MtGO - Return of the Living Dead

I played Magic the Gathering for 10 years, and spent a fortune on it, about $1,000 per year. First on cards, then after selling the cards for a fraction of what I paid for them, I reinvested the money into virtual cards in Magic the Gathering Online. MtGO started out as a good game with version 1.0, then the programming team changed and produced a horrible version 2.0. When I left the game in 2004, they said that MtGO 3.0 would come out in 18 months. Every once in a while I checked, but the release date was always 18 months away. So imagine my surprise when I now got an invite to the MtGO 3.0 beta via Fileplanet. Sure something I'll have a look at.

In 2004 I wrote a review about MtGO on Grimwell.com. As that site is now largely defunct, I'm going to put a copy of the review here. But please, remember that this was written in 2004 and doesn't represent the latest news:

Magic the Gathering Online (MtGO) from Wizards of the Coast is not an MMORPG, but it is a massively multiplayer online game with a fantasy theme. And some of the issues relevant to MMORPGs, like virtual property, are even more relevant to MtGO. I have played MtGO since its beginning in 2002, and followed its bumpy journey over the last two years. I even ran a now defunct "MtGO FAQ and Guide" website for some time. This is a review, trying at the same time to tell the history of this game.

Magic the Gathering came out in 1993 as the world’s first collectible card game. Unlike other card games, the two opponents each bring their own deck. Buy more cards, and you can build a better deck, increasing your chances to win. This simple principle catapulted a small gaming company named Wizards of the Coast (WotC) from obscurity into a position where they were able to buy TSR, the makers of Dungeon & Dragons. The same simple principle was then applied to the even more successful Pokemon collectible card game, at which point one of the world’s biggest toy companies, Hasbro, bought WotC.

Magic the Gathering is a very good game. Each player represents a wizard, with the cards representing his magical energy drawn from "lands", and his spells. Spells take the form of monsters that can be summoned, artifacts that give the player special powers, enchantments that can enhance monsters or even change the rules of the game, and spells like fireballs to directly battle your opponent or his monster army. Getting the mix right in building a deck is an art. Then you need luck in drawing the right card at the right moment. But you also need a lot of skill, as you often have several options what to do, and you have to find the best one.

The principle of spending more money to win a game made WotC rich, but of course it has always been a bone of contention. Obviously once you own every card, the game is determined by luck and skill, like most other games. But with thousands of new cards coming out every year, few people get to that point, and gamers resent being beaten by a less skilled player with more money.

To fuel their sales further, WotC invented a Magic tournament organization, the DCI, and organized big tournaments, in which the winners were rewarded with lots of money. For example the 2003 World Championship awarded a total of $208,130 in prize money awarded to the top 64 finishers. That is not PGA Tour Golf kind of money, but is serious enough to support some professional Magic players. And millions of teenagers dreaming of become rich by playing their favorite card game, and buying lots of cards along the way.

Magic the Gathering is still played as a card game all over the world, but the first shine has worn off a bit. With decreasing numbers of players, one big problem became apparent: MtG can only be played between two (or more) people that both own cards. If there are fewer and fewer players to be found in your local card shop, finding an opponent becomes the biggest problem in the game. Thus was born the idea of creating an online version, MtGO, which would supply you with an opponent at any time, without your even having to leave your house.

WotC wisely outsourced programming of MtGO to another company, Leaping Lizards. This cooperation launched version 1.0 of MtGO in the summer of 2002 with great success, but little publicity. The program ran stably, with a minimum of bugs, in spite of complicated interactions between thousands of cards.

The business model had not changed. The client was, and still is, free. But to actually play, you need cards, and those cost money. Like in the paper version, cards are sold mostly in so-called booster packs, containing 15 cards, where one booster costs $3.69. A theme deck, a preconstructed, playable 60-card deck, costs $11.99. Before you have a collection with which you can build competitive decks, you have to spend hundreds, or even thousands of dollars. And yes, the game is so addictive that many people do that. Me included.

Each booster contains one "rare" card, three "uncommon" cards, and eleven "common" cards. And what cards you get is random. If you buy several boosters, you will soon have your commons in multiples, while missing some uncommons, and a lot of rares. Every card can be used in up to 4 copies in a deck. It is generally advisable to put cards in multiples in your deck, because if you have only 15 different cards with four copies each, your deck is a lot more predictable than a deck with 60 different cards. So people hunt for the best rares, which can be sold for $10 and more.

With 3,000 simultaneous players, MtGO was a lot smaller than a game like Everquest. But the profits per player were a lot higher. MtGO is a faithful representation of a card game. It does not have a fancy 3D engine, in fact it doesn't need one, so bandwidth cost per player are low, as there is no need to transfer data about the 3D position of players, monsters, and objects. But the average player spends a lot more than the $15 per month that a MMORPG brings. In view of these profits, WotC thought of expanding the game. The plan was to bring out MtGO v2.0, with more features, for the 10th anniversary of paper Magic in 2003, and then use the publicity of the anniversary to hand out CDs with the MtGO client to everybody.

That plan could have worked, if there hadn't been a small detail: Version 2.0 was to be programmed by WotC themselves. They ended their successful collaboration with Leaping Lizards, and told a bunch of new in-house programmers who hadn't done v1.0 to take that code, add a lot of features, and turn it into v2.0.

Unsurprisingly MtGO v2.0 was a catastrophe. Not only did the new features not work, the whole game had become unstable. Every big event and large online tournament crashed the servers. Cards disappeared from peoples’ collections, or they received the wrong cards from opening boosters. Servers were often out for hours, constantly being patched. Bugs were as common as they had been rare in v1.0. Every new release of a new card set brought new problems. The big publicity action was scrapped, as the servers couldn't have handled new players anyway.

Right now MtGO is still running v2.0, in a patched up form. As v2.0 came with new cards, and people had spent money on those cards, it was impossible to roll back to v1.0. Many features have been abandoned, but the servers are now more or less stable. The code is undergoing a complete rewrite, and a stable version v3.0 with all the features is supposed to come out by the end of 2005. The game still has about 3,000 players during prime time. The big break-through just didn't happen.

Why are there still so many people playing in spite of all the problems? The answer is simply greed. What worked for paper Magic is working for online Magic as well. A large number of people play a special form of MtG called a "draft", which is a well-disguised form of online gambling. Players pay $13 to participate, in the form of three boosters at $3.69 and two "tickets" at $1. There are eight players in a draft, sitting in a circle. Each player opens one of his three boosters, picks one of the 15 cards, and passes the remaining 14 to his neighbor, while receiving another 14 cards from his other neighbor. He picks another card from those, passes the remaining 13, and so on, until all three boosters have been distributed and every player has 45 cards. The players then add land cards, build 40-card decks, and play a single-elimination tournament. The winner gets up to nine boosters, worth $33, nearly tripling his "bet", in a tournament that lasts barely 3 hours.

It is not pure luck-based gambling, as skill plays a prominent part in a draft, it is more akin to poker. But if you win often enough, you are able to at least "play for free", using the won boosters for your next draft, and selling the 45 cards you drafted to other players in exchange for tickets.

The people that don't try to make money by winning drafts try to finance their MtGO addiction by trading cards. In early paper Magic, people often still traded cards for cards, and only game shops sold cards for money. This made sense, because if you buy your cards in random boosters, you often have cards you do not want, and can trade them for cards you do want. In MtGO people soon discovered that the $1 tickets needed for entering tournaments can be used as a currency. So in MtGO everybody is a shop, and it is nearly impossible to find somebody still wanting to trade cards for cards. Everybody wants to buy your excess cards cheaply, and then sell you the cards you need at a considerable mark-up.

Even more than the paper version, Magic the Gathering Online is all about money. There are no levels to achieve. You do have a rating, representing how often you have won, and a high rating allows you to gamble for higher stakes. But lots of people found that it is to their advantage to play with the less skilled players for lower stakes. You win less prize money per draft, but you win more drafts than if you had battled against the other highly skilled players.

Players of MMORPGs often behave badly to their fellow players. But it is surprising to see how much worse player behavior gets when the game is about real dollars, and not just xp, virtual items, and gold pieces. Most of the bad behavior in MtGO is in the form of insults from an opponent who lost to you. But some players actually try to cheat, often in the form of collusion in leagues and drafts. Some have even tried to make an opponent lose by having their friends spam him with messages and trade requests, so he would lose due to time-out. Money is one of the most important pillars of civilization, but it is sure able to bring out the worst in each of us. This does not bode well for virtual property in MMORPGs. If the sword of uberness can be sold for $50 on eBay, players are going to behave a lot nastier to each other when fighting over it in game than they already are about items that can't be sold.

But while MtGO sure has a lot of problems, the basic game behind it remains brilliant. Even if you don't play for money, the game is very exciting, and deeply strategic. There is a good mix of luck and skill elements. And the online version does succeed in making opponents available to you at any time. Of course, it is "just" a card game and the 2D artwork scanned from the paper cards looks relatively bland compared to modern 3D games. Most people prefer it that way, as the game is rather complicated, and seeing the cards clearly is more important than them having beautiful animations.

You can get the client for free, and even play a very limited number of pre-constructed decks for free. It costs $10 to set up an account, but you get a $10 coupon for cards, so the account itself is basically free. You can try to play MtGO on a limited budget, for example $30 per month for the participation in leagues. Leagues are big tournaments lasting four weeks, where everybody has the same number and quality of cards. It is relatively easy to win at least a small prize in those, and you get to keep the cards, slowly building up a collection. But Magic is highly addictive, and there is a strong danger of ending up spending more than you intended. I certainly did.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:11 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Is the enthusiasm for raiding flagging?

I know that personally I am suffering for WoW burnout. Yesterday I spent the whole evening in the Puzzle Quest demo instead of playing World of Warcraft. But bloggers and forum posters often poll themselves as a population of one and then extrapolate their personal feelings into a general trend, and I'd like to avoid it. So when I observe certain signs of people nowadays being less enthusiastic about raiding, I'm not sure whether I'm just seeing what I want to see to reflect my own feelings, or whether it is really a growing trend. So I'd like to ask you, my readers, on how you see the raiding situation right now. Are you still interested in raiding, and are your friends and guild mates?

The thing is, I can't even say for myself why I'm not interested in raiding any more. Are the smaller raids less fun than the 40-man raids? Am I just burned out in general, and not wanting to raid is just part of a larger malaise? Aren't the new epics interesting enough? Or is it the expectation that the next expansion will give me better loot for a lot less effort that makes me not want to raid? I have the impression that the raiding atmosphere between people is less pleasant nowadays, with raids being less fun, more disputes, and more close to serious work, which isn't necessarily something I'd want to do after working on my job all day. (<-- Insert hardcore comment from some raider here that raids aren't supposed to be fun, they *must* hurt to be an achievement.)

I'd be interested to hear from you what your raiding situation is. Raiding more now than before, or less? Why? If you never raided before, do you think you'll start doing so now, that the raids have gotten smaller? Or do you feel you can't even get past the attunement step?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:29 AM Permanent Link  (49) comments Links to this post

 
Biofuels from food

I rarely write about politics here. And being of a centrist political persuasion, it is even rarer that I have to write that I agree with Fidel Castro, of all people. I mean, communism is dead, and the man is an artifact of a bygone era. But just when you think the next news about him will be his obituary, he makes a statement on biofuels I couldn't agree with more.

Turning food crops into fuel is a bad idea. In spite of globalisation there are still huge income disparities in the world. That means that an average American can easily pay more just to fill up his gaz-guzzling SUV than a Mexican peasant can pay for his tortillas. If the fuel and the tortilla are made from the same material, maize in this case, the Mexican goes hungry, and the American keeps driving. The current American drive to use ethanol from maize as fuel has more to do with the American farmer lobby than with any aspects of sustainable development and greenery.

That isn't to say that I am against biofuels. But the way to go is cellulosic ethanol, which is made out of the non-edible parts of plants. If you have ever seen a maize plant (what the Americans call "corn"), you know that the edible part is just a fraction of the total plant. So lets grow corn, make food for the world out of the edible part, and transform the inedible bits into fuel. While transforming cellulose into ethanol is harder than doing it with the edible parts, the technology is under development. Growing enough corn to fill America's cars, while only using the inedible part for fuel production, would probably even drive global food prices down. Which doesn't hurt the farmer, who makes up for it by selling the rest of the plant to a biorefinery, and makes life for the Mexican peasant cheaper. Everybody wins!
- posted by Tobold @ 3:09 PM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
No skill in MMORPG solo combat

I've mentioned it before, but I'd like to start a discussion about MMORPG solo combat, the situations where you are one-on-one against a computer-controlled mob. Given that in World of Warcraft you can level up from 1 to 70 by doing nothing else, and even the most ardent group-players like me spend a good part of their time soloing single mobs, I wonder why this sort of combat has to be that boring and void of a need for skill.

The reason why I'm thinking about that is me playing the Puzzle Quest demo, where each combat is played out as a Bejewelled-like puzzle. There are elements of chance, and your character stats influence the combat, but in the end you need to be good at this puzzle to beat the opponent. The game has a function that if you can't find a move, one possible move is pointed out to you, but if you always just take this random move, you are unlikely to win. Setting up some clever combo of moves and spells requires some thought, and when you win the game due to that, it is a lot more satisfying.

Back in World of Warcraft combat against a mob appears to be a comparatively boring sequence of button presses. Very often the sequence is the same. WoW even has a special /castsequence macro function, so if you find you're always casting the same three spells at the start of combat, you can put them all on one button. My priest always pulls with Holy Fire and Mindflay, then bubbles up, casts Shadow Word Pain, and then wands the mob to death. Except for sometimes having to renew the bubble or cast a healing spell, each combat is pretty much like the last one, regardless of what mob I'm fighting. My warrior either charges or pulls with a ranged weapon, and then pretty much randomly uses all his different special attacks one after the other until the execute button lights up and I can end the combat with it. The most exciting is fighting spellcasters, where I need to react and either interrupt their spells or try to reflect them back to them. Compared with most other video games, a MMORPG combat needs very little eye-hand coordination skills, and very little decision-making skills. Random button mashing, or even going afk in the case of well-armored melee fighters, often works just as well.

Unfortunately the only "improvements" to this system announced are MMORPGs where you need to target manually instead of locking on a target and repeatedly click on the mob to hit it. I don't see how that needs much more skill, this is just the same "action" combat system that goes back to the old days of Diablo. You create the illusion of action by requiring lots of clicks, but there is no skill in clicking. The outcome of combat will still largely depend on your character stats, and not on whether you made intelligent decisions during combat.

Thus my fascination with both puzzle-based combat systems (Puzzle Pirates, Puzzle Quest), and combat systems using elements from trading card games (Metal Gear Acid. Chronicles of Spellborn is going in that direction, but not far enough). Basically everything which turns combat into a mini-game of its own, and where your skill in that mini-game, together with luck and character stats, determine the outcome.

But other systems would be possible. Asian RPGs often use systems which are based on mobs being resistant or weak to certain elements. The whole Pokemon system is based on that, and the Final Fantasy XI MMORPG is using this in a minor way. The idea is simple enough, the player gets more different spells as he has in WoW, but they don't all work equally well on every opponent. There is usually some diagram of elemental oppositions, and the fire mob will be resistant against fire, but weak against frost, while arcane deals normal damage. WoW has the resistant part built in, but only on very few mobs, and whether a mob is fire resistant would only be interesting to a mage or warlock, and not to a warrior, priest, or rogue.

So what are your ideas to make MMORPG combat more interesting? Please, solo combat only, we'll keep the discussion about group combos and chains for another day.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:14 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft quest series

Great fun yesterday, I finished the Hero of the Mag'har quest series. Not only does that give you some unique insight into the history of the orcs, but you also get two blue items as reward. In this case I was lucky, because everybody gets a necklace that is only useful for melee dps, which is nice enough for my warrior with whom I did the quest, but would have been useless for my priest. The second blue item is leggings, and there you get a choice of cloth, leather, mail, and plate, so there is something for everyone. The plate legs are really good for my warrior.

Now finishing this quest series isn't easy. You don't even get to start the quest before you haven't finished all the other Mag'har quests. Then you have to do a long series of solo quests, and then you need a group to kill the last boss in the Auchindoun crypts, and then at least one partner to kill 15 elite mobs in Nagrand.

I noticed that in World of Warcraft quest series often start with lots of solo quests, and end with some group quests. And I can see both advantages and disadvantages in that. The disadvantage is that if you follow a quest line and come to a group quest, you might get stuck there for some time, unable to find a group to help you to continue the quest. That makes for an ugly break in the story telling. You'll frequently find people complaining that their quest journal is full of elite quests. With Blizzard having repeatedly dropped the ball on their LFG functionality, finding a group outside your guild is as hard as never, with no more global LFG chat channel, and a shitty LFG interface nobody uses.

The advantage of quest series ending in group quests is that it encourages people to join with strangers into groups, and make new friends. After all, this is not a single-player game, even if there are lots of people playing it like one. As the final quest of a series usually gives a blue item, they provide a strong pull to overcome the reluctance to group.

So what do you think? Is encouraging people to group by putting elite quests at the end of quest series a good thing? Or is all "forced grouping" a bad thing?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:49 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
Puzzle Quest news

Puzzle Quest is riding high, with strong sales placing it in the top 5 of the DS sales charts. Great success for a small independant publisher. I wonder how much of that is due to strong support from Penny Arcade, who seem to absolutely love this game.

I ordered this game for the PSP, but I'd also be interested in the PC version, which isn't announced yet. After all, a much bigger screen and a mouse are nice to have. And Puzzle Quest seems to me an ideal game to have on your laptop, as it doesn't use much resources, can be played in short bursts, and auto-saves frequently. Pressed about the PC version release, a developer said on the forums that "we can't talk about it", but that there *will* be a PC version in the future. Seeing how the demo version already seems to contain nearly the complete game, just with a level cap, the PC version should be easy enough to bring out. I just hope that it will be available by digital distribution, I would *not* want to buy it if you can only run it with the original CD in the drive, because I wouldn't want to carry the CD with my all the time in my laptop. If I could just buy a key to "unlock" the demo I already downloaded, that would be perfect.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:31 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Lord of the Rings Online open beta

The US open beta for Lord of the Rings Online starts on April 6. It is called the World Tour, which pretty much tells you that it is more a marketing event than a beta test. Quote:

Turbine, Inc. and Midway Games Inc. (NYSE: MWY) announced a massive, free “World Tour of Middle-earth” available to players throughout North America. Over one million players are planned to be invited into The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™, the most complete and authentic massively multiplayer online (MMO) world based upon the famous Books of J.R.R. Tolkien. The World Tour of Middle-earth is scheduled to begin on April 6th and continue until the anticipated launch of the game on April 24th.

