Too slow for AoE

My blood elf mage is level 27 now, so since level 26 I have all the spells needed for frost mage AoE farming, getting the collection complete with Cone of Cold at level 26. So I followed the excellent video guide for frost mage AoE grinding, starting with small numbers of lower level mobs. And I didn't have much success. It is not that the method isn't working, but as the guide says, it requires practice, practice, practice. And you need to be very fast. Which I am not.

Now I have no problems playing a mage in normal combat against single mobs, which requires a bit of strategic thinking and not much movement. You find a good spot at maximum distance, frostbolt the mob, frostbolt some more while the mob approaches, then hit frost nova just before the mob reaches you, take a step back and continue with frostbolts or other spells to finish him off.

But AoE grinding is much different, because you spend a lot of time running *away* from the mobs while your spells are on cooldown, or while you gather the mobs up. Which means that you need in split seconds to be able to turn around, hit the blizzard spell hotkey as soon as you stop moving, and then place the blizzard target circle at the perfect spot over the mobs and slightly towards you. And that takes me far too much time. While in the video the guy manages to get two blizzards off after each frost nova, I barely manage one. Then I would need to turn and run until frost nova is ready again, but there again I'm slow and get hit too much. So with a lot of effort I manage to get 3 mobs of 6 levels lower than me killed, but then I'm already low on health and out of mana, and the whole thing isn't very efficient.

I used to be good at quad-kiting, a special druid technique in Everquest 1, which works somewhat similar. But of course EQ was a much slower game. And that was many years ago, and my reflexes haven't gotten any faster since then. Somebody half my age certainly can make frost mage AoE farming work, but I'm simply too slow for it nowadays. But what I found very interesting is that this is the first time in World of Warcraft where I found that I was reacting too slowly for something. For most classes and most situations, split second twitchy reaction speed doesn't make any difference to your success chance in WoW. For frost mage AoE it certainly does. I'll go back to my frostbolts.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:25 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Guesstimating numbers

Changed asked in a recent comment: "I am curious about your estimates for these percentages of WoW players (say the 2M in North America and Europe):

% of people with level 70's
% of people who have entered Karazhan
% of people who have finished Karazhan (killed Nightbane)
% of people who have entered 25-man TBC raids

Wowjutsu provides some numbers but doesn't indicate how many of those toons are on the same account / same player. Any thoughts?"

I posted a reply, but before I copy that here, I'd like to discuss the subject a bit. Estimating numbers based on fragments of data we have and personal experience is extremely difficult. For example Changed mentions 2 million WoW players in North America and Europe, while I thought that of the 9.3 million total players about 4 million are from North America and Europe. But those are just numbers I remember from the last time Blizzard published numbers by region, and this could easily have gone down to 3 million or less since then.

The best source of raid population data is WoWjutsu. They use data from the WoW Armory, which is much more reliable than relying on user input. But the best they can do is count "raid guilds", and declare every member of a raid guild to be a raider. This is only true for the top raiding guilds. There are lots of casual guilds with large memberships, of which only a fraction ever went raiding. WoWjutsu only counts raiders, their total number of "players" listed is the total number of people in guilds with Karazhan loot. Which is why they have 100% of "players" listed as having been to Karazhan.

One principal problem of all sorts of counting population in online games is whether you count players, characters, or characters actually online. For example if we wanted data on how many people play Alliance and how many play Horde, the sum of the two as expressed as a percentage of all subscribers is over 100%, because some players have both. If you count online players, you give more weight to the players who are online more hours a week, and less weight to those who rarely play. My estimates are based on the number of suscribers, not on the number of characters, or online characters. The number of raiders as expressed as a percentage of online characters would be higher, because raiders usually play more.

So here are my half guessed, half calculated estimates:

% of people with level 70's

I'd say about 70%. I've used CensusPlus and saw over 60% of people online on my server being level 70. But of course many of the lower levels online were alts, while on the other hand all census software undercounts very casual players who just aren't online.

% of people who have entered Karazhan

WoWjutsu counts 1.9 million raiders out of a population of roughly 4 million US and Euro players. But this counts every guild member of a raiding guild as a raider, even if half of them never went to Karazhan, thus I'd say around 30%.

% of people who have finished Karazhan (killed Nightbane)
% of people who have entered 25-man TBC raids

Those two numbers are probably close to each other. According to WoWjutsu 1/3 of all players entering Karazhan also entered Serpentshrine, so the number is probably around 10%.

Feel free to give your own estimates in the comments. But don't just throw around numbers, give some arguments with them and tell us why you think there are more / less raiders than I'm guessing. And remember, this is percentages out of total number of European and North American subscribers.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:14 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Rewarding players for what they are doing

The first MMORPG I played was Ultima Online, and UO doesn't have levels. Instead it has skills for about everything you can do, so if you fight you gain skill points in fighting, and if you tailor you gain skill points in tailoring. Every single skill can get up to 100 points, and the sum of all skills together can't exceed 700 points. Thus everyone can create his own character class, mastering 7 different skills to maximum, or even distribute the points further. The general idea behind this concept is that the rewards that lead to character development are given out for whatever the player wants to do, and they are given in a form where he gets better in what he is doing, without getting better in other activities.

The other extreme of reward models is a pure level-based one. Whatever you do earns you experience points, which make you go up in level. And then the success of what you are doing depends on your level. Again you are rewarded for whatever you are doing, and your character develops and gets better, but there is only one way to count progress, and different activities all add to this one count, your level.

World of Warcraft is mainly level-based, but in fact has a hybrid model in some other areas. Many activities like solo PvE combat, group PvE combat, questing, or exploring new areas all give the same sort of xp that make your level go up. But for example crafting doesn't earn you any xp, you get skill points in the tradeskill you are doing. And PvP doesn't give xp either, instead you get honor, badges, and arena points. The problem is that your success in crafting or PvP still depends very much on your level. You can't get past certain crafting skill point caps unless you are of a certain level. And of course your level determines your power in PvP and your chance of success there. You can't make a pure crafter or pure PvPer in WoW.

Our recent discussion of class roles promptly spawned the old discussion in the comments of whether a MMORPG is for group play or for solo play. The answer is obviously: for both. The more different activities a MMORPG offers, the better it is. It is good that you can log into WoW and decide to solo, to play in a small group, or in a large group, to PvE, to PvP, to craft, or just to hang out and chat. If there is a problem, it is in the reward structure and the character development:

With World of Warcraft getting older, the large majority of players is at the level cap. By definition for group play you need other players, and because of the way WoW handles it you need players of around your own level. Thus most group activity, and *all* raid activity, as well as most PvP activity, takes place at the level cap. Somebody who creates a new character and wants to participate in all of these activities has to level up as quickly as possible to get to the level cap, so he can group with other players, or fight them in the arena. But the fastest way to level is solo play, so between 90% and 100% of the experience point needed to reach the level cap are earned soloing. Only then do you reach the point where you really have the full choice of all the activities that WoW offers. At lower levels you could still group and do some battleground PvP, but not to the extent that is possible at the level cap.

This obviously goes totally against the original principle of doing the activity you like, and by doing so getting better at it. Nearly all of the rewards (except the fluff) you get for doing things raises what I call your meta-level, a combined power score which adds your gear to your level. Of course at the level cap you *could* do PvP to get better at PvP. But you could also raid to get better at PvP, or craft yourself some gear to get better at group PvE. The rewards aren't very specific to the activity you are doing. And in the end it diminishes that great choice of what kind of game activity you would most like to participate in. You want to raid? Well, then solo to 70, do small groups to equip yourself, and craft the consumables you need for raiding. You're forced through a lot of stuff you didn't want to do just to arrive at the place you want to go. The system also causes lots of problems with regards to class roles. Some classes perform different roles in different environments, others are doing more similar things. But all the functions of a class have to be balanced for all environments, solo, group, raid, and various forms of PvP. And as you only see the aggregate score, the level, you can't look at a character and see how skilled he is at performing the different class roles.

So I was wondering whether it wouldn't be better to unravel the level system, and rather give out scores for different activities. For example you could have a solo level, a group level, and a PvP level. If you wanted to participate in end-game raiding, you would need to raise your group level by playing in groups, and soloing wouldn't help you to advance. Your different levels would reflect more closely the different activities that you pursued, and thus also tell more about the player skills you picked up on the way. If you needed lets say group level 70 to raid, and could only get there by leveling up in groups, one could be pretty certain that you learned notions of aggro management on the way. Your solo level or PvP level would be irrelevant to your power in group combat, so nobody would be forced to engage in a type of gameplay he didn't want. But by making group play the condition for group endgame play, there would be far more opportunities to group at lower levels. But unlike the original Everquest, which *only* had group play, there would still be the possibility to solo, or to PvP, and to gain levels in those activities, independant from your group level. You could level up all three if you wanted to, or you could concentrate on the areas you liked more. You would be rewarded for the activity you are actually doing, and the reward only developed your character in that direction, so you wouldn't need to do an unrelated activity to advance.

World of Warcraft is so big that often people get the impression that this is the final word in MMORPG development. Far from it! WoW certainly has refined and polished many of the existing concepts of the genre. But that doesn't mean that better ways don't exist. By observing the obvious flaws of the WoW level system, maybe a future game can come up with a better system of rewarding players for what they are doing, and making that reward relevant to character development in that specific sort of gameplay.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:55 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
Tribbles under new ownership

The reader who goes by the symbols = # # = pointed out the news that Perpetual Entertainment, the company that cancelled Gods & Heroes to concentrate on Star Trek Online, liquidated its assets last month and is now under new ownership under the name Perpetual, LLC. A letter was distributed to the employees stating that STO would be redesigned to be "more casual", and could possibly be financed by microtransactions instead of monthly fees.

Well, lets hope that the new owners have deeper pockets. The chances for STO to become the mythical "WoW killer" and have millions of subscribers were always slim. So maybe going for a broader audience and not requiring a monthly fee is actually a good idea for this particular game. Just because many bad games have a free-to-play plus microtransactions business model doesn't mean that all games with that business model have to be bad.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:25 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
When the class role doesn't match solo play

We touched the subject a couple of times in the past, but I thought I'd write a more detailed piece on the difference between group combat and solo combat, and why this affects different classes in different ways. I'll use World of Warcraft as an example, but in many ways the same is true for all games that use the same type of holy trinity tank-healer-dps group combat.

So how does group combat in WoW work? We take a typical group with one tank, one healer, and three dps classes. If that group fights several mobs at once, we assume that the extra mobs are under some sort of crowd control, sheeped, banished, sapped, trapped in ice etc., so we can reduce our discussion to the fight of the group against one single mob. We start with the tank who hits that one mob. In spite of possibly wielding some impressive looking sword, the damage the tank does is not very important. The most important function of the tank is to create aggro or hate, a numerical value which the AI mob uses to determine who to hit. Ideally the tank is always on top of that aggro list, and the monster thus always hits the tank, who by wearing the best armor and having defensive capabilities mitigates that damage down to the lowest possible value. The damage the tank does adds aggro, but he creates far more of it by using abilities like taunt, sunder, devastate, or thunder clap. It is important that the tank keeps the aggro, because his combined block and parry abilities, plus armor and defense rating is reducing the incoming damage by over half. If the same mob hit a mage or priest instead, the incoming damage to the group would be twice as high, and as an added problem the damage could interrupt their spells.

So now we have the tank mano-a-mano with the mob and both of their health points are going down. Unfortunately, as we are in a group encounter and the mob is an elite one, the health of the tank goes down faster than the health of the mob. So now we add the second component, the healer. The healer heals the tank with a mix of direct heals and heals over time. These heals create aggro too, but as long as the healer takes care not to overheal, he should be able to create less aggro than the tank, who is still spamming all his aggro-creating abilities like crazy.

So now the health of the tank remains up, as he is constantly being healed, and the health of the mob is going down, as the tank hits him. The mob remains glued to the tank, because the tank produces more aggro than the healer. This could go on for quite a while, until either the mob finally dies, or the healer runs out of mana. So now we need to get the health of the mob down faster, which is where the dps classes come in. Their role is to do most of the damage, in a constant stream, but not necessarily as fast as they can. Any single dps character can not do more damage than would be needed to top the tank on the aggro list, because then the tank would lose control of the mob. If for example a mage lands several crits, his aggro value for that mob grows too high, and the mob goes after the mage, who can't withstand the mob's damage as well as the tank can. But provided the dps classes can avoid that, their combined damage output is now leading to a fast fall in the mob's health, until the mob dies and the group wins.

Now lets say this mob was the final boss of the dungeon, the group divides the loot and splits apart, and each of them goes for some solo PvE, either doing some quests or farming some monsters for xp, gold, or reputation. The very term "farming" or "grinding" suggests that this is less interesting, more boring that group play. Why is that so? Because, on average, farming solo is much, much safer than playing in a group. In most cases you chose the place for farming in a way that your chance to die is very small to non-existant. While in the fight of the group against the boss mob the basic question was who would win, in farming the basic question becomes how fast can you win. In group fights, for example with the damage output of the dps classes we mentioned, it is often preferable to sacrifice speed for safety. Your group can take harder monsters by playing it slow and safe, giving the tank a few extra seconds to gain aggro before the others attack the mob, or by the dps classes limiting their damage with the help of a threat meter to avoid pulling aggro away from the tank. In solo fights being slow is a disadvantage. You are already sure that you are going to win. The only question is how many of these mobs can you kill in one hour, to maximize the gold, xp, or reputation gain.

So now our dps classes from the group are in solo PvE grinding, and they do exactly what they did in the group fight: deal damage. Only without having to watch an upper limit, because now the faster they deal the damage the better. Whatever talents or gear they have that helped them deal good damage per second in a group will also help them grind most efficiently.

The tank from the group isn't so lucky in solo PvE grinding. If he is still using the same tank gear and tank talent build that he had in the group, he can deal only slightly more damage than in the group fight, by changing to a more aggressive stance and using his rage for damage abilities instead of abilities that draw aggro. He still mitigates half of the damage with his armor, but that doesn't help him much, because he also deals a lot less damage than a dps class and thus the fights last twice as long. Per hour he simply kills less mobs than a dps class, because he deals less damage per second, otherwise they wouldn't be called dps classes. He can increase his damage output by changing his gear and/or his talent build. But it will never be quite as good as the best dps dealing class. And of course it would require him to collect several sets of gear, and to pay respec costs, which all adds up to a lot of cost and effort that a dps class doesn't have.

The healer has exactly the same problem. He deals enough damage to kill the same grinding mobs without problems, but slower than the dps classes. He doesn't die, because he can heal himself, but every single fight takes a bit longer than the one of a dps class, and at the end of the hour he has gained less xp, gold, or reputation. Again he can collect a second set of gear or spec differently for soloing, which again has a cost that the dps classes don't suffer. Or in summary: the class role of the tank and healer in a group is at cross purposes with the goals of solo PvE combat, while for the dps classes the two purposes align much better. Of course even a dps class might have some differences in the "perfect" talent build or gear for group play and solo play, but in general the differences will not be so large, and it is easy to find some compromise which works well for both.

Saying that a specialized tank or healer, in WoW terms lets say a protection spec'd tank or a holy spec'd priest, can't solo is clearly wrong. They can solo, and in many cases they can even do the same level of quests and kill the same level of mobs that a dps class can. But this comes at the cost of speed, if they stick to their protection or holy build and gear, they will level / get rich / gain reputation much slower than the other classes. Somebody who has played several classes will be very much aware of the difference, and leveling up slower is feeling less fun for most people.

This has several bad consequences. One is that healers and tanks are the least popular classes to play. But as every group needs at least one healer and one tank, they become the bottleneck for group formation. In my 3 years of WoW I'm sure that over 90% of the looking for group shouts I heard on various chat channels, including guild chat, were either looking specifically for a tank, a healer, or both. There are very few times when a group has a tank and a healer and has problems filling the other three spots.

The other bad consequence is that people who are aware that tanks and healers are needed for groups and decide to play one don't want to actually level him as such. They will make shadow priests, fury warriors, retribution paladins, etc. to level up to the level cap as fast as possible. That makes them of not so much use for groups in the lower levels, and they miss out on opportunities to already learn how to perform their class role at the lower levels. Level 70 is late for a warrior to learn how to taunt. And even at level 70 they often find that they prefer to stick to the more damage-dealing role, as it is better for soloing and for PvP. Which still doesn't help the other players looking for a tank or healer.

