Democracy works

The US House of Representatives rejected the $700 billion bailout package for Wall Street with 228 votes against 205. I have no idea whether that ultimately was the right decision or the wrong one. Everyone has an opinion, but most of it is based on rhetorics, not facts. Would the bailout have "saved the financial system" or have been "good taxpayer money thrown after bad fat cat speculations"? In the absence of a parallel universe where the vote went the other way, nobody can say for sure.

But in all the excitement most people missed how democracy won the day. 133 Republicans and 95 Democrats voted against the bailout, 65 Republicans and 140 Democrats for it. So while both sides quickly blamed the others, in reality we had something very special and rare here: Congressmen voting based on what their constituents told them, and their own political beliefs, and ignoring what their leaders told them to do. Perfect bipartisanship in the sense that neither side voted along party lines. There is a lot of talk about failure of leadership at the moment, but in my opinion this is a good thing. Politics shouldn't be determined by a handful of leaders, but by the voice of the people. And for once this actually happened. Democracy worked. And if you believe in the "wisdom of the crowds", maybe the decision was actually the right one.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:40 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Buying a license, not a game

Famous Wizard101 blogger Cap'n John posted an interesting theory on the last open Sunday thread: End-User License Agreement's (EULA) might be unenforceable in a court of law, because the license taker, YOU, have to pay before accepting the license conditions. If you don't like the EULA conditions, you cannot just go back to the shop and demand the money back. Hmmm, certainly an interesting theory. I am not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that the lawyers of game companies disagree with that interpretation.

But EA's lawyers are busy with a class action suit over Spore DRM installing the SecuROM rootkit on the users computer. And in another tricky maneuver they are trying to explain how the manual stating that you could run several accounts with one copy of Spore was just a misprint. Does that mean next time they can explain how the $49.95 price tag was just a misprint too, and in fact you now owe EA $4995? And of course the announcement that your Spore game could be rendered inactive if you dare to discuss DRM on the official forums is legally tricky as well.

Buying a game or other software is hard to understand for the average person. We *think* we bought the game, but in reality we only bought a limited license to use the software under carefully prescribed conditions. Only rarely the users revolt, like the 2,000 people leaving a negative review for Spore on Amazon, when the difference between owning the game and licensing it becomes too great. In most cases people just ignore the legal difference, and treat the game as if they would own it. DRM is often more an attempt to combat casual piracy than really designed to thwart serious hackers. A hacked version of Spore was available on Bittorrent before the game even hit the shops in the USA. And there is a big risk for game companies that the more DRM they pack onto their games, the more popular the pirated version becomes over the legally bought version.

As others so correctly remarked, it is a bad situation when the pirated version of the game is perceived as better (not just better value for money) than the legit version. The obvious solution for games with online components, and Spore easily could have done that, is to have no DRM on the disk, but make it impossible to create an account with a pirated version. People pay for World of Warcraft because even if you could play it with a pirated version on a free server, the game experience on the real servers is better. There is very little discussion about DRM regarding MMORPGs, because it simply is no problem. You can legally download the WoW client for free, as trial version. And while an anti-cheat program like Warden might be perceived as bad, a lot more people can live with that than with SecuROM.

Trying to sell your customers a complicated license and then going after them with for EULA infractions, or annoying them with DRM software, is not going to work well for mass market software like games are. You just get a mix of backlash and EULA breaches you can't do much against. Selling people just a game, and putting the license on the online service is a lot easier to understand. And if the online services are good, people are quite willing to pay for them.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Tobold’s Guide to Salvaging and Talisman Making in WAR

In economic speak an inefficient market is one where the people buying and selling goods do not all have all of the information, leading to price distortions. As in Warhammer Online I made a huge bundle of money by buying something for 3 silver 60, and after a trivial salvaging transformation selling it for 20 silver, I'm pretty certain that this market is inefficient. Many people appear not to be well informed about how the "gathering" crafting skill salvaging works, and how it relates to the talisman making crafting skill. So although it will hurt my virtual earnings, I decided to write this salvaging guide.

Salvaging is the act of disenchanting a magic (that is green name or better) item into fragments and essences. Both of these are used for talisman making, and salvaging is in fact the only source of fragments in the game. The most basic type of essences can also be bought from vendors, but for the higher types again the salvaging skill is the only source. Thus, as in WAR you can only take one gathering and one production crafting skill, salvaging is a natural fit with talisman making. But the other three ingredients to make talismans come from other crafting skills, e.g. gold essences from the apothecary skill, so unless you only work with the basic vendor materials, you will have to buy materials from other players with other tradeskills. There is no combination of skills that will give you all the ingredients, unless you work with alts.

The basic difficulty of salvaging is where to get the magic items to disenchant from. The economy of WAR has generally an excess of money, people earn more money by whatever they do, questing or RvR, than they need for training and buying the occasional siege engine. Due to that, magic items that aren't bound to a player can generally be sold for relatively high sums. Disenchanting your bind-on-equip items, or buying them on the auction house is just plain too expensive. So most players just salvage the items bound to them, that is old gear, or quest rewards they don't need. This very much limits the progress of your salvaging and consequently talisman making skill. With the first talismans you can make being rather weak, many people quickly lose interest.

But unlike World of Warcraft, in Warhammer Online you can buy unlimited numbers of magic items from renown gear vendors. And you can buy all renown gear and salvage it, even if you don't have the class or the rank or renown to actually wear these items. So the solution to the salvaging sourcing problem is to salvage bought renown gear. The cheapest green renown item I could find were the Squigkickas of Vengeance for 3 silver 60. I think that is a bug, and I put in a bug report, because the other rank 6 / renown rank 4 boots for other classes cost 8 silver 40. But even if I buy the more expensive other renown boots I make a lot of money by simply selling the fragments I get from salvaging, because on my server there aren't many people selling fragments, so people are willing to pay 20 silver for even the basic ones.

When you salvage a magic item, your success is determined based on your salvaging skill and the level of the magic item. Some items can't be salvaged at all, for example jewelry. You click on your salvage icon, which transforms your mouse cursor into a little hammer, and then click on the item you want to salvage. At this point, a window pops up, asking you what type of fragment you want to make. If you salvage a magic item with let's say a bonus to intelligence and willpower, you can make either an intelligence or a willpower fragment out of it. How high the magic bonus of the item is plays no role at all, the quality of the fragment is only dependant of your skill and the level of the magic item. Besides the fragment you will produce some echoes and whispers. If you right-click on a stack of 10 echoes, they will transform into one whisper; 5 whispers will transform into one essence. On average the number of echoes and whispers you get from salvaging one item is about enough to make one essence. If you fail your salvage, you will not make a fragment, but only whispers.

A low level item, like the level 6 boots I mentioned, will produce Silent Echoes and Silent Whispers, leading to Silent Essences, plus a fragment for talisman making requiring a minimum skill of 1. The next level of magic items produces Dormant Echoes and Dormant Whispers, leading to Dormant Essences, plus a fragment for talisman making requiring a minimum skill of 25. You can buy Silent Essences for 2 silver from a crafting vendor, but you can't buy Dormant Essences and above. So while the renown items you have to buy and disenchant for the "dormant" level cost around 15 silver, you can still make good profit from salvaging, because you can sell both the fragment and the essence. For every level of magic item and every possible bonus there are three different quality levels of fragment. For example if you make elemental resistance fragments of the lowest level, you're most likely to get Nascent Beryl Dust. Sometimes you will get a Nascent Beryl Stone, which is of better quality, although that isn't immediately obvious, as the name is white as well. In very rare cases you can get a green name Animated Beryl Stone of the highest quality. The quality of the fragment affects the quality of the talisman you make from it.

Once you have a fragment, you can start making talismans. You will also need a container, a gold essence, a curio, and an essence. The essence you got from salvaging or buy the lowest kind. The other ingredients you can buy the lowest version at a crafting vendor or higher versions from players with other gathering and production skills. When you open the talisman making window from your hotbar or ability window, you get a window with 5 spots. You need to first fill in the spot for the container in the upper left corner, then the fragment spot in the upper middle. When you fill in the other three ingredients, a power meter in the upper right corner shows you the power of the talisman. Higher quality ingredients increase the power level.

Many people dismissed talisman making when they made their first talisman and found out it gave a bonus only for some hours. But those are /played hours, and given the frequency at which you replace your gear at the lower levels, these hours might be all you need. Higher level talismans not only have higher bonuses, but also have longer durations or even are permanent. If you combine salvaging with talisman making, and thus get the fragments and essences at the cheapest possible rate, you can make good talismans at reasonable cost. And in WAR even low level items often have talisman slots, allowing you to boost your stats significantly. Of course the alternative, learning either butchering or scavenging as gathering skill, and apothecary as production skill, also can give some good advantages in terms of buffs from potions, or the use of healing or action point potions. But that apothecary chain has two annoying disadvantages: The extra time you need to spend to butcher / scavenge mobs after looting them, and the items gathered that way quickly filling up your inventory. The salvage / talisman making route only takes time when you have it available, and as you can do it when in a city, you can keep all the materials in the bank. So I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss talisman making as the "useless" one of the two WAR production skills.

- posted by Tobold @ 5:25 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Open Sunday Thread

A special open Sunday thread, because I'll be traveling a lot next week and am not sure how much blogging I'll get done. So here is an open space for you to discuss.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
WAR rollback problems?

Shamutanti wrote me because he had a problem in Warhammer Online with his character having been rolled back a day. I found other people reporting the same, both on the US servers and on the Euro servers. Anyone here had his character rolled back and lost levels, had to redo quests, etc.? Would be good to find out how widespread the problem is.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:57 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Color blindness and MMOs

A reader wrote me because he is color blind, and in some MMOs that leads to problems. For example while in WoW the quest icons floating over the heads of quest givers have at least two different shapes, exclamation mark and question mark, in other games only the color of that icon changes. So if you are color blind, you have to click on all of them to see whose quest you alread finished, and who still has a new quest to give you.

Lots of other things in MMOs are color coded too: The relative difficulty for your level of a monster or quest, or item quality. So should MMOs have an option for a different grey-scale scheme that is better visible for the color blind? Or is that such a small part of the population that they can afford not to bother?
- posted by Tobold @ 11:19 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Mythic news: queues and rest bonus

Server cloning worked well in my case, my server used to have half an hour wait at prime time for Destruction, now its down to 3 minutes max. In a further improvement to queues Mythic announced that they'll patch in a small change: If you crashed to desktop and log right back in, you skip the queue. As that was one of the major annoyances with queues, this is a good idea. On the downside of course queues will advance more slowly.

In other Warhammer Online news, Mythic published a FAQ about how the rest bonus works. That's the bonus to xp you accumulate when not online. Just like in WoW it is limited to a level and a half. But the numbers are slightly different. In WAR you get the basic bonus everywhere, +50% when you log out in a war camp or quest hub with the "you feel rested" message, +100% in Altdorf or the Inevitable City, and +150% in the guild leader's hall, a feature your guild acquires with rank. So right now I can only recommend flying to your main city before logging off.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:57 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Bind on need

Of course in WAR as well as in WoW there are people who roll "need" for an item they actually don't need at all, but just want to sell. So I had this spontaneous idea: What if items that you win with a need roll are automatically bound to you? Should be easy enough to program, and would really enforce the meaning of "need".
- posted by Tobold @ 8:55 PM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
WAR Auction House

I first started to get worried about auction houses when I noticed that late in the beta there still weren't any. There were auctioneer NPCs, but clicking on them didn't do anything, just weeks before release. Then last minute the auction house interface got patched in. Now, one week after release, it starts showing its inadequacies. This is not something which has been extensively tested in the beta, and accordingly the WAR auction house interface has serious flaws.

The biggest flaw is a fixed limit of 500 results. Not 500 results per page, then scroll forward. No, 500 results, won't show you the rest. The only way to get past that is to refine search criteria. Which would be nice if they were all implemented and working correctly, but they aren't.

Where the auction house completely fails is for crafting materials. Anyone who studied the WoW auction house a bit knows that crafting materials are traded much more than other items, like equipment. The WAR crafting system actively encourages trading crafting items, because you can have only one gathering skill, but need several different items for crafting. But all crafting items are rank 0, you can't set a filter by that. You can set a filter to only show crafting materials, but you can't search for only apothecary materials, or only fragments for talisman making. And as there are more than 500 crafting materials on the AH, with no way to refine the search by class, a good part of them remains permanently invisible, with the sellers wondering why nobody buys their stuff. Only if you know the name, or part of the name, can you search for something. But as you are unlikely to know the names of all herbs or curios or whatever, your chance of finding things are slim.

For weapons and armor the AH works somewhat better, but still has flaws. That is mostly because items in WAR have a very inconsistent system of restrictions. Half of the items are restricted to a particular class, lets say Black Orc. The other half are restricted by race and type, lets say orc/goblin and heavy armor. Now if you put "Black Orc" as search criteria on the auction house interface, it shows you all items limited for the class Black Orc, filtering out all the items restricted to other classes. But it doesn't filter out items with race and type restrictions, so you will still see items for Chaos or Dark Elf races, although obviously a Black Orc can't use those. So you do a search for your class and rank, and still come up with tons of results you can't use. There is no "useable" filter criterion, showing you only the stuff you could actually wear.

If you actually manage to sell something, you'll have the dubious pleasure of interacting with the mail interface, which isn't much better. Good idea: A separate tab for auction house mail. But I so wish that tab would have a "open all mail, take all items from it, and delete them" button. Instead not only do you have to open each mail one by one, take the attached items or money, and then manually delete the mail. You will also often encounter a strange bug telling you that you haven't read the mail you just took the attachments of, and are you really, really sure you want to delete it? If you put a bunch of stuff on the auction house and sold it, that gets tedious pretty fast. Hint: The bug seems to appear less often if you open your last mail first and work back from the bottom instead down from the top.

In summary the auction house user interface of Warhammer Online is rather bad, even failing to fulfill basic functions like showing everything for sale of a certain type. It clearly has been programmed in a rush, and not properly tested. There are some drop-down fields with only one option, suggesting that there are plans to improve the interface. But as it stands now, the auction house is more annoying than helpful.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:34 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
WAR clones servers

The population of Warhammer Online is growing, and in response Mythic opens new servers. But instead of just making new, empty servers, they have a novel approach: They clone old, overpopulated servers. Thus players on the old servers can choose whether they want to continue playing on their old server, or whether they want to move to the new server *without* having to do an irreversible choice. If your whole guild moved and you only realize that days later, you can still switch and find a clone of your character with the level and stuff from the moment of the split there.

