The Solofication of MMORPGs

Once upon a time there was a MMORPG called Everquest, and it forced players to group to progress. For most classes you could only solo the newbie zones, and starting from about level 10 or so you would discover that the lowest level mob that still gave experience points to you was already too hard for you to kill alone. But a few classes could use special tactics to solo anyway, druid were kiting mobs after them, and necromancers were fear kiting mobs away from them. (I played a quad kiting druid.) And it turned out that soloing was popular: far more people played druids or necromancers than playing any other class.

So every new generation of MMORPGs made soloing easier and easier, because that was what the customer wanted, until we arrived at World of Warcraft, where every single class is basically expected to solo all the way up to the level cap. There are differences in the speed at which the different classes and talent trees can solo, but even least soloable class can kill mobs and do quests of his own level. And soloing is still popular, with classes that solo faster being played more than classes that solo slower.

And as soloing was what the customer wanted, some unknown developer at Blizzard came up with a brilliant idea: What if PvP could be made soloable too? That sounded crazy, because by definition you need at least 2 players for PvP, and if you wanted more than just duels you needed large groups on both sides of a battle. But that unknown dev realized that it wasn't necessary to have players actually form pre-arranged groups to do PvP. It wasn't absolutely necessary for players to cooperate in PvP. Sure, a group that cooperated would beat a group that didn't, but you could very well create a balanced battle between two groups as long as both of them were equally unorganized. And thus battlegrounds were born, and once Blizzard tweaked the PvP reward system they were extremely popular. And the majority of people basically solo battlegrounds, that is queue up for them alone, and then do whatever they want once inside. I call that pseudo-solo. This goes so far that people actually complain if they end up against an organized group.

I don't know if that unknown developer switched from Blizzard to EA Mythic, or whether EA Mythic had their own developer realizing that this solofication strategy could be applied to PvE raid content as well. Because what they did was they invented the "public quest". Which works basically like a battleground, just for PvE instead of PvP. People just join, without arranging groups, everyone does what he thinks is best, while a few frustrated players try to shout orders and are generally ignored. Pseudo-solo large group PvE content, where everyone gets rewarded, I'm sure people will love it. Soloing is what the customers want.

But a MMORPG has a large and diverse base of customers, and not all of them prefer solo play. As early as Everquest some people noticed that a group is stronger than the sums of its parts. The larger the group, and the better it is coordinated, the greater the challenges it can overcome. Moving from open world to instanced content, developers were able to limit how many players could attack a specific challenge. But they couldn't prevent players from organizing themselves better and better, training each encounter for hours and hours, until even a large raid group moved with a coordination that would make the bolshoi ballet green from envy. And thus an arms race evolved, on the other side of the MMORPG from the solo content, a race in which developers would design harder and harder challenges, and raiders would again and again prove that these challenges could be beaten with perfect coordination. To understand that arms race, Blizzard hired one of Everquest's top raiders as lead designer, and consequently spent a lot of development effort on designing ultra-hard raid content. There were clearly *some* customers that wanted this, and not solo content. And while the number of top raiders wasn't large, they were deemed to be influence leaders, the kind of people that other players looked up to, and also the kind of players who were most likely to post a lot of comments on game forums or other places of the internet. And it worked! While the number of players actually experiencing the highest level of raid content is still tiny, the desire to be a raider is certainly far more wide-spread.

The problem is that these two parts of the game are drifting further and further apart in World of Warcraft and the MMORPG genre in general. Soloing becomes easier and easier, the need to group during leveling up has been nearly completely removed, elite mobs turned into soloable non-elites, and the rewards for pseudo-solo PvP have been much increased. It is now possible to go from level 1 to level 70 and full epic gear in World of Warcraft without ever joining a group once. And the classes who are best at soloing fast or best at PvP are the most popular and most played. Meanwhile raiding remains hard, because that is the very reason of being for it, and even harder raid content as added to the end with every content patch. But to overcome these challenges, people need to learn how to play in a coordinated way. And the mix of classes, talents, and gear required for raiding is very different from what is most popular and easy to achieve in the soloing part of the game. Slowly but surely the two modes of gameplay drift so far apart that cracks begin to appear, threatening the whole model. From a raider's point of view the leveling game now fails to fulfil it's function of getting people ready to raid. Sure, they might be level 70 and have epic gear, but they might still be totally useless for a raid: they have not even the most basic training of how to play their class in a group, and they are of the wrong class, wrong spec, and wearing gear with the wrong bonuses to succeed in raids. If the 40 people in an average Alterac Valley group decided to kick out the 15 least suitable among them and take the remaining 25 to any one of the 25-man raid dungeons, they would not be able to get past the trash mobs. The average player who soloed up to 70, invested some effort in PvP to get epic gear, and now wants to raid, will find himself rejected and laughed at by the top raiding guilds on his server. He'll complain about them being elitist, but in fact it is game design that created the gap between average player and raider. The solofication of MMORPGs creates a large number of characters who simply aren't viable for the top end raid game.

What needs to be done is to rethink the concept of solofication. Why is soloing popular? A part of it is due to Real Life ® contraints, if you solo you can play in smaller bits and bites, group play needs longer periods. But another part of it is just a Skinner box: people like soloing because the game teaches them that soloing is the easiest way to advance. So even if they would have the time for a group, they rather keep on playing solo, because setting up a group is so not worth it. Assembling the group is made complicated by a bad LFG system in WoW. Doing quests that aren't marked a group quests in a group is often bringing less experience points per hour than soloing them. And WoW's concept of teaching players how to group is equivalent of throwing them into deep water to teach him how to swim: some people learn it that way, but many get hurt and frustrated in the process.

Solofication not only opens up a gap to end game raid content, it also moves MMORPGs in a direction where they become vulnerable to competition from single-player games. When I recently asked whether people would play a single-player version of WoW without monthly fees, I was surprised of how many people would prefer such a game over an online MMORPG with monthly fees. If game design minimizes your interaction with other players, then why pay $15 a month for that interaction?

I think that it is time for the pendulum to swing back towards MMORPGs being more about groups again. Not enforced grouping, nobody wants that. But to a situation where even during the leveling process forming a group would actually be easy and the incentives would encourage it. Where people would learn to cooperate, because it would be to their advantage, and where due to that cooperation they would make more friends and develop stronger social bonds. Where players would arrive at the end game and already know how to play well in a group. Where playing a "support class" like tank or healer was a reasonable choice, and not a niche way for raiders to gimp themselves for the rest of the game. Where MMORPGs would be massively multiplayer again, and not massively singleplayer in parallel, as they are now. Here's hoping.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:14 AM Permanent Link  (54) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 31-March-2008

Before talking about my adventures in World of Warcraft this weekend, I'd like to say grats to my wife: Mrs. Tobold dinged 70 for the first time, also the first time she hit the level cap in three years of playing WoW. She has about a dozen characters, but most of them were given up a few levels before the cap. But then she discovered stealth, and first leveled up a rogue to 68, and now finally a druid to 70. Too bad she's running out of stealth classes now. As she neither groups nor does PvP, it isn't clear what she'll do next.

Me, I'm still playing three characters. Although I must say I'm playing my warrior less and less. At least I managed to get him up to another 9k honor, so he could buy the off-hand epic sword. As my tanking career is less than satisfying, and the welfare blues provide a good start for a dps gear set, I might respec to dual-wielding dps fury and see if that is more fun. Or I'll park him in a cupboard and only let him out when I need potions made.

My mage is coming along nicely, now level 67. I'm at the last quests in Nagrand, and plan to go from there directly to Netherstorm, because I haven't really quested all that much in that zone. This weekend I found a group with guild mates and a stranger to do a whole bunch of group quests in Nagrand. The demon quest series, the end of the Nessingwary hunting quests, everything except Durn the Hungerer, because we didn't have a full group. Doesn't matter, that quest doesn't have good mage loot anyway. I had great fun with AoE in Sunspring Village with the murkbloods, and just have to finish the Warmaul ogres before moving on.

The character I spent the most time on this weekend was my priest. I did every available Sunwell Offensive daily quest with him every day, plus several Magister's Terrace (MrT) runs. The funniest run was a heroic MrT run with a tank, two mages, and a hunter, all very well equipped, and playing well. With lots of crowd control even heroic is relatively easy, and we got to Kael'thas without many problems. But in heroic Kael'thas occasionally puts up a 10k health shield, and starts casting pyroblast for 50k damage. You need to take down the shield and interrupt the spell, which seems pretty much impossible. So you just have to wipe a couple of times until you get lucky and manage to get to phase 2 without him having launched a pyroblast. So we did that, Kael tosses us around with gravity lapses a couple of times, I desperately try to keep myself and everyone alive with prayers of mending and renews, until I find that everyone but me suddenly is dead. I target Kael, and find him at 1% life. So I cast a shadow word: pain and a disease on him, start blasting him with a wand, and somehow manage to kill him. ROFL, holy priest soloes Kael'thas on heroic!

If you have a good group, heroic MrT is nice, because it gives you 5 epics and 4 badges of justice. I had the impression that the loot table for MrT has an above average amount of weapons on it, heroic Kael'thas dropped two epic weapons for us, for example. My priest got an interesting epic trinket from the third boss, which gets one charge every time I cast any healing spell, up to a maximum of 20, and I can discharge it instantly and heal a target for 100 health per charge. An instant 2000 point heal can be rather useful, and you can charge the trinket before combat by spamming cheap renews.

With all this activity my priest is half way through honored, just 6k more reputation until revered, where I can get the jewelcrafting recipes I want. I think I overestimated the effort needed, I'll have the jewelcrafting recipes for epic gems long before the server reaches phase 3 and I can actually buy the uncut epic gems for badges. Not that it was a waste of time to do all those daily quests, they padded my wallet quite nicely. But I'm wondering if maybe I should stop with my priest at revered, and either do the dailies then with my warrior, or level up my mage and do them with him. Right now I don't see the use of getting my priest to exalted, while the warrior or mage could get some nice gear for reputation.

The last thing to report is a raid to Serpentshrine Cavern, where we killed the Lurker, and tried our hand at Leotheras the Blind. That was fun, and interesting to see for the first time for me, even if ultimately we didn't kill him. What was somewhat less fun was an episode where my guild wanted to start another SSC run, I didn't feel like going there, and their raid didn't get off the ground due to lack of healers. Talk about peer pressure. I sometimes get the impression that some raid healers go deliberately into hiding, log off, and don't even play alts around the time raids are formed, to avoid being pestered into raids they don't want to go to. Is it just me or are raid healers burning out faster than other raiders?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:01 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
Magister's Terrace and crowd control

I like the new 5-man dungeon, Magister's Terrace. But having run it repeatedly in normal and heroic with various groups, I noticed that our success was pretty much determined by the amount of crowd control we brought. If besides a tank and a healer you have 3 dps classes with crowd control, like mages, warlocks, hunters, and rogues, the dungeon is totally doable. If you bring lets say an enhancement shaman, a retribution paladin, and a fury warrior and thus have no crowd control except tanking, doing Magister's Terrace becomes nearly impossible.

That makes me wonder why not all classes get *some* form of crowd control, so they can perform a useful role beyond pure damage dealing in a group.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:38 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
Philips DVDR3597H region free

I bought a new Philips TV recorder this weekend, with a 250 GB hard drive and a DVD+R drive to make permanent copies of whatever you recorded and want to keep. Its a Philips DVDR3597H/31 to be exact, the big brother of the DVDR3595H. Installing it was easy, upgrading the firmware to version 1.61 from the Philips support website somewhat more difficult. And then in spite of what the vendor had told me, even with the firmware upgrade the DVD drive wouldn't play my region 1 DVDs I bought in the USA. So I searched the internet for a region free hack, which would make my machine multi region capable. And I found one that works:

1) Turn the DVDR3597H on, with no DVD in the drive
2) press HOME, so the browser appears
3) press PLAY. The display on the machine should say "BROWSER"
4) Slowly enter the following code: 159121212005255 (the numbers should appear on the display)
5) press PLAY. Done!
- posted by Tobold @ 11:29 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Switching gear

A reader sent me an interesting idea to solve the problem of tanks and healers being unpopular because hard to solo: What if there was gear which had different stats depending on whether you are alone or grouped? That way you could for example equip a tank with gear that helps tanking in a group, but increases his damage output when he is questing alone. Or healing gear that has more spell damage and less healing bonus whenever the healer isn't grouped. What do you think?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:32 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
Tiger Woods raids the Black Temple

One of my readers, Ben, left such an excellent comment on a recent thread discussing the different motivations of casual and hardcore raiders, that I decided to copy and paste it into this new thread:

This whole argument becomes a lot more absurd if you use a different context as an analogy. Let's go with golf. Golf is a sport with a very low barrier for entry. People of all ages and skill levels play and enjoy it, but there are those who play at a high enough level to compete professionally. Let's say you and your friends have a regular game you play every weekend. You don't have the skill to enter any PGA tournaments, but you're respectable amateurs. One week your friend announces that on an upcoming vacation you'll be given the opportunity to play at Augusta, a world famous course that's beautiful and requires strategies beyond anything you've seen in your golfing career thus far.

You've seen the pros play this course, so you're vaguely familiar with how it works, and you've talked to a few friends who've been there before. Still, nothing quite prepares you for the actual experience. You struggle through it and eventually sink your putt on the 18th green. Your score isn't pretty, but you've finished successfully, and you feel like you've grown in skill slightly for the experience. If you did this every week you might not be half bad at this course.

As you're walking toward the clubhouse, Tiger Woods comes running toward you, wearing his green jacket, medals around his neck, brandishing his most expensive club. He's yelling that you're a bunch of noobs and it's not fair that you got to play this course. He points out that since you got to start from a closer tee than the professionals you didn't actually accomplish anything of value. He goes on to say that he played through Augusta years ago and he's done it many, many times since, so he's clearly better than you. Finally, he insists that none of you is allowed to buy anything from the gift shop before storming off the way he came.

