Let loose the mods of WAR

In a recent Warhammer Online dev chat it was confirmed that "The UI will be totally customizable in terms of appearance and utility. For folks who understand what it means: It’s all Lua-based, so experienced modders will be right at home in WAR." Or to be even clearer: the WAR UI will be as easy to modify as that of WoW. Hmmmmm. Is that good news or bad news?

Nobody remembers it any more, but World of Warcraft shipped with a pretty bad UI. For example there was only one hotkey bar, and no way to add more of them. So some of the first UI mods added more hotkey bars, everybody used those mods, and Blizzard adapted the idea and patched additional hotkey bars into the standard UI. There are actually quite a lot of features of the WoW UI that started their life as player-made UI mods, until they were so popular that Blizzard adopted them. It is classic "Web 2.0" of user-created content, and World of Warcraft is a better game because of it.

There are quite a number of mods that make the game a lot easier for their users. Most raiding guilds require players to use a set of specific mods, like CTRaidAssist, Decursive, and some threat meter. I also use mods like FishingBuddy, which makes fishing a lot easier, Gatherer, which makes herbalism and mining easier, Recount, a damage meter helping me to optimize my dps, and Auctioneer, which helps me make money on the AH. Many of these mods are quite complicated, Auctioneer for example can search through all of the listed goods in the AH and propose underpriced ones for you to buy or bid on. Decursive and FishingBuddy reduce a series of several mouse clicks to a single click or double-click.

When exactly does the use of such addons cross the line to where it becomes cheating? I'm not talking about the legalistic view of "if Blizzard doesn't ban it, it's not cheating". I'm talking about the point where one player wins over another player because he uses an addon the other player didn't install. To give just one example, the effectiveness of a Warlock with his damage over time curses is much diminished if the enemy team is using Decursive. In PvE few people might mind if somebody else advances faster due to the use of addons. But in a PvP-based game like WAR one side having an advantage over the other due to the use of addons is more problematic. Yes, in principle everyone could download them and even the score. But if the UI isn't provided by the game itself, and you are forced to keep up to date with various addons from various mod sites, there are always some players losing out in that particular arms race.

And of course mods can influence the balance between classes in PvP. If a dev decides how powerful to make a damage over time ability, does he consider the use of addons to dispel them faster or does he balance their power with only the regular removal speed in mind? PvE balance is also affected; how far would all the WoW raiders be now if they didn't have raid healing or boss ability warning addons?

Mods create an additional layer of haves and have-nots. Game companies need to be very careful what exactly they allow addons to do, because otherwise the negative effect of being able to "cheat" outweigh the positive effects of improving the UI slowly for everybody.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:19 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Azshara

Recently, when my mage was level 48, I visited Azshara, a rarely visited zone situated north of Orgrimmar. The zone has one of the most profitable quests, especially if you are a mage. You just need to collect 4 tablets in some ruins, avoiding or fighting level 48 to 49 nagas. And then you need to deliver them to 4 different places and come back. Three of these places are Orgrimmar, Thunder Bluff, and Undercity, while the fourth is in Azshara. With a mage's teleport, that is quickly done, and all the quests together give over 40k experience points.

But besides that quest series, there isn't much to do in Azshara. There is a group of shipwrecked people hidden in a canyon on the coast, which you need to protect from a nage attack, but the quest leads nowhere, and few people ever even find it. There is another quest to kill some blood elves, some quests involving the Molten Core faction, and some quests about finding the sceptre that opens Ahn'Qiraj. But as these quests require the effort of a whole guild, and AQ is open since a long time on nearly every server, nobody does that quest line any more. Not even sure if you could still start it.

Other than for quests Azshara is a good place for collecting herbs, from Sungrass to Dreamfoil. And there are some ruins populated by demons, which used to be a popular place to farm Felcloth. As neither level 60 herbs nor cloth are very interesting any more, Azshara is pretty much deserted right now.

And when you rid through the zone, you pretty much can't help the feeling that the devs had plans for that zone which were never realized. There are corners populated with various monsters to which no quests point. There are wide empty spaces that could be used for all sorts of things. There is Ursolan, an area full of timbermaw furbolgs with a gate to what appears to be a big furbolg city or dungeon, but the gate can't be opened. There is even a non-functional PvP battleground, a kind of hollow mountain with entrances clearly marked for Horde and Alliance, but no actual instance connected to it.

I wonder if Azshara will ever get the "Dustwallow Marsh treatment", adding a village or two, a few dozen new quests, and opening up Ursolan and the battleground. Problem is that this isn't very likely. WoW doesn't have a huge shortage of level 50 zones or quests. And patch 2.3 adding content to the old world was an exception, normally Blizzard adds content mostly to whatever the current level cap is, as it is there where most of the players are. Azshara exists in its half-finished state for three years now, and it might remain that way forever.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:11 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Playing games with links

Via Grimwell I found the web-based game MyMiniCity. Well, it looks like a game, a bit like Sim City. Only there is no gameplay. The only thing you can do is to post links to your city in your blog, your forum sig, or wherever you hang out on the internet. At first you can only use a link that increases population, but then a link that increases industry becomes available, then transport, security, environment, and business. You are trying to get the biggest city possible, but of course your population needs all these things, and you need to get people to click on your link for your city to grow. And only one click per visitor per day counts. The only thing you get out of that is a ranking, you can try to have the biggest city of your country.

As Grimwell so correctly remarks, "Once you get past the goofy side of things though, there is a serious and almost smart business model here." It's the old dot.com "eyeballs are money" philosophy. Users are motivated to link to the site, creating lots of page hits, thus creating lots of views for the small banner ads. Note how I put lots of links to my city in this post to get you to click on them. I'm just fooling around here, but if I really wanted to grow my city, I would consider putting some link in the sidebar of the blog. MyMiniCity even offers XML and RSS feeds to support such things! Unfortunately besides growing your city and a small chat interface there is nothing you can actually do with your creation. It is social networking at it's most basic level, far, far away from Facebook or MySpace.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:03 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
So would you buy single-player WoW?

After a day of interesting discussion on social aspects of World of Warcraft, there remains one question: If World of Warcraft would exist as a pure single-player game, without servers, nor monthly fees, would you buy it? Single-player WoW would be exactly like World of Warcraft now, only that there are no other players. Auction house would be randomly seeded with goods, and all elites would be removed from the game, even from instances, so you could solo them.

Would you buy single-player WoW?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:35 PM Permanent Link  (52) comments Links to this post

 
The flexible solution

In the third and last article on how to solve the problem of new players solo rushing through old content to reach the level cap and then not knowing how to group once arrived there, I'm going to talk about flexible levels. The last group I did with my mage was running a level 11 warrior and level 14 shaman through RFC. Seeing how a high-level mage with AoE kills a whole room full of mobs at the same time is fun, but of course the dungeon trip was very short and didn't teach the low level players anything about real grouping. But what if I could have lowered the level of my mage to 14, and get some more players of other levels to join us in a level 14ish group? Similar systems have great success in games like City of Heroes.

Rushing through a dungeon with a character of too high a level isn't all that exciting. The challenge is missing, and there are no rewards. Nevertheless level 70 players visit low level dungeons more often than you would think, to help friends, out of nostalgia, or because they are bored of the limited number of level 70 dungeons. It would be easy to increase the participation of high-level players in low-level content if we just added some challenge and rewards.

Adding challenge is easy enough. Most stats, spell effects and abilities are numerical values and can easily be scaled. Blizzard already changed most low-level dungeons to have a less wide level range. For example Shadowfang Keep used to have mobs from level 18 to 26, but now all bosses are level 20 to 21. Thus we could downscale everyone joining a Shadowfang Keep group to level 21, and make the dungeon interesting for everyone in the group. Of course that will need some intelligent design decisions from Blizzard, deciding whether people lose spells or talents they wouldn't have at the lower levels, and how to downscale the effect of equipment. I think it would be best if a downscaled character wasn't any more powerful than a real character of that level, even if as level 70 he was wearing full epics. The purpose after all is to keep it interesting.

Adding rewards should be possible too. We already have a faction of time travelers, why not add a new faction of level travelers? Whenever a higher level player would join a lower-level dungeon group, he would gain reputation points for every kill and badges from every boss to make up for the lack of interest in the low-level loot that drops. The players in the group that are actually of the level of the dungeon don't get the points and badges, but the loot should be more interesting for them. The reputation and badges could then be used in the usual way to buy recipes and gear for the high-level characters which is actually useful at their high level.

Giving people the possibility to downscale their level and join groups of lower level players fulfills several purposes. For the lower level players it makes finding a group easier, because there are now more people interested in joining one. It is to be hoped that by mixing veterans and new players there will be some transfer of knowledge, with the veteran players teaching the newbies how to group. For the high level players the possibility to revisit old content in a non-trivial way opens up more possibilities and choices. The more choice a player has on what to do next, the better.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:31 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
The gathering solution

If you don't want to fast forward the lower levels, but still want people to group for the fun and learning experience of it, you need to find a solution which makes grouping at the lower levels more frequent. For this we need to look at the reasons *why* people don't group at the lower levels.

The problem has two parts: grouping at lower levels nowadays (compared to the time when World of Warcraft came out) is more difficult because there are less people of the lower levels around. And second it isn't profitable enough to group to be worth trying to overcome this higher barrier into grouping. The solution thus has to be to make it easier to find a group, and to make grouping more worth it than soloing, even counting the time it needs to set up the group.

One interesting solution I proposed before was to create cross-server dungeons. If cross-server battlegrounds can work, then why not cross-server dungeons? You'd need to put up the same restrictions on trading, but otherwise it should be possible. You just need a queuing and automatic grouping system like battlegrounds have. A bit more elaborate to make sure each group has a tank and a healer, but otherwise similar.

But that alone wouldn't suffice. You'd still need to increase the rewards for grouping to make up for waiting in a queue and potentially being grouped with nitwits. I'd keep the gear rewards as they are, the loot dropping in low-level dungeons is already good enough. One could think of adding something like a badge system, giving every player some sort of points or tokens to buy gear with in case nothing useful for him dropped. But otherwise the dungeon loot is okay as it is. What needs to be improved is the xp you get in a group. Right now the xp bonus for grouping is small. The xp for a mob is divided by the number of group members, and then some small bonus is added, around 20% if I remember correctly. Unless you have the world's most efficient group gathered together in zero time, your xp per hour in a group are notably less than your xp per hour when soloing. That shouldn't be the case. Joining a cross-server dungeon queue and doing a dungeon with a bunch of strangers should on average bring more xp per hour than soloing. Nobody wants to eliminate soloing from the game, it should always remain a viable option for people who don't have the time required to group. But soloing shouldn't be the fastest way to level up, because that teaches people to *not* group, which is counterproductive.

MMORPG players in general react strongly to rewards. Making grouping more easy and at the same time more rewarding can save the low-level game from irrelevance. Expansions should expand the game, not shorten it or make the old content useless. Cross-server dungeons with higher rewards could well keep the old content alive for new players and veterans with alts alike.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:52 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
The fast forward solution

Blizzard has already started to tackle the problem of new players, and they did it by speeding up the progress of new players to level 60. Since patch 2.3 quests up to level 60 give more experience points, and you need less xp to level. Thus the number of hours to 60 has been significantly shortened.

The question is where we go from here. People who played the original Everquest will remember the term "hell level", describing levels in EQ where due to the complicated formula used to determine how many xp you need to level you suddenly needed far more xp to get to the next level than you needed for the previous level. Blizzard inadvertedly introduced hell levels into WoW. For a new player, who didn't spend many months at level 60, the current level 60 must appear like a hell level. He got used to leveling quickly all the way up to 60, and suddenly progress slows down significantly. You need nearly three times more xp to get from 60 to 61 than you needed from 59 to 60, while the quests and mobs do not give significantly more xp now (only item rewards are better in Outlands, of course).

Rohan from Blessing of Kings suggested to keep time to max level constant, regardless of how high the max level grows. Thus when Wrath of the Lich King comes out and sets the level maximum to 80, Blizzard would have to speed up leveling from 1 to 70 by as much time as it takes to level from 70 to 80, hopefully smoothing the leveling curve while doing so. The problem with that approach is that levels aren't infinitely compressible. Zones have a certain size, and you need a certain number of quests and time to see all the corners. If every expansion raises the level cap by another 10, we are heading towards a situation where you do less and less quests in a zone before you outlevel it. And the new levels added in the latest expansion would always be hell levels, being much slower than the way up to them, because you don't want to rush people through the new content, only through the old one.

But speeding up leveling is not the only fast forward solution Blizzard offers. The new deathknight class will not even start at level 1, but directly at a higher level, probably level 60. And apparently previous ideas of having to do a level 80 quest to be able to play a deathknight have been discarded, new players will be able to play a level 60 deathknight on their first day. Which then of course raises the logical question of why only deathknights? Time to max level could easily be held constant if new players could start any class at max level minus 20. That of course would make the existing level 1 to 60 content even more deserted and useless, but at least there would be a reasonable chance to find a group with your freshly created level 60 character right from the start.

If World of Warcraft is designed as a game where the fun and the social activity is by design concentrated at the level cap, it makes sense to fast forward new players to that level cap. The disadvantage is that you are losing something when you shorten all the old content, regardless of whether you speed it up or just skip it.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:16 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Lite

I leveled my mage up from 51 to 52 last night by soloing Jinth'Alor. On the one side that was fun, and only the Vile Priestess Hexx posed any problems (she has an instant spell that turns you into a frog, and just kept me permanently frogged while she killed me, I got her on the second try by using my water elemental). On the other side it was sad to see the closest thing World of Warcraft had to a non-instanced dungeon turned into a solo encounter. I barely ever got the opportunity to group in my whole mage career, and seen only very few dungeons. I think I only did one regular dungeon group with people around my level, the other runs were all "boosted" by higher levels. I recently even boosted some low level guild mates myself through RFC. My warrior recently helped a warlock get to the place in Scholomance where he needed to go for his warlock epic mount quest, and the warlock didn't even know where Scholomance was!

If you look through PC games sales charts, you'll find that World of Warcraft has been consistently been in the top 20 since end of 2004. Some financial analyst calculated WoW's churn rate to be 4% to 5% per month. That is nearly half a million new players in WoW every month, or over 200,000 in the US and Europe! And I can't help but feel that these new players are not playing the same World of Warcraft that we played back in 2004 / 2005. They are playing a massively singleplayer game, WoW Lite, which has them soloing all the up to at least 60, if not 70, before being able to find groups. And then of course the groups suck, because the warrior is fury spec and never bothered to even put taunt on his hotkey bar, and the priest is shadow and hasn't got a clue about effective healing. Not their fault, how are they supposed to suddenly know all about grouping if they never had the opportunity?

World of Warcraft as a singleplayer game isn't actually a bad game. But between servers that are sometimes down, lag, and monthly fees, players must ask themselves why they are playing a game online when there is so little interaction with other players. The multiplayer aspects of MMORPGs are generally more interesting, and more likely to keep players in the game. The attraction of WoW to new players is likely to diminish. When Wrath of the Lich King and Warhammer Online come out, presumably not far from each other, new players have the choice between one game where they will have to solo now to 80 before they can group, and another game where they can play with lots of players of their level. That won't be the only criterion of choice, but it sure can be an important one. Cooperative multiplayer games are more fun than singleplayer games, because they add all the social aspects of popular applications like chat or MySpace to the game. It is sad when new players of WoW miss out on all that.

So today Tobold's MMORPG blog is dedicated to ideas on how to make World of Warcraft more social, and by that more interesting, to new players. New players are important to a MMORPG, because it is them that need to replace all those veterans that burn out sooner or later. It is in the interest of everyone that new players to WoW not only have a good time, but also learn how to play in a group.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:07 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
Losing the faithful

Remember I sent you over to Keen and Graev's Blog if you wanted to read more about Pirates of the Burning Sea? I'm not sure that advice is going to be good much longer. Keen posted an article about risk and reward in PotBS which sounds as if he won't play much longer. Great analysis by the way, of what I call negative sum PvP and other situations in PotBS which lead to Keen risking and losing his ship often, for very little reward. No wonder he is unhappy.

The funny thing is that I'm not having fun with PotBS because I'm evading all risk and just cash in the rewards for free. I'm not even moving any more, I just log on once every other day, produce my goods and put them up for sale in the same port. That gives me about 10k profit per day, for 10 minutes of "work" and zero risk. Profitable, but boring.

I'm sure that somewhere the devs think that people like me would give their money to people like Keen. That way *I* would contribute something to the struggle of my nation against the others, and the Keens would have ships to use in that struggle. Problem is that it doesn't work like that. Unless you pay him in dollars (Chinese doubloon farmers?), why should one player give ships for free to another player, just because he is from the same nation or in the same guild? There is nothing in it for the freetrader. If the player didn't care about doubloons, he wouldn't have rolled a freetrader in the first place. It remains a mystery to me how freetraders and other classes are supposed to work together and both have something from it.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:49 PM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Do the most active players shape the opinion of the rest?

A reader wrote me about a comment he had read on my blog, in which someone said that the hardcore players matter because they influence who buys and plays the game. The players who spend the most time in the game, the raiders, are supposedly also the guild leaders, the bloggers, the forum commenters, and so on. The theory is that if Blizzard wouldn't cater towards them, wouldn't spend more development time on their need than their number would suggest, they would leave and take everybody else with them. Do you believe that theory?

I never attributed Blizzard's focus on raids to them wanting to please a small number of opinion shapers. I think the reason is far more mundane, they hired Tigole, who was a big raid leader back in the days of Everquest as their lead designer. Tigole developed the game *he* wanted to play, without spending much thought on what other people wanted to play. If they had hired lets say me, WoW would have a wonderful economy and crafting system. If they had hired Marc Jacobs WoW would have Realm vs. Realm PvP. MMORPGs aren't just one game, they are a collection of many games, and everyone has his favorite.

But because everyone has his favorite and everyone in playing WoW in a different way, I don't believe that there is much of an influence of one group over the others. I do believe that if Blizzard made raiding much, much easier, some hardcore raiders would have all the raid dungeons on farm by now and might quit because there was no more challenge left. But I do not believe that everybody else would follow them. Just the opposite, they would keep playing longer, because suddenly there were all of these easy raid dungeons accessible for them. And I can even argument this assumption with an example from World of Warcraft history: PvP.

Before patch 1.12 PvP used to be just for the hardcore. As there was a relative ranking system, only a small handful of the most dedicated PvP players could rise to the highest rank and get the good rewards. The regular players were condemned to be stuck in the middle ranks forever and didn't get PvP epics. Then Blizzard changed the system and made PvP far more accessible, and with every patch it got easier and easier to get PvP epics. The real hardcore PvP players must find PvP far too easy now, and probably quit. But did that lead to an exodus of WoW players? Not at all. PvP is as popular as never before, and many, many players are in the battlegrounds and arenas for the epics. And they aren't there because they like PvP much more than group play or raiding. They are there because it is currently the easiest way to get rewards. If raiding was made easier, they would go raiding. For every one hardcore player leaving because of boredom, there would be several players swarming the new easy raid dungeons for easy epics. The average longevity of subscriptions would go up, not down. Players are far more easily swayed by in-game rewards than by what somebody says on some game forum.

Is your opinion of World of Warcraft influenced by the opinion of the top guilds?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:27 AM Permanent Link  (75) comments Links to this post

 
25-man raids and skill checks

Ontherocks wrote me and asked for my opinion on 25-man raids versus 10-man raids. He has a small guild, and he likes 10-man raids much more than the level 60 entry-level 40-man raids. I haven't done much 25-man raiding yet, but recently I was at Gruul and SSC with my guild. We killed Maulgar, who dropped the T4 shoulders for me, and Gruul. Funnily we wiped once on Maulgar, due to an unexpected pull, and didn't wipe at all at Gruul, although Gruul is supposedly much harder. We then went to SSC and wiped repeatedly on Hydross. I have problems comparing 10-man and 25-man raids in TBC, because the 25-man raids are harder. Going to SSC was certainly less relaxed than going to Karazhan, but that might well be because we have Karazhan "on farm" and are still struggling with SSC.

Some commenters were recently argueing whether raiding required skill or was just a gear check. I don't think the answer is simple, it depends very much on the specific encounter. Killing Hydross definitely requires a lot of coordination, thus is more of a skill check. Hydross has two different modes, water and poison, and due to a debuff you can only tank him in one mode for a limited time, and then need to drag him over a line to change his mode. Whenever he crosses the line he spawns 4 elementals and loses all aggro. Thus if somebody still damages him from his old side of the line, he goes right back to where he was, spawning another 4 elementals. So if the damage dealers, and especially dotters, don't watch very, very, very carefully what they are doing, Hydross crosses the line several times and deluges the raid with a large amount of elemental spawns, and it is game over.

Gruul on the other hand isn't all that complicated to kill. It is much more of a gear check. Gruul grows and grows, but if the raid group does enough dps, they'll kill him before he grows unmanageable. As our excursion showed, if your raid group is really well equipped, the Maulgar encounter can become more difficult than the Gruul encounter. But normally you can beat Maulgar with a bit of practice and not so much gear, while all the skill in the world isn't helping you much with Gruul if you aren't well equipped enough.