Really good idea, why has nobody else thought of that before? This not only reduces the population pressure on the old servers, but also jump-starts the new server with higher level characters, so the newbie zones aren't too crowded. Better to distribute the new players over two servers than have them all on one server. Of course guild moves still remain a complicated affair, but the clone method is way better than the old server split method, where you had to decide whether you would move or not in advance, and somebody always was left behind.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:19 PM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
WAR and RMT

I totally agree with Mark Jacobs' approach of banning gold spammers immediately, instead of banning a large amount every couple of months. But I can also see why the decision to report bannings with pop-up windows to the other players isn't liked by everyone. And I certainly can't support Syp's proposal to ostracize your friends if they bought any gold. But I don't think any of this matters for the reality of gold selling in Warhammer Online, it's all just the inconsequential noise people make about the issue.

The best Mark Jacob's can hope for it to completely ban gold *spammers* from his game. Which would already be a big step forward, but is still a completely different league than banning gold *sellers*. The fundamental problem with banning gold sellers is that me sending you 100 gold in WAR would be completely legit, because we could be best buddies or something. You giving me 20 bucks in return is the forbidden part, but as that part happens outside the game, Mythic won't be able to verify if it happened or not.

Syp is right in saying that the problem of gold selling is the demand of gold buyers. But his solution is wrong, because he short-sightedly attributes the demand to notions of "morality or honor", which is just plain silly. Player's demand for gold is simply a function of how grindy it is to get gold, and what you need that gold for. And that are all questions of game design. It is a lot easier to solve the problem with good game design than to start a successful crusade to stop people from cheating in video games. Google has 80 million hits in a search for "cheats", most of which are about video games, that isn't something we can make go away if we all just hold hands and wish for it very, very strongly.

Fortunately WAR seems to be on a good way to if not eliminate but then at least seriously reduce gold selling by the simple means of making earning gold fun enough, and not having ridiculous money sinks like 5,000 gold epic horses. The level 20 mount in WAR costs 15 gold, and I already have that much money at level 14, without any grind. The trick is that you do earn gold whatever you do, even in RvR. Although the player you kill does not lose gold or items, you loot him and get gold or even items. So you can have fun all evening with lets say defending a keep, spend money on siege weapons, and still come out ahead with gold in your pockets. And there isn't all that much you could spend it on. Renown gear is usually better than anything you can find in the auction house, crafted consumables are cheap enough, because that is all you can craft, and training and mounts are reasonably priced. So we could well see a lot less RMT in WAR than in WoW. And that without needing to never speak to our friends again.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (33) comments Links to this post

 
Do you play pen & paper RPGs?

My pen & paper roleplaying group just started a new campaign, this time playing the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying game (2005 edition). I'm playing with these guys for years now, various campaigns, usually every second Monday evening. But we are all around 40ish, and sometimes I feel like being a dinosaur when rolling dice and scribbling on character sheets.

So I was a bit at a loss what to tell the guy who wants me to review his independantly published pen & paper RPG Imperium Chronicles. He obviously put a lot of effort into his project, but I'm not sure I can make him much hope. Indie pen & paper RPGs might have been a good idea in the 80's, but nowadays I have the feeling that even the pen & paper games of big publishers struggle somewhat. I bought the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, but I got the feeling that it's release was a lot less talked about than the release of lets say Warhammer Online or Age of Conan. But maybe I'm wrong, and I'm just moving in different circles now.

So tell me, did you ever play pen & paper roleplaying games, and are you still playing them? Are strangely shaped dice a thing of the past, or is it still an active and vibrant hobby community?
- posted by Tobold @ 3:50 PM Permanent Link  (36) comments Links to this post

 
The Dungeons of WAR

Last night my guild did their first dungeon crawl in Warhammer Online. We visited the Sacellum, the arena in the Inevitable City, which has three short dungeon wings. The first has mobs level 13 to 16, the second from level 15 to 18, and the last from level 17 to 20. We cleared out the first, did the last except for the final boss, but didn't get all that far in the middle one, where curiously the mobs hit a lot harder than their higher level brethren. We might have beaten them too if we hadn't had one other player and me crash to desktop, resulting in half an hour queue to get back into the game.

The three dungeons are supposed to be holding cells for the arena, and they look the part. Of course that makes them look rather drab, compared to the often very colorful WoW dungeons. But apart from the look, the dungeons were fun enough. The trash mobs are of "champion" strength, and there aren't too many of them. Each wing seems to have 3 boss mobs, which are "hero" strength, and tough to beat. While the first dungeon only had beastmen, the last dungeon held exotic monsters, so we fought a wyvern, a manticore, and a hydra, all very nicely animated and impressive.

Gameplay in the dungeons was classic WoW style: We made a group with a Black Orc main tank, me as Shaman healer, two Chosen off-tank/melee dps, and two Squig Herder ranged dps. Levels ranging from 14 to 20, with the main tank being the level 20, which was helpful. Went in, beat up the trash mobs, and then faced the boss mobs, who took longer fights to beat. The bosses all just dropped green loot, but we got a blue drop from a trash mob.

We had one quest from Barak Varr to find a goblin in the deepest dungeon, and there is another quest for the lowest level dungeon in the middle of the arena. Unfortunately the arena is populated by level 35 aggressive mobs, and getting to the quest giver alive isn't easy. I only managed it by using the fleeing ability, dying directly after accepting the quest. Really bad placement, and the quest rewards aren't special either.

So all in all the WAR dungeons felt like the devs ticking off a check box: Dungeons, yes we got those! Needing a holy trinity of tank/healer/dps, they are less easy to set up, and give less rewards, than public quests, so I don't see me doing them all that often. I did like the boss mobs in the final Sacellum dungeon, but for the rest the WAR dungeons don't come close to WoW dungeons. But of course PvE dungeons is the main strength of WoW, so that doesn't come unexpected.

As far as I read, Altdorf has a similar set of three dungeons in the sewers, fighting Skaven. So if you are level 14 to 20, and have some likeminded friends, whatever realm you are on, there is a set of dungeons for you to check out. Interesting to see once, but otherwise just a minor distraction from the much better public quests and RvR of WAR.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:49 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Got my WAR collector's edition

My Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning collector's edition just arrived, a huge box. There is a book with concept art, a WAR comic, the game, a mouse pad, and two metal Warhammer figurines. I went right to the game and entered the code, although with the CE preorder code one can still play a while before needing a code. But I wanted to see whether it works, and get the CE ingame items as well. Of course the only result of me entering the key was an e-mail telling me that the key wasn't valid. Checking the code under a magnifying glass revealed that one of the Z was actually a 2, but the code was typed in a font in which Z and 2 only differ by 1 pixel. Really, why can't people use fonts where every letter and number looks sufficiently different from the others? On the second try I got it right.

So now I'm good for at least 30 days. Only problem being that I can't find out for how long, nor can I actually subscribe to WAR in Europe. The GOA account site is only as far as absolutely necessary to enter codes. The "My licenses", "My current subscription", and "My billing information" buttons on the account page are still greyed out. First MMO company that *doesn't* want my credit card information even if I'm eager to give it to them.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:42 PM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Why don't we play innovative games?

A Tale in the Desert is an MMO without combat, but not a pure sandbox either, there are skills, a series of tests, and a complex social gameplay. Puzzle Pirates is a completely player-skill based MMO, where your success at anything is determined by your skill in various puzzles, not your level or stats. Wizard101 has more traditional levels and quests, but a completely novel combat system based on magic cards. And the guys from PixelMine just sent me a press release on how their MMO Ashen Empires won the Best Fantasy MMORPG award at the Independent Games Festival. And that is just a handful of examples I happen to know of. There are tons and tons of innovative MMOs out there. But each of them attracts only a few thousand players. Meanwhile millions of players play games like World of Warcraft or Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, and then whine loudly about the lack of innovation in these games.

Doh, guys! Most game companies produce games for the money, not because they hope to become critically acclaimed starving artists. They are always going to look out what kind of games seem to sell well, and then make that sort of game. If customers throw a billion dollars a year at Blizzard for World of Warcraft, and A Tale in the Desert is making peanuts, then of course other companies prefer to make a game more like WoW than like ATitD. They would be crazy if they didn't do it.

In the last open Sunday thread people were blaming the big companies to make games as bland as McDonalds bland food. I'm saying that the complaint would be a lot more valid if the complainers weren't actually sitting in the McDonalds restaurant and eating bland burgers, while right next door there is an empty, small gourmet restaurant with a varied, but foreign cuisine. As soon as about a million of you guys start playing innovative games, game companies are going to make more of them. As long as you go for games that offer small, evolutionary steps to a well-known concept, companies are going to make those. The question is not why WAR isn't more innovative, the question is why there aren't more people playing Wizard101 or other innovative games. Game companies produce what the customers want, and we only have ourselves to blame if we voted with our wallets for evolutionary approach. If even we as players are afraid to try something really new, then how can you expect a company to bet millions of dollars on really new?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:56 AM Permanent Link  (28) comments Links to this post

 
The trouble with queues

As I mentioned my main character on the European WAR servers is a shaman, I'm playing on the Destruction side. Worldwide, on pretty much every server, there are more people who want to play Destruction than those who want to play Order. As that has obvious bad consequences for realm balance, Mythic introduced a radical measure: They simply don't let as many Destruction players onto the servers as there are people who would like to play Destruction. Servers have not one population cap but two, and if there are no spots left for Destruction, you only have the choice between playing Order, or waiting in a queue. That can get extremely annoying if you were in a group with your friends, crashed to desktop, and then need half an hour of queueing before getting back into the game. And I'm not even sure queues will fix the realm balance issues.

The trouble with the system is that it only works when the servers are nearly full, which is only during prime time at the moment. In the morning you can play whatever side you want without queueing. So to make servers balanced, Mythic has to trust that there are enough people who prefer Destruction, but are so annoyed by having to wait in line during prime time that they voluntarily switch to Order side. Unfortunately MMORPG players are a stubborn bunch. Some came to play with friends or complete guilds from previous games, and rather wait in line than play the other side on another server alone. Some just are fans of a particular race or class, and don't want to go over to the "enemy". Some even quit WAR totally instead of switching sides.

While the number of available servers only changes very slowly, and rarely goes down, the number of people wanting to log on and play changes every hour, and every day. In a mature game only 10% to 20% of subscribers are logged in during prime time. But in a game just after release the percentages are much higher, because few people buy a game and subscribe to then *not* play whenever possible. And subscription numbers too vary with time, Raph Koster has an excellent explanation. And that is just the natural cycle without outside disturbances. We all know that the number of people wanting to log onto WAR will drop significantly on November 13, when Wrath of the Lich King comes out.

So if there are 50% more players who want to play Destruction than Order, it means that one in three Destruction players is stuck in a queue when the servers are full. And when the servers are empty, Destruction still outnumbers Order by 50%. Order never gets to outnumber Destruction, except locally. Queues don't change that, unless half of the Destruction overpopulation decides to go over to Order *and stay there*. But as everyone knows that populations will go down in a while, many just stick to Destruction and wait it out.

The better method would be to find out why players prefer one side, and then make the other side more attractive to even out the numbers. But of course that is easier said than done, and easier done while the game is still in beta. I would have thought that after release maybe more casual players join the game and prefer the pretty races, but that didn't really happen yet. WAR isn't really targeted towards casual players all that much as WoW is. Casual listeners prefer the Beatles to Led Zeppelin (you need to watch a Mythic interview to get that joke). And the WAR elves and humans aren't actually all that pretty. And they aren't quite as cool or unique as many of the Destruction classes. Except for the White Lion, the High Elves are surprisingly bland and all look the same. As Greenskin you can always see who is who in your team, as High Elf only the guy with the cat stands out.

So I think that in spite of the queues, realm imbalance is going to stay with us for a long time. It is unlikely that Mythic completely reworks the Order classes to make them more attractive. And preventing people from playing the class they want only serves to annoy them, and doesn't solve anything.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:29 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
Mourkain Temple

Mourkain Temple is the WAR tier 2 scenario in the dwarves vs. greenskins scenario. And it is very badly designed. The basic rules are that both sides start out at opposite ends of a map, and there is an artifact in the middle. First one to click on the artifact grabs it, and now carries it arround. Collecting the artifact and holding onto it gives points, and the side that gathers 500 points first wins. Unfortunately the scenario has two major problems: Mounts and hedgehogs.

Tier 2 is the scenario that can be entered from level 11 to 21. In Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning you can buy your first mount at level 20, for an affordable 15 gold. So while everyone is running for the artifact, the few level 20 players will ride there. If one side has at least one player with a mount and the other side doesn't, the mounted side always gets the artifact. It would be so easy to disallow mounts in this scenario, I don't know why Mythic allows them here, where their use throws the battle off balance.

But mounts aren't the worst problem of Mourkain Temple, hedgehogs are. As others have noticed, the best strategy for the side that grabs the artifact first is to run back to their own base and form one spikey ball to defend the artifact holder. The official rules say that holding the artifact damages the carrier, but if that works at all, the damage is insignificant. Even with the whole other team bombarding the artifact holder at range plus the damage from the artifact, a tank can hold on to the thing easily for the whole duration of the battle, if he has just one dedicated healer keeping his health up.

This makes Mourkain Temple extremely unpleasant to play. The side that got the artifact first plays directly next to their base, where anyone dying respawns immediately next to the action. The other side has to run all across the map every time, and has no chance in that fight. Very often the winning side gets 500 points, and the losing side less than 100, earning them nearly no renown and experience points for their trouble. There are no close battles, no back and forth, no fun.

And it would be so easy to slightly change the rules to make this a fun scenario: 1) No mounts allowed. 2) Holding the artifact damages the carrier much more, and gives him a debuff that prevents him from being healed. 3) Dropping the artifact causes it to respawn IN THE MIDDLE, not at the point where it is dropped. So instead of the thing dropping in the middle of the group that held it next to their base, and often the same side picking it up, suddenly control of the middle of the battlefield would be important. Until Mythic fixes the scenario, I can advise you to use the tier 2 scenarios of the other two pairings instead.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (26) comments Links to this post

 
Open Sunday Thread

Time flies, especially in weeks where a new major MMORPG gets released. Sunday brings the open Sunday thread: Suggest subjects for discussion, or just tell us what you would write about today if you had a MMO blog.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
Acer Aspire One 150

My Dell XPS laptop is sitting on my desk and rarely moving. Charger included the thing weights several kilograms, and even with "only" having a 12" screen, it is too big to fit into my briefcase. Great solution to take with me on holidays if I want to play games. Not so great on a business trip where I just want Office and the internet. So I decided to spend €399 on an Acer Aspire One 150 netbook, as it was said to be even better than the eeePC. I got the Windows XP version, with 1 GB RAM and 120 GB hard drive (in addition to a 8 GB flash drive).