The idea of this happening is ridiculous, and yet it's exactly what's happening in WoW. The high level raiders are the WoW Pro Tour. The rest of us are just amateurs. What's really sad though is that the analogy can continue to another level - we play for fun while the complainers seem to treat it like a job.

This is exactly why I think that raiding should be made more accessible, not more elite. Enjoyment of raid content isn't limited to people who can spend 40+ hours per week raiding. Raiding isn't just about the epics, it is a different mode of gameplay. Sometimes it is just plain fun to hang out with a larger group of friends and try to figure out a new boss encounter.

The ideal MMORPG offers a large range of different modes of gameplay: PvE, PvP, solo, small group, large group, combat and non-combat. And it gives out rewards in a balanced way based on time, effort, and skill, with each activity being worth pursueing and offering its own rewards. Unfortunately World of Warcraft is moving further and further away from that model, and towards a far less attractive model of compartmentalization: Instead of having players able to do a bit of everything, they are encouraged to excel at one single activity, and then rewarded in a way that makes all other activities not worth doing any more. That not only diminishes the scope of the game, it also leads to situations like the one in the analogy, where the top dogs in one activity feel they are superior to the players pursueing different goals, and try to shoo them off their turf.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:04 AM Permanent Link  (38) comments Links to this post

 
Welfare Blues

I can't remember when I've been so angry the last time about a minor design decision by Blizzard. I was shaking my fist with rage at an NPC vendor, of all people; fortunately he didn't appear to have suffered lasting emotional damage from that. I was angry at him for a strange reason: he wanted to sell me dps gear which was better than what I had for a very low price. Blizzard in patch 2.4 introduced what I can only call "welfare blues": a set of excellent blue dps gear, great stats, set bonus, gem slots, and you only need to be level 70 and honored with some common factions to get it. The whole set costs only about 100 gold for all 5 pieces together, and can be gotten from the quartermasters of Thrallmar, Cenarion Expedition, Lower City, Sha'tar, and Keepers of Time at honored reputation, for all classes.

The purpose of the welfare blues set is easy to see: if you just leveled up a new character to level 70, you probably already got most of the rep you need for this, and you can buy this set of blue armor to be well equipped for your first PvP battles. In fact only the legs from the Keepers of Time will require you to visit a dungeon. If you skip those, there is no reason whatsoever to ever visit a normal 5-man dungeon again, unless you need gear for tanking. You just do one evening of daily quests, and you have enough cash to buy a complete set of blue gear that is better than most of items you could hope to find in a normal mode dungeon. With one stroke Blizzard made most normal dungeons completely obsolete. What the heck were they thinking?

I can only assume that Blizzard feels somewhat threatened by the PvP MMORPGs coming out this year, and are moving World of Warcraft towards being a game that is completely about soloing and PvP in response. What they fail to see is that the PvP fans will switch to AoC or WAR anyway, and that the changes do more harm to group PvE than they help PvP. Group PvE by definition is a group activity, and thus has strong network effects. By removing the incentives to go to dungeons for many classes and specs, it gets even harder to find groups for those who love dungeons.

And it would be so easy to give PvP players good gear that doesn't make dungeon PvE loot obsolete: Simply hand out stuff that has low stats when used in PvE, but gains bonuses whenever the user is in an arena or battleground. We already have potions and stuff that only works in battlegrounds, why not PvP gear that only works in PvP? Making welfare blues that make PvE less attractive is a really, really bad idea!
- posted by Tobold @ 8:20 AM Permanent Link  (35) comments Links to this post

 
PvP cheating

Keen and Graev have an interesting post about WoW PvP cheating in arenas. Apparently a 2v2 in really bad gear was found to have won 20-0 on an extremely high 2627 team rating, the second highest 2v2 ranking in the world. Which is pretty much impossible unless they cheated. I don't even know how all these cheating methods in arena I hear about, like win swapping or smurfing, work, but apparently there is a lot of cheating going on. Which doesn't bode well for WoW as an "e-sport".

Keen doesn't normally post anything about WoW, and I had the impression he was gloating a bit. And then he was really crushed by the news that WAR was delayed again. I couldn't help but wonder if Keen is under the impression that there will be no cheating in WAR PvP. Because I'm pretty certain that there will be. After all, WAR looks more and more like DAoC2, and people cheat in the original DAoC. And if players don't outright cheat, they still often use underhand methods, like attacking an enemy keep in the middle of the night when the enemy isn't logged on, and you can avoid the actual "PvP" part of PvP and just deal with NPC guards. There would have to be a miraculous change in human nature for no cheating or complaints about other players underhand tactics to occur in WAR.

And in a way cheating in WAR PvP is worse than in WoW. That WoW arena team that got a high ranking without ever encountering a real opponent thus never influenced the score of a real opponent. Besides possible jealousy of their rank and the PvP rewards they can buy with the points those guys acquired by cheating, their cheating doesn't harm any other player. But if you have a game where non-instanced PvP objectives really matter, and somebody cheats, it comes to the detriment of the players of the opposing faction. That increases the chance for detection, but it also increases the chance of somebody complaining about "cheating" in cases which could still be labeled as "clever tactics". I mean, I find attacking a keep at 3 am cheesy, but I wouldn't want anyone to be banned for that. So I'm pretty certain that there will be a lot of heated discussion in the future.

As for Blizzard, they should scan their own Armory for suspicious data like that, then verify that the players involved really cheated, and then ban them. If they don't go after PvP cheaters early and hard, their e-sports idea is dead in the water.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:43 PM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
Do you play on a PvP server?

As everyone knows I'm a carebear it comes to no surprise that I'm playing on a "normal" server, not on a PvP server. I was chatting with a friend today, exchanging our experiences of patch 2.4, and his take was radically different from mine, because he is playing on a PvP server: He couldn't do a single daily quest for the Sunwell Offensive, because he kept getting killed before he could kill the mobs. And when he and his fully epic geared friends decided to do Magister's Terrace instead, they died 4 times before even reaching the instance. Fortunately he is a warlock, and they could summon inside. But groups who needed the summoning stone in front of the instance died a lot more often before they could actually start.

To me (carebear mode again) that doesn't sound a lot of fun. I tried a bit of open world PvP last weekend trying to take Halaa, but as there are twice as many Alliance than Horde on my server (according to Warcraftrealms), you're always the underdog if you do open world PvP as Horde there.

And it is not as if by playing on a normal server I couldn't do PvP. Duels, and the battlegrounds, and arenas, and open world PvP objectives are available to me. PvP on a normal server is a positive sum event, where everyone involved gains some honor points, victory marks, or arena points. The only difference is that I don't have to fear getting ganked if I don't want to. I am honestly surprised that so many people play on PvP servers and apparently prefer the danger of being ganked. It makes me wonder if the people on PvP servers are more hardcore, and playing more hours than the people on normal servers. If you are on limited available play time, getting a group together and all transported to the start of the instance is already hard enough without getting killed repeatedly on the way. And obviously players on PvP servers get less daily quests done and need more time to farm the same amount of gold. What is the attraction?

I'd be interested to hear whether you are playing on a PvP server or a normal server, and why. Was that a conscious decision, or something you regret? Have you moved from a PvP server to a normal one, or considered it? Or do you consider rerolling on a PvP server if you are currently on a normal one? What do you think is the attraction of a PvP server in World of Warcraft?
- posted by Tobold @ 1:16 PM Permanent Link  (37) comments Links to this post

 
Encouraging playing a healer or tank

Group combat in World of Warcraft is a mix of damage dealing, aggro management, and healing, with different classes being specialized in those three aspects. But in soloing and PvP only damage dealing really counts. Most aggro management skills to increase or reduce threat don't do anything solo or in PvP. Healing is nice in solo and PvP, but not downright essential. Especially in soloing, healing doesn't get you anywhere, you need to deal damage to kill the mob to do the quest. So from the three different specializations, the damage dealers have obvious advantages: they can use the same talents, gear, spells and abilities in group combat, in solo combat, and in PvP. Meanwhile somebody who specialized in aggro management, like a tank, or in healing, is penalized. Either he has to collect several sets of gear and pay for respecs when he wants to move from grouping to soloing and PvP, or he has to live with being less effective in soloing than the damage dealing classes. Sometimes even both, there is simply no way that you can make lets say a paladin deal as much damage as a rogue or mage in similar quality gear.

Yesterday I was hanging out in the looking for group chat, before I found a guild group going to Magister's Terrace, the new dungeon. And the chat was full of half-complete groups shouting for a healer, a tank, or both. Even in guild chat we regularly have the same problem, healers and tanks are in short supply. Everybody wants a healer and tank to group with, but too few people want to actually play one themselves. For me that is a classical case of people voting with their feet: Everyone knows that by playing a healer or tank you are gimping yourself for solo and PvP, so they tend to rather play classes that are easier to solo.

What I think Blizzard should do is making playing a tank or healer more attractive. That would not only help the players who have a tank or healer, but it would over time also increase the number of tanks and healers in the game, and thus help everyone to find a group. And the key to encouraging people to play a healer or tank is certainly to improve their soloability. Making healing bonus count also as spell damage was a good move in that direction. But patch 2.4 was sadly devoid of any further improvements, especially for tanks.

And of course one frequently discusses point here is the cost and ease of respecs. Patch 2.4 slightly reduced the cost of respecs, you don't have to pay training costs repeatedly in addition to the respec cost. But respec'ing having a cost at all isn't affecting the different classes in the same way. If I would respec my mage from frost to fire, that would be purely for the fun of getting to use different spells. The mage would still be a damage dealer, and in most cases he could still use the same gear. For my protection warrior, a respec is something completely different: I basically switch from being a group character to a solo character. I need two sets of gear to be efficient in both forms, and whatever spec I choose, I become inefficient in the other mode. Nobody wants a fury spec warrior as a tank, they are just not good enough for the job, unless they are completely overgeared for that specific challenge. And the same is true for healers, groups don't want to rely on shadow priests or enhancement shamans for their healing. So why does Blizzard want to have a barrier preventing healers and tanks to switch easily between group and solo mode? It just discourages people from playing one of them in the first place.

Of course playing a healer or tank has one indirect reward: ease of finding a group. As a healer (not necessarily as tank) there is also a good chance that you'll get a raid spot easier than a dps class. But World of Warcraft is not a highly group-centric game, and lately the rewards for soloing (daily quests) and PvP have been significantly improved, while the rewards for grouping didn't get all that much better. And then a vicious cycle kicks in: People find it easier to do PvP, thus groups aren't needed that much, thus healers and tanks aren't needed as much, further reducing the appeal of those classes, making it even harder to find them for a group, which increases the appeal of PvP even more. Unless Blizzard wants to turn WoW into a game which is all about soloing and PvP, they should improve the appeal of playing a healer or tank, as long as there are still some of them left.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:56 AM Permanent Link  (30) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Journal - 27-March-2008

So patch 2.4 hit Europe yesterday, causing the sort of chaos that is considered normal in these cases. Most people reported easy patching, but from the three computers I patched one managed to crash during patch application, and I had to run the Blizzard repair.exe to fix the installation again. Then of course many addons refused to work any more, and the big WoW addon sites like Curse.com were down. It is strange how different the game feels if you don't have your usual addons working.

Once in the game, I followed advice from guild chat and first took the relevant quest from the middle of Shattrath, before using the portal to Silvermoon and flying to the new Sunwell island north of it from there. This being the first day, the place was still in it's first phase, with only two daily quests available. One was easy, killing 5 robots and reactivating them. The other was more annoying, because you needed to collect 4 quest items, which appear to have a drop rate of about 10% from the Wretched Fiend, possibly a bit higher from the Wretched Devourers. And of course the place was swarming with players, there were more players than mobs at some areas. There was also a non-daily quest, which teleported me to the Throne of Kil'Jaeden, where I got two more daily quests. I grouped up for those with a guild group, because they were there and we had to kill some elite mobs, but as you first have to weaken the mob before killing them, that might be possible solo. The other quest there was extremely easy, because you have to charge up a summoned pet by leading it next to dying mobs, but mobs killed by other players work. After doing those quests I noticed to my annoyance that there was no teleport back to the isle, so I had to fly back to Shattrath. I saw more daily quests there, but didn't get around doing them.

Instead I joined a guild group to visit Magister's Terrace, the new 5-man dungeon. Very nice place, I think of it as a raid dungeon for 5-man groups. The first boss is a bit similar to the last boss of Steamvault. The second boss is a mini-Curator. The third boss is a mini-Moroes (or mini-Maulgar) encounter, where you have to fight a whole group of different classes. And the last boss of Magister's Terrace, Kael'Thas is a complicated encounter in several phases, which took us a couple of wipes to learn. There were some other interesting features in this dungeon: as part of the quest to kill Kael'Thas, you get to use a scryers orb, showing you a nice cut scene preview of what I presume is Sunwell Plateau. Except at character creation World of Warcraft isn't using cut scenes otherwise, and everyone in my group agreed that it was a nice addition. The other interesting thing was that to unlock heroic mode for Magister's Terrace, you have to finish the quest to kill the last boss in normal mode. Very good idea, and much more logical than unlocking it with some reputation. Not that I'm planning to do much Magister's Terrace in heroic, because even with a raid-gear equipped guild group the place wasn't trivial in normal mode, especially Kael'thas. Although beating him was more about learning the encounter and finding out where to to "swim" in gravity-free mode, and not necessarily a gear check.

Well, handing in the head of Kael'thas made me ding friendly with the Sunwell Offensive. And this morning phase 1 was already 48% complete, so there is visible progress. The most often asked question in chat was where the badge loot vendor was, but apparently he only appears in phase 3, and wasn't available yet. The Sunwell Offensive quartermaster was up already, and I could see that my priest needs revered with the Sunwell Offensive to get the recipes for the epic gems. My warrior alchemist would need exalted to get a recipe for a nice alchemist stone trinket, but grinding a reputation to exalted for 1 item seems excessive. Not sure if I am going to do that, I'll start with the priest. But with the warrior I'll be able to do the fishing daily quest, which I haven't had time for yet.

