, because my 4-day mooncloth producing timer was ready, and Silithus has a moonwell right next to the flight master. But once there I promptly got invited into my guild's AQ20 raid, which was seriously lacking warriors and priests. I wasn't keen on going. Not that I don't like my guild mates, but Ahn'Qiraj is my least favorite raid dungeon, and playing late on a weekday evening when I have to get up at 6:30 am the next morning isn't really a good thing to do. So I was quite happy when another guild priest logged on later, one who was eager to go, and I was able to leave the raid. I'm not really feeling good about not helping my guild, especially since with only 2 warriors and 3 priests even just the first boss will be very hard. But I don't want to be dragged by loyalty into every single guild raid, when raiding is something I don't really enjoy much. And I especially don't want to compromise my Real Life®, going to work tired after raiding late.

So I logged my priest out, and just played a little bit with my paladin before going to bed. But Ahn'Qiraj kept haunting me that day, it just happened that on Eonar, where my pally is playing, the Ahn'Qiraj war effort event just started. Seems that it is scheduled to start 4 weeks after a server opens, which is reasonable. It was interesting to see the war effort event on a relatively young server. Only few players are level 60 yet on Eonar, and the majority of players is still below level 30. So things like linen cloth or light leather were dirt cheap in the AH until yesterday. Suddenly the war effort makes them more valuable. Everybody has at least an interest to hand in one stack of light leather and one stack of linen bandages. The first stack of everything you hand in gives you 10 signets, plus a war supply crate. The content of the crate is a green item, whose level is related to the level of the stuff you did hand in. Thus handing in linen bandages gives you a crate with some crappy low level item, while handing in silk bandages gives you a green item around level 25. But as I said, handing in the first stack of anything gives you 10 signets, while handing in more stacks gives you less signets, depending again on the level of what you give. Linen bandages later only give 1 signet, silk bandages 5 signets. The interesting thing is that the signets can be exchanged for another war supply crate, the level of which is related to *your* level, regardless of how you got the signets. So my level 29 could hand in 20 linen bandages and 10 light leather, get 20 signets, and exchange those for two crates of level 29ish green items. Okay, I wasn't lucky and only got leather stuff for sale on the AH, but even there I can probably sell them for more than the linen and leather was worth. And with some luck I could have gotten a useful item to wear myself.

So the war effort is quite nice for the lower level people. Over time you hand in everything at least once, and then the war effort rewards become less interesting in comparison to the cost of the resources. But even then it helps the lower level players, because some people still buy resources to hand in, which increases the demand for low level stuff, and thus makes gathering linen, light leather, or copper more profitable for low level people. And if everybody puts up the green items he finds in the crates in the AH, it becomes easier to find an item you need in the auction house. So in spite of the opening of the gates of Ahn'qiraj being far away, and my pally being unlikely to ever go there, I'm happy enough with the effects of the war effort.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:35 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
The Zerg Raid Dungeon

I have a new idea, a design proposal for Blizzard for content to be added in patch 1.12 or 1.13: The Zerg Raid Dungeon. World of Warcraft has a well known problem that players can reach level 60 on a casual play schedule, with lots of soloing, a bit of grouping, and just a small guild. Then at level 60 most of the content is raid dungeons in which casual players haven't got a snowball's chance in Molten Core to succeed. Thus 96.4% of players don't raid, get increasingly frustrated with the lack of content at 60 for them, and quit the game. The fact that every content patch brings back a huge number of resubscriptions makes it obvious that these people quit because of a lack of content in the first place.

So what Blizzard should do is to bridge the gap between the casual level 60 player and the raider by adding a new raid dungeon which is *easier* than Molten Core or Zul'Gurub. I call it the Zerg Raid Dungeon, because it should be designed in a way that a random pickup raid group can zerg in with 40 casual players and still have a good chance to at least kill the first boss of that place. Every subsequent boss would then be a bit harder, and require more and more refined game play, until the final boss, who should be about as tough as Lucifron, the first boss in Molten Core.

Of course the loot should be adequate for the difficulty level, thus less good than Molten Core loot, but better than tier 0 loot. This is not about getting casual player easy loot, it is about getting them training in raiding, which will ultimately allow them to proceed to Molten Core and beyond. And it is about offering them new content, keeping them playing and paying. Unlike Molten Core the Zerg Raid Dungeon would allow a bad raid to achieve some success, while at the same time showing them the advantages of playing better. This encourages people to come back and try again. Molten Core or Zul'Gurib aren't good training grounds, because they are already too hard for the casual player. And now that Scholomance and Stratholme have been removed as possible training grounds for small scale raiding, the Zerg Raid Dungeon is badly needed to bridge the gap from casual playing to the existing end-game content of WoW.