When Blizzard recently added damage bonus to healing gear, they clearly intended to fix this cross purpose between solo role and group role for healers. Warhammer Online stresses how each of their classes is good at dealing damage, even the tanks and the healers. Ideally a game would have many different classes which all kill mobs in solo combat at the same speed. And each class would have a specific role in group combat, like tanking, healing, crowd control or special effects which were all equally useful but different. Damage dealing shouldn't be a speciality, it should be a common base value. After all, when the typical looking for group shout goes out for "a tank, a healer, and 2 randoms", it can't really be considered a compliment to have one's class listed under "random".
- posted by Tobold @ 5:33 PM Permanent Link  (40) comments Links to this post

 
Village WiFi

As feared the hotel I'm in doesn't have internet access. Or rather, as they assured me, they do have internet, it just isn't working. :) But it turns out that most of the village is covered by area WiFi. So I just needed to go to the tourist info and buy a little scratch card with a userid and password, and now I'm connected to the rest of the world again.

The place here is designed for tourists, but in winter they apparently don't get enough traffic, so they rent the hotel and facilities out for business training courses and the like. The course I'm on has a rather demanding schedule, so I'll still not write a lot this week, but at least it won't be total radio silence.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:26 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Possible absence for a week

I'm going on a business trip today, to some out of the way place. And what worries me is that the website of the hotel where I'll be staying doesn't mention anything about "internet". So it is possible that I'll be without internet for a whole week, how am I going to survive that? :)

Actually, getting away from everything for a week is nice. But be warned that there might be no blog entries all week. If you get bored, post in the comment section of this post about what subject you want me to talk when I'm back.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:23 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Holy priest stealth fren

Okay, okay, so I made the word "fren" up by spelling "nerf" backwards. But what is the official opposite of a nerf? Anyway, somewhere hidden in long patch notes for World of Warcraft patch 2.3 is the fact that items that had a bonus to healing kept that bonus plus gained about 1/3 of that number in in spell damage bonus. So if you were a holy priest with +1,000 healing bonus, you suddenly gained +333 spell damage bonus. That makes a visible change to holy priest solo dps. But of course if you were a shadow priest with lots of spell damage bonus and little or no healing bonus items, it doesn't change a thing. So basically the patch increased the damage output of holy priests, while keeping shadow priests at the same level.

And I think this is the right direction to go, and should also be applied to other healing and tanking classes. Last week my tank was grouped with a priest and two shamans, and we had to look for a "healer", because all three of them were spec'd for dps. Fact is that as long as you solo, dps is far, far more useful than healing or the damage mitigation abilities of a tank. Not to mention that all the taunt abilities of a protection warrior become totally useless in solo combat. So many of the players who have a choice between a talent build for dps and a talent build for healing/tanking choose the former, so as not to gimp themselves for soloing. But of course that hurts their usefulness in groups, and makes it hard to find enough healers and tanks for grouping in general.

Classes who deal damage as their main job have it easier. They don't have to choose between a solo talent build and a group talent build, they usually get talents that are useful for both situations. Of course there is always some mini-maxing about what exactly is the best PvP, PvE solo, or group build. But if you went for a PvP or group PvE build, you'd still be very good in solo PvE.

By increasing the dps of people spec'd for healing or tanking to just a little bit below the dps they'd get if they would specialize in damage builds, it would make the group-friendly builds more viable and popular, and ultimately lead to more grouping. And that doesn't mean that the other talent builds would become obsolete, because they could have other interesting abilities, for example the vampiric health and mana drains of the shadow priest. It just would be better if we got away from a situation where everybody tells you that you *have to* spec shadow to solo as a priest.

Right now my holy priest is better in soloing than my tank. I can complete the Skettis escort quest easily with the priest, while the warrior sometimes gets into trouble and dies when things go wrong. How about turning my defensive and block bonuses into a damage bonus as well, Blizzard?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:48 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
The state of WoW gold farming

I'm back in WoW only since a short while, and I haven't done any farming to specifically go after gold, but I already accumulated over 1,000 gold just by doing daily quests and playing around for fun. I also noticed that I don't get any gold seller spam tells or e-mails any more. Only my newb mage got some random invites and when I accepted I got a /group tell advertising some cheat software, not gold. Apparently Blizzard's new tools to prevent gold spam are working. I saw somebody advertising gold in Orgrimmar once or twice in local /say channel, but much less than before. So if I'm swimming in gold without even going after it, and there is less gold spam, is the WoW gold farming industry in decline?

I went and checked some gold selling site, and found that 1,000 gold in WoW cost about $50 nowadays. That is pretty much what I remember from my last survey of that kind in Europe, but at that time in the US gold was much more expensive. Now the price is the same everywhere, thus the US has much cheaper gold than before. Which is kind of logical: if the supply of gold is growing, and the demand sinking, the price has to go down.

I think the daily quest did more to hurt the gold farming industry of WoW than all the previous ban actions together. When TBC came out I didn't think I would ever get 5,000 gold together for one epic flying mount, and in the end it took me several months and a lot of auction house buying and selling to get one of them. But if I'm continueing on the current trend, I'll have a another epic flying mount for my other level 70 character by early 2008, with Wrath of the Lich King still far away, and nothing else really to spend the money on. Two epic flying mounts worth 10,000 gold and not one gold piece of that bought from a gold seller! Having reduced the cost to raid with the alchemy changes, and introduced the daily quests to make gold faster, Blizzard basically flooded the WoW economy with gold. And it is even relatively fun to get, at least more fun than grinding the same mob all day long.

The tricky thing here is that daily quests give a relatively large amount of gold to regular players, but don't help the gold farmers very much. I can make 100 gold a day with the daily quests in less than 2 hours. But a gold farmer can also only get 100 gold out the daily quests, and then he'll need to go back to grinding mobs the old way for the other 22 hours that day.

Although the amount of gold in the economy has gone up a lot, I didn't observe a big inflation in the price of the primals and other resources that the gold farmers usually sell in the auction house. Adamantite ore is still where it was in price half a year ago. Only I can't buy it, prospect it, and sell the gems at a profit any more, because the prospecting chance has gone down, and the sales price of the gems has collapsed. Most rare gems go for around 30 gold now, when before I sold them for over 50 gold. Herb prices have gone up a tiny bit, but only Ragveil has gone up significantly (used for the new Mad Alchemist potion). I'm not sure whether Blizzard has reduced the herb spawn rate, or whether there are gold farmer collecting herbs now 24/7, but I have the impression that my herbalist is finding less of them. I haven't checked the prices of weapons, armor, and other gear, but somebody in guild chat remarked how cheap you could buy epics nowadays. Makes me wonder where all the money goes. Are people already gathering the 10,000+ gold they'll need for whatever new mount the Wrath of the Lich King expansion will offer at level 80?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:26 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
How not to install a new hard drive

I put myself into Windows installation hell yesterday, by making a small but strategic mistake: I installed my new hard drive without unplugging the old one. Getting the new hard drive into the computer was easy, especially since the Alienware case has lots of space and sufficient power cable connections. So then I booted the computer with the Windows XP CD, with both hard drives in. At setup I chose to install Windows XP on the new drive. Long formatting, then installation of Windows XP including SP1. Then I still need to install service pack 2, and all the drivers for the motherboard, sound, graphics, network, monitor, etc., until everything is up and running. Then I notice something strange: My new hard drive has the letter F:, the old hard drive still has the letter C:.

So I go to the Disk Management Utility to switch the letters around, and find out I can't. While the Windows setup CD correctly installed my new hard drive as the system drive, it kept the old hard drive as the boot drive. I reboot the Windows setup CD with the Recovery Console and try to fix the problem with the fixboot and fixmbr commands, but the only thing I achieve is destroying the old drive's boot record. So now I have two hard drives, none of which is bootable. Another reboot with the CD to try the "repair XP installation" function, only to find it isn't on offer if there is no boot drive. The only thing I can do is what I should have done right from the start: Unplug the old drive, and install Windows XP again on the new drive. Of course I also have to reinstall service pack 2, all the drivers, and so on, and so on. Took me hours until everything was running.

Following Shalkis' advice I also download a S.M.A.R.T. monitoring utility that can read the hidden information about performance and troubles on a modern hard drive. Well, at least I wasn't imagining things: The new hard drive scores okay on all counts, the old hard drives is shown as "fail" because of nearly 3,000 reallocated sector counts. So I format the old drive to erase my personal information from it (yes, I know that with very expensive hardware somebody might still be able to recover it, but who would bother for the insignificant data on a private drive?), and remove it from the case. Now I just need to put it into a padded envelope, wait until the delivery guy comes with my replacement drive, slap the return label on the envelope and give it to him to be sent back.

I also did something extravagant: I ordered another OEM copy of Windows XP Pro including SP2c, just for safety and convenience. I'm running out of activations on my existing Windows XP, and while there is probably some way to persuade Microsoft to give you more activations, I'd rather have the latest version, which will be faster to install as all the service packs are already included. By buying a hard drive I had the right to buy a cheap OEM version. Curiously if you want to buy an OEM version of Vista, you need to buy at least 3 pieces of hardware, or a new computer. I rather took my last chance to still get Windows XP before Microsoft decides to force everyone to use Vista.

What I don't know is whether it is possible to actually have two drives with a working boot sector in one computer. Because if that was possible, I would reinstall Windows again on the replacement drive. The hard drive I bought yesterday is only SATA-I, the replacement drive will be SATA-II and twice as fast. The shop didn't have any SATA-II drives, and I had to take what was available, a Seagate 320 MB SATA-I drive for less than 100 Euro. That would be good enough for a second hard drive for data storage, and I'd love to leave the Windows XP installation including boot sector on it in case of future problems. But I don't know if by unplugging this drive and turning the replacement SATA-II drive into a bootable Windows XP drive, and setting it first in the boot order in the BIOS, I can then plug the SATA-I drive back in and have two bootable hard drives in the computer.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:58 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
Henchmen in WoW

I bought the original Guild Wars, found it not very solo friendly, and never played it much. But many people tell me that since the Nightfall expansion added NPC heroes to accompany you, which are much better than the ordinary henchmen you could use right from the start, the game is much better for soloing. So when one of my readers commented that World of Warcraft doesn't have a tutorial to teach you how to play in groups, I was wondering whether World of Warcraft could introduce henchmen or NPC heroes.

Imagine running through a World of Warcraft dungeon together with 4 NPC henchmen. You would give basic orders, for example by setting the already existing raid marks and then giving a GO command, at which point the mage sheeps the mob with moon over his head, and everybody attacks the mob with the skull. The NPCs would be of your level, and would play uninspired but according to their class role. So if for example you were the healer, the NPC tank would pull on command, and the NPC DPS classes would do a steady stream of damage. But if you decided to heal someone too early with too big a heal, and pulled aggro on yourself, the NPC tank wouldn't automatically rush to your rescue, unless given a command to do so. The whole thing should be balanced (which is probably difficult) in a way that if you did nothing, or played badly the group would fail. But if you played well, you and the NPC group together would be able to finish the average WoW dungeon (non-heroic).

I don't think Blizzard is even thinking about adding such a feature, at least not before the third expansion. But when I stand all alone with a low-level character in front of a dungeon and can't find a group, I find the idea to have a group of NPC henchmen rather attractive. I didn't get to control more than 1 henchman in the Gods & Heroes beta before the game was cancelled, but the gameplay was certainly interesting. And I think that by playing with 4 NPCs instead of 4 random pickup group members, players would learn better how group play works. Unless you already know a lot about aggro management etc., it isn't always obvious why things went haywire on that last pull. The tank blames the healer for not healing him, the healer blames the tank for not getting the aggro away from him, but in reality it was the mage casting an AoE spell that made the plan go wrong, because then the healer had to heal the mage, which transferred the aggro to the healer, and thus kept him from healing the tank. Most people in a PUG think that one of the other 4 players was the problem, and rarely realize when it was themselves. If you'd control the other 4 characters, and they did only predictable stuff, you'd be able to experiment with different tactics. NPC heroes should be too weak to tackle the dungeons at the level cap, heroics, or raid dungeons, so people would still be encouraged to group with real players. But if they had practiced with NPCs first, maybe their group play at the level cap would be better.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:58 PM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Raid lockouts

Solf commented on the post about improving raid progression that "I'm very-very surprised that in all this huge discussion nobody mentioned raid lock-outs. To me it would seem that lock-outs and nothing else is the main obstacle towards "casual raiding"." Good point! Meanwhile another reader, Stargazer, sent me an interesting idea: "I don't understand why people can't have their personal raid. Instead of a weekly reset, you get your own reset when you want to (max once a week) and you even get saved with this group until you descide you no longer want to be saved with them (after a week or whatever it takes to make sure we are not getting epics for free because that seems to be very important). That way you could have you group of friends and actually fight your way through all these interesting places, even though you are only able to do so every 3rd Wednesday from 19:00 to 22:00." So let us have a look at raid lockouts, and how they could be improved.

Raid lockouts have two functions, a positive and a negative one. The positive function is that they enable a group to do a long raid over several days, restarting another day where they left off the last time. The negative function is that raid lockouts prevent people from doing the same raid or raid boss more than once per X days. If that negative function didn't exist, a Karazhan raid group that had mastered lets say the first boss, Attumen, could "farm" him several times every night, until every member who wanted any of the epic loot that boss drops was fully equipped with it.

The complication is that the raid lockout is handled in the form of a raid ID that saves all the members of a raid when a boss is killed. Every raid has a different raid ID. So if your guild goes one evening to Karazhan with two groups, and the next day from both raids only 8 people show up, you can't even reform one single raid group with them. Everyone who was in raid A is prevented from entering the place while grouped with somebody from raid B. The only thing you could possibly do is invite people who don't have any raid ID for this week yet. But anyone who would "help out" in such a way would then be prevented from raiding the same dungeon with another group for the rest of the week. The system forces people into a relatively strict organization. And as Solf so correctly remarked it is a big obstacle to casual raiding. It also prevents guilds from trying to equip more of their members with Karazhan loot. Even if you have a main tank who would be willing to raid more often than the main raiding times, and would be willing to do a raid group with some less well equipped and experienced people to get them some Karazhan loot, he can't do so if he also wants to participate in the main raid. Every guild has some bottleneck of limited resources, usually tanks or healers, and once all those are distributed over raid groups, no more raid groups can be formed.

So I was wondering whether it wouldn't be better to save people individually to certain raid bosses. If you have been to Karazhan already this week and killed Attumen, you could still join another raid group, and as long as there was at least one person in there who hadn't killed Attumen, that boss would still be alive. But when that new raid group now kills the boss, those members who had already killed him this week won't be able to get any loot or reputation award. That would still allow some sort of guild-based farming, but at least every player only gets once shot to get loot from one boss per week. Speeding up the process in which guilds equip themselves with epics wouldn't hurt, seeing how only 4% of hardcore raiders (which translates to less than 1% of all players) have ever visited the Black Temple yet, according to WoWJutsu.

The problem for casual raids is not that a casual player could never find a few hours to visit a raid dungeon. The problem is that of any group of 10 casual players there will be rarely a time when all 10 of them simultaneously have a few hours for raiding at the same time. The raid lockout system makes pickup raids nearly impossible, and it discourages guilds from taking the more casual and less well equipped and experienced players with them occasionally. Even Tigole said in a recent interview with Warcry that "For Wrath of the Lich King, we're discussing ways to foster a healthy sense of competition among guilds on the forefront of raid progression while still allowing this content to become more accessible to others over time. I think we have a lot of innovative ideas and we'll keep trying to improve the system." I just hope that part of that improvement relaxes the current raid lockout system.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:24 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Vista to the data rescue

The Alienware computer I bought earlier this year performed well enough in the last couple of months. While when I bought it there were several blue screens of death, an Alienware technician helped me fix that by the simple way of unplugging my SATA hard drive and plugging it back in into another SATA slot on the motherboard. Don't ask me why that helped, but it did. Since then I had no more BSODs, but the hard drive still was a bit flaky. Occasional corrupted files, and whenever I ran a checkdisk there were errors to repair. Last week I started having problems booting, getting an error message at startup to retry with CTRL-ALT-DEL. Yesterday then the computer stopped booting from the hard drive altogether. Damn!

