Webasto parking heater

More than 20 years ago, on a particularly cold winter night, I was driving my car homewards, coming from a visit to friends. I had scraped the ice from the windshield, but it was so cold, and the heating of the car directly after starting the motor wasn't doing much, that my windshield iced over while I was driving. I couldn't see where I was going, and the car drifted sideways without me noticing. I ended up hitting the boardwalk with both tires of the left side simultaneously, and both tires burst. So I stood there, with two flat tires, only one spare, at night, in winter. Not a very pleasant situation. Well, I walked back to my friends and phoned from there to get my car hauled to a mechanic, and all ended well. But since then I'm a bit paranoid when it comes to the visibility through my windshield.

So when a few years ago I first heard about parking heaters, I was interested. Heating up your car *before* you start driving is a good idea. But parking heaters aren't cheap, and as I was still driving an old car, installing one wasn't worth it. But this year I got a new car, and in autumn I had a Webasto parking heater installed. Today was the first time where my car had frozen over during the night, and with the use of the parking heater I ended up with ice-free windshields and a comfortable warm car. Instead of scraping ice I just needed to wipe the molten ice from my windshield.

The parking heater I have is burning petrol, it is not an electric block heater that needs to be plugged in. I have a remote control, and 20 minutes before I leave the house I press the on button. The parking heater burns a small amount of petrol in a controlled way, which heats the motor cooling circuit, and when that is warm the fans in the interior of the car are activated to blow warm air against the windshield. Of course that costs me some petrol, but not very much, about 10 ml per minute. A burner is a lot more efficient than letting your motor run while the car is standing to produce heat. And because the burner heats the motor, I use less petrol when I'm starting up the engine. Cold engines waste a lot of petrol.

Bigger cars have parking heaters as optional original equipment. For my Toyota Corolla I needed to have it installed after buying the car. At first I had problems getting it to work, because I use to have the ventilation of the car set to "automatic", which turned out to interfere with the parking heater's control of the ventilation. But the Toyota also has a button to direct the ventilation to maximum windshield defrosting, and that button turns off the automatic ventilation. So since I push that defrosting button in the evening, the parking heater works like a charm in the morning.

Yeah, I know, this is just a gadget. Not something which is absolutely necessary. But I've always been a sucker for gadgets, and this one at least does what it promises to do. I can afford this bit of luxury: a warm car and no more ice-scraping.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:15 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
Playing on Methadone

I told my guild that I was taking a break from raiding until the Burning Crusade. I "finished" playing the BC beta by leveling up my mage to 20. And I installed Dungeons & Dragons Online - Stormreach (DDO). If playing World of Warcraft is an addiction, then I'm on Methadone now. :)

Playing DDO is easy enough. Many things are similar to WoW or other MMORPGs. And at least the early game hasn't changed much since my first impressions of the beta test. And this game is definitely less addictive than World of Warcraft. In fact it feels more like a single-player game than like a MMORPG. One reason for that is that nobody is playing it. DDO has a total of five (5!!!) servers. I chose one at random, Aureon, and when I looked how many people were playing, there were only between 100 and 200 players online. So I looked at the official forums, and found a thread stating that another server, Lyrandar, was the most populated. I created a new character there, and found about 400 people playing on this server. Now I think these servers are international, and as European I'm automatically playing "off-peak", due to the time zone difference with the USA. But if at the time where I am playing all servers together just have about 1,000 concurrent users, even at peak times DDO can't have much more than 5,000 concurrent users. Compared to the 400 US and Euro servers of WoW, with over a million concurrent users at peak time, DDO feels really deserted.

But hey, I bought DDO when it came out, and still had the box shrink-wrapped in my games library. Better get some play value out of the money I spent for it. DDO is not a bad game, but it's main attraction for me right now is that it is "not WoW".

I need to get away from World of Warcraft before I burn out totally. I'd rather play something else now, and be eager again for the Burning Crusade expansion. Especially the level 60 raiding game is something that I had enough of. Yeah, I'm happy and proud to have seen BWL until Nefarian. But that took us two raids last weekend until Chromaggus was dead, for a total of 10 to 12 hours, waiting times included. The idea of doing that every weekend for the next couple of weeks before moving to the next raid dungeon filled me with dread and boredom. I don't know if that is different for other classes, but as priest healing and decursing in BWL plays pretty much the same as healing and decursing in Molten Core. Just the scenery is different. The fights are a bit harder, and the loot is better, but who needs tier 2 loot with BC just around the corner? The only change to that routine in sight was the next patch disabling decursive, and making dispelling magic a lot more hectic for priests. Not something I was looking forward to. Time to take a break.

That doesn't mean I cancelled my account for World of Warcraft. I might still check out the patch, maybe do a little of the "new" PvP (although I guess that the arenas will only be accessible in training mode, because the arena reward system is reserved for level 70 characters), or do some minor preparatory stuff for the expansion. Not sure whether I still want to play my level 63 priest in the BC beta. I just don't want to raid any more. I'll sure be back for the expansion, and that is less than 2 months away.

What I enjoy about DDO is that the playstyle is markedly different from World of Warcraft. Every quest is an instance, and there are a lot more scripted events, jump-climb-and-run parts, switches, puzzles, and the like. As I am still level 1 (there are only 12 levels in DDO, although each has 5 "rank" sub-levels), I didn't try grouping yet. I'll see how that goes a bit later. I choose a cleric for the same reason that I play a priest in WoW: figuring that it would be easier to get an invite. And in the D&D system priests are actually good at soloing, because they can wear heavy armor and heal themselves after the fight. I even got a "celestial dog" summoned pet.

The only trap is assuming that things are the same as in WoW when in fact they aren't. I had great difficulties with a quest where I had to dive through an underwater tunnel, running out of breath far too fast. I searched the potion vendor in vain for a water breathing potion or something. Until I finally looked in the manual and found that I could have breathed a lot longer under water if I had removed my plate armor and heavy shield. There is a certain logic to that, I just didn't think of it because what armor you wear doesn't make a difference to swimming and diving in WoW.

If you happen to play DDO and run into a cleric named Tobold on the Lyrandar server in the next couple of weeks, that's me. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 8:53 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft addon turmoil

While talking about the PvP changes in the WoW 2.0 patch, I totally forgot to talk about the most immediate impact that this patch will have on every player: All your addons will stop working. Or as the official forums say in techspeak: "WoW 2.0 represents a major change in the UI code, and as such ALL AddOns will need to be updated before they will work, if for no other reason than the Lua 5.0 to Lua 5.1 changes. Some AddOns will be more seriously affected, and a few will have to be redesigned." I already experienced that in the beta, if you copy your current addons in the directory of the beta client, they will all show up as "incompatible" on the addon window (you know, the one you get to from the character select screen).

This affect every existing addon, even if it's very simple and doesn't use any of the disabled old functions. I don't know much about the WoW scripting language, but I'd guess that updating the simpler addons will be relatively easy, I've seen discussion about writing a small piece of software that does it. But most people will just download the new 2.0 versions of their favorite addons from places like Curse Gaming or WoWInterface. Of course these sites will be break down under the load next week, so you might have to wait a while before you can download the 2.0 addons.

Some addons won't be immediately available, because they aren't that easy to update to 2.0 and their authors might have abandoned them. You'd either need to switch to another addon doing something similar, or wait until somebody else updates the abandoned addon.

Other addons simply won't exist any more, because their functionality is not supported any more. Basically any addon that made an intelligent decision based on some condition won't work any more. Prime example is Decursive, which was able to look up who is cursed and automatically dispelled the curse on the push of a single button. I don't know if it will be called that, but "Decursive 2.0" won't be able to do that this way. The best thing that it can do in 2.0 is show you a list of everybody who has a curse on him, and you will need to click on their name in that list to dispell the curse.

Bigger addons with lots of functionality will probably have to be rewritten completely. They will have to remove those parts that did any sort of decision, and maybe add some new functions based on the new script commands. For example I use CTRaidAssist, which has a decursing function, which will have to be rewritten.

Generally we can expect a lot of addon chaos next week, but it will calm down after a couple of days, and people will quickly get used to a new set of addons. But if you are an addon junkie, with dozens of them installed, prepare for some major turmoil.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:35 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft PvP v2.0 - New honor and arena system

Found a very informative post on PvP rewards in v2.0. Two important quotes:

1) Entire epic set is 95,500 pts plus 80 AB marks, 50 AV marks & 30 WSG marks.

2) The rough rule that we're using is "10% the honor you used to get." So, think like 500-1000 honor an hour depending on how you play.

You know me, given the data I can't resist doing the math. Especially since this one is so easy: You can get the entire epic set by doing between 100 and 200 hours of PvP in battlegrounds. That is the level 60 PvP reward epic set you previously needed to be rank 13 to get. Now 200 hours is non an insignificant amount of time, but it is *much* less than what you would have previously needed to reach rank 13 and get the same rewards.

So this is my take on the new PvP v2.0 system, as I understand it: There is a non-competitive and a competitive part. I call the battlegrounds and overland PvP part "non-competitive", although it obviously still involves killing other players. But although it is PvP, it works a lot like PvE: your skill only affects the rate at which you earn rewards. A highly skilled player might need only half the time of a player with very little PvP skill to achieve the same reward, but eventually everybody gets there.

The big flaw of PvP v1.0 was that you competed against *your own* faction more than you competed against the people you were killing. If you were the world's most skilled PvP player, with a perfect team that won every battleground, but Real Life ® limited you to playing 4 hours every evening, you would never reach rank 14, because somebody much less skilled than you who played 14 hours a day would gain more honor, and push you down in the relative ranking. If the perfect PvP player with the same 4-hour schedule and the bad-PvP no-lifer with the 14-hour PvP schedule do battlegrounds in PvP 2.0, the no-lifer still gets his complete epic set in less days. But at least the perfect PvP player can get the same reward, and has the satisfaction of getting there in less hours, even if these hours are stretched over a larger amount of days. This is a lot more fair than the previous version.

And then there is the competitive part: arena combat, where if I understood the system correctly, skill counts for more than time spent. Apparently it works a bit like the ELO system in chess: you start with a base rating, and every win increases that rating, while every loss pushes it down. Winning against somebody weaker is worth less points than winning against somebody stronger, but winning will never lose you points, and losing will never win you points. So this is really "competitive" PvP. And the factions, Alliance and Horde, are not involved in arena combat. You can end up fighting against teams from your own side. Pairing is done on a rating basis, the system will try to pair you against an equally strong opponent. But if there is nobody equally strong, the longer you wait in the queue, the wider the rating difference becomes against who you could be paired.

More info on arena combat here. You need to play at least 10 games to get rewards, and you need to participate in at least 30% of the games your team plays. At team can have up to twice as many members as needed, so your team for 2v2 arena fights can have between 2 and 4 players. You can be in one team of every format (2v2, 3v3 and 5v5) at once, and at equal performance the bigger teams will get more arena reward points. Even if you don't play very well, you still will get some arena points, but the difference in the amount of points that the winners will get compared with the losers is a lot wider than in the battleground system. You can't "grind" the arena, because playing 100 games with a 50:50 win:lose ratio is worth exactly the same amount of points than playing 10 games with a 5:5 win:lose ratio. Actually if your team has done 10 arena battles and won them all, it would be hard to gain any more points, unless you count on being paired against better teams and still winning, which would give you more points than just winning against 10 low ranking teams. While the points are given out every week, it seems the arena teams stay together and keep their ranking. They will need to do another 10 games next week to get more points, but starting from an already higher ranking. On the one side such teams have an advantage, starting the week already higher rated. On the other side, if the pairing system works well, these teams will be paired against other high-ranking teams, which makes winning more difficult.

Ideally this will allow "casual" PvP teams to also have some fun and get some arena rewards. They will be crushed by better teams, but then they are ranked lower, and will be paired against other casual PvP players. But that is the *ideal* situation. Now I happen to have played Magic the Gathering Online for years, which has a ladder system for leagues, and I can tell you that pairing is never easy. It is a compromise between how long you want people to have to wait for the start of a game, and how close you want them to be in ranking. If only the best and the worst team are waiting to enter the arena, sooner or later they will be paired against each other, which isn't much fun for either of them. The better team will complain that their win only gave them minimal ranking points, and the bad team will be depressed that they didn't stand a chance.

But if you are a so casual PvP player that you can't show up regularly for a team, arena is not for you. You can still do battlegrounds, and unlike the previous system you won't be penalized for doing PvP only occasionally. And there is a chance that in the battlegrounds you will be paired against the infamous pre-made expert PvP teams less often. After a month or two, a very good PvP team will have achieved all possible battleground rewards, and only the arena will provide even better rewards. So the concentration of casual players in the battlegrounds should be much higher than in the arenas.

I really like these changes a lot. I don't think they will turn me into a hardcore PvP arena champion. But at least I'm more tempted to participate in casual PvP, knowing that I will eventually earn some nice rewards, even if I'm not doing it very seriously. And the people who claimed to be the best PvP players will have an opportunity to prove it in the arenas, where their skill is really going to be measured. Just grinding PvP will only work in the battlegrounds, while in the arena you really need to be good to win and get ranked high.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:45 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Patch date announced

The next World of Warcraft content patch, called "Before the Storm", otherwise known as WoW v2.0, has been announced for next week. The US servers will get the patch on December 5th, the Europeans on December 6th.

If you still PvP this week, and manage to gain another rank, you will get this new rank in your display options. But you won't get the opportunity to buy PvP rewards based on the new rank, because directly after the ranks are updated, the rank system is discarded. Quote: "For those who have been seeking high-rank PvP armor and weapons, note that the new Honor System will still include these item rewards, and it will actually be easier to earn these items under the new Honor System than under the old Honor System. Those who wish to see how their PvP abilities measure up against other players will still be able to do so under the new Arena System."

Well, if you start from zero, the same rewards are easier to earn. But if this week you go from rank 10 to 11, instead of just buying an epic mount for very little gold, you will have to hand in 90 battleground victory marks to get it. Whatever the marketing talk, it is hard to disguise that the patch erases a lot of previous effort.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:40 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Can gold buying be outlawed?

Followup on today's earlier gold farmer post, where Felsir in the comments suggested banning the gold buyers. According to this newspaper there are as many as 500,000 Chinese gold farmers. That is for all MMORPG together, but obviously WoW has a significant market share.

In Blizzards regular gold farmer bannings press releases the usual number of accounts banned is between 60,000 to 80,000, and that is just the accounts that have been found using bots, Blizzard doesn't ban "manual" gold farmers.

Lets do some hypothetical math. Lets assume that WoW has a total of 100,000 gold farmers. Each gold farmer earns $100 per month (see link above). According to the spam tells I keep getting in game, its about 1,000 gold for $50, but I'd say 80% of that is kept by the companies running the gold farms. So each farmer only gets $10 per 1,000 gold, and needs to make 10,000 gold per month to earn his $100. Which means that each month 1,000,000,000 aka 1 billion gold are being sold, for $50 million. Wow!

