The rush to raid slots

Famously the first guy to hit level 70 in the Burning Crusade after release just took 28 hours to do so. But now, two weeks after release, seeing a level 70 character isn’t something exotic any more. But the progression towards level 70 isn’t even; you can see every level from 60 to 70 in Outland. And the distribution isn’t depending on player skill but on available time, as always in level-based MMORPG. I wonder how much of this rush is motivated by people trying to reserve a permanent spot in a guild's raids for them.

Raiding guilds might have some problems, because it is likely that many of them are actually too big now. Raiding guilds tended to invite enough players so that with the average participation rate to raids (which varies from guild to guild) on any given evening enough people show up to fill a 40-man raid. But in the Burning Crusade two effects come into play: the participation rate goes up, as people are more interested in the new content, and the level 70 raid size shrinks from 40 to 25.

In the coming weeks the typical raiding guild will for the first time have 25 level 70 players with a reasonable class mix online, and start their first raids. In that case the selection of who gets to raid is easy, because there are just enough people around to fill a raid. But as time progresses, more and more guild members reach level 70, and then the problems of raid slot attribution will start. Even if there are 50 players online, it is more likely that the guild forms one raid with perfect class distribution and the other 25 people don’t get to raid, instead of trying to form two sub-optimal raids. Predictably there will be some hard choices to make, and a lot of potential for guild drama.

What I am afraid of is that the speed to level 70 will have some effect on the distribution of raid slots. The most extreme example would be a guild’s main tank, who is often selected based on gear. The first batch of tanks reaching level 70, and getting a head start in raiding and endgame solo grinding will always have better gear than tanks arriving at level 70 later. So the temptation is there to invite the better-geared tank more often, or even exclusively when available. Of course that leads to a vicious spiral, where the better-geared people get to raid more often, improve their gear even further, and the gap between them and the less-well geared is continually growing. Similar considerations could be true for other classes, where gear also has some effect on things like mana pool or dps.

Ideally raid slots would be distributed as fairly as possible between people reaching level 70 earlier and later, to keep a large number of people well-geared. The reason for distributing raid slots, and therefore raid gear, evenly over the guild is to minimize the effect of people leaving the guild. In the weeks and months after the first raid the excitement will cool down, and some people will most probably burn out. If you favor the “first to 70” group of people when handing out raid slots, tempting as it is, chances are that it is exactly these people who burn out first, because they go raiding most often. The best equipped tank leaving and having to be replaced by somebody who rarely was allowed to participate in raids sets back the whole guild raid progress significantly.

But chances are that guilds will confuse fast leveling either with skill or dedication, neither of which is really true. In the short term inviting always the same 25 people to all raids of course speeds up raid progress. But in that case the people coming late to the party find that they never get invited. They might leave the guild, but even if they stay they aren’t really good replacements in case any member of the original hard core burns out, because they lack the gear and experience. Distributing raid slots among a larger number of people is the better long-term strategy. Sooner or later raiding guilds will shrink, by splitting or people stopping to play, until they are of the right size to regularly support 25-man raids. But the process to get there could be more or less painful, depending on how much value the guild puts on fast leveling progress.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:36 PM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Signs of life from Darkfall

Darkfall is a MMORPG in development by Aventurine, a greek startup company. As this has been "under development" with no release date announced since 2001, there have been rumors that it is only vaporware. But apparently the problem is only that a relatively small developer is trying to produce a big game, and that takes time.

So Tasos Flambouras (I'm not making that up, that's his real name!), the Associate Producer wanted to let me and my readers know about the state of the game, and sent me the link to the latest in-game footage. That's a 50 MB zipped Windows media file showing how the game and the characters will look, and how combat will go. Darkfall's claim to fame is horse-backed combat, to which apparently they now also added combat between ships, with the ability to sink them.

Looks pretty enough, but of course it is impossible to say how good the game is just from looking at the graphics. The gameplay is far more important, and we don't know anything about it yet. Well, maybe something to keep in mind, I doubt this will come out this year.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:18 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes released

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes has been released, to a flood of comments of "no way!" from the beta testers. The game has potential, but simply isn't finished. And the early release won't be helping to gain market share. The one bright spot is that it is available for digital download, a feature that more MMORPG should have.

Well, I won't be buying the game anyway. Huge but empty landscapes aren't my cup of tea. The only feature I really liked was the diplomacy system, but in the latest build of the beta I played that one was squandered to just be an alternative way to earn tiny amounts of money. It would have been far better if by doing diplomacy you could have earned new cards to make stronger decks to become an even more powerful diplomat. There should have been more diplomacy quests past the introductory ones, and more sense in moving from city to city to practice your diplomacy skills. Well, all that was things that were promised, and maybe one day they get added. Just another feature that just isn't ready, but was released anyway.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:58 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft on Tyra Banks Show

World of Warcraft "addiction" is just one of these non-issues that is sensationalist enough for daytime TV talk-shows, without being serious enough to actually worry the spectator. Good that over here in Europe we don't get the Tyra Banks Show, because they just had an incredibly bad episode on WoW addiction.

Excellent review and opinion piece written on that at Taking the Mickey. I couldn't have said it better, and so I don't. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 10:52 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Getting inside Burning Crusade dungeons

If you already reached level 70, you'll find that many instances in the Burning Crusade are locked and require a key to get in. I stumbled upon this blog entry by Heather Newman, titled A guide to getting inside 'World of Warcraft' dungeons. It explains how to get the keys to Shattered Halls, all the heroic instances, Shadow Labyrinth, Arcatraz, Karazhan, Serpentshrine Caverns, The Eye, and finally Battle of Mt. Hyjal.

Similar information can be found at World of Raids, Curse Gaming, and of course WoWWiki.

In any case it appears that Blizzard is prepared for people playing hundreds of hours of the level 70 endgame. I just hope that this time around the endgame is more inclusive, and the percentage of players able to get into a raid goes up.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:35 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 29-January-2007

Still level 64, but I feel as if I have reached a milestone: I did all the quests in Hellfire Peninsula. Not a single quest left in any of the many locations there. Except of course for the ones I can't get at level 64 yet, but I figure those are related to the high-level part of Hellfire Citadel.

It feels like a milestone because I deliberately wanted to do all these quests before moving on. I only did very few quests outside Hellfire Peninsula, and that only when I was with a guild group doing some special elite or dungeon quest. As Hellfire Peninsula was also the only zone I quested in during the beta, I feel as if I'm now reaching the *really* new content.

Of course I wouldn't be level 64 with just the Hellfire Peninsula quests if I hadn't done a lot of dungeon runs as well. I enjoyed those, especially the Coilfang Reservoir ones. And I am honored with both Thrallmar and the Cenarion Expedition already, and that is without doing the Zangarmarsh quests for them, which should advance me a bit further. But I have a sneaking suspicion that the reputation system is calculated in a way that you can't get much better than honored without reaching level 70 and doing the endgame instances. At 5999/6000 in friendly, just 1 point away from honored, the mobs in Underbog stopped giving reputation, not even the boss mobs got me over the threshold. I had to hand in unidentified plant parts to get over the threshold, and as soon as I did, that repeatable quest vanished too.

Every faction now has a quartermaster offering lots of goodies if you are just high enough in reputation. But there was nothing I wanted for friendly or honored, I need to be revered or even exalted for the good stuff. And I'm sure that is going to involve some crazy grind again. That's why I never got to the good rewards of the old world factions, and I don't think Blizzard changed their policy on that: You need to give the people that are playing 16 hours a day every day something to do. I was positively angry when I heard about the only way to get a Netherdrake flying mount: You need to be on the top team for a season of the PvP. That is another reward that someone with a job and family won't ever be able to aspire to. I wonder if you could tell the Better Business Bureau how Blizzard promised you a Netherdrake in the expansion and then made it impossible to get. Well, probably more a case for a shrink. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 12:01 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 28-January-2007

My undead priest hit level 64 yesterday, and got a new spell: Binding Heal, a spell that heals both me and my target. Situationally useful in groups, useless in solo play. I'll have to see whether I end up using it much, right now I'm not too excited about it. I have 23 talent points in discipline for the improved spirit buff, and now 32 and rising points in holy. Again, useful in groups, but not the easiest spec for soloing.

As a result I'm not making much progress with my quests, still haven't finished all Hellfire quests, but spend most of my time in instances. I'm getting a better feel for what levels and classes are needed for each dungeon. We did the mana tombs with a group with average level of 64, and that was too hard. We managed to kill all bosses in the end, but it took forever, we frequently wiped, and combined with some bad luck in finding boss drops for classes we didn't have, I ended up with a repair bill higher than the worth of the loot. Then I did the slave pens and underbog with two different groups, but both with an average level around 66. And that was simply overkill, which ends up being a lot more fun. Barely any deaths at all, except when we were experimenting with how many mob groups we could pull at once and AoE to death. :) And I got a nice healing cloak, better than my Hide of the Wild I've worn for ages.

I don't think I'll go to Hellfire Ramparts and Blood Furnace any more, at least not at normal difficulty. I think I got all the good priest loot from there, and I stopped gaining reputation from killing the mobs in there. I'm stuck at halfway through honored with Thrallmar and wonder how I'm going to increase that further with the handful of quests I still have. Maybe at heroic difficulty the dungeons give reputation again? I find it a bit annoying to have so many factions and reputation rewards up to exalted dangled before your nose, with no apparent path to reach them.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:42 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Can the lore survive the players?

There is a video parody (in French) of the Council of Elrond scene from the Lord of the Ring movies, subtitled with a typical World of Warcraft chat. The raid group has looted The One Ring with great stats, and is now fighting who gets it. Boromir, the paladin, argues that this is pally loot, Gimli wants to disenchant it, and in the end it is decided to roll for it, and Frodo wins with a 100. Then they go on the next raid.

Hilarious interpretation, if you play WoW. It is funny because it is so true. Whatever the lore of a game, once it comes down to loot distribution, selfish considerations of players wanting to make their characters more powerful beat all lore. That doesn't hurt World of Warcraft much, because the lore isn't strong outside the series of Warcraft games. But if you play Star Wars Galaxies or the upcoming Lord of the Rings Online, the lore is supposed to carry much of the game.

Both of these licences are about a heroic struggle of a small group of people against an overwhelming evil. The need to work together in spite of very different characters creates the interest, and the tension between Han Solo and Princess Leia, or Gimli and Legolas. You can find them argueing about how to best fight the evil. Even Boromir doesn't want to "ninja loot" the One Ring, he wants to use it to defend Gondor, instead of throwing it into Mount Doom.

Real players in a MMORPG aren't that heroic. They aren't fighting a great evil, they are just trying to make it to whatever the level cap is and get epic loot. Thus the famous hunter weapon jokes. Even in a guild group I had recently to shout at a mage who wanted to roll need for the Heartblood Prayer Beads (note the +31 to healing, not to spell damage). The stories that get your heart racing in a MMORPG are often about other players behaving either very selfish or very generous. About who to invite to raids, and how to distribute the loot. The lore plays a very small role in all of that. And that is why Star Wars Galaxies never felt like Star Wars, and LotRO can be a great game, but can't possibly make you feel like a member of the Fellowship of the Ring.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:28 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Are greens too powerful?

Yesterday on my server somebody found these bracers:

I made the screenshot myself, so this is not just something photoshopped. But it is obviously some bug, and it wasn't clear whether the guy wearing them would actually get the indicated stat increases.

Makes you wonder whether if you found these bracers, equipped them, and then started happily chain-killing tons of mobs for experience and loot, that would be considered cheating. Would using a bugged item be a bannable offence, even if you are in no way responsible for the bug and didn't do anything to hack it?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:40 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Made it to the front page

I get linked to a lot, from many different gaming sites, which isn't really news. But this time I got a link from Blizzard themselves, directly on the front page of the European World of Warcraft site, to my article on the size of Azeroth. As this is a rather temporary fame, I had to make a screenshot. Here it is:


- posted by Tobold @ 6:13 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Level 60 bosses chat


- posted by Tobold @ 11:52 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 26-January-2007


- posted by Tobold @ 8:43 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
MMORPG lifetime membership

Turbine and Midway did a press release announcing a Pre-Order Founder's Program for the Lord of Rings Online, which is scheduled for release on April 24. The program has two interesting features, one being that you can create a character in the open beta starting March 30 and keep that character after release.

The other interesting feature is that they are offering a Lifetime Membership for $199. Now that sounds interesting. If something similar would exist for WoW, it would have saved me a lot of money. But even more importantly a Lifetime Membership allows you to play the game on and off, without having to cancel the account if you get bored by it. No more hassle with resubscribing once your interest rekindled because of an expansion or something. If this Founder's Program exists for LotRO Europe as well, I'm very tempted to sign up for it.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:07 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Hasta la Vista, XP?

About every 2 years I buy a new computer, giving my 2-year old computer to my wife, and dumping her 4-year old computer. Next new computer is due somewhere in the middle of this year. But when I buy a new computer, I automatically buy an operating system that comes pre-installed with it. And by the time I buy my new computer, that operating system might well be Windows Vista instead of Windows XP, as the official mass-market release date for Vista is in 5 days. Which of course makes me wonder whether everything will run under Vista.

Apparently the first game people tested when seeing whether Windows Vista runs games is World of Warcraft, like in this Extremetech article. The only games that don't run well are those that use the Starforce copy protection program. But Tom's Hardware reveals that with the current drivers games play slower on Vista.

I don't think that is a big problem. In a few month the driver problem should be solved, and most games should be patched to run perfectly under Vista. If I would still buy a Windows XP computer in 2007, and keep it until 2011, I'm more likely to run into the other problem, the games of 2011 not running under XP any more. I guess going for the future-proof option will be the better bet.