While the Alienware PC came with Vista preinstalled, I had formatted the hard drive after having had all those problems, and installed Windows XP. So I booted my Windows XP CD now and try to fix the problem with the repair function of Windows XP. No luck. The only option I had there would have been to format and reinstall completely new. Now of course knowing that the hard drive wasn't reliable I had made backups of the most important stuff in the past, but the last backup was over a week ago, and I hadn't backed up everything, just the My Documents stuff. So I didn't really want to format the hard drive.

Then I remembered that the PC came with a Windows Vista CD, and I tried that. And lo and behold, that worked. It took a long while, but the Vista setup packed up all the corrupted Windows XP stuff in a directory named Windows.Old and installed itself a clean new operating system. But then the performance was still problematic, the computer ever so often hung for several seconds and wasn't responding, presumably while searching for some data on the hard drive. But with Vista at least booting up, I was able to start checkdisk. That again took a long time and found lots of bad sectors and corrupted files. But at least it fixed the system good enough for me to be able to copy all the data I needed to an external hard drive. I was even able to copy WoW from the Windows.Old to the Vista program files directory and it ran!

But of course the hard drive is a goner. It'll continue to corrupt data until it totally fails. So I'm going to do two things. Tonight I'll buy a new hard drive and reinstall Windows XP and everything on it. And I already called Alienware, and I'm going to send them the broken hard drive and they'll replace it. Yes, that'll end me up with two hard drives, but the current drive with 250 GB was more than half full already, and I don't mind paying for a second one. At least I'll have a chance to get the computer fixed for the weekend, and don't have to wait for the replacement part from Alienware. I don't blame Alienware, they didn't build the hard drive (Samsung did), and flaky hard drives are hard to detect, the errors tend to appear only with time. Sending me a replacement is the best thing they could do.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:55 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Massively on PotBS crafting

Note to self: Need to check whether the NDA for Pirates of the Burning Sea was dropped. Because it is either that, or Massively.com got a special dispense, or they are blatantly breaking the NDA with their extensive article on PotBS crafting. Some people compared the PotBS economy system to "EVE without the boring asteroid mining", which sounds rather attractive to me. :)

Massively also reports on an interview with the lead designer of PotBS, which reveals an interesting problem with their nation vs. nation PvP: Everybody wants to play the Pirates or the British (35% of population each), and nobody wants to play the Spanish or the French (15% of population each). Which is somewhat logical if you think of an international audience on English language servers. The British and the Pirates get all the good press in all the pirate movies you ever saw. The Spanish are just in to get their gold galleons robbed by the pirates, and I don't even remember the French really playing a prominent role in any of those movies. Which tells us that our "knowledge" of the pirate era is probably far more fantasy than historical. But of course for a game where you have 4 nations battling each other for dominance, the numbers are rather problematic.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:40 PM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
WoW getting fluffier

This is somewhat related to the previous post on mudflation, where it was stated that the long time people spend at the level cap before the next expansion comes out increases the mudflation problem, because they get stronger all the time through accumulation of gear. Which is correct only insofar as people spend their time getting stronger by acquiring gear. But if you look closely at what many people do in the current TBC endgame, you'll find that not all of them are after gear that makes their characters more powerful. A lot of time is spent going after fluff, which serves only as status symbols, without actually doing anything to the stats of your character.

A good example for level 70 fluff is the Netherwing Drake or Nether Ray mounts. You need to get to exalted with the Netherwing and / or Sha'tari Skyguard factions to get these mounts. But you also need the artisan riding skill for 5,000 gold to use them, and they fly exactly as fast as the epic flying mount you can buy for 200 gold. Getting any of these alternative epic flying mounts is pure fluff, you spend a lot of days gathering faction for a reward that is just changing the look of your mount.

In a way gathering the 5,000 gold for the artisan riding skill is also kind of fluffy. Yes, the epic flying mount is much, much faster than the normal one. It is much more practical to get around, and very useful in gathering resource nodes. But for doing most quests the epic flying mount doesn't help you. And in a dungeon or raid the epic flying mount is no help at all. Not having one is not hindering your progression in any way.

The last patch also introduced a sporebat non-combat pet which you need to be exalted with the Sporeggar to get. WoWWiki calculated that you need to kill over 1,000 mobs to farm that reputation, which to me appears to be a lot of effort to get a non-combat pet. The patch also introduced daily cooking quests, with rewards like a rare recipe for chocolate cake which does absolutely nothing, except promising to make you "very happy" and give some fireworks special effects when you eat it. Fluff at its finest.

Of course there is nothing wrong with fluff. As I said, it actually helps against the mudflation problem. And as long as the player *want* fluff items that just look good, there is nothing wrong in providing fluff as reward for quests or reputation gains. The only problem is that often at the start of a quest chain you don't know what the final reward will be, whether it is fluff, good gear for your class, or good gear for somebody else's class. As you wouldn't want to do a long quest chain to find out at the end that the reward is something you don't want, you are forced to look up the rewards in advance on the various third party websites and guides. But that is a completely different subject for another post.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:29 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
Mudflation and the WoW expansion gap

Keen and Graev recently had a post about mudflation in EQ2, and I was thinking about how much worse a problem mudflation is in World of Warcraft due to the larger gap between expansions. Mudflation in the context of WoW expansions is when a new expansion comes out, raises the level cap, and the green random loot and quest rewards you get over the next couple of levels are actually better than the raid loot from the previous expansion. The further you came in the level 60 raid circuit, the longer your raid gear lasted, but by level 65 the MC / BWL gear was mostly obsolete, and by level 70 nobody was wearing any level 60 epics any more.

Mudflation has some solid marketing and design reasons, so we can expect the same to happen with the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. The marketing reason is that phat loot sells boxes. The design reason is that you want everybody at the same gear level once they hit the next level cap, to maximize the number of people that qualify gear-wise for the next raid circuit. If level 70 epic gear from the Black Temple was still required to start raiding the level 80 raid dungeons, there wouldn't be many people around to raid. And new players could never hope to catch up.

The specific problem of World of Warcraft is that there is so much more time between expansions, the average time between WoW expansions is twice the average time between EQ1 / EQ2 expansions. There were over 2 years between the original release of WoW and the first expansion, and there will be more than one year between the first and the second expansion. And leveling in WoW is relatively fast (compared to EQ1, not EQ2 where apparently people went from 70 to 80 in the Rise of Kunark expansion in a week). So somebody who started when the game was releases spent nearly 2 years at the 60 level cap, and will have spent nearly 1 year at the 70 level cap once the Wrath of the Lich King expansion comes out. And during all this time spent at the level cap he still improved his character by getting better and better gear.

Getting stronger by collecting gear at the level cap is a process that goes much slower than getting stronger by leveling up, and it has diminishing returns, it takes longer and longer to get stronger and stronger. But nevertheless the designers have to put in some possible progress, because once people feel they don't advance any more, they are likely to quit. So even with slow progress, after one or two years of it, you are considerably stronger than somebody who just dinged. And the new gear in the next expansion has to be better than the gear of the people who got furthest in the previous expansion, thus the longer the gap between expansions, the bigger the mudflation in the new expansion.

One unintended consequence of that is the gear progression for people who level up new characters after the expansion comes out. Currently everybody leveling up in old Azeroth leaves the place as soon as he hits level 58. The rewards you can get in the same time for doing a quest of level 58 in the Outlands as compared to a level 58 quest in Azeroth are much, much better. Even after the patch 2.3 upgraded the loot from the old world dungeons, I don't see people of level 58-60 do dungeons like Stratholme or Scholomance, when even the green loot of Outlands is better, and Hellfire Rampart would not be any harder and give even more awesome rewards. A lot of the previous level 60 content is now totally unused, and the same will presumably happen to the much larger amount of level 70 content currently in the game when the next expansion comes out.

Fortunately for Blizzard the patience to wait for deferred gratification, in spite of being considered a personality trait important for life success, is something that is very much lacking in many World of Warcraft players. I am always surprised how some raiders appear to raid mainly for the loot, and are willing to endure very harsh raid guild rules and schedules far beyond the point where the raid in itself is still fun, just to acquire some loot which will be obsolete in half a year. That is probably one of the reasons why many raiders can't understand the casual player's request for "easy mode" raiding with loot that isn't better than that of heroic dungeons. A raider thinks in terms of loot, and doesn't see the point of having an easy mode raid if he can already get the same level of loot in a heroic dungeon which is easier to set up. A casual player thinks in terms of different gameplay experience, and would like to have the choice between a tight heroic run and a larger, more relaxed raid experience. Personally I'm not an instant gratification kind of guy. I can live very well without epic loot, I only want to raid as long as the raiding experience is fun and play, not work and long hours late into the night. I know that come the next expansion I'll soon be equipped as well as the raiders, and even if I'll probably level to 80 a bit slower than them, that is actually the way I prefer it.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:18 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Permadeath and permafail

Dofus, a normally cuddly 2D browser-based MMORPG is going ultra-hardcore by offering a permadeath server. You level up faster than on the normal servers, but if you die, that was it, character death, you need to make a new one. I guess a lot of players will try that once, and after one or two deaths go back to the normal servers.

Meanwhile Copra wrote me with another related idea: How about permafail instead of permadeath? How logical is it that if you follow a storyline into a dungeon and fail to kill the final boss, you get to try again? What if you could try every quest and every dungeon only once, and if you failed, you'd have to move on to something else.

I don't think that would ever be implemented in any MMORPG, because actually the developers like us to repeat the same content over and over, it saves them from creating more of it. But from a storytelling point of view, and gameplay point of view I find the idea interesting. The idea of failure being possible and having consequences does focus people. Maybe groups would be better if people actually had to think whether they could stay until the end of the dungeon, and whether going without a tank or healer is such a good idea. Of course you would have to replace the random loot tables from the bosses with something fixed, so you don't lose your one shot at a boss mob because he drops some loot you can't use. And there would need to be more dungeons, so you don't run out of places to go after a month.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:33 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
Free-to-play World of Warcraft in China

Graktar alerted me to the news, and I found a nice summary from Cameron at Random Battle: The CEO of The9, the Chinese distributor of World of Warcraft made some comments about the possibility of WoW going free-to-play in China, then had to backtrack and call it all rumor and speculation from the media.

As Chinese players only pay about 6 cents per hour to play WoW, and few of them play the 250+ hours per month you'd need to end up paying $15 a month, Chinese subscribers are a lot less profitable than US and European subscribers. The third quarter sales report from The9 showed that the company had a net revenue of US$ 42.2 million. Assuming 5 million players on the Chinese servers (note that the fabled Chinese gold farmer is *not* playing on a Chinese server, but on a US/Euro one for $15 a month), The9 is making less than $3 per player per month of profit, after paying for the servers and giving Blizzard their share.

Now how going free-to-play would make *more* than US$ 42.2 million per quarter of profit I don't understand. Free-to-play is a great business model if you have a game that just wouldn't sell with a monthly or hourly fee. But if you already have 5+ million players, chances are that going free-to-play isn't going to add all that many more of them. So now you need to find a way to make each Chinese player voluntarily pay more than per month than he currently does. What exactly are you selling him? Epics? Gold? Scrolls that buff your xp / gold gain for 1 hour (these are very popular in other games)? Other games have non-paying players wear particularly bland clothes, while the good-looking clothes cost money, but in how far would that be compatible with World of Warcraft's gear model? Or would you add advertising into the game, billboards in Ironforge, and the possibility to buy an ingame Toyota Tacoma mount?

So I think the free-to-play idea is stillborn. In fact I'd rather see the Chinese business model of paying a couple of cents per hour introduced for World of Warcraft in the US and Europe, now that the game is past it's peak here. A pay-per-hour model would enable people who aren't playing that much as before to justify keeping their account alive. I can tell you that when I was still paying for my WoW account after practically having left it in April, it was annoying to see the credit card charge when I hadn't logged on more than a few minutes per day, and that not every day. And even that isn't likely, we'll probably be paying a monthly fee until the servers shut down one day. Free-to-play is a business model which can't be introduced later into an existing game with a monthly fee without problems, as it requires the game design to be wrapped around the business model.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:29 PM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
I'll get you, Terrok!

There is a quest in Skettis where you summon Terrok, the Arakkoa god who gave his name to Terrokar, and kill him in a 5-man group. I already participated in that event twice, once as my priest and once as my warrior, but in both cases only to help out, not having the quest myself. And stupidly as priest I was so concentrated on healing people that I didn't really notice how the event goes, a common problem I have with playing my healer. So when I did it as the tank, I didn't even know I was supposed to pull him into the blue flames when he becomes invulnerable, until my group started shouting at me. :) We still won, but I decided to do better next time, and do the quest myself.

The quest series starts with a quest to collect 6 shadow dust, which drop regularly from the Arakkoa of Skettis. For that you get a potion that allows you for 20 minutes to see the invisible Time-Lost Arakkoa. You then have to go and kill their high priests. That was actually quite hard to do solo, especially the one who kept healing himself with Flash Heals. I got really annoyed when I nearly had killed him and my potion ran out, so the fight ended without me killing him, and I had to start over from the beginning. Gather another 6 shadow dust, get another potion, try again. This time I got lucky guessing when he would bombard me with his Shadow Word: Pain and some poison spell, and got my spell reflection up just before, which helped a lot to bring him down. Interrupting the Flash Heals is a priority in that fight, otherwise its impossible as a protection warrior solo.

After that there are some easy quests, involving getting a pack for a captured Arakkoa, then using the Arakkoa disguise from it to by a book from a half-blind sage. And then you get the Adversarial Blood quest to find the parts for the Time-Lost Offering, which enables you to summon Terrok. The problem with that is that you need to summon four smaller bosses for the parts. Each summoning needs 10 Time-Lost scrolls, which only drop from the invisible Time-Lost Arakkoa. And with one potion to make them visible you only get 20 minutes of seeing them, which isn't even enough to find 10 scrolls. So first you need to farm 30+ shadow dust from the visible mobs, get enough potions to enable you to farm the invisible mobs, and get the 40 scrolls together.

Once you have everything, you need a group to kill the 4 small bosses and then Terrok. Stupidly the quest drop from the small bosses can be rolled for by everyone in the group, not just the guy who worked so hard to get the scrolls. Thus you can forget about doing this with a pickup group, as definitely somebody will ninja loot by rolling need on the quest part, and then you can start farming all over again. Tell your group to pass on the quest item, but the small bosses also drop decent blue stuff, on which everyone could roll. Terrok himself even drops epic cloaks sometimes, or blue gear if you aren't so lucky. But the main reward is just reputation, 1000 for the person with the quest, 350 for the other participants.

This is actually a nice event to do for a guild. I'm not a big fan of farming mobs in a group, so I'll farm 40 scrolls solo. But once you have the scrolls you get a fun event for a 5-man group, not too hard for a decent guild group, and dropping either 4 blue items, or 4 blue and 1 epic, in a relatively short period of time. If you have a balanced group, as you should anyway, there should be something for everyone. And you get to vanquish a bird god, who could ask for more?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:58 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Invaded by raiders

My apoplogies, apparently some hardcore raiding forum linked to my blog and now I get lots of nasty comments from elitist raiders. My favorite one is: "Casuals, at least in Blizzard's eyes, are happy jumping in front of the mailbox in IF, or doing whatever it is they do." I also made the error of following a reader's link to the official WoW forums to a related thread, and the comments there were even harsher. It seems that some raiders have a profound sense of entitlement, thinking that the more they play and the more they shout at Blizzard, the more entitled they are to exclusive content. And they absolutely want that content to remain exclusive, and keep the casual riff raff out. Thus any ideas to make raid dungeons accessible to casual players get shouted down with all sorts of insults. Lets see if I can clear up some misconceptions:

- "Casuals can't raid because they don't have the time." A typical example of circular logic. Casuals have problems raiding a place like Karazhan, because assembling a raid group with any chance of success takes too long. But that is because Karazhan requires a good class mix, an attunement, and hundreds of hours played at level 70 for gear from other places. If a raid dungeon existed that was much easier, had no attunement, and had a lot more flexibility what class mix could come, assembling a raid group would go much faster. And how much time it takes *in* the raid dungeon would be a matter of good game design. If I had to build a casual raid dungeon, it would start with about 20 minutes worth of trash mobs, a first boss, and then doors in three directions, leading to more bosses. Thus the raid group can always decide how many wings of the dungeon they want to do in what evening.