I'll have to test drive it in normal business day application, but up to now I'm quite happy with it. It is small and lightweight enough to fit into my briefcase, but the 9" screen, keyboard, and touchpad are big enough to work with. The A150 comes with WiFi, but I do have an USB 3G modem recently acquired for when there is not WiFi signal to be found. Europe doesn't have all that many free WiFi spots, often you need to pay €10 or so for one hour of WiFi connection. So my 3G modem costing €5 per month plus €1 per day of use is actually cheaper as long as I only use it in Belgium. Roaming charges for data are horrible, so I'd only use it for emergencies outside Belgium.

I was laughing about this Acer Aspire One 150 review, where they even managed to get World of Warcraft running on it at 800x600 resolution and 24 frames per second. I don't think I'm going to use it for that.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:14 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
No Wrath without Burning Crusade

WoWInsider reports that Blizzard confirmed that you won't be able to play Wrath of the Lich King if you haven't got The Burning Crusade installed. Not a huge surprise, you'd have a problem to close the gap from level 60 to 70 without TBC anyway. But a reader was writing me and asked whether I thought that in the long run this could be a financial barrier to entry for people wanting to start WoW if they have to buy all the expansions.

I don't think that will really be a problem. You can now get the World of Warcraft Battlechest for $30, containing the original WoW and the first expansion. So you pay less for the bundle than either of them did cost on release. If on November 13 you want to buy WoW, TBC, and WotLK all together, it only costs you $70. And really, there is no good reason to want to buy WotLK for a new player right from the start. I'm pretty sure that by the time the third expansion comes out, there is some cheap package where you can buy WoW with both expansions for $30 or so.

The real barrier to entry into WoW nowadays is a completely different one. Like one of my readers commented yesterday, he had a friend joining for the first time, and that friend asked "where are all the other players?". That will be worse after Wrath than before. Not only will everyone be at level 80, which even with sped up leveling is a long way to go, but also there won't be all that many low level alts as in The Burning Crusade. TBC had veteran players making level 1 draenei and blood elf. WotLK has veteran players make level 55 death knights. Big difference for the future population of newbie zones.

Sad as it is, the best way to start WoW nowadays is via a friend, who recruits you with that triple xp offer and rushes you through the part of the game we used to love back in 2004/2005. Because in 2008/2009 that part of the game is an empty wasteland. You can still quest in the Barrens, but when you read some reference to the famous "Barrens chat" you won't know what they are talking about, because all you heard was eerie silence.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:33 AM Permanent Link  (28) comments Links to this post

 
Hear me brag!

Writing this blog is a considerable effort, which I sustained now for over 5 years and over 2,200 posts. I don't do it out of financial considerations, which is why you don't see any ads here. I do it because I want my voice to be heard, and because of the recognition blogging earns me. Official recognition, in the form of a press pass to a Blizzard convention, and a comped account for WAR is nice. But the more important part is recognition I get by my readers, in the form of them showing up in the first place, and, even better, leaving comments, feedback, and discussing what I write about. And because that recognition is so important for my motivation, you'll have to live with me telling you occasionally about milestones I reached. Yes, that is a sort of bragging. I'm not ashamed of that. If you don't like it, you could simply skip those posts.

According to Sitemeter my blog just passed 2 million visitors since I installed the counter in February 2004. I had few visitors back then, but now get around 3,000 every day. I also have about 2,000 readers of my feed, with no way to tell how many of those are also visiting the blog directly, and how many read only the feed. Visits per month have been pretty constant recently, so I'll have nearly a million visitors this year. According to Google Analytics just over half of the visitors find their way here via a search engine, although some of them are specifically searching for me, with "Tobold" being one of my top search terms. The other half are split rather evenly between direct visits, and people coming in via links from other sites.

I'd like to thank all visitors for coming here, but am especially grateful for those who come repeatedly, and those who participate in the discussion in an intelligent and polite way. You keep coming and participating, and I keep blogging. Deal?
- posted by Tobold @ 3:13 PM Permanent Link  (39) comments Links to this post

 
If it changes the way you play, it's innovation

I've read various reports of what people did during their headstart days of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. And I'm sure there will be many more reports like that when WAR launches the release version today. And one thing I noticed with myself, and you can also see in posts by, for example, JoBildo, is that people group more and PvP more in WAR than in other games.

Imagine you would start a new character in World of Warcraft today, and leveled him up to level 9. What activities do you think that character would have done from level 1 to 9? I think he would have spent most of his times doing regular quests. He might have started a tradeskill at level 5, but he certainly wouldn't have done any PvP (unless he was ganked on a PvP server). And it is unlikely that he would have joined any group.

My WAR character at level 9 has done regular quests, and learned tradeskills. But he also joined more than 10 groups (not counting scenario groups, and I have the achievement to prove that), for public quests and for RvR. I also reached renown rank (PvP level) 8, having done scenarios repeatedly, a RvR public quest completed three times, and having visited all three open world tier 1 RvR zones, once even in a huge warband (raid group). And I didn't group and PvP to deliberately change my behavior. I did it because it was the natural thing to do.

Groups are so obviously better for public quests and RvR that you need to be completely alergic to other people to want to avoid them. There is no "it took us half an hour to set up this pickup group, and then one guy did something stupid and wiped us, at which point half of the group left" in WAR. Instead you get situation where you and the other players around you are already doing the same thing, be it a public quest or taking an RvR objective, and grouping up is simply better than every one doing the same thing in parallel. I even grouped sometimes for normal quests, as in WAR there isn't the same problem as in WoW that if you are more people you need to kill more foozles to get 10 foozle ears for everyone; every mob killed counts as one kill or one item drop for every one in the group. And the group xp bonus is large enough to earn more xp per time in a group than solo, unlike WoW's.

Doing RvR comes naturally as well. You stumble upon some quest NPC asking you to do a scenario relatively early. You try, and you notice that regardless of your level and gear, you'll be able to do *something* useful in a scenario. Yes, a level 1 will just be boosted to level 8, have only his initial 3 spells or abilities, and no gear, so he'll be crushed in a one-on-one duel against a level 11 in full renown gear. But there are few duels in a scenario. Your level 1 spell will be boosted to level 8 and be perfectly able to damage that level 11, who'll might not immediately notice you if you fire ranged spells from behind. If you are a healer (my main is a Shaman on the Euro servers), you can help your side significantly by healing. And you are exactly as valuable for capturing a flag as anyone else. And while doing all this you will gain both regular PvE experience points, and PvP renown points. Renown ranks (PvP levels) will give you stat bonuses at the renown trainer, which are useful for both PvP and PvE. And the renown gear merchant will sell you good equipment, easily financed by all the coin you get in RvR from every kill.

There has been a lot of discussion of whether WAR is innovative or just a WoW clone. But the people argueing that its just a clone do so based on screenshots and feature lists, which is about as useful as a movie review based on screenshots and a plot summary. The question is not whether WAR looks like WoW and has classes, levels, and quests like WoW. The question is whether WAR plays like WoW. And it does not. I'm not saying WAR is better than WoW, I'm sure I'm going to miss fixed-group dungeons and raids at some point. But I'm absolutely insisting on WAR playing differently for the average user. At no point do you think "oh, I'm just doing the same stuff as in WoW here". In WAR you have more different activities, all of them viable paths for advancement, during the leveling stage. While in WoW the bulk of the choices is concentrated at the level cap. Yes, that means that at some point in the future I'll write a post about how there isn't enough to do in WAR at the level cap. But right now, leveling up is a hell of a lot more fun than in WoW. And that *is* innovative, player behavior is not something that is easily changed. If you can get people who mainly soloed and never liked PvP to do lots of groups and RvR, you have done something new to the genre. It will take some time for everyone to realize this, but WAR changes what a MMORPG is; playing more together and against each other than playing alone, who would have thunk that?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:40 AM Permanent Link  (52) comments Links to this post

 
Do I need labels / tags for this blog?

A reader wrote me and said he would prefer if my blog had tags, called labels on Blogger, where you click on lets say the WAR label to see all my posts about WAR. The reason I don't have those is that Blogger didn't have the option when I started the blog. While it would be easy enough to start now, I'm so no going back through 2,200 old blog posts to add labels, that would take forever. So do you think that it would be a good idea for me to add labels anyway, even if they only cover my new posts?

If yes, I'm looking for suggestions about what labels to use, beyond the obvious like WoW and WAR. I don't think it would be a good idea to have a label for every minor game, otherwise I get a too long list of labels. What do you think of an "other games" label? And I was wondering whether I should group my more theoretical posts that aren't really about one specific game into some "game theory" label. Suggestions about whether and how to tag my posts are welcome!
- posted by Tobold @ 6:57 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
On the way to e-sport?

A reader was asking me what I thought about the various class changes that Wrath of the Lich King will bring to World of Warcraft. He noticed that many of them seem to be for balancing, like removing all racial spells from the priest class, or giving druids a non-combat rez. Also lots of reagents have been removed, like rogue poisons and things like light feathers for levitate, removing some reagent-gathering from the game. His conclusion was that Blizzard is doing all that for their e-sports arenas. Balance is good for arenas, and so is the removal of reagents.

So, less atmosphere, less roleplaying, more arenas, more e-sports, is that the future of World of Warcraft? I'm not a big fan of arenas, so for me that would be a step backwards. But for other players arena seem to be quite popular. Are they fun, and Blizzard is right to push them, or are people just doing them for the epics? What do you think about the changes?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (29) comments Links to this post

 
A great launch, but ...

The quality of consumer software at release is generally bad. If the industrial software used for applications like running nuclear power stations, life support systems in hospitals, or air traffic control had as many bugs and crashes as the average consumer software, we would be in serious trouble. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games on average have a *worse* quality level than other pieces of consumer software. Notaddicted has an interesting article on WAR release expectations by Isobelle, asking why our expectations are so low, and why are we willing to let game companies get away with bad launches. Quote Keen: "Opening day rocked. Complete server stability for Wolfenburg - no lag - few crashes. Yes, I CTD’d 4x yesterday and there were many in my guild who were crashing as well. Alt tabbing is a sure way to fubar your game. Obviously the issues still persist into launch. This was, baring any unforeseen issues when SE’s and normal retail join us, the smoothest launch I’ve participated in." Smoothest launch ever, "only" 4 crashes to desktop, and you can't use alt-tab (unless you run WAR in windowed mode). Talk about low expectations.

I totally agree that on a relative scale, compared to other MMORPG launches, WAR is having a great launch. On an absolute scale European WAR servers were down this morning for emergency maintenance, if you want to play destruction you'll be stuck in a waiting queue for half an hour after every disconnect, there is still a good number of bugs, and clunky way in which you have to accept the EULA and TOS twice on every launch of the client is driving me crazy. But for some reason everyone prefers the relative scale, where measured by things like server uptime WAR is even ahead of WoW at release for the moment. Without mentioning that if you phone company or electricity company would provide service like that, you'd be up in arms.

Gamers are far too willing to let game companies get away with anything. And me right among them, I was far too happy about playing the game without considering all the implications of the Spore DRM controversy, where I got fooled into thinking I was buying a game, when in fact I was only buying a limited license to install a game 3 times, with some strings attached in the form of rootkit software. Gamers only get angry at the point when something prevents them from playing, like the GOA accounts page problems. But once GOA put up a way to enter your code, everybody was happy, without remarking that the current system is still far from being a fully functional account site. What are we going to do in two days, enter our credit card details into a "temporary" form field on an unsecured, flash-based website, with no way to check your account details afterwards? Maybe GOA has a miracle patch up their sleeves and will bring up a fully functional account site Thursday. But if they don't, they'll be forgiven just as long as they allow everyone in via whatever temporary solution they'll come up with. People will even accept server queues for the more popular side, without complaining how that effectively limits their choice of what to play. And hey, if after release in regular operation the WAR servers would be down for half a day once every week, that'll be accepted as being the same as WoW.

Are we right in doing this? Should we say "it's just a game", and not expect a higher level of quality? Television is also "just entertainment", but we wouldn't let TV companies get away with the level of service that game companies provide. Will we "shut up and play" if the Wrath of the Lich King launch is buggy like hell in November? Why did we let Funcom get away with a horrible launch of Age of Conan? I guess it was because we were bored at the time and the parts of the game that worked were fun. But should we be satisfied with that? How can we expect the quality of games to improve if we are so obviously willing to pay up even for bugs?
- posted by Tobold @ 2:31 PM Permanent Link  (33) comments Links to this post

 
WAR ships, Blizzard shares drop by 4 percent

From Ardwulf's Lair I got the news that WAR shipped 1.5 million copies, twice as many as AoC. Not bad, assuming they don't remain unsold on shelves. In other news Blizzard announced that Wrath of the Lich King will be released on November 13. Lots of people are trying to draw a connection between those events, but I don't think that is necessarily valid. I'll give you an example how easy it is to come to the wrong conclusion:

On the same day that WAR shipped, Activision-Blizzard shares dropped by 4 percent. "Hah!" the WAR fans will say, the shipping of WAR must be the reason for Blizzard's shares dropping, now that they get serious competition. Not so fast. Pretty much every share dropped yesterday, it was a day with the biggest loss on the New York Stock Exchange since 9/11. Electronic Arts shares dropped by 4 percent too; if WAR had been the reason that Blizzard shares dropped, there should have been a corresponding rise in EA shares. In fact it is much safer to say that the stock exchange completely ignored WAR shipping, it was just a coincidence that WAR shipped on the same day as the shares fell.

I am sure that Blizzard is aware that WAR is coming out. And if EA manages to sell those 1.5 million copies, plus the subscriptions going with that, it will rip a visible hole into Blizzard's earnings, because that would represent more than a quarter of their US/Euro customers (WAR isn't shipping to Asia yet). But frankly, I don't see Blizzard shaking in their boots. They are extremely confident about their products, and it was always clear that Wrath release will somewhat counter the WAR release, causing a spike in WoW subscriptions, and a dip in WAR subscriptions. November was always a good guess for the Wrath release date, I guestimated that date myself repeatedly on this blog. We can debate whether the date of the announcement is a dirty marketing trick, with Blizzard normally not giving us two months advance warning. But the release date itself probably depended more on intricacies of the Activision-Blizzard financial year reports than on Warhammer Online. Anyone remember Blizzard promising one expansion per year? If they release the second expansion 22 months after the first one, I wouldn't be talking about Blizzard releasing it *early* to counter a competitor. We should be talking about why Blizzard didn't release WotLK *before* WAR.

