Blog transformations

This blog underwent some transformations over the year, visible in the number of visitors.

Visitor numbers kept growing during the first quarter, and then two things happened in the second quarter: I quit WoW and I switched my RSS feed to enable reading my full articles via a feed reader. So while my December numbers look a lot lower than the peak in March, in reality the number of readers has remained pretty much constant. Instead of 3,000 visits a day, I now get 2,000 visits, but Feedburner tells me that 1,250 people are reading my feed. Of course feed readers are harder to count, the Feedburner numbers are just an estimate, and feed readers could always click on the article and get counted as site visitors as well.

The idea of this blog isn't to make money with views or clicks on ads, but to spread my ideas and to encourage discusion. So I'll keep the RSS feed this way, even if that diminishes the number of site visitors. Last year I paid about $100 for the advanced Sitemeter stats, but I let that lapse now. Google Analytics and Feedburner are giving me the same information for free. I'll just keep the basic Sitemeter counter for the cummulative count.

I hope you enjoyed my blog this year, and wish you a happy new 2008!
- posted by Tobold @ 8:25 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
WoW and the lowest common denominator

In other forms of media, for example books or movies, people are well aware of the difference between "good" and "popular". There are "good" books and movies that are critically acclaimed, count as literature or art, and that find their way into a typical school curriculum. And there are "popular" books and movies like Harry Potter and Spiderman, which the critics often call trash, but which make millions of dollars of profit. The reason why World of Warcraft has over 9 million subscribers and makes half a billion dollars of profit per year is that it belongs in the second category. Unlike many other MMORPGs it is made for the mass market, it is accessible for everybody, it is targeted at the lowest common denominator.

When we recently discussed losing in PvP, a reader named Xash made a very insightful comment: "Most people simply don't want to expend the effort and dedication required to become good at something. Look at guitar hero. We're swiftly entering a society where more people will know how to play a toy instrument then the real one. And its the same with competitive activities, how many pro baseball players are there? A great deal less then hohum ones. Why? Because the vast majority of people don't enjoy expending effort." I totally agree, I just don't see this as negative. Most people are good at *something*, and expend a lot of effort into their jobs, their families, or social activities. I don't blame them if for their entertainment they want to relax by doing something which requires a lot less effort. They want to play a toy guitar, or play some ball game badly with friends, or get some "welfare epics" in WoW, because all this is just for fun. Nothing would be gained if you somehow forced them to expend the effort to learn a real guitar, to play baseball at major league level, and to become experts at WoW PvP.

In fact it can be argued that MMORPGs in which you are encouraged to expend a lot of effort to achieve something are harmful. All those stories about WoW being "addictive" or people neglecting their job, family, or more often their studies are due to players having the impression that by expending effort in a game they are achieving something. Of course that is an illusion. Most of the time being on top of the game, whether having a 2000+ arena rating in PvP, or being a top raider and killing Illidan, will get you no rewards that are useful in real life. Even the guy who illegaly sold his rogue for $10,000 certainly took thousands of hours of gameplay to get that far, and thus earned less than minimum wages on the hours spent.

There are MMORPGs that are closer to literature or art, for example A Tale in the Desert, which focuses on social interaction between players. EVE Online has a strong PvP focus and is doing quite well with 200k subscribers. But developers must be aware that the choice is theirs: If they make a game which is hard, requires a lot of effort to succeed, and rewards only the best, the game might be "better", but it certainly will be less popular. If they want to make a game with millions of subscribers, they will have to go for the lowest common denominator. The game has to be accessible to everyone, require little effort, and give out plenty of rewards just for showing up. Pirates of the Burning Sea is a "good" game in many respects, but I hope the devs are aware that with their negative sum PvP system they painted themselves into the hardcore PvP niche, and will never get a million subscribers. Warhammer Online could still go either way, depending on how effort and rewards for PvP are handled. If you need to be in a top PvP guild to capture a keep in WAR and get a reward, while Joe Average gets no rewards because he isn't very good at PvP and doesn't have tons of friends, WAR won't see a million subscribers either.

And even the devs of World of Warcraft shouldn't pat themselves on the shoulder for having it done completely right. What they did get right from the start was the accessible PvE leveling game, with its excellent zones and quest system. They got the PvP system popular only two years after release, and they still have to iron out some wrinkles there (like the AV leechers). Their PvE end game originally was rather bad, got somewhat improved by TBC having more end game options for the common player, but still has large areas that are accessible only to a small elite in the form of raid content. If Blizzard wants to get even more subscribers, and reduce the churn rate, in the more valuable US and European markets they would have to go for the lowest common denominator for end game raiding as well. Investing a lot of money to create content that only single digit percentages of your subscribers are ever going to see just isn't efficient. The huge peaks of resubscriptions at every content patch and especially with expansions show that many average players grow bored due to lack of content in the end game. Creating easy mode raiding accessible for everyone wouldn't make World of Warcraft a "better" game, but it would make it more popular, and thus even more profitable. And the hardcore raiders would probably be better off with a niche raiding game, where you wouldn't be forced to level up solo for so long to reach the raid content but could start raiding right after character creation, just like you can do PvP in Guild Wars from the get go.

It is easy to criticize World of Warcraft for catering to the lowest common denominator, to be "popular" instead of "good", for being a toy guitar instead of a real instrument. But MMORPGs are still a relatively young and small market. We *need* World of Warcraft and other games like it to create and grow the market. Once there are many millions of MMORPG players, there will be enough people around to be interested in harder, niche games, catering to specialists in various areas like PvP or raiding. But the majority of average players will always stick to the games that just provide effortless fun.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:22 AM Permanent Link  (26) comments Links to this post

 
Making raiding more like PvP

In World of Warcraft there are people who like PvP very much, and rarely participate in the PvE endgame. And there are people who like PvE much more, and rarely do PvP (me, for example). And between these two small groups there is a much larger group of players who like both, and whose decision to do one or the other is often influenced by relative ease and reward of the activities. Which means that many of them are currently doing PvP, because once you done an initial tour of the non-heroic dungeons, it is easier to advance your character further by doing PvP than by doing heroics and raid PvE. Yesterday we discussed one of many proposals to nerf PvP. So lets have a look today at possibilities to make PvE more attractive to balance it out against PvP.

If you look at the epics you can get by PvP, they aren't better than the epics you can get by raiding. So why do so many people prefer PvP? There are three reasons: Less organizational effort, a guaranteed minimum rate of return, and choice of rewards.

You do not need a guild or group to participate in battleground PvP. You just sign up, and a group is being assigned to you. The deserter's debuff prevents people from cherry-picking the optimum group. If you really don't like the group you have been assigned to, you can afk out, but then you won't be able to rejoin another battleground for 15 minutes. And the whole PvP battleground is likely to last only around half an hour anyway. So people learn to live with suboptimal groups. With the opposition often having a suboptimal group as well, it isn't as if having a bad class mix is dooming you to failure. Arena PvP needs a bit more organizational effort, but not all that much. You can still log on, see if other team members are logged in, and organize a quick arena battle on the spot. You need far less people than for a raid, and you don't have to worry about lockouts. PvP is much easier to organize than a raid.

The more controversial feature of PvP is the guaranteed minimum rate of return. You don't need to actually win in PvP to gain something, you get a certain amount of points just for showing up. Show up often enough and you can get some reward even if you never killed a single opponent. PvPers have pointed out that getting a full set of arena epics while losing every battle in 2v2 would take 66 weeks, which is longer than one arena season, so the mythical "dancing naked in the arena" team doesn't exist. But if you are part of a 2v2, a 3v3, and a 5v5 team, you *will* have several epics at the end of a season, even if you completely suck at it. Even more problematic are the "leechers" in battlegrounds. It seems the reporting tool of Blizzard isn't efficient enough to eliminate those, I still hear from guild mates that up to half of the people in Alterac Valley end up with no damage dealt and no healing done on the final scorecard. Youtube has videos of guys tinkering contraptions that press keys on their keyboards repeatedly to avoid going afk, and it takes only a tiny amount of effort to hide somewhere else than the starting cave and avoid getting reported. This part needs some improvement from Blizzard, so that people that put in a honest effort and lose are still rewarded, while those who don't even try don't get anything.

The rewards in PvP come in the form of points and badges, which you can hand in for a reward of your choice. [side-rant: a reward of your choice unless you are a tank. My warrior just collected spirit shards, which you get from doing Auchindoun dungeons while your faction is controlling the towers. When I finally had enough to hand them in for a helmet, I found out that of the three plate helmets there are, one is for dps warriors, and the other two are for paladins. I was told that this is the same for other PvP gear you get for honor or arena points, there is no tanking gear. Presumably because tanking gear is so essential for raiding, and tanks aren't useful for PvP. But it annoys me that I don't even get the option to PvP for rewards unless I respec.] If you ever tried to get a complete set of raid epics, you'll know how big an advantage the ability of choosing your reward is. In raids you get random rewards from a loot table, and you can end up with no reward at all even if you have the most successful raid and clear out the whole place without a single wipe.

So how could we change dungeons and raids to be more like PvP and regain popularity? Obviously we need to give PvE the same advantages of easy organization, and guaranteed rewards of the player's choice that PvP already has. Players need to be able to queue up for a raid and get assigned to a pickup raid, just like they are assigned to a pickup group for battlegrounds. Of course that necessitates "easy mode" raid dungeons, for example in a system where the current difficulty level is labeled as heroic, and an easier "normal" difficulty is introduced in which a pickup raid group has actually a chance to kill a boss. This is simply a question of number of trash mobs, respawn rates, amount of health the mobs have, and for how much damage they hit. Creating an easy copy of a raid dungeon like Karazhan is very easy by just fiddling with these numerical parameters. Once we have that, Blizzard only needs to introduce the queue system for raids, making sure somebody in the raid group can tank and somebody can heal. And of course they need to remove the lockouts for the easy mode raid dungeons.

Once our automatically formed pickup raid group is in the easy mode raid dungeon, they should get "raid points" for every trash mob they kill, and "raid badges" for every boss. There shouldn't be any epic loot drops, just points and badges, which then can be handed in somewhere for epics. To prevent leechers, the pickup raid group should be able to kick out people by majority vote. But otherwise sticking with the raid group you have been assigned to should be encouraged by the same deserter's debuff system that battlegrounds have. How many times you would need to go pickup raiding, how many points and badges you'd need for what reward has to be balanced against the effort to reward ratio of PvP. But in the end you should have a choice where gaining similar epics from PvP and PvE should take comparable effort and time.

And yes, that would change the face of raiding completely, it would make raiding accessible for nearly everyone. Which is actually the big advantage of the system. The "old style" raids could live on in the form of heroic raids, but at least everybody would be able to see the various raid dungeons and experience the various raid boss encounters.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:01 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Runescape blocks unbalanced trades

A reader alerted me to the fact that my big discussion with Raph on whether you could eliminate RMT by blocking asymetric trades was actually a bit late. Runescape did exactly that on December 10. Unbalanced trades in Runescape are blocked, that is you can't trade money or items unless the value of the things traded is similar. If the difference in value depasses 3000 gp (sorry, no idea to what that would correspond in WoW currency, I don't play Runescape) the trade is blocked. In a development diary article the devs explain that with these changes they hope to remove RMT from their game. I wish them luck with that.

Will this completely eliminate all possible forms of RMT and "cheating" using real world money? Of course it can't. But it certainly will significantly diminish the the amount of RMT going on in Runescape. I made a mistake by taking up Raph's expression "eradicate RMT" when I wrote my post about asymetric trade. "Decimate" would probably be more correct. I was just too exasperated by his claim that game companies should join the RMT bandwagon because RMT can't be eradicated. Sure, you'l never be able to remove the last guy doing it. But if RMT goes from widespread to rare, we have already won a big battle. And how widespread or rare RMT is is a design question, because it very much depends on how easy it is to transfer funds in an asymetric way. Runescape blocking unbalanced trades is going to help a lot.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:46 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Separating PvP from PvE

Ontherocks wrote me a lengthy proposal, which I am just going to quote here:

Here's a thought. What would be wrong with making PvP earned gear only usable in the open world and BGs/Arenas? Or to put it another way, you can't wear it in PvE instances.

1. People who are PvPing for gear to fill PvE gaps, wouldn't bother, resulting in...
2. LFG for regular 5mans and heroics would increase again, as gearing for raiding would require those runs.
3. You would have to enjoy, truly enjoy PvP to spend time earning gear that could only be used in that manner.
4. PvE gear is inferior for PvP purposes, so there is no conflict with allowing it in the BG's.
5. (Here's the biggie) The shift to a positive sum PvP system is what brought this on. I agree it's more fun and inclusionary, BUT the game overall is worse as a result. This solution lets you keep the Positive Sum PvP, but preserves the PvE experience.

The situation I see on the 2 servers I play on, is that Large Prismatics are considerably more expensive than Void Crystals. That is hugely telling about the state of this game right now. It says:

1. No one gears for Karazhan via 5mans...
2. because it is easier/faster to pick a reward and get it in a week, rather than go through the effort to LFG and hope for a lucky drop from a 5 man, that is worse than the PvP item
3. PvP gear make Kara incredibly trivial, and more so as each new season of gear is released.
4. The result is void crystals in abundance, and very few in 5mans to DE gear and supply the LPS.

Is removing the ability to wear PvP gear in Raids a drastic move? Sure. But it would allow the game to have better PvE/PvP balance.

Now, the economist in me says that I can't stop here. I have to look at the impact to PvP. It will obviously impact the numbers of people who choose to PvP if that is the only change. But there is a finite number of players on a server, so you can't really both raise PvE interest and keep PvP interest at it's current high levels. But at this point, Blizzard is completely free to incentivize PvP however they see fit, without regard for it's impact on "the other game". If the result is that the BG's die completely, then they just got a lesson on how not fun their implementation of PvP was to begin with (read: no one was there for fun). I don't see anything wrong with letting the BG's continue to be a place to gear up for Arena's. They are the Endgame of the PvP game. Add more PvP quests so that gold can be earned in that game as well. Objective based, repeateable daily PvP quests (more than just "win an AV", I mean real quests.) would add depth.

I think PvP and PvE can coexist but not the way it is now. One cannibalizes the other unless they are separated.

I'm not doing PvP, and haven't done so since before TBC came out. But my guild chat tells me that sometimes over half of the players in AV are leechers, just afk or chatting in the starting cave to get free honor and badges for PvP gear. Apparently the new reporting system isn't doing enough to discourage them. But if PvP gear wasn't useable for raiding and dungeons, I bet they would be gone pretty fast.

On the other hand, the more you separate PvP and PvE, the more you force people to choose one or the other. Few will have the time to do both if the gear from one isn't useful for the other. Face it, PvP in WoW is *not* popular by itself, most people are there for the "welfare epics". If those would be made less useful, we'd go back to long queues for battlegrounds, because too few players would be playing PvP. So what do you think?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:34 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Non-automatic leveling

Today I'm posting a couple of things my readers sent to me, my apologies for not doing it earlier, but I was rather busy in my christmas holidays with family and stuff. The first is an interesting idea a reader sent to me: Why does leveling in World of Warcraft have to be automatic? You could as well program it in a way that you get a message that you are ready to ding, but the actual gaining of the level would be done by visiting a trainer. Some levels could even require a quest to level up.

The advantage of that system would be that you could stop leveling if you wanted to, without stopping to play. You could remain at level 19 for PvP, or you could stop at any level to wait for your friends to catch up. Seeing how difficult it is to level up together with friends, as people rarely play exactly the same hours, that could be a nice feature. Alternatively there could be a /stoplevel command which would stop you from gaining xp. Maybe if it was easier to stay together in the lower levels, people wouldn't feel forced to rush to the level cap to play together.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Limitations of Auctioneer

Inspired by Og I downloaded and installed Auctioneer, a famous addon to watch World of Warcraft auction house prices. That is I first downloaded the AuctioneerAdvancedSuite, pressed a wrong button on it, got spammed with "this is cheap, do you want to buy it" message boxes which I couldn't turn off, and then uninstalled it again. Then I installed the AuctioneerClassicSuite, which was much less confusing. I think I'll just use it for a while and see what comes out. But although I haven't used it much yet, I'm already more aware of its limitations than many regular user, due to previous knowledge of economics and how the WoW AH works.

Auctioneer overestimates prices: This is inevitable, because Auctioneer doesn't have data on actual sales, it only has data on for what prices people put up items for auction. If nobody buys something overpriced, the buyout price still shows up in Auctioneer, and because the auction goes on until it expires, everybody on the server using Auctioneer will probably register the price. Cheap or underpriced items will be bought much quicker, and not everyone will see them, because the auctions last much shorter. On average the prices recorded by Auctioneer are too high.

