Blogging and MMORPGs

"I'm quitting WAR" blog entries are currently a dime a dozen in the MMO blogosphere. But nevertheless I would like to link to two of them, to illustrate some fundamental differences. I very much liked pΘtshΘt's Getting out of WAR, for being able to say in much fewer words than I'll ever be able to what exactly is wrong with WAR. Snafzg's announcement of I'm not having fun in this game is much longer, but much more personal, and revealing how quitting a game is not just the game's fault, but also a matter of how your expectations fit with the reality of the game.

But what struck me the most as difference between the two posts is the outlook for the respective blogs. pΘtshΘt has a general MMO blog, subtitle "Perspectives on online gaming". He quits WAR, he probably picks up another MMO, and keeps on writing, no biggy. Snafzg's The Greenskin blog is a WAR blog. If he quits playing WAR, there isn't much of a perspective for his blog. If he wants to keep on blogging, and I hope he does, his options are all not quite as easy. He can transform his existing blog into a blog about some other MMO or MMOs in general, but the WAR-specific URL and blog title are getting in the way of that. Or he can open a new blog, in which case he'll lose a lot Google page rank and readers.

So my advice for anyone thinking about lets say making a Star Wars: The Old Republic blog is to consider how to name that blog very carefully. Even if it might be tempting to use your blog title and URL to clearly announce what game your blog is about, it will run you into trouble if ever you want to switch games. Take a more general title, and just switch content whenever you move from one game to another, it makes your blogging life a lot easier.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:22 AM Permanent Link  (26) comments Links to this post

 
Guilds and raiding

My WoW guild worries me. The officers made an announcement about the plans of the guild for raiding in WotLK, and it contains pearls like "we have too many tourists in our raids and tourists won't make us progress. If people want to be tourists, they should give up raiding or join pugs instead of wasting a guild effort". Oh great, the expansion isn't even out yet, and I have already been banned from raiding and told to join a pickup group raid, just because I didn't apply for a special internal guild rank by promising to raid every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. The raiders are even going to get a super secret forum section, no regular guild members allowed.

It isn't as if this comes as a surprise, as if in the 4 years of guild history I hadn't seen pretty much the same before. But what worries me is that this kind of movement systematically lead to guild splits, big dramas, and nothing but unhappiness, while at the same time completely failing to advance the guild's raid progress. Serious raiding of a small fraction of a large guild inevitably leads to them progressing a bit and getting stuck. By making a strong distinction between raiders and non-raiders, and not taking any "tourists" on raids, there simply aren't any replacements arounds when inevitably some serious raiders leave for some even more serious raid guild.

But I think the fundamental problem in this lies in the fact there are two very different definitions to what a guild is, in regard to raids. My preferred definition is:

A guild is a group of online friends who decided they want to play together. A raid is an opportunity for a larger number of guild members to play together, with the purpose of maximum fun, enabling a maximum number of them to advance their characters.

Features that point into the direction of this definition are the removal of attunements, and the introduction of badges, which enables the more advanced guild members to raid with the less advanced guild members, and still get something out of it. The other possible definition of a guild, the one I don't like, but which is very widespread is:

A guild is an organization with the purpose of advancing as far as possible and as fast as possible in the raid content. For this purpose it is important to have a tight circle of dedicated raiders with a maximum attendance rate to progression raids.

Now these two definitions don't necessarily sound as if they were incompatible. Theoretically it would be possible to have a guild with just exactly the number of raiders and composition of classes needed to advance, with each of them being available for every raid. In the real world there are some serious obstacles to that: Nobody is *always* available, and the right number of raiders and perfect composition might change with time. Typical example was The Burning Crusade, where a guild would have had to organize three Karazhan teams at the start to have enough raiders to continue to Serpentshrine Cavern. In Wrath of the Lich King the initial progression will go from one 10-man raid to the next, but it isn't clear that the perfect composition for each raid dungeon will be the same, and sooner or later all the 10-man raid dungeons will be completed, and then you need to come up with 25 raiders to move on. You don't need to be a great psychologist to foresee that there will be guild dramas in many guilds at that point in the progression.

I believe that a guild run after my preferred definition of purpose not only would have a lot less guild drama, and more fun, it would also have a more steady raid progress. Slower, yes, but more steady. Reality is rarely black and white, a sliding scale of grey tones is more likely most of the time; making a strict distinction between "raiders" and "tourists" is not a good idea. Whoever sets up the criteria always makes them so that he still qualifies as a raider, but in reality there is always somebody playing his class even better, is available more often, and is better informed about each raid encounter. Somebody who can't or won't raid three nights a week isn't necessarily a bad raider, but he becomes useless for raiding if you systematically exclude him from raiding and he thus ends up undergeared. If you have a much larger pool of potential raiders in a guild, each of them participating less often in a raid, raid progress is of course slower. But there is a much better chance of being able to find a replacement if some raider unexpectedly leaves the guild or doesn't show up for a raid.

And then of course you have to think about why you play World of Warcraft in the first place. I always maintain that fun and entertainment are the real purpose of MMORPGs. Social factors, like recognition, are important too. But even there standing with the most leet epix in front of the bank isn't necessarily as rewarding as being recognized as helpful by a large number of your guild mates. Do you want to be recognized as a person, or do you want to be a collection of numbers, stats, a specific role in a raid, and a talent build, interchangeable with anyone else with better stats?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:12 AM Permanent Link  (51) comments Links to this post

 
Why are there no enchantments on the auction house?

One of the great improvements of patch 3.0.2 to World of Warcraft was that enchanters can now cast their enchants on relatively cheap scrolls, and sell them that way on the auction house. They don't have to stand in cities any more, spamming the trade channel and waiting for customers. And they can now easily sell scrolls even for not-so-popular enchants, because somebody will always want those too. Only, it isn't happening. There are very few "scroll of enchant ..." on the auction house of my server, and then only for prices multiple times those of the ingredients.

Did all enchanters just give up and learn inscription instead? Or why aren't there any regular priced scrolls of enchant on the auction house? Why are there still enchanters spamming the trade channel, instead of putting their wares on auction and going to do something more fun?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (28) comments Links to this post

 
The market share of PvP

Apart from the pure Warhammer Online blogs, there is a distinctive feeling in the MMORPG blogosphere of people becoming disenchanted with WAR. Even Heartless_, who calls himself a WAR fanboy, now says that he'll leave WAR in three months if things don't get better. In a way that cycle of pre-release hype, and post-release popping of the hype bubble isn't anything new. But hype is only a distortion to players slowly revealing their true preferences.

The problem with the MMO market in the last months was that it was dominated by "bored with WoW" players. They bought Age of Conan, they bought Warhammer Online, they bought a lot of other games. But November 13th many of them will buy Wrath of the Lich King, and be back to World of Warcraft. And in early 2009 we will see some of them being bored of WoW again and looking for other games again. But at that time WotLK will still be relatively fresh, and there won't be any big new hyped game around, and players will slowly tend towards the game they like the most.

While it isn't immediately obvious if you only look at level 1 characters, at their core World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online are two very different games. That becomes most clear in the end game. It is hard to find a good description of the two different end games which doesn't use any terms that might be considered judgmental. But the endgame of WoW is one of PvE, and the endgame of WAR is one of PvP. In WoW you repeatedly fight raid bosses with various abilities and in various surroundings, but these bosses act on a script and are ultimately stupid. In WAR you repeatedly fight other players with a limited scope of abilities and always the same fortress / city surrounding, but these opponents react in a far more intelligent way. Both endgames have their advantages and disadvantages, and thus their fans and detractors. Some people simply prefer the one, some people prefer the other. The discussion of which one is "better" is about as pointless as discussing whether strawberry ice cream is better than chocolate ice cream.

While the motives of individual players might differ, on the large scale we can assume that people who prefer PvP will drift towards WAR, and those who prefer PvE will drift towards WoW. The two games together will totally dominate the US / European market for MMORPGs. And it is interesting to see how PvP fares against PvE when you give players a choice of two games with similar high quality, but different basic gameplay concepts. It appears that PvP in the western MMORPG market has a significant share, but there are about 4 times more players who prefer PvE. Worldwide the PvE to PvP ratio isn't all that different, after adding the Asian players of WoW and games that are big in Asia like the Lineage series to the count.

So I think PvP games will have a solid future, because somebody will always figure that its easier to go for the 20% of PvP players than competing with many others for the 80% of PvE players. I don't think we will ever see a game that makes players of all types happy, there are some fundamental incompatibilities between perfect PvE and perfect PvP. Perfect PvE means continuous advancement of your character in power, be that in level or gear. Perfect PvP requires characters being not too far from each other in power level, so that factors like skill and organization have a chance to influence the battle. I don't think that we will ever see a situation where PvP games have a larger subscription base than PvE games. There are simply too many people around who prefer to fight only against the game, not against the other players. I wish WAR the best of luck, and I am quite happy that it managed to give people a good alternative to WoW, but personally I prefer PvE games too.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:32 PM Permanent Link  (36) comments Links to this post

 
WoW glyphs and market value

My mage in World of Warcraft is still making good money selling glyphs, but only with minor glyphs. That seems strange, because "minor" glyphs have a much smaller effect than "major" glyphs, and should be less valuable, given that the cost to make them is about the same. But the very idea that the value of something is determined by its utility or cost to make it is flawed.