Having said that, I am fully aware that the Wrath of the Lich King beta is not in good condition. The WAR beta two months before release was a hell of a lot more stable than the WotLK beta is now. Blizzard still has a lot of work to do in the coming two months. The only thing I'm saying is that in a parallel universe without WAR, they'd probably fighting exactly the same problem with the same release date. Wrath isn't going to be released on November 13 because of WAR, it is being released on that day because it is bloody time, and players are quitting WoW out of boredom regardless of what other games are on the market.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:00 PM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
The nature of quests

In spite of what you might have seen on South Park, it is not possible to level up to the level cap in World of Warcraft by killing 65,340,285 level 1 boars. It is however totally possible to level up to the level cap in WoW or Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, or most other level-based MMORPGs, by killing monsters of your level all day long, without doing a single quest. But although quests are thus not strictly necessary, they have become a more and more important part of the genre. Ultima Online only had a few escort quests when I played it, Everquest (in spite of the name) had a gameplay where killing the same mob repeatedly was a much bigger part of gameplay than doing the occasional quest. Anarchy Online and Star Wars Galaxies experimented with random quest generators, which wasn't a huge success. It was World of Warcraft where the quest system had its breakthrough, and questing became the main occupation of players. But after a few years the fizz seems to have gone out of the model, with increasing complaints about "kill ten foozles" quests being boring. So what is the function of quests, and how could we make it more fun?

If you tried to level up without quests in WoW, you would most likely go somewhere where there are mobs of your level and start killing them. If you found a large enough group, and not too many other players are around, the first mob will have respawned by the time you kill the last mob, and so you can go around in circles until you level up. At some point your level is so high that moving to a higher level mob would be the optimum strategy. But before that there isn't really a reason why you would travel around and look for other mobs than those eternal respawns. Of course killing always the same mob over and over isn't much fun, but there is some sort of activation barrier which you must overcome to motivate you to move on and kill some other mobs. And in a game with quests, the quests provide exactly that motivation. By handing out an additional quest reward in xp, gold, or items, it becomes more efficient to hunt one specific mob only until you fulfil the quest for that mob, and then move on to the next quest. The player does it because including the quest reward he receives more xp per kill. But the ultimate consequence is that he ends up traveling all over the zone a lot more than if he wouldn't do quests. That helps distributing players over the zone better, and is more fun, because you see more different areas, and fight more different mobs.

The other core function of quests is to answer the eternal "now what?" question. Especially at the start of a game it is easy to become a bit lost in a MMORPG, not knowing where to go and what to do. Place a very obvious quest giver with some floating symbol over his head in front of the player, and the problem is solved. Players quickly fill their quest log with lots of small goals, and so they always have a good idea what to do next. If well done, like in WoW or WAR, the quests even lead you to the next higher region once you've outleveled the zone you're currently in.

The only problem is that quest might not be the best name for that. Merriam-Webster defines "quest" as being "a chivalrous enterprise in medieval romance usually involving an adventurous journey", so the quest for the holy grail would be a good example. Going around farmer browns shed to kill 10 wolves there somehow falls short, and feels more like an errand than a quest. There are a few good quest lines, or destiny quests, or book quests, whatever the game might call them, that rise to the level of a real "quest", but they tend to get lost between the many errands in your quest log. What is most often missing is the personal involvement of the character in the story (honorable exception being the AoC destiny quest until level 20); most often the quest story is somebody else's problem, with the hero just being involved by accepting to help. Even supposedly evil characters are incredibly helpful to total strangers in MMORPGs.

I think quests would be more fun if there weren't quite as many of them, but they'd be more involved. Why not have one big quest line per zone, sending you here and there, but always keeping up one story line? The disadvantage of such a model would be finding a group for some step of a quest line, with everyone else being at some other step. But most people quest alone anyway, and other game activities like the WAR "public quests" (not a quest either, more like an event), or PvP scenarios, are more suited for players to play together. Stories are better told on an individual level, because in a group nobody has the time to read a story text or wait for a cutscene. Besides the big quest there could still be other motivations to not stay in one place too long, for example by introducing diminishing returns when killing the same mob too long. Instead of a a huge collection of short stories quests could become longer novels, with the player in the center as the hero of the story, with some personal involvement beyond just a reward. The starting quest line of the Death Knight in Wrath of the Lich King shows how that could be done.

In summary, quests serve a useful purpose right now, but I don't think this is already the end of the development. Running errands for some minor reward doesn't make the player feel like a hero, and it doesn't contribute much to the development of the personality. I don't know into what exactly this will evolve, but I'm sure there will be some improvement towards more involvement in the future.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Thoughts on first headstart day

So, as I mentioned, last night I was playing WAR in two windows on servers in two continents, and the game ran smoothly. Didn't experience any server problems either. But due to my router kicking me out twice, I spent a good while in the waiting queue for Destruction on my European server, while logging onto the US server Order side went much faster. We'll see if population balances out over time, especially if the more casual players come online on September 18th, hopefully preferring pretty Order elves and humans to ugly mutants and monsters. So I had opportunity to play two characters, and these are my thoughts on my first day.

Tobold the Bright Wizard on the US Averheim server had a great start. There was a war master, giving out the repeatable quest for the local scenario very close to the human starting point, so I took the quest, pressed the join scenario button, and got into a scenario before I could even kill my first mob. My first kill on that server was another player, not a mob, I'm in danger of losing all my anti-PvP credentials. I kept doing that scenario over and over, with little PvE questing in between, until I noticed that my renown rank was limited, and can't get past my PvE rank (level) before level 40. At that point I was level 4 in both PvE and PvP, and stopped doing scenarios for a while, to first bolster my PvE rank. You *do* get PvE xp when doing scenarios, but if you don't get the renown points as well, it feels like a waste. So I did some regular quests, and participated in a public quest for a while. The public quest was packed, with sometimes over 20 players. Mythic modified the public quest loot recently, so that with more players there are more loot bags handed out. But I only got one white (lowest sort) loot bag in three attempts, because with 20 players there are still over half going empty. On the positive side with 20 players the three stages of a PQ are done very quickly. I learned how to use my faster spells in those situations, because my main fireball spell has a casting time longer than the average lifetime of a mob in a crowded PQ. I like the Bright Wizard class, both for PvE and PvP. Great damage, and staying at maximum range works very well in PvP.

The Shaman was a bit harder to play. I already noticed that when I tried the Archmage in the beta, which plays the same: You need to get to about level 10 before the class really kicks off. Before you don't have enough damage spells, as every second spell you get is a healing spell. The other problem was that the same scenario tactic that worked so well with the Bright Wizard didn't work quite as well for the Shaman. The war master wasn't in the starting area, but a village further down the road, so it took me some time to find him. And then with more Destruction players online than Order the waiting queues for Destruction are necessarily longer. But I love the fact that you can join the scenario from anywhere, and be teleported right back to where you were afterwards, it allowed me to do PvE quests while queueing for PvP. Me coming into the European headstart 3 hours late also meant I was constantly facing level 10 players in renown 6 gear in the scenarios, which are tough if you are level 3 with a boost to level 8, but no gear. Again, good that I already tested the Archmage, I know Shaman will rock in PvP after gaining a few levels, it's just the newbie levels where it is a bit harder. I already enjoyed very much the Shaman PvP playstyle of mixing healing with damage spells for maximum efficiency. And even if I lost more scenarios than I won, I still got plenty of renown and experience points. I was luckier with the Shaman in public quests, there weren't quite as many people in the first greenskin PQ, and with a lucky roll I got the better green loot bag, and thus my first green item. Public quests of later chapters have blue, or even purple loot, but the first ones are limited to green.

I only played 4 hours combined on the two characters, and thus didn't get very far. But so far I'm enjoying both characters. And I was impressed how smoothly the game ran on the first day. The following days will need careful management of server populations, with more and more players coming online. But if Mythic and GOA can get past that, this looks like a very successful launch.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:50 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Out of the closet

Imagine you and me meet in a virtual world and have some sort of dispute, like the typical guild drama. And I go and blog about that dispute, ranting, telling only my side of the story, and naming you with character name, guild name, and server. My blog has a Google page rank of 5, if you have a half-way original name my rant about you would probably top any Google searches on it. And even if you replied in the comment section, I would have the power to delete that post. This sort of one-sided publication power tends to make people nervous, so since some guild drama a few years ago I have a strict "no names" policy on this blog. My European WoW / WAR guild knows who I am, but I'm not using Tobold as character name except for bank alts, and I'm not mentioning the name of my characters, or other player's characters, nor guild names, nor server names on my blog. In the virtual world I'm a closet blogger.

For the US version of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning I'm making an exception to that rule. I am playing a Bright Wizard named Tobold on the Averheim server, and I'm a member of the Casualties of War guild. The reason I'm out of the closet there is that half of the bloggers in the MMO blogosphere are also members of that guild. In the event of a guild drama, everyone will be able to post his version of events on his blog, which will probably lead to the MMO blogosphere exploding. :) But with everyone else blogging about his participation in CoW, there was no reason for me to hide it.

Not that I expect to be involved in some guild drama, I probably won't even see much of the guys there during the week, because of the time zone difference. Weekends might be different. Yesterday I actually leveled Bright Wizard Tobold more than my Shaman on the European servers. I had some hickups with my router before I reset it, and Destruction being more crowded than Order, the wait time to get back into the game were much shorter for the Bright Wizard than for the Shaman, who waited in queue for half an hour after every disconnect. So most of the night I had two copies of WAR running in windowed mode, each connected to a different continent. And the game ran just fine! I'd say WAR is having a good launch.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:21 AM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
Public apology to GOA

I'm an idiot. I entered the PBOB01 code instead of the PCEA01 code. The former is the open beta code, which *was* expired, which explains the error message I got. (Although I do wish error messages were a bit more explicit, like "That's an open beta code, you dumbass" in this situation, instead of "this key has expired"). The latter is the headstart code, which I should have noticed if I had read the leaflet correctly. My apologies to GOA, mea culpa, that one was completely my fault.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:45 PM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
This key has expired - WAR Europe headstart

I am now officially screwed out of my Euro WAR Collector's Edition headstart. The CE headstart key I received got borked, probably when I tried to use it during GOA's registration site troubles. Now when I try the new page for headstart code entry, I get an "this key has expired" error message. And when I try to log into the game with my closed / open beta userid and password, I get an authentication failure. Which means that the previous registration didn't work well enough to get me into the headstart, but did register enough to make my key useless. Worst of all possible combinations. :( And of course GOA doesn't have anything resembling a working customer support up.

[EDIT: My fault. I entered the wrong key. See apology in later post.]

I reacted in a typical MMORPG player fashion, in the completely crazy way that counts as "rational" in our circles: I quickly grabbed a SE preorder direct download from direct2drive.co.uk, so I at least have the SE headstart key for tomorrow. Rewarding GOA for failure, sounded like a good plan. Anyway, rumor has it that there isn't much of a difference, as the Euro CE headstart supposedly only starts at 7 pm my time, to be simultaneous with the US CE headstart (1 pm EDT). So I guess tonight I'll hope I can get into the US headstart with my media account, and assuming no further catastrophes I'll start in Europe tomorrow.

[EDIT: Rumor was wrong. European CE servers started at 3 pm CET, or 4 hours before the US. Unbelievable! And I'm still locked out. :( ]
- posted by Tobold @ 1:15 PM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Goon Squad and WAR

The Goon Squad is a notorious PvP guild from the Something Aweful forums, with the explicit goal to annoy other players in whatever game they are playing. So it caused some consternation on the VNBoards for the US Sylvania server that the Goon Squad is planning to play Destruction on Sylvania (and Order on Red Eye Mountain). It even caused some players and guilds to deliberately choose another server. Well, that's one way to win PvP, if you make your enemies give up before you even start.

But then again, reading their forums, it appears that the Goon Squad won't be all that happy in WAR. As I mentioned in my review, WAR PvP is pretty much carebear, which makes ganking rather difficult. I had to laugh when I read that Goon Squad chose core ruleset servers, because they found the open RvR ruleset "retarded". And in EVE the Goon Squad is famous for having thousands of members and working with zerg tactics, which doesn't work all that well on overpopulated servers with a population cap. They ruled out Skull Throne because apparently there were already lots of Destruction guilds going there, which would have meant long queue times when trying to create characters for the whole huge guild there.

What I like very much about WAR PvP is that you get rewards for active participation, without necessary having to win. There certainly will be well-organized PvP guilds which will be hard or impossible to beat, but you can still engage in PvP with them and come out with xp, renown, and cash for your efforts.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:49 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
GOA registration half-working

A bit later than scheduled, the GOA code registration for the WAR European headstart went life this morning. You can enter your e-mail, userid, password, and Collector's Edition headstart code. But what you can't do is log into your account and check whether you are in the headstart or not. When I try to enter my code, I get a message "key is expired". Does that mean something has gone wrong and I won't be able to play in the headstart? Or does that mean that some previous attempt to enter my key has gone through and I'm golden? Nobody knows, because not only is there no site to check it, but the e-mail notification of previous code entry successes didn't work. So I can only wait until the servers open and pray it works.

Meanwhile the Warhammer Online account site from EA / Mythic in the US works perfectly.

But the good news from European WAR is that apparently all the beta testers have been credited with 7 days of free play starting September 18th. That is great news insofar as I'm not certain whether my copy will make it into my mailbox by day 1, as I had to order from the UK. The 7 free days should be sufficient to tide me over until I get my release version key.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:01 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Open Sunday Thread

Sunday again, so the floor is yours. Write about what interests you, or what you'd like to see covered in this blog.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Are players more stupid than the AI?

This post evolved from yesterday's discussion about the weakness of melee dps in large scale PvP. I had observed that a mage or archer standing back and shooting at people isn't all that likely to get attacked in PvP, while a melee class sticking his head out by running to the frontline is getting targeted by everyone. But has anyone noticed that this is only true for PvP, while in PvE, as long as there are no taunts, mobs will run after the highest thread, wherever he stands? Are players more stupid than the AI in targeting only what is in front of their nose, instead of the ranged dps or healer in the background?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:37 AM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
My WAR open beta

Right now I'm waiting for the European open beta servers to come back up, GOA had a "technical issue" after patching to 4.1.1. one day late. As the open beta ends tomorrow, so Sunday the headstart period can begin, I guess that's the end of the open beta for me. So what did I do during this time? Not much, I have to say, due to a mix of various technical problems, and me being not that interested in a character that gets deleted a week later. So basically what I did is try out the Witch Elf class, by playing one to level 10.