In general both skill and gear help most of the time. And in many cases you can to some extend replace one with the other. I remember doing a retro raid to Molten Core at level 70, and gear made some encounters very easy, which previously required a lot of skill. For example being turned into a bomb at Baron Geddon used to require you running to a safe spot, because otherwise the explosion would kill you and your neighbors at level 60. At level 70 we had a couple of people not knowing where to run, but due to much higher health they just shrugged off the explosion and nobobdy got killed by it.

It isn't necessarily the total number of people in the raid what counts. For skill checks it is more important whether the encounter is designed in a way that all of them need to do it right, or whether only X people need to do it right and the others don't have to play perfectly. If everyone needs to play perfectly, a higher number of raiders makes encounters *more* difficult. Imagine everyone has to do something relatively easy, for which he would have a 90% success chance. Take 10 raiders in an encounter where only one has to make a mistake for the raid to wipe, and the chance of success drops to 0.9^10 or 35%. If you need everyone in a 25-man raid to not make a mistake, the success chance is down to 0.9^25 or 7%.

Depending on how the encounter is designed, and what everybodies gear is, it might not be necessary that everyone in the raid is on the top of his game. The old 40-man raids certainly had some room for slackers. Then raids get easier, especially if for some roles (like dps) you can replace one guy with top gear by two guys with lesser gear. If you've been in WoW long enough, you might remember that it used to be possible to raid Scholomance and Stratholme with 10 people, UBRS with 15 people. Patch 1.10 changed those caps to 5 and 10. And although the mobs were made slightly easier, going to UBRS with 10 raiders was more difficult than with 15. The 5 extra people before weren't strictly necessary, but helpful.

When I first entered Karazhan in March last year with my previous guild's B team, we were all so badly geared that everyone of us would have had to play perfectly to succeed. And as we all had very little or no practice either, we only managed to kill Attumen, and just wiped over and over again on Moroes. When I went to Karazhan with my current guild (which is actually the guild I started the game with), I went with people with much better gear, and much more practice. And suddenly Moroes was easy. I was still wearing the same gear, and probably played with similar skill in the two raids. But probably my raid skills aren't perfect (I'm too slow for split second button mashing) and it is well possible that in the first raid I contributed to us failing, while in the second raid the degree of perfection needed from me was lower and I passed the skill check.

So instead of thinking in terms of gear check and skill check, I'd say that every raid encounter is a skill check, but the degree of difficulty of that skill check varies with the specific encounter, and can be modified by everybodies gear and the skill of the other players in the raid.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:03 PM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Extreme specialization

My mage in World of Warcraft is an exercise in extreme specialization. He is specialized in frost damage, and nothing else. I hit level 50 during the weekend, which meant that he can now use Flasks of Supreme Power, giving +70 to spell damage. Expensive, but it's okay, my warrior can make them and gather the mats. So with the flask, the wizard oil, and all of the "of the frozen wrath" armor my mage is wearing, he now has over +350 to frost spell damage. My frostbolts do over 700 points of damage, nearly 1500 for crits, and as mobs of my level have less than 3000 health, I can kill them with 2 to 4 bolts. They rarely ever reach me.

I have an addon named Recount, which measures damage per second. Funnily my level 50 mage does more dps on a level 50 mob than my level 70 protection warrior does on a level 70 mob. Because the warrior is also specialized, but in tanking. That works well in groups, but not all that well in soloing and PvP. Soloing with the mage is very easy, I'd guess he'd be very useful in a group, and in PvP as well.

Why is it that of the three group roles: tanking, healing, and damage dealing, only the damage dealing is really good in soloing and PvP. The other two abilities seem like support roles, and when there is nothing to support (solo) or very little cooperation (WoW PvP), these characters aren't quite as good. No wonder tanks and healers are always in short supply for groups, people prefer classes that solo better. Is the future hybrid classes like druid healers and death knight tanks, who can then easily switch to damage dealing when soloing? Or will we see better damage abilities for holy priests and protection warriors in the future?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:30 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
How to interpret WoWJutsu numbers

WoWJutsu is a third party website that uses World of Warcraft Armory data to rank guilds. On it's front page it proudly proclaims 2.4 million total players ranked, of which 98% are said to have visited Karazhan. This has been widely interpreted as 2.4 million players having seen Karazhan, which is about half of the total population of 4.5 million US and Euro players. Other people said that this number seems to high, and various arguments went back and forward on who to interpret the numbers. The Wowjutsu FAQ isn't all that precise on who exactly is counted. I had started using guarded phrases like "according to the most optimistic interpretation of Wowjutsu data", because I wasn't sure which interpretation was correct, and constantly got attacked for my numbers being wrong. Enough of that! Lets find out how Wowjutsu REALLY counts raiders.

The trick to find out the truth is to drill down to a level of which you are absolutely certain. On the Wowjutsu site you can click on "Realms", choose US or Euro, choose your realm, and finally choose your own guild to see detailed stats about your guild. And then you can go to WoW and compare the Wowjutsu numbers with the WoW numbers. To be very exact in my case I even submitted a "manual update request" to Wowjutsu, so I have scanned Wowjutsu data of today from my guild.

The result: In WoW my guild has 394 members (characters, not players), due to most of us suffering from altitis. Of these 394 characters, 164 are level 70. On the Wowjutsu site my guild is considered to have 164 raiders!

Wowjutsu considers every level 70 character in a ranked guild as being a raider!

A ranked guild is a guild in which at least one person has Karazhan loot. But that doesn't make every level 70 character in that guild a raider! In the case of my guild I went through the rooster on Wowjutsu, which has detailed information on who has loot from what raid dungeon. I counted 73 players with at least one piece of raid loot. Due to my guild having Karazhan "on farm" and being generous with raid epics towards newbies, I do not think we have many raiders with no epic loot. Thus in the specific case of my guild, Wowjutsu overestimates our number of raiders by a factor of over 2. Wowjutsu counts us as 164 raiders, when in reality we only have 73 people who ever visited Karazhan. It even counts my warrior as a raider, of whom I am 100% certain that he never set a foot into Karazhan.

There are far less than 2.4 million players who visited Karazhan. Far less than 50% of the player base ever got the chance to raid.

By counting every level 70 character in a guild with raiders as a raider, Wowjutsu seriously overestimates the number of raiders in WoW. There might be tightly organized guilds in which every character is a raider. But in general more guilds are like mine, having a mix of raiders and non-raiders, and Wowjutsu counts them all as raiders. By extension that means that not only the assumption that 50% of players already visited Karazhan is too high, but also there are less people who have visited the Black Temple. Wowjutsu counts every level 70 character in a guild in which at least one person has Black Temple loot as having visited the Black Temple, and thus lists 7% of their 2.4 million "raiders" as having gone there. But there are certainly guilds in which people are at different stages of the raid circuit, and only the top guys have visited the Black Temple. Raiding remains far too inaccessible to WoW players, and the top level raid dungeons have only been visited by a far too tiny number of players.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:52 AM Permanent Link  (29) comments Links to this post

 
Tobold's Theory of Relativity

It doesn't matter how much fun a game is in absolute terms, it matters how much fun it is relatively to the other games you might be playing instead.

Or, in other words, I just cancelled my account for Pirates of the Burning Sea. I'm having a really, really good time in World of Warcraft right now. Not only because of raiding and epics, but in general: playing my level cap characters in guild groups, daily quests, leveling my mage alt. Compared to that, when logging into Pirates of the Burning Sea, doing my daily production is all I can stomach before logging out again. Ship my goods across the Caribbean to sell them? Takes 20 minutes in which nothing interesting happens, unless I get attacked by NPC pirates, then it takes 30 minutes and still isn't interesting. PotBS has the most boring NPC pirates you can imagine: at my level and with a freetrader ship I don't have any chance to sink them. And they are always placed in a way that I can easily escape, it just takes so much time. NPC pirates aren't a plague, they are an annoyance. And in many places there are so many of them that you can't really do clever maneuvering to avoid them.

Pirates of the Burning Sea of course is a PvP focused game, and I'm not the world's biggest fan of PvP. But even if I would do PvP, I'd rather do it in World of Warcraft, where I'd actually gain something by doing it, and I would face an equal number of enemies. Except for the final port battles, which are 24 vs. 24, the rest of PvP in PotBS is not balanced. People only attack you if they are far superior in level, ship type, or they brought more friends than ships of your nation being visible in the vicinity. Flying Labs recently "fixed" an "exploit", where some lonely ship would cruise up and down in front of a port, and when a group of 3 enemies would come and attack the ship, the 5 friends of the lonely ship would come out of hiding from the port and join the battle. The gankers ganked, I liked that as a feature, too bad it's gone. Ganking is now nearly risk free. And PvPers can annoy non-PvPers by conquering their ports. I should recommend the game to Syncaine, he'll probably like it better than WAR. :)

While my Pirates of the Burning Sea review gets a lot of hits lately via Google, probably from people who saw the game now in the stores, my PotBS posts get very little response or comments. So I'd ask my remaining 3 readers interested in Pirates of the Burning Sea to head over to Keen and Graev's blog. Currently there is a daily PotBS journal, and even a complete port battle video. On this blog PotBS reporting will slowly grind to a complete stop soon.

I'll still be logging into PotBS from time to time until my free month runs out. But I'll spend most of my time playing World of Warcraft, which is the better game, relatively speaking.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:10 PM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Gaming as a problem

A reader, Sare, wrote me an e-mail with a link to the latest Penny Arcade comic on WoW addiction. He asks "Game addiction, does it really exist or is it just a myth? I found myself wondering about this as I sat on my computer and played World of Warcraft for the 10th hour straight trying to get attuned to karazan and farming gold and gems for the guild bank trying to prepare everybody else for it as well."

I think one of the major flaws of the whole game addiction discussion is that people see it too much in terms of black and white: Either you are addicted or you are not. Such a yes/no addiction might scientifically exist for addictive substances like heroin. It doesn't exist for video games or other forms of entertainment, like the fabled TV addiction. The Scientific American says "The term "TV addiction" is imprecise and laden with value judgments, but it captures the essence of a very real phenomenon. Psychologists and psychiatrists formally define substance dependence as a disorder characterized by criteria that include spending a great deal of time using the substance; using it more often than one intends; thinking about reducing use or making repeated unsuccessful efforts to reduce use; giving up important social, family or occupational activities to use it; and reporting withdrawal symptoms when one stops using it." The same is true for video game addiction: imprecise and laden with value judgements, but describing something which is nevertheless a real phenomenon. That article also says "That said, we need to be careful about overreacting. Little evidence suggests that adults or children should stop watching TV altogether. The problems come from heavy or prolonged viewing.", and again the same thing is true for video games. The same is *not* true for addictive substances like heroin, where even trying once is likely to start an addiction.

Television and video games both offer escapism. Wikipedia lists among forms of escapism "Principal amongst these are fiction literature, music, sports, films, television, roleplaying games, pornography, religion, recreational drugs, the internet and computer games." and quotes C.S. Lewis saying that "the usual enemies of escape are jailers". The problem is not the exact means of escape, one shouldn't join Karl Marx in condemning religion or Jack Thompson in condemning video games. The underlying problem is some unhappiness with our real lives which leads us to search for something better in a virtual one. Not lucky in love? A romantic novel or movie (or porn if it was more the physical part of love you were after) offers a brighter view. No success in your studies or job? But at least your guild downed Illidan! You're a fat couch potato? Compensate by watching sports all day on the TV. It is evident that all these are just false solutions. After all that you're still lonely, unsuccessful, and fat.

As long as you are aware of it, and don't confuse the false solutions with a real way to improvement, escapism can be fine. Sometimes our real world problems are temporal, and there is nothing to be said against a little escape to help us deal with the pain. Why not be a hero for a while in World of Warcraft after a bad day at work? You just need to stop yourself from the escapism adding to the problem. If you neglect your studies or work because of WoW, or TV sports replaces all of your physical activity, you have a real problem. Only such things are usually gradual, shades of grey, not black and white. You can't take the 10 million WoW players and say 40% of them are addicted, or give any other number, that is just nonsense talk. There are some players that play WoW only very little and if they have nothing else to do, some players that dropped out of school or quit work or left their family to play WoW, and all the shades in between. Most people are somewhere in the middle, where they might have the occasional minor real life problem due to WoW, like a late night playing session leaving you tired and without an ironed shirt to go to work with the next day. And with most of them that varies over time. Just take myself, I lived perfectly well without WoW for 7 months last year, and this week I'm a bit tired because I spent several nights raiding. There will be weeks in the future where I will play very little WoW. The need for escape comes and goes. And for the large majority anything you could describe as game addiction only happens in a very mild and not really problematic form. You could compare it to people that might get drunk once in a while, but are far from being alcoholics. It is better to watch yourself, because the border isn't very well defined, and of course you should avoid the problematic forms of addiction. But saying that a particular form of escapism is responsible and should be regulated against is just targeting the symptoms instead of the underlying causes.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:25 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Epic to wipe ratio

Of course it is an extreme oversimplification, but besides the fun of hanging out with friends, seeing new places, or vanquishing new bosses, the epic to wipe ratio plays a large role in how much "fun" raiding is for people. Last night my guild did another Karazhan run, second half from Curator to Prince, and my epic to wipe ratio went through the roof. I got the shoulders from the Curator, boots from Aran, and T4 helmet from the Prince. Only Illhoof and the chess event didn't yield anything for me. And only the Prince put up any serious resistance. [From all the encounters in Karazhan, the Prince is the most luck based. The "safe spots" are a myth, because what was safe last run won't necessarily work next run. You can either go for a high risk strategy and tank the Prince in the doorway, and if you get lucky and no infernal drops on the position of the healers and ranged dps the fight becomes nearly trivial. Or you can tank the Prince along the wall, which gives you somewhat more options in case of bad luck with infernal drops.]

But I'm well aware that three epics in four hours with few wipes isn't "normal". This isn't how Blizzard designed it, the credit goes completely to my guild, because they are willing to take a few newbies with them on every Karazhan raid. Kudos to my guild, both for being nice and for being intelligent. Showering newbies with epics like that beats disenchanting said epics, especially in TBC where the market value of the void crystals you get from disenchanting epics has hit rock bottom and is now *below* that of the large prismatic shards you get from disenchanting blue gear. And I fully intend to repay my "debt" to the guild by using my new gear to either help them advance in the next level of the raiding circuit, or by helping the next generation of newbies to get through Karazhan. I just need to set some priorities and do either the one or the other. After 3 Karazhan raids this week I'm signed up for a SSC raid tonight, and I'm starting to feel physical exhaustion. I'm not a young man any more, staying up until midnight every night and getting up at 6:30 am in the morning isn't something I can do several times a week any more without feeling tired afterwards.

In a normal raid progression the epic to wipe ratio is much lower. Either you have a raid dungeon "on farm", but then you already have most of the epics from there and just hope for luck on finding the last one or two missing pieces. Or you go to a new raid dungeon, where you will wipe much more often and not kill all that many bosses. Note that when calculating epic to wipe ratio, I only consider epics that are actually an improvement. Thus going to ZG or AQ20 with a group full of level 70s has an epic to wipe ratio of zero, because nobody is going to find anything useful there.

So while I am in "fast forward" or "easy" mode, the raid progression for the majority of World of Warcraft players remains too slow. Even by the most optimistic interpretation of the WoWJutsu data only 50% of players in Europe and North America have ever seen Karazhan, and only 3% the Black Temple, after one year of TBC. Come patch 2.4 with an even more difficult raid dungeon Sunwell Plateau, and we are looking at a raid dungeon that only 1% of the player base will ever see, because Wrath of the Lich King will come out before many people reach the top raid dungeons. That is silly, an inefficient use of resources. Raid encounters are a lot more complex than regular mobs, and take up a huge chunk of development time. I'm pretty certain that the WotLK raid dungeons are a major contributor to the fact that the expansion is coming out so late. The resulting raid encounters are way more interesting than regular 5-man dungeons, and great fun. They should be accessible to a far greater number to players. After one year 50% of players should have seen the *last* raid dungeon, not just the first one.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:32 AM Permanent Link  (33) comments Links to this post

 
Somebody is going to be disappointed by WAR

We're just not sure yet who. Syncaine has a Warhammer rant on his site complaining about people who are looking forward to WAR, but aren't big fans of PvP. Which would include me. He says: "I sincerely hope you HATE Warhammer. I mean absolutely HATE it. Because if carebear Joey likes Warhammer for its fun questing, crafting, and easy solo nature, that means everyone looking forward to Warhammer for it's impact PvP will hate it." And while I of course hope that it will be me who likes WAR and him who hates it (just kidding), I totally agree with his analysis that it is nearly impossible that both of us will like it. One of us, and by extension the two groups of people that like similar things than we do, is going to be severely disappointed by WAR.

I have a grudging admiration for the camp that Syncaine represents, because they are so passionate. They love what Syncaine calls "impact PvP", that is players being able by means of PvP to change the virtual world, to control parts of it, to affect what is going on for everybody. You just need to poke one of them and they will wax lyrically about how great Ultima Online was before Trammel "ruined" it for them.

Unfortunately for them, and fortunately for me, history is against "impact PvP". Reality shows that it is impossible to have impact PvP unless you allow a small minority of extremely dedicated players to dominate the less dedicated masses. It also shows that the less dedicated masses react to that by quitting the game in question, because nobody wants to pay $15 a month for being ganked and relegated to the bottom of the pile. UO didn't introduce Trammel to ruin the game for the PvP fans, they introduced it as an emergency measure to keep their game from dying, because they were bleeding subscribers. Over 90% of the UO player base ended up on PvP-free Trammel, while the mirror image Felucca with its free-for-all PvP was pretty much deserted. Other MMORPGs that tried to attract players with impact PvP, like Shadowbane, Archlord, or Fury, ended in dismal failure. There are passionate PvP fans out there, but there aren't very many of them.

It is theoretically possible that Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is all that what Syncaine desires: impact PvP, hated by "carebear Joey". In that case WAR would be one of the greatest financial flops in MMO history, failing worse than Vanguard. While some players and game developers might prefer PvP purity over financial success, I'm pretty certain that the business managers of EA see the matter differently.

I'm somewhat a cynic regarding statements by game developers. To me the most likely outcome is that WAR will offer fake PvP: something that looks like impact PvP, but is in reality limited to special areas, with carebear Joey being well protected and able to do the "fun questing, crafting, and easy solo" gameplay he wants. The PvP fans would conquer their keeps, proudly lording it over the lands, and hopefully not notice that they aren't actually lording over anyone, because the people they'd love to rule just stay outside their reach. And to me that sounds like a great solution.

In other words: I think WAR will be for PvP fans what WoW is for raid fans. In WoW the hardcore raiders think they are the elite, but their actual impact on the lives of the non-raiders is minimal. I think in WAR there will be PvP elite guilds capturing keeps and thinking they are the elite, but have little actual impact on the lives of the non-PvP players. Once in a while one side will capture the capital city of the other side, but then the map resets a few days after, and the whole system is set up in a way that casual players don't suffer too much for not having access to that city for a few days. And to make up for that little hardship, all players of the winning and of the losing side will receive some rewards, even if they didn't participate in PvP at all. The winners for having won, and the losers for balancing the sides out so that the same side isn't winning all the time. The developers will do their utmost to reach "well balanced" PvP, but well balanced isn't all that much difference from the static situation of a pure PvE game. I'm sure I can live with a balanced "fake impact" PvP like that. I just hope Syncaine will learn to love it too. Because if you want real impact PvP, you're forever condemned to low budget niche games. You can't have both impact PvP and a million subscribers.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:36 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
I found my ticket

As I remarked in a previous comment, raiding is not looking for loot just for loot's sake. It is looking for the ticket that allows you entry to the next level of raiding. And last night I found my ticket: the Shard of the Virtuous from the Maiden of Virtue in Karazhan, a one-hand mace with a huge bonus to healing. As I had already previously found a off-hand healing item from Aran, the two items together increased my +healing bonus by 200 points. On my first Karazhan raid I had under +1200 healing buffed, at the end of last night I had +1515 healing buffed. And as one of my readers remarked, once you have such a nice epic weapon, you are willing to spend the ca. 500 gold to enchant it with the +81 healing bonus enchantment, which would get me up to nearly +1600. There isn't a fixed number of how much +healing you need as a priest to visit Tempest Keep, Serpentshrine Cavern, or Zul'Aman. But I'm pretty certain that 1200 was too low, and 1600 is more like it. I'm feeling more confident, and less than a burden to my guild, if I sign up for a raid now.

One nice thing about the growing healing bonus is that due to recent patch changes one third of the healing bonus is also increasing my spell damage. That doesn't do much in raids, but it does make my soloing life easier. I'm not greedy, I pass on all damage caster loot I find in a group or raid. It is nice to know that by concentrating on the stats that help my priest most to become a useful raider, I'm not gimping myself for soloing. I just wish Blizzard would come up with a way to introduce something similar for protection warriors. The gear I collect with my warrior has armor, defence, and stamina, and is only marginally helpful for soloing.