I looked at the gazillion different versions of Windows Vista, and think that if I get the choice I'd prefer the Home Premium edition. Hey, I'd take the Ultimate edition if I get it for free, but I'm not willing to pay money for a bunch of extras I'm not likely to use. But the Home Basic edition is too basic for me, and doesn't have the fancy Aero UI. Not that I'd really need it, but it would be nice to actually see that something changed.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:00 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Jewelcrafting beyond 300

My jewelcrafting skill is now at 336. Progress beyond 310 was slow, and now has virtually stopped. Apparently 335 is the highest skill level for which the trainer still gives you recipes, and those are for very expensive level 66 jewelry, needing the new “primal” elemental materials from Outland, which aren’t widely available yet. In any case, jewelry is not something you can expect to make a profit of, as crafted gear always competes with gear that can be found as loot or quest reward. Dropped loot from dungeons is often better than crafted items, which usually results in crafted items selling for less than the auction house prices for the materials. Where crafting becomes interesting is in the consumables, which in the case of jewelcrafting means socketable gems.

There are NPC vendors of socketable gems in Outland. For 2 gold each you can buy one of numerous different gems, in all colors, giving all sorts of bonuses. But the bonuses are relatively small. Starting from skill level 300 a jewelcrafter can cut gems that give bonuses that are roughly 50% higher, for example giving +6 to one stat instead of +4. The raw materials for that are gems like Spessarite, Garnet, Peridot, Draenite, and Azure Moonstone, which sometimes drop from mobs or are found in chests in Outland. The gems can also be acquired by jewelcrafters using the prospecting skill on the new Outland ores.

Prices for the new Burning Crusade trade goods are still in a state of flux, with some people trying to sell goods are crazy prices; I’ve seen stacks of fel iron ore on offer for as high as 50 gold, and cutable gems around 25 gold. I only buy gems if I see them for 10 gold and less, and I think in the long run the prices will come down even further. But as all jewelcrafters, of which there are many, need these gems to skill up, the cut gems that players can use to put in sockets usually sell for 10 gold or less, making me lose money on them. Once the first excitement about Burning Crusade crafting has cooled down, I expect to be able to find more fel iron ore to mine, or to buy cheaper, and then I could get the gems from prospecting. I also got a couple of gems from other players, for whom I cut them for free, earning no money, but a chance for a “free” skill gain.

The highest skill level recipe for this sort of “green” quality gem is 325. And that is the reason why my skill is stuck at 336, and I don’t expect to be able raise it beyond 350. Starting at 350 your only way to increase your skill is by cutting rare, “blue” quality gems. But these gems are rare drops, and the recipes to cut them are even rarer. At the moment the recipes go for 400 gold and more on the auction house, and the gems for 300 gold. The resulting socketable gems give a bonus that is roughly 33% higher than the green gems, for example giving +8 to one stat instead of +6. Obviously unless you are really, really sure that you’ll never change that piece of equipment with sockets again, you aren’t going to put gems into the sockets that cost several hundreds of gold. I can only hope that when more people reach the higher levels and go to the higher level dungeons, the rare gems and recipes will become more widely available.

After 350 the jewelcrafting recipes are for level 70 items of jewelry and for meta gems, about which not much is known yet, beyond the fact that you can put them in any socket, regardless of color. I can only assume that these are “epic” gems, which few people will ever get to see.

I don’t see me “mastering” jewelcrafting in the sense that I hope to one day have all the possible recipes. There are simply too many rare recipes. But nevertheless I’m not unhappy with having chosen that profession. I used to be enchanter with that character, and in a way jewelcrafting is an improved version of enchanting. The further people progress in the Burning Crusade, the more items with slots they will wear. So while gems aren’t useful for twinking low-level characters, as enchanting was, the fact that most items have several sockets should provide a large demand for the gems. Unlike enchants, you can create cut gems and sell them on the auction house. That is a lot less hassle than standing in Orgrimmar trying to sell your enchanting services, which was taking time away from adventuring.. Getting an inventory of “green” quality gems is relatively easy, and doesn’t take as much inventory space as enchanting materials did. So I’m looking forward to always being able to provide my characters, and my friends and guild mates, with at least this quality of gems. If I happen to find some rare recipes and gems while adventuring, that would be a nice bonus.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:17 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Still wearing my raid armor


- posted by Tobold @ 3:16 PM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
LCD monitors


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Blog trolls


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Goodbye Molten Core


- posted by Tobold @ 12:59 PM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 22-January-2007


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Boing Boing linked


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BC hits the New York Times

You all seen them: The type of people who rush through the game to be the first at level X, shortly after a game releases or the level cap rises. So somebody proudly proclaiming that he was the first level 65 on his server after the Burning Crusade went live I normally wouldn't consider news. Except for this one does it in the New York Times, and in the Arts section, no less!

Memorable quote: "Of course in an online role-playing game like World of Warcraft the biggest and most central draw for most players is in exploring that virtual world and making one’s character more powerful."

There you have it, MMORPG explained in a nutshell. And the author is totally right that these two factors of exploring and growing contribute a lot to the lure of the expansion. But why rush? Once you reach level 70 the exploring and growing will be over again, or at least reduced to the snail pace you get from the end-game content.

And of course the author got tells of “You guys are huge nerds.” to which he comments "Yes, and proud ones, I might add." Only that being a huge nerd apparently is mainstream nowadays.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:51 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Playing WoW on your cell phone

World of Warcraft runs on PCs, and on no other platform. Blizzard often gets asked whether they will port it onto one or several next generation consoles, but they always say that the idea is interesting, but not something that will happen in the near future. The interest lies in the fact that more people own a console than own a PC capable of playing WoW. The problem lies in the fact that people would expect the same experience on every platform, and that is by no means easy. But what if you could play *parts* of World of Warcraft on another platform, a portable one, like your cell phone?

Imagine it is your lunch break at work, or you are traveling, and you have a bit of time, but not the hardware and connection to play World of Warcraft. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a mini-version of WoW on your cell phone that would only allow you to log into the game, chat with your friends and guild mates, and do some activities with your character that don’t require a 3D interface? For example buying and selling on the auction house, sending and receiving mail, and managing your inventory would all be very much possible on a cell phone, without requiring much data volume nor graphics capabilities.

For the players that would be convenient. For the game company this could be an additional source of income. Blizzard sells the “WoW cell phone client” for $5, and does a deal with the cell phone company that gives Blizzard 5 cents for every minute that somebody connects. Given the millions of players, that could quickly add up to quite a large pile of money.

Spinning the idea further, some people would certainly use the cell phone WoW even when at home, because it allows their characters to access the mail box, bank, and auction house without being in a city. That adds even more additional income. People spend crazy amounts of money on cell phones, for useless things like logos and ring tones, it would be only logical if MMO game companies would want a piece of that pie.

Realistically speaking the idea is probably a couple of years ahead of its time. World of Warcraft might never get there. But I wouldn’t be surprised if in 10 years some other game introduces this feature. Making additional money with very little development effort might well prove irresistible to game companies.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:05 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
I want to be a lone hero

Fantasy MMORPGs cast the player in the role of a hero. They work by making the player believe that he, either alone or in a group, braves great dangers, for which he is rewarded not only with treasure, but also with a sense of accomplishment. For this it is necessary for us to “forget” that when we kill the evil sorcerer, we aren’t the first to do so, and once we are gone the evil sorcerer pops back into existence to be killed by the next hero.

Right now the Burning Crusade is causing me problems. Not just the queues, the lag, or the repeated server resets I encountered last night. But because, with every spawn in Hellfire Peninsula being camped by at least a dozen people, I just can’t manage to forget that I am not unique. And I have the same problems with my blood elf mage in the newbie zones. At one point my mage started his combats by sticking a dagger in the mobs that spawned next to him. Because if he had stepped back and launched a fireball instead, the mob would have been claimed by somebody else in the 3 seconds that this would take.

In the best of cases I group with the other players standing around to kill a specific monster. But unlike other groups, which are formed to be stronger together, I am very much aware that I could have killed that monster alone, I just group so that one kill scores for the quest of several people, relieving some pressure. That is rational, but not very heroic.

The more normal case is that every player just plays for himself, tagging one mob at a time. In practical terms that means that every quest takes a bit longer, because I have to wait for respawns and run around more to find something to kill. But that is not the only impact. Lots of players grinding a limited number of monster spawns also feels a lot more like work than like a heroic achievement.

In the worst case the players start fighting among each other who gets to kill a spawn. The more players are hunting a mob, and the fewer of this mob there are, or the slower they respawn, the easier that happens. People accidentally or on purpose killsteal mobs from each other. People tag several mobs to prevent others from getting them. The event about the opening of the Dark Portal, in the week before the expansion came out, was probably the worst example I have ever witnessed, with players turning on PvP to be able to kill other players, just because those other players wanted to kill 6 demons for a quest too. Situations like that resemble more a food fight among little children than anything remotely heroic.

I play MMOGs because of the interaction with other players, the groups, the guild, the chat, strangers you meet, friends you make, the player-based economy. I wouldn’t want the world to be instanced so that I never meet anyone. But beyond a certain population density, other players start to become annoying. Right now questing in Hellfire Peninsula just doesn’t feel right. I want to heroically fight evil monsters, not treacherously fight other players for the tag.

If the servers were stable enough, I’d escape with a group into the Hellfire Citadel instances. But yesterday that wasn’t really the case, and I’m not too optimistic about the upcoming first Burning Crusade weekend. So I’m currently wondering whether I should spend time this weekend doing quests I didn’t do yet in places like Winterspring or Silithus, which should be a lot less populated.

I want to be a lone hero. But by definition a hero is an above average person. If you stand in a huge crowd of people all doing the same thing as you do, it is hard to feel anything heroic about that. I’m not saying that the narrative of the hero’s journey is not possible in a MMORPG, but I think it requires a better dispersion of players. Right now, due to the expansion, World of Warcraft has problems offering that.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:07 PM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Burning Crusade Levels

Trick question: how many additional levels does the Burning Crusade add to World of Warcraft? Nominally the answer is 10, from 60 to 70. But looking at it a bit closer the expansion levels behave differently than the previous levels. A Burning Crusade level is a curious hybrid between one and two old levels, so in practice the expansion adds between 10 and 20 effective levels to the game. Lets have this closer look:

The first thing you probably notice before you even make it to level 61 is that the leveling curve is much steeper. Getting from level 60 to level 61 takes more than twice the xp that you needed from level 59 to 60. The “length” of each BC level, measured in the number of quests you need to do and monsters you need to kill is more than twice that of the pre-60 WoW levels, This is not just the fact that the higher the level, the longer it is, there is an added factor of about 2 in the xp and time to level.

Once you level up it becomes clear that in the Burning Crusade new spells and abilities become available at every level, while in the pre-60 levels you only got new spells and abilities every 2 levels. But in total from level 60 to 70 you don’t gain as many new spells and abilities as in 20 levels pre-60.

Some effects of levels are linked strictly to the numerical level. From level 60 to 70 you only gain 10 talent points. And your stats only go up 10 times. But your talents and level-based stats are only one part of your total power; another big part is based on your equipment. And with the Burning Crusade gear being significantly better to that what you can gain with the same effort at level 60 in the old zones, your total power to 70 goes up by more than 10 levels.

The final result is that both from a view of effort to get there, and from a view of gain in power and abilities, the Burning Crusade gives more than 10 effective levels. In effect the number is closer to, but lower than, 20. That is good news, because it means that the Burning Crusade adds more than 16% to the World of Warcraft. Blizzard stated that the expansion would add 25% to the game, and looking at the effective levels that number sounds believable.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:01 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Europe vs. US RMT difference

Thank you to the reader who brought this to my attention: Apparently there is a huge difference in prices between World of Warcraft gold on an US server and the same amount of gold on an European server. There is an article about that named "Is Europe the 'Third World' of Warcraft?", but if you want to read it, you'll have to google it. Because the site that posts it is a price comparison site for WoW gold sellers, and I'm not linking to such sites.

But I checked a gold seller, and yet, WoW gold in the US is about 10 times more expensive than in Europe. 1000 gold in the US cost $300 to $400, while you can get 1000 gold in Europe for $30 to $40. A striking difference.

Quote: "The cost involved in producing (farming) gold on Europe must simply be lower than the cost involved in producing the same gold on World of Warcraft USA. What this means is that Blizzard is policing its American realms far, far more rigorously than it is policing its European realms."

Can't argue with that. If the cost of farming gold was the same in Europe and in the US, and the farmers are Chinese who play whereever they earn most, prices on the two continents should be the same. Because otherwise the farmers would just move to where they can sell the gold for more money. Only Blizzard wielding a heavy ban stick on the US realms, but leaving the European realms alone can explain the huge price difference.

I'm just not so sure which continent is worse off by that. If you think RMT is a very bad thing, you'd agree with the article that Europe was treated less well by Blizzard. But if you want to buy 1000 gold, you'd probably prefer to live in Europe. Makes you wonder if Blizzard is running a huge socio-economic experiment on a test sample of 3.5 million players to find out how bad RMT really is for a game.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:50 PM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Ten things you already knew about me

Brandon of MMO Gaming has interviewed me. I'm just posting the link here for reference. Feel free to read the interview, but be prepared that the questions mostly cover things that my blog readers already know about me. Starting with question 1) "What game are you currently playing?".
- posted by Tobold @ 8:40 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
Dynamic spawn system

Once upon a time in a classic MMORPG there was a camp of 10 foozles. And as there was a quest to hunt them for foozle pelts, often players came to that camp and started killing them. Using a classic respawn system common to many MMORPGs, whenever a foozle died, that triggered a timer, and 2 minutes later the foozle would respawn. So far, so good.