If you observed European stockmarkets this week, you might have heard something very funny happening: The shares of Volkswagen, a German car manufacturer, gained over 300% in value in two days, before falling down again. At one point Volkswagen was the most valuable company in the world, having a market capitalization higher than Exxon Mobile. So what had happened? Before this week there were many speculators betting on Volkswagen shares, like most automobile shares, going down in the future. These bets were made in the form of short selling, a practice in which you sell shares you don't have, either by borrowing them, or by making an empty promise to sell without having anything, the so-called "naked" shorts. But this week Porsche announced that they were in the process of buying Volkswagen shares, and that they were already controlling by various means 75% of the shares. And it was known that another 20% of the shares were held permanently by the state in which the main factories of Volkswagen are in. Thus 95% of the Volkswagen shares were in the hands of people who wouldn't sell them. It quickly became clear to the shortsellers that if noone was selling, then the share value drop they betted on would never happen. So now they needed to "cover their positions", that is buy the shares they didn't have but already sold. And they had to buy them at any price, which drove up the VW shares to so fantastic heights. Apart from a valuable lesson about the dangers of short selling, the story tells us that the market value of the Volkswagen company has absolutely nothing to do with the fundamental value of its factories, or some projected earnings expectations. The price was determined by having a small supply and large demand.

The economy of World of Warcraft is a lot simpler, but the same basic truths apply: The market value of items, in this case glyphs, has nothing to do with any fundamental value of that glyph, and everything to do with supply and demand. Inscription is a new profession, so many people learn it just because it is new. And to skill up, they can only make major glyphs, as those are the recipes learned from the trainers. The minor glyphs are learned by research, one recipe per day. Because people are impatient, want to skill up fast, and have excess money to burn, they buy the ingredients (herbs). Then they produce lots of major glyphs, which floods the market, and drives the prices down. In the end they paid more for the ingredients than they get back for selling the glyphs, accepting that skilling up a profession means losing money. But as nobody makes minor glyphs to skill up, and everyone has only a few minor glyph recipes compared to lots of major glyph recipes, the minor glyphs are relatively rare. And although their effect is often just cosmetic (polymorph penguin for example), some people are still willing to pay for that. So it comes that minor glyphs sell for considerably more than major glyphs. I check the AH every day for all minor glyphs that I can make, and then only produce those where the current market price is over 20 gold, which is my standard sales price. As even with high herb prices I can make that glyph for about 10 gold, I'm making good money. Plus often I don't pay that 10 gold, but gather the herbs myself, so I only incur an opportunity cost.

But I'm fully aware that there is no such thing as a fundamental value of glyphs. The price for major glyphs will rise once there are few new inscriptionists skilling up, because if you are at the skill cap, there is no reason to make a glyph to sell at below cost. The market value of minor glyphs will go down, as every inscriptionist will learn a new recipe every day, and they will become less rare. In the end the prices for the two types of glyphs will be very similar.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:15 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Do WoW battlegrounds need a time limit?

Silent has an interesting screenshot on his blog, about a Warsong Gulch battleground that was already going on for 9 hours 52 minutes when he joined it. We talked in a previous post about how this was caused by people doing PvP achievement farming, several players on that screenshot certainly got the "do 300,000 damage in a single battleground" achievement, as well as those about killing flag carriers.

In many ways the Warhammer Online scenarios are very similar to World of Warcraft battlegrounds. But the WAR scenarios have a 15 minutes time limit. With Horde leading Alliance 1:0 in the screenshot above, the battle would have been over and declared a victory for Horde after 15 minutes, and not dragged on 9 more hours.

So, should Blizzard change their battlegrounds to introduce time limits like this, to avoid one side stalling the battle completely?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:50 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
More on WoW zombies

Just a short note that yesterday the Lich King invasion world event evolved only slightly, by increasing the number of attacks from the necropolises. Which is good news, because previously there weren't enough undead to go around, and now it was much easier to get those quests done and collect enough necrotic runes to buy some nice epic pieces and fun, but useless, trinkets. Although I dislike the term "welfare epics", it has to be noticed that you can get a set of 4 epic pieces, including set bonus, having not more than 1 hour and 2 friends to help you kill the elite.

The discussion of whether that world event was a good idea rages on. The funniest contribution comes from the WoW forums, of all places, where somebody wrote a letter from the Lich King:

"My deepest apologies.

It is my understanding that my invading forces, in their attempts to besiege your cities and snuff out all life on Azeroth, have inconvenienced the activities of common civilians. In the future, I will ensure that your commanding officers are informed well in advance of planned invasion times so that they may properly fortify themselves.

I have also looked into the issue of my plague being too quick in its purpose and too difficult to cure. Please be reassured that I have taken the matter up personally with my top necromancers and that any further incarnations of said plague should be only a slight challenge for your natural immune systems to overcome. Please forward any additional complaints to either Kel’thuzad or Anub’arak.

Regards, the Lich King Arthas."

Kudos to Scott Jennings for delving deep enough into the abyss of the WoW forums to find this gem. Another unexpected highlight in the discussion comes from Kill Ten Rats, where Dragon discusses in detail the phases of the zombie invasion, and its implications. Both the parody letter and Dragon's analysis show the fundamental problem of it being impossible to have a world-changing dynamic event (which so many people were shouting for) without inconveniencing some people in their daily routine.

The current phase, in which attacks happen in places like Azshara, where otherwise few people venture, and fighting the attacks nets you phat rewards is at the same time much more uncontroversial, and more boring. I have to keep an eye on WoWInsider, just so I don't miss one of the phases of the event. The zombie infection was much harder to miss, and therefore made much more of an impact than just adding a few more mobs with more loot. If we want MMORPGs to break out of their static shell, we have to allow those changes to affect us in sometimes negative ways. And with the event only lasting a few days, there really wasn't all that much to complain about.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:47 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
WAR introduces auto-win for bigger realm

There is a very weird change in the patch notes 1.04 of Warhammer Online: "Victory points towards zone control will be granted if a realm has enough players in the queue to launch the scenario and the other realm doesn’t." Of course the exact effect of this is still unknown, as it depends very much of how many victory points are awarded for waiting in a scenario queue. But it is evident by very simple math that the more populous realm will always be the one having more people in waiting queues, and thus get more victory points out of this.

I really liked the previous method better: Scenarios somewhat favored the less populous realm, because they could play them more often. Open RvR favored the more populous realm. Done right this could prevent one realm dominating the other, just because more players chose that one realm than the other. After the change all kinds of RvR favor the bigger realm. Order might as well pack up and go home.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:09 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
Please explain why I shouldn't have an opinion

When I buy a newspaper, there are sections that I like, and sections that I don't like. So I'm using a clever trick: I read the news, technology, economy and whatever else section I'm interested in, and I simply skip for example the sports section that I'm not interested in. What I don't do is write angry letters to the Washington Post, telling them that they should stick to politics, that they have no idea about sports, and they should stop printing a sports section, or I'd unsubscribe. But exactly that is what several readers are regularly doing on this blog, whenever I write about anything but games. Funny thing is that a lot of readers writing to the Washington Post to remove their sports section or they'd unsubscribe have a better chance of succeeding as people threatening me with the same if I don't stick to games. I don't know if you noticed, but you aren't actually subscribed to this blog, and I don't actually make a single cent from you reading this. Which means your leverage is pretty much zero. But in the interest of a fair discussion, I'd like to give everyone the opportunity to express their opinion on why I shouldn't be allowed to have an opinion. Why shouldn't I write about politics, religion, culture, current affairs, news, etc., if I feel like it?

One argument I hear is qualification. Some people say that because I'm European, I shouldn't be allowed to write about America. Which in this globalized society isn't really a sustainable argument. All the magazines and newspapers I read, all the TV news, always contain information about America. Just look at the recent financial crisis, and tell me how I could understand why my European stocks tanked without considering America and it's sub-prime mortgages. I'm well informed about American politics too, and I'm pretty certain that there are people living in the United States who know less about the presidential election than I do.

Another point of view would be that me writing about other things is to the detriment of me writing about games. But why would that be? For example I'm interested in real world economics, and my knowledge on real world economics opens up the door to interesting blog post about the economics of virtual worlds. The better educated I am, the broader world view I have, the better I can understand games and what people are doing in games. If I would start to post several posts on politics a day, and none about games, I would understand your concern. But that is certainly not what I am doing. Over 90% of my posts are on games, and I often post several posts a day. There is considerably more games content on this blog than on many other MMORPG blogs. So a post on something else once in a while can't really turn my blog into something other than a games blog.

So, explain me: Why can't you just skip the posts that you don't like? Why do you have to leave a comment to tell me to shut my mouth, whenever I talk about something other than MMORPGs? Why should I not be allowed to express my opinions on world events on my very own blog, free of charge?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:22 AM Permanent Link  (89) comments Links to this post

 
Puzzle Quest: Galactrix

A reader alerted me to the news that Infinite Interactive is working on a sequel to Puzzle Quest, called Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, for the PC, Xbox 360, and Nintendo DS. And it's looking good, combining a slightly different puzzle with an Sci-Fi RPG this time, not straying too far from the original formula. Now this is one game I'll certainly buy. Too bad this time there isn't a PSP version.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:50 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
SWTOR bigger than WoW?

