LotRO Journal - 30-April-2007

Lots of action this weekend in Lord of the Rings Online. I was mostly playing my minstrel, who is now level 17. This weekend I finished the epic epilogue quests with him and then did the complete epic book I quest series together with my guild, from chapter 1 to chapter 12. Very interesting concept: Instead of dungeons, LotRO has these "chapters", many of which are instanced events or dungeons. Generally much shorter than WoW dungeons, but they form a progressing story, with cut-scenes at the end of each chapter tying your adventures to the Lord of the Rings story line. And you can always come back and do the dungeons again and again, if you just want to do it for the loot, which is often quite good.

That was especially fun doing with a role-playing guild, hobbits only. That kind of limits us with the classes, especially since except my alt nobody made a guardian. But the only really hard dungeon was the chapter 11 Barrow Downs one, and we did all the other chapters without problems. The chapter where we needed to pick lillies in the Old Forest actually gave us some nice opportunity for role-playing the effect of the sleep-inducing lilly parfume. In chapter 11 we had a couple of defeats, but in a group with 3 minstrels, a burglar, and a hunter we actually did quite well to finish that chapter after a couple of attempts.

As planned I'm now running around in self-crafted medium armor. But my plans to make that "superb leather armor" hit a snag. The recipes are not only one-use-only, they also each require some rare drop from a named mob around level 20, some of them elite. So up to now I'm mostly wearing tough leather armor, and only two pieces of superb, because that was all that I could find on the auction house. And then I paid far too much for it. I'm now probably the best-armored level 17 minstrel in the game. Have to spend all these farming profits on something. :)

I did some more farming, because I still suspect that farming nerf patch to be applied soon, maybe Tuesday. When I was up to 2.5 gold, I promptly blew half a gold piece on learning cooking up to master journeyman. I could have done more, but the expert recipes already require level 20 to eat the food, so I wasn't that interested. I made a mistake leveling cooking at apprentice level with cooked carrots. While this is the cheapest recipe, I hadn't counted on needing pie crusts for the next level. I could just as well have done pie crusts all the way to master apprentice. Anyway, I leveled the journeyman rank to master on doing Coney Pies, so now I have a large supply of good food for adventuring. Cooking has two sorts of foods. One that gives bonuses to your stats, the "trail food". And the other kind, which increases your morale and power regeneration for 5 minutes. Very useful for combat, although you can't eat in combat and need to think of eating your pie just before.

Besides crafting, I was mostly adventuring. I'm trying to complete all the accomplishments in The Shire, to get all the traits and titles. The biggest problem is the "slug-squasher" one, because there aren't all that many slugs around, and too many people hunting them.

The most exciting adventure was leaving the Shire and going into the Old Forest. The place is a mace, full of monsters, and some of them are too hard for a level 17 solo minstrel, like the huorn walking trees. And if you try to flee and run into a dead-end, you end dead. :) I died several times, until I went to look for a map, and found the one I linked to yesterday. With the map it got a whole lot easier, and I didn't die again. I was trying to find the mobs that drop the rare parts for my superb leather armor, but no luck. One is an elite walking tree which I couldn't have killed anyway, and I never found the other one, the bat, although I was camping the spot where it was supposed to come out for one hour. Well, I found that bat part on the auction house later, so that wasn't catastrophic. And the Old Forest was a lot of fun, being so scary and dangerous.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:34 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
Hackers are idiots

Somebody is trying to hack my World of Warcraft account, by taking my publicly available e-mail address and entering it on Blizzard's site, claiming to have forgotten the userID and password. The flaw in that plan? Of course the information gets send to me, not to the hacker. What an idiot! Already happened several times with my Google account too, but never got the wannabe-hacker anywhere.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:34 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO - Old Forest Map

I found a wonderful site called The Brasse with great hand-painted maps from Lords of the Rings Online. Especially useful is the map of the Old Forest, which is a nasty labyrinth. Im linking The Brasse map of it here, for reference.


The Brasse also has maps of EQ2, plus comics on various MMORPGs. Brasse did all the maps for all the EQ2 Prima guides as well as the atlas they produced. Really a great site, especially if you enjoy hand-drawn maps as opposed to the stupid screenshot maps you can find everywhere about WoW. Good to know that there are still some real map artists out there.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:21 PM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
Whoa! The colors!

I'm stealing screenshots from Kinless and Potshot to demonstrate the difference between the graphics of World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online. I could have done screenshots myself, but I thought using what other people think are typical screenshots of the game they are playing would be better.


The difference in style is very visible. WoW uses a lot more color, and is more comic style. LotRO's colors are more subdued and natural, without falling into the grey-in-brown trap like EQ2 did. LotRO has a significantly higher polygon count, and looks more realistic, just compare the trees. The over two years difference in age is noticeable, although of course that comes with the downside of probably needing a 2-year younger PC. In WoW your "shadow" is a round spot, regardless of your size or shape. In LotRO your shadow looks like it should look, a 2D image of you on the ground. I was seriously impressed when I crossed a ford in LotRO and noticed that in the water I could see both my shadow and my reflection. Water looks *so* much better in LotRO.

I always liked the WoW comic style. It has the advantage that you can exaggerate proportions to make things more visible. For example the treasure chests in WoW really shout "treasure" at you. LotRO's clickable items are smaller and less visible, but the game gets around that problem by adding an optional floating title to everything you can click on, and having important clickable things pulsate. I didn't like the photorealistic graphics of EQ2 or Vanguard very much. But I do like LotRO's graphics better than WoW's, although I must say WoW has the better animations. For me it is easier to imagine that I am living in another world if that world looks more natural.

Another important difference is how the characters look. I mentioned before that I made a female blood-elf, because I couldn't manage to create a male blood-elf character that didn't look too much like a pretty boy. If I would create several male blood elves, they would all look like pretty boys, just with different hair styles. In LotRO I managed to make two totally different looking hobbits, one old and gray, with a pot-belly, and the other young, with freckles, and muscular. Especially for a role-playing server it is important that you can deviate from the standard good-looking adventurer stereotype. In WoW, if you want to play somebody ugly, you need to choose a Horde race. In LotRO you can change the body type, or add wrinkles or scars to your face.

Both graphics styles are certainly viable, and if you have an elderly computer you might prefer the lesser system requirements of World of Warcraft. But if your computer is half-decent, Lord of the Rings Online sure is pretty. I'm a big fan of Nagrand, but The Shire beats it hands-down. I've always been an explorer, and having a beautiful world with impressive graphics makes that so much more pleasant.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:18 AM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
Losing the console wars

Trick question: Which was the best-selling games console in March 2007? If you answered Wii, you weren't quite right. While the Wii beat both the XBox 360 and the PS3, it sold less than ... the PS2. And the Nintendo DS handheld sold even more. The Wii isn't so much winning the next generation console wars as losing it the least badly. Meanwhile PC games sales for the first quarter of 2007 are up 17% compared to the same quarter of last year, with the sales of the Burning Crusade playing a big part in that. Even the New York Times sees rosy times ahead for PC games.

With all their fancy multimedia and internet capabilities, the next generation consoles are still not as good as a PC for surfing the internet. And if you consider that you need a PC for internet surfing anyway, upgrading it with a decent graphics card and more RAM so you can play games can end up costing you less than buying a PS3! Plus the PC still dominates some genres of games, like MMORPGs or strategy games.

I'm not currently planning to buy any next generation console anytime soon. If by christmas there are more games out for the PS3 that interest me, maybe. But right now I just don't see any interest in buying any one of them.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:17 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Blizzard getting nervous

I had an e-mail from Blizzard, and several readers who got the same letter also pointed it out to me: Blizzard is offering a free Burning Crusade trial, suspiciously close to the LotRO release date. Apparently they noticed they got competition, even if they are still the 800-pound gorilla. Well, good for us customers, I say.

On the other hand this is a typical example of the development department not talking with the marketing department. The marketing department does the best they can do, offering a free trial. But with the number of people that have WoW without having bought BC being low, the impact of this campaign will be low. What Blizzard *should* have done is to examine the reasons why people leave WoW, and then ask the developers to change the game in a way that keeps people playing. Hint: Adding the Black Temple to the game isn't going to help here. Not sure about the other content additions in patch 2.1, they might be good, they might be the next incarnation of the Silithus grind and the horribly failed tier 0.5 armor upgrade quests.

Interestingly LotRO is about to outflank WoW on the casual side. Two years ago WoW was consider the easy-mode MMORPG. Now people hit the level 70 wall, and only a small percentage of players can break through this wall and into the raid content. So nowadays many players consider the end-game of WoW as "too hard", and are looking for a more casual-friendly alternative. And Lord of the Rings Online is offering just that. LotRO is generally a bit easier than WoW, you need to kill less foozles per quest to get the reward, there is less grind. If you really spend 1 hour killing the same kind of mobs, you are already rewarded with an advanced foozle slayer title and trait. I don't know what will happen when people hit the LotRO end-game, but right now LotRO is the casual alternative to hardcore WoW.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:36 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO Journal - 27-April-2007

Short journal entry, because I didn't play last night, all the servers were down.

Now I know it would make a better story if I told you how incredibly surprised and outraged I was that I couldn't play. But in reality my reaction was more like "what took them so long?". The server crash is two days late. Probably delayed by the account creation page being inaccessible on release day, so it took people more time to create their accounts and overload the servers.

Of course I spent some minutes trying to enter the game repeatedly, and checking the forums. But once I realized the game was down for the night, I just wandered off, did some AH transactions in WoW, and then went to watch TV. I wonder if it's just getting used to downtimes, or whether my lifetime subscription has anything to do with it. If you consider a MMORPG to have a finite amount of content, and you already paid for all of it, it doesn't really matter so much when exactly you consume that content.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:28 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Warhammer Online delayed to 2008

I just got the Warhammer Online newsletter, which contained one important information:

We have made the decision to move our ship date for the US and Europe to the first quarter of 2008. (Release dates for Asia will be announced at a later date.) Since our acquisition by EA, we have been afforded many wonderful development opportunities and we plan to take full advantage of everything that is available. This includes taking several additional months to make the best MMORPG possible.

Many people already suspected this, but now it's official. No WAR before 2008. May I suggest a timing 3 months after the next WoW expansion? That tends to work well. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 5:32 PM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
You are who you know

I am wondering in how far your playing style in a game like World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online is influenced by the people you play with, especially your guild. I used to be playing casually in a casual guild, then raided in a raiding guild, and now in LotRO I'm roleplaying in a roleplaying guild. If I were in a PvP guild, would I like PvP more? Would somebody else who is currently heavily into raiding be just as happy doing something else, if only his guild mates were doing the same?

Most probably there are both types of players. Those who absolutely know what they want, and those who adjust their playstyle to whatever their friends are doing. It is an old mantra of the MMORPG genre that people keep playing these games to hang out with their friends. But apparently that isn't the case for everybody, because otherwise it would be hard to explain why some people change guild so often. Some people seem to be on a fixed trajectory, at their own personal speed, towards more and more challenging raid content. And if their friends aren't able to keep up with that speed, they move to the next guild, further along on that same path, until one day they arrive in a guild which fits their playing style.

The problem with selecting your friends to fit your playing style is that people change. In retrospect it becomes clear that all that guild drama in my first WoW guild was caused by people developing in different directions, or at least at different speeds. It is very hard to have a guild in harmony when some players are developing into hardcore raiders, and others barely budge from their casual roots. Real life constraints often cause that even if the casual people are willing to raid for friendships sake, they aren't as available or prepared as the really determined players, and just end up slowing them down.

My current WoW guild has a slightly different concept, beating the problem of differing interests by simply being huge. With nearly 200 people in the guild, there is always somebody around with similar interests. The downside of that is when those 200 people barely get two Karazhan teams together, and sometimes have to cancel 25-man raids because not enough players turn up. With everyone basically doing whatever they want, there isn't much of a sense of common purpose. With me not knowing when and how much WoW I will play in the coming months, such a guild suits me just fine right now. But such a losely organized guild doesn't do much to keep people playing beyond the point where they get bored with the game.

I don't know whether it is the atmosphere of LotRO, or the smaller guild with a common purpose, or the fact that its a roleplaying guild on a roleplaying server, but right now I feel a lot more comfortable in my LotRO guild. There is very little of the "have to keep up with the others" feeling, which makes WoW guilds feel like work sometimes. The big advantage of roleplaying guilds is that roleplaying doesn't require you to have a specific level, talent build, or availability in larger blocks of time. It's nicer if you are available for planned events, but if you can't, at least you don't feel as if you just lost out on DKP and future loot rights or raid spots. And if you show up, you're included. There is no "oh, we don't need a second rogue for this, sorry" argument that keeps you from playing with the others.

Nevertheless I don't regret having hung out with the raiders for some time. It turned out that I'm a decent enough raid healer, quite respected by the other raiders. At the very least that gives me the confidence that selecting my personal playstyle is a matter of preference, not ability, which makes the sometimes rude hardcore raider's comments on this blog easier to bear. Raiding is fun if you are in the mood for it, and it's not rocket science, most people would be able to do it if they have the dedication. I just did enough of it to last me for a while, and just don't want to do it any more. I now enjoy hanging out with different people, doing something completely different.

So, how is it for you? Are you doing what you are doing because that is what you always wanted to do? Or did you just find a group of nice people, and followed their lead? If your current guild changed focus and started doing something different, would you switch guild, or stick with them?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:38 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO Journal - 26-April-2007

I'll probably regret not power-farming now one day, but instead I went adventuring yesterday and made level 15. That is an important step, because at level 15 you get your first class quest from your trainer. Very, very nice, the class quest mostly consisted of an instanced solo encounter, and gave some very good results. In my case, minstrel, I got a nice club, and the ability to wear medium armor. Okay, this medium armor ability came as a class trait, not as skill, and so I had to use the only class trait slot I have at level 15 to equip it. (Translation into WoW-speak: I had to choose it as a talent, thus couldn't chose some other interesting talents.) But wearing medium armor instead of light armor is rather important for my survival, especially when soloing. So I consider it a big bonus.

Nevertheless I'm still running around in light armor. The reason for that is my tailoring skill. Although I'm blocked at journeyman, I was able to get some interesting recipes for level 16 medium armor, called "superb leather armor". The interesting thing here is that these recipes are single-use. So I won't be able to produce several of them for alts or for sale, unless I buy several sets of expensive recipes. But I can make a rather nice set of magical level 16 medium armor. As this is now less than half a level away, I'm not investing in any other medium armor right now. The light armor I'm wearing, self-tailored heavy quilted armor, isn't that bad. I only replaced the helmet, but the heavy quilted one made me look suspiciously like a garden gnome.

Overall I noticed that LotRO has a wider variety of armor *shapes* than World of Warcraft. I mean, my WoW priest ran around in the same shape of robe, just with different textures, from level 1 to 70. My LotRO minstrel already wore several different shaped pieces of chest armor, from things looking like padded armor to something looking like a leather coat. And the hats! Every time I get a new piece of head armor, it has a completely new shape, which does a lot to change the look of my character. In comparison my WoW warrior had helmet display turned off until level 70, because all the helmets he found looked like cooking pots, and didn't fit at all on the head of a troll (same helmets on a human or dwarf looked better).

Besides the class quest, I pursued some quests that incidentally lead to me acquiring more traits. I already mentioned my first racial trait, throwing a stone, which quite frankly sucked for a class that already has lots of good ranged spells. So I was quite happy when by killing a lot of spiders I got a second racial trait, hobbit stature, which increased my might by 20 points, nearly doubling it. I also got lots of different normal traits now, I'll have to sort through them and optimize the selection of those that I want to equip.

I also advanced a little bit on the epic quest line that everyone has. Well, every race has a different quest line, I assume, although I'm not sure whether they all come together at the higher level. I'm still in the epilogue, killing goblins in the greenfields.

In role-playing I got my hobbit guardian alt invited into my guild, and started the storyline of the guardian being the adventurous son of the more conservative minstrel / farmer. But I'm still in the Archet newbie zone with the guardian. There are so many things to do in this game, I barely know where to start. Isn't that great?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:12 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Spelling and grammar

It's always the first of April over at Daily Gaming News. So they posted the fake announcement of Blizzard introducing spelling and grammar exams into World of Warcraft, which players will have to pass to be able to play. The reason why that makes us smile is that sometimes we just wish it was true. We live in an age where people write as much as never before in the history of mankind: text messages, e-mails, blogs, game chats. And it turns out that one of the reasons why many people didn't write so much in previous ages is that they don't know how. They still don't know how, but somehow the social inhibition to prove they're an idiot by writing like one has become lost.

They simply claim that "u" and "r" are just socially acceptable short forms of "you" and "are", mix in some newly invented slang like "roxxor" and "pwn", some acronyms like "lol", and soon the phrases they're writing looks so unlike correct English that nobody even notices that they just spelled a couple of words wrong, and have no idea of the correct use of punctuation.

Blizzard will never test their players for spelling and grammar, but don't you sometimes wish that players in chat were writing something which resembled English a bit more?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:37 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
A lot of content

I was about to write a comment to a post on The Common Sense Gamer blog, but it got so long that I decided I'd better post it here. TCSG quotes Blizzard VP Rob Pardo, who "says the reason why WoW is successful is because it delivers a lot of content; not just a grind; and that content takes time and creative effort to produce.", and complains that this isn't true, because the WoW end-game is a grind. True, but that isn't what Rob Pardo said. In fact, objectively viewed, all what Rob says here is totally correct.

World of Warcraft is successful because it delivers a lot of content. Take the famous "casual" gamer, including the middle-class variant which has a casual attitude, but plays quite a lot (that would be me). How much content does he have in WoW, if he doesn't want to raid or grind? A rough estimate would be about 2,000 hours before he has explored all the zones, did most of the quests, and played several character classes and races, Horde and Alliance. 2,000 hours totally qualifies as "a lot of content". I can't even think of other media offering anywhere near 2,000 hours of content. You can read the complete Dune series of books much faster than that. Even endless TV series like CSI with all sub-series, or Friends, don't come anywhere close to 2,000 hours. But World of Warcraft offers that much content, and that is a major reason for its success.

Rob Pardo says "not just grind", and that is true, there is a lot of non-grind content in WoW. He doesn't say "there is no grind in WoW", because that would be a lie. The reason why I'm more or less burned out of WoW, and why so many other bloggers are angry with WoW, or cancelling their accounts, is that 2,000 hours is not the same as "endless". It is totally possible to consume all that lot of content in the two-and-a-half years of WoW's existence, if you play more than 15 hours per week, which a lot of players do. And at the end of the content there is no game over screen telling you that you have finished. Instead there is grind and the raid game that is only attractive to a small number of hardcore players.

The problem that Rob Pardo states in that interview is that Blizzard is unable to produce content as fast as some players consume it. I mentioned it before, at the rate that me personally I'm consuming content, the Burning Crusade expansion was only good for three months. Content patches help, but they aren't adding so many hundreds of hours of non-grind, non-raid content either. For me World of Warcraft simply ran out of content, even if I'm totally willing to admit that there was a lot of it to start with. I just couldn't get enough of it, couldn't ration it, and used it all up. Now I'll need to play something else until they restock.

Running out of content you still want to play is a sad thing, causing some negative emotions. Many people become so frustrated and depressed from it that they start complaining about how bad a game World of Warcraft is. I don't really feel comfortable with that. I'd like to have more content, I'd like the developers to create more non-grind, non-raid content for the masses (aka "me") instead of raid content for the elite. But that doesn't change the fact that I quite enjoyed the last 30 months of playing WoW, 30 hours per week. In fact I'd feel rather foolish saying "I played over 3,000 hours of WoW and finally came to the conclusion that the game sucks". The worst thing I can say about WoW is that after all that time I'm not sure I'll want more of the same, even if they added accessible new zones and quests. But I never expected World of Warcraft to last forever.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:59 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO Journal - 25-April-2007

Yesterday was the official release of Lord of the Rings Online, and over here in Europe it went medium smoothly. The servers stayed up, there wasn't too much lag, and installation and downloading the latest patch went fast enough. But the website on which you had to create your account and enter your CD key was totally overloaded, and hard to impossible to access. Now fortunately me and the other pre-order customers are allowed to continue playing without a CD key until Friday. But if you didn't pre-order, trying to create a new account for LotRO yesterday must have been quite frustrating. I couldn't manage to enter my CD key all day, and only managed to get my lifetime subscription set up this morning. Apparently LotRO is selling well in Europe.

