Age, luxury, and World of Warcraft

I am 41 years old. Whether wisdom comes with age is debatable, but one thing that is for certain is that for most people the financial situation improves with age. And with the improved finances comes more luxury: I'm driving a new car, while as a student I drove a clapped-out 10 year old Ford. I can always afford the latest graphics card and other hardware. I sometimes visit nice and expensive restaurants, which I could never have afforded 20 years ago. I even fly business class, though that is paid for by my company. The one thing where I am paying exactly the same, and receive exactly the same level of service, is for World of Warcraft and other MMORPG.

Recently there was a discussion going on here whether playing a harder MMORPG would have the advantage that less children would play it, thus improving the level of maturity of chat and behavior. I'm not sure that would work; it could be that older, more mature players have too many Real Life ® constraints, and would rather play an easier, more casual game. While bratty kids with lots of time on their hands aren't really daunted by hard games, taking it as a challenge. It would be possible to create a MMORPG for a mature audience, for example by making it a lot less violent, see A Tale in the Desert. But if you prefer the more game-like MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, it is hard to think of a configuration where the mature players wouldn't have to suffer from the immature ones.

So I was thinking about luxury servers for World of Warcraft. Imagine special WoW servers where the monthly fee is $30 instead of $15. In exchange you get faster server hardware, 99.9% uptime guarantee by having servers doubled up, faster GM response to your problems, a better customer service telephone line, and whatever else you could think of as improved customer service. But the real advantage would be a non-advertised one: most players on these servers would be older, and more mature. Because kids simply couldn't afford it, or would be unwilling to pay for the luxury, while middle-aged people like me wouldn't mind paying more for better service.

I know Everquest tried something similar, but I don't know if the idea ever took off. I know a lot of older MMORPG secretly wish they could somehow get rid of the immature kids that can be such a nuisance, with their potty mouthed general chat, attention span in the millisecond region, and hopping around like Kermit the Frog all the time. But would they actually pay to get rid of them, and to enjoy a better customer service from Blizzard at the same time? What do you think?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:45 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
Blue screen of death

I had some problems during the weekend with running a video-editing software on my main computer, getting lots of different error messages indicating some problem with drivers. This morning while patching the Burning Crusade beta things got worse, and I repeatedly had blue screens of death saying "Driver_irql_not_less_or_equal" in ndis.sys. I think it is safe to assume that my Windows installation is screwed. Which doesn't really surprise me, I'm using the computer a lot, and the same installation of Windows is running on it since over a year. Time for some kind of reinstall, to fix all the driver problems. Damn, that is going to take me a while.

Fortunately I found a very helpful Windows Reinstall website. I think I'll try the Microsoft's Windows XP Professional (Pro) Repair Install step by step guide. I used to do these reinstalls from scratch, formating the hard drive and everything, but I hope that won't be necessary.

A repair reinstall of Windows has the advantage of leaving all the data on my hard drive. The only problem is that it clears my registry, including all the information that programs might have written into the registry when I installed them. Thus lots of software doesn't run any more afterwards, and needs to be reinstalled as well. I heard that World of Warcraft doesn't need registry entries to run, so I would be able to play directly, without reinstalling WoW. I hope that is true, because installing WoW isn't really a short process. Can anyone confirm this?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Pickup raids

Hmmm, I hear more and more often about people organizing pickup raids to places like Molten Core. But I personally have never seen such a pickup raid. That is probably because I usually play on the Horde side, and Horde is just not as numerous as Alliance on a PvE server. The more people there are in total, the more likely is it to get a 40-man pickup raid going.

The only thing I've ever seen on offer on my server was a guild offering spots in their MC raid, but if you received an epic you would have to pay them 300 gold. That didn't look attractive to me, you would have to both pay and work for the epic, effectively paying it twice. And of course the guild in question had first pick rights on everything.

The problem with pickup raids, from my point of view, is the relatively low chance of receiving an epic, and the relatively large chance of receiving just a large repair bill. But of course the better the raid succeeds, the less of a problem that is. So if you have an alt, and your guild doesn't equip alts, you might want to run a MC raid with other people's alts. If everybody is an experienced raider, MC is possible even in a pickup group with strangers in tier 0 gear.

Did you ever participate in such a pickup raid? Care to share your experiences? How was loot distributed? Did people fight about loot, or was it a very civilized affair? How was leadership organized, and were there discussions on strategy?
- posted by Tobold @ 4:59 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
BC Journal - 30-October-2006

Another weekend of adventure in the World of Warcraft Burning Crusade beta. I hit level 62, got my jewelcrafting up to 315, and spent a lot of time exploring the Outlands. But I didn't play all that many hours in the beta, because most of Saturday I spent doing Real Life ® stuff, including the first christmas shopping, being a firm believer in starting that early. And Sunday afternoon I spent raiding on the real servers, although our BWL raid was again cancelled, and we ended up doing AQ20. Still, playing in a guild is fun, and makes a good change from exploring the beta, which is fun too, but of a more lonely kind.

Leveling in the Burning Crusade isn't quite as fast as in the original World of Warcraft, but that was only to be expected. From level 60 to 61 I needed 415 kXP, to level 62 473 kXP, and now to 63 I will need 504 kXP. That is a strange series of numbers, the difference between 61 and 62 is bigger than that between 62 and 63. Anyway, leveling up didn't *feel* slow, and I'm not even trying very hard, I have so many other things to do in the beta. I gain most of my experience points just by doing quests, most of the time solo. But this weekend I also did several elite quests in a small group of first 4, then 3 players. There is a series of elite quests involving killing elite giants in Hellfire Peninsula, and the first quest already gives a very nice wand (or other rewards for other classes), with 84 dps and good caster stats. The other quest rewards I currently get are usually about as good as the tier 1 and tier 2 gear I'm wearing, and it is always difficult to decide whether to switch or not. And that is just the green quest reward items. The expansion will level the playing field in equipment after 2 to 4 levels, making all the current raid epics obsolete relatively soon.

After having level 62, and a mining skill sufficient to mine adamantium, the basic ore after fel iron, I started to explore the zones around Hellfire Peninsula. That was enourmous fun. I ended up exploring two zones, Terokkar Forest and Nagrand. The forest is okay, but except for harboring the big neutral city of Shattrath it isn't really special. With Nagrand on the other hand I fell immediately in love, this is probably the most beautiful zone on the whole World of Warcraft. The encroaching demonic threat to this pretty lush landscape is very well done, creating a great atmosphere.

In the middle of Nagrand is the village of Halaa. This village can be either under the control of the Horde or under the control of the Alliance. To capture the village, the side not currently owning it must kill the villages 15 guards. That is insofar fun as you can take control of one of the 4 wyvern flight points around the village. Clicking on the wyvern gives you 10 aerial bombs, and puts you on the predetermined flight path, crossing the village twice. So you can kill the guard by dropping bombs on them, as long as there aren't any defenders destroying the wyvern posts and killing you when you land. Aerial bombardement seems to be one of the fads in Burning Crusade, there were already quests with it in Hellfire Peninsula, but I do like the idea. I would have liked it even more if Halaa hadn't been bugged. Me and two other Horde players tried to take the village with a combination of bombardements and ground combat. We got the guards down to 1 out of possible 15, but the last guard was bugged. First he evaded all attacks, so we couldn't kill him. Then he despawned, but the display still showed 1 out of 15 possible guards, when in reality there wasn't any one left. So as we couldn't do the final kill, we never got the village under control, which was annoying. Blizzard will have to still work on that feature.

Speaking of work left to do, while exploring Terrokar Forest I also crossed the zone border to Shadowmoon Valley, which resulted in me being teleported back into the forest. Shadowmoon Valley isn't currently accessible, presumably due to not being finished yet. The zones of Blades Edge Mountains and Netherstorm are likewise not yet open, not yet finished. You begin to see why Blizzard couldn't have released the expansion next month.

While exploring all these zones, I kept mining all the ores I could find, and thus maxed out my mining at 375. That allowed me to mine khorium, the final rare ore. The other rare Outland ore, eternium, doesn't have its own ore nodes. It is found sometimes when mining any of the other Outland ores, fel iron, adamantium, or khorium. You also have a small chance to find a cuttable gem when mining. The one thing you don't find any more is stones, except for the dense stones in the rich thorium veins that can be found in the Outlands. There doesn't seem to be a stone level after the dense stones.

Jewelcrafting after 300 is slow going. Your chance to find a cuttable gem while mining, or as a mob drop, is very low. Thus you have to prospect fel iron ore to get the cuttable gems, adamantium can only be prospected at 350 skill, and eternium and khorium can't be prospected at all. Prospecting destroys 5 fel iron ore, and either gives you nothing, or one cuttable gem, with an about even chance. So on average you need 10 fel iron ore for one gem. You can then either cut the gem, which is usually a yellow recipe, giving you a skill point half of the time, or use two gems and some metal in an orange recipe for some jewelry. Thus you end up with 20 ores per skill point, which is a lot. So while I was doing this, cutting gems to skill up, I had a nasty surprise: Once cut, the gems don't stack any more. Which means you will have to sell them fast, or use up a lot of storage space. As in the beta people can buy gems from a temporary NPC vendor, I ended up selling the cut gems for 1 gold piece to a vendor, destroying a lot of value in the process. And up to now, with 315 skill, I haven't made a single piece of jewelry good enough for me to wear, although the green +16 int ring with some +healing bonus is coming close. But as so often in tradeskills, I had just found a blue ring in a dungeon which was better.

Glyx just posted in a recent comment here a link to a jewelcrafting guide, which has a shopping list what you need to reach level 300 in jewelcrafting: 240 copper, 120 bronze, 40 iron, 60 mithril, 255 thorium, 110 gold, 30 truesilver, 50 flask of mojo, 10 large fang, 30 malachite/tigerseye, 30 lesser moonstone, 100 shadowgem, 35 jade, 40 citrine, 45 star ruby, 35 aquamarine, 40 large opal, 20 azerothian diamond, and 20 huge emerald. The cost for this will vary widely, depending on whether you are Horde or Alliance, how old your server is, and whether you buy the stuff now or after the expansion, when everybody wants to buy it. And that is just one possible way, I personally went a route which used less shadowgems, but a lot of silver bars. But you can see how the total cost will be several hundred gold, and as high as 1000 gold under the worst circumstances. I will probably end up skilling up jewelcrafting again, just because I already gathered most of the materials for copying them to the beta server. But for people who find themselves with nothing stocked on the day the Burning Crusade comes out, I don't think I would recommend this new tradeskill, it is just too expensive for too little effect.

The good news in that is that if you are bored right now, and worrying how you are going to pay for a flying mount in the expansion, especially if you want the 5000 gold epic one, you might want to do a lot of mining, storing all the metals and gems on some bank mule, and selling them shortly after the expansion comes out, when prices will presumably go up. And of course you could speculate and buy gems now, although that would bind your money for a long time, and if too many people do it, it could backfire. One tip: if you want to hoard metals, you can store the noble metals like silver, gold, and truesilver as bars. But the base metals might be worth more as ores than as bars, even if that takes twice the storage space. Especially thorium ore might be useful to have, as the high-end gems can be prospected from that.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:32 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Are MMORPGs all the same?

In the thread about the other MMORPGs coming out in 2007, Wiggly asked the very good question how much all these games would play the same. With World of Warcraft having brought millions of players into their first MMORPG, there must be lots of people wondering whether the grass is greener in another game, or whether it would be best to stick to the game you know, because the other games don’t offer much else.

There is a basic structure behind all MMORPGs that defines the genre, just like there is a basic structure behind all racing games for example. You are in control of one character, who is defined by a bunch of numerical values describing how strong, intelligent, or skilled he is. By playing this character, these numerical values invariably go up, your character becomes stronger. This “character development” is what differentiates a role-playing game from an adventure or shooter game.

Generally “playing” a MMORPG involves fighting against computer-controlled enemies. Winning these battles gives you experience points, or something similar, like skill points. It is also likely to reward you with some items which you can either use to equip yourself with, or sell them and buy equipment.

The majority of MMORPG play in a sword and sorcery fantasy setting, in which you can play a warrior, a wizard, a priest, or other typical fantasy characters. You usually can play either alone, or in small groups of around half a dozen player, or at the end of the game even in very large groups of up to 40 characters. Combat usually consists of targeting a monster and starting some sort of auto-attack, swinging your weapon at it. But you always also have some sort of special attacks, fancy combat maneuvers for the warriors, spells like fireballs for the wizards, and healing spells for the priests.

There is a general flow of the game where you start in a city, go out and slay monsters, gather experience points and loot, come back to the city, sell the excess loot, train, buy other equipment, and go out again. In seemingly endless repetition. There is a brilliant parody of this gameplay out there, called Progressquest.

This basic description covers every game from Everquest to World of Warcraft to the upcoming games like Vanguard or Warhammer Online. So are these games all the same? The difference lies in the details. Different MMORPG all have different game worlds and settings, and you can also sort them into different categories according to what the gameplay is focused on.

Game worlds are often a matter of taste. There are many different fantasy worlds, some in a more cartoonish style, others more photo-realistic. And then there are non-fantasy worlds, games that play in historic settings, science fiction games, post-apocalyptic wastelands, and who knows what else game developers will come up with. Some worlds only exist in the MMORPG, but other game worlds are coming from other media. So you can ride a bantha over Tatooine, meet Thrall from Warcraft 3 in WoW, visit the world of your Dungeons & Dragons campaign, enter the Matrix, and soon even travel with the hobbits over Middle Earth. Obviously if you are a fan of one of these worlds, a MMORPG playing there has a special attraction over games playing elsewhere.

How to classify MMORPGs into categories is a matter of much debate. There is no unified standard, and thus unfortunately no label on the game box telling you what category a game belongs in before you buy it. But here are some often mentioned classification systems:

The first thing I always try to determine is how much a new MMORPG focuses on being a “game” and how much it focuses on being a “world”. Of course all MMORPG are a bit of both, but there are major differences on what the developers focused on. A more “game” like MMORPG like World of Warcraft doesn’t give the player much opportunity to change the game world in a permanent way, but it does have a solid structure of game goals, quests to follow, levels to reach, and so on. A more “world” like MMORPG often has features like houses or other structures players can build, thus changing the face of the world. Examples would be Star Wars Galaxies, or A Tale in the Desert. Often the game elements of these MMORPG are less well structured; there are a lot of open goals.

Another important distinction is whether a MMORPG is PvE-centric or PvP-centric. Again many games have both. But there are games like World of Warcraft where the PvE is the main game, and PvP seems to have been added as a badly designed afterthought. While in games like Lineage or EVE the PvP is the center of the game, and all the other parts of the game just serve to train and equip you for fights against other players. It is important to check whether PvP is voluntary, consentual, or whether PvP is free-for-all, with the possibility of lots of ganking and griefing.

The most difficult thing to determine is how easy or hard a MMORPG is. While single-player games often have adjustable difficulty settings, there is no such thing in a MMORPG. So some games are relatively easy, like World of Warcraft, allowing even the most casual player to reach the maximum level. But other games, like Everquest, need thousands of hours of play to reach the highest level, and have much harsher penalties for failure.

Besides the different genres and categories, MMORPG differ a lot in how they set up the details of gameplay. For example for players to buy and sell items to each other, every game has a slightly different system: There are auction houses, bazaars, player-controlled NPC vendors, or players opening up shop while standing around away-from-keyboard.

So in the end no two MMORPG are really the same. If you liked your first one, there is at least a chance that you’ll also like another one, but it isn’t certain. And you certainly won’t get bored after 5 minutes in the new game, MMORPGs usually take a long time to get into.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:04 PM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft Gemcutting

With the help of a reader, who provided me with the final missing gems, I finally managed to get my jewelcrafting skill up to 300. At this skill you can go to the jewelcrafting grand master and buy designs for gemcutting from him. So this is how gemcutting works in the Burning Crusade:

First you need to do some mining, typically for fel iron in Hellfire Peninsula. With the prospecting skill you get with jewelcrafting you then need to destroy the fel iron ores in the hope of finding cuttable gems. Up to now for me about half of my attempts gave me a gem, the other half just left me with worthless fel iron dust. The gems I found were for example deep peridot or azure moonstone.

For the azure moonstone I have two possible "cuts", either solid or sparkling. The solid azure moonstone gives +9 stamina, the sparkling azure moonstone gives +6 spirit. Both are blue gems, which preferably should be put in a blue socket, if you want to get an additional bonus. The peridots are green, which in this case means you can put them either in a blue or in a yellow socket, and get the bonus in both cases.