But now lets look at the buyers. 1,000 gold seems to be a frequently traded amount, so lets assume that a typical buyer buys 1,000 gold per month. But if each gold farmer produces 10,000 gold per month, there must be 10 buyers per seller. So that would make 1 million gold buyers, or 1 in 7 World of Warcraft players.

Blizzard can well afford to ban 80,000 gold farmers. It makes for good publicity. And most of them will be back within a day, so Blizzard isn't actually losing any money from the bannings. As they need to buy a new account key, Blizzard actually *makes* money from these bannings. At $20 per new account, banning 80,000 gold farmers nets Blizzard $1.6 million. Call it a Blizzard tax on gold farming operations.

What Blizzard couldn't possibly afford is to ban the 1 million gold buyers. As these have no commercial interest in playing WoW, and banning would destroy the characters they were willing to invest in, a large percentage of the banned gold buyers would *not* open another account and start over. Blizzard can't afford to lose one seventh of their player base. Especially since we can safely assume that most gold buyers are in the USA or Europe, where Blizzard earns a lot more per month on each account.

Do you know what Blizzard could do to permanently remove at least half of the gold farmers from World of Warcraft? Easy, just decrease the cost for the different levels of riding skills by a factor of 10. Learning to ride an epic non-flying mount should cost 80 gold, not 800. And the epic flying mount 500 gold, not 5000.

True, the gold farmers exist only because there are gold buyers. But the gold buyers exist only because of the money sinks in the game. If there weren't expensive things like epic mounts to buy, and if raiding would net you more gold than the cost of repairs and potions, few people would need to buy gold. And then the gold farmers would be out of a job.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:08 PM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Confusing big with endless

My Draenei mage in the Burning Crusade beta is now level 19, and in the last corner of Bloodmyst Isle, doing the last of the new Draenei quest. When I have done them all, I'll be level 20. But there is a definitive "game over" feeling to that. This being a beta, the character will be erased when the expansion comes out. And while doing all the new quests was fun, there are no new quests between level 20 and 60 in the Burning Crusade. All the quests that my mage could still do I have already done with other characters. There is no fresh content left for him. And that makes me somewhat sad.

But looking at it objectively, that sadness is my own fault, based on a stupid expectation that World of Warcraft had endless content. Of course it hasn't, it just is very big.

By the time my mage hits level 20 and did all the quests in the new starting zones for the Draenei, he will have played over 20 hours. The single-player RPG Fable, which sold well enough, only has 10 hours of gameplay, and there are lots of other games that don't deliver more than 20 hours of content. Playing just one character through his newbie zones is already more content than many single-player games offer. My first level 60 character took 500 hours to level to 60, the next two took about 300 hours each. I don't know which single-player computer RPG is the longest, but the highest numbers I remember reading was 200 hours of gameplay for Baldur's Gate and Oblivion. And in World of Warcraft you can level about 4 characters to 60 without having done too many quests more than once. And that doesn't even begin to count the time you can spend in the more repetitive endgame. A friend of mine just clocked 1 million seconds, that is 118 days or nearly 3000 hours on his main character.

So World of Warcraft is huge, which explains the confusion. We play this for much longer than we would play a single-player game, and World of Warcraft never seems to end. There is always something new around the corner for hundreds and hundreds of hours. So the day when we actually reach the end comes as kind of a shock.

I have done over 95% of all existing quests, many of them twice or even more often. I have seen every corner in every zone, except AQ40 and Naxxramas. I have played every race, and every class to at least level 30, except for the mage who is still level 19. As much as I hate to admit it, the game is basically over, until more content gets added to it in the expansion. Its like turning the last page of the latest Harry Potter book and having the equally unattractive options of waiting for the next volume, or starting over reading the existing books again. I'm a bit at a loss about what to do next, while waiting for the Burning Crusade to come out.

I don't want to start another character, or level up one of my existing mid-level characters, because none of them has quests I haven't done yet, or could go to visit new places. I could raid, but that is getting old, and now that I've been until Nefarian I probably won't be seeing any new bosses for quite some time. I could level up my level 63 priest in the beta further, but that is basically living on borrowed time: The more content of the expansion I "consume" now, the less long will it keep me occupied in the release version. Maybe I should just take a break, install D&D Online or play single-player games until the expansion comes out.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:23 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Inside a gold farm

GigaOm has an article on Chinese gold farms, *yawn*, who hasn't? But it links to two YouTube videos, showing actual footage filmed in Chinese gold farms, from a TV documentary.

One theme of the documentary is "the future of work". The gold farm owner explains that he was in the US and found that a meal or haircut there cost 8 times as much as in China. If he could easily export meals or haircuts, he would make a lot of money. But as these things aren't that easy to export, he turned to the one "service industry" which allowed him to export Chinese labor to the USA. I guess he is paying neither customs nor any form of taxes, which makes that an attractive business.

In a way that gold farm is just a typical example of globalization. Work is done at the cheapest possible location. With the Chinese economy growing so fast, in 10 or 20 years the Chinese will be too rich to do such gold farm works. Meanwhile probably Africa will have acquired enough people with internet access and we'll talk about African gold farms.

The other theme of the documentary is exploitation of the young Chinese guys working in that gold farm "sweat shop". Now that argument I'm not buying. Sure, the gold farm looked not terribly clean, with two dozen people sleeping, eating, and "working" in the same house. But you can't compare that work to an US office job, you'll have to compare it to a job that an unskilled Chinese guy could find in China. I've seen another documentary about Chinese day laborers, most of them working in construction, and the gold farm work looked comparatively paradisiac to that.

In fact I've seen US dorms that looked remarkably similar to that gold farm. I bet if I installed a big table with a dozen computers running WoW in an average US college dorm, after two weeks the place would look exactly like the gold farm in the video. Just with pizza instead of ramen noodles, and the Americans not being paid to play WoW. If the Chinese guys are getting paid to play WoW, and the Americans are paying to play WoW, who is being exploited here?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:15 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Guild management in World of Warcraft

Managing a guild in any MMORPG, whether as guild leader or officer, is hard work, can be pretty stressful, and is often a rather thankless task. Since burning out on a guild leader job in Dark Age of Camelot, which basically ruined the game for me, I have kept my head low and prefer to avoid the responsability. But having been in several guilds in World of Warcraft, I have observed some typical modes of behavior of guild leadership, and I think WoW guilds are somewhat different from guilds in other games.

Over the years, playing so many different MMORPG, I've seen a lot of different guilds and types of guilds. And one type that was slowly developing out of the fact that there are so many more games to play now was the multi-game guild. I've been in an American multi-game guild, which was very nice, and only the inevitable problems of living in different time zones prompted me to leave. I joined an European multi-game guild, just to see it run into major problems with World of Warcraft. And I think the issue here is the underlying purpose of guilds in WoW and other games. Especially with multi-game guilds the purpose of a guild is playing together with friends. It is a lot nicer to move to a new game with a bunch of people you already played with, than to start every time again with a group of strangers. You then can expand your circle of friends and invite some new people, but the people who knew each other the longest form the core of the guild, and are often the guild leaders and officers.

In World of Warcraft the purpose of a guild is a different one: progressing together in the raid circuit. Many casual guilds either develop towards raiding, or have constant problems losing guild members to raiding guilds. Guilds start measuring their success in terms of what the most difficult boss is they can kill. Is your guild "only" killing Venoxis in Zul'Gurub, or are you killing Ragnaros, Nefarian, or even Kel'Thuzad? The original purpose of "playing with friends" becomes lost, and you start valueing people more for playing the right class in the right way than for being nice persons. In previous games to get recruited into a guild I often had to play with them for a while, to see whether I was a good guy and friendly character. In WoW most guilds have some restriction to recruitment based simply on your character class, and tend to ask more questions about what gear you have and what dungeons you are attuned to than verifying whether you are a decent chap.

It is somewhat ironic that World of Warcraft is a game where it is a lot easier to solo to the maximum level, but there are more people guilded in WoW than in other games. Guilds are considered a necessity to advance in the endgame, not an option to play with people you like.

What remains the same is that the guild management is often done by a small group of friends, some inner core of the guild. Guild size is more dictated by the number of people you need for a raid than by social concepts like the Dunbar number. The number of friendly relationships you have is often smaller than the number of people in the guild, so you consider some guild members your friends, while others are just a necessary addition for raiding.

Very often the guild's inner circle is the people that play the most, the people who are at the front of the raiding effort, and most advanced on the raiding circuit. Unsurprisingly loot rules often favor these frequent raiders, so they are also the best equipped. And with the very purpose of the guild being raid advancement, what is "good for the guild" is defined in how it pushes forward the progress of guild raids.

The big downside of that is that people who join the guild later, and are less far advanced than the average guild member, often have a hard time to get integrated. They might be required to have a certain level of equipment or certain attunement quests done to participate in the guild raid events, but at the same time the guild is too busy with the top end howthey *they* got their starting equipment and attunement quests by playing together, and how much harder it is to do the same in pickup groups. The same thing applies to learning how to raid well. When the top raiders of a guild tackled Zul'Gurub or Molten Core for the first time, there was a lot of discussion and learning how to raid together well. Later a newcomer might be able to join a MC raid where the dungeon is cleared out in record time, but without anyone explaining him the tactics. He'll have a better chance to get epic loot, provided everybody else already has most gear from there, but as a learning experience of good raiding that isn't so good. Besides being shouted at when he does something wrong, such a raid is more confusing than teaching him much.

I've seen that again and again how guilds are so concentrated of pushing the front forward that they basically forget about the stragglers coming behind. The worst uber guilds just kick out the people that fall behind. But even the better guilds basically let the newbies fight for themselves, or think that by letting them have an epic from MC they helped them more than enough. But purple loot can't replace the feeling of being part of a community, and new players having to endure pickup groups while the guild is raiding BWL probably don't feel much friendship towards the others. By the time they arrive at being able to raid Zul'Gurub, the guild has probably just decided to not give out any DKP for ZG raids any more, because no officer can be bothered to join these "low level" raids. The gap between players even inside the same guild is growing. And if everything is organized by guild officers that are the guild's top raiders, it is logical that not much thought is spent on the problems of the "lesser" guild members. I've seen some cases where the guild leaders evolved so far ahead of the rest of the guild, that they ended up quitting and leaving the bulk of the guild behind. Or they burned out and quit, with nobody left to take over guild leadership.

My hope is that the Burning Crusade fixes some of these issues. On the one side the smaller number of players per raid should make smaller, more casual guilds viable for raiding. It is a lot easier to know everybody and integrate everybody in a raid guild that only needs 25 people to attend each raid, than if you need 40 of them. For existing guilds, the fact that the Burning Crusade loot easily replaces the previous raid epics makes it possible to close the gap between players and let people newer to the guild catch up with the top raiders and guild officers.

Of course that won't be an easy process. There are a multitude of risks, things that could be managed badly. One very likely problem is that most guilds will keep their loot distribution and DKP system, which is in many cases heavily loaded against newer players. So on their first level 70 raid guilds might end up giving most loot to people who raided the most level 60 dungeons, although the link between having raided level 60 dungeons a lot and contributing to the success of level 70 dungeons is somewhat strenuous. With everybody wearing gear acquired from BC quests and dungeons, why should somebody have priority on level 70 raid loot, just because he went to Molten Core a hundred times? Another probable problem is that level 70 raids could easily be oversubscribed, because the 40 people who raided MC/BWL/AQ40/Naxx together all show up, and only 25 people can raid together now.

A difficult period will be the first weeks after the Burning Crusade comes out. Guilds that used to raid every night will have to somehow replace these large scale guild events with organizing lots of small scale 5-man groups. There is a danger of everybody soloing, and the guild not having any purpose or events left at all, with people drifting apart. And then not everybody will level up at the same rate, with the first level 70s impatiently tapping their feet while waiting for enough others in the guild to level up for raiding.

So I don't envy all these guild leaders and officers, they have a difficult time ahead, managing these massive changes to the previously established guild routines. Some guilds will probably not survive the transition, break up, and reform. But if that ends up grouping more similar people together, maybe that is not such a bad thing. Maybe the current World of Warcraft guilds, operating under the special 40-man raid constraint, are just too big for their own good.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:47 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 27-November-2006

This weekend I spent a lot of hours in Blackwing Lair, raiding the place both Saturday and Sunday afternoon / evening. It was a rather successful duo of raids, killing everything including Chromaggus, and saying hi to Nefarian himself. As I previously had only come until Firemaw, the whole second day was new to me. And even if we haven't killed Nefarian yet, at least I have seen everything in this place now.

My least favorite, and maybe even hardest fight in BWL is the first one, Razorgore. As you need to split your raid in 4 groups, you don't get many options in the class composition of the raid, you basically need every class at least 4 times. That often leads to our BWL raids starting an hour late, until we got everybody together. We promptly wiped on the first try, although we had popped all eggs at that stage, but with nearly all healers dead it was impossible to finish Razorgore off. But after that everybody was fully awake, and on the second try we won easily enough.

Directly afterwards comes my most favorite fight in BWL, Vaelastrasz. I love this fight, because I can do it in silly mode, spamming Holy Nova. That is as effective as Prayer of Healing for group healing, and does a bit of damage to Vael as a bonus. Too bad this spell is only good if you have unlimited mana.

After Vael BWL gets a bit more annoying. Fighting through the suppression room is a bit of a bore, and the Broodlord at the end isn't particularly exciting. And after that, you still need to clear out the remaining mobs in the suppression room.

The next fight, Firemaw, is more exciting, as you need to play with your line of sight, and fight him at a very specific location, with everybody in the raid placed just right. The trash mobs after that are rather nasty, but we got the strategy down good, with some mobs kited away while we kill the others. With that we finished the first day.

On the second day we killed more trash mobs, and the next two dragons, Ebonroc and Flamegor. These are similar to Firemaw, just without the line of sight problem, which makes them easier. Both go down on the first try, so up to now we did all bosses in one shot, except for Razorgore.

So now it's time to try Chromaggus, which the guild has killed only once before. The raid leader says we will do one not-too-serious attempt on him, just for practice and to find out what colors of ability he will be using. We expect to wipe, and then use the knowledge of what abilities he is using to bring him down in the next attempt. But it turns out that Chromaggus abilities this weekend aren't his strongest, and we end up killing him on the first attempt too. Man, we are good!

Lootwise there wasn't much on offer for priests. Only Firemaw dropped something I was interested in, the Black Ash Robe. With its +30 fire resistance it makes a very nice addition to my fire resistance gear. With fire damage still being rather prominent in the first zone and dungeons of the Burning Crusade, FR gear might actually still be useful to collect. I'm not really much interested in getting loot from BWL otherwise, I'm fine wearing 3 pieces of tier 2 and 5 pieces of tier 1 gear.