First remark on the Witch Elf class is that there are no male witches, you need to play a female if you want to try that class. No problem, I'm not paranoid about playing female toons. But I must say it did bother me that in 10 levels I never ever found any item of clothing which would actually have covered her enough to not get arrested for indecent exposure in the real world. If you are the type who likes to look at nice ass all day, Witch Elf might be the class for you.

So I level my Witch Elf up doing a nice mix of PvE and PvP. The advantage of that is that I get up to renown rank 7, and get access to some very nice renown gear. But then I didn't do all that many public quests this time, which would have been the alternative for getting equipped. As Ryan Shwayder's Nerfbat says, public quests don't work all that well when too few people are online. Between the registration issues and the lower population caps for beta servers, there weren't always enough people around to really finish public quests. But I don't agree with Nerfbat that public quests are antisocial, when there were enough people around they usually helped each other instead of exploiting each other.

In PvE the Witch Elf is quite useful, especially with decent gear. In PvP the Witch Elf, well, what was the word, ah yes, SUCKS. Ranged classes are infinitely much better in PvP than melee classes, because enemy players you'd actually have a chance to kill usually just run away. After having played an Archmage, who with a mix of ranged dots and self-heals is very good in PvP, the Witch Elf was a huge disappointment. I actually once met an Archmage solo in a lonely corner of a scenario, and he had no problems killing me, although I was one level higher. I simply don't hit *that* fast that he can't heal himself. And at least in the levels I played him the Witch Elf doesn't have the stealth or stun abilities that make a melee dps Rogue viable in WoW PvP. I also duelled an Ironbreaker once, but this time he was a level higher than me, and melee dps don't look good against tanks anyway. I didn't do any keep combat (in the closed beta for keep combat I got boosted to level 18, in the open beta I didn't get any level boost when entering tier 2 RvR zones), but I didn't cherish the thought of defending a keep as Witch Elf either. Ranged classes can stand on the walls and rain down destruction. A Witch Elf has to run out to do anything, and bikinis don't do much for damage mitigation. For release I'll play a Shaman on European servers, and a Bright Wizard on US servers.

I also tested out talisman making as tradeskill. Thanks to some advice from a reader I finally found out how to make magical essence (it says you should salvage it, but in fact you should just click on it), and made one talisman that gave +2 toughness for 8 hours. Being relatively hard to make, needing a disenchanted magic item as well as other materials, I was a bit disappointed that the talisman has a time limit and doesn't work permanently like an enchantment. I guess for release I'll stick to apothecary, potions are more useful than that, at least while leveling.

After GOA finally let people who weren't in the closed beta register for the open beta, we founded our guild. One evening we got 9 people together, and decided to do some RvR together. First try we managed to get both groups into the same scenario, but lost badly against a hardcore PvP guild who had done the same thing. In the following attempts we always ended up with only one of the two groups in the scenario, until we gave up. Then we went and wanted to do some open world RvR, but most tier 1 zones were already fully under Destruction control. We found one corner with two Order-controlled battleground objectives, but taking that was rather easy. We met few Order players, and seeing a whole group of us, they all just ran away. Not very exciting, really. We should have done a public quest instead.

So, not the best open beta I ever had, but at least I learned more about the game, and know better what classes and tradeskills I don't want for release.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:30 PM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
How many of you are lore fans?

The closest I ever got to living the lore of a MMORPG was questing in The Shire as a hobbit in Lord of the Rings Online. Most other games I simply ignore the lore. In many cases it is far too generic, with no great story telling. But a reader sent me a question about how many percent of players do follow the lore, and I frankly don't know. I know it's more than 3, apologies for a snarky remark earlier, but I don't know how many more.

One problem with lore is that MMORPGs play on persistent worlds. Persistent not only in the sense that the world is still around when you log off; but also in the sense that monsters respawn, and five minutes after you rescueing the damsel in distress she'll be in captivity again and waiting for the next hero to free her. Many quest texts aren't exactly great fantasy literature. And even the best told story quest lines suffer from often being set up in a way that you are doing parts of them in between a dozen other quests, and by the time you get to the next part of the quest chain you don't remember the previous part any more. There are very few examples of engaging quest lines, like the book quests in LotRO or the destiny quest until level 20 in AoC. World of Warcraft gets something close to a destiny quest in the next expansion for starting Death Knights, but more often than not a quest line in WoW just means not being at the same step of the quest when you want to share it with others.

I think, but have no numbers whatsoever to support that, that a majority of players just click through quest texts without reading it. There is anecdotal evidence to that effect, like Blizzard having had to introduce a fast quest text option after a fast quest text mod turned out to be one of the most popular addons in the early game; or people in general chat asking for quest help which is contained in the quest text they didn't read. But I'm not sure if people ignore the lore because they don't like lore in general, or whether they, like me, just don't appreciate the current level of quality. I'm certain that MMORPGs could tell stories better, because I've seen better examples. There is a lot more that could be done with (optional) cut scenes and voice overs and using instances to simulate something changing in the world.

It somewhat reminds me of the early days of cinema, where movies were just "moving pictures", with not much story being told. People watched because the medium was new and interesting by itself. But soon they got used to the novelty, and demanded more, and then films started to tell stories. I still hope that story telling in MMORPGs one day raises to a level where I'll feel engaged with the lore.

So how about you? Do you enjoy the lore in its current state or do you just click through it? What are your examples for good and bad storytelling?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link  (42) comments Links to this post

 
Free speech for people who work on MMOs

So Mark Jacobs has a blog. And some people are unhappy about that. I think we can all agree that Mythic's way to communicate with their players is substantially different than those of other MMO companies. SOE and Blizzard are so tight-lipped, letting out only carefully screened statements, that they make the KGB look chatty. But is Mythic's way better or worse than the old way? Part of the problem is certainly that humans are creatures of habit, and blanket statements like "devs shouldn't blog about their current games" are often accepted just because it has always been that way. But if we changed our expectations, why shouldn't they be free to communicate their thoughts however they like?

Everybody has an opinion. So game company CEOs, developers, and customer service representatives have opinions too. The only possible problem there is how readers are able to tell if somebody is making an official statement, or whether he is just voicing an opinion. As the private opinion of Iain Compton I'd have to agree that death threats to GOA because their account site isn't working are "borderline sociopath". As the official statement of Iain Compton, English Community Manager, WAR Europe, I'd have to say that calling your customers "borderline sociopath" is bad PR. As the private opinion of Mark Jacobs, helpfully labeled with "in my opinion", I have to agree with him that Iain's remarks were "way out of line". But to other bloggers Mark appeared to be "throwing GOA under the bus" or "cock-blocking your community managers".

Me, I like Mark's blog (but then of course I've been bribed by him). I find statements like "I think I’d rather shoot myself in the head than do another ToA" very helpful is judging into what direction WAR will head in future expansions (Hint: Don't expect a PvE raiding dungeon expansion with epics.). But I do see the danger of everyone reading too much into every single remark. Even Mark jokes about it when he says "I personally favor destro (Suddenly the Net lit up, Mythic Devs favor Destro, Order become red-haired stepchildren, news at 11!) but I’ll play both I’m sure." Can you imagine Mike Morhaime saying which his favorite class or side in World of Warcraft is? That would be a headline in every single game blog and game site covering WoW!

Why can't we accept that people working on MMORPGs have personal opinions and favorites too, like the rest of us, and that this doesn't necessarily influence game design? These games are created by large groups of people, there are lots of checks and balances. Even Paul Barnett cannot necessarily get his favorite bears, bears, bears feature implemented for launch, even if there is a video of him promising it on the official website. Do you really believe that all 300 Warhammer Online developers suddenly say "lets favor Destruction in the realm balance, because Mark likes that side more"?

If we would learn to accept a more open communication from various game developers, in the end it would be us who would gain from it, by being better informed. I personally would prefer if there was one unique place where official statements were posted, like the WAR Herald, because you can't expect your customers searching every blog and game site for your official statements. But putting a copy of that statement on the Warhammeralliance forums for discussion, why not? Why should I be upset that Paul has a video blog and logs his live on Twitter? Wouldn't it be great if we could openly discuss game design with developers on their blogs? Wouldn't the genre be better off with more rockstars in full public view, instead of the omerta of other companies? We just need to learn that, just like rockstars, the devs are fallible. They might not be snorting coke and trashing hotel rooms, but they *will* say stupid things, and they *will* promise features that are never going to be implemented. But as long as we take what they say with a grain of salt, that is okay.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:31 PM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
Timing your entry

A reader sent me a mail with an interesting point for discussion: When is the best point to start playing a MMO, at launch or later? Hot subject insofar as I compared WAR to WoW and LotRO, and Serial Ganker sid67 and several commenters remarked that the validity of that comparison very much depends on whether I compare WAR at launch with WoW/LotRO at launch or WoW/LotRO years later.

World of Warcraft at launch had serious server problems and some quite annoying bugs, like being stuck in loot position. Blizzard fixed those bugs in the months after, and added a lot of content over time, in free content patches and one expansion. So for some time one can honestly say that WoW got better with time. On the other hand, WoW right now, pre-WotLK, is in some sort of a trough. If you started World of Warcraft right now as a brand new player, you'd have a rather lonely time leveling your character up. Leveling up in 2005, where you could easily find people to group with for every dungeon, was more fun than leveling up in 2008. Also how good a game is is very much a subjective thing. Many WoW veterans are kind of burned out, having been there, done that, and are getting bored, at least until the next expansion. Thus my on the surface conflicting statements that I will play WAR on release, but think that WoW is the better game. If you just finished reading the best book in the world, do you read it again, or do you read a new book which is not quite as good?

I always liked playing new games right from the start. For me MMORPGs are social games, and it is easier to play with other people when everyone is in the same level range. Leveling up in parallel with everybody else in your guild is more fun than joining later and playing catch up. But if you want to play from the start, you need to develop a thick skin regarding bug resistance. I already mentioned that I had some trouble recently with WAR, alt-tabbing out to see some website, or my virus scanner popping into the foreground for an update, and alt-tabbing back into WAR presented me with a black screen. So I had to shoot down WAR with the task manager, log back in, and promptly found myself in a waiting queue because the server was full. There are also bugs in the open beta (Mythic hopes to fix them still before release) with mobs that can't be attacked. Some jerks discovered how to exploit that in PvP when playing a pet class, attacking other player with a pet that can't be attacked. And I personally had a case where that bug prevented me from advancing a public quest. I also tried the tradeskill talisman making, and found that I couldn't place the magical essences into the recipe window, so even when I had all components I still couldn't make a talisman. Even with Mythic in full bug-fix mode, nobody in his right mind expects WAR to be completely bug-free on launch day. But hey, I played Anarchy Online on launch day, and Star Wars Galaxies, or more recently Age of Conan, which months after release still has more bugs than the WAR beta. I can survive bugs, as long as they don't prevent me from playing.

So whether you should join a new game on launch day or better some months later depends on what you are looking for. Many games had problems of lacking content on launch (can't really say that about WAR or WoW, but LotRO or AoC certainly fall in that category), and maybe you want to wait until they are more complete. But then you are missing all the release day fun, when every level 1 mob is camped by a dozen players. :) (Hint: If that happens to you in WAR, join a scenario queue, you earn xp there too, plus renown, and enemy players respawn faster than mobs.) Finding a guild, making new friends, playing together with others, all that is easier in the early days of a game. Plus some players consider MMOs as a race, where being the first to level to the cap or achieve something is considered a great achievement, and you can only do that if you start early.

For all those reasons most MMO players prefer starting a new game directly at launch. Which has serious consequences for the companies running those games. Industry rule of thumb is that later only 10% to 20% of your subscribers are online at the same time. On launch day you get 50% to 100%, because those who prefer to wait of course don't subscribe yet. So if your servers are totally well equipped to handle 20% of your subscribers at prime time, you can still run into trouble in the early days.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:28 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Vanguard free trial

Vanguard just introduced the Isle of Dawn with Game Update #6. This is a separate newbie area with a level cap of 10. And SOE plans to offer a free trial of Vanguard using that Isle of Dawn. It's not up yet, but is expected soon. Nice try, but the timing could have been better. MMO players will be kind of busy with a new game and an expansion for an old game coming out before christmas.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:51 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Better Mobs and Pitchforks!

Or what Mark Jacobs has to say on Toboldgate.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:37 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
WAR review

Some readers preferred that I do a specific WAR review with a recommendation of whether to play it or not, so here is my take on that. As I've already talked enough about how the game works, this post is pure opinion. I don't do scores, but rather prefer relative comparisons: Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is better than Age of Conan and Lord of the Rings Online, but not as good as World of Warcraft. This isn't to say that you should play WoW instead of WAR, because that totally depends on how burned out you are of playing World of Warcraft. If you've been there, done that all in WoW, WAR might be a good option, at least until Wrath of the Lich King arrives. So, lets have a look at various aspects of Warhammer Online to judge it by:

Graphics: As many people remarked, WAR graphics are somewhat similar to WoW's, being cartoonish instead of photorealistic. In my opinion that is a good thing, because photorealistic games have problems with high hardware requirements, and the Uncanny Valley. Nothing wrong with a game looking, well, like a game, and not like the real world. While similar, WAR's graphics are somewhat less cheery bright and colorful than WoW's, which is consistent with the grimmer lore. (Hah! Smooth transition to the next point!)

Lore: The Warhammer lore has a quarter of a century of accumulated material, a miniature game, a roleplaying game, and lots of books. It is considerably richer than WoW's lore, and more mature. Not Age of Conan's bare nipples kind of mature, but grim and serious. You won't meet any Haris Pilton selling gigantesque handbags in WAR. That is good. But there is also a serious downside: As Michael Zenke so correctly remarks, Destruction in the Warhammer lore is really, really evil. But only in the books. In Warhammer Online, playing a character on the Destruction side is exactly as good or evil as playing a character on the Order side. Dark Elves get quests to kill High Elves, but High Elves get quests to kill Dark Elves, so which of the two sides is "evil" is just a question of semantics. A Destruction character, just like any Order character, will spend a lot of time being helpful to complete strangers by running errands (aka quests) for them. In the Warhammer books the evil of Destruction might churn your stomach, but in the game this is unlikely to happen. WAR is more like a war between the red and the blue army than an epic struggle between good and evil.