- "Casuals only want free epics". It is funny that the people who actually raid apparently think that there is no fun to be had in raiding itself, and that you do it only for the epics. Every single serious proposal I've read (or wrote) on how to make a casual raiding dungeon included that of course if the place is easier, the loot has to be less good. Casual players do not necessarily want free epics, they just would like to be able to raid at all.

- "Nobody would go to casual raid dungeons. Karazhan is extremely popular." Doh! Karazhan is extremely popular because it is the easiest raid dungeon that exists at the moment. Pre-TBC there were places like UBRS or Zul'Gurub which were easier than Karazhan is now or Molten Core was then, and these more casual places were very well visited. If Blizzard opened up a raid dungeon easier than Karazhan, it would draw a lot of people right now.

- "Casuals are happy jumping in front of the mailbox in IF". No they aren't, they just have nothing better to do. One thing that is important to many players, especially casual players, is to hang out with friends. If a raid dungeon is easy enough to be played in a very relaxed way, it is like a big party, lots of fun, hanging out with friends, while still having something better to do than just jumping in front of a mailbox.

- "You can't make easy raids because of the freeloaders." How your guild handles freeloaders is your guild's problem, not Blizzards. This might come to some surprise to the self-centered hardcore raiders, but not everyone is only concerned with his own welfare in World of Warcraft. Many people are quite willing to help guild mates to gear up, even if they couldn't possibly contribute as much as the already better equipped people in a raid. Raids that have enough slots for a couple of "freeloaders" are actually a good feature, for a better social coherence of a guild. Due to Real Life ® it is obvious that in a large group of friends not everybody plays the same amount of hours per month. And World of Warcraft is a game where your power depends very much on the amount of hours you played. Guilds kicking out the players that play the least, or the players who play the most leaving the guild to join a stronger one, are negative consequences of the current WoW model. A better guild model would allow the more advanced players to give a leg up to their friends that play less.

- "Blizzard should give most attention to the people shouting the loudest." Unfortunately Blizzard fell right into that one. Casual players have a lot less free available time. So of course they want to spend the little time they have to actually play, and not hang out in the forums complaining. If Blizzard wanted to know what their players want, they would have to put up some sort of survey *in game* with in-game prizes for everybody who answers, so that even the casual players would want to participate. Right now the casuals are the silent majority. The way they do vote is with their wallet. And the shrinking player numbers in North America and Europe should tell Blizzard something. Patch 2.3 was a first indication that Blizzard got that particular message and is trying to improve. Patch 2.4 will bring more daily quests and a new 5-man dungeon for casuals, but the added raid dungeon apparently will be rather hardcore. :( It is probably too late to still improve TBC raiding, I only hope that WotLK will be better in that respect.

- "I earned exclusive content because I pay a monthly fee and play a lot." Everybody pays the same monthly fee. But the cost per player for Blizzard aren't the same for everybody. Raiders use up more resources like server utilization and bandwith, because they play more hours per month. They are the least profitable customers for Blizzard. Of course Blizzard should provide content for them, as raiders running around in full epic gear are visible to the other players, and might motivate them to keep playing. But the amount of resources Blizzard should dedicate to them should be commensurate with their numbers. It was widely reported that data from WoWJutsu show that only 4% of the raiding population ever visited Black Temple. And we don't even know how much the raiding population is compared to the non-raiding population. If the Black Temple had been a 25-man raid slightly easier than Karazhan instead of a high-end raid dungeon, we can be sure that 100% of the raiding population plus many people that aren't part of that raiding population yet would have visited it. Thus between 30 and 50 times more people would have actually have used that content, and it would have been a far better use of Blizzard's resources.

- "I killed Illidan, I am a superior person than you are." Replace Illidan with whatever other boss the elitist raider is able to reach, and you aren't, and you'll see the sentiment far too often. I actually makes me a bit sad for the poor pathetic kid that achieved nothing more noteworthy in life than some success in some raid in some online game. As passionate as we might discuss games, in the end they shouldn't be that important. People should define their self-worth with real life achievements, like a happy family, a good education, a good job, being an upstanding member of a community. These are things that really count, and they are the most likely to make you happy in the long term. Failing classes, getting divorced, or losing your job over World of Warcraft raid success is a very, very Bad Idea ®. If ever politicians start legislation against "WoW addiction", raids will be the first thing to go. How do you think raiding is getting along in China, where you aren't allowed to play more than 3 hours in one session? Companies like Blizzard would be wise to create content that does *not* force you to play more than 3 hours every day just to keep up, just to avoid the backlash from the law.

A certain amount of competitiveness is good for games, it gives people goals to strive for. But there is a limit where competition can become just too much, like for example doping in sports. And I would say that World of Warcraft in many aspects is too competitive, especially in the raid content. It is all about the biggest e-peen nowadays, and not about playing together any more. But how many of 9.3 million players can be at the top of the game? Unless you change the business model to a spectator sport one, with live transmissions of Black Temple raids on ESPN and paid for by advertising, Blizzard has to try to give the maximum fun to the greatest number of players possible. Having many people excluded from the most elite content is not the way to go.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:37 AM Permanent Link  (41) comments Links to this post

 
Improving raid endgame progression

Doeg left an excellent comment on the Zul'Aman thread, which I want to take up to better explain my position, as I feel I haven't expressed myself well in that ZA post.

ZA is not targeted for toons in blues-n-greens, or even fully blues. Heroics, crafting, and PvP are ways to get the epics needed to survive Kara, where you get more-and-better epics, and then on to ZA. (I like that variety in obtaining gear, because I remember the days back when pretty much the only realistic endgame gear path in WoW was 40-man raiding.)

Interestingly, the very same complaints that are being leveled against ZA (too hard) are also proving true in the case of the reduction of Heroic key requirements. Within a few days there were stories circulating on my server about "I'm 70 now I can run a Heroic!" groups trying to jump into Heroics and getting mercilessly slaughtered.

I suppose that is, in part, a game design failure of sorts. Blizz guides us by the nose though the 1-70 content, mostly controlling access by turning on those little "!" when we're deemed ready. I suppose those poor guys and gals thought that a Heroic key was the equivalent of a yellow "!". It reminds me of the guildies who ding 70 and immediately say, "When's the next Kara run?", to which you have to say, "Whoa, there, big fella..." :).

This is exactly the game design failure I'm talking about. Ideally a player hits level 70 and what he has to do next in the progression is identical to what he *wants* to do next. Many, many players *want* to raid, far more than are currently actually raiding.

"Hard" or "easy" content does not exist in absolute terms. How hard a given dungeon is depends to some extent on how familiar the players are with it, but to an even larger extent to their level and gear. The heroic dungeons are a very good example for that. If you would do lets say the non-heroic Underbog with a group of level 58 characters equipped in green gear it would be very hard. Now the players level up, and get better gear, so by the time they are level 70 the non-heroic Underbog is rather easy to beat. But if at that point the same players try the same dungeon in heroic mode, they are back to it being hard again, as hard as when they were 58. A couple of months of gear progression later, heroic Underbog becomes easy again. Note how what the mobs in Underbog are doing doesn't change at all during that progression, only the numerical values of the stats of the players and the mobs change.

Initially Blizzard tried to prevent people from entering dungeons that were too hard for them by attunement requirements. The reason you need a key for Karazhan is that getting the key for Karazhan should drag you through several level 70 dungeons and is thus likely to acquire you some necessary gear. But being forced to do certain things wasn't very popular, the attunement scheme was abandoned for the latter raid dungeons. Strangely you still need a key for Karazhan, but can enter the harder raid dungeons without one. That shifts the problem to the guilds, who now have to tell people that they can't join lets say a Zul'Aman raid before having done a certain number of Karazhan raids.

What I am proposing is a better progression. I can see how this might be too late for TBC, but I can still dream about something like it being implemented for Wrath of the Lich King. Imagine when players hit level 80 they have a *choice* between level 80 5-man dungeons and an entry-level raid dungeon. The "difficulty" of the entry-level raid dungeon would be such that you have pretty much the same chance to succeed with the same geared people (only more of them) in the raid dungeon than what you'd have if you went to a typical level 80 5-man dungeon. And the loot would also be similar, or a tiny bit better to make up for the fact that it is harder to organize a larger group. We could even have *two* entry-level raid dungeons, one for 10 players and one for 25, to accomodate all guild sizes.

The result of that would be that all those players shouting "Ding 80, I want to join a raid" could actually do so. And of course there would be "harder", that is Karazhan-equivalent and up, raid dungeons after those entry-level raid dungeons. So the real hardcore could probably skip or do very fast the entry-level raid dungeons and go right to the next level. But the entry-level raid dungeons would make entry into the raiding progression accessible for a much larger part of the player base. If these players don't play very well, or their real-life schedules prevents them from attending on a regular basis, they might never make the next level. But at least they could raid at all. And by doing so they would learn about how to behave in a raid, and ultimately get better at it. It isn't so much that Karazhan or Zul'Aman is "too hard", the problem is that there is no easier alternative to go on a raid. Why not give people the opportunity to raid with the training-wheels still on?
- posted by Tobold @ 4:00 PM Permanent Link  (40) comments Links to this post

 
Do you like the non-raid TBC endgame?

I split this discussion off from my WoW journal. But when I was looking around what to do with my level 70 warrior, given that I don't have the time to dedicate myself for serious raiding any more, I was surprised on how many options there are. In fact the level 70 non-raid endgame from The Burning Crusade appears to offer far more variety and fun than the level 60 non-raid endgame did. There are more level 70 dungeons you can visit, especially if you count heroics as separate option. There are more factions you can gain reputation with, and in many cases gathering reputation has somewhat improved from how it was at level 60; you can already gain a good amount of reputation by doing fun stuff like dungeons or quests, without having to repeatedly kill the same monster over and over. There are more level 70 quests, and now some of them are repeatable on a daily basis. There are even more and better PvP options than before patch 1.13, allowing casual players to get some decent rewards for PvP without playing it 16 hours per day.

On the other hand the eternal problem of World of Warcraft is that "a lot to do" is not the same as "endless content". I basically stopped playing WoW in mid-April when LotRO came out, even if I only cancelled the account in July. So I'm 7 months behind everybody else, and still have a lot to do. But some of the guys in my pen & paper roleplaying group are complaining that they are already exalted with every single faction in Outlands. And of course they visited all the zones and instances far more often than I did and find them less exciting now. On the extreme casual end my wife never reached the endgame at all. She leveled a rogue to 68, then got distracted and is now playing a level 40ish druid, and is basically not using any TBC content at all.

I wonder in how far daily quests will improve the non-raid TBC endgame, and whether that could be a good model for things to come in the level 80 non-raid endgame. Especially the cooking quest, where you don't get the same thing to do every day, or the dungeon and PvP quests that send you to a different place every day, seem promising for this sort of content. I imagine doing the same bomb run every day gets old quite soon. But how does a WotLK endgame with dozens of different daily quests, all changing every day, sound to you? And how do you like the non-raid part of the current TBC endgame?
- posted by Tobold @ 11:40 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 19-November-2007

I finished the Ghostlands with my blood elf mage, and I'm level 22 now. While wondering where to go next, and finding that I knew all the available locations far too well, I felt my motivation slipping away. So I ended up not doing much more with my mage this weekend. I only walked to Light Hope Chapel in the Plaguelands, dying several times, to get the flight point. Since they added another flight point at Zul'Aman you can now fly from Undercity to Silvermoon if you have the LHC flight point. Then I went by zeppelin to Orgrimmar, ran to take the flight points in the Crossroads, Camp Taurajo, and Thunder Bluff, to finally log off at the inn in Crossroads. I still plan to play the mage, but preferably with accumulated rest xp. I won't see any new quests before level 35 (the new Dustwallow Marsh), so I have to play reruns for the next 13 levels.

So I played my level 70 characters some more. I log on my priest every morning for the egg bombing daily quest. And my priest is also the one I would take on the harder type of guild events, as he is better equipped and useful as a healer. I tried to get into a Gruul raid, but we were 26 players, and I volunteered to not go. After all, the others earned their place in the Gruul raid by having gone to Karazhan with the guild, and I just recently rejoined and have never been to Karazhan with them. So I certainly don't want to impose myself, I'll see Gruul another day. I'd love to go to Karazhan once in a while, but I don't want to sign up as a regular raider and end up feeling obligated to raid several nights a week. Understandably regular raiders get preferred slots in the raids, so I'm somewhat out of the raid circuit. I still think the game would be better if it had a pre-Kara "casual raid" instance, where a guild could go for more spontaneous fun raids without worrying too much about class mix and gear. But the way things are, the preference for regular raiders is built into the game, it is not a matter of choice for raid leaders.

The character I ended up playing the most this weekend was my level 70 warrior. He didn't do much yet after reaching level 70, so I have bad gear, barely any reputation, and only few dungeons ever visited with him. Ideal for playing him some more. Saturday some guild mates were looking for a tank to start the Ogri'la quest series, and I was happy to join. The series starts with a fat ogre named Grok sitting in the lower city of Shattrath, who sends you to another ogre near the Circle of Blood in Blade's Edge. He gives you three quests to kill three gronn, the cyclops-like giants. Two of them are in Blade's Edge, one static, one wandering, the third is in the Barrier Hills near Shattrath. You need a decent group of level 70s to beat them, especially the Barrier Hills gronn is nasty. After that your group has to do two events, one to find a grimoire, the other to summon and defeat a final gronn. In every of these quests the quest item spawns behind the dead gronn, and everyone in the group can pick one copy up. The quest series is very profitable, giving around 100 gold altogether, and opening up the possibility to speak with the ogres of Ogri'la and the skyguard rangers next to them for a bunch of new daily quests.

Up to now I really like the daily quests. My warrior is now doing at least 5 of them every day: The Skettis egg bombing run, the daily cooking quest, the Ogri'la "Simon says", the aether ray capture, and the demon bombing run. The two bombing runs are easy for him, because he has the epic flying mount (my priest doesn't). The Skettis bombing is trivial, except that you shouldn't do it at prime time where everyone is trying it and eggs are hard to find. The demon bombing run is much harder, but I found that if I keep moving while throwing the bombs I can often hit the cannon ball stacks without that the flak is hitting me. The flaks are nasty, as they throw you off your mount, but I don't mind the challenge, it makes the run more interesting. Wrangling the aether rays also is more a problem of finding them. As protection warrior I have no problems of getting them down to 20% life to capture them, without needing to fear actually killing them. The "Simon says" game is a bit annoying, but I installed an addon named Ogri'lazy, which helps you note down the sequence, so you can replay it. But my favorite daily quest is the cooking one, because it isn't the same every day. I already had one day collecting mana berries in Netherstorm, another cooking soul soup in Nagrand. And the reward is also random, besides the gold you get a crate of meat or barrel of fish, which might or might not contain one of several unique cooking recipes. Very, very nice.

Besides the daily quests my warrior also went to Mechanar once, non-heroic. I don't feel ready for the heroic dungeons yet. If the opportunity presents itself I'd love to do the daily quest for the non-heroic dungeon of the day, but up to now the groups that were forming in guild chat were for other places or not looking for a tank. Maybe I'll try to organize a pickup group, if you organize them yourself you can at least make sure the class balance is right. I was in a nice pickup group for Shadow Labyrinth, but we only got to the first boss before Blizzard decided to restart the server.