As an added bonus of my BWL adventures, I got my semi-retired troll warrior to do something he had never done before: Use his alchemy recipes for flasks. On our first BWL day we had just cleared out the place enough so that the alchemy lab in there was accessible without meeting any mobs. And the guild needed flasks of titans for the main tanks. My alchemist warrior has the recipes for flask of the titans and flask of supreme power since over a year now, but never made any of them. Whenever he was in Scholomance at the alchemy lab, he had forgotten to bring his materials. And with me playing nearly exclusively my priest nowadays, he didn't have much opportunity to do Scholomance in the last year. But now it was as simple as getting the materials, being invited by somebody who was saved to the instance, and going in after him. Me and several people from the guild donated materials, and I ended up making 9 flasks of the titans for the guilds raiding efforts. I also made 2 flasks of supreme power for myself, just for fun and because I had the mats in the bank. Obviously not for raiding with a priest, but maybe I'll need them in the Burning Crusade. I don't remember having seen an alchemy lab in the beta, so with the expansion lowering the interest in BWL and Scholomance, I don't know how making flasks will go in the future.

One bottleneck for getting the materials for the flasks was the stonescale eels. So I decided that it was time that my warrior learned fishing. Between raiding, playing some Medieval 2, and playing the BC beta I only managed to get him up to 75 skill this weekend. But I'd rather do this a bit slowly. Fishing is a good activity to relax. Using the tacklebox addon it involves less clicking, and I can read a book while fishing. This is something I always wanted to do with my alchemist, as fish appear in some alchemy recipes, but haven't go around to do. This pre-BC period is a good time to finish all these little projects you never had time for before.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Your worst World of Warcraft decision?

When playing World of Warcraft you have to take a lot of decisions: What server to play on, what character class, what talent build, what guild to join, and many more. And while we'd like to think of ourselves as perfect, given a large enough number of decisions to take, we are sure to get some of them wrong. So to get some discussion going for this weekend, I'd like you to tell your worst World of Warcraft decision. Did you chose a PvP server and hated being ganked? Did you join a guild where you didn't fit in?

My worst World of Warcraft decision was leveling a second priest to 60. Playing the other faction was fun, and chosing a character class that gets easily invited to groups had a certain logic. But of course I should have taken some other popular class, like a druid or mage. Ending up with two level 60 priests was just plain dumb, at level 60 they play too much alike, whether they are Horde or Alliance. The idea of having several level 60s is to have a choice of playing something different, having the choice between two priests wasn't very clever.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:52 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Medieval II - Total War Review

I managed to miss the complete Total War series of games, Shogun, Medieval, Rome, because they were mainly advertised as real-time strategy games, and I prefer turn-based strategy games. But the Total War games always had both a turn-based and a real-time part, and the latest title in the series, Medieval II - Total War (M2TW) improved a lot on the turn-based part. After seeing a video review of the game on the DVD of a computer magazine I bought, I decided that it was time to try this.

I now played my first grand campaign, leading England from just three provinces to ruling all of England, Scotland, and Ireland, plus controlling the continental coast from Rennes to Hamburg. That already took a whole day of playing, and I think I'll stop that particular campaign there and restart with other settings.

The turn-based part of M2TW plays a bit like Heroes of Might and Magic, with some similarities to Civilization: You start out with some cities that produce both money and troops. You can construct buildings in these population centers to either increase your income, or to build more and better troops. You have heroes, known as "generals" in this game, which can gather the troops into armies to attack other armies, or to conquer more population centers. Thus your empire expands. You also have diplomats, merchants, priests, spies, assassins, and princesses. These "agents" walk over the same turn-based map to perform different functions, adding a bit of spice to the conquering game.

When your army gets into a fight with another army, you have the choice of either letting the computer calculate the result automatically, or fighting a real-time strategy battle. The RTS battles are simple enough, there is no building of bases or anything, both sides just fight with the troops that met on the turn-based map. This being a game about medieval warfare, your troops are archers, spearmen, and cavalry, in many different types. In the RTS battle you try to maneuver your troops in such a way that you gain some advantage by having local superiority, hitting the enemy at his weakest spot, outflanking him, and fighting his troops with the troops he is weakest against. For example spearmen are strong against cavalry, while cavalry can easily trample down archers. Archers can rain arrows on the spearmen, and if the spearmen break formation and run after the archers, they become vulnerable against cavalry attacks. Add the effects of terrain, weather, and in the case of sieges city walls and towers, and you get a wide variety of possible battles.

I really like Medieval 2 - Total War. The mix of turn-based and real-time strategy plays very well. The turn-base game has events and missions, giving you some guidance and direction. And with your agents roaming the map on different tasks, from diplomacy to strengthening your influence with the pope, you get a lot more than a simple build-and-conquer game. The real-time strategy battles are quite fun, once you got the hang of it. Before my first battles I saved the game, and replayed the same battle several times to learn what works and what doesn't. But later I just went ahead, and accepted the occasional setback, they usually aren't life-threatening.

The part I am not totally happy with is the user-interface, controls, and automated management on the turn-based map. You can move every character (general or agent) only a limited distance per turn, just like you would expect from other turn-based games. But unlike other games there apparently is no button to cycle to the next unit that hasn't moved yet. You have a button to cycle through all of your units, but every time you find one that hasn't acted yet and move him, the list resets and you start cycling through the same units again. You can't set a unit to "don't bring this unit up again this turn", as in other games. And the order in which the units are cycled through isn't totally logical either. I ended up using the list scrolls to cycle through all my units, but these need a couple of clicks to open, and then you see three lists: generals, settlements, and agents, through which you can click to check for characters that still haven't moved yet. As the list takes up half of the screen, you end up playing on just the other half. I don't know if I missed some keyboard shortcuts, nothing is mentioned in the manual, or whether this functionality is just badly designed.

The AI automanagement I know how to fix, but I will need to start over with a new campaign to do so. In the default setting you can control construction and recruitment only in cities which have a general as a governor present. Unfortunately your number of generals is limited to male members of the royal family, that is your king's sons or brothers, plus the husbands of your princesses, and sometimes you get the opportunity to adopt somebody. But in total your number of generals is usually lower than your number of cities and castles. I tried to play it with this default setting, having some generals wander from city to city to act as governors and set construction, with other generals leading the armies into battle. But it soon turned out that I also needed generals to transport troops between cities. You *can* move troops without a general, but if they can't make the move in one turn, they end up standing around being led by a "captain" with no stats. And there is a chance that this captain is disloyal and the whole stack of troops goes over to the rebels. Then your troop transport ends up creating a big rebel army in the middle of your territory, which is quite disrupting. So I used my generals to transport troops, which left lots of cities without a governor for several turns. Then it turned out that the AI which controls these cities with no governor is a bit paranoid, and starts recruiting massive amounts of spearmen for defence, even in the most secure locations. You can turn that off, but only manually, and you have to think of turning it off again every time a general enters the city and leaves again. So I am going to restart, and set the starting option of being able to govern cities without a general present, because the recruitment and upkeep cost for the thousands of useless spearmen the AI built for me was killing me. Fortunately this is a problem easily fixed in the campaign start options.

My last little niggle is with the merchants, whose role it is to sit on a resource on the campaign map to create income. So most of the time they don't do anything, unless another merchant arrives who wants to take over the same resource. That isn't very exciting. And the exact effect of having the merchant sit on that resource is hard to figure out. When you click on him he tells you he is creating X florins per turn of income, but the number seems to vary frequently, going up and down for no apparent reason. And the relationship between the merchants and the trade building you can construct in your cities isn't obvious, not even on the city trade screen. I never found out whether these merchants really were a good investment, as they aren't cheap to recruit.

But besides from these minor complaints, the game is very much fun and has a lot of depth, both strategically and economically. You can transform your castles into cities and vice versa, which is very interesting. Cities generally bring better income, while castles give better troops, and have better defensive walls and structures. But transformation costs some money, and destroys the buildings that the new type of settlement can't have, so you better decide whether you want a city or castle when the settlement is still small. Balancing your economics with your troops is an interesting task: If you would build only cities and money-making buildings, your empire won't expand, and you risk being attacked. If you only build castles and recruitment buildings, you soon are broke. Finding the good balance is a nice challenge.

The real-time strategy battles are fun too. You can try varying tactics, using the terrain to your advantage. Nevertheless it is good that you have the option of letting the battle result be calculated instead of playing it out, because fighting out every battle isn't worth it, especially if your troops are far superior in strength. I also ended up putting most siege battles on automatic. Breaching the walls with rams, ladders, and siege towers is fun enough. But inside the city combat takes mostly place in the streets, which aren't very broad and don't allow much maneuvering. So the fighting in the streets, until you conquer the plaza, resembles more a brawl than a battle, and your options for fiddling with the tactics are limited. You definitely should do it a couple of times to get the hang of it, but running it automatically doesn't produce much worse results.

Medieval II - Total War also has a multiplayer part of the game, but this is limited to the real-time battles. I wasn't much interested in that, and didn't try it. For me the single-player turn-based campaign game is the main attraction of M2TW. Of course your mileage may vary, and maybe you like the multiplayer battles more than the single-player campaign. When I play RTS battles against the computer, I enjoy the possibility to pause the game to give orders, or to speed up the time when nothing interesting is happening. I don't think that would work in a multiplayer battle. You can have up to 8 players in M2TW multiplayer battles, but I wouldn't consider this to be the strong point of the game. If you like the battles more than the campaign, but don't have other players to battle against, you can also fight historic or random battles against the computer.

Graphically the game is pretty enough. It ran smoothly on my computer, Pentium 4 640 3.2 GHz, 2 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX, which is "last years model", but on the more expensive end of the scale. M2TW has an autodetect function, which adjusts graphical settings to the power of your computer. On my computer the autodetect decided to turn off the anti-aliasing, so I see some jagged edges, and I'm only running on 1024 x 768 resolution. For maximum prettyness you would need a dual core processor and one of this year's high-end graphics cards, which wouldn't come cheap.

Winning M2TW isn't too difficult, at least not on the easy setting I tried for my first campaign. I'll try a medium difficulty setting for the next one. Another setting I'm going to change is the campaign length, I had chosen to fight until conquering 45 provinces, which would have taken far too long. Normally I would prefer to just play the long campaign, whether I finish it or not. But in M2TW winning campaigns unlocks new factions. From the 17 playable factions only 5 are accessible initially, the others have to be unlocked by winning campaigns. Or you could just cheat and edit the data\world\maps\campaign\imperial_campaign\descr_strat.txt text file to unlock the other factions.

The long campaign might be interesting, because apparently if you play long enough you get the option to discover America and conquer the new world, battling against the Aztecs. I'll try a short campaign playing Spain next, and maybe after "winning" I get the option to play on, which would be nice.

I think I'll be spending quite a number of hours playing some more of this game. Of course no single-player game has as many hours of gameplay as a MMORPG, but M2TW will still keep me occupied for some time. I've read some people complaining that if you have already played Rome - Total War, the Medieval 2 version didn't bring that many new things, being more an evolution than a revolution. But as I haven't played the predecessor, for me Medieval II - Total War is fresh and fun. Recommended.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:20 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Playing other games

It is not always easy to buy last year's PC games. If they have been a big hit, you might still find them in the bargain bin for half price, or in a cheap "gold" edition. But the less successful games simply disappear. So when I see a game I think I would like, I tend to buy it *now*, even if I know I'm currently busy with another game and will only be able to play it later. After over 2 years with World of Warcraft, I accumulated a lot of these games which I bought but never played. Time to devote them some attention.

I'm not quitting World of Warcraft, but until the Burning Crusade expansion comes out, I'll tone it down a bit, not playing every day any more. I always tended to raid mostly on the weekends, and I can still do that. But instead of spending every weekday in WoW soloing or doing smaller groups, I want to play some other games for the moment. And if I play WoW, it will mostly be exploring the beta a bit more.

I have three level 60 characters, and I don't feel like leveling up another through the same old content I already know by heart. Playing the level 60 characters solo doesn't make much sense, with the knowledge that expansion is just around the corner. Why do some endless grind for little reward if the Outlands offer much greater rewards for much less effort? Whatever gear I acquire now will be obsolete at level 65 anyway. I'd still like to do some more raiding, not for the loot, but for hanging out with the guild and having fun. But of course that depends on whether the other guild members still want to raid. I'll see how this develops over the next couple of weeks, before the Burning Crusade kick-starts us all again.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:50 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Measuring World of Warcraft burnout

I'm getting a bit tired of World of Warcraft myself, waiting for the Burning Crusade expansion which will renew my interest. I observe a certain amount of WoW burnout in my guild. I read blog entries and "I quit" posts on the forums. All of which is just anecdotal evidence, and no indication of the health of the game. The number of people quitting isn't really relevant, the health of the game depends on the difference between the number of people joining and the number of people leaving. So how do we measure whether there is a general burnout of World of Warcraft players in this pre-expansion time?

Reliable information in this case comes from an unexpected source: the stock market. Blizzard is just a small division of a large media conglomerate, Vivendi Universal, and Vivendi doesn't have to inform investors about every little movement in the WoW player base. But The9 Ltd, a publicly traded Chinese company, which runs World of Warcraft in China, gets 99% of their income from that game. Thus investors demand, and get, very detailed information on how the game is going. And the CEO of The9 Ltd just had to announce that in the third quarter of 2006 players in China played 10% less World of Warcraft than in the previous quarter. Quote: "The fall in revenue comes as long-term users begin to desert the aging game in China."

Seeing how the game in China has been running for less long than in the USA and Europe, while being better advertised, we can be reasonably sure that a similar World of Warcraft burnout is happening in the rest of the world. Of course everybody expects that decline to reverse when the Burning Crusade expansion finally comes out. But ideally a game company would release the expansion *before* the people are getting bored and leave. And in China the expansion won't be out in January, as Blizzard is still negotiating about getting a bigger share of the revenue from The 9 Ltd.

Blizzard really needs to work a bit faster and harder if they want to keep their customers in the game for the next couple of years.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:01 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Going Medieval

I was in the USA, in an EB Games store, on the day Medieval II Total War came out. But some bloke at the warehouse had forgotten to load the box on the truck, and so I didn't get the game there. And I didn't get another opportunity to buy the game in the US, there being no shops selling PC games on any of the airports I passed through.

Back home I found an e-mail from Fileplanet in my mailbox, offering Medieval II as downloadable full version from their Direct2Drive store. $49.95, the same price as the boxed version would have cost. Hmmm, should I buy that? To make that decision I first downloaded and played the demo, liked the demo, and thus decided to buy the game. Headed to Fileplanet, went through the usual steps of buying things online, and hit a wall: Medieval II is only sold to people in the USA, Canada, and Mexico. Doh! Why that? The game has been released in Europe already, why shouldn't the downloadable version be available for Europe?

So I ended up buying Medieval II in the boxed version from Amazon UK. Pretty much the same price, except for the added cost of shipping. Ordered the game on the weekend, received it yesterday. Only got around to install it and play the tutorial, I'll play it more over the coming days and will post a review in a week or two.

But the story got me to think about the difference between buying a game as download and buying it on a CD/DVD in a box. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages.

The big advantage of downloading a game is that it makes impulse buying possible. You decide to buy and do it immediately. If you have a decent broadband connection, you'll have the game up and running within hours. The disadvantage is that you don't get the game in any physical form. If you don't do a backup of the game and/or the email with the download link and registration key, and your hard drive crashes, you lose your purchase. But if you know that, and you are a careful person, you can easily make a backup of the games you downloaded to a DVD.