Last night's raid was a blast, not only because of the loot. We had an unusual raid composition, as we were the "B Team", the second Karazhan raid group formed that night by my guild. We had 4 druids in the group, one healing, the other three switching between tanking and melee dps as required. 2 hunters, me as only priest, one healadin, one shaman, and one mage. Kudos to the guild officers of managing to balance the two teams so well, we actually finished our planned "first half Kara" before the first group. Well, they had the Wizard of Oz in the opera, and we had Romulo and Julianne (again, grrr, third time opera, third time Romulo), and apparently our encounter was easier. But we were really on a roll, killed Attumen, Moroes, the Maiden, and the opera event on the first try, and only wiped once on Nightbane before downing him too. And it only took 3 hours to do all this.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:52 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Playing whack-a-mole

No, this is not about raid healing. ;) I'm talking about gold seller comment spam on my blog. I'm playing a game of whack-a-mole with them, deleting all of their comments that try to direct people towards some gold selling website. This month has been particularly terrible, I'm getting several comment spams every day, and I wonder what I can do about it. I would hate to have to turn comment moderation on, or even turn commenting off, because I think the intelligent discussion of subjects by my readers is at least as valuable as my posts.

I don't understand why these gold sellers are so persistent. I have comment e-mail notification on, so I delete their comments several times a day, they are never up for more than a few hours. Even if they'd manage to get in just before the Google search engine scans my site, they wouldn't get any page rank from Google, because Blogger comments are automatically flagged as , denying them any search engine value.

The latest WoW gold seller is even leaving a sentence each on my posts that indicate he at least read what I was writing. Then he asks people to visit his blog, which contains only one entry which links to the gold selling site. I can't imagine that technique to bring him many visits, and I'm deleting his comments as well as the more direct ones.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:44 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
The PvP-free PvP of Pirates of the Burning Sea

Yesterday Pirates of the Burning Sea was officially released, and port contention PvP was enabled. Which lead to a lot of ... PvE. Because curiously port contention PvP contains very little actual PvP, but instead has hours of PvE grind. To put a port into contention you need to attack NPC merchants of the defending nation close to the port you want to take over. So if for example the Spanish want to take the British port of Belize (which is probably happening right now on every single server in PotBS), they have to sink British NPC merchants in front of Belize. Now you would think that to defend Belize, the British would need to sink the attacking Spanish players. But no! To defend Belize the British would need to sink Spanish NPC merchants in front of Belize, of which there aren't many, because the current nationality of a port determines what NPC merchants are around. The British could also run special defensive PvE missions, or hand in crafted goods to defend the harbor. But gaining contention points for the attacker is fast, and there is nothing to gain from defending, so nobody bothers. Especially not with Belize, which is far from the British starting area.

Why do the Spanish attack Belize? Because it has a strategically important resource, fir, and is conveniently close to the Spanish starting area. So is this economic warfare, the Spanish depriving the British of fir? No, Pirates of the Burning Sea doesn't work like that. When Belize becomes Spanish, the British fir log camps there pay a higher tax on production, and so the British players might be tempted to leave. But in all likelyhood Spanish players will build fir logging camps at their place. And for the players just wanting to buy fir, nothing changes. A freetrader can buy fir in the auction house of any nation, and there is no penalty or higher cost involved in buying from the enemy. The Spanish don't sell fir for more than the British did, so for the buyer nothing changes.

As a freetrader I actually prefer Belize switching to Spanish and staying there, in contrast to the British trying to take it back. Because only if the port is in contention do I risk to be attacked by player pirates and privateers when transporting goods to and from that port. If the port is firmly in enemy hands, it is totally safe for me to go there and buy my fir.

24 hours after the Spanish reach a certain contention level in Belize, there will be a port battle of 24 Spanish against 24 British players. In theory the British could defend Belize at that point. In praxis Belize is still far away from the British starting area, there is still nothing to gain from defending the port, and there won't be enough British turning up to defend the port. The Spanish will continue to attack British ports on the left side of the map, the British will attack Spanish and French ports on the right side of the map, and rarely do the nations ever meet. Now my judgement might be clouded by me not liking PvP in general. But I'd say that the PvP system in Pirates of the Burning Sea is particularly stupid.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:30 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Should I keep enchanting?

Not a rant. Please try for once to take this post as what it is: a honest question!

The story starts with the release of TBC. My priest gave up enchanting at that time to learn jewelcrafting. While leveling up jewelcrafting I produced a lot of rings and necklaces, and because many people did the same these crafted goods were impossible to sell on the auction house. So I created a blood elf mage, leveled him up to level 11, learned the enchanting profession, shipped all the jewelry to him, and started disenchanting.

Fast forward to 2008, the mage is now level 47. The priest started raiding and was using a lot of superior mana oil. Hey, I said to myself, no problem, oils are the one thing that my enchanter mage can make and ship to my other characters. For superior mana oil you need 310 skill, but due to a racial bonus the blood elf mage can get to 310 already at his current level. He was at 293 yesterday, and it turned out that getting to 310 is expensive. You need illusion dust and eternal essences, neither of which comes cheap. I managed to get part of the way with slightly cheaper wizard oil, but then spent like 200 gold in materials to get to 310. Learned the recipe of superior mana oil, and found out that I'd need a fel iron enchanting rod to produce the oil. For making that rod I'd need to get somebody to portal me to Outland and learn the recipe in Thrallmar. But even worse, I need the arcanite enchanting rod as well to make the fel iron rod. Together that is again more than 200 gold in cost.

So I didn't spend the money yet, I'm a bit low in funds right now, and first stopped to consider whether I really, really wanted to invest further into enchanting. My warrior is herbalist / alchemist, and my priest is miner / jewel crafter. Both of them can produce stuff that my other characters can use. My mage has tailoring, which I would like to keep to make things for himself and the priest, plus bags. But his enchanting profession isn't useful for my other characters, because they are on the same account and I can't have them logged on at the same time. I could pay to move him to my wife's account, but then I couldn't play the mage any more when my wife is playing her toons. The only useful thing as enchanter I can do is the mana and wizard oils, and those I could easily get for not much more than the cost of materials from the auction house.

One option, the cheapest, is to keep enchanting as it is now, at 310, and not invest in it any more. That would basically make my mage a disenchanter, not an enchanter. With 300 skill you can apparently disenchant all items in TBC, even epics. The advantage of having such a disenchanter is that usually the dusts and shards you get from disenchanting bind on pickup items sell for much more than vendoring those items. As many quests yield bop rewards you can't use, you'll at least squeeze a bit more of a monetary reward out of them. In groups it is good to have at least one disenchanter, for bop items found in dungeons that nobody can use. That isn't for personal profit, the shards are rolled for, but it's nice to have it available.

Another option is to ditch enchanting and take up something else. As I already have mining and herbalism on other toons, only skinning would make sense as a gathering profession. Could be profitable for selling the leather, especially as a mage who is good in mass killing animals. And some leather is used for tailoring, though not much. Or I take another crafting profession, but there only engineering would make sense. That is probably expensive to level up, and again not producing many useful things for other charactes. I loved having engineered bombs when I tried paladin once, but for a mage bombs aren't all that useful. There are some good goggles, and a lot of items that are just plain fun. Who wouldn't want to fly around in a helicopter?

The most expensive option is to level up enchanting to 375 and try to get as many good recipes as I can. I had a look through the TBC enchanting recipes, and it appears that very few are available from the trainer. Buying the more useful recipes from the auction house would cost thousands of gold. And then I'd still need to grind reputations and dungeons to get hold of the other recipes. I'm just not sure that this is worth it. I haven't seen any official Blizzard announcements where they state they are planning to change enchanting so that you could mail enchants to your alts or sell them on the AH. And standing in Shattrath or Orgrimmar for hours, peddling enchants in the trade chat instead of playing isn't really my idea of fun. Call me selfish, but why would I want to spent thousands of gold to get enchantments that only other people will profit from?

So I'm looking for advice, especially from people who leveled enchanting to 375. Do you feel the effort and gold spent was worth it? Or would you recommend just being a disenchanter? Or switching to engineering? Tell me what you think!
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
WoW hits 10 million on the rebound

Blizzard announced that they now have 10 million players. And they were even willing to give us a bit more detail, stating that of these 10 million 2 million are in Europe, 2.5 million in North America, and 5.5 million in Asia. Please keep in mind that the Asians only pay 6 cent per hour, and that the Chinese distributor The9 grabs a big share of the profits, so Asia isn't as profitable as it might look. In fact, if we assume that each western subscriber is worth $200 per year, for one expansion box and 12 monthly fees, the 4.5 million US/Euro players already bring in $900 million from Blizzards stated earnings of $1.1 billion. Which would lead us to the conclusion that Asia "only" earns Blizzard $200 million. Which is still quite a package.

Blizzard is telling us the US and Euro numbers because they don't look so bad any more as they still did in September. WoW is on a definitive rebound in the western world, as seen on the Warcraftrealms activity chart. December had the highest number of primetime players since March. Apparently many players, like me, got a bit bored of WoW, tried some other games, and then came back because the other games weren't any better.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:01 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
WAR is expensive

Sorry for today's deluge of post, I'm reacting to mails and comments. Due to popular demand from the one reader I have whose name I can't pronounce, I'm linking to some old news from Keen and Graev: Warhammer Online will quite possibly cost more than $14.99 per month. Insert huge outcry and everybody quietly paying up here.

Fact is that $14.99 is a completely arbitrary number. There is no relation whatsoever to cost. From financial data from Blizzard we know that about half of the monthly fee is pure profit. World of Warcraft would still be quite profitable at $10 per month. World of Warcraft would also still be quite profitable at $20 per month, even if that would obviously cause some people to quit. WoW is even profitable at 0.45 Yuan / RMB per hour (about 6 US cents), which is what the Chinese players pay. I pay €12.99 per month for WoW, which at the current exchange rate is $18.86. The choice of payment model (monthly or hourly) and price is done by marketing people based on local customes, economy, and historical developments. There is nothing whatsoever which would make $14.99 per month the one and only possible price for WAR.

Making WAR more expensive as WoW could even be a subtle marketing trick. "Look, our game is better, that's why it costs more!". If the price difference to WoW is small, lets say WAR costs $16.99 per month, EA can probably get away with it and lose only a very small number of potential customers. If you buy a MMORPG and play it for a year, you still pay less money than if you buy a regular video game every 2 months. Counting on a dollar per hour of entertainment basis MMORPGs are extremely cheap. Even watching paint dry is more expensive, if you have to pay for the paint. Movies, books, magazines, everything costs more per hour of entertainment than World of Warcraft does. Total profits of the video game industry are declining, because too many people spend too many cheap hours in WoW instead of buying new expensive video games that can be played through in 10 hours. And then of course there is inflation, prices go up all the time, although if you are young and only interested in the price of computers you might not have noticed. Expecting the monthly fees for MMORPGs to remain stable forever isn't very realistic.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:15 PM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Gold sellers in PotBS banned before game is even released

I already mentioned it below, but I keep getting e-mails asking me to write about this piece of news: Flying Labs already banned the first gold sellers in the pre-order period, before the game was even fully released (release is today). The only thing I am surprised about is that you are surprised about this. Let's relist a couple of things I already said about Pirates of the Burning Sea, and put them into the context of RMT.

1) PvP in Pirates of the Burning Sea is negative sum, it consumes virtual currency. And you don't even get phat epics in return. If you were to play PvP all the time, because that is what is fun to you, you'd run out of doubloons pretty quickly. And thus might be tempted to buy them from a gold seller.

2) All the doubloons in the game come from loot and mission rewards, but that doesn't say that doing missions and sinking NPC ships is the fastest way to wealth. Considerable wealth can be created by setting up some production chain and selling the goods produced with it. You can also make large amounts of doubloons by buying something cheap in port A, transporting it to port B, and selling it there for twice the price you paid.

3) Unlike WoW there is no direct link between level and income. This has two reasons. In WoW a level 1 quest gives you 12 copper as reward, and a level 70 quest gives you 12 gold as reward. As 1 gold is 100 silver, that is 10,000 copper, a level 70 player earns gold 10,000 times faster than a level 1 character in WoW. All gold farmers first level up to 70, and then start farming. In Pirates of the Burning Sea the difference between mission rewards from level 1 to level 50 is less than 10. Second reason is point 2, mission rewards and sinking ships aren't necessarily the fastest way to make money. If you play just until level 21, the pre-order level cap, and you have a freetrader, you have already access to some of the best cargo ships in the game. You can do fast smuggling operations and blockade runs with a MC Bermuda, or transport huge amounts of cargo on an Atlas bark. You can also already produce 95+% of all the production structures in the game.

Forget the WoW gold farmer! The PotBS doubloon producer isn't leveling up to the level cap and then repeatedly grinding the same mobs over and over. More likely he bought himself multiple accounts, leveled them all up to only 21 in a week, built 10 production structures on each of them, and plays every account only 2 hours per day, running his productions, shipping the goods to where they sell highest, and doing some buying, transporting, and selling of other player's goods as well. If he wasn't banned yet, he already has the first million doubloons in stock (I have 100k with just one account, and I barely played). And today with the release of the game the port contention PvP part of the game will be enabled, and regular players will start to lose money on that. The doubloon producer should be able to find customers quickly. The only problem is that he will have to meet his customers personally, because there you can't mail money and the auction house has a blind system which isn't well suited for money transfers (It is possible, but not safe). But in all other respects Pirates of the Burning Sea is an ideal game for gold sellers. There is no bind-on-pickup loot, and nearly everything is player made and tradeable. And the end game is a big money sink. RMT is a direct consequence of game design, and the PotBS game design encourages RMT very much.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:34 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
Instant classic Q&A from Sanya

Did you always want to know why game developers and customer service representatives of MMORPGs seem to hate you? You'll find the answers in this instant classic Q&A session written by Sanya. I especially liked:

Q: Why do you hate me personally?

A: We don’t hate you. This fifty page log of all the crap you spew in open chat channels, and the two thousand people who reported you, would suggest that a large number of the people on your server do in fact hate you. But we don’t personally care. We’ve seen worse. Amateur.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:20 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
The games I play and those I don't

A reader was asking why I didn't post about LotRO any more, and so I thought I'd better give you all an update on the games that I'm currently playing, and what I am currently *not* playing. Plus what I'll be playing in the foreseeable future.

Playing

World of Warcraft: It is easy to get misunderstood on the internet. I do try to write in a balanced way, not like blind fanboi. Which means that when writing about World of Warcraft I do mention all its shortcomings. No game is perfect! What people don't realize is that I write about WoW because I play WoW. And I play WoW because it is the very best game out there. Miles ahead of the competition. And the same thing is true in the details: I write about WoW raiding because I love all sorts of WoW group play, including raiding. The complaint is that raiding isn't available to enough people, not that raiding at the core is not fun. I'm currently very much at "the fun part" of raiding, killing bosses for the first time, getting phat loot, hanging out with friends in a relaxed raiding atmosphere, the lot. But that doesn't turn me blind towards the flaw in raiding design, the barriers of entry, the slow progress, the endless repeats necessary to advance. If I write about it, it is because I would love to see the system improved, not abolished. I think WoW could be even more awesome if raiding was more accessible to a larger percentage of the player base, and involved less "work". Your mileage may vary. Nevertheless, I'm having more fun in WoW than in any other game I have access to at the moment. Point.

Pirates of the Burning Sea: I just paid for the game including the free month, and I'll decide whether I'll keep playing at the end of that month. I do love ship combat, and I do love the PotBS economy system. Unfortunately the rest of the game is at best mediocre. And the nail in the coffin for me is negative sum PvP. To describe it in WoW terms: Imagine you wouldn't get any epics or other rewards in WoW raids, only the repair bill and the satisfaction of having beaten some boss. PotBS has PvP and port battles instead of raids as end game. But you can only lose stuff in them. Your ship sinks, your outfittings are gone, you blew through your ammo and consumables. And then you need to grind to make money to replace the stuff. The first gold sellers have been banned already, and that was before the release date, which is today! So I'm just playing my freetrader, playing with the economy to make lots of money, doing the occasional mission to have fun with the ship combat, and try to avoid PvP as much as I can. And you know what? If my side happens to win the map (which is likely given the fact that I joined the biggest faction), I'll get the same reward for that as everyone who lost lots of ships in PvP. Sooner or later the players are going to notice that PvP is a fool's errand in PotBS, and there is nothing else in the end game. And then they'll all switch to Age of Conan or whatever the latest game is that promises great PvP.

Not Playing

Lord of the Rings Online: LotRO is a good game. But it isn't quite as good as WoW, and in particular it has a lot less of content than WoW. I do think I did the right decision to take a lifetime subscription, because this is a game I plan to pick up again at a latter day, when I'm completely bored with WoW. But right now LotRO is on hold for me, while Turbine is busy adding content.

EQ2: After having tried it twice, I pretty much gave up on this game completely. Again not a bad game, but not accessible enough. I always feel that to play this I would first need to study various guides for half a year, EQ2 is so full of highly complicated features with little or no explanation in-game. If there were no other games, I would probably play it and take the time to learn all about these features. But when I just jumped in it left me in a state of permanent confusion, feeling lost and without a plan.

Any betas: The only beta I would have access to is Mythos, and that one is fun, but not something you'd want to spend large amounts of time on, as it gets a bit repetitive. I would love to get into betas of upcoming games like Age of Conan or Warhammer Online, and I applied, but never got an invitation. Guess I'll need to wait for an open beta, if there is one.

Will Be Playing

Wrath of the Lich King: Another $100 for Blizzard, two copies of WotLK for Mr. and Mrs. Tobold. Again, I love how Blizzard is producing excellent content and am looking forward to playing it. I don't love that they take far too long to produce an expansion, and I find the currently known list of features too short and unimaginative. But as I am sure that what little content there is in WotLK will be good, I'll certainly be buying and playing it.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning: My hopes for this game are very different than those of most people. Most people want another DAoC, I want another WoW. More specifically I have hopes that WAR will have an excellent PvE game, with 24 different classes to play through, lots of fun content, and some innovative new game concepts like public quests and the tome of knowledge. I do hope that I can avoid PvP for the most time, especially that I'll never be forced to do it, nor that WAR allows other players to gank me. I can see me trying out WAR PvP just for fun, but knowing myself I don't think I'll do it a lot. I don't think WAR will be quite as good as WoW, but it should provide an interesting diversion for a couple of months and be well worth the price of the box plus monthly fee (and yes I know the monthly fee will be higher than WoW's).

Age of Conan: I hope this game has an open beta and I won't be forced to buy it. But I do consider AoC important enough for me to have to at least try it. Even if I'm pretty sure I'll hate it. I don't like excessive violence, I don't like PvP, I don't like twitchy gameplay. I do like exploring new virtual worlds, and studying how game systems work. Enough to at least try it, but it would take a major miracle for AoC to distract me from playing WotLK and WAR.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:57 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
The BBC has news on virtual worlds

Diem alerted me to two articles from this week on the BBC news: The NASA wants to build a virtual world which would "simulate real NASA engineering and science missions". Apart from getting young people more interested in the NASA, the virtual world would also be used for training purposes of new personnel.

The second article is about EA's new online game Battlefield Heroes. Think the comic look from Team Fortress 2 (out of the Orange Box) combined with the gameplay of the old Battlefield games. Simplified play, low system requirements, and all financed by advertising and micro-payments. As the advertisments would look odd in the game world, they will be placed on the game's website and the launcher program. Battlefield Heroes is supposed to come out later this year, and will only be distributed online, no boxes in stores. I might have a look at that one.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:50 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Finished Karazhan

Last night my guild did an impromptu mini-raid on Karazhan, finishing off the last two remaining optional bosses: Illhoof and Netherspite. I came along, we killed both on the second try, and I have now downed every boss in Karazhan, if you count the opera as one boss. I still need to see the other two opera events, having only done Romulo and Julianne twice. I picked up a shiny new epic belt from Illhoof, and some more badges of justice. I think I need to spend an hour looking through WoW-Loot and make a list what items I need from what boss. But up to now the difference between "good blue" gear from dungeons and "average purple" gear from Karazhan isn't that great. I haven't had a single epic yet which was just plain better than what I was wearing before. It was always improving one stat by a little more while lowering another stat by a little less. The difference between T0 gear from Scholomance/Stratholme/UBRS and the epics from Molten Core was bigger.

I must say my guild is doing an excellent job of getting Karazhan raids together with a good mix of noobs like me who can still use most of the loot, and experienced raiders who make sure we don't wipe too often. On the more complicated encounters we might wipe once until the players there for the first time understand how it works, and then we down the boss on the second try. The easier fights we manage on the first try. Wiping repeatedly on the prince was really an exception. For once the small raid size of Karazhan is an advantage, because you need only a handful of experienced and well equipped raiders to complement another half consisting of new raiders, people who know their stuff and are equipped in decent blue gear but don't know Karazhan yet. And the badges of justice system helps there, because even somebody who has every single piece of loot in Karazhan can still use the 20+ badges from a complete run.

The downside of the raiding system for me comes now: X weeks of doing Karazhan over and over, until I have a set of gear that allows me to participate in the next stage of the raiding circuit. I am not saying that you don't need any skill to raid, but the real obstacles to raid progression are more often gear checks than skill checks. The whole system is designed to keep people occupied, to slow down their progress and force endless repetitions, because otherwise players would "finish" the game too fast. I'd much prefer a system where you'd advance a bit faster through the raid circuit and then the next expansion would come out faster. Blizzard being unable to produce expansions in a year or less is directly responsible for the raid grind system.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:01 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Guess the WAR and WotLK release dates!