“We decided to launch the World Tour of Middle-earth because of the overwhelming demand from players to get into the closed beta,” said Jeffrey Anderson, President and CEO of Turbine, Inc. “We expect the World Tour of Middle-earth to be a spectacular event like nothing that you’ve ever seen before.”

Well, the marketing hype is a bit thick, I'm not sure they'll get a million players in the beta, but Lord of the Rings Online is still a pretty solid MMORPG, and well worth trying for free during two-and-a-half weeks. Recommended.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:17 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Hero class rumors

Crowelf alerted me to an article on Tales of an Addict about a purported leak on the design of hero classes for World of Warcraft. Well, it's just a rumor, could be fake, and even if it was true it might get changed beyond recognition before it is finally implemented. But the basic idea is so incredibly boring, that it sounds real: Every class splits into three hero classes, with each hero class being equivalent to one talent tree. So a shadow priest could develop into a Dark Cleric, and protection warrior into a Guardian.

Besides being blindingly obvious as an idea, it would also incredibly bad game design. The catch is in the phrase "specializing in a Hero Class is like specializing in a profession - you're stuck with it forever". Now who would want to be stuck on one talent tree forever, with no possibility to change? Imagine you specialize as frost mage, and the next raid dungeon that opens is full of frost resistant mobs, making you as useless as a fire mage in Molten Core. Or you specialize as feral druid and Blizzard decides to nerf feral druids and make them less viable as tank. Or you specialize as holy priest and your guild decides that from now on they will only have paladins healing, and priests only allowed to be shadow as mana batteries for the pallies. This is all things that happened in the past and can happen again, and if you'd be stuck on a talent branch based hero class you'd be screwed.

So I'm hoping that this is just a well-made fake. The more likely story is that Blizzard has a folder labeled "hero classes" somewhere collecting dust in the back of a drawer, and nobody is really planning to work on it, until the marketing department decides that hero classes will be the selling point for the next expansion. But as so many MMORPGs already have this "each class can specialize into subcategories" concept, I sure hope that Blizzard comes up with something a bit more original and playable. I'd rather have *less* hero classes than current classes, for example bundling all spellcasters or all melee fighters.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:49 PM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
Dream Features: Less-random loot tables

In a comment this week Melmoth linked to an interesting blog article by Tomas Rofkahr about Intermittent Variable Reward (IVR), the principle that you are willing to do something unprofitable repeatedly for the small chance of getting a big reward. It's what makes people buy lottery tickets, but is also what makes people go to the same dungeon repeatedly until they get the reward from the loot table they want. I know a warlock from my guild who went to Shadow Labs over 20 times to get his Robe of Oblivion from the end boss Murmur there.

Now I don't mind a bit of randomness in loot tables, it's okay if I don't know what will drop when I kill a specific boss, or even if I come out of a dungeon and nothing for me dropped at all. But what I do find annoying is if something drops that nobody in the group could possibly use. The piece of leather armor, with no leather wearer in the group. Zoso complained about that recently (thanks again to Melmoth for pointing it out). In my only heroic instance run up to now the final boss dropped an epic, but it was mail armor, with no mail wearer in the group, and no disenchanter eiter, so I ended up winning it with a greed roll and found it sold for only 4 gold to a vendor. Doh! Not the reward you'd would have expected from beating such a hard dungeon.

Now we do know that pre-2.0 patch in Molten Core the loot tables were not totally random. Paladin loot didn't drop for Horde raids, and Shaman loot didn't drop for Alliance raids. So modifying the loot tables in function of the group going into an instance is technically feasible.

So my dream feature for today would be dungeon loot tables that takes into account group composition. If there are 2 plate wearers and 3 cloth wearers in the group, there should be no leather and mail drops, and there should be a 50% higher chance for cloth drops than for plate drops. It still leaves you with random chance, and the possibility that the drop isn't better than what you are already wearing. But at least it saves you from these annoying drops nobody could possibly use.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:17 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Time to complete BC 5-mans

A reader wrote to me

How about an article about time-length of Outland instance runs. I'm a casual player. Married to a tolerant non-gamer, two kids. I probably play 2-3 times a week for 1.5 hours at a stretch. My Shaman is 62, but I've only completed one instance (ZF). I've also mostly completed SFK and ST.

I had read that Blizzard intended that BC 5-mans would be much shorter. And someone in the Shaman forums said the same thing. That a good group can clear a non-heroic in 45-60 minutes. Is this your experience? I've tried Ramparts on two separate occasions, but both groups fell apart. (The latter was this weekend... my Elemental Shaman (MH) and the Dual-Wielding Warrior (tank) knew what we were doing but were improperly spec'ed, exactly like your recent post).

Anyway, if you have any thoughts on time-to-complete of BC 5-mans, I'd love to read them.

While we are in the middle of a heated debate on difficulty of 5-man groups, we tend to forget some basic truths. The most basic truth about instances is that playing in a group is more difficult than playing solo. Which for many of us is actually the attraction of it. A solo combat, only you against a single mob, is easy to the point of being boring. You know your spells and abilities, there usually aren't all that many of them, and most of the time you have a generous amount of time to hit the next button. One time this week I started a combat with my warrior against an even level demon, and after the first few exchanges of blows, my connection broke down. Had to reboot the computer and log back in, only to find that the warrior had won the combat in my absence, just by auto-attack. (Don't try that with a mage).

Group combat is a lot more difficult. Basically it is all about aggro management, forcing the mobs to keep hitting the tank with the high damage absorption capacity, and not the squishy mages and healers. That means that people have to time their spells better, for example not use their largest damage abilities right at the start before the tank has aggro. There is a lot more coordination required, giving you less time to decide on the right action and less room for error. You can't simply have 5 people doing the same as they would do in a solo combat.

Fighting in an instance with a group being more difficult and there being a higher chance to wipe has a big impact on how long it takes to complete a dungeon. I simply don't feel comfortable saying "you can do Hellfire Ramparts in 60 minutes". I know *I* can do Hellfire Ramparts in 60 minutes, in a guild group, especially if I'm going with my warrior and am able to set the pace. (When I'm playing my priest I have a lot less influence on the pace, as I shouldn't pull.) But if you go with a pickup group, Hellfire Ramparts can easily take 2 hours instead of 1.

Group coordination being so essential, and difficult, going somewhere with guild mates, people you already played with, is making things a lot easier. Coordination is something that needs a bit of practice. In the ideal case you get a pickup group where all the players are playing reasonably well, somebody is taking the lead, and after a few combats the coordination works well enough. More commonly coordination takes a couple of wipes, learning from mistakes, because everyone in the group isn't the most experienced group player, and nobody is really leading, or some people don't follow the leader's instructions. Every wipe costs some time.

And then, you already mentioned it, is the possibility of pickup groups falling apart. You wipe a few times, and somebody gets fed up and leaves. Or somebody has something real life coming up, like a kid having forgotten all about dinner time and his parents forcing him to quit playing. When somebody leaves at the very least you'll need some time to replace him, and if you can't find a replacement fast, other people are likely to leave and the whole group falls apart. So the time to complete that dungeon goes up to forever.

While I can't tell you exactly how long you'll need for the Burning Crusade instances, I can tell you that they are significantly shorter than the old world dungeons. 5-man instances in Burning Crusade all have between 2 and 4 bosses, with most having 3 of them. That makes them about half the size of Zul'Farrak, and needing only half the time. Which is a nice improvement from Blizzard, as it gives people with shorter playing sessions a better shot at being able to finish a dungeon.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:57 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Doesn't get more mainstream than that

One of the oldest and most established newspapers of the world, The Times (UK), will have a free trial version of World of Warcraft on CD, plus an 8-page booklet on how to play, in its next weekend edition. They already posted an article on "My life as a bearded dwarf", written by a non-gamer. Quote: "Personally, I’ve never created a character to play a game with before — hey, I have to do that in front of the wardrobe every morning for real, and I think all the ladies will know what I’m saying here." Very interesting read.

Anyway, there goes my geek street cred. Playing World of Warcraft is now so un-geek and mainstream as anything. Even The Times does it.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:48 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO removes IP blocking

Listening to their fans, Turbine reversed an earlier decision, and is now making it possible for people from all over the world to play on US servers. You need to import a US version of the game to do so, but you won't be blocked from playing based on your non-US IP address. This makes it possible for international guilds to play together.

Well, nice of them. But I'll go with their recommendation, quote: "However, we strongly encourage players to purchase and play the game in their region to receive the best game experience, connectivity and local customer support." As previous MMORPG not always had European servers, I have experience with playing on US servers from here, and it isn't all that great. Your ping is much longer, making anything that requires fast reaction more difficult to do. And even if you are in a very nice international guild (like I was), that doesn't solve the problem that Europe is 6 to 8 timezones ahead of the US. You rarely really get to play with your guild mates, unless you play during strange hours. Raid starting at 3 am, anyone?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:35 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Puzzle Quest Online

I just discovered a game I must buy for my PSP. Puzzle Quest is a combination of RPG and puzzle game, and instantly addictive. How do I know that? I played the demo, which is available for the PC. Which is insofar strange as the game itself is only available on the PSP and DS, and not on the PC. But even if you don't have a handheld console, I recommed you download the demo and play it to the level cap of 7, because it is so much fun.

The principle of the game is simple. You have a character walking between points on a map, picking up quest. The quests lead to fights. And fights are handled with a Bejewelled-like puzzle game, where you need to switch tiles on a board to get 3 or more of the same type in a row. Just that in this case the tiles deal damage to the enemy, or give you mana of a specific color, or experience points, or gold. The mana you can use to cast spells, of which you gain more as you level up. Winning the puzzles isn't always easy, but you can't really lose. If an opponent beats you, you still get all the gold and experience tiles you collected and just have to start over the fight. Worst case scenario is fighting the mob so long you level up or gain the money for better equipment, and then you win. Besides that you can build up a castle, listen to rumors, buy and sell equipment, and do other typical RPG stuff. It's all in 2D, so it runs easily on a handheld, but the graphics are nice enough.

Of course I immediately started to think about a Puzzle Quest Online MMORPG version, although I doubt anyone will ever produce it. I really liked Puzzle Pirates, but Puzzle Pirates didn't let you level up and develop your character. Doing puzzles as a RPG combat would be a nice change from the autoattack-plus-special-attacks standard fare of MMORPGs, or the click-to-kill versions that are being developed. Puzzle games like Bejewelled have even more players than World of Warcraft, and tapping into these players and offering them both puzzles and a persistant online world with chat and character development could be really great.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:01 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Dream features: More guild functionality

Continueing my series of features I'd like to see in World of Warcraft, I'd like to quote a letter from one of my readers:

"Every MMORPG game I know of has guilds and tools for handling groups of players. Usually a guild is just a list of players with a common chat and little more. Probably an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel has more features.

I wonder why Dev's never tried to really expand the concept and capitalise on the social aspect of MMO's. Especially nowadays with social networks in so high consideration, I would tend to think that many concept could be easily ported inside a game."

World of Warcraft is pretty much rock bottom in guild features, many other games have a lot more features in this area. So what guild features would be nice to see in WoW?

One interesting thing that Everquest 2 pioneered was more guild support on the game website. You log on with your account name and password on the game's website, and you get access to the guild roster, including seeing for example your guild member's tradeskill recipes. That place could have a guild event calendar, and even a forum for your guild. Blizzard's Armory showed that it is possible to extract information from the game to a website, but instead of making it available to all, this information might be better used for guild support and limited to guild members. Of course the better organized guilds have their own websites with forums, event calendars, and rosters, but support from Blizzard here would make things a lot easier and improve usage.

Another interesting concept already present in EQ2, but also to be found in LotRO, is some sort of guild rank, based on how long a guild stays together and how many players they have. That information could again be listed on the game's website, sorted by server, showing who are the established guilds on a server, and making finding a guild easier. Ideally a player would get some sort of advantage out of his participation to that rank, so if you stayed loyal to a good guild for a long time, you'd get something like a title to display.

One thing frequently proposed is a guild bank, but I'd like to take that concept further. The problem with a "bank" is that you'll probably not want to enable everyone to take whatever he wants without limits, allowing people to join just to rob the bank and leave. So why not have some sort of guild vendors, where items are accessible for everyone in the guild, but at a cost. That would enable for example guild crafters offering their wares to other guild members at lower price and without both having to be on at the same time.

World of Warcraft isn't a good game for that, but several games have guild housing, and some way of guild members to work together to contribute to that guild headquarter. Prime example would be City of Heroes / Villains, where guilds can build a base, staff it with different rooms and features plus defence hardware, and then run PvP raids against enemy guild bases, announced on some sort of calendar, so that both attackers and defenders show up. More peaceful games, e.g. A Tale in the Desert, have other guild projects where everyone in the guild can contribute towards a greater good. That gives guilds a purpose beyond just going raiding.

I'm not sure whether offering an in-game DKP system for guilds would be a good idea. Personally I'd favor a zero-sum system, and think that would be easy enough to implement in-game. But there are many differnt DKP systems around, and not all guilds might want to use the same system, as different systems tend to favor different people.

What other guild features would you like to see in World of Warcraft?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:58 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
The opposite view on talent builds in World of Warcraft

Having played the devil's advocate yesterday on everybody having to play their class role, today I'm going to argue the complete opposite view: Everybody should be free to spec as he want, and the game should accommodate that. Sorry if my previous post shocked or confused you, it's an exercise in dialectic, arguing both thesis and antithesis to get a more complete view on one subject. It sure worked in getting the discussion rolling. :)

The problem we're discussing is still the same: You want to visit one of the level 70 dungeons, and find that if take a random pickup group of people with some odd class mix, talent builds chosen more for PvP and soloing dps than for group support, and just average playing skill, you are likely to wipe several times before you even reach the first boss, and never make it to the end of the dungeon. That is particularly annoying if going to that dungeon is part of a long quest series, and you end up being blocked and unable to complete the quests.

The one solution I proposed yesterday is that if the group wipes, it's the players fault for not having chosen a better group mix and specialized group talent builds. I stayed away from the even more insulting "learn2play" argument, that the group wipes because the players are bad, but of course several readers brought up that argument in the discussion in one form or another (usually in the form of "but *I* can fulfill my class role without the right talent build").

Today I'm going to argue that if the group wipes, it's Blizzard's fault for making the dungeons too hard. And the solution to that problem is already programmed in: heroic mode dungeons. If it is possible to program a harder dungeon difficulty with better loot, then it must be possible to program an easier dungeon difficulty with less good loot. Why not have "easy" *and* "heroic" alternatives to the default "normal" dungeon difficulty? In "easy" difficulty you'd get less good loot, maybe only greens, but at least you could finish all your quests, and you could go and play with your friends, regardless of what classes and talent builds they are, and whether they are playing very well.

So you're a shadow priest, and your friends are a fury warrior, two retribution paladins, and a hunter. For the sake of argument we'll assume that you're playing very well (*grin*), but the warrior never liked tanking and is bad at it, the paladins think they are dps machines, and the hunter keeps his pet on aggressive mode. (I'm sure you already grouped with these people). Or another example, you're a shaman, and your 4 friends are shamans too, and you decide to rotate the roles of tank, healer, and dps. What I would like to see is an "easy" mode for level 70 dungeons that allows such groups to succeed. Not a walk in the park for a bad pickup group, but still doable after a couple of wipes. Far too easy for a good group with a perfect class balance and specced with the optimum group talents, but then there wouldn't be any reason for them to choose easy mode.

Now I know that for this argument I'll get a lot of angry comments from the opposite kind of people than those who shouted at me in yesterday's post. There are people around who think that a MMORPG is there to provide a static challenge, and that the players have to adapt to beat that challenge. Part of the adaption is learning to play better yourself, and that is certainly a good thing. But if you saw the people proposing to use the armory to kick out badly spec'd people from your group, you can see the dark side of adaptation. A lot of what is wrong with guilds in World of Warcraft is this concept of selecting your "friends" by class, talent build, and play ability. What if you have real life friends, or met people online who are extremely nice, but they play a class you don't need in your group, with a bad talent build, and they aren't playing very well?

I'd argue that the "MMORPG as a challenge" concept can only work for so long. Sooner or later players hit the limits of their abilities, or the abilities of the people they are able to organize as a group, and frustrations start to rise. The "MMORPG as a place to hang out with friends" has inherently a better longevity. But for that to be possible, the game has to make it possible to play with your friends without regarding their class, talents, and skill too closely. Being able to modify the difficulty level of a dungeon in *both* directions would go a long way towards that. It would make a far larger part of the game accessible to a far larger part of the population. The more accessible content you have in your game, the longer people are going to play it. And if by playing the "easy mode" dungeons they get better acquainted with the dynamics of group play, learn to play better, and finally manage to advance to the "normal" difficulty dungeon even with an odd groups, just the better.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:13 AM Permanent Link  (60) comments Links to this post

 
How you do quote in italics?

A reader had a question about my comments section: "How you do quote in italics?". And as I've seen several people try tags like [i][/i] or [url=http://www.com], it seems that I need to give more instructions. Square brackets don't work in the comments section, this is not a forum.

The comments section accepts only HTML code. So you need to use < > brackets. For italics you'd use <i> and </i> to bracket the text you want in italics. For URLs you need to use the horribly complicated <a href="http://www.com"> and </a>
- posted by Tobold @ 5:45 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Turbine escapes Blizzard lawsuit

Just kidding, but the UK's Court of Appeal just ruled that ideas behind computer games can be copied. So even if Blizzard noticed that the user interface layout, game controls, and many aspects of gameplay in LotRO are quite similar to WoW, they can't claim copyright infringement. Only the graphics itself and the source code are legally protected.

Not that Blizzard would have tried that, they themselves "copied" a lot of ideas from previous games. And computer games in general copy a lot from each other. Inside of one genre of computer games, game controls are often identical or similar. Many first person shooters play the same way, as do many real time strategy games. Every action RPG since Diablo used a red health bar and a blue mana bar, with red and blue potions to fill them up. Some things just become industry standards, and unless there is a compelling reason to change, people just stick to these conventions.

The obvious danger is that this prevents innovation. I'm still waiting for MMORPGs to break out of the same old "autoattack plus special attack hotkeys" mold, although I'm sceptical of proposed solutions to make combat based on real-time clicking (what if you have lag?). On the other side World of Warcraft has taught (<- notice the correct form of this verb this time) game developers that polish sells better than half-baked novel ideas. Ideally somebody develops a new idea, and others take it up and refine it, until the idea becomes overused and somebody else comes up with another new idea. There is still some room in the MMORPG market for games similar to World of Warcraft, with just incremental improvements and a few novel features. We'll still have to wait a couple of years for a game to break the mould and come out with a very new idea of gameplay in a virtual online world.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:06 PM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 26-March-2007

I didn't play all that much World of Warcraft this weekend. But between trying the LotRO monster play and watching a couple of episodes of the second season of NYPD Blue (much better after Caruso left), I still got a couple of hours of WoW in. That mostly consisted of my priest joining different dungeon groups, and my warrior doing quests in Nagrand.