I ended the weekend helping two guild mates doing Jinta'Alor in the Hinterlands. They asked me for help because that place used to be elite, and impossible to do with just 2 people of the level. But it turned out that the patch had turned all the trolls there into non-elite. I stayed anyway, so it went fast. As an added bonus I got quite a good amount of mageweave cloth there, for my mage's tailoring. And I finally found the Hinterlands robot chicken distress beacon, having done the Feralas and Tanaris one years ago. So I escorted the chicken to safety, flew to Booty Bay, and was rewarded with my very own robot chicken non-combat pet. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 8:22 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Zul'Aman ain't no Zul'Gurub

I visited Zul'Aman last night for the first time with my guild. We got two raids together, but the one raid group I was in didn't fare very well. We repeatedly wiped on the last trash group before the first boss. After 90 minutes into the raid the MT stomped off in disgust, declaring that "we weren't ready". Yeah, that's what it said on the TBC box. Other players were furious that we gave up so early. Me, I suddenly remembered that this sort of shouting was exactly why I find raiding often so stressful and went to bed. I certainly belonged to the part of the raid group that wasn't ready, because although I brought all the potions and stuff, I'm still wearing the kind of "good blue" gear you'd take on your first Karazhan raid. Zul'Aman definitely is post-Karazhan.

What I don't really see is why World of Warcraft needs such a post-Karazhan raid dungeon. I thought the raid progression after Karazhan was already pretty complete and didn't have any big gaps to fill. Why add just another optional place? I think a dungeon more in the style of Zul'Gurub, that is for 20 players and *easier* than Karazhan, would have pleased a much larger target audience.

I wouldn't mind going to Karazhan occasionally, when the guild stands in front of the place and doesn't have enough healers for example. But I'm not planning into getting into the regular raid circuit, raiding several nights per week. Which means I will never get equipped in the gear I'd need to see the raid dungeons after Karazhan, rest of Zul'Aman included. I'd love to see Gruul at least once, but wouldn't want to be a burden to my guild going there. Anyone else here not having much luck with Zul'Aman and wishing for something else?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:01 AM Permanent Link  (32) comments Links to this post

 
What WoW UI mod to display quest levels?

I am a big fan of knowing what exactly the level of the quest is that I am doing in World of Warcraft. Not just a color code, but the exact level. Thus I can do the lower level quests first and avoid having them go grey on me, for example. Patch 2.3 apparently changed the quest interface, and the UI mod I was using for years now, called Questlevels, was no longer working. If I had Questlevels on, it messed up the quest window of the NPCs, so for example I couldn't take the daily quest at Skettis any more, because all I saw was a column of golden dots.

So I went out and searched the various WoW UI mod sites for a quest level display mod which was up to date for patch 2.3 and I found QuestGuru. It not only displays the quest level, it also changes the quest window into a wide format showing the quest list and the quest you click on in detail at the same time. It even makes it easier to read the quest text, by coloring the names of NPCs and places. Very nice!

The only problem I have is that since I use that, the NPC quest window has the text "Bonus Honor:" written somewhere at random near the bottom, sometimes covering some quest text or reward. I assume that is a bug somewhere in the QuestGuru mod, but I don't know if other people have the same problem, and whether the mod programmers are aware of it.

Are you using an UI mod to display the quest levels in WoW? Which one, and is it working without problems with patch 2.3? Please limit discussion to UI mods regarding quests and the quest interface. There are far too many UI mods out there to discuss them all in one thread.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:33 PM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Grinding something boring to reach the fun part

Damion of Zen of Design has an interesting article up on the economics of daily quests in WoW. The way he sees them, the quests aren't very good, and people grind through them to finance the "fun" activities like raiding. He has a very interesting point saying that the classes that are most needed for groups and raids, that is tanks and healers, have the most difficult and boring time grinding for money or doing daily quests. Quote: "So back to our tanks and healers - they desperately need cash to run raid content, but they aren’t built either to grind OR to do dailies. The end result being tanks and healers logging on, doing pointless and stupid daily quests made increasingly tedious by their gear and advancement choices. The result I’ve witnessed, perversely, is a lot fewer people running instances. Why? Because the tanks and healers try to do their dailies, end up hating the experience of feeling worthless and impotent (also, NOT FUN), and start levelling up warlock or mage alts that can act as their cash generators by doing dailies or grinding. Or they just burn out and quit. Which means that, if you’re trying to put together a pickup group, it’s becoming increasingly harder to pick up a tank or a healer. And it wasn’t that easy to start with. And you can’t run without ‘em."

I can't really confirm the opinion that the daily quests suck, I haven't done enough of them. Up to now I only did the Skettis egg bombing, which is very easy with my warrior who already has his epic flying mount, and still easy enough with my priest and his normal flying mount. I started to look into the Ogri'la daily quests, but didn't have the time to really start them. I only joined some guild mates in a repeatable Ogri'la event, where you kill four dragons, and combine their 4 scales into one random cloak. If you are lucky and get the random cloak which has the stats which are good for your class, then you get an item with quite decent stats. But obviously the chance for that to happen is low. I got a cloak I couldn't use on my priest, which I then could exchange for an Apexis Crystal at Sky Commander Keller. And I haven't got a clue yet for what I need the Apexis Crystal, the whole Ogri'la stuff appears to revolve around crystals and shards.

As I am currently not raiding (although I might have a look at Zul'Aman this weekend), getting 12 gold each from the Skettis egg daily quest for my two level 70s is more than enough gold to feed my level 21 mage. But I can see the basic truth in Damion's claim that grinding is less fun for the support classes you need for groups. Soloing my current mage is definitely more fun than soloing a holy priest or a protection warrior. And yes, I leveled them up as holy and protection, because I wanted to always be ready to join groups. But I always enjoyed playing my support characters in group. Damion's "feeling worthless and impotent" comment only applies to soloing, if like me you actually prefer groups a healer or tank is a good choice for being so needed. You don't feel worthless or impotent if nearly every LFG message you read tells you that you are needed so much in groups. The most unfun thing about my mage is the feeling that in my situation on an old, underpopulated server on the even more underpopulated Horde side where everybody is playing their level 70, I won't have the opportunity to group with players of my level for a dungeon run before I hit the Outlands. Nobody needs a level 21 mage, *that* is "feeling worthless and impotent".

But in the end the two situations of Damion and me are the same: Damion grinds boring daily quest to finance fun raids. I have to level up solo in spite of a preference for groups, to reach the level where groups exist. The common factor is needing to do something you don't enjoy that much to reach the part you actually want to play. And that seems to be a common malaise in all sorts of MMORPGs. Doing boring asteroid mining to be able to afford a good ship in EVE isn't any different. I'm not an expert of EVE Online, but I would assume that if you do a lot of PvP there you end up incurring lots of cost, which you would have to cover by doing mining or trading, which might not be your preferred forms of gameplay.

My personal solution to the problem is to not look at the final goals too hard, but to concentrate on finding the fun in whatever it is that I am doing. Okay, so my mage hasn't found a single good group yet in 21 levels. But doing the Ghostlands quests certainly was fun. And I can even imagine finding fun doing quests I already did with my previous characters, because approaching the same quest with a mage will be very different than doing them with a priest or warrior. And sometimes it is better to opt out of goals which require too much unfun prerequisites. If you find the preparation for raiding too time consuming, then why not do something else than raiding altogether? For example heroic instances offer challenging group play, not unlike raids, and are economically more balanced, especially with the new daily dungeon quests of patch 2.3. There is no way to actually "win" a MMORPG, no activity that you are really forced to do. So if you find yourself grinding something boring to reach the fun part, maybe you just need better goals. Do you really need a 5,000 gold epic flying mount to have fun in World of Warcraft? I don't think so.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:41 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 16-November-2007

My apologies, but this is going to be another post on running through dungeons with a high-level chaperone. My blood elf mage was following a line of quests that sent him from Silvermoon to Undercity. In Undercity he picked up a quest to find the Book of Ur in Shadowfang Keep. He also got a mage quest to kill Dalaran mages around Shadowfang Keep. Plus a quest to visit Sepulcher, where he picked up more Shadowfang Keep quests. SFK has always been one of my favorite dungeons, and it has lots of cloth drops for mages. Add the promise of patch 2.3 to make these dungeon drops better, and SFK started to look very alluring.

So while looking around in Silverpine Forest for the mages, I noticed a group of people approaching SFK. I asked them whether they would tackle that dungeon and whether I could join, and they agreed. But of course that group had a level 70 player with them, a warrior, and there were no groups around without high-level player. I would have preferred a group of only players of my level, but then I'd rather go with a high-level than not at all, because at least I get my quests done.

My biggest achievement on that trip was "not dying". I barely got any damage in, because in the time it takes me to /assist the level 70 and cast a spell, his target is already dead. Obviously targeting other mobs is not a good idea either, it just sabotages his aggro management. The only useful thing I ended up doing for the group was removing curses, as SFK has several mobs that can curse you with various stuff.

In spite of this lack of contribution, the rewards were huge. Besides me and the level 70 warrior there were a rogue and a hunter, both obviously not interested in cloth drops and other caster loot. And such caster loot was nearly all that dropped. I got Arugal's belt, a blue cloth chest, a staff, some green loot, the quest rewards, and enough xp to gain level 21. And that was with only rolling greed on cloth, and passing on all leather, mail, and plate. It is very easy to see the attraction of dungeons runs like that: they are faster than regular runs, and immensely profitable. But they still make me feel uncomfortable. WoW for me isn't about getting free rewards. I don't regret that SFK trip as an experience on how WoW low-level dungeons are played in 2007, but I don't want to continue doing all the other dungeons like that. It is the achievement, the getting there that is the fun, not the reward at the end.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:56 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
The triviality of MMORPGs

Imagine a game of chess or a game with similar rules: a board with pieces that can only move according to strict rules. Now we make this game multiplayer online, and add another rule to it: if you move a piece in a wrong way, you lose that piece and your turn. Also the rules on how to move the pieces aren't written down anywhere. This makes the game hard for newbies, who have to learn the rules by their mistakes. Experienced players have an advantage of knowing all there is to know. And of course soon there are websites with "guides" telling you which moves are legal and which aren't. Now the producer of this game patches the user interface of this game: Every time you touch a piece, all the spots on the board that piece can go to light up. This change makes the game far more accessible to newbies, but the experienced players lose their advantage and complain about the game having been "dumbed down". Welcome to the big "dumbing down" debate that has been making the rounds of the MMORPG blogosphere in the last days.

The reason why I used a chess example is that the dumbing down debate touches several different MMORPGs. On the one side there are people just talking about World of Warcraft, and how patch 2.3 dumbed it down by making it easier to find quests (via the mini map) and quest items, which now sparkle. One of my earliest blog post successes which got thousands of hits over time, on "hidden quests" in WoW is becoming much less relevant now. On the other side there is a debate on whether games like EVE and EQ2, which withhold a lot more information about how the game works from their players are more "intelligent" than WoW. I absolutely love the little image on Keen and Graev's blog entry on the issue, stating that time doesn't equal difficulty. Making things like travel or death more time consuming doesn't really make a game more challenging, it only makes it more annoying.

For the game of chess, hiding the rules to make the game more challenging is stupid. Giving the players full access to all the information they need to play the game lets them concentrate on the actual strategy. Chess is a deep and complex game that doesn't need artificial "challenge" in the form of forcing people to try out how the game actually works. But is the same really true about MMORPGs? For me the real core of the "dumbing down" debate is what remains of the genre once we removed all the artificial obstacles. If it is easy to find all the quest givers, and it is easy to find the quest objectives on the map without using a third-party website, are MMORPGs maybe too trivial?

As far as solo PvE is concerned, I must say that MMORPGs are trivial. And I'm not just talking about WoW, a solo quest to kill 10 foozles isn't any more challenging in Vanguard, EQ2, LotRO or many other similar games. Once you found the foozles, there isn't much challenge in killing them, as long as the encounter has been designed for solo accessibility. The reason why people confuse time requirement with difficulty is that the amount of tactical skill and decision making required in a MMORPG is tiny. And in most cases playing better just means achieving your goals faster. Even the dumbest and slowest player can finish the solo quest, he just needs a bit more time than the most clever player. If intelligent gameplay just means achieving your goals faster, then time becomes the only obstacle and challenge.

I think that World of Warcraft is moving the genre in the right direction by making MMORPGs more user-friendly and layer by layer stripping away the need to gather information from websites outside the game. It is the right direction because it leads to a necessary next step: making the underlying game more tactical, challenging, and interesting. Not more twitchy, I don't think that is the right way to add challenge to a MMORPG in view of the genre's demographics. But there are lots of ways in which combat could be made less repetitive, more interactive, and requiring more tactical skills, decision making and intelligence. We might need this "dumbing down" phase to get to a "clevering up" phase afterwards.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:02 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
What the subscription numbers mean

The Burning Crusade was released in China on September 10. So it isn't surprising that the total number of players of World of Warcraft went up from 9 million in Q2 to 9.3 million in Q3 2007. Nevertheless I would say that the headline of WoW is still growing is somewhat misleading. It is probably more accurate to say that WoW is growing in Asia, while declining in the US and Europe.

I can only say "probably", because we don't get detailed numbers by continent any more from Blizzard, which is a signal in itself. But we know that there are more than 5 million Chinese players. If subscriber numbers in Europe and the US were still growing or constant, then the Burning Crusade would have only attracted less than 300,000 Chinese players, which would be proportionally much less than the same expansion caused as a peak when it came out over here. It is very well possible that the "growth" of 0.3 million is a mixed result between lets say half a million more Chinese players and a decline of 0.2 million in the western world. And despite of what WoWInsider says, me coming back to WoW won't make much of a difference in that. :)

So why is it important where exactly WoW is still growing? It is important because of time and because of money. Asia got both the original World of Warcraft and the expansion later than the West. So if Western subscriptions are declining, that could be a predictor that Asian subscription numbers will follow them downwards in a couple of months, assuming the game has the same life cycle in the different cultures. The money aspect of it is that a Chinese player pays significantly less than a US or European player, as he is paying 6 cents per hour instead of $15 per month. It is even possible that the 9.3 million subscribers now together pay *less* than the 9 million from the last quarter. And that would have business consequences, as managers are more interested in revenue and profit numbers than in raw subscription numbers. If profits per player are going down, somebody somewhere is starting to think how to reduce cost per player, and that usually means less customer service. And Blizzard definitely has to think about server utilization ratio, running hundreds of half empty servers can't be economically optimal. I'm still playing on the same server that I chose on day 1 of the European release, but nowadays that server is marked as "recommended" aka "low population".

Don't get me wrong, this is far from a doomcast for World of Warcraft. Stagnation or slight decline from a level as high as WoW's still means truckloads of money every month for Blizzard and Vivendi. I would just say that the initial growth phase is over after 3 years, and we now get into a phase of maturity. Blizzard will have to learn how to handle that new phase. Marketing campaign like the scroll of resurrection I profited from are only a start, we could well see things like server mergers or more cross-server possibilities implemented. And maybe Blizzard will even rethink their current model of how often to release an expansion, and what type of content to fill it with. I said it before, and nothing has proven me wrong yet, the Burning Crusade simply doesn't offer enough to last for everybody for over one year until the Wrath of the Lich King.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:43 PM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 15-November-2007

Hadn't had one of these WoW journals for a long time, and I'm not sure they'll become a regular feature again, but I thought I'd tell you some stories about my first week back in World of Warcraft.

I haven't done much with my level 70 characters. I do log them on every day to do the egg destruction daily quest. I've paid €35 for 90 days of WoW, and with two level 70s each earning 12 gold per day just with that daily quest, I'll make over 2,000 gold in that time. That is actually cheaper than buying gold, I think, although I haven't checked prices recently. The daily quests are relatively fast, especially with my warrior who has an epic flying mount. The priest first needed to do the pre-req ogre killing quest, and is slower in destroying eggs due to having only a slower mount. But apparently the new cooking quest requires killing the birds that guard the eggs, so the priest is now less likely to be interrupted by angry mother birds.

My "main", in the sense of being played the most, is currently my bloodelf mage. I reached level 20 with him, which is a major milestone. Not only do you gets tons of new spells at level 20, but also a mage gets the first three teleport spells. Thus I can now easily travel between Silvermoon, Orgrimmar, and Undercity. I don't quite understand the logic why Thunder Bluff needs level 30, but that isn't the most important destination anyway.