I don't want to blame them for being ambitious, but the announcement by EA and LucasArts that Star Wars: The Old Republic targets a bigger userbase than World of Warcraft rightfully evoked mostly ridicule. Especially since it was often reported a them wanting 11 million subscribers (a number Blizzard then declared to just have passed). So lets put things a bit into perspective.

As far as I know neither EA nor LucasArts ever said "11 million", they just said "larger userbase than WoW". I think what they meant was "larger userbase than WoW in the US and Europe". So suddenly we are talking 5 million, not 11. I don't think Star Wars is such a huge brand in Asia (except for Japan), and it is hard to imagine how they could get 11 million players without Asia. While the 6 million Chinese players add a lot to the fancy marketing announcements of Blizzard on subscription numbers, they don't add all that much to Blizzard's revenue. Chinese players pay 5 cents per hour, are apparently limited to 3 hours per day, and of that money a large part goes into the pockets of the Chinese distributor The9, not Blizzard.

I would like SWTOR to achieve several million subscribers. I also hope WAR is passing the 1 million mark soon. Because the one thing this announcement from EA shows is that Blizzard has lost their aura of invincibility. Other companies now think they can beat them, or at least get rich trying. Because if you "fail" and get just one or two million players, you still get a huge return on investment, even if you spent over $50 million on making that game. Of course you can also fail totally, like Hellgate London, which is shutting down for good in February. But as long as there are several games out there raking in the money, somebody else will always want to have a piece of the pie. And that competition can only be good for us players. Even if it just would make Blizzard at bit less complacent, that would already be a good thing.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Not a political blog

I do have opinions on world politics. That includes opinions on US politics, and the US presidential election. Given that the US president has the power to declare war on my country or put me into a jail without a trial (which, admittedly, he is unlikely to do in my case, but has done to others), it would be strange for me to *not* have an opinion on that. So it would be easy for me write more about politics, do a funny political blog. It would be easy to blog about how it takes $150,000 worth of lipstick to turn a pitbull into a vice president, or how children know best what is really scary this Halloween. But the problem with that kind of post is that they are completely irrelevant, even if that is what people like to read in political blogs.

Yeah, it's easy to make fun of some of the stranger aspects of presidential elections. But how much Sarah Palin spends on her wardrobe, or whether she looks better on a bike than Obama really shouldn't affect people's votes. The thing is that if McCain is elected, he'll be the oldest first term president ever. That means that there is a chance that he could die in the next 4 years, in which case Sarah Palin would become president of the United States of America. And what people should do is seriously consider whether she has the qualification for that. As they should judge the qualifications of the two presidential candidates and the other vice presidential candidate. And they should ask themselves whether they would like the kind of politics that these candidates would try to introduce.

And these real subjects aren't funny at all. Abortion rights aren't funny, neither pro nor contra. Universal health care isn't funny. Finding the right moment to get out of Iraq isn't funny. So a lot of this circus that the presidential campaigns have turned into, the bad jokes, the mud-slinging, the accusations of who has ever sat next to which shady character during a political dinner, the "I'm more American than you are" posing, is just deplorable.

I can't vote myself, and I can't tell you how to vote if you are American. But I would like to ask you to ignore the circus, and try to imagine how the US and the world would look like with whatever candidate you like. And then please don't stay at home, but go out and vote. The current French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been elected with 85% of the eligible voters having cast their vote. US presidential elections usually just have around 60% turnout. You don't want the French surrender monkeys beat you, do you?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:29 AM Permanent Link  (86) comments Links to this post

 
Zombies in the morning

I woke up at 5 am this morning, and couldn't sleep any more. Instead of tossing and turning, and waking up the wife, I decided to get up and play World of Warcraft. I had ended last evening trying to get some necrotic runes from the zombie invasion event for my warrior, but didn't have much luck. The attack places were heavily camped in the evening. So I thought 5 am might be a much better time. And that worked much better than expected.

Turned out I had two more sleepless guild mates, a mage and a priest. So we formed a group, with me gathering up all the undead, the priest healing me, and the mage using AoE spells to kill them. Worked like a charm. And then we started killing the elite Shadow of Doom with good effect as well. A bit over an hour later we stopped, but by that time I had two epics and 179 necrotic runes.

I flew to Light's Hope Chapel and handed in the quests, and spent the necrotic runes. I bought the other two pieces of the epic set (although the shoulders for some reason are shown as rare, not epic, in spite of epic stats). Only two things wrong with that set: It doesn't have any defense bonus, and is thus useless for tanking, and the plate leggings turned out to be a skirt. So now my warrior is running around in good-looking armor that makes him look like a priest or mage. Guess Blizzard didn't invest too much time designing these. Well, I'll only wear them for soloing anyway.

Then I still had tons of runes left, so I bought the tabard for the achievement, and the three trinkets: war horn, tome, and standard. The trinkets turned out to be all pretty useless. The war horn summons a level 60 paladin for a short time, who deals so little damage that he can't even kill one of those level 50ish undead in Eastern Plaguelands. He is funny though, because instead of just disappearing, he actually casts a bubble and hearthstones out. :) The tome just causes a holy explosion for minor damage, and the standard also deals holy AoE damage, but in several small pulses for a short duration. I'll probably end up deleting all those trinkets, because I don't have enough inventory space to keep them all, and even at level 70 they are sub par, at level 80 they'll be downright bad.

I'm pretty sure my priest doesn't need the epics you can get from killing Shadows of Doom or necrotic runes, he should have better gear already from raiding. But I'll have to check whether my mage still has some blue gear in one of the 4 spots you can get that new gear for. At least the mage has an easier time to reach an attack zone before it is cleared, even if I play in the evening.

In other news it appears that the zombie infestation part of the event ended naturally, a day after we got the quest that told us to visit various apothecaries to search for a cure. In the end the zombies were pretty bad, because the infection timer was down to 1 minute, from an initial 10 minutes, and the range and radius of the retching and zombie explosion had increased so much that it was pretty easy to wipe out the whole bank or auction house. I still liked that part of the event, because it got everyone involved, whether they liked it or not. You can't have a world-shattering invasion of zombies and have half of the population just ignore it. But its good that the infestation is over now, it would have been too annoying to let it run another two weeks until the expansion. I'm looking forward to find out how the story evolves further, and what will be the next part of the event. I find it great fun to be part of one of the few dynamic events of World of Warcraft, instead of just doing static stuff all the time.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:05 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Can't comprehend that cultural difference

Disclaimer: You might want to skip this post, it isn't about games.

I just read the news about the 8-year old who killed himself with an Uzi. That is tragic. The point where my comprehension stops is when the event was declared to be an "accident", and as "all legal and fun". So minors firing an Uzi is legal and fun, but if a minor wanted to drink a beer he would have to wait until he was 21? I think somewhere there is a confusion about the relative lethality of machine guns and beer. Nothing against hunting as a sport, but I don't think you hunt deer with an Uzi. Can anyone explain why children should be allowed to play with real machine guns?
- posted by Tobold @ 3:30 PM Permanent Link  (56) comments Links to this post

 
Accessibility and rewards

Keen has a post on the state of WAR, in which he blames the players for going for the reliable scenario grind instead of doing open world RvR. Quote: "This industry has been plagued by the “I want it, and I want it now” attitude. Yes, this was largely introduced when World of Warcraft gained popularity because, for the first time, developers started realizing that the majority of players want the ease of accessibility. What started out as a good idea - making things more accessible - turned into the near extinction of effort, achievement, and earning your reward." Keen thinks that this will lead to a future in which we get only games with effortless grind, because that is what the players apparently want. Not so fast! A game offering a fast, repetitive way to maximum reward will see that mode of gameplay be preferred over all alternatives. But that move is self-destructive, because quickly the players get bored. In WAR the players are trapped between repetitive scenarios giving the best rewards and more interesting content for which no groups can be found. And they are leaving WAR because of that. Yes, players want ease of accessibility, but WAR doesn't offer that; by having a "best way to level", WAR effectively makes the rest of its content inaccessible and obsolete.

It is true that MMORPGs have one fundamental problem: There is a conflict of interest between the fun of doing whatever you want to do, and the fun of advancing your character. The solution to that problem is easy to formulate, and hard to implement: Make the rewards scale proportional to the effort. Parts of the game that are high effort and give low rewards will be ignored. Blaming the players is a natural reaction, not just of Keen, but also from many game developers. But truth is that the devs are at least as guilty as the players, because they failed to scale the rewards right.

In modification of an old dictum, a good game is easy to access, but hard to master. The solution can not be to close down access to parts of the game. I don't support the proposed solution to eliminate scenarios from WAR, just as I don't support the idea of having raids in WoW be only accessible for an elite minority of players. We are talking about games here which ideally are played for several years, having a large variety of different modes of gameplay accessible to the maximum of players is essential to achieve that. But "accessible" means just that, having access, not "getting the maximum reward for minimum effort". Rewards have to be proportional to effort, and effort has to be measured including ease of setting the activity up. Scenarios in WAR are crowding open RvR and public quests out not only because of a pure measure of "xp per minute spent in a scenario", but also because they are so much more easy to set up. To organize taking a keep in open RvR, or do a public quest, you need to travel to the area, which given the annoying travel system of WAR can take a lot of time. And then you have to set up a group large enough to overcome the challenge. In comparison you can join scenarios from everywhere, and the game relieves you of all the effort of travel and getting a group together. If there was no "join scenario" button, nor automatic groups, and you would have to gather a group yourself and with the group fully preformed and present click on the portal to the scenario, which actually exists in the game world, there would be a *lot* less scenarios going on, even if we left the rewards unchanged.