Now when a player started killing foozles, and needed about 30 seconds to kill one, the population of foozles would decrease. After 30 seconds the first foozle dies, and the first foozle timer starts, and the foozle population goes down to 9. The population decreases to 8, then 7, then 6. After 2 and a half minutes the fifth foozle dies, and the first foozle respawns, keeping the foozle population constant at 6, as long as there is only one player killing them.

But if a second player turns up, the stable population goes down further, to always only 2 foozles being alive. And if even more players turn up, for some periods of time no foozle at all is in the camp. If 10 players kill the 10 foozles simultaneously, the players then stand around in the camp for 2 minutes unable to proceed before the respawn timer has completed. That is obviously not good, especially if you expect many players to hunt in the same area.

So Blizzard decided that for the Burning Crusade expansion, in the new zones that would most certainly be overcrowded with players, the classic respawn system wasn't cutting it any more, and they invented the dynamic respawn system. They aren't saying exactly how it works, but I imagine it goes a bit like this:

There is a maximum distance from which a player can attack. So if you draw a big circle around the foozle camp, with a diameter of this maximum attack range, you can count how many players are close enough to the foozles to attack them. And the more players there are in that circle, the more you shorten the respawn timer. Alternatively you could also just count the number of alive foozles, and make the respawn timer shorter when there are less of them alive. In both cases the more the foozles are camped, the faster they respawn, and there is much less of a problem of players not being able to find a single foozle to kill.

But the dynamic spawn system does have its disadvantages as well. If one player meets two foozles, and needs 30 seconds to kill the first one, then another 30 seconds to kill the second one, and due to lots of other players around the respawn timer is down to 30 seconds, by the time the second foozle dies, the first one respawns at that position. Now the combat never ends, unless the player runs away, because every time he kills a foozle, the other one reappears. Sooner or later the player is out of mana and/or health, and is cursing loudly about the stupid respawns.

So if you are playing the Burning Crusade and you wonder why you are swamped with constant respawns, that is just a side effect of the new dynamic spawn system. That can be annoying, but believe me, you'd be more annoyed if you couldn't find a mob to kill.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:14 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
My first day in Burning Crusade

Once I had the Burning Crusade up and running, I started by moving my main character undead priest through the Dark Portal into Outland. Took the flight path to Thrallmar, and rode through Hellfire Peninsula all the way west to Zandermarsh, tagging the Falcon Watch flight point on the way. In Zandermarsh I turned south and rode to Terrokar Forest and the city of Shattrath, where I set my hearthstone. I assume this is where my bind point will stay at least until the next expansion, because in Shattrath there are permanent teleport portals to all other cities.

After having set the bind point, I took one of this portals, to Silvermoon. I unlearned tailoring, and took up jewelcrafting instead. Now theoretically I have all the materials to take jewelcrafting to 300. But practically this is lot of stuff, and it is distributed over 4 characters, one with metals, one with gems, one with all the elemental ingredients, and the undead priest with the miscellaneous stuff like large fangs and flasks of mojo, plus the recipes. As an added complication I stored far more than necessary of these materials, so I'm sure I won't be caught short, and I can probably resell the excess for twice of what I bought it for. So I didn't mail all of the stuff to the jewelcrafter, but mailed batches of what I'd need for the next 50 or so points in jewelcrafting, waited until it arrived, did the skilling up, and then sent the next batch. Thus I only got until 135 in skill last night, but I'm not really in a hurry.

In the waiting time I did one dungeon trip with some guild mates, to the Hellfire Furnace. Yeah, I know, that is actually the second of the Hellfire dungeons, and not the first. But we did allright, with no deaths. Perfect party mix, my priest, a druid, a warrior, a mage, and a warlock. The mage + warlock combo is perfect crowd control in a dungeon full of orc warlocks, because you can sheep the orc and banish the demon. First mob dropped a paladin libram, and of course on the first day of BC in a Horde group we didn't have a level 60 paladin yet. Second mob dropped cloth bracers, but I didn't roll for them, as my tier 2 bracers were just as good. The last mob dropped some leather armor, to the delight of the druid. So no loot for me except for some random green stuff, but one dungeon trip already got me about 30% of the way to level 61, so I was pleased enough.

I also moved my troll warrior to Shattrath, because I realized that I'd better park him in a city or inn, and not in front of the Dark Portal where he was. Rest xp are back, and I want him to be charged up with them to the max. And of course set his bind point to Shattrath as well. I doubt there will be many people above level 58 left soon which are bound elsewhere than Shattrath.

Then I made a new character, a blood elf mage. I took a look at the male character model on the character creation screen, and decided to make a female instead. I'm not usually homophobe, but playing a powerful mage, able to incinerate everything, but who looks positively gay somehow goes beyond my roleplaying abilities. All the homosexual men I ever met were far too gentle for a thrower-of-fireballs role. So I made a female blood elf mage, and leveled her up to level 5. Then I moved her to Silvermoon and learned tailoring and enchanting. The idea is that my jewelcrafter will have to make a lot of low level jewelry to level up, and nobody will want to buy the stuff. So I'd rather use it to train enchanting on my new character than to vendor it.

All in all a successful first evening in the Burning Crusade. I refuse to get rushed, even if I already saw some people reach level 63 on the first day. For me the goal is the playing and experiencing, not getting the getting somewhere.

So how did your first day of Burning Crusade go?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:59 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
Blizzard vs. Pessimism

Welcome dear sports fans to this exciting event in which Blizzard tries to beat the pessimism of Tobold's Burning Crusade release day chaos predictions. The rules are simple: I try to buy, install, and get running a copy of the Burning Crusade expansion on his computer. Blizzard scores a point for everything that goes right, pessimism scores a point for everything that goes wrong, regardless of whether it is Blizzard's fault or not.

The game starts with an early goal for pessimism, when on Saturday before release date the online retailer where I pre-ordered my copy of Burning Crusade in September (!!!) has some problem processing a perfectly good credit card, and the order is dropped out of the waiting queue. In spite of giving another credit card number, the order is stuck in "processing" still 5 days later, and I have to call them to cancel it. 0:1.

Blizzard evens the score when I go in the afternoon to a local major retailer, and there is a complete wall full of Burning Crusade boxes, in both French and English. Apparently the normal BC boxes are in abundant supply everywhere, only the collectors edition is nowhere available. I give that point to Blizzard. 1:1

Starting the installation Blizzard scores a quick and highly unexpected goal by opening a window in which you enter your account name, password, and BC key. On clicking OK the application connects to Blizzard and updates your account in less than 5 seconds! Being mentally prepared to have to wait for hours on the account upgrade page, this is a big point to Blizzard. 2:1

Blizzard scores another point when I visit their website to see whether it is up, and find the site completely redecorated. The WoW homepage is stripped down to a minimum, offering all the services important on launch day, like account upgrade, technical support, and the forums, leaving out all the bells and whistles that only create unneccessary bandwith usage. Clever idea, one point to Blizzard, 3:1.

Pessimism catches up when I have installation problems, the installation gets stuck on disc 4. I copy all the discs to a hard drive and install from there, which works. But a friend calls me in panic, haven gotten stuck on disc 2, same problem. Apparently the installer is a bit sensitive when you click OK too fast. Not good, one point to pessimism. 3:2

I finally get everything installed and start patching. No points for anyone, the patch process is long and annoying, put you can reuse the previously downloaded huge 219 MB 2.0.1 to 2.0.3 patch file. Lets call that a draw, still 3:2

Finally the game is patched, and I expect the login server to be down, and a huge queue on my server. But Blizzard scores a final point by getting me into the game immediately. I give only one point, because it isn't prime time yet. But this brings the final result to 4:2 for Blizzard, scoring them a clear win over my pessimistic predictions. Grats, Blizzard, well done!
- posted by Tobold @ 4:30 PM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Player-created quests

Zoso has a brilliant article about the NPC whose house is filled with murloc eyes. And he mentions the idea of player-created quests, but is doubtful about it. And I think that if you'd allow players to write quest descriptions etc., most player quests would be really bad. But in a way player-created quests already exist, you can find them in the auction house.

A short look at the trade goods section of the auction house tells you that a stack of runecloth sells for 1 to 2 gold. That *is* basically a quest: "Go forward and kill level 50+ humanoids. Collect 20 of the runecloth they drop, and I will pay you 1 to 2 gold." Only the xp reward is missing. And from all the possible monster drops, trade goods are a rather small part.

So to make a game with player-created quests, you would need to expand the crafting system a lot, so that it uses a lot more of items that drop of monsters. Then a crafter who needs items for a tradeskill goes to some sort of NPC and indicates what he needs and how much he is willing to pay for it. The NPC transforms this buy request into a quest, adding information about on what mob to kill to get the item in question, and an appropriate xp reward. But you can't get the xp reward by simply handing in the items, you need to take the quest first, then kill the mobs, and while you are on the quest every item that drops that is needed for the quest is flagged as "quest item". This is necessary because otherwise two people could just get endless xp by sending the same stack of runecloth back and forth.

The interesting part of that is that it creates a more dynamic quest system. The demand of items varies with time, so the quests on offer change with time. If the crafted items are actually good, and not much inferior to found items as they often are in tradeskill systems, a symbiotic relationship develops between adventurers and crafters. The crafters pay the adventurers to go materials hunting, and the adventurers buy the crafted items. This is probably extremely hard to balance right, but could make for a very compelling game.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:20 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Accessibility

You might have noticed that in these pre-BC days I've written a lot about other games, both specific reviews and generalizations. While the question "what makes a good MMORPG?" isn't going away, there is an obvious risk that starting from tomorrow I'll be too busy with the Burning Crusade expansion of World of Warcraft to think about other games. Experience of fun beats theory of fun. :) But before the focus of this blog shifts once again, I'd like to talk about one major success factor of modern MMOGs: Accessibility.

The best games are easy to learn, but difficult to master. But often MMORPGs fail on the "easy to learn" part. You are given endless freedom, and too few clues what to do next. You leave the newbie area, come to a crossroad, and find yourself confronted with roads in three different directions, without any hint in which of these directions there are quests and monsters you could do at your level. As one of the directions leads into much higher level monsters that will kill you with a single hit, and another is leading you into a dead end or a lower level area, having the freedom to choose then often ends in frustration.

Now single-player games often have invisible walls or something blocking the "wrong" ways, forcing you into a linear gameplay, which isn't so much fun either. But WoW pioneered the idea to have a NPC with a big yellow exclamation mark standing at the crossroads, who miraculously detects that you are of the level likely to come out of the newbie zone, and gives you a quest to carry a parcel into the area where the next levels of quests and monsters are. You still have the total freedom to go wherever you want, but you also get guidance towards the direction where you are most likely to want to go. This concept of guidance has made World of Warcraft a lot more accessible to a lot of people who previously wouldn't have played a MMORPG, and thus increased the total market size for these games.

But accessibility doesn't begin or end with just quests. Another major element is the user-interface. And there we still have a long way to go. MMOG user interfaces have improved over the years, but still are far from perfect. In many games there are still quite a number of actions which you can only perform by typing a /command in the command line. Which over 10 years after the death of MSDOS is an anachronism, and is only serving to scare people away. Luckily in World of Warcraft the use of /commands and macros is mostly optional. But having observed newbies panic on receiving a tell, because there is no reply button, and you have to know how to start a reply (press R, or type /reply, or left-click on the name of the sender), I can see that there is room for improvement.

Once beyond the learning phase, accessibility doesn't end to be important. While a game should be difficult to master, it shouldn't be impossible to finish or to progress in. With progressing being probably the more important part. Again World of Warcraft made big progress in accessibility by lowering the bar of how many hours are required to level up. Also important is that WoW allowed people to progress while playing solo. The lowered time requirement and soloability enabled people who don't have a lot of leisure time to still log on, play an hour, and make some visible progress towards the next level. No xp loss or xp debt on death means that you *always* progress, you can't get stuck in an endless loop.

All of this broadened the potential user base. If you need to be an expert in gaming and computer programming, and have 4+ consecutive hours available to play a game, that eliminates already quite a lot of people from playing. World of Warcraft showed that the number of people who *would* play a MMORPG if they *could* was a lot bigger than the previous existing number of online roleplayers.

Accessibility means more players, which results in more profit for the company, which results in more money available for re-investing, and that is generally a good thing. There are some elitist purists, who prefer MMOGs to be arcane and difficult, only accessible for the hardcore elite of gamers. But economically that doesn't make much sense. Some game developers have understood that, but others still think that for some reason of purity online role-playing games should be highly complex and require endless amounts of time and dedication. The inherent Darwinism of the capitalist system will weed them out over time. But the 2007 crops of new games still has too many games that will fail to grab a major market share simply because they aren't accessible enough.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:31 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
The Crushbone Factor

I keep mentioning it, so I think it's time to dedicate a post to it: The Crushbone factor. As the term dates back to the time where Everquest had a near-monopoly grip on the MMOG market it is maybe a bit outdated. But on the other hand I haven't found a better word yet to describe a puzzling phenomenon: If you take two MMORPG which have a very similar feature list and actually play both of them, one of them can be much more fun as the other, without you being able to describe what the difference is. And I think the difference is often one of Crushbone factor.