As a blogger one often finds oneself in the situation to post some predictions. But as Niels Bohr said, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.", and with my blog in it's fifth year you'll be able to find numerous occasions where my predictions turned out to be dead wrong. I'm not selfish, so I want to pass on this opportunity to make an ass of yourself by predicting something totally wrong. The occasion is that I noticed in the discussion of the AoC release date that people have widely different opinions on when WAR and WotLK will be released, which obviously will have a huge impact on the success of other game releases this year. So tell me, when do YOU think that Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning and the second World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King will be released? To kick off the discussion, I'll start with the following predictions:

WAR: October 2008 (I don't believe in the official Q2 2008 release date.)

WotLK: December 2008 (And then they'll list TBC 2007, WotLK 2008, and claim to be right on target for their stated goal of one expansion per year.)

What dates do you predict?
- posted by Tobold @ 4:33 PM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Age of Conan delayed until May

Several readers alerted me that this weekends news of Funcom confirming a March release date for Age of Conan was already outdated by Monday. Age of Conan has now been delayed again until May 20. As Funcom still holds the record for the "worst MMORPG release ever" with Anarchy Online, I can understand why they don't want to risk a repeat performance. Beta testers leaked that some of the main features of AoC aren't yet implemented in the beta, so two more months can do the game only good.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:23 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Karazhan chess

As part of Saturday's Karazhan raid I had the opportunity to participate for the first time in the chess event. That was a lot of fun, even if I just stuck to the pawns, me being a noob. In the chess event you control a piece on a big chess board, where 16 Horde pieces face 16 Alliance pieces. You can only move from square to square, but combat is done with the pieces hitting each other with attacks and spells, trying to bring down the other piece's health just like regular WoW combat. Every piece has different abilities, and you win by killing the enemy king piece.

The Karazhan chess event is very easy, our guild refers to it as "free epics". Blizzard had to hotfix Karazhan once, giving stealth detection to some trash mobs on the way, after videos appeared on how to solo the chess event in an uncleared Karazhan by sneaking there. Apart from a joke on how chess was too hard for Alliance and would be changed to checkers, most guilds consider the event as a light entertainment interlude between harder fights. The strategy required is very basic, just kill the healers first and then concentrate on the king. And the pieces always have the same stats, so the players' gear and buffs make no difference whatsoever.

What did strike me most about this event is that I can't see any reason why it should be reserved for raiders able to get past Curator and the trash mobs. The chess event is a complete game inside the game, which obviously took a lot of effort to program, even more than a regular raid boss. And the ability of a raid group to win the chess event is in no way related to their ability to beat other bosses or trash. If they could just get there, any group of players could beat the chess event and get the epics. It is welfare epics for raiders, plus a free fun game thrown in. And the reason why it is so easy is that the pieces are well-balanced, but one side is controlled by a relatively stupid AI, while the other side is controlled by the players.

The same chess event would be a lot better if it was a 16 vs. 16 PvP battleground. Instead of choosing their piece, players would be randomly assigned one piece to control. As both sides would be controlled by players, and the board is symmetrical, the outcome just depends on player skill and a bit of luck. This would be the one PvP encounter where playing an overpowered / underpowered class or wearing full epics / only greens wouldn't matter. It would be real Player vs. Player, not Avatar vs. Avatar. Of course there wouldn't be epics at the end, but some honor points for both sides depending on how well their side fared, plus the usual victory marks. As a "free epics for raiders" thing the chess event is wasted, as a PvP battleground it would be extremely popular.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:40 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Does sex sell MMORPGs?

Adolescent boys feel a great curiosity towards the naked female body and depictions of sex. That is totally normal, a primal urge that goes back to a time where humans procreated with 15 and died at 30. Although video games generally have very little to do with sex, they often target a young male audience, and sex is an sometimes used marketing ploy to attract them. Just take E3 booth babes as example, although that practice has stopped with the reorganization of that video game trade show. Up to now there hasn't been much sex in MMORPGs, at least not officially, just some people having cybersex which is mostly text-based, with a couple of emotes. You can't even strip totally naked in a typical MMORPG, and the anatomy of avatars is of the Ken and Barbie kind. This is going to change when end of March Age of Conan comes out, the first MMORPG with a mature rating and naked female avatars as a major feature in marketing. Is that going to sell?

First of all, besides the marketing, there are perfectly good artistic reasons to have this sort of mature content in the Age of Conan game. The Conan the Barbarian stories and books of Robert E. Howard date back to the 1920's and 30's, and are sexist by modern standards, although they contain also strong female characters. A politically correct Conan would jar, you can't be both a barbarian and politically correct. But one man's laudable sticking to the source is another man's cheesy marketing ploy. By stressing the "mature" rating of the game Funcom obviously hopes to attract some people that are only interested in the mature parts of sex and violence.

But I have my doubts whether being the "MMORPG with boobs" is going to be such a strong selling point. If somebody under 17 wants to play a mature ratings online game, he obviously needs unsupervised internet access. And if he has that, Age of Conan might not necessarily be the most titillating content available. Why look at pixelated boobs of female avatars in AoC if the internet is full of free porn pictures and videos? While some people claim that social networks are now more popular than porn, the actual "percentage" of porn on the internet is disputed, as it depends on whether you count sites, visitors, or amount of data transfered. For example one study found porn to be 13% of all Bittorrent traffic, while another government study found only 1% of sites indexed by Google being pornographic in content. But I think we can all agree that there is plenty of pornography on the internet, and that an average teenage boy would have no problem finding it, even if his parents wasted money on some filter software, which never works.

So funnily enough it might be more the violence and gore part of the mature rating that will actually sell Age of Conan. The sex part will result in a couple of headlines and protests from attention seeking politicians, but I don't think it will actually drive the sales of the game. In the end much will depend on whether Age of Conan is any good, and not on how many naked pixels it contains.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:04 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Second half Karazhan

I haven't exactly "finished" Karazhan yet, but now I visited the second half of it, and killed the end boss, the prince. Now that felt more like a real raid and not easy mode raiding, because it took us about 10 attempts before the prince died. In the end we managed it, by letting our druid tank instead of our paladin. I might be prejudiced, but I'd say that we were missing a warrior tank. Anyway, the whole raid from Nightbane to the prince took 7 hours, including having to clear respawned trash mobs again.

I picked up an off-hand healing item from Aran, and a necklace that was more a damage caster one from the prince. I would have loved the priest/warrior/druid helmet token the prince dropped, but our druid needed it too and well deserved it. I don't know what it is, but I found that strangely in this round of raiding I care a lot less about loot than back in the days of Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. I'd rather not fight and see everybody get something and be happy.

Wiping didn't bother me. But I must admit that after 7 hours of straight raiding I was knackered, and my performance in the last fights was probably less than optimal, due to fatigue. And I had run out of potions, in spite of having brought 14 each of elixir of healing power, elixir of major mageblood, and 10 super mana potions. Are there any flasks that give healing bonus? For repeated wipes that might be better than elixirs.

I am going to spend this Sunday farming gold and herbs with my warrior, to finance the expensive raiding habit of my priest. You might have heard the news that some guy discovered the hard way that the maximum amount of gold you can have in WoW is 214,748 gold. But I can assure you that the guy was not a raider. Only casual players ever get rich in World of Warcraft.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:31 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Age of Conan release date

Nobody believes in the release dates that game shops list, those are often just rough estimates. But for once they got it right, Funcom confirmed the release date for Age of Conan to be March 25. The guys from Funcom obviously share everybody's belief that there will be a major clash of release dates between WotLK and WAR in the second half of this year, and are trying to get their game out well in advance of that. Which can work if, and only if, Age of Conan is polished enough and fun on release. Unfortunately there are rumors to the contrary. And being the "MMO with boobs" isn't going to save them if they release a game of Vanguardian state of readiness.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:08 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Spending Badges of Justice

There are so many things you can buy for badges of justice, you end up having difficulties to decide. But for once I indulged myself and instead of saving for some healing item, I took something that will help my priest a lot when soloing: the Carved Witch Doctor's Stick. The stats are okay-ish for a healer, but the important thing is the 175 damage per second. My previous wand only had 125 dps. As soloing with a holy priest consists of bubbling up and killing mobs with your wand, wand damage is extremely important. This wand is excellent for me. I'll buy some healing stuff with the next batch of badges. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 3:31 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Looking epic

Another Karazhan with my guild, who has done that far more often than me. Thus for me it is kind of an "easy mode" raid. Which doesn't mean I'm slacking, my healing and shackling went pretty well. We went until the Curator, and included the opera. Romeo and Juliet again, but apparently these two like me, because last time I got a healing trinket from Romulo, and this time I got the Masquerade Gown from Julianna. Good run for the guild insofar as nearly everyone got something, and we didn't need to disenchant or vendor anything.

For my priest the main effect of his new robe is that as epic robe the thing just looks better than non-epic stuff. Which made me think of this cartoon. How important is looking epic to you?
- posted by Tobold @ 12:07 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Online games called "spiritual opium"

Karl Marx famously said that "World of Warcraft is opium for the masses". Ooops, no, I got him mixed up with senior Chinese official Kou Xiaowei, who just said "Although China's online gaming industry had been hot in recent years, online games are regarded by many as a sort of spiritual opium and the whole industry is marginalized by mainstream society." Online game sales in China in 2007 were $1.46 billion, a more than 60% increase over the year before. There are 40 million online game players in China. So now the Chinese state wants to crack down on "undesirable elements of online games", and I don't think they are talking about gold spammers.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:17 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Looking beyond 2008

John Maynard Keynes, an economist, countered some argument on some expected development in the long run with the words "in the long run, we are all dead". That is certainly true, but shouldn't be used as excuse to only look ahead for a very short period. In his own slightly crazy and rambling way Jeff Freeman writes an excellent parody on the current frequently heard assumption that WoW is the end of MMORPG development. Some people assume that WoW lifted the barrier of entry into the MMORPG market so high that nobody will be able to overcome it. People decry the subscription model as dead, and suggest we should head for the hills of cheap free-to-play virtual worlds. Can that be the future of MMORPGs?

I don't think so. The lure of big profits will be too great. Yes, making another World of Warcraft might cost $50 to $100 million of investment, but what is that compared with WoW's current $500 million of annual profit? There aren't all that many projects with a possible annual payout of five to ten times the investemnt. Just like Jaws or Titanic didn't kill the film industry, World of Warcraft won't kill the MMORPG industry, just the opposite. We will see lots of failures like Vanguard on the way, from people thinking that because all subscription based MMORPG cost about the same monthly fee they can make a game with a fraction of the budget that WoW had and still rake in millions. Some games, like LotRO will be small successes, making a decent profit compared with their investment cost. But sooner or later we will see another big budget MMORPG with millions of subscribers. The idea that one company, Blizzard, could hold the financial and skill monopoly on making successful MMORPGs forever is laughable. Half the people who made WoW are already working for other companies.

When you hear people telling you that another blockbuster MMORPG is impossible, have a look at their background. Maybe they already produced games that weren't quite as successful, and need a good excuse to explain why they couldn't succeed. Or they have some free-to-play game, in-game advertising model or microtransaction platform for sale, and try to distract your attention from the fact that none of these business models has ever made that much money as the monthly subscription fee model. They'll tell you about the 11 million "residents" of Second Life, failing to mention that the peak concurrent user number is 55,000, or 1/200th of the number of residents. You'll make more money showing your ad in the commercial break of a TV emission of Plan 9 from Outer Space (supposedly the worst film ever) than from putting it up in Second Life!

Meanwhile Brenden from Another There finds this gem of current bestsellers at Gamestop.com, showing 7 out of 8 games in the list being MMORPGs with a monthly subscription fee. Many companies have MMORPGs that are selling well enough to make a good profit, so they are gaining both expertise and money, which they might want to invest one day in a bigger game. Even if you remove World of Warcraft from the equation, there are currently more MMORPG players than ever, and MMORPGs are one of the major contributors that keep PC gaming alive against the competition of console gaming. And while we don't know whether Warhammer Online will really be released in 2008, nobody really expects that game to flop.

World of Warcraft might be called the first blockbuster MMORPG, but it certainly won't be the last one.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:51 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Reacting to Deathknights

Do you feel threatened by deathknights? If you are currently playing a warrior in World of Warcraft, you probably do. When recently a reader suggested that Blizzard might surprise us with a sudden announcement of WotLK coming out in 4 weeks, unlikely as it is, my first thought was "and then what do I do with my warrior?". While in the long run the class roles will probably balance out, in the short run we can expect a rush of deathknights. And I'm simply worried of not getting any invites to groups any more, because wherever I apply I'm told "we don't need a warrior, we already have two deathknights".

The specific problem is that when WotLK comes out I will have at least two, if not three level 70 characters, and I don't know which of them to level first: warrior, priest, or mage (if mage gets to 70 by then). Now some people will reply to that with the common platitude of "play whatever is most fun", but that is just rephrasing my question. I don't know which character will be most fun, because that depends not only on myself, but also on the environment around me. I have most fun in groups, thus the character most likely to get into groups usually ends up being the most fun.

I was thinking of leveling up the warrior first, as long as there aren't any deathknights around yet. I mean, there certainly will be one crazy guy somewhere leveling up his existing level 70 to 80, do the deathknight unlock quest, and level up the new deathknight from 60 to 80, all in the first week after the WotLK release. But the large inflow of Deathknights, where half the server is playing one, is more likely to happen a few weeks later. Meanwhile I could level up my warrior from 70 to 80, and already visit all the new dungeons before two much competition for the tank spot is around.

Of course it is totally possible that deathknights aren't actually competition for the tank spot in a group, but more like fury warrior off-tanks. From the announcements it appears that deathknights should be better damage dealers than warriors. It would be really bad design if they were also better tanks, because then the whole warrior class would be obsolete. The question is whether deathknights are "good enough" tanks for groups to accept them on the tank spot. Or will there be groups of 3 deathknights shouting for a tank and a healer?

Leveling my holy priest up in groups shouldn't be a problem, there should always be a demand for healers. It is more a question of timing, first leveling the warrior while there aren't too many deathknights around, then leveling the priest when there are many of them, all looking for somebody to heal them. The mage I am not so attached to. He is obviously much easier to solo than a protection warrior or holy priest. But I haven't got much group experience with him yet, as he is only level 47 and there aren't exactly a lot of groups below level 60. And of course I haven't invested thousands of hours into that character, as I have into the two others.

What do you think will the deathknight do to the class balance in World of Warcraft? Will there suddenly be an abundance of possible tanks? Or will deathknights just be one of many classes vying for the "random" slot in a group after a tank and healer has been found?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:08 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
I think I owe Flying Lab money

On a larger scale we are used to measure the success of a MMORPG by the number of subscribers it attracts. On an individual scale the number of months that a particular game keeps us entertained is a more pertinent measure. Anything longer than three months I consider good enough, and anything over one year is huge success (only EQ and WoW ever did that for me). Pirates of the Burning Sea is in the "over 3 months of entertainment" category, but not in the "over 1 year" one. Which wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't already playing PotBS since August. I'm in the pre-order period where I would be expected to race to the level cap, but fact is that I can't even bother to log on every day. The game hasn't really launched yet, but is already dangerously close to the end of its useful life for me.

The logical thing to do for me would be to not buy PotBS. But that would send the wrong message. Pirates of the Burning Sea isn't a bad game, it is just lacking PvE content, and I'm not much interested in the PvP content. Yesterday's last-minute-before-release patch *removed* quests from the various starting areas, to make it less obvious that the devs initially had created only one set of quests and then copied and pasted it into all four starting areas. Now most of these quests will be only available to one or two of the four nations, so if you try another nation you're not playing the same quests again. Clever trick, but the devs had a point in that there were more than enough quests available for low level players, and culling them differently for the various nations made more sense than deleting the same quest for all of them. For all its flaws and third world UI, I enjoyed my time in PotBS, and wouldn't want to discourage other companies from making niche games like that.

So I'll buy the game next Monday, and recheck my interest level at the end of the free month. That's the least I owe them for playing the game half a year. My hope is that the economy develops new dynamics due to having more players than the closed beta. My fear is that lots of players means lots of ports under contention, making it harder and harder to avoid PvP. I do believe that negative sum PvP is probably the worst endgame option you can think off, but PotBS has exactly that: and endgame in which everybody will continuously lose ships, consumables, and outfittings and get nothing but bragging rights in return.

But then I'm playing the only class in the game that isn't PvP enabled: the freetrader. Imagine in World of Warcraft one class, lets say hunters, would be much, much weaker in raids, but much, much better in farming gold. Now imagine that guilds would say to their hunters: "we won't take you with us to raids, as you would weaken us. But you can stay in the guild and farm gold for us, handing it over to the raiders so they can pay their repair bills". If you can wrap your head around that crazy situation, you'll be ready to play a freetrader. Freetraders are considerably weaker in combat than the other three classes, so they have a harder time leveling and won't be welcome in guild PvP "raids". But they are better in the economic game, and some advanced ships can only be built by them. So hardcore guilds will want to have a couple of freetraders in their ranks, but wouldn't want really to play with them, but just expect them to provide the guild with advanced ships at below market rates. I don't think this setup is on the right way for a harmonious guild life.

I don't think many people will play Pirates of the Burning Sea for more than half a year. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't play this game at all. If you haven't played PotBS before, it certainly has a couple of months of entertainment value in it. And it is significantly different from past games like WoW, or the games expected for 2008 like AoC and WAR, to be considered a break from the regular fantasy MMO monotony. I'm all for highly polished mass market MMORPGs, but I wouldn't want them to be the only thing on offer.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:28 PM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Happy Birthday, Burning Crusade!

Today is the first birthday of the Burning Crusade expansion of World of Warcraft. The most noticeable thing about this event is the missing expected guest at the birthday party: Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion. Blizzard clearly failed their declared goal of one expansion per year. WotLK doesn't even appear to be anywhere close, the best guess for it's release is November 2008, 4 years after the release of World of Warcraft, and thus bringing the average to one expansion every two years. Blizzard is famous for being obsessed with quality, which is a good thing. But I can't believe they couldn't have used some of their $500 million profit to hire a bunch more people and get expansions out faster. As a WoW expansion is like printing money, a guaranteed 10 million box sales, I'm sure there is a strong business case for producing expansions faster. And the players would certainly like it.

The Burning Crusade turned out to be better than I originally thought. Nevertheless I do stand to my statement from last year that while TBC is nice enough, it doesn't offer sufficient content to occupy everyone until the next expansion. But lets have a look at what the Burning Crusade offered us over the last 12 months.

Of course on release a large number of people were mostly interested in leveling up their characters to 70. Leveling up from 60 to 70 was fun: the quests were of somewhat higher quality than those in the old world, and the loot and quest rewards were much, much better. Only point of criticism on the leveling game is low replayability: Every single level 60 character, Horde or Alliance, goes through the nearly the same quests in the same Hellfire Peninsula zone. Blizzard realized that flaw, and Wrath of the Lich King will have multiple entry zones.

At level 70 the endgame of the Burning Crusade turned out to be in many respects better than the level 60 endgame. The reputation grinds were less grindy (unless you hate instances). The number of possible 5-man instances to go to was larger. And if those 5-man instances got too easy for you, you could always visit them in heroic mode for better rewards. Subsequent patches added daily quests, which made farming money feel less like a treadmill and more fun. Crafting at level 70 was more useful than at level 60, but that turned out to be a mixed blessing: Yes, you now could craft really nice epics which weren't totally useless compared to the other loot available, and that was good. But the downside of that was that you obviously can't give out epics too easily, so getting them involves a lot of farming primals, which gets boring rather fast.

The Burning Crusade raid endgame wasn't such a big success, at least not from the point of view of the majority of players. Reducing the size of the entry level raid dungeon from 40 to 10 players didn't achieve it's stated goal of making raiding more accessible. It turned out that in an average guild a 40 man Molten Core raid contained a mix of more dedicated and less dedicated players. There was a certain amount of room for "slackers", not everybody had to be at the top of their game all of the time. While that was a bit annoying for those who did most of the work in a raid, overall the system was good for the social cohesion of a guild. There was a possibility to take less experienced people on a raid and teach them the basics of raiding on the go. The entry level raid of the Burning Crusade doesn't have room for slackers, as there are only 10 people in the raid. There is less opportunity to take friends, or to train newer players. As an added problem the higher level raids after Karazhan required 25 players. Many guilds had one A team breezing through Karazhan after a while, and a B team that was still struggling. So when the A team wanted to move on, they found that they were lacking 15 people for the next raid dungeon. Some guilds managed to organize their Karazhan raid groups better, having two or more groups of equal strength instead of an A and B team. But in many other guilds the A team left to join another guild's A team to have enough players for the following content. The system was responsible for a large amount of guild drama and reshuffling. Fortunately that sorted itself out after a couple of months, and the introduction of another 10-man raid dungeon, Zul'Aman, helped too.