Now I received a mail acknowledging may payment and telling me "your next payment is due before 01/01/70". Well, I'll be 105 years old on that date, presumably dead. So that's their definition of "lifetime subscription". :) Realistically, LotRO will probably cease to exist long before that, not being compatible with the holodecks of 2070, or whatever other display technology they'll have by then. As Codemasters has no information about *my* lifetime, I could be dead and buried with my descendants having inherited the userid and password, a "lifetime" subscription can only be for the lifetime of the game, not the player. But surpringly, in a world full of legalese, terms of services and end-user license agreements, I couldn't find the legal terms of the lifetime subscription anywhere. In any case Codemasters needs to hire some better lawyers. They had announced a "golden ticket" type contest to be part of the special edition, and had to renege on that, because running a legally binding kind of lottery covering many European countries turned out to be an unsolveable legal nightmare. They couldn't even put a wax-sealed letter as promised in the box, due to some safety regulations. Then they had problems producing the cloth map, and had to put a "parchment" map into the box instead. So now the special edition and collector edition boxes contain a lot less stuff than promised, and players who bought them are understandably upset. Fortunately I read about that before, and while my local store had all three editions in stock, I just bought the cheapest one.

I was playing the game yesterday still with my beta client, without movies and high-res textures. Following some advice from the forums I then installed the full game client on another machine, my laptop, and then copied the movies and high-res textures over to my main PC. At first that seemed to work, but then I zoned into North Downs and was greeting with black textures, turning my whole screen totally black, except for the 2D user interface. So I ended up uninstalling the beta client, and installing the full game client from scratch. As I already mentioned, the necessary download for that went quite fast, and there was no problem. I already thought LotRO was pretty with the old textures, but with the high-res textures the game became extremely pretty. But to see the game in all splendor you really need one of this year's graphics cards and a decent computer. For the first time I also saw the quite well done intro movie. Now I wonder whether I could delete it, because I have to press escape three times more every time I start LotRO to get past the movies. :)

Back in the game I'm on a balanced gameplay between farming and adventuring, based on the in-game time of day. By increasing your gamma you *can* adventure at night, but it isn't as beautiful as during the in-game day. So now I adventure during the days, and farm during the nights. The hardest thing I did yesterday was trying to do a level 11 group quest solo with my level 14, killing a named elite warg. As minstrel I have a fear cry, which allows me to heal myself while the warg is running, but even with that I nearly didn't make it. I ran out of mana, my potions were on cooldown, and my life went down faster than the wargs. Just then a level 17 elf came along, apparently undecided whether he should intervene or not, not wanting to be accused of killstealing. So I quickly typed "help", and he helped me, and I won the fight with a sliver of life (sorry, morale) left. Nice quest reward too. But I guess you really need a group for the LotRO group quests.

Then I worked on my accomplishments and traits. I killed wolves for my first "racial" trait, a short range "throwing a stone" ranged attack. Then I did all the postmaster quests, transporting mail between the villages of the Shire. Finally I started doing the similar pie transporting quests. Lots of running in these two quest series, but the advantage is that you get to know the geography of the Shire really well. And I'm also getting close to the nice accomplishment reward you get for doing 75 quests in the Shire. All this is probably not the fastest way to level up, but I'm not in a hurry. The one thing I learned from WoW is that reaching the level cap is more a problem than something to aspire to.

I'm having a role-playing idea, of which I'm not quite sure whether LotRO will allow me to do that. LotRO has a system where one character can be the parent of another, but I'm not sure it works with alts. If it would, I would like to make a hobbit guardian, and make him the son of my elderly hobbit minstrel / farmer. That would have a lot of role-playing potential, commenting as "the father" on how hot-headed the son is, while complaining as "the son" on how stubborn and conservative the father behaves. And all that in guild chat, with father and son obviously never seeing each other. From a practical point of view, and quite fitting into the roleplay, the rich farmer could finance the son, with the guardian being the more gear-dependant class and always a thankful target for twinking. I'd probably make the guardian an armorer, so I can make armor for himself, and iron farming tools for "daddy".

Not that I think I'll get there anytime soon. I tried to level up tailoring, and found that I quickly got blocked. To become proficient at journeyman level (making level 10 to 16 armor) you need to do a quest which involves killing a level 21 signature boar. Now I'm all for creating a player economy. But making the crafting system so that you can only make armor for lower level characters and never usefully for yourself is rather stupid. But up to now, and like in so many other games, the crafting system is the only real disappointment for me in Lord of the Rings Online. I'll have to live with what LotRO offers there, and enjoy the adventuring part more, which is really well done.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:10 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Wikipedia fame

I have no idea how long it has been there, but I just found out that there is a link to my blog in a footnote of the Wikipedia entry on MMORPG. And it wasn't me who put it there. :) So, yay! Another step towards internet fame achieved. With me not running ads, fame is the only return I get from writing this blog. I aspire to one day have my own Wikipedia entry. ;)

By the way, if you currently search Tobold on Wikipedia, you won't find me. But you *will* find the reason behind my strange obsession with pipe-weed farming in LotRO.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:42 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Get a life ... -time subscription to LotRO

The subject kept popping up in the comments, and mbp has a nice blog entry about it: An surprising number of people feel that getting a lifetime subscription is a good deal, even if you don't plan to be playing LotRO non-stop for the next 18 months. It is not a purely economical decision.

A monthly subscription is like a ball and chain, tieing you to a game and restricting your freedom. Getting rid of that restriction is worth something to me. I could buy 6 months of LotRO for a bit over 50 Euro, of a lifetime subscription for 150, so normally the break even point should be 18 months. And I'm far from sure that I'll play LotRO for the next 18 months, because of other interesting games like Warhammer Online, and the next WoW expansion coming out in that period. But I am going to pay for the lifetime subscription anyway, because it gives me greater flexibility.

I like World of Warcraft. I am pretty certain that I will buy the next WoW expansion. But I'm so not willing to hang out in WoW after basically having "finished" the fun part of the Burning Crusade expansion. I'm also looking forward to playing Warhammer Online, but I'm not going to sit here twiddling my thumbs waiting for it. All of this means that the way in which I play MMORPGs might change. Instead of sticking to one game for a while, and then giving it up, I might switch back and forth between two or three games. Just like you'd want to watch the latest episode of a TV series when its on, you might like to play the latest WoW episode (be it a content patch or an expansion) when it comes out. But between these WoW episodes you might want to see the episodes of LotRO. A schedule of playing LotRO now after release, doing a bit of WoW after content patch 2.1, then coming back to LotRO for the June content patch and so on sounds feasible, although I'm not yet sure how it will work out in praxis.

And a lifetime subscription for LotRO helps here. Because right now I'm looking at my WoW subscription and ask myself whether I want to cancel it, and for how long. Maybe I get bored of LotRO in a month, and then I wouldn't want to cancel my WoW subscription. Maybe I'll be playing nothing but LotRO for the next six months, and then I really shouldn't waste a hundred bucks on WoW during that time. By taking a lifetime subscription to LotRO, at least I won't have the same problem in the other direction. I can stop playing LotRO without worrying about a monthly fee.

Tell you what, Blizzard: You offer a lifetime subscription for WoW for $200 / €150, and I'll buy it. For the reasons stated above. Which I think is a generous offer from me, seeing that WoW right now is acquiring a whiff of "past its prime" scent.

Dear readers, how much would you be willing to pay for a lifetime subscription to World of Warcraft right now?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:45 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
The good old days of Molten Core

I was talking with a bunch of RL friends last night, during our pen and paper roleplaying session. They all play WoW, but on different servers and in different guilds. And they all expressed being unhappy with the Burning Crusade raiding game. The more successful ones are able to kill a couple of bosses in Karazhan, but complain that the loot isn't great, and each raid costs them a fortune. The less successful ones can't get past Moroes, or have problems finding enough motivated people for raiding in their guilds. And while the question of whether going to Molten Core at level 70 was fun or stupid was hotly debated, everybody agrees that at the time Molten Core was a lot more fun than Karazhan.

That is only anecdotal evidence, but I get the impression from different sources that the level 70 raiding game is even less popular than the level 60 raiding game. Which is a pity. And a danger for World of Warcraft, revealing a vulnerable soft underbelly in a year where several strong contenders are coming out. Take enough Lilliputians, and you can tie down Gulliver. The new free trial for Burning Crusade looks as if Blizzard marketing is getting nervous.

I stand by my earlier judgement that the Burning Crusade is a good expansion, but too little, too late. After three months most people have seen all or nearly all of the easily accessible content. The only thing that is left to do is raiding your way up to Mount Hyjal. Which would be fun if you could do it in another three months. But as the next expansion isn't scheduled before 2008, Blizzard had to stretch the content to make it last until then. And they did that by making raiding costly, hard, and not very profitable. What they failed to realize is that not many people are interested in a costly, hard, and unprofitable raiding game. The earlier ideas to make raiding more accessible to a larger part of the population seem to have been forgotten.

Now Burning Crusade certainly is superior to the old endgame in offering more top level 5-man dungeons. Grinding reputation by going to dungeons is far better than grinding reputation in Silithus. And the rewards for heroic 5-man dungeons are decent enough, except for the Badge of Justice rewards. But having better alternatives only aggravates the problem of the raiding game. Karazhan is a very unforgiving place, and the small number of players in the raid means that if any one of them loses connection or screws up, the whole raid fails.

At least Blizzard realized that the consumables situation for raids was untenable. It makes me wonder how many gold farmers are currently making a living out of supplying gold for Karazhan raiders. Making potions less prominent is going to hurt alchemists and herbalists, but is going to make raiding a lot cheaper. And it offers Blizzard a second chance to correct the difficulty level: Obviously if they leave Karazhan like it is, and reduce everybodies potion buffs, Karazhan becomes pretty much unplayable. Remove the buffs, and you need to adjust the difficulty level of the raid dungeons. That gives them an opportunity to overcompensate, and make Karazhan without buffs easier than it was before with buffs. Nobody is going to give a damn about Blizzard adding the Black Temple, if players can't even get past Karazhan. As long as players think that the good old days of Molten Core were better than the current situation, Blizzard has a problem.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:17 AM Permanent Link  (39) comments Links to this post

 
Curiouser and curiouser LotRO patch

I was wrong. LotRO Europe *did* apply a patch today, but not the same one as last weeks US patch. We only got a minor bug fix patch. Farming is still as it was, and so are repair costs. Why Turbine would want to run the same game in two different versions is a mystery to me. Is that some sort of social experiment? Do they think Europeans should get the same number of days to exploit the farming profits as the US players got? I have no idea!

I'd still assume that one day they'll apply the same patch to the European servers, but I have no clue when. Next ordinary patch day would be the Tuesday in 8 days, because this Tuesday's patch was moved forward to today, because of the official release tomorrow.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:23 PM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO Journal - 23-April-2007

Today is patch day in Europe, in preparation of the official release day tomorrow. That means that the farming patch, which the US already has since last Wednesday, will go live in Europe today. Which is the end of farming as we know it. The patch deliberately breaks farming, making it impossible to grow anything at a profit, neither from vendors nor players. It also makes it impossible to cross-breed, and thus to advance your skill to the highest level. Farming is basically "on hold", until Turbine completely reworks the system. I think a less radical solution, like reducing vendor prices for the few crops that made money, would have been better. But I'm willing to give them time to create a new farming system which hopefully works as intended.

As you might have noticed, I liked farming in Lord of the Rings Online. I liked the interactive part most, sowing fields and seeing what harvest I would get. The plant processing meant having work you character for half an hour, without you being able to do anything, except chat, which wasn't that optimal. But at least that gave me opportunity to get a lot of other Real Life ® things done over the weekend, whenever my character was processing his crops. In the 10 pre-order days I spent about 40 hours farming, which is a lot, even if half of that was afk crop processing. But the good news in that is that I managed to explore every single aspect of the old farming system. I did make a lot of money, over 3 gold, but instead of keeping that money, I spent most of it, about 2 gold, to get my farming skill up to master, and for cross-breeding. That still leaves me 1 gold in my pocket to finance my adventuring, which is more than enough at my level.

Every tradeskill in LotRO has 5 ranks: apprentice, journeyman, expert, artisan, and master. And in each rank you can be proficient or master. The recipes that pre-nerf made money were all at master expert level, so most people stopped there. The artisan and master level require more expensive ingredients, so you lose a lot of money whenever you grow a field of those ranks. But I did it anyway, and did master the artisan level, and got proficient in the master level. I didn't get to master the master level, which would have given me the grandmaster title, but I found that the title "master farmer" was what I wanted to run around with. Right now being master farmer is completely useless, there is nothing I can make that anybody would want to buy, even if I just charged them my cost. But maybe when the system is reworked being master farmer becomes useful one day. Right now I only did it for the roleplaying aspects, it gives my hobbit a solid background as farmer who is only forced by the encroaching evil to go adventuring instead of tilting his fields.

Besides skilling up, I enjoyed the cross-breeding system. You start that with rare Sweet Lobelia seeds, which can be found in treasure chests, or received by a quest. You multiply those seeds, then cross-breed them with some other seeds you can buy to make Muddyfoot seeds. Multiply those again, and cross-breed into Dragonsbreath. Multiply those again, and cross-breed into Eagle's Nest. Eagle's Nest is artisan level, so I spent a lot of time growing these to skill up artisan to master. Every field loses you some money, but the alternative is growing strawberries. And as strawberries have the same yield, but sell for ten times less than Eagle's Nest, skilling up with strawberries would have cost me a lot more. The other advantage of going the cross-breeding route is that I stored away seeds and plants of every of these rare pipe-weeds. My guild is planning a role-playing event, a farmer's market, and I'll be running a pipe-weed stall, offering rare pipe-weeds for sale. That could be fun.

I only did very little adventuring over the weekend, wanting to achieve all my farming goals before the farming system got shut down. And I'm happy I did it, there is still lots of time to quest and level up. I did finish a few quests and reached level 14. But there is still so much to do in the Shire. Not only the quests, but also the many accomplishments and traits you can achieve. I'm still determined to get the lifetime subscription. But my immediate problem is getting hold of the LotRO box tomorrow. I ordered one from Amazon UK long time ago, but apparently they haven't even shipped it yet, so I'll never get it tomorrow. Might have to check the local stores whether they'll sell it already tomorrow. I'll try the same store where I was able to get Burning Crusade on release day, but the release of LotRO isn't quite that big an event, and I'm not sure I won't be without LotRO for a few days before I can get the game somewhere.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:00 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
First LotRO content patch announced for June

Turbine announced Shores of Evendim, the first big content patch for Lord of the Rings Online, for June. The patch will add a new zone, complete with 60 quests, 9 new monster types, and new items in the form of armor sets. A upgraded music system will also be added. And all this comes in the form of a free patch, just 2 months after release. Niiiice!
- posted by Tobold @ 7:24 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Tracking deflation

I mentioned before that Lord of the Rings Online is similar to World of Warcraft. That of course also means it will suffer from some of the same problems, like gold farmers. So I surfed to the site of a recently mentioned company I won't link to, and no surprise, LotRO gold was already on offer, 3 days before release. Now cheating with bought gold is obviously the most useful very early in the game. And at the same time there is still very little gold in the system. Which means that if you buy gold for dollars, the price now will be the highest ever. Over the coming months the gold price will fall, but that price development can give us interesting information; for example if Turbine actively banned gold farmer accounts in a timely manner, gold prices would remain high.

So just for the record, as a starting point of comparison, currently 100 gold in LotRO cost $500. By the way, you can't compare that to World of Warcraft, because the purchase power of a gold piece in LotRO is higher. Actually I'm surprised 100 gold is even on offer. With 1 gold being 1000 silver in LotRO, and the "evil farming exploit" earning you 100 silver or 0.1 gold per hour, you'd need to farm 1000 hours to earn those 100 gold. At 50 cents per hour, you wouldn't even get a Chinese to work for you. And the servers aren't even live for 1000 hours yet, you'd need several people farm that much. Plus there is a level cap of 15. Somewhere people must have ways to earn much more than the farming income of 100 silver per hour.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:50 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) review

Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) has a very flexible release date system. While the official release date is on the 24th of April, many players are already able to play the characters that will be rolled over into the release version, and so for all practical purposes the game has already started for them. Thus I don't think it's too early to write my first real review of LotRO. Obviously a MMORPG is always a work in progress and could be re-reviewed several times, or looked at under different aspects. So this post describes how the game is now, how it plays in the low levels, and what the first impression is about where the game is going to.

At the core Lord of the Rings Online is a very good game. The graphics are pretty. The game runs well, even on average computers. There are few bugs, and they aren't of the serious kind. The game is very accessible, with a very good introduction for new players, and a well-working quest system. And of course LotRO profits from the Tolkien lore, and manages to leverage this lore into creating a living world in which everyone who read the books or saw the movies will feel instantly at home.

But of course no game is perfect. One issue is while LotRO does many things right, it achieves doing the right thing by taking the best aspect of previous games. LotRO is an evolution of the MMORPG genre, in the right direction, but doesn't introduce many revolutionary features. One reason why people feel instantly at home is because they played World of Warcraft before, and LotRO plays very, very similar to that. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if you were looking for a revolution, you might get disappointed. If on the other hand you liked World of Warcraft, but got a bit burned out, and you are looking for something similar but new, LotRO is exactly the right game for you. In further reviewing LotRO, I will repeatedly compare features to World of Warcraft, which by sheer size is emminently qualified as a point of comparison.

Lord of the Ring Online has 4 races, humans, hobbits, dwarves and elves. You will notice that this list doesn't include any "evil" races. But that doesn't mean you can't play the bad guys. LotRO has an innovative PvP system called monster play. Any player starting from level 10 can visit special fel scrying pools and temporarily play a level 50 monster in a PvP zone instead of his character. There is a choice of different types of orcs, or a warg, or a giant spider to play. There currently is only one PvP zone, the Ettenmoors, containing several castles and PvP quests and objectives. Monsters are always level 50, but they can improve their stats by spending destiny points. You get 200 destiny points each time your real character goes up a level past 10, and you can earn them by doing PvP quests as a monster. The same destiny points can also be used to buy temporary buffs for your good character. Once enough players have reached level 50 with their good characters, we can expect interesting PvP battles. But as this only happens in the Ettenmoors, there is no PvP ganking like on PvP servers in WoW. PvP is completely consensual. And by making it a fight of players against player-controlled monsters, and not against other player characters, LotRO doesn't run into the same problems as WoW to balance characters for both PvP and PvE.

Once you have chosen your race and gender (with no female dwarves available), you can proceed to choose one of 7 character classes. Due to the Tolkien lore there are no mages and no priests. But lore-masters throw fireballs at their enemies and play not unlike some mage / warlock mix, just having a summoned animal pet instead of a demon. And minstrels act as healers. LotRO doesn't have hitpoints and death, but morale and defeat. Thus a minstrel "heals" by raising his fellows' morale with songs. There is a burglar class, using the term Tolkien used for the job that Bilbo accepted to do for the dwarves in The Hobbit. There is a hunter, master of bow and arrow. And there are three melee classes, guardian, champion, and captain, with different roles.

With a class chosen, you can spend some time thinking of a name, and modifying the look of your character with various sliders. And then it's off into your first adventure, an instanced introduction quest that explains the game to you. Very well done, as this first part is pretty much on rails, so even complete beginners can't get lost. After that you enter a newbie zone, which again is separated from the rest of the world. Only by doing an instanced quest at about level 5 you can proceed into the larger world. If you create more than one character, you are given the option to skip the intro and newbie zone, but then you also skip most of the quest rewards from there, so I wouldn't advise that.

Combat in LotRO is pretty much exactly like combat in WoW: a combination of auto-attack and pressing hotkey buttons for special effects. Some classes have variations of this theme, like the minstrel having balads that both damage an enemy and buff himself or his party, and which have to be played in a certain order. Or the champion who has some special attacks that grant him fervor points, and others that cost fervor to execute. The only combat feature that is radically different from WoW (but not totally new, Final Fantasy XI had something similar) is the possibility for a group to start special combo attack chains, which if correctly executed can have a major impact. Burglars have a special skill to start these combo chains, but otherwise groups get the opportunity to do so at random moments in combat.

LotRO has lots of quests, signaled by a golden ring (instead of an exclamation mark) floating over the head of the quest-givers. There is the usual range of monster-killing and fedex quests. There are some interesting variations, like a quest where you need to gather eggs without the rooster who patrols the farm seeing you. Or transport quests where you have a time-limit, and because you carry something aren't allowed to swim or fight. The most interesting quests are the instanced group quests, which play like a 15-minute instanced dungeon. But if you don't like to group, you can avoid the group quests and level up soloing.

Combat and quests are earning you experience points, which make you go up in level. Leveling up allows you to learn new skills. One positive point in comparison to WoW is that your old spells and abilities are automatically upgraded each level. The new spells and abilities you buy from your trainer are exactly that: new. And besides the active abilities to put on hotkeys which you can learn at every even level, there are some passive skills you get at uneven levels, so you don't always have to wait two levels before you get something new.