Of course you could still get into trouble, depending on the copy protection scheme the game uses. People who bought the shooter Prey from a download service named Triton recently found that they couldn't play the game any more. The service had gone bust, their servers were down, and the game only runs after verifying with the server that it is a legit copy. No server, no game. Fortunately the game's distributor 2K Games are offering a replacement, shipping boxed copies of the game to the people affected. Nevertheless that provided a pointed reminder of the dangers of buying game downloads.

If you buy a boxed copy of a game, you have the game in a physical form, and unless you scratch the disc or your dog chews it, you'll be able to reinstall it if ever your hard drive crashes. You also get the game's manual in physical form instead of just a .pdf file.

The downside is that you'll either have to drive to a shop to buy the game, or wait a few days for a mail-ordered copy to arrive. And then again you can have problems with the copy protection. In the worst case the game decides not to run on your machine, due to some incompatibility of the copy protection scheme with your computer. Or the game installs a copy protection program like Starforce on your PC, which ends up making your computer slower or instable. But the most common copy protection is the game forcing you to insert the disc every time you want to play it.

Now I've been around long enough to remember computers without hard drives. Whatever software you wanted to run, you first needed to insert the disc, a floppy at that time. Most software has advanced far from this stage, nobody needs to insert an Office disc into a drive to start Word or Excel. Only games are still backwards like that, forcing you to keep your collection of discs close to the computer, and start searching for the right disc whenever you want to play another game. The one advantage of MMORPG is that they don't need that sort of copy protection. And while swapping discs on a desktop PC is just annoying, it gets worse if you want to play on a laptop. Your laptop's hard drive might have enough room to have dozens of games installed. But do you really want to lug all those game discs with you?

I am one of the most "legit" people I know when it comes to copyright, I don't pirate "warez" games, nor music or films. I buy the games I want to play. But sometimes you can find me surfing on evil hacker sites, just to download a no-CD crack, which enables me to play the games I legally bought without having to insert the disc every time. Stupid. I really think the game companies should come up with something else, like an online registration of the game, which verifies that you are the legal owner of the game, and then modifies the files on your hard drive to run only on that particular PC, but without a disc in the drive.

So in the end I prefer the downloadable version of a game to the boxed version. I can live without the printed manual, I can make a physical backup copy of the game, and then the advantage of not needing a disc makes the downloadable version more attractive to me. Now I just need to find a store that sells downloadable games to Europeans.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:07 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Non-addictive MMORPG

Recently Second Life hit the 1 million registrations mark. But according to Terra Nova the number of peak concurrent users is just below 10,000. The high number of registrations is due to registration being free. Presumably a lot of people try Second Life once, and never come back. The ratio of "subscribers" to active users during peak time is 100 to 1 for Second Life.

Now I don't have really good data on the peak concurrent users of World of Warcraft. The number is only reported for China, where peak concurrent users for WoW just hit 630,000, out of 5 million "subscribers". As the total number of subscribers of WoW is now 7.5 million, I'd estimate the total peak concurrent user number for WoW to be 1 million. But even if we take a much more conservative estimate of 750,000, the ratio of subscribers to active users during peak time is 10 to 1 for World of Warcraft. When WoW came out in the USA, during the holiday season of 2005, it had 600,000 subscribers and 200,000 peak concurrent users, a ratio of 3 to 1, but of course we can expect the enthusiasm to have gone down since then.

So why is a World of Warcraft subscriber at least 10 times more likely to be found actually playing the game than a Second Life subscriber? Is that proof that WoW is highly addictive, while Second Life is a non-addictive MMORPG?

I think the answer is much simpler, the business model is different. If you pay for a monthly subscription, it doesn't make much sense not to play. If the subscription is free, you only play when you really want to. Second Life has less than 30,000 paying customers, the landowners. The ratio of paying customers to paying peak users is probably much better than 100 to 1.

But whether we call it addiction or we call it by any other name, it is also likely that World of Warcraft is more "attractive" than Second Life. Given both an WoW account and a SL account for free, most gamers would end up playing World of Warcraft and more or less ignore Second Life. While people (including me) love to complain about the shortcomings of World of Warcraft, it isn't as if Second Life wouldn't have its troubles. The BBC reports SL problems with self-replicating worms, server outages, and copybots. And among people frequenting virtual worlds, MMOs like World of Warcraft with a large game component have consistently been more popular than MMOs like Second Life, which offer more of a world to hang out, and less of a game.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:55 PM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Lost content?

In a recent comment here, Shalkis remarked that the Burning Crusade expansion would make a lot of the existing level 60 content useless. Hellfire Rampart is not harder to beat than lets say Scholomance, you could even say it's easier, because the dungeon is shorter. But the loot in the new dungeons is significantly better than the loot in the old dungeons. So except for special tradeskill items, like righteous orbs or dark runes, there is no reason to visit the old level 60 dungeons any more.

Now veteran players won't mind. We visited Scholomance a hundred times and won't be sorry to never see it again. But new players join World of Warcraft every day, and there will be people reaching level 60 for the first time only after the expansion has come out. And they will quickly realize that the Outland dungeons are significantly more profitable than the old world dungeons.

Similar things hold true for some other level 60 activities. PvP won't really be affected, as you can use the honor points and victory marks you earn at level 60 to buy level 70 gear. But who would for example do the incredibly difficult tier 0.5 upgrade quest when he can do simple level 60 quests in Hellfire Peninsula which give much better green gear as rewards? And if you can level up further, why would you want to spend a lot of time grinding faction, for example doing the field duty quests in Silithus?

So what do you think? Will there be a big part of the previous level 60 content unused after the expansion comes out?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:01 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Traveling with the laptop

Last weeks trip to the USA was my first big trip with the new Dell XPS M1210 laptop. I used to travel with a 15.1" medium-sized laptop (Dell Inspiron 6000), which was still rather bulky and heavy to lug around. The new 12" laptop was a lot easier to handle and lighter to carry. And the 3" less screen diagonal make surprisingly little difference for working and playing.

The new laptop has more RAM, a much faster CPU, and a better graphics card, resulting in a 3DMark05 score of just over 2000, more than twice as good as the previous laptop. That means that World of Warcraft runs perfectly without me having to turn down the graphics settings. And it turns out that running WoW over a hotel room internet access isn't a problem, although that probably depends on the quality of your hotel's internet access. In fact, as I was playing the Burning Crusade beta, it turned out that the European beta servers are actually in the US, and my latency was lower in an US hotel room than at home in Europe.

The only thing that wasn't working was watching DVDs on my new laptop, they were stuttering in both video and audio. Hey, didn't I have that same problem before on my old laptop? Unfortunately, while the symptoms were very similar, the solution wasn't the same. The IDE channel was well set to DMA, not PIO. So I started trying to fix it in other ways. I installed new video and audio drivers. I uninstalled the Dell Media Experience and installed another DVD player with another DVD codec. I searched for new drivers for the DVD drive, but couldn't find any. Nothing helped. The troubleshooting wizard on the Dell site suggested "trying with a known good drive", but where would I get a known good drive on a business trip?

Back home I still had the old laptop (I plan to give it away for christmas), so that one has a known good drive. I found out how to remove drives on a laptop, which is remarkably easy, they are held with just one screw and then slide out and in. But the known good drive, while looking the same size as the not working one, somehow had a slightly larger front panel. While I was able to fit it into the new laptop, the tray was stuck and wouldn't open. So I did the next best thing, and tried the non-working drive on the old laptop. Surprise, surprise, it worked. So I put it back into the new laptop, and even greater surprise, now its working.

I'm not quite sure how switching the drives and then switching them back did fix the problem. But I have two theories: Either the problem was the DVD drive not being plugged in perfectly. When removing it and putting it back, I somehow managed to plug it in better, so now it works. Or, second theory, by switching the drives and turning the laptops on, Windows Plug&Play reinstalled the drivers for the DVD drive, and that was all it needed. No wonder people also call it Plug&Pray.

Anyway, now I have a perfectly working new laptop, which is lighter, easier to transport, more powerful, and does everything I want. I'm quite satisfied. I just wish sometimes I knew more about fixing computers. I usually manage to fix the problem somehow, but that is on a trial and error basis. My desktop PC still has the odd blue screen crash once in a blue moon, and sometimes fails to start. But as the problem only happens rarely, and isn't reproducible, fixing it is very hard.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:25 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft Burning Beta

Generally I support public betas as a good marketing move, besides obvious testing purposes. Just like a free trial, a beta which invites a large number of people can produce a lot of positive hype, provided the game is any good. Having said that, I think that the Burning Crusade beta is a flaming disaster for World of Warcraft. A mix of bad timing of the beta and bad end-game design of the original game is driving more people away than it attracts.

The bad timing is due to the delay of the expansion release to January. Inviting a large number of people to an unfinished beta three months before release is not a good idea, especially without an NDA.

The bad end-game design of the original World of Warcraft has always been with us. At level 60 the normal flow of the game stops, and is replaced by a variety of alternative activities, like grinding faction, PvP, or raiding, all of which have a much lower reward to effort ratio than leveling up and questing. You can still improve your character, but it will cost you a lot of time, and in the case of raiding a huge organizational effort. Now that is not unusual for an end-game, most MMORPG work this way. But all the information coming out of the beta makes is blindingly obvious that the huge effort we put into the level 60 activities will be wasted shortly after the expansion comes out. By end of February most people will have fully replaced all their shiny epics with Burning Crusade green and blue gear. They will also have replaced all their PvP reward gear, their PvP rank will have gone up in smoke, and their PvP factions won't be used for anything any more. Other factions they might have grinded will have become pretty much obsolete.

With the motivation from the rewards falling away, many people start asking themselves why they are doing this end-game. If you raid or PvP or grind because it is fun, everything is fine. If you don't really like it, and just do it because of the rewards or because there isn't anything else to do, the knowledge of the Burning Crusade beta is a big drain on motivation.

Especially raid guilds have always been an uneasy alliance between people who actually like getting wiped repeatedly for 6 hours in a big group of 40 people, and others who are just there for the epics, or because they couldn't find anything better to do. Hands up everybody who is in a raid guild and who noticed a declining participation in raids over the last couple of weeks. My guild has some people openly refusing to go raiding any more, citing the Burning Crusade as a reason. Others don't give a reason, but simply don't show up for raids. Even the people who enjoy raiding, which includes me to a certain extent, are getting frustrated with signing up for BWL raids that never start due to lack of participation, or Molten Core raids which go a lot less smoothly than before, due to many experienced raiders missing. Whether you raid for loot or for fun, at some point you have seen enough of Molten Core.

Curiously while lots of people have been invited to the beta, and more invitations are being sent out all the time, the beta servers are pretty empty. In the beta of a new game you can create a character and learn a lot about how the game works. Although you know that your beta character will be deleted, at least you feel you gained a lot of useful knowledge for the release version. You can also experiment with different character classes and see which one you would like to take for the real game. Playing a copy of your original level 60 character in the Burning Crusade beta is a lot less attractive. You already know how to play him. You gain some knowledge of new zones, quests, and dungeons, and you can experiment with the new talents. But that isn't really enough to keep you busy for 3 months. And the release of the Burning Crusade expansion will then feel like a big roll-back, where your same character gets thrown back to 60 and will have to do everything again. After first proposing ready-made level 60 characters, Blizzard changed their mind and only allowed copies of existing characters in the beta. Thus you can't for example try a level 60 character of a class you didn't play yet.

Lots of people visited the beta as tourists, had a look around, explored a couple of quests and the new instances, and then stopped. Especially the big increase in xp requirements for leveling discouraged a lot of people from playing the beta to 70. Even if you get there, it will be difficult to find enough people to explore the level 70 raid content. So the beta had the curious effect of making people want to play neither the expansion beta, nor the pre-expansion real game. Most of them will be back for the Burning Crusade release, but right now the beta is rather causing a low point in World of Warcraft, and not the hoped-for hype.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:26 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Columbus airport

I'm back at my favorite airport again, Columbus, Ohio. Not very big, but modern, clean, and always equipped with the latest technology. I especially like the free wireless access here, of course.

The latest novelty is an e-play kiosk. That is a machine with basically a big hard drive and a DVD writer. The machine is operated via a touch screen, from which you can search or browse for hundreds of movies stored on the hard drive. If you find one you like, you can pay between $10 and $20, depending on how new the film is, and get it burned on a DVD.

The choice wasn't all that great yet, and I didn't find anything I liked. But this is definitely a glimpse of the future. The limitation up to now seems to be the hard drive, which limits the number of DVDs on offer. Now imagine hyper-fast broadband connections, a huge central server with every DVD in existance stored on it, and customers being able to download and burn any DVD they want. Another long tail opportunity.

Well, another 2 hours before my plane goes. And then I have to switch planes to get home to Europe, arriving tomorrow morning. I think before I'll visit another of my favorite features of the Columbus airport: A & W All American Food, a burger shop "with a retro feel", as they say. Good burgers, and draft root beer. Can't get that back home in Europe.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:41 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
The view from the bottom

I just bought the 6th season of CSI on DVD. If I neglected my job and family, not to talk of other hobbies, hygiene, and good eating habits, I could possibly watch all 6 seasons in one week. Add the CSI Miami and CSI New York DVDs, and I can watch everything in 2 weeks. If I decide to still go working 8 hours a day, doing just the minimum for not losing my job, but still neglecting everything else, it will take me a month to watch all these DVDs. And then I could just start over, watch them for another month, and another month, until I can't stand CSI any more and stop watching. Should I then write an interesting blog post like "The View from the Top stating that CSI is a dangerous addiction from which I have been miraculously cured? Or is CSI a totally harmless form of entertainment, which I abused due to some personal psychological problem?

While I haven't heard much about CSI addiction, I'm always surprised how many people go for the "dangerous addiction" option when discussing World of Warcraft. I think that is part of a more general trend of blaming all sorts of problems on others, never admitting that it might be yourself who has a problem. Got fat? Sue McDonalds. Lost your wife and job? Blame World of Warcraft. Makes you wonder when the first law suit against Blizzard will arrive.

That is not to say that people overdoing World of Warcraft don't exist. But if WoW wasn't there, the same person would search to escape from the real world in some other way, be it TV, books, or video games. So we should offer these people help in the form of counselling for escapism, not shouting for warning labels on World of Warcraft boxes.

Millions of casual World of Warcraft players are enjoying this game in healthy doses. There isn't a threshold how many hours of WoW are suddenly an addiction. You need to know yourself how many hours of leisure time you have, after taking care of your family, your job, your friends, and whatever else is important to you. That totally depends on your personal circumstances, for example I'm sure I'd play a lot less if I had children. Real addictive substances don't have such a safe level.