In the beta there is a NPC vendor named Ushtug the Temporary standing next to the grand master jewelcrafter, selling exactly these cut gems, like the solid azure moonstone. As somebody here already remarked, the name suggests he won't be there in the live version. This leaves the market for cut gems to the jewelcrafters. Cutting gems is very easy, getting the cuttable gems is a bit of a chore, but no problem. The limiting factor will be that it takes 300 jewelcrafting to do so. The materials I blew to get to this point had a market value of over 500 gold. And with everybody wanting to be a jewelcrafter, the market value of the same trade goods will easily be twice that when the expansion goes live. Guilds will certainly want to have a jewelcrafter or two, but this isn't exactly the best profession for the casual player. The jewelry you can make up to 300 is nice, but will probably not earn you any money, will all the other people skilling up and putting up the same rings and necklaces for sale as you do. How well and for how much the cut gems will sell, nobody knows yet.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:45 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Dell - Tobold 0:0

I reported that the only thing wrong with my last order from Dell was that they had sent me a wireless mouse instead of a mouse with retractable cable. No biggie. But I called Dell, and they agreed to send me the mouse I actually ordered, free of charge. Great customer service!

Today I get the small parcel from Dell, open it, and what do I find? Another wireless mouse. One more phone call confirms that wireless mouses is all they have left, even if a month ago when I ordered the laptop the mouse with the retractable cable was still possible to order. Well, I left it at that. I didn't get the mouse with cable I wanted, but instead I got TWO wireless mouses. Lets call it a draw.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:34 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
The games of 2007

Readers of this blog might be excused if they think that this is a World of Warcraft blog. It isn't. This is a blog about whatever MMORPG I am currently playing, and the MMORPG I'm playing since 2 years now is World of Warcraft. I'm not always sticking to the same game that long, 2 years is breaking the previous record held by the original Everquest. In other years I might play a dozen different MMORPGs.

But for the moment I play WoW, and I'm looking forward to the first expansion early next year, so chances are that I will continue playing WoW until at least the first half of 2007. Whether I will continue after that, and whether I will reach the 3-year mark, I simply don't know yet. It is possible that all the new games coming out are not so great, and I'll stick with World of Warcraft. Or it could be that I'll get bored with WoW, and jump onto the next big thing as soon as it becomes available. So what would my options be?

One option would be Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, presumably out early 2007. Well, you know how reliable announced release dates in this business are. Vanguard was developed by a bunch of ex-Everquest developers, lead by Brad McQuaid. They started developing Vanguard for Microsoft, but in an ironic twist of fate ended up back with Sony Online Entertainment. The general idea behind Vanguard is that modern games have grown too soft and carebear, and Vanguard will specifically target the hardcore players, bringing back the original feel and "The Vision" of Everquest, with graphics more fitting for 2007. Unfortunately "The Vision" is all about making players suffer, so they feel closer social bonds to each other. That includes lots of downtime and timesinks, and heavy penalties for failure, like naked corpse runs. That doesn't sound very attractive to me, call me a carebear. Even more disheartening are reports from the beta testers that while the graphics have a high polygon count (and thus run badly on all but the most expensive computers), they are artistically rather bland and ugly. On the positive side Vanguard promises to be rather rich in features, having lots of races and classes, and every imaginable fantasy MMORPG feature up to and including player housing. I'm just not sure it will be any fun.

Something completely different is promised for Pirates of the Burning Sea. No more elves and orcs, in this game you get to play a pirate. Presumably out in June 2007. This is a big unknown, the developer Flying Lab Software hasn't got any previous experience with MMORPGs. As every player controls a complete ship, and combat is ship-to-ship based, the gameplay is probably much different than what you're used to from character-based MMORPGs. I sure hope that this will be good, it would be fun to play something completely different for a change.

Did you notice that most players solo all of the first part of a MMORPG? So did Funcom, the developers of Age of Conan, to be released Q2 2007. And as you solo the first part anyway, they just split their MMORPG into two halves, and turned the first half into a single-player game. So you play a classical single-player RPG, and at the end you are released into a massively multiplayer world. Interesting concept. Other major improvements promised over previous MMORPGs are the more interactive combat system, where you will actually need to target zones of the enemy's body, instead of just starting auto-combat and going for a cup of coffee. Would be great if it worked, but could be totally horrible if it gets messed up by lag. Unlike lets say WoW, Age of Conan will also have collision detection, that is you can't just run through another player. That could do a lot for realism, but you'd have to find a way to prevent some players standing in a doorway and blocking the access to the bank or something other important. I have no information how good or bad AoC is. The only thing that scares me a bit is that it is heavily PvP-centric.

A more PvE-centric game will be Lord of the Rings Online, from Turbine, expected for "spring" 2007. This one has my toes tingling. Turbine isn't my favorite MMORPG company, they produced too many bad or mediocre games. But who wouldn't want to walk on Middle Earth? And surprisingly leaks from beta testers seem to indicate that the game is more fun than you'd expect from the Turbine label. The difficulty will be to find the right balance between playability and being true to the Lord of the Rings license.

Also expected for 2007, with no release date given, is Tabula Rasa. This game is playing in a science fiction setting, and will presumably resemble more a shooter game than a classic MMORPG. Lead developer is Richard Garriott (aka Lord British), of Ultima Online fame. Personally I'm not a big fan of science fiction, but I can see how the combination of shooter elements with a MMORPG could make a great game. Could. Not sure that Tabula Rasa will be it, but there is always hope.

And that isn't an exhaustive list of the games of 2007. There are a couple of other ones, like Gods and Heroes, playing in ancient Rome. And half a dozen Korean games. Will any of these games kick World of Warcraft from its throne? Probably not. But I kept the game that is most likely to gain a solid market share from WoW for last:

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is also announced for 2007. Although honestly I wouldn't be surprised if it slipped into 2008. Developer is EA Mythic, previously Mythic Entertainment, whose claim to fame is having produced Dark Age of Camelot, which by many people is still regarded as the best PvP MMORPG ever. And just like DAoC basically took Everquest and added good PvP to it, WAR is trying to take WoW and add good PvP to it. Whatever you might think about developing a game whose screenshots looks suspiciously similar to World of Warcraft, and has the familiar dwarves, orcs, and elves, you can't help but wonder how successful WoW could have been if it had better PvP. In the end World of Warcraft came to its current prominence by being a better Everquest. It wouldn't be surprising if WAR would beat it by being a better WoW.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:48 AM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
BC Journal - 26-October-2006

I'm still planning to fully explore jewelcrafting. So I skilled up mining with my undead priest in the beta to 300, and used the metals gained that way, plus all the stuff I brought over from the real servers, to skill up jewelcrafting to 275. Technically I am not stuck there, but to progress I need a lot more rare gems, which I probably can only get by extracting them from thorium ore. Sigh, it seems I'll be spending a lot of time mining radioactive thorium before I get jewelcrafting to 300.

To change my mind from mining, I joined a group for the blood furnace part of Hellfire Citadel. That place is still bugged with flying orcs. Unfortunately an even more serious bug makes it impossible to kill the final boss, unless you manage to do so on the first try. If you wipe, like we did, the boss attacks you too early on the next fight, and can't even be targeted, causing a certain wipe again and again.

But all wasn't bad, the second boss dropped my first socketed item: Bloody surgeon's gloves. They have +18 sta, +20 int, +7 spi, and +31 on healing. And besides these already not bad stats, they have two sockets, a red and a blue one. So I went to Thralmar and bought socketable gems at the jewel vendor there. I don't know if that vendor will remain there in the release version, or whether jewelcrafters will be the only source of such gems in the expansion. Anyway, you socket the gems by shift-rightclicking on the item, which makes a window pop up. Then you can transfer gems from your inventory to the item's sockets. I chose a +13 healing red gem and a +2 mana per 5 seconds blue gem. By using the gems of the same color as the sockets, I gained an additional +3 spirit bonus. If I had wanted to use lets say a +6 int yellow gem instead, I would have foregone the +3 spirit bonus. Gems you socket can't be removed, but they can be replaced by other gems, which destroys the first gem.

But probably the best discovery of the evening was that the meeting stones now have a summoning functionality. I'm not quite sure how many people you need to summon, but if you are in a group, standing next to a meeting stone, and one group member is far away, you can target the group member and click on the meeting stone. That opens a portal just like a warlocks portal, through which the group member can be summmoned. Nifty! I just hope the LFG interface becomes more popular in the expansion, in the beta which is comparatively empty players don't use it much. But with an improved LFG interface *and* a way to summon people, starting a 5-man dungeon group could become a lot easier.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Safer Windows

Bill Gates is in the business of selling, among other things, operating systems for personal computers. While he is quite successful at that, a lot of the code of these operating systems is based on older code and design dating back many years ago. And some years ago personal computers were just that, personal, and not connected to any sort of network. So the operating systems designed for these non-networked computers are generally not very good at networking, and have more security leaks than the Afghan border.

Unsurprisingly Mr. Gates, having woken up to the reality of the internet, is since some time rather busy making his operating systems safer. For the current Windows XP there is now a Windows Defender antispyware program available for free from Microsoft. And, if you believe the announcements, next years Windows Vista will be a lot safer than any previous Windows versions.

Good news? Not if you profited handsomely from the Windows security flaws. Symantec and McAfee, two of the biggest providers of security software, are claiming that Microsoft is committing anti-competitive behavior by fixing those safety holes themselves, and not giving other companies access to the kernel-level security features of Vista. Doh!

There have been years of lawsuits about whether Microsoft had the right to add features like media players and web browsers to their operating system, with mixed results. But the one thing that a company making an operating system *must* be allowed to do is to make it safe. Can you imagine a judge forcing Microsoft to leave open security holes in their operating system, just so that companies making security software still have a market? If Mr. Gates manages to bring out an operating system which is immune to spyware, viruses, and hackers, more power to him.

I recently uninstalled the McAfee security center from all of my computers, because it became more and more bossy, not wanting to let me do even perfectly safe things, like transfering files between my computers. I do have a hardware firewall in my router, and the Windows software firewall, so a third firewall really isn't necessary. Against viruses I now use the free Avira AntiVir software, which isn't any worse than the $100 per year McAfee software. And I use another free software, AdAware against spyware, although I might try out the new free Microsoft Windows Defender. In combination with some basic common sense rules, like "don't click on anything in your email" and "don't be stupid", that is more than enough security for a home computer. Worst case scenario? I spend half a day formating my hard drive and reinstalling everything. I keep my data backed up, and don't store anything really secret on my computer, so why would I need expensive and cumbersome security software?

Don't believe the panic, most of what you hear about how dangerous the internet is, is hype spread by companies selling that software. Even the BBC honeypot, which they set up specifically to show how dangerous the internet is, required the journalists to click on a lot of spam messages, voluntarily installing software, before the computer became so clogged with adware and spyware that it stopped running correctly. If they had have the Windows firewall running and not clicked on any spam, their computer would have been perfectly safe. But of course that wouldn't have been such a good story.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:41 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Patch, what patch?

A bit more than the usual confusion on the World of Warcraft forums. Eyonix hinted about a soon to be released content patch, before the holidays, followed by an EU blue name stating there would be no patch 1.13. Now Tseric tries to explain: "What it seems that people are expecting is another content patch that is independant of the expansion. More specifically, a lot of folks seem to be looking for a free content patch, should they choose not to purchase the expansion.

This is not happening. Therefore, the EU CM is correct in saying there will be no 1.13. We will not be patching the original version of WoW any further.

What we are doing is upgrading the game client to 2.0. This is what happens in an expansion.

The patch 2.0 is going to prepare for the expansion. We will release more specifics about what is in that at a later time. For now, consider it as the patch that allows players who don't have the expansion to keep playing with players who do. If we were to fully upgrade to expansion, players who did not get the expansion on release day would be shafted until such a time as they upgraded. We do not want this, so we have a prepatory patch which will bridge between the two versions of WoW.

Therefore, patch 2.0 will be released shortly prior to the release of expansion boxes. There will be no patch 1.13."

Basically the Burning Crusade expansion contains content which is exclusive to people who buy the expansion pack, but also changes to the game which everybody will get, whether he buys the expansion or not. Among these are the new honor system and the talent trees. Makes sense, how would you for example want to have everybody with the expansion on the new honor system while keeping the old honor system for the others? So apparently there will be a patch before christmas, it will be called 2.0 (and not 1.13), and it will already patch in the new honor system and talents and whatever other general rules changes the Burning Crusade expansion brings.

Sounds good to me. I wouldn't mind them patching in the new honor system *today*, the earlier it comes, the better. And as the new talent trees have 51 points to the top, and you already have 51 talent points at level 60, having the talent trees early wouldn't hurt either. Makes for a more exciting christmas than another repetition of the same old Grandfather Winter christmas quests. And by splitting up the rules-change patch from the expansion content addition, the servers might have a better change of handling the traffic.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:41 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
How to blog

Sane Mike, in a recent comment, asked about blogging: "How do you actually do it? Where do you get fresh ideas from every day? How long does it take to write? How do make the time to write in between gaming, working and home life? Does it ever become a chore? If you do feel like spilling the beans and letting us in on your blog writing secrets I think that would make a very interesting article." Now it happens that I recently got confronted with the question on how this blog started, so my head is filled with thoughts about my blog, and this might be a good time to write them down. And maybe they answer some of Mike's questions.

For me, blogging started as a solution of a technical problem: archiving my written words. I already wrote a lot on different game message boards. But game forums usually are badly or not at all archived. And if you switch from one game to another, you often switch from one message board to another, and you end up starting over writing things for people who never heard your name, with a "post count" of zero. Then there are problems of ownership, on a game forum your threads can be locked or deleted. A blog solves all of these problems, giving you a place where you are (more or less) the owner, where your written texts are archived, and where you can keep your writing place even if you switch to a new game.

So in my case the writing was there first, and the blog came afterwards. If you never wrote on the internet, if you have no practice at all expressing yourself in writing in a public place, starting a blog from scratch would be a *lot* harder.

Where do I get the ideas from? Mostly from playing, but if that fails, from reading other blogs, game forums, game magazines, press releases, and other relevant material. My secret is that I mainly write for myself. *Not* thinking of what your readers expect helps a lot when blogging. A blog is as much a diary as it is a public document. As soon as you start worrying about meeting a certain writing standard, or having to cover a certain subject, writing block sets in. There are millions of blogs out there which get a lot less hits than this one not because their authors write any worse than I do, but because they don't write enough. If you know a good blog which is only updated once a month, chances are that you'll soon forget about it. Instead you visit my blog every day (I hope), because there is *always* something new there. And once a month I manage to write something really great. But the not-so-great everyday writing is necessary to keep the blog alive. And sometimes I get lucky, and in spite of a blog entry being not well thought out and less than perfectly written, I get a very interesting discussion going in the comments section. That adds a lot to the entertainment value of the blog, and helps me finding new ideas to write about.

How do I make the time? Writing this blog doesn't take as much time as you might think. I type 50 words per minute, which is slower than a professional secretary, but faster than most people. And I type directly from my head, I rarely first do a draft or something. I certainly do a number of spelling mistakes, and I don't even use a spell-checker, but spelling on the internet being what it is, nobody really notices.

Blogging rarely becomes a chore. There are days when I'm too busy to write a long text. But usually I can get away with just writing something short, or link to something. Yesterday I had a rather busy day, but Blizzard's announcement of the Burning Crusade release date, quickly copied and pasted, saved the day for my blog. And I sometimes have more ideas for articles than I want to write on that day, so I just blot down the idea on a notepad, and write the blog entry on another day when I can't think of anything.

I don't think there are really "secrets" to blogging. There are some skills which make it a lot easier, like the aforementioned typing skill, or general writing skills. But in general it is a "build it and they will come" affair. I'm still surprised how many people are reading this. I believe they come because I write original content, original not in the sense that these are especially deep or novel thoughts, but in the sense that I write my own thoughts down, instead of just linking to other people's content. Hyperlinks are a wonderful invention, but there are far too many people trying to generate traffic with nothing but links, and not much own content. If you create a blog, and not a "portal", you will profit from that, regardless about what you write. Other people will link to your content, suddenly your blog appears in Google searches, and then the page views come rolling in. Everybody has his favorite subject, something he is able to talk passionately about. You just need to transform that passionate speech into written words. If that passion is something exotic (like massively multiplayer online role-playing games) as opposed to something mundane like politics, you have a reasonable chance to make a name for yourself with blogging, whether that was your original intent or not.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:02 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 25-October-2006

Not a typo, this is a journal of "regular" World of Warcraft adventures, not Burning Crusade beta adventures. Now that the expansion has been postponed to January 2007, I don't want to spend all of that time playing the beta, and then already go bored by its content into the release. Especially since everything I do there will reset, and I have to do it all again. The other important aspect is that I would like to stay close to my guild, raiding with them, keeping in touch, and not vanish into the beta for 3 months.