But if you were to log on tonight an count the percentage of players in raid dungeons, you'd notice that there are less people raiding nowadays than in the level 60 endgame. PvE raiding is now relatively less popular, for the simple reason that PvP has become more popular. This is a simple result of PvP mudflation: Arena seasons are much shorter than the time between two expansion in WoW. And every new arena season introduces even better rewards. And to make sure that new players can keep up with people in season 3 arena gear, season 1 arena gear has been made available for honor points, and is relatively easy to achieve. While Blizzard shouldn't have allowed Tigole to belittle them as "welfare epics", fact is that it is now easier to get a nice set of epics from PvP than from PvE raiding. That confirmed a widespread suspicion that some people were just raiding for the phat loot, because now these people aren't raiding any more, they are doing PvP.

PvP being relatively more popular isn't necessarily a bad thing (even if on underpopulated servers it makes it hard to find PvE groups). After all the Warcraft background is one that would presume a lot more PvP to take place. And as a defensive move against a wave of upcoming PvP-centric games, making PvP more popular in WoW is certainly a clever idea. Unfortunately if the people doing the PvP are only there for the phat loot, you can expect a certain amount of exploiting going on, and PvP is less safe against exploiting than PvE is. There are people doing AFK honor farming in battlegrounds, people buying themselves a spot in top arena teams, win trading (also called "smurfing"). So while now more people are doing PvP, the players who actually enjoy PvP for PvP's sake are less happy now, because the exploiters spoil their fun. Blizzard is well aware of the problem, but their first attempts to stop AFK honor farming haven't been very successful, and they have to come up with new ways to stop PvP exploiting.

The Burning Crusade didn't add new classes to the game, but it added one new race per faction, and via this new race made the classes that were previously restricted to one faction available to the other. So now there are bloodelf paladins for the Horde and draenei shamans for the Alliance. With the new races came new newbie zones up to level 20. And patch 2.3 added new quests in the level 35 to 40 range, where previously there weren't enough of them. Also leveling from level 20 to 60 has been sped up with the patch. All this lead to many people leveling alts nowadays.

So all in all the Burning Crusade has reason to celebrate on its first birthday. Things didn't go flawless, but well enough. Subscriber numbers went up when TBC was released, then went down a few months later, but went slightly up again after the summer and are pretty much stable now. This was helped by a lack of serious contenders in 2007. The coming months risk being harder for World of Warcraft: if Warhammer Online is released well before Wrath of the Lich King, the combination of not much new happening in the old game and the promises of a new game could lead to a noticeable migration towards WAR. Evil tongues say that the relative release dates of WAR and WotLK are of such importance that neither side dares to announce a fix release date. Images of Wild West gunfighters staring at each other at high noon in the main street of Tombstone for hours without moving come to mind, waiting for the other to draw first. Let's hope that under these conditions Wrath of the Lich King makes it before the Burning Crusade's second birthday.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:57 AM Permanent Link  (30) comments Links to this post

 
Should all alts be able to start at level 60 in WotLK?

Details about the next World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, are still sparse. But from the initial announcement it appeared as if the new class, Deathknights, would not have to start the game from level 1. Instead they would directly start at a higher level, with 58, 60, or even 70 being mentioned as possibilities. Let's say 60, just to spare me the effort of writing "58, 60, or 70" or "a high level" every time.

Now there are good arguments for and against having new characters start at level 60. The advantage is obviously that if you are mainly interested in the endgame, starting at level 60 saves you about 200 hours of leveling from 1 to 60. The expansion adds little or no content for levels 1 to 60, so the option to skip those will be welcome to some. The disadvantage is that a level 60 character already starts with a large number of spells and abilities, and 51 talent points. Not having gone through the leveling process, players don't get the time to learn these spells, abilities and talents slowly, but have to start learning to swim at the deep end of the pool.

But now lets say we are okay with Blizzard's decision that Deathknights start at level 60. Then why would somebody making a Deathknight alt start at level 60, while somebody making a warrior alt, or an alt of any other class, will still have to level up from 1 to 60? The *option* to start at level 1 has to keep existing, for players new to WoW, or fans of the old world for example. But if we can start level 60 Deathknights, why not give us the option to start level 60 priests or other character classes? As I said, there are good arguments to start all classes at level 1, but if one class gets the option to start at level 60, then why not all of them? The same arguments that speak for allowing Deathknights to start at level 60 should surely be valid for other classes as well!
- posted by Tobold @ 4:05 PM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post

 
Star Trek Online cancelled

Warcry reports that Star Trek Online has been cancelled. Well, not officially cancelled, but the company that used to be called Perpetual and used to have the license to make Star Trek Online had to give back the license. Some other company could now restart developing the game, but they won't get any existing code from Perpetual.

Scott Jennings calls it an impossible license. But apparently the reasons for Perpetual giving up the license are less about design possibilities, and more about financial possibilities. Perpetual already cancelled Gods & Heroes which was already in the beta and had pre-order boxes shipped to retailers. And they did some clever legal and financial engineering, including creating a new company, P2 Entertainment, and transferring all their assets including the Star Trek Online license to that new entity. People who were owed money by the old Perpetual sued them over that move. Investors had to write off their investments, as the old Perpetual went bankrupt.

For us players all that just means that we won't see a Star Trek Online game before 2015, if ever.

[Edit: Rumors have it that the new STO developer will be Cryptic Studios.]
- posted by Tobold @ 1:06 PM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Listen to me! Or rather not

There has been some discussion lately in the MMO blogosphere whether game developers should listen more to the proposals from players and bloggers on how to improve their games. Hey, I get 3,000 readers a day, I'm obviously qualified to improve a game with 9 million subscribers and annual revenues of over $1 billion. NOT. Everyone is an armchair game designer, but it is only easy because our ideas never get realized and thus don't have to prove they actually work. If you poll people about their intelligence, a majority of people will claim to have above average intelligence, and only very few people will say they have below average intelligence. As obviously only half of a population can have above average intelligence, with the other half being below, this just shows that people have a tendancy to overestimate their abilities. Most of us, me included, couldn't even design Vanguard, and certainly not World of Warcraft.

Listening to players and bloggers has the added problem that the players who write their opinion about a game are already just a small minority of the total population, and not necessarily representative. In fact it is often said that some developers listen *too much* to the opinions of a small vocal minority of hardcore players. You really don't want the devs to follow all the "nerf " cries from the official forums.

That doesn't mean that game forums or blogs couldn't be an important resource for game developers. They just have to be handled right. One approach is to take ideas from all of these player sources and use them in brainstorming sessions. I don't know if you ever did a real brainstorming, but the process there is to first collect a large number of ideas, even crazy ones, and then sort them out later. As a provider of crazy "out of the box" ideas, the internet can't be beat.

The other approach is to listen to player concerns and verify whether they are true. For example me and other people often state that too much development time is spent on creating content that ends up being seen by a too small percentage of the player base. But of course we have no data whatsoever what it did cost to develop the Black Temple, and our data via WoWJutsu on how many players visited it are at best incomplete. Blizzard obviously has much better data than we have. They should know how much it really did cost to create that raid dungeon. They should know how many people are visiting it. And they should know how many people quit the game after having reached level 70, not visited a raid dungeon, and wrote "nothing more to do" in their small exit interview form. There are hard facts that business managers at Blizzard should have access to, and where it is not only their right, but even their job, to challenge the developers to come up with a solution. Running a MMORPG is a business, and the churn rate is extremely important for the profitability of the game. World of Warcraft is very successful, and very profitable, but that doesn't mean that there is no way to improve it.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:12 AM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
Coming late to PotBS

I received an e-mail from a reader who is worried about "missing the boat" (pun intended) because he didn't get into the pre-order period of Pirates of the Burning Sea. As I thought my answers might be interesting to other people, I'm posting his questions and my answers here:

Q: 1) Regarding the economy you mentioned the early stages as expected were very chaotic and enabled players to make some quick easy money. Is the level of money that can be earned by those in the pre-order stage large enough to give them a significant foothold in the market and dominate the economy in the mid-term or is it peanuts in comparison to what the economy that will develop into? How long will it take newcomers to get their own foothold into the economy?

A: The great majority of wealth in Pirates of the Burning Sea is produced in real time in the form of stored labor. In the beta it was perfectly possible even when the economy was stable to make about 100 doubloons per hour of labor stored. As you have 10 structures per account and 24 hours per day, you can thus make 24,000 doubloons per day. And for that you only need an investment in the order of magnitude of one day's profit. Spend 24,000 doubloons once, and make 24,000 doubloons every day. Even if in the retail game the economy turns out to be much more efficient and thus the value of one hour of labor lower, investment cost in Pirates of the Burning Sea is low compared to profits. So somebody starting new in the retail version, if he knows what he is doing, can make money with missions for a day or two, and then build up a production chain which produces exactly as much profit as that of somebody who has been in the preorder period.

Money is very easy to come by in Pirates of the Burning Sea. I currently have around 150k doubloons, and that is after demolishing one production chain and building up another. A level 21 frigate goes for around 30k, and a crate of typical cannon ammo with 100 shot costs just 120 doubloons. At the end of the closed beta I had 750k doubloons, and the main problem was that I didn't know what to spend it on. So sure, I might have a quarter of a million doubloons advantage over somebody starting the game only on the 22nd, but that isn't going to help me much.

Q: 2) With regards to the ability to reach level 20 before the official date, how significant is this. Will late comers be able to quickly catch up, or will those who got into pre-order continue to stay three weeks ahead of the levelling curve and dominate from a level persepective?

A: Pirates of the Burning Sea is not a hard game to level. I saw the first level 21 player on day two, and now after one week there are already a lot of level 21s. I'd expect late comers to catch up quickly, if they want. As with all MMORPGs, this is more a question of how many hours per week you are planning to play. I would guess a lot of hardcore players went for the pre-order, and will level to 50 very quickly after the cap is lifted and try to dominate the PvP game. But the pre-order period of two weeks is less advantage as it sounds, because you can get to the same level in much less than two weeks. And unlike WoW, where time spent in the end-game raiding will give you better gear necessary for even higher raid dungeons, the level cap of Pirates of the Burning Sea is much harder. It isn't so hard to get the best possible ship (although for Naval Officers that needs some farming of royal commendations), and then that's it. Only player skill and organization then makes a difference in PvP battles. You might get crushed by an enemy hardcore PvP guild, but not because they have "T6" ships, because those simply don't exist.

PvP in Pirates of the Burning Sea is dominated by hardcore guilds, especially in the coming months where the hardcore will already have reache level 50 and the casual not yet. Port contention participation is capped to 24 players per side, and the players who contributed the most to throwing the port into contention have the highest chance to be selected to the battle. Which means that guilds will "raid" enemy ports by throwing them into contention on one day, and fighting the contention battle on the next day, with little or no participation of solo players. The organization and out-of-game tools like voice chat will give a guild a big advantage over a random assembly of defenders. So if you want to kick ass in PvP, membership in a top PvP guild will be far more important than the two weeks of pre-order leveling.

In summary, as I said before, the people playing the pre-order game are more doing Flying Labs and the players coming later a favor than gaining an advantage for themselves. A retail player will have the option of buying a reasonably priced Bermuda sloop at level 8, or a Mediator cutter at level 12, while the pre-order players either had no player-built ships available at all, or had to sail to the other end of the world to buy an overpriced one. Retail players will also have access to cheap ship outfittings, ammo, and consumables from day one. The only lasting difference is that most of the pre-order players are already beta veterans, with lots of experience in how the game is played, while among the new players there will be many setting foot into the game for the very first time. Whether it is economy or PvP, experience is definitely an advantage.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:45 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
A watery mini-rant

As I said I leveled my WoW mage from 44 to 47 this weekend. And that again made me wonder why they set up the mage's summon water spell the way it is. The various drinks that recover mana have a level restriction, and that restriction goes up in steps of 10 levels. There is level 5 drinks, level 15 drinks, level 25 drinks, level 35 drinks, level 45 drinks, and so on. So when you hit level 45, you naturally prefer the level 45 drink, which gives three thousand mana over the level 35 drink which gives only two thousand.

The mage water summoning spells also increase every 10 levels. But instead of going up at levels 15, 25, 35 and 45, they go up at levels 20, 30, 40, and 50 etc. Thus a level 45 to 49 mage can only summon level 35 water, and ends up rather using the level 45 water he can buy for cheap enough. Then at level 50 to 54 he'll use his summoned level 45 water, until at level 55 it again becomes better to use bought water.

Why can't I summon level 45 water at level 45, where I need it?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:04 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Efficient leveling in World of Warcraft

Yesterday's post was about how a badly designed reward system ends up with players pursueing wrong goals, and playing in a way which isn't the most fun. This weekend I leveled my mage from 44 to 47, doing quests over a wide level range. And it struck me that the way World of Warcraft hands out xp for quests and killing mobs isn't necessarily promoting fun, because it doesn't encourage players to challenge themselves. The most efficient way to level in WoW isn't the most fun one.

Doing quests and leveling up has one inherent feature which is very good: Adjustable difficulty. You can choose between quests that are below your level, at your level, or above your level. The lowest level quest you can get (still green, not grey) is generally trivially easy, while the hardest red quest you can accept will be very, very difficult to solo. Ideally the game should be designed in a way that challenges players to try difficult stuff, thus the rewards for doing quests and killing mobs higher than you should be better, or at least equal, to doing the easy stuff. Unfortunately that isn't the case in WoW. Rewards per kill or per quest go up with the level of quest. But the difficulty and time needed goes up or down exponentially with the level difference, while the xp rewards go up linearly. Thus if you want to maximize xp per hour, you best do trivially easy quests of 3 to 5 levels below yours.

This is true for all classes, but playing a mage makes it very easy to see. As I mentioned before my mage is exclusively equipped with gear and consumables that increase spell damage (+276 to frost spells at the moment). With this setup, if I attack a mob 3 levels below my level at maximum range with a frostbolt and just keep spamming frost bolts as fast as possible, the mob usually dies before even reaching me. That is because I just need about 3 frost bolts to kill such a mob, the first that attracts it's attention and two more that hit the mob while it is moving towards me, slowed by the first frostbolt. 3 frostbolts don't cost much mana, so I can target the next mob right away, and kill quite a number of mobs before running out of mana and having to drink.

A mob of about my level is less trivial, because it won't be dead after 3 frostbolts. I might get lucky and get criticals, or proc a frostbite rooting the mob in place. But generally the mob will reach me, so I have to do something else but frostbolts. I can use Ice Barrier, a damage absorption shield, and just keep firing frostbolts while standing still. Or I can freeze the mob in place with frost nova, take a step back, and then hit him with frostbolts again, which now have a much increased crit chance due to talents. The increased number of frostbolts I need, and the other spells I need to avoid getting damaged too much, cost more mana, so I can kill only two or three mobs before running out of mana and having to rest to recover it. If I attack a mob 3 levels higher than me, I need even more evasive action, like blinking around. And I need even more frostbolts or other damage spells to kill him. Which means that after one fight, I'm either already out of mana, or at least don't have enough left to start a second fight like that.

Now look at the xp table for WoW. At my level, 47, I get 280 xp for killing a mob of my level. I get 20 xp less per level difference for lower level mobs, and 14 xp more per level difference for higher level mobs. Thus a level 49 mobs brings 308 xp, while a level 45 mob brings 240 xp. But given the huge difference in difficulty between killing a mob two levels above me and killing a mob two levels below me, I can easily kill two level 45 mobs in the time it would take me to kill one level 49 mob. And as the two level 45 mobs are worth 480 xp, that is much better than killing one level 49 mob for 308 xp. I'm over 50% more efficient when killing the lower level mobs.

Talking of killing two mobs brings me to another obvious flaw in the xp reward system: Killing two mobs at once is much more difficult than killing them one after the other, but gives exactly the same amount of xp. Fortunately in WoW you usually follow quests, thus sometimes you're forced to take on several mobs at once. But if you were just xp grinding, the most efficient way would usually be choosing enemies that you can kill one by one. The possible exception is mages, who due to the fact that low level mobs still give decent xp if killed en masse and their possibilities to use AoE spells can do AoE xp farming.

Of course most players don't do math, calculating the maximum xp per hour they could gain. But if you look at the various leveling guides, whether the excellent free guides or the dubious ones where people try to get money from you for exactly the same information you could have gotten for free, you will see that they all advise doing quests a few levels below your level. Between the players who follow guides, and players who figured the advantage of farming lower level mobs out themselves, the xp reward system influences general player behavior. And unfortunately it encourages players to go for the safer option, as it is more profitable. I would claim that playing it safe isn't the most fun thing to do in a virtual world (although probably advisable in the real world). A reward structure that would encourage players to kill the highest level mobs they possibly can would be better, as it would get people to think more, and develop the best tactics. Not that WoW is likely to do a major revamp of their xp table. But developers should be more aware how simple things like the xp table end up determining the behavior of large numbers of players.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:14 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Moroagh on game design

Moroagh has a very interesting, but long, series of posts on game design: A parable, and a discussion (part 1, with a postscript, and part II) on how game developers should learn from observed player behavior, instead of condemning it as cheating. As that text is very long, and game developers probably don't have the time to read all that, I thought I would make it a bit easier for them, by condensing the message into one single phrase:

If a large number of your players repeatedly do something that you don't want them to do, there is something wrong with your design, not with the players!

The specific problem of MMORPGs is that the developers designed something they considered to be "a challenge", but players often end up considering it as "a grind", and start looking for ways to avoid that "challenge". They buy gold to avoid the challenge / grind of farming 5,000 gold themselves, they look up quest solutions when the quest description simply wasn't clear and wandering all over the map to find the target didn't seem fun, they go afk in Alterac Valley because fighting over that battleground gets old quicker than you collect the honor you need. If the players can't find a way to avoid the challenge, they give up instead of working hard for the goal the developers want them to strive for, end huge raid dungeons end up being basically unused.

Fact is that the amount of dedication and perseverance players are willing to invest into a game varies over a wide range. One player gives up after the first wipe, another only reluctantly stops trying after the 20th wipe because it is 3 am in the morning, and vows to come back the next day. That is a design problem, because the guy giving up too fast might get frustrated and leave because he finds the game too hard, but if you made the encounter easy enough to beat on the first try, the most dedicated players might find it too easy and leave because they are bored. Moroagh makes a good point in saying that "making people spend more effort in an escapist world instead of going out and actually doing something useful for society" is not a good idea. Especially if that "more effort" consists of repeatedly doing something you already mastered, like farming one raid dungeon again and again to get the gear to be able to try the next level, or farming gold or reputation.

The current generation of game designers, WoW included, have a tendency to set the required effort level too high, presumably because they don't want to risk players "finishing" the game. A reader wrote me to point out that if the analyst claiming that World of Warcraft has a monthly churn rate of 4 to 5% is right, there are more people leaving WoW every month than visiting the Black Temple. Of course people leave WoW for all sorts of reasons, but running out of content or hitting an obstacle beyond which you feel you can't progress is certainly high up on the list of possible reasons. You can't help but ask how many people more would keep playing WoW, if this large amount of high quality raid content would be made accessible for them.

There are actually two solutions to the problem: Either lower the amount of effort required in general, or present the same content with variable degrees of difficulty. No, there is no good reason why a specific encounter, boss mob, or raid dungeon has to be exactly *this* hard for everybody. It's just a bloody game, for god's sake! Many people play it to relax after a day of productive work; designing in a way that the MMORPG takes away from productive time is asking for trouble. The more reasonable players will just refuse and leave, and the more irreasonable players will risk their job and family pursueing false achievements, until politicians come down like a ton of bricks on the genre to save them. In China they already did.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:50 PM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
PotBS pre-order period

Keen and Graev have a good post on the Pirates of the Burning Sea pre-order period, remarking on the obvious danger of getting bored if you are in a PvP game where PvP is disabled for the moment. They also recommend leveling up by hunting high-level ships in a group in the open sea. Unfortunately that advice isn't all that great for freetraders, because if you sink the wrong ships, your reputation with the other nations goes down. That doesn't matter for other classes, but for a freetrader that can critically damage his ability to trade with other nations. Thus joining a group with other classes, who don't care and aren't selective in what they attack is not a good idea as a freetrader.

Unlike other games, the pre-order period for Pirates of the Burning Sea is more than a marketing ploy, it serves an important design purpose: building up the player-based economy. The game started with some seeded goods, and the first couple of days of the economy were pretty chaotic. For example my granite business: granite was seeded at 15, the seeded goods quickly were out, granite prices skyrocketed to 300, lots of people built granite quarries, and the price collapsed to around 40. Might fall further, might rebound, I got out of that business now anyway. The point is that this was done mostly by players who already had beta experience. By the time the less experienced players enter on January 22, the economy should have stabilized. And there should be lots of ships, outfitting, ammo, and consumables available. The pre-order players do get some advantage of making money and 20 levels earlier, but port contention PvP is reserved for the retail version.