The term "addiction" suggests that WoW is a dangerous substance, you try it once and are drawn into it against your will. Nothing could be further from the truth. World of Warcraft is just a lot of fun, and it is your free-willed decision whether you want to enjoy that fun with or without neglecting the rest of your life. The proof that it isn't an "addiction" lies in all these miraculous "cures", all these people that claim they were addicted and now stopped. Do you think people addicted to lets say heroin cure themselves that easily? What happens in reality, just like in my CSI example, is that the more you exaggerate consuming World of Warcraft content, the faster you burn out. At one point the game simply isn't fun any more, because you've seen too much of it. Classic MMORPG burnout. No miracle cure of a modern addiction here.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:40 PM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Playing a mage in World of Warcraft

My Draenei mage in the BC beta is level 12 now, and I am beginning to like the class. I never played a mage above level 10. I once played a troll mage to level 10, but didn't really like the class at that time. But that was much earlier, when I did know a lot less about the game, and my main was a warrior. Since then I leveled 2 priests to 60, and soloing a priest is not totally unlike soloing a mage, at least at the very low levels.

The secret of playing a very low-level priest or mage is using a wand as early as possible, which is level 5. The level 5 wand that an enchanter can make is very powerful compared to a caster melee weapon, like a staff. And in the early levels you often don't have enough mana and spells to kill a mob without using a weapon. Of course that is more true for a priest than for a mage. But even a mage can get into situations where he runs out of mana, or he wants to conserve mana. A wand at these low levels has a damage output comparable to typical damage spells, doesn't use any mana, and can't be interrupted.

But the more spells I get with my mage, the less I use the wand, while my priests used their wands up to level 60. Mages have better crowd control, in the form of the polymorph spell, and the frost nova freezing the enemy to the ground. And they are missing the power word shield which makes using the wand as a priest such a good option.

I start the combat from maximum distance with a frost bolt. Fireball has a slightly higher range, if I use the fireball first, the mob runs towards me at full speed for some time, before I can get the frostbolt off. So I prefer frostbolt first, fireball next. By now the mob is close enough for the instant cast fire blast. When the mob reaches me, I have several options. If he is already nearly dead, I finish him off with the wand. If he still a good amount of life, now is the time to freeze him with a frost nova, and step back out of his melee range. Then I can kill him from a distance with a big fireball, or some other spell.

I tried arcane missiles, a channeled spell that shoots 3 arcane missiles over 3 seconds. But I would have thought that it would shoot one missile per second. But to me it seems that first nothing happens for 2 seconds, and then in 1 second I get all 3 missiles shortly one after another. I also don't see any channeling bar to tell me where I am with this spell, which makes it a bit confusing. Not sure if this is working as intended, or a beta bug, or just lag. The fireball rank 3 I got at level 12 seems to be both faster and more mana efficient. I put my first talent points into making the fireball even faster, I was under the impression that "fire mage" was a good option for soloing.

I also got Dampen Magic at level 12. Hmmm, I might be tempted to use that one against spellcasting enemies. In a group this spell isn't that good, because it also reduces the power of healing spells cast on me, but I don't think it affects healing potions.

The ability to make food and water is useful, but not really earth-shattering. Annoyingly you only get the spell to make a particular level of water 5 levels after you could buy and use that water, so at level 10 I got the spell to make level 5 water. In the pre-BC World of Warcraft mages at level 60 could do a quest to get a spell to make conjured crystal water, which is better than the best available vendor-sold water, morning glory dew. But the expansion introduces much better high-level water, far superior to the conjured crystal water. Maybe the time where mages are commonly being referred to as "water boys" are over? People were assuming the mage talent tree looks like this:


We will have to see how the level 70 water spell looks in comparison to the level 65 vendor-sold water.

I'm looking forward to getting my first real area of effect damage spell at level 14. Technically frost nova is AoE as well, but you can't spam it, it has a long cooldown. But with the arcane explosion I get at level 14, I can experiment with killing large numbers of lower level mobs with AoE. Sounds like fun.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:23 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Travel journal - 17-November-2006

Oh the joys of air travel! My flight back home got cancelled due to bad weather. I got booked onto another flight for tomorrow, so instead of being back home on Friday afternoon, I'll only return Saturday morning.

Used the courtesy phone to find a hotel near the airport, where I could stay for the night. No problem, the Marriott hotel I called said they had a room and they would send a shuttle. The shuttle never came, so after 45 minutes I took a taxi instead. Arriving at the Marriott the receptionist told me that they were overbooked, and sent me across the street to a Courtyard Marriott. So finally I got a room.

In spite of these problems I usually like to stay in Marriotts, because they have free high-speed internet access in every room. Just that in this room there was no ethernet cable. I go back to the front desk, where the receptionist was chatting with the cleaning lady. I ask for an ethernet cable, and the cleaning lady has one in the pocket of her apron. Wow, I'm impressed. I'm not sure a cleaning lady in an European hotel would even know what an ethernet cable is, much less have a spare one in her pocket.

So I'm all set up for another night in the USA. Fortunately I'm a pessimist (or in this case realist) regarding travel, and alway pack an extra set of underwear. You never know when you might need it.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:09 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
This blog is now required reading

Sometimes I check out what sites link to this blog, because usually sites that link to here are about MMORPG games, and thus interesting to me. But my latest link discovery nearly caused me to fall from my chair, I was laughing so hard. The link came from the University of Minnesota. I'm the last link (of just 4) in the required reading material for the week of November 14, labeled "discussion of issues in MMORPGs". This is for the Fall 2006 course "Creating the Social Web" of the IT Labs in the Computer Science & Engineering department.

I find that extremely silly. I'm just an ordinary bloke playing computer games and writing about them. And suddenly some professor is sending his students to read my blog as an example for "the Social Web"? This Web 2.0 craze is getting ridiculous. What's next? Google buying my blog for $50 million? (Hey, I'd take the money.)
- posted by Tobold @ 12:28 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
Free advertising for gold guides

Read my usual Google Alert on World of Warcraft today, which alerted me to one blog post by a guy named Gitr, titled Gitr hits it big-time. He says "I have finally made an impact somewhere. I got an invitation to review a gold guide by a fellow who saw that I was bragging about how well I do with my auctions and getting gold using my normal methods. I have a reviewer account to give this site’s methods a whirl and see if I see an improvement."

I probably wouldn't even have noticed such an entry, if I hadn't just received probably exactly the same invitation by the same gold guide seller. I wasn't going to take him up on that offer. And seeing that he sent the same flattering words to every WoW blogger out there doesn't make me think any higher of him. :)

You might think I'm strange, but I do think that people selling guides how to earn gold in WoW quickly are worse than people selling that gold directly. That is because the information how to earn gold in World of Warcraft can be learned from lots of free websites. So gathering free information and selling it on seems disreputable to me. Especially since the guy needed to collect the information only once, and can sell it to other people many times. A gold farmer, if he isn't using a bot or dupe, can only sell the gold he farmed once, that is he is selling some sort of "work". A gold guide seller is selling stolen intellectual property. Of course Blizzard would argue that WoW gold is their intellectual property and that a gold farmer is selling stolen intellectual property as well, but that argument never convinced me.

My advice: Don't buy any guides how to earn WoW gold quickly, nor guides how to level quickly. Half an hour of search with Google will probably get you the same information for free. These people do *not* have any secret information for sale which would make you a WoW gold millionaire with little effort. Most of the hints are of the "buy cheap, sell expensively in the AH" type, which are easier said than done. And if there are places where gold can be earned faster than in other places, you can be sure that the gold farmers know about it, and are already camping that spawn, making the information about that place worthless.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:43 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
US shopping

I did some more shopping during my US visit, got the CSI season 6 DVD that came out today. EB hadn't gotten their delivery of Medieval II Total Wars, so I took that as a sign that I should better play the demo first, and bought Neverwinter Nights 2 instead. I also bought some trousers. It will surprise you when I tell you that I'm not usually a shopping type of guy. Why the shopping spree?

I earn my salary in Euros. Five years ago from today one Euro would have bought me 88 US cents. Today it buys me $1.28. Some readers recently mentioned real wages. In Euro terms my real wages have gone up by about 10 percent over the last 5 years, less than 2 percent per year (which still isn't so bad). In dollar terms my wages have gone up by over 50%, nearly 10% per year. When I stand in a US mall and see what things cost here, I feel rich.

A DVD in the US costs about as many dollars as I would pay for the same DVD in Euros in Europe. So over here I get it about 25% cheaper. And that's besides the fact that I can get DVDs here that aren't even out yet in Europe.

Even stranger are the prices for clothes. The trousers I bought was $25, about 20 Euro. The same trousers in Europe would have cost me at least 40 Euro. Which is curious, because the trousers are made in China, like most clothes nowadays, and probably cost the same to import into the US or into Europe. It seems European clothing retailers have a higher profit margin than US ones.

Well, shopping is limited by the empty space in my suitcase. And I can't buy everything I want in the USA. With most electrical things I'd run into problems of the US having a different voltage and plug size. And while with DVDs I managed to work around the regional code, I can't buy any console games here, because the regional coding on them isn't that easy to get around. Final Fantasy XII is out here in the US, won't be out before February in Europe, but I can't buy the US version here, because it simply wouldn't run on my PS2. Well, you can't have everything. And I think I prefer my higher purchasing power to getting games earlier.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:06 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Travel journal - 14-November-2006

Another business trip to the USA. This is always a long trip, but as my company is generous enough to book business class on transatlantic flights, it isn't so bad.

The terrorism scare seems to have abated to a reasonable level. No liquids allowed in the hand luggage, but I just checked my suitcase in. On the airport all the duty free shops had desperate posters out, advertising that there were special arrangements that could be done if you wanted to buy liquids and transport them on the plane. I wonder by how much their business in liquors has gone down.

On the American side everything went very smooth. In spite of my plane being slightly late, and me having only 1 hour for immigration, baggage claiming, baggage re-checking in, and getting through the security scan, I didn't miss my connecting flight. The people from the Transport Security Administration are doing a great job of getting large numbers of people through the system with a minimum of fuzz.

This is the 5th time in 12 month that I'm at the same location in the USA, same hotel, so at least I know how to get there, and where the shops and restaurants are in the vicinity. So of course I had steak for dinner, probably the best feature of the American cuisine. Then I went to the mall and bought a couple of TV series on DVD (Las Vegas season 3, and season 1 of The Closer, Numb3rs, and Boston Legal). I just have to find the time to go to the mall again in the next 2 days, between lots of work. The guy from EB told me that Medieval II would only come out today, and the guy in the DVD shop said that CSI season 6 would be out today. Damn, I was one day too early. Good that I'm staying until Thursday.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:30 PM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
BC Journal - 13-November-2006

This weekend I didn't play my level 63 priest, but leveled up a Draenei mage to level 11 instead. If in the release version I'll make a new character, it will probably be a blood elf, to stick to the Horde side. So the beta is a good opportunity to see the new Draenei starting zone and quests. So here is a screenshot of my mage on the Draenei mount, the elekk:

No, I didn't reach level 40 over the weekend, but there is a very fun quest where for 15 minutes you are allowed to ride an elekk to warn several people of a coming invasion. You can't use the time to go anywhere else, you'll get kicked of the elekk if you ride it away from your target. But it gives you a nice taste of things to come, and how your mount will look like once you have the level and money to buy one.

I had the impression that there are more quests with scripted events, besides the normal "kill 10 foozles" quests. I especially liked the quest where you run from totem to totem to learn the furbolg language, getting temporary abilities like flying or invisibility for each leg of the way. The quest where I disguised as a tree was fun too.

I'm planning to play this character until I did all the new Draenei quests, which will probably be around level 18. And that is the problem of the new races in the retail version, after level 18 you'll be back to the old leveling grounds, to quests you probably already did several times. Not fun, I would have wished for more mid-level content in the expansion. Well, maybe the next expansion will add some.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:05 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Sid Meier's Railroads!

I love railroad games. Fortunately Sid Meier's Railroads! is one of the better ones, dragging the original Railroad Tycoon into the modern age, better than the numbered sequels did.

Sid Meier's Railroads! (SMR) is a pretty game. Unfortunately that means it also has rather stringent hardware requirements, like a x800 Radeon or GeForce 6800 or better graphics card. As one reader already reported, this won't run on most laptops, nor on older PCs. But on my "last year's" PC it ran very smoothly and looked great.

SMR is both a very modern, and a very old-fashioned game. The modern aspect is the gameplay, which has been made very, very accessible, easy, and user-friendly. Everybody can play this, you don't need a masters degree in economics, nor do you need to study the game manual for hours how it works. The old-fashioned aspect is that while SMR has a multiplayer part playable over the internet, it is otherwise not very networked. There is not automated update, and the number of scenarios and maps is fixed, with no editor, and no way to download additional maps from a player community. Well, there are 15 scenarios, and the location of the resources changes every time you play, so there is decent replayability. But an editor would have been nice.

You are the president of a railway, starting with a terminal and a short line of track, plus a pile of cash. You make money by adding more track, all of which has to be connected to your original line, building more stations, and running trains between the stations. Laying tracks couldn't possibly be easier, you just first click to some point of your existing track, then to whereever you want to build the track to. The computer automatically calculates the best path, including grading, bridges and tunnels. If you don't agree with the computers choice, you can optimize by not building the whole track at once, but first building just the bit pointing in the direction you want, and then continueing from there.

The only fiddly part is double-tracking, adding tracks in parallel to existing tracks so that trains can pass each other. The double-track button lays the track, but does NOT connect it to the other track. You have to manually add the cross-over points. For example if you want to double track a station (recommended in most cases), you click on double-track, lay a bit of double track just where the platform is, then click on the normal track button and connect one end of the double track to the next signal point of the real track, and then the other end to the other signal point. If you build very complicated tracks, trains sometimes have problems with pathfinding, but on the standard single tracks you're likely to start with, everything goes well.

Every map has cities, ranging in size from village to metropolis. The price of goods in every city is the same, but the larger cities need more different goods. And you can grow a small town into a large city by providing it with all the goods it needs. The bigger the city grows, the more place is there for industry. You can just provide the existing industry with goods, but you can also buy out the existing industry to pocket the profit, or even build new industry on empty lots. Besides the cities there are resource nodes of many different types and sizes. These don't develop, but you can build a station there to get the goods. Some goods are part of longer chains, like coal first being made into steel, and the steel then into automobiles.

You start at an early period of railroad history, with slow steam engines. Depending on the end date of the scenario you might end up with TGV high-speed trains, new trains becoming available at the historically appropriate time. There are also random events, influencing for example the price of goods.

This is not a game for the hardcore micro-management fan. Sid Meier's Railroads! is a relatively simple game. It is more like a good-looking model railroad for people without a huge basement, with an easy game attached to it. Fun, but not too challenging. I like it. Recommended.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:45 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Finding a virtual identity

My first level 60 character was a troll warrior, specialized as tank. I tanked my way through Stratholme, Scholomance, and the other dungeons, up to General Drakkisath in UBRS, and it was fun. Then it became increasingly obvious that we were often blocked due to lack of healers, I leveled up my undead priest, and from then my whole raiding career was done with the priest.