Crushbone was the name of a low-level zone in the original Everquest, located just north of the wood elf starting area. The zone was populated by orcs. But it wasn't just a zone full of orc camps, the place felt positively alive. There was a whole orc ecosystem there. Emperor Crushbone is sitting in his castle, planning an invasion of Faydark with the help of his evil dark elf advisor, Ambassador D'vinn. There were mines in which the orcs forced slaves to labor. There was a hill on which the orc trainer was training the troops. And you got to see all that, because there were quests which told you the story of the place, and some of the best items in the game for that level, like the Shiny Brass Shield dropped there. The place was dangerous, especially if you wanted to take down the emperor himself, but the rewards were worth it. It was a bit like a non-instanced raid dungeon. And there is barely an Everquest player who didn't visit it, and who doesn't remember it fondly. So fondly that the latest EQ2 expansion, Echoes of Faydwer, which brings back Crushbone and the other zones of that continent is renewing the interest of many veteran gamers in that game.

The Crushbone factor is the hard to explain difference between Crushbone and a generic zone full of generic orcs. The added value that you get from having a zone that is alive, which is more than the sum of its parts, where everything fall together to create a fun and memorable experience. Unfortunately it is not only hard to describe, it is even harder to recreate.

Even World of Warcraft doesn't always manage it, although the game has some good zones. For example most of the cities in World of Warcraft seem relatively alive. Who doesn't remember the little boy William in Stormwind, stealing his sister's dolly, and running all over the place with her? But that experience isn't perfect, because while we wish we could smack William and give the dolly back to his sister Molly, we can't. There is no interaction with the players. World of Warcraft scores better with similar game elements, like the rabbits or sheep running around farm communities. Not only can you see the rabbits being chased and killed by wolves, you can interfere and either kill the rabbit or the wolf. You can skin the rabbit, or the sheep, and the sheep even sometimes gives you wool from skinning, which is a nice touch. The sick deer in Darkshore can be cured by a quest. All this is helping to make the virtual world feel more real, but still it is not as good as Crushbone. The best places are those where you get the feeling that you kill mobs for some greater purpose, and not just for getting some xp, loot, and a quest reward. Where your adventures make you part of the world, where you live the story.

But this is more of a feeling than a list of required features. Over the weekend I played in the Vanguard and LotRO betas, and LotRO had a strong Crushbone factor feeling (better than WoW actually), while Vanguard didn't. Besides the NDA not permitting me to talk about LotRO features, it is actually easier to explain what Vanguard doesn't have than to explain what LotRO has. Vanguard simple often feels too empty and dead. You travel along a river, and come upon a camp of huts. You expect somebody to live there, and approach carefully, not knowing whether there are peaceful fishermen, or some sort of humanoid monsters. And then you are disappointed that it is neither, the camp is simply void of all life, there is nothing to interact with. And you get the same experience over and over again, huge cities with few inhabitants, beautiful ruins with nobody around, large stretches of fantastic landscapes where you meet neither mob nor NPC nor harmless animals running around. What is sad about it is the obvious potential to be a living, breathing world. Much of the landscape and architecture of Vanguard is breathtaking. The fishing village or the abandoned ruins are *there*, the developers would just need more time to fill them. And given the size of the world, they would need a lot of time to fill the whole world with life. Time that the January 30th release date is not going to give them. And filling a world with life after it has been released is a lot more difficult.

Besides filling the world with life, and interweaving the quests and mobs in an area into a coherent story, I can't even really give advice to the developers. Just like most of us are able to see a movie and decide whether it is "good" or "bad", without being able to make a good movie, I as a player can feel the Crushbone factor when it is there. But I probably wouldn't be a good game developer, because I don't know much about the techniques to create a virtual world. I can only live them. And blog about them.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:30 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
The Lord of the Rings Online NDA

I actually took the time to read the important passages of the NDA for the LotRO beta. The relevant paragraph 5 on confidentiality says: "Protection of Confidential Information. During the course of the Preview Program, you will have access to non-public information concerning the Game, including, but not limited to, the game design, look and feel, computer software, game concepts, storylines, features, screen shots, characters, graphics, audio, visual images, any information, discussions or postings of Codemasters or other participants in Preview, Feedback, business methods or other technical or business information which is not generally known and which is proprietary to Codemasters and/or Turbine (and/or their respective affiliates, publishing partners, licensors or licensees) (“Confidential Information”). All of the foregoing is confidential and proprietary to Codemasters and/or Turbine (or their respective affiliates, publishing partners, licensors or licensees). You agree to treat as confidential all Confidential Information (including your password) of which you become or are made aware in connection with your participation in Preview, regardless of whether it is specifically designated as confidential and regardless of whether it is in written, oral, electronic, or other form. The Confidential Information may include, without limitation, trade secrets, know-how, inventions, game interfaces, technical data or specifications, testing methods, business or financial information, research and development activities, product and marketing plans, and customer and supplier information. You agree that you shall maintain all Confidential Information in strict confidence; you will not disclose or permit access to Confidential Information to anyone other than Codemasters or Turbine (or its respective affiliates, publishing partners, licensors and/or licensees), or discuss Confidential Information with anyone except within the Game itself or on the Preview boards accessible by logging in with a username and password on."

In plain English, I'm not allowed to give you a preview of Lord of the Rings Online, or blog a "first impressions" post telling you anything about this game works. But this confidentiality covers only game information. My opinion per se is not covered, as long as I don't explain the in-game details of what I like or dislike. So here is a very short statement of my opinion on LotRO, with more to follow when the NDA is lifted:

I am *so* going to buy this game! It is absolutely wonderful. And given the right conditions the Lord of the Rings Online could even make a dent in World of Warcraft's armor of total market domination. Way to go, Turbine! Practice makes perfect. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 7:11 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
How big is Azeroth?

It takes quite some time to completely explore every corner of the World of Warcraft, Azeroth. But how big is this world in square miles or square kilometers? While other game companies brag about the size of their worlds, Blizzard is keeping mum about this. So I had to go out and measure it myself.

If you have a look at the continent of Kalimdor, you will see that it is roughly rectangular, and three times as long as it is wide. So if we could measure how wide it is, we would have its area. And the second continent, the Eastern Kingdoms, while being shaped more irregularly, has roughly the same area. But how do you measure the widths of a continent?

To measure a square mile, you first need to define what a mile is. As "a mile" doesn't even have the same length on different places on our earth, that isn't trivial. The basic definition of a mile is coming from Roman times, defining a mile a 1000 double steps of a marching legion. The soldiers had to walk through all of Europe anyway, so you just needed to count their steps and had the place all measured up with few extra effort. Clever guys, these Romans. But on Azeroth "steps" aren't that easy to count, and the length of legs between the different races varies widely. But interestingly all races move at the same running speed, so it makes sense to define the mile by the time it takes to run it. On earth, a marathon runner has a running speed of about 12 miles per hour. As everybody on Azeroth is a hero, lets just define the Azerothian running speed as 12 mph as well. This effectively defines an Azerothian mile as "the distance you can run in 5 minutes", without using any speed enhancing items of course.

So what I did was run from the east end of Thousand Needles to the west coast of Feralas, because you can do so in pretty much a straight line. I timed it, and crossing the width of the continent of Kalimdor running took me 18 minutes and 35 seconds. That makes the distance 3.7 miles. That means the continent of Kalimdor is 41 square miles (just over 100 square kilometers) big, and the world of Azeroth pre-Burning Crusade is about 80 square miles or 200 square kilometers.

I called Kalimdor a continent. But at 41 square miles it doesn't really qualify. The island of Manhattan has 20 square miles, and somebody else compared it to Azeroth. He used a different method, but ended up with a similar result. The Isle of Wight, a small island in the channel between the UK and the European continent, is 146 square miles, and thus bigger than the World of Warcraft including Outland. Azeroth is a pretty small place.

But in the end measuring the size of a virtual world in square miles doesn't make much sense anyway. If you made a parallel World of Warcraft with exactly the same number of quests and mobs, and the same geography, but just doubled all distances, Azeroth would be 4 times as big. But that wouldn't add anything to the game. So counting the size of Azeroth in number of quests is a better indicator of game "size". And in that respect World of Warcraft is easily beating other games that just have more land mass.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:15 AM Permanent Link  (54) comments Links to this post

 
Move or stay?

World of Warcraft is undergoing a period in which server populations change a lot. People resubscribe for the Burning Crusade, and server get overcrowded until there is a free server transfer, a server split, or people are paying for a paid server transfer. Great migrations, WoW style. So a lot of players will pose themselves the question whether to move or whether to stay.

The main disadvantage of moving to a different server is a social one: You don't know anybody on the new server. If you are in a guild you like, and the guild didn't decide to move as a whole, moving would mean giving up your guild and friends, in the hope of finding a new guild and new friends. Of course if your guild just exploded in a huge fight that might actually be an advantage.

People who just resubscribed after a prolonged absence don't have that problem. Sad as it is, but WoW guilds are often very fast-living, with a high turnover, and if you haven't been online for a couple of months, either you've got kicked out, or nobody remembers you. You might as well move to a different server. The same is true for people who didn't join a guild, or who joined one of the numerous phantom guilds which don't really play together.

The main advantage of moving to a new server is that you avoid login queues and lag. But there are other advantages as well: The economy is different on newer servers, with less inflated prices for trade goods, and more lower level items still being traded in the auction house. Interesting especially if your character isn't level 60 yet. Very new servers also have a higher percentage of the population below level 60, so finding a group below level 60 is easier.

So if you are offered a free server move, and you have no social ties to a guild or friends, moving is probably a good idea. I'd stay away from paid server moves, unless you have real-life friends on the server where you want to move to.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:02 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Vanguard tourism

My Vanguard: Saga of Heroes experience has its ups and downs. Yesterday was predominantly a down day, which ended me up being very disappointed. I had run out of quests with my level 10 cleric, and noticed that, unlike WoW, Vanguard doesn't have "bring this parcel to the next area where you will conveniently find the next bunch of quest givers" quests. So I saddled my virtual horse and traveled around the continent of Qalia all evening as a tourist, looking what else there was than newbie areas.

That started nice enough, with the discovery that in Vanguard you can mount your horse while running, you can cast buffs while mounted, and if you cast an offensive spell you automatically dismount, instead of getting a "you can't do that on a horse" error message. But while moving away from Khal I noticed that my framerate wasn't improving. It stubbornly stuck between 7 and 10 fps, which isn't the smoothest way to see a virtual world. And apparently that wasn't a graphics card problem, because the Vanguard lag meter informs you about "network fps". I simply couldn't get a better framerate, because the connection was lagging. Sigh!

Things went downhill from there. I did find level 10 and higher mobs, but it became quickly apparent that there were very few quests beyond level 10. I could have leveled up by just grinding dispersed random mobs, but that isn't much fun. What is definitely missing is the "Crushbone factor", the added kick from having an area in which quests, mobs, and background story fall together to make a unity that is memorable. Vanguard sure has some interesting landscapes and architecture, but they aren't well used. While riding around I found one huge city right out of Arabian Nights, but there were only a handful of NPC vendors there, and not much going on. I also found some other interesting buildings, including a huge temple in the wilderness, but there were neither mobs nor NPCs there. In some places I could ride 15 minutes in a straight line and not meet a single mob nor NPC. What good are empty landscapes for a virtual world?

In the north-western corner of Qalia I stumbled upon a deserted mountain, a huge area, which had a handful of housing plots. Maybe 20 in total over the area, with up to 6 bundled in clusters. At this point I realized that player housing in Vanguard will be a huge disappointment. There simply won't be a housing plot for every player, and as the plots and houses cost huge amounts of money, only the most leet or large guilds will be able to afford a house. This isn't really "player housing", it is more "guild housing for the elite". A rough estimate from the amount of world I've seen and the number of housing plots I've encountered tells me that there will only be a few hundreds of them, on a server with a prime-time population of 3,000 to 5,000 players, which corresponds to roughly 20,000 players per server total. Only a few, single digit percent of the population will end up with a house. Bleh!

The final nail in the coffin was the news spreading like wildfire on the chat channels that SOE had announced January 30 as the official Vanguard release date. I nearly choked on that one. Vanguard does have potential, but it solidly falls into the category of half-finished. No way will this game be in any state which could decently be described as ready for release in less than 3 weeks. SOE is shooting themselves in the foot here, releasing an incomplete game two weeks after the Burning Crusade is probably the worst possible move. Three to six more months would both much improve the game, and draw on a pool of WoW players finding that the expansion couldn't keep them playing forever.

So my current plan is to ride around some other continents, maybe make a halfling rogue or so to see how other characters play, and then abandon Vanguard in time for the Burning Crusade. For this Saturday I got an invite for a Lord of the Rings Online Euro beta stress test. It only lasts half a day, from noon to midnight, and as far as I know the NDA isn't lifted yet, but at least it will give me an opportunity to compare this to Vanguard. Because I don't believe in a "WoW Killer" at this point in time, and in the end the games coming out in early 2007 will have to fight it out between them who grabs the second prize.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:30 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft hits the 8 million mark

These "resubscribe to WoW early before the BC rush" e-mails really worked: Blizzard just announced World of Warcraft now having 8 million paying customers, of which 2 million are in North America, 1.5 million in Europe, and 3.5 million in China.