And the same principles apply to WoW: There should be lots of different activities, solo and group, PvE and PvP; and each of these activities has to be accessible to everyone, but give out rewards in proportion to the effort, including the effort to set something up. For example the group xp bonus for WoW should be a lot bigger than it is now. There should be an added bonus for visiting the lower level dungeons, because previously the reward from dungeons was the gear you got there, but with the now increased leveling speed that gear isn't really worth the effort of finding a group in a low-population level bracket any more. And at the level cap, there should be "low effort" raids with low rewards. Not zero reward, like "oh why don't you just raid Molten Core", but with a reward that is well balanced between the added effort of setting up a group of 10 instead of 5, and the difficulty of the encounters. If implemented well, the idea of WotLK to then offer the same dungeon in a high effort, high reward mode is great. It worked well enough with heroic dungeons, there is no reason to assume it couldn't work with heroic raid dungeons. Nobody says there shouldn't be ultra-hard raid bosses in WoW, giving out the best possible rewards.

In a way WoW has it easier than WAR, because PvE is more predictable than PvP, and thus easier to reward in proportion to effort. So at least for PvE raids, getting the rewards right should be possible. For the PvP part of WoW, as well as for most of WAR, the problem is a lot harder. On the one extreme the reward structure of PvP can be so much in favor of gaining some objective, that players end up not actually doing any PvP at all, but doing some pseudo-PvE instead. In WoW you can see that when two groups of 40 players rush in Alterac Valley, and then pass by each other on the way to the enemy fortress to kill NPC guards there, instead of fighting each other. In WAR you can see those 3 am city raids, where the players of one faction attack at a point in time where there are the least player defenders, and they only have to deal with NPCs to take the fortresses and city. On the other extreme, if you make the rewards for killing enemy players in PvP much bigger than for achieving an objective, you end up with everyone brawling in the middle, and nobody going for the flag or whatever the objective is.

I think it was Brad McQuaid who promised for Vanguard a perfect system where what is most fun would also be most rewarded. Obviously he failed to deliver, but that doesn't invalidate the goal. Players *do* have fun when they are challenged. But they also want maximum rewards. In a perfect game the rewards be exactly in proportion to effort, and then players would automatically search for the most challenging activity they can still win, continuously pushing the envelope, and having the most fun. But it is impossible to overestimate the pull that rewards have in MMORPGs, and if there is a flaw in the system that enables people to get higher rewards for lower effort, they will go after that. It is not that they are actively avoiding the effort, or the fun, it is just that the lure of the reward is so much stronger. Blaming the players is easy, but doesn't get us anywhere, because we won't be able to change player mentality. Making the perfect game, with a constant reward to effort ratio, is hard, but in the end it is the better solution. And maybe one day developers will come up with a way to create self-balancing systems, where there is no "best way" to advance.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:54 PM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
My WoW today and tomorrow

In the open Sunday thread Spinks asked "What about Wrath of the Lich King are you most excited about/looking forwards to? And which character do you plan to level first and why?". Good question, but I'd like to first tell you all what I am *currently* playing in World of Warcraft, before moving to my plans for the expansion.

My number one priority at the moment is to experience all parts of the world event leading up to the Wrath of the Lich King. The motivation behind that is simple: This event is only happening now, it will end with the release of WotLK, and anything I missed I will never have the opportunity to do later. Yes, there are parts of the event that are annoying: Logging on a bank alt and finding the banker having been turned into a zombie, or dying to a zombie attack myself. But then, I timed the respawn time of a flight master, and it turned out that he respawns in 2 minutes. 2 minutes! That is really a minor inconvenience compared to the greater good of making this event feel like a real invasion. I got more annoyed when it took me forever to do the new quests to gather necrotic runes and kill a shade of doom, because it turns out the shades drop epic gear, and as soon as a zone is under attack the undead there get heavily farmed, and the shades killed, which end the attack. The scenes at the summoning circles reminded me of the scenes at the dark portal when TBC came out: A horrible kill-stealing fest. Most annoying was when I spent 8 necrotic runes to summon a shade, and then somebody tagged it and stole it from my group. And these summoning circles don't respawn in 2 minutes, the timer seems to be over 1 hour.

When I'm not doing the pre-WotLK event, I'm enjoying the other new features of patch 3.0.: Inscription, achievements, and easier dungeons and raids. Big news: My warrior, who I nearly had given up upon before, is fun again. Before the patch he was stuck in a vicious cycle, where I wasn't invited to raids or heroics because my gear sucked, and I couldn't get better gear because I wasn't invited to raids or heroics. Now there are far more "casual" raids and heroic groups organized. And I'm doing some silly stuff, like tanking Onyxia, and finally finishing Magister's Terrace on normal, in case I ever want to do it in heroic. Plus I'm dealing more damage in solo play now, in spite of still being protection spec. So I went to Karazhan with both my mage and my warrior, and my "raider" priest even got to the third boss of Mount Hyjal. I got a couple of epic upgrades on all my characters, but honestly that isn't the most important for me right now. The important thing is playing in a group with strong cooperation, having fun. The gear is likely to be replaced soon.

Which brings me to my plans for Wrath of the Lich King. Because my motivation doesn't change, just because some expansion comes out: I still want to play PvE in groups, overcoming challenges that can only be beat by coordination of the efforts of several players. I'm looking forward to the new dungeons of Northrend, and I'm very interested how accessible Blizzard is going to make those first raid dungeons. From that motivation comes the answer to what character I'm going to play first: My priest. There is nothing to suggest that healers will be any less needed in WotLK groups. Maybe even more, if the addition of the Death Knight really solves the tank shortage there will be a healer shortage just behind. And I'm comfortable soloing and leveling up with holy spec, even if that might not be the fastest way. Given how many players who have a character who *could* heal will be using some non-healing build to advance fastest, I think I should be able to easily get into dungeon groups on my way to 80.

Most probably I will play the warrior and mage a bit in parallel, for example for their tradeskills, but the priest is certainly the first one I want to get to level 80. Which character will be the second depends very much on how things develop on the tanking front. I mean, if I hear a lot of shouts looking for a tank for dungeons, I'm certainly going to log my tank on and play. But if there are hundreds of Death Knights, and everyone considers them sufficient for tanking purposes, my warrior will be unemployed. That is the big disadvantage of preferring group play: It depends on what everyone else is playing, and who they want to invite into groups. That is especially true for me as casual raider, if I want an invite into raids although I'm not a regular, I have to be of a class / build that there is a shortage of.

I've played a Death Knight a bit in the beta, and it was great fun. The "phasing" nature of the first two levels, in which the Death Knight learns all of his spells and talents, in combination with telling his personal story, is one of the best parts of World of Warcraft. But it only covers two levels, and every Death Knight experiences the same destiny. And then he'll have to level up from 57 to 70 using content I know all too well, after already having played three characters to 70. In addition to that, Death Knights will be "flavor of the month" for a good while, and I don't foresee groups searching desperately for a Death Knight in preference of any other class. So I might make a Death Knight as an alt, for fun and for doing some tradeskills I don't have on the others, but I don't think I'll play that one very much, or level him to 80.

I don't know how long all this is going to entertain me. Probably several months. Which, one the one side, is great news, I'm having something to look forward for months. On the other side I'm pretty certain that Blizzard will not bring out a third expansion in 2009, and that I will get bored with WotLK before the next expansion comes out. I'm not really making plans what I'll play then. LotRO Mines of Moria? Warhammer Online? Some other MMORPG? Single-player games? I don't know. I'll decide that when the moment comes. In spite of what some other players think, choosing a MMORPG is not the same as choosing a religion. It's just a game, and the most important feature is to have fun. I'll play what is most fun at the moment. That might be WoW right now, but it won't be WoW forever.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:46 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Open Sunday Thread

Sunday, a day of rest, for me, and the opportunity for you to tell me in this thread what subjects you'd like covered in this blog, or start a discussion among you.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Why WAR can't have 10 million subscribers

The discussion on the current World of Warcraft world event, where the zombie infestation allows players to inconvenience other players for a short time, and that causes a huge outcry of "I quit", reminded me why WAR can't have 10 million subscribers. How well would someone who can't support having to wait 5 minutes for a flight master to respawn react to being shut out of his capitol city for *days*, following a successful capture?

By definition PvP always inconveniences another player. At the very least by you winning and him losing, thus him getting less points than you. Any form of "impact" PvP, where one side can capture keeps or cities, prevents the other side from using those keeps or cities. And of course if you are in a PvP area, or PvP is on all the time, you can be killed. A large number of players simply can't stand being inconvenienced by other players in any way. They even go mental if another player accidentally pulls a mob they considered to be "theirs", or if some hunter rolls need on the weapon they think should have been reserved for their class. How do you want to get that sort of player into a PvP-centric MMO?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (32) comments Links to this post

 
Fun or grief?