Averages hide variations over time: World of Warcraft items undergo cyclical price fluctuations. If you watch prices on every day of the week, you'll notice that items aren't worth the same during the week (especially on patch day) as they are during the weekend. During the christmas event small eggs (needed to bake cookies for a christmas quest) suddenly go up strongly in price. Other one-time events change prices too, for example prices for gems skyrocketed with the latest patch, because people got lots of socketable arena season 1 gear for honor points. Auctioneer can store high and low prices, but won't tell you at what times prices are usually higher.

If everybody would use Auctioneer, you couldn't profit from it any more: Auctioneer can help you to buy things cheap and "flip" them, selling them at a profit. But that only works because some people sell goods for cheap, because they don't know what they are worth. If you sell something frequently traded, like lets say Runecloth, it is easy to see for how much other people are currently selling it and then undercut them. But if you want to sell some green item, the "Dastardly Dagger of the Duck", chances are that when you sell it there are no other identical pieces for sale. Thus people usually accept the proposed bid price (which is 50% over vendor price) and then post a buyout price somewhat higher. That has nothing to do with the market value of the items. Traders know that for example the same item "of the eagle" (+sta and +int) sells for more than "of the gorilla" (+str and +int), although the bid price WoW suggests will be the same. The profit comes from many people being not well informed, and thus selling items too cheap. If everyone had good information on previous prices, "flipping" would be much harder. Note that other games, e.g. Pirates of the Burning Sea, give price information on the average sales price of every item over the last 30 days.

I can see the interest in making quick virtual bucks by flipping items on the WoW auction house, but that business isn't for me. I don't see myself camping the AH for profit instead of adventuring. Not that I don't enjoy trading, but in WoW trading isn't the most fun part of the game. I'd rather do my trading in PotBS, where it is much more fun and the adventuring is less good than WoW.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:39 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
How the WoW raid of the future will look

Hammer of Grammer has this WoW comic on the future of raids which is very funny. And so true.

I found this via Og's Ledger, a blog dedicated curiously enough to the art of WoW auction house flipping, buying low and selling high. Very interesting read. I'm not sure I'm doing Og a favor by linking to him, as I'm aware that some players consider AH flipping to be some sort of crime. I'd say it's just applied economics meeting bad AH design by Blizzard. But that would be the subject of a much longer post.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:01 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Second epic flying mount

Woot! I reached one of my goals: I now have an epic flying mount for my other level 70 character, the priest. I started gathering money a bit over 6 weeks ago, at which point I basically had zero, because I had bought the first epic flying mount just before my break. But I made about 100 gold a day from daily quests, and the remainder by transmuting Primal Earth into Water. So now both of my level 70s have the maximum riding skill and at least one mount to go with it. My warrior already has two mounts, the bought one, and the Netherray. And he is already revered with the Netherwing, so I'll probably continue those daily quests and get the Netherdrake too.

The various mount types are just fluff. But having the 300 riding skill for the epic flying mount makes a big difference for travel speed. And I would assume that the next expansion at least has zones where you can use the flying mount. I don't know if Blizzard plans to introduce further riding skill increases for even better mounts in future expansions. But I have the impression that an epic flying mount will be more helpful in Wrath of the Lich King than any gear I might pick up, because the gear will be replaced by new stuff fast. Riding skill is forever.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:38 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft enchanting

I know it isn't optimal, but my World of Warcraft level 70 characters are running around without enchantments on their gear. One problem is that I never know when I'll get the next upgrade, so spending lots of money on an enchantment for an item that might be replaced tomorrow doesn't seem worth it. But the even bigger problem is that it is so damn difficult to get your stuff enchanted.

When you hear an enchanter in the trade channel offering enchants, more often than not he asks you to "bring your own mats". Which is pretty stupid, as only enchanters can produce the dusts and shards in the first place. As non-enchanter I can only get the materials from the auction house, and then I don't know what the going rate is for most of them, and risk overpaying if I buy them in a hurry. If the enchanter doesn't properly link his enchantment, I don't even have an in-game way to find out what the mats are, I need to look them up on some website. By the time I have everything together, the enchanter has logged off or joined a group and is now in the middle of a dungeon.

And I really don't understand what the added value of that system is supposed to be. Forcing strangers to meet each other? World of Warcraft already has itemized enchantments, so-called augments, for example the Aldor and Scryer inscriptions.

Why can't an enchanter simply produce such augments with his craft, portable enchantments that can be sold via the auction house?

The main advantage for the enchanter would be that it is a lot easier to make a profit if he sells enchantments via the auction house. When my priest still was enchanter, he found other players notoriously unwilling to pay anything for enchanting services. I was supposed to spend hundreds of gold on rare enchanting recipes, and then do enchants for free if the mats were provided. Now he is jewelcrafter, and while people still want rare gem designs done for free if they bring the raw gems, at least I can sell crafted gems on the auction house for more than the price of the raw gems. Why can't enchanting work like that?

If enchantments were available from the auction house, a lot more people would use them. Right now enchantments are mainly used for the players at the top of the game. If you are still leveling or gathering gear at a steady pace, enchantments are just too complicated to get to make them worth while. If you could buy them on the auction house, you could get a cheaper enchantment for the gear you hope to replace soon without losing all the time hunting for materials and an enchanter with the right recipe. Right now enchanting is a fringe tradeskill. Making enchantments tradeable would make it accessible for more players.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:19 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
We just don't want to lose

If you haven't read Scott Jenning's How to Make a Game with PvP Done Right article I linked to two weeks ago yet, you should do so now. The only problem I have with it is that it talks a lot about how PvP can't work, and a lot less about how PvP can work. There is an up to now not disproven theory that PvP can't work in a MMORPG at all, because it is incompatible with whatever makes a MMORPG a MMORPG, for example levels and gear. But I think *if* PvP can work in a MMORPG, it can only do so by rewarding *both* the winner and the loser.

I came to that conclusion by listening to a conversation in guild chat where one player was complaining how much it sucked that he got only 83 honor points in half an hour of Alter Valley battleground. I restrained myself from typing into guild chat that "this is called losing". Because I understood perfectly well that he wasn't complaining about losing AV, he was complaining that recent changes to AV made losing give less rewards than it used to. You get more honor per hour now from winning, as battles are shorter now, but less from losing. And apparently although you get "some" honor and 1 victory mark for losing, people like it less than the previous situation, where the difference in honor gained for winners and losers wasn't so big.

The other insight I arrived at this year was that people care a lot about individual PvP rewards, but don't care all that much about which side is winning. In the Pirates of the Burning Sea beta we had a situation where a hardcore guild after one wipe switched to a previously underdog nation, leveled up to the cap quickly, and then started to dominate PvP with their higher levels and better organization. That turned out to be a bad idea, because you could read endless rants from them about how the enemy nations had a "conspiracy" going on to "boycott" port battles. What really happened was that players from other nations had quickly realized that they were losing each battle, and thus simply didn't go to them any more. Because if you came to a port battle and lost on the sea part, your ship lost durability and eventually sunk. A big personal loss, not considered worth risking for the small possibility of winning, which only helped the nation, but gave no individual PvP rewards.

In the December video podcast of Warhammer Online the devs again talk a lot about their RvR PvP-system, about keeps, siege weapons, and victory points that make one side or the other win. What they are strangely silent about is personal PvP rewards, and how these are affected by winning and losing. Keeps are probably going to change owner many times between map resets. That is certainly going to be huge fun to do a couple of times. But if you EA Mythic expects people to keep doing it for a long time, they better hand out personal PvP rewards for every time you capture a keep or accomplish other PvP objectives, whether they are instanced or open world RvR objectives. *And* you better also give personal PvP rewards for the losing side. Not for "losing a keep" if you lost it while asleep. But unsuccessfully defending a keep should give nearly as many personal PvP points per hour as successfully taking it.

People simply don't want to lose. And they certainly don't want to pay $10 to $15 a month for the privilege of losing. That means PvP has to be positive sum, so if you win some and lose some you still end up coming out ahead. But as some people lose a lot more than they win, the only way to make sure PvP is positive sum for everybody is to give out PvP rewards for losing. The huge increase in PvP activity from before to after patch 1.13 in World of Warcraft, which turned WoW from a game where PvP rewarded the winners to one where PvP rewarded the losers nearly as well, tells us that this is the way to go. After all, X hours spent in PvE in a MMORPG are certain to earn you a reward. So if PvP wants to compete with that, the same X hours have to earn you a similar reward. Losing doesn't hurt if you still come home with a nice reward for the time spent, and the fact that the winner got a somewhat bigger price even keeps you motivated to try and do better. That system is still full of design pit traps (like afk honor farming in AV), but those problems can be solved with careful design.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:42 PM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Merry Christmas


- posted by Tobold @ 9:08 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
A thought experiment on RMT

As part of my ongoing discussion with Raph on RMT, I came up with a thought experiment, based funnily enough on Ultima Online, the game Raph designed. The one design question UO more or less "solved" was whether people wanted unrestricted PvP. It did so by creating two mirror images of the world, one with and one without PvP. Over 90% of the population ended up in the non-PvP half called Trammel, while the PvP half called Felluca ended up pretty much deserted. So although in discussions the PvP lovers were shouting much louder, once people had the chance to vote with their feet it became obvious that unrestricted PvP was not so popular. Now lets apply the same to World of Warcraft and RMT. I'm splitting WoW into two otherwise identical copies, which only differ in their handling of RMT and trades, and you tell me which one you'd like to play.

Tobold's low-RMT WoW

1) Gold can't be sent by mail to characters on other accounts, nor can it be directly traded in a trade window.
2) The auction house is changed into a "blind auction" system like in Pirates of the Burning Sea, that is you see that there are X items for sale and that the average price for them in the last 30 days was Y, but you don't see who sells them, and you don't see exactly what the buyout is. You bid, and if your bid is higher than the lowest buyout, you receive it at the price you bid.
3) As added precaution against "selling worthless rock for 1000 gold", all sales which exceed 5 times the average sales price get flagged for inspection by a GM, who has to approve it before the money arrives.

Note that this still doesn't totally eliminate RMT, nor does it do anything against transfering your UserID and password to a company to have them earn gold / xp / honor for you. That's why this is labeled *low*-RMT, not zero-RMT.

Raph's high-RMT WoW

I'm trying to represent Raph's ideas to the best of my understanding. If I get anything wrong, I'm sure Raph will correct me.

1) RMT is declared legal. Blizzard opens up Blizzard Exchange, which works like Station Exchange in that it is a platform for legal RMT controlled and guaranteed by Blizzard, so you don't have to worry that you never get the virtual currency or item you bought. Blizzard is taking a percentage of each deal.
2) The "bind on pickup" characteristic is replaced by "bind on equip" on all items in the game, including raid items. The level limit is replaced by an effectiveness factor, so if you are level 10 you *can* wear a level 70 raid sword, it just doesn't work quite so good. Quote Raph: "They’d be the classic fantasy hero stripling given the magic sword before they know how to use it."

I didn't add "Blizzard sells gold / items" to the list, because I'm not 100% sure that Raph proposes that. And of course RMT in that world isn't mandatory. Just like there is no zero RMT game, there can't be a 100% RMT game. But as RMT would be save and legal, and you could buy raid epics for cash, it certainly would be much more RMT as the normal or low-RMT version.

So tell me, of the three alternatives Tobold's low-RMT version, Blizzard's existing "RMT is illegal but wide-spread", and Raph's high-RMT version, which one would you prefer to play?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:03 AM Permanent Link  (32) comments Links to this post

 
Raph not open to new ideas

In a typical example of how little developers are open to new ideas, Raph tries to discredit me by saying that my proposal to remove asymetric trade is equivalent to removing groups and guilds and all forms of cooperation from MMORPGs. Apparently he didn't understand or chose to ignore the important word "asymetric". A group in which one person tanks, another person heals, and other people deal damage is *not* asymetric as long as the characters involved are of roughtly the same level. Each player performs a different role, but each of these roles is equally important. I never proposed removing groups from MMORPGs, Raph did. Nor did I propose to remove all trade from MMORPGs. One person selling a Primal Water to another person for 20 gold is totally fine. One person selling a worthless rock to another person for 1000 gold is not, because nobody would do such an asymetric transaction if there wasn't a real world counterpart to it.

Lets have a look at a real world example: A politician needs his house renovated, and the work to be done has a independantly estimated market value of $50,000. If the builder send the politician a bill for $50,000 and the politician pays it, we have a symmetric trade, and everything is fine. If the builder send the politician a bill for $1,000 and the press gets wind of it, everybody will assume that an illegal counterpart for this asymetric trade occured, like the politician getting a big city contract to the builder. Raph saying that to prevent asymetric trade you have to eliminate all trade and cooperation in the game is like saying that a politician shouldn't be allowed to renovate his house or buy anything at all. It is an invalid extrapolation, trying to make a reasonable request seem crazy by exaggeration.

Yes, removing asymetric trades from MMORPGs would remove *some* forms of non-RMT assistance from these games as well. You couldn't send 1000 gold to your friend or girl friend for example. Sending it to your own twinks could be enabled, for example with a shared bank account. But you don't have to remove guilds and groups from a game to achieve this, although you might want to remove the ability of level 10 characters gaining xp when grouped with level 70 characters to prevent that form of powerleveling as well.

Over at Raph's some commenters propose removing "bind on pickup" and "bind on equip" features altogether. That shows a disturbingly naive view of human behavior. To anyone with half a brain it should be obvious that if you make all items in the game tradeable, you would much increase RMT. Especially in a game like WoW, where raid epics are designed to be accessible only to a small percentage of players. Next thing you'd see would be the "Chinese Raiding Guild", just keeping the most essential epics for themselves and selling the rest for dollars.

The whole discussion started with Raph's blanket statement that "RMT cannot be eradicated" which he used as argument that game companies should get into that business as well. I found his accompanying statement of "Will the gamers like this? Flatly, no. At least not publicly. But a heck of a lot of them will pay up quietly." somewhat insulting to players. My problem here is that players do not even get the choice to prove that they would really prefer a game without RMT, because developers aren't open to new ideas that could actually remove it. Raph having to try to ridicule me and turning my proposal into something monstrous that I never said just shows that he doesn't *want* RMT to be removed. Because he sees it as the revenue model of the games of the future.

As so often, one of the most insightful comments to the whole discussion comes from Darniaq, who said "What is the real problem with RMT? That it exposes the underlying truth of mass acceptance of inequality." There is huge inequality between players of a game like World of Warcraft, from the most casual player who never even reached level 70, to the guy running around in Black Temple epics. Unrestricted RMT where everything is tradeable somewhat levels the playing field, as now some of the players who would never be able to reach top end raid epics otherwise now would be able to buy them for real money. But having played Magic the Gathering Online, I have already experienced how such a model can destroy a game and turn it into an ugly bastion of unrestricted greed which would make even Gordon Gecko flinch. I can live with a restricted RMT model, like WoW has it, where gold can only be used to buy things like epic mounts, but not dungeon / raid loot. But if game companies would be running the RMT themselves, simple business logic would encourage them to make larger and larger parts of the game available for money. The moment where the players thoughts go from "Wow, I found the fabled Sword of Uberness" to "Wow, I just earned $50", the game is dead.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:36 PM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Live Gamer

A reader alerted me to a new company named Live Gamer, who is trying to provide a legit platform for RMT with the support of the game companies themselves. Several companies, including SOE, back the venture. Raph thinks that "Will the gamers like this? Flatly, no. At least not publicly. But a heck of a lot of them will pay up quietly." and calls the idea a no-brainer because uncontrolled RMT is "impossible to eradicate" and "worth billions to someone else". Controlled RMT would be "controllable and therefore potentially less damaging". Blizzard disagrees and won't use Live Gamer.

I think that RMT is possible to eradicate. You just need to make gold "bind on pickup". That is, you need to remove all possibility of asymmetric trades where one player can give or send gold to another player. And you need to change the auction house system to make it anonymous and blind, so that players can't buy a worthless rock for 1000 gold and transfer money that way. This is totally possible, but it would have a cost: it would also remove twinking (unless you program a shared bank) and sending money to friends or guild mates. But possible it is, the only thing that is missing is the will of the game companies.

I still believe that Blizzard, in spite of their public anti RMT stance, is secretly regarding RMT as a feature, and is therefore unwilling to eradicate it. They did a good job in reducing secondary negative effects of gold selling, like gold spam. They *could* eradicate gold selling itself, but they won't, because lots of players do buy gold and would be annoyed if they couldn't.