Now compare that to the 280,000 players that pre-WoW were thought to be the size of the European MMO market. World of Warcraft increased the market size at least 5-fold. Sorry, don't have the numbers for North America, but I'm sure the overall market size grew there as well. That is important, because paying customers equal profit which equals future investment in new games. That could be Blizzard working on World of Starcraft, or other companies wanting their share of the pie. Now the market has been proven to be there, people start investing. And while not all the games produced that way will be good, overall we players will get more choice between better games. And even if you hate WoW, you'll have to thank Blizzard for that.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:18 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Customer service in the event of being hacked

A reader directed my attention this Blizzard customer service forum post: "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! As the advent of the expansion looms ever closer, we have noticed a marked increase in players posting on this and other forums regarding the current status of their account investigation; more specifically, there seems to be some concern as to whether all restoration of characters and items lost due to compromise shall be concluded before The Burning Crusade is released on Jan. 16.
...
We can certainly appreciate players' desire to know precisely where they stand in regards to their investigation, and how much longer they shall have to wait before restoration can occur, as we recognise and share the player base's sense of urgency in the matter; please be advised, however, that neither the in-game Game Masters, nor those who moderate the Customer Service Forum, shall be able to provide any additional information beyond what is offered in the update e-mails sent at regular intervals by the Account Investigations team. While it may happen that those e-mails do not always contain all the pertinent information players seek, this is due to our having diverted all possible resources to the investigations themselves, in order to maximise the efficiency of the restoration process to the fullest extent possible under the circumstances.
...
(Please note: In our efforts to stave off clutter, any additional threads regarding this matter may be locked or deleted at our discretion.)"

Apparently keyloggers and phishing scams have lead to a large amount of accounts having been "hacked", that is their password stolen, characters robbed, and either left naked or deleted. And customer service is unable to handle all these cases, which leads to waiting times of several weeks, if not months. And there is no information to be had where you are in the waiting queue and when your account will be restored. Obviously the affected players are angry, and post on the forums. And Blizzard tells them that they will just lock or delete their posts.

Being hacked is apparently the customer service situation which game companies are least able to handle. I remember in Everquest SOE stopped people from overwhelming customer service with "I've been hacked" requests by making reporting to have been hacked a bannable offence. Yes, you heard that right, if you came to customer service saying your account had been hacked, SOE would simply close down that account forever. The argument was that "hacking" didn't exist, all incidences were caused by people sharing accounts and passwords, and as that was against the EULA it was reason enough for banning. It "worked" insofar as soon nobody was complaining about hacking incidents any more. But it didn't improve SOE's reputation for good customer service.

Blizzard at least say they are working on each hacking incident, but if it takes several weeks to repair, you might as well start playing a new character. The problem is that Blizzard has no way of knowing what really happened. Was it a hacker who stripped your character, using a keylogger trojan? Or your little brother, using the password you attached with a post-it to your screen? Or did you try to dupe your money by sending it to a friend and then claiming you got hacked? Blizzard can't just automatically restore every character on request, that would be too easy to abuse. And a lengthy investigation into what exactly happens would cost a couple of hours of some customer service representative, which could easily wipe out all the profit they made from you.

Unpleasant as it is to have been hacked, in the end you will have to assume part of the responsability. If a virus formats your hard drive you can't demand restoration of your porn artistic image collection from Microsoft either. Phishing scams or keylogger trojans only work if you fall for them and have taken no preventive action. One would wish that Blizzard would handle these cases faster, but that isn't as easy as it seems. I can see how Blizzard will lose a couple of customers over this, but $15 only buys you so much customer service, and you quitting might be cheaper for Blizzard than a big effort to solve your case. The one to blame is the criminal who hacked you, Blizzard is as much a victim in this as you are.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:04 PM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
A more positive spin on Vanguard

Reading through mine and other people's Vanguard impressions, it struck me that they come out a bit too negative. The problem here is that it is so hard to evaluate a game purely on its own merits. You always compare it to something. And compared with the accessibility and polish of World of Warcraft most games, including Vanguard, make a bad figure.

But I am having fun in the Vanguard beta. My gnome cleric made it to level 10, and got his first mount. Only 30% faster than walking, but the idea to give mounts earlier is a good one. And at 12 silver 50 copper it wasn't costing more than I had. I do like playing a cleric in Vanguard, because in that game clerics are more like I think they should be: healers with melee combat abilities, just like in D&D. My cleric wears heavy armor, and has 2 melee moves, but only 1 ranged damage spell. I like that more than the World of Warcraft cloth wearing damage caster cleric.

If I had been in a coma for the last 5 years and gone straight from Everquest to Vanguard, I would totally have loved Vanguard. Besides the obviously better graphics, the gameplay improved a lot from EQ to Vanguard. The death penalty is less harsh, you get a chance to summon your corpse for 10% of the xp to next level; costly, but better than losing all your gear. There are a lot more quests in Vanguard than in EQ. And the downtime between fights is a lot shorter. The diplomacy system is great. So what is not to like?

The problem is that I haven't been in that coma, and while Vanguard moved in the right direction compared to EQ, World of Warcraft had already gone much further in that direction. So from a WoW perspective Vanguard is moving backwards. It isn't the dinosaur that some descriptions are labeling it. But it is a step backwards. It is a good game, but less good than WoW, in all aspects: technical, artistic, and gameplay. I said I wouldn't buy it, but I'm wondering if that is my last word. What if in a month I'm bored with the Burning Crusade? Apparently you can get Vanguard on the Station All Access Pass, together with all the other SOE games, which sounds like not such a bad deal. But still the problem remains, how do you fairly review the second-best game?
- posted by Tobold @ 12:26 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Ouch! Got whacked with a nerf bat

One line of the World of Warcraft client patch 2.0.3. patch notes says "The "Vestments of Transcendence" Set +15% mana regeneration has been replaced with 20 mana per 5 sec." Ouch! That hurts. 15% is a lot more than 20 mana per 5 seconds. For me it was closer to 50 mana per 5 seconds. I can see how Blizzard didn't want the percentage to stand, with the possible much better mana regeneration at level 70. But why not make make it as good as it was at 60? It isn't as if there were too many priests and people were shouting for them to get nerfed.

Speaking of which, warlocks and druids got nerfed a lot more than priests, my condolences.

The patch also introduced an invasion event at the Dark Portal, which unfortunately is very badly designed. Demons come through the portal and you get a quest to kill 6 of them. But every demon is instantly flagged by a mage or warlock with AoE, and if you play any class without AoE you can forget about flagging one. And if you are Horde you are likely to get killed, because the Alliance guys put their PvP flag on, to prevent Horde AoEers to use the same tactics. Alliance outnumbering Horde they just kill anyone who accidentally hits one of them. How come that these events bring out the worst in people? Blizzard should have distributed the spawn points wider from each other to prevent AoE hogging.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:08 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Challenge, anyone?

In 1973 two young guys founded a company named Tactical Studies Rules to produce a rule set for a tabletop war-game. The game was to be a squad-based tactics game, and the new idea was to have every player play one soldier in the squad. As there were already lots of historical war-games on the market, the developers decided to use a fantasy setting, based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and other authors. The game came out a year later under the name of Dungeons & Dragons, the company shortened its name to TSR, and the history of role-playing games had started. Fast forward to 2007, and the face of role-playing games has changed a lot, with World of Warcraft being a prominent example of the genre now. But at the heart of it every MMORPG is still a squad-based tactical war-game, and the challenges the game poses you are still mostly tactical in nature.

The main challenge in the gameplay of a MMORPG is to take tactical decisions in a limited time-frame. You have to decide which of your abilities to use, or when to run away. Unlike a first-person shooter or platformer game, a MMORPG isn't very twitchy. You have a second or so for each decision, and being much faster, or having much better hand-eye coordination, doesn't make you much stronger. At any given moment there is a cap on how hard a challenge your character is able to overcome. That cap is given by in-game statistics like level, skill points, or how much damage your spells do. Somewhere out there, there is a mob you can't possibly beat solo with your current level and gear, however hard you practice. Only by going up a level, or getting better gear, can you get past that cap. Or by not taking the challenge on solo, but forming a squad, a.k.a. group. In the hardest cases you even need a platoon, a.k.a. raid.

Playing in a group or raid increases your options, because of the interaction with the other group members. The group is stronger than the sum of its parts, because you can make tactical decisions which bring out the strong side of every class. In a solo combat you have to deal damage, withstand damage, and heal damage all by yourself. In a group you can have the tank do the withstand damage part, have a mage or rogue do the damage dealing part, and have the healer do the damage healing part. The challenge becomes one of coordination and aggro management. You don't pull when the healer is out of mana, you don't launch your fireball before the tank has sufficient aggro, and so on. The coordination of a 40-player encounter can be truly challenging, and need a lot of practice before the raid gets it right.

But practice you can in a MMORPG, in solo, group or raid mode. Unlike a real war, or a pen & paper role-playing game where the mob is controlled by an unpredictable dungeon master, in a MMORPG a mob is controlled by a predictable artificial intelligence. You died the first time that murloc ran away from you and alerted all his friends, but the next time you pulled him away farther from the others and beat him. You learn which mobs have what resistances and weaknesses, and how to beat each of them. With the harder and more unique boss encounters, you might even be able to read the tactics on the internet, or even see a video on YouTube. Chances are when your guild first saw Onyxia, you already knew about the three phases of the combat, and somebody was making a "minus 50 DKP" joke. It is more a matter of learning, of knowledge, and less of skill.

Now if you compare different MMORPG, you call some of them "easier", and others "harder". But in fact the "hard" games like EQ1 or Vanguard are not requiring an ounce more of skill than the "easy" World of Warcraft. The only difference between these games is in how much reward they give out for a success, and how much punishment for a failure. It is absolutely necessary to have both a reward for success and some punishment for failure, otherwise there is no game. But success or failure do rarely depend on the actual skill of the player, but more on the risk he is willing to take. You died because you fought a monster you didn't know yet and it was stronger than you thought, or because something unexpected like a respawn happened. Once you know all the abilities of that mob, the layout of its camp, and the potential adds and respawns, you don't die any more.

So if a game is "harder", taking away experience from you when you die, and handing it back to you slower, you automatically react by taking less risks. The game effectively punishes you for taking on new challenges, so you better get to know one camp of mobs very well, and stick to it. In Everquest people could stay for several levels camping the same mob encounter. There were other mobs of the same level in the game, but why would you want to go there, if tackling that new mob probably meant a bunch of lost experience points and no added reward? In the "easier" World of Warcraft you don't lose xp by dying, only some time and money for repairs. And with nearly every monster camp being covered by a different quest, moving from one encounter to the next suddenly becomes a lot more interesting. Even if you die once or twice before you learn the new encounter, the added quest reward more than makes up for the small death penalty. So the “harder” game doesn’t take more skill, it only pushes you into a more boring gameplay, taking away options from you.

If a mob can’t be beat in solo mode at all, you need a group to do it. If there is no mob that gives reasonable xp in solo mode, the game is effectively forcing players to group. Forced grouping is another way to take away options from the players by making the game "harder". If one day you don’t feel sociable, or you don’t have the time required to first set up a group and then stay together long enough to make the group finding worth while, you lost the option to go adventuring that day.

In group situations, making a game "harder" also has mostly bad unintended effects. If you grab 5 random people of the correct level for a group, and fail to beat a specific encounter, what do you do? Making the group stronger by improving coordination is hard. Often all the group members already play their class reasonably well and have grasped basic concepts of aggro management. Sometimes there is a complete idiot, but these people are usually hard to educate. And if everybody is already playing reasonably well, getting coordination to perfect isn’t going to make enough of a difference to really become much stronger. So often players take the easier way of making a group stronger: changing the composition to something closer to ideal. Out goes the shaman healer, in goes a cleric. Instead of tanking with a warlock’s pet, you invite a warrior. If you group with these people more often, for example because they are guild members, you exert peer pressure to make the cleric specialize in healing, and the warrior wear a shield instead of a two-hander. Again the "harder" game is just taking away options from the players, because suddenly playing your shadow priest becomes less viable, or your hunter can’t get an invite to a group.

The problem is that nobody has yet come up with a way to make a mob encounter more *mentally* challenging. Making something harder just means increasing the stats of the mob, not increasing the artificial intelligence of the mob, or forcing the player to think more when beating it. Because there is no more clever way to beat a mob, the only options of the players are to become stronger by going up in level or gear, or by bringing more other players to an encounter. We talk a lot about Chinese gold farmer bots ruining the economy. But the real scandal behind that is that it is actually possible for a bot, which is just an extended macro with no artificial intelligence to speak of, to play a MMORPG well enough to earn rewards that other players crave. That tells you a lot about how "hard" a MMORPG really is. Telling somebody to "learn2play" is ridiculous, because even a bot can play this, there isn't much player skill involved once you learned how a specific encounter works.

I would like to play a MMORPG that was more mentally challenging, in which I would need to think more in each combat. I would like mobs to have better artificial intelligence and be more unpredictable. I would like having to make more tactical decisions, based on what I see the enemy doing, or other random factors. Sooner or later the "collectible card game" concept, where the abilities you can use at any given moment are "drawn" at random from a "deck" of abilities is going to hit the MMORPG genre, and I’m looking forward to that. I can also see a future generation of more twitchy "action MMORPG", but I’d prefer my challenges to remain tactical.

What I don’t want to play is a game which is only called "harder" or "more challenging", but does nothing more than have mobs with higher stats, less xp per kill, and more xp penalty in the case of dying. I don’t want my ability to explore the world taken away because I just can’t afford to die that often. I don’t want my ability to play solo taken away, because playing solo gives no or too little xp. I don’t want my ability to play with my friends taken away because the friend has the wrong class or the wrong spec. It doesn’t matter if the fanbois of the "hard" games call me a "carebear", I simply refuse any harder challenge that is only arrived at by taking away options from me. Give me a MMORPG with tactical challenges that a bot can't play, and I'll show you who really is the more skilled player.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:00 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
Vanguard previews

With the Vanguard NDA just having been lifted, I'm not the only one to have blogged his first beta impressions. Van Hemlock has a list of links to Vanguard previews. He is also complaining that there is too little beta testing going on in a beta test, which is certainly true, but not something I tend to get angry about. A beta test doesn't just need people trying exotic things, but also a large number of average players just doing what they would do in a real game, and just reporting the bugs that stopped them from doing normal stuff. Van Hemlock proposes to ask "What happens if I try to combine my crafting kit with that Paladin Trainer while I'm a ghost?", but even if something bad happened when you do, it wouldn't be high on the list of things to fix.