Technical: I'm only talking about the game itself here, the European account registration site is a different chapter. Warhammer Online has less bugs than Age of Conan, but more than World of Warcraft. WAR is generally quite playable, but you *will* come across bugs, some of them annoying, in your daily gameplay. A week before release, and with Mark Jacobs' explicit statement that Mythic isn't doing miracle patches, the "this is just a beta" excuse for bugs is wearing thin. The current version 4.1 is rather solid, and improved things like pathing and the Tome of Knowledge. But it isn't bug free. You will still see some bad pathing, albeit less than in the first preview weekend, and you will come across mobs that can't be hit. My most hated bug: If you alt-tab out of the game and try to alt-tab back in, you are greeted by a black screen and can do nothing but shoot down the game with the task manager. But I finally managed to "fix" that problem by playing in windowed mode. Nothing game-breaking, but certainly one point to consider in our judgement.

PvE: Despite all the marketing hype praising WAR as a PvP game, WAR is a great PvE game. PvE fun might stop at the level cap, which is only 40. But for making alts and leveling them to the level cap without doing any content twice, WAR even beats WoW. You can level up at least 6 characters to 40 before doing any quest twice. And there are more character classes than in WoW, although I can't exactly say how many. Technically there are 20, but some are mirror images; an Archmage plays exactly like a Shaman. But not every class has a mirror image, so the number of different classes is somewhere between 10 and 20. And there are more different game mechanics than WoW has. WoW only has 3 right now, using mana, rage, or energy, with a 4th on the way for Death Knights using runes. WAR has more different basic mechanics right out of the door, but again I haven't played all the classes yet and thus don't have an exact count. Another great WAR PvE feature are public quests, which are a lot of fun. But WoW still keeps the PvE crown, because it has a wider variety of quests, and a huge PvE raid endgame.

PvP: I like WAR PvP. I'm a carebear. If you are a pre-Trammel UO, hardcore impact PvP fan, that should make your toes curl up: If I like WAR PvP, you won't. WAR does not have "meaningful" impact PvP with permanent consequences and the ability to free-for-all gank anyone you dislike. WAR has a solid system of carebear PvP, which is much better integrated with PvE than it is in WoW, and there is a whole lot more of it than in WoW. It just isn't much more permanent than in WoW. At best you can conquer the enemies capital, which will cause the map to reset a couple of days later. The keeps you conquer will be lost to a sneak attack at 3 am in the morning, unless you are crazy enough to organize a 24/7 substantial guard, armed with the telephone numbers of all your guild members, and your guild members are willing be woken up in the middle of the night to defend that keep. I think the WAR PvP is the best option for a mass market MMORPG, but the real hardcore PvP fans will certainly be disappointed by it. WAR PvP is substantially better than WoW PvP: Staying to the end is more important than winning, so no people afking out when they start to lose. But actual participation is better measured and rewarded than in WoW, so no people staying back in the cave and collecting rewards while absent either. Another great feature is good PvP reward gear for every level, not just epics for the level cap. In WAR you don't level up to the cap doing PvE and only then start with PvP. In WAR, just like the marketing slogan says, war is everywhere, you are best off if you do some PvP at all levels, and constantly switch between PvP and PvE. Maximum fun by maximum variety, a good concept.

Social: With open groups, public quests, and living guilds, WAR beats WoW easily in social functions. It is a lot easier to play together with a bunch of strangers in WAR than it is in WoW. Groups in WAR are inclusive, the more the merrier; groups in WoW are exclusive, you better take the right mix of classes, levels, and talent builds. But while in WoW "pickup group" is a dirty word, a good group in WoW is a marvelous machine of collaboration, and WAR is missing that somewhat. The social dynamics are very different, you group easier with strangers, but you don't feel that much of a bond with some once you finished beating that public quest together with them. It remains to be seen how that works out for WAR guilds; in principle it is easier to do something together with all online guild members, regardless of class or level, in WAR than it is in WoW. But by making cooperation easier, the level of trust required is necessarily less high. WAR will probably have a lot less guild drama than WoW, but we will have to wait and see whether a WAR guild raiding a keep will feel the same level of connection as a WoW guild raiding a dungeon.

In summary, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is a good game, albeit not perfect, and it will have some problems living up to the excessive marketing hype from Mythic. It is certainly worth buying and trying out for a month or two. But I honestly don't know yet whether I will play WAR or WotLK in December. And I certainly can't tell *you* which game to play. But I would suggest you give WAR a chance while Blizzard is still building their expansion. WAR has enough good, and new, features to justify giving it a try. Don't let anyone tell you it's just a WoW clone! Recommended!
- posted by Tobold @ 6:00 AM Permanent Link  (54) comments Links to this post

 
Toboldgate

Not only did I have to laugh about the Toboldgate title, but the analysis of Boathammer is pretty much spot on: Critics get free samples all the time, so why exactly shouldn't a MMORPG critic get a free subscription from a MMO company that wants him to cover their game? Every single video game review you'll read in a print magazine is based on a free copy of that game. And as I am certain that Mythic hasn't created that free media subscription program only for me; I'm sure that at least a bunch of print magazine journalists got exactly the same free subscription. They just didn't mention it, probably because they thought it was perfectly normal, and for me it was something unusual.

I think the main question in the MMO blogosphere is more along the "Why him? Why not me?" axis. Some people seem to be rather miffed at me. Ethic from Kill Ten Rats felt it necessary to post a "we would never accept any free subscription" manifest, and then blocked comments to that thread. Which is easy to write if you didn't get a free subscription offered in the first place. Honestly, how many bloggers would have refused a free subscription to WAR or any other major MMO?

I have no idea whether I am the only blogger who got one, or just the only blogger admitting he got one. And I don't know either why I received it. Was it my Paul Barnett interview? The 3,000 visitors per day, or 2,000 feed subscribers? My Blizzard press pass, on the logic that if Blizzard thinks I'm press then the other companies follow? Even if I'm the first, you might find solace in the thought that I probably won't be the last. Your blog might be the next big thing if you put enough effort in it, and if it becomes customary for MMO companies to hand out freebies, then maybe one day you'll get one too. It is not as if we bloggers had a huge income from our activity, so some recognition is nice.

I consider the value of that free subscription to be somewhere around $200, based on the fact that I bought a lifetime subscription for LotRO for that amount, and that the monthly fee of LotRO and WAR are similar. For me $200 is not really a huge amount of money, it is less than what I make in a day in my job. I would be disappointed in you if you thought that I could be bought for that little. But if you really think that I'm in Mythic's pocket now and won't be able to write anything unbiased from now on, I'd recommend not reading my WAR coverage and especially not my upcoming WAR review.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:57 PM Permanent Link  (35) comments Links to this post

 
Should Europeans play WAR on US servers?

A lot of European WAR fans are currently considering the option of playing Warhammer: Age of Reckoning on US servers instead of on GOA European servers. Can't really blame them, GOA hasn't done much to earn our confidence. Big announcements of how nothing could possibly go wrong, then things going wrong, radio silence followed by apologies, and the account site still not working: No wonder some people think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. The US has a working account site, and an open beta which by all reports is running quite well.

But playing on US servers has serious downsides. One is ping, the time between something happening on the server, the information getting to you, and your reaction travelling back to the server. I have no actual measurements for WAR, but for other games I observed about 50 ms ping to Europeans servers, and over 200 ms ping to US servers. Okay, that's only fractions of a second, but in a heated PvP battle fractions of a second can make all the difference.

The other big downside is time zones, I blame Copernicus. :) WAR, much more than WoW, is a social game. You *want* to be online when everyone else is online, be it for public quests or for PvP. Europeans live 6 to 9 time zones ahead of the US, so unless you play day and night anyway, you're not going to be online much during US prime time. Your US guild plans a big keep raid event, but they'll schedule it for the time when they are all online, which is 3 am in the morning for you. Been there, done that, it's not a good idea.

Of course for me it is easy to be confident that WAR will run on launch day in Europe, as I have that free US account as backup (Side note: Anyone noticed that I'm the only one reporting to have got one? I can't believe Mythic created that service just for me. There must be lots of game journalists and maybe even bloggers out there who also received one of those and kept mum.). But I'm really hoping that the European launch goes well, even if the open beta didn't. I want to play on European servers, not only for the ping and time zone, but also because my guild and all my friends will be on the Euro servers.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:07 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
GOA: Age of Registering

Stealing a bad pun from Book of Grudges, this is the third day in the ongoing saga of registering for the European WAR open beta, run by GOA. The account registering page is currently down. The reason for that is that the temporary page put up yesterday allowed people to register, but the infrastructure behind it wasn't able to support the load, and didn't send out the confirmation e-mails. So even those who were able to register still aren't in the game. As the open beta ends, and the headstart period starts, in less than a week, this is starting to get serious. We aren't even sure yet we will able to register for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning in Europe on launch day. Right now any statement from GOA how confident they are that nothing could possibly go wrong with that would just be laughed at.

This is in stark contrast to the US WAR open beta, which is running just fine by all accounts, with no problems whatsoever reported on registering. And I'm not buying the excuses how hard it is for GOA to have a simultaneous release with the US, just because WoW had a European launch 3 months after the US launch. After all, that excuse is only valid for WAR itself, not for the account page. The GOA account software is completely separate from the EA one, so they can hardly claim they had to do last-minute localization on it. Plus the foolhardy decision to only start the account registering service a few hours before the open beta started was GOA's, as documented by their various declarations of how confident they were.

On the bright side communication has improved by leaps and bounds. The official WAR Europe site is now giving frequent updates on the situation. You don't have to search various game sites and blogs any more to get the latest official news, which was a silly way to do it in the first place.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:00 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Spore Review

Spore is the best 4X space game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate) since the original Master of Orion. It revives that flagging genre by making it easily accessible, real-time, with intuitive controls, removing the micromanagement, and making it very, very personal. Instead of your various fleets battling the AI's various fleets, your only control one space ship, followed by a few allies. You still beat the AI's various fleets, because your ship is more powerful, and just like a MMO avatar simply resurrects when destroyed. In Spore your space ship is *you*, whatever you do, wherever you want to do it, you first need to fly your space ship there. Oh, and Spore also comes with 4 mini-games for children before that space phase, covering the cell, creature, tribe, and civilization stages. But those stages are simplistic, easy, and short, and ultimately without consequences.

The game starts with the cell stage, where you steer an amoeba through an seemingly endless ocean, eating food and trying not to get eaten. You start out having a mouth to eat, eyes to see, and flagella to move. Pretty soon you'll find a "piece of DNA" for a sting as weapon, and with the points you acquired from eating food you can go to the creature generator and modify your creature. You can modify shape, color, and the position of your various parts. But if you remove any parts, you'll quickly learn that you cannot function. You *need* a mouth, eyes, and some means of propelling yourself. If you want to kill other amoeba to gain their DNA, you need some weapon, although you can finish this stage without doing that.

Once you've eaten enough food, you can evolve to the creature stage, which at first only involves adding some legs to your creature. You'll see a nice animation of your creature reaching the shore, and a summary history of your previous stage, something you'll get between any two stages in Spore. You'll quickly realize the biggest disappointment of moving from one stage to the next: Your actions and evolution of the previous stage have very little consequences on the next stage. For example when you reach the creature phase, you lose all DNA and parts you collected in the cell phase. The only consequence of the cell stage to the creature stage is a bonus ability based on whether your cell was herbivore, omnivore, or carnivore.

The creature stage is cute, and simple. Like in the cell stage you create a creature, but now in 3D, shaping a body, attaching arms, legs, eyes, mouth, and various decorations to it. The body parts give you various abilities, peaceful ones like singing, dancing, or striking a pose, or attack abilities like charge or strike. In the peaceful, herbivore version you walk over a huge landmass meeting other creatures and try to impress 3 creature of the same type for a reward. The creatures you meet are either premade from Maxis, or are creatures you created in the past, or creatures other players created and which the game downloaded via the internet. Endless possibilities, so endless that Maxis included a ban button if you encounter a walking penis. You impress them by starting communication, after which the other creature will perform one of 4 possible peaceful activities, like song or dance, and you must mimic it, doing the same activity. With advancement comes the ability to add allies, making your performances more impressive. When you impress some alpha creature, you get a piece of DNA, and other pieces can be found on animal skeletons. The DNA pieces allow you to improve your various abilities, or just decorate your creature in strange ways. In the carnivore version you attack the other creatures instead, for the same rewards. In both cases you fill up an advancement bar at the bottom of the screen, and when it is full you get to proceed to the tribal phase.

Attention! At the creature to tribal stage advancement you get a final chance to modify your creature, after that its look remains the same for the rest of the game. This is important because you might have added some features to the creature that are ugly, and you just needed them for a higher rank in something. Also, as the game expressly warns you, you should add arms to your creature at this point if you haven't done so before (they aren't strictly necessary for the creature stage). This is a completely cosmetic exercise: The abilities you collected in the creature phase are absolutely irrelevant for the following phases, you just get another bonus depending on how you played that phase. So instead of using the mouth that gives you the best singing score, you might want to use one that makes your creature look nicer, as you'll be stuck with that look. But then again that only really matters for the tribal phase, while you technically still have the same creatures in the civilization and space stage, you'll rarely ever see them.

The tribal stage is very similar to the creature stage, in that you need to either impress or suppress the other tribes. You impress them by arming your tribe with various musical instruments and play those that the other tribe requests. You suppress them by attacking them. Instead of DNA pieces you collect new buildings for your tribe, and new equipment, which again gives various stats. Besides interacting with the other tribes, you also collect food from plants or animals. Once you've done all tribes, you advance to the civilization stage.

The civilization stage is again divided into a peaceful and a military option, only now the two play the same way. Either you bombard other cities with religious messages, or you bombard them with artillery. You can construct land, air, and water vehicles, of military or religious type. The religious ones you can equip with huge organs, gongs, and megaphones to get your message across, very funny. Whatever you build in the vehicle editor comes out with health + speed + attack power = 100, you just have to decide where to put how many points in by adding the various components. Again, once you conquered by military or religion every city on the planet, you advance to the space age. At this point you get to design your space ship. It doesn't matter what you add, this is just for looks. But as you are going to fly that space ship for a very long time, you might want to make it pretty.

Finally you are in the real game, the space stage. While the previous stages can be rushed through pretty quickly, the space stage can be played near endless. In this stage Spore has a very impressive zoom function. If you zoom in to the max, your space ship hovers close to the ground on some planet, and you can see the wild creatures and plants. There are many different plants, and all the endless creations from the creature phase. You can then zoom out to the orbit, to the solar system, to the galaxy, and so far out that you see the whole galaxy before you. Which you will have to do at some point, as one of you're goals is to find the center of the galaxy, which is a lot easier with zooming out than with using the distance and angle indicator. You can zoom in and out from grass level to galaxy level, and you'll be zooming to various distances constantly throughout the game. I finally got tired using the mouse button for that, and used the CTRL+ and CTRL- keyboard shortcuts instead.