On the other hand last weekend I did three BWL raids, Friday night, and Saturday and Sunday afternoon. The Friday night raid never started, but counting all the time together I spent 12 hours in BWL, which is too much for one place on one weekend. So I'm trying to split up my raiding activity a bit better over the week.

Fortunately for me, yesterday night there was a raid on our calendar which was especially interesting to me: second half of Zul'Gurub. I have done the first half, killing all the animal-aspect priests of Hakkar, many times. But somehow I never was in a raid killing Jin'do and Hakkar. So a raid doing only the bloodlord Mandakir, Jin'do, and Hakkar, was exactly what I was looking for as a divertisement from BWL raiding. Due to our lack of priests it was easy to get invited into the raid. Having two different "sizes" of raids is sometimes problematic for a guild: If you have enough people on weekends for 40-man raids, you probably have too many for one 20-man raid, but also probably not all the classes necessary to make two good 20-man raids. You end up creating one raid, and having some people unable to participate. I always feel slightly embarrassed that I rarely have to sit out a raid due to my class. But then again, it is obvious which classes are more in demand than others for groups and raids. And if you insist on playing a class where there are too many off, you have to live with the consequences.

So we started the raid with not quite perfect, but reasonable, mix of character classes. Only 2 priests, but both of them experienced raiders (excuse me for saying that about myself) in good gear. As you would expect the raid for a Zul'Gurub raid in a guild which is half through BWL, we had a mix of experienced people who were there for practice and fun, together with some less experienced people who could use the training and the loot. That went very well. We killed all three remaining bosses on the first try, with not a single wipe, and in just 2 hours. Yay! My first Hakkar kill!

Then I got extremely lucky, Hakkar dropped the Touch of Chaos, an epic wand with an awe-inspiring 82 damage per second, plus a +18 bonus to spell damage and healing. And the people who had more DKP than me already had it, or something equally good, while the less experienced raiders in the group obviously had less DKP than me, so I received the wand. Yay! My first epic wand! I used to wield the Antenna of Invigoration from AQ20, but the new wand has a whopping 10 dps more. Even in the Burning Crusade beta I haven't seen a wand as good as that yet. As my soloing strategy as priest is very much wand-based, this was a very good find for me. It is unlikely that I find anything better before being quite a bit into the expansion, and that is now months away.

Recently I have been quite lucky with epics. My DKP are dropping, which isn't easy in our system, as it tends to give out more points than taking away. I'm sure that will be balanced by other periods where I don't get anything for some time, but I don't mind. The priests in my guild are currently circumventing the DKP system, by having a gentleman's agreement to stop rolling for tier 2 priest items before every priest in the raid has three of them. Our DKP system by itself would be more likely to first equip one priest with lots of tier 2 items, before slowly trickling down to the next priest in line. But we felt that for the Transcendence set it would be better for everybody if we spread it out more evenly, and get every priest the 3 pieces needed for the very nice 15% mana regeneration set bonus.

In fact I would be perfectly happy to go into the Burning Crusade expansion with the gear I have right now, 5 prophecy, 3 transcendence, the Will of Arlokk, and now the epic wand. Every further improvement is just for fun. If I continue raiding Molten Core, I'll probably even end up with Benediction one day, even if I am not a big fan of that staff. But if everybody else has it, I'll take it before throwing the eye away. My necklace, and the two rings I'm wearing, are still blue, but I haven't even seen any epic items I'd want to replace them with. I'm not really searching websites for how to improve my gear, I prefer to go raiding where I like, and get surprised by the result. Yesterday that worked, the wand was certainly a nice surprise.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:27 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Article submissions

I got a very strange e-mail, an anonymous "article submission". Two pages of text, neatly paragraphed. Correct spelling and grammar. Written in a newspaper article style, the text could have appeared in any newspaper without appearing out of place. I'm not going to post that text. Because while the form is perfect, the content is pure drivel.

The article is labeled "Adventurers Wanted: Disabled Need Not Apply", and claims that Blizzard is preventing disabled persons to play by removing macro functionality from World of Warcraft. In reality the only thing that Blizzard did was removing some very small part of the macro language, preventing macros that made intelligent decisions, like Decursive, as well as making it harder to program bots. But the article writes it up in a way as if Blizzard removed all macro functionality, and did that only to prevent disabled people from playing the game. And the author even gets George W. Bush into his argument that Blizzard can't do that.

I was wondering where the article came from, a reply e-mail asking for some sort of name or identification didn't get me a response. I have a faint suspicion that this was written by somebody in the business of using bots to farm gold. Because I can see how removing a macros ability to make intelligent decisions can hurt the bot industry. And this being people with lots of money, they could have afforded some hack to write up a text that looks good and defends their position with fake political correctness.

Fact is that the change to the macro language does absolutely nothing to the interaction of disabled people with World of Warcraft. If they can move the mouse and use the keyboard sufficiently to just move around, the existence or not of intelligent macros doesn't make any difference to them. The weak and the helpless have it hard enough without being used as a facade for spurious argument.

I don't generally accept "article submissions". This isn't a newspaper, this is a blog. If you can write articles, open up your own blog. If you send me a link to your blog, I will read it, and *if I like it* I might post a blog entry with a link to it. I also regularly write articles based on suggestions from my readers. Your e-mails and comments are always welcome. But please don't try to use me as publishing platform for some pseudo-political game article.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:22 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Burning Crusade now officially postponed

Blizzard finally released a statement regarding the release date of the Burning Crusade expansion. It says:

"IRVINE, Calif. -- Blizzard Entertainment® today announced that the release date for World of Warcraft®: The Burning Crusade™, the highly anticipated expansion for World of Warcraft, will be in January 2007. By adding a few extra weeks to the development cycle beyond its original target date, Blizzard will be able to extend the closed beta test and further refine the new content that will ship with the game.

“We appreciate the enthusiasm surrounding World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, and we’re excited about putting the finishing touches on all of the new content,” said Mike Morhaime, president and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “We feel confident that the extra time spent polishing the game will result in the high-quality experience that our players expect and deserve.”

Blizzard began the closed-beta phase of testing on World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade earlier this month. The January 2007 release window will allow extra time for current beta testers to participate in the final stages of development and continue providing valuable feedback.

Further information on specific worldwide release dates, pricing, and other details will be announced in the near future."

Well, I don't blame them. This adds 2 months to the development of the expansion set, and by what I can see in the beta, the time will be needed. Kudos for not giving in to the marketing guys, but insisting to release TBC only when it is ready.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:03 PM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
America blames China for capitalism

One of the best articles I've read since a while on real-money trade (RMT) and gold farming is unfortunately in German. Very balanced description of the issue, and all the related problems, from exploitation of Chinese young people to in-game inflation.

But the really remarkable part of that article is where the author notes how funny it is when American World of Warcraft players blame Chinese World of Warcraft players for ruining the game with capitalism. True, it has a certain irony to it. American capitalism conquered the world, and is still fighting hard against anything from communism to the welware state world wide. And now the ex-communists come and show us how to extend capitalism to the areas of our lives where we didn't have it yet. Makes you wonder if it wasn't better to have some areas where the common good beats pure capitalism.

As the author also remarks, RMT exists because of first world demand, not solely because of third world supply. I always liked the Penny Arcade take on RMT, where the Chinese guys wins with his argument of "$50 dollar u get epic mount". As long as people are rich enough and willing to spend $50 on an epic mount, but unwilling to farm the many hours it would take to do so in-game, the goldfarmers will continue to exist, Chinese or otherwise.

The damage that RMT does to the online worlds is that it destroys the illusion, the suspension of disbelief. Like a reverse Mastercard advertisement, riding through the Barrens with an epic mount might be priceless; but if you just count it as $15 for a month of WoW and $50 for the gold for the epic mount, the experience appears to be a lot more mundane. Even the player who farmed the gold for his epic mount himself starts thinking of it as a $50 vehicle, instead of a great achievement and status symbol. Even if deep inside we are aware that virtual goods aren't a great achievement in life, we would still prefer to think so and keep the illusion up.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:42 PM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
BC Journal - 23-October-2006

As I spent about 12 hours this weekend in Blackwing Lair on the real servers, I didn't get very far in the Burning Crusade beta. But I did make it to level 61, and I had a lot of fun doing so. From level 60 to 61 you need 415,000 xp, which is nearly double the 210,000 xp you need from 59 to 60. But each kill gives about 500 xp, or 1,000 xp if you have rest bonus like I did, and each quest gives about 7,000 xp. I didn't consider the leveling time to be unreasonably long up to now. I'm leveling slowly, but that is because I'm playing more like a tourist, spending more time exploring than concentrating on levels.

The beta isn't exactly crowded. I wonder how Hellfire Peninsula will play when it goes live on the real servers, and a thousand or more players hit the zone. In the beta finding a mob to kill for your quest usually isn't a problem. I sometimes had to postpone a quest because too many other people were killing my mobs, but I usually quickly found another quest to do where there was less competition. When fighting the mobs in the evil orc fort of Zeth'Gor, my problem was actually the orcs respawning too fast. By the time I had cleared out a path to my target, they already started respawning again.

The most fun quest I did up to now was two missions in series where I was riding on manticore (whose flight path I couldn't control), and had to throw bombs on some demons and their teleporters. Not really a dangerous quest, as the demons can't hit you up on the flying mount. But immense fun, especially the second part where you have to throw the bombs in a way to kill a certain number of demons.

The least fun quest looked harmless enough, a level 61 quest to kill demons, this time on foot. But something was horribly wrong with the quest. I assume the mobs and the quests should have been marked as elite, but they weren't. So while other level 60 mobs hit your for 100 points of damage, the demons at this spot hit you for 400 points (and the level 62 non-elite boss mob for 700 points of damage) per hit. Absolutely impossible to solo, and very frustrating. I assume this isn't working as intended, there are quite a number of bugged quests. For example the number of demons to kill in the bomber mission was different in the text than in the short list of things to do. And I also got a quest which told me to go to some place and meet "XXX". Quest was level 1, grey, and there was no "XXX" at that spot, the quest is obviously just not finished yet.

Drops continue to be good, although I haven't found any more stuff useful for my priest. I found a green random trash mob one-handed sword, which at 45 dps was better than the weapons my troll warrior has. Too bad it was "of the eagle", the int bonus isn't exactly useful for warriors. The funniest drop was a grey item, a two-handed mace called "The stoppable force". Joke on the people who grinded AV reputation to exalted to get the "The unstoppable force" two-handed mace. Blizzard continues to add little jokes like that to the game, somebody told me there was a blond blood elf named Haris Pilton in one of the cities.

The lore of the Outlands is nice, and well told with quests. I just hope the quest series that leads to you discovering an unknown friendly orc tribe in the Outlands will have some follow-ups later. I can also recommend the guided city tour from Khadgar's servant through Shattrath, which explains a lot of the draenei and blood elf lore.

I've visited the second dungeon in the Outlands, the Blood Furnace in Hellfire Citadel. Another short dungeon with 3 bosses, slightly harder than the Rampart. The only annoying thing was that some of the orcs in there were bugged, and were flying motionless through the air, instead of being animated and walking. As they kept flying when dead, and there was a room with lots of them, this got quite confusing. No luck with drops for me there, only weapons and armor I couldn't use. But I did get the key to the third dungeon, although that one is of much higher level.

I moved my troll warrior to the beta server as well, loaded with crafting materials for jewelcrafting. Now I just need to train mining a bit more and collect lots of thorium to continue. The other materials, like gems, noble metals, and exotic stuff like different sorts of mojo I packed a lot of. So while I was skilling up mining with my priest in Tanaris (good place for mithril), I passed by the Caverns of Time and decided to visit them. You can enter the main area now, which used to be blocked by a nasty dragon. But I couldn't get into any of the three instances. The third instance gave a "this instance isn't ready yet" error message, the second one you can only enter after finishing the first, and the first instance you need to do a pre-quest for. And that quest seems to be level 64, at least the quest giver showed a grey exclamation mark at level 61, and the meeting stone in front of the dungeon said level 64-70. The place looked to be fun, but I guess I'll have to wait before I can explore it further.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:36 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Transcendence set bonus

After another cancelled Blackwing Lair raid on Friday night, we had more luck this afternoon, and got enough people for a BWL raid together. And Razorgore was so friendly as to drop the Bindings of Trancendence for me. So with the Halo from Ony and the Leggings from Ragnaros, I now have 3 pieces of the priest tier 2 set. And that gives me a very nice additional 15% mana regeneration when casting bonus.

Together with the meditation talent I know regenerate 30% of mana even when casting, which is nice for a raid healer, who often is spamming heals through all the fight, if there aren't enough healers for a healing rotation. According to the Theorycraft addon I now regenerate 45 mana per tick while casting, and 115 mana per tick otherwise.

With the 3 pieces of Transcendence and 5 of Prophecy I have, I am now in a position where I don't really "need" any more gear before the Burning Crusade comes out. I'd be perfectly happy staying like this until the other priests in the guild are as well equipped. After the expansion comes out, I'll probably replace most of that gear rather quickly, with greens and blues from BC. Otherwise I get the feeling that people will point with fingers at me, saying "look, what a n00b, he is wearing epics!". :)
- posted by Tobold @ 8:08 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Shorter dungeons

The instanced dungeons of the Burning Crusade expansion are a lot shorter than the dungeons of WoW 1.0. Tigole said that "Our goal was to keep most 5-man instance runs to 1-1:30 with a few exceptions." That is certainly true for the first dungeon I played in the Burning Crusade beta, Hellfire Rampart. And I really like the idea that you can join a group for a dungeon run without being forced to stay with them for 3+ hours.

Now I wonder what length the raid dungeons of the Burning Crusade will have. I appears that there are a lot of them, which suggests that they as well will be shorter. Wouldn't it be nice to have raids of 2 to 3 hours? With the raid cap being lowered to 25 players, shorter raid dungeons would make sense. You get raids that are easier to organize and don't last 4-6 hours. If you absolutely want to raid for more hours, you can always do several raid dungeons in series.

I can't help the feeling that the "raiding guilds" of next year will look and feel considerably different than the classic raiding guilds of today. The transition will be challenging, and I'm a bit afraid of the possibilities for guild drama. But in the end I think I'd like raiding which is easier to organize and shorter.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:26 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
BC Journal - 20-October-2006

My attempts at jewelcrafting made a big move forward, just to then come to a complete standstill. I started the evening at 148 jewelcrafting skill, and managed to make the next 2 points with a bit of mining and luck in prospecting exactly the gems I needed. At skill 150 I learned to make a mithril filigree, which got my skill up to nearly 190. Then with some gold and truesilver items made I advanced to 215, where I got totally stuck. The only two orange items left that I could craft either need 4 flasks of mojo or 4 vision dust. Which wouldn't be a problem to buy on the AH on a real server. But the test server AH is basically empty, and as everybody either has a low-level blood elf / draenei or a level 60+ character, there is no trade in mid-level items at all. I would need at least 20 flasks of mojo to get to the next recipe at 220, which would mean killing over 200 level 40ish trolls. Not something that I consider doing anytime soon. I think there are too few jewelcrafting recipes, I got stuck several times with only one or two orange recipes and one or two yellow recipes, and that makes advancing your skill very difficult.

In other BC beta news, I downloaded a 300 MB patch which added many of the missing outland graphics. My level 60 water now has a proper icon. And the level 65 water now regenerates 7200 mana, much better than the 5580 before the patch. Not that I can use it yet, I'm still level 60. But I did make some progress doing quests and advancing towards level 61. One Horde quest series ended in giving me a staff with +33 stamina, +22 intellect, and an astounding +80 to healing and spell damage. And that is a green item from a level 60 quest.

Unfortunately the patch also added a major bug, messing up my inventory. Items which I had sold or destroyed previously kept popping back up in my inventory, and continued to do so every time I relogged or zoned. That got me some metal bars, ores, and gems that I had already used for crafting back, but also lots of worthless crafted low-level jewelry. Most annoyingly my Horde priest had spent some time collecting small clams from murlocs to get small lustrous pearls, and repeatedly found his inventory swamped with clams. And these were bugged, empty, and I had to right-click on the all to make them disappear, without getting any contents.