So in a way the companies signing up for Live Gamer are more honest. It just isn't a "if you can't beat them, join them" attitude as Raph suggests. Game companies just realized that RMT is a way to close the gap between people playing a lot and people who don't have that much time. Far from being damaging to the game, RMT actually prevents millions of players from quitting the game because they can't keep up with the Joneses. And once you realize RMT as a feature, of course the game companies want to cash in on that feature themselves, and not leave it to third parties and potential scammers. Right now Blizzard is only "taxing" gold sellers by periodically banning a huge number of them as publicity stunt, and then selling each of them new game boxes and accounts to let them back in.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:54 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Why Fantasy?

On Terra Nova Richard Bartle asks Why Fantasy? and the Ancient Gaming Noob lists blogs with responses. My personal answer is that it is a freak accident. It isn't that people wouldn't play a good SciFi game, it just happened that the best games of the MMORPG type were of the fantasy genre, while the people who made SciFi games produced less good games (my apologies to Raph). EVE Online isn't doing so bad, but with its bad tutorial and hardcore PvP it remains niche and inaccessible for the average WoW player.

That doesn't mean that all future successful games have to be fantasy. The hypothetical World of Starcraft game would probably get millions of players. And while the future of Star Trek Online is uncertain, Stargate: Worlds looks quite interesting. If we just wait a few years we'll be able to see people discussing "Why SciFi?" or "Is Fantasy Dead?".
- posted by Tobold @ 7:40 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
Dustwallow Marsh much improved

In April 2005 I wrote

One quite interesting detective quest has to do with a burned down inn, at the border between the swamp and the Barrens. There are three "clues" hidden in the inn, a shield, a tiny badge, and some hoofprints. I had found the shield, but the other clues I only found after reading about them on Thottbot. Each clue leads to a quest, leading to the perpetrators of that crime. Unfortunately the series ends with a dud. After you did everything, you are told to bring the black shield to somebody in Thunders Bluff, for the final revelation of the mystery. And there you hand in the shield, get a tiny xp reward, and the quest abruptly ends without explanation. Seems a bit unfinished. Maybe you would get more information if you did the Alliance side quests from the same three clues, but my druid only found the black shield at the time, and now his account has expired.

Maybe the reason why the Dustwallow Marsh are a bit underpopulated is that this is not the only bad quest in there. There is a guy in a hut in the swamp, "Swamp Eye" Jarl, who gives three quests which don't make much sense. First he wants three soothing spices, which you have to buy from a vendor, and the reward is only some food without stats. Then he wants 40 spider eyes, but he is talking crazy, and you don't really know what for. And then he wants an expensive smithed sword for the third quest. I declined that third quest, because I knew how valuable the sword was, and the reward he offered was worth a lot less. But I checked on Thottbot if there was another quest behind that, which would explain and reward a bit more, but there apparently isn't. Simply a badly written series of quests. It actually speaks for the otherwise high quality of the World of Warcraft quests if the bad ones are jarring so much.

Well, I'm happy to report that the detective quest continues after handing in the shield now. And Swamp Eye Jarl, while still being crazy, also much improved his quests. He doesn't want spices and a smithed sword any more, he now takes frog legs and a sword that drops from a named murloc. His quest texts have been rewritten as well, so that he comes over more believable as the mad guy living in the swamp. Going there is now definitely worth it, because he also gained a less crazy room mate with even more quests. And then there is the grave I also previously mentioned.

One very nice, hidden, level 40 quest is in the Dustwallow Marsh. There is a hut with a guy named "Swamp Eye" Jarl, who gives very bad quests (best avoid doing those), but in his garden is a freshly dug grave. When you click on it first, you find a hand. Bring the hand to Brackenwall Village gives you a reward, but no clue that the quest isn't finished. You need to go back to the same grave, and by further digging find a head. From that starts a quest where you boil the head in a troll voodoo cauldron in Grom'Gol to make him speak, which then gives you a quest to find a necklace from crab men in Dustwallow Marsh. After handing the quest in at Brackenwall, you are sent to Orgrimmar, where you get the choice between two very nice blue rings. Well worth it, and I guess not many people did that quest.

Only now the grave has a yellow exclamation mark floating over it, which makes it much more obvious that there is a quest to get there. Of course Dustwallow Marsh also gained a new town, Mudsprocket, and many more new quests. What appeared "unfinished" to me in 2005 is now a complete zone. Makes me wonder if Blizzard is planning to rework other unfinished zones, Azshara comes to mind. Anyway, good job on Dustwallow Marsh.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:25 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Work or pay

I bought the original Guild Wars when it came out, but never played much of it. I'm not much of a PvP guy, and the PvE wasn't so exciting. But I'm still in the Guild Wars database of users and so they still send me mail with advertising and special offers. This week I got a mail offering me to buy skill and item unlock packs. Normally when you make a character in Guild Wars you have the choice of whether you want to make a level 1 character and level him up to level 20, and gather all the possible skills yourself. Or you make a level 20 character right away, but that one only has a limited set of standard skills. Unless you pay for the skill and item unlock pack and get access to all the stuff that other players had to painstakingly find themselves. Hmmm, looks surprisingly like RMT to me.

The basic problem is always the same: you can achieve anything in a MMORPG given enough time. But some people just don't have that much time. Conveniently people with little time usually have not much time to play because they have a job, and because they have a job they have more money than somebody playing the game 16 hours a day. Thus offering the guy with little time some of the achievements that the guy with lots of time "worked" for is usually an easy sell. Gold sellers make millions of dollars that way. And of course game companies would prefer to grab that money themselves, and not leave the profit for third parties. Thus NCSoft gives you the choice in Guild Wars: Do you want to work to gather all the skills and items in the game to use them in PvP, or do you prefer to pay for them. I'm pretty sure that players who did work for them won't be happy about this offer.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:37 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Pirates of the Burning Sea endgame

Massively recently had a post about the PotBS endgame, but you should have noticed from the "press tour" in the title that what is reported there has nothing at all to do with the real endgame in PotBS. Pirates of the Burning Sea is primarily a PvP game, and the endgame is PvP. There are no raids for phat epics, or other ways to improve your character with equipment. You just make money or grind special royal marks to buy ships with, and then you sink those ships in PvP.

And this is exactly why I don't believe that Pirates of the Burning Sea will keep their players for a very long time. The purpose of the game is PvP, and PvP is a negative sum game. Negative sum because the winners gain less than the losers lose, so if you win one and lose one, you're worse off than before.

What also worries me a bit is that the making money and losing money in PvP part are split between different character classes. The freetrader class is great at making money, even large sums of it, but so bad in ship-to-ship combat that they should avoid any serious PvP action. The pirates, privateers and navy officers will do most of the PvP, but the players enjoying that kind of gameplay might not necessarily be inclined to play in the economic game as well, and so they will constantly be out of money. Now you can imagine a guild having both freetraders and navy officers, with the former financing the latter. But what exactly are the latter going to do for the former? In principle they could escort them, but I doubt that is going to be popular, escorting a freetrader while he brings cargo from A to B. Chances are that if he is escorted, he won't be attacked, so nothing will be happening on that trip, which can be mindnumbingly boring.

A division of labor could work if Pirates of the Burning Sea would have good guild tools, in which the contribution of everyone was somehow rewarded. Unfortunately the PotBS guild tools are very basic, on the same level as World of Warcraft. It is easy to imagine how freetraders in guilds will be paying for most of the ships, get very little recignition for that, and stop playing after a while. The best way to PvP is probably to have two characters, a navy officer and a freetrader, and run the freetrader as money-making alt.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:37 PM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Battlemaster trinkets

A reader was asking my opinion on the Battlemaster trinkets, level 70 epic trinkets that can be acquired in two different ways: Either with 75 badges of justice, or with 30000 honor and 40 AV marks. Unfortunately that is a bit like asking a beggar whether he'd prefer the Mercedes or the Rolls-Royce; I only have 3 badges of justice and 600 honor points on two characters together, so it is hard for me to say which way is easier.

40 AV marks used to be impossible to get when I did PvP a year ago, me being Horde. But apparently Horde wins a bit more often now, and the AV battlegrounds are shorter, not lasting several hours any more. 30000 honor I still haven't got a grasp how fast you can earn those. I only know the daily PvP quest gives 419 honor. I heard people saying several thousand honor per day wasn't a problem for them, but of course that depends on how much you are playing.

Badges of Justice are easier to get nowadays as well. The daily heroic dungeon quest gives you 2 badges in addition to the about 3 you get from killing the bosses in there. And Karazhan and Zul'Aman also drop badges from all bosses, 22 badges for clearing Karazhan once. So if you are in a raid guild that clears Karazhan every week, and do one heroic dungeon per week as well, you'll have 75 badges in 3 weeks.

So what would you say, are the two different prices for getting the battlemaster trinkets equivalent? Or which one would you say is easier to achieve, PvP or PvE cost?
- posted by Tobold @ 3:10 PM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
My first epic

Well, my first TBC epic to be exact, as at level 60 my priest was nearly full epic, and still is wearing the T2 helmet from Onyxia. But not having raided yet, and not having done much of the other level 70 endgame either, I didn't have any level 70 epics yet on either character. But yesterday I joined a guild group to farm Apexis Crystals, and this morning I hit exalted with Ogri'la and thus could buy Vortex Walking Boots for my warrior. From a tank point of view they were barely better than the blue boots I was previously wearing, more armor but less agility, a bit more stamina. But then they have a nice bonus to critical hits, which should make farming a small bit easier.

If I would get more Apexis Crystals, I could get another epic, the Crystalline Crossbow. But I use the ranged weapon just for pulling, and my throwing knifes are nearly as good as the crossbow, and don't need ammo.

In other news I'm making progress with Netherwing reputation as well, and found that after all there is at least one reward besides the Netherdrake mount. At friendly I got an Overseer's badge, and at honored the improved version Captain's Badge. At revered I'll get an even better version, with +45 stamina bonus, which might actually be worth wearing all the time. Otherwise I just equip the badge, summon the pet, and then switch back to another trinket.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:19 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
AFK Gamer on post 2.3 Alterac Valley

AFK Gamer has a post on Alterac Valley after the 2.3 patch which is interesting. Apparently Alliance is losing AV a lot now. Which is curious insofar as in my pre-patch experience Alliance won at least 3 out of 4 Alterac Valley battles. But the patch changed some of the rules, and now the situation has reversed. Readers tell me that at least on some servers the Alliance players are now boycotting AV, so that Horde players can't get any honor there.

The last time I did battleground PvP was a year ago, after patch 1.13 changed the honor system and before TBC came out. My warrior, like everyone at the time, was doing battlegrounds to get some nice equipment for honor points, which previously had only been available to the top PvP ranks. Instead of needing 16 hours of PvP per day for several months, you could now get the same gear by doing an hour of PvP a day for a much shorter time. But while that was an interesting experience, I didn't enjoy PvP all that much. So now although I know that I could probably get some nice gear by joining the arena, I just opted out of PvP.

So as I am not an expert on PvP, I invite you to tell me about PvP in AV after 2.3. Is it true that the situation reversed and Horde is now winning more than Alliance? Why do you think that is so? And please, no "Horde plays better than Alliance" crap, the only reasonable assumption is that players on both sides are the same.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:06 AM Permanent Link  (34) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 17-December-2007

Christmas is here! Or rather the Feast of Winter Veil started in World of Warcraft. As most seasonal events in WoW that means a bunch of quests with fluff rewards, for example the mistletoe to turn your mount temporarily into a reindeer. As there is also a machine that turns you into a gnome with a santa costume for half an hour, you can be the little santa riding on a flying reindeer through Shattrath. Too bad you won't be the only one who had that idea.

Besides the fluff there is one Winter Veil quest which gives out a more useful reward: the Stolen Winter Veil Treats, leading to You're a Mean One, in which you have to kill The Abominable Greench in Alterac Mountains. Reward is one mid-level random tradeskill recipe. But those recipes can *only* be gotten from that particular quest. They are for alchemy the Elixir of Frost Power, for tailoring a green holiday shirt, for engineering the Snowmaster 9000 (making one snowball per day), for leatherworking the Gloves of the Greatfather, for smithing the Edge of Winter, and for enchanting the Winter's Might enchantment.

Now because of my frost mage I absolutely wanted to have the recipe for the Elixir of Frost Power. Having 4 characters of at least level 35, and two characters from my wife's account, I did the quest 6 times, but no luck. I got the enchanting recipe, which is also useful for the mage, as it adds +7 frost spell damage as a weapon enchant. But fortunately a friendly guild mate found the potion recipe and sent it to me. Hunting the Greench is a bit annoying, especially if you do it 6 times, because there are so many people who want to kill him. Grouping helps, as ideally it gets the quest cleared for all group members. But only if they are all near when the Greench dies. Which isn't as easy, as the group usually spreads out to cover several possible spawn points. In the best case I tagged the Greench with an instant damage spell from my mage, turned him into a sheep, and we killed him when everyone was there. But in several other cases I managed to tag the Greench, but other players not in the group then killed him, before the other players in my group were close. Then I still had the quest done, but neither my group members nor the players who did all that damage to the Greench got anything out of it. Rather inconsiderate!

In any case, this was one of the situations where I was happy that I had played Everquest before. A typical WoW player can't stay 5 minutes on the same spot. An Everquest player knows how to be patient and camp the same spot for a long time. For the Greench I just choose one spot where I had seen him spawn and just waited for him to appear. While waiting I made a macro saying /target The Abominable Greench; /cast . So when the Greench appeared, I was always the fastest grabbing him, even if other players were around. Because they were running around, while I was concentrated on the one spawn, and had the macro to grab it fast.

Besides the Feast of the Winter Veil I mostly did daily quests. Thanks to all the readers who advised me to stick with the Netherwing daily quests! I followed their advice and really, after you get to friendly the quests there become much better. The Booterang daily quest is a blast, and the quests in the mine are also much easier than the quests you need to grind to get to friendly. Meanwhile I got to honored, which opens up some racing quests. But I think I won't do them right now. I'm spending christmas at my parents house, and only have the laptop to play WoW on. For the racing I'd rather have the 22" widescreen monitor, and not the 12" laptop screen, because otherwise I'll never manage to evade all that stuff the guy I need to race throws at me.

In any case I already have a curious problem with the daily quests: I'm hitting the cap of maximum of 10 daily quests per day. Which means I'm making just over 100 gold a day. I have 4k now, just 1k gold to go for the second epic flying mount. I can't do the Netherwing daily quests with my priest, because apparently you need to have the epic flying riding skill to get past neutral with the Netherwing. Strange that the best quests to make the gold for the epic flying mount are only available to those who already have one!
- posted by Tobold @ 8:37 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
The raiding I miss

Yesterday my guild went to Gruul's lair, and there was an empty spot for the first boss fight, killing King Maulgar. That gave me the opportunity to raid once again, which I hadn't done for a very long. Not counting one very bad Karazhan raid, I hadn't had fun raiding since before TBC came out. And funnily I enjoy the aspects of raiding that the hardcore raiders hate: Gathering all the people together, chatting in front of the raid instance, preparing. And I enjoy doing my job well during the raid. I was happy that I hadn't forgotten how to raid heal, and that the main tank was never anywhere close to dying while I was on him. I even saw more of the fight than I usually do, due to my new widescreen monitor. In previous raids all those raid windows didn't leave much room for a view in the middle, but with widescreen the situation is much better.

The part of raiding that I don't enjoy are fighting for loot or raid spots. Not that we had any fights, but I was deliberately keeping my head low. Maulgar dropped epic shoulders which I could have used, but as soon as I saw that other people needed it too I withdrew my "need" request. As long as I haven't worked out whether I can and want to raid regularly with my guild, I'm not feeling comfortable grabbing raid loot. In my opinion raid loot isn't really the property of the individual player, but more a resource of the whole guild. Giving raid loot to people who aren't using it to increase the chance of success of the guild in the next raid isn't all that useful. Same thing with raid spots, we had more than 25 people for the Gruul fight, we had too many healers, and from the healers I certainly was the least well geared, with the lowest +healing, so I let somebody else take my spot.

Now I am thinking about whether I should try to join one of my guilds Karazhan raiding teams after christmas, if I'm having so much fun raiding. But as I enjoy the social aspects of raiding, Karazhan isn't ideal, the raid is too small to be social. And my usual playing times are from 6 pm to 10 pm, while my guild's usual raiding times are from 8 pm to after midnight. I need to work out how often I am willing to raid until late in the night, getting up at 6:30 am next day for work. Raiding itself isn't so hard, it is the organization around it that makes it difficult.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:51 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Oh, forget about market share!