In the space stage you start with the planet you conquered in the civilization stage, which is producing one color of spice. You have a building editor to create houses, factories, and entertainment buildings, but the editor is purely cosmetic, every factory works the same. In the colony editor you place factories, houses, and entertainment buildings in every city. The more factories you place, the higher is your space production, but they also cause unhappiness. Entertainment buildings produce happiness to counter that. Houses are neutral, and produce what the buildings next to them produce. In your starting system the buildings are extremely cheap, but your spice production is rather low. You load the spice on your space ship, leave your solar system, and start exploring neighboring planets. In other solar systems you can find other civilizations, with which you can trade, form alliances, or do war. Or you can find empty systems, which you can colonize, and gather other colors of spice.

You can also do missions, at first for your own civilization, then for others, to gain their favor. The missions range from the typical Fedex "bring me something from planet X" to more complicated eradications of infected creatures somewhere, or even warfare against some other civilization. The missions for your own civilization are especially well done, because they act like some sort of tutorial, explaining you all the possible activities in the game.

Spore has a very nice achievement system, with rewards linked to your activities. You don't research new technology, you get it as reward for doing things, and what you get is connected to what you are doing. For example there are achievements related to how many solar systems you explored, and in consequence you'll get a "Frequent Flyer" badge which unlocks better drives for your space ship. Apart from achievements there are collections, so you can go hunting for sets of artifacts all over the galaxy if you want. Spore is pretty much the dream game for explorers.

In summary, I'm enjoying Spore very much, but mostly the last part, the space stage. I don't mind playing through the previous stages, because they are short enough, but in the end most of the effort you put into creating your creature is lost. Fortunately you can even skip the first 4 parts once you unlocked the space stage. The first two stages are probably suited as game even for young children. As the space stage is a very good game in its own right, I'd consider the first 4 stages just as some sort of bonus. Seen as a space 4X game, Spore is very good, and provides many hours of fun. Maybe not the revolution some people have been hoping for, but a thorough modernization of the genre. Recommended!
- posted by Tobold @ 6:18 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Virtual lynch mobs

Over at Mark Jacob's blog the man is complaining about the threats and insults that the GOA account fiasco evoked from some customers. On the one side Mark certainly has a point: People say things on the internet that they would never dare to say to your face. I had my share of that, and I can feel his pain.

On the other hand Mark should be happy that his customers react in this irrational way, by posting foul language on some forums to blow off steam. Because the alternative would be customers reacting in a completely rational way and cancelling their pre-orders. MMO players *are* crazy like that, they complain in the most extreme form possible, but keep on paying every month. Most companies would be happy about customers like that, because in the end customers voting with their wallets hurt a lot more than any bad insults.

And of course the situation was made worse by Mythic's "we don't need no steeenking official forums" policy. At one point on Saturday this very blog was the place with the most up to date official information on the subject, even if it was a statement that community manager Iain probably regrets now, that nothing could possibly go wrong. Sorry, there aren't that many people reading this blog. Official information about what is going on belongs on an official site. If you get all the discussion about what is going wrong on your own forums, you can delete the most excessive threats and insults. Mythic's way to make official posts on forums they don't own takes forum moderation out of their hands, while still giving those forums enough officialness to become the target for all verbal attacks.

Anyway, I won't allow any virtual lynch mobs on my blog, against anyone. It is okay to be angry and to vent it, but not by using excessive personal attacks and threats. Calling GOA "incompetent" and threatening to cancel is totally okay. The anonymous "DEATH TO GOA" post is certainly *NOT* okay. There is quite a lot that can be intelligently said about the hubris of GOA without resorting to virtual lynching.

And GOA promised the account servers would be up in 20 minutes from now. Fingers crossed.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:23 PM Permanent Link  (32) comments Links to this post

 
GOA apology and other WAR news

So GOA had to roll out their CEO for a public apology:

"Dear all,

I rarely address players directly, but I wanted to write you as too few of you have been able to access the open beta today.

As my team explained in the previous post, although we have opened the servers and corrected numerous issues during the last 24 hours but we have not yet solved the issue of saturated Open Beta key activations that we’re currently experiencing. I am sincerely sorry for this, and I understand all the frustration the situation has spawned.

Today was a dark day. We expected a massive influx of players, but reality was even harsher.
I personally commit that we will communicate to you as clearly as possible on the resolution of these current issues. My goal is to give Warhammer Online the success it deserves. Be ensured that all GOA teams, with Mythic’s support, are working hard to bring you the best possible game experience.

Best regards,
Ghislaine Le Rhun
GOA CEO"

Unfortunately GOA is still slightly delusional about their success, as witnessed in their other post on the situation:

"We have encountered serious problems with the authentication system since this morning, while the stability of the game servers, the speed of the patcher and the performance of the downloader have all been satisfactory. This issue, combined with an exceptional amount of traffic and a fault which was not identified during the extensive tests we ran on our platform has unfortunately limited the access to our servers to only a few of you along with our closed beta testers who had already been a part of the closed beta."

Hey, GOA! Didn't it occur to you that the stability of the game servers etc. might be satisfactory because there are only a handful of people who can actually access them? We simply have no idea what will happen to the servers once the account site is up and everyone tries to get into the game.

How is the situation in North America? Did everything start smoothly there, account site and servers?

At least we got some info about realm balance hidden in the official update on WarhammerAlliance:

"Server caps
Previous closed beta testers are being let in. We are successively allowing more and more players join. The current population cap is 500 players per realm (so 1000 max players online per server) with an additional 1500 players in queue. We will raise both the online and queue caps by roughly 25% every few hours. This is a delicate process, vital in keeping the servers and starting zones in good shape. Reports from QA reveal that our Open Beta servers have indeed performed very well since they were brought online, as those of you who can currently play can surely attest to."

So there are separate caps for Order and Destruction, which at least initially (when the servers are full) should work to balance things out. Of course that means that if you want to play the more popular side, you might end up in a situation where you are waiting in queues much longer, or are forced to play the other faction.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:45 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
GOA WAR Europe account site not working

What a surprise! GOA opened their account site to enter pre-order beta codes only hours before the open beta starts, and now the site isn't working. If you create a new account you get stuck at the third page, where you are supposed to type the letters shown in a captcha image, but no image is actually displayed. If you try to log in with an existing account, you get a "unable to process your request" error message.

Lets all say together: "I told you so!"

[EDIT: 7 pm, the European WAR servers have been up for 2 hours now. Only there are barely any players, population is shown as "low" on nearly all of them. That is because only the closed beta players are currently in the open beta. The European WAR account site from GOA is official "down for maintenance", aka "we haven't got a clue why it isn't working, but we're trying to fix it anyway".]

[EDIT2: 11 pm. Account site still not working. GOA posts an official update on Warhammeralliance saying "To the account pages. Well, that's another story. They've been down or not working very well for most of the day. Sorry, about that." The WAR account thread on Freddyshouse reaches 99 pages, I'm sure it'll be 100 by midnight. Who here is starting to get a bad feeling about launch day?]
- posted by Tobold @ 12:25 PM Permanent Link  (36) comments Links to this post

 
Bears, bears, bears

Paul Barnett is a highly intelligent guy with boundless enthusiasm. The combination makes for great stand-up comedy, and one of his best performances is the famous "bears, bears, bears" video, part of a Mythic production video podcast on quests (#7). In the video Paul explains why it is stupid for a quest giver to not know that you already killed lots of bears, just because you didn't have the quest yet, or because you didn't find the bear paws. He promised the kill collectors, NPCs that will reward you for any mob you kill. Quote: "If you wander along and see a lot of monsters and you're not so sure whether you should harvest them, remember somebody, somewhere wants them dangling on a chain."

I found the idea very interesting. So after making my first character, a dwarf, and doing the first couple of quests, I made a second character, another dwarf. I knew what monsters I had to kill for the first couple of quests, so I didn't take the starting quests, I just went and killed 4 squigs first, going to the quest giver later. Big disappointment: The quest giver completely ignored what I had already killed, and asked me to go and kill 4 squigs. Only much later did I stumble upon my first kill collector quest NPC. They exist, and they will give you some xp reward per mob you killed, but only for some very specific mob type. I haven't seen more than 1 kill collector per zone yet, and they only reward you for one type of mob, and it usually isn't the mob you were likely to kill anyway. The video made me think the whole game would work like that, every quest would allow "reverse questing", where you kill the mob first and get the quest later. But that is not the case. Kill collectors are in the game, but they are a minor feature, not a complete reversal of how quests work.

Meanwhile I had mentioned Paul in a blog entry somewhere, and called him Paul "Bears, bears, bears" Barnett. And Paul saw that, laughed, and wrote me an e-mail. That was just after my interview with J. Allen Brack from Blizzard, so Paul told me he wasn't hiding either, which ultimately lead to me having the opportunity to interview Paul Barnett. But my first response to him was that I would have to revoke his "bears, bears, bears" nickname, as the feature wasn't really in the game. As this was during closed beta, I couldn't write about it at the time, but now the NDA dropped, and we enter open beta today.

Paul explained me that he personally would have liked the kill collector feature to work for every quest. Warhammer Online already memorizes all your kills in the Tome of Knowledge, so rewarding you after the deed even if you didn't have the quest would have been technically possible. So he has "been running a one man campaign to get this feature into the game". Due to other things being more urgent (like the pathing issue, now more or less resolved), the feature didn't make it into the game for launch. But "it is scheduled for post launch and is on the white board for Paul's big moans".

Note that the actuall kill collector quest NPCs work somewhat different: They reward you for every single mob you killed of a certain type. In the closed beta some of these rewards were too high, and for mobs that were too frequent, like the dark elf kill collector in the starting area giving you extra xp for every high elf you killed, with nearly every other quest asking you to kill high elves anyway. Huge amounts of extra xp, while other races only got a kill collector quest for some rather rare spiders. You basically doubled the xp for everything you were doing anyway. That made me somewhat critical of the kill collector feature. But I think what Paul wants isn't that unlimited extra xp for every kill thing, he just wants reverse questing. If you meet a troll on your way and slay him, and meet a quest NPC later who asks you to kill 3 trolls, you'd already have one of them done. If you had killed hundreds of trolls, you would get the whole quest reward, but wouldn't be rewarded any more than if you just had killed 3. If you were rewarded extra for every kill, people would start looking up third-party database sites to find where the kill collector for the mob they just killed hundreds of were. But if it's limited to getting quests done before you receive them, it's just a nice extra feature so you don't have to kill things twice. I hope that makes it into the game one day.

Meanwhile Jeff Hickman and Josh Drescher gave a very interesting interview on Game Focus, where they answered a question about what the biggest challenges were with "making good on all the promises we've been making, especially those Paul has made". :) So, we might still see that bears, bears, bears feature working for every single quest sometimes later in the game, but not for launch.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:49 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Open Sunday Thread

Time is flying these last days, can't believe it's Sunday again already! So again the blog is all yours, use this open Sunday thread to talk about anything you like, or propose subjects for discussion later in the week.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
Virtual hotels

How mainstream have virtual worlds become? Somebody sent me a link to a travel blog, which normaly reports on real places, but did a post on virtual hotels. Declaring WoW dungeons as "hotel", just to get the biggest MMORPG into the series is a bit of a stretch. But the other 5 are virtual hotels all right, like Habbo Hotel or some hotels in Second Life. By reporting on virtual space in media normally reserved for real world spaces, the writer must have assumed that people are sufficiently familiar with the concept to be interested.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:21 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
Full disclosure on my relationship with Mythic

In the interest of full disclosure I'd like to tell you that I accepted a free subscription for the US version of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Yeah, I know, it smells like a bribe, but my reporting on WAR is not going to be influenced. It's hard to remain too principled if somebody is sending you a code telling you that it is valid for all beta phases and the live game itself.

Nevertheless I will still pay for WAR, because my main activity will be on European servers, where my guild is. Playing WAR on a US server means not only a slower ping (not good in a PvP game), but also being 6 to 9 timezones ahead of everyone. I was in a US guild for other games, and it didn't work out, with guild events constantly scheduled for what was 3 am for me.

But then, getting into the European servers might not be all that easy. It's 24 hours before the open beta starts, and the GOA account site is still not up. European community manager Iain Compton posted this comment on my blog yesterday:

"Firstly, there is no doubt about whether Europeans will get an open beta. We announced this in the last newsletter and confirmed it yesterday in our news. The EU open beta has never been in any danger of being postponed, canceled or otherwise missed.

Secondly our website has already been dealing with traffic that makes the expected rush for signups pretty trivial. We get more visits per day that the total number of open beta keys in existence across the world. We have launched major timed events before and we have a lot of experience in making sure that key systems are able to handle the pressure. The account pages are coming, they have been tested thoroughly and we aren't concerned about the stability of the server."

Well, excuse me for being sceptical. I promised I'll keep you all updated on the development, but honestly I wouldn't be surprised if some people never got to enter their open beta codes they paid some pre-order fee extra for.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:15 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
Currently installing: Spore

On my way home I picked up Spore in a local shop. Of course local in Belgium means that I have the choice between a French and a Dutch version. But on installing the game I get a wide selection of languages, and can install Spore in English. Kudos to EA for not being too narrow-minded with their localized versions!

So with the GOA account site still down, I'll play Spore this weekend and tell you what I think of it next week.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:05 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
WAR is everywhere - except Europe

Today Mythic starts the second WAR preview weekend, which will be immediately followed by the start of the open beta on Sunday. But that is true only for the US. Europe didn't get any preview weekends, neither the first nor the second. And there is still doubt whether we will get an open beta: We did get pre-order codes with a "guaranteed" spot in the open beta, but up to now the website where you could enter that code was never up.

Think of it! Two days before the open beta and the account site where you have to enter your code to get into the beta isn't up yet and never was. The minute the site opens it will obviously be overrun by hundreds of thousands of players all trying to sign up at the same time, equivalent to a Denial of Service attack that will in all likelyhood shut down the site faster than it opened.

Given the fact that WAR over here costs $18.75 per month (Euro 12.99), I really can't understand why Europe gets so much worse service than the US. Are they actually trying to scare away their best paying customers?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:59 AM Permanent Link  (33) comments Links to this post

 
Paying for advancement

Blizzard's latest recruit-a-friend program, with it's triple xp and free levels, made a number of people recruit themselves as "friend", and start dual-boxing WoW for faster advancement. WoWInsider reports how to get from level 1 to level 60 in 20 minutes. But of course you need to pay for a second account to get all the benefits. So if you look closer, you are actually paying real money for faster advancement.