So I was experimenting with the new zombie infestation world event in World of Warcraft last night. Clicked on a conspicious crate in Booty Bay, took the boat over to Ratchet, and went into the pirate area, where I turned into a zombie. As zombie you continuously lose health, unless you attack humanoids. When you kill NPC humanoids, they rise as zombies as well, and you can beckon up to 4 of them to help you. You also have a ranged area effect with which to infect humanoids, which then turn into zombies after 10 minutes.

The pirates got boring quickly, so I headed into Ratchet itself, infecting NPCs, and battling the guards there. A low level player attacked me, so I killed him. Another just stood watching, so I didn't want to attack him, but infected him anyway so he could share the fun. A while later a level 70 pally turned up and killed me, ending the zombie infestation of Ratchet.

So far, so harmless, although I'm not sure how the player I killed felt about that. I stopped mucking around as zombie and joined a Karazhan raid with my warrior. But guild chat reported lots of people being unhappy with the world event. Some players used their zombie infestation power to take out centrally important NPCs, like the flight master in Shattrath, or bankers and auctioneers. Of course the NPCs respawn after a few minutes, but lots of people get annoyed if they have to wait for 5 minutes for a flight in Shattrath. And it seems the infestation is programmed to spread, this morning I noticed conspicious crates and infected animals in the cave that is the arrival for teleports in Thunder Bluff.

So on the one side players always complain how static the game is, and want events that change the world. On the other side they complain if something actually changes, and they can't access their flight master, banker, or auctioneer NPC immediately. One guy in guild chat got so angry, he logged out. And I'm sure we'll hear a lot more complaints before the event ends with the release of Wrath of the Lich King. Are game-changing events doomed, because players can't accept any change?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:44 AM Permanent Link  (66) comments Links to this post

 
Ixobelle on crafting

Ixobelle, previously from NotAddicted, has an own blog now, with an interesting article on crafting interfaces. The principal question is whether crafting in its current form is too easy, just click a button with the ingredients in your inventory. I don't know if Ixobelle's crafting interfaces are the best solution, but I sure would like to see more crafting systems like in Puzzle Pirates or A Tale in the Desert, where you actually need some skill to craft something, and the better your skill, the better the item you craft.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:30 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Redefining Raiding

What you can do or not do in a single-player game is strictly defined by the program code. A massively multiplayer online game adds a social dimension to that, there are things that are theoretically allowed by the code, but practically not possible due to other players. The more players are involved in any given game activity, and the more they depend on each other, the more important the social rules for that activity become. In World of Warcraft raids are the activity that requires the most cooperation, and has thus been subject to the most social conventions and rules. But raiding changed from the original game to the first expansion, and it will change again in the second expansion. While the social rules aren't hard-coded into the program, they are nevertheless a logical consequence of the coded game rules. And as the code changes, so will the social rules. Whether we are considering ourselves as "raiders" or not, we will need to rethink the social rules of raiding. How do we define raiding in the new context of the Wrath of the Lich King?

The first thing to do here is to carefully separate what are actually coded rules for raiding, and what are only social conventions. For example you might be surprised to find out that many TBC raid instances can be entered at level 65. The "you need to be level 70 to raid" rule is a social convention. And did you hear the story about the druid soloing Onyxia? Well, we know for a fact that he needed *some* help, because you can't enter a raid dungeon unless you are in a raid group, for which you need at least 2 players (even if the second player stays outside). If they aren't hard-coded, why do social rules exist? Players make up criteria for inclusion or exclusion in reaction to the difficulty of the raid encounter. If 10 random players at the level cap can't beat the first raid dungeon, players have to organize a raid with a better mix of classes, talent builds, and equipment to improve their chances. That results in two lists: One list of inclusions of what you absolutely need to succeed, for example 2 tanks, 3 healers, and 1 warlock for a banish during a special encounter. The other list is a list of exclusions: You don't accept anyone who is not at the level cap, who has not a certain quality level of equipment, who does not have a certain talent build for his class, or who is not available to play at certain times for a certain amount of consecutive hours. Even if you exclude the hard-to-measure variable of player skill, there is something like a perfect raid composition for a given raid boss. The difficulty level determines how far you can stray from that perfect composition and still succeed.

In the Burning Crusade, when it came out, two factors made raiding relatively hard: The raid size was reduced to 10 players for the easiest raid, Karazhan, so after filling your list of must-haves, there wasn't much room left. And the difficulty level was high, so that as long as people were wearing blue gear, the raid composition couldn't be far off from perfect to still succeed. There were even guilds who changed raid composition for each boss, because they didn't have one composition that was able to beat them all. That strengthened the image of raiding being an elitist activity, that the average WoW player shouldn't even attempt. And raiding being only for the "elite" of most dedicated players was even supported by the developers, to the point that when other sources for epic gear were introduced, Tigole called those "welfare epics". But what is important to realize here is that raiding is *not* inherently elitist. This has been well proven by patch 3.0.2., which made raiding a lot easier by reducing all raid mobs health by 30%. Given that change, and the higher probability to nowadays find somebody who is well-geared and knows Karazhan already, the chance of success of a "pickup raid" to Karazhan is now much, much higher than last year. Guilds are taking their alts raiding, and while it isn't quite "raiding for everyone" yet, Karazhan is much more accessible to the average player now than before.

And if we believe what Blizzard tells us, raiding is supposed to remain more accessible in Wrath of the Lich King. And if they want to do it, there is nothing to suggest that it can't be done. Of course a raid dungeon which is easy enough to be completed by a pickup raid full of casual players will be way too easy for those who were into hardcore raiding before. But so what? There is more than one raid dungeon, every raid dungeon exists in two difficulty levels (easy for 10 people, hard for 25), and if the first dungeon is too easy for you, you just try the next, and the next, until you find one that is challenging enough.

This is a huge opportunity for Blizzard to redefine raiding as a possible activity for a much larger percentage of players. The difficulty of the raid dungeon determines the social rules of inclusion and exclusion that guilds and players will draw up to say who can raid and who can't. If the difficulty is low enough that most players can at least kill a couple of bosses in the first raid dungeon with minimum requirements of raid composition, gear level, and time commitment, then the image of raiding will change. The more people are participating in raid content, the better the business model of Blizzard that offers raid content as main course for the endgame holds up. Whatever else you think of WAR and its PvP endgame, at least that PvP endgame is totally accessible to anyone at the level cap, and nobody will be kicked out of a group for having the wrong class or talent build. WoW can't afford to keep their endgame exclusive for a small elite, they must open it up to a larger public to hold onto more players for longer.

If Blizzard really makes raiding a lot easier in Wrath of the Lich King, the only remaining barrier is in the heads of people. Social rules are slower to change than coded rules. Some people who didn't raid before will continue thinking that raiding isn't for them, even if they would perfectly be able to succeed in a raid. And some of the old raiders will resent not being that much of an elite any more. Which is silly, because of course the more hardcore players will always advance faster and further than the average player. It is just the entry into raiding that gets more accessible, and that can only be a good thing.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Do you like embeded commenting?

Blogger took me by surprise by adding embedded commenting, and switching my blog to that option by default. What that means is that there is now a comment input form at the bottom of each single-post page. If you click on the permalink you now see that form which wasn't there before. If you click on "comment" from the main page, you now actually land on the permanent page for the post, and it looks to you as if I changed my commenting interface.

Have a look at it, test it out by commenting to this post, and tell me whether you like the new way of commenting. If not, fortunately there is an option to override the default and go back to the old system.

[EDIT: In response to problems with the sidebar pushing the commenting field too low on Firefox and Chrome browsers, I modernized my Archive listing into a dropdown menu, which makes the sidebar much shorter. Just a hotfix until Firefox / Chrome problems are resolved by Blogger.]
- posted by Tobold @ 1:38 PM Permanent Link  (29) comments Links to this post

 
Zombie world event starts in WoW

WoWInsider reports that the world event in preparation of the Wrath of the Lich King is starting already. It is a zombie infestation, where you can be infected by clicking on curious crates, and turn into a zombie, able to attack NPCs and other players. Good timing, as it obviously fits well with both Halloween and the arrival of the Lich King.

I don't know all the details of the event, but the big advantage of a spreading infection as world event is that it isn't limited to one zone. As previous world events showed, getting all your players to gather in one place causes more server problems than fun.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:17 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Can't rely on addons

Not having played World of Warcraft for a while, I used the opportunity of the patch 3.0.2 to clean up my addons. I deleted all the old addons, deleted the WTF directory with the saved variables as well, and then reinstalled some patch 3.0 compatible WoW addons manually. Finally I downloaded the Curse Client to help me keep my addons up to date in the future, because I don't want to repeat the same exercise next month. But I noticed that several addons I used to have either weren't supported any more, or had changed substantially.

The one I'm missing most is CTRaidAssist, which isn't supported any more. It was my main utility for raid healing. I tried to replace it with Ora2, but that one apparently doesn't display the health of all raid members, so I'll need another addon like healbot. I'm also annoyed about the new version of Auctioneer, which I used in the past mostly to post auctions 5% under the current price. That pricing model doesn't exist any more, there are several statistical models based on histograms and standard deviations and 95% confidence levels. I have a rough idea about that sort of math, but frankly it isn't of any help if you just want to shift your glyphs quickly. Statistical price models aren't any good in periods of rapid price shifts. You'd be a complete idiot to e.g. sell herbs right now based on historical prices.