Is this just a dream? The chances of Blizzard actually adding a raid dungeon easier than Molten Core are slim. They are busy adding a raid dungeon more difficult than any existing place in patch 1.11, in spite of the fact that less than 0.1% of the players will be able to visit this. Blackwing Lair and AQ40 aren't exactly overcrowded these days, the number of players able to kill even the first boss in Naxxramas is tiny.

But that doesn't mean the Zerg Raid Dungeon concept won't happen. The only thing it needs is inertia on the part of the developers, which is generally something that you have a reasonable chance to see. The only thing Blizzard needs to do is to *not* change anything in Molten Core when the Burning Crusade comes out. Molten Core is hard for a level 60 pickup raid, but it would be nearly the perfect Zerg Raid Dungeon training ground for a level 70 pickup raid. It would fit all the requirements: A group of 40 players of level 70 that haven't raided before have a decent chance of killing Lucifron on the first try, but subsequent encounters are getting harder for them, and will teach them to play better. The current MC loot will be decent for level 70, but not as good as the one in the new level 70 raid dungeons. And participating in a level 70 zerg raid through Molten Core would teach a casual players a lot of the do's and don'ts for raiding in a 40-man group.

I still have hope that we will see this solution. Not only would it be good game design, and pleasing a large group of players. But it would also be a lot easier to implement than all alternatives, because the devs just need to do nothing. The alternatives, like lowering the cap for Molten Core from 40 players to 20 players would be a lot more problematic. It would mean that level 60 players couldn't access Molten Core any more, just to prevent level 70 players from zerging it. A "sliding" raid number cap based on levels would be hard to implement and complicated. And if you make Molten Core harder by lowering the raid cap, while keeping the loot the same, no level 70 would want to go there, and the place would turn into a museum. You could keep Molten Core as a level 70 raid dungeons by making all mobs harder and making the loot better, but that would be a lot of work, and the raiders who have been to MC a hundred times won't be too keen to go to the renovated version again. So I think turning Molten Core into a Zerg Raid Dungeon training ground would be the best and most probably solution. Hey, maybe Blizzard could place a meeting stone in front of it!
- posted by Tobold @ 7:50 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
MMORPG on TV

I recently watched an episode of NCIS (no relation to CSI), in which the navy criminal investigation service agents were working on a case involving a reality TV show filmed in a marines camp, "Babes in Boot Camp". Funny, because you could easily imagine somebody coming up with that idea. So the agents talk among themselves about how stupid TV is, but say about one of them "he doesn't watch much TV, because he spends most of his time pretending to be an elf lord in an online game". Needless to say that the guy doesn't get much respect for that alternative, and he is the anyway always the nerd of the team. So not really positive TV coverage of MMORPG here.

But in a way that is the most realistic depiction of MMORPG on TV that I've ever seen. Timothy McGee, the NCIS agent playing a MMORPG is a geek, got a degree from MIT and everything. Not the typical crime fighter. But then, finding the criminal in an NCIS episode often involve things like tracing a mobile phone or crosslinking databases, and I can't see Dirty Harry doing that. Crime fighting has gone modern, and McGee fits right in. So even if his boss makes fun of him, calling him "elf lord", playing a MMORPG is totally in character for him, as this is generally still seen as a nerd activity. And it is shown as something that doesn't interfere with his job, apart from bad jokes, something he does instead of watching TV.

I can live with that. MMORPG as intelligent alternative for the brainy guy, instead of watching dumb reality TV. They could have been nicer about it, but in the end it is a lot more realistic than showing video games turning kids into mass murderers. MMORPG and video games make bad TV, because they aren't really spectator sports. If you show the reality of somebody playing WoW for several hours in a row, it looks very boring, because all the fun happens inside the head of the guy playing. So media often show the extreme sides, the Korean guy playing until he died, the parents letting their child die while playing a game, or the Chinese guy killing another guy over the theft of a virtual sword. Showing a kid playing a violent video game and then going Columbine on his high school makes more interesting viewing than the reality, which is harmless enough. If you took violent video games out of this world, the kids would go back to watching violent TV, and you'd get the same discussion all over again. Video games are mainly entertainment, an alternative to TV, and just like there is good TV and bad TV, there are good games and there are bad games. It is good to show online games as part of the ordinary lfe of people, not as something threatening. Thanks, McGee!
- posted by Tobold @ 11:25 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 2-May-2006

I did a bit of everything in World of Warcraft this weekend, playing many different characters of different levels. I think I'm a bit beyond the point where I "have to" reach a specific goal or advance a specific character, nowadays I'm just playing for fun.