I finished the evening in Karazhan, short run from start to opera, so I'm at 138 badges now. I haven't checked the various sites what exactly the badge loot for priests is, I'll check it out directly once we reach phase 3 and the vendor is up. I'll be speeding that process along by doing lots of daily quests and Magister Terrace runs, probably in normal, for the reputation. Once I get the hang of that place, it might even be good to visit with my warrior, for loot drops.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:16 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Warhammer Online delayed until "fall"

This just in from Eurogamer: Jeff Hickman from EA Mythic told the press today that WAR will be delayed until "fall" of this year, no exact date given. At the same press conference the content of the collector's edition was revealed. Curiously that package contains "access to the open beta", there must be something I don't understand about the term "open". Or maybe this is just about you being able to keep your beta character for release, as many games do now.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:51 PM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Scott Jennings says it better

I'm just a humble disciple of the original MMORPG blogger Lum the Mad, who manages to summarize the whole patch 2.4 changes to raiding in a simple diagram, while I spent two longs posts discussing design progression.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:47 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Virtual economics

Just a short link to an article in Scientific American, who report about the Ph.D. economist that was hired to look after the economy of EVE Online. Interesting, but the article doesn't contain much news.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:41 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
The further you go, the harder it is to progress

I was chatting recently with a reader about WoW when he made a good remark: "The further you go, the harder it is to progress". That pretty much sums up the whole character progression game from level 1 to full T6 epic gear. It includes my wife complaining how slow it is while she approaches the level cap for the first time in 3 years of WoW. And it includes much of the whole raiding discussion on this blog.

From a game design point of view, that kind of exponential increase of difficulty with progress makes a lot of sense. Instead of having a linear progression ending at a hard wall, a "game over" screen, you get a MMORPG that appears endless, because the closer you get to the end, the slower you progress, asymptotically, so you never actually get there. Given the fact that developers can't create content as fast as players can consume it, this method is the only way to keep the illusion of endless progress up.

The disadvantage is that everyone gets stuck on that progression curve at some point, but all on different points. It becomes difficult to discuss where you are stuck, or to advise people how to progress further. Just as example, there was a recent discussion going on in some thread of how important it was to spend a thousand gold or more to gem up and enchant your blue gear to be able to progress further into heroics and raids. For somebody playing a lot, a thousand gold is probably a reasonable amount to spend towards progress at that point. But a lot of players who are more casual, or on alts, find a thousand gold to be a hurdle as difficult to overcome as beating a heroic or getting into a raid.

Matters are further complicated by the fact that there are more than one path of progress, all with different difficulties, often changing with time, and sometimes not equally valid for every character class. Sometimes you can overcome a hurdle on one path by switching to another and progressing there, like when you get some PvP reward epics to progress in heroics or raids. But that isn't an universal recipe, other players might be better off to be helped by their guilds through Karazhan, or to grind materials for crafted gear. You need to know a lot about someone to be able to give him proper advice on what to do when he is stuck.

The most fundamental change to those exponential progress paths are the expansions, which completely reset it. The day before the expansion is released you were stuck somewhere and felt you couldn't progress any more with effort that was acceptable to you. The next day you're back on easy street, with 10 levels of fast progress ahead of you. And as much as that fast progress feels good after having been stuck, it also makes you question your previous progress. Why did you spend so much time getting that one epic item at the level cap, only to replace it with a green random drop in the new expansion?

Therefore it is important to overcome the illusion of progress and achievement, and to concentrate on the fun you have playing. Goals are important as check boxes, as temporary objectives. There is nothing wrong in wanting a specific piece of gear, or a specific level of equipment which opens up new content to you. It is fun to pursue some goal, and to clap yourself on the shoulder once you achieved it. But progress by itself in MMORPGs isn't real, and if going further becomes too hard for you, doing something else is totally viable. If you ditch your friends and guild just for the promise of more progress in another guild, you'll risk finding yourself at the start of the next expansion with just hollow progress and no friends, and burned out from the effort it took you. Maximizing fun is a better strategy than maximizing progress.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:16 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
<N00b Inc> beats Black Temple in badge loot

Excuse the hypothetical sensational headline, but it seems some people get all excited about the new badge loot introduced in World of Warcraft patch 2.4. You can now buy for badges of justice some epic pieces which are roughly equivalent to T6 loot. Which means that theoretically a guild could do nothing but Karazhan and heroics, equip themselves with badge loot, and then jump directly to Black Temple, Mount Hyjal, or even the new Sunwell Plateau, skipping Tempest Keep: The Eye and Serpentshrine Cavern. And some elitist raiders feel threatened by that development.

Of course, as already mentioned, this is all just hypothetical. One pseudo-T6 badge loot chest piece costs 100 badges. That is 20 evenings of daily heroics, or 5 complete Karazhan clears, or a combination of the two for just 1 piece. To get a full 25-man equipped in badge loot would take many months. Even longer on a casual "n00b" schedule: Since I rejoined WoW in November my raiding priest made 156 badges of justice, of which I spent 25 for a wand, and still have 131, just enough to buy maybe one piece of pseudo-T6. And I'm not even sure I want that for my priest, with whose gear I'm satisfied enough. Now if I could send the badges to my warrior, that would be a different story, but they and the epics you buy with them are soulbound. The only alternative to spending them on gear is to spend badges on epic gems and selling those gems for gold. I'll watch how the prices for that evolve, and decide then whether I want better epics for my priest or more gold for my other characters.

So we won't be seeing guild moving directly from Karazhan to Black Temple, but behind the outcry of the elitists lies some real fact: Advancing through the raid circuit post patch 2.4 will be faster than before the patch. Guilds will still follow the same trajectory from Karazhan to ZA, SSC, and TK. But by doing all the stuff just like before, they will now collect badges everywhere. And when their gear has the inevitable hole from that one piece that never dropped, players will be able to fix that hole with a good piece of badge loot. With more badges gained and better badge loot, people will simply gear up quicker than before. And they will arrive at the Black Temple having "worked" somewhat less cumulative hours than the leet.

Of course I'm all for it. The low number of players having seen the top raid dungeons after over one year of TBC was just plain silly, and not an efficient use of development time, which apparently is a scarce resource at Blizzard. It is much easier to live with the devs adding yet another top raid dungeon, Sunwell Plateau, when at the same time they speed up everyone's progress through the raid circuit. Removing Karazhan attunement and making badge loot more valuable even somewhat lowers the barrier of entry into raiding, giving hope that some previous non-raiders will try it. Moving raiding from an elitist activity to something more suitable for the average player is a slow process, but Blizzard at least is moving in the right direction. I hope they are applying these lessons learned when making the raid dungeons for Wrath of the Lich King, and provide us with one "introductory" level raid dungeon.

But whenever devs make something easier, the "when I was young we walked bare-foot through the snow to school, uphill, both ways" crowd shows up booing. For some people it isn't enough to have achieved something first, they must also make sure that nobody else gets there, or it tarnishes their leet shine. Blizzard should ignore these people. Yes, having top end content might be good marketing, attracting people looking for a long-term goal. But that only works as long as these people think they will actually make it to that goal one day. At level 60 so few people made it to Naxxramas that Blizzard is now recycling the place for the next expansion to not totally waste the effort of creating it in the first place. It would be great if more than 1% of the player base would actually kill a boss in Sunwell Plateau before Wrath of the Lich King comes out. The new badge loot is speeding up the way there, and that is a good thing.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:48 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Brutally honest

The San Franscisco Chronicle yesterday wrote:

"This means that rather than simply repudiate, we must try to understand people whose views may shock and offend us. It's a common politically correct trope today that whenever someone is "offended" - especially about an issue of race or gender - the conversation stops and the offending parties must repudiate their statement. But sometimes offending people is productive: Honest dialogue about difficult and often personal issues will necessarily involve some bruised feelings."

Of course they were speaking about Obama's admirably gutsy speech about race, where he finally realized that "don't ask, don't tell" won't work for race issues. But of course the comment reminded me strongly about the recent discussions here, where some people were "offended" by me writing about controversial issues, and asked me to repudiate. So I'm following the advice from that newspaper, and will consider some bruised feelings a necessary and productive part of honest dialogue.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:50 AM Permanent Link  (28) comments Links to this post

 
Anonymous commenting back on

I hope the trolls have gone, and regular readers were complaining about not being able to comment any more without having some Google or OpenID account. So I turned commenting back to "Anyone - includes Anonymous Users", as it was before the fake ID troll attack. I do get e-mail alerts on any comment, and I will wield a heavy ban stick on any troll rearing his head, especially anonymous ones or those pretending to be other people.

If you want to comment here and become part of the community, I really recommend thinking of a pen name for yourself and using the "Name/URL" option with that name (URL is optional) instead of posting under anonymous. Not only are anonymous posters easy to confuse with trolls, there is also no way to tell them apart. Do you really want to post some intelligent comment, just to have it followed up by something moronic from another guy who also calls himself "anonymous"?
- posted by Tobold @ 12:46 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Patch 2.4 this week

Via WoWInsider comes the confirmation that patch 2.4 will arrive today on the US servers, and tomorrow on the European servers. I'm certainly going to discuss what I like and dislike about the patch in the coming days. But here I am just going to state something very fundamental: This patch is very essential to World of Warcraft for the simple reason that it adds more content. A lot of people suffer from WoW burnout, and have either already quit or aren't playing all that enthusiastically any more. The Burning Crusade has barely enough content to last the average player one year, but certainly not enough for nearly two, if we assume that Wrath of the Lich King won't be out before Q4 2008. Patch 2.4 is not so much patching the game but more patching the gap between TBC and WotLK. And that is a very good thing.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:03 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
LFGG

A guy we've been playing with for years left our guild this weekend because he was annoyed that he never could find any guild groups for 5-man dungeons. Pretty mild stuff as far as guild drama goes, but it made me think about guild groups. And in a way he is right, "Looking for guild group" (LFGG) is becoming harder and harder.

As usual when looking for reasons for player behavior, it is worth while to look at the risk to reward ratios. Normal mode dungeons are easy enough, but most people don't really need the loot from there any more. Following the advice of my readers I did some more Black Morass that weekend with my warrior, but none of the pickup group people involved needed any of the loot, it was just about the reputation, and about helping out somebody with his Karazhan key. I also did a guild group to Steamvault, which was the daily dungeon quest, and again most items got disenchanted, except for a chest piece for our pally, and me rolling a lucky greed roll on an Ace of Blessings. So with few people interested in the rewards, it's hard to get a normal dungeon group going.

Heroic mode dungeons are even worse. Either I'm extremely unlucky, or I always get a combination of too hard dungeon and too weak group. I tried Auchenai Crypts heroic this weekend, with a competent but not epic equipped guild group, and we failed miserably. We totally hated the place, with its invisible adds, 1-minute unbreakable possessions, getting kicked of the bridge by random explosions that can't be stopped, and we never managed to even kill the first boss. But the same people have no problems getting epics from PvP or even contributing reasonably well to a guild Karazhan run. So why go heroics when there are easier options that give better rewards?

The principal design problem here is that raids, PvP, and heroics should run parallel, so people can decide what they want to play and in all cases get similar rewards for similar effort. But in reality the rewards from heroics are somewhat below those for PvP and raids. Sure, at the start of TBC going to heroics first to gear up for Karazhan was a good plan. But a year later it is easier to find a "mixed" raid, with some better equipped people helping guild mates through Karazhan, and heroics are a far worse option. Heroics would be easier if you could get those well-geared people to help, but why would they want to do that? After a couple of Karazhan runs, nobody needs loot from heroics any more, and the few badges aren't worth the time. And if you can't get your guild to run you through Karazhan, PvP is now a better option than heroics, because PvP rewards improved and heroics rewards didn't.

Added to that is the problem of organization. World of Warcraft doesn't offer a guild very many tools to work with. Guilds need to find their own forums, their own event calendar applications, their own DKP or reward systems, and organize everything outside the game. Finding a guild group would be a lot easier if there was a LFGG functionality or an in-game guild event calendar for planification of raids and 5-man groups. The only thing a guild has is guild chat, and that isn't really a good tool to organize something. You can just state your request and hope that enough people are online who are interested in the same dungeon or just willing to help.

I love the small group content of World of Warcraft, small groups are so much more personal than big raids. But I think the concept of adding heroics dungeons to gear up for the first raids wasn't perfect. Given the competition from raids and PvP now, either heroics would need to be a bit easier, or the rewards would need to be increased to make them attractive even for people in raid / PvP gear. Are you still doing heroics regularly? And how do you find a guild group for them?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:37 AM Permanent Link  (30) comments Links to this post

 
Nagrand

I find Nagrand one of the prettiest zones in World of Warcraft. It combines a green lush environment with fantasy elements like floating rock islands and waterfalls. The points taken over by demons and having been corrupted make a really interesting sharp contrast, giving motivation to fight the corruption (not that this really would be possible). But right now I'm doing quests with my level 66 mage in Nagrand, and I must say from the quest design point of view, Nagrand isn't perfect. There are far too many "kill 30 talbuk, 30 windroc, and 30 clefthoof" quests, and once you did the first series, you're told to kill another 30 of each of slightly higher level. So you basically go somewhere and kill everything that moves for an hour, which isn't all that interesting or different from grinding.

The most interesting quest in Nagrand is probably the one with the trampoline. You spend more time trying to figure out how the trampoline works than killing stuff. I had some problems with the summoned bird being bugged and evading me, but a friendly shaman helped on the second try. The background story of the weak Mag'har leader is also interesting, leading to a visit of Thrall to his grandmother. But there are many, many quests that are just about killing X of this and Y of that. A bit more interaction with the environment or background story would have been welcome.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:31 PM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Virtual property rights

I'm trying to split off the discussion of the Blizzard vs. MDY lawsuit away from the short posts where I just linked to the court documents. Because I don't really want to talk about Glider, which anyway is a program I need about as much as a machine that watches TV for me. For me playing World of Warcraft is entertainment, and having a bot do it for me is counterproductive. But I am interested in that lawsuit, for the simple reason that if it actually gets far enough in a court, we might get some interesting rulings on virtual property rights.