My guild raids every night, and I try to participate 2 to 3 times a week. And as there aren't all that many level 60 raid dungeons below BWL, I know them all inside out by now, and start getting a bit bored. So I tried to reactivate my warrior. But the guild has a lot of warriors, and understandably they wouldn't let a badly equipped alt tank. So I had to respec to dps warrior, 18/33/0 arms/fury, dual-wielding flurry. I tried that spec in solo and PvP, and it dishes out quite a good amount of damage. And then I waited for an opportunity to go raiding with my warrior.

Last night the opportunity came, a Zul'Gurub raid which due to lack of rogues could use more dps warriors. We killed the bat boss, the snake boss, the spider boss, no problem. But I absolutely hated it. Playing that dps warrior in a raid just wasn't fun to me. Then some RL stuff came up, and I left the raid. I don't think I'll ever raid with that character again, at least not as dps warrior. Dps warrior is just not me, not my style.

I think the main reason I don't like dealing damage in a raid is that there is no simple feedback on how you are faring. As a healer it is pretty obvious whether your healing target is alive or dead. As a tank you always know whether you are keeping aggro or not. But as a damage dealer you are one of many, and you can't vary your tactics and see what works and what doesn't work. Even an addon like Damagemeters can only give you a total score. A secondary reason for not liking my dps warrior job is that it requires too much running around. As a priest you just stand and heal. As a tank you should have the mob firmly rooted on one spot. But as melee damage dealer you need to run after your targets all the time, which is not something I enjoy.

This is a valuable lesson. Because while I have 3 characters leveled up to 60, and a bunch of lesser levels, I don't see myself leveling them all up to 70. Not only would that take too much time, it would also sooner or later require spending all the money for riding skill 225 for each of them. Only my undead priest has 150 skill, and I think I'll have a good chance of having enough money for the normal flying mount and required riding skill when I need it. For the others I would first have to spend money on the epic ground mount, effectively doubling the cost. I'm not sure I still want to spend all that time on alts. That is the one disadvantage of expanding the game: the longer the game is, the less alts you can bring to the top.

So I found my virtual identify as a priest, and will spend most of the time after the expansion comes out to level up that priest, and then go raiding with him. My warrior will only level up once the priest hits 70, and will mainly be used for his herbalism and alchemy tradeskills. If I go visiting dungeons with my warrior, I'll turn him back into a protection spec'd tank. I might also make a new character, a blood elf mage, because I always wanted to play a mage, and having a new race for it increases the interest. But I have no idea how high I'll get with that one. Because whether I will still be playing World of Warcraft in a year, I don't know. It depends of so many things, but currently my interest is declining. You can't play the same game forever.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:54 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
A good election

[Warning! Political post - not about gaming]

Next week I'll spend in the USA again, from Monday to Friday. And I'm going there with a smile on my face, because I think the country just had one of the best elections ever. Not because the Democrats "won", I don't believe that either party is much better than the other. But because the election was a very good example of democracy working: The voters clearly expresses what they wanted, and they got it.

Defense secretary is not an elected position. But it was pretty obvious that the voters were unsatisfied with the level of success in the war in Iraq. The "stay the course" vs. "cut and run" debate was silly, because both options were bad. But even Rumsfeld had to admit that "I will say this -- it is very clear that the major combat operations were an enormous success. It's clear that in Phase 2 of this, it has not been going well enough or fast enough." With this Phase 2 now going on for years, at enourmous cost in lives and money, voters demanded a rethink of strategy, plus the head of the guy responsible, and they got it with Rumsfeld's resignation.

The other big issue on voters mind was corruption, with Republicans having been caught with their hands in the cookie jar, not to mention page's underpants. Again I don't think that Democrats are fundamentally better. But power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and having the same party in control of all branches of the legislature for many years is not a good idea. Changes in power, and even what the French call "cohabitation", the president and congress being of different parties, is not a bad thing.

Special kudos go to George Allen, who wisely decided not to become the Al Gore of Virginia. By conceding he sent out a clear message that, small as it is, 0.3% difference is larger than the error margin of a vote count. Recounting wouldn't have changed the result, and a lengthy legal process would only have served to cast doubt on the electoral process, and make people think that their votes weren't counting.

Add the highest voter turnout since over 25 years for a midterm election, and it is clear that the one winner of this election was democracy itself. America has stepped away from the dangers of becoming a one-party state, positively differentiating itself from China. Now the USA just needs to fix some minor problems of voting machines and gerrymandering, and they will be again the most democratic nation on earth. The presidential election of 2008 is wide open and will be very interesting. The future is looking bright.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:39 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
Burning Crusade hits stores on January 16

Blizzard finally announced an official release date for the Burning Crusade expansion of World of Warcraft: On January 16 the expansion will be on the shelves of game stores in North America and Europe.

Please note that this is an official Blizzard release date, not one of the fake release date that EB Games or Amazon or some other retailer might have given you earlier. Blizzard is famous for their "when its ready" release policy. They are very reluctant to announce release dates too early. But once they give a fixed date, you can be sure it will be out on that day.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:17 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Life in Azeroth blog

I don't do link lists, mostly because I am lazy, and if I had a permanent list of links, I would need to check it regularly to see if the links are still alive. That doesn't mean I won't link to other people's blogs or sites. I do it in posts like these, which help me find theirs URLs back without needing any maintenance.

The latest nice blog I found is Life in Azeroth by Yet Another Nightelf. As the name suggests it is pretty much a pure World of Warcraft blog. Y.A.N.E. doesn't write as much as I do, but he has far more links to interesting articles of the WoW blogosphere than I do. The blog reads very well, and is a good starting point for further exploration of other people's blogs.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:31 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Cartman nerfed

Interesting post by Tigole on the new slower leveling in the Burning Crusade. While the overall xp requirements per level went up by 40% (he euphemistically calls that "lenghtening the curve a bit"), that is partially compensated by giving you more xp from quests and in dungeons.

As far as I can say the quest xp went up by about 25%. The xp you get to kill a mob of level X remained exactly the same. The xp you get for killing an elite mob in a dungeon went up, but I don't know by how much. I only can say that now killing a dungeon elite mob of level X in a 5-man group gives you pretty much the same xp as killing a non-elite mob outside a dungeon solo. That is about 500 xp per mob in the first couple of Burning Crusade dungeons, twice that if you have rest bonus xp. Obviously the mob density in a dungeon is much higher, and a group kills a lot more mobs per hour in a dungeon than you would kill soloing outside. Thus dungeon xp will be quite good.

Tigole says they are "Placing less emphasis on grinding outdoor creatures while not on a quest (sorry to Cartman and the South Park kids killing their 1,232,232 fel boars)". Which is true on a relative scale. Grinding xp haven't been lowered, but as everything else has gone up, the relative viability of grinding has gone down. That can only be a good thing.

He defines his "Ultimate Goal: An experience curve that does not require "grinding" outdoor mobs. So long as you are always questing through your leveling experience, we've achieved our goal. If you ever need to "stop" and kill creatures to open up quests, then we have more tuning to do. We will not require people to go into the Dungeons. HOWEVER, dungeon exp will be very rewarding for those who choose to attempt the added challenge." I can live with that, and I can confirm that in my beta experience you can level up by doing all the quests of your level. The big disadvantage is that it's *all*, or nearly all, the quests of your level you need to do. That isn't good for replayability. I've alway complained about the "Stranglethorn Hole", the fact that there aren't very many zones to level up from 35 to 45. But you *can* level two characters doing two completely different sets of quests, one doing Stranglethorn, the other Desolace. Hellfire Peninsula will be much worse. Every single character of yours you wish to level past 60 will do exactly the same quests in exactly the same zone, with absolutely no choice nor variety. And if you can't see those quests any more, you won't even be able to grind instead.

The only alternative to doing these quests is doing a lot more dungeon trips. This is something I sure am going to try in the live version, with my guild. Basically doing a dungeon is now bringing more xp per hour than soloing non-quest mobs PLUS of course the item rewards are a lot better. I can see me doing every 5-man dungeon ten times, thus not only making sure I don't miss any of the gear from there, but also contributing a good bit to my xp. But that plan stands or falls with the ease of finding a group for visiting a dungeon. The new LFG system is certainly an improvement. But the beta servers are relatively empty, and it is hard to say whether the new system isn't used because of lack of critical mass, or whether people don't like it. If you want to do me a favor, once the expansion goes live, please remind people in the LFG chat channel to use the LFG system instead. We will need to kickstart the system, once people start to use it, everybody will come, and looking for a group will become a lot easier.

Of course doing the same dungeon over and over will become boring too. But it is still more interesting, and now not only more profitable but also faster, than grinding boars. I can only recommend it to Cartman, especially since in an instance he would be safe from the player killer.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:21 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
First person - third person

The PC games review magazine I buy has a DVD with video reviews, that's why I buy it. Seeing some gameplay video with comments is a lot more informative than written words and static screenshots. This month is a good one for fans of role-playing and strategy games, like me. There is Medieval 2, and Anno 1701 on the strategy games side, and Neverwinter Nights 2 and Dark Messiah of Might & Magic on the role-playing side. And looking at the video reviews I quickly decided that the one game I certainly wouldn't buy is Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. Because of all the games in the list it is the only first person view game.

I also didn't play Oblivion, for the same reason: Oblivion is first person view. You can play it in a fake third person view, where basically the camera is moved back to behind your head, instead of in it. But then it still behaves like a first person game, that is the camera points where your character looks. And, most stupidly, in the case of Oblivion your view of the cursor is then blocked by the back of your head. Doh!

I just can't play first person games very well. In the best of cases I just don't have the overview of my surroundings as in a third person view game. In the worst of cases I get video game motion sickness. In any case I don't enjoy playing first person view games very much, so I tend to not buy them.

Interestingly most MMORPG can be played from a third person perspective. While most shooter games can't. The difference is that in shooter games you need to target your enemy exactly, while in a MMORPG you lock onto a target, and can usually hit it as long as it remains in a wide arc in front of you. Now upcoming MMORPG are about to introduce more active combat, with more elements not unlike a first-person shooter game. Tabula Rasa proudly claims to introduce first-person shooter elements into the MMORPG genre. Which makes me wonder in what view these games will be played. Third person? First person? Or the Oblivion-like fake third person view, where the camera always points in the same direction as your nose?

I would much prefer if all MMORPG could be played in third person view. Because just like in WoW you can always zoom in a third person view so much that it becomes a first person view, which means that first person view fans are never excluded. But if MMORPG became first person view, I wonder how many people would stop buying them. I would be one.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:51 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
PC hardware requirements

The speed in which PC hardware develops isn't constant. Two years ago or so we had reached a relatively slow phase, where processors didn't get much fasters because they had reached some physical limits, and graphics cards developed at a constant but modest pace. But then the pace picked up: On the CPU side the development of the Core 2 Duo and equivalent processors gave a big boost to processing speed. And by moving from AGP to PCIexpress the graphics cards developed at a breakneck speed as well.

Now for christmas 2006 there are a lot of games being released, like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, which take advantage of all that added processing and graphics power. If you have the latest computer, with a Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, and a 7900 generation Geforce, or X1900 Radeon, graphics card, these games deliver a graphical splendor like never before. If you happen to have a computer over 2 years old, with a single core processor without even hyperthreading, and still an AGP graphics card, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic will look really bad and run only choppy. Even on my Pentium 4 640 3.2 GHz, 2 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX machine I bought last year, which wasn't cheap, the game won't be running well with all the graphics options turned on.

Now I didn't even plan to buy Dark Messiah, but that is just one game of many coming out, and lots of games that *do* interest me coming out in 2007 will have similar hardware requirements. No problem for me, I buy a new desktop every two years, and 2007 the next PC is due. But obviously not everybody can afford changing his PC that often, especially since the hardware required to run at full graphical splendor isn't the cheapest.

Which makes me wonder how much of the success of World of Warcraft is simply due to the fact that it runs on an older or cheaper computer. A friend of mine bought a PC last year just to play WoW on it (replacing a really ancient machine), but for just $1000 he got a machine that ran WoW perfectly. Everquest 2, which came out in the same month as WoW, and is the same genre, wouldn't run that well on the same computer. And next years Vanguard would probably just stutter on it.

And from all I hear about Vanguard, and see in screenshots, Vanguard is a perfect example of what is wrong in computer graphics these days: The polygon count and shader effects and whatever is high, the artistic value is low. You get landscapes where the water has a perfectly photorealistic surface, but the beach is totally bland and boring. Meanwhile on a beach in World of Warcraft you can't see every sand grain, but there are interesting ship wrecks, murloc villages, and beached dead marine dinosaurs.

Game developers need to spend less time on high-end graphics effects, and more time on making their landscapes and scenery artistically pleasing and interesting. Because artistic value isn't that dependant on hardware, and scales down better. If your game only looks good on the latest and most expensive hardware, you won't find many people wanting to buy it.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:57 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
A more varied World of Warcraft

In recent discussions here we heard a lot of opinions on how class X owns class Y in PvP, up to the point where people had a hard time to believe that I'd lose to a rogue in PvP, or that my warrior isn't very good in PvP. Do I just suck in PvP with whatever I play? That is perfectly possible (hey, I'm an old man), but I have another explanation. The thing is that not every character of the same class is the same. Every class has three talent trees, and there is usually one among these trees that is very good in PvP, and others that are better for PvE. And with the Burning Crusade adding more talents to each tree, people can specialize even more in either PvE or PvP. And it isn't only the talents, but also the gear.

Now take the statement "class X owns class Y in PvP". What if the character of class X is specialized in PvE, put all his talent points in PvE-specific talents, and is wearing PvE gear? And the guy playing class Y is specialized in PvP, took all the best PvP talents, and took all the best PvP gear? Wanna bet that in that particular duel the guy from class Y wins, although he should be "owned" by class X?

It isn't "priests" or "warriors" that are bad in PvP. Its "holy priests" and "tank warriors" that are bad, while "shadow priests" and "dps warriors" do quite well. And the same is true for most other classes, you can PvP-gimp your character, or make him really good in PvP.

Even if you respec'd to something more suited for PvP, you'd still need to gather a different set of gear. Most tier 1 raid gear gives great bonuses for raid PvE, but these bonuses usually aren't all that great for PvP. For example PvE cloth wearers usually have much lower stamina and therefore hitpoints than PvP cloth wearers in specific PvP gear. Group PvE works by having a tank taunt the monsters away from the casters, so they don't really need to have a lot of hitpoints. In PvP there is no such thing as taunt.

That there is perfect gear for different purposes is probably inevitable. But why do players have to chose between PvE and PvP talents? Ideally you'd chose to do PvP this night, and spec accordingly, while next night there is a raid planned and you go back to a PvE talent build. But Blizzard made that impossible by making changing your talents increasingly expensive, the more often you do it. The cost goes down again after a month, but having a different talent build every day is certainly not viable right now.