My warrior is level 67, and I can't help the feeling that he levels faster than he can do all the quests in Burning Crusade. By the time I finish Nagrand I'll be 68 or very close to it, and I haven't even touched Blade's Edge, Shadowmoon Valley and Netherstorm yet. I lost interest in quests once I hit level 70 with my priest, and I wonder if I'll continue questing with my warrior after hitting the level cap. Quests earn you good money, but the items are usually worse than what you could get out of dungeons, except for the rewards of the hardest elite quests, for which you'll need a group as well. So not much interest in soloing at 70.

But for the moment I do like questing in Nagrand. I did a lot of quests for the Mag'thar orcs, so now I arrived at an interesting looking quest where I'll have to collect herbs in different Outland regions for the grandmother, for summoning some ancestor spirit who is supposed to kick some sense into her depressed grandson, the weak leader of the orc tribe. Up to now most Nagrand quest were of the "go to this place and kill anything that moves" type. Fortunately as a protection spec warrior handling several enemies at once is not so much of a problem, even if killing them isn't very fast. That made storming the various ogre, blood elf, and murkblood camps easy enough.

My priest was mainly logging on to do 5-man dungeon groups. Currently I'm trying to improve my reputation with several Outland factions. By going to mana tombs and doing a repeatable Netherstorm quest I managed to hit honored with the Consortium, which gave me four new jewelcrafting recipes. Then I turned towards Thrallmar reputation, and did two runs into Shattered Halls. Tough place, but we cleared it out in both cases. Unfortunately the end boss refused to drop my dungeon set 3 gloves.

After the second run I was just 19 reputation points away from revered with Thrallmar. Getting a group together to just kill 2 mobs in Shattered Halls seemed a bit silly, so I thought about other ways to gain reputation. Already having done all Thrallmar quests, I turned towards the repeatable PvP quest to capture the three PvP structures in Hellfire Peninsula. That turned out to be harder than I thought. Sunday evening I managed to do the quest once, but it gave only 10 reputation points, and I need another repetition to get to revered. Unfortunately there are lots of bored level 70 Alliance around, and when you just switch a structure from alliance controlled to neutral, you'll get killed by several invisible level 70 rogues before you can flag the structure for the Horde. So this morning I tried something else, logging on very early before going to work and taking the structures when nobody was looking. Good idea, but I wasn't the first one to have it, the structures were all already Horde flagged, and I couldn't do anything. I'll try again tonight, sooner or later it should be possible to get this stupid quest done and reach revered for the heroic mode key. Overland PvP in Burning Crusade sucks, unless you can make yourself invisible. A PvP spec rogue can perma-stun and kill me without me even getting the chance to hit the fear button once. And with Alliance outnumber Horde 2:1 on my server, I can't even count on finding more people to help me than the other side can muster.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:46 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Gimping your group talents in World of Warcraft

I played in a couple of groups this weekend, and ended up getting a wide range of qualities from perfect group to absolutely horrible group. And for once the problem was less with people leaving early or anything, but really two groups in the same dungeon against the same group of mobs faring very much differently. And in the bad groups the problem was usually a player with a "solo-friendly" talent build that sucked in group play. The dps warrior trying to tank, or some healing class without healing spec. The only ones where it was hard to notice a difference between good and bad was the damage dealing classes, because they don't get any opportunity to gimp themselves for groups.

I leveled up a priest to 70, being holy/discipline spec all the time. That made me a less effective soloer than a shadow priest, but whenever I joined a group, I was able to perform my class role, that of a healer, very well. I'm currently leveling up my warrior with a protection build, which is exactly the same thing, slower soloing, but much better performance in a group. One day I'd like to level up my blood elf mage a bit more, but he doesn't have that problem. His talent trees are different, dealing different types of damage, and having some variation in crowd control and mana management. But whatever branch he goes for, he will be a good damage dealer in a group. Unless he is specialized in a damage form against which the mobs in the dungeon he is in are resistant (fire mage in MC), he will be able to perform his class role. A bad mage might have a bad timing of his spells, but at least you won't find one telling you "Damage dealing? I'm not spec'd for that!".

And I wonder why the talent trees for other classes can't be the same. A warrior should have three different protection branches in his talent tree. Maybe one that works more on damage reduction, another that works on him having tons of health (like the current druids in bear form), and a third that specializes in aggro management. Priests should lose the shadow branch and get another sort of healing branch instead. The hybrid classes can have more variety, but for example a paladin should have the choice between tank and healing, and don't have a silly dps talent branch.

The reason why pickup groups so often go bad is that you get a dps warrior, a dps paladin, a dps priest, etc. together, and then wonder why this isn't working as a group. If people like to deal lots of damage, they should play a damage dealing class, and not take a class with a totally different role and gimp it. But because damage dealing is good in solo PvE, and essential in PvP, Blizzard gives every class the opportunity to gimp themselves for group play, and so many people take them up on that offer that it makes group play a lot less pleasant than it should be.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:09 AM Permanent Link  (40) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO monster play - the new way to PvP

I mentioned before that having both PvE and PvP in a game causes problems, because what constitutes "class balance" for PvE and for PvP is so very different, and it is impossible to balance both at the same time. Lord of the Rings Online cleverly avoids that problem by never letting player *characters* fight each other. But if you want to do PvP, you can do so, you just have to first transform into a monster. So PvP becomes player versus player-controlled-monster, giving you all the advantages of being able to fight intelligent opponents, without all the disadvantages of classic PvP. Brilliant!

Yesterday I tried monster play out for the first time in the LotRO beta. I traveled to Bree, and found the Fel Scrying Pool in the south-west of that town. Clicking on that I was given the choice of starting monster play, or exchanging the destiny points I had won in monster play for some temporary buff. After choosing monster play, I was presented with 5 options of what kind of monster I would like to play: a spider, a wolf, or three different kinds of orc. I went for the spider, which turned out to be not the easiest monster class, but I managed.

The monster you create has level 50, and remains level 50, you can't "level it up". But you can increase its stats and even gain new abilities by spending destiny points. And these stay with your monster, so you can come back repeatedly to the same monster and play it to increase its power. You can have 1 monster of each class stored, and that is per character, so if you want more, you'd just need to level another character to 10, the lowest level at which monster play is allowed.

Now this being the beta, and there being no level 50 player characters around, I couldn't really test the PvP. But that doesn't mean there is nothing to do in the Ettenmoors, the PvP zone. There are numerous PvE, or should I say MvE, quests that have you kill mobs or NPC guards. Each quest rewards you with some destiny points. But it quickly becomes obvious that the most points could be gained in a raid on one of the numerous castles on the map. That is where most of the PvP action will take place later. The castles are defended by NPC guards, but with players from both sides around it would be more fun.

Normally MMORPG worlds are rather static, whatever you do changes back to its original state after a few minutes. But I can see how the Ettenmoors will develop over time starting from release of the game. Because players can play a monster starting from level 10, but need to be level 50 to fight against those monsters, the Ettenmoors will be firmly in monster hand for the first couple of months of the game. Then gradually the balance will shift, the "free people" will have some first successful raids, and again many months later the balance will have shifted to something where both sides have equal chance of winning. So in effect the character of the zone will change with time, which is interesting.

Back into the normal game, I was able to spend my gained destiny points for buffs. There is a long list of buffs you can choose from, starting from gaining more xp, to having more morale and power, to faster regeneration. Most buffs seem to last for 30 minutes, which given the fact that you can only get them in Bree and then still have to travel to whereever you want to quest is a bit short in my opinion. But nevertheless the option to spend destiny points either on your monster or on your real character is nice.

Lord of the Rings Online is by no means "a PvP game". There won't be much real PvP action before enough people hit the level cap of 50. But at that point the Ettenmoors could become as good as the DAoC RvR zones, with raids taking and re-taking castles. I like it.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:36 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO interview on Warcry

No, I do *not* have a mandate to cover all MMORPGs equally. It is just a coincidence that right after that WAR interview I stumble upon an interesting LotRO interview on Warcry. Jeff Anderson is talking about recent changes in the beta, where the developers tried to make the economy less generous, and overshot the target. But in his view, which I share, that isn't a bad thing to happen in a beta, as Turbine listened to the player comments and corrected the situation. Balancing a game in the beta, instead of in the release version, is a good thing.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:24 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
Mark Jacobs interview on MMOG Nation

I'm looking forward to Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning. The only reason I'm not writing about it is that I'm not in any beta for it, and can only report second-hand news. But if I had to place bets on the most successful MMORPGs coming out in 2007, WAR would come right behind LotRO. Only that I'm not 100% convinced yet that the WAR release date won't be delayed into 2008.

Anyway, to feed you at least with the above-mentioned second-hand news, MMOG Nation has a nice interview with Mark Jacobs on WAR and other subjects. Quote: "Question: What do you think Warhammer does 100% better than anything else?

Mark: Oh, our RvR. That’s something we did obviously quite successfully with Dark Age of Camelot. If you talk to our players, even players of other games, they think that Camelot’s implimentation of RvR and PvP was the best in any MMO."

And yes, it was. DAoC had by far the best PvP around. Too bad I hate PvP, and even the best PvP isn't terribly attractive to me. But as there are a lot of people that do like PvP, I can see how WAR could become quite a big success. Personally what I always liked about RvR was how optional it was, you could keep out of it if you wanted to, or just participate when you felt like it. Nevertheless that system doesn't solve the principal problem of how to balance classes to be equally strong in PvP, but different as well as equally interesting in PvE.

I must admit that I'm not a big Mark Jacobs fan, because in the past he has said some very stupid things about RMT, basically blaming evil players of trying to destroy his perfectly designed game worlds. I have always believed that RMT should be considered as unintended consequence of bad game design, and that the game developers are at least as much responsible for it as the gold farmers are. And apparently Mark is now at least recognizing that the only way to keep the gold farmers away is to have a different game design. He says "A guiding principle is something like, in this case, design the systems to discourage farming, and limit impact that gold farming companies can have on the game.", but refuses to go into the details of how such a system could work. I'm quite interested with what he comes up, and whether it works.

But the guy still has some very unrealistic views, based on a "developers are the new gods" attitude which often ends up clashing with what the players believe. He says: "I’m a real big believer in EULAs. EULAs are what help keep these games online. The day that developers in the United States lose the ability to enforce our own EULAs, is the day that MMOs will start to dissappear. These companies are breaking our EULAs, they’re flouting them in our face, their behavior’s in our face, saying “we can do whatever we want”, and I’m sorry, that’s just wrong." Well, if it's "just wrong", then why doesn't he go and sue IGE and all the other gold farming companies? It seems to me that the developers lost the ability to enforce their EULAs long ago. And that is because they wrote things into these EULAs that try to extend the rights of the developers and limit the rights of the players to an extent which is not compatible with the US legislation. They can't enforce their EULAs for the simple reason that these EULAs wouldn't hold up in court. It would take a brave soul and a huge amount of money to clear the question of virtual property rights in US courts far enough to enable writing enforcable EULAs.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:46 PM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Peer pressure

An anonymous reader posted a comment late on my Is the Burning Crusade reshuffling guilds? article. To rescue that comment from obscurity, I'm quoting it here, because I think it is very interesting.

Our guild started out saying no pressure to level - lets take time and explore and enjoy the new content. (There are quite a few couples in the guild with small children, so we are limited on time sometimes to play.) Soon I began to feel the pressure to level level level, and despite all our resolve not to, we sprinted to level 70, about 2 weeks behind the "inner circle". Before we even reached 70, the pressure to attune became really strong. We both play key classes for Karazhan, so the pressure was heavy for both of us to get attuned, and quickly. We finally made it through the attunement process, and we are regularly trying to help our friends that we actually enjoy playing with, get attuned also by running the different instances and dungeons needed in between the raiding schedule.

We've been reluctantly pulled into what I refer to as the "inner circle" and although we are among the lucky who've been included on all the karazhan runs so far, our friends are beginning to think (and realize) the guild is focusing on this one team. We are worried that we will get blocked in with this inner core of people that we don't enjoy playing with; but also worried that if we say no, we won't get to raid at all. Now that the "inner circle" is attuned - they are only helping the classes get attuned that they need to fill out "balance" their "A" team, although I've been told we are going to have two equally balanced raid teams for Karazhan.

It's really irritating not to have any choices about whether to go on a raid or not or which team i want to be on. But we are afraid if we turn down a raid, or don't sign up, we might not be invited on any raids. Our guild is on the medium to small size, so it would be hard (not impossible though) to form our own team, but I am honestly here to play and have fun with my friends, and this situation is making me want to form my own raid team within the guild, so we can have a reasonable schedule and actually enjoy going there, instead of having to group with mean people who only want us there because we are "this" class or "that" class. We've also got the problem that the "inner circle" likes to split my spouse and I up and I worry they would put us on two different raiding teams.

BC has made people crazy. Definitely made it hard to just log in and have fun. So I guess we are stuck in between the people who are way aggressive and way out front and the slower group who hasn't even hit 70 yet. Yup, stuck right slam in the middle...I wouldn't really worry too much about it, 'cause we like to do the instances and dungeons, but eventually we'll want the challenge of raiding the larger areas, so we are stuck going with the flow until some more of our friends get attuned. We are working earnestly to help them, but in the long run - unless we disband, we won't have any control about who gets to play with who if they form teams instead of continuing our guild's policy of having open signups for all raids, and running numerous raids. ~sigh~ oh well...at least it felt good to vent...

A certain amount of peer pressure has always been part of World of Warcraft. You raid when everybody else is raiding, or you don't raid at all. But do you think that the Burning Crusade has made matters worse? I remember that on some raid days every single level 60 online from my guild was in Molten Core. But now raids seem to have become a lot more selective, with often just one group going to Karazhan, and everybody else online doing other things. We aren't raiding all together any more.

On the other hand the Burning Crusade introduced a much larger choice of 5-man instances to go to after reaching the level cap. Many of them are already good for level 70 groups, and those that are a bit too low can be played in heroic mode to make them challenging for level 70 groups. Thus playing together in 5-man groups definitely has increased from the level 60 endgame to the current endgame. Which has the nice effect of having less peer pressure, as organizing a 5-man run is a lot more flexible than organizing a raid. You don't feel you have to log on at a certain time to be able to play at all. And you don't regret "missing" a group, because there are so many of them around.

How has the endgame changed for you? How do you spend the majority of your time? How much do you feel pressured to play by your guild mates?
- posted by Tobold @ 11:43 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Leveling fast a bannable offense?

The latest World of Warcraft story hitting the news is about Blizzard being heavy-handed with banning people. CNet reports about the boy who was playing night and day to catch up with his friends, and got banned for "powerleveling". The problem in cases like these is that there are 8 million players in World of Warcraft, and only a limited number of customer service representatives, so any appeals against having been banned take quite a while to get handled.

People have been banned for leveling too fast, coming into contact with gold or items that have been obtained fraudulently, and for logging on the same account from many different locations. While these things can be indications of terms of service violations, they can also be completely legit and innocent. For example the guy who logged onto his account from IP addresses all over the world was just a frequent business traveler, and not sharing his account for powerleveling. The method to ban people first and wait for them to appeal and prove their innocence is questionable. But it is an obvious consequence of not having enough people to look into each case more closely, and using an automated dragnet to search for suspicious behavior instead.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:04 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Compared to a toothache ...

I went to the dentist yesterday evening, with a light toothache, and ended up getting two root canal treatments. Ouch! And if that wasn't unpleasant enough, I will have to go again several times, and get a new bridge capping the two teeth and the empty spot between them. This being considered as "cosmetic" by my health insurance, I have to pay about 80% of the cost of 2,000 Euro. Ouch, ouch, ouch! Not that I couldn't afford this, but at the end I'll just arrive at the same quality of life than before the toothache, and poorer. The only good thing is that it provided me with some insight on how cheap my hobbies are.

For example the total cost for LotRO, buying the game itself and a lifetime subscription, will be only 200 Euro. Compared to a toothache that is a lot more fun, and much cheaper. Even the unreasonable splurge on the top-notch computer I just ordered, when depreciated over its predicted lifetime of 4 years, is just 750 Euro per year.

Assuming you would buy a computer that runs World of Warcraft comfortably well for 1,000 dollar, buy one copy of WoW of $20, and subscribe for 4 years on the 6-months plan at $12.99, you end up paying just $400 per year for playing World of Warcraft. Well, add another $400 per year for the broadband internet connection if you consider that without WoW you wouldn't pay for internet. But even that is cheap compared to many other hobbies. And compared to a toothache ...
- posted by Tobold @ 6:57 PM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Theorycraft and arena PvP warrior blog

Are you interested in the science which is nowadays called "theorycraft", the analysis and discussion of the underlying numbers in a MMORPG? Alcaras is running a website named Subcreation - Better gaming through intelligence, with a forum on theorycraft, or what he calls Intelligent Discussions. That used to be mainly about the mage class, with lots of posts on how to spec and play a mage, but now has expanded to all other classes. And there is an attached blog discussing arena PvP from a warrior point of view, again with a focus on numbers.

There is some good stuff there, although I have to admit I'm a bit bothered by the stress on "intelligent". If he has the intelligent discussion, then what do I have here, or other people on other blogs and sites? Lets hope he only tries to differentiate himself from the official WoW forums. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 2:29 PM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Measuring player performance in WoW

I had a mail from Cap'n John on an idea of his about damage meters:

I have an answer to the obligatory damage meters where everyone wants to be #1 and anyone below them should "Lrn2Play, Nubcakes!"

Damage Meters (D) and Healing Meters (H) already exist. What we need is a Mod that compares both figures and gives us a new variable, say X, where X = D/H. The more Damage you do and the less Healing you require, the higher X will be. Dish out a ton of Damage but need a lot of TLC from the Priest and your X-factor will be lower. Now we're talking low maintenance DPS.

Naturally a Tank will have a low X-factor because his (or her) job is not to inflict a lot of damage but to absorb a lot of damage, meaning he will need a lot of Heals compared to his Damage output, but that's acceptable for the Tank.

X = D/H will reveal that the Rogue who topped the Damage charts needed more healing than the Tank, which could explain why the Priest was OOM and unable to heal the Tank, which is when Wipes occur.

High DPS good, low maintenance DPS better (shades of Animal Farm?).