I don't really have a "main" character, but if I had to designate one of my chars as such, it would probably be Raslebol, my troll warrior, who is the first of my MMORPG characters ever to hit a games level cap. I'm playing him more often again nowadays. My guild used to have too many warriors and not enough priests, so I leveled up a priest to 60 and played that one, but nowadays the situation has reversed, and we have plenty of priests and few warriors. So I played Raslebol several times this extended weekend with my guild. I already told about the two raids, but I also visited Scholomance and Stratholme.

Scholomance was fun, because we had a nearly perfect group and cleared out the complete dungeon, including the nasty side area with Jandice Barav. Raslebol had a quest for turning the lich Ras Frostwhisper into a human since many months, and now I finally got to do it. The groups secondary tank held the lich's aggro while I was transforming him from maximum range, and that worked very well, without getting interrupted. The transformation turns the fearsome looking lich into a human in underpants, which is hilarious. He still keeps the same abilities and loot, so nothing really changes in the fight, but it did get me the quest done. The reward for the quest was a shield which was a slight improvement over what I had before, but most importantly looked much better. My previous shield was one of the many shields with a small buckler look with a skull painted on, which just looked tiny in my trolls hand. Now I have a tower shield which looks a bit more unique.

After Ras Frostwhisper, we killed the 6 bosses which make headmaster Gandling spawn, and then the headmaster. I've read somewhere that Blizzard wants to put better loot on those 6 bosses, which is really necessary. The fights are tough for a group of 5, and several of them just dropped a nearly useless dark rune and a stone for Argent Dawn faction. These bosses used to drop parts from green armor sets. But now these armor sets have been upgraded to blue, and turned into ultra-rare drops, we didn't find a single piece on 6 bosses, which is pretty stupid. That is *not* what I understand under "improved loot", as announced in the dungeon improvements. These 6 bosses should together drop at least 2 of these armor parts, otherwise there is no point in going there to collect the set.

The Stratholme group started as something completely different. I asked in guild chat if some kind soul would help me farm Frostmaul Giants in Winterspring, which at level 60 elite are just a bit too tough to solo for me. According to Thottbot they have a 2% chance to drop the recipe for greater frost protection potion. But I always suspect that Thottbot only counts drop percentages when there is any item loot at all, so if half of the giants only drop money, they aren't counted and the real chance to find the recipe would be only 1%, which could take a lot of farming to find. So two friendly guild mates volunteer to help me, and a third one logs in while we are already in Winterspring, sees that there is a guild group there, and asks to join too. Before he even gets to us, we kill the 5th Frostmaul Giant and find the recipe, an extraordinary streak of luck. Now I got all 5 greater protection potion recipes on Raslebol: Arcane, Fire, Frost, Nature, and Shadow.

So we have nearly a full group with no more purpose in Winterspring, and decide to invite one more guild mate and go to Stratholme, undead side. As Raslebol was on the "Stratholme in 45 minutes Baron run quest", we got that timer running automatically. Well, the group wasn't quite as experienced as the Scholo group, we had some accidents like me getting feared into another group of mobs, we wiped two or three times, and by the time we killed the Baron we had taken 2 hours. Now somebody is going to tell me again that doing it in 45 minutes is feasible, and I think it is: You just need a group of 5 people doing it repeatedly until they know every corner of the place by heart and play together in perfect harmony. Unfortunately casual players never get into such groups. Doing Stratholme repeatedly with every time a different group is not likely to ever succeed in doing this quest. I would guess that over 90% of the people trying the tier 0.5 upgrade quest series will get stuck at that point. That suits the hardcore players just fine, because they don't want other people to get good gear with a "casual" play style, as that would invalidate their choice of play style. But I still would say that Blizzard claiming that tier 0.5 being the alternative for the casual player isn't exactly truth in advertising. To get the tier 0.5 quest series done, you need to have a raid-like hardcore guild, just with less players than a raid needs. It is an alternative for the top players who for some reason don't have 39 friends and several hours of raiding time available, but for the majority of casual players this still isn't achievable. Stratholme in 45 minutes is basically a 5-person raid, necessitating the same play style of "repeated attempts to perfection" as Onyxia or MC, just with less people.