Because you have to chose a talent build, you get stuck in one style of play. If you are PvP spec'd, you'll be less useful in groups and raids, and might even have problems getting invited, being passed over in favor of somebody with a PvE talent build. And by being PvP spec'd you end up getting PvP rewards, and end up in a set of gear which is only good in PvP. And the same thing is true the other way round, if you specialize in PvE you will have problems doing well in PvP, and by getting mainly PvE raid rewards, your gear will also favor PvE over PvP.

I think Blizzard could make World of Warcraft a lot more varied, and PvP a lot more popular, by allowing cheaper or even free talent respecs. So on the one evening where there is no raid planned, you could go doing PvP instead, and not be totally gimped. With socketed items from the Burning Crusade you even have some freedom to "respec" your gear. Even the tier 4 raid gear isn't automatically PvE any more, instead the raid boss mobs drop tokens which you can exchange for different types of items with different sets of stats. So if somebody raided enough, he might well acquire a PvP set of gear from playing PvE.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:28 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft expansion ships

Unfortunately this is just the World of Warcraft: Shadow of War expansion to the WoW board game. But if you have this excellent board game, you might be interested in extending it. You can get it directly from the game developers, or from Amazon.

Oh, and if you don't have the board game yet, seeing that there won't be a Burning Crusade expansion lying under your christmas tree, maybe it's time to get back to some computerless gaming?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:11 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Subcreation PvP Highlight Reel 1: Eye of the Storm

Alcaras from Subcreation.net has put together this video of Eye of the Storm, the new battleground to be introduced in the Burning Crusade. Looks pretty cool, check it out!
- posted by Tobold @ 7:41 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Wolfgangdoom on balance

Wolfgangdoom has a very nice blog entry on balance, and he is against it. I'd say the issue isn't that easy.

The problem is that we don't even have a good definition of what balance is. Or rather, we know that balance means that different character classes should be equally strong, but we fail to define "strong in what?". If your definition of strong is a pure PvE soloing definition, you could measure the speed how fast a character class levels when playing solo. In that respect World of Warcraft is pretty well balanced, the difference in soloing power between the weakest and the strongest class isn't all that large. But the classes I'm playing (priest, tank) are definitely on the "less strong" side of the list. Why would I chose to play the "weakest" classes? I could play a hunter or warlock, which are much better for soloing.

The answer is that soloing speed isn't all that important to me. If I wanted just to solo, I could play a single-player game. I like playing in groups, and my personal definition of strong is "most likely to get invited into a group". Suddenly my priest and tank move to the top of the strength list. And World of Warcraft becomes less balanced. The difference in likelyhood to get invited into a group between a hunter and a priest is much larger than their difference in soloing speed.

Where World of Warcraft class balance breaks down totally is in PvP. The way PvP works in WoW, honor points are given out based on damage dealt, which obviously favors damage dealing classes. A tank or a priest simply earn a lot less honor on a battleground than a rogue or a mage. And in the arena combats I tried, my priest had no chance whatsoever against a rogue, because the rogue simply went invisible, and I couldn't do anything. Then I got stun-locked and couldn't do anything. Then I died. Abilities like stealth or stun become immensely powerful in PvP, while other abilities like my tanks taunt become totally useless. So making a game in which the classes are equally balanced for solo PvE, group PvE, and PvP seems pretty much impossible to me.

I think Blizzard made good choices in balancing. It is important that every class can solo PvE and level up at reasonable speed. Group PvE balance is harder to balance, because it also depends on numbers; part of the popularity of priests is based on them being relatively rare. And on older servers that balance starts to correct itself, as people see that more priests are needed for raids, and roll priests to get into raiding guilds.

With World of Warcraft being primarily a PvE game, being primarily PvE balanced is important. But the more Blizzard is trying to focus on PvP, the more problematic class balance becomes. With the arenas coming up in the Burning Crusade, there are some classes which simply aren't viable in a 2 vs 2 fight, and priests are certainly one of the non-viable classes. As the arenas again give out rewards on a relative scale, making a team including sub-optimal PvP classes is just a waste of time and money. I don't see defensive spec'd warriors or hunters doing well in arena PvP either. Rogues, mages, and warlocks will rule. Shamans, paladins, and non-resto druids might come in useful for the larger teams, as support classes. And it would be nearly impossible to change the abilities of the classes in a way that they remain balanced in PvE and become balanced in PvP as well.

In the end the only real balance on offer is the ability to play any class you want. If you are looking for the strongest soloer, roll a warlock. Want easy group invites? Roll a priest. Want to dominate arena PvP? Roll a rogue. Prefer Alterac Valley PvP? Maybe a paladin is your best option. Just don't expect one class to shine in all fields (although mage comes pretty close to that).
- posted by Tobold @ 10:30 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
BC Journal - 7-November-2006

My undead priest in the Burning Crusade beta hit level 63. Now he needs 744 kXP to reach the next level. What helps is playing slow and using a lot of double xp rest bonus. But more interestingly, the Burning Crusade challenges my perception of what exactly a level is. I might be "leveling" twice as fast as I thought, depending on how you define it.

Now you think I'm going crazy. What would anybody need a definition of level for? It's that little number shown under your portrait on the World of Warcraft screen. But numbers are just that, numbers. The really important thing is what happens in consequence of these numbers. And you could argue the most important consequence of leveling up is learning new spell and abilities. So how many levels do you have to gain to get new spells? In "old WoW" you only got new spells every second level. In the Burning Crusade, after level 60, you get new spells every level. And that isn't just half the number of spells you'd usually get, at level 63 I got 3 spells, and looking ahead on the trainer window I see about that number or more new spells (or spell ranks) every level.

That means that while the Burning Crusade gives you only 10 levels worth of talent points and stats increases, it gives you 20 levels worth of new spells and abilities. If you previously had a tendency to disregard uneven level gains, and only counted the ones that got you new spells, you will now only get levels that really count. And the difference in xp needed from 58 to 60 compared with 60 to 61 suddenly isn't all that huge any more.

Besides leveling up, I did a couple of arena fights, the new additional PvP mode. Terribly, terribly boring. You start in a side room to a small arena, get one minute to buff up at no mana cost (all previous buffs are erased) and then the fight starts. There are no objectives other than killing the enemy players. And in all the fights I was in, all the enemy players were invisible, either rogues, druids, or night elves. Going into the arena visible is a death sentence. I have no way to detect an invisible rogue, I get backstabbed, stun-locked, and die before I can cast a single spell or do any other action. Did that three times and decided that the arena wasn't for me. Unless Blizzard changes PvP in a major way to either prevent total invisibility or total stun-lock, there is simply nothing I can do there as priest.

I don't know anything yet about arena PvP rewards. The fights I was in were just practice fights with no rewards at all. To get rewards you need an arena charter for 50 gold per team, with a team having twice as many members as needed for each fight. But this is only available at level 70, and the beta is still capped at level 67. On the good news front, while checking for PvP rewards I noticed that the latest beta patch added lots of level 70 PvP rewards for the standard battleground PvP. Curiously they were prices pretty much identical to the level 60 rewards, so you can chose whether to spend you 15000 honor and 30 battleground victory marks for a level 60 or for a level 70 sword. I guess most people will take the level 70 reward.

I got killed once by a very funny bug. In Hellfire Peninsula there is normally a level 70 mob wandering around, called a Fel Reaver. That is a huge robot-like creature, reminding me of a battlemech. He is 10 meters tall, and the earth shakes where he walks, and he makes some sort of trumpeting sound. And he kills you with a single blow. But being so huge makes him pretty hard to miss, and after dying once you learn that you'd better run when you see him. Only that since the last patch the Fel Reaver is bugged, and runs around in the shape of a normal sized black bear. So I see that black bear approaching me, am a bit confused because that zone usually doesn't have any bears, hear the trumpet and the earth shaking, and turn around to see from where the robot is approaching, and to where I can run to safety. By the time I realize there is not robot, and it is the bear who is the Fel Reaver, I'm in his large aggro radius and die.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:22 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
Burning Crusade slow leveling

Sometimes one forgets the difference between a "beta" and a released product. But with the latest patch to the Burning Crusade beta, Blizzard sent me a painful reminder that they are still working on balancing everything out. They "nerfed" leveling in a way which would have had half of their customers coming after them with torches and pitchforks if they did this in the release version. But for the beta one has to expect hard changes like that. What they did was making leveling a lot harder, by upping the xp requirement per level after 60 by about 40%.

So getting from level 60 to 61 used to need 415 kXP, but now needs 580 kXP. I'm level 62, and instead of needing 500 kXP to advance, I now need 700 kXP. How much more effort is that? Well, if you make xp only by killing mobs of your level, without rest bonus, and without quest xp, you now need to kill 400 mobs more *per level*. Obviously that makes the Burning Crusade "longer", without actually adding any new content. I'm not really happy about it.

To use old Everquest terminology, all levels after 60 are now "hell levels". That is if you plot the amount of xp needed per level (195 kXP to 58, 202 kXP to 59, 210 kXP to 60, 580 kXP to 61, 660 kXP to 62, 700 kXP to 63), you immediately see the jarring break in the curve. Now somebody who has been level 60 for months, and is happy about *any* level advancement, will sure be able to live with that. But later, with people reaching level 60 after the expansion comes out, advancing after reaching level 60 will feel like walking through treacle.

8 months ago I wrote a blog entry named Bad design by bad testing, where I said that Blizzard holding a contest where you get a beta tester slot by grinding excessively would lead to the data coming out from the beta test being skewed towards excessive grinding. I hate having been right about that. Somebody not really aware of the nature of the beta testers observed that many of them hit level 67 in a week or two (you can't really advance much after that, all the zones higher than that aren't open yet). And based on that flawed observation, they slowed everybody down. I think Blizzard should tone down the xp per level requirement a bit again. What should not happen is that if you do all the quests of a level, you still haven't got enough xp to level up, and are forced to grind some mobs just for xp.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:05 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft all or nothing?

I have a Google Alert set to "World of Warcraft", so Google sends me always the latest news on the game. Recently they started adding a section of the latest blog entries, from Google Blog Search, to the alert e-mail. And that made me find this interesting blog post of World of Warcraft addiction:

The author played World of Warcraft, found it too addictive, and went cold turkey. Quote: "I loved every guilty minute of World of Warcraft, and yet I knew I couldn’t go on playing it. I was playing for hours every day, and my appetite was insatiable. There are so many better things to do in the world besides sit in front of the computer all day playing video games. There is awesome stuff out there, like riding your mountain bike and seeing live music and cooking thai food and hiking through clouds in a freezing drizzle."

But now he finds that this plan isn't really working out, because he finds himself bored in the evenings. Quote: "I can live without World of Warcraft, but I can’t live without… well… I suppose I can’t live without long, dark and rainy evenings with nothing to do between 5:00 and midnight. Yeah, I’m not gonna lie to you, this kinda sucks. Even the financial aspect of canceling my account has completely backfired. Now that I’m not paying $15 a month for WoW, I’m looking at $1,500 televisions to fill the void. Yup, in lieu of a subscription to Warcraft, that TV will pay for itself in eight years."

And that is exactly why I am thinking that World of Warcraft isn't bad for you. Because, face it, how many evenings in your life do you spend with "awesome stuff" like "riding your mountain bike and seeing live music and cooking thai food and hiking through clouds in a freezing drizzle", or whatever *you* consider awesome? And how many evenings do you just spend watching TV, if you don't play video games? Dane says "Video games are addictive by design. They are the Soma of our century." Right. So you better give them up and watch TV, the Soma of the last half-century? That doesn't make sense to me.

Obviously the sensible thing to do is to not neglect your job, your family, and all the "awesome stuff". But chances are that after taking care of all that, you will still end up with several hours per week with nothing to do. And in that time you could read a book, build a model railroad, watch TV, or play World of Warcraft. There is nothing that would make World of Warcraft worse than anything else in that list, or any other possible hobby I didn't list. If you start neglecting any of the real life stuff for WoW, then you can call yourself addicted. But if you just really, really prefer playing WoW to watching TV, I wouldn't be worried. Just the opposite, playing a troll hunter is a lot more social and interactive than playing a couch potato.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:34 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Windows Live OneCare

I was aware that Microsoft was working on ways to make Windows safer and less vulnerable. I just didn't know they are planning to charge us extra for that! There is now a Microsoft product named Windows Live OneCare available, which include antivirus, antispyware, and firewall software. But it costs $49.95 per year after an initial free 90-day trial.

Only available in the US, probably because the European commissioner for competition isn't likely to let that one pass. Think of it! The vulnerabilities that this program fixes are the responsability of Microsoft. They first sell you a not safe product, and then charge you extra for making it a bit safer. I can see a great possibility for General Motors or Ford here: sell cars only without seat belts and airbags, then charge people extra for these safety features.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:57 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Guild banned for wall-hacking

Gamespot has the story of one of the uber-guilds getting banned by Blizzard for using wall-hacks to reach C'thun. Apparently they didn't want to bother with killing the less lucrative bosses in AQ40. Gives you a whole new view on what it means to be an uber-guild.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:44 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Master crafter in one hour

I am not a big fan of the World of Warcraft tradeskill system, because it involves only trade, and no skill. The only difficulty in the non-gathering tradeskills is getting all the recipes and the materials. Thus about one hour after the Burning Crusade expansion goes live, we will have the first master jewelcrafters. It is easy enough, you just need to have all the materials ready in your bank, and a couple of clicks later you hit 300 in jewelcrafting, or even a bit beyond.

I have a growing suspicion that because it is so easy, and because you can hoard all the materials already before the expansion comes out, there will be a *lot* of jewelcrafters. Far more than there is demand for. Of course some of them won't be properly prepared, and will get stuck half of the way, because they underestimated (and didn't look up) the huge amount of materials needed to reach master jewelcrafter. But even those who make it to 300 will find that after having blown hundreds of gold worth of materials on reaching master jewelcrafter, there isn't much money to be made with that tradeskill. I'm not even sure that a cut gem will sell for more than what the ore is worth from which the gem was prospected.

Mastering tradeskills takes a lot longer in other games. But it is rare that it needs any skill. I still remember with horror Star Wars Galaxies, where I made 1680 Mabari chest plates to reach master armorsmith. Now gathering resources in SWG was fun, but the actual crafting was really bad. In Everquest 2 they tried to slightly improve the act of crafting by turning it into a simple mini-game. But again the amount of skill needed was very low, and the amount of items you needed to grind was very high.

The best tradeskill I have seen in any MMORPG is smithing a blade in A Tale in the Desert. Because there are no "skill points" or anything involved. You start with a block of metal, a choice of different hammers, and clicking on the metal with your mouse simulates a hit with the hammer, and deforms the metal. You can switch at any time between a view of how the blade should look, and how it actually looks. The quality of your blade is simply given by how close your shaped metal block comes to the target. It is an interesting game, and smithing a good blade is a skill the player has, not his character. A high-quality blade is valuable, because it needs either a lot of skill, or endless patience and tries from a less skilled smith.

Another good game for tradeskills is Puzzle Pirates, where every tradeskill is a different puzzle. Again your own skill with solving that particular puzzle determines the quality of the outcome, there is no grind through a stack of materials to gain skill points.

