Death Knight tanking

I wanted to test how good Death Knights are at tanking. Only problem: There are no other character classes than Death Knights in Hellfire Peninsula in the beta. But as my own Death Knight is a gnome, and thus Alliance, and all my level 70 characters are Horde, I had copied my level 60 human priest to the beta, loaded with herbs for the DK's Inscription. So I specced the priest holy, went to Hellfire Peninsula, and shouted for 4 Death Knights to come to Hellfire Ramparts with me.

I was quickly taken up on the offer, and we cleared out Ramparts, with only one wipe at Nazan. Due to their good starting gear, the DKs just crush the trash mobs. Healing them is challenging, but doable for a level 60 holy priest. By some fluke of fate we found, besides one staff for me, only weapons and armor Death Knights can use. And the good new for DKs is that the stuff was better than their starting gear. Hellreaver is a good upgrade to the runesword they have.

We killed the first and second boss by simply overwhelming him with damage. The third boss, Nazan, is a lot tougher, and there the tanking deficiencies of the Death Knight class became apparent. It's not that they can't withstand damage if properly geared. But holding aggro is a problem, they don't have much threat attraction abilities, and their taunts aren't good for main tanking. Death Grip has a 35 second cooldown and only works for 3 seconds. Blood Boil has a shorter cooldown, 15 seconds, also works for just 3 seconds, but only works on diseased targets.

I'd have no problems inviting one Death Knight into any group as off-tank. But once the Death Knights stop being overgeared in the mid 60's, using a DK as a main tank will be problematic. They *do* take more damage than a protection warrior, so need more heals, so the healer is more often getting aggro, and the Death Knight has problems managing that. Harder dungeons, and especially heroic dungeons, will need something else than a Death Knight to tank. As I said, protection warriors aren't obsolete. Too bad half of them will retire in frustration after playing a Death Knight for a while and exclaiming "why doesn't my warrior solo like that!". I don't think this attempt by Blizzard to solve the tank shortage will work. Improving the soloing power of protection warriors, or introducing the free talent swap, would have been a better plan.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:45 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
WotLK achievement system

One thing I tested during the WotLK beta was the new achievement system. It isn't fully implemented yet, you can earn achievements and achievement points, but you can't spend the points on anything yet. Anyway, my level 70 warrior I copied into the beta has 88 out of possible 532 achievements, for a total of 820 achievement points. Still a lot to do if I wanted to collect them all. Which I won't do, because for already existing characters it will be next to impossible, as they would have to repeat a lot of old stuff.

The problem lies in the fact that up to now World of Warcraft kept track of some things, but not of everything. So the achievement system knew that I had done 1472 quests with my warrior, giving me the 1,000 quests done achievement. It didn't know that I had done more than 5 daily quests, as those aren't kept track of. It did know that I completely explored Outland, but it didn't know that I've been to many dungeons in Azeroth and Outland already. So the "Kill Archmage Arugal in Shadowfang Keep" achievement is still greyed out, together with every other "kill boss X in dungeon Y" achievement. Who is going to organize a raid to kill Ragnaros again, just for 5 achievement points?

I think the achievement system is a nice addition. But adding it to a 4 year old game has obvious problems. And some achievements, like gaining exalted status with various factions, aren't really worth doing just for some points and checking one more achievement off your list.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Spore and intelligent design

I was idly wondering whether the religious right would protest against Spore, because that game is based on the theory of evolution, which is contrary to the beliefs of the creationists. But then it struck me that Spore isn't pro-Darwin at all! The DNA mutations that lead from an amoeba to a race conquering space are not at all random and subject to the survival of the fittest; instead they are directed by a higher power, invisible to the creature itself, the Spore player. So in fact Spore promotes the theory of Intelligent Design. That should be okay with the religious crowd, although maybe they have problems with the whole god-sim concept.

More realistically is the scenario where nobody besides me makes any comments at all on the relationship between Spore and the conflicting theories of how man was created. If we ever see a big public protest against Spore, it will be because some teenager found out that he could create a humanoid biped with a pink texture skin and boobs, and that creature ends up being on the top spot of downloaded Spore creatures. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 1:12 PM Permanent Link  (47) comments Links to this post

 
The future of grouping

There is an interesting discussion going on between Rob from MMOCrunch and Cameron from Random Battle on how soloable a MMORPG should be. And as happy as I am that Cameron is concentrating on his personal blog again, on this issue I'm on the other team, the pro playing together one. Or as Raph Koster says, "the single player game is an aberration".

That is not to say that I am against soloability. There are certainly times when I am not feeling sociable, or where I just don't have the time to play together with other people, and would prefer just to do something on my own. I do think that every MMORPG should offer the possibility to do things on your own, including gaining xp and advancing your character. But what I am strictly against is the system most prominently displayed in WoW where soloing is the *fastest* way to advance your character.

I do believe that there is a small group of players who absolutely want to solo all the time, and a small group of players who absolutely want to group all the time. Between them is a huge majority of players who have no strong opinion on the matter, and are mostly moved by the incentives. Most common argument in World of Warcraft against grouping for levelling is "it's not worth the hassle". Yes, but what if it was? WoW is simply badly designed in that aspect. The LFG tool is awful. The group xp bonus is so tiny that in most situation a group makes less xp per hour than a single player. And there is a huge gap in difficulty between the content designed for solo play and the content designed for group play. Solo content is trivially easy most of the time, group content is often designed in a way that one player making a mistake will wipe the whole group. "Pickup group" is an derogatory term in WoW, evoking fears of you being killed by somebody else's faults; but that comes not from people inherently being anti-group, but from WoW teaching them that a group is only useful for specific group content, and that one is so hard that a pickup group is likely to fail. In World of Warcraft before the level cap you only need a group to get better loot from dungeons; but as you can level up soloing so fast, spending that extra group time to gather that better loot simply isn't worth the effort. WoW distorts the picture, because developers see everyone soloing and think that is what players prefer, when in reality the players just followed the incentives more than their preferences.

Soloing by definition is the default mode of a MMORPG. You log on and you are alone. Getting a group together or getting into a group requires some effort. Effort in time, effort in social skills, effort in trust. But in the history of mankind people have always banded together against threats, because in the real world a group nearly always has a higher chance of success than an individual. The Neanderthal went hunting in groups, not solo. Any half logical virtual world should make adventuring in a group easier than alone; but instead they are now often perversely designed to discourage grouping. You kill a mob in WoW in a full group, and only get 28% of the xp you'd get if you had soloed it. Half of the quests are designed in a way that if you would need 10 monsters to kill solo, you'd need to kill 50 of them in a group of 5; and then there aren't 50 mobs around, the respawn time is slow, and doing that quest with a full group takes twice as long as soloing it. No wonder nobody groups any more before the level cap!

The Everquest approach of forced grouping is certainly the wrong one, but I still have fond memories of EQ pickup groups. Banding together with strangers to face dangers, building strong communities, making new friends. And I think that you can have all the advantages of this in a system that encourages grouping instead of enforcing it. Leave half of every zone as it is now, soloable and everything. Fill the other half with challenges that a single player of that level would be unable to overcome, but which would be no risk for a group of 5. Make it easy to find pickup groups around you, and make the group xp bonus high enough that playing in a group always gets you more xp per hour, and finishes your quests faster, than if you soloed. And suddenly you get a game where most people are grouping most of the time, and liking it!

People playing together has huge advantages for a MMORPG. Once the initial effort to work together with strangers is overcome, players enjoy playing together more than playing alone. There is lots of evidence that people play games in which they have strong social ties to other players longer than if they play alone. Developers should encourage people playing together for their own benefit, because players staying longer in a game means added income. If someone absolutely wants to play alone, a single-player RPG is nearly always the better option: No monthly fee, and the single-player nature of the game allows the player to be the hero who saves the world instead of one of 10,000 heroes killing monsters that respawn 5 minutes later.

And maybe a game where people group more than solo out of their own free will isn't so far away. Mark Jacobs announced at E3 that Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning will have a feature called "open grouping". That means that unless you flag your group as private, anyone in the vicinity can join the group if it isn't full. So an adventurer goes to some corner of the game world because he has a quest to kill 20 foozles, opens his looking for group interface, and sees that there is already a small group of people killing foozles quite close. He joins them with a single mouse click, doesn't have to run far to meet them, and kills the foozles together with them faster than if he did it alone. People leave the group when they finished the quest, but then new players join it, and create in effect a perpetual foozle-killing group for this one particular corner and quest. Now I can only pray that the designers of WAR made it so that being in a group gives you more xp per hour than soloing, and finishes your quests faster, not slower. But already the announcement that the LFG tool of WAR will be so much better than WoW's got me quite excited.

And then of course WAR has the public quests, where anyone entering a specific area is automatically at the same step of a quest chain, which can be repeated several times with a mix of rewards, some of which you get just by continued participation, and some extra loot you can earn in what Mythic calls a Vegas loot system. It should be blindingly obvious to most players that forming an open group in a public quest is pure unadulterated advantage. Groups always will be more efficient than the sum of their parts, and the unique incentive system of public quests actually gives you more rewards for more efficiency. A group of one tank, one healer, and one damage dealer will get more influence points per minute than the sum of influence points of an ungrouped tank, healer, and damage dealer of the same level and gear. More influence points per minute means faster access to the influence loot, and a better bonus on your roll for the Vegas loot. So finally we have a realistic system where a group is rewarded for being stronger than a bunch of loners.

Finally, while everyone knows I'm normally not a big fan of open-world PvP, the fact that the bigger team nearly always wins that sort of PvP is a big incentive for grouping in WAR. This is a game where you earn some sort of PvP xp for killing other players in open-world PvP areas of zones. And it is a game where you are polymorphed into a chicken if you enter such a PvP zone which is too low for your level, so solo ganking of lower level characters is out. Does anyone think that this is a system where you wouldn't advance faster if you just clicked on the open group button? If you refuse to group, your opponents won't, and they'll kick sense into you pretty fast.

So for me Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is the big hope, the future of grouping, the MMORPG which brings the genre back from the abyss of the massively single-player online game. This is why I don't care whether the graphics are superficially similar to WoW, or the feature list doesn't look much different. Because if WAR manages to be a game where you can solo, but the better option will often be to group, the actual play experience of the game will be dramatically different from World of Warcraft. It will require a certain amount of re-education of people having been lead astray by WoW, but if WAR pulls that off it might well beat WoW if not in subscription numbers but then at least in longevity. At the core most players want to play together rather than alone, and nudging them over the barrier can only be good for a massively multiplayer online game.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (26) comments Links to this post

 
Moderate drinking

In the latest version of the WotLK beta drinking a potion now gives you a "potion sickness" debuff that prevents you from drinking any other potions until you rest out of combat for some seconds. Which means that even in very long combats you can only drink one single potion. That has zero effect on solo players, but casters in raids often drink several mana potions per fight.

I don't think this will hurt Alchemists very much. Yes, the demand for mana potions will probably go down. But what few people realize is that you don't actually make money with Alchemy (except for transmutes), the potions you make cost just minimally more than the herbs you need to make them. The real money is in Herbalism. And while Herbalism thus loses some demand for herbs for mana potions, they'll earn lots of new customers: Inscribers. As a bonus Inscribers are less picky than Alchemists, because they don't need one specific herb, but any of a similar level will do.

How raiders will survive without multiple potions is a different question, but they will adjust. Priests already use mana conservation and regeneration talents a lot, and get more of them in WotLK. Damage spellcasters will have to do the same. So don't be surprised if you see a Mage rolling need on some gear with a big spirit bonus. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 8:04 PM Permanent Link  (26) comments Links to this post

 
Beta Warriors vs. Death Knights

Still in the spirit of doing in the beta what I won't do in the release version of Wrath of the Lich King, I copied my level 70 Warrior there. The good news was that in spite of him having only average level 70 blue armor, I could tank the first dungeon, Utgarde Keep, just fine with a 61-point protection talent build. The bad news was that even with some searching I found nothing in the current version of the WotLK beta which would significantly cure the problems that Warriors have in TBC.

First of all, if Blizzard plans to allow people to have two talent builds and switch easily and cost free between them, that feature isn't implemented in the current beta yet. Well, in the beta any respect costs only 1 copper piece, but that is just for testing, and won't make it into the release version. Thus the biggest Warrior problem, that they can either tank or deal damage, but not both, isn't solved yet.

Then I looked through the various new Warrior spells and talents, and found very little which really changes the way how a Warrior is played. For example the 51-point protection talent Shockwave isn't really all that great in practice. It suffers from the same problems as Thunderclap, that it'll break sheep and other forms of crowd control. And the 3-second stun. At best it combines abilities of already existing Warrior abilities into something which might be useful for AoE trash tanking. The 51-point Fury talent Heroic Leap is just a fancy-looking Charge. Many of the other new talents give you X percent more of this or that, but don't add any new game mechanics to the Warrior class. The new spells are just the same, there are even more rank upgrades and fewer totally new spells than in TBC. I've already heard mages complaining about the same, not sure for which classes the same is true as well. I know the paladin class is being much changed. But a Warrior at level 80 will play pretty much the same as he is playing currently at level 70. WotLK does not reinvent the Warrior class.