And yes, building up the economy can be boring. After destroying my granite quarries, I moved my production to Yucatan. Which is quite far away, 20 minutes or so of travel. I had to go back and forth several times to transport stuff. And on many of these trips *absolutely nothing happened*. Sometimes you get attacked by NPC pirates, in which case it is very easy to run away, but if you are afk you lose your ship and cargo. Thus you are forced to watch your game while traveling large distances, which is extremely boring. I ended up using my new wide-screen monitor to run PotBS in a small window, while using the rest of the screen to surf the internet and blog. Building up the economy can be a hard slog. For most people the real fun only begins on the 22nd.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:36 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Sunday cleanup

I often get mail from people who want me to link to their website / blog / game. I always take the time to look at that site, and sometimes the decision is easy: If the site is nice and relevant to the subject of MMORPGs, I post a short article with a link. If it is a commercial site selling gold or guides, I don't post a link. But then I'm still stuck with a bunch of posts which fall somewhere in between. They aren't terribly relevant to me or to what I imagine are the interests of my readers. But they are nice sites or games, just a bit borderline to my usual scope. As I had a bunch of such posts recently, I decided to go for a compromise: I'm doing this one big post that cleans up my mailbox and links to each of those sites with just a short paragraph saying what it is. So lets start:

If you are interested in Backgammon, 1 On 1 Backgammon might be the site for you. It has lots of news and strategy articles on backgammon. Unfortunately it appears to be sponsored by commercial backgammon sites enticing you to play online for money, so be careful what links you click on there.

Writing about the games you play, like I do, is not for everyone. Some people would prefer to just film their in-game adventure. WeGame is there to help, and is now in public beta. They offer a tool that helps you to create a video from your game, and you can upload the resulting game videos to their site. The YouTube for gamers, so to say.

But maybe you want to blog, just not all alone on a classic blog site like Blogger? MMODiary.com offers you a space to blog, plus a community of other MMO bloggers to exchange with. It's a combined MMO blog and social network site.

Beyond Protocol is a massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game (MMORTS). Not quite my cup of tea, but maybe you like RTS games and prefer them in a massively multiplayer environment. The game plays in a Sci Fi environment, where you build a space empire and control fleets of space ships battling other players.

Last mail in my mailbox wasn't even asking for a link. It was just the guys from Mythos, Flagship's free MMO, telling me they are expanding their beta. And as I am already beta tester, I can send out three invitations. So if you are interested in Mythos, which is a simple, but fun game, the first three people asking me for a beta invite will receive one. As reward for having read this post unto the end. :) [EDIT: all invites gone, you can stop asking]
- posted by Tobold @ 7:57 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
How do you even compare games?

Russell Williams, CEO of Flying Lab, the makers of Pirates of the Burning Sea, made some very interesting comments on Mystic Worlds. He says:

We’re not using WoW as our yardstick. We don’t have 65 million dollars, huge teams, or a backlog of work to draw upon. And that’s why we didn’t build another fantasy game, because we knew we’d be a fly on WoW’s windshield. Frankly, if what you’re looking for is a game that matches WoW on this level, you may as well just stop playing new MMOs until Bioware comes out with theirs, or you’re always going to be disappointed.

What I can tell you is that our ship combat kicks ass. Period. And it’s a damn sight better than WoW’s. We have to do new and different things to differentiate ourselves because for all of WoW’s strengths, it’s not everything. I do think you’ll be happy with us going into the future, because now that we’ve finished the foundations of the game, we’re just going to keep polishing and expanding it.

And yeah, he is totally right. PotBS's ship combat is way better than WoW's. Because WoW doesn't have any. But the comparison is still important because people are not going to buy PotBS for the features that are similar to those of WoW, they are going to buy it for the features that WoW doesn't offer: ship combat, production and trade, conquering cities with PvP, etc.

I think the people that should get nervous when Pirates of the Burning Sea comes out are the makers of EVE. Because PotBS's feature overlap more with EVE's, and in many aspects Pirates of the Burning Sea is more accessible and more user friendly than EVE.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:46 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Pirates of the Burning Sea is too expensive

Pirates of the Burning Sea is a game with many good points. Keen and Graev just pointed out one, the great ability to search a PotBS database in game by pressing F1. I keep liking the economy game and the ship-to-ship combat. But then I hear that Flying Lab Software has announced the subscription price scheme, and one month of PotBS costs $14.99 (with the usual reductions for longer subscription periods), the same as World of Warcraft. Only PotBS is no WoW!

Warcry had a recent editorial about The Year the Subscription Model Died. They say that post World of Warcraft new MMORPGs with a subscription business model failed to attract more than a quarter of a million subscribers, while free games like Club Penguin, Second Life, or Habbo Hotel attract millions of players. Doh! Stop the press! Headline: "People prefer free stuff over having to pay for it!"

If you have two restaurants sitting right next to each other, and one is offering high-quality meals for $15, and the other is offering greasy junk food for the same price, the junk food restaurant will suffer. That does not mean that the restaurant model of demanding money for cooked food is dead. That does not mean the junk food place should give away their food for free and try to finance themselves by selling brand T-shirts or putting advertising on their walls. It simply means that the junk food place needs to adjust their prices to correspond to the quality of their food. Given the choice between a steak for $15 and a greasy burger for $5, enough people will opt for the burger.

MMORPGs aren't much different. As I said, PotBS has many good qualities. But to pretend that it is as good as WoW, that it has as much content, is as polished, and offers as much variety of gameplay is really stretching the truth. In a one-to-one comparison it is obvious that World of Warcraft is the better game. And while of course not every MMORPG player is price-sensitive (often time is the restricting factor), Pirates of the Burning Sea would be better served with a lower price tag reflecting that lower quality. Who says you can only either ask for $15 or nothing? Why not a $5 per month subscription, which would attract a larger number of players?
- posted by Tobold @ 11:42 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Transmute mastery fixed

My warrior in World of Warcraft is alchemist and master transmuter. He has one very profitable recipe, Transmute Earth to Water, with which he can transmute once per day a Primal Earth (worth about 3 gold) into a Primal Water (worth about 18 gold). As that is 15 gold quickly earned, I did that transmute nearly every day since I came back to WoW. And after a while I began to notice that in spite of being master transmuter, I never ever got multiple Primal Waters out of my transmute, which I normally should.

It turns out that transmutation mastery was broken in patch 2.3, and worked only on making Primal Mights. Doh! This week patch 2.3.2 fixed the bug, but the news never made it into the patch notes. I still haven't got a single transmutation with multiple results, but I sure hope their number increases now.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:30 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Kill Ten Rats on the social experience

Ethic from Kill Ten Rats wrote an excellent post on "where did the social go?". Early MMORPGs like Everquest had enforced grouping, and developers discovered over the years that the ability to solo was very much valued by the players. But then they overshot the goal and instead of making soloing possible, they made soloing the most efficient and fastest way to advance your character. With the sad consequence that MMORPGs lost a lot of their social cohesion. Concepts like loyalty to your guild or the reputation of your character are only alive in some veterans, while players new to the genre change guilds more often than their underwear, and take the guild bank with them if possible.

As Ethic points out the solution is to "Don’t force the group, make it so you can’t wait to group." Developers spent too much time to develop ways to sanitize their games from possible anti-social behavior by minimizing player interaction. In the previous post I mentioned how Pirates of the Burning Sea managed to set up a player-run economy that doesn't contain any actual contact between players. Ethic mentions how games introduced mechanisms against power-leveling and kill-stealing that ended up isolating players even if they were at the same time at the same place and after the same monster.

Simple thought experiment: You see at equal distance a rare named mob and another player. What do you think?
A) I need to hurry to grab that mob before the other players tags it
or
B) I should cooperate with that other player to overcome the challenge of that named mob
In many cases the answer is A), because cooperation isn't rewarded. Only if the mob is an elite quest mob (and most elite quest mobs have just been removed from WoW in patch 2.3) where grouping with the other guy and killing the mob would solve the quest for both players would it be advisable to team up. But in most cases you are well able to kill that mob alone faster than the time it takes to form the group, and if you kill it alone you get more xp and loot. The game mechanics encourage us to solo, and while there are other players around us, we end up being alone together. This lack of social interaction has consequences in diminished longevity of MMORPGs. If you don't make friends, there is no reason to keep playing the same game as your friends do. If you can hop guilds, you can hop games.

This is sad, because it would be so easy to remedy this situation. People do not group in World of Warcraft (especially not below the level cap), because the challenges and rewards are structured in a way that a group which doesn't turn out perfect earns less rewards than solo play. A pickup group where maybe one player isn't playing all that well, or somebody has to leave due to Real Life ® events, is a high risk, which isn't compensated by the rewards you could achieve if the group turns out well. And for some quests (of the "collect 10 foozle ears" type, as opposed to "kill 10 foozles) even the most perfect group would take more time and get less rewards when doing the quest together than if every member just soloed it. As Ethic suggests groups should have more possibilities to work together, like combo moves. And as I already mentioned previously, the group xp bonus has to be raised substantially. If you meet a stranger in the same area where you are questing, inviting him should give such a substantial bonus that you overcome your fear of the risk that the guy might turn out to be an idiot. Advancing solo should be a definitive possibility, but it shouldn't be faster than cooperation with other players.

And of course games, especially World of Warcraft, need to introduce more tools to enable cooperation. The guild tools of WoW are woefully inadequate. Why is there no in-game event calendar? Why does every guild have to go through the painful process of finding somebody able to set up guild forums, finding free or cheap hosting, chasing after the members in game to tell them where to sign up for the forums, setting up a system of forum access rights, and organizing a way for new players to apply for membership? It would be so easy to offer guild forums automatically to every guild, accessible from in-game and outside browsers, with access rights handled automatically based on guild titles, and new players being able to apply for membership from inside the game. And that would only be covering the bare necessities of guild life, the stuff players already set up privately outside the game because it is so essential. It is easy to imagine far more powerful guild tools and ways for a guild to cooperate on common projects, with reward structures that encourage loyalty and cooperation.

Players don't like to be forced into anything, but they strongly react to rewards. Just look how suddenly everyone is doing PvP while group PvE is in decline in WoW, just because the rewards for PvP are now better. If it is so easy to influence behavior with rewards, instead of putting up lots of barriers to isolate players from each other and prevent anti-social behavior, we need reward structures that encourage social behavior. The stronger communities that would follow from that also benefit the game companies, in the form of higher longevity of the game. "I can't quit this game, my guild is already level 17" should be a developers dream.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:08 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Karazhan raid experience

I am so not going to bore you with a detailed description of how we killed this or that boss, what loot dropped, and what tactics we used. I leafed through many WoW blogs in the past, and found that all the descriptions of raids to one place strongly resemble each other, because everyone uses the same well-known and publicly available strategies, the bosses are always the same, and the loot drops only vary slightly. So I'm just going to say that my first Karazhan raid with my old guild was great fun, and I saw lots of encounters and events I had never seen before. We did Atumen, Moroes, the Maiden, the opera, and Nightbane. I got one epic, a healing trinket from Romeo, but we weren't all that lucky with the other epics and many of them ended up being needed by nobody. I'm not crazy enough to "need" on epic cloth items which are obviously designed for damage casters, and which would have ended with me having less +healing than in the blue items I'm currently wearing. Anyway, I don't raid just for the loot, and I always get badges of justice which I can turn in one day for whatever epic I need most.

In the comments of the last couple of days there were some questions regarding my Karazhan raid. One hardcore raider asked why casual players wanted to go raiding at all, if it was obviously so difficult to schedule. But when I see encounters like the opera, where the same location has a random chance of three different and nicely scripted events, or boss fights like Nightbane with its several phases, I can only wonder how anyone playing WoW would *not* want to see them. A hardcore raider killing Nightbane for the 15th time and cursing because the one piece of loot he wants is still not dropping might consider the evening to be hard work spent for nothing. But for somebody there for the first time the huge amount of work Blizzard developers put into these raid encounters is really obvious, and the difference with the boring mobs you can kill solo is striking. If the hardcore raider don't want casual players to raid, I propose that the devs make the solo and non-heroic group encounters as interesting as the raid encounters are now. And save the raiders some time by making raid dungeons simple linear corridors without decoration with X stacks of trash mobs in evenly spaced distances, followed by a boss with huge stats and powers, but no animations or scripted events. If the casual players value the lore and detailed embellishment of encounters so much more, why waste all that work on the hardcore raiders who only want the difficult fight and the loot?

I'll certainly sign up for more Karazhan raids. And if I get a bit more lucky with loot, I might be able to move on to other raid dungeons. But the fun is certainly in seeing the places, and in hanging out with friends to overcome the challenges. That my guild doesn't organize a Karazhan raid every night and I'm not expected to raid several times per week suits me just fine. It is obvious that there is a point somewhere where the same raid dungeons stops being fun, and starts becoming a boring treadmill you are only willing to do because of the promise of another fun place somewhere in the future. I frequently talked about how Karazhan is too hard for an entry level dungeon. But of course for the raiders the problem is more the gap in difficulty between one raid dungeon and the next, forcing them to run the same raid over and over. Hey, now I even understand why people loved the introduction of Zul'Aman!

Another reader asked how raiding Karazhan compares to playing Pirates of the Burning Sea. Well, Karazhan wins hands down. Not only because of the huge different in quality and polish between WoW and PotBS. But also because a Karazhan raid by definition is a group thing, a social experience. Pirates of the Burning Sea in its current pre-order state is an almost pure solo game. PvP isn't enabled yet, and there is only a single (but repeatable) group mission in the whole starting area. I enjoy the economy game, but the interaction with other players in the PotBS economy is indirect and anonymous via the auction house. You could theoretically set up a contract with another player, for example for him to provide you with a certain amount of raw materials every day at a fixed price. But PotBS doesn't have any tools to support that, you'd need to be online every day at the same time as the other player and meet in some port to manually transfer the goods. Games like Ultima Online or Star Wars Galaxies with their player-run shops had much better opportunities to develop long-term business relationships between players. The PotBS economy might be player-run, but without the players actually getting to know each other in the process. I can tell you who the master smiths are on my WoW server, but I have no idea who the ships made I bought in PotBS.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:23 AM Permanent Link  (34) comments Links to this post

 
PotBS Journal - 10-January-2008

Day 3 of Pirates of the Burning Sea, and I already achieved the goal of becoming rich. While the price of granite is dropping towards 100, that still means that my granite production is making 60,000 doubloons a day of revenue, of which 90% are profit. I was already able to buy an overpriced level 14 ship for 22,000, although I'm still only level 10 and won't need it right away. But player-built ships are still extremely rare. I think I'll make it to level 14 with my civilian Bermuda sloop and then continue with that level 14 player-built Snow I bought.

I also spent quite some time shipping ropes from the French to the British. All auction houses started with some quantity of seeded goods, and of course the devs gave equal amounts of goods to every nation. But as there are far more British players on my server than French or Spanish, I could buy the last seeded ropes the French never used and ship them to the British ports, where the seeded goods had run out long ago. I choose ropes because even in the normal economy those sell for over 100 doubloons, and the seeded price was only 34, thus I could sell at triple the buying price.

The disadvantage of such trips is that they take quite some time, time that is then missing for leveling up. So I just made 1 level, from 9 to 10. And tonight I'm signed up for my first Karazhan raid with my WoW guild, so I won't level up in PotBS. Well, I'm not really in a hurry for level, they aren't that important for the economy. Although getting to the level 21 cap of the pre-order would be nice, as there are some good freetrader ships at level 19 and 21. And at level 20 you can build some structures you couldn't build before. I'll see how I'll manage my time between PotBS and WoW.

I still don't know how long I'll continue producing granite, it depends on how fast the price deteriorates. It is totally possible that many people built granite production because of the high prices, leading to the price undershooting the long-term price, which in the closed beta was around 60. And of course with more players than the beta, and a more permanent outlook, long-term prices could be lower in the retail version than in the beta. But I don't worry, I already have enough cash on hand to demolish everything and build up a new industry elsewhere. Just where?

I'm tending towards splitting my production over two cities in Yucatan, making fir and hemp to combine to rope and other textiles, including sails for ships and sail outfittings. The other possibility would be to build up the same industry in one port in the Bahamas, but then I'm on the wrong side of the Antilles, north, while most British ports are south. And it isn't very clear yet where the front and the main activity of fighting will be when PvP is enabled on the 22nd. I could also try something crazy and build up wine production in a French port, because they have a monopoly on the stuff. That would mean paying higher taxes on production, even with the freetrader tax evasion skill. That could still be profitable, as wine is hard to get for the British, but in the beta the wine prices never really took off. It is strange, but prices in PotBS don't follow strict economic laws. Sometimes goods are underprices just because they aren't sexy, while others are overpriced even in the long term.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:12 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
WorldIV on becoming casual

Tuebit from WorldIV has a great post on turning from hardcore into casual. Quote: "We all start out strong. The average 20-hours per week was nothing. And then, you know … life happens. Career, spending time with friends whose names aren’t spelled in 1337, kids, mortgages, the inevitable switch from beer to wine spritzers. It happens to everyone. If you’ve got a job, kids or a significant other, you’re no longer playing nightly for hours. And if you still are, you probably soon won’t have a job, kids or significant other."

He then proceeds to specify what kind of game he is looking for as a casual gamer, without wanting to play what is currently offered under the label of "casual game". And I agree very much. Just because we are adults now with real life responsabilities that keep us from raiding all night doesn't mean that we want to replace epic adventures of a game like World of Warcraft with cutesy games from Club Penguin. We're casual, not brain dead.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:37 PM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
Expanding MMORPGs over several platforms

A year ago I posted an idea how playing WoW on your cell phone could look. One of this weeks recurring headlines in the MMO blogosphere is some venture capital analyst claiming that 2008 will be the year where MMORPGs reach the cell phone. And I found an interesting post on Sierra Kilo with a basic design for a new MMORPG which contains the features:

• Easily access parts of the game without the main client
  
  
  
  • The game API allows players to create their own external interface to the game
  • Create a web-based interface for access from any browser
  • Create a mobile interface for phones or PDAs
  • Create your own mini-client software or widget
  
  
  • Once a partnership is created through the main client using a special key, external sources can manipulate different aspects of the game through the API
  • Chat with other players (requires an in-game communicator device)
  • Adjust or display the rate of various automated in-game equipment (requires compatible in-game equipment)
  • Access the “Help Wanted” or auction system
  • Receive SMS text messages about the progress of long-running automated in-game tasks
  • Subscribe to public RSS feeds relating to story arcs, weather forecasts, and other in-game news
  • Search a wiki for information about the world and contribute your own information

Lots of good ideas here. I'm sure we could all come up with even more ideas of what features of for example World of Warcraft we would like to be able to access from a browser during lunch break at work, or from our PDA or cell phone. WoWBerry, anyone?

The underlying principle behind all this is that a MMORPG is a mix between 3D and 2D information. Our characters, combat, zones, spell effects etc. take place in a 3D world. The chat window, our inventories and paper dolls, the auction house etc. take place in 2D. So if you want to access only some 2D part, for example involving only your inventory and the auction house, you don't strictly need the huge 3D client with its 12 GB footprint on your hard drive. A browser-based auction house access, or guild chat on your cell phone is technically totally possible.

But still I don't believe that 2008 will be the year where this takes off. For example World of Warcraft is still way behind in offering even web-based tools, Everquest 2 is far more advanced there. And "technically possible" isn't the same as "easily implemented", there are foreseeable complications of authenticitation and server load. And no one know whether there is money in it. How much would people pay for being able to use their PDA to do an Auctioneer scan? If every line of guild chat comes at the price of one SMS, would you still want to have it? I'd think it will still take a couple more years before you see WoW on your cell phone.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:36 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
PotBS Journal - 9-January-2008

Second day of Pirates of the Burning Sea (pre-order access), and my economic efforts already reached the first stable state, which I will probably be able to maintain and milk for profits for a while. I am now the proud owner of 10 granite quarries, the maximum I can get without paying for a second account, as players are limited to 10 structures per account.

I logged on that second night with my first production of granite ready, and several people of my guild complaining how rare and expensive granite was. You can produce 1 piece of granite for 6 doubloons and 0.4 hours of labor, but the auction house prices for granite were as high as 300 doubloons. I sold my granite to my guild mates for 60 doubloons each, which enabled them to get their economies going, and still gave me enough profit to expand my operation. Once everyone in my guild had enough granite, I sold the remainder for 200+ doubloons on the auction houses. It costs a bit over 2,000 doubloons to build a granite quarry, but by the end of the evening I had enough money to even demolish my starting wood and gravel production sites and my draughtsman's office, and replace everything by granite quarries.

I'd expect granite prices to drop over the coming days, but even if I keep selling the stuff for 60 doubloons I'll make enough money to prepare for a move and change of business. Granite is a great thing to produce early in the game and in the starting area where everyone is. But in the long run fewer people will be in that starting area, granite demand will be more distributed, and with granite being so easy to produce, there will be much more competition. So I will want to move to somewhere higher level and closer to the center of the map, Yucatan for example. And I will want to produce some intermediate goods for shipbuilding or consumables and ship outfittings. As these things require more complicated production chains, there is less competition is producing them. I don't think I will want to go into the production of ships or ship provisioning, as these need multi-player effort and coordinations. I'd rather stick to producing something I can "solo".