I reported a couple of bugs in the Vanguard beta: a spell description saying my spell dealt 419 points of damage, when in fact it was only around 50; a quest which was impossible to finish because you didn't get the quest item when you should have gotten it; and the fact that the boat didn't show up in 40 minutes of waiting. Broken quests, and especially broken public transport, are a lot more serious than obscure situations, unless of course the obscure situation leads to a duping bug. So if most Vanguard beta players do like me and just play and report the important bugs, it does already a lot of good.

And while companies *call* it a beta test, I doubt they aren't aware of the marketing implications. Open betas are part of the marketing strategy of any new game nowadays, not unlike free trials. At the very least it allows the company to measure interest in the product, and do some sort of server stress test, even if not a single bug is reported.

Anyway, Van Hemlock also writes a passages I couldn't agree with more: "Personally, I always knew that Vanguard wasn't going to be for me. I'd done my time on the grind, I've played 2000-era EverQuest 1 for my crimes, and feel that my debt to society has well and truly been repaid. I'm here for the EZ-mode, and don't care who knows it. Any game looking to differentiate itself from World of Warcraft by being more difficult, is probably not something I'd enjoy nowadays. Still, I'm old, bitter and twisted - there's millions of youngsters who have only ever known WoW, and it's good that they have the option of 'Challenging' if they want. Whether that actually turns out to be 'Challenging', or merely 'Frustrating' is another matter." Makes me want to write a blog post about the concept of "challenging". I'll probably do it sometimes this week.

Finally, although the link is in Van Hemlock's post, I'm linking to The Common Sense Gamer's Vanguard preview here too, because it is well written and comprehensive. Read it.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:19 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
To instance or not to instance

In my pre-BC WoW slump I tested two other MMOGs: Dungeons & Dragons Online and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. And what is interesting about that is that these two are on the opposite extremes of the scale for how many instances a MMORPG should have: In DDO every mob encounter is instanced, while in Vanguard there are no instances at all. So lets have a look at the advantages and disadvantages of instances.

The big advantage of instances is that it avoids food fights. If you want to have big boss mobs in your game, which need a raid effort to kill, but also drop the best loot, there is a good chance that several guilds want to kill that boss mob at the same time. Imagine Onyxia in World of Warcraft was not an instanced encounter, but a mob that respawned every 2 hours. What guild gets to raid Onyxia on Friday night or Sunday afternoon? And how do you get a raid together for Tuesday morning? Without instances either there is lot of shouting about "kill-stealing", or guilds start organizing some sort of raid calendar, which also involves a lot of fighting and is necessarily imperfect. The bigger the game, the less likely is it that people can organize some sort of fair distribution of who gets to raid the boss mob when. I never got to kill the world boss mobs in WoW. Not that my guild wouldn't be able to kill one, but with some uber guilds systematically hunting the world bosses down, the second tier of guilds never even gets a chance to try.

Instances allow for scripted adventures, for single players or groups. DDO is full of these, dungeons where you have to pull levers at one place to open a door at another place. Obviously that is impossible if strangers are in the same dungeon with you. If you have to set several levers into a certain position, by the time you reach the door, somebody else touched the lever and spoiled your effort. Again a World of Warcraft example: Imagine your guild erased all the runes and just killed Majordomo in Molten Core, which makes Ragnaros appear in a different location, and some other guild is camping that location and kills Ragnaros, getting the best loot while avoiding most of the work. Triggers don't work well in non-instanced dungeons and encounters.

But instances also have disadvantages: You never meet anyone in them. Other players are both the best and the worst feature of MMOGs. Yesterday I played Vanguard, where there are no instances, and my level 8 gnome cleric went into a dungeon called the library for doing a second round of quests there. On the way I met another player advancing through the caves towards the library, and he invited me. We met more players in the library, and invited them too, until we had a full group. That allowed us to even kill the level 10 library boss mob, and finish all the quests for all group members. Meeting other players in situations like these can be lots of fun, and you are likely to make new friends, which is one of the key attractions of a MMOG.

Meeting another player in the same non-instanced dungeon is probably the best looking-for-group system you can think of. In an instance there is always a problem if some players have to leave half-way through the dungeon. If there are no instances, you can still look around and pick up some other players, making groups more dynamic. You can play together without being forced to stick together for a certain time.

If I had to choose between Vanguard and DDO, just on the base of the use of instances, I'd chose the non-instanced Vanguard. DDO just feels too lonely, too much like a single-player game. But extremes are rarely the best solution, so if you throw WoW into the equation, with its limited use of instances, you get a lot closer to the optimum. Non-instanced dungeons work perfectly as long as the boss mobs only need to be killed for a quest, not for loot, and repeatedly killing them makes no sense. If a specific mob spawning deep down in a dungeon drops some good loot, you automatically get people camping it. You just don't want a group fighting all the way through a hard dungeon like Lower Guk and finding that the Frenzied Ghoul end boss with the good loot (Flowing Black Silk Sash) is perma-camped by some higher level other player, or worse, a gold farmer bot.

I'm not yet quite sure how Vanguard handles this, but the quest boss end mob of the library didn't drop anything, he is just there for the quest, which is good. I did encounter a "named" flying book mob in the library, which dropped a magical necklace. But I have no idea how "campable" these Vanguard named mobs with the phat loot are. I only just hit level 9, so I can't possibly say how this continues. I'm okay with non-instanced dungeons where most of your reward comes in the form of quest rewards. But dungeons like in WoW, where the dungeon mobs drop significantly better loot than the overland mobs, and especially raid dungeons, I can't imagine working without them being instanced. Working with other players towards a common goal is great. Having to compete with other players about who gets to kill what phat loot mob is a lot less pleasant, and can lead to some seriously bad situations, like intentional trains to wipe out the competition. A limited use of instances is probably the best solution.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes First Impressions

I checked the Vanguard forums and found that its true: The NDA has been lifted and I can talk about my impressions from the beta. Now I just got into the beta this weekend, so this isn't a complete review. This is what I learned from 16 hours of /played in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. (I'll just call it Vanguard, not using the VSoH abbreviation).

The first thing to mention is that Vanguard is slow. In every possible aspect. Even just starting up the game takes at least twice as long as World of Warcraft (unless you are in a queue, of course). Going from A to B is slow, because the distances are much bigger, and there are no gryphons to ride on. Leveling up is slow, in 16 hours I only got to level 8. And the graphics, while very pretty, often produce lag and make the game slow as well. Now the lag and slow startup are probably unintentional, but the slow transport and leveling is deliberate. In Vanguard you aren't supposed to reach the level cap as fast as you did in World of Warcraft. And you aren't supposed to teleport and fly all over the world, you have to run or use a mount for most places, except for a few boats between continents. This is all part of the Brad McQuaid "vision" ™, which has downtime as a deliberate element of the game. If it takes you longer to get somewhere, you feel more of an achievement once you get there. The WoW philosophy of instant gratification is frowned upon, although I'm sure instant gratification will always be more popular. Vanguard is a MMORPG for the hardcore elite, casual players don't even need to apply.

Vanguard is a pretty big game, at least if you count it in square miles or in the 17 GB footprint on your hard drive. But sometimes I couldn't help but think that a good part of of this size is achieved by cheating. For example there are 19 races, which sounds like a lot. But of these 6 are human races, and 4 are elvish races. That saves a lot of textures and animations, just use the same model with a different color. Just like Blizzard did with the blood elves. A lot of the landmass size is gained by having empty landscape, with little or no mobs. That creates a feeling of distance, because you have to run so far to get to the next quest target, but didn't require all that much work from the artists. The one aspect where Vanguard is a bit too small is quests. I have no data on exactly how many quests there are, but they seem to be a lot thinner on the ground than in World of Warcraft. Even to get to level 8 I had to do some grinding because I ran out of quests, and then move to the starting zone of another race to pick up more quests. Of course this is a beta, and we can only hope that more quests will be added. Especially since quests don't seem very balanced yet: By doing the quests in both the gnome and the Qalia human starter areas, I noticed to my surprise that the quest reward items were better for the humans. From the humans I received armor with the same armor class as from the gnomes, but the human armor gave a bonus to hitpoints, which the gnome armor didn't. And around the human city there were a lot more quests than around the gnome city.

From the general gameplay and mechanics Vanguard is very, very similar to World of Warcraft. The user interface looks similar, and even the keyboard shortcuts are identical. The gameplay of the adventuring part is the same as in WoW: You take a quest, are told to kill 10 foozles, you go and kill them, you come back, you get xp and a quest reward. Nothing wrong with that, this is a gameplay which works, so why change it? Experience points give you levels, every two levels you get new spells or abilities, and during each level using your abilities raises your skills to a cap of 5 times your level. There are some minor differences in targetting, you can have one friendly and one hostile target, which makes switching between healing and damaging easy. If you solo you just have to think once to set yourself as your friendly target, there is no auto-selfcast.

I am not a big fan of the World of Warcraft maps, especially the dungeon ones. But in comparison to Vanguard, WoW has excellent maps. The map and mini-map function in Vanguard is so useless, it makes me cry. You only get to see where on the continent you are, but you don't see any details. There are no city maps, no dungeon maps, and even in the outdoor zones you only see the mountain ranges and major rivers, and no details at all. Vanguard makes up for that by having a system of waypoints. So your quest target area is often marked on the map as a waypoint. And on the compass you can always select one waypoint to show up as a red dot, giving you the general direction to your target. You might not be able to go there straight, and the map won't tell you the way, but at least you know the direction.

I didn't group much in the Vanguard beta up to now. Only once I teamed up with another character for a series of quests in a library at the end of some cave, which was rather hard. Instead of "normal" and "elite" mobs, Vanguard mobs have between 1 and 5 dots, and soloing anything beyond 2 dots is very hard. I don't know if there will be soloable mobs available up to the highest level, or if Vanguard has forced grouping. But I know that the interesting places, the dungeons, have the mobs with more dots, that require a group.

Besides adventuring, you can spend your time harvesting, crafting, or doing diplomacy. Harvesting works similar to World of Warcraft, you can learn up to two harvesting skills, then you go out and find resource nodes, and click on them to harvest. Unlike WoW you can have separate sets of clothing for harvesting, crafting, diplomacy and adventuring, you have 4 paper dolls to equip, not just one. Equipment is always automatically put on the right doll, and you don't need to switch anything when in the middle of monster killing you want to harvest some resources. Nice!

Crafting is supposed to be a mini-game, but unfortunately it is a boring one. You click a lot of buttons in series. Sometimes you have a choice which button of several possibilities to click, but the choice is usually rather obvious. For example if a complication appears, you better click on the button that deals with the complication first. You need to do very few real decisions, and these mostly deal with how high a quality of goods you want to craft. Higher quality uses more materials and more clicks, thus takes longer. And you only have a limited number of action points, and as each click costs some of them, you can't drive the quality up indefinitely. I got to artificer level 4 in the time I played, which didn't get me any further than making intermediate items, no useable goods yet. The crafting system is very complicated with lots of different skills which you can increase by doing it. But in the end you are standing in a city in front of a workbench and click buttons for hours. Not all that exciting. On the positive side there are "work orders", where you craft things for a NPC who pays you for them. You won't get rich from that, but it is a nice change from having to spend much money to train, as in WoW.

The third alternative occupation is the one where Vanguard really shines: Diplomacy. This is a kind of collectible card game, which is a lot of fun. Each game starts with a counter in the middle, and by playing cards with numbers in the upper right corner, you move the counter towards your side by so many spaces. Each of the two players has a number how many turns he needs to have the counter on his side to win. Besides the victory counter there are four columns of counters called expressions, where both you and your opponent count their expression points. There are cards that don't move the victory marker much, but give you expressions points instead. Other cards move the victory marker a lot, but cost expression points, and you can't play the card if you don't have the points. Every played card can't be used again for a random number of turns. Cards can give expression points not only to you, but also to your opponent, allowing him to pay for much better cards. This requires a lot of strategy to keep the victory marker on your side, and your expression points up, without giving the opponent points he can use. Different opponents have different cards, and often one of the 4 expression columns is greyed out and can't be used in that diplomacy parley, so you need to change your deck accordingly. That makes every parlay different. If you win a parlay, you might get items that give you bonuses, or new cards, and your diplomacy skill goes up. With a higher skill you need less turns for victory. The whole thing is a brilliant sub-game, and great fun. The only problem is that you can't just parlay with everybody, parlays are quests and can only be done once. So diplomats need to travel from city to city to find all the diplomacy quests, and have to travel a lot more than other adventurers.

Your four careers as harvester, crafter, diplomat, and adventurer are totally separate. You don't need to be adventurer level X to reach Y skill in harvesting or diplomacy. And crafting even has a level of its own. But each of these careers takes a lot of time, so you simply won't have the time to max out all of them. And of course harvesting requires you to search the landscape for nodes, with the higher up resources being in areas with higher level monsters, so it isn't really 100% independant from adventuring. But you could never leave the city and level up crafting all day, buying the resources and selling the finished goods via the broker, the Vanguard auction house. And for diplomacy, while you need to travel between cities, you can do so on the roads and don't need to explore the more dangerous corners of the maps. Diplomacy is definitely my favorite here, although it isn't quite clear yet for what it will be good in the long run. The developers talked of opening up trade routes with diplomacy and making money that way, but I'm still far from such things, if they are even implemented yet.