Of course the other side to this argument is that if the DPS is high enough the Mobs will go down so fast that a few extra Heals thrown the Rogue's way are no big deal. But that's usually only going to happen when the group is overpowered versus the Instance's difficulty level, as you, Tobold, found out on your recent MC Run.

I'd be interested to know if the Damage and Healing Meters could be configured to throw up this X-Factor, as an answer to the guy who loves to toss up the Dmg Meters after every Boss fight.

"Yeah, pal, you're #1 on the Damage Meters, but look at the Healing you needed. No wonder our Priest is always OOM and needs to drink after every single fight."

Personally I'm not a big fan of damage meters, and especially not of healing meters. And while Cap'n John's idea would be an improvement, I don't think that its solving the problem.

The underlying problem is that measuring damage and healing output only gives you a total score. It does not tell you anything about the timing of that damage or healing. And I would argue that the timing of damage and healing is what makes a good player, not the total output.

That is easiest to see with healing. Imagine two groups running the same dungeon in parallel, each of the group having just one healer. Obviously the success criteria to compare the two groups and the two healers would be which of the groups has the least deaths, and not which of them has the higher amount of points healed. In fact, if both groups come out without deaths, the group which used *less* healing to achieve that is probably the better one. If one of the groups used a lot more healing, they probably ended up with the healer being out of mana a lot more often after the fight, thus everybody waiting for him to drink and recover his mana between fights. Equally obvious when comparing the two groups healing scores is that the healer isn't uniquely responsible for the score. If one group manages aggro much better, so that the mobs always hit the tank, with his better damage reduction, the healer will need to heal less points. Now combine the two groups into one raid group, and the same thing still applies. Assuming the healers work with some sort of healing assignment, it is a lot more important that their healing target doesn't die than how many points they heal. And the behavior of the healing target influences the score. So you can't pull out a healing meter at the end of the raid and determine who was the best healer. There is a brilliant post on Yet Another Nightelf's blog on how to top the healing meters by doing all the things that are bad for a raid.

Similar considerations apply for damage. More damage isn't always better. One important aspect is timing. A mage starts a combat with a full mana bar, a tank with an empty rage bar. If the mage pulls out his biggest guns right away, without waiting for the tank to gain some aggro and rage, he is likely to pull the mob away from the tank if he lands a crit. That leads at the very least to the tank losing time by having to run after the mob, and the healer wasting mana on having to heal the mage. In the worst cases it leads to people dying and the group wiping. Timing the damage to do less damage at the start and using the biggest spell to for the death blow is a lot better gameplay, but a damage meter can't show that. Another aspect is mana efficiency. Killing a mob faster with more damage only helps if the time you gain that way is longer than the time you lose for having to recover that mana. If your mage is out of mana after every trash mob, and is reduced to using his wand after half the boss fight, he isn't a very good mage, whatever huge damage numbers he produced.

If you are in a good group with good players, you will know it. If somebody screws up, you will often also know what went wrong. But you won't be able to describe that difference between good and bad with some simple to measure numbers. How do you measure how good your pulls are, how little time you lost standing around, how well the aggro management was? Damage meters, whatever you do to modify the numbers, won't tell you that. And people looking after their damage meter and healing meter scores are more likely to play bad than good, because playing after the meter just encourages bad behavior.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:16 AM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
Calibrating my crystal ball

The physicist Niels Bohr once said "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.", a quote that is also sometimes attributed to Nostradamus. I went on record saying that Lord of the Rings Online will be the best selling game Turbine ever produced, which means getting more than the 120,000 subscribers that the first Asheron's Call had. I also predicted that it would probably even beat the current subscriber numbers of Everquest, which means over 200,000 players. Said like that, this are just numbers. How did I estimate them?

One source is annecdotal evidence. Like the general chat in the LotRO beta or in the forums, where a majority of beta players say that they will buy the game. Or from the other side, the number of people you meet in World of Warcraft who say that they are bored with it and are looking for a new game. This gives me a general impression about LotRO being popular with people that tried it, and a potential pool of customers willing to try something new. But that isn't talking numbers yet.

To get from there to a number, you need a another number to compare it with. For me that number is a statement from Brad McQuaid that Vanguard : Saga of Heroes has "well over 100,000" subscribers. Why this number? Because Vanguard is comparable to LotRO in a number of aspects. Both are triple-A titles produced by people and companies that have been around since the first big wave of commercial MMORPGs. Both are released in the first half of 2007. Both have the same monthly fee business model (although LotRO adds to that with the founder's club business model). Assuming that Brad isn't lying through his teeth, this gives me a number to calibrate my crystal ball with.

And now it's back to guesswork and extrapolation. Having played both the Vanguard and the LotRO beta, I think everyone here noticed that I like LotRO a lot better. LotRO has the more interesting world, less boring grinds, and a lot less bugs. And that isn't just my opinion. I read a lot of previews and reviews about both Vanguard and LotRO, and the reviews on Vanguard are at best mixed, with "unfinished" and "bugs" getting a lot of mention. The echo that LotRO gets is a whole lot more positive.

Then there is the different target audience to consider. The Escapist just has an interesting article about games targeting a more casual crowd. The best-selling PS2 game for 2005 was a quiz game called Buzz!, which most serious gamers considered to be simplistic and boring. But it sold over 4 million copies. The game's developer David Amor presented at the GDC what he considers to be the factors for success: familiarity, simplicity and approachability. And if WoW has teached us anything, it is that the same formula is true for MMORPGs. LotRO is more familiar, more simple, and more approachable than Vanguard. And while there are people that will scoff at familiar, simple, and approachable, I still think that these are important parameters for the mass market. Hey, even SWG got up to 250,000 subscribers, just based on familiarity.

This isn't necessarily a measure of "value". I'm not saying that LotRO is twice as good as Vanguard. It is just a measure of "success", and I *do* believe that LotRO will sell at least twice as many copies as Vanguard. Because Middle-Earth is so much more familiar than the rather generic Telon. Because LotRO is simpler than Vanguard. And because the intro of LotRO, having first an instanced soloing zone with a story-line, and then a newbie zone you can only leave through another instanced story, is a lot more approachable than the newbie zones of Vanguard. So if Vanguard sold over 100,000 subscribers, LotRO should get at least 200,000 together. Which would make it the number 2 MMORPG in the US and Europe after WoW. (Not world-wide, due to the much higher subscriber numbers of Asian games like Lineage or FFXI) Everything beyond that becomes impossible to estimate, because it will depend also on things like marketing, and how well the retail launch goes.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:13 AM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO interview in The Guardian

The Guardian has an interview with LotRO executive producer Jeffrey Steefel. Besides the usual blabla it gives us some glimpses into the future of the game, with the announcement of housing, live game events, using battles from the book like Helms Deep as PvP areas, and mounted combat. Seems they are having big plans for additions to the game.

Finally something where nobody can accuse them of copying WoW, Blizzard isn't exactly fast in adding new features to the game, we might be seeing player housing in LotRO before we see it in WoW.

Quote:"Is WoW's huge success a benefit or a hindrance to LOTRO?

A huge benefit. Think about it, what Blizzard has managed to do is hugely expand the market from something that was niche to mainstream entertainment. It has changed the entire landscape which means now is the perfect time to come out with a product like Lord of the Rings Online."

On the timing I certainly have to agree. The LotRO release is perfectly timed to catch people just realizing that the Burning Crusade didn't change the same old WoW, and isn't going to occupy them for much longer. And the marketing for LotRO is apparently going very well also, with beta keys being handed out in every magazine. I would be really surprised if LotRO wouldn't be selling very, very well. Not beating WoW, but certainly beating Everquest.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:11 PM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post

 
Character stats in the Burning Crusade

By introducing jewelcrafting and items with sockets, the Burning Crusade for the first time made it possible to customize items. You yourself can decide whether as a warrior you prefer strength, stamina, crit or defense rating. As a spell caster, you can choose between intelligence, spirit, spell critical rating, added spell damage (or healing) or spell penetration. But while you can choose what to take, you have less choice of how much of it you get. There are three levels of gems, very cheap from vendors, cheap common gems from jewelcrafters, and rare expensive gems, also from jewelcrafters. While you can thus choose your price level, the relative ratio between the stats remains fixed.

For example Blizzard considers 1 intellect to be worth the same as 1 spirit, strength, or agility. The vendor gems give you +4 to one stat, the common JC gems +6, and the rare gems +8. But stamina you get +6, +9, or +12, in every case 50% more than the other stats. Taking the middle level of common jewelcrafter gems, this is the relative scale of what you can get for the same price:

• +2 mana per 5 seconds
• +6 int, str, spi, or agi
• +6 crit, spell crit, defense, or to hit rating
• +7 spell damage
• +8 spell penetration
• +9 stamina
• +12 attack power
• +13 healing

But what if the players don't value the stats in the same way? As a jewelcrafter I can tell you that not all gems sell equally well. That is because not all stats are equally useful, both in respect to how many differenct classes and builds can use the stat, and in respect to how much quantity of that stat you need to make a difference.

The prime example here is spirit, compared with lets say intellect and stamina. 8 out of 9 classes have only very limited use for spirit, and +6 on any other stat is significantly better than +6 spirit. And if stamina is one of the prime stats of your class or build, of course +9 stamina is far, far superior to +6 spirit. The only class that can make some use out of spirit is the priest, and even as a holy priest with a build that maximizes the impact of spirit, I'm hard pressed to declare +6 spirit to be better than +6 intellect, +9 stamina, or +13 to healing. That means that when I put +spirit gems on the auction house, I'm nearly certain not to sell them, even at a discounted rate.

Why should you care if you aren't a jewelcrafter? Because the same principle applies to the looted items without sockets. The same item with an "of the eagle" attribute, giving +stamina and +intellect, sells a lot better than if it was "of the whale", giving +stamina and +spirit, because spirit is valued less by players than intellect is. In fact a green "of the whale" item you might as well vendor, you'll only lose your auction house fee if you put it up. Which is obviously a fault in the game design, as Blizzard obviously considers the different "of the animal" items to be equally valuable, when for the players they aren't.

And curiously the relative scale of Blizzards evaluation of stats has changed with the Burning Crusade. If you compare items pre-BC and post-BC, it becomes immediately obvious that there is much more bonus to spell damage, spell healing, and feral attack power around than before. Of course all the stats went up from pre-BC to now, but for the same item level these stats increased by a higher percentage than others.

Changes in how much stats items give are not neutral towards class balance. Some classes are a lot more reliant on stats for effectiveness than other classes are. For example the basic stats of int, str, sta, spi and agi have a large effect on how much damage a melee fighter deals, but no effect whatsoever on spell damage or healing, or spell critical rating or penetration. Which is probably why Blizzard increased the +healing and +spell damage stats on the Burning Crusade items.

The biggest change in stats is that to stamina, which used to be given out in the same quantities as other stats, but now regularly appears in much larger numbers, about 50% more than the other basic stats. That had a profound impact on the relative levels of health points, damage done, and healing done, with significant consequences especially for PvP. It is easy to see how for example a warlock, who can convert stamina into mana, profits much more from this move than a mage, who cannot.

I think Blizzard should review the balance between stats, and their effects on the balance between classes. Ideally items of the same level, but with different combinations of stats should be balanced until they are considered to be worth the same thing by the player economy. This undoubtedly would mean increasing the spirit bonus that items give, but also balance some other stats against each other.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:12 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
MMO maps

Somebody sent me a link to a Karazhan map, and when looking at it I realized that this was the first "drawn" map from World of Warcraft I've seen in two-and-a-half year of playing this. In older games, like Everquest, there were lots of sites with different versions of hand-drawn maps of everything, from zones to dungeons. But among the 8 million players of World of Warcraft there doesn't seem to be anyone able to draw a map.

The source of this problem of course is that nobody needs outdoor zone maps in World of Warcraft. It is trivially easy to make a screenshot of the in-game outdoor zone maps, and so everybody does just that, and maybe adds some points of interest. The other source of WoW maps is the in-game mini-map. This is a bit harder to extract, but it's perfectly possible to do it and get a complete "satelite image" view of Azeroth. The same source can also be used to extract dungeon maps, and that is the basis of all the dungeon maps I've seen.

Unfortunately all these maps extracted directly from the game aren't very good. It isn't always obvious where you can go on an overland map, and where the mountainous terrain blocks your way. As for dungeon maps, they aren't very clear, and especially if the dungeon has several levels they fail completely to show you where you are going. I really miss the hand-drawn maps back from my Everquest days, which were often quite beautiful, and being drawn from a gamer's perspective showed you exactly what you needed to know.

I don't know whether people will start drawing maps in Lord of the Rings Online, but I already got some maps of Middle-Earth. I bought "The Atlas of Tolkien's Middle-Earth" (Karen Wynn Fonstad) and "The Maps of Tolkien's Middle-earth: Special Edition" (Brian Sibley) from Amazon, and of course there are maps with the Lord of the Rings trilogy of books. That of course doesn't give me any game information, but at least I get an independant source of hand-drawn views of the same area. The game is true enough to the Tolkien lore to have all the towns, villages, and points of interests in the right spots.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:51 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Heroic mode dungeons in World of Warcraft

I did my first heroic mode dungeon in World of Warcraft this weekend. Given that it is easier to get revered with the Cenarion Expedition than with Thrallmar, and thus there are more people with the heroic key to Coilfang Reservoir than with the key to Hellfire Citadel, we we for the slave pens. The experience was pretty intense, even on the trash mobs everybody had to play just perfectly to not wipe. Being the sole healer on the second boss in heroic slave pens and everybody surviving was probably my best performance in this game ever.

We made it, and killed all three bosses, getting an epic and a primal nether at the last boss. Too bad nobody wanted that epic, and we didn't even have an enchanter, so I ended up vendoring it for very little gold. As the first bosses of the heroic dungeons just drop blue items, and only the final boss drops a primal nether with 100% chance, and an epic, I can see how shorter heroic dungeons will be a lot more popular than longer ones. I think we even could have skipped the second boss in slave pens, which is probably what people will do if they go to "farm" primal nethers.

The only thing that every boss drops are badges of justice, which you can exchange against epics. Only you need a lot of those badges, and the epics you can get are rather crappy. Why would I want to kill 25 bosses in heroic mode for a Bishop's Cloak when I alreade got Cloak of Whispering Shells from killing one boss in non-heroic Steamvault? The epic cloak gives 1 int less, and only 4 healing and 4 mana per 5 seconds more.

I don't have much BC raid experience myself, but from all what I hear the difference in power level between blue items and epics isn't all that big this time around. Apparently Blizzard noticed that giving out very powerful epics just means that in the next expansion you need to hand out very powerful greens to everybody, because otherwise people just keep wearing their raid gear. Hey, my level 70 priest is still wearing his Halo of Transcendence from Onyxia. But of course if you don't give out very powerful epics, and everybody expects to get better greens in the next expansion, the motivation to put in enormous effort to get epics now isn't all that strong. Of course that is hard to measure, but it seems to me that this time round there are less people interested in full-time raiding than before. I can't blame them.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:02 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Molten Core at 70

I went to Molten Core with my guild last night. 27 people, most of them level 70, and we simply owned the place. Took us just over 2 hours to completely clean out Molten Core, and that was on our worst strategic behavior. For example the new Garr strategy, "lets just bunch up all these guys and AoE them". And most of the time it worked. Only Geddon and Ragnaros offered any kind of serious resistance, the other bosses just dropped dead in record time.

Of course there wasn't much of a challenge involved. And its not an event I would repeat anytime soon. But after not having been there for months, and remembering how much harder it used to be, kicking some ass there once was real fun.

As a priest, at level 70 I still behaved pretty much the same in MC than at 60. Just that my mana pool was larger and my heals bigger. The only real improvement was using Mass Dispel at those encounters where many people got debuffed at once, starting with Lucifron. Where the main difference was for the raid was in the damage dealing. The speed with which you take the enemy down makes a huge difference, because once the mob is dead, it doesn't matter what fancy abilities he has. And I have the impression that damage dealing went up faster in the Burning Crusade than healing did. In level 70 dungeons I barely ever use my fast heals any more, they are just too small now to make any difference.

I'd like to do a similar exercise for BWL, AQ40, and Naxxramas, but maybe that will be harder to organize. For example not everyone is attuned to Naxxramas. And I'd assume that the harder dungeons still need some sort of strategy.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO to have separate versions US and Euro

Just like World of Warcraft, the Lord of the Rings Online will have US servers and European servers, and they won't be compatible with each other. Quote via Warcry: "What this means is that the version of the game you can play is determined by the service operator that supports your region. Since the service operators maintain completely separate billing, hosting, and support systems it is not possible to allow players to access both services - they're just not compatible with each other."

The good news is that apart from the minor difference from which date on the preorder customers can keep their characters, the release date for the European and US version will be the same, April 24th. So while you can't import a US version and play it here in Europe, most people won't really feel the need to do so.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:16 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Buying from Alienware

My last desktop and both notebooks I bought over the last couple of years were from Dell. I had my fair share of troubles with Dell logistics, but the machines itself were solid enough. But apart of having not much "street cred" among gamers, Dell now annoyed me by not offering gaming computers that are 100% Vista compatible. Their gaming models still come with Windows XP installed, and some of the hardware just doesn't work with Vista. But what I want is a computer that runs for the next 4 years, and I assume that in 4 years there will be only DirectX 10 games around. So I need a 100% Vista compatible computer, with Vista already installed and everything.

If I would live in the US, I'd have a much larger choice of suppliers of gaming PCs, for example Falcon Northwest, but these don't deliver to Europe. But one of them, Alienware, opened operations in Europe. So I spent some time building virtual computers in my browser, both at Dell and Alienware, and found the prices to be pretty much identical. Only that Alienware computers look better, have better "street cred", come with Windows Vista Home Premium preinstalled, and are guaranteed 100% Vista compatible (as long as you don't order one with two SLI graphics cards, as the technician explained me on the phone when I verified this). And comparing the websites it seems clear that while Dell is specialized in business PCs, Alienware only builds computers for gamers.

So here is what I just ordered for just under 3,000 Euro:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4 GHz CPU, the "medium" model of the dual core processors, with the best bang for my buck. As I currently have a single core CPU, just with hyperthreading, the speed increase will be noticeable.
  
• Nvidia nForce 680i SLI motherboard
  
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS (640 MB), just a bit slower than a GTX, and fully DirectX 10 compatible. Only one of them, I really don't need SLI. According to different benchmark sites this card will already be twice as fast as my current Geforce 7800 GTX, and that is without accounting for the much faster CPU.
  
• 4 GB DDR2 PC-6400 SDRAM. If there is one thing I learned from years of buying computers is that you can't have enough memory. And Vista is a memory hog. I wouldn't dream of buying a Vista gaming PC with less than 2 GB, but I went for the future proof 4 GB.
  