There are no talent trees in LotRO, but by leveling up you open up slots into which you can install so-called traits. The interesting thing in that is that you first need to earn these traits, before you can install and use them. You earn traits by doing various deeds. That could be doing a number of quests in one region, or killing a number of monsters. But you can also earn traits by doing long quest-series, like all the postman quests in the Shire, or by visiting all the places of interest in a region. These traits can be upgraded by earning the same trait again in a different region. There are also class-specific traits which are earned by using your spells and abilities, so if you use one combat move more often than another, you'll get that trait earlier, and it'll improve that specific combat move. The system is very well done, and a lot more interesting than just distributing talent points.

Besides combat you can spend your time in Middle-Earth doing tradeskills: gathering resources, crafting weapons and armor, making jewelry or scrolls, cooking, or even farming. The act of crafting itself is done reasonably well, but the balancing of the economics of crafting isn't done yet, and Turbine is still working hectically with patches and nerfs to get the system balanced, sometimes breaking more than fixing. Thus for a final review of the tradeskill system we need to wait until it is fully implemented.

Fortunately the crafting seems to be the only part of LotRO that has an unfinished feeling, at least in the lower levels. The game is full of little surprises, NPCs talking and living their lives, making at least the low-level areas feel very much like a living world. Again it is too early to say how well the mid- and high-level game is done. On release LotRO covers only one region of Middle-Earth, roughly the area of the first book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The other areas are going to be added in future expansions. Now don't despair if you are used to the glacial speed in which Blizzard is adding expansions to WoW; the one strong point of previous Turbine games was the high frequency of game events and addition of content.

I'm not giving out scores, saying whether Lord of the Rings Online is better or worse than World of Warcraft. Lets just say that they are in the same class of high-quality MMORPG with a focus on accessibility for the average player. There are a number of minor differences, where one might prefer the one or the other, but generally the gameplay and quality of execution is similar, at least in what I saw up to now. So in my opinion Lord of the Rings Online is one of the best MMORPGs around. Recommended.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:36 AM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO Journal - 20-April-2007

The game hasn't even really started yet, and the US LotRO forums are already in full flame war "nerf the other guy" mode. It turned out that the farming nerf was worse than expected, because while the patch notes said that only pipe-weed seeds would be reduced from 3 to 1 per poor plant, in reality the same nerf was applied to all other plants, fruits and vegetables. And as the farmers feel that this in no small part is the fault of people posting "nerf the farmers" posts on the US LotRO forums, they retaliate with "nerf the explorers" and similar posts. They demonstrate how a naked level 4 burglar, fresh out of the newbie zone, can make 100 silver per hour as explorer, gathering ores and woods, by just selling them to a vendor. Or how at level 15 a scholar can farm easy green mobs for materials, craft them, and make 100 silver per hour from vendoring the results.

Meanwhile Turbine posted a flawed policy on crafting, especially farming, which Nissl copied in a comment here. The relevant passage is "If you find yourself making money consistently by executing recipes and selling the proceeds to a vendor, do not expect that scenario to last. Farming is intended to be interdependent with other players, not vendors." Note that this excludes making *any* profit, no matter how small, by selling farmed goods to vendors. Now obviously you will always make a profit with the other gathering professions, even if you sell to vendors, so applying different rules to farming is very wrong.

Apparently the idea is that farming goods should be sold at a profit to cooks. Apart from the problem that only tinkers have the cooking skill without the farming skill, the larger flaw in that reasoning is that cooked food isn't really necessary to play. If you start with farming, which has fixed costs for seeds, water, and fertilizer, it is easy to calculate for how much vegetables have to sell to at least break even for the farmer. But if the cook buys the vegetables at this break-even cost, plus adds his own fixed costs for vendor-sold ingredients, a simple mushroom pie already costs a fortune, before the farmer and the cook have even made a single copper piece of profit. Nobody is going to use food that expensive, just to get a tiny buff or regenerate health and mana a bit faster.

Even worse is the situation with pipe-weed. Anyone can for free use the /smoke emote. Smoking pipe-weed grown by a farmer just adds cute smoke rings to the animation, and that only if the pipe-weed was one of the better sorts. The idea that players would pay large sums of money for that is ridiculous. Even if a few players would buy it, the market is necessarily tiny. It can be argued at which skill level exactly how much silver per hour a farmer should be making by growing pipe-weed and selling it to vendors. But saying that this activity should make a loss when selling to vendors is crazy.

My farmer on the Euro servers is still pre-nerf, and thus he is busy exploring the old farming system before the new rules break it. In the pre-nerf system there is a very interesting part on cross-breeding, where you have special cross-breeding recipes to grow new seeds. That is already costly at the old system, as you need lots of water and fertilizer to just try to multiply your seeds, and then cross-breeding them. But in the old system cross-breeding at least "works", in that you produce more seeds than you started with, so at the cost of the other ingredients you can sustain that activity, and slowly work your way up from Sweet Lobelia to Muddyfoot to Dragonsbreath to Eagle's Nest. Takes hours, costs hundreds of silver, and only produces pipe-weed that is worth less than the cost of the ingredients. But at least you can skill up this way and produce some rare sorts of pipe-weed for roleplaying. After the patch this system is going to be completely destroyed, as in future each field will yield less than half of the seeds needed to grow the next field. As you can't buy the seeds anywhere, there is no way to sustain cross-breeding. I don't know what Turbine was thinking when they decided to cut the seed yield instead of just reducing the price at which plants and seeds sold to vendors. Why first design a cross-breeeding system and then destroy it? It wasn't as if you would have made any money cross-breeding, so no risk of exploiting.

Anyway, as I like the pre-nerf farming system, and am highly sceptical that the post-nerf system is even remotely playable, I'm still spending all my time farming and not adventuring. I already had people here comment about that in an angry fashion, as they want me to tell stories of heroic deeds. But if you look at it from a story-telling point of view, starting LotRO like this is actually the proper way. There is a famous concept of hero's journey, which is the basis of much fantasy and scifi story-telling, including such famous stories as Lord of the Rings, or Star Wars. The hero's journey starts in the ordinary world, and the life of a hobbit farmer is very well suited to give such an ordinary world starting point. The story is more believable if the hobbit starts out as farmer, and then goes adventuring to battle the evil forces that threaten his peaceful existence. The typical MMORPG way, where you are born an adventurer and the first thing you do in the world is kill something, makes for really bad story-telling.

If you think of it, even in a fantasy world all wealth is produced by agriculture and crafting. If a dragon or orc has any treasure, it was stolen from somewhere, but produced by farmers and crafters in the first place. Thus the philosophy now explicitely stated from Turbine, but also present in all SOE and Blizzard games, that farming and crafting is a money-sink, financed by the gold that drops from monsters, is just the reverse of any realistic economy. Historically wealth is produced in peace times, and war destroys much wealth. In LotRO and WoW wealth is produced by war and destroyed by peaceful activities. And here we sit and lament that some people think that video games are a bad influence on children. They might actually have a point there.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:19 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Sensible people struck down by RMT allergy

There are many bloggers in the MMO blogosphere, many of which I respect very much. But something is very wrong if in a current blogosphere debate the only reasonable comment is written by John Smedley, president of SOE. The issue is that SOE hired a new guy named Dave Christensen. And the guy worked for IGE in the past, which is the worlds biggest gold-selling company. So now Scott Jennings, Heartless, and Michael Zenke, among others, are all proclaiming that this is the end of the world. No, the new guy isn't supposed to introduce gold selling into all of SOE's games (they already have that in EQ2), he'll just try to sell SOE games in Asia. His only "crime" is to have worked for a gold-selling company before. In the opinion of my peers that apparently totally disqualifies him from ever being hired by any game company. And SOE is supposedly causing the end of civilization by hiring such a pariah. What a hogwash! Apparently these otherwise sensible blogger are so overcome by their RMT allergy that their brains switched off.

Michael Zenke at least posted a clarification, with excerpts from a letter from John Smedley, stating some very reasonable things: 1) He left IGE. Isn’t that a good thing? 2) We put it in the press release precisely to avoid anyone else thinking we’re trying to hide a part of his background. I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to think we put that in there as an advertisement for why we hired him. Believe me IGE has image issues worldwide, not just in the US.

Real-money trade (RMT), the selling of virtual currency for real dollars, is a highly complex problem, which has been around for many years. And one reason why we aren't any closer to a solution is that everybody insists that the problem is *caused* by gold-sellers. Everybody pretends that we have a system of perfect game designers and perfect players, into which the evil gold-selling criminals invade to destroy the lives of the innocent. The truth couldn't be further away from that. Game developers design bad game systems, where advancement doesn't depend on your skills, but on the time you spend in the game. And where advancement and time can be tranferred to a certain extent from one player to another via gold. And we have not-so-innocent players who decide to cheat by buying this advancement. The gold-sellers just exploit the existing weaknesses of the game systems, and of the players. Painting gold-sellers as the only evil guys in this story is simplistic and not helpful at all.

IGE is not a criminal organization. The exact legal status of RMT is unresolved, because game companies don't feel confident enough in their legal position to actually take IGE to court. And the worst you can accuse them of is breaking the contract represented by the terms of service and end-user license agreement. If you ever let your little brother or girlfriend play on your account, you committed exactly the same crime. It is understandable that game companies don't like it, but it's hardly the crime of the century. Somebody who worked for IGE doesn't deserve to become a pariah because of that. Game companies opposed to RMT might even *want* to hire people from IGE, to gain better insight in how RMT works, and how the game company could change their games to prevent it.

What do you think made the CEO of IGE more happy: SOE mentioning IGE in a press release, or Blizzard introducing epic flying mounts costing over 5,000 gold pieces? For once SOE isn't the evil company in this story.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:31 PM Permanent Link  (28) comments Links to this post

 
Evolving from game to world

The recent discussion about tradeskills revealed that there is a part of the MMORPG player base who consider the fighting of monsters to be the only important part of any massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Other activities, like crafting, decorating your house (if your game even has that), or hanging out in taverns to chat, are seen as waste of time, or money-sinks. Their worth is only defined in terms of how they advance your adventuring career, like crafting giving you access to potions needed for raiding. In that model you only need player housing to store your gear, crafting only to make you weapons, armor, and consumables for fighting, and visits to cities only for the necessary trips to your trainer or the auction house. But this model wastes a lot of the potential of online worlds. It turns them into single-purpose, nearly linear, simple games of character advancement. That certainly works for many people, but isn't necessarily the most attractive model for everybody. And by being so linear, this model also has serious problems of longevity.

Now experience has shown that virtual worlds without any sort of game aren't that popular. Second Life has a lot of hype, but very few paying customers. Even A Tale in the Desert, which has game parts, but no monster killing, only has a very small player base. To appeal to a mass market, the classical monster-killing, -looting, and character advancing has to be part of any successful game.

But that doesn't mean that the game couldn't have alternative occupations and advancements. There was a lot of buzz around Vanguard offering alternative careers in either adventuring, crafting, or diplomacy. Too bad the execution and balancing of that was flawed. And the balancing of the crafting system in LotRO isn't looking promising either, although at the base there are a lot of good ideas.

What a future MMORPG needs to offer is different ways to spend your time, beyond fighting either monsters or other players. If any game manages to create alternatives that are executed as well as fighting monsters is working in World of Warcraft, that game could well become the "WoW killer" people have been waiting for. A virtual world in which you could besides adventuring also spend time to decorate your house, to go shopping, to dress in clothes you buy for looks instead of stats, and where you could have jobs other than monster-slayer, has the potential to attract a much larger player-base. Only 16% of WoW-players are female, for example. Only 13% of male WoW players are over 35 years old. Killing stuff will always be highly attractive to young, male players, but game companies would be stupid to limit themselves to just this one target demographic.

But to be attractive to other types of players, the alternative occupations in the game must be independant from adventuring. There should be connections between the different systems, but few or no absolute dependencies. It doesn't help that Vanguard has a wonderful system to decorate your house, if the type of player who would like to decorate houses is forever unable to get there, because you first need to kill 1 million monsters to buy the house. To tailor clothes in World of Warcraft you need to increase your player level, and the only thing you can tailor in different colors is shirts. The diplomacy system in Vanguard starts out brilliantly, and then fails to lead you anywhere.

If I am currently playing with the farming tradeskill in Lord of the Rings Online, it isn't just because I can make more money farming than killing monsters. It is because I've killed enough monsters in WoW and other games, and killing them in LotRO isn't so different. But sowing fields, harvesting and processing plants, cross-breeding seeds, and advancing my farming skill, is a completely different and independently viable system. The reason why I'm so angry about the nerf is that it destroys this viability and independance. I'm just not as interested in a farming tradeskill which you only do because you need buffs from cooked food, but which you need to kill monsters to finance. Crafting as just a money sink in MMORPGs just isn't that attractive.

I am dreaming of a game where I could play a crafter who wouldn't be forced to kill monsters, if he didn't want to. A game where I could have my own house, decorated if I wanted to, and run my own proper shop and business from that house, with hired NPC vendors like in UO or SWG. And beyond that lots of other alternative lifestyles could be possible in a fantasy MMORPG. A diplomacy system that is self-sufficient and viable, where you travel between different places to talk with people and do politics. Or a system where you could play a sage, gathering information in libraries about ancient secrets, and the location of treasures. I'm dreaming of a virtual world, a MMORPG that is a collection of games, and not just one monster-killing games with a couple of useless side-quests. With violence in video games being hotly debated and under attack, it would be wise for game developers to try to offer something else than this violence. As long as any other activity in a MMORPG is subsidiary to combat, these games fail to live up to their potential.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:41 PM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO Journal - 19-April-2007

Double joy, not only were the server back up last night, it also turned out that the Euro servers didn't get the US farming nerf patch yet. No idea when the Euro servers will be patched, but normal patch day is apparently Tuesday, and if Turbine doesn't decide than an emergency hotfix nerf is necessary, I'd still have the whole weekend to farm under profitable conditions. I might even manage to advance my farming skill further!

But before I can think of advancement, I'll make the money to support it. As processing plants takes long periods without interactivity (bad idea that), I turned to my laptop and started making an Excel file to calculate what the profits of the pre-nerf farming system are. That is I did what I would do to make money, planting 20 fields of Sweet Galenas with the mastery option on, and wrote down exactly my costs, from repair costs to the cost of ingredients, and my income for selling the pipe-weed. Planting and harvesting 20 fields and then processing the about 100 fair and about 40 poor plants takes about 1 hour. And the profit from that, after deduction of all costs, is between 60 and 120 silver, usually about 90 silver per hour. For comparison, a horse at level 35 apparently costs 4220 silver. So you would need to farm 47 hours straight to buy the lowest level horse. I don't find that to be an excessive profit. I sure hope that grinding mobs at level 35 to finance your horse takes less than 47 hours, thus at mid-levels farming mobs is probably already more profitable than farming pipe-weed. What Turbine might want to do is half the profit on the Sweet Galenas at expert level (or make it take twice as long), and then introducing another recipe at artisan level that makes 90 silver per hour of profit.

I don't see anything wrong or unbalancing to have a crafting activity in the game that earns you a mid-level horse in 50 hours. You just need to make it so that the activity can't be automated or botted, but requires player input regularly. If you can gather wood and ore for 90 silver per hour at that level, or farm monsters for more than 90 silver per hour, I don't see why it should be unbalancing to have farming pay the same.

Being on a role-playing server, and in a role-playing guild, doesn't mean you can't play in an intelligent fashion. With my guild being aware of the upcoming nerf, everybody who was already farmer of course farmed like crazy last night to get reap the benefits before the nerf hits us. But we spun a story around it, about a gypsy foretelling bad harvests and severe seed rot in the future, explaining why we had to get our harvests in now in a hurry.

Between farming pipe-weed for money and helping some guild mates with the Gift of the North instance encounter, I looked ahead on how I could advance my farming skill further. The problem here is that I only have one artisan level recipe, strawberries, and that one you can only make at huge losses. It costs about 12 silver in advanced ingredients to grow one field, but each strawberry sells for only 12 copper pieces, and of course you don't grow hundreds of them in a field even at the best of luck. I'll put the data on my spreadsheet tonight and see how much it will cost me to advance, but I'm sure it's hundreds of silver pieces of cost to get to the next level.

As far as I've heard I will then have to start cross-breeding pipe-weed seeds to advance. That requires Sweet Lobelia seeds to start with. I managed to buy a 12th seed last night, at the extortionate price of 20 silver for 1 seed, thus having enough for 2 fields. And this time I was luckier growing these fields, and my seeds started to multiply. This again being a money-losing activity (unless I resell the seeds, but I need those myself), I didn't do it all that long. But I ended up with over 50 seeds, which should be enough to get me past streaks of bad seed growing luck in the future. Of course I'll have to grow further seeds again before the patch, unless Turbine introduces another way to grow seeds I don't see how farming skill could be advanced. So I got my work mapped out for me before the nerf patch hits me. Leveling my character meanwhile is on hold.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:37 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO Journal by mbp

Many of my readers are bloggers themselves, which is why we call this a "blogosphere", in which ideas bounce around back and forth between writers. It is often impossible to say who started a specific concept or idea. So I'm not claiming that me writing MMORPG journal entries is in any way original. One of my readers, mbp, is also running a LotRO journal. I want to quote something about a LotRO "feature" from there, because it already annoyed me, and I haven't written about it yet: "One feature that I sorely miss is the ability to adjust the size of the user interface (menus, text and icons) independently of the screen resolution. I have a 1280x1024 pixel LCD monitor and if I use a lower resolution the image seems blurred as it tries to stretch to fill the screen. Unfortunately at 1280 x 1024 the on screen interface is too small for my liking but I cannot find a way to get it bigger. I now have a choice of blurry 1024x768 or squinty 1280x1024. It is quite possible I am overlooking something here - it seems like a glaring omission to me. I imagine people with 1600x1200 LCDs must be really suffering on this one.

You might be aware that I just bought a new high-end gaming computer with a dual core processor, more RAM than necessary, and a Geforce 8800 GTS 640 MB graphics card. So given my horsepower of course I tried to get the max out of it when playing LotRO and initially turned up the resolution to 1600 x 1200. And as mbp writes it is impossible to play LotRO at that resolution, because your user-interface becomes far too tiny. You *can* increase the chat font size, but not all the other fonts (like the quest journal) and user-interface elements. So I had to compromise at 1280 x 1024 resolution, where I still can read everything, but the game isn't too low in resolution. World of Warcraft is *much* better in that respect, having a scaleable (and fully modable) user-interface.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:35 PM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Gnomersy on better tradeskills

One of my readers, Gnomersy, took me up on my challenge to discuss a better tradeskill system. For technical reasons, and for being a bit too long for a regular comment, I'm posting his e-mail in this thread, and I'll comment it. Gnomersy writes:

Tobold issued a challenge to come up with a better trade skill system, so here is my attempt :P Similar to Tobold, I'll look at both the profitability and the crafting elements in a profession.

Turning firstly to profit, I haven't check this but I'm pretty sure that if you compare the vendor prices for ores to crafted items, you will find that the loss is small because the vendor doesn't pay much for ores. It is only when you compare AH prices for the ore that you realize the huge loss you are taking when crafting useless low level items. I don't believe increasing the amount vendors pay for crafted items is the answer because that will only drive up the AH price for ore (because now I will be willing to pay more for ore because I'm going to get more back from the vendor).

The obvious answer to this to make the crafted items valuable so players are willing buy them. In my opinion, the biggest problem is not the quality of the item but the amount you have to make. There are a number of low level green items which aren't bad for their level, but if everyone makes 20 of them to level their profession, supply will far outstrip demand (don't forget there will be dropped items as well).

One solution (which I will develop later) would be to introduce more variety in crafted items ie rather than just + stam pants, be able to craft + stam/str/agi/int/etc gloves, boots etc. That way, rather than everyone making 20 of the same pants, people can make different armor pieces with different bonuses depending on the market. Even so, if you look at the supply of items (items made in the course of leveling a profession plus dropped items and compare it to the demand (ie no. of players with an item inferior to that on offer) supply will generally be greater than demand). With a wide range of quality craftable items there is a possibility (albeit small) for a (very) patient and observant player to make a profit.

On the other side of the equation you can increase the demand. By this I don't mean more players because players will take up professions thereby increasing the supply side. The way to increase demand for crafted items would be to either make mobs drop less, create more slots to put armor (different slots for left and right boots LOL) or take away the ability to repair thereby forcing people to replace their armor. All of these would have dramatic (and possibility undesirable) impact on game play and therefore not valid options. In any event, after about level 20, the market for equipment is actually quite small. I have leveled a warlock all the way to 70 without buying any equipment from the AH except getting all the < lvl 10 greens I could get my hands on at the start. Of course my warrior would not have been able to get away with using a VC quest reward staff at level 50 but my point is that between quest rewards and dungeon there really is not be a big need to constantly go to the AH to upgrade your gear. In conclusion, I believe that there is insufficient demand for intermediate items (of non-consumable nature) for leveling a profession to be profitable.