Of course World of Warcraft won't change their way how tradeskills are handled any more. And I must say that the gathering portion of the crafting isn't that bad. But when mastering a tradeskill is a simple matter of consuming a large amount of resources, with no effort or skill involved, being a master in anything doesn't count for much. People tend to value a crafter by the amount of rare recipes that he has found or bought. I would have preferred if the act of crafting involved some sort of game, and playing the game well would have given you some crafting advantage. But as it is I will be just one among many master jewelcrafters, with not much of a business.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:36 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
What's faith got to do with it?

My apologies in advance for one of my rare political, not game related, blog posts. If you think that game bloggers shouldn't have political opinions (aren't gamers citizens?), or you simply don't like politics, you might want to stop reading here.

I've just read an article about Canada, where politics are usually much more secular than in the USA. But the same-sex marriage debate suddenly has introduced a much larger than usual dose of religion into politics. It seems that most of the arguments against same-sex marriage are faith-based. Now that surprises me. What has faith to do with the legal status of marriage?

Marriage has always also been a religious ritual, and many people still marry in church. But the institution of marriage is much, much older than any of the existing faiths. And no religion has a monopoly on marriage, you can be married whether you are christian, muslim, hindu, buddhist, any other faith, or even atheist. You can marry somebody of a different faith than you. And the civil authorities recognize marriages without regard to the faith of the two persons. So why can't we discuss the legal status of same-sex marriage without argueing whether or not the christian God would approve of it? The gay couple in question might not even *be* christian, so why should they care about christian morality? And why should the christian church care if two muslim men want to marry?

The only thing the religious arguments in this debate do is to confuse the issue, to dilute the secular arguments against same-sex marriage. Because even if you are not a fundamental christian, you might well argue against same-sex marriage. For example a case can be made that marriage is a form of "contract" signed between a man and a women for the economic security of their children. Back in the middle ages being childless was one of the few possible reasons for a divorce. And while taking away marriage rights from childless couples would be impossible, you could well argue that a same-sex couple, which doesn't even have the biological possibility to conceive a child, should be denied these rights. I'm not going to take sides here, I'm just saying that the matter can be debated without religious arguments.

Or if you absolutely want to bring in religion, you could totally separate the civil legal status from the religious one. You could stop using the term marriage in any secular, civil documents. People would get a "civil union" registered with the state, and that would be all that would legally matter. This civil union could be same or different sex, depending on secular laws. And if people wanted to have a ceremony of "marriage", they could do so with their church or whatever other organization, without any legal consequences. And then every church could decide whether they would be willing to hold this marriage ceremony for same-sex couples or not, based on their faith. But that would have no effect whatsoever on legal questions such as marital property rights or heritage.

There aren't any theocracies left in the Western world, with good reason. A person's secular rights and status should not depend on his faith, or on the faith of others. A church must have the right to deny a couple a religious marriage ceremony based on reasons of that churches creed, thus a catholic or evangelical priest not willing to marry a same-sex couple in a religious ceremony is totally understandable. But that is a matter of that churches faith, and should not have any consequences on the legal status of that couples civil union. And the discussion about whether a state should or shouldn't permit civil unions between two members of the same sex should not be influenced by any prevailing religion.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:09 PM Permanent Link  (43) comments Links to this post

 
BC Journal - 2-November-2006

I finished my exploration tour of the currently available Outland zones by traveling all over Zangarmarsh. Only the 4 lower level zones of Outland are currently open, the 3 higher level zones can't be entered yet. Zangarmarsh is a slightly psychedelic looking marshland full of gigantic mushroom forests, spore monsters, glowflies in different colors, and a number of other mobs.

There are 4 villages in Zangarmarsh, one Horde, one Alliance, and two neutral ones, where you can gain faction with. In the middle there is a graveyard flanked by two towers. You can "capture" the towers by standing in them with PvP flag on, and once you captured both towers, you can carry a flag from the village of your faction to the graveyard to capture the graveyard. I couldn't find a quest for the capture of the graveyard, but I did it anyway, even if there was no reward.

So while I talked with the standard bearer, from whom you get the flag to capture the graveyard, I noticed there was an option to redeem Marks of Thrallmar. I already had 6 Marks of Thrallmar, which I gained by doing a PvP quest in Hellfire Peninsula twice. The quest consists of capturing 3 structures, again simply by standing in them with your PvP flag turned on. Capture all 3 structures, and get 3 Marks of Thrallmar in a repeatable quest. Now in Hellfire Peninsula I didn't see much interest in gathering more Marks, because the rewards were good, but more for melee than for casters. At the quest giver you can get blue slotted rings with a high stamina bonus for 15 Marks, as well as gems to put into the slots for 10 Marks. You can even get an item which increases your xp by 5%, but only for 30 minutes. I wasn't really interested in any of these rewards at the time, so I stopped the repeatable quest after 2 runs. At the time the quest was a bit boring, because I just had to stand in each structure for some minutes to flag it, and nobody tried to stop me, so there wasn't really any PvP.

But in Zangarmarsh at the standard bearer I could turn in the same Marks of Thrallmar for other rewards. And one of these rewards was really useful for me: The Incendic Rod, a wand with an astounding 97.1 DPS, +8 stamina, +14 to spell damage and healing, and +3 mana regeneration per 5 seconds. The other rewards there were a throwing weapon, a bow, a libram, a relic, and a totem, thus covering all possible classes' needs for items in the "ranged weapon" slot.

So back I went to Hellfire Peninsula, to do more repetitions of the PvP quest that gives the Marks. And then things got interesting: I found a group of Horde players doing the same, they invited me, and there was a group of Alliance players fighting us. Well, the fighting wasn't all that intense. The nature of the PvP quest is such that a certain amount of collusion automatically occurs. Both sides need to capture the same 3 structures, and you capture it the faster the more people of your faction with PvP flag on are in the structure. So if an Alliance and a Horde group meet in the same structure, they fight a bit to determine who is superior, but then the losers usually don't insist, but simply move on to the next structure. Not only would it be hard to keep control of all three structures, it would also be counterproductive. Only once the enemy captures the structures back can you again capture them and get another quest done.

At first I thought fighting for the structures was totally useless. But then I noticed that I had picked up more Marks of Thrall than I should have had from the quests. I did the repeatable quest 4 times, but instead of having 12 Marks, I had 17. So by fighting in the structures and doing honorable kills, I must have been awarded additional Marks. Thus having more than the 15 Marks I needed, I went back to Zangarmarsh and got my Incendic Rod wand reward. Getting 15 Marks doesn't take all that long if both sides are capturing structures. The worst thing that can happen is that one side isn't playing, because then you are blocked after capturing all 3 structures. Never happened to me, but I was thinking that at least on the beta server, where I have both Horde and Alliance characters, I could have resolved that blockage by switching from one faction to the other. If both sides are doing PvP around the structures, which I expect will be the case most of the time on the live servers, them being more busy than the beta servers, you can get 15 Marks easily in an afternoon. At which point I ask myself whether that is well balanced, or whether Blizzard is going to increase the cost of the rewards in Marks a lot before the Burning Crusade goes live. If I compare the cost of the level 60 epic two-handed mace, The Unstoppable Force, of 30000 honor and 80 AV Marks, with the cost of the level 62 wand, 15 Marks of Thrallmar, I don't find that balanced. Of course priests (and hunters maybe) are a special case here, because for us the ranged weapon we can get from Outland PvP is our "main weapon". I never hit anything with my staff, I just carry it for the stats. I always use my wand, which has much higher dps.

I finished my round trip through Zangarmarsh, and then realized that I hadn't found a dungeon there. Hmmm, wasn't there supposed to be one? I went to the official map of Outland, and found the dungeon entrance marked as being in the middle of Serpent Lake. I had swum through that, and seen a strange structure in the middle, on which I had climbed without finding any entrance. A second trip there revealed the entrance to be a tunnel under water in the middle of the structure, leading to the Coilfang Reservoir dungeons. Like Hellfire Citadel there are 4 dungeons here, two lower level 5-man dungeons, a level 70 5-man, and a level 70 raid dungeon.

I had just left Coilfang and gone back to Hellfire Peninsula to do some quests, when I got a tell asking me whether I wanted to go to the Slave Pens, the first of the Coilfang Reservoir dungeons. Of course I wanted! I didn't know the people, but the group turned out to be good. We wiped once when we pulled the second boss without clearing the room first, but other than that we were very successful. Killed all three bosses, found a couple of nice blue and green items (although nothing for me), and gained good xp in the process.

If I want to see more of the Outlands, especially the Caverns of Time, the dungeons I haven't visited in the Outlands yet, and the zones that aren't open yet, I will have to level a bit more. I assume, though I'm not sure, that I have until January to do so, which even for a slow leveler like me should be possible, with the help of the free time during the holidays. But I still want to keep playing my "real" characters, at least my main, the undead priest. I want to go raiding two or three times per week, and I want to skill up his mining to 300, to be ready for jewelcrafting. After thinking about it long and hard I have decided to ditch tailoring when the expansion comes out. Thus I'll have the level 60 warrior with herbalism and alchemy, and the level 60 priest with mining and jewelcrafting. That should cover all my needs for craftable "consumables", potions and socketable gems. I'll leave my second priest, the human one on the younger server, on tailoring. The expansion promises some improvements to tailoring, but in my experience you don't use very many self-tailored items, except for bags.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:14 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Findports

More and more games are played over the internet. Not only MMORPG, but all sorts of games with multiplayer modes, automated updates, or downloadable extras. And some of these communications of the games over the internet clash with firewalls, so ports have to be opened in these firewalls to make the game run smoothly. But which ports? That information isn't always easy to find. So the site Findports has compiled a nice list of many, many games, and which ports to open in the firewall to make them play over the internet.

The ports for World of Warcraft are, as far as I know, not necessary for playing, but they do speed up the downloading of the patches, as the Blizzard Downloader is a peer-to-peer application.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:27 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
The new World of Warcraft honor system

As apparently we will get the new honor system patched in before the expansion, I'm not calling it the Burning Crusade honor system. But of course all the information I have on how about it works is from the BC beta. As you all know, the old honor system, where you were assigned a rank based on your *relative* performance compared to the other players on your server and your faction is going out the window. And the new system will give PvP rewards based on absolute points. The big advantage in that is that lets say winning 50 battlegrounds and doing 1000 honor kills in the new system will always be worth the same, regardless how much the other players played, and regardless of whether you did those battles over 1 week or over 1 month. So how do the rewards work?

What I did was visit the PvP reward NPCs, both in the Hall of Legends in Orgrimmar, and the one standing in front of Alterac Valley. I couldn't actually do a battleground, because there aren't enough players on the beta servers to fill one up. But I was able to see the rewards, and what they cost.

The big disappointment was the Alterac Valley PvP reward NPC. He was offering exactly the same rewards as before, with no "level 70" items added (yet?). That makes the best items available from him look decidedly mediocre compared to green and blue items you can get in the Outlands even at level 60. The big surprise here is that there are no more reputation requirements. You don't need to be exalted to buy lets say The Unstoppable Force. You just need to "pay" 30000 honor points and 80 Alterac Valley Marks of Honor. Whatever reputation you gained with the Frostwolf is useless now.

In a way that makes sense. You get 1 Mark of Honor from losing, and 3 from winning. So while currently people in AV often go reputation farming, and ignore the win condition, winning AV will become a lot more important. Because all the honor points don't help you if you don't also have the 80 Marks of Honor. Assuming you win half of your battles, you need to finish AV 40 times to pay for the Unstoppable Force.

Next I went to the Hall of Legends in Orgrimmar, which is now open to everybody, not just officers as before, because the officers rank doesn't exist any more. You can still display your highest rank, if you want to, but it doesn't do anything any more. Except, curiously, of still giving you the 10% NPC vendor rebate if you ever made it to rank 3. No idea why they left that in, as I don't see how new players would be able to still gain that bonus.

In the Hall of Legends there are several PvP reward vendors, for armor, weapons, mounts, and accessoires. Here there are a few level 70 items, but up to now I only counted 4 of them, the others are still the same as the PvP rank rewards. For example a Sergeant't Cloak (level 60 version) now costs 1500 honor and 10 Arathi Marks of Honor. General's Satin Leggings cost 4250 honor and 30 Warsong Gulch Mark of Honor. Some items cost "Eye of Storm Mark of Honor", but I didn't see any Eye of Storm battleground.

Most stupidly an epic mount cost 30 AV, 30 WSG, plus 30 AB Mark of Honor. But as it still needs 150 riding skill (which still costs 720 gold), this mount is just for show, you can with the same riding skill training cost buy an equally fast standard epic mount for just 80 gold, instead of paying 90 Mark of Honor for a battleground epic mount.

What I don't really like is that most items here also cost specific Marks of Honor. If you don't like lets say Warsong Gulch, you can't pay for the General's Satin Leggings, because these need WSG Marks of Honor. Only the potions, insignia of the horde, battle standard, and some cut gems to put into sockets can be bought with honor points without Marks.

As long as Blizzard doesn't adjust the PvP rewards to the much higher level of Burning Crusade PvE rewards, I don't see how the changes will induce people to play more PvP. The new system is better than the old reputation farming and rank system, but the rewards need some serious balancing to make PvP as attractive as PvE.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:48 AM Permanent Link  (30) comments Links to this post

 
Adventures in computer repairing

Good news first: I managed to fix the Driver_irql_not_less_or_equal ndis.sys blue screen of death error. The bad news is that I'm now even more puzzled about my computer than before.

What I wanted to do was a simple reinstall of Windows XP Pro. So I put in the CD, press the F12 button at start-up to go to the boot selection menu, select boot from CD. Windows XP CD boots up, and after loading a bunch of drivers and stuff goes to the first screen, where you have to press Enter to continue. Only pressing Enter doesn't do anything. In fact no key does anything, it seems among all the drivers he loads there isn't one for the keyboard. And I tried both a USB keyboard, and a classic PS/2 keyboard. Several times, connecting and disconnecting keyboards, and rebooting. But while all the keyboards always work in the boot menu, none ever does in the Windows XP setup menu. I'm stuck.

So I try something different, boot my computer from the hard disk, but in safe mode. Then try to run the Windows XP CD. It runs, keyboard works, but when I tell him to install, he refuses. My Windows XP CD is service pack 1, while the installed version is service pack 2, and he claims he can't install an older version over a newer one. Fortunately when service pack 2 came out, I asked Microsoft to send it to me on CD (for free). So I put in my Windows XP service pack 2 CD, and install that one. Now this doesn't do a complete Windows reinstall, but it does install a large number of files, and luckily for me, whatever was broken in my computer before is fixed by that. No more blue screen of death, and the video editing software that wouldn't run last weekend due to driver problems is now running perfectly.

I'm just worried that if the computer crashes even worse, I won't be able to do a full reinstall, due to the keyboard not working in the Windows setup. And why doesn't it work? Is that some trick from Dell to prevent people from installing whatever they want? Or is my Windows XP Pro CD too old to work with my current hardware? I'm puzzled.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:36 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post