• 700 W power supply, computers nowadays eat a lot more power. I could have taken a 1000 W power supply, but I don't plan to install a second video card.
  
• 2 optical drives. I took a second drive, because I figured that among two different drives I have a better chance of finding one that runs silently enough. On my current computer one of the drives makes far too much noise.
  
• 1 floppy drive, which I don't need, but couldn't unselect. Come on, floppy drive is so much last century.
  
• 250 GB hard drive. I have another 250 GB on an external hard drive nowadays, which makes switching computers a lot easier, so I don't need a bigger internal drive.
  
• Razor Diamondback Mouse, a gaming mouse, shiny
  
• a keyboard I won't use, I still have this wonderfull Logitech G15 keyboard
  
• funky case, network card, standard sound card (Vista doesn't do surround sound anyway), preinstalled Kapersky Anti-Virus (most XP Anti-Virus software doesn't run under Vista), and some useless free stuff like an Alienware T-shirt and mousepad.

A solid machine, that in all likelyhood will still be able to play games in 2011. For now it's even a bit overpowered for what I'm playing. Hey, even Vanguard would run on this. And the 3,000 Euro budget is pretty much what I'm always shooting for. You can get a perfectly good computer able to run WoW just fine for 1,000 Euro, or you can get the meanest Alienware monster PC with water cooling, 4 processors, and 2 video cards, for 6,000 Euro. If I would live in the US, I could get the same system for the same amount of dollars instead of euros, but this is one of the cases where you have to think 1 euro = 1 dollar, even if the exchange rate currently favors the Euro.

So now I'll have to wait until the machine is built and shipped, two to three weeks, and then I'll see if the Alienware logistics is as bad as the Dell one. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 10:58 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Disclaimer

There is a "WoW News & Information Blog" (no link provided on purpose) which copies texts from this and other blogs and World of Warcraft news sites in a way that makes it look as if me and the other authors were contributing to that site. But in fact the texts are simply stolen, copied and pasted from publicly accessible sites, and server as the respectable front for a gold-selling operation.

So for the record, I am not a contributor to that site, or any other site selling gold. While I am not a rabid opponent of RMT (real money trade, exchanging virtual currency for real one), and I'm "claiming the 5th" (making use of my right to not self-incriminate me) on whether I ever bought WoW gold, I have never supported any WoW gold-selling operations. I have even declined the obvious opportunity to make a bit of cash with Google Adsense on my site, because most of these ads on WoW sites end up advertising gold sellers. I can't prevent these people from copying my writing, and I can't be online 24 hours a day to delete their comment spam on my blog. But I want you to know that I do not support them, and am in no way receiving any money from them.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:07 PM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Does Blizzard frustrate you?

A reader was suggesting an interesting subject for discussion, the different ways in which we as players are sometimes frustrated by Blizzard as a company. He writes: "At this moment, I am very frustrated with Blizzard. Last night I tried to renew my subscription via credit card, but something was bugged about the account management page, so... now my card is blocked for 3 days! And no, my credit card is fine, I pay with it online all the time ;) I had planned a quiet weekend, nothing much to do, just playing some WoW, but that isn't possible anymore now. What's your biggest frustration?"

I think he hit the nail on the head in that it is often "inability to play" that frustrates us most. Be it account problems, server downtime, connectivity problems, all that sort of stuff where we really would like to play but can't. My biggest frustration in the last couple of weeks was playing during some server instability where people got frequently disconnected. You pull a boss and then either you get disconnected, or the priest healing you does, and it all ends in repeated wipes and an unplayable game.

So, how did Blizzard frustrate you recently?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:19 AM Permanent Link  (26) comments Links to this post

 
Trading card game elements in MMORPGs

I was discussing yesterday that I wasn't expecting much innovation in the upcoming MMORPGs of 2007, especially not from a game where the parent company is EA, more famous for their 137 versions of Madden NFL than for groundbreaking innovation. But that doesn't mean that I don't think innovation in MMORPG wouldn't be possible, or that I wouldn't want it. I *am* critical towards the current trend to make MMORPGs more action-based, because the effect of lag on that would be horrible. But what I think could be a big innovation in MMORPGs is the use of elements from trading card games.

If I had 50 million dollar spare to invest in a MMORPG, which is unlikely, because rounded to the nearest million I have 0 million dollars, I would make it trading card game based. I've described some ideas in the past, on this blog, and in an April's fool joke on Grimwell.com. The basic idea is to replace the hotkey button with a hand full of cards, with each card representing a possible action in combat. Whenever you use a skill, that is play a card, you draw a random new card from your deck. For the player the interesting thing is building good decks, where the card fit together in a way that you're likely to have a good hand and maybe even some nice combos. For the gaming company the interest is in the possibility to sell people booster packs of random cards. Magic the Gathering and the Pokemon trading card game have shown that this is potentially very, very lucrative.

The Chronicles of Spellborn is advertising their skill system as being similar to trading card game elements. But I had a closer look at it, and in reality there are no random elements involved. TCoS just has a revolving hotkey bar, with 6 rows of 5 skills. You can use only the 5 skills visible to you right now, and then the skill bar rotates and you get the next 5 skills to choose from. But you determine exactly the order, you don't get a random row or random skills in it, you get the sequence you've built. Now that is already some innovation, and might be fun enough. I've signed up for the beta, and if that won't work will try to get into the open beta. From the videos the game looks good and fun enough, but of course I'll need to play it to say whether it is really fun.

So the only good computer game with trading card game elements I've played this year was Metal Gear Acid on the PSP. That works very well, but of course as a single-player and offline game there is no way to for the game company to make money on selling boosters. A trading card game MMORPG in which you could earn cards in the game, but if you don't have the time for that buy them in booster packs in an online store, wouldn't even need a monthly fee if well balanced. The monthly fee business model is a barrier of entry into this genre, and the Guildwars expansion based business model is only profitable enough for the best selling games. It is not only MMORPG combat that needs some innovation, but also the business model.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:25 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Massive Magazine closes down

Remember me complaining about Massive Magazine taking stuff from this blog without linking to me? Well, I got an apology from the author, it won't happen again. Sure it won't, because The Escapist just reported that Massive Magazine is closing down. The downside being that I paid $10.99 for an online subscription of which I only ever got 2 issues. And as I just read them online, not downloaded them or anything, I can't even re-read those two.

It is not that games magazines aren't profitable, apparently the games division from the parent company The Globe had revenues growing by 50%. And no, it wasn't my complaint either that shut them down. Instead it was a lawsuit from MySpace that led to the demise of Massive Magazine, quote: "The Globe was recently found liable in a California court for hundreds of thousands of spam messages sent to MySpace users." That's what you get if your business practices aren't squeaky clean. You might be able to get away with messing with Tobold, but you don't mess with Rupert Murdoch!
- posted by Tobold @ 4:38 PM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Unrealistic expectations

Two things happened in the last couple of days: One, I got several mails and comments saying that I should get more interested in Warhammer Online or Age of Conan or Chronicles of Spellborn. And two, I've seen more commentaries about Lord of the Rings Online being "unoriginal" and "not true enough to the Tolkien lore". Abalieno laughed at me for calling LotRO the "next big thing", because he thinks the game needs to be closer to the books.

The thing is, that most major MMORPG are following a typical hype trajectory. As long as you can't play them, as long as there are only a few alpha testers, and lots of features listed on some website, the MMORPG in question is the greatest ever. As soon as the beta phase has grown large enough for many people to actually try the game, people realize two things: Much of the gameplay of the new game is very similar to the gameplay of any other MMORPG, and the hyped "new" features in fact aren't much better than what we had before. In the end it all boils down to how well these well-known characteristics are executed, and whether the few new things and the new world are fun to explore.

I'm especially laughing whenever I read how LotRO is too similar to WoW. Because two-and-a-half years ago the same sort of people were complaining how WoW was the same as Everquest. The basic gameplay of MMORPG, where you kill mobs to gain loot and xp to level up, where you have a tank taunting mobs, a healer patching up the tank, and some others dealing the damage, hasn't changed in ages. And tell you what, that will still remain the same for quite a while, and Warhammer Online will be called an unoriginal copy as soon as people get to play it. You can rename the brilliant EQ-parody Progressquest to Progresscraft, or Progress of the Rings, or Progress : Age of Reckoning, and the joke will still apply.

So here are some answers I'd like to give to comments about upcoming games:

1) "LotRO is a WoW clone": Doh! That's why I want to play it, man! You can rephrase that critique in marketing-speak to "LotRO is a fine example of the state of the art in MMORPG development, exhibiting all the good features that have evolved over the years, and have been proven so popular in World of Warcraft", and it would remain just as true. It just depends on how you look at it. I don't *want* a game that is radically different from WoW, and neither do the majority of the other players out there. Hey, I would have bought "WoW: The Middle-Earth expansion", so why shouldn't I buy LotRO?

2) "LotRO isn't true to the Tolkien lore": No kidding! You mean a game in which 3,000+ would-be heroes per server interact with each other can't exactly reproduce the atmosphere and experience of reading a book by yourself? Who'da thunk that! If you had imagined that you'd get to be the ring-bearer and you'd never get to see other people exhibiting Tolkien-untypical behavior like /ooc chat or "farming mobs", maybe you're in the wrong genre of games. People are people, and a lot of the behavior you'll see in LotRO from them will make Boromir look like a rather upstanding guy in comparison, and Samweis look heroic.

3) "Don't play WoW/LotRO, play WAR instead": I'm not discounting the possibility of Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning turning out to be a great game, in fact I rather hope it will be. But the most optimistic estimate of its release date is Q4 2007. And there is a significant chance that either it will be released at that date but widely be considered as unfinished and not ready for release (call it the "SOE model"), or that the release date will slip into 2008 (the "Blizzard model"). Even if it miraculously turned up in perfect shape for the christmas sales, that is *still* 8 months of waiting time. I need a game to play *now* (WoW) or an alternative very soon (LotRO). I'm still calling LotRO the "next big thing", not because I think it will "kill WoW", or because I'm sure it will be better than WAR. But because I think it will sell several hundred thousand copies, significantly outselling any previous Turbine game and the other recent arrival on the market, Vanguard. And it will do that because it is "good", without necessarily being "better", and because the timing for a WoW-alternative is right. Warhammer Online is probably the "next next big thing", but people aren't going to hold their breath until then. Other upcoming games, like Chronicles of Spellborn or Age of Conan have some interesting features, but probably not the same mass-market appeal. They can be successful in their respective niche, just like Vanguard claims to be successful with over 100,000 subscribers. But they will operate on a completely different tier of the market.

In short, don't get carried away by your expectations, don't believe the hype, and take the upcoming games for what they are: attempts by trial and error to improve an existing genre of games, without destroying the proven popularity and profitability.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:03 AM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
Zul'Gurub post-BC

I had the most fun evening in World of Warcraft since a while, joining a guild raid to Zul'Gurub. We were about 15 people, levels from 61 to 70, but with most players being 70, and we totally kicked ass in that place. Which wasn't really surprising, but it *is* fun.

When we look at our characters and see the numbers, how much health, mana, armor, etc. we have, and how many points of damage our attacks and spells do, or how much we heal, we are aware that we have become much stronger through the Burning Crusade expansion. The problem is that we often don't feel it. Killing a level 70 mob at level 70 isn't much easier than killing a level 60 mob at level 60. And if your guild moved from "farming" Molten Core and BWL to wiping in Karazhan, you can't help the feeling that you actually got weaker.

Visiting Zul'Gurub really let me feel how much stronger my character had become, and that was just the level 65 warrior. I survived two exploding bats, because I have so much more health now. Tanking boss mobs with a level 70 priest healing me was very easy. At the panther boss, where previously we often got swamped with panthers, our single mage just sneezed at them and they all dropped dead. There were a couple of boss special abilities that still hurt, and where we still needed to use the right tactics, like the tiger boss resurrecting his mates, or having to poison yourself for Hakkar. But mostly we were just reducing our strategy to blasting everything to smithens, and it worked. Not something you'd want to do every day, but nice and relaxing for one evening. Oh, and I dinged 66 in ZG, which was funny, because people don't usually level up in raid dungeons.

Of course we couldn't use much of the loot that dropped. There was some interest in the 18-slot bag the panther boss dropped, but the Will of Arlokk staff he also dropped just got sharded. Man, my priest ran around with that staff for many months and was so proud to have gotten it. One level 61 warrior still could use the 2H-sword that Hakkar dropped, but I had gotten a polearm from Hellfire ramparts that was already better. So we just got a lot of disenchanted shards, and lots of bijous and coins.

I had first thought that I'd need the Zul'Gurub reputation to finally get the mageblood potion recipe for my warrior. But as it happens I got lucky the same day, and found a "cheap" (400 gold buyout) recipe for major mageblood potion in the auction house. Previously I had seen the same recipe for 600 gold bid, 1000 gold buyout, and had only bid on it, only to have it bought out shortly afterwards. No more need for Zul'Gurub reputation for me now.

Next stop is Molten Core, where I will go with my level 70 priest. My warrior was so rarely in MC that I wouldn't have a point for comparison. And I want to see the effect of Mass Dispel on Lucifron, and other dispel-heavy encounters there. I think these occasional visits to "old" level 60 raid dungeons go a long way to raise the spirits in a guild, especially when not everybody is happy with how Karazhan raids are going. Imagine that, Molten Core as a kind of picnic, a party among friends to have some fun together, instead of seriously being at the top of the raiding circuit.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:27 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Jewelcrafting as a cash cow

Getting my jewelcrafting up to 375 was hard and expensive. Buying random world drop recipes to be able to cut rare gems was even more expensive. But now that I got at least one recipe for every type of gem, jewelcrafting turns out to be a veritable cash cow. It involves some volatility of the random results, but on average the profits are great.

As example this week I bought 12 stacks of adamantite ore for 25 gold each, for a total of 300 gold. 12 stacks of ore means 48 uses of the prospecting skill, each destroying 5 ores, a quarter of a stack. But each prospecting gives one adamantite powder (worth between 50 silver and 1 gold), and on average 1 common gem, which after cutting I can easily sell for 4 gold. And on average every 6th prospecting gives a rare gem, which when cut sells easily for 50 gold. So out of my 300 gold investment I got 48 adamantite powder (ca. 30 gold), 50 common gems (200 gold), and 8 rare gems (400 gold), more than doubling my investment with very little work involved.

The only trick involved is to be patient, because prices often fluctuate wildly. If adamantite ore in the AH sells for much more than 25 gold, I don't buy. Although often I can get around that by buying on the Alliance AH instead, where the price evolution is independant from the Horde AH prices, and then transferring the ores via the neutral AH and my wife's account. Same holds true for selling, sometimes somebody floods the market with underpriced gems, and I just wait that out. By experimentation I found that 4 gold for common gems is a price where I usually sell the large majority of what I put on the AH, thus suffering no losses in AH fees. In cut rare gems my 50 gold price tag is rarely undercut, but again I'm going for low prices high volume, instead of pushing prices to the max and risking losing the advance AH fee.

Of course I did have setbacks, for example when one day I only got half of the rare gems that I would have expected. But even then I just came out even, without making a loss, with the common gems selling at least for enough to recover my investment. I was thinking of expanding my business, buying more rare random world drop recipes and thus being able to offer more different types of cut rare gems. But I bought my recipes over a long period whenever I could get them for between 150 gold and 250 gold. Meanwhile the prices for these recipes have gone up, and I rarely see any on offer below 400 to 500 gold. And there is always the chance that prices for ore will go up permanently and prices for gems down, destroying my profit margin. But for the moment I'm making good money with this tradeskill, which is unusual in WoW.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:39 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
What would you do with just one month to live

... your virtual life? While there are lots of stories about doctors telling people they only have X weeks to live, in real life I don't think doctors would be willing or able to give you any accurate estimate on how long you still have to live. But in virtual lives it is often easier to foresee the end: your subscription might be running out, or you know the release date of the next game you want to play. In my case I checked and double-checked, the date for the EUROPEAN pre-order access to Lord of the Rings Online is the 14th of April. (US players can already start playing a beta character from 30th of March, and take that one into the release version, albeit with a level cap of 15.) That gives me exactly one month to still play World of Warcraft. I'm not cancelling my subscription yet, better to have a back available in case the LotRO servers aren't stable on release. But in all likelyhood I'll start playing LotRO in a month, and if all goes well won't have much interest in WoW for some time. So what do I do in that month?

For me MMORPGs have always been about setting myself goals and going after them. That can be reaching a certain level, or skill level; doing all quests in some area; making a certain amount of gold for some purchase; or even beating a raid dungeon. There are short-term goals and long-term goals, and so having only a limited time available changes the equation. For example it appears obvious that in one month I won't reach Mount Hyjal, so activities that just serve to check off another case on the complicated Mount Hyjal attunement chart aren't top priority any more.

So right now my top priority is leveling up my warrior to 70. Not because I need him to be at 70, but because that way I can do all the quests in Nagrand, Blade's Edge, Shadowmoon Valley, and Netherstorm, which I didn't do with my priest. I'll get to know the zones I don't know all that well much better, and get the maximum of "content" out of my Burning Crusade purchase. Doing this in one month is perfectly feasible. And of course if I get bored by LotRO, or WoW comes out with the next expansion and I want to restart playing, having two level 70 characters gives me a good start for that.

Secondary goal is to do 5-man instances with my guild, whenever the opportunity presents itself. 5-man groups still are, and always have been, my favorite mode of gameplay in World of Warcraft. In fact, if I should find that LotRO dungeons aren't that good (I simply don't know that yet), it is perfectly possible that I'll play both games, switching to LotRO for soloing fun, while doing group activities in WoW. Again, having two level 70 characters would be ideal for that purpose.

What I am not going to do any more is trying to raid Karazhan, unless there is a situation where 9 people from my guild stand in front of the place and can't play unless I join. I'm simply chickening out on that one. Karazhan is very hard. I don't enjoy very hard. And I enjoy even less the guild drama developing from the fact that it's very hard, and not everybody is equally suited to go there. I'll leave it to the l33t, the kind of people who think they are superior human beings because they enjoy harder dungeons. It is one of the advantages of age that I don't need to succeed in a raid any more to keep up my self-esteem. The only difficulty will be resisting peer pressure in my guild. Some people think that raiding is awfully important, more important than having fun or playing together. But my priorities for what might be my last month of WoW lie elsewhere.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:39 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Dream Features: Sorted trade goods in the auction house

In the second installment of my column on single features I'd like to see in World of Warcraft, I'm going for something hopefully a lot less controversial: A better sorting of items, especially trade goods, in the WoW auction house.