That is a rather serious bug. A MMORPG absolutely relies on you finding yourself back in the state where you logged off when you log back on. A bug that adds items to your inventory doesn't sound that grave, but what if the next time it makes items from your inventory disappear?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:38 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
No changes to old content

Just a link to a post from Tigole on what happens to the old content, places like Molten Core, when the Burning Crusade expansion comes out: Nothing. "We don't have any immediate plans to change that content or the gear from those zones. ... And those who have never seen those zones, can experience them for the first time with an increased level cap. ... For now, the old raids will remain 40 person. ... For now, the reset timers will remain the same."

I think this is great. Of course you can argue whether it makes any sense to go to Molten Core with 40 level 70 players. But the good thing is that you *can* do it. Just like you now can go and farm the Deadmines with a level 60 character.

Even if the Molten Core loot won't be much good to a level 70 character, enabling "easy mode" raiding could be interesting. For me it takes the stress away from my guild trying to beat BWL. If we don't manage now, we can always go later. The fact that the end boss of Naxxramas is probably too hard for us to beat at 60 doesn't mean that I will never be able to see him. And guild who never even managed to go to Molten Core, because they couldn't get 40 people together, can visit it at a higher level and with less people. The level 60 raid dungeons become training grounds and tourist attractions, instead of being the one path to progress.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:20 PM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
WoW realm queues and server age

If you ever tried to log on to one of the more populated realms (servers) of World of Warcraft during prime time, you know them: Waiting queues, telling you that you are player number 163 waiting in line to log on, and giving you an estimate that this might take 24 minutes. Apparently these queues have been put in place by Blizzard not only to prevent overloading the servers, but also due to game design reasons. So ideally the queues prevent not only lag, but also zones becoming overcrowded, with too many people hunting for the same mobs.

Of course for that to work you have to assume some sort of player distribution over zones. Letting, lets say, 3,000 players on the server only prevents lag and overcrowding if these 3,000 players distribute themselves over the world in a "normal" fashion. The world event of the gates of Ahn'qiraij opening was a good example of how that could fail, because a much larger percentage of players gathered in Silithus than normal, causing horrible lag.

So queue or no queue, on the first days after the Burning Crusade expansion goes live, we can expect lag and overcrowding problems, because people will be concentrated in 3 zones: The draenei and blood elf newbie zones, and Hellfire Peninsula for all level 60 players. I thought I could escape overcrowding by going to an instance, but that might have been optimistic. On the beta server I already got the message once that I couldn't enter the Blood Furnace instant, because there were already too many groups in that instance. So there seems to be a limit on the number of players the instance server can handle.

But what I am even more afraid of is having to wait in a queue. Blizzard will raise the cap of how many players are allowed per server by 25%. That will probably be sufficient for the latest and newest servers, but I doubt it will suffice for the older servers.

By the time the Burning Crusade comes out, the oldest World of Warcraft servers will be over 2 years old (3 months less for the oldest European servers). During these 2 years a lot of people stopped playing WoW, but they still have inactive characters on the servers. Blizzard keeps inactive characters indefinitely. So the older the server, the more inactive characters accumulate. The Burning Crusade will most certainly cause a large number of players to resubscribe, like after every major content patch. So the number of people trying to get online on an older server will be much larger than the number of people trying to get online on a newer server.

As my main character, the Horde priest, is playing on one of the oldest European servers, part of the original batch of servers that were available on the first day of World of Warcraft in Europe, I'm afraid that I will run into major queue problems. That is especially annoying when you finally get in, but then get disconnected for some reason. Sometimes the game will allow you to bypass the queue and reconnect immediately. But we had several raids where somebody who lost connection only came back 20 minutes or more later, due to having to wait in the queue. These queues might get 1 hour or more long after the expansion comes out. Not a very appealing prospect.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:21 PM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
BC Journal - 19-October-2006

I moved my Alliance priest to the Burning Crusade beta servers as well. Not only does that give me more opportunity to play around with different aspects of playing a priest in the expansion, but he also came loaded with far more materials for jewelcrafting. That plan had limited success. I managed to get my jewelcrafting to 148, but I'm stuck again, and even to get that far I had to do some more mining. And that's with loading every available slot with metals and gems. I slowly begin to realize that it won't be possible to skill up jewelcrafting to 300 just materials stockpiled on just one character, you will need to use at least one other character as mule to store all the stuff. The good thing in testing it in the beta is that now I know that I'll need exotic stuff like Soul Dust, mana potions, and large fangs to skill up jewelcrafting, and can prepare better for the real transition to WoW 2.0.

Both my priests on their regular servers are holy/discipline spec. On the beta server the Horde priest (who has lots of +healing epics) is 0/0/51 shadow spec, while the Alliance priest is 5/46/0 holy spec. Both priests visited the Hellfire Rampart, the first 5-man dungeon of the Outlands, and both healed just fine. To put that into context: The Alliance priest, who doesn't even have more than 2 tier 0 armor pieces is able to heal in the first instance because he specialized in healing. The Horde priest can get away with shadow spec, because what he lacks in holy talents he makes up with gear that gives him +400 on healing spells.

So having raided and gathered epics *does* help, I certainly wouldn't call it wasted time. But if your level 60 doesn't have more than the gear he arrived with at level 60, he can still continue playing, as long as he distributes his talent points wisely. I might move my troll warrior, who is wearing tier 0 gear, to the beta server as well, because the effect of gear is probably different for other classes. But as far as I can judge it, people leveling up to 60 after the Burning Crusade comes out won't be forced to spend a lot of time at 60 gearing up before they can move on to the Outlands.

In a way that is problematic. If Hellfire Rampart isn't much harder than Scholomance, but gives much, much better loot, who will ever visit Scholomance again? Or Stratholme, LBRS, Dire Maul, etc.? I still like the idea of level 65 to 70 groups one day visiting Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Ahn'Qiraij or Naxxramas on "easy mode". But I'm not really sure that will happen. Maybe it is just that my "reason to raid" is just wanting to have fought the boss once, not minding the loot or the achievement. But the people who are interested in the loot won't want to go to BWL at 70, and there isn't much achievement in killing Nefarion at that level.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:16 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Beta schizophrenia

Do you play a MMORPG just for the adventure, the fun and experience of playing? Or do you play it for the character development, the virtual rewards? That question normally doesn't matter, because you get the fun and the reward at the same time. But by having copied my character to the beta test servers, I suddenly find myself in a situation where I have to chose one over the other.

Playing on the beta server is fun, because most of the things I see there are new and exciting. I'm not saying the the content of the Burning Crusade is better than that of the old World of Warcraft, but after over 2 years in the game I've seen pretty much everything in the old world. The BC beta gives me new zones, new dungeons, new loot, a new tradeskill to play around with, new mobs to fight, and many other new things. But whatever experience, levels, and skill I gain, whatever gear I acquire, will be gone when the Burning Crusade goes live and the beta closes down.

I told you how my priest on the beta server learned jewelcrafting, got a new staff, bound in Shattrath, and changed to shadow specialization. Last night my guild on the "real" server had an Onyxia raid scheduled, and as we are recently often short on healers, I logged on and helped out in that raid. And so I played the same priest without jewelcrafting, with his old staff, bound in Undercity, and still on holy specialization. I felt as if I suffered from a split personality, a clear case of beta schizophrenia.

This weekend my guild has several BWL raids scheduled, and I will try to participate in as many of them as I can. And over the coming weeks I will try to balance beta test playing with real server playing. If the Burning Crusade is really delayed until next year, I might even level up my shaman on the real server from currently 42 to 60. But more importantly I will keep playing with my guild, raiding several times per week. It doesn't matter if the only loot I get will be replaced by Burning Crusade loot shortly after the expansion comes out. It is the social aspects of playing together in a guild that is important. And if I level my shaman, or improve my priests mining skill, or get the third piece of Transcendence for the set bonus, those are rewards that I will be able to keep. I will certainly also level my beta priest a bit, just to get deeper into the Outlands, but if I spent all my time reaching level 70 fast, I'll just have to do it all over again when the beta ends.

Playing the same character in two incarnations on two servers will be a bit confusing, but I'll have to get used to it. I don't want to give up either of two.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:36 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Why do we raid?

This risks getting both philosophical and controversial. But with the Burning Crusade expansion approaching, the daily life of the average raiding guild is going to change dramatically for a while, both before and after the expansion comes out. And the reason for that is while it is possible to get 40 people gathered into a raid, it is unlikely that they are all there for the same reason. And with the Burning Crusade offering some viable alternatives for some of the motivations for raiding, people are reacting differently to the prospect of the expansion.

Some people like the social aspects of raiding. Hanging out with your online friends in a shared adventure. Helping the guild as a whole, without looking at your own advantage. For example I still participate often in Onyxia raids, although I already have the Halo of Transcendence, and there is no drop from Onyxia which I still need. But obviously I couldn't have gotten the Halo without my guild, so I find it natural that I'm still there helping others getting their tier 2 headpiece or whatever else they want from Onyxia.

Another important aspect of raiding is exploration, seeing new bosses, learning new tactics. Unfortunately progress there tends to be rather slow, it is not every day that you see a new boss. A different motivation, but which sometimes gets confused with the exploration aspect, is the feeling of achievement when your guild manages to kill a boss for the first time. Whether you do it out of curiosity, or out of pride, you end up advancing from boss to boss in the classic raid circuit, from ZG to MC to BWL to Naxxramas, with AQ thrown in as side branch.

Many people are motivated to go raiding because of character development, the wish to increase the power of your character further by equipping him with epics. This might not be the prime reason for everybody, but it is at least a part of the motivation for nearly everybody. Getting an epic is part of a classical effort and reward cycle, where the effort of raiding gets you a reward, and the reward motivates you to further effort. Pretty much a primal instinct, you can train rats to push a lever to get a food reward, and Blizzard training people to go raiding by feeding them epics works the same way.

And lastly some people raid because there is nothing else to do at level 60. Well, there is farming, grinding reputation, or PvP. But for many people these other options are even less appealing. Raiding is the "least bad" way to continue playing at level 60.

Of course you can't easily put people into drawers, sorting them by motivation. In general people have a mix of several of these reasons to go raiding, in varying degrees.

Now Burning Crusade comes and shakes up these reasons to raid. If you were just raiding because you had nothing else to do, the day you get the expansion means you won't have to raid any more before you hit level 70, which might take weeks or even months, depending on how much you play. If you were raiding mostly because of the loot, you probably already know that the Burning Crusade has much better loot right from the start than even Blackwing Lair can offer. In fact some people who raid just because of loot are already stopping to raid now, argueing that waiting for the Burning Crusade is the path of least resistance to better gear.

People who want to explore new places or achieve new boss kills will probably still be raiding until just before the expansion. Some readers commented here that they would like to "finish" Naxxramas before the Burning Crusade comes out. But once it is out, exploring the Outlands and achieving kills of BC bosses whose strategies isn't already posted on every WoW website will make them stop visiting the old raid dungeons. You could image a "tourist" raid of level 70s who didn't manage to beat BWL or Naxxramas at 60 going exploring there at 70, but that won't be considered as much of an achievement.

I could imagine some guilds still running a raid or two per week to the old dungeons for some time after the Burning Crusade comes out for social reasons. Not all guild members might have access to the expansion immediately. And the guild as a social entity needs a purpose, some guild events to organize, before enough people hit level 70 and the next raid circuit begins.

With people having different reasons for raiding, and many of these reasons falling away when the expansion comes out, many guilds will have trouble staying together, due to lack of purpose. Ideally guilds would be busy organizing 5-man events until enough people reach level 70 to restart raiding. But most guilds don't have (or lost) practice in organizing such small events. And people will quickly diverge, leveling at different speeds. By the time the guild officers reach level 70, they will be lucky if they can find 25 people to raid with. Worries that the new 25-man raid cap will prevent you from raiding with your 39 friends you raided with at 60 are probably not very realistic. It is unlikely that the same 40 people would still be together by then. Very few guilds will manage to rush to 70 at uniform speed, spending most of the time to 70 playing together. Most people will see a lot of soloing and pickup groups, in spite of being in a guild. Some guilds will split up, many people will switch from one guild to another, because they either leveled faster or slower than their guild mates. The best chance a guild has to stay together is being a social guild, where the purpose always has been to just play together. If you don't mind the loot or the achievement or insist on always seeing new stuff, you can always find some sort of event for the guild to do together. But with purely social guilds being rare, many guilds are facing stormy weather, with the Burning Crusade shaking up old habits and guild structures. Will you miss having a guild raid on offer every night?
- posted by Tobold @ 3:44 PM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Burning Crusade delayed?

Rumors are flying that Blizzard will miss the "Q4 2006" release date for the Burning Crusade, and release the expansion only in January 2007. I don't know if that is true. On the one hand releasing it before christmas would make better business sense, this is the prime season for computer games. On the other hand Blizzard is known for releasing things "when they are ready", which is often later than you think.

Of course Blizzard isn't saying anything, as usual. The only release dates you can read are from the different online retailers. And the fact that they all give a different date proves that they are just guessing as well. I remember that Blizzard announced the official release date of the European version of World of Warcraft only one week before the actual release date.

The source of the rumor of a delayed release is probably the beta. Now that depends whether you consider the current BC beta as being "closed" or "open". Starting the "closed" beta in mid-October would indicate that the game won't be ready by end of November. But if you consider that inviting 100,000 players per continent is pretty much an "open" beta, they could just make it.

Playing the beta sure showed me that some things weren't finished yet. I have items with a big red question mark as icon, the real icon not having been designed yet. I met an orc guard whose graphical representation was just a small, checkered 3D cube. I had the beta freeze on me once, but of course that could have been my computer. The current beta is certainly playable (and less bug-infested than lets say Star Wars Galaxies), but I'm not sure it up to Blizzard's stringent quality control.

Some people argue with the time it takes to produce the "gold master" and produce all the CDs. But of course that isn't much of a problem with a MMORPG, you just put a nearly finished version on the CD and patch it the day it goes live.

So the only thing we really know about the release date is that we don't know anything. Blizzard might surprise us and mid-November announce an end-November release date. Or we all wait until end-November and only get a press release saying that the release is delayed to Q1 2007.

While everybody is burning to see the expansion (excuse the pun), Blizzard gets my respect for their willingness to delay releases on quality reasons. There are far too many half-finished games released, and especially MMORPG often are nearly unplayable on release. One company releasing their games and expansion only when they meet high quality standards and are nearly bug-free is a refreshing change. Even if waiting is sometimes hard.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:02 AM Permanent Link  (28) comments Links to this post

 
BC Journal - 17-October-2006

This will be a short entry. I received my new laptop yesterday, *and* it was Dungeons & Dragons night, so I didn't have time to play much. The only thing I did was ride around in Outlands a bit and explore.

I visited the two zones adjacent to Hellfire Peninsula: Zangarmarsh and Terokkar Forest. I especially liked the mushroom forests of Zangarmarsh. But for gameplay the city of Shattrath in Terokkar Forest is more important. It gave me flashbacks to the original Everquest.

In Everquest getting from one place to another was hard and took a lot of time. I happened to play a druid, who not only could teleport himself, but also could take his group with him. So during the time of the Kunark and Velious expansion I had a nice business going as a taxi service, teleporting people for monetary donations. Then came Shadows of Luclin, which introduced the Nexus, a spot on the moon of Luclin with teleport portals to many places on the old world. That killed my taxi business, as people could just teleport via the Nexus instead of finding a druid to teleport them.

Shattrath is the "Nexus" of World of Warcraft. It has teleportation portals to all 8 cities, but of course you can only use the 4 portals leading to the cities of your faction. The portals are one-way, you can't teleport back to Shattrath. But you *can* set your hearthstone to the inn in Shattrath, and I guess that is what most people will end up doing. Shattrath is relatively central in the Outlands, and with the ability to teleport to Orgrimmar, Thunder Bluff, Undercity, and Silvermoon (for Horde), being bound in Shattrath means that I can reach any place in World of Warcraft relatively quickly.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:51 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Dell XPS M1210 laptop

My new laptop arrived yesterday. If you don't count the day of the order and the day of arrival (I ordered the laptop on a Friday and got it on a Monday), I only waited 10 business days, which is just inside specifications. No idea why they sent me that other e-mail telling me I had to wait another month. I just hope they won't send me another one, it was hard enough to get rid of their last double delivery.

The Dell XPS M1210 is a small laptop, but very powerful. The dimensions and weight of a laptop are pretty much a function of the screen size, and the M1210 has a nice little 12.1" screen. But while other lightweight laptops are designed to run only business applications, the XPS in the name shows you that this is a gaming machine. The Core 2 Duo T7200 CPU is lightning fast. The Geforce Go 7400 with 256 MB RAM is a decent graphics card for gaming. I went for 2 GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, thus no memory shortages braking out the performance. And the 160 GB SATA hard drive is big enough to store all my data.