If you look up "trespassing" in law books, you will find a wealth of information and law that developed over hundreds of years. You can find out exactly what your rights are to for example cross somebody else's land which is the only way of access to some landmark. Property rights are one of the oldest forms of law. But virtual property laws are new, and jurisdiction hasn't really evolved all that far yet.

At the heart of the virtual property debate is the question of whether you actually own your character and his possessions. Most players instinctively think they own their characters. Game companies think they don't, players only have limited use rights for anything that happens on the company's servers, including characters. If you really owned your character and that gold in his pocket, then who could legally stop you from selling that character or gold? Or who could stop you from running a program that plays your character 24/7 to level him up to 70, if getting to 70 is all you are interested in? The horror vision of a game company is a court decision that says that virtual property is property of the players, which would mean that players could sue the game companies for decisions that affect the value of said property, for example shutting the game down, or causing virtual inflation.

So you might have noticed that in the lawsuits of Blizzard vs. Peons4Hire or MDY the game company is careful not to invoke any virtual property rights directly. They claim, and with some justification, that the actions of gold farmers and botters have a negative effect on players, and thus on Blizzard's business. The goal is to either reach an early judgement in favor of Blizzard to shut the small company disturbing their business down, or if that fails, to scare them into a settlement. That is why Blizzard is asking for several millions of dollars of damages from MDY, but would probably settle for Glider just going away and MDY stopping to do business. But such an outcome would leave the underlying question of what exactly you can and cannot do in a virtual world unresolved. And that wouldn't be the best possible outcome, so I kind of grudgingly have to admire the fighting spirit of MDY.

Companies shouldn't be in the business of making laws. Sure, there have to be rules. If I enter a McDonald's restaurant, there are certain house rules I'll have to obey or get kicked off the premises. But there are also laws and rules of the real world that take precendence over the house rules. Virtual worlds aren't any different. I totally agree that Blizzard should have house rules for World of Warcraft, telling people how to behave, and threatening to kick them off the premises if they don't. But I do not think that real world laws don't apply at all in the virtual world, and I do not think that Blizzard could make any sorts of rules. Just like McDonald's can't refuse to serve someone based on his color of skin, religion, or sex, Blizzard isn't the final judge of what is and isn't allowed in World of Warcraft. There are limits where their jurisdiction ends, and the real world jurisdiction starts. If the CIA is looking for terrorists in World of Warcraft, they clearly think that this is outside Blizzard's jurisdiction.

We just don't know where exactly these limits lie, because they haven't been explored very well yet. This is why lawsuits like these are important, no matter on which side your sympathies are: If there is no law of the land, you'll one day do something that you considered totally okay, but the game company didn't, and is banning you for. Can a game company delete your character which might be worth $10,000, or do you have real world rights that could prevent that?
- posted by Tobold @ 2:30 PM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Can't find Blizzard's e-mail

Several people suggested that if I visit the Blizzard 2008 Worldwide Invitational, I should apply for a press pass. So I spent this morning on a easter egg hunt, trying to find out how to do so. And it turns out that Blizzard doesn't have a publicly available e-mail address for press support. They give the postal address for Blizzard Europe, but the Blizzard site only posts the e-mail address for job applicants, and the World of Warcraft site only post the e-mail addresses for account and technical in-game problems. I couldn't find either a general nor a press specific e-mail address. Strange!
- posted by Tobold @ 7:04 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Blizzard documents in the MDY case

I'm awfully sorry that these documents can only be found on the Glider website, but here are the legal documents asking for summary judgement filed by Blizzard themselves: version 1 and version 2 and exhibit 1. Most of Blizzard's statement seems quite clear to me, describing the damage that Glider bots cause the game. The strange part is the one about copyright infringement, where Blizzard says that Glider creates a copy of WoW in the computer's RAM, and that it is this copying which is the copyright infringement. That confuses me a bit, because every time I play WoW I create a copy of it in my computer's RAM and I wasn't aware that this could be a copyright infringement. Without loading WoW into your RAM, WoW is just another shiny coaster.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:25 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
WARNING!!! Troll attack on the MMO Blogosphere

I was reading through some of my favorite blogs and noticed that on Bildo's blog there was a comment signed Tobold that I hadn't written. And on my blog there was a fake Bildo comment, totally trollish and insulting. Somebody is using the comment functionality where you can use any name you like to post troll comments under false names. I have no idea how many of the other string of troll posts of the past days are from fake IDs. I'm afraid I will have to turn off anonymous commenting for the moment, you'll now need a Google account or any other OpenID enabled account to post comments here. I will also delete several troll comments.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:31 PM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Blizzard vs. MDY (MMO Glider)

I'm afraid this will cause another big debate, but this is actual news: Both Blizzard and MDY Industries, the makers of Glider (previously called WoW Glider) filed motions for summary judgment yesterday, another step in their ongoing legal battle. You can find documents on the MMOGlider website: version 1 and version 2. I'm not legal expert enough to even explain what a "motion for summary judgement" is, I figured it is a request to find for or against before a real trial even starts. But what is interesting is that these documents are relatively readable even for a non-lawyer, and contain a range of interesting facts.

For example there are interesting details on how Blizzard's Warden software and another utility called Scan.dll work. It also contains this interesting tidbit on banning: "Blizzard does not ban, nor has it ever banned the licensee itself. If Blizzard bans a licensee’s account, the licensee may immediately sign up for a new account using the licensee’s name and same credit card number that it previously used for the banned account." People don't get banned, accounts are.

Blizzard is asking for damages because:

a) Because Glider can help advance a character’s level faster, Blizzard loses revenue from a licensee who uses Glider because of a shortened monthly subscription time;
b) Because a portion of Blizzard’s licensee’s oppose the use of botting programs such as Glider, many people quit in frustration thereby causing Blizzard to lose revenue;
c) Because the gaming world perceives people who use Glider as having an unfair advantage, many potential WoW players choose not to play WoW thereby causing Blizzard to lose revenue;
d) Glider users can use the software to “farm gold” in WoW, which damages the WoW game economy thereby causing people to quit the game;
e) Blizzard must pay employees to deal with complaints about bot programs; and
f) Blizzard must pay employees to locate Glider users in the WoW game environment and verify Glider detections from Warden so Blizzard can ban such accounts.

Blizzard's expert witness Dr. Edward Castronova argued that these bases damage Blizzard in the amount of twenty million dollars per year. Obviously MDY's expert witness doesn't agree, pointing out that not only is there no way to quantify these damages, Blizzard themselves recently shortened the time it takes to reach level 70. They also say that Glider is not the only unauthorized third party program, and Blizzard can't just sue one of them for all the cost for employees hunting down all of them.

Even more interesting is MDY's claim that while the use of Glider is cheating and breaks the EULA and TOU, it is not a copyright infringement, because a) WoW can be copied freely anyway, and b) Glider doesn't make unauthorized copies of the game or circumvents any sort of copy protection measures. They say that Glider only does things that somebody playing 24/7 could also do, it's just a "bot", not duping or hacking anything.

The legal outcome of all this, if there will be one, should be interesting to watch.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:08 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
I just paid Blizzard 140 Euro for cool in-game items

Or in other words, I bought 2 tickets to the 2008 Worldwide Invitational which will happen end of June in Paris. That's only like 2 hours away from where I live, so I couldn't possibly not go. While the tickets aren't exactly cheap, I do expect Blizzard to give me a bag of swag in return, most likely including a code for a unique in-game non-combat pet. There will also be a chance to play Wrath of the Lich King for a few minutes, and Starcraft II if I wanted, as well as discussion panels with Blizzard developers. Now I just need an oversized butterfly net to catch one of them and give me an interview. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 7:20 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
EQFlames

I am not going to comment much on the EQFlames interview on Massively, because one of the SOE people involved is somebody I consider to be a friend and totally upright and honest person, Grimwell. So it would be hard for me to say anything nice or balanced about the insults and nonsense that "LFG" is spouting in that interview.

I'm just writing this to remind you that of course the whole EQFlames issue is very much identical to the beta leaks issue I reported on not long ago. If you consider beta leaks to be bad, then what can you possibly think about somebody breaching both his contract and the trust of the game developers he was giving access to? Even if he claims to be just whistleblowing, the creation of a site named EQFlames doesn't exactly suggest an objective attitude. No wonder SOE kicked him out from that special access program!
- posted by Tobold @ 2:08 PM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
Zen of RMT Design

Damion from Zen of Design wrote an excellent article about RMT and basic fairness. Quote:

Most current MMO players perceive buying power as cheating. Even the ones who are doing it do. These same players do not bat an eye at mailing some unused gear to an alt, or dropping a hundred gold into the mail for their girlfriend’s brother. But if the brother buys it from Goldfarmers R Us… well, that’s just DIRTY. At it’s core, it makes achievers feel that other achievers got handed what they had to WORK for.

Is it entirely rational? No. But the concept of what is right and wrong is, ultimately, a societal concept, and ultimately, while designers can try to change player perceptions of what’s fair, there are also times when the community makes the declaration, and the company is forced to respond, or risk becoming irrelevant.

Brilliant! He also mentions that "the debate about RMT is ultimately a debate between those who have money, and those who have time" and that the perception of fairness and acceptance of RMT could possibly change if the demographics of MMORPGs shift towards the over-30 players who have more money and less time.

I just want to add that the eternal "casual vs. hardcore" debate is actually very much related to a similar problem of perception of fairness as the RMT debate. If you consider MMORPGs totally objectively, they are not fair games. Damion has a comparison with baseball, but in baseball one team doesn't get to go out on the field and play and score while the other team is still sitting in their offices working. "Achievement" in MMORPGs is very much linked to time spent in game, and as some players spend a lot more time in game than others, comparing their achievements is inherently unfair. Of course RMT is still cheating, and overcoming one sort of unfairness by trying to balance it with another sort of unfairness is never going to achieve a fair result.

Lots of people call me pro-RMT, a label I can just shrug off. I'd prefer to call myself anti-pseudo-achievement. An epic mount or full epic gear is fun, but *not* a life achievement you should put into your CV, regardless of whether you achieved it by spending hundreds of hours or hundreds of dollars. Buying yourself an epic in-game "achievement" is like buying yourself a huge plasma TV: it'll cost you a lot of extra money without adding all that much to the entertainment value, as you'll still have the same TV program / game in front of you. Only that building that plasma TV yourself in hundreds of hours of work isn't any better.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:59 PM Permanent Link  (34) comments Links to this post

 
Casual Gemology

My first epic flying mount was financed to a large percentage by me mining or buying adamantite ore, prospecting it, and selling the rare (blue name) gems after cutting them for about 50 gold each. Haven't done that for a long time, so yesterday I tried it again to see where the market had evolved. Adamantite ore has remained pretty much constant in price on my server, between 20 and 30 gold a stack. But the prices for gems have changed a lot, and not all in the same direction. I sold two cut red gems for 75 gold each, while cut green gems went as low a 15 gold, and uncut green Talasites for less than 10 gold in some cases. So not only has the chance to find a rare gem from prospecting been nerfed by Blizzard, there is now also a chance that the rare gem you find is worth less than the ore you prospected it from. My try ended with me making just a small profit, and that was with being lucky with the colors I got.

The reasons for this price difference is that most people went towards a strategy of ignoring gem slot colors, because the bonus stats you get if you follow the colors is too small. So people advised my warrior for example to ignore all colors and fill up all my slots with blue +12 stamina gems. Blue and red gems are popular for this, yellow gems less so, and except for the red/blue Nightseyes all the mixed color gems are totally out of favor.

The upside of that is an opportunity for people with little cash. Mixed color gems aren't really all that bad. Two green gems for example will give you exactly the same stats as one blue and one yellow gem, but you might be able to buy them for less than half the price. And sometimes mixing stats is better than taking all the same kind. I'm not going to follow that advice to use only +12 stamina gems, because then my defense would drop even further below the magic 490 limit. So a cash-strapped warrior might be well advised to go for Enduring Talasites (+4 defense, +6 stamina) at 25 gold each instead.

I expect rare gem prices to drop in the future, especially the expensive ones. The demand is driven by the kind of people who have sufficient gold and want the very best gems possible. But with patch 2.4 the very best gems will be epic ones. The uncut gems will be sold for badges of justice, and the jewelcrafting recipes for reputation, so epic cut gems will soon be available. As for the common gems, which are already trading only at pitiful low values, apparently there will be recipes to combine them into more valuable stuff in patch 2.4. So maybe jewelcrafting can become profitable again, in spite of the usual differences of getting people to pay anything for cutting a gem. ("Looking for jewelcrafter who has a recipe that costs 1,000 gold on the AH, is willing to travel to my location, and then cuts my gem for free." -Pause- "Hey, why are you jewelcrafters so uncooperative?")
- posted by Tobold @ 9:06 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Judging Karazhan

By my latest calculation I now got about 140 Badges of Justice from Karazhan, that is more than 70 boss kills there, having killed every boss repeatedly. So in view of this grown experience and the changes the place and the environment has undergone in the last year, I'm reviewing my opinion on Karazhan. It used to be more on the negative side, but now it is broadly neutral. The key question for me still is how useful Karazhan is as an entry-level raid dungeon.

Most of the negative points of Karazhan haven't changed much, there are only some minor improvements: The attunement is going to be removed in patch 2.4, making Karazhan slightly more accessible. And while in my opinion Karazhan is still too hard for a *first* raid dungeon of a level, the level of gear people have on average has gone up, which ends up making Karazhan easier in an indirect way. You just have a better chance of having somebody with epics in your first Karazhan group nowadays, be it from raids or from PvP.