I tried an arms/fury spec for maximum dps, dual-wielding two-handed weapons with Titan's Grip. Even with 5 talent points put into that ability, you still suffer from a 20% speed penalty, which turns Titan's Grip into a talent which doesn't give more added damage than any other talent. Yes, with an arms/fury build you deal decent damage, but unlike a Death Knight you don't have any talents to heal yourself, and thus suffer from longer downtime between fights. Some people claim that MS Warriors dominate PvP, but that isn't true. They dominate PvP only as much as rock dominates a game of rock-paper-scissors, seen from the view of the scissors. They are flavor of the month sometimes in some arenas, but there are no data in the armory that suggest that Warriors would be generally better than other classes in PvP.

There will still be endless arguments in the coming months whether Death Knights are better or worse than Warriors in PvP or tanking. But there is no doubt whatsoever that Death Knights are better for solo PvE. They are what used to be called a "tank mage", a class without weaknesses, having both good offensive and defensive abilities. Death Knights even have self-heals, for gods sake! They are a complete tank, healer, damage dealer trinity rolled into one. And they can do it all with one balanced talent build. In fact due to how runes work (see post before), a balanced talent build might work better for them than a specialized one, unlike other classes.

That doesn't make Warriors obsolete. They still will keep their role as preferred main tanks for most raid bosses, and probably for heroic dungeons as well. But unless Blizzard really implements the talent-switching feature, which they occasionally think about, but haven't really even promised yet, leveling a Warrior is just a hard task you do in view of a main tank career later. Anyone who ever tries a Death Knight, and I guess most people will do, will have a hard time going back to playing a Warrior. I don't know exactly who will do more damage given equal equipment, but the Death Knight has so much more utility and abilities that just make his live easier. Death Knight is the ultimate soloing class, while Warriors even with the new talents and abilities still rank among the worst classes to solo with. My Warrior is now retiring and spending his old age as a pure alchemist, until Blizzard makes Warriors as easy to level as Death Knights, which they probably never will.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (32) comments Links to this post

 
How the Death Knight works

From the first announcement of Death Knights as a class to the current beta status, a lot has already changed for this class. So some people heard outdated news and now believe things about the Death Knight that aren't true any more. In this post I'm going to explain how the Death Knight currently works, and try to dispel some of the rumors.

First of all the conditions to create a Death Knight have been significantly lowered since the first announcement. The only thing you need to have is one character of at least level 55 from another class, and you'll be able to create a new Death Knight. You don't lose your previous character, there is no transformation into Death Knight, you simply make a new character. You don't need to be level 80 or do some high level quest. Just at least one character on one server with at least level 55 will enable you to create one Death Knight on every server. You can never create more than one Death Knight per server, because they would make too good tradeskill or banking mules. Any race can be a Death Knight, not only the gnomes you see all over the beta. ;)

Second I'd like to talk about the Death Knights rune sword, which figured heavily in the early marketing. In the current beta version you start out with a two-handed green sword, which you upgrade to a two-handed blue sword. But you aren't forced to use only two-handed swords. You can use polearms, two-handed swords, axes, or maces, or even dual-wield one-handed swords, axes, or maces. So there isn't really a "rune sword", there are just runes which are associated with you, not your weapon. What you do have is runeforging, a selection of Death Knight specific weapon enchantments, with which you can add special effects to your weapons. I'll leave the theorycrafting of whether dual-wielding or two-handed weapons are better for Death Knights to somebody else.

So even without a sword, a Death Knight has 6 runes: 2 blood, 2 frost, 2 unholy. In some previews you could read that you'd be able to adjust that, for example take 3 blood, 2 frost, 1 unholy, or any other combination. In the current state you simply can't, you're stuck at 2-2-2, and if I read the beta forums correctly, this isn't going to change in release. As a Death Knight you have two sorts of spells: One sort uses runes, for example "1 blood", or "1 frost and 1 unholy". When you cast such a spell, the respective rune(s) under your character profile grey out, and then come back after a 10-second cooldown. As you have only 2 of each, if you use two abilities using the same type of rune shortly after each other, you're out of that type of rune for a while, and need to use abilities using other runes. Unfortunately that doesn't combine well with talent tree specialization: If for example you put all or most of your talent points in the blood tree, as my beta death knight, you get additional spells using blood runes. But then you have lots of spells using blood runes, and few spells using frost or unholy runes, and you can't use them because you are limited to 2 blood runes. So for me a system with which you could change your mix of runes would have been preferable.

The second sort of Death Knight spells uses runic power. Every time you use a spell that uses runes, your runic power bar fills up. There are also talents that add to your runic power in other ways. But otherwise it works a bit like warrior's rage: The runic power bar starts at zero, fills up during combat from you using your rune spells, and then allows you to unleash the runic power with various runic power spells. Runic power isn't blood-frost-unholy type specific, fortunately. By the way, one of the best Death Knight spells, Death Grip, which makes an enemy jump right in front of you, uses neither runes nor runic power. It's just for free, and instant, but with a 30-second cooldown. Nevertheless I think the thing will be extremely powerful in PvP, especially in large group PvP. If you ever fought in Alterac Valley, you know the situation that sometimes large blocks of enemy combatants face each other, and the first players to move forward are the first to die. Being able to pluck out a caster or healer at range from the enemy group and teleport him into your group where he will quickly be killed is a powerful thing. Or you can use it to remove a defender from a flag or other strategic position. Up to now WoW doesn't have all that many abilities that enable you to move another player, you can mostly only stop him from moving. Death Knights can do both. And the thing is useful for PvE pulling and prevention of runners as well, plus has a taunt ability added for group PvE.

So this are the Death Knight powers, but how does he play? A bit like a dps warrior or rogue, just with less downtime, because Death Knights have some blood talents to heal themselves. As I mentioned before, a Death Knight starts at level 55 in an instanced zone, shared with other Death Knights but no other classes. He has to do a series of destiny quests, which give him his talent points, his mount, his special abilities, and upgrade his gear from green to blue quality. At the end of that destiny quest series the Death Knight is level 57, and is released into the real Azeroth, in the Eastern Plaguelands. Lots of Death Knights level up there to 58, before moving to Outlands. I'd recommend moving to Silithus or Winterspring instead, where there are less other players around; or you could even already get to Outlands at level 57, with the help of a friendly mage, or by first traveling to Dalaran and porting to Shattrath from there. The Death Knight at level 57 is wearing gear which is nominally blue, but in reality has near-epic stats that surpass most level 60 pre-TBC blues. That means he is a killing machine, and makes xp faster by killing lots of mobs than by doing quests that require much traveling. In the Outlands a Death Knight can then start to find better gear, and level to 70 quickly, as the xp requirements for level 61 to 70 have been halved in WotLK compared to TBC, at least in the current beta state. I can't say much yet about how good Death Knights are in a group, but as solo leveling machines they are already awesome.

Finally one more word of advice: Don't miss out on training for your Death Knight! Death Knights can only train in Ebon Hold, a place they can always reach by a special teleport gate spell. But there isn't one class trainer in Ebon Hold, there are three: One for blood, one for frost, and one for unholy. To learn all the new spells when you make a new level, you must visit *all three* trainers, not just one of them.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:45 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
WoWGuild Manager Live

People sometimes ask me how I come up with all these ideas for blog posts. Most of the time I don't know myself. But this one I literally dreamt up. Woke up in the middle of the night with a vivid memory of having dreamt about this non-existing game: WoWGuild Manager Live (WML). I played WoW and Football Manager Live the day before, and my brain mixed the two up in my dreams.

In WML you play the manager of a World of Warcraft guild. You start by hiring players of different classes and stats. Unlike the real WoW, you need to pay the players a daily wage, out of a daily income based on your fame, so you can't directly hire large numbers or the best players. Every player has his regular WoW stats and talents, but also mental abilities like patience, punctuality, or lootwhoring. You put together a team, 10 players at first, define a series of tactics, and send them on a raid. Their success in the raid depends on their stats, and how adapted your tactics were to the particular challenge and the player's particular strengths and weaknesses. You can watch the raid, but it is only displayed with colored dots on a 2D map, and in fast forward. But you can press a time-out button and adjust tactics or bring in substitutes if there is a problem. Sometimes there are emergency time-outs, for example if a player left in the middle of the raid, or there is a guild drama random event.

By succeeding in raids your guild gains in fame and daily income. Your player's stats increase due to experience and the epic loot they got (not shown in detail). You can auction players off to other managers, and in regular intervals there are wage auctions where other managers can try to steal your players away by offering them higher wages in a sealed bid system. You might also be forced to sell or let go players because of some players not getting along with another one, or retiring. But if you manage your team well, you'll be able to raid harder dungeons, and ultimately the even harder 25-man dungeons.

I don't think anybody will make this game, I really just dreamt it. It plays just like Football Manager Live, only with WoW guilds and raids instead of football teams and matches. Maybe I'm missing the kind of computer RPGs where you controlled more than just one character, and gave strategic commands to a whole adventuring party. Apart from pets and the henchmen in Guild Wars, that aspect is sadly missing from modern MMORPGs. I'll just keep dreaming.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:15 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Inscription for bloody beginners

As promised, I explored the new Inscription profession in the WotLK beta. First thing to say is that it isn't finished yet. You can level it up to 125, and then the trainer only has one more recipe for skill level 250, but you can't reach that because you don't have the intermediate recipes. Obviously a lot of recipes still missing. From the promised recipes to modify spells there is no sign yet.

So, what is Inscription? Inscription is the tradeskill to make scrolls. You can make the regular stat-buffing scrolls, but also some special scrolls like the Scroll of Recall, which works like a second hearthstone. Useful! Furthermore you can make blank scrolls for enchanters, on which the enchanter can then place his weapon or armor enchanment and thus make it portable. This finally allows enchanters to put their enchants on the auction house, which is a huge improvement.

The first recipes use Peacebloom and Silverleaf, the basic herbs from the newbie zones. The recipes after that use pomace, for example Alabaster Pomace. The pomace is made with a new skill, milling, which you get when you learn inscription. It works just like prospecting for jewelcrafting: You click milling, then you click a stack of herbs, you lose 5 of the herbs, and gain 2 to 3 pomace. There are less different pomace than there are herbs, so Peacebloom, Silverleaf, Mageroyal all give Alabaster Pomace from milling. Finally a good use for those more common herbs nobody needs.

The pomace is turned into ink, and the ink plus parchment gives a scroll. The parchments are available at the inscription goods vendors. For Alliance I found the grand master inscription trainer in Valiance Keep in the Borean Tundra (you get there by boat from the new Stormwind Harbor), but the inscription goods vendor was in the mage tower at Amber Ledge. There was both a vendor and a trainer at Dalaran, but the trainer didn't seem to be working yet, although that was difficult to say with the horrible lag that place still has.

It is hard to say yet whether Inscription will be useful, as it is yet in a very unfinished state. But I'm looking forward to exploring it some more in some later build.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Open Sunday Thread

The traditional open Sunday thread, where you can talk about whatever you like, and propose subject for me to write about. In today's special edition you can even ask me about the Wrath of the Lich King beta, if you have specific things you'd want to know.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
My first hours as a Death Knight

I spent my first few hours in the Wrath of the Lich King beta, and as there is no NDA, I'd like to tell you about it. As planned I made a Death Knight, and in the span of 4 to 5 hours leveled him up from 55 to 57, as well as out of his starting area, a little place I like to call Tortage.

Tortage? Isn't that the Age of Conan starting area? It is, and in Wrath of the Lich King it isn't really called that way. But taking a page out of the AoC book, the Death Knight starting area is an instanced region from which you can't reach the rest of the world until you haven't finished a series of "destiny" quests. And that plays just great, most fun I had in WoW for months. Your Death Knight starts with green armor and no talent points, and every quest gives you either a blue piece to replace a green piece with, and/or some talent points, and sometimes even some essential class skills. So by the time you finish your destiny quest series, you'll be fully clad in very good looking blue armor, have all the talent points you're supposed to have at your level, and all your essential class abilities.

And of course by being instanced, there are things possible that wouldn't be possible in the normal WoW, like the passage of time. For example when your destiny quest series is nearing the end, you're asked to go back to base by using a specific teleport portal. But that portal also transports you forward in time, to the same area, but looking much different from the advancement of events in the war between the Scarlet Crusade and the Scourge. Oh, and you're the Scourge, the epic destiny quest line tells how you'll eventually break free from the grasp of the Lich King. The whole thing contains some epic battles, with you doing various activities including steering a dracolich in a massive attack, or killing hundreds of enemy soldiers using their own canons.