Another big change at level 20 is that at this level you can raise the cap for tradeskills from 150 to 225. My mage is tailor and enchanter, so I bought lots of silk and made azure silk stuff, which I then disenchanted and recycled the dusts for raising enchanting as well as tailoring. I also disenchanted another batch of old jewelry, that my priest had made when TBC came out to raise jewelcrafting. Enchanting is a great skill for recycling. The only problem is that I can't enchant the gear of my other characters.

I reached level 20 mostly by soloing. I teamed up with single players at one or two occasions, but only had one full group. And that was the pickup group from hell, where the leader thought that if he got a group of 5 people together with levels from as low as 12 to only 19, we would be able to kill the level 21 elite "end boss" of the Ghostlands and his minions. Of course the boss wiped us out in seconds, and I didn't want to try again with the same team. But as low level players on the Horde side on my players aren't numerous, I couldn't find a better group for the three elite quests in the Ghostlands. So in the end I used a level 49 warrior from the account of my wife for a little dual-boxing event, and got the quests I couldn't solo done that way.

I still haven't finished all Ghostlands quests, so I'll stick around there and finish them. As I had lots of rest xp after my restart I probably leveled faster than intended, so the Ghostlands will at least get me to level 21, if not 22. I'm not quite sure where I will go after that, maybe I'll do the level 20ish quests of the Barrens next, to get better faction with Orgrimmar, and then on to Thousand Needles. I'd love to do some dungeons, like Wailing Caverns and Shadowfang Keep in my 20s, but the prospects are not looking good, unless I dual-box again. That would give me the rewards, but not the real fun of grouping in a dungeon, and so I'm not sure I'd want to do that. Chat is full of low-levels asking for high-level characters to run them through dungeons, but I think they are missing the point by doing it that way. I'd love to play in a group with players of my level to start learning about how to control my aggro as a mage, and be prepared for future groups. Having a high-level character run you through a dungeon teaches you nothing.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:26 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
WoW patch 2.3 is a major UI improvement

Europe gets patches a day later than the US, so it was only last night that I could play with patch 2.3. Now most comments on that patch are about the added content. Added content is nice, especially if it is well targeted. And nothing could be better targeted than finally eliminating the Stranglethorn Hole, that curious lack of quests in the level 40s. By adding 50 quests to Dustwallow Marsh, and to a lesser extent by making the Arathi quests non-elite, World of Warcraft has much improved in that level range. At the high end of the spectrum the patch added another raid dungeon Zul'Aman. With many casual raiding guilds now somewhere in Karazhan, that is also well targeted added content, although I would have wished the new raid to be for more than just 10 players.

But obviously there are a lot of players that are neither post-Karazhan raiding, nor currently at level 40. And I am really happy how much of an improvement patch 2.3 is for everybody, even if he doesn't use the added content. Patch 2.3 gives the WoW user interface another major overhaul, and improves many aspects of it considerably:

- Much, much easier to find stuff in cities. You can now set your tracker to point out whatever kind of NPC you are looking for, for example all profession trainers, or the reagent vendor. In addition to that you now see all quest givers, including quest giving objects on your radar. No more missing a quest because you never thought to look on the second floor of every house in the city. No more walking 10 times past a wanted poster without noticing it, it now even has a golden exclamation mark floating over it.

- Mailing of several objects now enabled without special addons. You can mail up to 12 items in the same mail. And you just need to right-click them in your inventory, no more drag-and-drop necessary. Same works for trade windows.

- Guild banks. These have so much space that I've already started to see solo players founding their own 1-man guild to get a guild bank.

- Improved auction house, with the UI somewhat cleaned up. But more importantly you can now put up items for sale for up to 48 hours, twice the previous limit. And finally, finally, if you search for something and get several pages of results, the sorting functionality covers all of those pages. Previously if you had lets say several pages full of silk cloth and sorted them by price, you had to scroll through all pages to see what the lowest price on each page was. Now all the lowest cost silk cloth will be on page 1.

- Inspecting now sees another player's talent build. I'd call that one controversial. Yes, you might want to see the talent builds of other players, for example to get some inspiration for your own build. But do you really want every pickup group criticizing your build?

- If you try to cast something while sitting, you will now automatically get up and cast, instead of just getting an error message. If you don't like that, there is a command to turn this feature off: /console autoStand 0

All in all a lot of improvements to make the life of the players easier. And I must say that having spent some more time in EQ2, I already appreciated the UI of WoW much more. World of Warcraft has a much more user-friendly UI. And a good part of it comes from "borrowing" the best ideas of the most successful UI mods programmed by players.

Besides the UI improvements and added content, there are also some changes to the gameplay. XP to gain a level between 20 and 60 has been lowered, and the quest xp between level 30 and 60 has been increased. The most reliable data I found talk of 18% less xp needed per level between levels 30 and 60, less bonus between 20 and 30. Assuming a similar increase of quest xp, and gaining half the xp per level by questing, you would need about 30% less time to level now between 30 and 60. Rewards have been improved in the dungeons of old Azeroth. But I'm afraid that won't help much, because low population and faster leveling means even less people available to form a group for a dungeon. At least for Outlands there are now "quests of the day" for one heroic and one non-heroic dungeon, which should improve people's chances to find a group for that place. I'm not even discussing all the changes to classes, because that would go into too much detail.

While of course in such a huge bundle of changes everybody will find bits he likes a bit less, in general I think this is a rather nice patch with something for everybody. It was a good time for me to come back to World of Warcraft.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:26 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Kreation's Edge on character advancement systems

Vajuras from Kreation's Edge has a huge Treatise on Character Advancement Systems, listing many advantages and disadvantages of class based systems and skillpoint based systems. It is biased towards skillpoint based systems, but otherwise a very good read. My only complaint is one of semantics, he calls the skillpoint systems "skill based systems", which is misleading. We aren't talking about player skill here, but about avatar skill points. It is perfectly possible to make a skillpoint based system which doesn't need much skill to play, there is no advantage here over level based systems. On the other hand I still get annoyed sometimes when people in level based games think that they are more skilled than other players, just because they have a higher level. Somebody having killed Illidan is only proof of a high degree of determination and time investment, which isn't necessarily the same as "skill".
- posted by Tobold @ 2:16 PM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Would they make it addictive if they could?

Ophelea brought to my attention an interesting thought experiment on Rock, Paper, Shotgun: If the makers of MMORPGs would have the technical possibility to make their games psychologically or physically addictive, would they do it? Conclusion, quote: "For a game with a monthly fee, of course they would. Or at least, some of them would, and they’ll be the rich and successful ones. In fact, if they were a publicly owned company - or owned by one - they would be legally required to do so, to fulfil their requirement to maximise their shareholder’s revenues."

Of course that isn't proof that lets say World of Warcraft is really addictive, in spite of all the "fell of the wagon" jokes on my return to WoW. I certainly don't believe in single games being addictive, because to some extent they are interchangeable. If I went back to WoW it was more due to a lack of alternatives of a similar quality level. But if in a hypothetical parallel universe WAR would have come out now, in time for christmas 2007, and would be as good as WoW, I'd probably be playing that. Unfortunately in the universe I'm stuck in the year 2007 didn't produce any "WoW killers".

So if anything it is the MMORPG lifestyle that is addictive, not a particular game. Just like you could say watching TV is addictive, although you aren't watching the same show all the time. And even then for a large majority of consumers the TV or MMORPG is only used to fill out their available free time. The number of people who actually give up their job and family to play World of Warcraft 16 hours a day is tiny. That is a lifestyle that isn't sustainable unless you inherited a big bundle of money. I can see how a student could lose a year or so of his studies due to a video game addiction, but sooner or later reality will kick in and force him to make a living or go back to his studies. But such behavior isn't limited to MMORPGs or video games. Escapism existed long before those games, and escaping to a virtual world is just one possibility among many. The problem lies with the losers trying to escape from real life, and not necessarily with an inherent addictiveness of the means they chose to do so.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:11 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Persistent stats in non-MMORPGs

Shaddowofadream wrote me with an interesting observation: Games from other genres than MMORPG are now using persistent stats more and more. Look at this example from Team Fortress 2, or the whole XBox Live Gamerscore thing. So even if your character restarts at "level 1" every time you restart the game, you still have some sort of documentation on your game achievements and progress.

I found that interesting in the context of how many people said that my idea of a level-less MMORPG would never work, because people wouldn't be satisfied to only get status symbols, titles, and trophies for their achievements, and not actual improvements to the power of their character. Maybe I was asking the wrong crowd? MMORPG players are so used to levels or skill gains, that they can't imagine a game without it. But somebody playing a first-person shooter or similar game online is totally used to starting every game with the same power of his avatar, and only the skill he as a player acquired in playing the game making a difference to his performance.

I'm not saying that levels or skill gains in MMORPG don't work. But when I look at my new WoW mage, now level 18, who basically has to solo at least another 40 levels (if not 52) before having a chance to find a group for an instance, I am painfully aware of the negative consequences of a level-based game. The fact that there are WoW players that are willing to pay hundreds of dollars to somebody to powerlevel their character for them is proof that there is a problem somewhere. If we could find a way to offer people persistent stats showing their achievements, without these getting into the way of people playing together, that would be truely great.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:47 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Girl meets WoW

In my absence from World of Warcraft I wasn't all that much interested in WoW-only blogs, and thus neither read them nor reported on them. So I completely missed the excellent Girl Meets WoW blog, which started in September this year. Her mage leveling builds post is patch 2.3 up to date, and helped me decide to respec to frost, as well as giving detailed instructions in what order to take the talents. She also has an excellent mage macro guide.

As you can see, Girl Meets WoW is full of practical advice for World of Warcraft players, though more for the advanced player than for the newbie. Having been out of the loop so long I found it an excellent resource for learning all about the changes coming with this week's patch 2.3. Recommended!
- posted by Tobold @ 8:26 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Pirates of the Burning Sea second stress test

Pirates of the Burning Sea is coming out January 22, and it promises to be radically different than other MMORPGs. Thus it's a good idea to try whether you like it. You'll have the opportunity to do so tomorrow, November 15, in the second Fileplanet PotBS open stress test. The first stress test was a success insofar as they found where the problems were, but ended with them having to limit access to only a few hundred players. This time they are hoping to be able to accomodate more people without the servers going down.

Ship-to-ship combat, pirates, broadsides, swashbuckling, check it out!
- posted by Tobold @ 7:14 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Syncaine on EVE as the ultimate MMORPG

Syncaine from Hardcore Casual is throwing down the gauntlet: He believes that EVE Online has all the answers to all the issues that plague other MMORPGs, and challenges everyone to prove him wrong. My general opinion is that by solving many things differently than other MMORPGs, EVE simply has different issues. The problems the average player has in a game that allows non-consentual PvP which can cost you your cargo and more are simply not the same as those of a PvE-centric game with a bit of loss-free consentual PvP thrown in. I mean, in WoW you actually can still get rewards for losing every single PvP battle without it costing you anything.

I agree that the single-server setup of EVE has advantages when it comes to scalability and the ability to play with or against any other EVE player, without being hindered by artificial server borders. But this only works because space in EVE is so vast. There is no Ironforge where thousands of players could turn up at the same time and overload the server. Space travel in EVE can get rather boring, because of space being so vast and empty.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:15 PM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
Have guilds in WoW grown bigger?

One of the really nice things of me rejoining World of Warcraft was getting tells from people that remembered me, and rejoining a more casual guild I have been part of in the past before playing in a raiding guild for some months. Although I am not principally I friend of guild hopping, I obviously feel more at home in a casual raiding guild (doing ok in Karazhan, probably just right for Zul'Aman) than in the hardcore raiding guild I left (where I would have problems catching up to them, as they are already in Tempest Keep). But one thing I noticed while looking at guilds was that apparently there are now less of them, and the surviving guilds have more members.

So I was playing pen & paper roleplaying last night, and as always WoW was discussed as well, as I had turned them all into WoW players in early 2005. (I'm a bad influence.) And one guy had this interesting theory about smaller, casual raiding guilds: Guilds are regularly losing members, because they either quit WoW totally, or just quit the guild to join another one. And more often than not the people who quit are at the better equipped end of a guild. People who are already geared up well, but feel that their guild isn't advancing fast enough for them to get to the next gear level are more likely to quit or change guild. People less well equipped often get a decent number of epics in their first raids because everyone else already has them, and are thus more likely to stay. So now what happens if you have a relatively small guild, with relatively few raids per week? The number of epics you lose from people leaving becomes large compared to the number of epics you earn every week from raiding. Thus small, casual raiding guilds can become stuck at some point of the raiding process, because their better equipped people don't stay around long enough to get everybody equipped for the next level of the raiding circuit. Ultimately the smaller guild totally disbands and people join larger guilds with a better raiding progress. Guilds that don't paddle hard enough simply sink. Thus the average number of players in a guild and the average number of raids guilds do is going up.

How does it look on your server. Did you observer guild consolidation, with less guilds being around, but having more members?
- posted by Tobold @ 1:11 PM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Twinkability

My first character to hit level 60 in World of Warcraft was a warrior. Next level 60s were two priests, one Horde, one Alliance. I leveled the Horde priest to 70 first when TBC came out, then the Horde warrior. The low-level mage I am currently playing was created when TBC came out, and I was speed-skilling jewelcrafting with my priest. I sent all the jewelry I made to the mage, and disenchanted it to level up enchanting. I also learned tailoring with him, because that is a good combo with enchanting, as tailoring doesn't need a gathering skill, and you can disenchant tailored green items for dusts.

So now I have a level 17 mage who is maxed out at 150/150 tailoring and 160/160 enchanting. And I still got tons of higher level jewelry to disenchant once I hit level 20 and my enchanting cap goes up. Plus of course I have access to large amounts of gold, one daily quest with a level 70 gives you all the money you need for a long time for a level 17. I'm twinked to the max, wearing only magic armor, weapons, and jewelry. I even put enchantments on everything I could. I know all that is a terrible waste, since you outgrow your equipment so fast, but it isn't as if I had anything better to do with the mats.

The one thing that irks me is how little all this twinking is actually helping my mage. I found just one item yet which increases fire spell damage. All the other stuff I can tailor, enchant, jewelcraft, or buy from the auction house increases my intellect, stamina, and spirit. But none of that really improves my mage, as the damage I deal is totally independant of my stats. Intellect means I can cast longer before I run out of mana, but then I have to sit and drink longer to get it back. Stamina gives me more health, but mages shouldn't get hit anyway. Spirit theoretically increases my mana regeneration, but while the effect on a priest is already small, the effect of spirit on a mage is too tiny to even notice. In short, the mage has a very bad twinkability, he profits very little from being a twink. I already had similar problems with my priest, where again being twinked doesn't help you much in solo situations, unless you go for a spirit talent build and gear.

Now compare that to the warrior. Stats like strength and stamina are highly important to a warrior, and so is armor. A twinked low-level warrior deals more damage and survives a lot longer than a non-twinked one. Warriors have high twinkability. So in hindsight I might have been better off if I had played a priest or mage as my first character, and then used their cash to twink a warrior, who would have had an easier live. Hunters, rogues, feral druids, shamans and paladins also have a relatively high twinkability. Warlocks have a low twinkability. It's three years to late to think about it for most of us, but maybe something to keep in mind for future games. If a game has damage dealers whose damage only depends on their level and not on their stats, they make great first characters. The other classes who are helped a lot by their stats make better twinks.

I hear that in this week's patch 2.3 Blizzard is changing low-level magic items for casters to have more bonuses to spell damage, and thus make gear more relevant for casters for leveling up. Good timing, as this will improve the twinkability of my mage. Only problem is that most of these items will be bind-on-pickup loot from dungeons. And finding a group for a low- or mid-level dungeon on a 3-year old server is next to impossible. I checked my server at prime time and found 900 Horde players online, but 600 of these were playing their level 70. The 300 remaining characters were pretty much evenly distributed over the other 69 levels, thus only about 4 characters per level available for grouping. I so wished Blizzard would introduce cross-server instances (with trading disabled inside the instance).
- posted by Tobold @ 12:46 PM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
WoW mage talent build for leveling

Alcaras from Subcreation.net has a sticky post on the World of Warcraft forums on Mage Talent Specs. Slightly outdated probably, as it is from patch 1.12, but still a very good source. But I have problems to decide whether I should use a fire build or a frost build for leveling up.