One of the biggest complaints against Karazhan is now just an historical footnote: Many guilds had a hard time moving from 40-man raids to 10-man Karazhan and then onwards to 25-man raids. The raid ID lockout system is largely responsible for the organizational chaos and guild drama that many people experienced due to this bottleneck. You simply couldn't take a successful 40-man raid and make 4 successful 10-man raids out of it, visiting Karazhan several nights a week until you ended up with 40 well equipped people from which 25-man raids could easily be formed. In many guilds a separation into A-teams and B-teams took place, with the A-team advancing faster, then getting impatient while waiting for the B-team to catch up, and quitting the guild to join the A-team of other guilds for 25-man raids.

But now we come to the positive points of Karazhan: the small raid size does have its advantages. One immediate effect is that Karazhan bosses drop 2 epics for 10 people, thus giving a 20% average chance to get an epic per boss kill, while the 25-man raids give 3 epics for 25 people, which is just 12%. Not only are you more likely to get an epic from a Karazhan boss than from a 25-man boss, you are also certain to get both reputation and badges of justice, so you'll never come out completely empty-handed from a successful raid. It is a good thing that patch 2.4 introduces badges for 25-man bosses, and adds even better badge loot. The badges have the positive effect that it is far easier to find an experienced raider willing to join a Karazhan raid group, even if there is no more epic drop loot for him there, than it was pre-TBC to find experienced raiders willing to go to Molten Core again. The small raid size also makes it easier for smaller guilds to get the necessary numbers together, although there isn't much flexibility in class choice. You really need 2 tanks, 3 healers, and 5 dps classes with a good class mix to get far in Karazhan.

My last point is totally subjective: I've killed the first bosses of ZA, TK, and SSC, but somehow Karazhan felt more "fun" to me. Karazhan has a lot of character, while I found other raid dungeons, especially Tempest Keep, a bit bland and unoriginal. Last night I finally met the third opera event, the Big Bad Wolf, and getting chased around as little red riding hood was incredibly funny. The night before I had killed the Void Reaver and Astromancer in Tempest Keep, and although we one-shotted them, I found the fights more annoying than fun. Moroes' "How terribly clumsy of me" or the comments of the concubines on the way to the Maiden have more character than anything I've seen in the 25-man dungeons yet.

Anything I missed? What is your opinion of Karazhan, and why do you like or dislike it?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:26 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
What does the Internet know about you?

While I'm battling anonymous trolls on my blog, the BBC is reporting about the opposite problem: an interesting analysis of somebody who put too much information about herself on the internet. Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the prostitute that brought down Eliot Spitzer, had pages on sites like MySpace or RateMyBody.com, and once she got famous through her connection with the governor of New York, the press was able to get all sorts of information about her, including photos, and publish it. Now she and her lawyers are trying to put the genie back into the bottle with legal action, but that's too late.

Me, I'm afraid of offering too much private information of myself on the internet. There is no MySpace page about me, or Facebook, or anything. On this blog I'm not using my real name, and I'm keeping information about myself to a minimum. If I get caught in bed with the governor of New York tomorrow (which is admittedly unlikely), the press won't find photos of me on RateMyBody (I'd be afraid of the rating anyway) or the story of my life posted anywhere. The worst they could find would be this blog, leading to the obvious "he plays video games, he must be a mass murderer" conclusion. :)

But others, including my readers, aren't that careful. Half of the e-mails I get are from people using their real name, and a good number are using their company e-mail system to send it. The one that cracked me up most was the one to which the company mail system had automatically attached a request to comment on my satisfaction with the guy's mail to his manager, linking the manager's mail address (Don't worry, I didn't reply). If I know your real name, what info can I find about you on sites like MySpace or Facebook? I googled my real name and to my satisfaction there are other people who have the same name as I do, and they come up higher in Google. So if your name is relatively common, you might preserve some anonymity that way. But other than that your MySpace page is only anonymous as long as nobody looks for it.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:20 PM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Beta Leaks

The issues we discuss around MMORPGs are often similar, if smaller in scale, than the issues of the real world. One hotly discussed issue of the real world is leaks and whistle blowing: should people reveal secrets if they think that the revelation is in the best general interest, and should journalists report those leaks? If a chemical company is poisoning the ground water, Enron is fiddling their accounts, or the CIA is falsifying data on WMD or torturing people, would it be better to reveal that, or should they be allowed to keep those things secret? The equivalent subject in MMORPGs is leaking information from beta tests: If a game sucks, should beta testers leak that information, or should they keep mum and let the company make money by selling lots of games on the day of release before people realize how bad it is? Vanguard apparently sold over 200,000 copies before crashing to under 50,000 subscribers, should beta testers have warned potential players earlier?

It is easy to claim that "you signed an NDA, you shouldn't talk about that beta". Obviously the people who alerted the authorities and press about the Enron account fiddling also had a contract with Enron forbidding them to pass on secret information about the company. Making a bad game is not as bad a crime as ruining your investors, but then an NDA is not as strong a contract as an employment contract. Both Age of Conan and Warhammer Online have been announced for May, just two months from now, and unless they are postponed there isn't much time left before release, and neither game has even announced an open beta yet. Either there will be no open beta at all, or a rather short one, with very little opportunity to spread the word about possible flaws in these games. But as especially in MMORPGs the drive to be in the game right from the start is strong, that can lead to many people buying the game without being able to test it before, and then being disappointed, having wasted $50+ on a flawed or incomplete game.

A reader alerted me to a site called Beta Leaks, which does exactly what it says in the title: it is a forum for leaking information from MMORPG betas. And I was reading a thread called "AoC Beta Leak FAQ" there which gave me a lot of information I'm sure Funcom doesn't want me to have, and especially not write about. Now I never signed an NDA with Funcom, but that information is obviously tainted by coming from somebody else's breach of his NDA. So I'm not going to report it. But although I'm sure I'll get another one of those idiot comments that me linking to that beta leaks site is already breaking a taboo, I would at least like to start a discussion here about how legitimate beta leaks are. The people who leak obviously think that it is in the better interest of the players to have that sort of information, while the game companies obviously think this stuff shouldn't be public knowledge. Where do you stand in that? Could you imagine to ever leak information from a beta, if you thought the game was really, really unacceptable? With companies buying favorable reviews from bigger game sites, at which point does revealing information become a legitimate guerilla tactic instead of just a breach of contract?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:53 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Nobody forces you to read this blog!

I'm getting sick and tired of people telling me what I am not allowed to write about on my blog! There was that wave of people telling me that I couldn't interview the gold seller because that would be advertisement. And there are some people (or one anonymous guy posting several comments, who knows?) telling me that I should stop asking questions about my warrior. Newsflash: You don't get to tell me what I can write about! If you don't like a particular post subject, don't read it. It is not as if the content of a post with the title "interview with a gold seller" could come as a surprise to anyone. Of course the gold seller is pro-RMT and would like to advertise his business. And the same is true about the "WoW warrior question" thread, you could see the subject from the title and if you don't want to read about that, just stop reading!

For all I care, if you think that my opinion on a subject, or me asking questions sometimes instead of preaching invalidates my whole blog, feel free to not read anything here. If all you do is complaining, you are not a valued customer of this blog. I'm not making a lousy cent of any of my readers. I am writing my blog for those readers who value my opinion, and especially for those readers who are willing to engage in intelligent discussion about various subjects, mostly centered around MMORPGs. Posting about controversial subjects and asking questions is very much part of trying to engage my readers in that intelligent discussion, and not an invitation to trolls to tell me that I'm not allowed to post that stuff.

My opinion on RMT has remained broadly neutral and unchanged over the now nearly 5 years of existence of this blog: I would like RMT to disappear by better game design. If grinding an exchangeable currency wasn't part of MMORPGs, RMT wouldn't exist. Having that sort of gameplay element and then trying to forbid RMT is hypocritical and doesn't work, because game companies basically try to regulate something that happens outside of their sphere of influence. If I send you 1000 gold because you are my mate, it is perfectly legit. If you in return and outside of the game give me $50, both of our accounts theoretically should be banned. But first of all the game company has no right whatsoever to meddle in the real world relationship between you and me, and second they have no way to control whether you gave me $50 or not. As it is, game companies make millions of dollars from gold farmers replacing banned accounts, and nothing ever changes. If Blizzard or any other game company really wanted to stop RMT, they could easily do it. Hey, my warrior got 3 epic flying mounts, one for gold and two for reputation. If mounts never had cost gold in the first place, and you would have to grind only non-tradeable reputation to get one, instead of tradeable gold, the RMT companies would have lost millions of dollars of business. So I do think that the responsability for RMT is a shared one between the game designers, the gold selling companies, and the gold buyers. Making that a taboo subject on which there either is no talk at all allowed or only rants against gold sellers is counterproductive. After all the RMT debate touches on the much deeper subjects of virtual property rights, and the influence of game design on player behavior. This will come up again and again on this blog, so if you don't like it, feel free to either ignore those posts or leave. But if you are willing to argue your point about the evils of RMT in an intelligent and polite manner, you are more than welcome to do so.

On the subject about me asking questions, about my WoW warrior or other things, I actually think that the threads evolving from those posts are among the better ones of this blog. I certainly don't want a blog about me preaching ex cathedra and declaring my limited knowledge and opinions to be absolute truths, with my readers all posting "I agree" comments. Even after spending thousands of hours playing a wide range of MMORPGs, there are still a lot of games I haven't played; and even in WoW there are a lot of classes I only played through to level 30ish, so I can't possibly know about lets say paladin raid healing. And I'm only human: I do arrive at situations in game where I don't know what to do, feel a bit lost, or could use some help. Admitting that one doesn't know and asking for help actually takes more balls than keeping up an illusion of being all-knowing (which is actually a typical immature teenage behavior). And I am quite proud about the high quality of the responses I got to my questions, revealing that my readers are no less knowledgeable than me. It also revealed how easily some people are willing to accept simple messages as gospel, like "you need 490 defense", and are also willing to spread these simple messages as absolute truths. Only a few people did dig deeper and came up with a more nuanced message of how you could replace one point of defense by two points of resilience and still remain uncritable. Both the subject of resilience (why is this considered to be a PvP-only stat?) and me asking questions will come up again in the future. If you think that me asking questions is so lame that you don't want to read my blog any more, bye bye, and don't let the door hit you on your way out. If you just aren't interested by detailed theorycrafting, just skip those posts. And if you have detailed knowledge and are willing to share it, it is that what makes you a MVR, a most valued reader. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 7:53 AM Permanent Link  (47) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Warrior questions

My apologies to those of you not interested in the subject, but as I mentioned before a good part of this blog is just me writing about the things that preoccupy me in whatever game I'm currently playing. And as you might have noticed, my current preoccupation is about my warrior in World of Warcraft. That doesn't mean I'm not playing my priest or mage any more, I pretty much play all three evenly. It is just that priest and mage are both playing more or less "on rails", on a well determined path, the priest in the raiding circuit and the mage leveling up. You don't want me telling you how my guild killed Hydross or the Lurker, because surprise, surprise, we killed them exactly like everyone else does and blogs about. And my mage, now 65 will level to 70 doing the same quests everyone else did. It is only the path forward for my warrior that I don't have a clear vision of yet, and so it is him I tend to think about most, and thus write about most.

The recurring question for my warrior is what I should do with him in the level 70 end-game, given that I don't want to raid with him. I already did an endless amount of daily quests with him, leading to me having 3 epic flying mounts now, the normal one, the Netherray, and the Netherdrake. Of course I didn't do the quests for the mounts, as three of them aren't any more useful than having only one. I did it because every quest gave around 10 gold, thus hundreds of quests give thousands of gold. I will most likely continue to do that after patch 2.4 doing the Sunwell daily quests, unless that turns out to be impossible because every single player on the server is camping the same spawn for the same quest. :)

Unfortunately that gold didn't improve my warrior; most of it was spent on my second epic flying mount, for my priest, the rest is mostly used to finance my priest's expensive raiding habit: repair costs, potions, and large sums for gems and enchants for the epics he finds. Even if I had more gold, I wouldn't want to buy epics for thousands of gold from the AH for my warrior, at least to me it appears as if grinding gold and buying epics for it is the least efficient way to get epics. So I'm looking for other ways to improve my warriors gear. And that is where most of the questions arise, because I'm not really good at theorycrafting, and don't really know what I'm shooting for.

For example my warrior has 480 defense, and I know that I should be shooting for 494 defense to be immune to critical hits. What I don't know is how important the last 14 points are, with 480 am I significantly too low in defense? Or are the last 14 points just bringing me from 99% uncritable to 100% uncritable?

I am even less sure about the relative importance between health, armor, and defense. For example I could improve my armor by over 1000 points if I exchanged my Ogri'la Aegis by the PvP season 1 reward shield if I gathered the honor for it, but would lose 23 defense and gain some resilience instead. So I'd be even further away from the 494 target. Same consideration with the rest of the honor-bought season 1 plate armor: I could gain lots of strength, some stamina, and a good amount of armor, but I'd lose a lot of defense. I'd hate to spend many hours doing PvP for epic gear, only to find that I'm shooting myself in the foot with it lacking defense. And everyone I ask tells me a different story. Some people swear you can tank in PvP armor, others say you need 494 defense first, and everything else is secondary. How many points of health or armor is 1 point of defense "worth"? (If I understood it correctly 1 point of armor is more or less worth 1 point of health, the two are nearly equivalent). And in how far can I replace defense with resilience?

Anyone know of a tank calculator where you can enter your stats and it calculates a single "survivability" score out of it? As long as I don't know what gear I'm looking for, it is very hard to know what I should be doing to find it. Right now I'm just randomly doing a bit of everything, but that isn't neither efficient nor fun. I much rather have a clear goal and path towards that goal in front of me.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:58 PM Permanent Link  (26) comments Links to this post

 
Spore preview

I'm subscribed to a magazine on PC games which comes with a video DVD with about one hour worth of games previews, reviews and similar stuff. This month a good part of it was a preview of Spore. In case you live in a cave and haven't heard yet, Spore is the game Will Wright, the Sims guy, is currently developing, to be released in September this year. And the game is heavily hyped. Which makes people wonder whether the game can possibly live up to the hype. So it was interesting to have a look at gameplay footage and see what the hype is all about.