The M1210 comes with an integrated webcam, don't know if I have any use for that. It comes with a bunch of preinstalled software; I had to wrestle some time with McAfee Security suite trial version to get it uninstalled, it always said that it couldn't be uninstalled because it was running, but you couldn't stop if from running without uninstalling it. I hate these modern "security" suites, which totally take over your computer. I just need the Windows firewall and a freeware antivirus program, everything else is just paranoia.

My only complaint is that I ordered the laptop with a Kensington mouse with retractable cable, and got a Kensington wireless mouse instead. I'm not a fan of wireless mouses, because of the batteries. Especially for a laptop you risk your batteries running out when you are somewhere where you can't get a replacement battery.

I installed Futuremark's 3DMark05 and PCMark05 on the laptop, and compared the speed to my desktops. In 3DMark05 the M1210 scored 2096 points, over twice as much as the previous laptop, who had a X300 graphics card with a 996 score. Not bad for a laptop, although my desktop with its Geforce 7800 GTX scores significantly better, at 6800 points. In PCMark05, which measures both graphical performance and a range of other computer tasks, the M1210 scored 4111 points, which is basically the same as my desktop with 4272 points. So what the new laptop doesn't have in graphics card power, it makes up in CPU power, the Core 2 Duo is a great processor.

I'm quite happy how much smaller and lighter the new laptop is compared to the old one. I really want to use it as a *portable* computer, on business trips and holidays, so being small and light is a must. That the screen is necessarily smaller doesn't bother me at all.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:23 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
BC Journal - 16-October-2006

This is the first "journal" entry of my adventures in the Burning Crusade beta. While I was playing yesterday, I noted down all the small things that are new, so this is going to be a jumble of random thoughts and description of new features.

When I first started the BC beta client, my level 60 undead priest hadn't been copied yet, so I was greeted by an empty character screen. Hmmm, time to make a draenei and a blood elf, and have a look at the new newbie zones. Both the new starting areas are nice enough, having new architecture, and a couple of new monsters, besides familiar ones like skeletons or spiders. Each race gets two new zones, with the highest level monster I have seem being level 18. Think of it like a Tirisfal Glades + Silverpine Forest combo.

The blood elves starting zones are north of the Eastern Plaguelands, and can be reached by a pass, blocked by a portal, which is probably there to keep people without the expansion out. You can also teleport from a guy next to the mage trainer in Silvermoon to another guy standing in the upper courtyard of Undercity (Ruins of Lordaeron) and back. This is recommended, because for a level 18 blood elf to take the road and run into the Eastern Plaguelands, where level 50ish mobs lurk quite close to the road, might be a short, bloody, and frustrating experience.

The draenei start on islands south of Teldrassil, west of Darkshore. I haven't explored it yet, but I assume there will be a teleport to Darnassus. Not sure if there will be any other way to reach the continent. I quickly got bored with playing the new races. I did enjoy the fact that the new zones looked different than any other zone. But the gameplay was pretty much identical than leveling up any other level 1 character.

Fortunately meanwhile Blizzard had finished to copy my undead priest to the beta server. The first thing I did with him was heading towards the Outlands. The only way there seems to be the Dark Portal in the Blasted Lands. I had previously seen other portal-like structures, for example in the middle of Duskwood, or in Feralas. But I checked the Duskwood portal out, and it still leads nowhere. So I had to fly to the Swamp of Sorrows, and ride from there to the Dark Portal, in southern Blasted Lands. You arrive there at a big platform, where you get your first quest, to travel to the Horde outpost of Thrallmar, with a wind rider conveniently provided. Alliance gets to fly to Honor Hold. Right now, Hellfire Peninsula doesn't seem crowded. But this is just the beta, and I don't know how many people are on the server where I am, and how many have even finished the slow download of the 2 GByte BC beta client and copied their characters. This being the only entrance, this might be very crowdy when BC goes live.

In Thrallmar I first deleted all my old quests, I don't think I will need Stratholme quests in the BC beta. Doing that I noticed that the quest journal cap has been raised from 20 to 25, which is good news.

Next thing I did was a bit peculiar, I hit ALT-I. This is because I switched to WoW directly from EQ2, where ALT-I opened all your bags. So I had remapped the WoW function to open all bags from SHIFT-B to ALT-I, just because I was used to it. But in Burning Crusade the keybindings were reset to standard. And Blizzard had mapped a new functionality to the I key, which triggered when I hit ALT-I. The new functionality is a Looking for Group window. This window has two parts, a LFG and a LFM (Looking for More) part. In the LFG part you can list up to three things which you would be interested in joining a group for. That includes zones, quests, dungeons, and even raids. So you could for example state that you look for a group to explore Hellfire Peninsula, or to go to the Hellfire Rampart dungeon, or to do a particular quest. The LFM window lets you select the same zones, quests, or dungeons, and then shows you everybody who has himself flagged as LFG for that event. Now *IF* everybody starts using this, the LFG/LFM window could become extremely useful. Unfortunately MMORPG players are a very conservative bunch, and I saw very little activity in the new window, with most people still shouting on the LFG chat channel.

In Thrallmar I took all the quests I could find, and had a look at all the vendors and trainers. There is a Thrallmar faction vendor, where you can get items based on your Thrallmar faction, which you can increase by doing quests or killing mobs in Hellfire Citadel. There are vendors for different items, general goods, trade goods, food and drink. I noticed level 60 water for sale, which regenerates a very nice 5100 mana. There was also level 65 water for sale, which at 5580 mana isn't much better.

There are also a number of tradeskill trainers in Thrallmar. I said in my jewelcrafting post that I haven't seen the artisan jewelcrafter, but now I'm not so sure that he isn't in Thrallmar. I learned jewelcrafting later, at the time of my first visit to the Outlands I still had tailoring. So I saw that for 10 gold I could increase my tailoring skill limit from 300 to 350. And there were some interesting new recipes. The cloth after runecloth is called netherweave, and it can be transformed into a 16 (!!! not 18 !!!) slot netherweave bag. It also can be used to make a netherweave net, which holds an enemy in place for 3 seconds. This could change the dynamics of PvP quite a lot, as it seems that everybody will be able to use it. I didn't see an 18 slot bag, but I've read that imbued netherweave bags with 18 slots exist. But for the moment the number of our inventory slots isn't growing, the main bag still has 16 slots. What did grow was the bank, which instead of having 6 colums of 4 slots plus 6 bag slots now has 7 colums and 7 bag slots. Buying the 7th bag slot (already having the 6 others) cost only 25 gold. Assuming you put a 16 slot bag in there, you gain a total of 20 bank slots, which is nice.

I killed a couple of mobs in Hellfire Peninsula, and ran around a bit. But I noticed that I didn't have an xp rest bonus, so points were slow to come in. I didn't have any "stored" finished quests, and I've read that Blizzard is going to add something to the live version of BC that prevents people from handing in 20 previously finished quests on the first day of BC and level up to 61 directly. I just don't know what exactly they plan to do there.

I fiddled around a bit with the options. I had copied my addons from the WoW folder to the BC folder, but they only showed up as "incompatible", and I had to play without any addons. So I turned on WoW's own scrolling combat text, while normally I use the superior SCT addon. No biggie. But in the options I noticed a new option which enabled me to see my targets cast bar. So whenever I target another player or NPC who is casting something, I see a little yellow bar showing the progress, and naming what spell is incoming. As my priest is now spec'd shadow for the beta, and I have the Silence spell, that enemy castbar is extremely useful.

I left the Outlands and spent the next couple of hours learning jewelcrafting, with limited success. (see today's other post) Up to that point I wasn't terribly impressed with the Burning Crusade. Lots of small improvements, lots of "more of the same" good stuff, but the new zones played a lot like the old ones. Thrallmar is even using the same old orcish architecture, and Hellfire Peninsula looks similar to Blasted Lands. Except for the awesome looking sky, you might still have been on the old world.

My impression of the expansion changed when somebody in the LFG chat channel (not the new window, sigh) was looking for a healer to go to Hellfire Rampart, the first dungeon in the Hellfire Citadel. It appears that Hellfire Citadel has 4 "wings", separate dungeons, of which two are for level 60ish 5-man groups, one is for level 70 5-mans, and one is for level 70 25-man raids. I like Hellfire Rampart a lot, and I was completely awed by the loot dropping there.

Hellfire Rampart is a dungeon where you can go directly at level 60, with any half decent pickup group. It is relatively small, which makes it ideal for shorter dungeon trips. There are only 3 bosses, and a good number of orc trash mobs. The first boss is half way through the place, then at the end you reach a platform from which you can already see both other bosses, one to the left, one to the right. The group I was in had a level 58 hunter, me as level 60 priest, a level 61 warrior, and two level 62 mages.

One of the first trash mobs dropped some leather boots, +31 stamina, +20 fire resistance. That was just the green trash loot, but items like that would have been wonderful for Molten Core / Blackwing Lair / Onyxia. The first boss was easy to kill. He had two adds which would have healed him, if they hadn't been turned into sheeps. He dropped the first blue item with sockets for gems that I saw: Wasteland Stitched Leggings, mail, +22 Agi, +24 Sta, +15 Int, +32 attack power, three sockets with which you could boost the stats even further, and an additional +2 mana per 5 seconds if you filled them with the gems of the right colors. Quite powerful!

The second boss wasn't as easy to kill, we wiped on the first try. He casts a "treacherous aura" on one group member, which then hurts the other group members around the affected character. He also launches nasty shadow bolts, and summons felhounds. Second fight we used my prayer of shadow protection and stood further apart from each other, and killed him easily. When looting him my eyeballs nearly popped out! Crystalfire Staff, +34 Sta, +34 Int, +16 "critical strike rating", +46 to both damage and healing spells. That is *significantly* better than my Will of Arlokk (+35 spirit, but only +19 int, +15 sta, and +46 to healing, not to damage spells). I was afraid that the two mages both would have wanted that staff, but they both said they already had much better. Wow!

This is *serious* mudflation. If the first level 60 5-man group dungeon replaces the best staff that I could find after months of raiding, and the other blue items I saw easily beat the tier 1 raid loot, it means that the Burning Crusade will level the playing field. By the time people are level 65, they will all wear only BC items, and whether you spent a thousand hours raiding or not won't matter at all. I've seen a *green* dagger drop from a trash mob which was better than the epic Krol Blade from old WoW. If you still have bind on equip epics in the bank, try to sell them quickly. They will all become worthless the day WoW goes version 2.0.

Finally we tackled the last boss of Hellfire Rampart, Vazruden. He rides a dragon named Nazan. You "pull" Vazruden by killing his two guards, then he dismounts and attacks you, and when he is nearly dead the dragon enters the fight. Now this is a very hard fight. It seems both Vazruden and Nazan always go for the healer first, however much I tried not to produce aggro. We managed to kill Vazruden every time, but then Nazan would fry us. If you wipe at that point, Vazrudan springs back to life and you have to start over. I don't know if it is a bug or a feature, but you can loot Vazrudan when he dies, wipe, come back, kill him again, loot him again, wipe again, and so on. When we finally killed Nazan, we had looted Vazruden 4 times, each time receiving a nice blue item. And Nazan dropped a staff any feral druid would kill for, with not only very high stat bonuses, but also giving +160 to attack power when in any animal form, including moonkin.

I hadn't studied BC loot lists before, but I can see why we have problems getting 40 people for BWL together. Of course people raid for different reasons. I kind of like tackling known and new bosses in a big raid group, I'm not just there for the loot. But if the loot is the most important aspect for someone, that somebody can be excused for not wanting to go through all that trouble of repeated wiping and high potion / repair costs, if he knows he will be able to get better loot by an easier way soon.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:41 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Jewelcrafting for beginners

As long as I am in the Burning Crusade beta, I am going to write a series of blog posts about the expansion. These are basically spoilers, so if you don't like spoilers, look away. But for the rest of you they might serve as useful hints, and even give you some ideas how to prepare already today for the expansion. I'll write a number of "BC Journal" entries with my observations. But whenever possible I'll group the information on a single subject into one post, for easier reference. This blog entry is about everything I could find out about low level jewelcrafting.

Jewelcrafting can be learned from trainers in the new Draenei and Blood Elf cities, I couldn't find a jewelcrafting trainer in the old cities. As I was playing a Horde character, I flew to Light Hope's Chapel in Eastern Plaguelands, and rode to the Blood Elf city of Silvermoon. Later I found out that there is a teleport between Undercity and Silvermoon, which made traveling back and forth a lot easier. The journeyman, expert, and master trainer are all in one spot, no idea yet where the artisan trainer is hiding.

When you learn apprentice jewelcrafting, you get two new skills in your spellbook: jewelcrafting and prospecting. You also get the first basic recipes. Prospecting is the art of turning ores into gems. Only basic ores, like copper, tin, iron, etc., can be turned into gems. Rare ores like silver and gold, or quest ores like incendite are not prospectable. Prospecting destroys 5 ores, and always gives you one worthless metal powder, plus between zero and two gems. The gems are of the type which you could also find when mining that metal, so Tigerseye and Malachite for copper, and so on. Prospecting is important, because jewelcrafting needs lots of gems, more than normal mining can find. But as prospecing destroys a lot of ore, it makes jewelcrafting use quite a large amount of resources.

As I had already heard about ores being needed, I came to the BC beta with 160 copper ore and 160 tin ore in my bags. That turned out to be not enough. Because besides destroying the ores for gems, you also need lots of metal bars to make either intermediary products or final jewelry. I ended up spending many hours in the beta mining; which was easy, because everybody else was in the new zones, and I had places like the Wetlands or Hillsbrad for me alone to mine. If you plan to do jewelcrafting when the expansion comes out, you should stock at least 200 each of copper and tin, plus gems and silver. I got my jewelcrafting up to 110 before I needed the first iron, but unfortunately the first iron item also needed large fangs, and I wasn't prepared for that. All other items I could skill up with either needed silver, shadowgems, or moonstone, none of which are very easy to find, and so I'm blocked at 110 right now.

You might have heard about socketed items and gems to put into these sockets being made by jewelcrafting. Well, not at the lower levels. There don't seem to be any socketed items below level 60, nor does it seem that a jewelcrafter can do any socketable gems before 225 skill. I assume that is something the artisan trainer teaches you, the one I haven't found yet.

The main product at jewelcrafting up to 110 are rings, plus some necklaces. As low level rings and necklaces aren't very common up to now, jewelcrafting will be useful to equip low level characters with jewelry. I heard, but couldn't confirm, that there will be recipes for enchanters to enchant jewelry, adding further bonuses.

The other product of jewelcrafting is statues, which are made from the stones (rough stone, coarse stone, heavy stone, etc.) which you find when mining. 10 stones make one statue, which is a clickable object in your inventory. When you use it, you summon a cute mini earth elemental pet, which heals you for a couple of seconds. Not by very much, but might be useful to classes which don't have other combat healing methods available. Unfortunately the statues are bind on pickup, only the jewelcrafter himself can use them.

Up to now I'm not terribly impressed by jewelcrafting. Lots of people will try it, just because it is new, but just like the other item-producing tradeskills, the quality of the crafted items isn't all that great. I was able to make one blue ring, with good stats for its level. It was interesting because when you make it, you don't know what stats it will have. You get a ring with a random "of the animal" name. I got a "of the tiger" ring, with +4 agility, +3 strength. The ring was labeled "Unique - equipped", meaning that I could have several in my inventory, but could only equip one of them.

To explore jewelcrafting further, I loaded up my Alliance priest with tons of metals and gems, and copied him to the BC beta. You can only copy 4 characters, and copying takes 2 days, so it will take a while before I can tell you more about higher level jewelcrafting, if I ever get there. But I have decided that my Horde priest, who currently has mining and tailoring, will not give up tailoring to learn jewelcrafting. I think I will take one of my level 40ish alts and make him a jewelcrafter instead, sending him the metals mined by my priest. This is not really a "must have" tradeskill.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:43 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Mudflation and raiding

The Burning Crusade is throwing a long shadow, and already has a measurable effect on World of Warcraft, in spite of not being expected to go live for another 6 weeks or so. The reason is the beta, and tons of websites already posting the items you will be able to get in the expansion. And there are lots of items in the expansion which are significantly better than the loot you can get from Blackwing Lair, and a lot easier to get. Mudflation at its finest, the new items of the expansion devaluating the old raid loot.