One of the first things you learn when you occupy yourself with graphical display of data and statistics is that such displays can always be tweaked to show what you want them to show, whether it is real or not. And recently I've seen so many misleading graphs on MMO market share that I'm starting to wonder whether these people are so naive, or whether they are trying to mislead. Look at the graphs for example on Raph Koster's website, or the market share graph on VOIG MMOGdata. Raph shows WoW as one among many players between Club Penguin and Habo Hotel. VOIG shows WoW on top, but closely followed by Second Life. But what exactly are these graphs comparing? Club Penguin or Second Life have a share of what?

One thing that is for certain is that it isn't "market share" in the classic sense of share of the dollar value of the market. We now know that WoW is making over $500 million profit a year on $1.1 billion of revenue in 2007. Habbo Hotel was reported to have $77 million of revenue in 2006, just 7% of that of WoW. Second life is "barely profitable". Club Penguin makes $35m of profit on $65m of revenue. In financial terms World of Warcraft is the whale among the minnows, and none of the competitors comes anywhere close.

So Raph is talking about competition for "eyeballs". But again you need to cheat somewhat when counting those eyeballs. Yes, Second Life has over 11 million registered users ... but only 52,000 peak concurrent users. For every Second Life user actually online at prime time, there are over 200 that are not. Most of these users are only still in the system because signing up was free, and Linden Lab never removes people from that database, even if they only ever played for 5 minutes once. The 9.3 million subscribers from World of Warcraft are *active* subscribers, and not counting people who cancelled their account. You can't compare numbers of free accounts with numbers of paid subscriptions!

Talking of eyeballs, which is a term from advertising lingo, of course it is very important of how long that eyeball rests on the message. The average time a Second Life user spends in the game was reported to be 12 minutes per month. Meanwhile players spend over 17 hours per week in World of Warcraft, over 300 times more. I don't know how the numbers look for Habo Hotel and Club Penguin, but as "casual games" they certainly take a lot less hours per week than WoW.

In summary, if somebody talks to you about MMO market share, you better double-check what numbers he is comparing. Mattel might be selling more Hot Wheels cars than Ford is selling real cars, but putting the two numbers on a graph saying "car sales market share" just wouldn't make any sense. Virtual world sandboxes like Second Life or casual virtual social spaces like Club Penguin certainly are interesting market trends. But trying to draw attention towards them by fiddling with the data is only going to backfire, as it already did for Second Life, where the press reporting has turned quite negative this year.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:49 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
The next bottleneck

The original World of Warcraft had a bottleneck: Around level 40 there were less quests than for the other levels, and most of them were neutral quests in Stranglethorn Vale. People playing alts, even if they switched faction, ended up doing the same quests over and over. And on PvP servers the concentration in Stranglethorn lead to lots of ganking there. But what I called the "Stranglethorn Hole" is gone since patch 2.3: More quests of that level range have been added, especially to Dustwallow Marsh. Other level 40 content that was barely used because it was elite had been made accessible by turning it into normal content, for example Stromgarde Keep in Arathi. And because level 40 quests now give more xp, and you need less xp to gain a level in that level range, the level 40 bottleneck is truely gone ... only to reappear at level 60.

If today you'd meet a level 60 character doing quests in Silithus or the Plaguelands or other spots that were popular pre-TBC, you'd think that the guy was either stupid or hadn't bought the expansion. Nobody is using the old content any more, because the quality of rewards in Hellfire Peninsula is so much better. Everyone leaves old Azeroth as soon as they reach level 58 and can use the Dark Portal. But of course the bonus to quest xp and fast leveling from patch 2.3 ends at level 60. And again both factions find themselves in the same zone, doing the same quests, as the devs took some shortcuts and created the same quests for Thrallmar (Horde) and Honor Hold (Alliance). After the second alt you'll start to hate the place. And even totally new players leveling up for the first time will feel that they are lacking options where to go at level 60.

Now for once the solution to the problem would be easy, as there is already sufficient level 60 content in World of Warcraft. The devs just would need to rework the old Azeroth level 58 to 60 content a bit to give out the same level of rewards that Hellfire Peninsula does. The huge gap in quality between old world and new world items was necessary when TBC came out, because the new world had to offer items that were attractive for people who spent up to 2 years already at the level 60 cap. But now that level 60 isn't special any more, the gap actually hurts the leveling process, because it limits people's options. For both new players and alts it would be better if there was a slower ramping up, maybe starting from the mid-50s, so that moving from the old world to Outland doesn't appear such a huge step. Players would need to buy the expansion to get past level 60 anyway; leaving the old world level 58 to 60 content comparatively unattractive, as it is now, serves no useful purpose. So I hope that one of the content patches before the next expansion contains some more remodeling of old world content in preparation of the future. If World of Warcraft really has a churn rate of 4% to 5% per month, in a year from now half of the players won't even understand why there are all those level 60 zones in the old world if they have so bad rewards. It's an oddity created by history, and the devs should fix it.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:46 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Blogger introduces OpenID commenting

I just remarked yesterday how it wasn't a good idea of Blogger to remove the ability to sign your comments with an URL leading to your blog. The guys from Blogger agree, and apologize, while adding a new feature to Blogger, the use of OpenID:

Right now, the only way to add a URL to your name when commenting is to sign your comment with OpenID. We apologize for removing the URL field from the comments form prematurely two weeks ago. That was a mistake on our part that came from launching OpenID support on Blogger in draft.

Ironically, our testing of OpenID, a feature that lets you use accounts from all over the web to comment on Blogger, made it appear that we were trying to force you into getting a Google Account. We regret this appearance, since we're strong supporters of OpenID and open web standards in general.

If you haven't set up OpenID, you can still link to your blog — or any webpage, for that matter — by using the standard <a> tag inside the comment form.

As both Wordpress and LiveJournal are OpenID-enabled, the majority of bloggers should be able to comment here using the new feature without needing to type pesky HTML code links back to their blog.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:56 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Nothing but WoW for christmas

Warcraftrealsm published their latest US & EU WoW activity numbers showing an uptick in November, although the numbers are still below the peak in Spring. My anecdotal evidence tells the same story, my guild is full of people coming back after taking a break. If you ask around, there are two major factors to that revival: Patch 2.3 and the fact that all the games we have been hoping for for 2007 have either been cancelled, postponed, or turned out to be less good than hoped. Michael Zenke from MMOG Nation lists why he hates 2007. Lord of the Rings Online gets my "best new game of the year" award, but for me and many others that game lacked long-term motivation. So while I don't regret having taken a break from WoW, for me there is nothing but WoW to play for christmas.

When I'm looking around to how other people are playing World of Warcraft right now, I notice that I'm playing the game differently. I am less goal-oriented, and am concentrated more on the playing aspect. While my level 70 characters certainly aren't well equipped, I don't have a list saying "need to go to dungeon X to get item Y for my warrior". I just play whatever comes along, when somebody in guild chat says "need a tank for this or that", and I have the time, I usually just join without checking what's in it for me. Then when something drops that I can use, it is a nice surprise. Of course that isn't "efficient", I don't even have enchantments on most of my gear because I haven't got a clue whether it is something I'm likely to carry around for a while or whether I'll find something better tomorrow. But I find playing like that less stressful. I'm never disappointed if some loot didn't drop, because I didn't know it could drop in the first place. And I'm certainly not doing stuff I don't like just to get the reward, for example I haven't done any PvP battlegrounds or arena in spite of people claiming there were easy epics to be gained there.

I'm not saying my way to play is better, but it certainly suits me better. And it is also a reasonable strategy in view of the long break I took. Nobody knows the WotLK release date yet, but my 7 months of break will probably be around half of the time between the two expansions. Everybody else is far ahead of me in level of gear, and I'd never catch up to them if I tried. So I avoid the stress, try to have the maximum of fun, and I'll be where everybody else is when the expansion hands out green level 71 items that are as good as the current epics.

Of course that doesn't mean I don't have goals in WoW. I'm making good progress on the money for my second epic flying mount, from 0% to 75% of the money needed in just one month, and that without me having the feeling that I was grinding for it. If I don't have it for christmas, then certainly early next year. I'm also quite happy with my new mage. Again not with the thought of "I need to get to level 70 as fast as possible", but experimenting with how to play that new class, and enjoying the way more than the destination. It isn't unlikely that I manage to get the mage to level 70 before the next expansion comes out. But although a dps class is sure more fun to solo than a tank or healer, those characters are first in line to be leveled to 80, because I love playing in groups with my guild mates more than I like to solo. Having fun with friends, that is what World of Warcraft is all about for me. Shiny epics are secondary.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:56 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Blogger vs. Wordpress

While this post gives me the opportunity to link to the new home of Gwaendar's Altitis, the real subject is "moving your blog". Apparently over the last couple of weeks a couple of MMO bloggers moved from Blogger to Wordpress. One cited reason is that due to recent changes of the Blogger comment system, commenters can only link back to their own blogs if that blog is from Blogger. You can post comments under a non-Blogger nickname, but the field that linked that nickname to an URL was removed to prevent spam links. Wordpress doesn't have that restriction.

Now while I'm not happy about that change to Blogger either, I wouldn't move my blog because of that. The problem is that I have a Google pagerank of 5 with my Blogger front page, and about 60% of my traffic comes from search engines. And unlike Ogrebear, I found by Google analytics that the people who arrive at my blog via a search engine nearly exclusively were actually searching for the kind of information I'm providing. On my top 100 search terms there is only one objectionable one: "s i m s p o r n" (excuse the spaces, I just don't want to increase the number of hits I get on this), because of a piece I once wrote about the nonsense of blurring things that aren't even there. All others are about games or at least about computers, linking to the posts where I write about my hardware. If I moved my blog, my pagerank would disappear, and people wouldn't be able to find me, nor the information they were looking for in my blog.

So the only thing I can offer is pointing out again that paragraph 6 of my Terms of Service specifically allow you to sign your comments with a link back to your blog. It's a bit complicated, because you need to use proper HTML code to do it, but I recommend writing that code once into a text file and using copy & paste to sign with it.

I'm not expert enough to say whether Wordpress is really better than Blogger, I haven't even tried it. But if you are thinking of creating your own blog, I'd recommend to try the different possibilities first. If you move later, you'll inevitably lose part of your traffic.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:39 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
The trouble with WoW loot while leveling

There has been a large multitude of Diablo-like action roleplaying games for single players in the last two years, and even several good attempts to bring that concept online with games like Mythos, Dungeon Runners, or Hellgate: London. Besides the click-to-combat system, these games are characterized by constant gathering of loot. The players are motivated by expecting loot they can use around every corner, a constant stream of upgrades. If we compare that to World of Warcraft, we can say that the end-game to some extent is also very much about loot. But while leveling up, loot plays only a minor role, and doesn't contribute all that much to player motivation. Why is that so?

There are a number of factors that prevent WoW loot to be as fun as it could be while your character is still leveling up: item levels, item material, and stats.

Items in WoW have both a minimum level and an "item level". While the minimum level tells you what level your character needs to have to wear an item, the item level tells you where you are likely to find that item. An item with item level 40 would typically drop as loot from a level 40 monster or be a reward for a level 40 quest. But the minimum level is typically 5 levels lower than the item level, so the level 40 mob drops items that a level 35 character can wear. Obviously players are interested in wearing the best gear they can, so a level 35 player would look for items with a minimum level of 35, which have item level 40. Thus to gather them by himself he would need to do level 40 quests or farm level 40 mobs. That isn't impossible, but it is hard, and it isn't the best strategy to gain the most experience points per hour. You level up much faster if you do quests of your own level or slightly below than if you do quests of higher levels, because the effort to do the harder stuff goes up faster than the xp rewards do. So if a player pursues an optimum strategy for leveling up fastest, the gear he finds will be constantly 5 levels behind.

The problem of item material is one that isn't limited to the leveling part of the game. I'm playing a mage, so I can only use cloth armor and certain types of weapons. Whenever I find leather, mail, plate, or something like an axe, the stuff is completely useless to me. I can only sell it, or disenchant it. Stats are a very similar problem. While technically nothing prevents me from wearing gear that adds to my mage's strength or agility, I would need to be downright stupid to do so. These stats don't do anything for a mage. Again this problem persists even in the end-game, although some classes suffer more than others. For example if my warrior groups with a paladin and we find two pieces of plate armor, one with bonuses to stamina and defense, the other with bonuses to intellect and healing, my warrior could only roll for the former, while the paladin could find use for both of them.

Add it all together and you arrive at a situation in which 99% of the loot that you get while leveling, either from mobs or from quests, is being sold or disenchanted. And the gear you wear is most likely bought from the auction house. Only some long quest series, group quests, or instances are likely to reward you with gear that you would actually want to wear. But there are no important game design reasons of why that has to be this way. There are a number of ways in which Blizzard could improve the fun potential of loot gathering while leveling. And while it isn't very realistic to expect them to do that for the old content, some of the improvements would be possible to implement in future expansions, as each of these adds a new leveling part to the game.

The biggest improvement possible would be to the quest rewards. The moment the game offers you a quest, the game *knows* what class you are, and thus what types of gear you could possibly use. Many quests currently offer the choice only between one to three items, what with 4 possible materials means that some classes won't get anything, while the "choice" of the other classes is predetermined. Instead of offering one piece of leather, and one piece of mail armor, the game should know that I'm a mage, and offer me two different pieces of cloth armor, for example a fire and a frost one. If I'd do the same quest with a warrior, the reward should be a choice between two pieces of plate armor, one with more defense, the other with more strength bonus. And so on. What kind of a "reward" is it if you offer a plate helmet to a mage, which is even bind on pickup? World of Warcraft quest rewards shouldn't force you to study third-party websites just to find the few quests which reward you with items you can actually wear. There is a lot of potential fun in gathering loot, and World of Warcraft should exploit that potential better.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:53 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
Mage of Frozen Wrath

When I rejoined World of Warcraft and started leveling up my new mage, I commented on how little effect twinking had on that mages performance. The usual mix of gear that everyone is wearing, between quest items, loot, better loot from instances, and gear bought from the auction house mostly adds to your base stats, like intellect or stamina. And while intellect determines the size of your mana pool and has a small effect on your crit chance, the overall effect of such stats on a mage isn't large. Even my heavily enchanted twink mage with all the gear he couldn't have bought with his own money was performing barely better fully equipped than running naked.

So when thinking about it a bit more, I started to come to a radical conclusion, and a crazy idea: As all the gear that adds to basic stats is of very little added value to my mage, I should simply forget about it, and only look for the only secondary stat that really counts for a mage: spell damage, or particularly for my frost mage, frost spell damage. So every time I logged on my bank alt, the one who gets send all the stuff to sell and who is doing all the AH buying, I searched the auction house for "frozen", and bought all the gear "of frozen wrath" up to 20 levels higher than my mage level.

A month later I'm level 35 and I'm nearly completely equipped with gear which is either "of frozen wrath", or which gives a general bonus to spell damage. And the result is astounding: I have a frost spell damage bonus of "up to 169". Now I'm not a theorycrafter, I need to find a mage theorycraft guide comparable to the warrior guide I linked to today. But the base damage of my current frostbolt rank 6 is 174 to 190. And the simple trial and error experiment of shooting mobs with and without my frozen wrath gear tells me that without the gear I do about 200 points of damage with my frostbolt, and with the gear I do about 300 points of damage, a huge 50% more. That results in me needing one or two frostbolts *less* to kill the same mob. I can often kill mobs of my own level with frostbolts before they even reach me! That constitutes a huge gain in kill speed and mana efficiency, as not only do I need less mana to cast less frostbolts, I also don't need to spend the added mana on freezing the attacker with frost novas. Though although I have less mana as I forewent all the +int bonuses (except for enchants), I don't have more downtime, because the added mana efficiency makes up for the smaller mana pool. And of course if I'm running low on mana there is always free water, and a smaller mana pool is faster to fill up again.