Because one thing is certain about Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, it isn't ready for release yet. In spite of having only between 2000 and 3000 players per server (and only 3 beta servers), the servers crash several times per day. And the client is also prone to crashing every couple of hours. Many quests are still bugged, for example I got stuck in gnomish diplomacy because I was supposed to get somebody fireworks by winning a parlay. Won the parlay, but no fireworks, thus no quest completion, and no further quests. Sigil is working on fixing things, for example I was stuck in crafting with a quest as well on Saturday, and it got fixed by Sunday. But while the game is certainly already playable, it doesn't really feel finished yet. And I sure hope they will add another thousand or two thousand quests.

But it doesn't really matter for me, I won't buy this game. I'm very much a fan of instant gratification and "easy mode" MMORPG gameplay as in WoW. Vanguard is much harder. Not in the skill you need to play it, but by making everything longer, and by punishing you harder if you fail anything. Since I reached level 7, I receive an experience point penalty on dying. Then I can either run naked to my corpse to recover my equipment and some of the experience, or say goodbye to the experience and summon my corpse to the altar where I got resurrected. There is no way to run as ghost to your corpse and continue from there. If you died deep in a dungeon, you will have to restart from the beginning, because dungeons aren't instanced, and the monsters respawn. A wipe is really, really hurting in this game. As I said, Vanguard is targeted at the hardcore, the iron men of virtual worlds. Me, I'd never even get to the highest level, not with all the experience point penalties from dying. And while Vanguard could have some success in its hardcore niche, the fact that this is a niche means that it will never get past a few hundred thousand players. This is not a WoW killer.

But of course if you prefer the harder style, this might be the game for you. On the world <---> game scale, Vanguard is placed a lot closer to the world end than Everquest. Players can build houses, boats, and decorate with self-crafted furniture. You might end up with a unique and fully decorated castle on top of a mountain, surveying all the lands around you. Getting there will be hard, but that is the philosophy of this game: if it isn't hard to get, it isn't worth getting. This is Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, not Saga of Casual Players. I don't have time for this, but maybe you do.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:09 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft realm splits

Blizzard is fully aware that there will be a wave of resubscriptions flooding the servers soon. Cap'n John alerted me that they are working on a way out: server splits, currently being beta tested. Unlike other games, where you had to give a /move command to move to the split server, World of Warcraft will present you with a choice on the character selection screen. If you don't chose, you will be moved to the same server as your guild leader (nifty!), or if you don't have a guild, you'll be moved in a way to even out the population. You could also end up on the server you didn't chose if too many people opt for one of them.

That will cause a lot of anguish, but I'm afraid it might be necessary for the older servers. The important thing is to arrange choices with your friends and guild mates, to avoid splitting away from your friends. But accidents always happen in these cases, which can be very annoying.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:53 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Isn't there a simple XCopy backup utility?

I bought an external hard drive yesterday. A Lacie 500 GB USB 2.0 drive for just 199 Euro. But now I'm struggling to find the kind of backup utility I want. I copied several directories, for example the My Documents directory to the new drive. But in the future I would just want to copy the new or changed files. I can do that by opening a DOS window and typing something like
xcopy "C:\Documents and Settings\Tobold\My Documents" F:\My_Docs /S /D /I /Y
but I would need to type that command for every directory I want to back up. Even in a batch file that isn't very user-friendly. I'd like some sort of utility which does such an incremental backup copy with a few clicks to select the directories. And I can't find the right one.

The problem is that most backup utilities refuse to simply copy files. They all want to pack the files into one big zip archive or something similar. The built-in Windows XP backup wizard creates .bkf files. Many other backup utilities use other form of proprietary archive files. I don't want that. The external hard drive is big enough to hold the files to be backed up withing zipping them. And I don't want to run into problems where when I want to restore a file, I absolutely need the same software that I used to archive. I just want to make an incremental copy which leaves the files as they are and is easy to not only restore, but also to copy to other computers.

Can anyone here recommend an incremental copy utility that doesn't pack files into archives but leaves them as they are?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:42 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Vanguard Fileplanet beta started

U.S. residents only can get into the Vanguard beta via Fileplanet. Another restriction is that you have to be a Fileplanet subscriber.

Me not being a U.S. resident, I first got a mail with the subject of "Vanguard beta is here", with a link which sent me to a page telling me that I couldn't get one. Then I got a mail saying "Dear Non-U.S./Canadian Subscriber, We thank you for your interest in the Vanguard: Saga of Heroes beta program on FilePlanet. Unfortunately, between the pre-promotion of the program and its launch this evening, we had to restrict access to U.S./Canadian residents only. However, since you signed up before the restriction, we're going to set aside some keys and make sure you get one." And then finally I got a mail with a key. How nice of them to make an exception.

So now I signed an NDA and won't be able to comment on Vanguard any more until it is lifted. But I'll make notes and report when I'm allowed to.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:26 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Don't blame me

Nearly two years ago, March 2005, I wrote about an extended downtime the European servers were experiencing. Yesterday the European servers had another extended downtime. Which wouldn't be remarkable, if I hadn't got three people apparently finding that article with Google, and commenting about yesterday's downtime. I can only guess that as usual when the servers are down, the European WoW website and forums were also down, and these people just needed some place to vent. Well, that's okay, just don't blame me for Blizzard's server outages.

It is still anecdotal, but apparently Blizzard's mail to get people to resubscribe early for the Burning Crusade is working. Or players decided on their own that it would be better to dust off their old characters early and do some preparation for the Burning Crusade. In any case, I hear more and more stories of login queues and server crashes. This doesn't bode well.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:02 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
Burning Crusade queue prediction

I was playing on US servers before the European servers opened up, so I have a cancelled US account. Due to this I just received a mail from Blizzard stating: "Blizzard Entertainment proudly invites you to return to the World of Warcraft on January 16th and journey beyond the Dark Portal, where an infinity of new experiences await you. Given the high volume of returning subscribers we expect when The Burning Crusade™ expansion goes live, if you are planning a return to Azeroth, we recommend reactivating your account as soon as possible in order to avoid the expected rush of launch-day activations."

So Blizzard expects the same thing that I mentioned before, a large number of "returning subscribers", and an overloaded account management server. But how is that going to affect existing subscribers? My prediction is long waiting queues on logon, depending on the age of your server.

I did a Google search to try to find how many copies of World of Warcraft were sold, but couldn't get any numbers. Blizzard is only ever talking about their 7.5 million current subscribers, and never about the total number of copies sold. Because if you knew how many millions bought WoW and you know how many are playing, you also know how many people quit World of Warcraft. And after over 2 years there must be millions of people having quit the game already. And there is a strong chance for them to resubscribe for the expansion, especially if the reason they left was that they got bored of the previous level 60 end-game.

The problem is that the resubscribers won't be evenly distributed over all servers. They will want to continue their old characters on their old servers. Even if they want to play a new draenei or blood elf, they will want to do so on their old server, so they can send money and items from their old characters to the new one. And obviously a 2-year old server has a lot more of quitters a.k.a. potential resubscribers than a server that just opened 3 months ago.

Pulling some hypothetical numbers out of my hat, lets say that the average player plays World of Warcraft for one year. That means every year there are as many people quitting a server as there are playing on it. Now lets say half of the people who quit do resubscribe on the 16th. That would result in the population of a 2-year old server doubling, and the population of a 1-year old server going up by 50%. A brand new server has no resubscribers at all. Meanwhile Blizzard is increasing server capacities by 25% for all servers. Which means the new servers have more than enough capacity, but the capacity increase is not sufficient for the original servers.

As my "main" undead priest is on such an original European server, there is a high chance that I will experience long waiting queues in January and February. After some time some people will give up and move to a less populated server. Or they will discover that the Burning Crusade didn't solve the issues they had with WoW when they quit in the first place, and quit again. If I wasn't in a guild, I would consider doing a paid character transfer to a very new server now, and avoid the queues. But I prefer to stay with my guild. If the queues get too bad on my old server, I can still play the level 60 human priest I made on a younger server.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:17 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Forbes on cheating

Forbes.com, the "home page for the world's business leaders", has a special report on games, covering games of all kind. Besides the to-be-expected stupid article on WoW addiction, there are some interesting interviews, and an even more interesting article on video game cheating called Cheating is good for you.

Quote: "There are four major reasons why players cheat in a game: they're stuck, they want to play God, they are bored with the game, or they want to be a jerk. The overwhelming reason most players cheat is because they get stuck. Either the game is poorly designed, too hard, or the players are so inexperienced that they can't advance. A boss monster can't be beaten, or a puzzle solved, or the right direction found. In such situations, players face a choice: They either cheat or stop playing altogether.

That pretty much describes me. For example I really liked GTA Vice City as a game, for the excellent 80's Miami Vice atmosphere. But not being 18 any more I simply was too slow for some of the missions. If I hadn't used cheat codes to succeed, I would never have seen the second half of the game. I cheated to play.

But in a MMORPG there is a different way to get stuck. For example I got stuck in the original Everquest at level 42. It wasn't that I was totally unable to earn more experience points. But at the amount of time I was able to put into the game it took me *weeks* to advance one more level, and at the level I stopped the progress was so slow, it just seemed as if I wasn't advancing any more at all. World of Warcraft, where the time to level 60 is about a quarter of the time to 60 in the original Everquest, was just the right speed and length for me. Emphasis on the "for me". Because while I tend to side with the casual players, I do have 20 to 40 hours per week for playing MMOGs, and not everybody has that much time.

And that explains my attitude towards RMT, buying virtual gold for real world dollars. Yes, it is cheating. But cheating as alternative to quitting the game is acceptable, as long as it doesn't hurt other players. I'm opposed to duping gold, or using bots to farm it. But if some guy, Chinese or not, is manually playing WoW to sell the gold he farms, I don't mind. Because the chinese gold farmer is just doing exactly the same in-game activity that the gold buyer would have to do if he had the time for it. The gold buyer is taking a cheating shortcut, saving the time he would need to farm gold by paying somebody else to do it. Not only does that allow him to skip the more boring parts of the game, but the equipment he buys with the money also speeds up his leveling process, or gets him past challenges that he wouldn't have been able to handle without. And I think Blizzard is aware of that, which is why manual gold farmers and gold buyers aren't banned. The alternative would be the gold buyer being stuck and quitting WoW, and the gold farmer not opening up an account in the first place. Some people will always find cheating to be morally wrong, but this isn't the Olympics, and if harmless cheating is the only way to keep some players in the game, so be it.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:45 AM Permanent Link  (30) comments Links to this post

 
Too early to say who wins console wars

The Guardian has an article about the "lower than expected" sales of the PS3 in the USA. In November / December the PS3 sold only 750,000 units, compared with 1.8 million Wii and 2 million XBox 360. Typical example of how you can take correct data and end up with wrong conclusions. Microsoft did not win the console wars yet, with Sony coming last.

The correct answer to the question of how many Wii and PS3 units sold is "all of them". The numbers cited above are comparing the sales of the XBox 360 with the production numbers of the Wii and the PS3. It is impossible to say how many more Wii and PS3 units would have been sold if they had been available. And it is hard to say how many XBox 360 were sold for the simple reason that no other "next gen" console was available at that particular store. We'll have to wait for the christmas 2007 sales to get a first realistic glimpse on which console is coming out ahead. And then it will still take many years before a count of the lifetime sales of each console reveals a final judgement on this issue.

I would have bought a PS3, but over here in Europe they aren't even sold before March. Wiis were sold, but a friend of mine who got one for his kids had to ask in half a dozen shops before getting one. The only next gen console I saw available in the shops I visited was the XBox 360. Being actually for sale gives this console a big advantage in the number game up to now. It will be some time before you'll see all three of them standing on a shop's shelf. And even in 2007 the XBox will still have the advantage of having already over 100 games available for it, while the others are still catching up.

I'm not in a hurry to buy that PS3, although I still think that I eventually will. Besides having to wait for good games, I have two other issues with the PS3: High Definition, and the Blueray drive. I don't have a HDTV yet, and High Definition TV is slow in arriving. I'm sure that the next TV I buy will be High Definition. But right now I would only need it to see PS3 games in the best resolution, and that is a bit hard to justify. Makes you wonder if the famous guy who ruined his TV with a Wiimote was just looking for an excuse to buy a new HDTV. The Blueray drive is simply a gamble, nobody knows if Blueray will be the next VHS or the next Betamax. With Blueray players still more expensive as a PS3, this could either be a bargain, or an investment in the wrong technology.

While I'm not planning to buy one, I still think that the Wii will end up outselling both the XBox 360 and the PS3, because it is much cheaper than either, and more accessible to the non-hardcore gamer general public. Everybody "gets" Wii Sports after 3 seconds of explanation. You can't say that about the typical console games on the competitor's machines.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:46 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft's new looking for group system

A reader asked me for my comments on the new looking-for-group (LFG) system. Which is kind of hard, because I haven’t used it yet. In fact, as far as I can see, *nobody* used it yet. I’m just not sure whether that is because the system is bad, because nobody is looking for a dungeon group, or because people aren’t used to the new system yet.

In theory I like the system. Being able to indicate either zones, quests, or dungeons to which you would like to go, with up to three choices at once, is a good feature. You can toggle auto-join on or off. The only functionality I don’t like is that apparently checking what other people are looking for a group for a specific dungeon automatically flags you as looking for group for that place as well, and then is hard to turn off. But in general the system seems to be well designed.