I believe the raw materials will always be more valuable (from a gold point of view) than crafted items because the raw material will give something a crafted item will not - skill points. When you consider higher level characters power leveling a profession driving up the prices of ore, intermediate crafted items will never be able to compete. As such the only efficient way to level a crafting profession to take two gathering professions and switch over when you have buckets of money at level 70. There is nothing you could have made at the lower levels that you could not have bought (except maybe for engineering).

I don't think there is anything fundamentally wrong making profession leveling a money sink. As Tobold has previously posted, in WoW money = time. So essentially, the cost of leveling a profession can be seen as an investment/commitment of time in the hope of getting some cool rewards at the end.

I have only played WoW so I have not had any personal experience in the mini-games that Tobold refers to. However, from reading his previous posts, the mini-games can come in two formats. Those which are essentially time sinks to make it harder to bot or go afk during the crafting process. I don't particularly like the sound of this because I play WoW to kill mobs not do puzzles. Secondly, there are those mini games that link your success (with an element of randomness) at the mini game with the quality of the item. In this case there is essentially a chance that you will make a higher quality item that will sell better (because there is less supply). To me it seems like a lazy way to try to make the profession interesting and profitable (by leaving it to chance). I may be wrong, but I guess the end result would be that most people end up getting good at the mini-games and most items that are produced are of a similar value/quality anyway. Again you have an excess supply.

As Tobold identified, the other purpose to take up a profession is to craft items. I think the recent changes by Blizzard have been a step in the right direction in that there are now items worth crafting relative to effort required to make the item and loot that is available via drops (Did anyone manage to make Nightfall, the epic axe that required exalted from thorium brotherhood and a ton of mats that were MC drops?). As a tailor, the BOP side of the house is good, but won't make me any money because I can't sell them (I can sell my specialist cloths - but that's hardly an exciting).

If you look at the loot tables there are maybe 5 BOE items in tailoring that are on par with dungeon drops/rep rewards etc. These are sure money makers. To get them you have to grind until one falls into your lap or have enough money to buy one off the AH when it pops up. I don't have a problem with this system per se because getting these high level recipes should involve some effort and investment. (Maybe an epic quest where you can chose one of the recipes at the end might work as well - particularly if there are a large number of legitimately good plans to choose from). What I would like to see is more of these BOE items. Using tailoring as an example, cloth wearers have 8 slots that can be equipped with cloth gear. Broadly speaking cloth armor can be categorized as spell damage, spell crit and healing (putting aside cloaks that can be used by all classes so +AP, +RAP, tanking and other stats would also be desirable). Surely, Blizzard can come up with at least another 10 craftable items that are on par with dungeon drops. That's without even considering resistances sets. Having more variety will allow more tailors to have their own niche which will give some meaning and purpose to the profession. Apply this across all professions there will be quite a few very valuable plans around for people to find/buy/sell/trade. With enough rarity and variety in recipes, crafters will be able to distinguish themselves from other crafters with their recipes. This is a concept that Tobold has previously touched upon. The down side is that the AH will be have lots of epics (they won't be cheap if Blizzard gets mat balance right). The hardcore may be unhappy because you could deck yourself out in full epics without setting foot in a single raid. But, if an epic cost 500g each, it will still cost you about 4000g to deck yourself out. Very few people would actually go down that route - and so what if they did? With the current level of epics, having full epics is hardly god mode. If the plans were rare enough, they could be spread across a number of different craftsmen so you would still have to track them down. It is unlikely they would all be just sitting on the AH because the items would be too valuable just to make have constantly up on the AH. Most people would buy a few to round out their characters while getting most from drops. I also believe raid sets should be better to encourage raiding.

Additional thought could also be put into the mats. For tailoring at least, you essentially have to grind elementals. I'm in favor of having to get mats that only drop off dungeon bosses, so long as there is a reasonable supply (chromatic breastplate anyone?).

If the end game is about improving your character by increments, you can make it a lot more interesting by offering many different but moderately difficult ways to improve your character. I believe crafting is something that can do that - I have a crap helm that I want upgrade. I could kill boss X a few times in the hope it drops or I could kill boss Y for the mats a crafted alternative, or I could grind a bit for the money to just buy said crafted alternative. In about /played 8 hours I have a better helm one way or other. The effort would be roughly equivalent to that required to gain a level. Alternatively, I could raid and get the tiered sets. Even raiders would find the increased range of crafted epics useful - a warrior can have a tier 4/5/6 tanking set and crafted DPS set. Those who like off the beaten path talent specs will be able to itemize in a similar off the beaten path manner. You would have so much more control over how to set up your character. There might even be a chance that our toons will actually look different from each other (ok I'm reaching here :P) The 1-70 leveling curve Blizzard created is an addictive thing of beauty. If those principles can be applied to endgame character gearing, the endgame will be just as addictive.

Gnomersy correctly states that it is the AH price of ores that is so high that it makes crafting unprofitable. As I said that is a direct result of gathering requiring a lot more effort than crafting. You can simply solve that by making gathering easier (faster spawns for example) and the crafting more elaborate, requiring at least more attention, or even some skill.

I don't think that reducing the loot drops to make crafting items more profitable would go down well with the general population. Lots of people prefer looting mobs to crafting. But Gnomersy has identified the problem correctly, crafters making low-level items in large quantities just to skill up. A better solution might be a way to "practice" crafting, SWG had that if I remember correctly. You get the same skill gain from a practice item than for a real item, but you need less materials, and you don't get a useable item for sale at the end. You could get a "grey" practice item for sale to vendor instead, to balance the cost.

On the number of craftable items, Gnomersy is right on the money. This is one of the improvements in the LotRO tradeskill system over the WoW tradeskill system. For example as tailor you craft complete armor sets of the same level, and not getting first a recipe for level 5 boots, then for level 6 gloves, then for level 8 leggings, and so on. Making a complete set of 6 items gives you a better chance to sell them than making the same item 6 times for the same skill gain.

One reason why I insist to make crafting more interactive is gold farmers and bots. If crafting is both profitable and non-interactive, you can easily automate it, and just have a bot crafting stuff 24/7 to make money. The exact system how to craft could take on many different forms, but it should be about as complicated as the combat system, so that it remains accessible. Making items is only part of the equation, giving players an alternative way to spend time in their favorite virtual world might be even more important. Lots of people want to be an adventurer, but that doesn't mean that nobody should be allowed to be a full-time blacksmith. Games like Ultima Online or Star Wars Galaxies had people voluntarily choosing to become full-time crafters, setting up a shop, building up a business, and that can be as exciting and fun as killing dragons. The important point is to make different activities equally viable, to get some interesting interaction. Crafters craft equipment for adventurers, and adventurers provide them with rare recipes and looted crafting components. A world that has different types of players is a lot more interesting than a world in which everybody does the same.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:30 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
First LotRO patch

No LotRO journal today, for the simple reason that I couldn't play last night. Tuesday is maintenance / patch day in Europe for LotRO. And this first maintenance / patch since the pre-order access started didn't go well. Apparently people were rubber-banding all over the place when they brought the servers up again, and so they had to do an emergency shutdown. Current estimate is that the servers might come back up at noon today, more than 24 hours late, and even that isn't certain. Not a good start. Especially as some of us paid extra for a pre-order box, basically paying for the 10-day head-start, and every day of downtime hits us extra hard.

I'm not sure if a patch broke something, Turbine is talking about "database hardware issues". There are no patch notes for Europe, but there *are* patch notes for the US, where a patch is due today:

The following changes have been made in the April 18 patch:

Economy/Crafting:
Item damage upon defeat will no longer occur until the player reaches level 10. Once you hit level 10 all bets are off, but you get a free ride til then! Keep in mind that item wear still occurs during combat.
The repair cost has been lowered on some uncommon/rare jewelry, weapons, shields, and clothing.
Signature, Elite, and Boss monsters drop more money.
Pipeweed seed processing recipes now only give out 1 seed instead of 3, like they were always supposed to. (Farmers, please drop the pitchforks! There are changes coming to better your plight. More details to follow.)

Yes, making profit with farming was declared to be a bug and was "fixed". As the US server pre-order access started 2 weeks earlier than the European one, the US has a level cap of 15, which the European servers don't have. And as many players already hit that level cap, they were all trying to advance their characters in the only possible way: making money. Somebody on the US forum calculated that farming bandits was already at level 15 exactly as profitable per hour than farming pipe-weed, but that is only the case if there is only one player farming them. Farming mobs has diminishing returns the more players are around, farming pipe-weed doesn't. And so hundreds of players were growing pipe-weed, and Turbine decided to stop them with this patch.

Of course this change throws out the baby with the bathwater. It doesn't just reduce profits, but makes growing anything unprofitable, even Sweet Galenas at master expert level. The profit you used to get per field was less than the new added cost of having to buy more seeds. Furthermore this "fix" totally breaks the only way to get past artisan level in farming. To get past artisan you need to "cross-breed" seeds. Remember me talking about the rare, non-buyable, Sweet Lobelia seeds I had troubles multiplying? To cross-breed and skill up past artisan apparently you need hundreds of these seeds. And with one field now needing 6 seeds to grow and returning between 0 and 6 seeds, you can never get more seeds than what you started with. With no way to multiply seeds, you'd need to find all these hundreds of seeds you need to advance in rare treasure chests, which is bloody impossible!

I can only hope that in a future patch they are adding some sort of new recipe to multiply seeds. That would make it possible again to make money, but with twice the work, first growing the seeds, then growing the pipe-weed. Thus profits per hour would be much lower than hunting mobs, but at least you wouldn't lose money with everything. Farming is officially defined by Turbine as a gathering skill, and at least gathering skills should be profitable. Imagine if repairing your mining tool after each ore node would cost you more than the value of the ore, that would pretty much kill all metalworking. This is currently the case with farming and cooking. Lots of vegetables can either be bought from a vendor or grown by farming. But somebody on the US forums calculated how growing mushrooms cost him more money per mushroom than buying them, which completely destroys the raison d'etre of farming.

Well, at least they relieved the situation with the repair costs. Me not having an income any more from farming, maybe I'll be more annoyed by repair costs now. Apparently repairing magic items cost so much, that some people preferred wearing non-magic armor, which isn't really in the intent of a MMORPG. But all in all the patch notes leave a distinct impression that the game economy isn't balanced yet, which is a bit disappointing.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:48 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO review on CVG

With open betas and pre-order access periods it becomes hard to tell when a game is actually released. So we'll have to forgive CVG to already post a first review of LotRO. They give it a 9.2 score, an "Elite" medal, and call it the "next big MMORPG contender". Hmmm, I should have copyrighted that expression. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 8:20 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft on German TV

For the small part of my readership able to understand German, I have a rare example of intelligent TV about video games. A half-hour documentary on World of Warcraft, describing the game, tracing its roots to pen & paper roleplaying and previous games like UO and EQ, and describing the social effects in a balanced and mature manner. So instead of hysterical "WoW destroyed my marriage" we get a futurologist speculating what the fact that WoW destroyed your marriage said about the quality of your marriage in the first place.

The film even explains concepts like tanking, and shows a Blackwing Lair raid. But also touches on issues like powerleveling or Chinese gold farmers, again in a non-hysterical way. The film neither falls into the "Second Life" hype trap of declaring this to be how the world looks in the future, nor does it spew the usual anti video game hatred. It shows how the game is played, in a necessarily condensed, but realistic way. Very well done.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:09 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
A better tradeskill system

You might have noticed that doing crafting and tradeskills is often something I explore early when starting a new game. I love crafting. Unfortunately in most MMORPGs the crafting system is badly designed, and ends up being less and less used. This is because apparently game designers design tradeskill systems without even taking into account the most fundamental basics of economics. Lets have a look at what is wrong with tradeskill systems in MMORPGs, and how we could design a better system.

To see what's wrong, you first need to define what right is, what the goal of a tradeskill system is. A tradeskill system in a MMORPG has two goals: A) It gives players something else to do than just killing monsters all the time. And B) it offers an alternative way to advance your character, focused on gaining money and items instead of xp and levels.

Now this second part, offering a way to gain virtual gold and items, is often conflicting with the alternative of gaining gold and items by killing monsters. Some people argue that crafting should not be allowed to be profitable, because otherwise players would have a way to earn money without risk, offering a better reward / risk ratio than adventuring. That argument is obviously hogwash. There is no risk involved in farming mobs, the gold farmers carefully select targets that don't pose any risk for them to be killed. Especially bots are farming gold without any risk, unless they are on a PvP server in WoW where concerned players of the other faction sometimes kill them.

Risk doesn't really exist in a MMORPG, because even if you are killed, that "death" only translates into a loss of time. Time is the only real scarce resource in a MMORPG. Therefore instead of looking at reward / risk ratios, you have to look at reward / time ratios. More precisely you have to look at two reward / time ratios: The instantaneous one, how much gold you are making per hour right now, and a cumulative one, how much profit you make with one activity over the complete life of your character.

A level 1 character in a MMORPG usually starts without a single copper piece, and earns his first virtual currency by killing level 1 mobs. Killing level 1 mobs only gives very little money, but it *is* profitable. The higher the mob level, the higher the profit. Depending on the way that the game handles repair costs, you might make a loss if you die repeatedly trying to kill monsters that are too high for you. But generally there are always some mobs somewhere in the game which are extremely unlikely to ever kill you, and which you can "farm" for gold, whatever level you are. Lifetime earnings are always positive, and growing faster with time, as you level up.

Ideally a tradeskill system would work in a similar way. You start crafting the lowest possible items, and earn a few copper pieces with that. You also earn skill points, "level up" your tradeskill, and your earnings grow with time. Curiously game designers never thought of this simple system. Instead in most existing MMORPGs, crafting *costs* you money. You create items at a loss, paying more for the ingredients than what the crafted item is worth. Even if you gather the resources yourself, you still pay an "opportunity cost", because you could either have spent the same time farming mobs, or you could have sold the gathered resources instead of using them for crafting. In World of Warcraft the price of resources on the auction house is nearly always higher than the value of the items you can make with those resources, thus there are very few opportunities to buy resources, craft, and sell the product. My WoW herbalist / alchemist often gathered herbs, sold the herbs, and bought the potions he needed in spite of being able to make them himself. Making the potions myself would have destroyed value.

So if crafting loses you money, why do people craft? Well, point A) still applies, it is something else to do. And if you consider lifetime profits instead of momentary profits, at the end of the scale crafting can be profitable. At the highest skill levels, with the rarest recipes, you might be able to make good money by selling your goods to players in World of Warcraft. As I already reported, in Lord of the Rings Online you can even make money by selling to vendors if you reach a certain skill level of farming, although you lose money before that.

In most cases selling crafted goods to an NPC vendor occurs huge losses. Game developers often work based on the ideas of other game developers, from their experience of earlier games, and the silly idea that you shouldn't be able to profit by buying resources from vendors, crafting them into a product, and selling that product back to the vendor, is unfortunately very solidly established in the world of MMORPG design. But this concept is based on the flawed assumption that players will be able to get more money for their crafted goods from other players than from NPC vendors. Unfortunately this is only true for the rarest of crafted goods. The way tradeskill systems are designed, everybody skilling up needs to craft a large number of lower skill items. That tends to totally flood the market with that item, making it impossible to sell at a profit. As the immediate purpose for the crafter is not the profit, but the skill-up, he is often willing to sell his crafted good at a loss.

A better tradeskill system would be profitable from the start, just like farming mobs is profitable from the start. The trick is to make crafting just earn a handful of coppers at the lower levels, just like farming mobs at the lower levels only gives little money. Over the complete lifetime the profits from crafting should be roughly equivalent to the profits from farming easy mobs. Thus after 50 hours of crafting you should earn about the same per hour as you would after 50 hours of leveling up and killing monsters. And that profit should come from selling ordinary items to a vendor, without having to rely on other players buying the goods. Now when adventuring, if you don't just farm easy mobs, but take an extra effort, for example by finding a group and going to a dangerous dungeon, you are likely to get much better rewards. In crafting the equivalent would be a way to craft rarer items that other players would actually want to buy. That would require extra effort, for getting the recipe or gathering the resources, but would be potentially more profitable, by selling to players instead of vendors.

Once the economics of crafting is fixed, the next important point is fixing crafting as an alternative way of spending your time in the game. In very many games, from EQ1 via DAoC to WoW and LotRO, crafting consists of pressing one button and waiting for some progress bar to finish. That has a number of negative effects: First of all it is boring, especially if the progress bar is slow and you have to craft many items. For example processing a farmed plant in LotRO needs 15 seconds. But as one field can yield up to 12 plants, and you usually plant several fields before going to the workbench for processing, you might end up having to wait 15 minutes for all the plants to be processed, without any interaction from you as player. You can't move during that time, you can only chat. Needless to say that players in those situations start to go away from keyboard, read a book, or watch TV. I've even been playing WoW on my laptop to check auctions there while my LotRO character was crafting. That is obviously less than optimal.

A better tradeskill system makes crafting a more interactive process. Very simple interaction exists for example in WoW fishing or the growing of plants in LotRO. Even better interaction exists in games like A Tale in the Desert or Puzzle Pirates, where crafting is a real mini-game. EQ2 and Vanguard have crafting mini-games, with the EQ2 one being more fun than the Vanguard one. An ideal game has the crafting process being an interesting mini-game or puzzle, with your skill in the mini-game affecting either time to completion or the quality of the result. The crafting process *should* take a certain amount of time, because if you could make several items simultaneously on a single short click, you could never balance the reward / time ratio. But it would be a lot better if that time was spent interactively, instead of just having to wait. The more interactive crafting is, the less of a problem you have with people trying to "bot" crafting to make money while afk.

With crafting in WoW being relatively effortless, the limiting factor for the crafting process becomes the gathering of the resources. Different games have different resource gathering systems. Unfortunately some of these systems are unnecessarily competitive. Herb and ore nodes respawn relatively slowly, thus requiring a lot of traveling around to gather them. And the more people are looking for these nodes the further the returns of gathering are diminishing, driving up the prices. It is hard to say how this will work out in the long term in LotRO, but right now resource nodes seem relatively abundant. By far the best resource gathering system I've ever played was in Star Wars Galaxies, where resources shifted only once per week, but then you went on an interesting resource hunt, using a scanner to pinpoint the highest concentrations, and testing many different spots for the quality of the resources. Then you just had to plunk down your harvesters and come by once in a while to collect. With resource fields being relatively large, even if somebody else was faster than you to put his harvester on the highest concentration point, you still could plant yours next to his and just get a few percent less yield of the same high quality resource. Advances in computer graphics can make gathering more interesting. For example one of the good points in Vanguard was felling trees to get wood, because there was actually a falling tree animation.

Gathering can be fun, depending on the system and the scarcity of the resource nodes. So our better tradeskill system might well have resource gathering as a component for at least some of the crafts. I'm a lot less in favor of using crafting components that drop rarely from monsters. In EQ1 you gathered metal by killing the goblins that carried it, and wood by killing treants. As we defined the goal of crafting to be a different occupation than killing, a drop component beats the purpose. I'm more in favor of vendor-sold components, at least for the simple items you just make to skill up. They have the advantage that it is very easy to design crafting profits per hour, if the resources are sold by vendors, you know how long crafting takes, and the product is sold to vendors again.

Finally I would like to remove some traditional restrictions from our better tradeskill system. One restriction is often how many crafts you are allowed to have. This wouldn't be so bad if crafts didn't often depend upon each other, one craft needing components made by the other. That is supposed to get people to work together, but most players prefer crafting as a soloing activity, and hate running after others for components. Thus restrictions just lead to people making several crafting alts and spending stupid amounts of time on sending goods between them. If we design a better tradeskill system, which is interesting to play, and where the rewards get better the more time you spend in it, there is no reason not to allow players to take several crafts. Thus they could either specialize and become very good in one trade, or be more of a jack of all trades, literally. The other restriction I'd like to remove, which exists for example in WoW, but not LotRO, is the connection between your crafting skill and your adventuring level. Again it beats the purpose of an alternative to tell somebody that he has to level up to 60 to be allowed to craft pass a certain skill level.

In the end it all depends on how well all of this is implemented. When people talk for example about the great potential of Vanguard, one aspect of that is there is an obvious design idea of allowing players to advance in different activities, adventuring, crafting, and diplomacy. That is a great idea, the more alternative ways you have to spend your time in a MMORPG, the longer you will play it. But for this to work, the different systems need to be roughly equally interesting and rewarding. Given the choice between an interesting adventuring system which gives lots of rewards, and a crafting system with long wait times that is losing money, only the most diehard crafting fans will spend their time crafting. None of the existing MMORPGs is anywhere near having a really good crafting system, although several of them have sub-features of crafting that are very good. It really is time to make a game with a better tradeskill system.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:22 PM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO Journal - 17-April-2007

I was reading the LotRO forums, and several people there were loudly complaining about the high repair costs. With several other players responding that their repair costs are very low to insignificant. So what's going on? It turns out that LotRO has a hidden death penalty, in the form of repair costs.