The World of Warcraft auction house works reasonably well if you are looking for weapons or armor. Want a plate glove for your level 65 warrior? Just select the armor category, plate sub-category, hands sub-sub-category, and optionally select a level range, and all the plate gloves available will be shown. But if you look for other things than weapon or armor, things become more complicated.

For example imagine you found your first item with sockets, and you want to buy a gem to put into a red socket in the auction house. Good luck! Right now there is no way to find them, unless you know the name of what you are looking for. Gems, cut or uncut, are listed under trade goods, together with ores, metal bars, cloth, enchanting supplies, leather, and a wide range of other materials. As the name "trade goods" suggests, there is heavy trade in them, and you can usually find more than 1,000 items in this category. And there are no sub-categories, all you get is an unsorted list, over 20 pages at 50 items each. Sorting by rarity or price only works on the one page you're on, not over the whole 20 pages. Going through that list to find red gems is a nightmare. The best you can do is find the names of all possible gems that fit in red slots (blood garnet, living ruby, flame spessarite, noble topaz, shadow draenite, nightseye) and search for them by name, although that will still give you a mixed list of cut and uncut gems.

What is missing is sub-categories for trade goods. Even just having sub-categories like alchemy, blacksmithing, jewelcrafting etc. would be a big help. But ideally there would be sub-sub-categories like red gems, blue gems, yellow gems under jewelcrafting, or ore, bars, and miscellaneous under blacksmithing. The probable reason why nobody has implemented this is that apparently currently any one item can only be in one category. So ùost trade goods like metal ore, which would be used for blacksmithing, engineering, and jewelcrafting can't be sorted into one category. The solution would be to allow one item to have several labels, and thus be present in several sub-categories.

Sorting trade goods into categories would make life a lot easier, without changing anything in the rules of the game. It is just an improvement of the user interface.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:18 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Yet Another Nightelf on Karazhan

Okay, I'm a month behind with my blog reading, been too busy playing and working. But Yet Another Nightelf has a thought-provoking short post on whether Karazhan is the new UBRS. Which is something I hear as an argument quite often, but can't really agree to.

The only point where Karazhan is really like UBRS is that they are both 10-man raids, with UBRS being the only 10-man level 60 raid content, and Karazhan the only 10-man level 70 raid. But that is where the similarity ends.

UBRS isn't really "raid content", it is a lot more similar to a 5-man dungeon which allows a larger number of people. In the earlier days of World of Warcraft, when the cap on UBRS was 15 people, and the cap on Scholomance and Stratholme was 10 people, UBRS was considered to belong in the same category as Scholo and Strat, not in the same category as Molten Core.

One reason why people didn't rank UBRS as a real raid dungeon is that there are no epics to be found there. Instead you find parts of the dungeon set 1, or tier 0, armor. The same set that you'll find in Scholomance or Stratholme. Now Karazhan has epic loot, and no dungeon set 3 blue pieces at all.

Another important difference, which totally changes the raid organization, is that UBRS doesn't have a raid timer. You're expected to finish it without a pause. Karazhan has a 7-day raid timer, just like MC, and it is exactly that timer that makes cooperation inside a guild between different guild groups so difficult. If two groups A and B go to Karazhan on day 1 of the timer, and on day 2 there are only 5 people of each group on, they can't just combine and go raiding together. They are excluded from grouping together there for the rest of the week. UBRS never had such problems.

As the raid timer suggests, Karazhan is a lot harder than UBRS. Yeah, I know, it is difficult to compare difficulty, and somebody will chime in telling us how he wiped in UBRS back in the days. But that was never the "wipe 10 times on first boss, beat him, then wipe 10 times on second boss, etc." over several days type of gameplay. The better your group, the further you got, with quite a lot of groups beating the final boss after a few hours, and most people at least getting until Rend in one go.

Now both UBRS and Karazhan are mandatory to visit for further content. You needed to visit UBRS several times for the Onyxia key quest chain. And you need to finish Karazhan for the Serpentshrine Lair key and thus ultimately Mount Hyjal. But UBRS was never considered mandatory to gear up for Molten Core. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the current thinking is that a raiding guild needs to farm Karazhan for gear for quite a while before being ready for any of the 25-man raid dungeons.

I don't think there is any level 60 instance you could compare Karazhan to. It's for much smaller groups than Molten Core, and even Zul'Gurub. And personally I always considered ZG to be as difficult as MC, just for smaller group sizes, while I don't see any instance which has the same difficulty level as Karazhan but for a larger raid group.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:06 PM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft as a role model

The BBC news report some interesting stories from the Game Developer's Conference.

Quote: ""Viacom has launched three MMOs and nobody noticed," said Raph Koster, president of Areae and the former head of Star Wars Galaxies. He added: "Anybody who is not watching how big media is moving into this space is missing a major major story."" With Mark Jacobs and Rob Pardo agreeing that "there will be a lot of corpses". Sounds obvious to me. Optimistic as I am about the future growth of the MMO genre, there is an obvious limit to how many multi-million subscriber games there can be out there.

But besides clones, what could World of Warcraft be a role model for? Quote: "Five years from now a social networking site without a 3D universe will look like a dinosaur." Yup, I can believe that. As soon as the technology is there, hanging out in a 3D universe is of course more interesting than hanging out in a place that just has text and photos. Although I'm not convinced of the "Second Life" model of a virtual world without a game. Hanging out around a well-defined activity, a game, is usually a lot more successful than hanging out in an empty space the users can fill with content. There is a reason why lots of real world social interaction happens around activities like bowling or playing golf. It gives a nice background to talk about, and fills those odd silent moments when nobody has to say anything.

But whatever virtual worlds will develop into, unsurprisingly the prediction is that WoW won't always be the top dog. Quote: ""WoW will have its day and it's nothing to do with how smart they are," said Mr Jacobs. "It won't be for a while but it will happen."" Which is probably true, but given how the people who say that are game developers who have a vested interest in *their* game rising to the top of the heap, you'll have to take these predictions with a grain of salt.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:04 PM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Is the Burning Crusade reshuffling guilds?

A reader who prefers to remain anonymous wrote me and asked me about my opinion on how The Burning Crusade transforms guilds. In his guild the most hardcore players leveled to 70 and attuned to Karazhan a lot quicker than the rest, and then instead of helping the others to reach the same level just quit the guild and joined a "more serious" raiding guild. And I wouldn't be surprised if that happened all over the place.

Of course there are also bright examples. I was discussing WoW with some RL friends last night, and their guild decided to not start Karazhan before everybody was attuned, and organized lots of evenings for the different steps of the attunement quest. Such organization goes a long way towards creating a more homogeneous guild environment. But the more frequent thing is for the Burning Crusade sorting out people inside a guild into different sub-groups, and these groups eventually separating.

It is Karazhan that will turn out to be the real bottleneck here. I have yet to hear from guilds that successfully manage two or more Karazhan raids in parallel, most either limit themselves to one raid, or have a second group that fails miserably. Lets face it, not all 40 players in a MC raid were equally responsible for the success. There is a wide distribution of dedication and skill, from the main tank who participates in every raid, to the guy who is on his first raid and ends up getting several epics that nobody else wants any more. With the same 40 people you simply can't run 4 Karazhan raids in parallel. Karazhan is hard, and it requires all 10 players in the raid to be totally focused.

This leads to the Burning Crusade making a more clear distinction between hardcore raiders and casual raiders. If the guild is very large, the hardcore just tend to forget about the rest and just organize their little 10-man raid for themselves. Which of course will sooner or later lead to 10 people standing in front of a 25-man raid encounter and wondering how to do it. It would be surprising if they didn't have the idea that its easier to leave the guild and join other people with the same mind set and problem. In smaller guilds this separation simply happens earlier, because the hardcore aren't numerous enough to form their own Karazhan raids.

Molten Core already at level 60 could be successfully raided by less than 40 people. That provided guilds with free raid slots that they could fill up with less experienced, less geared people, who were just there for the headcount and contributed less than the others. Some sort of DKP system made sure that the more frequent raiders got loot first, but most people were okay with unneeded epics going to newbies instead of being sharded. The advantage of that was that at the end of the raid the newbie had gained both experience in raiding, and possibly some gear, making him more valuable for the next raid.

This sort of training ground is missing in the Burning Crusade. When I first heard about the raid dungeons I automatically assumed that there would be a 25-man raid dungeon which you could tackle wearing a full set of the new blue dungeon set, the equivalent of going to MC in full tier 0 armor. But apparently this is not the case, there is no alternative to Karazhan with equal difficulty and larger raid size. Everybody needs to gear up in that 10-man dungeon to access the first 25-man dungeon. That will be fiendishly hard to organize inside a single guild. The temptation will be strong for a serious reshuffle of guilds, with several guilds' regular Karazhan raiders banding together for the bigger stuff, and leaving their former guild mates behind.

If you think of guilds as being associations of players of equal attitude and needs, formed just to accomplish things they couldn't do on their own, this reshuffling is the only logical thing to do. But for people like me, old enough to remember previous concepts of guilds being there for friends to play together, this trend comes as a serious disappointment and sad statement on the selfishness of players.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:30 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Potshot on LotRO

Potshot has a very readable and nice series of impressions from the Lord of the Rings Online beta here, here, and here. He calls LotRO "WoW for adults", and I think he could be right in that the game might have a bigger appeal to a slightly older set of players. Starting from the fact that the younger players probably never read the Lord of the Rings. But also because LotRO is more about living in Middle Earth than about pwning mobs and other players. Being no spring chicken myself any more, the idea of games targeting another audience than kids appeals to me. People like me grew up with games, but we'd like our games to mature with us.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:20 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Dream features: Solo / Group talent build switch

World of Warcraft has 8 million amateur game designers, all of them convinced that there are features that they could have designed better than the developers. :) So I thought I'd start a column where I discuss single features that I think are easy enough to implement and which could make World of Warcraft a much better game.

What we discussed frequently in the last weeks is the problem of people preferring a talent build which is optimal for soloing, but less-than-optimal for grouping. Add to that add dungeons in which less-than-optimal groups are unlikely to succeed, and you get a big problem. I know several people in my guild who changed their talent build repeatedly in the last couple of weeks, torn between the different requirements of different play styles.

It is obvious that Blizzard doesn't want us to have free respecs whenever we want, because that would mean that any two players of the same class would be exactly the same, just a few clicks away from having the same talent build. So we end up having only one semi-permanent build, which is only viable for certain modes of gameplay, and de facto excludes us from participating effectively in other sorts of gameplay. Why have a game in which you can solo, can group, can raid, can PvP, and then make it so that you can't do them all with one build?

So my suggestion would be the possibility to have not one, but two different talent builds for each character, with a simple button to switch between them. Thus you could have both your dps-heavy soloing build, and your group-friendly support build. There would still be a sense of uniqueness, for example my holy priest has a build with 23 points in discipline for the improved spirit buff, while another holy priest goes for the 41-point circle of healing holy talent instead. The talent build switch would allow us to go shadow priest, fury warrior, or feral druid whenever we are just soloing, or when we want to participate in PvP.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:21 PM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 12-March-2007

I had a bad weekend in World of Warcraft, so bad that by Sunday afternoon I decided that ironing my shirts in front of the TV would be more fun. But the funny thing is that nothing special happened, just the usual series of wipes in raids, 5-man groups that never start because one class is missing, people leaving groups in the middle of an instance, and being ganked in PvP. Me not being able to stand that any more tells you more about my advancing symptoms of WoW burnout than about the game itself.

Well, at least I got to see Karazhan, and we even killed the first boss, the stable master. Then we spent two days wiping on the second boss, Moroes. Don't bother explaining me how easy he is to beat with the right strategy, it was the raid group not being very focused that caused the wipes. I was unable to convince the other healers that we would need healing assignments, because with the priests being on shackle duty nobody wanted to be solely responsible for MT healing duty. We had several wipes caused by the other priest in the raid having a bad internet connection and getting disconnected. We even wiped on trash mobs, when the raid leader marked mobs as target for shackle which turned out to be immune to that. But most annoyingly the wipes caused people to lose focus and interest, some people left, we stood around waiting for replacements to arrive, and then got wiped by respawns. With a little more training and organization, and with everybody on top of his game and his internet connection, we certainly could have done it. But Karazhan is very unforgiving to even the slightest mistakes or problems. I never thought I would say that, but I'm kind of missing Molten Core, where a single person losing connection, going afk, or being drunk (don't laugh, happens often enough), isn't instantly destroying the whole raid for everyone else.

But as I said, I'm suffering from burnout. A year ago I would have shrugged off that sort of problems and not let it bother me. Now it makes count the days until LotRO comes out. I could play the beta, but I'd rather explore Middle-Earth with a real character that doesn't get wiped. Well, one more month until that.

Meanwhile I'm trying to make the most out of World of Warcraft and especially the Burning Crusade expansion by doing the quests I haven't done yet. With my priest I had systematically done all quests in Hellfire Peninsula, Zangarmarsh, and Terrokar Forest, and hit 70 by doing the first Nagrand quests. With my warrior I skipped a lot of those quests. And now that I hit level 65, I'm starting where my priest left off, doing the level 65+ quests in Nagrand. I do like Nagrand, it is so pretty. But I sure do hope that the other quests there are a bit more exciting than the ones I was starting with for Nessingwary's expedition: kill 30 rocs, 30 clefthoofs, and 30 talbuks, to get a new series of quests that has you kill 30 bigger rocs, 30 bigger clefthoofs, and 30 bigger talbuks. Once I'll have finished that I'll be able to kill one boss roc, one boss clefthoof, and one boss talbuk, to finally get some item rewards. Can this be the pinnacle of modern quest design?

I did some PvP too, in Nagrand. Horde had captured Halaa, which doesn't happen often, because on my server there is a 2:1 Alliance:Horde player ratio. So Alliance turns up quite quickly to take it back, but they get struck by a bug I had already experienced in the beta: one of the guards disappears, and the score is stuck at 1 out of 15 guards. In that situation it is impossible to capture Halaa (until the next server reset). But of course lots of people see the 1/15 score and flock to Halaa to capture it, giving rise to some PvP action. That was fun for a while, netting me 21 Halaa battle tokens. But then the numerical superiority of the Alliance slowly came to bear, and we had 20 Alliance ganking 10 Horde. Horde couldn't do anything, you just got killed the moment you rezzed. And Alliance couldn't do anything either, because of the bugged guard preventing them from doing the actual capture. Not very satisfying for anyone. I could have bought a plate belt for the 1 research token (gained by handing in 20 powders from random kills in Nagrand) and 20 Halaa battle tokens. But the belt was obviously designed with PvP in mind, not for PvE tanking. The "resilience" stat it gives, which lowers the chance of enemies landing a critical hit on me, and also lowers their crit damage on me, isn't of much use in PvE soloing. For PvE I'd rather have defence.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:03 AM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
Non sequitur - 11-March-2007

This is an experiment, tell me how you like it. I got a number of small news items and thoughts, which I am going to bundle up in one post. They got no relation to each other, thus the title of "non sequitur", latin for "it does not follow".

WoWinsider reports the first bit of "news" arrived at by using the Armory spying tool: Death & Taxes, one of the major raiding guilds in World of Warcraft, has all paladins spec'd for healing, while the priests are all shadow. Something is wrong with class balance.

Social networking in WoW is all the rage, but some people have come up with a seducingly simple solution. Friendnet is an addon which allows you to share your friends list in WoW. Too bad my friendlist only contains my alts (for faster mailing). To keep contact with friends I'm using guild chat and self-made chat channels for non-guild friends.

Fair Game is a project to promote fair trade products with Machinima movies. Their World of Warcraft clip can be found at YouTube.

MMO Evolution has a How to get into a raiding guild guide. Quote: "Step One: Know the need, and pick your class accordingly". So true, but right now it's hard to say which classes are needed most.

Personally I've been in the world strangest group with my warrior. Besides me as tank, there was a druid, a shaman, and a paladin. And we never started, because, you won't believe it, "we haven't got a healer". All of them, even the pally, were dps spec'd, and nobody wanted to heal. I'm beginning to wonder whether the whole "you can freely decide between 3 talent trees" isn't a mistake. I can fully see why a pally would want to spec dps for leveling up, but where does that leave groups?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:09 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Blizzard does have a sense of humor


- posted by Tobold @ 7:48 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
My martian invasion

In 1938 Orson Welles directed a radio version of H. G. Wells' classic novel The War of the Worlds in the form of fake news bulletins. This was done so well that quite a number of listeners believed that there was an actual martian invasion going on, causing a minor panic, but making this episode very famous. A lot less famously two days ago I wrote I parody, a post making fun of the weak points in The Burning Crusade, in the form of fake news on a non-existing second WoW expansion called The Freezing Jihad. Most of my regular readers got the joke, but after being passed through a couple of newsreaders and link on game forums *some* people believed the news (especially when only reading the headline), and then got enraged for having been sold fake news. My apologies, there is no martian invasion, and no second World of Warcraft expansion announced. Although I still wouldn't bet that when the second expansion announcement comes it will be 100% different from my fake one. :) Pink orcs are unlikely, but woodcrafting and level 80 are a definitive possibility.

The fundamental problem behind that is that this is just a blog, a one-man operation, me writing about whatever I have on my mind. Thus my articles wary wildly in style, quality, and subject. There is no newspaper editor watching over me, taking care that I only post real news, and that everything is highly objective. Of course I'm censoring myself a bit, and I'm generally a level-headed and reasonable person. But if the mood strikes me, I might post something which I think is funny, in spite of a risk to offend or mislead somebody. One day I write a parody, the next a journal of what my characters are doing, and the next some sort of review. And I'm always 100% subjective, even if I try to list the pros and cons in some of my points. Even the subject matter changes with my interests, so if I really change from WoW to LotRO in April that will have a big impact on what game I'm writing about most. In quality I'm pretty certain that I have good days and bad days, sometimes writing much worse than on other days (or reporting something I believe is true but isn't), or having the occasional unusually bright idea.

And I don't think this variability will change. In a way it constitutes one of the charms of blogs as opposed to much more sterile and stable newspapers. I'm not even trying to be a news media, it is more that I allow my readers a glimpse into my private diary. Nothing what I say is the final word on any subject. The evaluation of quality, veracity, and impact of anything is write is left to the reader. Especially when I write about news you'll never be sure that I am covering "all the news fit to print", because I often simply miss developments. Or that I'm not simply making a joke like the Freezing Jihad one. You have been warned. If you want predictable, subscribe to The Times.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:27 PM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
Burning Crusade tradeskills

I've been asking one of the best blacksmiths on my server to give me his impressions on his craft. Of the producing tradeskills I've more towards those that produce mainly "consumables" (Alchemy, Jewelcrafting, Enchanting), and neglected those that produce mainly more permanent gear (Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, Tailoring). So with getting the observations of a blacksmith, I now got a wider view of crafting in the Burning Crusade.