Once out of the destiny quest line, you end up at Light's Hope Chapel in the regular world, and can start doing quests there. Or you can travel elsewhere. Fortunately all the flight paths are already available, you will not have to visit every zone in Azeroth on foot to tag all the flight points. I made my way to Stormwind City, used the new harbor there to get to Northrend, and learned the new profession Inscription there. I'll tell you more about that once I have explored that one more. But for a first evening in the Wrath of the Lich King beta it was a great success. I can only advise you that even if you don't plan on leveling a Death Knight up, do at least those 4 hours of destiny quest with him. It's well worth it.

Blizzard said that Death Knights should *feel* epic, and they certainly do. They also said that while feeling epic, Death Knights shouldn't actually be much better than existing character classes, especially the Warrior. Unfortunately they completely fail on that account. After 5 hours with the Death Knight I feel like deleting my Warrior (but won't do it because of his Alchemy). I can't say whether the damage output of a level 57 Death Knight is far superior to that of a level 57 fury Warrior. But his utility is far, far superior. How about a taunt that has a good range and not only forces the enemy to attack you, but also teleports him towards you? Finally a version of taunt that is useful for solo and PvP in WoW, as you can use it to keep enemies from fleeing, or even to pull. How about various abilities that convert either your damage or the enemies damage into healing, so you don't have all that downtime between fights that the Warrior has? How about spells that freeze the enemy to the ground or pelt him with spells from a distance? And that is just the start of the list. I don't know about the usefulness of Death Knights in groups yet, but I can already see they are much better soloers than Warriors, even in their frost "tank" spec. Right now census sites like WarcraftRealms show 12% of the players having a Warrior. I bet you that in a year that number will have dropped to 8% or below (if they properly update and don't count characters not played any more). Guilds will still need protection Warriors for tanking, but only a masochist would still play a dps Warrior if he can easily get a much better Death Knight. I sure hope that Death Knights are good enough as tanks in a group, because otherwise the only thing that is going to tank is the probability of getting a group together.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:41 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
I want a WoW lifetime subscription!

As syncaine from Hardcore Casual so correctly remarks, some people are avoiding the Wrath of the Lich King beta because they fear if they play the beta, they will have seen most of the content before the expansion is even out. My WotLK beta is up and running, but as I said I plan to use the beta to play the deathknight I might not want to play in the release version. But I completely share the fears that the total amount of content in Wrath of the Lich King will not be sufficient to last until Blizzard manages to bring out the third expansion.

And with WAR and other interesting games looming at the horizon, I foresee me playing World of Warcraft on and off. New expansion or large content patch comes out, I play for a couple of months, then take a break for a couple of months to play something else. I pretty much already did that with The Burning Crusade.

The only problem in that mode is having to cancel and reactivate your account all the time. How annoying! What I'd really need is a World of Warcraft lifetime subscription for $200, which would allow me to play WoW whenever I want, without having to bother with my subscription status. Wouldn't that be a good idea? Even for Blizzard it might be a good plan. WotLK is probably going to come out this year, with the bulk of the sales being in 2008. But as they probably won't be able to make another expansion before 2010, their earnings in 2009 will be lower than usual, and investors don't like that. So why not launch a lifetime subscription option in 2009, and thus carry forward future earnings. After all, WoW is 4 years old now, and you can't really say with certainty that all the 10 million players are going to be playing this for more than $200 worth of monthly fees. Better grab the money now, while the game is still hot.

If you are paying for WoW right now, would you be buying a lifetime subscription for $200 early next year?
- posted by Tobold @ 11:09 PM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
Project Lore

I don't know if you ever saw World of Warcraft video guides on YouTube, but there are tons of them, with vast differences in the quality of the explanations. But what unites them is the bad quality of the video images captured from the game, making it really hard to actually see anything useful on them. So a couple of guys went and founded Project Lore, a site with high-quality video guides through the dungeons of World of Warcraft.

They just started, and did Hellfire Ramparts first, and now progressed to the Slave Pens. The gameplay video is in the middle, small webcam cutouts of 4 of the 5 group members in the corner, and some text explanation at the lower edge. Generally quite well done. But of course right now it isn't terribly useful. Who needs a video guide how to beat Hellfire Ramparts on normal now? We've all been there a year ago. Slave Pens on heroic is somewhat more useful, but again most of us already know the place inside out. So I just hope the guys got enough WotLK beta keys to already start producing video guides of the dungeons there. Now THAT would be useful!
- posted by Tobold @ 8:10 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Copying features - good or bad?

Any feature in a modern MMORPG has a long pedigree, often dating back a decade ago to Everquest and Ultima Online, or even earlier to MUDs and Dungeon & Dragons. That makes the discussion of whether WAR copied features from WoW or the other way round pretty much futile. In Wrath of the Lich King new features are going to be added to World of Warcraft: siege warfare PvP and an achievement system for example. As chances are high that WotLK and WAR will be released around the same time, some people suspect that Blizzard is trying to preempt a possible success of WAR by nicking some of its features. But of course the achievement system could as easily have been copied from Lord of the Rings Online. Who knows? Who is copying whom isn't important. But what is evident is that we are moving towards a situation where the feature lists of all major MMORPGs will look pretty much alike. Now is that a good thing or a bad thing?

As I mentioned before, I don't think that feature lists are all that important. The implementation, and how the features interact with each other are far more vital. For example siege warfare in WoW is going to be strictly localized to one single PvP zone, just a fun diversion. In WAR keeps are far more essential to the RvR gameplay, as they give bonuses to zone control, and thus ultimately the sacking of the enemy capital. In Age of Conan siege warfare is mainly used to crash your computer. ;)

So for me it is always interesting how the various games implement the same feature. Player housing for example was a very different beast in Ultima Online than it is in Everquest 2, which again is much different from player housing in Lord of the Rings Online. I would actually *want* Blizzard to copy that feature, just to see their version of it. If a new game comes out with a feature that is fun, why should everyone be forced to play that game to enjoy that feature. Maybe the new game is otherwise not so great, and you'd rather have that shiny new feature in your old favorite game. Even if innovation is conceived at one point, we're all better off if the best features turn into industry standards. That doesn't turn all games into identical clones, because their basic structure and focus is often different. I'm looking forward to the WoW achievement system, even if it isn't a new idea.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Wakfu combines MMORPG and Anime

There is a flash-based MMO produced in France called Dofus, which in spite of its limited graphics has quite some success. So the makers, Ankama Games, started to produce an improved version called Wakfu, currently in closed beta. And this time they are using their game world to not only make an MMO, but also an Anime cartoon tie-in. This trailer is showing bits of both.

I did like the strategic turn-based combat of Dofus, but found the game overall to be a bit too grindy. It is surprising how Korean a game made in France can feel. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 9:03 PM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
WAR press beta

I received a mail from Mythic's PR agency, inviting me to the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning press beta. Interesting, I didn't even know there was such a thing as a press beta. In the earlier stages of the WAR beta, press was excluded; so if they are now opening up it appears as if the game is getting closer to release.

What is a beta actually? I think everyone understands that word differently, just look at all the Google "betas". As I could see in the comments to yesterday's thread, the WAR beta is a particularly touchy subject. Mythic made lots of advertising to get people to sign up for the beta, then used the large number of people signing up for the beta as marketing tool ("look at us, we got millions of people signing up for the beta"), and then only let a small number of people actually get into the beta. And as this beta is already running longer than some other MMORPGs had in total lifetime from release to being shut down, that leaves hundreds of thousands of beta applicants unhappy for never making it into the beta.

From the people who actually made it into the WAR beta there also have been some negative comments. These can to a certain degree be explained by Mythic having a different idea of what a beta is than many of the beta testers. Some beta testers just want to play for free, but Mythic actually wanted the beta test to, well, test their game. There are stories that for testing purposes the graphics were toned down up to recently. And you couldn't just make a character and play whatever you wanted, the beta test was very structured, and only specific races, classes, and levels were available at various times. So you might log in and find your character from the last phase deleted, and you having to play a new character of level X of some other race. Which *is* a good method to actually test stuff, but requires a certain dedication from the beta testers beyond playing for free. Mark Jacobs recently explained the decision to cut 4 classes from WAR by the feedback of beta testers, and them watching the numbers and seeing that people didn't play those classes in the beta because they weren't as much fun as the others. Compared to lets say WoW still struggling with the fact that people find protection warriors not so much fun since 4 years, using a beta to make sure all of your classes are popular is probably not such a bad idea.

But for marketing purposes the WAR beta isn't ideal. Because many other companies used their beta very differently, people are used to much shorter beta, inviting everyone who applies, and showing off the game near completion. These "marketing betas" serve better as free trial version, and to fuel the hype just before release. Their testing value is limited to stress testing the servers, and even there beta testers complain if during a stress test there is lag or login problems. Doh! I think Mythic did many things right with their beta to improve the actual game. But they shouldn't have asked everyone to sign up for the beta when they knew that is was still a long process not suited for the general public. It's not good to have potential customers disappointed before the game is even released. I hope they make up for it by inviting every applicant to some open stress test beta two weeks before release.

Personally I'm irrationally happy about my WAR press beta invite. Irrationally because it's for the wrong continent, and I'm already in the regular closed beta for Europe. I won't see anything new, and the press beta is still under NDA, so I can't write any more than I could before. But the simple fact that my status as blogger has risen to the point where big companies send me press beta invites, let me interview their top people, and give me press passes for events makes me very proud. My apologies for that pride, but the blog is a huge amount of work, and I get zero financial benefits from it. Positive feedback from readers and companies alike is my only reward. So you must excuse if I appear to be bragging about things like special invitations, reader numbers, and blog milestones of numbers of visitors, posts, and years. Consider them to be my salary.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:42 AM Permanent Link  (30) comments Links to this post

 
Interview with Paul Barnett

Paul Barnett, creative director at Mythic Entertainment for the upcoming Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, gracefully agreed to be interviewed by me via e-mail. I sent him questions, and he replied to them, so the back and forth interactivity of a face-to-face interview is missing, my apologies. But it's an interesting exchange nevertheless, and I'm quite looking forward to playing WAR. Paul is a great guy to listen to, intelligent, and full of enthusiasm for the game.

Tobold: Paul, you are creative director and lead designer for Mythic Entertainment's upcoming Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR). Is there any feature in WAR where you'd say, "this is mine, my idea, I thought of this"? Or is your job limited to having an influence on the ideas of other people?

Paul: The first bit is easy as Mark Jacobs is the lead designer. After that you have a raft of dead clever people all dedicated to making a great game. These people are so clever that the need for additional core creativity from me is almost zero. So my job is to act as a true magnetic north for Mark's design. And that's a tricky, because so much of design at the start of a game is concept rather than mechanics.

I guess on reflection there are 3 parts to my job. Firstly, at the start of a project I have to be boundless in energy and enthusiasm for the game. I have to see the connections and concepts from the page rather than from the build of the game. So little code is finished, so few art assets are created and no real game mechanics are in place that I live most of the game in my imagination.

Add to that, good, hard working souls who are pouring energy into a targeted part of the game. These people are committed to a singular task, be it getting a render engine working, creating initial databases or making concept art. They don't have time to look sideways, to drink in all the other areas that are starting to spring forth.

So my second job is to be boundless in talking up the project and warming people to the idea that they are part of something larger. It's much like the alienation concept that Marx talked about. I mean Marx also talked some rubbish but the basic gist that a worker works better when they can see how they are contributing to the end is valid and one that my role is supposed to support.

Lastly, I like to see my role as acting as one who can confirm and give comfort to the ideas our teams come up with. I am not smart enough to have many ideas, but I am just about smart enough to spot a good one.

As for my contribution...

I would say that I added about 1% to the game. And that's a ton, a ton more than I thought I would be able to when we first started. My additions are, on the whole, small and curious. Most ideas sprang from the original design and the way that that design was birthed into the game we have today.


Tobold: At the LIFT08 conference you compared MMORPGs to movies. A century ago movies went from just showing moving pictures that fascinated because of this being a new technology to a medium that tells stories. Are MMORPGs heading the same way? Is WAR telling stories, and how does it do that better than the competition?

Paul: Hmm I think MMO's are hobbies, I don't think that the film point is valid. I used the history of film to put forth that the challenges film has faced where potentially industry breaking and yet film survived. I was attempting, a little ham fistedly, to make the connection that the online space faces industry-changing moments, but unlike film faces them faster and more aggressively. Where as film had five big challenges in fifty years we get about fifty big challenges every five.

On the topic of telling stories, I am with the people who see comics as a medium for telling stories and while you could say comics are like film, I mean they both tell stories they are radically different, a comic can not be made into a film, it just can't. You can take the basic ideas, some of the images and pervert them for film but you can't just transpose a comic to film. If you did you would get a static movie with no sound. That might be great for a comic, its lousy for a movie. So MMO's tell stories, player stories in much the same way as comics and films. It is the same desire driven by a different engine and rules.