Nevertheless the Stratholme expedition was fun. We found a lot of tier 0 bracers, belts, and even some gloves. Raslebol didn't find anything that would still be an improvement for him, but at least I got two more quests done there. The only thing that was a bit annoying was that the baron dropped the tier 0 pants for a class that wasn't present in the group. Before the 1.10 patch people used to make "class runs" to dungeons like Stratholme, with one member of every class. So except for the rare cases where the Horde found pally armor, or the Alliance shaman armor, the raid resulted in one member getting the tier 0 pants he needed. Now, with the group size limited to 5, even if there are 5 different classes the chance that the final boss drops armor that is useful is only 55%. In the other 4 out of 9 cases you can only disenchant the loot you get from the final boss, which is a bit sad. Why can't they make the loot tables checking which classes are actually in the group, and only drop useful armor?

As I said, I also played other characters this long weekend. Kyroc, my priest, I didn't really do much with. I went to Silithus and tried out the Field Duty quests. The good thing was that as priest it is possible to solo the part where you need to support a group of Horde guys to kill a giant bug, to get a signature under your field duty papers. So I did that twice, and got a combat quest and a tactical quest. But it turned out that these are group quests. If I wanted to make any significant progress in Cenarion Circle reputation with these, I would need to gather lots of different field duty quests first, and then get a group together killing lots of bugs in a hive, or summoning twilight lords. And I had the impression that not many people are interested in these kind of groups.

I spent more time playing my paladin, who is now level 29. I smithed two green iron hauberks, kept one, sold the other, and then ditched blacksmithing. Now I'm up to 195 in engineering, which is a lot more useful, but expensive. The grenades and bombs of engineering address perfectly the weaknesses of the paladin class, of low damage output and lack of ranged abilities, and make him a lot stronger. At level 29, blowing up several mobs at once for 500 damage with a goblin land mine is pretty powerful. On the downside I spend time mining and gathering resources just for making bombs, without earning any money from crafting. I'll try to sell things like Gyrochronatom, and other engineering supplies that are needed for quests. I have no idea if there is a good market for guns, ammo, and scopes, I will need to explore. The only positive thing is that other classes at 29 need to start thinking of saving up money for a mount, but my pally will get a free horse at 40, so I can spend my money on engineering.

Finally I played my shaman a bit, who happens to also be engineer. For that class it is a less good fit, as my enhancement specced shaman is already a damage machine. And he is level 39 now, and the same goblin land mine is weaker, relatively speaking, because the mobs have a lot more hit points. The shaman went for gnome engineering, making funny gadgets, but I think the pally will go for the more explosive goblin engineering. Waldin, the shaman, finished doing all the quests in Desolace, so now I'm thinking where to go next. I still hate Stranglethorn, so I was thinking Dustwallow Marsh. I remember some fun quests there from the ogre village.

The shaman feels a lot more powerful than the pally, but maybe part of that is that the shaman is twinked to the max, with an epic mace and shield and the best equipment money can buy. The paladin is on a new server, with a very different economy, and no level 60 to support him financially. I got some decent blue pieces from smithing or from dungeons, but most items are green and not of the highest possible level. Not twinking does make a difference, even if I'm playing the pally pretty well, based on economical knowledge and general game knowledge. I was proud when I joined a group to the Stockades and one group member said that I was the best pally he ever played with. Well, the warrior in the group was playing rather badly, for example using intimidating shout in a crowded area and bringing half the dungeon down on us, so it was easy to be the better tank. But it is always nice to be appreciated.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:02 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
Bloodspell

Hugh Hancock asked me to report that he has released his Machinima film Bloodspell on the internet. So if you are interested in that sort of film making, check it out.

Hugh used the Neverwinter Nights engine to make this movie, which is probably a good choice for pro's. There are other people who like to stage movies in World of Warcraft. But if you plan to make your very first own Machinima film, your easiest choice is probably getting a copy of The Movies.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:11 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post