Getting any tradeskill up to 375 is a rather expensive process. The blacksmith needed 1,000 thorium bars and 200 elemental earth just to get to 330. My jewelcrafter used a long list of gems to level up to just 310. But all of these were with materials that could be gathered before the Burning Crusade even started, and lots of people had stockpiled materials to get their tradeskills up fast.

Progress got a lot slower when the only recipes that still advanced your skills were those only found in the new areas. The only lucky one here is my alchemist, because herbs are relatively abundant and easy to find. Finding ore nodes is a lot harder, apparently they spawn less often, or there are far more people searching for them, as ore nodes are used for jewelcrafting, blacksmithing, and engineering. To put this into some perspective: While prices for Adamantium Ore fluctuate wildly, the range is about 1 gold to 3 gold for a *single* ore, 20 to 60 gold for a stack. So with an average price of 2 gold per ore, and an average yield of 2-3 ore per node, finding a single adamantium node is worth 5 gold!

If fel iron and adamantium is already not easy to find, getting eternium and khorium gets really, really hard. Eternium is a random rare "side-drop" from mining fel iron or adamantium ore nodes. Khorium is gathered from khorium ore nodes, which rarely spawn in the place where usually a fel iron or adamantium ore node spawns. There is no way to selectively go after either of them, you just hunt for the normal ores and have to get lucky to find them. That is especially hard on blacksmiths, because they use a lot of felsteel, which needs 4 eternium ore per steel bar to produce, so even one pair of felsteel gloves ends up needing 24 eternium ore.

While gathering materials is slow, getting the recipes to craft something higher level is a lot slower. Trainers don't give any of the higher level recipes, leaving only faction recipes and drops as source. The good news is that reputation in the Burning Crusade isn't all that hard to gather, because except for Aldor/Scryer rep you automatically gain faction by killing mobs in dungeons. Do a lot of 5-mans, and your reputations automatically goes up. Only if you happen to prefer soloing, you're screwed, limited to a few repeatable grinding quests to gain faction. The bad news is that drop recipes are really, really hard to acquire in the Burning Crusade.

This is due to rare drop recipes in the Burning Crusade using a new system. They are all "world drops", meaning there is no mob that drops them more often than another mob. You can't farm a particular corner of the world for a particular recipe any more, as it was still the case at level 60. The other new feature is that the rare drop recipes only drop for people with that tradeskill. If you are in a group of 5 and 2 of the players are jewelcrafters, and a mob drops a jewelcrafting recipe, only the 2 jewelcrafters will even see it and get the need/greed roll box. If there is no jewelcrafter at all, the drop simply doesn't happen, and thus the amount of recipes entering the world is further limited. As these drops are rare to begin with, and the crafters that are the only ones being allowed to get them of course first fill their own recipe books before selling excess recipes, the number of recipes found in the auction house is very limited, and the prices are sky-high, costing many hundreds of gold pieces. On the positive side of that is that crafters are now more unique, you will find few or no crafters having all the recipes of their trade. On the negative side your recipes are now very much random, there is no way to say "I want that recipe" and go after it, except for farming gold and camping the auction house.

The reason why I personally prefer crafting consumables, like potions or socketable gems, is that the resources for them are more widely available. I regularly gather adamantium ore, or buy stacks of them if the prices are below 25 gold per stack. Then I use the prospecting skill and transform them into adamantium powder (needed for mercurial adamantite, which is a major component in jewelry), lots of common gems, and the occasional rare gem. I get about 1 rare gem for 30 adamantium ore on average, so I can make a profit by selling the cut rare gems for 50 gold, and using the proceeds to buy more recipes.

For the crafters of gear, getting materials is a lot harder. The better recipes all use a lot of primals, which makes primals very much in demand and expensive. Both hardcore players and gold farmers nowadays spend a lot of time farming elementals to get primals. If you want to craft epic items, you often need one or several primal nethers. These only drop reliably from the end bosses of heroic instances, and can thus be considered as an added partial epic drop from them. Not something the average player will see a lot of.

A lot of the epic level 70 gear you can craft nowadays is "bind on pickup", and thus becomes soulbound as soon as you craft it. This very much illuminates the philosophy behind World of Warcraft tradeskills: you craft to enhance your own character, opening a business is secondary. If you want to be a blacksmith, you better do it with somebody able to wear plate armor and wield metal weapons, because as a priest, mage, or warlock you'd lose out on many of the crafts advantages. But if you're a warrior smith, you gain an additional source of epic weapons or armor, which are equivalent to what you can get in a raid.

In summary I'd say that the Burning Crusade tradeskills work as intended, giving players an additional thing to do to enhance their characters. This is far, far away from the concept of a player-run economy that games like UO, SWG, or LotRO have. Crafting doesn't play a big role in World of Warcraft, it's just an extra. It fits in the general philosophy of WoW as primarily a game, and not so much a virtual world. That will leave some player (including me) yearning for more, but works well enough for the majority.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:26 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Learn2play - or the role of skills in World of Warcraft

An anonymous troll recently left a couple of comments on this blog, spreading his version of an argument which is more commonly quoted as "learn2play": The idea that the problems that casual and semi-casual players have with World of Warcraft and its latest expansion are due to a lack of skill and talent of said players. The troll's insults, haughty attitude, and empty threats caused several of my other readers to respond that WoW doesn't require skill at all, which isn't strictly true either. Time for a balanced view at the subject. Does playing World of Warcraft require skill, and would we all be happy with WoW if we just had more skill and talent?

Playing World of Warcraft reasonably well, especially in a group situation, certainly requires some skill. For example take my priest: I need to watch for the group's health bars, not only how full they are, but also how fast they are going down. Based on that information I need to make decisions on what spell to use to heal them, between instant or quick spells that waste a lot of mana, heals over time, and slower but mana-efficient big heals. I also need to keep an eye out for debuffs, of the disease and magic kind, where I have to decide whether I need to dispel them quickly or whether healing is more important. If there is nothing to heal or dispel, I should add to my small part to the damage output of the group. And for most of these decisions I only have split second to make the right choice and execute it. Clearly that takes some skill to get right, and clearly there are some people who don't have these skills.

But where the troll is wrong is in thinking that only the elite has those skills. Only a minority of players doesn't have them, as they are easy enough to learn for an average computer gamer. In fact in a MMO it is often impossible to tell the difference between an average player and somebody with excellent skills. This is due to the nature of online games, where the information that you pressed a key must travel to the server and back, around which MMO combat is by necessity designed. Having more skill in pressing buttons faster doesn't help you at all, you just can't react faster than your ping. Many players of the semi-casual crowd (to which most of my readers belong) are as skilled as any hardcore raider. My healing in raids is generally appreciated.

If it isn't skill that limits the casual and semi-casual player's success and enjoyment of the game, then what is it? The answer is simply that other factors than skill have a much larger influence on the success of a group than skill itself. For example, who would you choose to tank Ragnaros for your raid: The world's most skilled and talented warrior in tier 0 blue armor and no fire resistance, or some average guild tank in full epics and 350+ FR? Gear beats skill all the time. Another big factor is the opportunity to practice the same encounter with the same people. Raids learn how to kill one boss, but then wipe on the next one, not because the next one is more difficult than the first, but because it takes time to learn the next encounter by heart. If you know that Lucifron casts Impending Doom, and that it is important to dispel that instead of healing, and you even have an addon installed to tell you when the next doom strikes, then getting this right suddenly becomes a whole lot easier. And not all of that sort of knowledge can be acquired by reading up on the encounter, or being told, some you just have to learn by doing, often repeatedly. Now exchange half of the raid group with equally skilled people inexperienced in that encounter, and you wipe again.

So what most often limits the success of average players is time. The time needed to acquire better or more specialized gear (many raiders are currently farming primals for crafted arcane resistance gear for Karazhan). The time needed to practice the same encounter repeatedly until you know exactly what to do when. But most importantly the time to organize the perfect group.

The perfect group is far more than a time problem, it is often mainly a social, you could even say ethical problem. People make friends, and they want to play with those friends. Rarely is a group of friends organized to form just the right mix of classes, talent builds, and level of gear. Nobody wanted to play a priest or druid, so the paladin needs to be main healer; the second paladin tanks, because the warrior wanted to spec fury; and the rogue is running around in outdated green gear because his family life leaves him less time to play. That works well enough as long as the group of friends is doing just outdoor quests together, they can even beat most elite quests. But in the harder dungeons such a group is doomed to fail. And they shouldn't even think of going to a raid dungeon. Soon the difficult ethical question arises whether you should rather group with your friends, or with some people who are a lot less nice, having a huge epeen, but have all the right classes, talents, and gear. The hardcore players regularly choose efficiency over social bonds here. I've seen people get kicked out of raiding guilds for crimes like going on holiday for 3 weeks, or daring to respec to a PvP build.

Successful hardcore raiders certainly have something which casual and semi-casual players don't have. But it isn't "skill" or "talent". The most positive word I can find for it is "dedication". This dedication includes the willingness to spend more time in the game than the average player (to the potential detriment of study, work, and family), and the ruthlessness to select your "friends" based on their class, build, and *their* dedication and usefulness to you.

If by a miracle all players of World of Warcraft suddenly became highly skilled and would "learn2play", it would solve nothing. The too hard dungeons of The Burning Crusade would still draw lots of complaints from average players, because they still don't have the time to grind all the possible gear needed to beat them. They still don't have the time to wipe 12 times on each boss to proceed to the next, and don't enjoy doing so. And they still would prefer to group with their friends instead of with some jerk with a bigger sword, or a "better" class.

The solution, if there is any, is to make the normal dungeons just so hard that they are challenging but beatable by normal players playing with their normal inefficient group of friends. Karazhan should be doable by a pickup raid of semi-casual players. For the people who like to play hardcore, the exactly same dungeon should be available at heroic difficulty, beatable only by the best and with the best gear and practice, in a perfect group, and of course giving much better loot. So everybody gets to see everything, but the heroic stuff is "reserved" for the leet.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:57 PM Permanent Link  (32) comments Links to this post

 
WoW patch day

Today is patch day in Europe, while in the US the patch 2.0.10 has already been applied yesterday. The big news is obviously the substantial reduction in feral druid bear tanking powers. Priests, got some adjustments as well, a reduction of the efficiency of the shadow priests vampiric embrace, a cooldown added to prayer of mending to prevent insta-heal spamming, but some improvements to fade, circle of healing, and power word: shield, to balance the nerfs out. But with everybody discussing the nerfs, people are totally forgetting that the same patch also improves some other classes. Both shamans and warriors get some very nice ameliorations to their abilities. But of course a nerfed druid shouts louder than a buffed warrior, that is in the nature of patches.

I never played my shaman past level 44, so I'm only going to discuss the warrior changes here. They are (from the patch notes):

- The rage normalization equation has been adjusted to grant more rage.
The typical warrior should see an increase of 15% to 20% in their
rage generation.
- All warriors had their critical strike chance adjusted upward
slightly (about 1%).
- "Thunder Clap" is now useable in Defensive Stance. In addition, the
tooltip has been adjusted to indicate it causes additional threat.
- The cooldown on "Victory Rush" has been removed, and it can now be
used up to 20 seconds after killing an enemy.
- "Unbridled Wrath" has been modified so that rather than a fixed
chance to grant rage, it has an increased chance when using slower
weapons.
- Increased the health bonus from "Commanding Shout" by 50%.
- "Improved Battle Shout" talent renamed to "Commanding Presence" and
now increases the health bonus from "Commanding Shout" in addition
to increasing the melee attack power from "Battle Shout".

The major change is more rage and a better chance to crit, which is obviously great for all warriors, regardless of talent build. Don't be confused by the percentage numbers, the 15% to 20% improvement in rage is on a relative scale, so my warrior will be getting up to 20% more rage per minute in combat. The crit chance improvement is on an absolute scale. So if I had 10% crit chance before, I'll have 11% afterwards, which is effectively a 10% improvement, not just an imperceptible 1% one.

The changes to Thunder Clap are brilliant. It gives a tank another ability to use his rage on, is AoE, and the additional threat is great for tanking too.

I also like the change to Victory Rush. The problem was that previously you had only 15 seconds after killing one target before having to use Victory Rush on the next target, which sometimes was just not enough to run over to the next mob. Now its 20 seconds, which should be sufficient. But more importantly I can now use Victory Rush better in a combat against several less strong enemies, as long as they still give experience. Previously the cooldown for Victory Rush was 15 seconds, as long as the timer before which I had to use it. So if I killed a mob with the Victory Rush ability, I couldn't use Victory Rush on the next mob, because of the cooldown. I still only get one use of Victory Rush per kill, but now there is a bigger chance that I'll actually be able to use it.

I can't say much about the changes to Commanding Shout, its a level 68 ability, and my warrior is still level 64. As you can only have one shout active per warrior, either Battle Shout or Commanding Shout, apparently most warriors previously stuck to the Battle Shout, increasing the melee damage output of the group, and thereby the aggro on the warrior. Only groups with 2 warriors would get both shouts. But previously the Commanding Shout only gave 730 health. Now its nearly 1000 points without talents, and even more with the talent, for the whole group. That makes it worth considering it, if the group setup isn't heavy on melee damage.

Of course none of these changes will fundamentally change the warrior class. In fact one could argue that letting the air out of druid bear tanks might end up having a bigger influence on the warrior class than these improvements. But improvements they definitely are, with no strings attached. So while for my priest I bemoan the loss of alternative tanks for his 5-man groups, for my warrior I'm quite happy about the improved abilities.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:30 PM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Blizzard announces second World of Warcraft expansion

Blizzard today announced that the second expansion for their best-selling MMORPG World of Warcraft, to be named The Freezing Jihad (TFJ), will come out in January 2008. This expansion will offer an exciting list of new features:

• Level cap raised from 70 to 80.
  
• A new continent, Iceland, with three exciting new outdoor zones, with hundreds of new quests. For the sake of simplicity and symmetry there will be only neutral cities and quest-givers in Iceland.
  
• New teleporting mounts, available at level 80, for the low price of only 20,000 gold. Due to technical restrictions these will only be usable in Iceland.
  
• Two new races, one for each faction. The Leper Gnomes joined the Horde, while a new, previously undiscovered race of Pink Orcs is joining the Alliance. New starting zones that will allow you to level these new races up to level 20, then its back to the ever popular Barrens and Stranglethorn.
  
• Due to popular demand a new class will be introduced, the monk. The monk is martial arts expert, dealing high amounts of melee damage, but wearing only cloth armor, and using only fist weapons and staves. He has some fascinating psionic stealth abilities, and will be able to open locks with just the power of his mind.
  
• New tradeskill, woodcrafting. Players with this profession can kill treants to gather wood, and craft it into an exciting range of bows, arrows, and staves. Craft exclusive epic bows and staves from wood dropped only from raid dungeon end bosses.
  
• Many great new loot and quest reward items. Green quest rewards at level 71 will be superior to old Black Temple epic items.
  
• New, more challenging dungeons. After listening to our core audience we decided to make all dungeons much harder, so that only the best can expect to beat these encounters.
  
• New raid dungeons, all capped at 10 players. New raid interface that only allows 1 player of each class to join a raid group, and that only if he has put at least 41 talent points in the talent tree marked "raid talents" for his class.
  
• New Permanent Elite status. One week after release of TFJ a special event for level 80 characters will become available, lasting only 1 week. Everybody who succeeds in this event will receive the Permanent Elite status, giving him exclusive access to the raid dungeons, and a floating Elite gold star over his head. Don't miss this chance to finally distinguish your elite skills permanently from the masses.
  
• Yet another total revamp of the PvP reward system. New battleground added for level 80 players.
  
• New Looking for Group interface. Drawing on the developers vast experience with meeting stones, global chat channels, and LFG windows from the past we came up with a new Looking for Group interface which will finally work, we think.
  

With all these exciting new features, carefully tailored towards what our players most vocally tell us they want, and based on what worked in the past, we feel that The Freezing Jihad will be a smash success, selling millions of copies again. Will it?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:08 AM Permanent Link  (52) comments Links to this post

 
Buying a new Vista PC

Every two years I buy a new desktop PC. As I bought the last one in summer 2005, I'm planning to buy the next PC this year, somewhere in the next 6 months. And unless one of my local stores comes up with an unexpectedly cheap offer, it is most likely that I will buy another Dell. I'm always having logistics problems with Dell, but their computers just work. And I'm simply not hardware expert enough to build my own system. Well, I'll probably could stick the parts together, but I wouldn't be confident that it was as stable as a Dell. It is far too easy to under- or over-engineer one system component which then ends up making the whole thing flaky.

Now Microsoft has just released their latest version of Windows, called Vista. And installing Vista on an old computer is apparently a bad idea. So my thought is to buy a new computer that is designed to run Vista from the ground up, has a DirectX 10 graphics card, and only uses hardware that is 100% Vista compatible.

Only apparently Dell doesn't have Vista compatible gaming computers yet. Dell's XPS M1710 notebook and the XPS 710 desktop, both gaming computers, are still shipping with XP because of driver incompatibility with Vista. And Dell can't say when they will offer Vista compatible gaming computers.

For once I don't blame Dell. I've read a lot about gaming on Vista machines, and it appears that the world is simply not ready for Vista yet. DirectX 10 graphics cards are still few and far between. Drivers aren't optimized yet, and often run considerably slower than DirectX 9. A typical chicken and egg problem; while there was no Vista, nobody was interested in DirectX 10 yet, and now without good DirectX 10 hard- and software there isn't much interest in Vista.

Well, I think my best option is to wait. In a couple of months I'm sure there will be fully Vista optimized gaming computers out there, even here in Europe. Worst case scenario is that I'll buy the PC a few months later than planned. By christmas it will probably be hard to still find Windows XP computers on the market. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 1:14 PM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Europe gets a nerfed PS3

USAToday has the story about the PS3 coming out in Europe not having the chip to play PS2 games. There will be a software solution to play PS2 games, but it isn't clear yet how many games will be compatible with that, and how well they'll run. Not that the PS2 chip in the PS3 was working very well, there were a number of incompatible games, but I don't believe removing it will improve the situation for the Europeans. It is a simple matter of cost-cutting.

So for the first time I'm questioning my resolve to buy a PS3. I had already planned to postpone the purchase until christmas, but now maybe I won't buy one at all, or only much later. I have a huge library of PS2 games, and in comparison there aren't all that many PS3 games out I'd really like to play. So unless the PS3 is fully downward compatible, I'd need to decide between the PS2 and PS3, and the PS3 would lose out in that.