Both Friday and Saturday I stood in BWL with 30 to 35 people of my guild, and not enough people of the right classes to even attempt Razorgore. Friday we ended up going to Molten Core, which was lucky, because I got my Gloves of Prophecy there, and now have 6 Prophecy, 2 Transcendence. Nice! But some guild members were online and simply refused to come to BWL, citing that they didn't want to bother wiping repeatedly in BWL any more, if they could get better loot easier in Burning Crusade.

And of course besides the loot effect, some people simply don't feel like playing the "old" World of Warcraft any more, now that the new one is on the horizon. Either they are playing the beta (like I do), or they are taking a break until the expansion comes out.

The effect on 40-man raids is profound. Guilds are usually designed in a way that they don't have too many reserves for raiding, that the 40-man raids just fill up. If some people burn out, take a break, play the beta, or just wait for better loot from BC, the remaining guild members often can't get enough people for the more challenging encounters together.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:16 PM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Reader appreciation

Of course I appreciate all the readers of this blog, as a blog without readers would be kind of pointless. Even more I appreciate those of you who actively participate in the discussion, and leave comments and feedback, whether you agree with my opinions or not.

But the grand prix title of "most appreciated reader" goes to the one guy who mailed me his spare beta key for the European Burning Crusade beta. Thanks a lot, mate, that was very nice. And it will give me something to write for the next days or even weeks, the NDA having been lifted.

I am currently in the process of downloading the game client, which will probably take still until tomorrow or later. The client is 2 Gigabyte large, and after one night of downloading I'm just at 18% completed. I found a mirror of the English (GB) client on Curse-gaming, but it is broken, or can't cope with the downloads.

Apparently there are 100,000 beta testers for Europe alone. This places this beta somewhere in the middle between a closed and an open beta, being invite only like a closed beta, but having a number of players more similar to an open one. There being only 4 realms, I wonder whether how playable it will be.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:32 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Epic flying mount, just 8000 gold

The beta for Burning Crusade has started. I assume there is a NDA, but there is a lot of information leaking. Among them I found this forum entry with the cost of the riding skill needed for normal and epic flying mounts. The expert riding skill (225) costs 2,000 gold, and the artisan riding skill (300) costs 5,000 gold. And of course you will have to have paid 100 gold for the apprentice riding skill (75) and 1000 gold for the journeyman riding skill (150) before you can learn the higher skills. Learning riding to 300 to be able to ride an epic flying mount thus costs 8,100 gold base cost. And that only buys you the skill, you still will need to either buy or quest for the flying mount that goes with it. Note that all these are *base* prices, you usually get a 10% rebate for being honored with your faction. Currently there is also a 10% rebate for being at least rank 3 in PvP, but it isn't sure whether we will lose that one after the expansion totally remodels the PvP honor system.

If a normal flying mount is sufficient for you, you only pay 3,100 gold base cost, or 2,790 gold after the 10% rebate. If you already have a riding skill of 150, from having bought an epic mount before the patch 1.12.1, or from buying the riding skill now, you will "only" need to spend 1,800 gold after rebate for the skill necessary to fly the normal flying mount. But even that is far more than the average WoW player is likely to have. And as at least the normal flying mount is needed to access certain zones and dungeons in the Burning Crusade, lots of people will have a lot of farming to do for cash. While you can probably earn more gold per hour at level 70 than currently at level 60, farming 1,800 gold will still take many hours. And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people will "outsource" that farming, and buy the gold from professional gold farmers. I don't know if there are any publicly traded gold farming companies, but now would be the time to buy shares in them.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:32 PM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Legal cheating with third-party software

In World of Warcraft as in most other MMORPG the use of third-party software which helps you win battles in PvE and/or PvP is a bannable offence. With one notable exception: voice-chat software like Teamspeak or Ventrilo. Although this sort of third-party software gives your team a huge advantage in PvP, and helps a lot in PvE raiding, it is legal. Mostly because it is hard to detect, as it doesn't directly mess with the game's data, like a bot software would do. This being so, I think that game companies should integrate voice-chat into their games, to level the playing field.

My first guild in World of Warcraft raided without using voice chat. Some people were absolutely opposed to voice chat, and nobody had the knowledge and the hardware to run a Teamspeak or Ventrilo server in the background. When I switched guilds and started raiding with the new guild, I found they were using Teamspeak. I installed TS on my laptop (thus it doesn't affect the performance of the PC I'm playing on), and noticed immediately how much smoother raids go when you have voice chat. Especially aggro management becomes easier with somebody on TS announing "go DPS" and "stop DPS" at the appropriate moments. Voice-chat also beats any boss mod hands down in announcing who is the bomb at Baron Geddon, or similar important announcements.

Move to PvP, and the advantage of using voice-chat becomes so big, it isn't even funny any more. On the smaller battlegrounds in World of Warcraft the "premade" teams, using voice-chat, rule absolutely. They just need one guy to guard every flag they own in AB, calling in their mobile team via TS as soon as the opponents try to attack. If you can communicate quickly where the enemy is, it becomes easy to always outnumber him.

If a third-party software makes such a big difference to a game's battles, there are only two things a game company can do: Ban it, or integrate it. Banning it is easy when the third-party software using game commands, which is how Blizzard is able to ban Decursive and similar software. But voice-chat runs completely in parallel, without touching the game. And as I said, my Teamspeak runs on my laptop, so even if Blizzard's Warden spyware would be able to detect Teamspeak, I would still come up clean. So I think Blizzard's best option would be to integrate voice-chat into World of Warcraft, for example as part of the WoW 3.0 expansion, a year after the Burning Crusade.

A number of MMORPG companies are already going that way. Turbine does it, for DDO and LOTRO. EVE online is going to integrate Vivox voice-chat software into their game. NCSoft's Auto Assault has it. And integrated voice-chat has also been announced for Tabula Rasa, and a number of other upcoming games.

Now nobody will be forced to use voice-chat when he doesn't want to. But removing the technical hurdles to using it and integrating voice-chat directly into the game is a good thing. World of Warcraft already puts everybody on a battleground into one raid group. Putting them into one voice-chat channel automatically as well would be easy. It would then just be up to the players whether they actually wanted to coordinate their attacks that way.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:10 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 12-October-2006

Logging on yesterday, after the weekly maintenance during which PvP ranks are calculated, I found out that I had failed to reach the Sergeant's rank that I had wanted for my Horde priest. I just made it to Grunt, one rank below, but with over 90% of the points needed for the next level already. While I did more PvP than my last character reaching Sergeant, my guess is that cross-server battlegrounds have made PvP much more popular, and on the honor ranking relative scale that means you need to do much more PvP for the same rank. And of course you don't even know how much more is necessary to reach a certain rank. God, will I be happy when this stupid system disappears with WoW 2.0 aka the Burning Crusade expansion.

Well, I still want to be Sergeant, due to the 10% reduction of vendor prices, even if I am not sure whether I will keep that reduction in WoW 2.0. So my priest did some more PvP. To keep things interesting, I decided to do the quest which requires you to collect three honor marks from each of the three battlegrounds. That involved losing three long battles in Alterac Valley, winning an extremely short Warsong Gulch battle, and winning a medium length Arathi Basin battle. The advantage of doing the quest was a nice cash payout, plus over 2000 bonus honor points. I then played some more WSG and AB battles, having already done more than enough AV battles.

I'm now even more puzzled than when I asked why the Horde loses AV most of the time. I only lost one WSG battle, and that was with a Horde pickup group facing a single-guild Alliance group which was probably using Teamspeak, which is an immediate win condition. All the other WSG battles, Horde pickup group against Alliance pickup group, were won by the Horde, and often 3-0. The Horde also dominated all the Arathi Basin battles I participated in, I haven't lost a single one yet. So how can it be that Horde is so bad on one battleground, but wins easily on the other two? Why should the Horde be better at organizing small groups, and the Alliance at organizing big groups? I thought that maybe in WSG it would be the shamans in ghost wolf form being the best flag carriers, but actually due to my epic horse, bubble, self-heal, and psychic scream it was often me who was carrying the flag in the WSG battles I participated in. And in most cases that happened more or less unopposed, me just riding to the Alliance stronghold, grabbing the flag, and running back casting a few spells to protect myself from the few defenders. Boring.

In spite of winning, I don't like Warsong Gulch at all. There doesn't seem to be any strategy behind it, just people randomly running around until somebody grabs a flag and carries it home. And the WSG battles are just too short. Alterac Valley is better, even if I always lose there, at least there is something like a front moving back and forth, with people gathering at different battle objectives, and trying to balance attack and defence. But my favorite is probably Arathi Basin. It has just the right length of battles, a good number of battle objectives, and a good mix of offensive and defensive encounters. Unlike AV, the battle in AB can't really stall, somebody is always edging closer to the win. But unlike WSG the win always takes some time, because it is hard to keep control of more than 3 resource points.

I will do a bit more PvP with my priest, just to get the points I think I need to be sure to make rank 3. But as a long-term occupation PvP in its current form doesn't hold enough interest for me. Usually both sides are more or less unorganized, and individual encounters are decided more by who has more players at the location than by any clever tactics. As getting your fellow players to coordinate more is a nigh impossible task, the whole exercise is far too chaotic for me. Which still leaves me asking myself how to pass the time before the Burning Crusade comes out.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:40 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Mainstream duopoly

The Economist has an article about Second Life (subscribers only), labeled a "special report" and being 3 pages long in the print magazine. I've seen Second Life discussed in Businessweek and the New York Times. In fact it is hard to tell which of the two games, Second Life or World of Warcraft, is receiving more media attention. But fact is that if you open a non-gaming magazine or newspaper and find an article about virtual online worlds, it will be either about WoW or Second Life. No other game ever gets a headline, they might just be mentioned somewhere in a list.

The surprising thing in this is that Second Life isn't a terribly successful MMO. While it has 750,000 "residents", this is just the number of people that have a free account. The number of paying subscribers, aka landowners, is just 25,000. And the number of concurrent users is a measly 9,000. Even Dungeons and Dragons Online has more players and monthly revenue, but never gets mentioned in a print magazine. So why is Second Life part of the mainstream duopoly?

The answer is probably the interesting business model of Second Life, which in a way is full in the famous "Web 2.0" trend. Users create content and sell it to other users, with the company owning the platform getting a share. The top ten Second Life entrepreneurs are reported to make an average income of $200,000 a year. With numbers like these, people easily oversee the fact that with just 9,000 players online at any given time, Second Life isn't quite the shining example justifying big investments in the Web 2.0. The big incomes are often made by virtual land speculation, the revenue from actually creating and selling virtual items is a lot smaller.

But in a way the duopoly is justified, because World of Warcraft and Second Life pretty much cover the two extremes of the game vs. world scale on which all MMO must find their place. WoW is very much a game, with up to now very little world aspects. There isn't even player housing, no way for a player to leave a permanent mark on the world. Second Life is the extreme world type MMO, with no game content except for user-created games. Here the user can't slay dragons and level up to ultimate power, but he can rent a piece of land, create his own dream home, and fill it with his own creations of virtual furniture, or buy these from other players. Many other games are somewhere in the middle between these two extremes, being more game than Second Life, but more world than World of Warcraft.

While game critics often like world aspects in MMO, the MMOs leaning more towards the game side have traditionally sold a lot better. Fact is that most people either aren't very creative, or prefer to express their creativity in the real world. Very few houses in MMOs like Star Wars Galaxies or Ultima Online were actually worth looking at. I never played Second Life, but I am pretty certain that besides a few shining examples, there is also a lot of user created garbage in that game. A more game like MMO, where most of the content is created by developers and is subject to a certain quality control, usually ends up being nicer to interact with. And the game aspect of killing monsters, gaining experience points and levels, and looting stuff, is a lot easier to digest after a hard day at work than the task of creating new content. We are still far from a Web 2.0 world MMO beating out a game in the number of users, and we might never get there.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:20 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Dell is confusing me

Just 24 hours after sending me an e-mail saying that they could only deliver my new laptop in mid-November, Dell sent me another e-mail saying that the laptop just shipped. For a second I considered the fancy notion that somebody at Dell read my blog and decided they couldn't afford the bad publicity. But the far more likely explanation is that it is just an administrative SNAFU.

Well, if they really shipped it, it should arrive early next week at the latest, which would be just 3 weeks after I ordered it, which isn't so bad. I'll just have to wait and see.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:15 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
Games are getting better

I read a lot of complaints about the state of the game industry only producing bad sequels, and no good games any more. And I don't think that is true. In fact gamers nowadays have it so good, they don't even know any more how bad it used to be.

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81, back in 1981, a quarter of a century ago. That computer had 1 kilobyte of RAM, extendable to 16 kilobyte. And there was a version of Space Invaders running on it, in black and white, 64 x 48 pixel resolution. The ZX81 also played chess, text adventures, and other games, many of them text-based, or with very primitive graphics.

My next computer was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. So now I had 48 kB of RAM, and 15-color 256x192 graphics, making a lot more complicated games possible. There were even the first jump-and-run games, like the famous Manic Miner. But gameplay was horrible, you couldn't save your game, and you had only 3 lives. When you lose your last life, or you turn off the computer, you have to start from the first level again. The levels being rather hard, I ended up using a cheat for infinite lives and leaving the computer turned on, so I could finally see all the levels. The Spectrum also ran a version of Elite, using primitive vector graphics. I didn't play no role-playing games on the Spectrum yet, but there was a text adventure named The Hobbit, based on Tolkien's book, which showed some basic graphics, but was still based on a text parser. So if you saw a boat and typed "board boat", you'd get a message that this wasn't possible, until you found out by trial and error that the correct command was "enter boat".

A few years later I got a Commodore Amiga 2000, the first machine which actually looked like a desktop computer of today. Its graphics were far superior to the PCs of that time, with up to 4096 colors at 640 x 256 resolution, and a "blitter" enabling fast movement of sprites. On the Amiga I played my first computer role-playing games, like The Bard's Tale, or the first "3D real time" RPG, Dungeon Master. But it wasn't real 3D, you couldn't move the camera around yet, you just had first-person view and could only turn in 90° angles, and move square by square. There were strategy games like Empire, which were my first multiplayer experience. Multiplayer meaning several players taking turns "hotseat" on the same computer.

After the Amiga I bought my first PC, and I'm still mainly playing PC games. But PC games also have come a long way. You only need to look at the different versions of Civilization to see how far we have come. I remember playing PC games in 4-color CGA, with horrible magenta and cyan tones. And it isn't only the graphics. With the typical RAM of a PC having grown from 640 kilobyte to 1 or more Gigabyte, games have become a lot more complex too. And they have become a lot more user-friendly over the last 25 years.

But what has happened is that the market for video games has grown enormously. There are now far more games produced every year than before. That automatically results in two things: Not every game is highly original any more, and some games are better than others. It is not that games developers have somehow lost the ability to produce original games, it is only that the number of games being thrown onto the market has depassed the number of new ideas. Instead of 10 new games being released having 5 new ideas, we now have 100 new games being released having 10 new ideas. The percentage of original games is decreasing, but not the total number of them.

And with several games of the same genre available, people start comparing them with each other. Is Dungeon and Dragons Online a bad game? Compared to World of Warcraft, probably. Compared to the old The Bard's Tale it is revolutionary and far superior. You could say that the rising tide lifts all boats, even the junk games of 2006 that get a "4 out of 10" rating in a PC games magazine or review website are much better than most of the games I grew up with. Which is why everybody is playing today's games, and very few people still play Sinclair Spectrum games on an emulator. Everybody who was there at the time will agree that let's say Elite was one of the best games ever, but nobody wants to play it any more. Because it was great only compared to the other games of that time, not compared to what is on offer now.

And I do think that this will continue. The games of 2010 will be better than today's games, and not only in graphics. Following Sturgeon's Law, 90% of the games of 2010 will be crap, compared to the other 10%, although still beating most games of the year 2000. And with the video games market having grown further, 10% of it will still be quite a lot of games. There are already more good games out there than I have the time to play, especially if some of them (like WoW), have the ability to entertain me for a thousand hours and more. And while the doomsayers will always be around, I think we can look into a bright gaming future.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:39 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Dell delivery delay

Besides giving opportunity for a lovely alliteration in the post title, the news from Dell is bad: Instead of sending me the laptop I ordered after 10 business days, they can't do it any earlier than 30 business days. That is 6 weeks, dammit. I won't have the new laptop before my next business trip to the USA, and I was looking forward to that "test run" of it.

Dell said they were missing some parts. No wonder they are currently losing market share, their supply chain management was their unique selling point. There are enough companies selling you either standard computers right now, or custom built computers in 6 weeks. Dell was offering custom built computers in barely more than the time it takes to ship them, I had one Dell computer delivered only 1 week after I ordered it. If they can't do that any more, they are a lot less interesting.