Only from all I hear the new LFG interface isn’t used much. People complain about the old global LFG chat channel being gone, and look for groups by sending tells or random invites to other players they found with /who, or by using the general chat channel. Why should that be so?

The reason why I am not using it is simply that I’m currently not interested in any groups. And I guess I’m not the only one here. The raiding activities of many guilds have more or less shut down. Everybody is either doing whatever he thinks he should do to prepare for the Burning Crusade, or doing PvP to get some nice epic rewards. As the battlegrounds automatically put you in a raid group, there is no need to look for a group. And as the new PvP reward system gives you a choice between blue items from dungeons or purple items from PvP, dungeons are quickly going out of fashion, which is a shame. But the good news is that in 2 weeks dungeons will again be the best way to acquire gear.

What remains to be seen is whether players will then start to use the new looking for group interface, or whether the Hellfire Peninsula chat will be full of LFG cries. Many players mistrust the auto-join functionality of the new system, which might end you up with a feral druid as healer and other sub-optimal group compositions. This auto-join was already the reason players disliked the previous meeting stone system. But many players don’t understand that you can turn the auto-join off now, and thus don’t use the system at all. It will take time, and probably some heated discussions in general chat, to get people educated.

I am sometimes a bit surprised about how conservative MMOG players are, having problems accepting changes to the interface, even if they are to the better. I would say that new LFG system is quite good, especially in combination with the new functionality of the meeting stones to teleport. You can now easily find somebody for a dungeon group, regardless of their current location, and teleport them to the dungeon instantly, if at least two group members are already there. That should be a lot more popular than it is. I just hope that the expected popularity of the new Burning Crusade dungeons will break the ice.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:40 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Population density

Virtual worlds need to manage their population density. If a zone is deserted, playing there isn't any more interesting than a single-player game. But if there are too many people at the same spot, players get into each others way, and the loading of all the character's textures causes lag. So game companies need to manage how many people are allowed on a server, and take measures to distribute them well over the different zones.

World of Warcraft gets the distribution part right most of the time. One reason for that is that unlike many other games, WoW can largely be soloed. The other big reason is that the quest system strongly rewards you for moving and seeking out all the different corners of the world. The counter-example, of how not to do it, is Final Fantasy XI. In that game you can't solo, but need a group in a very narrow level range. And there aren't many quests, so most of the time you are just grinding mobs to level. As a result people tend to all gather in one zone for a specific level range. For example everybody from level 10 to 20 is in the Valkurm Dunes. There is another zone of identical level range, Buburimu Peninsula, but it is nearly deserted. You can't go there, because you can't find a group there. So everybody is standing on each other's feet in the dunes, and never sees another zone of that level. Boring through bad game design.

But even World of Warcraft isn't perfect. One major distribution problem is between Horde and Alliance. Yesterday I did a census on my main server, a 2 year old European realm, and found 800 Horde players and 1800 Alliance players logged on at 6 pm. Alliance traditionally has a higher percentage of casual players (apparently attracted by being able to play humans and sexy elves), and the recent pre-BC raiding slump seems to affect Alliance less than Horde. Blizzard is trying to fix that, by giving the Horde sexy elves, but we'll have to see to what extent that works. Meanwhile the difference in numbers makes for long Alliance PvP waiting queues, and for more lag in Ironforge than in Orgrimmar.

Distribution becomes a catastrophic problem when there are world events. Everybody who experienced the opening of the gates of Ahn'qiraij saw major lag, and probably even a couple of server crashes. In Star Wars Galaxies players unhappy with some changes to the game tried to stage a protest march, and the GMs had to forcefully disrupt that and teleport the participants to other planets, because the servers simply couldn't withstand a large gathering of characters.

It is predictable that World of Warcraft will have big player distribution problems when the Burning Crusade comes out. More than half of the players of WoW have at least one level 60 character, and they all will want to visit Outland. But there is only one portal to go there, and only one zone to level up from 60 to 62, Hellfire Peninsula for both Horde and Alliance. Thus it is likely that we will see half of the population of each server concentrated in one single zone. That could cause crashes, but at the very least it will result in lag. And with players outnumbering mobs in the zone, doing the same foozle hunting quest as everybody else will be a pain. Blizzard is working on a "dynamic" spawn system, but in the beta it wasn't working well.

As long as a game is growing, distributing players among the servers is manageable. You can split overpopulated servers, or offer free or paid character transfers. Somebody is always tempted to leave a crowded server and start fresh on a new server. The population density issue becomes far more difficult to handle if the number of players is shrinking, which happens sooner or later in every MMORPG. Especially the lower level areas of a game tend to become less and less populated with age, leading to problems in finding groups. Also the player economy suffers when the player numbers fall below a critical size.

I wonder how World of Warcraft will handle the expected strong fluctuations of player numbers in 2007. I'm sure that the Burning Crusade expansion coming out will cause many people to reactivate cancelled accounts, with player numbers shooting through the roof in January / February. But I don't think that this increase will be permanent, and I'd expect that peak to pass after a couple of months. Blizzard will open up new servers simultaneously with the expansion coming out, and reportedly increases server capacity by 25%, argueing that the land mass also increased by 25%, thus the population density would remain constant. Personally I think that the old continents will be relatively empty, the new continent relatively crowded, and once the wave of new blood elves and draenei has passed, low population density in lower level zones will become a real problem.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:07 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Burning Crusade Outland maps

Gnomeproblem.com has a series of Outland maps, with numbered locations. So if a quest sends you to "Felpark Ravine", and you don't know where that is, you can look it up here.

Am I the only one missing maps in drawing? In previous games people with orientation and drawing skills would make wonderful maps of zones and dungeons. In World of Warcraft the only thing you ever see is screenshots of in-game maps that have been photoshopped with a bit of added information. That works for outdoor zones, but usually not very well for dungeons.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:05 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Jame's Horde Leveling Guide

I leveled up my human priest using (in parts) Jame's Alliance Leveling Guide. And yes, that's "Jame's", not "Jamie's". Anyway, while I was toying with the idea of playing a blood elf mage when Burning Crusade comes out, I got a bit worried that there are only new quests up to level 20, and then I'd need to slowly level from 21 to 60 on my own. So I was wondering if Jame also had something for the Horde. And yes, he has. I'm linking Jame's Horde Leveling Guide here for reference. It only goes until level 51, but that is not a problem, there are so many zones to go to after 51, and I can use some hints from the Alliance guide.

As I said, I tested out parts of his Alliance guide, and found it well written and accurate. Other people are trying to sell guides like this, so give the man a round of applause for posting such a detailed guide for free.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:40 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Why the hurry?

Complementary to the previous post about the Burning Crusade distribution is the interesting question of *why* everybody is so eager to start playing the World of Warcraft expansion on the very first day. Given the expected difficulties to get hold of the Burning Crusade on the 16th, and get it up and running on the first day, why don't we just wait a week before starting? But the reasons for wanting to play as early as possible are many.

One is simply a lack of alternatives. Even if you don't buy the Burning Crusade expansion at all, many of the expected server problems will keep you from playing the pre-expansion WoW anyway. If the login server crashes, or the game servers break down under the load, nobody can play World of Warcraft in any form. And then there is the social aspect: if everybody else is playing the new content, and you don't have the expansion yet, you'll be pretty lonely in the old lands. It will be hard to find anyone for lets say a dungeon trip to Scholomance, and there will be no Molten Core raids whatsoever for some time. Even the currently crowded battlegrounds will probably stand near-empty in the first week of the expansion.

Another reason for wanting to start early is people being competitive. Even more than previous MMOGs World of Warcraft has trained people to value others more for their level and gear than for their character. Many players will "race" to level 70. But this isn't a fair race, you can win it by starting earlier than somebody else, and by "running" longer every day than him. While installing the Burning Crusade a week later is probably less stressful and frustrating, it would automatically start you with a disadvantage in that raid.

More importantly is the related reason of keeping up with the Joneses, or in this case mainly your guild. Guilds in World of Warcraft often have only one purpose: raids. And many guilds will try to get back into raiding as fast as possible, which means getting a sufficient number of people to level 70 as fast as possible. As an added complication the size of raids is going down from 40 to 25. As guilds will start raiding as soon as they have 25 players at level 70, rushing to level 70 is a good strategy to get a place in the guilds core raiding team. By the time the slower people reach level 70, you will be more experienced in the raid content, and better equipped, and might thus beat them out in the selection of who will be allowed to participate in the next raid. Sounds kind of Darwinian, but this is something that will happen in many raid guilds, planned or unintentional.

Personally I'll try to grab the expansion on the first day, but if that doesn't work out I won't be terribly sad. I plan to explore the new content to its fullest, and not rush to level 70. But I'd like to keep up if not with the top, but at least with the bulk of my guild, for the simple reason that I'd like to do a lot of 5-man instances. Guild runs are always so much more pleasant than pickup groups. Raids, well I'd like to at least see the level 70 raid dungeons. But I have doubts that these will keep me playing WoW until the next expansion comes out in a year or so. If I feel that the new raids are just like the old ones, and if some good new games come out, I might take a prolonged break from World of Warcraft. But hey, you never know, maybe I get hooked leveling a blood elf mage to 70 instead.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:18 PM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Burning Crusade distribution

On January 16 the Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft will come out and literally millions of people will want to get hold of a copy, and preferably start playing on the same day. But if I look at the current information on how the expansion is to be distributed, I doubt that things will go well. Lets have a look at distribution and explore how it could be improved.

The only option we know about to get hold of the Burning Crusade is to buy a box with a CD in a shop. These boxes will be available starting from January 16, not before, and the Burning Crusade will apparently go live at noon on that same day. This method will result in maximum frustration for the World of Warcraft players. First it will be difficult to get hold of a box on the 16th. Mail orders will probably only arrive a couple of days later, and local PC games stores might very well be sold out rather quickly. Then all the people who actually got a box will have to register their Burning Crusade key on the World of Warcraft account management website. It is well known that the WoW website is one of the major weaknesses in the Blizzard infrastructure, and more likely than not it will collapse and not be available for many hours on end on the 16th. And once you got past that, you'll still need to pass the bottlenecks of the login server, and the patch download, before you can actually play. And that is if the game servers can withstand thousands of players all crowding the same zone, Hellfire Peninsula. There must be better possibilities to handle all this.

Frank Pearce, senior VP of product development at Blizzard, talked in an interview about the possibility of digital distribution. Quote: "It's something we're talking about, but no final plans for The Burning Crusade." As we haven't heard anything yet, it is likely that there won't be any digital distribution for the Burning Crusade, which is a shame. But even if there was one, if you can start that download only on the 16th of January, it would probably be very slow. The Blizzard servers could never handle direct downloads, and the peer-to-peer solution they use for patch downloads is crawling only at a snail's pace. The BC beta download took me 36 hours with that system, in spite of me having high-speed ADSL. And even if the Burning Crusade could be downloaded on the 16th, that wouldn't solve the problems with the account management servers etc.

So what the fundamental flaw of the Burning Crusade distribution is, is the timing. What Blizzard *should* do is to distribute the boxes and preferably also a digital download version at least one week before the expansion goes live. That gives everybody time to get hold of a copy, get the key entered into the account management website, and be ready for playing on the day that the Burning Crusade goes live. Blizzard has already realized the importance of distributing data early with their "background downloader" application, which downloads patches before they go live. What is true for patches is even more important for expansions, people need time to get everything set up.

Other companies have far better servers for downloading large amounts of data. Already many people download their World of Warcraft patches from sites like Fileplanet. Blizzard should team up with one of these companies for the digital distribution of expansions. The digital distributor takes a cut, but so do regular distributors, and then Blizzard saves the money for the CDs, box, and manual. If Blizzard would combine early distribution with outsourced digital distribution, every player would be able to get hold of the expansion in time. Even simpler, there are a lot of people already having a functioning BC beta client running on their PC, so if Blizzard would allow them to just purchase a key and change a small file to connect to the real servers instead of the test realms, they could get lots of people playing with minimal download effort.

But maybe Blizzard doesn't *want* all the players to be able to access the Burning Crusade on day one. I remember being lucky on the European start of World of Warcraft, and being one of the few players who got past the account management site before it broke down. That resulted in me being able to login and level up without too many other players getting into my way. Every player who doesn't get a box on the 16th, or who can't get his Burning Crusade key registered, will be one less player blocking the login servers or overcrowding Hellfire Peninsula. Makes you wonder if the bad distribution system is a deliberate strategy.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:49 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Craig's WoW in 2006 review

This year I didn't bother to write a review of all the games I played, because it basically would have said "I played World of Warcraft". But Craig wrote a long review of his year 2006 in World of Warcraft. An impressive raid calendar with up to 22 raids per month, and a slow progress from BWL to Naxxramas.

I don't keep records of all the raids I attended and what loot I got in each one. But for me 2006 started with my undead priest at level 42, and my level 60 warrior being semi-retired because nobody needs warriors. It ended with my undead priest in 5 pieces of tier 1 and 3 pieces of tier 2 gear, and my warrior having not advanced except for getting a high warlord 1h weapon from PvP. Instead I leveled a second priest to 60, Alliance this time and on a new server, but that wasn't a terribly bright idea, because having two level 60 priests is boring. I did spend quite some time raiding, getting up to the end of BWL, but due to Real Life ® preventing me from raiding every weekday, I don't think I ever did more than a dozen raids in a month.

How did your year 2006 look in review?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:14 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post