The disadvantage of playing a freetrader is that freetraders are weaker in combat. The general design idea behind that is that freetraders can make up for their lack of combat talents by having enough money for the best ships, outfittings, and consumables. But as the economy is still in its start-up phase, there simple aren't any ships, or outfittings available, and only the low-level consumables from the junk vendor. Well, at least I reached level 9 and replaced my starting ship with a civilian Bermuda sloop you can buy for 2,500 from the civilian ship vendor. Civilian ships are less good than the player-built version and need a slightly higher level to use. But there weren't any player-built Bermudas in the British starting area for sale, and those I could have bought at the other end of the map were priced expensively at 10,000 doubloons or more. Not worth it for these low levels, where you still advance quickly enough. I'd rather save my money for a Mediator Cutter at level 12, although I haven't seen one for sale yet anywhere. I'm making up for my lack of combat power by first having gained some levels doing the economy tutorial and by sinking pirate ships on the open sea, then going back to the starting town and doing quests a few levels below my level.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:24 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Mass market MMORPGs

Content is king! Much of the quality, and the success that followed from that quality, of World of Warcraft can be explained by the amount of work that went into creating that virtual world. Every zone is hand-crafted, every mob hand-placed in some semblance of fantasy logic, and for each of the little corners of a zone there seems to be a quest or other reason to go there. The huge amount of work that went into WoW cost a huge amount of money, estimated to be around $50 million. By getting millions of players, that bet paid off, and Blizzard is reaping over $500 million of profits per year. And that is good, because profits like these encourage other game companies to invest similar huge sums of money into games. Of course you can make a bad game with lots of money, but it is reasonable to assume that Blizzard doesn't have a monopoly on good game design. If you look at smaller games, you often see great design ideas, and a lack of execution and polish, which is directly related to a lack of money. I mean, I love Pirates of the Burning Sea, but it sure could have used another couple of programmer and game developer man-years to polish it up.

Large investments in MMORPGs are only possible as long as you can expect large returns, which means large number of subscribers: mass market MMORPGs. That move towards the mass market comes with a design cost, as the only way to attract large numbers of subscribers is to make your game accessible for everybody. You need to lower the barriers to success until people who aren't very dedicated can overcome it. And you need to design your game in a way that people don't really need other players to advance. The original Everquest is a great game, but it clearly showed the limits you can reach with a game that needs hard work and a group to advance. World of Warcraft got 20 times more subscribers by appealing to all those people who would never have had the time to succeed in Everquest.

It is easy to deride the mass market game as being carebear or trivial, their players as soft or spoiled. But in any hobby there is only a small number of truly dedicated people willing to go to enormous lengths to achieve the ultimate result, and a much larger number of people that are just pottering around for fun. What I am not sure about is whether everybody realizes how the fact that you want a game to succeed and attract many players (and thus be financially successful and not shut down after a few months) clashes with some very reasonable wishes towards game design. My post yesterday on how I don't believe that Warhammer Online will manage to introduce meaningful PvP is based on my assumption that EA will want WAR to be a mass market game, not a niche game for hardcore PvP fans.

In a mass market game communities tend to be less tightly knit, have less cohesion. In Everquest a players reputation was still taken very seriously. You couldn't steal from your guild and expect the next guild to still invite you, like in WoW. The concept of gaining epics in one guild, making you strong enough to leave that guild and join the next more powerful one, was unheard of. You couldn't even switch servers at that time, not to mention changing your name.

Dark Age of Camelot never had more than a quarter of a million of subscribers, about half those of Everquest. It is by many considered to be the best PvP game ever. But can you translate the PvP concept of DAoC into a mass market MMORPG? Or will WAR get stuck somewhere in between two goals that are impossible to reach at the same time: having great and meaningful PvP, and appealing to millions of players? I can easily imagine WAR to come true with all their promises of PvP greatness, but only reaching a quarter or half a million of subscribers, because meaningful PvP means that the players who aren't serious about PvP and just want to play around for fun will get their nose blodied and quickly give up on the game. I can also easily imagine WAR going for the mass market, stressing soloable PvE more, and making PvP fighting for keeps a fringe activity for the top guilds (just like PvE raiding is a fringe activity for the top guilds in WoW). I can't see how WAR could reach both. I don't see how meaningful mass market PvP could happen. I think the best the PvP fans can hope for is having a great PvP sub-part of WAR for the hardcore, but structured in a way that the majority of players can live without it. It will not be "meaningful" in a way where you can really dominate another faction, because the majority of that faction will simply be able to ignore the fact that their side is losing.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:10 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Keen and Graev compare WoW and WAR

Keen and Graev have a detailed post comparing World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online. Good stuff, with links to many WAR dev videos. I'm detecting a certain WAR bias, but I don't mind. I'm not subscribing to the theory that fans of one game should fight fans of the other game anyway. The more good MMORPGs we have to choose from, the better. I might well end up playing WAR, but the key difference then probably is that WoW is old and WAR will be new. The discussion of who copied what from whom isn't really all that important.

The point I am most skeptical about regarding WAR is where Keen is most optimistic: The relevance of PvP. Keen says:

"In Warhammer Online you do have something to lose in PvP. Some people think that WAR is pointless PvP. How does losing your main city to the enemy sound? How about losing actual territory such as Keeps (castles) that were held by your guild? (See latter differences for more explanation). And quite possibly the greatest incentive to do well in the RvR is that you need do better than your opponents or they will get stronger. If your enemy is constantly killing you then they are going to have Victory Points, more land, better skills, cooler looking characters, and you’re going to feel like a dirty little squig for sucking. In World of Warcraft no one cares how well your faction does. If you all suck in the battlegrounds it has no impact on the world around you."

Exactly the same can be said about PotBS, you can replace "WAR" with "PotBS" in the quote above and get a statement that is as true. But from all I personally experienced in PotBS, people don't care about PvP there, they only care about their own advantage. If the first thing I see happening in the PotBS economy is British players manipulating the British AH to screw over other British players for their own advantage, when with a little bit more work they could have screwed the other nations instead, I don't feel as if the welfare of the virtual nation is of any relevance to the players of that nation. We'll have to see how that works out in PvP after the 22nd, but in the closed beta I only saw players engaging in PvP for their own advantage, with next to no coordination or consideration for the greater good of the side they played on. In WoW you have the AFK leechers causing their faction to lose battles in Alterac Valley.

I am pretty sure that if WAR has any way to screw your own side to your own advantage, players will take it. Why should one guild care if another guild loses a keep? If they could they'd probably even conspire with the enemy to take that keep, because the only way for one keep to go from one guild to another from the same faction is if the enemy takes it between the two. Why should players worry if they lose their main city, if control resets a few days later and RvR war restarts from zero? If the enemy is stronger and is becoming even stronger with constant victories, the average player will simply reroll on the winning side and not heroically fight a losing battle.

MMORPG PvP has one major disadvantage: it tends to bring out the worst in people. PvP combat is inherently unfair, because the attacker only initiates combat if he is reasonably sure that he can win. Most PvP players avoid a fair fight if they can, which is why we have things like battlegrounds or arenas where only equally sized groups of similar level can fight each other. I would be really, really surprised if Warhammer Online could reverse a decade of MMORPG PvP trends and turn players into heroes willing to sacrifice their own advantage for the greater good of their faction.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:14 PM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft fishing

I have mixed feeling towards fishing in World of Warcraft. On the one side it is peaceful, relaxing, possibly profitable, and not a bad way to spend some solo time. On the other side the actual fishing "game play" is too simple. I played other single-player RPGs, like Dark Cloud, where fishing was a lot more fun. WoW fishing is extremely simple, and has the dubious distinction of being the first activity ever in WoW for which bots were created. The existence of bots in a MMORPG is a sure indication of a boring activity that doesn't require enough intelligence to perform. Due to this flaw, WoW fishing has a checkered history. It was botted for profit early in the game, then nerfed until it was totally unprofitable and nobody fished any more, and then Blizzard slowly introduced new features to make fishing more attractive again.

You fish in WoW by equipping a fishing pole, putting the fishing skill button on a hotkey, throwing out your line using that hotkey, waiting up to 20 seconds until the bobber moves, and then clicking on it to reel your catch in. Using an addon like Fishing Buddy you can throw out and reel in your catch at the same time with a right mouse button double click. And that's it. You double-click about every 20 seconds and the only "skill" required is moving your mouse pointer over the random location where your bobber landed. Unlike other crafts your chance to earn a skill point does not depend on how difficult a fish you are trying to catch. Thus you could learn fishing in Orgrimmar or Ironforge and skill up fishing to 225 without ever moving a step. Then you'll need to do an easy fishing quest in Duskwallow Marsh to get to 300, and buy a book in Zangarmarsh at 300 to get to 375. But you could still level up to 375 fishing only in that little pond in Orgrimmar or Ironforge and it would go exactly as fast as if you fished in various places, or even faster because you don't have any travel time.

At the start your fishing skill goes up every time you reel in a fish, but later the skill only rises after having found an increasing number of fish. I haven't done the calculation, but read that it takes 15 hours of fishing to get to the maximum skill. Fortunately the fishing timer was shortened from 30 seconds to 20 seconds, and the bobber now always moves at some point of the timer. You can still not reel in a fish, but that is mostly if you are fishing in a zone that is too high compared to your fishing skill. Check this WoW fishing guide for details on which zone you can fish with what skill, or where to find which fish.

So why go fishing if it isn't interesting? As I said, Blizzard made it more interesting after initially nerfing it. One major improvement they added was fishing pool "nodes". You can fish in nearly every spot of water without a node, but the nodes give you more valuable fish, or even containers full of valuables. I once got "rich" from fishing with a level 16 character in Stranglethorn Vale on a brand new server. You can fish level 40ish trade goods and even green magic items from floating wreckages in STV with fishing skill you can get as low as level 10, although it is difficult to find the right spots without getting eaten by level 40ish mobs. The Stranglethorn Fishing Extravanganza fishing event every Sunday at 2 pm is even more profitable at low levels, you get 1 gold 21 silver for every 5 tastyfish you find. Especially on new servers, where you can't make lots of gold by selling low level trade goods like copper to high level players and their twinks, fishing is a very good way to make cash early. Even for higher level players the addition of fishing nodes makes fishing a lot more interesting and dynamic, because it encourages you to move around and search for them.

There is now even a fish tracking skill in the game. You learn it from a book you can find when fishing. Best spot for that is Windshear Crag in Stonetalon Mountains, where the trunks you fish out from wreckages and oil spills have a pretty high chance of dropping the book. The fish tracking skill shows you all fish nodes on your radar, with the unfortunate exception of the tastyfish schools from the STV fishing contest.

Most fish are still worthless to vendors, and worth very little to other players on the auction house. But some fish are valuable. There is a "Goldenscale Vendorfish" you can vendor for 6 gold. Other fish are useful for alchemy, and the deviate fish can be cooked into a meal that transforms you into a pirate or ninja. People pay good money for that. You can even fish motes of water out of pure water nodes in Outland. But the main use for fish is cooking. Blizzard changed cooking that now you get stuck at level 275 if you don't cook any fish, and the next meat recipe is only at 285. Raising cooking in parallel to fishing is much, much easier than cooking meat drops from mobs. At the lower levels cooked fish doesn't give any stats bonuses, while cooked meat does. But at higher levels cooked fish gives some nice bonuses, especially for casters. And as a hunter you can always feed the cooked fish to your cat or bear pet.

So fishing does have some uses now. I already got enough fish with my warrior to raise the cooking skill of my new mage to 300. I'm at just over 300 fishing skill, and I'll continue some more occasionally, just for fun and relaxation, and to make some gold in a peaceful way. I would wish that Blizzard had made fishing a bit more interactive, but it isn't so bad now.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:14 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
PotBS Journal - 8-January-2008

Yesterday the live servers for Pirates of the Burning Sea opened their doors for everyone who had bought the preorder box or preorder download. While the "real" release is in 2 weeks, on the 22nd, many people already got in now. Getting the preorder box in Europe wasn't easy, but getting the preorder download from DLGamer was easy enough. And it is basically free, because the 10 Euro you pay for it you get back when you buy the game from them. Technically the release was a success: I was able to enter my preorder key a minute after the servers went live, needed a bit less than one hour to patch to the latest version, and then could play right away. There was a bit of lag in the starting city, but no major technical problems.

The only thing Flying Labs messed up was server selection. Of the 4 European servers only 2 were marked as being "EU". And while they had designated servers for different languages (English, German, French, and Spanish), the server selection screen didn't say so. There had been announcements on the PotBS website and forums, but there were some last minute changes in the number of servers, so many people were a bit confused. I'm on the EU English server, Roberts, and we ended up with a GM spamming messages all evening that this was the English servers, and telling people what the German, French, and Spanish servers were so they would move there.

I made a British Freetrader. British because I expect the English speaking server to have lots of British players. In the beta about 35% of players were British, 35% Pirate, and 15% each Spanish and French. The numbers might look different on the French and Spanish language servers, but I'd expect the British to dominate my server, which suits me just fine. I'm not very interested in participating in PvP, and if I play a game with unbalanced PvP, I'd rather be on the winning side. Anyway, port contention is disabled until release, so I have time to build up my economy.

I started the game doing the tutorials, and then directly did the economy tutorial. The economy tutorial starts at the auctioneer of the starting town, but then sends you randomly to one of two possible ports. There you have the choice of building up your first structures in that port or in the other one. Of course I got sent to the port where I didn't want my structures, which forced me to go back and forth a couple of times. That wasn't so bad, because on the way I could attack a couple of low-level NPC pirates, and already make good xp and loot before even starting real missions. I used the money to buy the materials I needed to build my first structures. Good that I did that early, because some players then realized that they could buy up all the cheap seeded building materials and resell them at much higher prices. After seeing granite go from 15 doubloons seeding price to 200 doubloons, I realized that my idea to start my structure building with granite quarries was a good one. I also bought some more cheap seeded materials, but as I didn't want to hurt the British economy, I rather bought them in the other nations ports and shipped them back to the Brits. Economic warfare instead of profiteering and sabotaging the own side.

I did the economy tutorial, including a long trip to the capital. But as I was already level 5 and had the level 5 class quest done, I could also hand in the 10 small pennants I got as reward for the class quest at the capital to get some iron. That helped me build more granite quarries, and right now I already have 4 granite quarries up and running, plus the low level wood and gravel production from the tutorial, and a draughtsman's office to make structure deeds. A good start.

Level-wise I only got up to level 7, as the economy stuff takes up a lot of time. But as the preorder time is capped to level 21, I don't think I need to hurry to level up. I'd rather get my economy up for release. Producing granite is nice for the moment, but in the long run I'll want to have my home port somewhere more central, and produce some intermediate goods. Raw materials are easy enough to produce, and sooner or later even the people playing combat classes will realize that having a bunch of structure producing raw materials in the background is a good thing, and then profits from granite will go down.

I want to keep playing PotBS in a "low maintenance" way, and spend the majority of my time playing World of Warcraft instead. PotBS is still horribly unpolished, for example typing /who in the command line spams the names of all players of your nation into your chat window in alphabetical order without class and level information, and you can't even scroll up to the first name because there are too many names now and the chat window buffer isn't big enough. There are also still places where you can't click to interact with an NPC or location, you need to press "X" on the keyboard to advance. That was especially annoying in the economy tutorial, where at one step you had to go to an unmarked location in the tavern and press "X" to advance the quest. I can see how new players would easily be blocked at that point. But I do have some time I can spend in PotBS and leave WoW for some evenings. There are "raid nights" in my WoW guild for higher raid dungeons where I can't participate due to lack of gear, and organizing any guild groups on those nights is also extremely difficult, because most players are raiding. So instead of soloing WoW then, I can play PotBS. And play WoW when guild mates are available for group content, like on the weekends, nights without raids, or on nights where I might get into a Karazhan raid.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:35 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft Sweepstakes

I once said that I wouldn't run Google ads on this blog because there was no legit secondary market for MMORPGs, only a dubious one selling gold or scamming people with "game guides" that only contain information they could have gotten for free. Well, I'm still not willing to run Google ads, but slowly but surely a legit secondary market develops around World of Warcraft. I got an e-mail from the marketing department of Simon & Schuster, announcing their World of Warcraft Sweepstakes.

Simon & Schuster is a large publishing house from New York, and they are publishing the World of Warcraft novels. So if you are willing to give them your address and some information about yourself (thus risking to get advertising), you can win "books, toys, cards, and collectibles" from World of Warcraft. Nothing in-game though. And the sweepstakes is only available for the US, so even if I wanted to I couldn't participate. Maybe not the world's most interesting opportunity, but at least the thing is legit enough for me to willing to advertise it for free.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:21 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 7-January-2008

Ah, the weekend! Longer play sessions, more people online during the day, and only only one "raid night" in my guild: ideal conditions to find guild groups. I managed to do two heroics groups, one with my priest to Shadow Labyrinth, and one with my warrior to Botanica. In both cases we killed all the bosses, confirming my estimate that my characters are well equipped now to do heroics with the right team. Although Botanica with my warrior was a bit limit, we had a situation or two where the priest simply couldn't heal me fast enough. A bit more health or armor would have helped. Well, I'm starting a collection of badges of justice, and maybe I get lucky with drops, so one day he should be ready for anything. This run no suitable plate armor dropped, but a nice one-hand sword for soloing, Revenger. For tanking I'll keep the Crystalblade of the Draenei.

Talking of "being ready for anything", my warrior also finished his attunement to Karazhan in the Black Morass. Wow, has that place been nerfed! It's not trivially easy, but a *lot* easier than it was originally. My priest at the time took 13 attempts to get attuned, and that wasn't even considered unusual then. My warrior now finished Black Morass on the first try. We only had one death, no wipe, and that was because the second boss is immune to taunt, which makes keeping aggro difficult. Only disadvantage of finishing so fast is that my warrior only got to honored reputation that way. :) Well, if the opportunity arrises I can alway help others to do Caverns of Time dungeons and gather some more reputation. I even got the Caverns of Time heroic key, back in the days the very idea to even try BM on heroic made people laugh.

Most of my soloing time this weekend I spent with skilling up fishing, but that's a story for another day.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:04 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Touching a nerve

I was a bit surprised by the reactions to my post yesterday on what to do next in WoW, it seems I touched a nerve there. Either the post came out totally wrong, or the commenters were overreacting, and projecting their own fears into words I didn't really say.

As you know I recently completed a big project in WoW, getting the money for my second flying epic mount together. I think it is only natural after completing one big project to stop and pause to think what your next big project should be. I tried to list all the options, but maybe I felt more need to explain why I don't like the options I dislike than to explain what options I like and why. In any case I don't see why some people interpreted that as me being totally fed up with WoW and ready to jump off a cliff. That is totally not true. And the next guy calling me "emo" gets his comment deleted! ;)

I believe World of Warcraft is the best game out there, and believe me, I spent 7 months last year to look for a better option and there wasn't one. While I'm certainly interested in trying the next new games, I believe on WAR has the potential to keep me playing for more than a few months, and I don't believe that WAR will come out in the first half of 2008. I'd like to be wrong in that, but only if the resulting early release isn't *too* early, wouldn't want WAR to pull a Vanguard.

I do enjoy playing in 5-man groups in WoW, and even in raids. But when listing my options of course I have to mention that organizing groups or raids has some difficulties. Not saying that it is impossible or that I think I'll never be able to get into a group or raid. But I can't just overlook the obvious problems of quality of PUGs, the current relative unpopularity of PvE due to high PvP rewards, being on a low-population server, or my personal timing problems with raids. Problems that I might be able to overcome or work around somehow. I also enjoy leveling my mage alt, but again I must be allowed to at least mention that I already did most of the quests between his current level and the level cap, and repeating old content is of course not quite as interesting as new content.

As always when somebody says something relatively neutral about a MMORPG, I got responses of the "WoW is perfect and you are emo" kind, and "WoW is boring and you should quit". My thanks goes to those commenters who kept cool and helped me listing and reevaluating options instead of overreacting and calling me names. The others should take a minute to consider why they reacted so strongly, and whether their own feelings towards WoW are still rational.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:32 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Do you use WoW voice chat?

A reader asked me on my experiences with the integrated voice chat of World of Warcraft. I didn't have any. I haven't used any voice chat since TBC came out. I found voice chat very helpful when raiding at level 60, but only if the raid group has somebody willing to take over the job of "drill sergeant", barking orders at the other players. In the natural chaos of a 40-man raid, even simple commands like "start dps" or "stop dps" can improve the raid a lot. I would assume barking commands to be less useful in 10-man raids, but I don't have enough TBC raiding experience to be sure.

Before TBC I used both Teamspeak and Ventrilo for voice chat. In the TBC European beta, which mixed people from the English, German, and French servers on the same beta server, I found that most of the Germans used voice chat, even in pickup groups. I don't know if that is due to some cultural difference, or due to the fact that the "English" servers are in fact the server for everybody who isn't German, French, or Spanish, and thus has the widest mix of nationalities and languages. I've never been asked to join voice chat in a pickup group on a European "English" server. And as my current guild isn't using voice chat either, as far as I know, I never had the opportunity to check the newly integrated WoW voice chat out.

So I'd be interested to hear from you what your voice chat experiences are. Do you use the integrated WoW voice chat, or do you use a third party software like Teamspeak or Ventrilo? Do you use voice chat for small groups, or only for raids? How useful is voice chat in the TBC raid environment?
- posted by Tobold @ 3:42 PM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
Thinking about what to do in WoW

My problem in World of Warcraft is that I don't know when the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, will be released. GameStop famously published a date of November 3 2008 with the explanation that "Official price and release date have NOT been announced by Blizzard. In this case, the price and release date were determined by the GameStop e-commerce staff, (comprised of overpowered warlocks), using a combination of 6 and 20-sided die.". Some optimists still believe that WotLK will come out in the first half of 2008, based on Blizzard's declared goal of publishing one expansion per year. Some pessimists see the expansion slip into 2009. And while I personally think that Q4 2008 is most likely, I simply don't know for sure.