As for progress in story telling, I am not sure I understand the question. I have seen some fantastic ideas and concepts from games. But most of the concepts and ideas appear in my head, in my imagination. Those emotions, those feelings are not really a shared experience, nor are they owned by the creator of the art. I find it odd when people want to review a movie, because while some of the review can be technical in nature on the whole it is the emotional understanding of the movie that matters and that is a singular experience and, I would hope, different for everyone. So I don't know if story telling will move on. I do know that while MGS4 is curious, I am not sure it's using the medium of a computer game to tell its story, it strikes me more of a passive wrapping up of an idea. I am not convinced that Bio-shock is telling a story with a computer game either. It's more like using a strong art style to fire your imagination. I got a lot of mileage from Lords of Midnight (a very old Spectrum game with basic graphics); have I ever played a game that told me a better story? No I don't think so, and that's not because of the technological limits. Game play is forever, tech is as deep as plastic.

I am not sure how you judge if we do it better than anyone else. I guess if the measure is monetary success then we are up against it. If it's critical response I guess we are in the lap of the reviewers and if it's a personal experience, I guess almost any game can do a good job of that. I fear your question confuses me, which is not that hard to do. We can play in the kitchen of design of a while but at some point we have to kill it, cook it and eat it.


Tobold: In other MMORPGs gameplay changes dramatically when you reach the level cap, will that be the same in WAR? How do you manage the design conflict of having to cater for those players who'd rather spend a long time in leveling-up mode, and those who want to reach the level cap as quickly as possible?

Paul: Er, you don't. Some people just finish things, heck people like finishing things; it's why jigsaws are popular with analogue people. It's why books have a last page; it's why we go on journeys in our car. I like the idea of the journey being as important as the destination, sometimes more so. But some people just don't see it like that. They want completion as fast as possible. So we just don't worry about them. That type of player is not really a core hobbyist. They just like to complete games, most have played a lot of MMO's, a lot, a heck of a lot. They are not true fanatics of the Warhammer game. It's like saying that a man who has a lot of one-night stands is a romantic. But our game caters for them and gives them a great game, but the real game is found in the journey, found in the people who are looking for a warm, challenging and fun game world. A place gripped with the three core drivers of a good hobby, which are skill, commitment and imagination.


Tobold: You described WAR as being Led Zeppelin to WoW's Beatles, with the difference being RvR, or as you call it, "beating the living snot out of other people". Now there are people, including me, who either don't enjoy PvP much, or who feel they can't compete with pimply 12-year olds ganking other players all day. How are you going to sell WAR to us?

Paul: Not sure it's a sales job. We basically took two types of play. I want to kill other people all the time, forever. That's one type and boy have we got a game for you. And the other type I never want to fight another player I want to build a history and enjoy myself against the environment. You can do those two extremes. And there is a third way, where you play as much or as little of each type as you want.

If a player never wants to fight another player, then they can PVE, wait for the cities to fall and enter those for additional PVE content. Attack the bright wizard college, take on the King of the city, wander in the sewers and dungeons, and so forth. There is a ton of game for the PVE lovers of the world.

And you know what, we have a bunch of people who profess not to love PVP and at some point they will give it a go, quite a lot after dipping in their toe find that its not as bad or horrific as they imagined. So you may find you like it, if not, no worries there is oodles of game for you.


Tobold: Thanks for the interview, Paul. Any final message you want to convey to my readers?

Paul: Sign up for beta, come on in and test it out! Give us feedback and enjoy yourself!
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
Star Wars Online done right?

Being on holiday I nearly missed the announcement from EA at E3 that yes, the unnamed Bioware MMO in the works is Knights of the Old Republic Online. Or maybe has a different name, but will certainly be based on the Knights of the Old Republic role-playing games. Good news indeed.

To understand why everyone is so excited, one has to have played some of the previous Bioware games. They are generally well done, smooth flowing gameplay, and have a stronger focus on storytelling than other RPGs. How that translates into an MMORPG is anyone's guess, but it could be quite exciting.

And of course any KotoR Online game will be significantly different from WoW in not having the typical orcs and elves. Star Wars is a great license to build on, and the previous MMORPG with that license, Star Wars Galaxies, got quite a solid number of players (for the time) in spite of lots of bugs, dubious game design decisions, and complete changes to gameplay in the middle. It is hard to imagine how Bioware could be doing *worse* with that license, so this has a shot at the "next big thing" label.

Of course we might do better to forget about it at the moment, and don't feed the hype. I don't expect this to come out before 2010, and we don't know anything yet about gameplay etc., so maybe it's best to just wait and see.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:27 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
WotLK beta update

Just a short update to let you know that I got a beta key now. I just need to wait until the European WotLK beta download page is up, it is currently just showing a 403 error message. The US beta is apparently already up and running.

Somebody asked why I would want to play the beta and risk spoiling Wrath of the Lich King for me when it comes out. I've come up with a plan to prevent that: I've decided that when WotLK is released, my priority will be leveling up first my priest, and then either the mage or the warrior to 80, depending on what classes are most in demand for groups. I don't think I'll want to play a deathknight in the release version of WotLK. So the plan is to play the deathknight in the beta. Then either I find out that I like that class more than I thought, or in the worst case scenario, I find out I don't like deathknights, and already have it crossed of my list of things to do. I won't do questing in Northrend in the beta, so the content will remain fresh for me for the real release. I might just take a tour and have a look around the various zones, to help me with orientation later.

Of course I also want to look at the new profession: inscription, and check how it works. So my beta deathknight will be a herbalist / inscriber (apparently you need herbs for that skill). That will help me decide whether I want to unlearn any of my existing tradeskills of my level 70 characters (for example the enchanting of the mage, who doesn't have many recipes) in the release version. And it also helps to already find out what resources I'd need if I wanted to skill up inscription quickly. I did that for Burning Crusade, and already had all the gems needed to get jewelcrafting to 300 before the expansion even came out. Very useful, because after release you can't get the rarer stuff on the auction house any more for a while.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:01 PM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft - The Adventure Game - Review

At the WWI 2008 I saw that Fantasy Flight Games had brought out a second WoW board game, called World of Warcraft - The Adventure Game, which is a lot smaller and easier to play than the huge World of Warcraft - The Board Game. I couldn't get it at the WWI, but then managed to pick it up in a local games store for €30 (it costs $40 in the US). So now I played it first solo to learn the rules, then with my wife, and we both liked it a lot. Here is my review:

World of Warcraft - The Adventure Game (WoWTAG) is played on a 84 x 56 cm board, which is just small enough to fit on a dining room table with all the cards and counters around it. The board depicts the Eastern Kingdoms continent, pre-TBC, from the Plaguelands to Booty Bay. There are 3 major cities, Undercity, Ironforge, and Stormwind, and lots of other locations from WoW. In WoWTAG you play one of 4 possible classes (warrior, mage, hunter, or warlock), so a maximum of 4 players can play. The winner is the first player to collect 8 valor points, by solving quests or collecting trophies. Each game takes around 2 hours, once you get the hang of it. If you want longer or shorter games you could modify the number of points needed for victory.

In each turn a character first rolls a special movement die, which allows him to move 1 to 4 spaces, and also is marked to give 1 to 3 energy at the same time. After movement comes the exploration phase, where the character either interacts with discovery tokens placed by him or other players, or with resources printed on the space he landed on, which can for example heal wounds or give him new ability cards. The next phase is the encounter phase, where usually an encounter card is drawn. Finally there is a maintenace phase, where quests are finished and items are equipped, and then its the next player's turn. Most things in WoWTAG can have 4 levels: grey, green, yellow, or red, and the game comes with 4 stacks of 40 encounter cards for each level. There are nice card holders, which not only make finding the right color easier, but also allow you to draw from the bottom of the deck easily. Cards are drawn from the bottom, because every card has two sides: Usually a monster on the front, and an item on the back. In an encounter you draw the card, fight the monster, and flip the card to get the reward if you win.

Combat is a simple roll of two dice: One for you, one for the mob. You add your attack value to your die roll, and if you roll your enemies defence value or higher, you hit him for as much damage as your damage value is. Same thing for the monster. The 6 on the die is marked with a sword symbol, and often triggers special abilities or effects. The dice are only rolled once per combat, even if both combatants survive. Monsters all just have 1 health and die from any damage, but defeating another player is rather difficult due to this one-round combat; if he wasn't wounded before, it is unlikely you'll defeat him in just one round. There is both melee and ranged combat, with ranged having the advantage that it is counted first.

The 4 different character classes each have a deck with 23 spells and ability cards in it. Some of these can be played in the movement phase, others at the start of combat before rolling the dice, and a third class can be played at any time, or under special conditions listed on the card. Combat abilities modify your attack, defence, or damage values, or they are "weapon replacement effect". For example a frostbolt is such a weapon replacement effect, which works like a ranged weapon of attack value 3. You start with 3 such ability cards, there are various ways to draw new ones, and you can hold a maximum of 10 in your hand. Most of them use the energy shown on the movement die, but you can use mana potions and other effects if you didn't roll enough energy for all the abilities you wanted to use this turn.

What makes every game different is not only the randomness of the encounter cards, but also the quests. You start with two starting quests, which give one or two valor points each, and then go to elite quests, which give two to three valor points. As you need 8 valor points to win, you'll need to do four to five quests. Or you can attack a boss mob like Hakkar in Zul'Gurub for a 4-point trophy for a quick win, but of course these aren't easy to beat. Many quests ask you to visit specific locations, or kill a number of specific monsters. There are also "PvP" quests, in which you need to damage or defeat another player. If you don't like the quest you got, you can go to a quest giver in a city and get a new quest, discarding the old one. You always have two quests active, never more, never less.

World of Warcraft - The Adventure Game is cleverly named, because gameplay has a lot of adventuring in it. The board starts empty, but then fills up with quest locations, global events, location event cards, and undefeated monsters, making it different every time. You always need to make decisions of whether you want to hang around killing easy monsters, hoping for some good weapon or armor to help you, or whether you want to visit the special dungeon spaces to level up, or whether you want to pursue quests right away. Luck plays a big role in WoWTAG, but clever planning and use of abilities is also very important.

WoWTAG can be played with 2 players, although then you might want to add some house-rules modifying the PvP part; like allowing players to redraw when they get a quest requiring them to kill another player, because otherwise you get lots of stupid chases. With 3 or 4 players you can do PvP as intended, and the more players adding more stuff on the board also makes the game more fun. This is a fun adventure game, not a highly serious strategy game. I don't know for sure, but WoWTAG looks as if Fantasy Flight Games could release expansions, adding the other continent of Kalimdor, and more character classes for example. World of Warcraft - The Adventure Game is fun even for people who don't know WoW, but of course meeting familiar monsters and places makes it even better for people who played the MMORPG. Recommended!
- posted by Tobold @ 7:12 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Wrath of the Lich King beta started

So the Wrath of the Lich King beta started, making it likely that the expansion will come out before christmas. If you haven't "opted in" to the beta yet, you should do that on your World of Warcraft account page. Log in your account as normal, scroll down to the last option, and there should be the WotLK beta opt-in, which is free. Then you still need to wait for an e-mail to invite you. I haven't got one yet.

What I did get was a FAKE WotLK beta invite, but I didn't fall for it, as it lead to a site with a .tk domain. Be very, very careful of those. They lead you to a fake account login screen, and when you enter your userID and password there, you'll find all your characters stripped naked the next day, if not deleted. Do not enter your userID and password on any site which isn't https, for a safe connection, and is www.worldofwarcraft.com, or www.wow-europe.com.

I haven't entered my WWI code for "one future Blizzard beta" yet, because when I got it the codes weren't working yet. But even with the code one doesn't necessarily get WotLK beta access. What I *could* enter now that patch 2.4.3 is out is my code for the Tyrael pet, so now my priest has a somewhat chubby angel floating behind him. Cute!
- posted by Tobold @ 10:25 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Open Sunday Thread

Sorry for being late with the open Sunday thread, but I was busy with holiday activities. Anyway, here it is, your thread to suggest subjects and talk about whatever you like.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:04 PM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Playing football online

A note my American readers: This post is about online versions of what Europeans call football, which differs from American football in that it is actually played with the feet only. You might know it under the name of "soccer".

I'm in the last week of my holidays, and when I wasn't going out or doing other holiday stuff, I basically spent most of my computer time playing the beta of Football Manager Live. FML is organized in seasons taking about one real-world month each. And I just started less than a month ago, so for the first time I'm experiencing the end of a season. And it's exciting! I'm currently 4th in my division, so I'll probably make the playoffs, and get a chance for promotion to the premiership of the "early evening football association" I'm in.

The other exciting thing about the end of season is that the contracts of many players run out. You can only auto-extend the contracts of 5 of your players, for the others you'll have to bid against any other manager. As there is still too much money in the economy, some rich managers bid very high wages, up to 50k per day for world class players. But I bid much lower amounts for good, not-quite-world-class players, and got some good improvements and reserves on the cheap.