On the positive side, while I *would like* to have the laptop right now, I don't absolutely *need* it for a specific date. Would be a lot more problematic for people ordering a Dell computer end of November as a christmas present, and being told they'll only get it in January. Putting a printout of the order form under the tree isn't quite the same.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:20 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Google buys YouTube

It sounds like the dotcom boom v2.0: Google today bought YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars. That is $33 for each of its 50 million users. Not bad for a company that was only founded last year and has never made a profit. If the whole Web 2.0 boom spectacularly crashes, at least this deal will be one of the often quoted examples.

Now you would think that as a blogger, I would be a fan of "user-created content", and thus a big supporter of the Web 2.0 idea. But unfortunately it isn't so easy. User-created content has the big disadvantage that you can't control it. So if you make money by displaying that content, you can well be held liable if this content is illegal or objectionable. People are adding 65,000 videos per day to YouTube, nobody would even be able to control all of these for appropriateness.

One often quoted problem is copyright. I just told how I watched the South Park World of Warcraft episode on Google video, where the admins couldn't take down the pirated copies of the film as fast as fans posted them. Now some copyright owners don't mind, but sooner or later one of them will sue, and we will end up with the Napster lawsuit all over again. Fact is that most internet users don't consider copyright violations as a crime, and will always flood video sites with copyrighted material of all kind. But the legal situation is much different, and YouTube might get shut down one day just like a multitude of file-sharing sites were before.

But even if there was only material without copyright, the ability of users to post what they want is problematic. Especially if you source of revenue is advertising, which is linked to the video's content. Extreme example (don't read this if you are easily offended): Some antisemitic neo-nazi posts a video of what he would like to do with the jews, and Google adsense places an advertisement for industrial gases next to it. You can be sure that the company who paid for the ad won't be pleased.

There are a lot of things you wouldn't be allowed to show on TV, starting with Janet Jackson's breast, jihadist or other extremist propaganda videos, extreme violence, porn, libel, and so on, and so on. So how would you prevent that sort of content to pop up on YouTube? Sooner or later some politician will find some objectionable content on YouTube, and start shouting for the site to be shut down.

And even if YouTube can survive indefinitely, it isn't sure whether it will still be the hottest thing around in a couple of years. It takes a while to recuperate 1.65 billion dollars, especially since the site isn't profitable yet. A link with the Google advertising business has obvious synergies, but the price might just have been too high. It seems people investing in technology have very short memories, wasn't the last dotcom crash just 5 years ago? I wouldn't buy Google shares right now.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:42 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Goodbye Decursive

Relmstein has the news that changes to the scripting language in the Burning Crusade expansion will make addons like Decursive stop working. Basically there won't be any addons possible any more which automatically target people based on a condition. Now if you ever played a priest, paladin, or mage in a raiding guild, you will probably have been instructed to install Decursive, and in some boss encounters your job was to just stand there and spam that one Decursive hotkey. Many Molten Core bosses, like Lucifron or Baron Geddon, have area-of-effect debuffs which are quite lethal, and have to be dispelled quickly. Doing that this fast will be very hard without the Decursive addon.

But in a way the current situation was untenable, because the difference in power between a player with Decursive and a player without Decursive was too big. Debuffs are for example heavily used in PvP, and Decursive can make quite a difference there. So Blizzard would either have to integrate the function of that addon into the game itself, or change the scripting language to turn it off. They chose the latter, to the delight of PvP warlocks and the dismay of raid decursers.

At least they got the timing right. Few people will worry about MC encounters getting harder for level 60 characters on the day they can start leveling to 70. And if the level 70 raid dungeons have similar AoE debuffs, well, at least the new raids are limited to 25 people, making manual targeting and decursing obviously easier than 40-player raids.

While Decursive made my life in raids a lot easier, I don't think I will miss it terribly. There was no skill involved in decursing, you just spammed a single key without thinking. Necessary, but boring. Iwouldn't uninstall it yourself, as that would be shooting myself in the foot, and get me angry comments from my fellow raiders. But if it is turned off for everybody, I can live without it. Macros and addons like Decursive are a terrible slippery slope to playing a bot.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:56 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
A false dawn?

I detect symptoms of burn-out in many veteran players of World of Warcraft, including myself. People "taking a break", or playing less, or still playing while being a lot less passionate about it. But most WoW players are in a state of high expectation for the Burning Crusade expansion, hoping that it will rekindle their interest in the game. And I wonder if the expansion can meet those expectations, and how long that will last.

My personal guess is that at the start the Burning Crusade will get people back into the game, and cause a lot of people to resubscribe. But by the "official" count, the amount of content added is only about 25%. So if players of the original WoW got bored after 2 years, they should get bored with the expansion after less than 6 months. In a previous prediction of time to 70 I calculated that the average player would need about 200 hours of /played time from 60 to 70, that is 40% of the time the average player needs from 1 to 60. But that calculation would only be true if you haven't been stuck at level 60 for months. Many level 60 players already spent a lot of time to improve their characters with better gear, and somebody wearing a nice collection of epics will certainly have a head start and need a lot less time to reach level 60.

A few crazy people will probably reach level 70 after a week, and by the end of the year most raiding guild will have enough players to start the new 25-player raid dungeons. Now raiding is a part of the game that can be stretched forever, as Blizzard has shown with the level 60 raiding game, where few people ever reached Kel'thuzad. What is less certain is how far people's patience can be stretched. Very soon level 70 raiding will feel remarkably similar to level 60 raiding, and sooner or later people will just get fed up with that, because it is a highly repetitive activity, driven by rare high-end rewards.

So I wouldn't be terribly surprised if by the second quarter of 2007 we see the numbers of World of Warcraft players decreasing from the inevitable December 2006 Burning Crusade peak. Relmstein suggests that other game companies are aware of that and launch their new MMORPGs in early 2007. But of course that is a chicken and egg problem: Do these games come out to grab the players leaving WoW, or are the players leaving WoW because there will be new games? In any case I consider it unlikely that the Burning Crusade will be able to hold our attention until the next expansion comes out a year later.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:32 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Saylah on LOTRO PvP

Saylah of Mystic Worlds has a short rant with interesting information on the PvP planned for Lord of the Rings Online. Why would PvP in a MMORPG be interesting to anyone? Because in LOTRO you can only play the good guys, so no orc vs. elves PvP possible, and Turbine had to come up with something else.

The solution is allowing players to turn into monsters, and then having Player versus Monster Players combat. Which, unlike Saylah, I think is basically a good idea. Transforming into a monster for some time is going to be popular. I *do* agree with Saylah that making PvMP both consensual *and* restricted to special PvMP zones is a bit silly. I'm no fan of unlimited PvP, but either restricting it to certain zones, or to turning a PvP flag on would suffice, both is overkill.

Unlike "normal" ganking in other PvP games, the monster variant automatically has more limited griefing potential, because it seems your power as a monster is determined by your monster points, not by the power of your character. What happens often in other games is that people play PvE for all its worth, get immensely powerful, then get immensely bored, and start ganking newbies using the powers they accumulated. Hey, even the South Park episode on World of Warcraft was like that. I would imagine that if your monster power is independant of your character level and power, you automatically get less of these bored high-level gankers.

You can often hear me saying that WoW PvP isn't very good. And in fact there are lots of things wrong with the current honor system in WoW. But World of Warcraft got one major thing right: PvP has to be an alternative occupation in a PvE game to be permanently successful. The basic idea of games like Archlord, where your standing in the game is defined by PvP, and PvE is only a means to the end of getting stronger for PvP, is flawed. In a PvE game everybody can win. In a PvP game by definition there have to be losers. And getting people to pay for playing losers is always going to be a hard sell. I think Lord of the Rings Online got this one right as well, but we'll have to see how it actually plays out.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:40 PM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 9-October-2006

Things are getting desperate, I find myself doing more and more PvP. :) After getting my warrior to revered with the Frostwolf, and not being sure yet whether exalted is worth the grind, I went to Alterac Valley with my priest instead. Although Horde always loses AV, I kind of like the place. And my Horde priest really could use the 10% vendor price reduction for being Sergeant, as he is buying tons of sacred candles every week for raiding.

Now my priest is holy spec, and you wouldn't think he was any good in PvP. But surprisingly he ends up being a lot more fun to PvP with than the warrior. Except for his ridiculous bow, the warrior has no ranged attack, so he is forced to be always in the middle of the enemies, and so he dies a lot. Especially since most of the damage dealt in AV is by magic, and the warrior has no defence against that. A holy priest can not only cast spells from a distance, he also survives magic attacks better with the help of dispel magic, his bubble, and healing spells. His psychic scream works a lot better than intimidating shout, and has a much shorter cooldown; I even managed to ninja graveyards by fearing the NPC guards and taking the flag before they were back. And of course I spent some time healing warriors in the middle of a melee, provided I could identify who the warriors were. As for the priest the goal is to get to honor rank 3, and I don't target a specific faction, I might try Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin with him this week as well.

Other than PvP, my Horde priest spent 5 hours straight wiping against Firemaw in Blackwing Lair. I had missed this weeks first part of BWL, where they took down the first three bosses, so this second raid to BWL went straight to Firemaw and did nothing but that fight over and over. We never won, we need more training and more fire resistance gear. The fight is highly complicated for a healer, because you are supposed to stand in a way that you have a line of sight to the tank you are healing, but not a line of sight to Firemaw, who is stacking a nasty fire damage debuff on everybody in view. That is trivial as long as the tank and Firemaw don't move, but unfortunately they refuse to stand still, so you always end up either having no LOS to the tank, or getting damaged by Firemaw.

The other raid this weekend was more successful, farming Molten Core in less than 5 hours from start to finish. We had one wipe on an overly enthusiastic trash mob pull, 4 groups of trash mobs is a bit too much, but killed all the bosses on the first try. Majordomo dropped the Eye of Divinity, and while I was on top of the priest DKP list, I declined and passed it to the next priest in line. I like my Will of Arlokk, it looks a lot better than Benediction. And even if I had the Eye of Divinity, I would need to spend a fortune on the Eye of Shadow, do a very difficult quest, and then spend another fortune getting the new staff enchanted. Maybe another time, but other priests wanted the thing much more than I did. Turned out to be a good decision, because by passing on the Eye I was still on top of the DKP list when Ragnaros dropped his pants, uh, I mean dropped my pants, the leggings on transcendence. My second tier 2 item, I hope that in one of the next BWL raids I can pick up a third and get the very nice 15% mana regeneration while casting bonus.

I didn't play my Alliance priest at all this weekend, except for logging him on for a ZG raid which didn't take place due to lack of participation. The guild I am in is small, and very nice, but inefficient. And as I already said, playing an Alliance priest at level 60 isn't really a change from playing a Horde priest. So right now this priest only has a future as a guinea pig, he already has mining and a store of ores and gems to test out jewelcrafting. My Horde priest just dropped enchanting to learn mining, but still has tailoring, and I need to find out whether I can keep tailoring in combination with jewelcrafting, or whether I need the mining / jewelcrafting combo.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:25 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Revered with Frostwolf

My troll warrior finally made it to revered with the Frostwolf faction of Alterac Valley, in spite of constantly losing the majority of battles. So I got myself I nice blue one-handed axe as reward, and then considered the serious question whether I want to continue to exhalted. But for the moment I think it isn't worth it.

While the shield and two-handed weapons from being exalted are nice, my warrior is dual-wielding fury spec. And the only one-handed epic reward you can get is the Lobotomizer dagger. Which isn't exactly the weapon I'd like to have for PvE. Nice dps, but no stat bonuses, and the intelligence debuff is totally useless against mobs. So if I made it to exalted, I would only buy the shield and two-hand weapon to bank them.

The other problem is the epic mount you can get at exalted reputation, because it has been nerfed at patch 1.12.1. It only costs 8 gold, instead of 80 gold for a normal epic. But as you still have to spend 720 gold to learn epic riding skill, the saving is minimal. Do I really want to spend many more days in AV, just to save 72 gold on an epic mount? Maybe later.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:30 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
South Park - Make love, not Warcraft

I watched the latest Southpark episode 1008 "Make love, not Warcraft" on Google video. Not providing a link, because there are already several dead links to different uploads of that particular video on both Google and YouTube. This is copyrighted material, and the admins are required to take the videos down when they find them. But of course the video being "hot news" this week, it got uploaded lots of times, so I was able to catch one version before it got deleted.

The Southpark episode is remarkable in that half of it plays in the game of World of Warcraft, and you see the familiar WoW graphics and animations, with the voices of the Southpark characters. Blizzard cooperated heavily, which explains why for example the bad guy could summon scorpions into the Arathi Highlands, an effect which would be impossible to reproduce if it was just a typical Machinima movie, filming sequences from the standard game.

The story of "Make love, not Warcraft" is of a fat and pimply bad guy who plays so much, he becomes "super-high level", stronger than the GMs. Then he starts player killing newbies, preventing everybody from doing quests, and Blizzard can't do anything to stop him. Quote: "How can you kill that which has no life?" The solution is for the Southpark quartett to become super-high level themselves. Of course that leads to them having no life anymore either, and becoming fat and pimply. But with the help of Blizzard executives bringing them a USB stick with a powerful sword on it the kids finally kill the bad guy, and Cartman (as dwarf) smashes in the head of the bad guy lying on the ground, splattering blood and brain. Another thing you can't see in the real WoW game, I was a bit surprised that Blizzard allowed that.

In any case it was brilliant product placement from Blizzard, a lot of nice things are said in the episode about the game, even Stan's father gets hooked. And Blizzard is depicted as a company that just wanted to make a game for people to quest and have fun, and got surprised by people with no life playing it all day long. Which might initially have been true, but instead of producing more content for the "we just want to quest and have fun" crowd, Blizzard added more incentives to the no-life crowd, and actually encouraged the phenomenon. It is ironical that the bad guy is a player killer, because due to the current bad design of the PvP reward system, only the people with no life get to the highest rank there. To Blizzard's credit they are going to change that. I don't know how many people watch South Park, and how many of them weren't aware of World of Warcraft yet, but this is the sort of brilliant advertising money can't buy.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:54 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 5-October-2006

Yesterday I logged on around 6 in the evening, and had 2 hours to kill before our raid to AQ20 started. So I started to do the usual repairing, restocking, cleaning up my inventory routine. And it struck me that in my bank I have two bags full of enchanting dusts, essences, and shards, plus part of another bag taken up by the rods you need for enchanting. But the number of times I was enchanting anything in the last 6 months I could count using no more than my fingers. Enchanting is not a terribly useful skill once you are 60, because your gear isn't changing very often. And you can't use it for twinking much either, because it only works if you buy or find bind on equip items. The usually much better bind on pickup items on your alts you can't enchant, because you can't have both characters online at the same time.

Then I considered what I know about jewelcrafting, and it seemed to me that jewelcrafting would be more useful than enchanting in respect to alts. And of course it is new and shiny, and already more interesting for being new. So I ditched enchanting, put all my dusts and stuff on the auction house, and learned mining instead. The idea is to level up mining, while hoarding the different ores and gems I find in the process. Thus the day I get the expansion running, I have the materials to actually do something. As far as I know, you need the raw ores to extract gems, you also need the ores to make metal for the jewelry, and you also need the standard gems. I'm not sure what else I should already collect, I've heard rumors of the elemental essences being needed as well for some jewelcrafting. Anyway, I spent the time before the raid happily riding through Durotar and mining copper. Funny if you do it with a level 60 in a newbie zone and even the bad priest AoE Holy Nova takes the mobs out if necessary.

Afterwards I went on a highly successful AQ20 raid. We killed all the bosses before Ossirian on the first try, and then killed Ossirian on the third try. On the first try we were unluck with the tornado just coming to the crystal we were all gathered around, and on the second try we had a lag spike which made us call one crystal a second too late. Supreme mode, war stomp for 9000 points of damage on 4 characters, and the fight was basically over. On the third try we got Ossirian down without problems. He dropped a very nice staff, but other players had more DKP than me, and I didn't get it. We didn't find the remaining Codex for the next rank of Prayer of Healing I'm still missing either. But I did get another 2000 points of CC reputation, and am just 1000 points away from honored now. Which means that I will need to do a dozen more AQ20 runs to reach revered, ouch! And to consider that this is the "fast" method to gain Cenarion Circle reputation, gathering it in Silithus would take even longer.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:36 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Why I hate bots

Just a few weeks ago I started to get more and more tells in game from people with names like "jdjjssdffggh" asking me to go to this or that website to buy World of Warcraft gold. And prices were constantly falling, to as low as $40 for 1000 gold. Somebody told me that there was new bot software out, and in fact you could see a lot of hunters in obviously bot-controlled movements farming the best spots in the game. On the new server I made my Alliance priest on, of the first 10% of players that reached level 60, an astounding 67% were hunters during off-peak hours. Meanwhile I get less tells, and the gold prices seem to have gone up again to $60 per 1000 gold and above. Rumor has it that Blizzard found a way to detect the new bot program and banned thousands of them. Well done, I say!