Baring some kind of miracle, Wrath of the Lich King will bring another big wave of mudflation, with green gear from level 75 being better than current Karazhan or PvP epics. So if I engage in some game activity I don't like now, just to get phat loot, and WotLK comes out in half a year, I'll look rather foolish. Of course if WotLK really comes out only for next christmas or even after, gathering better gear while waiting would be more useful.

My favorite activity in World of Warcraft is group PvE. My warrior is now at 12k health, 11.3k armor, and 486 defense, so I'm just strong enough to start tanking my first heroics. Only finding a group is hard, as many people are now rather doing PvP, because the rewards are better. I would also like to raid a bit, but that would be with my priest. There are less tanks needed in raids than healers, and my gear deficit hurts the tank more than the priest. Plus the priest has far more raid experience, I know how to raid heal. I just wouldn't want to do it every night, especially not if the raids last into the small hours of the morning.

So the plan is doing a bit of raiding when possible, doing some heroics when I can find a good group, but given the organizational difficulties of both raid and heroics PvE, I'm pretty sure I'll be stuck with nothing to do half of the time that I'm online. So I'm looking for alternatives. I finished one of these alternatives, getting my second epic flying mount. Currently my warrior is leveling up fishing, he got from 125 to just over 200 this week, but the process is rather boring. But at least fishing skill is something that won't be invalidated by the next expansion. I could gather some more money with daily quests, but of course having already done 5,000 gold worth of daily quests, these start to be boring as well. And it isn't obvious for what I would need that gold in WotLK, apparently there are no new mounts to buy. Plus I'd expect gathering gold to be easier at level 80 than at level 70. Another obvious alternative would be leveling my mage to 70, which would give me a tank, a healer, and a dps class. I'll probably do that, but not full time, I'd rather play the mage slow and profit from rest xp bonus. Now that the mage got through the new Dustwallow Marsh quests, there is only known content for me until level 70.

Of course I could join the crowd and do PvP. I'm not a big fan of PvP, and my current level 70s aren't optimal for doing PvP. DPS warriors are apparently doing quite well in PvP nowadays, but then I would need to respec and give up my dream of being a tank. Not only do tanks suck in PvP, Blizzard also made extra sure that there is absolutely no tanking gear to be had as reward for doing PvP. My holy / discipline priest would be able to do PvP without a change of talent build. But PvP with a healer isn't very interesting. In arenas you are always the first to die, and in battlegrounds healing is a rather thankless occupation. For healers the PvP reward situation is somewhat better than for tanks, but not as good as for dps classes. So my best PvP option would be the mage, but then I would need to get a move on leveling him to 70. Actually by the time I reach 70, PvP might be the only way for him to get any good gear at all. There is a current trend that the rewards from PvP get better all the time, while rewards for PvE dungeons remain the same. If WotLK is still far in the future, we might see season 4 or even season 5 of the arena, pushing the arena gear of season 2 and 3 into "buyable with honor points" mode. At which point I could probably forget about getting a group for a PvE dungeon or heroic dungeon for my mage, because nobody will go there any more, they'll all be in PvP. At least a mage in PvP would be a lot more fun than a tank or a healer.

Did I forget anything? Can you think of something else that would be useful to do before the next expansion comes out for World of Warcraft?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:29 AM Permanent Link  (37) comments Links to this post

 
How I become the boss of Blizzard

Apparently I'm not the only one having problems coming up with serious predictions of the top ten games of 2008. But instead of shortening the list to two like I did, other bloggers turned to humor. I especially laughed, and was somewhat flattered by the following prediction from Wilhelm, the Ancient Gaming Noob:

10. World of Warcraft

The failure to ship the promised expansion, the Wrath of the Lich King, in 2008 will finally take the shine off of the land of Azeroth. While Asian numbers will remain healthy based on the strong PvP following and the late release of the Burning Crusade, a precipitous fall in subscriptions in the US and Europe and the consequent decline in revenue will put the fear of Wall Street into the corporate masters at Vivendi. Star Craft II will soften the blow some, but it will be released so late in the year that it won’t be able to make up for the droves of departing subscribers.

The team at Vivendi’s HQ will not swallow Rob Pardo’s line about polish. They will want action and they will want it ASAP.

Michael Morhaime will be sacrificed to satisfy the financial markets and Vivendi will hire a top notch executive search team to find a replacement. The search will end when a proprietary computer algorithm reveals a single true match for the position.

Negotiations will commence. Offers and counter-offers will fly. In the end, the positions occupied by both Michael Morhaime, Frank Pearce, and Rob Pardo will be will be filled by Tobold.

The three former Blizzard execs will be the subject of an early 2009 press release about the formation of a new game studio.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:45 PM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Your face on a Stargate Worlds NPC

If you live in the U.S. and watch Stargate Atlantis on the SCI FI Channel, you can now participate in a new sweepstakes promotion where the prize is having an NPC in the upcoming Stargate Worlds MMORPGmodeled after you. Not sure if Stargate Worlds will really be released "Fall 2008", but in any case it is an interesting version of "fame" that you can win here.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:46 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Improvements for casual raiding

My plan for 2008 is to retire to an island in the South Sea and have my readers continue writing my blog. Just kidding, but Trevor sent me a long summary of casual raiding ideas already discussed here with his suggestions and asked me to publish them. Sure, no problem. Although if you can write like that, you might want to consider starting your own blog. :)

Dear Tobold,

Recently your blog has several posts that really is relevant and interesting to me. A bit of background. My guild is a casual raiding guild (http://www.happyhourguild.org ). We schedule 3-4 raids a week, but our average raider can only attend about 2 raids a week, meaning we have lots of rotations/substitutions. We have had slow but not always steady progression.

I believe this is true - most WoW players will like to experience PvE raids if they can. To me and many others, raids are the best part of the game. To be able to research and execute a complex strategy as a team to take down a boss is an exhilarating experience. I see many comments posted at your blog by others that is basically anti-raid, saying how raiders are only interested in loot, how raiding is a boring (!) activity. But I think these are posted by people that either have not raided much, or raided with the wrong guild. I think the biggest improvement that can be made in WoW is to make raiding more casual-friendly.

So, I will put up a summary of proposals here, if you deem suitable, hopefully you can put them up at your blog for discussion (and hopefully wider attention). Majority of the ideas are from your blog (from you directly or your readers).


1) Easymode Raid Dungeons
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(http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2007/12/making-raiding-more-like-pvp.html)

Have an easymode version of raid dungeons. Set them at the difficulty level of say half a tier below its normal counterpart, with loot corresponding to that difficulty level. For casual guilds this serve as a bridge towards higher level content, and furthermore at any one point in the guild's progression more content is open to it. Which is a terrific thing. For hardcore guilds (for whom raid progression is a competition), these easymode dungeons are quickly skipped after using them to get a feel of the encounters, hence it should not be an objection to them. I do not see any drawbacks to having these easymode raids.


2) Better Handling of Raid IDs
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One of the biggest hindrance to casuals now are Raid IDs. Even if there are 18 people online and ready to raid, sometimes the raids are no go because 9 are locked to one ID, and the other 9 another ID. Raid IDs serve 2 functions:
i) Identify the state of the dungeon (how many bosses down), hence allowing raids to be spreaded over multiple sessions.
ii) To prevent bleeding edge guilds from farming the easier bosses over and over again, hence gearing up too quickly, hence clearing the highest level raids too quickly. Although arguable (and I am sure will be argued :p), I will assume this is necessary for Blizzard due to their limited resources, hence limited pace of new content created, hence they need to regulate the consumption of these content. Basically, a guild's loot is limited to the number of unique teams it can field (say if Kara has 30 pieces of loot available, a guild able to field 2 unique teams is constrained to 60 pieces for each week).

So, any new proposals will have to satisfy these 2 constrains. There is a relatively easy way - allow intra-guild exchange of IDs. For example, an interface is available to officers that shows the Raid IDs in the guild, and the members belonging to these IDs, and the officer can just exchange one member already having an ID with another.


3) Better separation of PvE and PvP
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(http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2007/12/separating-pvp-from-pve.html)

What do I mean by separation? What I mean is that you should not need to do PvP (BGs and Arena), in order to do well in PvE (raids), and vice-versa. A person who does not like PvP, should not be compelled to do PvP so as to get gear that will allow him to do better in the activity he likes, ie. PvE raids. Same the other way around. At one point pre-BC, the situation is that to do well in PvP you will have to raid, because PvE raid gear are so much better than PvP gear for PvP purposes. That is bad. Now the situation is in a sense reversed, and equally bad. PvE gear of the same item level is better than PvP gear for raids, but PvP gear of much higher item level are available for grinding as soon as you turn 70. For example, many casual raiders in my guild who does not at all like PvP, felt compelled to grind BGs and Arena, simply because PvP is a faster way to gear better to help our guild progress further in PvE raids. It especially hurts casuals because we already have limited time to play.

The suggested remedy in Tobold's blog post to limit PvP gear to BGs and Arena, although drastic sounding, I think will work. The alternative, which I think is better, is to make PvP gear even more specialized for PvP (and same goes for PvE gear), but without an artificial block. Right now already stamina and resilience is emphasized in PvP. The problem is that even after a big chunk of the item budget goes into stam and resilience, the PvE potential of the gear (say +dmg or +heal or +AP) is still too high. One way is to emphasize burst potential, much valued in PvP but of limited use in PvE. Rather than +100 dmg, let the item have a "Use" that gives +300 for 15 seconds every 5 minutes.


Thanks for your time.

Cheers,
Trevor

Just some small comments. On point 2 I believe that if you have "easy mode" raids which just give out points and badges, and are accessible via a queue similar to battleground queues, you will have to get rid of Raid IDs altogether. Which shouldn't be a problem, because there aren't any epics to farm, only points and badges. There aren't any PvP battleground lockouts either.

On point 3 I'd like to point out that the separation of PvP and PvE wasn't my idea, but another reader's post. I know it is difficult, but my preferred solution is to balance PvP and PvE in a way that the same hours spent in either gives comparable rewards. If rewards were balanced enough, people would automatically chose the method that was more fun to them. If one method gives better rewards people tend to play stuff they don't like just for the rewards. Both methods have to be tuned in a way that just showing up and doing nothing doesn't earn you rewards, which isn't yet the case in PvP.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:32 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
WotLK against WAR

This was supposed to be my "top 10 games of 2008" predictions post, until I realized that there will only be 2 top games in 2008, and one of them is an expansion. Yes, I believe only the Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK) expansion of World of Warcraft and EA Mythics Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning (WAR) will make a major splash in 2008. Of course there will be other games, like Pirates of the Burning Sea or Age of Conan, but their success will be limited. They'll all perform in the range between what Vanguard and Lord of the Rings Online did in 2007, that is between a total flop and "nice, but soon forgotten" with a quarter of a million subscribers max. Only WotLK and WAR will sell more than a million copies each. So lets have a look at these two big ones.

Wrath of the Lich King is a curious beast: On the one hand it is a no-brainer. Whatever quality level it has, it will sell 10+ million copies world wide. Yes, that is more than the current number of subscribers of WoW, but WoW is estimated to have a churn rate of up to 5% per month, so there are millions of players that could potentially come back for the new content. It is possible that WotLK will cause the total number of subscribers to break the 10 million line, but that depends a bit on timing, and how much later China gets the expansion than the western world does. On the other hand Wrath of the Lich King is critically important for Blizzard and WoW. The big risk here is extrapolation: Customers are going to see the first and second expansion, and those two will shape the expectations for the future expansions. If WotLK has only the features already announced, the extrapolation looks basically like this: "Every WoW expansion adds 10 new levels to the top of the game, resets the raid progress of everyone, and then provides a new set of raid dungeons for the top players". This image will be attractive to some people, but not to millions and millions of them. An increasing number of people will realize that they just bought yet another expansion, leveled yet another 10 levels in a few weeks, and got stuck in yet another end game not tailored towards *their* needs for another year. And then it will be really, really difficult to sell these people a third expansion. If Blizzard wants to create a WotLK expansion that will encourage most players to buy the next expansion as well, they will have to do better. They will need to make the end game more accessible to the average player, especially the raiding end game. And they will need to add more content targeted towards the average player, like player housing, new races, new classes beyond one hero class per year, and new content for all levels, not just the top.

Of course one man's risk is another man's chance, and that is where Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning comes in. WAR enjoys a clear marketing superiority over WotLK. Blizzard is making interesting advertising about WoW in general, including TV ads with Captain Kirk and Mr. T, but is remarkably silent about their next expansion. Since the original announcement half a year ago, there have only been a few screen shots released, and no new information. Meanwhile WAR is producing hype faster than they are progressing with the game. There are monthly newsletters, video podcasts, developers blogs, and constant announcements of major changes in response to beta player feedback. I have no idea how good WAR is really going to be. But I do believe it will sell over a million copies just based on everybody's expectation that WAR is the next big thing.

A lot will depend on timing. WAR could do extremely well if it comes out either at least a month before WotLK or at least 3 months after it. It will have a much harder time if it comes out at the same time as WotLK or shortly after it. That makes you wonder how much of this "we'll release it when it's ready" talk from both sides is just strategic maneuvering, with neither company willing to announce a release date too early and give the other company a chance to place their release better. The most likely outcome of this is that both games end up being released only in the second half of 2008. While Blizzard could seriously spit in EA Mythic's soup by holding out and releasing WotLK only in Q4 2008, they will hurt themselves as well, because it makes their "one expansion per year" promise look increasingly hollow. And the people suffering the most from "release date poker" are the players.

I don't expect WAR to be better than WoW, but it doesn't have to be. Customers are going to make somewhat unfair comparisons like "WotLK offers 1 new class, WAR offers 24 new classes", or "WotLK offers 1 new battleground, WAR offers a completely new PvP system". This is exactly where WotLK being more of the same will hurt WoW. Many bored WoW or ex-WoW players will at least give WAR a chance. That will not "kill" WoW, but it will be noticeable in WoW's earnings and profits. Which might actually be a good thing. Success makes complacent, maybe once a serious competitor makes itself noticeable Blizzard will steer away from that "more of the same" formula.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:12 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Iowa primaries and global food prices

My excuses for writing one of my rare posts that are about politics and not games. But I read a bunch of news over the holidays and started to make a surprising connection. Fact is that food prices rose a lot globally in 2007, due to supply not meeting demand. Global grain stocks dropped by 55 million tons in 2007. At the same time America turned 30 million tons of maize into fuel, more than half of this drop. But ethanol from maize isn't efficient or economically viable, you could feed one person for a year with the maize needed to create enough ethanol to fill up a SUV. The maize to ethanol fuel business exists only due to generous subsidies.

So why do these subsidies still exist? Many sensible people, even US presidential candidates, have in the past spoken out against them. But today every single US presidential candidate is either silent on the issue or supports ethanol subsidies. Was this change of heart caused by a change in scientific findings? No, it was caused by the curious way the Americans elect their president. Before the presidential election the two parties first elect a nominee. And the elections of the nominees do not all take place at the same time in every state. The Iowa caucuses for the election of both the Republican and the Democrat presidential nominee are first. Winning those gives a candidate a big advantage for the elections in the other states. In the past some people who nationwide polled far behind managed to win the Iowa caucus, and surfed that wave of success all the way to the US presidency. Iowa being predominantly white and rural has profited very much from ethanol subsidies in the past. And that is why no candidate dares to speak out against ethanol subsidies.

Higher food prices create winners and losers, with the winners being farmers, and the losers being poor urban populations. Which really makes me wonder how the picture would look if the first primaries were in New York instead of Iowa, and suddenly all candidates were against ethanol subsidies, because apart from being expensive and inefficient they drive up food prices. In 2004 only 130,000 people came to the Iowa caucuses. It is curious what a big influence this small number of people has on global food prices.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:09 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Numerical boss stats and strategy

I was a bit surprised in recent discussions to see so many comments that said (paraphrased) "you can't make raid boss encounters easier, because they require strategy". I think you got that one backwards. Raid boss encounters require strategy, because they are so hard. I've been to Molten Core with a level 70 raid guild, and the same encounters that needed a lot of strategy at level 60 suddenly were a lot easier and left far more room for error. It wasn't as if good strategy wasn't helpful any more. But if lets say somebody was turned into a bomb by Baron Geddon and exploded in the middle of the raid instead of in a safe corner, it didn't cause a wipe any more, because people had more health, and were faster healed back up to full.

The difficulty of raiding is basically the about the degree of perfection that a raid group has to achieve to beat the boss encounter. And that degree of perfection depends very much on numerical values, both those of the boss mob, and those of the raid group. You can see that by the equally backward comment of "you don't need to make Karazhan easier for noobs, because Karazhan is already much easier now than it was at the start". Of course Karazhan is much easier now for a raiding guild; not only do they have more experience with the encounters, but they are now wearing epic gear from many Karazhan visits, and that makes a big difference in difficulty. A group of 10 players who never visited Karazhan before and who are wearing blue gear from non-heroic 5-man dungeons will still find Karazhan to be very, very difficult.

Just like you can make Karazhan easier by equipping the whole raid group with epic gear, you could make it easier by by reducing numerical values of trash and boss mobs. If a boss has less health, deals less damage per second, and his special attacks have less effect, the encounter would be easier. If you take some raid boss and reduce for example his health, dps, and damage from specials all by 20%, suddenly many groups that would wipe at that encounter before would be able to do it. This is probably more evident to people with experience as raid healers, because they know how much of a difference it makes if the boss mob needs 5 seconds longer to reduce the main tank from full health to zero.

The importance of numerical boss stats is very visible in heroic 5-man dungeons. The heroic bosses do not have any different abilities than the non-heroic ones, they just have higher numerical stats. If you have a group that can kill the first boss of heroic ramparts, and take the same group to the non-heroic version, they can afford many more mistakes and strategic errors and still win.

So I still believe that labeling the current raid dungeons as "heroic", and then creating a mirror copy where everthing has lower stats (and maybe some trash is removed) would create "easy mode" raid dungeons that would be accessible to a far larger number of people. People would still have the hard version with better rewards to aspire to. But they could train how to do raid encounters in a less unforgiving environment, and earn something like raid points and raid badges that could then be used to buy equipment. Players wouldn't be forced to do PvP even if they didn't like it much, just for the rewards they get there from honor points and BG badges.

It is unlikely that Blizzard will do these changes for the TBC dungeons. But they still could introduce "normal" and "heroic" raid dungeons in Wrath of the Lich King, just like they introduced "normal" and "heroic" 5-man dungeons in TBC.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:11 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
European preorder of Pirates of the Burning Sea

Pirates of the Burning Sea is still expected to come out on January 22. But players who buy the preorder box get access 15 days early, which is January 7, aka next Monday. And I haven't seen a PotBS preorder box in any of the shop I visited, apparently the European distribution isn't that top notch. So yesterday I ended up buying a preorder virtual "box" from DLGamer for 10 Euro (which also gives me a 10 Euro coupon when buying the game there).

Only problem is that the download is by BitTorrent. As I am very much legit and against piracy of music, videos, and warez games, I didn't even have BitTorrent software installed. Fortunately DLGamer provides you with a link to a freeware BitTorrent client. Started the download, went to bed, and woke up to find my computer crashed after 0.6% of the download was completed. Grrrr! So I restarted the download this morning and hope it is completed by tonight.

I can understand why Blizzard is distributing their patches by the peer to peer way: there are enough World of Warcraft players on the internet at any given time, and Blizzard is providing the P2P client in the background of the WoW Launcher. I'm not so sure that P2P is the best way to distribute smaller games. How many people are downloading PotBS from DLGamer? Can't be more than a handful. I would have preferred a direct download from them to being forced to install fishy BitTorrent software.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Railroad Tycoon - The Board Game

I had a fun time playing Railroad Tycoon - The Board Game with friends during our new year party. The game is huge and has lots of pieces, but the rules are simple enough to unpack the game and start playing. Or so we thought. Unfortunately we played the German version, where the rules booklet was suffering from bad translation. And when I later looked up the game on BoardGameGeek I noticed we had done a huge mistake: when calculating how far you can deliver goods, and how many points they bring, we counted hex tiles, when what we *should* have counted was links between cities. Strangely enough the game still worked and was fun to play when using that wrong rule. But I suspect the game would have played rather differently if we had used the correct rules. As often there are several hex tiles between cities, moving goods X links is much farther than moving them X tiles. I only noticed that there was a problem because there is a rule about bringing goods from Kansas City to Chicago, and these are 9 tiles apart, but the best locomotive can only travel a length of 8.

Apart from that small problem, I really liked the economic aspects of the game. You start with no money at all, but you can get all the money you want by giving our shares, each of which gets you $5,000. But at the end of every round, you need to pay $1,000 per share, and at the end of the game every share counts as one negative victory point. So giving out lots of shares early to get the investments going can really backfire. It is an interesting principle, because you never run out of money, as you can always give out more shares. But you need to find the sweet spot between giving out too few of them and not having enough cash to build, and giving out too many and being brought down by dividend payments and negative points.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:23 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post