I'm sure going to continue like this and concentrate on spell damage gear and consumables. I've started using self-made Lesser Wizard Oil, and soon I'll be able to use Arcane Elixir potions from my warrior alchemist. I'll keep looking for frozen wrath gear on the auction house, but I'll have to find out the other code names for the general spell damage gear. I think there is "of the Invoker" and "of the Sorcerer", but those only seem to exist on Outland gear. Of course once I hit the level cap and start joining groups I'll need to balance that better. Maximum dps doesn't make the best mage for groups, it only messes up aggro management. But for soloing and leveling up, maximizing spell damage is sure the way to go for a mage.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:11 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
Guild quests

Bliss wrote me with an interesting idea on a possible social engineering feature for World of Warcraft guilds: Guild quests

A recent post you made regarding WoW's future made me wonder if you had any thoughts or suggestions as to what could be done, within the current construct of the game, to increase social engineering. Guild housing, I'm sure, has its own series of difficulties and obstacles for being realized, and although it would be fun to see and have a common "room" to hearth back to with my fellow guildmates after a raid, it doesn't strike me as something that would truly foster a sense of connectedness with them. It would just be a common place that I might run into them from time-to-time rather than outside of Karazhan for instance.

I thought recently that a Guild Master might be able to specify a daily quest for items that the guild bank was needing - similar to the gathering of materials for the opening of the AQ gates. He/She might have an interface that allows choosing of various materials and a guild "butler" NPC might have the quest for the day. The Guild Master says, "Hey - we could really use some Felweed for potions/elixirs/flasks," so they can set a daily quest for collecting these materials...perhaps no more than 2-3 per day so as to not exploit easy questing. Gold payout would be less than a standard daily quest, but would still count towards the limit that a character could do in a particular day. I know that lower level characters don't have access to standard daily quests until max level, but this could be allowed giving lower levels the ability to contribute if they have the gold even; I don't know, just thinking out loud here. :P

Interesting idea in principle, but the devil as always is in the details: World of Warcraft doesn't have a mechanism to count the actual *gathering* of Felweed as a quest item, it can only see that you received it. Thus if there is a quest that gives lets say 5 gold for delivering 10 Felweed to the guild bank, there isn't anything that would prevent all guild members to take the quest, take the 10 Felweed out of the guild bank, hand in the quest, thereby putting the same 10 Felweed back into the guild bank and getting their 5 gold reward. So a quest like that would just hand out free gold to all guild members. To work at all, the quest would need to actually destroy the Felweed, which not only is against the idea of gathering something for the guild, but also then results in people just looking whether 10 Felweed are better sold at the AH or better handed in as quest item.

So let's try to design a better form of guild quest for better guild social engineering. First of all we need a common project in which the guild as a whole would be interested. That could be enlarging or decorating the guild hall, or it could be something more useful. As we started with a proposal to collect herbs, lets stick to that general theme: Lets design a guild quest that adds a temporary potion dispenser to the guild hall. The potion dispenser would hand out a limited number of flasks of various levels, from low- to mid-level flasks useful for soloing, to high-level flasks useful for raiding. Once it is operational, every guild member could use it to get 1 flask of his choice, which would be soulbound. After 3 days the dispenser would disappear, and the quest could be restarted to build the next one. To build the potion dispenser would require a large number of special herbs. These herbs would be quest items, that is soulbound, and could only be found by herbalists as an added "loot" item when "opening" a herb resource node. And, now comes the tricky part, the quest herbs can only be found in herbs in zones that correspond roughly to the level of the character gathering them. That is a level 5 guild member herbalist would be able to find such quest herbs while gathering Peacebloom in Elwynn Forest, but a level 70 guild member wouldn't find any quest herbs in the same Peaceblooms, he would need to gather Felweed in Outland to find them. Thus every herbalist in the guild could participate equally by doing something appropriate for his character level, and have a positive contribution to something that helps the whole guild. Of course that is just one example, you'd need to have other guild quests for the other gathering professions, and something involving killing mobs for the non-gatherers. But the principle should be similar: you only get quest items by killing mobs that are at least green to you, but a low-level guild member can get the same quest item from a low-level mob that the high-level guild member can get from the high-level mob. The reward is some added feature to the common guild hall which also helps all guild members equally regardless of level.

The general idea behind features like this is that guilds should have a common purpose. Right now that isn't the case in World of Warcraft, where the only common purpose appears to be guild chat and raiding, with everybody below the level cap and a certain gear level unable to participate. I would so love to take all the World of Warcraft developers, lock them in a room, and force them to play A Tale in the Desert for a month. They could learn a lot about social engineering from that game, even if it probable has less players than a single WoW server.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:32 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
The protection warrior guide

Elitist Jerks they may be, but they sure know their theorycraft. Quigon has a very detailed protection warrior guide up on the Elitist Jerks forums, for everyone who didn't know yet that 2.3654 defensive rating = 1 defense skill (which then equals 0.04% improvement on various defensive stats). Which then means that you need 140 extra defense, or 336 defense rating at level 70 over your natural base of 350 defense, to become uncritable. As I said, the guide is very detailed, with formulas and graphs, so at the end I felt I needed to program a spreadsheet to decide what gear to chose on my protection warrior. Then I got over it, and decided to play on without too much minmaxing.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:53 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
WorldIV Gameblog Interviews

There is an interview with a guy named Tobold up on WorldIV. They are starting a series of interviews with bloggers, and I sure hope they'll get somebody a bit more interesting for the next interview. :)

Just kidding. In fact I was surprised how well researched their questions were. These guys aren't sending a standard form with ten identical questions to every blogger, but form the questions based on the content and style of each individual blog. I'm looking forward to reading other blogger's interviews over there.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:18 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
The dead horse blog drama

I stumbled upon a post over at Plaguelands, where Krones calls out Jeff Freeman for a rant Jeff wrote about the quality of blog posts on Nerfbat and Massively. Woot! Blog drama! And for once I'm not even in the middle of it and can smirk from the sidelines. Well, *could* smirk, but I long ago decided that I won't smirk on anything Jeff Freeman writes, because I can never decide whether it is brilliant or crazy. So instead of smirking I write my personal opinion on the subject of "dead horses" in the MMO blogosphere subjects.

The discussion of MMORPGs is a narrow subject, a very narrow one even. The total number of MMORPGs is just in the hundreds, and most people only discuss the major ones, which brings the number down to a dozen or so. The genre is very narrowly defined, especially if you only discuss "games" and exclude social virtual worlds with not much gameplay. Thus the number of possible interesting subjects for discussion is limited. A good newspaper article can cover half of them at once, and a good book on MMORPGs probably covers over three quarter of the subjects there are. I have 1675 blog posts (this is #1676), and there simply aren't 1675 different subjects to discuss about MMORPGs. Add hundreds of other MMO blogs, plus gaming sites like Massively, and it becomes inevitable that the same subjects are discussed over, and over, and over again. PvP, RMT, the casual vs. hardcore debate, MMO business models, class balance, those are subjects you'll find discussed repeatedly on every MMO site. But that doesn't make them "dead horses".

There are several factors that keep the endless discussion of the same subjects alive: news, analysis, and new players. For example the recent round of discussion on "welfare epics" was caused by the news of the changes in the latest WoW patch, which made season 1 arena gear available for honor points. Today's PvP post here was reporting the great analysis done by Lum on that subject. But more important is the fact that while *I* might be aware of a large part of the previous discussion of RMT or PvP, I cannot assume that everybody visiting my blog has read all the previous discussion here and on all the previous sites too. You'd be surprised how many people send me mail with questions like "Hey, did you ever play game X?", when my review of game X could be found by typing it's name in the search box at the top of my blog. With every discussion here is a chance that somebody new posts an interesting comment with a fresh point of view. Google Analytics tells me that 62% of my visitors every day are "new visitors", and only 38% are returning visitors, so I can't automatically assume that everybody who reads this already knows what I wrote before.

Eliminating every subject that already has been extensively discussed from our blogs would not only leave them rather empty, it would also be counterproductive. Because none of these subjects are closed. There is no consensus on virtual property rights, or how much PvP a game should have, or whether raiding is good or bad for a game. You'd *think* for example that developers would have learned a lesson from Ultima Online, and then Auran brings out unlimited PvP MMO Fury and promptly goes bankrupt over it, with 9 out of 10 bloggers thinking "I could have told you so" without even having played it.

So when I read other people's blogs, or sites like Massively (where the discussion admittedly tends to be less deep than on personal blogs), and I stumble upon a well-known subject, I just read it quickly or even just diagonally to check whether there are any hidden news or new insights. If not, I just move on to the next article. But just because something might be a "dead horse" to me, doesn't make it an invalid subject for discussion for the rest of humanity.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:43 PM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
The blessing of welfare epics

Rohan from Blessing of Kings posted a series of three articles on "welfare epics", starting with this general one, then refining it into a less biased version, before finally hitting the ultimate reason of why raiders can't understand PvP rewards: PvP rewards improve in quantity, not quality, when you put more effort into the activity. Brilliant observation, because it very much explains how raiders can think of the PvP rewards in terms of "welfare epics", even if PvP players have good explanations on how there isn't any welfare involved, and you can't really "dance naked in the arena for a few weeks and get epics".

It was Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan (Tigole) who called PvP rewards "welfare epics" at BlizzCon. I hope his boss slapped him for that, because that was really, really bad marketing. If you have a multi-faceted product, you don't let the guy who designed one facet of it diss one of the other facets in public. The impression of "WoW is all about raiding" is harmful to the profitability of the game, because raiding doesn't appeal to everybody. A "do whatever MMO activity you like best and get equally rewarded for equal effort" image is a much, much better sell. The posts on Blessing of Kings help to understand how difficult it is to understand what exactly constitutes "equal effort", but for once the reality of WoW is better than the public image.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:38 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Lum does PvP right

Scott Jennings, aka "Lum the not-so-mad anymore" wrote an historically important (or as he calls it "hysterically self-important") article on how to do PvP right in an MMO, and it is absolutely brilliant. It not only explains what to do, but it also shows up very well all the pitfalls and difficulties in the process. This should be required reading for every MMORPG developer who plans to have PvP in his game. Read it!
- posted by Tobold @ 10:00 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft design trends

We would all like to know how World of Warcraft will develop in the future, but of course "knowing" that is impossible. What we can do is to have a look at how WoW is designed and how it developed with the first expansion, the patches, and what is announced for the second expansion. From that we can try to make out trends that could possibly predict where WoW is heading, but we'll have to do like financial analysts and attach a big "past performance is no guarantee of future results" disclaimer to it. So I inserted my WoW disc into my crystal ball and give you my predictions, sorted into a "bad" and a "good" category:

The Bad

• A too strong focus on a part of the game that is accessible to only a too small percentage of the players, raiding. Note that I am not saying that raiding itself is bad, I'm not supporting Cameron's suggestion to turn it into 5-man content. Raiding is a fun activity and a valuable addition to the game. The bad trend is the design that reserves all of raiding for a small elite of hardcore players, and then spending too many resources on that. This could easily be overcome by introducing some form of "easy mode" raiding, in which even a pickup raid could succeed, while keeping the current difficulty for "heroic mode" raids. But apart from some interview bylines that they would love raiding to be more accessible, there is no indication that WoW is heading that way.
  
  
• Players spend too much time in the end game. This is actually a combination of two things: fast leveling and slow releases of expansions. As a result the average player reaches the next level cap in less than half the time before the next expansion, and ends up being stuck in the end game with its much slower character progression for a far too long time. People who feel their characters aren't developing any more tend to quit the game. Which is bad, even if most of them come back for the next expansion. While it is obviously hard to produce expansions faster while keeping the quality level intact, World of Warcraft should at the very least reduce the time between expansions to 12 months, preferably less. This would be better both for the gameplay, and for the business, as every expansion is a guaranteed money printing machine for Blizzard.
  
  
• Game growing fastest in the length dimension. Every expansion seems to add 10 levels to the game. But there hasn't been a new class added to the game in the past 3 years, and the next expansion only promises one single new "hero class". Most new content is added at the top end. This means that the leveling experience for new players, and the replayability for veterans of WoW isn't ideal. Level demographics lead to people mostly soloing all the way up to the level cap. While the ability to solo is a strength of WoW, being forced to solo in a massively multiplayer game because you can't find enough people of your level to form a group is a problem. One possible solution would be cross-server instances, but it is clear that WoW can't increase its level cap indefinitely without negative effects. A better strategy would be a "Kunark" type of expansion, adding new classes and races to encourage people to start over with new characters. One hero class per expansion isn't enough.
  
  
• Lack of social engineering. After 3 years of experimenting with various designs, World of Warcraft still doesn't even have a looking for group functionality that is accepted by the players. The guild functionality is basic, and there are no common purposes and goals provided for a guild to pursue beyond raiding. That encourages guild hopping into whatever guild fits best to your current raid progress, and weakens social cohesion. People should be rewarded for staying loyal to a guild and for working together towards common goals, which would strengthen the social aspects of the game.
  
  
• Lack of innovation. If I write a parody about a fictionary expansion to WoW and end up getting congratulations of how well I predicted the Wrath of the Lich King, something is wrong. World of Warcraft hasn't introduced enough new game elements, and people are waiting for features and innovations like player housing. Blizzard is strong in "exploiting" (their words) and improving upon what they have, but bad at introducing new things.
  

The Good

• Quality of the content. Not only did World of Warcraft start with the highest quality of content in the field, the trends even show continuous improvements. Most people agree that the quality of many of the newer quests in the game is somewhat better than the original ones, which were already a big selling point for WoW.
  
  
• More things to do in the end game. The number of different activities in the end game has grown from the original level 60 end game to the TBC level 70 end game. That trend started already with the addition of Silithus, but TBC really added a lot here. Even if you are not raiding, there are a lot of different things to do at the level cap now, more dungeons in various difficulty levels, more quests (including daily quests), more reputations, and more PvP options. There are even more mini games, like bombing runs or the "Simon" game.
  
  
• Positive sum PvP. It is in the nature of PvP that somebody has to lose, and unlike PvE where the loser can be a monster that doesn't mind, players don't really like losing. World of Warcraft rewards players even when they lose, which keeps them playing. Critics call that "carebear PvP" for "welfare epics", but I strongly believe that this is the only way that PvP in a MMO can be viable for the long term.
  

So, these are the trends I see. Tell me if I have overlooked trends that you see in the design of World of Warcraft;
- posted by Tobold @ 8:40 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
The $100 soda

I mentioned it in passing before, this weekend I emptied a glas of soda over my G15 keyboard. Bad, bad idea! Of course similar things happened to me before with previous keyboards, but previous keyboards were a lot simpler. A cheaper keyboard you can just rinse with lukewarm water under the shower, put on a radiator to dry for a day or two, and it will be fine. With the G15 that method didn't work at all. When I connected it again after drying, the backlit keys were playing a flickering lightshow, the LCD panel went crazy, and some keys occasionally hit themselves. Not good!

That G15 keyboard was very hard to get. I live in Belgium, where people are using French AZERTY keyboard layout, which is significantly different than QWERTY. You can't just swap a few keys and you're fine, because for example the number keys are all different from US/UK keyboard layout. On a French keyboard you need to hit shift to get a number from the number row above the letters, the non-shift version gives you special French characters with accents on top. So I imported my G15 from the UK, which was hellishly expensive and cost an additional bundle in shipping cost.

So how to replace a broken G15, having gotten so used to it? Easy! I bought a new G15 in Belgium, with a French keyboard layout, then ripped out the keys from the new keyboard and put the keys from the old keyboard in. Tada! The keyboard itself doesn't know it is French, so as I still have the UK keyboard driver the layout works just fine now. Only problem of course is the $100 price tag, making that the most expensive soda of my life.

I bought the new G15 at Media Markt, a German chain that invaded Belgium a few years ago, because they have huge stores where you can find everything, and usually at the best available price. So as I was already in the shop, I looked for a DVI cable. No luck at the computer cable section, but fortunately (and unusually for a European shop in the christmas season) there were lots of sales clerks around. One of them directed me to the audio cable section, where I found 2 different DVI to DVI cables. One gold-plated 2m cable, and one not plated 3m cable, same price, 20 Euro. Now I know that gold-plated shouldn't make any difference for a digital cable, but I certainly didn't need 3 meters of it, so I went for the shorter, shinier version anyway. After a small adjustment of the driver (which comes in analog or digital version) of the Syncmaster, I now got a perfect video signal. A happy conclusion to my hardware adventures of the weekend.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:23 PM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 10-December-2007

Apart from fiddling with my hardware, I spent a lot of time this weekend just playing World of Warcraft, spread over three different characters: warrior, priest, and mage.