But as I mentioned before, playing a football manager in an online game isn't for everybody. It's great for strategists like me, but boring for people who want a bit more action. But one of my readers wrote me and alerted me to another online football game coming out soon: Football Superstars. Here you don't play a football manager, but a football player. The games are actual 11 vs. 11 "PvP" matches, with only the goalkeepers being AI controlled, the other 10 players on each side are controlled by humans. The game is download for free, play for free, probably with microtransactions for fancy outfits somewhere thrown in. Because when you aren't playing a match, you can hang out in bars or the gym, and chat with the other players, everything is 3D. Not for me, I prefer the text and 2D matches of FML, but I must admit that Football Superstars looks better. But then I guess most matches are pickup group vs. pickup group, as it will be hard to form fixed teams and get everyone together every night to play your leagues. I wonder how the teams will be managed, maybe they need a football manager after all. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Is World of Warcraft too easy?

If you take 10 million random people and sort them by height, you'll get a bell curve called a Gauss curve, or "normal distribution": There are very few very tall people, some tall people, lots of average height people, some small people, and very few very small people. The reason this is called a normal distribution is because most natural distributions look like this. And although it is much harder to measure, if you sorted the 10 million World of Warcraft players by skill, you'd get the same distribution. 7ou'll get everything from low skill to extremely skilled, with the large majority being somewhere in the middle. Only the very low skill end of the curve is missing, because people who don't have enough skill to even do one quest won't play very long.

And the same is true with every other game. People have different skills in video gaming. And if your skill isn't high enough for the minimum skill level needed to succeed, you don't play. I suck at first person shooters, so I don't play them. Which means my dollars are lost to the game companies making first person shooters. So Blizzard, clever as they are, made World of Warcraft very easy. Many people who have difficulties to succeed in the average video game still manage to kill monsters and do quests in World of Warcraft. And the learning curve for WoW isn't steep at all. You get new abilities every two levels, but most of them aren't any harder to use than the first two abilities you started the game with. If you managed to kill that wolf at level 1 to gain your very first experience point, chances are you'll also be able to kill that level 69 mob that makes you ding 70.

But shooting for the lower end of the skill curve has one disadvantage: Soloing in World of Warcraft in most cases isn't very exciting if you are of average skill or above. If a game is too easy, it isn't challenging enough to be fun. That is why so many people rush through the leveling game and try to get to the level cap as quickly as possible, even paying other people for power-leveling them to there. At the level cap you can group, and you can raid, and while you still don't need to be a rocket scientist to successfully group or raid, you definitely need more skill for that than for soloing. You need to watch what the other players in your group or raid are doing, and the combats last longer, forcing you to think about concepts like mana efficiency or regeneration.

Now if World of Warcraft was much harder, it probably wouldn't have gotten 10 million subscribers. Being accessible to everyone is a strength. But I wonder if WoW wasn't even better if it offered more challenge to players for who it is too easy. Sure, you can fight monsters of higher level than you are even now. But why would you? The fights last twice as long and don't give twice the xp, so in the end you'll level slower if you search the challenge. There is no solo content which would give better loot for higher challenge, like a group dungeon does. And groups at lower level nowadays are hard to find, if your time schedule would allow you participation at all. I'd love to see solo instanced class quests, like Age of Conan has in the lower levels, introduced to World of Warcraft as well. They could even be designed to teach you your various class skill, by having challenges you can only overcome by using your class-specific spells and abilities.

Or of course the expansions that add levels to the game could have those levels be more difficult (and not just longer) than the previous levels. Unfortunately I don't think Blizzard is about to do that. I'm looking forward to Wrath of the Lich King for the exploration of the new content. But I doubt soloing up to 80 will challenge me, or most other WoW players.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
Watch your fingers!

Or even better, film them. I got a request from beginning game designer Sara Pickell, who is looking for footage of your hands while playing World of Warcraft or another MMORPG. I'd help, but I don't even own a video camera.

The request makes me wonder whether other game designers looked into how ergonomic their keyboard layout was, and how much button mashing it involved. I am good with keyboards for the rather ordinary use of typing (I type 50 words per minute), but some games get my fingers all tangled up. For example I found the combos in Age of Conan hard to type as fast as I wanted, and ended up putting them all on macro keys of my G15 keyboard. For WoW I'm not using keyboard macros at all.

How about you? Are there MMORPGs which you find easier or harder to use by keyboard than others?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:06 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Offline skill training

I stumbled upon a blog entry by mbp on The Tyranny of Skill Training, where he complains that he has to log into EVE at certain times to start the next skill training. In EVE you train skills in real time, whether you are online or not. If a skill training ends while you are offline, you are effectively losing training time until you log on and start the next; there is no queueing. Football Manager Live, the game I'm currently playing, has a similar system. But when you are not learning a skill, at least you are gathering the time as a bonus. So if you haven't learned a skill for 1 hour, and you start learning the next skill, you get 1 hour of double speed progress in the skill training. Good improvement!

Football Manager Live also has a skill planner, where you can say what final skill you want to reach, and the planner proposes the fastest way to get there, including all possible learning bonus skills and prerequisites. That *looks* like a queue, but still isn't one, you still have to learn skills manually. I guess that the reason that neither EVE nor FML have queues is that they don't want players to open an account and only log in once per month until they have a fully skilled character. That is a good idea. But the result is that you feel you need to log on at specific times, to start your next training, and sometimes that time is rather inconvenient.

So I was wondering why these games couldn't simply include a short queue, that is you are learning one skill and can already queue one next skill after that, not more. In that case you don't have to log on exactly when the first skill learning is finished. You could log on at any time afterwards, as long as the second skill is still in training, and queue up the next skill without loss of time. You still can't program skill training for long periods, but at least you don't feel as if you should log on at 3 am or lose valuable training time.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:28 PM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
It's the numbers, stupid!

Sorry for borrowing slogans from Bill Clinton, but sometimes I think that we are overly fixated on feature lists of MMORPGs, and don't look enough at the numerical details. In this post I am going to argue that numbers are extremely important in the design of a MMORPG, and can completely change how a game is played.

But first a real-life example: In the air that you breathe there is 20.9% of oxygen. If for some reason the oxygen concentration drops below 19.5%, this officially counts as Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health. As you can see, a small numerical change in oxygen concentration (less than 2% absolute, 10% relative) can have rather serious consequences.

MMORPGs are ruled by numbers. Every sword blow, every spell is a calculation. Your level, and your experience points, are counted in numbers. Your whole character is a collection of numbers in the form of stats. And what these numbers are, and how they evolve, is to a large extent decided by game developers. A big part of game development consists of balancing numbers, and the decisions taken there have a huge influence on how the players will play the game.

I recently realized one interesting example when I made a gnome deathknight in the Wrath of the Lich King demonstration version at the WWI 2008 in Paris. I made a female gnome deathknight with pink hair, just because the idea was so silly. But in reality the gnome deathknight only *looks* silly. While in many other games a small character like a gnome or halfling would do considerably less melee damage than a big character like a tauren or ogre, in World of Warcraft there isn't any noticeable difference. The gnome deathknight is as efficient a killing machine as the tauren deathknight, despite the obvious difference in height and muscles. That is a design decision by Blizzard, and it leads to people playing and race/class combination without having to worry about the effect on stats.

Another example is the group xp bonus in World of Warcraft. There isn't any for a 2-person group, so if a mob gives 100 xp if you kill it solo, it gives only 50 xp if you kill it in a 2-person group. As in most situations a 2-person group does NOT kill twice as fast as a single player, you end up getting less xp per hour if grouped with a friend. There is a 40% xp bonus for 5-man groups, so the same 100 xp solo mob now gives 28 xp if killed by a full group. In that case you would need to kill 4 times as fast as a single player to make more xp per hour in a group than solo, which again is hardly possible; the spawn rate alone would prevent you from doing so. It is easy to see that the group xp bonus is completely arbitrary. But now imagine we would increase the bonus in a way that generally you would get *more* xp per hour if you killed monsters in a group than if you did it solo. It would turn World of Warcraft into a game where between level 1 and 70 a lot more grouping would happen than now. It wouldn't change the fact that you can solo all the way up to 70, but it would increase the incentive to group with strangers and make new friends, thereby adding the missing "massively multiplayer" part to the leveling part of World of Warcraft. Change the numbers, and you change the game.

My last example is combat. Having played several different MMORPGs this year, I noticed that one typical fight in each game takes a different amount of time, and a different number of keystrokes. For example in Age of Conan combat is very quick; at level 1 some casters can kill a level 1 mob with a single spell. World of Warcraft has a medium speed combat. And other games are even slower. Again that is an important design decision which is completely numerical. If combat is faster, it becomes less tactical. By the time my rogue in WoW has three combo points on a mob and could use the "expose armor" finishing strike, the mob is dead already, and the ability doesn't make sense for this short combat. When he is in a group, fighting a longer fight against some boss mob, the ability suddenly becomes interesting. Again the game would be very much different if there was a numerical change to damage output and health of characters and mobs, making fights longer or shorter.

Of course there are many more examples, I can't list them all. But I hope I was able to make my point that numerical parameters in games are at least as important, if not more, than the typical bullet point list of features you can see in any game announcement. If you see an announced Wrath of the Lich King feature like "New tradeskill: inscription", giving you the ability to modify your spells and abilities to do more damage, or crit more, or have added effects like knockback, that sounds very cool. But how important this new inscription profession is going to be depends solely on the numbers: How much do the inscriptions cost? How much more damage or crit or added effect are they giving? By changing the numbers inscriptions could range from totally useless to something everyone must have. There could be interesting tactical choices, or it could be a boring must-grind-for-best-mats affair where one inscription is strictly better than another. The bullet point announcement really tells us nothing. The real effect is in the numbers.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:03 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Happy 5th birthday, blog!

My two very first posts, and with them the creation of this blog happened exactly 5 years ago today, in 2003. Since then the blog has come a long way: From an initial readership of zero it has grown to nearly 3,000 direct visits per day, plus 2,000 readers of the RSS feed. I don't have a total of the RSS feed readers (which are only estimated by feedburner anyway), but the total of visitors is over 1.8 million.

Even more important to me is the smaller core of regular readers and commenters, who have managed to get something like a community going, with every post receiving dozens of intelligent comments, and only very few troll posts. While the discussion sometimes gets heated, in general the community here has much higher standards than those of typical official game sites or rant forums.

So I would like you thank you all for your intelligent and polite contributions. If you browse through the 5 years of history of this blog, you will find that it was the feedback from readers that encouraged me to continue. I couldn't have done it without you. Thank you!
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (43) comments Links to this post

 
Cheating and modding now illegal

The decision of the judge is out in the law suit between Blizzard and the makers of the Glider bot, MDY Industries, and it is broadly in favor of Blizzard. They didn't get through with their DMCA claim, but Glider was ruled to infringe Blizzard's copyright:

"The Court reaches the following conclusions on the basis of undisputed facts, construction of the EULA and TOU, and controlling Ninth Circuit law: Blizzard owns a valid copyright in the game client software, Blizzard has granted a limited license for WoW players to use the software, use of the software with Glider falls outside the scope of the license established in section 4 of the TOU, use of Glider includes copying to RAM within the meaning of section 106 of the Copyright Act, users of WoW and Glider are not entitled to a section 117 defense, and Glider users therefore infringe Blizzard’s copyright. MDY does not dispute that the other requirements for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement are met, nor has MDY established a misuse defense. The Court accordingly will grant summary judgment in favor of Blizzard with respect to liability on the contributory and vicarious copyright infringement claims in Counts II and III."

Which means that ANY program modifying the "copy" of World of Warcraft or any other game in the RAM is a copyright infringement. Any wall hack, speed hack, teleport hack etc. now not only makes you a despicable cheater, but is now actually against the law. Any unauthorized mod is a copyright infringement. Welcome to a brave new world!
- posted by Tobold @ 9:39 AM Permanent Link  (34) comments Links to this post

 
Getting game economies right is hard

I mentioned before that I was in the Football Manager Live beta, that it has no NDA, and that the economy wasn't working yet. Please keep in mind that I'm talking about a beta, and of course the problem might be fixed before the game is released. But I found it a good example of why game companies might want to hire an economist, like the makers of EVE have done.

In Football Manager Live, you start out with a small amount of money, and a daily income of about £100,000. You select a team of players and substitutes, all of which want a daily wage. Those daily wages are your only expense (up to now), so you take players whose combines wages are less than £100,000, and there you go. If you make a profit at the end of the day (or rather accumulated over several days), you can invest that money into buying better players from other managers. By having better players, and by winning competitions, your reputation goes up, and so does your daily income. So, does this sound like a good economic model to you?

If you said yes, or are a developer for FML, you overlooked a small problem: Nearly everybody will be clever enough to pay less wages than his daily income. So every day the amount of money in the system is increasing. Managers on average get richer all the time. And as they can only spend that money on player transfers, this causes a huge inflation in the market value of all good players. On the game world I'm on, top players can go for over £10 million, and the prices are constantly going up.