My mage is level 17 now, and up to now has put all points into fire talents: the one that decreases the fireball casting time, and the one that adds a stun chance. The idea is to start casting fireballs at maximum range, spam them as fast as I can, and by the time the mob reaches me finish it off with a fire blast. Works great most of the time, even greater if I get a stun result in. The disadvantage of this is that it works only really well against single mobs in outdoor environments. Against grouped mobs or in confined spaces where I can't get to maximum range, it works less good.

I asked around some other mages I know and several of them preferred a frost build for leveling. It's less damage per second, but better crowd control by slowing mobs down or freezing them in place. Thus it should work better against groups and in dungeons. There is also the arcane tree as a third possibility, but that one seems to be good for support at higher levels, and not so much useful for leveling up.

So, what is your advice, should I stay fire, or should I switch to frost for leveling up my mage?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:18 AM Permanent Link  (33) comments Links to this post

 
Financial research on virtual currency

Real-money trade (RMT) is big business, with revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. So it isn't surprising that some people watch this business and do the type of financial research you'd expect about any other big company. I'd like to draw your attention to MMOBux and their recent article on the The Rise and Fall of IGE. Fascinating stuff, about big piles of money in a company at the border of legality. And extremely well researched with tons of links proving every statement.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:41 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
The resurrection of my WoW account

Blizzard, in an attempt to stem the ebb of dwindling subscriber numbers in the US and Europe, has started a new marketing campaign: The Scroll of Resurrection. That works a bit like the invite-a-friend campaign, only that in this case you can invite friends *back*, after they have been inactive for at least 90 days. The invited friend gets a free 10-day trial, and if he resubscribes you get a free month. So I invited myself back into World of Warcraft.

Well, technically my wife invited me back. While my account has been cancelled since July, my wife was still playing on hers, very casually, weekends only. So now I used her account to send a scroll of resurrection to my account, and then got back in the game. I then resubscribed for 3 months, so I should get 30 free days on my wife's account as well as the 10 free days on my account. Good deal, seeing how it is me who pays for both accounts.

The plan is to advance to phase 5 of the player life-cycle: Recovery, by playing casual. More specifically I want to play my blood elf mage, currently level 11, to see first the rest of the blood elf content (Haven't visited Ghostlands yet), and then see whatever new content is available for level 20 to 60 in next weeks patch 2.3. I don't know yet how much I am going to play my two level 70 characters, priest and warrior. My old guild kicked me out, for which I don't blame them after 4 months of absence. And last night I checked what they were doing, and found that they had 29 players online, 25 of which were in Tempest Keep. I don't think I'd want to rejoin them, they look too hardcore for my casual recovery.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:13 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
Turning back time?

Foris, a reader, wrote me with an interesting idea for World of Warcraft: classic servers which work exactly as WoW used to work before the patch 1.13 and the Burning Crusade changed everything. So PvP would still be old style honor ranks. The level cap would be 60, and people could raid the classic raid dungeons from Molten Core to Naxxramas again.

So what do you think? Is this a good idea? Or can't time be turned back? Would you personally play on a classic server?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:27 PM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Tobold's MMORPG Blog Terms of Service

After discussing various aspects of game's terms of service, and having had several discussions this week in the comment section about what is acceptable use of this blog, I've decided to formulate *my* terms of service. Of course I am not a lawyer, and this isn't a legally binding document. But it should give you an idea of what I consider my rights and your rights regarding this blog.

1) This is Tobold's MMORPG blog. The opinions expressed here are mine, unless attributed to somebody else. While I strive to be rational and give balanced views, it is inevitable that everything I say is just a subjective opinion. I don't claim to speak in absolute truths. Feel free to mentally add "In Tobold's opinion," in front of every sentence you read here.

2) I have the right to talk about any subject I want. Most of my posts are about various aspects of massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG). But occasionally I do talk about other games, other sorts of entertainment, or just about things that happened in my life. You have the right to simply skip the posts you don't like. I tend to mostly talk about the games I am currently playing. But even if I play one particular game for a longer period of time and write a lot about it, there is no guarantee that I will not stop playing and writing about that game.

3) You have the right to propose subjects for me to talk about. Preferably you'd do so by email, there is a clickable email address in the upper right corner of this blog. I have a good track record of replying to my mail and many of the reader suggestions made it into blog posts. But I do reserve the right to not post about the subject you suggested if I find it doesn't fit in here. If you want me to quote you, please add instructions to what name I should attribute the quote. When I have no instructions I tend to not mention anything that looks like the real name of my readers, for privacy reasons, so you might want to sign your letter with whatever pseudonym you usually go by on the internet.

4) You do have the right to comment on this blog. You also have the right to disagree with what I say, or with whatever other commenters say. You do not have the right to voice this disagreement in the form of personal attacks or by using foul language. In the interest of keeping the level of the discussion at a high standard, I do reserve the right to delete comments that are insulting or full of profanity. If you want to be heard, try to present a counter-argument in a polite and rational way. I will never delete well argued comments just because I disagree with them.

5) You do have the right to privacy. You do not need to register with Blogger to comment on this blog, nor are you required to give your real name at any point. I do however ask you to use some sort of pseudonym to sign your comments. Under "choose an identity", simply check the box next to "Other" and fill in whatever pseudonym you would like to be known under into the "Name" field. As an added advantage you can fill in the "Your web page" field if you want to link to your own blog. If you post just as the default anonymous, readers tend to take your opinion less seriously. Discussion between several anonymous commenters is very confusing. And I'm cutting anonymous commenters less slack when deciding whether I should delete inappropriate comments. So it is in your own interest to use some sort of name.

6) You do have the right to include links into your comments. But be aware that only HTML coding works, so you need to use code like <a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com">Look at my blog</a> to make your links clickable. Please be aware that Blogger automatically tags all your links in the comment section as NOFOLLOW, which means that linking to your site in my comments section will not improve your Google pagerank, and will be ignored by many other search engines as well. Thus comment links will only produce traffic for you if other readers find them relevant enough to actually click on them. It is therefore advisable to link to specific posts on your blog with a good description of what the link is about. Just putting a general link as your signature is less effective. I do reserve the right to delete comments if a link in them leads to a site which is overly commercial or otherwise inappropriate. Specifically I frequently delete comment spam leading to sites selling gold or cheats.

7) You do have the right to quote me, and use my posts partially or in full, as long as you attribute them correctly as having been written by "Tobold" and link back to the source (preferably directly to the individual post, although linking to the blog is acceptable). I do not have the time or resources to start any sort of legal action if you steal my stuff without linking to me. However I do reserve the right to point fingers and mock you mercilessly on this blog if you do so. As you probably stole my stuff to gain credibility somewhere, you would probably find that being pointed out as a thief on my blog is counterproductive to your purpose. You have been warned! You do have the right to use my RSS feed as feature on your website, as long as it is set up in a way that links back to my blog.

8) I do try to attribute quotes and ideas to the sources I got them from. If you think I quoted you without properly naming the source, please send me an email and I will rectify the situation if the complaint is justified. Please note that in the case of "news" I might just quote the one blog where I saw the news first, or not quote any blog if I see the news at many different places at once and can't really follow the news to its source. Please note also that MMORPGs are a relatively narrow field of interest, with a limited number of subjects, so it is perfectly possible that I post an idea similar to some idea you had some time ago without having actually read your blog, and thus without a link to it. Feel free to add a "I wrote something similar on my blog" comment with a link to your blog post in my comment section in these cases.

9) If you have a blog and feel that I am ignoring you, feel free to send me an email with a link to your blog, so that I can have a look at it. I do not guarantee that I will link to you, but if there are some particularly interesting articles on your blog, I might link directly to those. I do not have a blogroll, nor do I plan to add one, as I found that the quality and quantity of blog posts on most blogs fluctuates, and I don't want to spend lots of time verifying the blogs on my blogroll constantly. Nor do I want to get into fights which blogs should or should not be included. Feel free to include this blog in your blogroll, but if you only list blogs there that link back to you I totally understand if you leave me out.

10) I do not run advertising in the form of banner ads or similar permanent front-page links on this blog. I do reserve the right to change this policy if somebody offers me large piles of money. Although I am not as religiously opposed to gold selling as some other people are, I do refuse to link to sites that sell gold, sell guides or cheats, as well as to sites that offer a platform for this sort of trades. Not because I hate them, but because I want to stay away from the controversy. If you have a product or website that you think would be of interest to my readers, you can send me an email, and I will have a look at it and judge whether I will post about it. If you have a game you want me to write about, I am willing to test it if you give me trial or beta access to it. In no case will the fact that you invited me to your site or game as opposed to me having found your site or game on my own make any difference to the way I report about you. I will always try to report about any site or game in a fair way, but if your game is bad, I will say so, even if I got in for free. You can't buy good reviews on this blog.

I would appreciate feedback on whether you find this terms of service fair. Please also tell me if you think that I have forgotten to cover something I should have mentioned.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:48 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
Selling your time

It's still "Termination of Service" day here at Tobold's blog. Some frequently cited major bannable offences in most MMORPGs are selling / buying of virtual currency for real money (called RMT, real-money trade), selling / buying an account, or powerleveling, that is paying somebody to level up your character on your account. The legal position on account selling and powerleveling is relatively clear cut: the player only has a single-user license for his account. For account selling or powerleveling people must necessarily give their account password to somebody else, which is against the terms of service, and thus bannable.

The legal position on RMT is a grey area in most jurisdictions. It rests on the assumption that virtual items are part of the intellectual property of the game company. Thus the game companies claim that you can't legally sell something that doesn't belong to you in the first place. Some people try to get around that problem by claiming they aren't actually selling the virtual item (which doesn't leave the game and thus remains the property of the game company), but are selling their time. That doesn't stop the game companies from banning gold sellers, because "selling time" here is just semantics. What actually happens is that the buyer sends cash, and the seller sends gold, which very much looks like a sale.

In spite of being bannable offences, RMT and powerleveling are still going on in large scale, it is a multi-million dollar business. So I was wondering what would happen if the game companies got a better grip on it, and could really manage to completely suppress all gold sales and powerleveling. Would there be a way in which companies could offer services which help players advance faster in the game for a payment of real money without breaking the EULA and TOS as they exist now?

And I think the key here is the selling of time concept. Powerleveling is only not allowed when it involves sharing accounts and passwords. But if a player paid somebody else with a level 70 character to run behind him and help him leveling, no violation of the EULA or TOS would take place. In a similar vein the gold farmer could also group with the gold buyer, put the group loot options on free for all, and receive cash for running around for one hour with the buyer collecting all loot. I remember that at the time of the opening of the gates of Ahn'Qiraj there were several servers where powerful guilds encouraged other players to contribute resources by holding a lottery in which the winner would get a spot on a Molten Core raid with first dibs on all loot useable by his class. If such raid spots would be sold for cash, I don't think it would break any existing rules. And even if the game companies added new rules, such a transaction would be nearly impossible to detect. You can't ban people for not pulling their weight in a raid, after all.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:24 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Termination of Service and refunds

I've decided to make the subject of all my posts today the "Termination of Service" rules of MMORPGs, because they are so rarely discussed. No, I have never gotten kicked out of any game, it was only reading the Termination of Service rules from WoW that awoke my interest in the theme. The specific subject of this second post is about refunds.

Imagine little Johnny gets a wad of cash from his grandma for his birthday, and buys himself a MMORPG. He opens an account, prepays for a lifetime subscription, and starts playing. Not knowing much about what is allowed or not, and not reading the lengthy EULA and TOS, he follows the bad advice from a buddy from school and on his first day in the game buys some gold and/or installs a bot program. On his second day little Johnny gets banned from the game. (Not likely, I know, but theoretically possible given the rules). Does he get any money back?

When you pay $50 for a single-player game without internet activation, you receive something of value. You can play the game whenever and as long as you want, and you could even resell it. When you buy a MMORPG for the same money, you already can't resell it if you used it just once. And if the server shuts down or for some reason you broke a rule and the game company decides to terminate their services to you, you can't use the game you bought at all. One recent bad scenario was people paying for a pre-order box of Gods & Heroes, and then the game was cancelled before it was even released. In that case people got refunds, which was pretty messy. But what about refunds in the event of a termination of service? Several games offer lifetime subscriptions now, and even in World of Warcraft you can pay your subscription for 6 months in advance. But the game company has the right to terminate their service to you for any reason they see fit. For somebody not very well versed in the ways of MMORPGs it is hard to see why some mods are perfectly legal, while installing other mods is a bannable offence.

Game companies should have the right to refuse service to customers that they deem harmful to the game. But they should also refund that customer for any subscription that he has prepaid and will not receive due to the termination of service. But as far as I know these companies don't have any refund policies right now. Refunds probably weren't deemed necessary when somebody got banned half-way through the month and was paying a monthly fee. But with the possibility to pay for a lifetime subscription or 6 months of subscription in advance, that policy isn't tenable any more.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:01 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Don't play a different faction than your wife in WoW

I'm so happy I don't have an account in World of Warcraft any more. Because my wife still has one, her computer is in the same room as mine, and apparently that is against the terms of service of WoW. Quote:

As stated in the World of Warcraft Terms of Use, Blizzard Entertainment reserves the right to permanently terminate this Agreement "without prior notice," resulting in an immediate and permanent account 'ban' if you engage in behaviour that Blizzard Entertainment considers to be a “serious” violation of the World of Warcraft Terms of Use Agreement. “Serious Violations” of the World of Warcraft Terms of Use Agreement would include the following:

6. allowing players who are playing characters aligned with the "Alliance" faction to chat or otherwise communicate directly with players who are playing characters aligned with the "Horde" faction, or vice versa;

Now I'm sure it isn't meant like that. But the obvious phrase of "on the same server while in a PvP battle" or something similar is just missing. So as I had mostly Horde characters, and my wife has several Alliance characters, I was apparently committing a bannable offence. Oh, no! Can I still talk to myself if I have both Alliance and Horde characters?

This must be the silliest termination of service rule I've ever seen.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:02 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
Am I news?

I'm not by nature the world's most humble person. That is pretty much evident by the simple fact that I have this blog, which is a vanity tool for self-promotion, I have no financial interest in it. I derive a certain satisfaction and sense of accomplishment from the fact that I get over 2,000 visitors every day, plus another 1,000 people reading my RSS feed. But this week I'm starting to feel slighly uncomfortable about the level of celebrity status I appear to have achieved. In the last 3 days the new MMO news site Massively published three different articles that can best be described as re-blogging my content: Linking to a post of mine, summarizing it's content, and asking their readers what they think of it. I wouldn't have thought I'd be *that* newsworthy. "Tobold writes something" shouldn't be a headline.

It is true that I'm trying to post articles with original ideas to mix with the otherwise predictable articles with comments on MMO news. "Bioware teams up with LucasArts to make new MMO", you try and come up with an original comment to that one, *everyone* has the same "the next Star Wars MMO is coming" idea here. Thus posts like the one on level-less MMOs are me trying to offer something different. But that doesn't make me unique. There is a good number of excellent MMO blogs with original ideas out there that I am reading (and linking to) regularly. And some are much better researched than mine, like Keen and Graev's blog to give just one example. So why should I be any more newsworthy than the other blogs? I'm having trouble getting my head around that.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:36 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
Impossible, or just never done right?

"Fantasy MMORPGs are more popular than SciFi MMORPGs", "Classic autoattack/hotkey combat is more popular than action-oriented combat in MMORPGs", "<insert your favorite MMORPG prejudice here>". It is tempting, but often misleading, to extrapolate the success of individual games into industry trends. Tempting, because game developers would like to have a magic formula on how to make a successful MMORPG following simple guidelines of what works and what doesn't. Misleading because in the end the only thing that 9 million World of Warcraft players tell you is that World of Warcraft is a very good game.