My warrior did mostly group activities, besides the solo daily quests. I finally got around to kill Terokk and finish that quest. But as the other group members also had a store of time-lost scrolls or offerings, I ended up killing Terokk three times, and the group even killed him a fourth time with another tank from the guild who needed him too. We got one epic cloak, but not for me, and of course I also gained oodles of Skyguard reputation. That made me hit exalted, and so I now own a nether ray epic flying mount. 160 gold just for show, the nether ray actually has less functionality than the normal epic flying mount, as it can't gallop on the ground, it always flies. Might be an advantage, as you don't have to hit space to take off any more, but in some situations I was using the flying mount to ride. I would love if Blizzard let people *ride* the flying mount in old Azeroth, and just not let them take off, instead of blocking usage outright.

I only visited one dungeon with my warrior this weekend, Sethekk halls. That was insofar funny as three of the other players repeatedly had problems getting out of the line of sight of the arcane explosions of Talon King Ikiss. On the third try the three of them were again dead, Ikiss was still more than half alive, and only me and the shadow priest were still around. But I kept his aggro, and Ikiss wasted a lot of time polymorphing the priest. The priest launched quick heals whenever he wasn't a sheep, keeping me alive, and I kept whittling Ikiss' life down. We both managed to avoid his arcane explosions all of the time, and after a rather long fight we actually won. You *can* two-man Talon King Ikiss, it just takes a while. :)

I did another group quest with my warrior, Zuluhed the Whacked, which opened up the Netherwing daily quests to me. That was a severe disappointment. In comparison to the Skyguard and Ogri'la daily quests, the Netherwing dailies are a boring grind. And there are no reputation rewards except for another epic flying mount with a different look and no added features. Compare for example having to kill 15 demons for Ogri'la for 12 gold and rep with having to kill about 80 creatures for the same Netherwing reward (40 crystals with about 1 crytal per 2 kills). I think I'll do each Netherwing quest once and then forget about it. Having two level 70s I have enough daily quests available to be able to choose.

Speaking of which, my priest got honored with Ogri'la this weekend, which enables him to do the Banish More Demons daily quest. I did that quest with both my warrior and my priest in short succession, and it is depressing how much better the holy priest is at soloing than the protection warrior. The priest kills the mobs in half the time, and thanks to the bubble ends up taking less damage than the warrior. I don't even need consumables to refill my mana thanks to the shadowfiend pet, while the tank uses a lot of bandages and cooked food between fights. I know that arms warriors are shining in PvP and solo PvE. But as you saw I usually do group activities with my warrior, for which he needs to be tank spec'd. And I can't respec several times a day depending on the situation. Other classes, who can solo well in their best group talent build, have a definitive advantage here. Blizzard should try to find special protection warrior skills to add which improve his damage output in solo PvE, without making dps warriors even more powerful in PvP. I'm a bit worried what is going to happen to warriors when the Death Knight comes around. Druids and paladins are already good alternatives to tanking in many group situations, and adding another tank class with better damage capabilities pushes the protection warrior into a "only good for raid tanking" niche. Well, to improve the situation I'll start gathering both dps and tanking gear for my warrior now, even if that means I'll have to roll need more often. Still not willing to respec, but maybe getting some better damage gear will already help a bit.

My mage leveled up to 35 this weekend, doing quests in Hillsbrad and Thousand Needles mostly. I think I'll do some more of those, and wait until I'm level 36 before moving to Dustwallow Marsh and trying the new quests there. But first the level 35 allowed me to raise the cap on all my tradeskills, so I was busy all evening doing tailoring and disenchanting, using up over 720 runecloth I had stored on some bank alt. I'm close to 300 tailoring now, and then I'll be busy a while to reach 300 enchanting. I also want to do the cooking and first aid quests to get those skills up as well. It's so nice to have lots of plans to what to do next.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:19 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
Influence of hardware on WoW

This weekend my World of Warcraft game experience was much affected by changes in hardware. On the positive side going from a 19" CRT to a 22" wide format flatscreen was like taking the horse blinds off, my viewing angle of the game improved significantly. On the negative side I spilled soda on my G15 keyboard, and it isn't running any more, and I'm playing on some dinky keyboard that came with the computer. My Razer Diamondback mouse remained unchanged, but I was wondering how much effect hardware has on your "performance" in World of Warcraft. And is that "fair" in a PvP context?

Now games are my main hobby, and I have a comfortable level of disposable income, so I tend to have pretty high-end hardware. But I'm spending that money to improve my comfort, not my achievements in any game, especially not in MMORPGs, which I don't consider to be competitions in the first place. And I'm not doing much PvP anyway. But I'm well aware that there are lots of people that take WoW a lot more competitive than me, either by trying to get further in PvE, or by crushing the opposition in PvP. And to crush the opposition you better have a fast, lag-free computer, high bandwith, a good mouse and keyboard, and having a wider viewing angle with a widescreen is certainly helping not to be blindsided.

So is the PC really a viable tool for "E-Sports", or should competitive games rather be played on standardized consoles? I'm sure better hardware only affects performance by a couple of percents, but you try to get into a F1 race with a car that is better by a couple of percents than the competition. At the top it is the small things that count.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:29 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Connecting a flat screen

I just got a Syncmaster 225MW 22" flat screen for my computer, up to now I was using a 19" CRT. So I unpack everything, start to connect the PC to the screen, and notice that the only video cable is a VGA cable. Now my Geforce 8800 GTS 640 MB only has DVI out, but came with a DVI to VGA adapter, and I can connect the PC with the screen just fine and it works. But somewhere it bugs me, and I wonder whether I would get a better image if the connection were totally digital.

So I go out and try to buy a DVI to DVI cable. No luck, none of the four stores I visit has one. But the last store sells me a DVI to HDMI cable, and promises me that this would work as well, as the screen also has a HDMI port. Well, first of all it isn't that easy, you need to push the "source" button on the screen a couple of times until he detects the signal from the PC via the DVI to HDMI cable. And then the image is much worse than before: it is bigger than the screen and not centered, so I'm losing part of the image. And it's far more blurry than the result I get with the cheap VGA cable.

Searching on Google didn't find anything, except complaints by other people that their HDTV isn't running well with their PC. The manual of the Syncmaster is silent on the issue, except saying that "you can't use a HDMI cable to connect a PC", but that might be a reference to HDMI to HDMI cables. The NVidia Settings screen, even in advanced mode, has nothing on DVI or HDMI. I'm stumped.

Anyone know whether I can use a DVI to HDMI cable to connect a flat screen to my PC? And is it even worth it? Should I buy a DVI to DVI cable, provided I can find one, or is the VGA cable going to give me the best result?
- posted by Tobold @ 12:25 PM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
Guildcafe Espresso

According to my GuildCafe page I am "famous" :), so the guys running the place asked me to promote their new campaign: The GuildCafe Espresso annual awards. Here you can nominate the best fansite, best gaming blog, best machinima, best video, best UI mod, and a couple of other categories of player-created content until the 1st of January. Please put the URL of whatever you are nominating, not just the name.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:45 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
The many meanings of beta

Recently Richard Garriot revived one of the dead horses of MMORPG discussion by stating that it was a mistake to invite so many people to the Tabula Rasa beta. Cameron from Random Battle has an excellect article on beta testing up. To a certain extent I do agree with him: *If* MMORPGs would have the option for a free trial from day 1 of the release, beta tests could be a lot smaller and shorter.

There are several games I never bought because I disliked them in the beta, Vanguard, Tabula Rasa, and Hellgate London for example just for this year. And while I do like Pirates of the Burning Sea, I'm currently not participating in the open beta, because I already played too much of it in the closed beta, and rather wait for the release version instead of experiencing another character wipe. And I only played the PotBS beta since August, other players were in that beta for even longer, I heard the first beta test started in 2005. In my opinion beta tests should be a lot shorter, otherwise you risk that the beta testers are burned out before the game is even released. And if they are burned out when the NDA is dropped, that has a negative effect on the reviews as well.

On the other hand stress test weekends are a bit too short to give players a good impression of a game. Often the very fact that it is a stress test results in lots of server problems, which aren't necessarily there in the real game. And for more complicated game features a weekend isn't sufficient to experience them. For example on the PotBS stress test weekends, the economy features couldn't really be explored, because it takes days to build something up.

The PotBS devs are a pleasure to read on the official forums, because they are so disarmingly honest. About the open PotBS beta (STARTS TODAY!) they quite honestly said that it was more of a marketing device than for quality control and testing. Games having an open beta of two to four weeks just before release can serve both for marketing and for still finding some bugs. It is not because not every beta tester reports every bug that a beta test is useless. Some people take beta testing more serious than others. I must admit that I was very pleased when I reported a possible exploit in the PotBS beta which then ended up gettting fixed in the next patch, or when I got reply mails from the PotBS devs saying "good catch". But even somebody not reporting a single bug can serve as tester, because the simple fact that he is playing causes an effect on the game. Some exploits are caught not because the people who find them report them, but because players observe other players using them and complain. Or if a player manages to "break" the economy, that should become pretty obvious without anyone having to write a bug report. I would even go so far as to say that if all beta testers were just looking for bugs instead of trying to play the game, many faults would be missed. So I would have to say that it is more the length of a beta that I see as problematic than the fact that there is an open beta in which not everybody is an eager bug reporter.

But the bad press of Vanguard, Tabula Rasa, Hellgate London, and to some extent even Pirates of the Burning Sea, is also due to the game companies releasing games when they are just about playable. I read lots of reports that Vanguard is getting better, that Tabula Rasa improved a lot from beta to release, that Hellgate London is slowly adding things that would actually make it interesting to subscribe, or read about all the wonderful things the PotBS devs want to add after release. But sorry, you can't release an unfinished game and then ask of all the game reviewers to not write about it until a year later when the game is better. If you ask your paying customers to pay for a game, you must live with the reviews you get for the version you released. If you need better reviews, do it like Warhammer Online, cancel your beta and delay the game. You only get one chance to make a good first impression.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:44 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
How important is an avatar?

If you play EVE Online, all you ever see of the character you play is a portrait, and the ship he is flying. Pirates of the Burning Sea in its early development was like that, but later the developers decided that they need to have players controlling avatars, including the ability of using that avatar in swashbuckling combat. It has been widely remarked that the avatar combat isn't quite as good as the ship combat in PotBS. But on the other hand people keep blogging about character creation in PotBS. Character creation is considered important, and was for example one of the main selling points of City of Heroes. So how important is it for a MMORPG to have an avatar and to have lots of options in dressing up your character?

One school of thought is that how your avatar looks isn't important, the gameplay is. Back in the days where I hung out at Grimwell.com we used to call the dressing-up avatars part of the game "Barbie Online", but that was before Mattel actually created a Barbie Online virtual world. While I didn't play EVE Online very long, the fact that I didn't have an avatar played absolutely no role in my decision to quit that game. In World of Warcraft I normally choose equipment based on stats, not on looks, although sometimes very bad looking gear annoys me, or good looking gear pleases me.

On the other side there is a notion that the more casual a player is, the more important the look of his avatar becomes. Having avatars and dressing-up options becomes part of the drive to make a game more casual player friendly. Of the short list of features announced for the next World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, one was "Customizable hair styles and additional dances for new and existing characters". Something I would never have put on a list of the top 10 features of a new expansion, but apparently Blizzard thought otherwise.

Customization of avatars has it pitfalls. Games like City of Heroes or Pirates of the Burning Sea let you choose the look of your character at the start, and unless you go to a tailor shop to change the look, this is how you will look for the rest of your virtual life. In games like World of Warcraft you create a character in basic dress, but every piece of gear you equip changes your look. So if you had epic adventures and killed mighty boss mobs, that will be visible to everyone in the look of your avatar. Both methods can go wrong. If you choose your look yourself, you have the option of creating a look that doesn't really go well with the game, Kill Ten Rats has this wonderful example. In City of Heroes the devs had to remove colors from the palette that looked flesh-colored, because some people insisted on making nude looking avatars. But if your look is determined by your loot, you're desire to wear something good looking might clash with your desire to wear something with good stats for your class. My troll warrior in WoW looks plain stupid in most plate helmets, and I'd love to wear lets say a hat instead, but of course hats only exist for cloth / leather wearers. One of the best compromises is probably Everquest 2, where you have two paper dolls: the default one where you put your gear that gives you stats, and a "for looks" one, where you can override the look of your real gear by putting something better looking on this second paper doll. But then that system has been criticized for allowing one class to look like another, which can be relevant in PvP.

So how important is an avatar and the ability to dress him up to you? Would you rather choose your clothes at the start of the game, or do you prefer your equipped gear to determine your look? Would a game not having an avatar deter you from playing it?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:46 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
SEC filings on Activision Blizzard

PΘtshΘt posted links to the SEC filings on the Activision Blizzard merger and some other related documents. Besides the financial information one can also get some vague ideas about their plans for the future of World of Warcraft out of it. Oh, and they also state their total investment in WoW as being >$200MM (I'd read that as being development cost of the game and the expansions, plus hardware investment). Cheap, considering the $517MM profit in 2007 and the >40% profit margin.

Now, onto the future, where I noticed the following tidbits:

• Slide 16 has "In-game Advertising" mentioned for 2008 / 2009 as market opportunity.
  
• Slide 17 gives the plan for 2009 as "Continue executing proven strategies at Blizzard".
  
• Slide 18 elaborates on what "continue executing proven strategies" means, and lists them as "Expand Online Model: Grow subscription base, Add new online revenue streams, Strengthen customer loyalty". They also mention "drive growth of recurring franchises".

That doesn't sound very exciting or innovative, but I don't think it means they threw all thoughts of innovation overboard. After all this is a financial document, and "execute proven strategies" plays well with financial analysts, even if gamers might not be too excited about the idea.

Gamers also will not necessarily like the ideas of "in-game advertising" and "add new online revenue streams", which could include microtransactions as well as advertising. We'd be more comfortable with "grow subscription base" and "strengthen customer loyalty", but of course those are easy to claim as goals and hard to realize. I'd just like to point out that focusing on raid content is *not* the way to make the game more accessible to a larger number of players ("grow subscription base") or to strengthen the customer loyalty of the majority of WoW players, who happen to be non-raiders. An expansion model that only adds content to the high-level end of the game likewise isn't ideal to pursue these stated goals. Maybe Activision Blizzard should take the opportunity of the coming reorganization to get some fresh blood into the WoW development team and pursue some new ideas.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:38 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
WoW makes $520 million of profit a year

Businessweek has an article about the Activision Blizzard merger, and among the financial results that had to be revealed for that merger is the nugget that World of Warcraft is projected to make a profit of $520 million on revenues of $1.1 billion. Given how the development cost for World of Warcraft was estimated to have been less than $50 million, making over 10 times your investment per year in profit is really outstanding. No wonder everybody wants a piece of that pie.

On the other hand careful observers will have noted the disparity between the reported 9.3 million users and the $1.1 billion of revenues. World of Warcraft is still one of the best-selling video games every month, and they sold millions of copies of Burning Crusade for $40 each this year, so a good part of those revenues comes from box sales. Thus Blizzard makes less than $100 per subscriber per year. A US subscriber pays between $156 and $180 per year. To bring the average down to $100, there must be a lot of Chinese subscribers all bringing in a lot less than $100 per year to Blizzard. If we assume 4 million US / Euro players each paying $160 a year ($640 million total), and $300 million is box sales of TBC and WoW in 2007, that leaves us only $160 million revenue for the remaining 5.3 million Chinese players, each paying $30 per year. If we believe the Chinese to bring in more than $30 per year revenue, we'd have to revise our estimates on the number of US / Euro players downwards. Which would be my best guess, albeit only based on anecdotal evidence of reported problems with underpopulated servers.

Furthermore the recent growth in China can be explained by the fact that they got the expansion only in September. It is reasonable to assume that in China the player numbers will decrease as well a few months after the TBC release, just like they did over here. The financial result of World of Warcraft in 2008 will depend very much on when that expansion comes out in the different regions, and whether they can again get such a huge wave of resubscriptions for the second expansion as they got for the first. I'd say Vivendi picked a good time for their merger, it is totally possible that next years profit numbers will be lower. Which is still a ton of money, but financial analysts don't like decreasing profits.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:20 PM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Do not install EVE trinity premium client patch!

Thoms alerted me to the following news from Massively: The EVE trinity premium client patch deletes the Windows XP boot.ini file, making it impossible to reboot your computer afterwards. Massively has detailed instructions on how to fix the problem, but if you already restarted your machine you'll need to enter command line commands into the recovery console you can only start with a Windows XP CD. So right now I can only advise you to not patch EVE before you are certain that all the problems are resolved.