Now originally the idea was that if you buy an expensive player, you would need to balance the added income he brings by increasing your reputation and chance to win competitions against his wage and the money you pay for the transfer. But if you know that the same player will be worth more tomorrow than he is worth today, you don't need to worry about whether he wins games for you any more. You don't even need to worry whether you can actually use him in your team, or you already have far too many strikers (they tend to go for the most money). If you bought the player for £3 million, and sell him at the end of the season for £5 million, the trading gain you make far exceeds any potential effect of the player on your match win ratio.

So some people now play Football Manager Live without actually caring a damn about line-ups or tactics. They just scout the markets daily for promising young players, or cheap offers of middle-aged players. If the managers have been playing a while, they got the "judge potential" skill, which shows them how good a young player will probably become when he gets a bit older, huge advantage if you're trading. So they buy cheap, sell at huge profits, and quickly amass great fortunes. And the sad thing is that because they have their teams stacked full of superstars, they also tend to win games a lot. New managers coming later into the game don't have a chance.

Fortunately the devs are on the right track, and are talking about adding other money sinks to the game. I hope that in the release version there is something resembling a balanced economy. Hyper-inflation destroys economies, whether they are virtual or real.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Are NDAs a good idea?

Rohan asked in the open Sunday thread whether NDAs were a good idea. He says: "My initial thought is that if you have a good game, an NDA will cut down on the amount of hype or positive publicity you can generate. If you have a bad game, people are going to ignore your NDA and post anyways, as the only repercussion is getting kicked out of the Beta/game." Interesting thought! Although it paints a grim picture of the only reason for people not breaking a legally binding contract is if the punishment for the infraction hurts them. At least the game companies must think that people who sign an NDA will actually stick to it, regardless of the quality of the game.

My take on NDAs is that they are a form of attempted control of public relations. I'm in one beta without NDA, Football Manager Live, so I can state freely that I like the game, even if the economy is screwed up. But then Football Manager Live probably needs all the publicity it can get, even if it's just me writing about it on a blog. I'm in another beta, for Warhammer Online, where the NDA only allows me to say that I'm the beta, and not what I think about the game. And I think that is what the guys from Mythic want. They have a huge and well-functioning marketing machine, one that is even more impressive than that of Blizzard. They have monthly newsletter, the Warhammer Herald, video podcasts, developer's blogs, they got everything. If they have bad news, like, hmmm, lets say not being able to finish 4 classes and 4 cities before release, they prefer to have Mark Jacobs doing the announcement and writing detailed explanations on various game forums. They have the PR under control.

And, beta leaks or no beta leaks, at least for them it works. They can live without the potential hype from people in the beta, because they already get enough hype from people who are NOT in the beta, who just react to what Mythic fed them. There are already lots of WAR fan blogs, in spite of the fact that the game isn't even out yet. I think they are much better off with the NDA they have. If you see some of the "beta leaks", you'll notice that they are based on outdated information, or misinterpret a test of something as being a problem in the future release. How would a game company be able to use a beta test to actually test something if then everybody went "I just saw this in the beta and I hate it" publicly? The purpose of the beta test is for the beta testers to say "I hate this" to the devs, and the devs to take it our or make it better for the release version.

The only "beta leaks" I believe in are those like in the case of Vanguard, where Sigil said "we are releasing this game in 3 weeks" and all the beta testers collectively went "no way!". But for games which still have months of development ahead of them, I'd rather have an NDA, and us relying on official announcements instead of rumors. I'm willing to worry if Mark Jacobs tells me that Empire won't have tanks, but I'm not willing to do so if some beta tester says that there were no tanks on the Empire character selection screen. Only when the game is released, or at least very close to release, or the developers say so, do we really know what features are in or not in. If NDAs keep the premature rumors low, than that is fine with me.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Flagship studio closing?

Flagship Studio, makers of Hellgate: London, and currently developing Mythos, are apparently closing down for financial reasons. I didn't post the first rumors of it yesterday, but now at least the new owners of the intellectual property are making statements to that effect, even if Flagship Studio itself is still in denial. Players report that the Hellgate: London account page is down, so you can't cancel your subscription. I am not a lawyer, but I'd think that in this case you could tell your credit card company to refuse payment, if you really want to. But then, both Hellgate and Mythos could be run in the future by the new owners, so I wouldn't panic until the servers shut down.

I think it is fair to say that Hellgate: London wasn't a huge success. It was nice enough to play for a couple of hours, but didn't really have what it takes to justify a monthly fee, which in any case was relatively high for a relatively small upgrade from the non-subscriber version. Mythos looks a lot better, but is still in beta. I sure hope somebody will make the effort to apply the final touches and release that game. Somebody will soon make a statement blaming WoW for the failure of Hellgate: London, but the truth is that game companies fail if they make mediocre games, with or without Blizzard. The only thing you can blame Blizzard for is showing the world that quality games *can* be made.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:58 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Open Sunday Thread

Here it is again: The traditional Open Sunday Thread, where you can propose subjects for discussion, or discuss whatever you like.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
The Shandalar Project - Your turn

My apologies if the Shandalar discussion has been too one-sided up to now, but that is the nature of a blog: I get to describe my ideas first and readers can only add comments. Not much I can do about that, unless I turn the blog into a Wiki or some other form of more interactive media. But me stating my ideas doesn't mean I'm not listening to yours. There has been a lot of very good input, amidst some not-so-constructive criticism of the "this will never work" type. Not that we'll ever find out whether it will work, as nobody, not even me, is ready to really develop Shandalar the game.

Now I propose we discuss how we could continue the project. Do we just leave it there? Do we vote on various points? Do I try to write it all again, modified by your input? What can we do? In which direction do we want to move our hypothetical game Shandalar?

As I'd like to contribute to this general discussion as well, here is one thought: How close should Shandalar be to classis games like World of Warcraft? The chapters I wrote were deliberately aiming for as different as possible, creating a game without levels, without classes, without stats, without gear. But of course we could as easily make a game with levels, with classes, with stats, with gear, a game which would be a WoW clone with cards for combat. What features of World of Warcraft would you say Shandalar absolutely can't work with, and what features would you say would be better to leave out to differentiate ourselves from WoW?
- posted by Tobold @ 1:05 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
EA Mythic finds the third way

Some companies, like Blizzard, only release games when they are finished, so players have to wait a very long time. Other companies, like Funcom, release their game at the perfect moment, but with lots of bugs, and thin content in the endgame. Now several readers wrote me with a link to an article at Massively on Warhammer Online, saying that Mark Jacobs from EA Mythic Mythic Entertainment has found a third way: Release the game on time by cutting major features, and throwing game balance over board.

The first major feature that isn't going to make it into release are 4 of the 6 capital cities. Only the Empire / Chaos conflict will have their capital cities of Altdorf and the Inevitable City. The Dwarf / Greenskin and the High Elf / Dark Elf conflicts will have no capital cities. As you might have seen in the video podcast (YouTube link, the link on the official site was dead at the time of writing), the capital cities are the ultimate prize in the RvR conflict. For two thirds of the game, this final prize will be missing.

The other major thing that won't make it into release is class balance. Originally every one of the 6 races was about to have 4 classes: tank, melee dps, ranged dps, and support (healing). Now the melee dps classes for Dwarves and Greenskins, and the tanks for Dark elf and Empire have been removed. That leaves the dwarves / greenskin battle at least symmetrical, but in the other two pairs one side will have 4 classes against the other sides 3 classes. And if you were thinking of playing Dark Elf or Empire and like group PvE, you'll be left to wonder how to do that without a tank.

Personally I'm looking forward to WAR for its PvE content: Lots of new classes, new zones, public quests, the tome of knowledge, and so on. For me 4 classes less at release isn't a problem, as they'll probably be in by the time I played all the remaining 20 classes. But somebody who was looking forward to WAR for the RvR must be devastated. One side beating the other because they have classes the other side doesn't have access to? Ouch! You finally crush the enemy, get ready to plunder his city, and are stopped by an "under construction" sign? Where is the point?

One day a game company is going to find out how to produce quality games on time, without bugs or missing features, and they will do to the current crop of game companies then same as what Toyota did to the US/Euro car companies. Until then we'll have to buy the equivalent of a three-wheeled car from Mythic Entertainment, or the model announced for last year only coming out a year later from Blizzard, or the car whose motor mysteriously stops working once per hour from Funcom. No wonder nobody takes gamers seriously, we seem to be a bunch of masochists.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:14 AM Permanent Link  (31) comments Links to this post

 
The Shandalar Project - Questing

As mentioned before, classic MMORPGs don't have quests, they have errands. You aren't on a journey to search something, you just take on small jobs. In our hypothetical MMORPG Shandalar, we want to do better. We want quests to start with players wanting something, which then makes them gather information and adventure to get it. That something in my original idea would be cards, but of course the same system would work for equipment or anything else.

So lets start with a player wanting a specific card for the deck he is building. Of course he could buy boosters to get cards, but as the cards in the booster packs are random, that could take a while. He could trade for the card he wants, but then he would have to give away his existing cards. And maybe some cards are "bind on pickup" and can't be traded. So to spend his points on the one card he wants, the player has to find the place where this card is sold.

The search starts in a city. Having cities with a central function where people need to go back to is important for a world to feel alive. In this case cities have sages, which have books showing every single card in the game. Of course with some good user interface that lets you search, filter, and sort. Once he has found a card there, he clicks on it to ask the sage for information about where that card can be acquired. The sage answers by giving the player some general information, about what region (zone) the card is in. And so the voyage begins.

Once the player is in the right zone, he can ask for the card in the villages there. So NPC dialogues are linked to your quest journal: if you have a quest for this zone, an option appears in each NPCs dialogue window there, enabling you to ask him for that card. If you are in a village which isn't the closest to the final goal, the NPC will send you to the right village. If you are in the village that is closest to the card, the NPC will tell you where to go, like "a cave in the northwest, guarded by orcs".

We can invent some sort of lore about altars left by the ancients, explaining why you get cards at those altars. But in any case the altars are guarded by some monsters. So while the quest isn't asking you to "kill 10 orcs", you end up killing them to get to the altar they are guarding. Having a reason to fight monsters other than that somebody wants 10 of them dead is an improvement. Once you finally arrive at the altar, you can exchange your points for one or more copies of the card you wanted. And then it's time to return to the city and go on your next quest.

If we make one specific altar give one specific card, a week after the day is released there will be a website showing all the cards with all the locations. So I was wondering whether what card what altar gives should be different for each player, and random. What do you think?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:34 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Chinese poetry

I got an email from 徐华周 which made me smile:

"your blog so beautiful, and the pagerank if to high , may i have a link to your blog?

look forward to ............

thanks"

I think he doesn't want a link *to* my blog, but a link *from* my blog, and I don't do permanent links. But as he didn't even say what he wants me to link, I can only take his request literally: Dear 徐华周, you can put as many links *to* my blog on your site as you want.
Yours,
Tobold
- posted by Tobold @ 10:01 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
The Shandalar Project - Trading

Of course in our fictionary MMORPG we could use a bog standard auction house system to trade cards. But then a lot of bad things would happen, things you can observe in Magic the Gathering Online, and in World of Warcraft: People would trade not to get the cards they need or get rid off the cards they have in surplus, but they would trade for profit. In MtGO it quickly became impossible to trade one card for another card of the same value. People only traded for "tickets", the MtGO currency, and trading was ruined by people buying everything cheap and selling it on at a profit. And in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft we are all aware of gold farmers, leading to negative secondary effects like botting and keylogging.

All this is caused by greed, and trading with greed in mind is made possible by asymmetric trading: Nothing has a fixed value, and so people can overpay, underpay, or even "trade" you 1,000 gold for nothing in the game (while receiving $50 outside the game in exchange). All the games using standard trading and auction house systems suffer from this, so we need a radical solution to make Shandalar free of RMT and profiteers: We will restrict all trades to only allow symmetrical trades.

This is possible because right now we only have two things in the game: points of various colors, and cards of various color and rarity. And we have NPCs who sell those cards for points, so we KNOW how many points every card is worth. Thus we can restrict all trades to symmetric trades, where both sides put up cards of exactly equal value. We don't want people to be able to trade points, or trade cards for points, because then questing becomes pointless. We just allow trading cards for cards of equal value.

Thus our "auction house" looks very different from a classic MMORPG auction house. You can have both buy and sell orders. In a sell order you put up a card you'd be willing to trade away, and list one card, or several possibilities, of equal value you'd want for your card. A buy order is just the reverse, you say what card you want, and list several possibilities of cards of equal value you'd be willing to trade in. We might want to add an auction house fee in points, but points don't change hands between players.

As you can't trade something for nothing, or even something for something that is worth much more, it will be extremely hard to game the system to trade cards for real money. After all, we want to have the monopoly in selling cards for real money, in the form of booster packs. And because there are no profiteers gaming the system, players can trade their cards in fair trades with other players, without anyone feeling cheated.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
Blizzard authenticator mandatory one day?