Now I'm a very careful player, and as long as I solo I rarely die. I observed that by playing like that the repair costs are relatively low, not having a big impact on my finances. But you know how things can go, you take on a quest, underestimate the danger, you die, and then instead of doing the sensible thing and running away you suddenly get stubborn and try again and again, dying several times in the process. I did that once and ended up with a nasty 20-silver repair bill, after doing a quest that paid only 3 silver or so. Obviously if you play LotRO in a hotheaded way, dying often, you'll run into serious money problems. As long as you are aware about this form of death penalty, this isn't such a bad thing. LotRO has no xp loss or xp debt on dying, and only a very minor form of rez sickness, which only becomes significant if you die repeatedly in a short time. You don't even have to run as a ghost or otherwise to your corpse, you come out instantly alive and fit at the next graveyard. So having at least one form of death penalty in the form of repair costs is probably necessary, otherwise there are no consequences of failure.

My hobbit farmer is still making money growing Sweet Galenas pipe-weed at master expert level, with the mastery option turned on. But then I went and blew most of that money on my other two yeoman crafts: cooking and tailoring. Tailoring is interesting in being more typical of the LotRO tradeskills. Tailoring uses lots of leather, which comes from light hides dropped by various furry animals. You need a forester to turn the hides into boiled leather. But LotRO doesn't have a level limit on tradeskills, so I just sent a dwarf alt through the dwarven starting area until he got level 6 and finished the intro instance. Then I made this dwarf a woodsman, so he now has the forester profession to boil my leather. And as woodworker he can make campfire kits, which I need for cooking on the hobbit. My hobbit already had a lot of light hides from his advanced wolf-slayer deed, but then bought even more of them cheaply on the auction house, sent them all to the dwarf and got them back processed. I love how LotRO's mail arrives instantly, without the stupid 1 hour delay that WoW has. So now I got the mats, how does tailoring work?

First you need to turn the boiled leather into leather pads and leather bindings. These you combine either with vendor bought bolts of cloth into light armor, or with boiled leather into medium armor. As apprentice tailor you have one series of recipes for light, and one series of recipes for medium armor. But you can get another series each for light and medium armor from dropped purple recipes. As the drop rate is relatively high (compared to WoW where recipes drop very rarely), it is easy enough to pick up the complete series of recipes at reasonable prices from the auction house. Now once you are master apprentice you get the mastery option. That means you can add a purple monster body part, like a "dirty bat claw" to your recipe and have a 50% chance of a critical success making an even better item. Again the mob body parts drop often enough to be priced reasonably on the auction house. So already at the apprentice tier you have 4 different levels of light armor, and 4 different levels of medium armor you can make: trainer recipe with and without critical success, and drop recipe with and without critical success, with the drop recipe items being better than the trainer recipe items. So now I'm running around in a mix of yellow drop recipe cloth armor and purple critical successes.

But all in all getting there cost me a fortune, for the hides, the recipes, the added mob body part component, and the relatively expensive NPC vendor bought cloth component. And all this for armor with a minimum level of 7, which I'm now replacing with the quest reward items I get at level 13. So as a way to equip yourself tailoring is far too expensive. There is no way to make money by selling items to vendors, as the armor you produce sells for less than even just the cost of the vendor bought cloth. Without the money I made farming I could never have afforded my tailored armor. And it gets worse. To get past apprentice and into journeyman tailoring, you need medium hides. These drop from level 18ish mobs, but the armor you can tailor from these is minimum level 10. So anyone who can gather the medium hides is probably already wearing better armor than the best armor he can tailor with the hides. So right now I'm not impressed with tailoring. The only nice feature of tailoring is that in spite of the better tailored armor being yellow or even purple, with magical bonuses and everything, it isn't bind on equip. Thus when I got a quest reward replacing some tailored armor I was wearing, I was able to hand down my old armor to a lower level guild mate. Which is nicer than having to vendor it for a fraction of the cost to make it. I guess my purple critical success items might stay in the economy for quite a while, until somebody accidentally vendors them.

Cooking is also a tradeskill that destroys large amounts of money. Many ingredients are vendor-bought, and the resulting product sells only for a fraction of the cost. I didn't even reach apprentice proficiency yet, but I got close. Up to now I've been mainly growing pipe-weed when farming, but ultimately I hope to grow more vegetables, and concentrate on the recipes that I can cook using mainly grown vegetables, and few bought ingredients. Up to now I only cooked 10 hard biscuits and 10 eggs and onions to do a quest in Bree twice, which brings me back to farming:

In farming I had up to now only used the recipes I received automatically when skilling up. But there are other recipes being sold by the farmer vendors. For some of these recipes the farmer vendor also sells the seeds. For other recipes the seeds can't be bought. One of these recipes where you can't get seeds is another pipe-weed, called Sweet Lobelia. As different pipe-weeds blow different smoke rings when being smoked, having exotic pipe-weeds is of interest from a role-playing point of view. This is purely for show, smoking has no positive effect on your character stats, probably to get the game past the censors. :) Sweet Lobelia seeds apparently can be found in supply crates, a kind of treasure chest, but I'm not high level enough to go to regions where supply crates appear in monster camps. In the Shire I only found backpacks, which work the same way, but give lower level treasures. The only other way to get Sweet Lobelia seeds is to do a quest where you hand in 5 hard biscuits and 5 eggs and onions, created by cooking, and receive 6 seeds, just enough for one field of Sweet Lobelia. So I did that quest, and managed to get 3 more seeds from the auction house. But unfortunately I wasn't lucky with my Sweet Lobelia fields, and never got a critical success producing lots of poor plants, thus lots of seeds. I was taking care to grow the fields without the mastery option, because apparently then your chance to get poor plants is slightly higher. But I only got 3 poor plants once, and then a series of 2 and 1 poor plants per field, below the rate of self-replacement of the seeds, until I ran out. So I cooked another batch of biscuits and eggs and onions, sent them to my dwarf, had the dwarf travel to Bree, and did the quest again. I also bought more seeds from the auction house. Right now I have 11 seeds, as soon as I get at 12th seed I'll try again. I hope that by starting with enough seeds for 2 fields I'm more likely to keep going until I get lucky and multiply my seeds.

But first I'll need to do another day of Sweet Galenas mastery farming, to replenish my money. I spent several hundred silver on tailoring and cooking, without much to show for it. If I didn't have farming, I wouldn't know how to pay for all of this.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:12 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Unfair to compare?

I have a subscription to a magazine on PC games, and since World of Warcraft became a best-selling PC game the print magazines also write about MMORPGs. In February that magazine reviewed Vanguard, and gave it a pretty abysmal score of 62 out of 100, with WoW having over 90. And in the text of that review the reviewer made some references and comparisons with World of Warcraft. So in the last issue there was a reader's letter complaining about the low score and the comparison. The reader stated that Vanguard was for a different audience than WoW, and couldn't be compared. And it shouldn't receive bad marks for features like corpse runs and endless grind, because Vanguard was for people who loved those features. The reader complained that comparing Vanguard with WoW was "unfair".

In response the editor said something that I very much agree with: You can't review a MMORPG in 2007 without comparing it to World of Warcraft. A game doesn't exist in a vacuum, it is part of a genre, and has to be compared to the standards of that genre and the best games in that genre. Now we can argue whether WoW is "the best" MMORPG, but that is just semantics. I think we can all agree that World of Warcraft at least sets a standard in the MMORPG genre, both in matters of gameplay as in matters of technical execution. Depending on your point of view World of Warcraft has "dumbed down" or "made more accessible" gameplay, which is a major reason of why it could attract so many players who never played another MMORPG before. And WoW undoubtedly raised the bar in technical execution. Yes, it still isn't perfect, there are some bugs, some lag, and some server problems. But compared to what the industry standards were before, the technical execution of WoW is much improved, and everyone now expects games to be as good.

Personally I don't give scores in game reviews, because a good part of a review is subjective. If Vanguard in its current form had come out in 2003, after EQ1, but before WoW, it would have received better scores. But even compared with EQ1 Vanguard has a lot of bugs, and visibly unfinished areas. It is prettier than EQ1, and more accessible. But judged by the standards of 2007 it fails to impress. It is too hardcore for the average player in the now much enlarged MMORPG audience. And it's technical execution is below current standards. Even in a parallel universe where WoW didn't exist, you'd compare Vanguard to something else, for example Lord of the Rings Online. And how ever you are giving scores in game reviews, there is no way that Vanguard would have ended up with a higher score than LotRO. But Vanguard would probably have scored higher in a world without WoW.

Comparing Lord of the Rings Online to World of Warcraft reveals another aspect of the story on comparisons. Up to now LotRO meets the standards for accessibility, as well as the standards for technical execution, that WoW set. Somebody who hasn't played WoW can start LotRO and enjoy it right from the start. LotRO is a good game in its own right, with or without comparison. But Lord of the Rings Online doesn't exist in a vacuum either. The comparison to WoW is more difficult, because it is more similar. If I had to give scores, I would choose a rough scale, and then give both games a 9 out of 10. But the temptation for game reviewers is to give one game a slightly higher score than the other, to make a statement on which of the two games is "better". And, game reviews working as they do, the probable result of that is that WoW will "win" this comparison, with LotRO being docked some points for being less original. "Less original" is the other side of the coin "meeting industry standards". Again LotRO would have scored higher in a parallel universe without WoW.

So should Sigil and Turbine wail loudely about their unlucky fate of living in a universe where World of Warcraft exists? Just the opposite, because they also profit handsomely from WoW. A rising tide lifts all boats, and in this case the tide is World of Warcraft. WoW increased the total MMORPG market size, especially in the USA and Europe. WoW famously sold more copies in Europe on the first day than the previous estimate of the total market size for that genre was. Between all the bad news from Vanguard you get to hear that it has 200,000 subcribers, which by pre-WoW standards would have made it a major game. The US LotRO open beta filled all of its 1 million beta slots, although its hard to say how that will translate into sales on release day and beyond. It is impossible to predict how many subscribers LotRO will end up with, but again it will be a large number in comparison to pre-WoW days.

Behind stable or rising subscription numbers of a MMORPG is a constant coming and going of players. Even if WoW is still growing slowly, millions of players have already left it, replaced by new players at a greater rate. Having acquired a taste for the genre, many ex-WoW players are now a lot more open to playing another MMORPG than they were before they played WoW. So while the games of 2007 might be losing review score points in the comparison with World of Warcraft, they are gaining access to a larger pool of possible players. And in the end money talks louder than review scores.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:20 PM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
LotRO Journal - 16-April-2007

The European pre-order access to Lord of the Rings Online started this weekend. Turbine had sent out e-mail to everyone with the pre-order key, telling them to not even try before the 14th, but then cleverly opened both the account page and the servers already a full day earlier. This avoided the "bursting door" effect, where everybody tries to create and account and log on at the same time, crashing the servers. Very smooth move.

So this was it, the opportunity to create my first character who wouldn't be deleted for release. Time to breath deeply, and think what exactly I want from LotRO. Now I am a "middle-class" player, somewhere between casual and hardcore. I'm playing MMORPGs since the last millenium, starting with Ultima Online, but World of Warcraft was the first game where I hit the level cap and joined a raiding guild. That was a fun experience, but a bit too stressful in the long run. One major reason for me to play LotRO is that I'm burned out from WoW. And I certainly don't want to find myself in a situation in a year or so where I'm raiding the witchking of Angmar every weekend, with a small Balrog raid thrown in on Wednesdays. So the obvious idea with LotRO is to approach the game in a different way.

The idea how to play it differently came from an unexpected corner, the guildmaster of a previous guild of mine. Now I left that guild because of guild drama and a big fight I had with some of the more hardcore members. But I remained in friendly relationship with several of their members. And it turns out that some of them, especially the not-so-hardcore ones, planned to start playing LotRO on a role-playing server. Now there is something I never tried. I'm playing pen and paper Dungeons & Dragons, and other RPGs, since the early 80's, and still have a campaign running every two weeks. But I never role-played in a MMORPG. In fact the acronym doesn't describe what most people are doing. It should be MMOG, or even MMORG, for massively multiplayer online raiding game. The RP part is considered fringe among most players. Time to join that fringe. So I made a character on a role-playing LotRO server, the same that my old guild is on. As the guildmaster was visibly uncomfortable with the idea of me joining my old guild again, which is understandable due to the complicated multi-game structure, I decided that to get into role-playing I'd better join a role-playing guild.

So here I am, technically a hobbit minstrel, but role-playing more in the direction of a hobbit farmer. I gave my avatar grey hair, wrinkles, and the pot-belly of a man just past his middle age. Still strong enough to take up his pitchfork and his lute against the menaces of wolves, goblins, and the like. But more interested in his farm and a good meal than in hunting dragons.

I chose the minstrel class because I played all classes to level 6 to 10 in the beta, and minstrel was the one I liked the best. He fights in a way that is totally different from anything I've played before. He has ballads, and these both damage a targeted opponent, as well as buffing my character for a short duration. And these ballads are sorted in different tiers, with the restriction that you can only sing a ballad of a higher tier if you have one of the buffs of the lower tier on you. In addition to that he has melee moves and battle cries, plus healing spells. A well-rounded character, which plays very good in solo, but with the healing is obviously also a good choice for groups.

So over the weekend I leveled my new hobbit minstrel up from level 1 to 13. That involved doing lots of quests in the Shire. The Shire is a relatively peaceful place, so there are a lot of quests that involve more running around and exploring than fighting. That suited me just fine. Especially interesting are the quests of a new type, where you have to carry something somewhere, within a time-limit, and while avoiding NPC hobbits that want to intercept you. For example you can transport mail between the different hobbit villages, but you have to avoid nosey hobbits. If you get too close to them, the quest fails. So you need to run over the fields, but without getting into combat with the wildlife. And you can't cross streams by swimming either when you are carrying something.

Of course there are "kill ten rats" quests too, although in this case its shrews, not rats. Or wolves, spiders, goblins, et cetera. Up to now all these kill quests were relatively short, with high drop rates whenever I needed to collect items from mobs, often 100%. But if you are feeling like killing stuff, there are several traits that are earned for example by killing 60 wolves, or bandits, or goblins, or spiders. So I already spent some time killing wolves beyond of what I needed for the quest, to get their light hides (you don't need skinning in LotRO to collect these) and to fulfill the wolf-slayer and advanced wolf-slayer deed. The wolf-slayer deed gave me the right to call myself "fur-cutter" as a title, if I wanted to, while the advanced wolf-slayer gave me a trait, which is equivalent to a talent in WoW. You get slots to put traits in by leveling, and then choose among all the traits you have earned by deeds. Besides "kill 60 monsters" deeds, there are also deeds and traits related to you using your abilities a certain number of times, doing a number of quests in the same region, or visiting a series of points of interest.

Most quests are soloable, but there are a few fellowship quests. I failed to get to level 10 without dying, which would have earned me the "the undefeated" title, because I started a group quest event without realizing it was a group quest, and then got killed by 4 swarms of bees and 2 bears, all higher in level than the indicated quest level. Once I joined my guild, I did a couple of group quests with them. Some just play normally, just against more monsters. But I also visited an instanced quest called "A Gift of the North", where your group is teleported to an instanced copy of a place that also exists on the normal map, to fight through a quest event and kill a troll. Besides a good quest reward, and being fun, we also found lots of yellow and purple drops (the equivalent of green and blue in WoW). Especially purple tradeskill recipes drop a lot more frequently than in WoW, which is great. But I am also wielding a purple dagger now, which I found in a non-instanced group quest event on a bandit boss.

So why all this killing and questing if I wanted to play a farmer? Well, I would have liked to farm more, but leveling up farming loses you money, and I needed the quests and loot to finance the farm. Farming used to be extremely lucrative in the beta, but Turbine re-adjusted the prices to balance things better. In my opinion that still isn't well done. You can still earn lots of money by being a master expert farmer, it just costs you money to get there. Let me explain the system:

Farming works by you buying 6 seeds, 2 fertilizer, and 1 water, and standing on a public field to use your sowing skill. That grows a small patch of the plant you sowed, which you can then harvest. Only you can harvest your field. Harvesting gives you a random number of fair and poor plants. You transform the fair plants at the workbench into the final product, which you can sell. And you transform the poor plants into seeds. Unless you have a critical success, on average a harvest gives you 1 fair plant and 2 poor plants. The 2 poor plants provide exactly the number of seeds you need for your next patch, so seeds are basically self-replenishing. Add a few lucky crits, and you produce an excess of seeds. But your main income is from selling the product of the fair plants. For the economics of it, lets just assume we always just produce enough seeds to continue farming. Then it becomes clear that to make a profit, you need to sell the product from the 1 fair plant for more than the water and fertilizer costs you.

Now every time you sow a field or process a poor or fair plant, you earn points. You start out at apprentice level, and once you have enough points, you are considered to be proficient as apprentice. That gives you a title (apprentice farmer), and access to the next tier of recipes, the journeyman recipes. Once you are proficient at journeyman, you become expert, then artisan, and so on. But even if you are proficient at one level, you can continue working on that tier of skill. So if instead of doing journeyman recipes, you continue with apprentice recipes, you will reach master apprentice level. Once you reach master level in any tier, you can use the mastery option when sowing fields in that tier. That adds 3 soils to the recipes, but now yields 5 fair and 2 poor plants on average, instead of 1 fair and 2 poor. So the seeds are still self-replenishing (but with less chance to produce an excess of seeds, it seems), but you get 4 fair plants more, and thus a lot more plants to sell.

So far so good. As you would expect the higher you go up in recipe tiers, the more the seeds cost (but you only need them to get started), and the more money you get when selling your product back to the NPC vendor. But curiously the apprentice, journeyman, and expert tiers all use the same type of water and fertilizer, and always the same amount. The result of that is that 1 fair plant at apprentice level sells for far less than the cost of 1 water and 2 fertilizer, while 1 fair plant of an expert recipe sells for slightly more than the cost of the water and fertilizer. And the products from 5 fair plants at master apprentice level sell for less than 1 water, 2 fertilizer, and 3 soils, while at master expert you make a profit of about 6 silver pieces per field. And you need to be master apprentice and master journeyman, before you can become master expert.

So I spent certainly over 100 silver just to get my farming skill up. That is basically all the money I earned from quests and loot by going up to level 13, never buying any gear, only spending money for training. But once I had sunk those costs, and reached master expert level, I was earning money from farming like crazy. As I said, about 6 silver per field, so in an hour you can easily make the 100 silver pieces back. While I was broke all the way up to master expert, I ended the weekend with over 200 silver in my pockets. And now I'm producing money a lot faster than I could ever hope to do by adventuring at level 13. So the idea now is to make lots of money, and use it to equip my character better, and also to pay for the two other crafts I have, cooking and tailoring. Apparently those lose money at all levels.

There is a certain risk that farming will be further nerfed. But the last time they did that they just adjusted all prices downwards, which lead to the stupid situtation now that farming costs a fortune at low skill, and earns you the fortune and more back at high skill. I'd rather they make low level farming be cost-neutral, or earn you some meager copper pieces, but then make the profits increase slowly with level, so that at master expert the profit is reduced by half from what its now. The funny thing is that if Turbine leaves the system as it is now, the famous "gold farmers" will be exactly that. Why level up a character to farm gold from mobs, if you just need some seed money and level 5 to reach master expert farmer and earn the gold on the fields? But maybe that is what Turbine wants. Farming is totally non-exclusive and non-competitive. Any number of gold farmers can populate a field and make money, without having a direct effect on the other players. Sure, there is the indirect effect of the farmed gold on the economy. But at least you get rid of the problem that gold farmers camp the best spawns and regular players have problems killing those mobs because they are overfarmed. An interesting way to reduce player complaints about gold farmers.

I want to finish this long journal entry with some comments on the graphics of Lord of the Rings Online. LotRO sure is beautiful, much more so than WoW, but without needing the same huge hardware requirements as Vanguard. You can see quite far in this game, and then actually walk to the point you saw in the distance. Technically LotRO is very well done, with very few bugs, no crashes the whole weekend, no lag yet, no logon queues. And it even supports my G15 Logitech keyboard, showing my health, mana, and dread on the little LCD display.