As Massively says: "CCP is on the verge of earning the title of having the worst expansion launch in the history of the genre."
- posted by Tobold @ 1:00 PM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
PotBS beats WoW

... in having a better auction house system for the trade in commodities. :) In most other respects World of Warcraft is superior to Pirates of the Burning Sea, and one can even argue that the WoW AH system is fine for trading loot gear. But for commodities, the trade goods that get bought and sold very often, the WoW auction house system is terrible.

Besides daily quests I make some money every day with my warrior, who is also an alchemist, by transforming a cheap primal earth into an expensive primal water. So when I put my primal water on the AH, I do what everybody does: I first check the current prices. And if the lowest buyout price is 20 gold, I put up mine for 19.95 and am sure to sell mine before the other guy. The people who put up their goods earlier are losing out, because I see exactly what their buyout price is, and can easily undercut them by 0.25% at insignificant loss to me to jump the queue and be first in line for the buyers.

Pirates of the Burning Sea has a blind auction house system. You see how many goods of one type there are, and you see recent prices, plus the average over the last 30 days in the region and globally. But you don't see the buyout price that the other players put up their wares on. You can theoretically find it out by bidding first 1 doubloon, then 2 doubloon, then 3 doubloon, and so on until you find the lowest buyout. But that takes too much time, and you'll end up buying one item from the competition which is counterproductive if you only wanted to sell a small quantity.

Apparently there are plans to make the PotBS auction house system even better in some future patch by introducing buy orders, just like EVE Online has. That would be interesting for World of Warcraft too. Imagine you could post an offer that you're willing to buy up to 5 primal waters for 20 gold each, log off, and find the goods in your mailbox the next time you log on. A system that shows both buyers and sellers offers, like a stockmarket, ends up giving much more reliable and less volatile prices. And you aren't punished for having put up your items at the wrong time, just 5 minutes before somebody undercuts you.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:11 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Do I need a voice to be real?

Via Brackish Waters I found Brent's (from Virginworlds) comment on Another Here about me saying: "These are things that CAN be done with the written word, but not nearly as effectively. Take Tobold and Van Hemlock, two notable gaming bloggers. Everyone knows their work, but do you feel like you know Tobold? Even after 1000 posts, he is still a disembodied (silent)voice in the blogosphere and readers have no idea of what he is all about, as a person. If he started podcasting, that would change overnight."

Now Brent is running what is probably the most popular MMO podcast out there, so I must forgive him a certain bias towards the spoken word. :) But I'd like to answer his comment with two points:

1) There are things you can do with the written word that you can't do with the spoken word. The written word doesn't suffer from accents, mumblings, or being either too fast or too slow. The written word is easier to edit for the writer, and for the reader easier to read in non-sequential ways, like reading diagonally, or jumping back to reread a previous phrase. Thus the written word often allows expressing more complicated concepts than the spoken word. The written word is easier to search through with Google. The written word can also be easily read on a computer screen at work without your boss noticing. My blog gets 30% more hits on weekdays than on weekends, and a good percentage of the mail I get is written on some company mail system. There is a reason why this site is silent and not too flashy. ;)

2) Half of the things I could possibly reveal by having a voice are things that I don't want to reveal. Not that it is very likely in my case, but people have been fired from their jobs after their employer found their photo on their blog, and a voice might be just as recognizable. The other thing podcasting would reveal is that I have a bad German accent, and that I am a better writer than I am a speaker. If blogging would suddenly be completely replaced by podcasting, I would probably be like the silent movie stars who lost their career when the talkies came. I'd say everybody should stick to the form of expression at which he is good at.

Do you think I am less real because I don't have a voice? That you have no idea of what I am all about, as a person? Or are you happier with me as a writer than as a talker?
- posted by Tobold @ 4:48 PM Permanent Link  (30) comments Links to this post

 
What to give xp for

We recently discussed MMORPG systems in which different activities gave different types of experience points, like the skill based system of Ultima Online, or the different xp types of Earth & Beyond, or EQ2's adventuring and crafting level. Now lets have a look at the more common type of game where there is only one sort of experience points, which is given out for different activities.

The reason why I'm talking about this now is that I now can talk more freely about Pirates of the Burning Sea. And in PotBS there is a glaring design flaw on how experience points are distributed. PotBS has 4 character classes, of which 3 are for combat, and the 4th, the freetrader, is specialized in the economic gameplay. But, and that is where the flaw comes in, economic gameplay reward little or no experience points. You can easily earn 100 xp for a newbie quest or sinking an easy ship in battle in 5 minutes, but building a frigate in a week rewards you with 10 xp. Most other productions don't give any xp at all, nor do you gain xp by any sort of trading activity. There are special freetrader quests where you get xp for shipping goods from A to B, but the goods aren't provided, you have to pay for them yourself, and thus you end up paying huge amounts of doubloons for gaining xp as a freetrader. Thus freetraders are forced to do combat missions like everybody else to advance in level. Only they are very bad at it. The special freetrader ships are slow and bad in combat. The freetrader combat talents are worse than those of all other classes. And the freetrader can't even spend all his talent points for combat skills, as he need to spend around half of them for economic skills. As a result many people in the beta just made a main character of some other class to do combat, and then had a lower level freetrader alt for earning money. Level 50 freetraders were much rarer than level 50s in any other class. Get to level 21 with your freetrader, where you have access to the huge capacity of the Atlas bark, the fast mastercraft Bermuda, and the ability to build a medium shipyard, and then you can concentrate on your navy officer, privateer, or pirate.

Other games are more balanced, with less obvious design flaws. But that doesn't mean that lets say the distribution of experience points in World of Warcraft or similar games is already perfect. If you look at the Bartle types of explorer, achiever, socializer, and killer, you'll quickly realize that the achievers are rewarded best and level fastest. Exploring zones in WoW gives some xp, but far less than doing quests and killing monsters. Crafting doesn't give any xp. Social gameplay like groups give better loot than solo gameplay, but not necessarily better xp. And PvP doesn't give xp at all. Thus if different players with different preferences of gameplay modes spend the same time in the game, they will earn xp at vastly different rates. Also in WoW the different character classes don't earn xp at the same rate, with some classes being more suited for solo play which gives more xp, and other classes more suited for group play, which gives less.

To some extent that is unavoidable, you don't want to give out xp for people spending hours spamming nonsense in Barrens chat. But it is important to know that giving out rewards has a strong influence on player's behavior. For example WoW gives out much better rewards for quests than for grinding mobs, while the original EQ had it the other way round. So players in WoW do a lot more quest, which encourages them to travel around a lot more, and makes the game less of a treadmill. If Blizzard would want to encourage more group play, especially at the lower levels, and get more people to use the LFG system and play in pickup groups, they could simply do that by increasing the bonus xp you get in a group. In Everquest when the devs found that too few people visited dungeons because of the higher risk there, they added zone xp bonuses, which got people to use that content more.

It is possible to give out xp for activities like crafting or PvP, which currently don't give any. But that has to be very carefully designed. For example in the WoW crafting system the crafting itself takes very little effort, the problem is finding the ingredients, and those can be bought. Thus if WoW crafting gave xp, people would either buy gold or give gold from their mains to their alts and just press one button to brew 100 potions to gain 1 level, which is not what you want. In EQ2, where crafting is actually a game, xp for crafting makes more sense. In PvP giving out xp has several pitfalls. One is the opportunity to conspire with somebody from the other faction. He lets you kill him 100 times, then he kills you 100 times, and both of you come out with lots of quickly earned xp. The other problem is that xp for PvP, if badly designed, could encourage ganking and other negative forms of PvP behavior. World PvP is already often characterized by the attacker only initiating combat if he is sure that he can win, and giving out rewards would only encourage bad behavior.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:31 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Welfare epics

First of two posts today on the subject of rewards: Dyslexic wrote me to ask whether I would comment on the "welfare epics" issue, where Blizzard in the last patch made season 1 epic arena PvP gear available for honor and battleground badges, thus giving far more people access to them. So lets have a look at epics, and who gets them in World of Warcraft.

The basic principle for rewards in a MMORPG should be that equal effort rewards you with equivalent rewards. But MMORPGs have a certain interest in encouraging people to play together, and thus group activities are generally better rewarded than solo activities. The main sources for epics in WoW are raids and arena PvP. You can get epics by reputation grinds, crafting, or battleground PvP, but generally you will need to play more hours solo to get something equivalent to an epic that a group would have gotten faster.

Making the season 1 arena gear available as battleground PvP rewards moves somewhat away from that design. Battleground PvP is a borderline case between solo and group. Technically you are in a group, but nobody has to organize that group. People treat it like solo play, you log on, decided you want to do PvP, click on the NPC, wait in queue for a while, and off you go. It can be done with little or no planning. And in the worst case scenario you lose, and *still* get rewarded with one badge and some honor, while the winners just get more of both. Arena PvP is much more organized, you need to get a team together and agree with them when to do your battles. The organizational effort is much bigger, although the actual PvP isn't any more demanding than battleground PvP.

And there lies the base problem: should organizational effort be rewarded so much? Does somebody who spent 10 hours organizing and 40 hours doing arena PvP deserve a better reward than somebody who spent 50 hours doing battleground PvP without much organizing? Or should the same amount of effort spent be rewarded with equivalent epics?

On the one side of that argument is the fact that if you organize an arena team, or a PvE raid team, the cohesion among these players will be much better. The social experience is better, people are more likely to make friends, and friends lead to a better longevity of the game. In a battleground often everyone of the 10 players has the impression to be grouped with 9 idiots, who all think the same of him, but that is just the result of a lack of organization. There is very little cohesion and not many new friendships formed. The same is true for PvE, where the pickup group is an infamous source of countless anecdotes and ridicule. But in fact most of the time it is just a lack of communication. There is no magical mechanism that directs all idiots into pickup groups and all good players into well organized guild groups. More often than not it is the real-world environment that determines whether a player can commit himself to a regular arena team or raid group. If somebody doesn't know in advance when he will play this week, at what times, and for how long, his participation in all sorts of organized events is limited, and he'll automatically be more often in pickup groups and battleground PvP. That doesn't make him a worse player than somebody who knows he play every evening from 8 to midnight, and can organize teams around that schedule.

So for me it is fine if arena gear can be gained by battleground effort. After all, there is a mudflation, and the season 3 arena gear is much better than the season 1 one, so the organized play is still somewhat better rewarded. I can't subscribe to an attitude saying that only organized play deserves epic rewards. And I'd like to point Blizzard in the direction of Warhammer Online, where the concept of public quests looks like a battleground for PvE. Wouldn't it be great if we had PvE content which would be to raids like battlegrounds are to arena PvP? Log on, sign up, wait in queue and go PvE raid? But just like battleground PvP has been designed somewhat differently than arena PvP, that sort of pickup raid design has to be modified from normal raid design to be viable. That some elitist jerks will look down on the rewards as "welfare epics" is only a sign of their lack of character, and doesn't make rewards for less organized play a worse game design idea.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:32 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 4-December-2007

I had an interesting weekend in World of Warcraft, and didn't get around to post about it yesterday. Saturday was exclusively spent on my level 70 characters. My warrior found a guild group to do the Ogri'la group quests. That resulted in him getting an Apexis Crystal, with which I bought the Ogri'la Aegis, a very nice tanking shield. Then I switched characters, but stayed in that same guild group with some modifications, and we did the Ogri'la attunement quest chain for my priest and and another player.

So now my warrior has access to 7 daily quests, two in Skettis, the cooking daily, and 4 in Ogri'la. My priest doesn't have cooking, and not being honored yet he only has 3 Ogri'la quests, for a total of 5 daily quests. But I'm not doing all 12 daily quests every day, that gets boring pretty quickly. I'm more likely to do 6 quests with the warrior (skipping the Skettis escort), and between zero and two with my priest. The biggest difference between the two characters is that the warrior already has his epic flying mount, while the priest is still saving up for one. And that makes a huge difference for the Ogri'la bombing run. With the epic flying mount I often can destroy all 15 stacks of cannonballs without being hit or landing even once. With the normal flying mount I got shot down every single time, and sometimes already on the approach. I ended up riding around with the epic non-flying horse, standing next to the cannonball stack, casting shield, mounting on my flying steed and immediately throwing the bomb. Then I get shot down, but with the shield on and not having left the ground that doesn't do much harm.

My warrior also started the next quest series leading to more daily quests, in Shadowmoon Valley for the Netherwing. But I'm at the step where I need a group now, and will have to ask around for one to continue. Strangely the daily quest I enjoy the most is the cooking quest, probably because there is a random quest out of at least 4 different possibilities every day. Each quest involves traveling to a different zone, and the quest only pays 8 gold, so it isn't as fast a money-maker as the other quests. But you get free meat for your cooking, and a chance to find a rare recipe. I already have the Kibler's Bits, and Hot Spicy Talbuk recipe. But I read there is also some fish soup and the even rarer (but apparently useless) chocolate cake recipe. Fun!

On Sunday I mostly played my mage. The leveling speed really increased at lot, I got from 27 to 31 in one day, albeit while playing a lot. At level 28 I got invited to a very good pickup group to Razorfen Kraul. I hadn't realized before that they had lowered the level requirement for that by around 4 levels. Previously I would have thought 28 to be too low for RFK, but now it went just fine, we cleared out the whole place. Not much luck on the loot side though, we had two priests and the shadow priest won the roll for the robe with the spell damage bonus. After that I soloed a lot of quests in Hillsbrad, Stonetalon Mountains, and Ashenvale, until I hit level 30.

At level 30 as a mage you get a class quest for a very nice wand. Only problem is that you aren't really able to do that quest at level 30 until you receive a lot of help. First I had to travel to Dustwallow Marsh, to Tabetha, a mage living in a hut in the south. I promptly got killed while trying to escape from some spider and getting aggroed by a lot more mobs on the way, but it turned out that there is a graveyard next to Tabetha's hut, which got me to her very quickly. I was also able to get the new Mudsprocket flight point. Then, after an easy intermezzo in Thousand Needles, I had to get one book out of the Scarlet Monastery library, which at level 30 wasn't even on my list of possible dungeons in the LFG window. But a friendly level 70 mage from my guild ran me through the library, so I got the book, another book for a quest in Thunder Bluff, and the robe and dagger from Doan, even if I can't use them for a couple more levels. Wow, a level 70 mage sure can blast his way through SM fast! It reminded me why I wanted to level up my mage in the first place. :) Next I had to kill level 32 to 35 trolls in Arathi. Both Thottbot and Allakhazam show strange false data for non-existing level 30 "Witherbark Troll", but what you really have to do is to kill the witherbark axe throwers and other trolls south of Hammerfell. Now this is possible for a level 30 mage, but dangerous and slow. Not good news if you need 10 quest items with a 25% drop rate, and have to kill 40 trolls. But I had barely started when a level 70 Alliance warrior turned up. Which was already strange in the first place, because what does a level 70 want in that corner of Arathi Highlands? Apparently playing the gallant knight to pretty blood elf ladies (even if the player behind them is a guy). He waited until I had pulled and thus locked a troll, then easily killed him. And he continued to do so until I had my 10 quest items. No communication possible, except for emotes, and I didn't do more than wave and curtsey. Nice guy, or very, very bored. Or both. :) Last step of the quest required me to charge the 10 sticks from the trolls at the circle of outer binding in the same zone. Which wouldn't have been a problem, except for the level 38 and 39 level thunder elementals swarming around the place. So I needed help from another level 70, but this time I could use one of my own. I simply logged on my level 70 warrior, traveled there, cleared out the place, then quickly logged the mage on and completed the quest before the respawn. Back to Tabetha I got the wand, and all the quest xp rewards got me to level 31. Wow, I hadn't done anything than this one quest series to get from level 30 to 31, but of course I had a lot of help.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:28 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
How to get rich in Pirates of the Burning Sea

I ended the PotBS closed beta with a freetrader who was only level 19, but had 750,000 doubloons, which is quite a lot of money. I got there by concentrating on the economy part of the game, trade and production. Not only is that part very interesting, it will also be very important for people to sustain PvP. PvP is a negative sum game, in which the losing player often loses more value than the winning one gains. So how does one get rich in the PotBS economy?

First we need to look at the fundamental differences between PotBS and a game like World of Warcraft. In WoW a unit of copper ore obviously has some sales value, but doesn't have any production cost. The only "cost" is the time spent by the WoW player to find a resource node and mine it. As the time of a player has no fixed value (it tends to go up with level and server age), the price for copper ore varies wildly from server to server. This is not the case in Pirates of the Burning Sea. There is copper ore in PotBS, but to produce 10 costs 260 doubloons (including upkeep and taxes) and 1 hour of stored labor. Unless you find somebody who is just plain stupid selling it at a loss for 25 or less, you will usually be able to find copper ore on some auction house for anything between 30 and 50 doubloons.