Jack-o-Lantern wrote me, because he was wondering whether the Blizzard authenticator had hidden implications. Using it certainly increases the security of your account. But it also makes it harder to sell an account, because you would need to send the authenticator by normal mail, not just UserID and password by e-mail. And it makes it harder to share accounts between guild mates, or give your account temporarily to a powerlevel service. Thus the authenticator cuts down on a lot of behavior which Blizzard previously had problems stopping.

Right now Blizzard can't produce as many of the authenticators as people are willing to buy. But I'm guessing guilds in which a lot of account sharing is going on simply won't buy the thing. So what if later Blizzard makes the use of the authenticator obligatory, for example by packing one in the next expansion box and only unlocking accounts for the latest expansion if it is protected with an authenticator?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:32 PM Permanent Link  (39) comments Links to this post

 
The Shandalar Project - Cards and Combat

In our collaborative effort to develop the card-based MMORPG Shandalar, we now have to talk about the most important centerpiece: The cards. As I already mentioned, cards replace spells and abilities hotkeys from other games. You will have one large collection of cards, and one "deck" of cards you carry around with you, with which you battle other monsters and possibly players if we want to introduce PvP.

My initial idea would be to have cards in 5 (or more) colors. For example white would stand for holy magic, including holy damage and healing. Black would be destructive magic. Red could be ranged damage, from weapons like bows. Green would be blunt weapons, including special effects like stuns. Blue would be sharp weapons, including special effects like bleeds. Every color is connected to one item shown held in your hand when you use it, a holy symbol for white, a wand for black, and the respective weapons for the other colors.

Why the items? Because we want to prevent players from simply choosing the best cards from every color and making 5-color decks that do everything, so we need to give an incentive to stick to one or two colors. The incentive is the cooldown, the time between using two cards. Remember we aren't talking about a game that looks like playing cards, Shandalar's combat will look like typical WoW combat, the cards are just the buttons you press on. If you use a blue card for a sword blow, followed by another blue card for another sword move, you can do that relatively quickly. If you follow the first blue sword move with a white healing spell, you're character will be shown sheating his sword and brandishing his holy symbol. This animation will take a two or three seconds, and thus make switching from color to another slower than sticking to the same one.

Combat starts with you having 7 cards in hand. When you use the first card, you'll have 6 cards left, and we need to think about a mechanism for replenishing cards. That could be either that for every card you use, you draw a new one. Or it could be time based, that every X seconds if you don't have 7 cards in hand already, you get a new card. Which one would you prefer? In any case I was thinking about cards that let you draw more cards, or increase hand size, and other cards which let you do combos, so you'd play several cards at once, leaving you with less than 6 cards in hand. Time-based redraws might be better so people don't end up with zero cards in hand.

I would make cards with different rarities, like the common, uncommon, and rare cards from Magic the Gathering. But rare cards shouldn't be strictly more powerful than common cards, only more complicated. So a common blue card would be a simple sword blow for some damage, a rare blue card would be a sword blow causing a bleed, or starting a combo, without doing more damage than the common card. Rarer cards should also give fancier animations and spell effects than common cards. But somebody with a good commons deck should be able to still have a chance to beat somebody with an all rares deck.

The deck rules from Magic the Gathering are also probably a good idea: You have a minimum size of deck of 60, but if you want you can put more than 60 cards in your deck. If you want to minimize randomness, you can put several copies of the same card in your deck, but not more than 4 of the same card.

Players would start the game with exactly 60 cards, just one full deck with no choice yet, and the deck would contain 12 common cards of each of the 5 colors. That gives them the opportunity to test all colors, and the monsters in the newbie zone would play equally bad 5-colored all-common decks. With the cards they add from buying or adventuring, players would then improve their decks to remove some colors and make either very focused one-color decks, or more versatile 2- and 3- color decks. There is no "mana" cost, like in Magic the Gathering, so the only penalty for mixing colors is the added delay when using one color after another. The starting 5-color deck should make the advantage of sticking to few color pretty clear.

I already mentioned that mobs don't drop gold or gear or cards, but colored points. The color of points they drop depends on the color of their deck, and the harder they are, the more points they drop. So the initial mobs in the newbie zone with their 5-color decks would drop low numbers of points, evenly distributed among all colors. Harder mobs could not only have more hitpoints, but also better decks, for example one mob with a two-colored red/blue deck would thus drop more points, and only red and blue ones. If you are after points of a specific color, you'd need to hunt mobs using decks with cards of that color. As that hinders group play, because the various classes need different colors of points and would rather kill different kinds of mobs, I was thinking of offering a group bonus in the color of the players choice. If a monster normally drop 100 red points, killing it with 5 people would not just give everyone 20 red point, but in addition to that 20 group bonus points. Each player could set on his character screen what color or colors he wants those points to be in. Giving a big enough group bonus would make killing monsters in a group faster rewards than soloing. And the points you get for colors you aren't currently interested in you can still use for cards for your collection, or for trade.

What do you think about cards and combat so far? Can you think of cool effects for cards without making them totally overpowered? How would you make card combos? And don't forget to tell me your prefered mechanic for redrawing cards.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (37) comments Links to this post

 
The Shandalar Project - Introduction

Back in 2004 I posted some ideas for a self-designed MMORPG. When I recently mentioned that old design again, I got a lot more positive echo than 4 years ago, which is mostly due to how much the readership has grown since then. And in the last open Sunday thread Paul suggested a cooperative approach to flesh the idea out a bit more. I think this is a brilliant plan, so I'm giving you The Shandalar Project.

Over the coming days I'm going to write about my ideas for the various parts and features of this imaginary MMORPG that I call Shandalar. The name is "borrowed" from the name of the world in a video game from 1997, Magic: The Gathering from Microprose. But I guess for a non-commercial venture and a hypothetical game I won't get into too much trouble with copyright. Your job is to come up with constructive criticism, improving and adding ideas to each part. Please try to stick generally to the direction I'm proposing, we'll get nowhere if you'll question each of my premises. If we want to make a card-based fantasy game together, it doesn't help if you prefer a SciFi shooter.

The basic concept of Shandalar is that it is a cross between MMORPG and trading card games, like Magic the Gathering. In the Microprose game, Shandalar was the name of a fantasy world which the player explored, battling the creatures he encountered by playing games of Magic against them. My Shandalar is a MMORPG with a classic 3D fantasy world, and the battles are graphically not unlike World of Warcraft, as I think that visual 3D crossing of swords is a lot more popular than playing cards. The cards you draw randomly from your deck replace the spells and abilities hotkeys you would have in World of Warcraft. So as every combat starts with a different random draw of "cards you can play", that is "buttons you can press", no two combats are the same, even if you fight the same kind of monster repeatedly. More on this in the cards and combat chapter in another post.

In the Shandalar game there are no levels, and no gear. Everything revolves around the cards, and you get better by building better decks with better cards. There aren't even character classes in the game, the color of the cards in your deck determine what class you are playing. That gets around nicely the problem of people wanting to respec or wanting to play a different class: You don't have to restart the game with another character, you just change your deck. This will also be discussed in the cards and combat chapter, as you can hardly discuss cards separately from combat, the two are too much entwined.

The business model of Shandalar is based on the old saying that "time is money". Classic MMOs like WoW have everyone pay the same, and then those players who spend the most time advance the furthest. Magic the Gathering has been accused of favoring those who spend the most money. Shandalar is trying to hit a compromise which gives you the best of both worlds: The game is free-to-download, and free-to-play, but you only get a very limited number of cards to start with. You can get more cards either by adventuring, or by buying booster packs of random cards, with 1 rare, 3 uncommons, and 11 common cards, just like in Magic the Gathering. So if you don't have any money, you can get all your cards just by playing. But the profitability of the game (remember that developing and running MMORPGs costs money) depends on people wanting to take a shortcut and buying booster packs. And of course players will be able to trade cards among each other, with a trading system designed to eliminate RMT by only allowing symmetric trades. More on that in the trading chapter.

Even questing is all about the cards. Because not only are we all sick about the classic "kill 10 foozles" quest, some of us also realized that doing those isn't really a quest, it's just an errand you run for somebody else. A quest in Shandalar is a real quest, defined by Wikipedia as "a journey towards a goal, used in mythology and literature as a plot". It works like this: While killing monsters you don't get cards or gold as loot, you get points of different colors. You can buy cards with the points, but the places where you can do that are not in cities, they are in remote wilderness places. The rarer the card, the harder it is to get there. So a quest consists of you going to a sage in a city, who basically has a book showing all the cards in the game. You click on the card you want, and the sage tells you in what area of the world you can find that card. You travel to that area, and talk to NPCs, which give you more detailed directions. You fight your way through a cave full of monsters, arrive at some altar or relic, and there you can exchange your points for the card you wanted. No more killing 10 foozles for a farmer who rewards you with an item you can't use. Instead you quest because YOU want a specific card. We'll discuss questing further in the questing chapter.

I'd prefer if we could discuss cards and combat, trading, and questing, in their respective chapter. So I'd like to limit discussion in this thread about things like whether you like the idea, what other chapters we are going to need, and other general subjects. Please note that all the ideas you contribute go into the public domain, unless you patented them first. It is highly unlikely that anyone will ever want to make Shandalar under this or another name. If somebody did, I'd be happy enough just to see my ideas realized and to be able to play that game, I wouldn't and couldn't demand payment for ideas I published without patenting them.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:57 AM Permanent Link  (48) comments Links to this post

 
European ninja vs. pirates

In a new twist on the eternal ninja vs. pirates fight, some European MPs are trying to ninja sneak a new law hidden in a big telecoms act into European law. The law would ban you forever from the internet if you get caught pirating three times. There are some obvious flaws in the law, which are more likely to hurt the innocent than the real pirates: For example you could lose internet access if you failed to secure your WiFi and somebody else warchalked you, and used your connection for illegal downloads. And of course it is highly dubious that there doesn't appear to be enough legal basis to even fine most of the pirates, but now the ISP could somehow find enough proof to turn off their internet access forever.

I'm all for copyright holders having legal rights, if necessary even to fine proven pirates. But turning off the internet for piracy is like turning off somebody's electricity because he used a stolen TV. Way disproportionate!
- posted by Tobold @ 9:53 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
How much game do you need to support a monthly fee?

I'm still happily playing the Football Manager Live beta, but I'm painfully aware that it is very much a niche game. On my beta server there is a large number of players inactive, for example in the league I'm in 13 out of 19 players haven't been online in the last 10 days. When FML gets released, there will be a core of very enthusiastic fans, but the average computer gamer will just look at the game shortly and then give up, because the complexity is high, and the graphics are low. In the particular business model of FML that means he downloads the game for free, doesn't get a free trial, so he pays for 1 month of fee, and gives up before the end of the month. So I was wondering whether a different business model wouldn't have been more appropriate, like a higher cost of buying the game, no monthly fees for a basic version in which the stats are condensed into easier to understand aggregate values, and a monthly fee for a luxury version for the hardcore fans who want all the details.

That got me wondering for what people are willing to pay a monthly fee, and for what they wouldn't. Playing Diablo 1 or 2 on Battle.net has no monthly fee, and if Blizzard isn't changing their business model, Diablo 3 will still be playable online in multiplayer mode with all your friends for free. Is it really such a huge difference between World of Warcraft and Diablo multiplayer that the one would require a monthly fee and the other wouldn't support one? And if WoW still supports a monthly fee, what about the less popular MMOs? Would Hellgate London been better off without its partial monthly fee subscription model for fans? Would Tabula Rasa have sold better if it had been free-to-play with microtransactions? Would Guild Wars have sold 5 million copies if it had a monthly fee?

I don't think the monthly fee subscription model is ideal for every game. There are some games I just wouldn't pay a monthly fee for, even if they are nominally MMORPGs. Although I'm not so poor that I couldn't afford it, I refused to pay 2 Euro more per month for Age of Conan than World of Warcraft costs (WoW is 12.99€ per month including taxes, AoC is 12.99€ excluding taxes, 14.94€ including taxes, for month-by-month subscription in both cases.). But I donated $20 voluntarily for Kingdom of Loathing, and not just because that gives in-game items. And then there are certainly games I wouldn't pay for, but other people would, or vice versa, so the rules on how much game you need to support a monthly fee aren't universal.

So what do you think? What are you willing to pay a monthly fee for, and where do you balk at the cost? Are there specific features which you think justify a monthly fee?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:40 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Age of Conan longevity

Several people requested an update on Age of Conan, but all I can offer is some links, anecdotal evidence and opinion. From what I hear I am under the impression that Age of Conan suffers from a lack of longevity: Lots of people played it with lots of enthusiasm, and got bored pretty fast afterwards. Classy Gamer collected data on server populations, but when he pointed out the results on the official forums, Funcom censored him. And exact data on AoC subscription numbers are hard to come by, Funcom only ever posts good news, and uses weasle words like "number of units shipped" (not sold).