One interesting graphical feature of LotRO is the day/night cycle. A game day lasts about 3 real world hours, of which about 1 hour is night. And the night is a lot darker than the night in World of Warcraft. You can light a torch with ALT-F10 (I tested it with a guild mate, that torch is only visible to yourself, not to others) to light your immediate surroundings. But unless you fiddle with your gamma settings, the night is nearly too dark to go adventuring. I often found myself farming at night, adventuring by day. And of course I spent nights roleplaying in a tavern with my guild mates. I think Lord of the Rings Online does the day/night cycle better than World of Warcraft. In WoW, if you only play in the evenings, you only ever see the game world in evening colors. But day or night just changes the lighting slightly, even at midnight it isn't really dark anywhere. So in WoW you tend to ignore the time of day completely. In LotRO day and night have more effect on you. Visibility is lower at night, which affects adventuring. And some quests are linked to the time of day, for example there is a quest to spy on a black rider, but he only appears at night, of course. The only thing I'm missing is a way to tell in-game time. I started to note the time when it becomes dark, so I know it gets light again in about 1 hour. And then I find myself an occupation for which the dark isn't bothering me, and wait with exploration for the daylight. Having to react to the light is a good thing, it creates more of a "world" feeling.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:09 AM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft getting easier

In a previous post I proposed that dungeons, including raid dungeons, should have an "easy mode", just like they have a "heroic mode". While some people liked the idea, a lot of the more hardcore people vehemently stated that "dungeons are supposed to be hard", and resisted all ideas to make them more accessible. But apparently the mood in the community has changed. It turned out that the Burning Crusade dungeons are too hard even for most of the hardcore, and that most people can only beat them by using copious amounts of flasks, elixirs, potions, and other consumables. With every raiding night now costing 50 to 100 gold, many raiders were complaining. I already started wondering how many raiders secretly started buying gold from the hated gold farmers, just to finance their raiding habit. The situation got bad enough for Blizzard to react.

Blizzard's argument is that the dungeons are so hard because all those consumables exist. And they got a point there. Look at a single elixir, like the elixir of mastery, giving +15 to all stats. That is a bigger bonus to your stats than what you could hope for by upgrading all your equipment to epics of one tier higher. Especially in the Burning Crusade, where the difference between epics and blues is often wafer-thin.

So in the next big content patch, consumables will be significantly nerfed. One part of the nerf is in the power of the consumables. For example the flask of mighty restoration, that currently gives +70 mana per 5 seconds will only give +25 soon, but the materials will also be reduced by a factor of 3. Another part of the nerf is that you can only have one "battle" and one "guardian" elixir effect on you, *or* one flask, which counts as both. And then, when through these changes people run around considerably less buffed with consumables, the dungeons will be made easier, so raids can beat them using just the now diminished buffs.

Obviously that will make raiding a lot cheaper and easier. And the only ones complaining are those that specialized in elixir mastery and were gaining a fortune on the raiders. The hardcore raiders see how advantageous this is for them, and forgot all about their earlier objection to easy mode dungeons. Blizzard will just continue to add new, harder dungeons at the top, while making the entry level dungeons easier. At some point we'll get to where people can raid Karazhan with a pickup group, which was my criterion for easy mode in the first place. I think that such creeping changes are bad game design, and would have preferred if the dungeons had started out easier from the beginning. But better late than never, and apparently such creeping nerfs are more acceptable to the vocal elitist minority. As long as they had the dungeons first, and there is now new content exclusive for them, they don't mind what happens to their old playgrounds.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:27 PM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Blogosphere chain letters

DM Osbon tagged me with another of those "name 5 things, tag 5 other bloggers" chain letters. Now I'm supposed to name 5 goals of mine. I'm going to cheat on this one. First of all I won't tag anyone else with this. And then I'm not listing personal goals, but only 5 goals I have with my characters in World of Warcraft. Sorry, but I never really been a friend of chain letters, and shouldn't have participated in the last one on "5 things you didn't know about me". Well, anyway, here are 5 WoW goals I have:

1) Reach level 20 with my blood elf mage and do all the quests in the new blood elf zones.

2) Get the botanist's field guide from Botanica and learn potion mastery with my warrior alchemist.

3) Do slave pens with my level 70 warrior. Yeah, it's late, but I have only the Underbog part of the Coilfang Reservoir quest completed, and really should get the other half done.

4) Become revered with the Sporeggar with my warrior alchemist, so I can learn the transmute primal earth to water recipe. Primal earth being a lot cheaper than primal water, that might be a good money-maker. And I'm already honored with them.

5) Visit Shattered Halls and Arcatraz with my priest to get the last 2 missing pieces of the "Hallowed" priest dungeon set 3.

Not very ambitious goals, but then I'm playing a lot less World of Warcraft these days, and if I get sucked into LotRO I might never even make these.

Suggestion: Instead of me tagging other bloggers, I'm tagging all of my readers to list 5 of their World of Warcraft goals in a comment. How about that?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:54 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
What you see is what you get

Kaziel wrote me, and gave me permission to publish it here, about his take on class roles in World of Warcraft compared with other games.

Like you, I've grown tired of WoW as of late. Also, like you I've decided not to jump back into the Raiding game, which means that after completing the major dungeons of current WoW endgame, for the most part we've "beaten" the game.

With that, I've been playing the Open Beta (or World Tour) in the US for LOTRO. This game is something of a contrast in class design compared to WoW. While the so called "holy trinity" is still there, instead of creating each job with a way to DPS, they gave each class pretty specific roles other than DPSing (with the obvious exceptions of Hunters and Champions). While I think each class has a certain amount of DPS abilities (such as the Lore Master's staff smack ability, or throwing the thing on fire at the enemy) they obviously fit into certain specific roles, as described on the character creation page.

I'm curious about your take on it. My feelings are that while Blizz did many things right, the decision to make each class able to spec DPS was a mistake. Mind you, having access to abilities that allow you to DPS isn't a bad thing (in fact, I think to a degree it's necessary otherwise you end up with classes that can't solo in order to make money, and they are left floundering), but when you give a job with an obvious certain role (for example Priests healing) and give them the ability to completely ignore that aspect of their gameplay (the infamous "I'm a Shadow Priest. I don't heal!" quote) you're just asking for trouble. Some might say that being given options is a good thing, and I agree. My counter to that statement is that you are given options, specifically during character creation. In LOTRO, when you pick a class, it clearly says what the job is (for example the Captain is listed as a Pet/Buffer class). The game that I know best that made classes mostly with single roles is FFXI (been playing almost since release and I'm still playing it now). When you're partying for XP, and you invite a Paladin, you know exactly what you're getting, a tank. If you invite a White Mage, you're getting a healer. There are some classes that can fill multiple roles depending on gear and subjobs, such as Warriors, Ninjas, and Red Mages, but even then, those jobs have main purposes, and really are exceptions to the rule. While every job may not have something fun for everyone, at least you know what you're getting when you invite someone, and you can pick the jobs you want and only play them.

Also, I think part of the decision making process on Blizzard’s part was the idea of "If we make some classes with DPS specs and tanking specs (or healing and DPS, or whatever) then more players will play those classes, but be willing to be flexible and do alternate roles aside from what they specced." And while this is a good plan, in theory, in practice it blows up in your face more often than not. I've lost track of how many times I've been in a group with a druid as the only healer, and they say something like "I'm feral spec. I don't heal." But then doesn't want to leave so we can get a healer. And of course there are the famous experiences of being grouped up with something like a fury specced warrior who tries to tanks dual-wielding, in PvP gear, and Berserker Stance.

At first, I wasn't going to send this email because it was quite similar to your post "Gimping your group talents in World of Warcraft", but then when I started thinking about it, I realized what I was asking about was different enough. Mainly, it's the fact that Blizzard chose one way of class design and LOTRO (along with many others) have taken a different approach, instead your post being about choices within the existing system, and your views on this.

I still think that there is value both to classes having a well defined role, and to players being able to switch playing styles. The Final Fantasy XI game Kaziel mentions for example gave you the possibility to change from one character class to another every time you visited your house. Your different character classes had their own respective levels, but if today you weren't feeling like playing the white mage healer, you could level up your same character as black mage damage dealer instead. That gave you the choice of what to play, and the other players could see what style you were playing. In World of Warcraft the problem is often that from a distance you just can't tell. You need a healer, but the /who command only shows you who is priest or druid, and not whether they are willing or able to heal.

More importantly it is the difficulty of the dungeon which determines how specialized somebody has to be to beat it. If your warrior for ramparts is level 60, he'd better be protection spec to make a good tank. If he is level 70, he'll still be fine with his twohander in berserker stance. Same is true for a healer. Being holy spec raises the "effective healing level" of a priest, being shadow spec lowers it. If there is another healer around, or the dungeon is of lower level, the lower effective healing level might work just fine. But if the dungeon is very hard, you'd better be spec'd right for the job.

So I wonder if WoW could somehow calculate a players effective healing level, based on his level, spec, and gear, and then display this instead of his character level. If people would see what they get when they invite somebody to their group, there wouldn't be so much conflict.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Blizzard vs. WoWGlider

The Forge has a series of articles on the Blizzard vs. WoWGlider lawsuit (link goes to the latest article, follow the links from there). WoWGlider is a bot program for World of Warcraft, and Blizzard not only wants the company that makes it to stop selling it, they also want all of the money the company earned.

Now I never used a bot in my life, as I think that wasting time is what games are made for, so using a program to do it for you is counterproductive. And I certainly don't condone the use of bots. But *somebody* should tell Blizzard that an EULA / TOS is not a piece of legislation. You can ban people using bots, but writing rules to outlaw bots yourself, and then trying to sue somebody based on these self-made rules seems rather spurious to me.

The main reason I don't like macros and bots is that they are living proof that my favorite hobby consists of a series of repetitive actions needing no intelligence. If you and me both started a new level 1 character, and I were to play my character as I play all of my characters about 30 hours a week, and you were to play your character with WoWGlider 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it is obvious that your character would reach level 70 faster than mine, and have more faction and more gold than my character. Me (hopefully) playing better than a bot is easily outweighed by the bots longer playing hours. The bot is superior to me as a WoW player, measured by the same standards as the leet players think they are superior to me. The bot makes a laughing stock out of any claims that skill is needed to play WoW, because obviously the bot doesn't have skill, but still ends up being more successful in the game than any human player.

So the obvious way for a game company to get rid of bots would be to make a game that really takes skill and intelligence to advance in, and thus couldn't be played by a bot. Blizzard sueing the makers of WoWGlider would be like Ford sueing the makers of screwdrivers, because screwdrivers can be used to hotwire a car and steal it, instead of designing a better lock. Somebody using WoWGlider is breaking his contract with Blizzard, and Blizzard has all the right to ban him for that. But no such contract exists between Blizzard and the makers of WoWGlider. And "providing a tool for customers to break their contracts" is not a criminal offence. I don't see Blizzard sueing the makers of programmable keyboards or mouses.

You can't just sue somebody because you don't like what he does, even if you are multi-million dollar company. Blizzard obviously hopes that a small bot-making company can't pay all the legal fees to effectively defend themselves, and can thus be sued out of existence with a frivolous lawsuit. Whatever you think about bots, that is just wrong. The only people Blizzard has any right to attack are the users of bots, not the makers.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:36 PM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post

 
General economic equilibrium in World of Warcraft

One of my strange hobbies, besides playing MMORPGs, is economics. And as many MMORPGs have some sort of player-run economy, there is often opportunity to combine these two hobbies, by looking at the virtual economies of a game like World of Warcraft. Economics can explain a lot of the phenomena of a player-run virtual economy, for example auction house prices. And that isn't as simple as it often looks.

Most people are aware of the laws of supply and demand. Primal air is more valuable than primal shadow, because the motes of air drop at fewer places than the motes of shadow, and the primal air is used more frequently in crafting recipes. Thus for primal air the supply is low and the demand high, causing high prices. Primal shadow are nearly worthless, because the supply is high and the demand low.

But what is more difficult to understand is the general level of auction house prices, effects like inflation or deflation. To understand this you need to understand general economic equilibrium theory. And because most people don't understand that, you can read a lot of nonsense being told about inflation in MMORPGs.

Stated in simple terms, general economic equilibrium in World of Warcraft means that an hour of your time is worth a fixed amount of gold pieces. An hour spent killing the best possible monsters for cash, or spent for farming tradeable goods like primals, or spent gathering herbs or ores should in the end give you the same amount of value. If killing monsters for cash gave you more gold per hour than the farming of primals, somebody needing primals would rather farm gold and buy the primals on the auction house. This would decrease supply and increase demand of primals, so their auction house price would rise, until the equilibrium is reached again, and one hour farming gold or primals is worth the same. Of course that assumes that people are intelligent and always do it the most profitable and fastest way, but as long as there are enough intelligent people out there, the general economic equilibrium plays a big role in determining auction house prices.

That is most visible if you go nowadays to the auction house and check the price for low level fungible trade goods, like wool cloth or copper. With nearly everybody having characters that would easily be able to farm wool cloth, and most people being far too advanced in their tradeskills to still use wool, you might expect wool cloth to be very cheap. But if you actually want to buy some, you'd find that wool costs a lot more than you thought on an older server. That is because high-level characters don't find wool cloth on the mobs they kill for other purposes. If a high-level player wants wool, he would need to deliberately farm it. And while killing the level 20ish humanoid mobs that drop wool is fast for a high-level character, he would first need some time to travel to a location where to find those. He might be able to gather 100 wool cloth in an hour, but during this hour he could have earned a lot of gold by killing mobs in Outland, and so a stack of wool is suddenly worth a couple of gold pieces. The Burning Crusade increased the amount of gold you can farm per hour from monsters, and thus ended up increasing all the auction house prices for gathered goods, because one hour of gathering time is now worth more. This of course helps new players, because they can sell the wool they gather for much more than it was worth when everybody was low level.

So if one hour of your time is worth the same, whatever you farm, does that mean there is no room in World of Warcraft for clever money-making? Fortunately not so. What you need to do is to identify situations where the situation is out of equilibrium, and use that situation for arbitrage advantage. For example when making money gathering herbs the equilibrium price is reached because the more people are gathering herbs at the same time, the longer it takes to gather a given quantity, which keeps the prices high. But the equilibrium price is an average over all the hours of a week, and at some times there are considerably less people gathering herbs than at other times. So if you gather either add very odd hours (4 am gathering session anyone?), or during times when all those raiders are busy in Karazhan, you get more herbs per hour, and thus better profits than if you gathered at times when everybody else is doing it too.

Curiously the laws of economics also tell us that the effect of gold farmers on the economy is often misunderstood. You can often find people complaining that gold farming would bring more money into the economy, thus raising prices. But that is only the case if the gold farmers are grinding cash or items sold to NPC vendors. In reality gold farmers aren't farming gold itself, but are busy gathering items that sell well to other players, the same herbs and primals that regular players gather. That can be very annoying if you are a regular player, because you arrive at lets say the elemental plateau in Nagrand because you need primal airs and find that the place is totally overcamped, and it is hard to tag any air elementals, with so many farmers around. But if you consider the effect of this on AH prices, you'll realize that gold farmers grinding primals is actually *lowering* the general price level for primals, not increasing it. By perma-camping they maximize the supply of the primals. And as long as they make their gold by selling primals to other players, and not getting fresh cash from mobs, the money supply remains unchanged. Whatever inflation you observed in the last few months is more likely to stem from The Burning Crusade's increased hourly gold income to regular players, than from any gold farming.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:06 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
Random access content

The Economist recently had a story about Google digitizing books. The author expressed his opinion that not all sorts of books were equally suited to being read in a digital form. Some printed books have content which is essentially "random access", meaning it consists of discrete bits, and you are equally likely to want to access any of these bits. You look up a word in a dictionary, a recipe in a cookbook, or a specific chapter on what you want to know about in a textbook. You don't read that dictionary or cookbook from cover to cover. Thus a digital dictionary or cookbook, with a search engine to find what you want, makes sense. A digital novel with a search engine makes a lot less sense. You probably don't want to read just the passage where Bilbo meets Gollum and finds the One Ring, you want to read the whole The Hobbit from start to end. A novel is sequential, not random access. And as you want to read all of it, having the book in printed form, so you can read it in a deckchair next to the pool, or whereever you want, is more practical than a digital version on a PC screen.

Now I was thinking that games too can be either random access or sequential. I recently bought Final Fantasy XII, but haven't had the time to start it yet. That is because I know that Final Fantasy RPGs are sequential, they tell a long story, and thus you better play them when you have time to actually get to the end of the story, which can be 60+ hours. A MMORPG like World of Warcraft is a lot more like random access. There is no story from start to finish, there are discreet little bits of stories in the form of quests. You can log on, look into your quest journal, choose any one of the up to 25 quests in your quest log, and do it. You can't really do content that is much higher in level than you, and doing content that is much lower usually isn't profitable. But in a certain level range of content there is no sequence, it doesn't matter what quest or zone you do first.

A MMORPG being random access is a huge advantage, because it gives you a wider range of possibilities to play with other people. As long as you are in the same level range as the person you want to play with, you can quest together or visit a dungeon together. You don't have to be at the same point in the story, because there is no story. On the downside the lack of story is a disadvantage for MMORPGs, because logging on for an hour just to grind some primals or gather some herbs for your next raid feels more like work than like a part of an epic adventure.

So I was wondering whether MMORPGs should have a main story line, a main quest line. Of course still with lots of side-quests and the freedom to do anything you want, even if you just log on for a short bit. But having a main thread to follow, besides leveling up from level 1 to 70, might give you more of a sense of purpose. Otherwise playing a MMORPG feels like reading a cookbook.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:09 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
WoW at 150 fps

When I installed World of Warcraft on my brand new E6600 Intel core 2 duo, Geforce 8800 GTS computer, I was a bit disappointed of it showing a framerate of only 85 fps at 1600 x 1200 resolution with all graphics settings maxed out. After playing for some time and noticing that these 85 fps were pretty constant, and not fluctuating with what I saw on the screen as expected, I realized that I just had set the options wrong. "Vertical Sync" was checked, thus the framerate couldn't go faster than the screen refresh rate of 85 Hertz. Doh! I unchecked it and now the framerate is displayed at up to 150 fps.

Which of course is stupid. With the screen being refreshed only 85 times per second, having more than 85 fps simply does nothing. And World of Warcraft plays perfectly smoothly at half that framerate. Playing WoW at 150 fps is unnecessary overkill, and I just measure the framerate for bragging purposes.

But setting the Vertical Sync wrong, after years of experience with PC games, makes me wonder how many people actually understand all these setting you can find in a typical PC games video settings. Vertical sync, trilinear filtering, anisotropic filtering, mipmaps, vertex shaders, what does it all mean? Why does it feel as if I need a degree in computer engineering just to set the graphics settings for a game? I'd rather have an auto-detect routine that selects all this stuff automatically in function of the framerate.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:11 PM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Puzzle Quest (PSP) review

I finally got the PSP version of Puzzle Quest last week, after having played the PC demo for a while. Good timing, I just got it a day before I had to spend 3 hours on the train, the perfect opportunity to play a PSP game. Meanwhile I clocked another couple of hours with the game, and it's time to write a review.

Puzzle Quest combines role-playing elements with a Bejeweled-like puzzle game. You play a hero in a long story, saving the Queen and her kingdom (queendom?) from an evil undead threat through countless battles against monsters. And each battle is this Bejeweled-type puzzle. You have a square board full of random tiles of 7 different types. You and your opponent take turns, and each move consists of swapping two tiles in a way that you get at least 3 tiles of the same type in a row. At that point those tiles are destroyed, and the tiles above them "fall" down, with empty spaces in the top row being replaced by new random tiles. If this falling creates new rows of 3 or more tiles of the same type, they are destroyed as well, so you can get a cascade of destroyed tiles.

Every destroyed tile counts for something. Most important are the skull tiles, which deal damage to the opponent. You win if you reduce your opponent to 0 life points. Then there are gold tiles and purple xp stars, which give your hero gold and experience points, respectively. And then there are 4 colors of mana tiles, which add this color of mana to your stock. Once you have enough mana, you can use it to cast spells instead of doing a regular move. Spells can deal damage, heal, manipulate the board, buff yourself, or debuff the opponent. As different types of opponent have different spells, the game is very different depending on what you fight. For example a troll has a spell that regenerates his life if he spends a certain amount of blue mana, and if you want to win you better make sure that he doesn't get too much blue mana, which means having to take it yourself, or manipulating the board to destroy blue tiles.

The game lives of the interaction between character abilities and the puzzle. Playing the puzzle makes your character stronger, as he gains gold and experience points, even if you lose a battle. But then gaining levels gives you new spells, and points to distribute among abilities, which helps you win the puzzle. For example fire mastery makes every destroyed red tile give you more red mana, and also increases your chance to get another turn after lining up 3 red tiles. So your level, and the level of your opponent, plays a big role in determining who wins the puzzle battle.