Spore is actually not one game but five. Or a game in 5 separate phases with little connection between them. You start out the game as an amoeba in phase 1, develop into a creature in phase 2, form a tribe in phase 3, found a civilization in phase 4, and move on into space in phase 5, which is more or less endless; that is there is a final goal but you aren't forced to go for it and can just keep playing. In every phase you interact with or fight against computer-controlled NPC amoebae/creatures/tribes/civilizations/spaceships, Spore is a single-player game. But, and that is the main source of the hype, you can connect Spore with the internet. In which case Spore is *still* a pure single-player game. But the NPCs are downloaded from the internet using the player created creatures of the other Spore players. So not only does Spore allow you to build your own creatures, structures, and spaceships with an extensive editor, your creations can end up as NPCs in somebody elses game. Which basically makes for a game with an infinite number of possible NPCs in infinite variety, from minmaxed for optimum performance to just plain wacky. Apparently one dev made a set of creatures formed like the letters of the alphabet, and that's just one possible idea. Apparently there will even be "themes", so you could play a game in a winter environment, or one with an Egyptian theme full of animal-headed bipeds and pyramids. Or you could create such a theme yourself, the creative possibilities are endless.

And there's the rub: infinite possibilities for creative toying around. Spore is not in the strictest sense a game for gamers. The footage I saw and the comments that went with it showed that Spore will the ultimate casual game. There is no way you can lose, just like with a MMORPG you simply get reborn if you die. And the actual gameplay is relatively simple. In the early phases you just swim or run around and eat smaller creatures, avoid bigger creatures, and try to find bits of "DNA" which allow you to modify your creature with new features. Yes, in the later phases you'll have a civilization or space empire, but do not expect the complexity level of a Civilization or Master of Orion.

It is no wonder that EA loves Will Wright: Spore is a game that will sell millions of copies, and that's just on the PC / Mac. There will also be spinoffs on the Nintendo DS, mobile phones, and the Wii. And who knows on what other platforms, now that consoles are often connected to the internet, and how many expansions. EA milked The Sims for all its worth, and Spore will be no different. But how many hardcore gamers play The Sims? The main demographic for Spore will be the same as that for The Sims: casual gamers. So expect lots of "Spore is boring" comments not long after the game comes out. Me, I'm looking forward to toying around with Spore for a while, it looks really nice. But I don't foresee me spending hundreds of hours on it. Just like I didn't spend hundreds of hours with Creatures or Black & White. Spore will be a toy, not a game.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:41 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
Paladin heroic healing

I'm a bit confused. Some time ago I read that in some major raid guilds paladins heal and priests do damage. I never played a paladin beyond level 30, so I have no first-hand experience in pally healing. But I wasn't too worried when last night we formed a group to Blood Furnace heroic, with my warrior as tank and a paladin as healer. The guys had a 50/11/0 healing spec, and was wearing healing gear, so what could go wrong? Well, everything. The harder hitting trash mobs hit me for 3k of damage, while the fast heals of the paladin healed me for 1.2k (1.9k crit), and his slow heals for 3k (5k crit). What gives? My priest in equivalent gear has fast heals for 2k (3k crit) and slow heals for 4.5k (7k crit). Plus the priest has a heal-over-time, plus the instant Prayer of Mending, not to mention minor stuff like Lightwell. Is a priest really healing over 50% better than a healadin? What are the healing paladins among you healing for, and what variety of healing spells do you have?

It was a bit annoying, because my tank kept dying, and we didn't manage to complete the event before the second boss. Now my warrior is certainly not the world's best equipped (12k armor, 12k health, 480 def unbuffed), but that's the kind of gear you get from normal difficulty dungeons. Without heroics I can't get better gear, so I don't know what to do if that gear isn't good enough to tank in heroics. I looked for PvP reward gear, but there isn't anything useful for a tank, except for a shield without defense bonus. Am I just out of luck, or do I just need a priest for heroics?
- posted by Tobold @ 5:15 AM Permanent Link  (39) comments Links to this post

 
Is AV fun?

On average the quality of comments from readers of this blog who sign with some sort of name is much higher than the quality of the anonymous commenters. So it came to some surprise that my last post had an anonymous comment of surprising insight:

"I think it's telling that you didn't mention that Alterac Valley was fun (if it was), but instead focused on the reward side of doing it."

Telling it is, most certainly. But of what? It is no secret that I am personally not a big fan of PvP, so one could be tempted to conclude that it's only me doing PvP just for the reward. But then you'd still need to explain why the percentage of people playing PvP has constantly increased in parallel with Blizzard increasing PvP rewards more and more. So I'm pretty comfortable in saying that it's not just me, it is a large number of casual players doing PvP for the epics. Not because there is any "welfare" involved, but because you can do PvP without the organization of a guild. (Note that my priest, who is raiding, doesn't do any PvP, because he gets his epics from raids, and my guild is shorter in raid healers than raid tanks.)

So is Alterac Valley fun? For the first couple of times, yes, even for me. But the fun ran out long before I reached the 18,000 honor points, and that was mixing all 4 available battlegrounds to varying degrees. There are very few battlegrounds, far fewer than 5-man or even raid dungeons. Three of the four battlegrounds date back to summer 2005, the fourth was added with the Burning Crusade. Anyone who likes battlegrounds now knows the inside out. And while player behavior is somewhat unpredictable, over time there are certain repeating patterns in the behavior of groups in battlegrounds. So following Raph's Theory of Fun, I usually only have fun when I try something new: doing PvP with protection spec, or playing AV as premade.

So how about you? Do you have fun in Alterac Valley or the other battlegrounds? Or do you "grind" them for the rewards?
- posted by Tobold @ 4:53 PM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Alterac Valley premade

You probably know already that in patch 2.4 World of Warcraft will add the ability of joining the Alterac Valley battleground as a group. If you can't wait that long, you can do like me and download an addon called Preform AV Enabler. It doesn't work 100% reliable but with a bit of trial and error you can manage to get a large group of up to 40 people into the same Alterac Valley battleground. Someone on my server was promoting that idea, it being double honor weekend in AV, and I joined that AV raid and did a couple of runs with them. We won every single one of them, which is unusual, as on our server cluster Horde usually loses.

I made about 10k honor that way Friday night and Saturday afternoon. So I got my Gladiator's Slicer, a huge upgrade damage-wise to my old Crystalblade of the Draenei. And that still leaves me with nearly half of the honor I need to get the off-hand version of the same sword if I want to spec Fury.

Talking of spec, I was Mortal Strike arms spec on Friday for PvP, but then noticed that in battlegrounds my ability to deal damage wasn't strategically important. I weakened the enemy side much more by rushing in and keeping several opponents occupied for a long time. So I respec'd back to protection, but improving my build using my reader's advice. It is mainly a build useful for heroics, but taking all possible spell damage mitigation, spell interruption and deflection talents. And funnily enough it works great on battlegrounds. With my arms build I had problems killing paladins, but with this build I kill them much more easily, reflecting their damage spells back at them and interrupting their heals.

So now I got a better sword for soloing, and a spec that is useful for groups and PvP. I'll stay like that for a while, but will probably do more PvP for the second sword and some dps gear.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:07 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Would less downtime make protection warriors more soloable?

A reader sent me an interesting proposal:

If a lot of time for solo warriors is spent eating/otherwise getting back health, perhaps a protection talent/spell inproved by protection talents could be added, that heavily increase health regeneration outside of combat. Something like: "Warrior's Recovery: Tier 5 talent. Increases health regeneration from spirit when out of combat by 50/100/150% (or some other large regeneration number that cut down heavily on downtime). Again, something like this might be a protection talent, an addition to current protection talents, a spell improved by such talents, etc.

If rage would help in speeding up grinding, perhaps warriors could get a spirit tap type of ability that builds up rage quickly outside of combat for protection warriors, (I imagine it as quickly building up rage, that than decays slowly but still leaves a good enough amount left to be used in the next fight.). Again, this might be a new talent, addition to some current talent, or spell that is improved by protection talents.

Again, I haven't actually had to solo quest or grind any protection warriors, so these as likely as not wouldn't be workable ideas. Hopefully they at least provide some food for thought, if nothing else.

The only objection I have is that I already use Execute at the end of the combat to speed up grinding, so I have no rage left between fights to spend on a health regeneration talent.

So I have an even simpler idea. Right now bandages heal a fixed amount of health. That makes them great for mages and other classes with low health. But it makes them far less useful for warriors, because the same 3,400 points healed that got the mage up back to full health will only heal a third or less of a warrior's health. So why not change bandages to work on a percentage of health instead of fixed points basis? If I were able to bandage back to full health faster between fights, that would help my protection warrior to reduce downtime.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:45 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Syncaine on difficulty

Interesting article on the difficulty of World of Warcraft from Syncaine of Hardcore Casual. His problem is similar to one I mentioned not long ago: World of Warcraft in most situations offers only a single difficulty level. But while I was talking more about the difficulty level of group content being too hard for some people, Syncaine explains how the solo content can be too easy for other people.

Soloing quests in World of Warcraft is trivially easy. By definition everyone is able to do it, regardless of skill, experience, dedication and amount of available time. So if you design quests to be doable by the worst possible players, they are far too easy for the good players. And in extreme cases, like Syncaine's, your level prevents you from receiving quests that you would already be able to do, being a few levels lower but well equipped and a good player. Of course there is a certain amount of bragging in that statement, but also a kernel of truth.

I usually do quests of around my level when leveling, but I do so without excerting any effort. Yes, it's "easy mode", but for relaxation I don't mind usually. I could do higher level content, but that would actually slow down my leveling, as a mob that takes you twice as long to beat only gives like 10% more xp. Sometimes I do a few crazy hard things like soloing elites to challenge myself, but it isn't something I'll do all day long, especially if it isn't even rewarded. And while the chance to die against a higher level mob is obviously higher, the "challenge" is strictly numerical, the harder mob only has more health and hits harder, it doesn't act any more clever than the lower level mob. If you really want to apply your superior skill in WoW soloing and actually get rewarded for it, you'll need to do things like AoE farming (where my skill frankly sucks, because it is based more on speed than on tactics). The best I can do is playing cleverly in a way that I kill more mobs per hour, using less downtime, and that still isn't very exciting.

With World of Warcraft having so many servers, I sometimes wonder if it shouldn't have servers with different levels of difficulty. Would you want to play on a hard mode server, where doing a quest of your own level solo was pretty hard and involved a couple of wipes before you fully understood the encounter? That *is* the current gameplay model for raiding, so why doesn't it exist for soloing, at least for those players who'd like it?
- posted by Tobold @ 4:55 PM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
Sex, drugs, and RMT

Prostitution is evil. Selling drugs is evil. Selling virtual currency (called real money trade or RMT) is evil. Some people live in a world of moral absolutes, which is most easily achieved by not thinking too closely about the issue. While there is a good argument to be made that the resignation of Eliot Spitzer over his prostitution affair is justified, it is harder to argue that the woman involved was evil. What if the man hadn't been married, and had paid for sex in a place where that wasn't illegal, would it still have been evil? And what about selling drugs? If I drive 2 hours from here in my car to the Netherlands I can visit a "coffee shop", which isn't selling coffee but cannabis totally legal. The guy selling the stuff is probably some old hippie, and there is no reason to consider him as evil.

On RMT I was a bit disappointed how the discussion about my recent gold-seller interview was limited to the question on whether one should talk about the subject at all or hush it up. The far more interesting question of the morality of it was pretty much ignored, because most people had a preformed opinion already and were unwilling to discuss in terms other than moral absolutes. So I'm asking again: Is gold-selling in itself evil? Or is it just the spamming, scamming, botting, and breaking of the EULA that is evil? Is somebody selling EQ2 currency on the SOE Station Exchange, where it is legal, still evil? Is somebody selling UO gold on EBay evil, again totally legal. What about virtual worlds without a game component, like Second Life, is selling virtual goods there evil? If selling gold isn't evil in games where it is allowed, then how "evil" is it to do it in a game where the EULA forbids it, compared to other intellectual property crimes like file-sharing? Does all virtual currency really belong to the game company, and do they have the right to tell you what you can do with it? You see, once you start digging a bit deeper, and to actually *think*, there is room for discussion about the morality of RMT.

I admit that the interview wasn't perfect. I didn't have access to the "Tobold's MMORPG Blog" company jet to fly over to the states and interview Chris Bottomly face-to-face. By sending him all my questions in one bunch I missed the opportunity to ask him further questions based on the answers he gave. And some people accused me of having been too soft, which was due to me not wanting to scare him off. But all is not lost: Chris is willing to answer more questions if you guys can come up with a couple of good ones. So this is your chance to learn more about the RMT business from inside: Simply post here in the comments section what question(s) you would have asked when interviewing a gold seller. Obviously if your question is downright insulting or delving too deeply into the commercial secrets of the company, Chris won't answer them. But if you thought that in principal it is okay to interview someone from the RMT industry and just would have liked a different set of questions, maybe together we can design the questions for a second interview. So, what would you ask him?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link  (42) comments Links to this post

 
Improving PuGs

There is a subject I’ve been thinking about for a while, but it is hard to come up with a good solution: how could you improve pickup groups (PuGs) in World of Warcraft? A pickup group is a group formed with complete strangers, via the looking-for-group (LFG) system or via chat, usually formed to tackle a challenge that can’t be soloed, such as elite quests or instanced dungeons. In World of Warcraft PuGs are a source of constant complaints on all sorts of forums and blogs: they quite often fail to achieve their purpose and break up before they completed the quest or dungeon they were formed for. So why is this, and what could be done to improve PuGs?