Of course a certain amount of decrease is due to the summer slump. But bugs and lack of endgame content certainly play a role too. Age of Conan is fun, fast, and furious. But if your're playing a female avatar, you deal less damage than a male, and the bug will take weeks to correct. If you bought AoC for the siege warfare, you found out that it simply doesn't work yet. And while AoC's storytelling and quests are absolutely great level 1 to 20, they get thinner and thinner towards level 80. Not without reason was level 1 to 20 the only part open during the beta. So it is totally possible that people cancelled their account after the initial fun subsided, and they realized AoC didn't have much long-term substance.

And then there is the alternative that players suffer from Bartleitis: "I already played Age of Conan, it was called World of Warcraft". How many people started Age of Conan for the simple reason that they were bored with WoW? But if you have been questing, and leveling, and fighting monsters for loot for 4 years and are bored of it, Age of Conan is only offering you more questing, more leveling, and more fighting monsters for loot. Age of Conan is somewhat different from WoW, especially in graphics and combat system, but it isn't completely different. Gameplay is very similar, just a bit faster during combat. If an overdose of WoW made you burn out of MMORPGs, AoC won't cure you.

So what do you think? Will everybody be back to Age of Conan after the summer, or after a couple of patches? Or was AoC just a mayfly?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
Open Sunday Thread

I'm on holiday, so every day is like Sunday, and I nearly forgot to post this open Sunday thread. What are the sujects you would like to discuss?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:47 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
Artificial stupidity

Many people hate murlocs in World of Warcraft. But when you consider the reasons for it, you'll see that murlocs are hated because they are slightly less dumb than other mobs: many of them use ranged combat, and thus can't be pulled away that easily, and when they are hurt, they run for help. That makes them annoying to kill, but also shows how MMORPGs are designed around artifical stupidity. Even with the most intelligent races of them, a single adventurer can kill half their settlement in plain sight of the other half without anyone noticing or reacting. That is essential for soloable gameplay, but not very bright.

This explains why work on artificial intelligence in games advances so much slower than work on lets say graphics. There are graphics cards, and physics cards, but the "AI card" never took off. Because more graphics power is always good, but too much artificial intelligence is just plain bad. If the first mob in Karazhan would do the logical thing and shout for help, so that all of the mobs in the place come running to repel the intruders, even the world's toughest raid guild wouldn't have beaten the place yet.

One argument for PvP features in MMORPGs is that they would provide players with intelligent and unpredictable opponents. But being intelligent, these opponents object to getting slaughtered, which is why even PvP-centric MMORPGs need dumb PvE monsters, who don't mind getting beaten all the time, and don't log out to roll a new character on the winning side instead.

Artificial stupidity is a design challenge. It isn't actually all that hard to program mobs which would play WoW better than a human, because they have much faster reaction time, and playing WoW well doesn't actually require more brain power than a PC can provide. It is hard to program mobs who *seem* to react intelligently, and still manage to lose all the time. The standard "taunt" and aggro management mechanics are a typical example of artificial stupidity: It's stupid for the mob to hit the best armored and least dangerous member of the player group. But it plays well, because it is just hard enough for bad groups that make aggro management mistakes to fail as a result of it. That gives the players the impression that by good aggro management they outwitted the mob, and winning because you play well is fun. That works so well that nobody has come up with a better method yet. Even Age of Conan, with its superficially different combat system still relies on taunts and aggro management in group combat. If the devs wanted to program better artificial intelligence, the mobs would kill the healer first and the mage next, and MMORPG combat would be a lot different and less fun, especially for the cloth wearers.

So what the future will bring is monsters that are still stupid, and still lose all the time even if they have superior numbers. But maybe somebody will manage to make them appear more intelligent. The one field where MMORPGs could use a large dose of artificial intelligence is with NPCs: Many quest NPCs don't even recognize you any more five minutes after you saved them from death. More intelligent NPCs could act as source of information, giving you directions to quest goals for example, which would be better than looking the quest locations up on Thottbot. But even for MMORPGs game companies spend far more money to develop graphics, than to develop an artificial intelligence that would make the virtual world come alive. Artificial stupidity is here to stay.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:00 AM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
More on Blizzard's design process

A reader who reads more than just game blogs sent me a link to a blog about innovation, where already in April there was a great article on Blizzard's innovative design process. Who said Blizzard wasn't innovative? At least their business practices are considered to be an example of innovation by some experts.

And their game design? In a follow-up post the author considers the claim that Blizzard just copied existing stuff as too harsh; he says: "In the American West, for example, pioneers included thousands of early settlers, not just the first few to explore the land."
- posted by Tobold @ 6:45 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Banning works! For small values of "works"

A reader sent me a link to the latest Gamerates charts showing how the price for 1,000 gold shot up from $20 to $40, apparently in reaction to another wave of bannings from Blizzard. So apparently bannings work to disrupt the gold commerce. But only to disrupt: Gold prices go up while the banned accounts are replaced with fresh accounts, and I'm pretty certain prices'll go down again in a while.

Which makes me wonder if periodic ban waves are the best strategy here. After all it means that some bots have been identified and allowed to continue until the date of the next ban wave. Would it be better to ban every account as soon as he is found? Or is the ban wave more effective in striking the gold farmers infrastructure, because it grabs all of their accounts at once? In either case the bans only hold the gold farmers down for a short while. Anyone got a better idea how to remove botters more permanently?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
Football Manager Live

I'm in the beta for Football Manager Live, and as there is no NDA and the game is supposed to come out this summer (published by SEGA), I'd like to tell you about it. First of all a warning: This is a football (soccer, not the US version) manager game. If you expect lots of action or beautiful graphics, you're in the wrong genre here. The fanciest graphics you'll see in FML are a bunch of dots running over a 2D football field. Lots of the gameplay has you poring over stats, with all the graphical charm of an Excel spreadsheet.

So why would anybody play something like this? Because the first football league was founded in 1888, now they have 120 years of experience in how to make balanced and fun PvP, and FML is using the best of this experience to make their player versus player game balanced and fun. Not playing often? Playing rather badly? No problem, you'll end up in a league with people like you, and will still have fun in games where you actually have an even chance to win.

The developers, Sports Interactive, have a series of single-player games called Football Manager 2008 (2007, 2006, etc.), so they drew on a huge database of real-world football players' stats. You start out with a limited budget, so even if you know the best players, you can't simply grab them early, because you can't afford them. Instead you'll have to make do with lesser players, build up a team, determine tactics, join a league, and play lots of friendly and league games. The fun is when you see how your decisions made a difference. If you after long consideration finally decided to spend a bigger bundle of money for a new forward center and he shoots two goals in the next match, it is great joy. There is still luck involved, and you can't do all that much to influence a match, but you can change tactics or substitute players and hope that helps. Even if you're not a big fan or expert of football (and I'm not) you can have great fun in Football Manager Live.

There are around 1,000 players per server, in many different leagues, and bidding for the same pool of real-world players. The game has elements of fantasy football, an EBay-like auction system, a football manager game, and role-playing elements where you increase the stats of your manager. And of course with many people online at the same time in the same game, you can chat, make friends, or discuss strategy.

League systems in other games have often failed due to the difficulty of getting players online at the same time to play their league games. FML solves this elegantly by giving you a number of days to find your opponents, after which the match can be done in the absence of one or both players, just using their standard team setup and tactics to determine the outcome. But it also tries to get people to be able to play a maximum of matches with both players online, by grouping them into leagues based on preferred playing time. So you'll state at what times you're most likely to be able to play, and the game finds a league for you with people with similar preferences.

Right now the game is in stress test beta. That can be annoying, because the devs deliberately overload the servers, so you have bad lag, or the server crashing just when you were about to win a match. But this is because they put 4 gameworlds on one server, which they won't do in the release version. I'm already having lots of fun, and I'm considering paying a couple of months for the release version when it comes out (the game will be free to download). Might be just the thing while waiting for WAR and WotLK. But as I said, I don't recommend it for everybody. But if you ever played and liked a football manager single-player game, FML is well worth checking out.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:49 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Follow the money

Economic theory uses a model for human behavior which is the homo economicus, "a being who inevitably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial with which they can be obtained.” If you look at the general behavior of people playing games, you'll notice that the homo economicus can be found there as well. People try to get maximum fun for minimum cost. So there are always lots of people in free-to-play games, but if a game comes along that costs money, players are nevertheless willing to pay for it, as long as it is more fun to them than what they could have gotten for free.

If you were a game designer looking for a mission statement, something like "providing the maximum fun to the maximum number of players" is a pretty good option. And because of the homo economicus players, this strategy also works quite well for making money, which you need to develop games in the first place. Most players want good-looking graphics, and that means hiring an army of artists and coders to make your game, if you want to go for the maximum fun category.

There has been a lot of criticism towards the game industry, accusing them of being unoriginal. Sequels, sequels, everywhere. Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, GTA 4, Halo 3, The Sims 3, Far Cry 2, Fallout 3, not to mention the annual versions of various sports games. Why can't game companies be more original? Because game companies are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing, making the games that players want, and the players don't want original games.

Just look at action RPGs on the PC: There have been dozens of games between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3: Titan Quest, Sacred, Dungeon Siege, and many, many more. None of which sold as well as Diablo 2, and Diablo 3 will again outsell them all. The action RPGs from other developers often were more innovative and added new elements to the genre. But what the players really want is another Diablo.

It isn't the game companies that are to blame, but the players. Players vote with their wallet, and game companies just follow the money. The last game of Madden NFL will be made when players stop buying it. It isn't as if game companies don't release new games as well as sequels, it is just that sequels very often sell better. There are tons of original games out there, but you find them in the bargain bin, or distributed online from some independent company, because there simply aren't all that many people who want to buy such a game. Why would anybody expect Blizzard or EA to make a conscious effort to make a game nobody wants to buy? Why complain about a game like Diablo 3 being developed, if we already know that millions of people will buy it and enjoy it? A few people might have preferred Blizzard to develop a text MUD instead, but we all know that only a handful of people would have played it, even if the idea would certainly be original.

Adam Smith said "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." I can only add that it isn't from the benevolence of the game companies that we expect our fun either. The game that makes the most money is the game people were willing to spend the most money on, because it was the maximum fun for the maximum number of people. What the complainers really want is for big companies to spend millions on making a game that is in the little niche they prefer. Hey, I want Blizzard to make a $50 million turn-based strategy game! Not going to happen, because there aren't enough people like me around; I have to play cheap Russian remakes of King's Bounty. Complaining that the game companies make games for the majority and not just for you is just selfish.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (53) comments Links to this post

 
Reading between the lines

An anonymous commenter asked me: "Tobold, I wanted to ask you if you are not a little bit disappointed about the announcements made at the WWI regarding wow. I mean, we learned nearly nothing. What do you think?" Well, I think that I learned a lot about WoW that weekend. Because often you learn more by reading between the lines and watching what is going on than by listening to a big new announcement.

Just read my interview with J. Allen Brack again. Many commenters simply projected their own view onto that, and just saw what they expected to see. But if you read it with an open mind, you learn a lot about the way Blizzard sees World of Warcraft. They are obviously extremely confident in the long-term future of WoW, so confident they don't even think they need to plan ahead. They strongly believe in quality, which is good, and don't believe in sticking to a timeline, which I think will bite them in the behind one day. You wouldn't want to produce lets say a car the way Blizzard develops games. Fortunately all other software companies have the same problem. Apparently creative coding doesn't lend itself to strict organization.

The interview also told us that if you hear anyone from Blizzard talking about a potential future feature, it is just that: Talk. For example somebody on some WoW panel mentioned Blizzard looking into allowing people to switch between two talent builds, and many people jumped on that and now think this is a feature that will come soon. But the interview clearly taught us that Blizzard looking into something only means the idea is on a board together with lots of other ideas. Maybe it will be patched in next year, maybe it will be part of the next expansion after WotLK, or maybe it will simply never happen.

Another important info from the interview is that Blizzard still considers World of Warcraft to be a group game. Did you notice that when we talked about the reasons for lack of healers and tanks, J. talked about the warriors damage contribution in a raid or group, which should be more meaningful? The solution to add more damage to warriors is the good one, but of course most players are worried about their damage output when soloing or PvPing, and couldn't care less about their position on the damage meter in a raid.

Finally there is a world of info contained in the simple phrases "We definitely want you to play at the high level with your friends. And we are always looking at neat good ways for you to get up to the high level." Not "we want you to level up with your friends". Blizzard is totally sold to the idea that the real multiplayer part of their game happens at the level cap.

I think that getting this sort of information of how Blizzard sees World of Warcraft, and how they produce the patches and expansions, is more useful than a precise announcement of lets say the WotLK release date or one more feature in it. For example I can now tell you with almost certainty that the next expansion after Wrath of the Lich King will come out in 2010, just by logically extrapolating the information about the production process. You heard it here first. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 6:00 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post