Puzzle Quest also offers other typical role-playing elements besides questing and battling monsters. You can equip a number of items which increase your stats. You get an income from holding cities, and once you built a siege engine you can lay siege to other cities, and get money from them. With the money you can buy buildings in your castle, for example a temple where you can pay gold to increase your stats. You can build a dungeon to capture monsters, a mage's tower to learn the spells of the captured monsters, a forge to craft items, or a stable to capture mounts. You can visit taverns to learn rumors, have companions join you that give you a bonus in battle, build towers to reduce the chance of your cities starting a revolt, and many more activities like that. Besides the main quest line, there are side quests, and also random monsters blocking the road. At any given moment you have lots of options on what to do next. You even get to make some moral decisions, like whether to imprison the evil sorcerer, or to free him in exchange for information and a good weapon.

Of course puzzling with random tiles involves some luck (and some people swear the AI cheats when it gets unusually lucky). But skill plays a big role in winning the puzzle battles. If you are able to see how to line up 4 or more tiles instead of just 3, you get extra turns. Being able to start cascades is an obvious advantage. And you constantly need to decide after which sort of tile to go next, whether you want to grab some gold or rather some mana, and how you can prevent the opponent from getting the mana he needs. Different strategies apply to different opponents, and sometimes you need to battle a strong opponent several times before you learn the best strategy or get lucky. Beating an opponent higher in level than you can give very nice rewards. And of course your decisions outside the puzzles are important as well. Should you try to conquer cities to earn gold, or rather follow the main quest line? Maybe first gather some runes to forge items, or do side quests to level up before tackling that next hard opponent? The possibilities are endless.

Having played the game first on the PC, the PSP version has some obvious disadvantages: The screen is small, the control with cursor keys are less comfortable than with a mouse, and the loading times are longer (a constant PSP problem). The PC version also had a helpful hint function showing you one possible move if you couldn't find one for a while, which the PSP version lacks. And the PSP version has a nasty bug which prevents your companions from giving you their bonuses. But then the PSP is easier to transport than a PC, and Puzzle Quest is programmed to constantly autosave, so whipping your PSP out to play a quick battle while on a break is always possible. Puzzle Quest also exists as a Nintendo DS version, and the PC version is rumored to come out this summer.

I like this game very much. I even think that I'll buy the PC version as well when it comes out, for my laptop, in spite of already owning the PSP version. While the main quest series, apart from a few decisions, remains always the same, Puzzle Quest has great replayability. There are 4 different classes I talked about in an earlier post, and they play very differently. And the influence of your and your opponents level, spells, and items on the puzzle makes every combat a bit different. So Puzzle Quest offers many, many hours of fun. Recommended.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:21 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft and prostitution

The current story about World of Warcraft making the round through American newspapers isn't quite the publicity that Blizzard was looking for: On Craigslist, an internet site for free classified ads, a woman is offering that if a guy were to buy her an epic mount for 5000 gold, he could "mount" her. This being the first documented case of real world prostitution for virtual gold, the story spread like wildfire through the internet. Of course she claims that this isn't prostitution, she just sees it as a way to get a mount both for herself and her WoW character. :)

I don't see virtual gold prostitution taking off. There are too many servers, with players on any one server living in too far an area. The woman has to find a "john" playing on the same server, having lots of gold, *and* living reasonably close. But of course the story could lead to some interesting political and legal fallout, as especially US politicians are likely to jump on any connection between video games and sex. Video games are often considered to be "for children", although in this case it seems that the woman has a much clearer idea about the typical demographics of an MMORPG than any politicians.

Lets forget about legalities for a minute. Lets assume that the woman was making that offer in a state or country where prostitution is legal, and lets forget that trading virtual items for real world stuff is against the WoW terms of service. I googled for "WoW gold" to see what the going rate for gold on a US server is, and found 5,000 gold offered for about $600. I am neither an expert in buying WoW gold, nor in paying for the services of prostitutes. But the fact that you could get a woman to sleep with you for $600 isn't especially shocking to me. It's probably more on the high end of the price scale. "Man pays woman $600 for sex" wouldn't get a headline in any newspaper, not even in the US, unless the guy is a celebrity.

But now we add the legal aspects, and the story gets interesting. If you were to give 5000 gold in WoW to your girlfriend as a present, that would be perfectly legit under the terms of service. And of course having sex with a woman you barely know is also totally legal, unless you pay her. So for the "mount for mount" offer to be illegal, the prosecutor would have to define World of Warcraft gold as a legal currency or equivalent to one. But that would have huge ramifications on the whole "is virtual property covered by real world laws" discussion. If the law would consider the guy sending 5000 gold to the woman a payment in the legal sense of the word, then suddenly all the gold in World of Warcraft is legally considered money, and tons of laws about liability, theft, and taxes apply to it. This is exactly what MMO game companies have been trying to avoid for years.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:45 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Less consumables used for raiding?

I just read some more news on the upcoming profession changes, announced by Nethaera on the offical WoW forums.

Alchemy

- Elixirs now stack in two categories, Battle (Offensive) and Guardian (Defensive) Elixirs. You can only have one of each type of Elixir up at a time. As a result Elixirs now stack with class abilities such as "Arcane Intellect."
- Four new defensive elixirs have been added. Two are on trainers, one is in Halaa and one is in Cenarion Expedition.
- "Flask of Petrification" can no longer be turned off during its duration, but it now will clear all threat from all monsters for the duration of the effect. Though monsters may reaquire you after the effect ends.
- The cost to purchase Imbued Vials has been reduced.

Makes me quite happy that I just finished leveling my alchemist warrior to 70, because I used to have 5 elixir buffs on me all the time while soloing, and soon you won't be able to have more than 2. It also tells me that I definitely won't be shooting for elixir mastery, now that you need less of them.

But of course for raiders this change will make raiding a lot cheaper, as nobody can demand from you to drink more than 2 elixirs per wipe. Depending on how they are divided, it is even possible that some classes can only drink 1 elixir that gives them meaningful raiding stats, unless they find a way to make useful "Guardian" elixirs for dps classes. We'll have to wait and see how the new recipes turn out.

While making the imbued vials cheaper is nice, the main effect of the changes will be that alchemists will be even less in demand, as people will drink less potions. Probably there will soon be a consensus about what the "best" elixirs are for any given class, and then nothing else will sell any more. I think I'll better specialize in potion mastery and hope that they don't do major changes to the way how healing and mana potions work.

Other professions also had changes, but not so major ones. Jewelcrafting gets a color sorted interface for gems, fishing becomes faster, and seaforium charges will be able to blast open locked chests. All very nice, but not as groundbreaking as completely changing the way how elixirs work.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:25 PM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
Social aspects of voice chat

One of the current trends in MMORPGs is integrated voice chat. Dungeons & Dragons Online already has it, and Lord of the Rings Online will have it too. EVE Online just announced that you can now have integrated voice chat in their game too, but you need to pay $10 per year for it. Even the non-game Second Life is introducing integrated voice chat. So what are the implications of that?

Voice chat is a useful tool when you try to coordinate a group in some activity which needs coordination and fast action. I have done World of Warcraft raids with and without voice chat, and the if properly used the voice chat gives you more of an advantage than half a dozen epics. In PvP the superiority of a team using voice chat against a team not using it isn't even funny any more. But in spite of these measurable advantages, my guild isn't using voice chat any more, and I know a lot of people who are reluctant to use it, or downright refuse to do so.

One problem is that voice chat only helps if somebody is giving orders, and the other players are following these orders. Back in the days of Molten Core my guild had a very nice guy, with a good voice, and a knack for giving clear instructions. He wasn't even an officer in the guild, but him announcing when to start and stop damage dealing on mobs was such a constant factor that even my wife recognized his voice as the "go dps guy", just from listening to me raiding. I once did an afternoon of Arathi Basin PvP with the guy, and him directing us to the hot spots made us win every game. If somebody gives orders and people follow these orders, giving the orders by voice is simply faster and more efficient than typing.

But not everybody is comfortable or able giving orders. The reason why my guild isn't using voice chat any more is that the officers say that everybody should think for themselves. Which is nice in theory, but rarely leads to everybody ending up thinking the same thing. They are insofar right as voice chat is less helpful for a 10-man Karazhan raid, where there are many different functions to perform by few people. In a 40-man Molten Core raid there were essentially 30 people doing the same job, dealing damage, and coordinating that helped more. Nevertheless I feel a certain reluctance of some people to bark orders and expecting others to follow them. Voice chat is not very effective for discussing strategy, that is easier done with typing, where people can scroll back to re-read things if needed, and two people "talking" at once is less of a problem.

Thus while a pickup group in Lord of the Rings Online theoretically has the option to use voice chat for coordination, I don't really see that happening all that often. Establishing effective leadership in a pickup group is hard to impossible.

The other big drawback is the inevitable breaking of the fourth wall that comes with voice chat. If communication is by typing, you can pretend to be somebody else for role-playing purposes. You can play a character of another gender, age, or physical build than yourself in a MMORPG. Voice chat breaks that illusion, because you can't help your voice revealing a lot about your gender, age, and origin. You lose a part of the internet anonymity which is quite cherished by a lot of players. If you were a teenager with a squeaky or breaking voice, would you want to use voice chat at all? And while currently one out of every two female characters in WoW is played by a man, voice chat would much reduce this possibility of gender-bending.

Of course willingness or unwillingness to use voice chat is also a cultural phenomenon. I don't know why, but I observed than whenever I played with Germans, even in a pickup group, the first thing that was exchanged was the Teamspeak coordinates, so the group could use voice chat. British players tend to reserve voice chat for their "mates". Which given the fact that all Europeans who don't have their own language servers tend to play on the English servers, thus populating it with a very wide range of different accents, is probably a wise choice. With voice chat quality not always being optimal, having to deal with accents from Israelian to Scandinavian isn't always easy.

Personally I have two problems with voice chat: One is that I hate wearing headphones, they tend to hurt my ears after a couple of hours. The second is that I don't live alone, and you can't use voice chat without the other people in your appartment hearing it, which can be annoying for them. Especially if (see One) I'm not wearing headphones and have voice chat incoming over the loudspeakers. And of course that works in both directions, everybody who ever used voice chat has a funny story where something that wasn't supposed to be communicated slipped through an open mike. (Word to the wise: Only use button-activation, never voice activation.)

I can see the interest of using integrated voice chat for PvP-centric games. The one game that should have voice chat, but doesn't, is Guild Wars. Neither will the upcoming Warhammer Online. Voice chat in EVE sounds like a good idea (although having to pay for it doesn't), and could even be considered to be "in character". For a more PvE-centric game like Lord of the Rings Online the interest in integrated voice chat is less pronounced. I never used it in the beta, but then I was soloing most of the time anyway. The one thing I certainly wouldn't want to have is some sort of General Chat channel over voice chat. The level of immaturity reigning on typed general chats is already bad enough, no need to hear all those swear words over voice.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:12 PM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 10-April-2007

I'm still determined to start playing Lord of the Rings Online next weekend, when the European pre-order access starts. Captivating as MMORPGs are, it is likely that this will lead to me taking a break from World of Warcraft. And I have no idea how long that break will be. I might be back at WoW after a month, or I might put it on hold until the next expansion. So I was thinking what I still wanted to achieve in World of Warcraft before the break, and getting my second character up to level 70 was on top of the list. This weekend I hit that goal, and my warrior dinged 70, and bought his (normal) flying mount.

I wanted to get to level 70 not because of some sort of status, but because I reached level 70 with my first character without doing the quests of Nagrand, Blade's Edge, Shadowmoon Valley, or Netherstorm. So with this second character I managed to complete all, or nearly all, the quests of Nagrand and Blade's Edge, plus more than half of the Shadowmoon Valley quests. Still more than one zone worth of quests missing, but I might just do those remaining quests with my level 70s. Not quite as much fun as leveling up, but at least you gain gold and reputation.

With both characters I had the feeling that I was leveling too fast in the Burning Crusade, especially in the second half from level 66 to 70. Of course as I played my warrior not every day, he always was on double xp bonus, which added to the speed. But the impressive looking 750,000 xp you need for the last levels are not that huge once you notice that you easily make 75,000 xp per hour just doing solo quests. Just 10 hours to level up is a bit short in my opinion for the highest levels. I had the impression that the time per level was actually getting shorter.

Now that I'm 70 with my warrior, who is also alchemist, I should go for some alchemy specialization. There are now potion mastery, elixir mastery, and transmutation mastery, of which you can choose only one, and have to do a quest to reach it. The transmutation mastery quest is the easiest, requiring you just to hand in 4 Primal Mights, but of course that is rather expensive. The elixir mastery quest is the hardest, you need to farm Black Morass for 10 items, and apparently the drop rate is low. Potion mastery requires you to get a book from a boss in Botanica, plus some potions. I don't think I'd want to do elixir mastery, but I can't really decide between transmutation and potion mastery. You can only transmute once a day, or once every couple of days, depending on the cooldown. But of course if you ever got your transmutation mastery to proc on a Primal Might transmute, you'd make a big profit. Potion mastery would be nice for all the healing and mana potions you regularly drink. But frankly I'm not excited by any of these masteries. Other tradeskills get new recipes on specialization, alchemy just gets a chance to produce several potions instead of just one.

While soloing with my warrior, I used a lot of elixirs. But that is because when soloing I don't die very often, so each elixir lasts a full hour. In a pickup group you tend to die a lot more often, and quickly stop wasting those expensive potions that only last until the next wipe. I raids you also wipe a lot, but you are still expected to use potions, which makes raiding a rather expensive hobby. Fortunately I don't raid any more, because all I see the raiders in my guild doing is either raiding or farming for raids. And Blizzard is planning changes to the way elixirs work, making them stack with other buffs, so you'll be expected to drink even more elixirs for every wipe.

In the Burning Crusade Blizzard introduced dynamic spawning for mobs. The more people there are killing mobs in a location in Outland, the faster the mobs spawn there, thus making sure that there is a constant supply. But that isn't true for all spawns. For example the elementals that drop motes, needed for various primals in crafting recipes, don't spawn faster when overcamped, and nowadays they are always overcamped. And herb and ore nodes also don't have dynamic spawning, the more people are after these resources, the harder they are to get. I know several raiders who dropped whatever tradeskills they had to take up herbalism, because that is nearly a required skill nowadays for raiding.

And there is the big flaw in the World of Warcraft crafting system: the resource gathering is the limiting factor. Alchemy is not a money maker, many potions sell for less than the price of the herbs on the auction house. That is because performing alchemy is fast, and everyone has mostly the same recipes, so alchemists are interchangeable. To be special as alchemist you need to get hold of some rare recipe. A few of them you can try to farm, but those that drop from a specific type of mob often have drop rates of around 0.2%, which means you'll need to kill 500 mobs on average to get such a recipe. Many more recipes you just can't do anything to hunt for them, you either would need to be extremely lucky with a world drop, or buy them from the auction house for crazy prices. Or you'd need to be extremely lucky receiving a random discovery recipe after making thousands of potions.

What Blizzard should do is to make resource spawns dynamic, so the more people gather ore or herbs, the faster they respawn. And they should make it more viable to hunt after recipes, by having more recipes drop from specific bosses in specific 5-man dungeons, instead of being random world drops. Ideally the crafting process itself would take some skill, but that is probably asking too much from a game like World of Warcraft.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:56 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Filling the half-empty glass

Late 2004 I beta-tested both World of Warcraft and Everquest 2. I was impressed how feature-complete and bug-free WoW was running. There were some server issues, but EQ2 had even more of those. And EQ2 was full of bugs, and major game mechanics were changed with every patch, leaving a distinct impression of an unfinished game. But even unfinished games get finished eventually, and I read that EQ2 is quite nice and stable nowadays. Only by now they obviously missed the boat, and only have a fraction of WoW's subscribers.

Early 2007 it's deja vu all over again. I beta-tested both Lord of the Rings Online and Vanguard. And this time it's LotRO which makes a finished impression, and Vanguard which isn't. Vanguard just announced getting rid of the naked corpse run, and I'm sure they are going to fill up all those empty areas with time, so in 2 years or so it could be a quite playable game. But who is going to buy Vanguard in 2 years?

If you buy a MMORPG you go for the market leader, or the recently released game. You don't buy the game that had bad reviews 2 years ago, hoping that it has become much better since then. Even if you wanted to, finding a good source for a review on how a game is 2 years after release is hard. A Google search just keeps directing you to the original, unfavorable reviews. You need to read a lot of blogs, and often between the lines, to get an idea how a game has evolved.

I just hope that the game company managers learn this one day. Bringing your game out early isn't going to help you if it isn't ready for release. The initial bad impression that a half-finished game is leaving behind is very hard to overcome, even if you improve the game a lot later with patches. Even Electronic Arts learned that lesson, and says that for example Spore will be released when it's ready, and not before. In spite of MMORPGs being easier to patch than single-player games, releasing them only when they are ready is the better marketing strategy for them too.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Hasta la vista, Vista!

I got my new Alienware computer 3 days ago, and I can't remember the last time when getting a new computer was such a struggle. Part of the problem is a known crash bug with Nvidia nForce 680i SLI motherboards and SATA disk drives. For some reason I can't get Nvidia's hotfix for that to run, need to wait for Alienware to provide me with a BIOS update. But apart from the rare random blue screen of death, the main problem with the new computer was Windows Vista.

The computer came with one user account with admin rights, and at first I didn't create anything else. That turned out not to work well, I got constant "security options dialog" error messages. Some research with Google suggested that this happens because Vista is trying to kick up some security requests to the next higher level of account, and if you are at the highest level, you get that sort of error message. Not sure if I understood that right, but I created a second account, a simple user account without admin rights, and running on that this sort of error message disappeared. What didn't disappear was Windows Vista's annoying habit to doubt everything I did. You start a program, any .exe, and Vista tells you that running programs on a computer is a potential security risk, and asks you to confirm whether you are really, really sure you want to do that. That drives you up the wall pretty quickly.

The one program that ran well under Vista was World of Warcraft, which is because WoW puts all its data in the same directory, and doesn't use other directories or the registry for anything. I had less luck with other programs. The Lord of the Rings Online beta client I couldn't get running at all, because it works with several different directories, having parts of the information in your Documents folder. And again Vista's security features kicked in, and didn't want to let LotRO have access to the Documents folder. Apparently there is some way to assign rights and exceptions so that programs can actually use data from folders, but it is damn complicated.

In any case, after 2 days of working with it I still couldn't see what the advantage of Vista should be. It worked exactly like XP under a new coat of paint, and with lots of annoying security features that prevent you from working with your own computer. It was often annoyingly slow, even on this new high-end computer. And there was no good documentation to navigate around all the pitfalls that Vista still had. So yesterday I just gave up on Vista. Reformatted the hard drive and installed Windows XP. A friendly Alienware technician told me that the mainboard SATA crash bug might be less frequent if I put the SATA cable in another SATA port on the motherboard. I did that, and didn't have a crash since. And under Windows XP I don't get any other error messages either, and a lot less security warnings. Even LotRO was running without problems.

Finally I was even able to run 3DMark05, which doesn't run under Vista, and compare the speed of my new computer to the previous one. Not bad, a 3DMark05 score of 13,928 is more than twice as high as my last desktop from 2 years ago.

Vista only caused me trouble. But hey, it was an experiment. I knew I could always go back to XP. I can't recommend Windows Vista for gaming at the moment. Maybe in a few years, when the game developers have programmed their games to take account of Vista's security standards. But for the moment I'll stick to Windows XP.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:36 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Money for WoW items

I'm telling you, these gold farmers do it all wrong. They spend all this time in these sweat shops working hard, getting only a few bucks for their gold, and with the gold you can only buy the same stuff that all the other players already have access to. No, no, the real way to make money is to sell lottery tickets with a very low chance to win an item that nobody else has, like a sun umbrella, pet monkey, or an imp in a ball. Crazy? No, actually that's the news from MMO Evolution, and they got the screenshots to back them up.

Only instead of lottery tickets Upper Deck Entertainment is selling World of Warcraft trading card games. And in each pack there is a tiny, tiny chance to find one of these new loot cards. Which makes them valuable. The pet ape is $100 on EBay. And you'd need to open booster packs of WoW trading cards for hundreds of dollars before you got all the loot cards.

And there isn't any 12-hours shifts playing a computer game in a sweat shop involved. They just make money out of nothing, because people are willing to pay $100 for a non-combat pet, as long as it is cute. Totally legit. Makes you wonder when Blizzard will start selling WoW items directly for dollars. Although the lottery system is maybe more elegant.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:08 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Don't buy 4 GB RAM for Windows Vista

My new Alienware pseudo-Dell computer arrived, I'm still busy installing everything and testing. But this site has a very good explanation why I shouldn't have bought 4 GB of RAM for it. 32 bit Vista only has 4 GB of address space, and a large chunk of it is taken up by the address space needed for the PCI bus, other components, and most importantly your video card memory. So due to my 640 MB Geforce 8800 GTS, Vista can only access 2814 MB on my machine. Doh!