Although Vivendi already made it official more than a year ago that WoW isn't the last Blizzard MMORPG, a recent job posting on the Blizzard website for "Lead 3D Character Artist and a Lead 3D Environment Artist to work on a next-gen MMO" recently fueled speculations about the next Blizzard MMORPG. Although we have no confirmation whatsoever, there is a general assumption that that "next-gen MMO" would come out before World of Warcraft dies of old age. Thus a WoW2 or World of Diablo fantasy MMORPG would cannibalize the subscribers of the original WoW, and business managers don't like slaughtering cash cows. Which leads many people to believe that the next Blizzard MMORPG will be based on the Starcraft brand. Whether it will be called World of Starcraft or something else isn't really relevant. But the combination of the strength of the Starcraft brand in Korea, the boost that the Starcraft brand will receive from the soon to be released Starcraft II, and the growing importance of the Asian market for MMORPGs all make a Starcraft MMORPG seem like a plausible bet.

At which point we are back at the perceived truths stated at the start of the article. Of course even "Blizzard can make a second multi-million subscriber MMORPG" is just a perceived truth. But there is at least the tantalizing possibility that Blizzard could make an action-oriented SciFi MMORPG which sells as good as WoW. Nobody really knows whether SciFi games are *really* less popular than fantasy games, or whether it is just a statistical fluke that the most successful games up to now have been fantasy themed. Nobody knows whether the current type of MMORPG combat used in so many game is the best possible solution, or just the sad evidence of copycat game design. It is totally possible that with Star Trek Online, the possible Star Wars themed Bioware MMO and the next Blizzard MMO we might see some very successful SciFi MMORPGs in the coming years. And by changing the genre, with the possibility of having some of the action take place in space and not on a planet surface comes a good chance of us seeing some new forms of MMORPG combat. Then we all might have to think over our prejudices. Maybe all the things we think don't work in fact just were never done right.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:39 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Fury, anyone?

I totally missed the fact that another MMORPG was released last month, Fury. All I knew about that game was that it *only* has PvP, no PvE against computer controlled monsters whatsoever, and that completely switched off any interest for me in that game. But the game came out on October 16, and I haven't heard much about it in the blogs. Only Massively reports that Gamespot gave Fury one of the worst reviews ever. On a site that gave Vanguard a score of 7.5, you can imagine the shock about giving a score of just 4.5 for Fury.

So no initial interest combined with bad reviews means I'm not going to touch this one. But of course I wonder if it is really *that* bad. Has anyone here actually played it and can tell us more about it?

[EDIT: Found a more detailed review of Fury.]
- posted by Tobold @ 11:07 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Eye of Judgement

I've first read about Eye of Judgement on Penny Arcade, now Keen and Graev have a short review of Eye of Judgement. So I'm looking for more information about this game, and my spider sense begins tingling. Eye of Judgement boosters with an official retail price of $4.99 are selling second-hand here in Europe for up to 20 Euro ($28). And that's from serious sites like Amazon.de. The last time I saw this level of crazyness was 1993 when the first Magic the Gathering cards hit the street. It could very well be that Eye of Judgement is the next MtG.

So what is Eye of Judgement? It is the world's most expensive trading card game. To play you need a Playstation 3 and a Play Station Eye camera, plus at least the rather expensive starter box with the game, with then optional theme decks or boosters to add to your card pool. Oh, and a TV, but I'll assume you have one of those. So if you have the TV but nothing else, starting to play will cost you over $500. Ouch! After that, the sky is the limit, trading card games are notorious for people spending way too much money on them. Having been caught in the MtG back then, I'm well aware of the dangers.

So why is Eye of Judgement apparently such a hit? Because it combines the addictiveness of trading card games with a way to overcome the disadvantages of a card game. Card games suffer from being not very graphically attractive, and from having to find somebody to play against. In Eye of Judgement you play your cards on a play mat, which is scanned by the PS Eye camera. Thus the PS3 knows what card you played where, and translates your action into a graphically more appealing event on the PS3. And because the PS3 can be connected to the internet, you can play against anyone in the whole world who has the same game and is also looking for somebody to play against. The computer even prevents cheating, by scanning your deck, virtually shuffling it, and telling you what cards you "draw".

This is way better than either pure card games, or existing online versions of trading card games where the cards are all just virtual. You get to hold the cards in your hand, get to do a real collection, but still have all the advantages of finding people to play against online. And apparently the graphics are way better than lets say Magic the Gathering Online, which only displays cards, no animated graphics. While the requirement to have a PS3 will certainly mean that Eye of Judgement will be less of a mass phenomenon than Magic the Gathering was in the 90s, this could be one of the games that drive the sales of the PS3.

The only cloud on the horizon is the limited capabilities of the PS Eye camera to tell a real card from a good photocopy. Apparently the first working pdf files of ultra-rares have appeared on the internet. And unlike MtG players rarely meet each other face-to-face. Thus Eye of Judgement might end up being the most successful trading card game in which there isn't any actual trading of cards taking place.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:25 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Could a MMORPG work without levels?

While most people enjoy the character development part of a MMORPG, the level-based gameplay does tend to produce some problems. In PvE it is hard for players of different levels to play together, and in PvP big level differences make fighting each other pointless. One of the first big commercial MMORPGs, Ultima Online, didn't have levels. But it had a skill system, and in the end it doesn't really matter whether you are much better than another player because you have more levels or because you have more skill points. So I am wondering whether a MMORPG would be possible in which there are no levels or skill points at all, where your character would *not* become stronger with time.

Imagine a game where you spend the first hour creating a complete character, including all possible skills, talent builds, and everything. You step into the virtual world, and from now on there is no more numerical change of your stats. You don't earn experience points, don't gain levels, don't get additional skills, and don't gain stats by finding weapons or armor that adds stats. The only improvement to your character is by you learning how to use your skills most effectively. If you meet another player in the game who has chosen the same class and build as you, you will have exactly the same stats as he has, even if one of you spent hundreds of hours more than the other in game. Thus there is no barrier to you either working together or fighting each other in PvP.

If there are no xp and no stats on loot, how do you motivate people to go adventuring? With status symbols. For example the game would have epic armor looking all shiny and much better than the armor you started the game with. Only it would have exactly the same stats. And all gear would decay with use, so gaining gold and looted gear, or crafting gear, would not be useless. Borrowing elements from Lord of the Rings Online, there would be lots of titles you could earn, depending on your actions. And there would be an elaborate system of player housing, so the longer you play, the bigger a house you could afford, and it would be stuffed with lots of trophies from your adventures. If you killed the dragon, you could have the head of the dragon on display over your fireplace. There also could be reputation points to be gained, that would give you access to status items and tradeskill recipes. You could even have visual upgrades to your skills, like colored fireballs or other special effects, as long as that fireball still does the same damage as every other fireball.

Such a game could be the ultimate "world" MMORPG, with people having the impression of living in that world. There would be lots of goals and achievements, but no numerical differences. There would be no problems of "aging" server populations, newbies not able to play with or against veterans, or people complaining about the end-game, because all the game is the end-game. Would you play such a game?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:08 AM Permanent Link  (47) comments Links to this post

 
Player life-cycle

Nick yee of the Daedalus Project has an interesting survey result on the player life-cyle. They observed that many players in a MMORPG go through the same stages in the same order: Entry, Practice, Mastery, Burnout, Recovery.

As I apparently reached the Burnout (Nothing Left To Do) stage for World of Warcraft, I wonder if there is a Recovery for me. I still consider it likely that I will resubscribe to WoW for the next expansion, if only for the simple reason that there is nothing else.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:01 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Troll on Fire talking inflation

I found an interesting article on inflation in MMOs over at Troll on Fire. (Warning! Reading that post might cause your eyes to hurt, as the author uses a rather small and grey font on black background.) He argues that MMORPGs have inflation, and could use some sort of central banker to control money flow according to some inflation index.

Interesting argument, but I don't think the solution is realistic. What we need to look at is the primary reason behind the inflation in these games: Your money supply goes up with your level. Thus as servers age and the average level goes up, money supply goes up for the economy as a whole. Troll on Fire quotes the example that a level 70 player isn't likely to farm copper in the newbie zones. Now look at that example from a different angle: time. A level 70 player isn't much faster farming copper than a level 10 player is. But in one hour of farming monsters a level 70 player can make much more gold than the level 10 player. Thus speaking with David Ricardo the level 70 player has a comparative advantage in making gold, while the level 10 player has a comparative advantage in making copper, and both gain by trade.

Time is the only real currency in a MMORPG. You can achieve anything by spending time. And whether you get a resource directly by spending time gathering it, or by farming money to buy it doesn't matter. Most players are likely to choose the method which gets them the most resources in the smallest amount of time. The more high-level players are around, earning more virtual currency, the more does the auction house price of the low-level resource go up. But that observed inflation is an illusion. In fact if you consider only time having a value, there is actually a deflation: The level 70 player gets more copper per hour by buying it for farmed gold. And the level 10 player gets more xp and levels per hour by gathering the copper, selling it, and investing it in equipment and training cost. So both players spend less time to get to their goals.

That this is actually deflation, not inflation, becomes even more visible if you consider fixed costs, like training or buying a mount. Lets consider buying a level 40 mount for 100 gold: The very first player on the server reaching level 40 hasn't got anyone richer around to sell loot or gathered resources to, so he needs to spend X hours killing monsters to get the 100 gold for his mount. Same server, one year later, some newcomer reaches level 40. He profits from many higher level players being around with more money, because he can sell them loot for their twinks or gathered resources. He ends up spending a lot less than X hours to get 100 gold together, lets say half the time, X/2. So the value of the level 40 mount went *down* by 50%, from X to X/2 hours. This is to the advantage of new players, and no virtual central banker fiddling with price indices is needed.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:10 PM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Spoilt rotten by World of Warcraft?

I've been looking through many MMORPG blogs recently, and I get the impression that quite a number of bloggers, me included, are in a gaming slump. Many stopped playing WoW, and are now jumping in and out of various games. But they rarely stick to one game, and some even went back to World of Warcraft. The deluge of bad news and postponements of the next wave of games has deflated much of the hype that surrounded them earlier. Of course it is hard to say how many people are affected by this gaming slump, but even on this blog (borrowing a measurement technique from = # # =) a post about Gilmore Girls gets far more comments than the latest news from Warhammer Online. Have we all been spoilt rotten by World of Warcraft and are now unable to have the same enthusiasm for other games?

World of Warcraft is an excellent game, with thousands of hours of content, and an unprecedented level of execution and polish. And for many people WoW was their first MMORPG, and that usually leaves an even rosier impression in people's memories. Nevertheless a huge amount of content isn't the same as endless content, and after 3 years many players are getting a bit bored of WoW. But there is nothing better on the market. WoW already borrowed heavily from previous games like Everquest, and the gameplay of most post-WoW games is even less innovative. New ideas seem to be limited to "lets make MMORPGs more twitchy" and "lets add more PvP", but neither of these ideas has lead to any truely outstanding new games. And while some games, like Lord of the Rings Online, are quite decent, they are neither radically different nor as polished as World of Warcraft, so people who try them after WoW burn out quickly.

Many, many blog posts ask whether World of Warcraft can be beaten, and what the next big game will be. Do we have to wait for the next Blizzard MMORPG, which will presumably be World of Starcraft? And will World of Starcraft actually be innovative and better than WoW? Blizzard has a great track record of taking existing game concepts and polishing them to perfection, but they are neither the most innovative nor the fastest game company.

My prediction is that we are looking at at least one more year in which the the MMORPG market and blogosphere is becoming increasingly splintered. People will play more different games, but for shorter periods of time. Some games will be more niche, some a bit more mass market, but even Warhammer Online will not be successful enough to get us back into the previous situation of one game so heavily dominating the discussion. And maybe that isn't such a bad thing.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:08 AM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post

 
Aggro Me on Fantasy Wars

I love turn-based strategy games. So I followed the advice of Aggro Me to try out Fantasy Wars. The demo lets you play two different battles, but strangely doesn't let you play the tutorial. Nevertheless gameplay is intuitive enough that you'll manage to do the two battles without major difficulties. But either the game doesn't have much strategic depth, or due to me not having access to the tutorial I didn't find the strategic depth. Graphics and gameplay are nice enough, but not outstanding.

So I checked out GamersGate to see whether Fantasy Wars was cheap enough to buy it and hope for more strategic depth when having access to tutorial and the campaign. But it costs 40 Euro there (which is $56 at current exchange rate), twice as much as the far superior Puzzle Quest. So I ended up not buying it.

I do like hex map turn-based strategy games, expecially the fantasy kind like the old Fantasy General. Unfortunately these games have become very, very rare. So except for finding a Windows XP version of Fantasy General I'm out of ideas what other hex map fantasy strategy games I could play.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:26 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Gilmore Girls

I'm in a bit of a gaming slump. The only game I still play regularly is a beta I can't write about due to the NDA, and even that I'm playing less than I used to play previous games. So less time with games leaves me more time for other things. And for a slump there can be nothing better than watching endless episodes of a fluffy TV series: I just finished all 6 seasons of the Gilmore Girls on DVD. (Season 7 should come out this month.) And the great thing is that in all the 6 seasons together *absolutely nothing* happened. It's a mystical fantasy world, where financial hardship is defined as having to cut out coupons from the newspaper, and the love childs of teenage pregnancies end up in Ivy League colleges. Totally unrealistic, but if you're in the mood for fluff it's perfect.

Academic literature critics probably won't agree, but the Gilmore Girls remind me very much of the Jane Austen novels. It's 200 years later and on a different continent, but the scope and subject are the same. Female heroines whose problems are mostly limited to those of love and social standing. The fact that nothing really happens is cleverly disguised by the witty dialogue, full of cultural references. For a non-American the cultural references are not always easy to understand. But in return the series gives a nice overview of American mating habits; is dating really that formal in the USA?

Well, now I have to look for another fluffy TV series to fill my time. I hear Picket Fences has been released on DVD this year.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:33 PM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
WoWInsider quits WoW

Just kidding on the quitting part, but the guys from WoWInsider now realized that there are other games than World of Warcraft out there, and started a second website called Massively. With the same writers, same basic layout, same sort of news reporting, just covering all the other MMORPGs as well as WoW. Good idea, I'd say. So I'm sending my hellos and best wishes for the future. /wave
- posted by Tobold @ 5:13 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Late for WAR

Via Keen and Graev's blog I got the news that Warhammer Online is now officially postponed from Q1 to Q2 2008. I don't think that surprises anyone. And I'd still say that Q2 is slightly optimistic, I'd bet even money on another delay.

Mark Jacobs explains the delays in his State of the Game, in which he also mentions that yes, part of the layoffs at EA were from the WAR team, but not in large numbers.

The more interesting news in that letter was that they are now planning different Server Rule Set Systems, quote: "In addition, we’ll be making changes to the RvR (open field RvR FTW!) and Server Rule Set Systems. These changes bring WAR a step closer to fulfilling the promise that “War is Everywhere” while ensuring a great play experience for those that do not choose to engage in RvR 24x7." I read that as meaning that WAR will have normal and PvP servers, just like WoW, with PvP servers having PvP enabled everywhere, and normal servers having PvP enabled only in the specific PvP zones. I'll so be going for the normal, PvP-lite version here.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:43 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Mythos impressions

Thanks to the reader who sent me a Mythos beta invite I was able to test this game, and it's a gem. There is a good description including video up at West Karana, so I'll not go too much into the details of how Mythos works. Basically it is a Diablo clone, including the isometric view. I very much like the comic style graphics. And Mythos is so much fun! You get lots of choices to make how to spec your character, the combat is exciting, and you get tons of loot.

I especially like the map system. Maps can lead you to quest or random dungeons. And although I *know* that the dungeons are all randomized, they don't necessarily feel that way. There are several different tile sets from crypts to mines to caves, lots of different monsters, and a good number of boss mobs dropping the better loot. And because the map says for what level it is and whether it is for solo or group play, you can choose what kind of dungeon you want to visit. Very cool.

Absolutely unbeatable is the price, because Mythos apparently will be free to download and free to play. The game will be financed by microtransactions, but I haven't seen what you'll be able to buy with cash yet. Mythos isn't really encroaching on MMORPG territory, but I had more fun in Mythos than in the comparable Dungeon Runner, Hellgate: London, or Tabula Rasa. Although of course my preference of isometric view and the fantasy genre influence my judgement here. A fun little game, recommended.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:54 PM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post