As we interact with our games through a user interface, and addons change that user interface, we get very used to playing with specific addons. But you can't rely on addons, they aren't made by Blizzard. When a major patch makes old addons not work any more, there are always some that have been abandoned by their authors. Which isn't very surprising, because usually the authors didn't get paid anything, and didn't receive much recognition either. And of course the authors are usually players, and when they quit the game, they stop supporting their addons. Blizzard has a history of implementing the functionality of the most popular addons into their standard user interface. But that takes quite some time. And I don't think there are all that many people out there playing WoW without any addons at all. There being so many good addons programmed for free enables Blizzard to slack on improving the standard interface. I just wish Blizzard would stop modifying the LUA language of WoW, so old addons could be used indefinitely.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
Your virtual gold is real under Dutch law

There have been similar cases in China, but now a Dutch court decided that virtual goods are real enough so that you can steal them, and convicted two teenagers for virtual theft. This is something game companies have been resisting a lot, because as soon as our virtual goods are considered to have a real-world value, the game companies would become liable for losses due to bugs or even due to changes in the game.

But highly theoretic considerations of virtual property rights apart, of course the courts decision was sensible in this case. Two kids stealing a toy from a third, younger, kid doesn't become any less reprehensible just because the toy only exists in a virtual world. From there to a comprehensive system of virtual property rights is still a long way.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:28 PM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Are you so silly that you only play one MMO at a time?

I am. Mark Jacobs said in a recent interview: "I play multiple MMOs... the idea that you only play one is really kind of silly." And he talks about research having been done on that subject: "We've done surveys on that, the industry has done surveys… so any comment along the lines of 'well if they're in my game they're not playing in another game,' flies in the face of all research that's been done among MMO players." Hmmm, I wasn't aware of that research. Anyone got a link?

Personally I have terrible problems playing more than one MMORPG at the same time. I am monogameous. The fundamental problem is that these games are designed to suck the maximum amount of time out of you. Playing one game for two hours is a lot more effective than playing two games for one hour each. Of course there are transition periods, where you decrease your activity in one game, and start up the next, and still are subscribed to both. And technically I'm "playing" Guild Wars and Lord of the Rings Online in parallel to World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online right now, plus a number of free games. But only if you consider having a valid subscription as being the same as playing a game, which kind of breaks down as concept with games that don't really have a subscription or where you bought a lifetime subscription. A better definition of "playing" is actually logging into a game and doing more than just emptying your mailbox. Practically for me it is hard to imagine playing several MMOs on the same evening.

So lets add to this research and do another survey: Do you frequently play more than one MMORPG on the same day? How many monthly subscriptions are you usually paying for in the same month?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:34 AM Permanent Link  (55) comments Links to this post

 
Star Wars: The Old Republic will be a storytelling MMORPG

As I've mentioned several times before, I see a future for better storytelling in MMORPGs. Just like movies went from being watched for the fascination of moving pictures to being watched for the stories they tell, I think MMORPGs could become more of a medium to carry a story. So it was with great delight that I read the FAQ for Bioware's announced Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR):

How does Star Wars: The Old Republic differ from other MMO titles?

Star Wars: The Old Republic will be similar to other MMOs but with several key innovations. Traditionally MMOs are built on three pillars; Exploration, Combat, and Progression. We at BioWare and LucasArts believe there is a fourth pillar: Story. Our mission is to create the best story-driven games in the world. We believe that the compelling, interactive storylines in Star Wars: The Old Republic are a significant innovation to MMOs and will offer an entertainment experience unlike any other.

Melmoth thinks this will be impossible. But I think that while introducing better storytelling into MMORPGs is not an easy task, Bioware certainly is the best placed to try it. Their single-player RPGs have excellent story lines. And of course the Star Wars universe is a very strong license for storytelling. So I'm sure hoping they will pull it off.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:04 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
Goals and activities

Rohan from Blessing of Kings has an interesting observation on achievements: "WoW shows you all the Achievements available, while WAR hides them." Green Armadillo explains a bit more on the WAR philosophy towards achievements, being more of a history of past deeds than a guideline where to go next. For me that is just one part of a hugely complex debate on how to introduce goals into virtual worlds, and how to make pursuing these goals more interesting.

I am a strong believer in having to have goals in a MMORPG. If there are no goals, you get a non-game sandbox virtual world like Second Life. The huge success of World of Warcraft can be explained by its excellent system for the management of goals. There are short-term goals, like quests, and long-term goals, like reaching a level cap, some exalted reputation, or killing some raid boss. The new WoW achievement system adds to both sides, having some achievements you can do in a few minutes, and others which will take you days or weeks to complete. In this context it is evident that the WoW achievements have to be known to the player, he needs to be able to see what achievements there still are to do for him. That is why WoW gives you more information on achievements than WAR does.

But words like "quest", or "achievement" evoke an idea of there being some difficulty in completing them. "Fetch me a bottle of lemonade from the fridge" is not a quest, it is an errand. And when you do it, it isn't much of an achievement. So the problem for game design is to create quests and achievements which actually have some degree of challenge to them. Many quests, and some achievements, limit that challenge to the act of fighting one or several monsters. And there is a growing dissatisfaction from players towards that model, especially when that fight is a solo fight, not involving other players. The sad truth is that the fight of a solo player against monsters in a MMORPG involves little or no skill. The outcome of such a fight is to a large extent determined by your level and gear, and to a very small extent to your ability to play your class well. There are many monsters you can easily kill by just mashing buttons randomly or in always the same sequence. There are many monsters you can't kill at all. And there are very few monsters which two players having the same class, level, and gear would find the more skilled player beating the mob and the less skilled player losing to it.

Other quests are even more trivial, just involving going somewhere and clicking on something or some NPC. So to make things a bit more interesting, most quests involve a certain amount of searching and exploration. Here the different philosophies of WAR and WoW are the reverse of what they are on the achievements: WoW gives you just a general direction and description where to find your quest goal, WAR marks the place you have to go to with a red circle on your map. On achievements WoW gives you more information, on quests WAR does.

I don't want to get into an argument here which way is better, because in the end the amount of information a game gives you often is irrelevant. A big problem here is that both quests and achievements in both games (and many others) are static: Every player has to perform exactly the same task to fulfill that quest or gain that achievement. In consequence there are websites listing all quests and achievements, and players who don't want to search themselves can just look up the information. If the game doesn't show you the exact quest location, then some website, or even an addon will.

Keeping players motivated with goals to undertake interesting activities is hard. The fundamental problem is that an activity that is interesting and challenging is often not the fastest way to advance towards your goals. Why search out that mob where your skill would make the difference between winning and losing, if you can find monsters that you are sure to win against and earn xp faster? Why lose time searching that zone when you can find the information where your quest target is on the internet? I couldn't find that quote attributed to Raph Koster anywhere that "humans tend to optimize the fun out", but he did say: "What people are doing is trying to make gameplay predictable--as predictable as putting on pants. Human civilization is based on making life boring. As boring as possible. Exciting can get you killed. Predictably is, therefore, good. In other words, every game is destined to be boring."

Initially the player sits around in a virtual world without goals and doesn't know what to do. So in order to incite him to do something fun, the developers present him with goals in the form of quests and achievements. But the most fun is in the unexpected, the dangerous, and millions of years of evolution have trained our brains to seek to avoid that. It doesn't matter that virtual death doesn't hurt, and only costs us a bit of time to reverse, we still are doing our best to achieve our goals without taking much risk. At which point game design degenerates into an arms race between clever developers who want to force players to take risks, and clever players finding ways to circumvent the dangers and still arrive at the reward. But in the end we, the players, tend to have the most fun when we can't avoid the risk: In balanced PvP, in challenging raids. Multi-player games keep us playing longer, and are more fun, because playing with or against other players automatically adds the unpredictability that is so much fun, but which we are trying to avoid. We want our multi-player games to have solo content, but nobody has come up with a good way to add that fun unpredictability to the solo part of MMORPGs yet. At the very least our actions in solo combat have to have a bigger influence on the outcome of that combat. Unless there are some major changes to the system combat is handled in MMORPGs, I don't see that happen anytime soon. Our goals end up ruining our activities for us.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
A personal decision

I already mentioned that my WoW server had problems last weekend, preventing me from playing as much as I wanted. I didn't mention that instead of playing WAR instead, I reacted by a mix of impatiently camping the WoW servers, and walking away to watch some DVDs. I logged into WAR once, emptied my mailboxes, and logged out again, feeling absolutely no desire to play WAR. Meanwhile my head is full of all the things I want to do next in WoW. I have to face it: I effectively quit WAR already.

This isn't completely unexpected, even before I started playing WAR I said I would probably just play it until Wrath of the Lich King comes out. And me preferring WoW is not necessarily a judgement on the respective qualities of the two games. It is a personal decision, based on personal preferences. I like PvE more than PvP, always did, and World of Warcraft is simply the better fit to my preferred gaming style. I did like many parts of Warhammer Online, like open groups and public quests, but with everyone mostly playing scenarios, the parts I liked in WAR just didn't happen as much as I would have wanted them to.