Having said that, I must add that my reasons for hating bots are probably different than those of other people. Because I don't mind "normal" gold farming, where somebody (Chinese or not) is playing the game in a more or less regular way, trying to maximize the amount of gold earned per hour, and then selling it to other players with less time and more dollars. As armchair economist the concept of time being equal to money isn't new to me. Whether a player farms gold himself to buy an epic mount or whether he pays another player to farm that gold for him does exactly the same thing to the game economy. Making that transaction illegal only distorts the game by favoring the time-rich over the money-rich. Buying gold isn't any different than paying somebody to mow your lawn.

All that is only true if the gold enters the economy by somebody actually playing a character, killing mobs and selling the loot. As soon as the gold is created in an automated way, by means that aren't available to the average player, the equation changes. Worst of all are money dupes, or other cheats that create gold out of thin air. While fundamentally being the game programmers fault, somebody finding and using the dupe bug can bring the whole game economy crashing down. But bots are equally bad, because they allow a single person to run many bots at the same time at a much lower cost than paying somebody to play. Having to pay the gold farmers a wage limits the amount of gold that can be farmed per server. Even the most skilled gold farmer needs 20+ hours to gather 1000 gold, and at a sales price of $40 that just isn't feasible.

But my main reason why I hate bots is emotional. It devalues my achievements in the game. I might be proud to have reached level 60, or having made a certain amount of gold. And then I watch a bot character doing both of it faster and without human supervision, just controlled by some sort of extended macro. That dispells any illusion that I might have that playing World of Warcraft would actually require some skill. I stopped playing chess when cheap toy computers got powerful enough to consistently beat me. I often quote Sid Meier who said that a game is a series of interesting decisions. As soon as I feel that the decisions aren't interesting, because even a bot can do them, the game stops being fun.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:51 PM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Why does Horde always lose in Alterac Valley?

Unusually for me, I've been doing a lot of PvP lately, taking my level 60 troll warrior to Alterac Valley again and again, at least a dozen times. The reason I'm doing it is farming Frostwolf reputation, where I am now just 3,000 reputation points away from revered. The revered Frostwolf reputation rewards are already better than the gear I'm currently wearing, and if I continue to exalted, I might finally get hold of some epics with my warrior too (who due to there being too many warriors is excluded from raiding). How much reputation you gain from a battle in Alterac Valley doesn't depend much on whether your side wins or loses. But I couldn't help noticing that from over a dozen AV trips, Horde only won 2. Why does Horde lose so much in Alterac Valley?

I really have no idea why the win/lose ratio isn't closer to 50:50. I didn't confirm it, but I was told that Horde is winning at least half of the battles in Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin. It is only the Alterac Valley battleground where they fare so badly.

One possible explanation is geography, the battleground not being totally symmetrical, and the natural pathways somehow giving the Alliance an advantage. For example whenever the Alliance takes Iceblood graveyard, it is very hard for Horde players to get from the south to the north, as the defenders of the graveyard can easily prevent the Horde players from passing. The equivalent Stonehearth graveyard is a bit farther away from the choke point of the Alliance, and it is easier to break through. I just don't know if that is advantage enough to explain why Alliance wins so often.

Another often cited explanation is paladins, which are still exclusive to the Alliance. There are a *lot* of paladins in Alterac Valley, much more than one eighth of the Alliance forces. It takes the Horde a lot more effort to kill a paladin than the Alliance excerts in effort to kill a shaman. As a warrior for the Horde it is often my job to rush through the enemy lines, thereby pushing them back. But a paladin is doing a much better job in that, because while I get stun-locked after a few meters and die, the paladin just uses his bubble and gets much farther behind the enemy lines, forcing at least a part of the enemy players to follow him, breaking up the front line. No wonder the pallys are so outraged about the possibility of a priest spells dispelling their bubble. On the other battlefields, where there are less players, and not the big frontlines evolving typically in AV, the paladins have less of an advantage. And in places where fast movement is of essence, the shaman with his ghost wolf form is probably superior to the paladin.

A third possible explanation could be that the Alliance players on average are better equipped than the Horde players, on PvE servers, due to being more numerous. It is certainly true that there are more Alliance players having full epic gear than there are Horde players, just because there are more Alliance players in total, and they have it easier to get raid groups together due to being more numerous. But it isn't clear whether the percentage of players in epic gear on a battlefield is higher on the Alliance side than on the Horde side. Are the players in AV mostly bored raiders showing off their epic toys? Or are these characters like my warrior, who are in AV because the reputation rewards are better than the gear they wear?

Or maybe one of you has another explanation of why Alliance wins more than half of the AV battles. Did you observe the same on your server, or is AV more balanced where you are playing it? I don't believe that there is a fundamental difference between the abilities of the players of each side, so no "Horde players suck" comments please!
- posted by Tobold @ 8:41 AM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post

 
Can DKP ever be fair?

I'm not going to link to it, as I am in none of the guilds involved, but I just read a thread on an application forum of a major guild on my server, which raises an interesting point. The guy applying wants to leave his old guild and apply to the bigger one, saying that he has friends in the new guild he would like to play with. But people from the old guild saw his application and complain that he is leaving with negative DKP, indicating that he got more loot than he "deserved". He raided 18 days, 32 successful boss encounters, and received 5 epics.

Now if you assume every boss dropping 2 to 3 epics, and a raid having 40 members, participating in 32 boss kills should get somebody an average of 2 epics. So assuming the guild runs with a zero-sum DKP system, somebody getting 5 epics instead of 2 should well be in the negative. Does that automatically mean that the guy cheated his old guild? Even if you assume that the DKP system is correctly measuring participation versus reward, can it ever measure fairness?

Now there are a handful of uber guilds on each server which have an equal number of players from each class, all with similar participation rates. But the more normal situation in the "second tier" guilds is that some classes are relatively rare, while others have much higher numbers. That is a natural consequence of the fact that in the population as a whole certain classes are more rare than others. The guy who wanted to switch guilds with negative DKP happens to be a druid, the most rare class in World of Warcraft (and getting rarer with the expansion), due to there only being one race per side being able to play that class. It is safe to assume that in the raids of his old guild he was one of very few druids in each raid, which is how he ended up with so many epics. In my own guild we had one raid where one new druid received 3 epics on his first Molten Core run.

Imagine a guild where on every raid there are twice as many warriors as druids. Now try to design a DKP system that gives the same average number of epics per raid attended to every player. You will quickly find out that this is totally impossible, as most drops are class specific. The best you can achieve is fairness inside of one class. There are a few items useable by several classes found in raid dungeons like Molten Core, which can be used to slightly adjust the fairness. But in a guild with twice as many warriors as druids, the druids are going to get twice as many epics per raid as the warriors, there isn't much you could do about that. And if the guild is using a zero-sum DKP system, the warriors will have positive DKP, and the druids negative DKP.

Another factor resulting in somebody receiving more epics than other players is how often the players raid. Raiding is an exercise in diminishing returns. While raiding more often gets you more epics in total, the number of epics per raid is going down with time. Whatever your DKP score is, if you already have the item that drops, or something better, it will go to somebody else. Typical situation is the guild wanting to kill Ragnaros, but already having done the first MC bosses dozens of times. As the guild needs to kill all the bosses to "unlock" Ragnaros, such MC runs are producing a high yield of epics, most of which the people who were in the guild from the start and who raid a lot already have. People who are new or who raid less have a good chance to receive an unusually high amount of epics per raid, in spite of their low DKP scores.

Of course people who raid a lot are likely to feel some resentment towards newer players who get more epics for less effort than they did. In some cases that resentment leads to the guild for example deciding not to raid Molten Core any more. It is easy to see that if the guild only visits places like Blackwing Lair where not many people have the loot from yet, this favors the people who raided most often with the guild, and accumulated the most DKP. But that is not a very wise strategy. Every guild suffers from natural attrition, people stopping to play, or wanting to switch servers, or leaving for another guild. A guild needs to feed the newer members with epics and raid experience, so that if some older player burn out and leave, there are people there with good enough gear to replace them. The new guild member with his complete tier 0 set and no DKP won't get any loot out of Blackwing Lair, and won't ever be able to improve his gear soloing. So the guild must farm MC to get him equipped. Of course if he leaves the guild after getting his epics, that is annoying. But that isn't a failure of fairness in the DKP system. It is an inevitable consequence of guilds having a member turn-over, and different participation rates to raids.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:57 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Hellfire Peninsula

I was playing D&D yesterday, and because I have infected all the players in my D&D group with World of Warcraft, we were talking about that game a lot. And our DM pointed out that if you look at the map of Outland, you notice that it only has one entry point, only one zone marked as being level 58-63, Hellfire Peninsula. So given that more than half of the players of World of Warcraft have at least one level 60 character, and that there will be lots of people resubscribing, and player caps for servers will rise to about 4,000 players, we can expect over 2,000 players in the one Hellfire Peninsula zone in the first couple of days after the Burning Crusade expansion comes out. Ouch! Talk about crowded.

There will be undoubtedly major problems with the typical "kill 10 foozles" quests when hundreds of players are trying to kill the same foozle. That will be unpleasant enough on a PvE server, but you can expect people actually killing each other over a foozle spawn on the PvP servers, as Hellfire Peninsula is the entry zone into Outland for both Horde and Alliance.

One solution around the problem will be Hellfire Citadel, avoiding the crowd outside by going into an instanced dungeon. Of course that depends on Blizzard having put up solid enough hardware, which doesn't break down when a thousand players want to play in the same dungeon.

You might think of making a blood elf of draenei character instead of leveling up your level 60 character, but unfortunately the two new newbie zones won't be any less crowded, and there will be no dungeon there to lighten the load.

What might be the best solution for the first week or so is going back to the old content, zones like Silithus, Plaguelands, or Winterspring. Once the level cap is raised, you will again get experience points for killing mobs in the upper 50s, and even for doing the high-level quests there. Maybe not the most interesting activity, but could end up being less frustrating fighting over spawns in Hellfire Peninsula.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:27 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Less guild drama?

I was struck by a recent comment from Sane Mike, who is missing the old days when I was still reporting from my previous guild and says: "Your guild life is a bit less dramatic these days." Is it? If I think about it, I guess the guild drama is still there, I just don't care about it very much any more, and I write about it even less. Drama, like art, is in the eye of the beholder.

I suffered enough emotional distress over guild dramas in the past. And blogging about it helped me to cope, but was perceived as being "unfair" by the guild officers involved. Of course that is arguable. Guild officers are usually in charge of the guild forums and often delete or lock threads which they don't like, for example "I'm leaving the guild" threads which mention reasons for leaving which might be considered a critique of the guild leadership. Blogging about a guild drama takes the criticism outside of the range of their censorship, which is good. But it also makes the guild drama visible to a lot of strangers who know nothing else about the background of the guild, which is not so good. Everybody likes to watch a good drama, but nobody wants to star in one.

So this is why I'm not blogging much guild drama any more. In fact I went more or less totally anonymous. I'm not using Tobold as a character name or forum name in any of my guilds, and don't tell them I have a blog. And I don't mention my characters names, nor guild names, not even server names on this blog, so I'm not being found out via Google.

That doesn't mean there is no more guild drama. But the longer I play World of Warcraft, the more repetitive even the guild drama becomes. One of the main tanks not feeling appreciated enough and leaving to join another guild where he can be the star, based on all the loot we sent his way? Seen that often enough, *yawn*. One guild member being found out writing an application on another guild's website, dissing our guild? Stopped caring about both the disrespect and the curious fact that guild officers monitor other guilds application forums long ago. The only thing that still raises my temper is when I post my thoughts in my usual long-winded analytical way on the guild forums and get just a "you're an idiot and don't know nothing" response without any counter-arguments. So I just gave up on trying to convince my guild that a DKP system which gives out far more points for each raid than it takes away for loot is the guild-made equivalent of inflation, and not a good thing. Many people just don't understand behavioral economics, the way in which incentives dictate the likely behavior of people. But as even Blizzard developers seem to get their incentives wrong often enough, it isn't surprising that guild officers don't realize the full effect of DKP or raid-invite system incentives on things like recruitment or raid attendance.

Sub-optimal systems is something you learn to live with. Happens to you in your real life all the time, at work or in politics, it would be astounding if systems in virtual life would always be perfect. Since guilds, especially large guilds, are very slow to change anything, many World of Warcraft players just switch guild repeatedly, until they finally arrive in a guild they can live with. In the end that is the ultimate form of democracy. Guild leadership often isn't very democratic, but voting with your feet and switching guilds is a lot easier than switching jobs or changing your nationality. That is why so many of the guild dramas are about people leaving.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:02 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Success ≠ Fun

What a strange weekend. My Horde priest participated in two BWL raids, which were a smashing success, experiencing his first kills of Razorgore, and my guilds first kills of Vael and the Broodlord. I also went on the first part of a MC raid with him, effortlessly killing the 4 first bosses in an hour and a half. But then I switched to my Alliance priest, because they had planned their very first expedition to Zul'Gurub and really needed a priest. And although this ZG raid failed to even kill a single boss, it ended up being more fun. Success does not equal fun, it seems.

I think it has mainly to do with atmosphere. My Horde guild on a 40-man raid is by necessity very concentrated on the job. There isn't much talk in the raid channel. Teamspeak is dominated by commands like "Go dps now!". The sheer size of the group makes chatting difficult, be it typed or voiced. And as we like to go fast and the main tank is permanently pulling, everybody is too busy holding aggro, dealing damage, or healing, to have much time for idle banter anyway. Blackwing Lair of course had some discussion on tactics, but Molten Core is just routine farming, with no surprises. Raiding with my Horde guild is a very serious affair.

My Alliance guild's Zul'Gurub raid was a totally different animal. Right from the start it was obvious that we didn't have enough people to succeed, starting with only 14 players, going up to 15 later, and ending up with 12 when some had to leave. Not everybody was level 60, we had a couple of players from level 55 to 58. And only 3 raid members had ever been to ZG before, all the others were playing their first high-level character. So for the guild ZG was a very new experience, full of surprises. Lots of chatting in the raid channel and on Teamspeak about "Hey, look at this!", or "Wow, I can see Hakkar, lets pull him :)".

I did my best to warn everybody of the most dangerous pitfalls, but we made a number of blunders. First berzerker we met was pulled onto a narrow bridge, where he used his knock-back attack to hurl some players into a bunch of crocodiles. And of course the exploding bat riders killed a couple of people in spite of my warnings.

Nevertheless we were happy with what we achieved. We wiped several times on the easiest ZG boss, Venoxis, but at the end we at least had the tactics down pat, and had him down to 25% life with just 15 people. It was obvious that we just needed more players in the raid. We got a couple of green items, a couple of coins and bijous (which since patch 1.11 are only useful to hand in for reputation), and even one voodoo doll (which is completely useless unless you master ZG a lot better). But more importantly we were having fun, chatting and laughing on Teamspeak all the time. It was a party of friends having fun on some excursion into the unknown. Achieving anything was only of secondary importance.

I don't think it is a difference in the guilds that makes these raids so different. My Horde guild isn't serious because they are all so serious people, but because the game forces you to be concentrated to the max if you want to succeed in places like Blackwing Lair. An exploration raid to just have a look around in Zul'Gurub is not something you can do repeatedly. Sooner or later my Alliance guild as well won't be satisfied unless there are bosses killed and loot gained. And that will force us to become more efficient, and less relaxed. A pity.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:47 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
More BWL

Another day, another step of BWL progress. On yesterday's BWL expedition we managed to kill Broodlord Lashlayer on the second try. Not a bad pace of progress, I have to say, after only killing Razorgore for the first time last week, and Vael this weekend. Our further progress then came to a screeching halt, when we had repeatedly trouble to handle the warlocks in the next room. We hadn't really been prepared for them, and for trash mobs they are rather nasty.

I guess BWL will become rather popular with my guild in the coming weeks, now that we actually kill bosses there and get tier 2 loot. Wiping on the first boss somewhere is always depressing, but wiping on a boss further in, after having gotten some loot already, is much more digestible.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:37 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post