The first thing to discover is that the term PuG and the complaints about them are new; they didn’t exist before World of Warcraft. Nobody complained about pickup groups in Everquest or other pre-WoW MMORPGs. This tells us one important thing: the problem is not inherent to MMORPGs in general, but specific to World of Warcraft. So what changed? What happened was World of Warcraft making soloing more prevalent, and grouping optional. Soloing was a niche version of gameplay in Everquest, limited to few classes, and everyone had extensive group experience. Of course there were still bad and failing groups, breaking up early. But as there was no alternative to grouping for most people, players had better grouping skills, and they behaved better because they didn’t want to be excluded from future groups. But of course this doesn’t point us to a solution; you can’t turn back the clock and make a game with enforced grouping, it would fail miserably. Soloing is very, very popular, we need to come up with a way to make PuGs work in a soloing environment.

When thinking about what the problems of PuGs in WoW are, I came up with three categories: risk, reward, and communication. Lets look at these three categories in order.

Risk describes the chance that the pickup group fails to reach its objective. Why does this happen so often? Now some elitist people will start about how all the other players in the game are idiots, this is the main explanation given in many of the rants on the official forums. One thing to consider here is that if you held an “exit interview” with all 5 members of a failed PuG separately, *every one* of them will tell you that the fault lay with the other players. It is rare that the mistake leading to a wipe is clearly identified and visible to all players in the group. And sometimes a wipe is just due to bad luck, a resisted taunt coinciding with a critical spell hit, leading to a failure of aggro management, with all players having insufficient skills to recover from that. Learning to play in a group isn't easy, because you often don't find out what the root cause of the failure was. And there is a vicious cycle going on: pickup groups have a bad reputation, thus people prefer to solo, thus they don't learn how to play in a group, thus they make pickup groups bad. So yes, the risk of pickup groups is strongly related to skill, but the skill of players isn't necessarily determined by their IQ, but more by practice and game design. And sometimes it's the guy who complains the loudest about the other players who actually caused the PuG to fail.

So how could risk be reduced? One possibility is a touchy one: fiddling with the difficulty level. It is evident that if a dungeon would be much easier, fewer groups would fail when trying it. But of course the danger here is to create trivially easy and thus boring content. Far too many players think of the difficulty level of World of Warcraft encounters being written in stone and having to be identical for all players. That is nonsense, as you can easily see when looking at normal and heroic dungeons in TBC. So theoretically it would be possible to have a wider variety of adjustable difficulty levels, like easy-normal-heroic, with corresponding reward levels. The purpose is to offer to all players group content corresponding to their skill level, so everyone can have gameplay that is challenging enough to be fun, but easy enough to be beatable. In a large population of players there is a distribution of skill and dedication, and the cut-off point for minimum skill and dedication required to have a successful group could well be lowered. Solo content, which is mostly non-instanced, was designed to be beatable by everyone. The instancing of most group content makes it possible to have content that is more challenging, but the current situation in WoW where group content is principally harder than solo content is not absolutely necessary. Easy mode group dungeons, not much more difficult than solo content, could be introduced to remove the step-up in difficulty between solo and group content.

The less controversial way to reduce the risk of a PuG failing is to increase everyone's skill level. But to achieve that you would need to get more people to play in groups, for training. So easy mode dungeons would actually work on that aspect as well. But if you don't want to change difficulty, you need to get more people into groups by working on the rewards and by making it easier to find groups, that is the reward and communication categories.

Group rewards in World of Warcraft, compared with previous games, are a strange beast. In many other games as a member of a group you can earn more experience points per hour than if you'd play solo. This is not the case in World of Warcraft. The xp for killing a monster are divided by the number of group members, and then a group xp bonus is added, which depends on group size, but is relatively low. A mob that gives 100 xp when soloed gives 28 xp per group member in a 5-man group. Thus if the group doesn't kill mobs 4 times faster than a single player, which is unlikely, in a group you earn less xp. Groups in WoW are nearly exclusively formed to kill mobs that can't be soloed at all, and not for the experience points but for the loot and quest rewards. If you level up soloing and don't buy gear from the auction house, in WoW you will mostly be geared in green gear. The more you group, the more blue gear you will acquire. But while better gear is always nice, for leveling up it isn't strictly necessary, as you outlevel your gear fast anyway, so you can well solo and wear greens all the way up to the level cap. So if the only reward for grouping is blue gear, and you don't really need that blue gear to advance, it's no wonder that many people decide they don't need to group. Of course that strategy stops working at the level cap, where gear improvement is the only way of character improvement left. Grouping becomes relatively more attractive (although nowadays you can pseudo-solo PvP instead), and then not having grouped for 70 levels comes back to haunt you. It is no wonder if PuGs are bad if the players in the PuG have very little training in group play.

Thus improving the rewards for grouping would improve PuGs. And it is easy, Blizzard would just need to change the group xp bonus modifier. If a group of 5 killing a 100 xp mob would get 50 xp each instead of 28 xp, grouping would become a lot more popular even for killing non-elite mobs. If it gave 100 xp, most people would hunt in groups whenever possible, and the first solo fans would start complaining about grouping being "mandatory". The group xp bonus modifier is a brilliant tool to influence player behavior, and should be used more to encourage grouping. By encouraging grouping the players would get more grouping skills and training, and the general experience of grouping would improve.

My last point is communication. If you hang out in any city in World of Warcraft you will quickly notice the amount of groups being formed via the general and trade chat. If you are of one of the more desirable group classes (tank, healer), you'll also notice groups being formed by private chat. But if you use Blizzard's own LFG system you'll find very few other players there. In my opinion this is due to the LFG system being over-engineered: it not only tries to make people find each other, it also tries to automatically groups them. And it doesn't do a very good job with that. You end up with groups without a tank or healer, because the automatic system assumes that every warrior, druid, or paladin can tank, and every priest, shaman, druid or paladin can heal.

PuGs could be improved by improving the looking for group system, and that would be very easy: just remove the automatic grouping system and replace the whole LFG system by something much simpler. People should simply be able to flag themselves as looking for group, and be able to write a short note, like specifying where they want to go, or what spec they are. It would also be helpful if you could inspect people on the LFG list, so you can already see whether a warrior is protection spec, or whether a player has the gear necessary to succeed in a heroic instance.

Pickup groups will never be perfect, and never be as fun a grouping with your friends. But making new friends is an important component of MMORPGs, and improving PuGs could well achieve that. Blizzard would just need to improve the risk/reward ratio of PuGs, and make them easier to form with a better LFG system.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:24 AM Permanent Link  (34) comments Links to this post

 
Billion dollar WoW killer

I got a few e-mails linking to various reports on the story that Activision boss Bobby Kotick claimed you couldn't make a viable competitor to WoW even if you invested up to 1 billion dollars. Yeah, I've seen that story, but wasn't originally going to comment on that obvious nonsense. While it is theoretically possible to make a bad game for 1 billion dollars, you'd need to spend that money very unwisely to do so. It is far more likely that you could spend $100 million for a MMORPG which gets 1 million subscribers and then makes $200 million *per year* of revenues. Mr. Kotick had two reasons for his outrageous claim: He needed to explain the Activision Blizzard merger, and he wanted to discourage investors from giving money to future competitors.

A bit later the same guy explained how the new company could make a Call of Duty MMO. Very convincing: First he says viable MMORPGs can't be done even for endless amounts of money, then he invests money in the next MMORPG. I don't know why Vivendi doesn't put a press ban on the guy, they just had to deny an earlier comment from Mr. Kotick announcing in-game ads for Starcraft II. I hope the guy is any good as manager, because he sure shouldn't try doing public relations or game design.

Blizzard is a company making very good games. But the idea that Blizzard somehow could have a monopoly on being the only company to make a successful MMORPG is laughable. And if you'd invest $100 million in a MMORPG *now*, World of Warcraft will be in full decline by the time your game gets out anyway. We haven't seen anything from Blizzard or any other MMORPG company which suggests that you could keep up your subscription numbers for 10 years. WoW will still be *alive* in 2014, but it won't have 10 million subscribers any more. Especially not if they continue with their current expanion model.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:01 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
The terrifying Deathknight

A rare example of Blizzard delivering faster than promised: They promised us that the Deathknight would be terrifying, and quite a lot of players of warriors and bloggers are already terrified! Via Random Battle I found this excellent analysis of Deathknights from Wolfshead. It is pretty negative, but well worth reading. Read both Wolfhead's original post and Cameron's comments and then come back here for my take on the subject.

At the root of the problem is a mismatch of the current reality of tanking classes and the promises Blizzard made about Deathknights being dps tanks. If we assume that Blizzard holds their promise and makes the Deathknight a class that can tank well enough in most group situations while still doing enough dps to be good for soloing and PvP, there is an obvious problem for the other tanking classes, especially warriors, for who this is not the case. The other possibility is that Blizzard doesn't hold their promise, and as Wolfshead suggests pulls a bait-and-switch job on us. You can see how neither alternative is very promising.

Playing a warrior I obviously don't want a new class in the game, played by a large number of players because it is the first new class since 2004, which takes exactly the same role that I have, only doing it better, and which rolls for exactly the same loot, except for shields. If that happens, I can kiss my warrior goodbye. But on the other hand I have a vested interest in Wrath of the Lich King being a big success, I don't want my already low-population server to become even emptier, so I don't want people to be totally disappointed by the Deathknight class either. And I think Blizzard is aware of these two problems, and wants to avoid them. But how?

One alternative is following a classic MMO class design rule, which says that a hybrid needs to be weaker in all of the roles he can perform than the specialized class which can perform only one role. Thus a Deathknight would be a less good tank than a warrior, and a less good melee dps than a rogue. Unfortunately that approach has two problems: it isn't very attractive, and on the tanking side it is very hard to design "less good". Damage is easily scaleable, tanking is not. Either you hold the aggro or you don't. If you scale down tanking so the Deathknight needs a bit more time alone in combat before the other players can start dealing damage, and then need to tone down their dps to not out-aggro the Deathknight, the average player will just declare the Deathknight being useless for tanking. You can already imagine groups of three Deathknights spamming the trade channel for a healer and a tank in that case, because everyone will think of them as dps classes. And a bit further down the road you'll see groups that still need a dps class advertising "need dps, no Deathknights please", because they prefer other classes with higher damage or more crowd control or other useful abilities. This is what Wolfshead describes, a solution where from initial design or with nerfs the Deathknights ends up being less popular than other classes, after the inevitable first surge.

A better alternative would be to make Deathknights as good as tanks as tank-spec druids and paladins are now. That is perfectly viable for most group situations, even including some raid encounters. There is a certain logic behind having all tank hybrids be equally strong. But to make this work, Blizzard would need to do a major rework of the warrior class, significantly improving the viability of the warrior tank in solo and PvP situations. And I'm not talking about minor improvements, as announced in patch 2.4, like Cleave not breaking sheeps any more. I'm talking about changes where a tank warrior would solo grind mobs at the same speed as a feral druid or Deathknight, and where a warrior with a shield is a serious threat to some classes in a PvP situation and not a cause for laughter. The 4 tanking classes would basically be equivalent in tanking, with each class having advantages in some situations over the others; and they would be equally good in soloing and PvP, just using different styles. One could for example imagine tank warriors shining in PvP with various shield maneuvers, for example being dangerous to casters with a much improved shield reflection skill. Basically the warrior would turn from being a specialized tank class to one of four equally good but different tank hybrid classes, and that without being penalized by having to pay dearly every time he wants to switch roles.

So this is where we are: We still have very little information about WotLK, and what we know is that introducing the Deathknight is not without risks for the overall class balance in World of Warcraft. You can take the alarmist point of view like in the quoted articles and be terrified of the Deathknight. Or you can hope that Blizzard takes the opportunity and creates a class balance that is even better than before, by upgrading the warrior and removing many of the problems that protection spec warriors already have before the Deathknight class is there. Does it make sense to have ONE dedicated tank class which isn't much use for anything else when chosing the tank spec? For a game that stopped being all about PvE groups, I think not. We don't need "group only" classes or talent trees in World of Warcraft. Let's all be hybrids!
- posted by Tobold @ 11:12 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
A new currency in WoW

Badges of Justice will play a more central role in World of Warcraft after patch 2.4: there will be more ways to earn them, and far more ways to spend them. On the earning side the biggest change is that *all* raid bosses now drop badges, plus there is a small chance to get badges from supply packs gained via daily quest. On the spending side there will be far more epic gear that can be bought, in better quality than before, plus you can buy epic gems for badges now. A reader told me that you could even buy recipes for badges, but I couldn't confirm that, I read those recipes would be related to reputation. In short, Badges of Justice will become kind of a new, alternative currency in WoW. What effects will that have?

One interesting point is that it is a non-tradeable currency. Badges are soulbound, thus no "Chinese badge farmers". Well, you could theoretically buy yourself a spot in a farm raid, but I doubt that business will get very big, due to the organizational difficulties. Who said non-tradeable currencies were not a viable approach to eliminate RMT? Blizzard apparently thinks otherwise, and that is good. Especially if you compare things you can buy for gold with things you can buy for badges, you'll see that badges are far more valuable than gold. If I understood it correctly, the epic gems you can buy for badges will be uncut, and thus necessarily not soulbound, as you need to be able to give them to a jewel crafter. So they could be sold for gold on the auction house, which should establish a gold <-> badges exchange rate indirectly. That will be interesting to watch.

The other important effect of the changes is that even if 25-man raids now give badges, a Karazhan farm run will still be the most efficient way to earn them, the most "badges per hour" so to say. That is a good thing for guild cohesion, because previously the top raiders of a guild outgrew Karazhan and didn't really have all that much interest in helping less advanced guild mates to get their gear there. After the changes a mixed run of experienced and less experienced raiders through Karazhan in advantageous for both sides, which should encourage the practice. A Karazhan farm run becomes "an epic gem and a half" even for people who can't use any of the random epic drops there. And by selling these epic gems raiders could probably finance their other raid expenses. I see this as a big improvement, because previously it was often more efficient to quit your guild and join a more advanced one than to help your less advanced guild mates, and that always bugged me.