And in the end it is like Melmoth says: It's a matter of whether you are having fun in a game, and not always easy to explain why you haven't. It isn't something you can really argue about. I am in no way dissing those of you who prefer WAR over WoW, that would be *your* personal decision, based on *your* personal preferences, which are exactly as valid or silly as mine. There is no reason whatsoever why we should all prefer the same game, and in fact I think it is healthy that *not* everyone prefers WoW, because competition is good for the genre. I wish Mythic the best of luck with their game, and hope they'll break that million subscribers mark. I might be back some day, and am looking forward to all those improvements they promised us. But for now my gut tells me to play World of Warcraft, and who am I to argue with my gut?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:52 AM Permanent Link  (63) comments Links to this post

 
PvP achievement farming

I got an interesting mail from Machinima-turned-cook film maker Hugh Hancock, about the unintended consequences of introducing PvP achievements into WoW:

Thought you might be interested to hear about one of the first unexpected consequences of introducing Achievements to WoW!

So with the latest patch came all the Achievements, including a bunch of battleground achievements - capture the flag 5 times, kill a flag carrier 5 times, kill 50 flag carriers over your character's life, etc. Also, a whole reset on the powerscales, as you know.

So, I logged into WSG to check out my character's new abilities, and found something very odd - the Horde were entirely Tier 2-4 Gladiator kit, and were all sitting in their base. They didn't even attack Alliance who came in, even though their flag carrier - with the third flag of the game - was sitting right there with them. They just waited, patiently, until the unfortunate Alliance member walked up to their flag and took it, and then they killed him/her. Repeat.

Yes, the Horde were farming achievements. We figured they'd blown through "5 flag carriers in a single battle" and were going for either "50 flag carriers in career" or "300,000 points of damage done in a single BG"

The Alliance couldn't get their flag back, because they were horribly outclassed kit-wise. They certainly didn't stand a chance of capturing a flag. The Horde weren't going to end the BG any time soon, so we ended up essentially being the mobs being farmed - only rather than honour farming, which most people recognise as inefficient, this "achievement farming" was very sensible for the Horde, who presumably wanted to get their achievements quickly and easily, and hence the entire Horde team was cooperating nicely.

I'd guess, unless something changes, we can look forward to seeing this as a regular thing any time a PvP guild gets a new member who wants to complete some Achievements...

Raph Koster, "humans tend to optimise the fun out".

Funny, but somewhat sad. Have you seen anything similar, people behaving strangely in PvP to get some achievement? In WAR I noticed several people doing scenarios naked, because there are achievements for that too. Why do developers even put such achievements in which can only lead to weird behavior?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:53 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
WoW Inscription Review

As you all should know by now, I love tradeskills in MMORPGs. So the new inscription craft in World of Warcraft was the most interesting part of patch 3.0.2 for me. After leveling it up to over 350, and learning all the recipes available from the trainer, plus a few others by research, these are my impressions of this new trade:

Inscription is a relatively simple trade, best combined with the herbalism gathering skill. You "mill" stacks of 5 herbs into pigments, turn the pigments into ink, and add some parchment to create mostly glyphs, plus a few other scrolls and off-hand items. You don't need any loot drop or crafted trade goods for inscription right now, just the herbs you can gather and parchments from an NPC vendor. This is spiced up a bit by "rare" pigments, but in reality these are more "uncommon" than rare, and aren't used for glyphs, which are the main product of the craft. They are great for skilling up, but the tarot cards and off-hand items you can make from them are mostly useless, and only the one rare pigment needed to make one type of vellums for enchanters is really useful. Sidenote: Inscription produces armor vellum and weapon vellum, which can be enchanted like armor or weapon, and results in a scroll of enchantment, which can be sold and applied by someone to his weapon or armor. If you already have an alchemist / herbalist, you might consider combining inscription with enchanting on another character. Other enchanters will have to buy the vellums on the AH. In any case this is a great improvement of the enchanting skill.

But as I said, the main product of inscription are glyphs, of which there are two types: Major glyphs and minor glyphs. Major glyphs modify one of your more essential spells or abilities. Many give a flat-out bonus, like 20% more effect to Ice/Frost Armor, or adding a heal effect to Power Word: Shield. Other major glyphs change the nature of a spell, like the glyph of Frostbolt giving 5% added damage, but removing the slow effect, which would be useful in a raid (where the slow doesn't work anyway), but bad for soloing. Minor glyphs are often mainly cosmetic. For example the glyph of the penguin turns people you polymorph into penguins instead of sheep. There are also minor glyphs that remove the material component of spells like levitate or slow fall, or that make your buffs cost 50% less mana. Characters get more and more slots for major and minor glyphs during their career; at level 70 they have space for 2 major and 3 minor, at level 80 they get another major, for a total of 3 and 3. The glyph page is a tab in your "spellbook" you open by pressing "P". To enter the glyphs in those slots, you need to stand near a "Lexicon of Power", which are placed next to the inscription trainers. Just ask a guard if you can't find them.

One great innovation hidden in the inscription profession is the way the recipes are learned. As far as I know, and only valid up to now, there are no loot drop recipes. Loot drop recipes ruined some other professions for me, because I can't go raiding with all of my characters, and grinding the same dungeon over and over for a 1% drop chance recipe doesn't appeal to me anyway. Up to now all the major glyph recipes are gained from the trainer. All the minor glyph recipes are gained by a completely new method: Research. You get a minor research recipe early in your career, with a 20-hour cooldown, using cheap materials. The recipe produces a random stat boost scroll, plus you learn a random minor glyph recipe. If I understood it right, the recipe you learn is completely random, and if you'd learn one you already have, the research "fails", yielding you nothing for that day. Getting all the minor glyph recipes together is going to take months, with no way to speed it up, except log on every day. Great lure to keep people logging in, and in my opinion a much, much better way to learn recipes than the loot drop or alchemy random discovery way.

So, should you learn inscription? The big question behind that is what other profession to give up to learn the new one. Frankly, I'd only do it you have a character where you are unhappy with his current profession. For example I learned inscription on my mage, dropping enchanting because I didn't have any of the good recipes anyway. It is true that I made a small fortune with inscription in the last days, but that was due to two factors: Everyone is buying his first glyphs, and I had enough herbs in stock to skill up and make glyphs. Herb prices on the auction house are crazy right now, so buying herbs to learn inscription would cost you thousands of gold. And I'm pretty certain that the prices for glyphs will stabilize at an affordable level. The main problem with inscription is that there will be little repeat custom. Most people will buy 3 minor and 3 major glyphs, install them, and forget about them. Only very few hardcore players will switch out glyphs on a regular basis, putting in "raid glyphs" or "PvP glyphs" for different modes of gameplay.

The main weakness of the inscription profession is that glyphs aren't terribly well balanced. Some glyphs simply don't sell at all, because others are just downright better. You can only put three major glyphs at level 80, and you'll want those to boost the spells and abilities you use the most. Even allowing for the possibility of different specs, and different play styles, that still leaves a good number of glyphs that simply don't make the cut. And I think Blizzard is aware of that, and is already talking about changing a lot of glyphs in the 3.0.3 patch, still coming out before Wrath of the Lich King. And then of course WotLK will allow us to skill up from 375 to 450, adding more recipes for glyphs. There are several rumors surrounding the future of inscription, like the self-only shoulder enchants replacing the previously planned bonus glyph slot. And some people speculate on glyph combos, which would activate if you put in certain combinations of glyphs. But I'd wait for Wrath of the Lich King to really come out before believing any of this, betas and rumors change all the time.

In summary, inscription is fun enough as profession. It appears to be especially suited as "crafting lite" for alts, for example Death Knights, as you don't need to visit specific dungeons to find the recipes (unless that changes with WotLK). Inscription will probably not be a huge money-maker once the initial excitement cools down, but it is useful enough, and low maintenance.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
WoW server stability bad at the moment

I had a lot of fun this weekend in WoW, but didn't play as much as I wanted to, and not always where I wanted to. Because since patch 3.0.2 the European server I'm playing on, along with others in the same battlegroup, and some other server clusters, experiences lots of problems. This weekend there were several maintenance downtimes and rolling server restarts, and that was just the "planned" outages. There also were login server problems on Saturday, and on my server the whole Sunday long the world server for Outlands and all TBC content was down. We wanted to raid Mount Hyjal, but that instance wasn't up. We then wanted to go to ZA or AQ40, and these instances weren't up either, at which point we cancelled the raid. Anyway, there were several people who couldn't have participated, because their characters were in Shattrath, which was also down. Lots of players seeing lots of "World server down" error messages.

The WAR servers this weekend were in a much better state than the WoW servers. Too bad I didn't feel like playing scenarios.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:05 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
The Shattering of Azeroth

My World of Warcraft mage went to UBRS last night, with a pickup group, to get the Leeeeeeeeeeeeeroy! achievement. The pickup group consisted of my mage, who is a blood elf and thus was created post Burning Crusade, one guy who had the UBRS key, and three people who had never ever even been to UBRS, having started playing after TBC came out, and thus missed the period where people were still visiting level 60 dungeons. I had to show them where the door was, and tell them that we needed to extinguish the runes in the first room, and click on the altar in the second room to advance. Killing the 50 rookery whelps in under 15 seconds then was easy, because you just need a level 70 warrior to pick them all up, they don't really hurt him, and then AoE. It was obvious why nobody is going to UBRS any more: Who wants a trivial challenge that rewards you with useless loot drops? Large parts of Azeroth are effectively dead already, and Wrath of the Lich King will further reduce the small number of alts still using that content, because many alts will start as level 55 now.