I should complain to Alienware, why are they selling Vista machines with 4 GB, if its impossible to use that much RAM?
- posted by Tobold @ 5:53 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Vanguard mistakes

Me not playing Vanguard after the beta any more, I don't want to say too much about this game. Most people don't like it, reviews are bad to lukewarm, but a few people are big fans, and flame everyone daring to disagree. But I think it is safe to say that Vanguard didn't have the world's best and most successful launch. Says who? Says Brad McQuaid! He thinks the biggest problems of Vanguard are performance, underpopulated servers, launching too close to TBC, and marketing to the wrong crowd. For once I don't disagree with Brad, although I might add some others to the list.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:29 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
WoW fishing with a Wiimote

Some fans of the Nintendo Wii managed to get the Wiimote running with World of Warcraft. So here is the video of WoW fishing with the Wiimote. I so wished that fishing in WoW was a tiny bit more interesting. Since Burning Crusade you get some really useful fish for cooking, but the process of leveling it up is 15+ hours of monotonous boredom.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:17 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Splitting the MMORPG genre

One of the recurring rumors in the MMO blogosphere is that World of Warcraft would come out in a version for this or that next generation console. With variations of the rumor being either the console game accessing the same servers as the PC version, or there being a "lite" version for the console, not requiring any keyboard. I don't know if Blizzard will ever do that, but there is already a lite version of Everquest called Everquest Online Adventures for the PS2, and Final Fantasy XI has both the console and the PC access the same server. With the next generation consoles being increasingly networked and internet-ready, it is only a question of time when we will see more console MMORPGs.

One of the recurring comments in the MMO blogosphere is console gamers wouldn't be very welcome, being not as "mature" as PC MMORPG players. While it is true that the average age of a console gamer is probably much younger than the average WoW player, and that the monthly fee keeps a lot of bored teenies away from MMORPGs, I don't think that expanding the MMORPG genre to consoles would be a bad idea. In fact the growth in total player numbers would probably allow us to split the genre is several sub-genres, appealing to different demographics.

There are already existing differences in MMORPGs: PvP vs. PvE-centric. Casual vs. hardcore. World-centric vs. game-centric. Soloable vs. enforced grouping. But in most cases these are just differences by degrees. The PvE game LotRO has a PvP monster play part, while even the most PvP-centric game like Lineage has PvE parts as well. Nobody agrees what a casual game is, even WoW is too hardcore for some. Nearly all games offer both solo and group content to varying degrees.

Where I see a much clearer split of the genre coming is in the way that MMORPG combat is handled. Several of the upcoming games are promising to make MMORPG combat more action-oriented, with aiming and more frenetic clicking. Apart from the technological problem of how to realize this when there is lag, MMORPG action combat obviously would appeal more to a younger demographic. Older players, like me, aren't really excited about the idea. Me, on the other hand, I'm dreaming about MMORPG combat which would be more strategic, slower, and require more thinking. I get excited about games like Puzzle Quest and Metal Gear Acid, which use puzzles or trading cards as combat mechanism. But I'm fully aware that this deeper but slower way of combat isn't likely to attract the younger crowd. But hey, if the genre grows big enough, there is room for games for all ages. Even a turn-based strategy game like Heroes of Might & Magic 5 still sells very well, because there are enough older gamers out there to buy it.

Consoles would be ideal to support action MMORPGs, with or without sharing servers with PC clients. The MMORPGs with slower, more strategic combat mechanisms would probably sell better on PCs. Besides the differences in combat, console MMORPGs would probably be more game-centric, with few social elements. It's hard to chat using console controls. On the PC side games could become more world-centric compared to WoW. The recent article on WoW in The Times discussed among other things how the (adult and female) author would have liked more social elements in the game, for example having a jukebox and a pub quiz or raffle on offer in the WoW taverns.

On the business model side, games with no monthly fee would probably be more attractive for a younger crowd. For older gamers a monthly fee isn't that much of a problem, and many would even be willing to pay more for things inside the game. That could be booster packs for the trading card combat game, or it could be fancy outfits like those being sold in Second Life or some Korean games.

In short, there are lots of ways in which MMORPGs could develop, and they aren't all going to be of the one-size-fits-all kind. By accepting that different solutions of platform, combat system, or business model could be ideal for different demographics, the genre could open itself up for a much larger variety.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:57 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Scammed!

I played World of Warcraft for two-and-a-half years without falling for any of the numerous scams around. No longer, now I'm 125 gold poorer, and one experience richer. I thought I'd buy a [Recipe: Flask of Distilled Wisdom] really cheap, but got sold a [Recipe: Flask of Distilled Wisdom] instead. You don't see the difference? Neither did I! The one I wanted is the recipe that has been in the game since the beginning, with a 2% drop rate from the end-boss of Stratholme, living side. The one I bought is the new version, which you can buy and use only if you are exalted with the Cenarion Expedition. Due to slopply game design from Blizzard this recipe isn't bind on pickup, so once somebody is exalted, he can buy these recipes in endless supply for 4 gold, and scam people into believing they are the real thing, selling them for hundreds of gold.

And I can't even report the guy who scammed me, although I remember his name. There is nothing in the Terms of Service or EULA stating that you can't sell worthless crap for large amounts of gold. It's caveat emptor, buyer beware.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:48 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
How big is Middle-Earth?

Curiously my most linked-to article ever is the one measuring the size of Azeroth from the World of Warcraft as 80 square miles. With me planning to play more Lord of the Rings Online than WoW in the future, you could expect me measuring the size of Middle-Earth next. But I don't have to, because the size of Eriador, the region of Middle-Earth you can visit in LotRO has been officially announced, and no lesser medium than the New York Times.

They first had the size of the LotRO world given as "50 million acres", which would have been 1,000 times larger than Azeroth. That frankly would be impossible. So they issued a correction stating that they made an error, and that the real size is 50 million square meters, which is less than 20 square miles, and thus just a quarter of the size of pre-BC Azeroth. I can believe that number, I once ran from Ered Lindon to the Misty Mountains, and it wasn't all that far.

Now if you take the size of Eriador and assume that the rest of Middle-Earth will have the same scale, the whole world of the Lord of the Rings Online, after all expansions are out, will be as big as World of Warcraft before the first expansion. Fortunately we can expect Turbine to bring out expansions faster than Blizzard. But criticism that Lord of the Rings Online will be relatively small on release is certainly justified.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:16 PM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
Take out the trash

The April Fools' joke from the Death & Taxes guild was a fake map of Black Temple showing a huge rat maze with a handful of bosses, thousands of trash mobs and a remark saying that the respawn timer on the trash was 20 minutes. Whether it is for loot or the challenge, people go raiding to fight boss mobs. Spending hours to clear trash mobs, only to see them respawn and having to clear them again, is highly annoying. With the trash respawn timers being generally short in the Burning Crusade raid instances, complaints have been piling up.

Fortunately these complaints have come from the top raiding guilds, which are the only customers Blizzard is listening to. So WoWInsider now has the story that Tigole announced raid changes for patch 2.1.0 which would make trash mobs easier to clear and respawn slower. (Unspecified changes to how Elixirs and Flasks work have also been announced. As have changes that make rogues better in raids.) And no, this isn't another fake joke.

I think a certain amount of trash mobs in a dungeon is fine. But I do agree that they shouldn't respawn so fast. The respawn timer in the first part of Karazhan is only 30 minutes, so if your raid isn't working like a well-oiled machine, and there is some delay due to somebody getting disconnected or having to leave, you get caught in a wave of respawning trash. I also wouldn't mind them thinning out the trash a bit more, as fighting the same mob over and over gets old pretty fast.

What I'm a bit dubious about is the design philosophy to make raid dungeons deliberately too hard to start with, and then gradually nerfing them down to an acceptable level. Sure, that is more popular than starting too easy and making it harder later. But a bit more playtesting would have been nice.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:50 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
Puzzle Quest Journal - 2-April-2007

No idea yet whether this is going to be a regular column, but seeing how addicted I am already to Puzzle Quest before even getting hold of the full game, I thought I might as well start a journal. First things first, Infinite Interactive posted a Puzzle Quest April Fools' joke on how to access the cheat menu.
The "Toggle AI Cheating" is an insider joke, some people complain that the AI cheats, but I'd say the AI is simply better at playing the game than most players are. The "Show Nude Heroes" and "Play Secret Cow Level" are giving the joke away. Much better hidden is that the access code apparently is morse code for "I AM A NOOB". I wonder on how many cheat code sites this fake information will be copied. :)

I ordered the PSP version from Amazon.co.uk, but they are unusually slow this time, and give me a projected delivery date of mid-April. So I followed the advice of one of my readers and ordered from HMV instead, who just mailed me that they already shipped it. So I hope to get it before the Easter weekend. Until then I'm stuck with the PC demo version, limited to level 7.

But after some experimenting it turned out that there are more monsters to fight in that PC demo than I thought. The trick is to save all your money, until you can buy a forge for 600 gold. That opens up another mini-game to forge items from runes, and as you get these forged items for free, the initial 600 gold investment is well spent in comparison with buying items from shops. But more importantly, at least in the demo, once you have the forge you can battle a new mob at every tower on the map, by selecting "search for runes". If you win those fights, you get new runes, and can combine them with the existing runes to forge more different items. And the runemasters you fight are level 15 to 30, which with you being level 7 max is a serious challenge.

These hard fights allowed me to evaluate better the four character classes in the game: druid, knight, warrior, and wizard. The difference between the classes are in what spells they get, and in how many points it costs to raise which stats. As you only get 4 points per level, you can't really afford to put many points into a stat that costs 3 points to raise, you're better advised to divide your points between those that cost 1 or 2 points. This predetermines in which stats the different character classes will end up being good at. So here is my review of the Puzzle Quest character classes:

At first I liked the druid, because the first spell he gets is a healing spell, Gemberry. He also gets Calm to remove status effects. By healing yourself you can prevent yourself from losing, which means you eventually win. Unfortunately the druid isn't very good at damaging his opponents. His battle stat, increasing the damage from skulls, costs 3 points. And he doesn't get all that many or all that good damage dealing spells, only Forest Fire in the demo. Against the harder runemaster opponents the fights always took very long, and when the opponent had a way to heal himself they got downright unwinnable.

The knight is a bit better. For him the battle skill costs only 1 point, so by putting lots of points there he has a good damage potential. His spells are a mix of many different types. Board manipulation, like getting all the experience point purple stars with the "Divine Right" spell, or destroying a gem that's in the way with "Thrust". A limited way to gain life with the favor spell (Every time you gain experience, 50% chance of gaining +1 life. Obvious combo with Divine Right.). And the knight gets the awesome Stun spell, which both damages the enemy and lets him lose a turn. But as the knight gains mana slower than a druid or wizard, he'll still be doing most of his damage with lining up skulls. The knight is a kind of hybrid class, although more leaning towards melee.

The warrior is probably easiest to play, I think I'll chose that class for my first "real" game when I get hold of my copy. The warrior is another class where the battle skill only costs 1 point, so if you are good at lining up skulls on the board, you'll deal tons of damage. And again mana gaining is slower than the caster classes. But his spells come in only two flavors: dealing damage and manipulating the board. Against some harder enemies I was able to win by simply constantly denying them the blue and yellow mana they needed for their abilities, which is easy with a Wild Lore spell (Destroy all blue and yellow gems.) Such mass destruction spells of certain gem types also increase the concentration of the other colors, which if correctly pulled of can give awesome chain reactions.

The final class, the wizard, is a lot harder to play, but very powerful. While the battle skill costs 3 points for him, the wizard can gather mana quickly by putting points in fire and air mastery. The wizard has by far the best damaging spell, I ended a couple of fights by just using the mana I had to cast several Fire Bolt spells in a row. Haste is also very nice, dealing 4 damage every time you get an extra turn. That should be awesome at higher levels, because besides getting extra turns when you manage to get 4 tiles in a row, you also increase your chance to get random extra turns when increasing your mastery of the four elements. The wizards weak point is his morale skill, which is low to start with and costing 3 points will forever remain low. As morale determines your life points, and also much of the damage reducing armor in the game needs a certain minimum morale, the wizard is very vulnerable.

Apart from the class spells you can gain other spells, if you build a dungeon, capture a monster by beating it three times, and then play a mini-game to steal one of his spells. These stolen spells cost you more mana to cast, but might give you a better rounded selection of spells. Apparently you can only carry 6 different spells into battle, so you'll have to chose which mix is good.

Choosing a different class very much changes how you play this game, which is great for replayability. I found it very interesting how your spells and abilities, and those of your opponent, change each battle into a different experience. A warrior killing a skeleton is a totally different game than a wizard killing a bat. By having role-playing elements in the game, you can modify the difficulty level by leveling up or equipping yourself with better gear. (Apparently monsters go up in level too, but only in a fixed level range. Lets say one specific monster can be level 18 to 24, then if you're lower than 18 it will be level 18, if you're between 18 and 24 it will have your level, and if you're above 24 it will be 24.) So you can eventually outlevel a monster you found too hard to beat earlier. Losing a battle in Puzzle Quest is no big deal, you still get some gold and experience, and just try again. The only way is forward, until you hit the level cap of 50 and complete all the quests. Given the many different features and possibilities that Puzzle Quest offers, this promises to be an entertaining journey.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:51 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 2-April-2007

Yes, I'm still playing World of Warcraft. But significantly less than before. This weekend even the Puzzle Quest demo, limited to level 7 as it is, managed to keep me playing longer than WoW (I just had to play all character classes to the max in Puzzle Quest to see which one I liked best. I recommend warriors.) So I didn't do any instances at all this weekend, and only grouped shortly once, to help a guild mate with an elite quest.

So what I was doing in WoW is playing my level 68 warrior. Having finished all the quests in Nagrand, except a couple of boring ones that I decided to skip, I moved on to Blade's Edge. Questing there started a bit slow, there aren't all that many quest-givers in Thunderlord Stronghold. But once I did the first handful of quests, it opened up a quest series for Rexxar, Champion of the Horde. Apparently he has given up wandering through Desolace, and has been replaced there by another champion of the horde NPC for the Onyxia quest chain.

Many of the quests in Blade's Edge mountains involve killing ogres. Fortunately there are a couple of fun quests and events, not just serial killing. You meet the disembodied head of a troll witch doctor, who is asking you for 10 beers and a hookah (no, I'm not spelling that wrong), which leads to you receiving a source for beer that distracts one tribe of ogres. You get to curse some ogre buildings. And Rexxar sends you to control a marmot which stealthes through the ogre camp to poison their kegs. All fun enough, but after a couple of hours I tend to get bored nowadays.

That is insofar strange as soloing with my warrior is more fun than soloing with my priest. I so love the spell reflect ability, especially since it also works on a couple of breath weapons. Not only is the ability very useful, it also forces you to react more, making combat more interactive. Nevertheless I did have a situation again this weekend where I got disconnected while fighting 2 ogres, and by the time I reconnected one ogre was dead, and I still had enough health left to kill the other ogre before he got me. That makes me feel as if my button-mashing wasn't serving for much more than shorten fights I would also have won on auto-attack. Not very heroic, nor interactive.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:00 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
The serious side to the joke

Ah, April Fools' Day. Blizzard announced Tin Foil Hats and tried to pass of their old Warcraft RTS games as the new WoW expansion. Turbine announced blue-skinned hobbits with white hats, whose complicately spelled name was pronounced like Smurf. And I write a fake announcement how WoW gets rid of gold farmers permanently. But of course such jokes are only funny if they are remotely believable. The funny thing in my joke was that it actually would have worked! If you would prevent players from giving each other gold, gold farming as we know it would die. But so would major parts of the player economy, as well as twinking, and sending stuff to your friends and guild mates. So the serious question behind the joke is: How much would we be willing to endure to get rid of gold farmers?

Farming gold is perfectly legal, as long as you don't use a bot to do it. Sending 1,000 gold to a complete stranger is perfectly legal too. Only receiving real money in exchange for these 1,000 dollars is against the terms of service and can get you banned. That means of the activities of a non-botting gold farmer, the only thing that is illegal happens outside the game. Unless the farmer is so stupid as to sell the gold on EBay using the same e-mail address that he used to sign up for his WoW account, there is no way Blizzard can catch him. They can't legally get hold of the buyers credit card statement or find any other proof that the seller received dollars for his gold. Blizzard can, and does, detect bots and bans accounts using them. Blizzard can't, and doesn't, ban a sweatshop full of Chinese farming manually. Neither can they do anything against the big companies buying gold from the farmers and selling that gold for dollars to other players. They can ban the account that is sending in-game spam mail or tells advertising a gold-selling website, but those are just free trial accounts anyway.

The reason why the in-game activities of gold farmers are legal is that they are indistinguishable from the behavior of regular players. I saw a guild mate of mine riding on a talbuk, and asked him how he got it. He said its a reward from getting exalted with the Mag'har, and he got it by killing ogres in Nagrand. At 10 reputation points per ogre, you can calculate how many of them he killed to get there. And he probably made a pretty sum of gold at the same time. How is Blizzard going to know that this guy killing 5,000 ogres is a regular player and not a gold farmer? Sending gold per mail is also something that regular players do all the time. Mostly between characters of their own account, but often also to players on other accounts, be it girlfriends, little brothers, or guild mates.

You can think of many different modifications to the game which would make gold farming harder to impossible. Like in yesterday's joke you could make gold effectively soulbound. Or you could introduced something like the Chinese government requires, having mobs drop less and less gold after 3 hours (although that would just force the gold farmer to buy 8 accounts). You could lower the gold cost for mounts and other money sinks by a factor of 10, thereby reducing the buyers' demand for gold. But any solution you come up with is sure to impact regular players as well. My April Fools' joke would have effectively killed large parts of the WoW economy. Diminishing returns would be rather unpopular, think of what would happen if your raid finally reaches the end-boss of the dungeon, and he doesn't drop anything because you took too much time to get there. Less money sinks would cause inflation in the prices of AH-traded goods. And so on.

Even the current situation, where Blizzard looks for suspicious behavior and then bans a hundred thousand accounts every quarter is a compromise. Whatever sophisticated software and methods you use, you will always have some false positives and false negatives. So after the bannings there are still some gold farmers left in the game (while the banned ones just start new accounts), and if you have just 1% of false positives you just banned 1,000 totally legit players which were caught in the dragnet by showing some unusual behavior. Of course these complain loudly, causing a lot of bad publicity.

So in the end stating that gold farming is harmful and should be eliminated is too simple. You need to do a more complete analysis just exactly how harmful it is, and what you would be willing to sacrifice to get rid of the problem. Apparently Blizzard thinks that gold farming isn't harmful enough to justify limitations to the legit player economy. They react slow to people reporting bots, both because of the danger of innocent people getting accused of botting, and because of the cost of following up every report immediately. They are against real money trade, but it isn't their top priority, and they aren't going to do anything spectacular, like preventing gold trade by changing the game, or sueing a major gold selling company.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:15 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Blizzard gets rid of gold farmers permanently

Blizzard added to an earlier thread about gold farmer banning on the forums by outlining their plans how to get rid of gold farmers for good in patch 2.1.0. It turns out that this is easier than we thought. There are only three ways for a gold farmer to pass gold to his customers, and Blizzard is blocking all three, without causing too much hardship to regular players.

First is the mailbox, which after patch 2.1.0 will only transport written letters. The possibility to attach items or gold, or to COD, is going to be removed. Mail is currently the top distribution method for farmed gold, so good riddance.

Second is the auction house. Currently you can transfer gold via the auction house by the receiver selling some worthless item for 1,000 gold. To stop that, the ability to freely set the price of items in the AH will be removed. Today already the minimum bid price is set automatically. Starting from patch 2.1.0 the buyout price will also be set automatically, at twice the minimum bid price.

The third method to transfer gold is the trade window. Totally removing that wasn't possible, as it is needed for things like lockpicking and enchanting. So Blizzard cleverly transformed the trade window into a tradeskill window. Just giving somebody items or money isn't possible any more. But a crafter can select one of his recipes in the tradeskill window, and it will show the ingredients list to the customer, plus a fixed fee. If the customer fills in all the materials slots, the crafter can craft the item, and it will directly appear in the backpack of the customer. Even bind on pickup items can thus be crafted for somebody else! Very useful.

With no more way left to transfer gold to their clients, the gold farmers will quickly go out of business, Blizzard hopes. I'm a bit sceptical that this will only half work: Powerleveling is still possible, and if you give your account to some gold farmer, he could farm gold for you on your account. Less practical than the current method, but there is always one way left to do it.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:07 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post