The last point I'd like to mention is that raids now in part have a guaranteed return, just like PvP battlegrounds have. Previously you could have a completely successful raid, but end up with nothing but a repair bill, because of the random nature of the epic drops. In the future you will always get something if you kill a boss, even if you aren't lucky with the drops. With badges now becoming more valuable, cooperative gameplay activities like raids and heroic instances should become a bit more popular. Which is a good thing, as WoW was moving a bit too much towards being a solo or PvP pseudo-solo game. Encouraging people to play together can only be good, even if of course patch 2.4 has a lot of solo content as well.

So I do like the growing importance of badges of justice, and just hope that Wrath of the Lich King will have their own, even more improved badge system.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Interview with a Gold Seller

Another short interruption of my holidays, for an unusual post: Instead of writing just my opinions or news copied from elsewhere, this is actual original news, an interview, and thus the closest I ever got to "journalism". I frequently receive offers by e-mail to advertise in exchange for money various companies selling virtual currency. I always tell them that I don't do any advertising on my blog, and especially not for gold sellers, and usually I never hear from them again. But in this one case I got a polite reply, which developed into a discussion about the reputation of the real-money trade (RMT) industry. The discussion of the issue on MMO blogs is heavily lopsided against RMT, because the people who sell gold usually don't participate in that discussion. So I thought it would be a good idea to give somebody from the industry the opportunity to express his point of view. Chris Bottomley, the Marketing Director of MOGS agreed to be interviewed by me.

Tobold: As introduction, could you tell us your view of what MOGS is doing, and what your role is in the company?

Chris: First off, thanks a lot for arranging this interview Tobold; we appreciate the chance to put over a perspective of RMT that's seldom visible between the forum flame wars and Chenglish press releases.

Whilst not trying to use too much marketing-speak, MOGS provides MMORPG gamers with virtual currencies and services using an approach that's secure and geared toward ingame needs. I mention our approach not as a mean of shameless self-promotion, but rather to differentiate ourselves from shady (Chinese) service providers out there.

We also work closely with gamers and suppliers in the USA and Europe to buy-in currencies on a variety of games. We've developed a network of trust among Western suppliers so that we don't need to rely on workrooms in China.

My role within the company is to communicate our unique position to gamers, make them aware that they can deal with a reputable American company without paying a premium. Many of our new customers are under the illusion that Chinese RMTs, though a risk to deal with, are significantly cheaper than companies like ourselves – they're pleasantly surprised when they discover that's not the case.

Tobold: In our e-mail exchange you mentioned Chinese competitors destroying the reputation of your industry. How does your company differ from other RMT companies?

Chris: Like night and day. MOGS has been born out of a passion for gaming, all our staff are MMORPG gamers themselves and thus have a deep-rooted understanding of gamer needs. In contrast, the companies in China are almost all established on the back of venture capital, so they've no need to understand or respect the needs of gamers or the standards we have in the West. I don't make this judgement based on ignorance or prejudice; prior to working with MOGS I spent 12 months with a large Chinese RMT company, so I'm very familiar with how the RMT business is treated in South East Asia.

MOGS is completely independent and registered in the US, so we have to be accountable. Operating in a way that's legitimate and sensitive to the needs of our customers is the only way we can operate. If we were to indulge in the practices of our Chinese counterparts (stealing accounts, not delivering currency and then lying about it, using leveling accounts to farm Gold etc) then, as an American company, we would be liable to be sued for malpractice. Have you ever tried suing a Chinese company? It's virtually impossible, and the Chinese RMTs know and take advantage of this on a regular basis. This is what has given the industry the reputation it currently suffers from and it hurts more than just the practitioners of these ill deeds. In my view, this lack of accountability is the core reason for gamers mistrusting RMTs and who could blame them?

The problem is amplified when you bring in venture capitalists as a factor. By pouring money into these illegitimate operations, they are enabling them to spread misleading information to millions of gamers in the hope that they can gain their trust long enough to take their money. Due to their lack of service quality these companies cannot grow organically; they can't retain customers and so must spend to bring in new ones. Conversely MOGS is independent, free from outsider investment and unable to match the advertising budget of the likes of IGE and THSale. We've gotten to where we are today through delighting customers, having them come back again and again, and ultimately growing the company through word-of-mouth.

Tobold: Virtual items paid for via PayPal are not protected, the buyer can't charge back the money if he doesn't receive the virtual items or currency he paid for. But gold sellers demand payment in advance, so there is an obvious danger of being scammed when buying virtual currency. How can legit RMT companies build trust? I'd guess it would be hard to get references even from satisfied customers, because few people would admit buying gold.

Chris: This is an issue that works two ways and we would love to see PayPal deal with both. If you're making a purchase with your account balance, then a dispute will almost certainly go the way of the illegit RMT. However, if you use a credit card you can reverse the payment with the credit card company directly, and there's literally nothing the RMT can do about it. Obviously this is a much safer option for the gamer but it also leads to large amounts of fraud with cyber-criminals purchasing currency, reversing the payment with their credit card provider and then re-selling the currency to the same company. PayPal need to recognise both issues and put in place measures that protect legitimate buyers and sellers against the undesirables out there.

Tobold: What drives your business? Why do you think that players are buying virtual currency for real money?

Chris: I don't think there is one single reason. Buyer motivations range from not having sufficient time to go through the grind and enjoy other aspects of the game, to simply wanting a competitive advantage over friends or rivals.

We've established ourselves and continue to operate on the basis of enhancing gaming experience. Some players don't agree with these "enhancements" and believe it goes against the spirit of the game, which we completely respect. We're not in the business of making everyone agree with us or enforcing ourselves onto gamers (which is why we don't conduct ingame advertising or mass-mail spamming); if a player does not approve of our services then they have the choice not to deal with us.

Tobold: Blizzard recently won an injuntion against RMT company Peons4Hire, but interestingly was sueing them for spamming, and not for gold selling. Do you feel at risk from possible lawsuits from game companies? Do you think that the legal argument of game companies that all virtual currency is part of their intellectual property and thus can't be sold would hold up in a court of law?

Chris: The legal issues faced by RMT companies is certainly an ever-present risk and should encourage RMTs to operate in as fair and legitimate manner as possible. The Peons4Hire injunction was completely just and I'm glad Blizzard are taking measures to minimize ingame spamming. There needs to be more action of this type in games such as Guild Wars, where there is often more spam than legitimate chat.

Where does the intellectual property line lie? I'd feel uneasy answering that one not being of legal background. For years gamers have debated over whether developers will take legal action against RMTs and whether or not virtual trade is legitimate. Personally, I don't believe Blizzard would ever take action because it simply does not make business sense for them. MOGS doesn't force customers to buy virtual services; we're not holding your family with a list of demands. The fact is that gamers, for whatever reason, feel they would benefit from these services and Blizzard recognizes that RMTs keeping World of Warcraft gamers happy and continuing with their monthly subscriptions makes sense for them.

After posing this perspective I'm often asked, "So why do Blizzard ban RMT accounts then?", and the answer is always the same. To open a WoW account requires both a CD Key and subscription, but as Chinese credit cards are not accepted this become a 60-day pre-paid game card. A Chinese workroom would pay around $35 for both these resources, the majority of which goes right into Blizzard's pockets. As a rough estimate based on experience within Chinese workrooms, I would say 200,000 workroom accounts were banned in 2007, 99.5% of which would have been replaced by a new account (with a new CD key and pre-paid card) right away. Based on these numbers, the banning of Chinese "Gold Farmer" accounts was worth approximately $7,000,000 last year alone. Now you can better understand why RMT continues to exist and why legal action against RMT is extremely selective.

Tobold: One of the main tools of game companies in fighting RMT is banning the accounts of the sellers. Is that just a cost of doing business for you? Interestingly there is very little known evidence of gold buyers getting their account banned. Do you think your customers are safe, or do they risk losing their account when they buy gold from you?

Chris: Second question first; we have NEVER had a customer lose their account on World of Warcraft, or even incur a suspension, due to purchasing Gold. Going back to the points above, the last thing Blizzard wants to do is alienate gamers who feel they need the support of RMT to better enjoy their gaming.

Accounts being banned is a factor for the majority of the industry, though I'm happy to say we've not had a WoW account banned since April 2007. Blizzard has introduced a lot of processes to identify Gold farmers and sellers, including advances in Warden and a metrics-based system, but mainly it comes down to an IP sweep. They know that Chinese workrooms will continue to buy accounts regardless of how often they're banned and that they are the most likely to engage in undesirable practices, so this tried and tested method claims most RMT accounts.

Tobold: Recent changes to World of Warcraft delay the arrival of gold by mail, whether sent directly or via the auction house. Does the future of gold selling in WoW involve meeting in dark alleys of Ironforge or Orgrimmar?

Chris: The mail delay was brought in shortly after the introduction of metrics testing; looking at character behaviour as a means of identifying farmers/traders. As far as we can see this is a buffer period in which Blizzard can further inspect who you are and whether you're legit. Gold can still be sent via mail securely, but extra measures must be taken in order to ensure this. Rather than give up on mail, we've developed a system that allows us to continue to utilize it and guarantee it is not deleted in the inbox.

This is another measure, however, that whilst hindering illegit RMTs in one sense, benefits them in another. It seems that many Chinese RMTs are using "it must have been deleted in your inbox" as an excuse for incomplete Gold orders. If you request Gold to be resent you will either be ignored or schooled in the fine art of Chinese RMT logic e.g. "We sent it, you didn't get it – it's not our fault!".

The mail delay is another half-baked measure put in place by Blizzard to create the perception that they're fighting RMT, when they're really counting the profits from all those banned accounts!

Disclaimer: I have not bought any gold from MOGS and thus cannot vouch for their claims. No currency, real or virtual, changed hands in exchange for me posting this. This post is an honest journalistic attempt of showing a subject from a different angle, not an endorsement of RMT.

So here you have it, the other side of the story. I do find the concept of there being "white hat" gold sellers interesting, as most of the complaints I hear about RMT are about things like bots or gold spam, and not so much about the selling of gold itself. Earlier claims that RMT will bring the WoW economy to a crash haven't come true, after over three years the WoW economy actually appears more stable than the real world economy, in spite of a multi-million dollar RMT industry all selling WoW gold. If it was really possible to separate RMT from it's secondary negative effects like scams and spam, the only remaining objection is that buying gold is cheating. Which it certainly is. How serious a crime you consider cheating in a video game to be, I'll leave for your personal ponderation. I'll just give you to consider that the answer very much depends on whether you consider MMORPGs to be competitive or cooperative games.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:31 AM Permanent Link  (52) comments Links to this post

 
Gary Gygax dead

A reader alerted me to the fact that Gary Gygax died this week. He was one of the inventors of Dungeons & Dragons, and thus a great many of the features and conventions we see even in modern MMORPGs go back directly to his creative genius. Not only D&D players will mourn his passing.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:43 PM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Is WoW PvP the best possible PvP for a MMORPG?

I'm on holiday in one of these places where the geographical location doesn't really matter, as long as there is endless sun, blue sky, a beach, a pool, and an all-you-can eat buffet. But I'm interrupting this holiday for an hour to update this blog. Before I left, I spent an afternoon in World of Warcraft doing mostly PvP. Somebody was forming a "premade" PvP group in the trade chat channel and I joined this "trademade" group to do a couple of Eye of the Storm and Arathi Basin battlegrounds. A nice improvement over just joining random battlegrounds alone, especially the few times where we were originally paired against another premade group, which then promptly deserted the battleground when facing us. All in all a lot of fun, and I'm half-way in honor to the one-handed sword I want.

So I was wondering, if World of Warcraft PvP manages to entertain me, who certainly isn't a PvP fan, might WoW PvP already be the best form of MMORPG PvP possible?

My reasoning is that there is an inherent incompatibility between MMORPG and PvP. A MMORPG works on the basis of continual character improvement: systems where you can actually lose xp or levels have died out, and we are now always winning, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, but never really losing anything. PvP on the other hand, by definition has a winner and a loser. And PvP is best if the two sides are equally strong, which doesn't mix well with a system in which players can be more or less advanced, depending on how much they already played before.

World of Warcraft pretty much solves this incompatibility. You don't really lose in a battleground, you just win less. Being killed is nearly without consequence and happens so often you stop noticing. And the bigger the battleground is, the less important become differences in gear, because a few very well or very badly equipped people don't make a big impact in a 40 vs. 40 battle.

Now it is perfectly possible that some future MMORPGs will succeed with similar formulas: PvP in which character development isn't overly important, and in which there are no losers. You can call it carebear PvP, but by the simple fact that it doesn't frustrate people so much, it is bound to be the most popular PvP. If other people are clamoring for PvP which has a more lasting effect, "impact PvP", or "meaningful" PvP, I'm sceptical. In WoW you win PvP in an instanced battleground, and there is no lasting result, because when you log off the next person playing must be able to win *his* battleground without a lasting influence of what you did. As soon as you move PvP to the overland map, and have people conquer lands and castles, and set it up in a way that the castle you conquered is still around when you log on next time, your PvP success comes at the cost of a negative experience of somebody else. For a win to stay around, the loss has to stay too. Impact PvP is creating real losers for a longer time, and those people won't be happy. Even if the permanent losers are those who are objectively the worst PvP players, any system which continually frustrates one group of players is bound to fail in the long run. The worst and most frustrated players quit, and then it's the second-worst group of players getting hammered until they give up. That can only lead to a shrinking user-base, which is the last thing a MMORPG needs to be a success.

Other games where players fight other players, but that don't have the baggage of persistent worlds and MMORPG character development fare better here. Ladder systems in which people mostly play against people of similar skill level work better outside persistent worlds. For MMORPGs the carebear PvP of WoW might be the best possible solution.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:20 PM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post