Sony is on a bad trajectory, Nintendo is clearly winning the next generation console wars this year, with Microsoft a solid second, and Sony trailing far, far behind. For the PS3 to still pull up ahead there would need to be a major breakthrough of the Blue-Ray system. With the average Blue-Ray player still costing more than a PS3, that would make the PS3 attractive again. But right now nobody knows whether Blue-Ray will be the next Betamax or the next VHS, and paying extra for having Blue-Ray in a gaming console doesn't sound like a good plan right now.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:56 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Can you play two MMORPGs?

LotROVault has the details on the US open beta for Lord of the Rings Online, which starts on March 30 for people who pre-ordered, and April 6 for everyone. In Europe I don't know about the open beta, but release date in April 24, and if you pre-order you can get in 10 days earlier. In both cases, if you subscribe to the Founders program, you can take your beta character into the release version, but apparently there is a level cap at 15. Unless they nerf farming until then, I can see lots of level 15 characters growing Sweet Galenas pipe weed until they absolutely swim in gold for the first day of release. LotRO gives a whole new meaning to the term "gold farming". :)

Anyway, I preordered Lord of the Rings Online. And from where I am standing now it looks as if I will be taking a lifetime membership for $199 (€149, £99). Not because I am already 100% certain that I will play LotRO for more than 20 months (Founder's club member could also get a reduced monthly subscription rate of $9.99). The main reason to get a lifetime membership for me would be that it saves me the hassle of thinking about whether to keep up my subscription later.

Monthly subscription fees are one factor that encourage a clean break between games. I quit game A, cancel my account, and subscribe to game B. But I'm wondering whether this time I could do it differently. Keep my subscription for World of Warcraft, and switch back and forth between playing WoW and LotRO. The interface is so identical I wouldn't have to relearn controls every time I switch. And while LotRO is stronger in exploration of a new world, casual content, and more enjoyable tradeskills, World of Warcraft is stronger in dungeons. I could imagine going on a raid in WoW one day, and peacefully farming in Hobbiton the next. I don't know much about the LotRO end-game yet, but I'm not really keen on rushing through the game to get there.

I just don't know whether that idea is viable. There is a risk that every evening I decide what to play just based on a gut feeling, and that every evening I end up deciding for the same game. Last time I tried a game with no monthly fee, Guild Wars, I ended up playing it not very much, because it didn't appeal to my explorer soul. But this time I could well imagine ending up playing LotRO all the time and forgetting all about WoW, until LotRO gets boring and WoW comes out with something new. Then switching between games wouldn't be on a day-by-day basis, but more on a month-by-month, or even quarter-by-quarter basis. Fact is that both WoW and LotRO are very good games, and the only reason to switch is that I've already seen too much of WoW.

So what do you think? Can you play two MMORPGs, and switch frequently between them? Or do you have to be monogameous?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:56 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
Got the Karazhan key!

After 2 weeks of trying I finally succeeded in getting the Karazhan key in my 13th attempt. Woot! As several people suggested, taking a shadow priest into the group did the trick. Good that I did that now, but apparently shadow priests are getting nerfed this week, with their Vampiric Embrace getting reduced in efficiency considerably. VE was such a help in Black Morass, as it saved me tons of mana for healing the non-tanks. I only needed to dispel and heal the tank.

But having finally done it does in no way alter my opinion that this encounter is far too hard for a mandatory attunement quest. I did it so often that after finally getting there I am now revered with Keepers of Time, which gave me the key to redo the thing on heroic mode. Frankly, I can't even imagine that anyone will ever be able to beat Black Morass in heroic mode, not before another raise of the level cap. In my opinion all the non-heroic 5-man content in the game should be doable in a pickup-group (and BM most certainly isn't). If you want ultra-hard content, switch to heroic, there is no need to have places where the average player can't succeed in normal mode.

Nills wrote an excellent comment on yesterday's thread, which I'm going to quote here:

1. Blizzard freaked out at the idea of the hardcore raiders completing all the content in 6 months, and tuned the entry endgame too steep. Indeed, over on the hardcore forums the opinion is that Kara (and BM) are tuned just right, but there is a complete brick wall in difficulty after the first 25-man boss. Somewhere under 100 guilds are able to progress at all, and a couple bosses have only been killed by 2-3 after weeks. It was particularly dumb for blizzard to worry about the uber-hardcore because they never quit through months of waiting for content before. Make em wait a few months in the middle of the year, then patch in BT, make em wait a few months at the end of the year. Problem solved. This perspective can also be seen in the lack of current limits on consumables for 25-man raids (=tuning around consumables= farming 1/3 of your playtime).

2. Blizzard took the wrong approach to solving the gear gap issues. Rather than carefully introduce new gear tiers/content that let non-raiders/pvpers/arena pvpers stay even with or just a tiny step behind cutting edge raiders throughout the year, they totally nerfed gear progression in karazahn and beyond. The carrot is not what it used to be.

3. Blizzard fell into the dichotomy you most commonly see on the forums, casual vs. raider. They really needs to understand that in between the 40% who play <10 hours a week, "casuals" and the 5 % who play >30, "hardcores", there is a large pool of MMO enthusiasts, "semi-casuals" who are enthusiasts and for whom MMO play has more or less replaced TV. These people are more reliable long-term subscribers than casual players, many of them pull several friends along with them, and they do not burn through content at the speed of hardcores. The first game that is built entirely around this group will be a big success.

So what we got now is an end-game which is harder than the previous version, has less lure of "phat epix loot", and isn't suited for the 95% of the population which are casual or middle-class. Lots of Naxxramases, no UBRSes. Bad idea, both from a game design and from a business point of view.

So now I'm attuned to Karazhan, and if I'm lucky I'll get a raid spot and get to see the place. I'll give it a fair try, and see how it develops. But if it turns out that the end-game still revolves about wiping 12 times to succeed some minor step forward in the 13th attempt, I don't think I'll do that very long.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
My World of Warcraft crisis

I'm having my personal World of Warcraft crisis, triggered by failing ten Black Morass runs in a row. It is not that I don't believe I'll ever make it; one day I'll have the right combination of classes, skills, and luck to get that damn key to Karazhan. But the frustration makes me doubt the whole WoW end-game concept of repeatedly ramming your head against a brick wall, until that wall finally breaks and gives you access to the next brick wall. I am agitated, frustrated, and annoyed, and wonder why I should play a game that does that to me, when all I want is a game that entertains and relaxes me.

The Black Morass is hard, but not impossible. I tried it with many different groups. About half of the groups just had the wrong composition, which is easily noticed by the group not being able to close one portal before the next one opens, which automatically leads to you being overwhelmed after some time. There are 18 fights in a row, you just need a few seconds break between them to drink and regain mana, because mana potions are on a too long cooldown. One mistake or piece of bad luck in that series and you can restart from zero. I had a couple of groups who would have been able to win this event, but there I stumbled on different manifestations of bad luck and a few bugs that Blizzard is responsible for. I've had one group member fall through the world to his death, had two mobs bugged on perma-evade destroying Medivh's shield, one time the second boss resetting to full health after being nearly dead, and once a lost internet connection. And of course many, many cases of people having to leave after one wipe or two, forcing me to redo it with people that first needed to learn the encounter. And that was all with guild groups, I can't even imagine how horrible Black Morass would be with a pickup-group. Even the guilds most dedicated hardcore players reported needing 4 to 5 attempts before getting their Karazhan key.

The point is that this shouldn't be so hard. This isn't the key to Mount Hyjal. Karazhan is just the first 10-man raid instance, so this is the equivalent of getting the key for UBRS. Sure, getting the key to UBRS wasn't trivial, but it was a lot easier than Black Morass, and only one person in the 10-man raid needed the key. For Karazhan everybody needs the key. Getting the key to Molten Core and Onyxia was easier than this.

When Blizzard announced that they would lower the number of players in a raid, and make smaller dungeons, I assumed that the level 70 end-game would be more accessible for the average player than the hard to organize huge 40-man raids of the level 60 end-game. I was wrong. Blizzard errected a number of walls in the form of attunements and keys that keep the average players out of raid dungeons. And it turns out that smaller raids mean that less members of a guild get to raid each evening. You simply can't take the same 40 people that did a MC run and split them into 4 viable Karazhan groups. You just wouldn't take people like dps warriors or feral druids (post-nerf) into Karazhan.

I still remember my very first World of Warcraft instance, doing Ragefire Chasm in a group consisting of 5 shamans. That was fun, because in spite of being far from an ideal group composition, it still worked. The harder dungeons get, the smaller becomes the selection of guild compositions that still work, and talent builds that still work, until you end up with groups that all fall into the same boring template. And anyone who doesn't want to comply with that same boring template is automatically excluded. And this is where World of Warcraft now is with the Burning Crusade, a huge selection of different dungeons, only accessible by a small selection of the player base. If you read the comments on my post yesterday about the Black Morass, you find lots of helpful hints saying you *need* this or that class with exactly this or that talent spec. And nobody even notices any more what is wrong with that very idea of needing specific classes and builds.

And that is just the beginning of the new raid circuit. Apparently the first Karazhan bosses are easier than Black Morass, but then the raid hits another wall, and wipes on the same boss many times, until finally beating him after a few weeks and moving to the next boss. Rinse, lather, repeat. The repeated failure and frustration is built into the system, and necessary to stretch the content to last for a year. But hey, if you got one month supply of coffee, adding enough water to it for it to last one year isn't the best possible plan. Add to that the inevitable tensions that every failure as well as every choice of who gets a raid spot and who gets what loot induces into a guild, with the inevitable guild drama ensuing, and you get a sort of gameplay that really isn't much fun. Beating that one obstacle is nice, getting phat loot is nice, but there are long intervals between those events that just make it too frustrating to be worth it. For every one raid where you beat a new boss and got a piece of new gear, there are several where you just got a repair bill. Is that really how I want to spend my evenings? I don't think so.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:43 AM Permanent Link  (39) comments Links to this post

 
The Black Morass

The Black Morass is the second dungeon in the Caverns of Time, and you need to have completed the first dungeon there to even start it. The Black Morass isn't a dungeon in the classical sense, but a big event, The Opening of the Dark Portal. Besides being the best way to get your Keepers of Time reputation up, you need to successfully finish this event as the last step of the quest series to get the key to Karazhan. Unfortunately the event is very, very hard, and more often than not a group attempting it will fail.

Before you begin the event every member of the group should get a chrono-beacon from Sa'at, a Keeper of Time stationed inside the instance, right behind the entrance. This chrono-beacon will summon a dragon to help in the defence of Medivh, and should best be used during the second boss wave. After getting the beacon,your group has the boring task of clearing out the isles around Medivh from trash mobs. Profitable for skinners, but otherwise not very exciting.

When this is done, somebody can start the event by getting close to Medivh. At this point Medivh will start a ritual to open the dark portal, with a defensive shield around him, and your task is to defend him. If you fail the dark portal never opens and the history of Azeroth changes ... , unless you just try it again, and again, and again. How you can change history *and* go back to the same event repeatedly is a mystery to me, but hey, all time-travel stories suffer from being illogical.

Once you started the event there will be 18, eighteen portals opening one after another. Each portal releases one elite mob, and a constant stream of dragonkin and dragon whelps as long as it is open. They all head for Medivh's shield and try to destroy it, which ends the event in failure. Your task is to kill the elites to close the portals and then kill all the mobs before they do much damage to the shield. The key here is to kill the elite quickly, because how long the portal is open determines how many mobs you get, and the next portal will open soon after. If you are slow, you get overwhelmed.

As an added difficulty the 6th, the 12th, and the 18th portal have a harder boss mob as elite. That has the advantage that these drop blue loot items and give lots of Keeper of Time reputation. But they are harder, so take longer to defeat, and thus are likely to cause problems. Especially the second boss has a nasty debuff that makes healing less effective, and stacks on your tank until healing spells just heal him for 0 points. Unless you can kill that one very quickly, or find a way to switch to an offtank until the debuff resets, that second boss is responsible for most of the wipes in this place. But make no mistake, even if you have that second boss down pat, it is perfectly possible to just get overwhelmed by the 18 portals, because you don't get much time between portals. If you wipe, the event continues without you, and by the time you're back, Medivh will be dead and you'll have to restart.

The only good thing is that you don't have to leave the instance to restart and get all the trash mobs back. If you just wait inside, Medivh will respawn, but not the trash mobs. Once he respawned, Sa'at will hand out fresh chrono-beacons, and you can start over. Or you just forget about the Black Morass and Karazhan and go adventuring elsewhere, because this place can be really, really frustrating when you failed it for the umpteenth time.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:36 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
The classes of LotRO

I'm late to the party, there are already some excellent description of the playable classes in Lord of the Rings Online out there, for example at Wikipedia and LotROvault (/wave Bildo). But meanwhile I managed to play all classes and races myself, just past the newbie areas, to get my personal impression on how the classes play.

I recently discussed why it was difficult to add new classes to an old game, like World of Warcraft. But of course if you make a totally new game, even if it is similar to WoW, you get an opportunity to make all the classes a bit different. Lord of the Rings Online has 7 classes, but the only one that is instantly recognizable is the guardian in his role as tank, playable by all races. He wears the heaviest armor and shield, and has "taunting" abilities to draw the monsters attention towards himself.

Now in the holy trinity of tank-healer-damager you'd search for a priest, but priests don't exist in Lord of the Rings. Even health points don't exist, there is only "morale". If your morale goes down to zero, you "run away" and find yourself back at the nearest rally point. Which plays exactly the same as if you would "die" and come out at the nearest graveyard. But by renaming your health to morale, you don't need somebody with divine powers to heal you, you need somebody who can boost your morale, which is the minstrel, a bard type character which is LotROs main healer. That gets us nicely past the usual stereotype priest abilities, and gives Turbine the opportunity to have a healer in the game who plays a good deal differently than a WoW priest. The minstrel not only has healing songs, but also cries and ballads that damage the opponent. At least in the low levels where I played him that worked quite well for soloing, and the song system with different layers was quite interesting. As I often play a healer in MMORPGs, this is probably the class I'll play as my main. All races can play minstrel, but I'll go for hobbit.

Now looking for a damagedealer the closest thing is probably the hunter for ranged damage. All races can play hunter, but I wouldn't be surprised if you see a lot of them being elves named some variation of Legolas. Even my hunter was an elf called Legostein (Lego brick). :) While being non-magical, the hunter has some of the typical glass-cannon properties, being able to deal a lot of damage from a distance, but being easily overwhelmed when fighting several foes. The hunter also has traps for some minor crowd control. Interestingly he can keep firing his bow in melee combat, and while he'll get interrupted at first, he is gaining "focus" over the duration of the combat, which I assume prevents interruption.

There is no mage, because there are no playable wizards due to the Tolkien lore. But there is a lore-master which more resembles a warlock in WoW. The lore-master has a pet (animal, not demon), abilities that deal fire damage, and later some crowd control. Only humans (technically they are called "the race of man", but that includes female "men", so I use the term humans instead) and elves can be lore-masters.

If you are looking for melee damage, your best bet is the champion. This is a very good soloing class, because the champion is nearly as well armored as a guardian, but his abilities are tuned towards damage-dealing instead of defence. He even has the best area-of-effect damage in the game, being able to hit several enemies around him. All races except hobbits can play this. I'll probably play a couple of alts in LotRO, and the champion is top of my list for a second character. I'm not saying that he is a better damage dealer than a hunter, its just that I like melee damage more than ranged, and the champion has better survivability in a pinch.

Of course you can also deal melee damage with a burglar. I'm currently reading The Hobbit, where the dwarves hire Bilbo Baggins as a burglar, so this is vintage Tolkien, the first character class ever mentioned in the lore. As you would expect from a burglar, he can sneak and attack enemies from behind. He can also debuff them with various dirty tricks. I haven't tried it, but apparently a burglar has abilities to start "conjunctions", which are LotRO's chain attacks for groups. Conjunctions can start without a burglar, but he has the skill to start them at will, which should make him useful in groups. Humans and hobbits can become burglars.

The last class in the mix is a really special one, the captain, playable only by humans. The interesting feature here is that most of his abilities affect his whole group. He has pets in the form of heralds carrying a banner which give a AoE buff. And whenever the group kills a foe, he has a selection of buffs he can cast triggered from that event, including a limited heal. So in some way he resembles a paladin. You can still solo play with him very well, but the full extent of his abilities only come into play in a group setting.

Humans can play all classes, the other races are limited to 4 to 5 classes each. I think it is a good idea to enable all classes to play the tank class and the healer class. LotRO is not revolutionizing MMORPG combat, and it is to be expected that groups will want to have one guardian and one minstrel, although for easier encounters a champion and a captain might suffice. Lord of the Rings Online has a good mix of classes, covering all bases, without just copying previous MMORPGs.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:08 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
The end of virtual privacy

In the real world, if a government decided to launch a web application into which you just have to type a name and get all the possible information and data about any of its citizen without his consent, there would be an outcry of privacy advocates. In the virtual World of Warcraft, Blizzard did just that. The Armory (still in beta right now) (click here for the European Armory) allows you to type in the name of any World of Warcraft character, select the one you want if there are several with the same name, and see all his stats, his gear, his reputation points, his skills, and his talent build, as well as his guild. And apparently there is no switch in your World of Warcraft interface to disable other people viewing your data. If you play, all of your data are now public. Soon many guilds will use The Armory for checking out candidates for recruitment.

Now I don't mind people using applications like CTProfiles (which now will die a screaming death) to exchange their data if they want to. But where are my virtual privacy rights if Blizzard just makes my data available to everybody? At the very least the players should get a screen when logging on the next time allowing them to make their data private. Your only hope of hiding right now is to name your elf hunter some variation of Legolas (there are over 400 of those on the US servers alone) and tell nobody what server you are playing on. There are 11 Tobolds on European servers, and 9 in the US. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 12:02 PM Permanent Link  (26) comments Links to this post

 
GemList, a great addon for jewelcrafters

If you are a jewelcrafter in World of Warcraft, and your friends and guild mates know that, you sooner or later get tells asking you things like "Hey, what red gems can you make" or "Can you do anything that gives a bonus to healing?". At which point you're forced to look through the not very practical jewelcrafting interface for the gems in question and send the answer back as a /tell. Unless you install the wonderful addon GemList written by mikezter, which does exactly those replies for you.

You just need to educate your friends to send you the requests in the form of "!gem red" or "!gem healing", and the addon will send them a list of the red gems or the healing gems you can make automatically. In the default setup the jewelcrafter doesn't even see the incoming and outgoing tells from the addon, although I changed the options on mine to show at least the incoming tells. Very, very useful.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:41 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post