In Wizard101, which I just subscribed to, you can buy a second currency called "crowns" on the website. In game you can then exchange the crowns for gold, or buy special sets of epics for level 5+, level 10+, level 15+, level 20+ etc., which are much better than the gear you can get from questing and adventuring. The crown-bought gear increases your health, your mana, your spell damage, and reduces your chance to fizzle and the damage you take. Plus you get some extra spells. Again you pay real money for in-game stuff that makes you advance faster.

In the case of WoW and Wizard101 that is double-dipping, first they charge you a monthly fee, then they charge you a second time if you want to advance faster. More classic are the huge number of free-to-play games with microtransactions. In many cases you can pay for scrolls or items that grant temporary double xp or gold, thus making you advance faster.

If you consider a MMO like any other game, paying to advance faster seems wrong, a form of cheating. You couldn't imagine paying for an extra queen in chess to win games. But then MMOs aren't really like other games: Skill and luck only play a limited role in how fast you advance. The most important factor in nearly all MMORPGs is how much time you have to play. People playing twice as many hours advance twice as fast. Nobody remotely believes that the players who will get the new "first to reach level 80" titles in Wrath of the Lich King are those who are the most skilled. It will be those who either catass, that is play day and night with just minimum interruption for life's most basic necessities, or those who share accounts and play a character 24/7 in shifts.

So if you can advance faster by spending more hours, then why not allow similar advancement for money? After all, time is money, and people with jobs and family could well be willing to rather spend dollars than endless hours in front of the computer. The flaw in that argument is the premise that advancing faster is better. Do you watch DVDs on fast-forward so you can watch the same movie in half the time? Certainly not! The movie director timed the movie in a way that it is entertaining at its normal speed, and in fast-forward you'd miss most of what's going on. And the same is true for MMORPGs: The original leveling speed in World of Warcraft isn't so bad, at least not for your first character. If somebody actually used the Recruit-a-friend program to recruit a friend who never played WoW before, I'm not sure he's doing him a favor to speed him through the game at triple speed. The moral hazard for game companies is that by selling ways to advance faster, they are tempted to design the game in a way that the most fun speed is the one you have to pay extra for, while the no-pay default speed is feeling slow and grindy. If a game is designed so that players are tempted to pay to skip parts of it, there is obviously something wrong with that game.

If the different speed of advancement of the catasses and the casual players becomes too much of a problem, I'd prefer a Chinese solution: A character can only earn full xp for 3 hours a day, and gets no xp and loot at all after playing 5 hours. People who want to play more, need to play several alts. But at least the difference between the fastest character to level to the cap and the average isn't as huge any more. Better restrict the unhealthy behavior than encouraging it with extra titles.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (28) comments Links to this post

 
Google Chrome - The price of simplicity

I was reading in the online version of a German newspaper an article about Google Chrome, the new internet browser from Google to rival Microsoft's Internet Explorer (or rather put Firefox out of business). So I click on the link given there, download and install Google Chrome, and of course due to the German link Google Chrome installs itself in German. I don't want German, I want English. I uninstall Google Chrome, surf to the English Google Chrome site, download and install Google Chrome again. Hooray! Now I got it in English. I surf to my Google personalized homepage, and find that this is now in German. What the heck! Check the same page out in IE7, where it is still in English. Fiddle with all Google Chrome and Google personalized settings for 15 minutes, but can't manage to get my Google personalized homepage back to English. I can set Google to have English as preferred language for search results, but that doesn't affect the personalized homepage. And because the page is in German now, the Google news gadgets now only give me German news instead of international news. It's frustrating! So I'm back to Internet Explorer.

Google Chrome is fast and simple, having a lot less buttons and setting than Internet Explorer. Many people will like that. But my personal experience taught me that there is a price to pay for that simplicity: The internet didn't suddenly get less complicated by switching browsers; Google Chrome just appears simpler by making educated guesses about what you might want. If it gets those guesses right, everything is fine. If it gets those guesses wrong, you're in deep shit trouble, because now everything is so well hidden under the hood that even simple settings like your preferred language become invisible. If you want any settings that are not standard, you're out of luck, and might need to resort to fiddling with a registry editor to get things like you want them.

Microsoft has often been accused of being an evil empire. But at the moment I'm not so sure if Google isn't about to become the next evil empire, and worse than Microsoft. I constantly run into problems with Google applications trying to impose their will on me, or not working. Language settings are a big problem, sometimes I get everything in Dutch, just because I live the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. I don't even speak Dutch! Why can't Google see that I installed an English version of Windows XP and clearly indicated there that I want everything in English? Why does Google have to try to be more clever than my settings, and make guesses at what language I want to have my pages in based on my IP address? What if I took a trip to China? And programming Google gadgets in a way that they crash Internet Explorer is either sloppy work or a low blow to get people to switch to Google Chrome.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:03 AM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post

 
Darkfall

Darkfall is an MMO which has been under development for 7 years. Once in a while the devs send out video trailers or something, trying to get blogs and game sites to write about that game, and they often oblige. But I don't believe in Darkfall. There is a 50% chance that it is vaporware anyway, and will never be released. And the other 50% are covered by the case that the game is released, and flops horribly. Darkfall is advertised as having totally unlimited PvP, including the option to completely loot all the gear of the player you just killed. That might have sounded like a good idea in 2001, but in 2008 a game like that simply won't fly. So in spite of getting mails or comments sometimes asking me about Darkfall, I don't want to waste my time writing about that game.

If you want to know more about Darkfall, check out The Ancient Gaming Noob. He has it covered.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Wizard101 released

Wizard101 went live today. I already mentioned the free trial and the $9.95 monthly fee. But now there is also a 6-month subscription for $49.95 and a 12-month subscription for $79.95. And for this week only there is also a special offer, where you can get the first 12 months for $60. Hmmm, another offer I couldn't refuse. I subscribed for a year, because at $5 a month the game is quite reasonably priced.

I already mentioned the child protection features. So if you want to meet me in game, send me an e-mail, and I'll get a "true friend code" from the game to mail back to you. The code is valid for 48 hours, and would allow you to chat with me and even teleport to my location if we are both online. As I said, no guilds in that game, but only networks of friends.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:01 PM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
The state of LotRO

That pipeweed must be powerful stuff, because other than what he was smoking I can't find a good explanation for Turbine's Jeffrey Steefel claiming that Lord of the Rings Online will be the next big thing in mass-market MMO successes. Thanks, Jaxom, for alerting me to that article.

I agree with him that there are several steps of success for a MMO, step 1 being to make a viable game, and step 2 being getting enough subscribers to be profitable. And I'm sure LotRO got to that step. But step 3, market dominance, seems to be totally out of reach for LotRO. Even with the Mines of Moria expansion and The Hobbit movie.

Of course it is hard to say how successful exactly LotRO really is, Turbine doesn't release any sales or subscription numbers. Even if we had subscription numbers, they wouldn't tell us much, because they include lifetime subscriptions. Hey, I'm a LotRO subscriber, I just haven't played the game for like forever. I don't regret that lifetime subscription, because it gives me more options what to play at any given moment. But I can't say that LotRO grabbed me like WoW or WAR did.

I should check out the current state of LotRO. When I played it, it was great until the mid-20's, and then got a bit boring. Not quite as extreme a drop as Age of Conan, which after level 20 just becomes a completely different game, but still a noticeable drop in quality. But with lots of content patches that should have become better by now. Only I don't have the time to play LotRO. The second half of 2008 is stuffed with new game releases, and many of them interest me far more than LotRO or the Mines of Moria. And as I don't have subscription numbers and can only "measure" the MMO blog buzz about LotRO, I must say that I think I'm not the only one with that attitude. The Mines of Moria will just get buried under WAR and WotLK.

Steefel says that better marketing or bringing out a console version could catapult LotRO to the top. Well, he sure could use some better marketing, but I don't think he'll even reach Warhammer's numbers just with that. As for a console version, there are too many people talking about bringing MMOs to the console, and too few successes. Final Fantasy XI is on the console, and it's still just one of many "stage 2" (profitable but not dominating) games out there. It isn't even totally clear whether the MMO gameplay and business model would be such a big hit on consoles. Most MMORPGs are far too complicated to be easily controlled with a gamepad. I can imagine a console version of Wizard101, but not of WoW, WAR, or LotRO.

LotRO is a nice enough game, and well worth checking out if you have nothing else to do. But you need to smoke a lot of pipeweed before you think it could one day become a "WoW killer". It's more likely to remain forever an "also ran". Which, as long as it is profitable, isn't actually all that bad.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:00 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
How low can you go?

How low can you make a monthly subscription fee? I recently wrote that I find the regular monthly fee for Football Manager Live too expensive at $11.33 per month (12 months subscription), and only signed up because I got a half-price beta tester offer. Now the forums of Wizard101 are full of people saying that $9.95 per month (1 month subscription, not sure about rebates for longer periods) is too expensive for Wizard101. Well, with Wizard101 actually having 3D graphics and being a lot more like a regular MMORPG, I think the $9.95 for Wizard101 are a better deal than the $11.33 for FML. But I can see how the monthly fee will scare away some players, who won't continue past the content you can play for free. But then I'm not sure if $5 per month would have been much better, and I'm even less sure how much monthly fee you need to be profitable.

Let's take World of Warcraft for comparison. Whatever the development cost for that game was, I think it's safe to say that this has been paid back already. With expansions not coming out all that often, the profitability of WoW depends mostly on the income from monthly subscription fees compared with operating cost. Blizzard has a profit margin of nearly 50%, according to their 2007 numbers. So it follows that their operating cost per customer per month must be about half of his monthly fee, or about $7.

Now Blizzard has millions of customers, and correspondingly a good economy of scale. Of course smaller companies have much smaller server farms, which cost a much smaller total amount of money. But on a per customer basis the smaller server farm is probably more expensive than the huge Blizzard server farm. The fact that the smaller game has probably less content doesn't really help with operating cost. Maybe the smaller company can save some money by having less customer support, but it isn't as if WoW had a huge amount of that. So probably the smaller game companies also have operating costs of $7 or more per customer per month. They have to charge you around $10 per month to have a decent profit margin, at $5 per month they couldn't survive.

The economics favor the bigger games in the monthly fee subscription model. WoW or WAR have ten times the content of FML or Wizard101, but they aren't ten times more expensive. That is why the smaller games often have different business models, like premium services, or microtransactions. Having less content, and therefore by definition less longevity, it is better for the smaller games to nickel and dime their customers for the maximum amount of money for a shorter time. But for the big games it is better to keep them playing for a long time at a steady monthly fee.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:07 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
WotLK introduces server first titles

According to MMO Champion as part of the new achievement system in Wrath of the Lich King there will also be a set of "server first" titles. For example "The Malefic - First warlock on the realm to achieve level 80" or "Twilight Vanquisher - Participated in the realm first Sartharion the Onyx Guardian kill (25 player)". Except for causing another silly race to the level cap (in The Burning Crusade the first guy reached level 70 after 28 hours non-stop playing), I don't see that having much of an impact. But well, if it makes some people happy, I don't mind. As long as I get to kill Sartharion the Onyx Guardian in a 10-man raid that doesn't take my guild over a year to achieve, the server first guys can have all the titles they want.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Wizard101 Review

In KingsIsle's Wizard101 you play Harry Potter a young wizard student in the magical school of Hogwarts Ravenwood. Under the guidance of headmaster Dumbledore Merle Ambrose you help to defend the school against the evil plans of the dark wizard Voldemort Malistaire Drake. As you can see from the lore, the game is targeted at children, and has all the child-proof features you could wish for. And the graphics are suitable for children too, even the undead look cute! So why would I be talking about a game for children? Because the combat system is more intelligent than that of World of Warcraft or any similar game.

Combat in Wizard101 is based on trading cards. You put together a deck, of which you draw a random hand of 7 at the start of combat, and redraw new cards for every card you played. Cards have a cost from 0 to 4 "pips", and you gain one pip every round. So if you want to play higher cost cards, you need to either pass or play only 0 cost cards for some rounds to accumulate pips. Every card you play results in some animation, usually summoning something that attacks the enemy. The downside of that is that you can't turn off or speed up those animations, so every combat lasts even longer than in WAR.

Cards come in 7 different magic schools, fire, ice, myth, storms, life, death, and balance. You choose one of these schools at the start, but you also get "training points" during your career, which allow you to buy spells from other schools. But as you can only buy the higher level spells of other schools if you already have all the lower level spells of that same school, it is usually best to put all training points into the same secondary school. You have infinite copies of the spells you learned. In addition to that you can put golden "treasure" spell cards into your sideboard, which you can access by discarding cards in combat and pressing the draw button. These treasure cards are one use only, and you can get them as loot, or quest reward, or buy them for gold.

Besides cards you also collect gear, which has bonuses to your health and mana, or to the spell damage of some school, or to spell resistances. Some items even give you access to new spells. Health and mana does not regenerate after combat. You need to find red and blue wisps to recharge them, or teleport back to the city where you can play various puzzle games at the fairgrounds to replenish.

Gameplay is typical for an easy MMO: You get quests telling you to kill some monsters or to talk to somebody. Doing the quests and killing monsters gives you xp, which make your level go up, which gives you more health and mana, as well as access to more spells. The zones in Wizard City are streets, where (how educational) you are safe if you stick to the sidewalk, but can be attacked on the road. If you run into a monster, a magical circle opens up with you and that monster, where you exchange attacks until one of you dies. Other players can join that circle, but then other monsters can add to the combat too, so that up to 4 players can fight up to 4 monsters at the same time. Big advantage: If you fight in a group all the kills count for everyone, so if you have to kill X mobs it is often faster to join other player's fights than soloing everything. But you can't form fixed groups, and there aren't any guilds in the game either. You do have a friends list, and you can teleport to where your friends are. The quest line is rather linear, if you play Wizards101 a second time, you'll play exactly the same quests again, only with presumably different spells.

Wizard101 is in the last phase of the beta, the headstart phase in which characters won't be deleted any more for release. Once the game is released, you can still try it for free. Half of the first world, Wizard City, is accessible without paying, which means you can level up to about level 12 and decide whether you like the game. If you want to go on, there is a monthly subscription fee of $9.95. At some point in the future KingsIsle also wants to introduce a RMT system, where you can pay real dollars for a second virtual currency called crowns. Crowns can be exchanged against gold, or you can buy extra good gear with crowns, if you want to advance faster.

Wizard101 is a good game. It is remarkably stable and bug-free. It isn't as big as WoW or WAR, and more linear. But if you can overlook the child-suitable graphics and like more tactical combat than classic MMORPGs can offer, Wizard101 might be the game for you. And as you can try it for free, I can only suggest checking it out. Recommended!
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post