To make money out of producing items, you need to decided which item is most profitable to produce. You do that by looking at the one thing that limits your production: Stored labor. Every production lot has 24 hours of stored labor per day, and you can only have 10 lots per account, thus 240 hours of stored labor. So lets say you could produce either copper ore or granite. Production cost for copper ore is 26 doubloons per ore, and lets say you could sell it for 40 doubloons, 14 doubloons of profit. As it takes 1/10th of an hour to produce 1 ore, that would mean you receive 140 doubloons per hour of stored labor. Now compare this to granite. It costs only 35 doubloons to make 5 granite, but 2 hours of labor. Production cost is thus only 7 doubloons per unit of granite. Now imagine you could sell the granite for the same 40 doubloons per unit as you can sell the copper ore. Looks attractive, as you paid much less to produce it. But if you look at the labor cost, you just sold 2/5th of an hour of stored labor for 33 doubloons; you'd get only 83 doubloons per hour, considerably less than our copper ore example. In this example, if you had 10 lots making only copper ore and could sell it all for 40, you'd make a profit of 33,600 per day. If you had 10 lots making only granite and sold it for 40, your daily profit would be just under 20,000.

The same thing is true for production chains. You need to calculate how much money you are making per hour (or per day), and not be seduced by big ticket items, or some "percent markup" numbers that mean absolutely nothing. And you should check where exactly in the chain the profit is made. If the profit is more or less evenly distributed over all steps, you might thing of building up the whole chain. But if for example the raw materials are cheap and not very profitable per hour to produce, you might want to buy them from other players and concentrate on the more profitable intermediate and finished goods. That calculation can get rather complicated. A guy named Monthar published a nice Excel spreadsheet on the closed beta boards, but it hasn't been updated for the current build nor copied to the open beta boards afaik. But I'm sure that this or a similar spreadsheet will appear soon.

If you don't want to start fiddling around with spreadsheets, because you don't want to play a freetrader, but concentrate on the combat aspects of PotBS, you should still produce some raw materials. Even if you just get say 20 doubloons per hour of stored labor by making some raw material and selling it in the port where you produced it, that is still nearly 5k free doubloons every day. You'd be stupid not to take those.

Which brings me to the second part of the economy: trading. While producing is for every class, in trading the freetrader class has significant advantages. Given the right skills they can see all auction houses in the world, sail the open sea faster, and trade with foreign nations. For trading the same rule applies as for production: don't look at percentages. Look at the really limiting factor, which is time and cargo capacity. Making 400% profit by buying something for 1 doubloon and selling it for 5 is only good if you can do it without moving, or you have a huge ship and the two ports are very close. Otherwise the 10% profit from buying something for 100 doubloons and selling it for 110 is simply better, because it makes more actual doubloons for the trip.

The big difference between production and trading is that the former makes doubloons per real-time day, the latter makes a profit per hour shipping goods from A to B. A good combination of the two is to produce goods in your chosen home port and ship them to somewhere not too far where the prices are higher. Especially raw material prices are usually lower in ports that have that resource, and can already be higher right next door. The disadvantage of shipping goods around, apart from a potential risk if entering a PvP zone with those goods, is that you don't earn any experience points by that. Thus the low level of my rich freetrader. But then of course you can afford the very best ships, outfitting, and consumables and level up faster afterwards.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:06 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
PotBS open beta

Flying Lab software announced the open beta for Pirates of the Burning Sea starting on Friday for people who weren't in the closed beta. Note how I didn't divulge that fact, although I knew that for a while, because the devs asked us beta testers not to leak this before.

I did apparently break the PotBS NDA by posting my review 12 hours before the NDA drop was officially announced, but I thought the devs saying on the beta boards that the NDA dropped on the 3rd was sufficient. Now Keen is pissed at me. Not quite sure whether that is because he has a much more strict legal interpretation of "click to accept" contracts (which aren't necessarily legally binding in every country) than me, or whether he just felt I cheated in some imaginary "who gets the review out first" game. You should read his review anyway, it is quite good. Keen was one of the prime sources of PotBS information over the last months, and now he is writing on the IGN PotBS Vault. Sorry, Keen, I just wanted to get this out as fast as possible. I would say that our purpose here to spread the good word about PotBS is the same, and it wasn't my purpose to "beat" you or anyone.

In the spirit of this I should also mention another good PotBS review, this one from Potshot. I totally agree with his recommendation of: "Its fun but not in a MMO crack sort of way to me. I could see that it could really be a hoot with a decent Society (aka guild) of friends and I could see where it becomes one of those games that sneaks up and starts stealing all your time. My recommendation would be to get in the open beta and see if its your cup of tea." So go to Fileplanet on Friday and get into the open PotBS beta!
- posted by Tobold @ 1:41 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Pirates of the Burning Sea Review

Since early August 2007 I had the privilege of playing the Pirates of the Burning Sea beta. I like the game a lot, and before I went back to WoW I played that beta more than any other beta or finished game I had access to. Unfortunately I couldn’t write about it at the time due to the NDA. So naturally now that the NDA was dropped today, I have a *lot* to say about PotBS. So much in fact that I won’t even try to fit it all in one post. I’ll start with this review, giving an overview how PotBS works and how the gameplay is. And then over the coming days and weeks I’ll write posts about details of the game, like the economy, tips & tricks, etc.

Pirates of the Burning Sea, like all MMORPGs, starts with you creating a character. You get the choice between 4 nations and 4 character classes. The 4 nations are: Britain, Spain, France, and Pirate. The former three are very, very similar to each other, while the pirates play a bit differently. The 4 character classes are: Navy officer, privateer, freetrader, and pirate. Only players of the pirate nation can play the pirate character class, and that is the only class they have access to. If you play one of the other 3 nations, you get to choose between the other 3 character classes. Pirates are the only characters in the game that can capture ships for themselves. Navy officers are specialized in ship-to-ship combat with broadsides. Privateers are specialized in boarding combat. Freetraders aren’t very good in combat at all, but they have advantages when it comes to the economy, and can to some extent overcome their lesser combat skills by using more expensive ships, outfitting, and consumables.

After choosing nation and class, you need to design the look of your character. Equipping gear in PotBS is not going to change the way you look; you can only add accessories, like a parrot on your shoulder. But if you don’t like the look you chose at character creation, you can change it in a tailor shop in the bigger ports.

Pirates of the Burning Sea is set in the Caribbean in 1720, but also has some mythical elements. After character creation you start on a ship in the middle of a fight. The tutorial teaches you how to do swashbuckling (the sword fighting type of combat), and how to do ship-to-ship combat, sinking enemy ships with your cannons. At the end of the tutorial you land on the docks of the newbie port of your nation. You’ll see quest givers with green exclamation marks floating over their head, or green question marks for quests you already completed, like the tutorial quest.

You are starting the game at level 1, and you gain experience by finishing quests, killing enemies in swashbuckling, and by sinking ships. At the start you’ll do quests most of the times, beginning with the port you started in, and then later the nearby ports of your nation. On the docks of every port you will find the longboat coxswain, your way to either the open sea, or to many of the instanced quests of that port. So much of the time you will grab one or several quests in the port, run to the longboat coxswain at the docks, do the instanced quests there, and then go back to the quest giver for the reward and maybe some more quests. All quests are instanced, but some start with you going through a door in the port. There is a helpful local map accessible with “l” showing you where quests are waiting for you.

There are many different kinds of quests. Some are land-based swashbuckling quests, others are ship quests. Sometimes you just need to sink the enemy, other times you are specifically instructed to board him. Sometimes you just need to touch certain points and escape, or prevent somebody else from escaping, or break through a blockade. Sometimes you are alone, sometimes you have NPC controlled allied ships with you. The majority of quests can be done alone, but you can also do them in a group, in which case the quest scales up in difficulty to compensate for the larger number of players.

When you level up, you gain one skill point. Every even level this is a swashbuckling skill point, which you can invest in a skill that makes you a better sword fighter. Every odd level you get a captain skill point for skills that apply to your ship (or your economic skills in the case of a freetrader).

Besides experience you will also earn money, in the form of doubloons. Training doesn’t cost anything, so what do you do with your hard-earned cash? You buy a bigger ship, or you equip yourself and your ship. Pirates of the Burning Sea has an economy in which the bigger part is played by the players, and a very small part is played by the NPCs. NPCs sell you “civilian” ships, which are worse than the player-built ships of the same name. They also sell you very basic ship outfitting, and very expensive ammo for you cannons. They buy your loot at very low prices, except for special “loot items”, which can otherwise be turned in for collection quests.

In most cases you are better off buying from and selling to other players, via the auction houses. Many ports have an auction house. The map is divided into several regions, and when visiting one auction house, you can see the prices and wares on offer for all auction houses of that region. Freetraders can see all auction houses with a special skill. But while you can buy from other auction houses directly, you need to actually go to that port to pick up the goods. Most goods in Pirates of the Burning Sea have a weight, and need to be transported by ship. You can’t just “mail” goods to somebody else somewhere else, like in many fantasy MMORPGs. This means that sometimes money can be made by buying goods cheap in one place, and selling them at a profit at another place, after shipping them there.

It isn’t very often that looting ships gives you trade goods, most of the time trade goods are produced by players. To learn how to do that, you best do the economy tutorial, which you get from the auctioneer in your starting port. The economy tutorial explains how to build a warehouse and production structures, as well as explaining about foreign NPC traders, and where your nation’s capital is. This is well worth doing early in the game, as there is a reward which is quite substantial for a low-level player. You get a deed for a level 4 ship, and if you don’t want to use it, you can sell that deed for a hefty sum to the civilian ship dealer.

Most ports have a number of natural resources, like an oak forest, or iron deposits. You can only build an iron mine somewhere where there are iron deposits. You can build a forge that transforms the iron ore into iron ingots and other metal goods everywhere, but unless you want to haul goods between ports all the time, it is better to concentrate on a few ports. You also need a warehouse everywhere where you have production, and while the first warehouse comes cheap at 200 doubloons, the second already costs 3,200, and the third 16,200, another reason to only use few ports for production. Finally you are limited to 10 production lots *per account*.

Every production lot accumulates “stored labor” in real time for up to three days. Every resource you want to gather costs some money and some stored labor. Some production building manufacture goods from resources, in which case you need the resources, plus money and stored labor. Even if you aren’t very interested in the economy, you should at least build production units for resource gathering. As resource gathering is limited by stored labor, which is limited by number of production lots and real time, resources always sell for more than the cost to produce them. You just need to come to your home port once in a while, use all the accumulated stored labor to mine iron, chop oak, or produce whatever other resource, put the resulting resources at a markup on the auction house, and presto! Free money!

More complicated, but usually also more profitable is manufacturing goods from those resources. For example a lumber mill turns oak logs into oak planks, which a shipyard can then use to make hulls and eventually ships. Player-built ships are the top of the economic pyramid. They require a large number of very many different goods to make. It is impossible to produce all those materials yourself, seeing how you are limited to only 10 production lots. Thus if you want to be a ship builder, you need the help of a guild (“society” in PotBS), or you need to buy intermediate goods on the various auction houses. But ships aren’t the only useful things to produce. Much easier is the production of consumables like cannon ammunition, or various patches to repair your ship in combat (the equivalent of a healing potion). And then there are ship outfitting goods, for which every ship has a number of different slots, and which improve the stats of your ship.

So now you level up and get better and better ships and equipment. What else is there in the game? There are no “dungeons” or “raids”, but there is PvP. When you bring up the map of the Caribbean in the game, you see all the ports distributed over the map, marked in the color of the nation that holds them. This starts out with the historic distribution, but during the game the ownership of ports can change. To take over a foreign port, you first need to create “unrest”, by sinking NPC ships of the nation that owns the port, or by supplying goods to the rebel agent in that port. Once the port is in contention, a PvP zone appears around that port, marked with a red circular area around the port. In a first step this area only allows pirate vs. nation players PvP, but when contention grows this becomes a full-blown nation vs. nation PvP zone. Finally, after 2 days, there is a huge 25 vs. 25 players contention battle, in which the port can change ownership. A nation can “win” by capturing lots of foreign ports, at which point rewards are handed out to the winners, the ownership situation resets to the initial state, and the losers get a head start for the next round. PvP is consensual insofar as you aren’t forced to enter PvP zones. But of course you might log off and when coming back a few days later find the port you’re in being the center of a PvP zone, at which point you either have to wait for the fight to be over, or dare to try to escape without another player attacking you.

Ships can sink in Pirates of the Burning Sea. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, because most ships have several points of durability, and when you sink you just lose your cargo and come back in the next harbor. Only when the last point of durability is used up, the ship is gone for good. You can have several ships in a dry dock all over the map, so when one ship is gone, you can continue with the next. If ever you lose your last ship, a fallback ship is provided to you, depending on your level. But these are even worse than civilian ships, so you should try to make some money and get yourself a new ship soon. So there is a money cycle, where you make money with quests and by sinking ships, but spend money on new ships, as well as outfitting and consumables, most of them from the player-run economy.

Thus Pirates of the Burning Sea basically is a game of three parts, a PvE part where you quest and level up, a PvP part to “win” the game for your nation, and the economy part that creates the ships and goods needed for the two combat parts. You can’t really opt out of the PvE part, but how much you want to participate in PvP and the economy, or both, is up to you. This variety of parallel modes of gameplay is one of the strengths of PotBS. But this isn’t the only reason why you should play this. Pirates of the Burning Sea is very different from the usual MMORPGs, and offers a lot of innovation. Especially ship combat is very well done, and is a lot more tactical than classic MMO combat. Ships have the most of their firepower in their broadsides, and between trying to keep the enemy in the arc of your guns and using the wind for maneuvering the battles often become very interesting. My other favorite part is the economy, which in some ways is similar to that of EVE Online, but without the boring asteroid mining. As labor is produced in real time, you can make a lot of money as a freetrader while logging on only for short play sessions several times a week. And the market is dynamic, reacting to supply and demand of player-produced goods.

But while Pirates of the Burning Sea is a gem, it is unfortunately a rough one. It seems that all other development studios are crying so much for polish that for PotBS there wasn’t much left of it. Some features are really mind-boggling primitive, like the /who command that dumps the list of all players and their locations, but not their class and level, into the chat window. No filter options. Good luck finding somebody that way. Other features are still in development, for example the user interface isn’t scaleable yet, thus becomes very small at high resolutions, but the devs are working on it. Overall the game has a lot of rough edges, which belie the game’s long development time. Players used to the smooth and comfortable way everything in World of Warcraft works might be put off. But behind the rough surface is a really good game, worth overlooking these minor flaws. Most of them will probably be fixed a year from now.

Pirates of the Burning Sea is no “WoW killer”. I wish this game the best of success, but as it requires a lot more thinking than WoW, the potential audience is smaller. And I have doubts about the game’s longevity. Up to now the majority of quests for each nation are identical, up to and including the quest name, just copied and pasted. Thus replayability is limited. Furthermore I’m not sure whether PvP is enough to carry the end game, with no raids, nor epic loot to acquire. On the other hand not every MMORPG needs to last you for years. With many people waiting for games or expansions that will come out later in 2008, Pirates of the Burning Sea, which is released in January, might just be the game to play while waiting for the next big thing. Recommended.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:01 AM Permanent Link  (31) comments Links to this post

 
WoW buys Guitar Hero

Vivendi today announced an $18.9 billion deal to buy Activision, and combine it with their own game division to a new company called Activision Blizzard. The obvious idea of the merger is to use all the cash that WoW is making to build a bigger company to rival Electronic Arts. While World of Warcraft got mentioned in all the news reports on the deal as being the biggest game on the Blizzard side, the announcement didn't contain anything about the future of WoW or new Activision Blizzard MMORPGs. Rumors are flying, but they are just that: rumors. There might be some interesting news in the future, but for now both companies will be rather busy with the merger.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:46 PM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
WAR update

Massively has the latest Warhammer Online video update, explaining what EA Mythic was working on while the beta was closed. Apparently the character classes will get three talent branches each to specialize in; now why does this sound familiar? And WAR is adding more battlefield objectives for open world RvR, borrowing features like keeps and siege weapons from Dark Age of Camelot. Or as they say, better well stolen than badly innovated. :)

Warhammer Online still remains the only game on the horizon likely to break the 1-million subscriber ceiling. But I'm not holding my breath while waiting. I'd rather wait for this to come out christmas 2008 and be good than getting it early and unfinished.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:27 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post