So on the one side we have old content that isn't used any more. And on the other side we have Blizzard not achieving their promised one expansion per year rhythm, because creating new content takes so much time. So I propose to solve both problems, and do something that every ecologist loves: Recycling.

In practice this would me a new expansion, called something like "The Shattering of Azeroth", to come out in a year, in time for the holiday sales 2009. Besides the expected introduction of new hero classes, and raising the level cap to 90, the expansion would change the starting level of World of Warcraft to 55. So not only new hero classes, but newly created characters of any class would start at level 55. Any existing characters of level lower than 55 would see their level increased to 55.

This would liberate huge parts of the world, all the zones previously used to get from level 1 to 55. So the expansion would tell the story of a terribly cataclysm that transformed these zones. Instead of making a new continent for levels 80 to 90, old Azeroth would be transformed into zones from level 55 to 90. All the old mobs, and quests, and quest hub villages, would disappear, but the basic geography would remain, maybe with some modifications to zone connections. So now all these old zones and dungeons could be populated with new quest hubs, new quests, new mobs, spanning all the range from level 55 to 90.

I think veterans would enjoy revisiting old dungeons with new mobs and bosses. And for new players they wouldn't be any different from a completely new dungeon. For the devs it would take only half the time to repopulate the old dungeons and zones with new mobs and quests than it would take to create a new continent from scratch. And we would elegantly get rid of the depressing sight of deserted zones.

Of course clever people will realize that a game having only levels 55 to 90 isn't any different from a game having only level 1 to 34. But it is exactly this shortening of the level span that would be the big advantage of "The Shattering of Azeroth": The less levels there are in a game, the likelier it is to find somebody of the same level to play with. Instead of doing a rush job on new players to get them ever faster to the level where the rest of the players hang out, they would start at the same level as veterans doing hero classes. And while in WotLK 5 Death Knights make a lousy group, in the new expansion there could be functioning level 55 groups between hero classes and regular classes, because they all start at the same level.

The Shattering of Azeroth would remove a lot of content from World of Warcraft. But would that really be such a big loss? Isn't it better to reuse a zone like Westfall and the Deadmines instead of leaving it as a near-empty playground for a few solo players? Getting "boosted" through some old dungeon is a much less rich experience than going through that dungeon with players of your level. And of the quests that would be removed, only very few were memorable anyway. Who would miss some "kill 10 foozles" quest, as long as there is a new quest instead for killing the new mobs of now higher level in that zone?

So I think recycling the old world of Azeroth would be a great opportunity for the next World of Warcraft expansion. Because the old way of adding 10 more levels with a new continent at the end has its limits. It is better to recycle old content than to let it die a slow death of becoming insignificant.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (26) comments Links to this post

 
Open Sunday Thread

Need I say more? The now traditional open Sunday thread, in which you can discuss what you like, or suggest subjects for future blog entries.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Karazhan easy mode

My guild did a short Karazhan raid last night, and I went along with my frostmage, who hadn't raided much yet, and got several nice epics. But since Blizzard has reduced the health of all raid mobs down by 30%, Karazhan was too easy for an experienced raiding guild with several raiders wearing much higher level gear. We had 4 mages in the raid, and our strategy at Moroes was "gather Moroes and all the adds on one spot, then AoE". This continued all the way through, we cleaned out the place in less than 3 hours, and even the final boss, the prince, just took 97 seconds to nuke to death. Nightbane never got around to use a single fear, we didn't need a beam rotation on Netherspite, all the bosses just fell over death before they could do anything serious.

I would have loved Karazhan if it had been like this in January 2007, with the mobs having low health like this, and no key requirement. It would have allowed even casual guilds to get into raiding shortly after doing a couple of level 70 dungeons. In October 2008 the changes are kind of silly. Even if there is anyone left who hasn't seen Karazhan yet, he'll still get better gear in Northrend in a month. And for those who already raided, the nerf just removes all strategy from the raid. At its current state the Karazhan bosses should give much less badges of justice, and there should be a "heroic" version where the bosses have more health and drop more badges. If the first raid dungeon in Wrath of the Lich King is like this, I'll be happy. But having an ultra-hard dungeon at the start of an expansion and nerfing it into sillyness at the end doesn't sound like a good plan to me.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:00 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
Rohan on Retribution Paladins

I don't know very much about paladins in World of Warcraft. I only ever played one to level 32, and that was ages ago. So when I heard other players complaining about how overpowered retribution paladins are, I got confused. Aren't paladins the class that deals the least damage in this game, assuming all classes spec for maximum damage? So I asked an expert. And Rohan of Blessing of Kings kindly explained why retribution paladins aren't overpowered. Overall they still deal little damage, they just are able to use lots of abilities with long cooldown at once to deal a big burst of damage.

So if that subject interests you, I suggest you head over to Blessing of Kings and read Rohan's excellent analysis of the problem.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:53 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
This WAR announcement is real

While I was making fun of Mythic with my fake "WAR light" announcement, Mark Jacobs posted the State of the Game, with some real improvements. It's long, so I limit my discussion to three central points:

"In December, the Black Guard and the Knight of the Blazing Sun will officially be part of WAR". Good! I'm not going overboard with praise here, because removing a feature just before release, and then delivering it later shouldn't earn you extra credit (Blizzard likes to do the same thing). But adding the two missing tank classes to the game is important. Some content, e.g. public quests, has been designed with tanks in mind, and Empire and Dark Elves not having any of those was sometimes a bother. Yes, you can fly to other zones, but that didn't happen often enough to solve the tank shortage for those races. Now things should slowly balance out.

"We will continue to enhance WAR’s mail system until it is one of the best mail systems found in any MMORPG." Translation: "We'll improve the mail system until it isn't any more the worst part of WAR, and isn't totally sub par to anything else found on the market any more." Mail improvements are sorely needed, and of course Mark has to put a positive spin on it. But before it becomes "one of the best mqil systems found in any MMORPG", the WAR mail needs several years of work.

"We will also be giving players more incentive to engage in open RvR by improving the rewards for both assaulting and defending in RvR." Good, but could we get the same improvement of rewards for public quests, please? This is an important first step to get people away from instanced scenarios and into the open world, but I wouldn't limit the incentives to just RvR.

So the announced WAR patch 1.1 promises some good improvements, very well targeted to combat the current weaknesses of the game. Kudos to Mythic for knowing what to focus on. In comparison, while I did like WoW patch 3.0.2, the WoW patch felt like a huge bag of goodies with something for everyone, and very little focus. But hey, of course WoW is at a very different step in its life cycle, and the differences are understandable.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:28 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
WoW talent builds and identity

As promised I'm packing the more theoretical or philosophical aspects of my thoughts on World of Warcraft talent builds into this separate post. A reader directed me to the blog of a mage friend who is cancelling WoW, giving as one of his reasons the introduction of spec toggling. Quote: "To my mind, specs are an essential part of the "RPG" half of "MMORPG." They help to differentiate characters and define a character's personality." In other words, your talent build defines your virtual identity, and being able to switch quickly between specs destroys that identity.

I understand the idea, but I don't really agree with the sentiment. I'm always in favor of giving options, and let the players decide whether they want to take up or not those options. For example I feel strongly about the identity of my WoW priest as a healer. I tried shadow, and didn't like it at all, because it goes against that feeling of identity, of who that priest is. But I wouldn't ask Blizzard to remove the shadow talent tree from the game, or quit the game in protest because it is in.

In this context it is important to notice that talent builds in World of Warcraft affect different classes differently. If I can dual spec my frost mage into a fire mage, or build any other spec for him to switch to, the identity of my mage as damage dealer will never change. Whatever spec I have on the mage, he will never be the tank or the healer of a group. That is one reason why I said in the previous post that choosing a spec for my mage was easy: It didn't involve a choice of identity. I'd need to be much deeper into roleplaying before it would matter to me whether my mage hits his enemies with fire or with frost. For me, and most other players I'd guess, choosing a mage spec is simply a question of variations of style and efficiency. Maybe one build with more arcane is slightly better for very long fights like those in raids, maybe another build is slightly better for PvP. But however I spec him, the mage will always remain a ranged damage dealer with some crowd control elements. And very few groups or raid groups will kick me out for having "the wrong spec", because there isn't really a wrong one.

For the warrior and priest choosing a talent tree is more difficult, because there is a possibility to change your identity through talent builds. A tank and a fury dps warrior do not play the same role, don't have the same identity. And there is a risk of choosing a "wrong spec", one that excludes you from some part of the game, or seriously gimps you. You *will* meet groups or raid groups who don't invite you because of your talent build if you are a warrior or a priest. "You're a shadow priest? Sorry, but we need a healer." Yesterday there were several people in general chat complaining that they couldn't find a tank for their groups, because so many warriors had succumbed to the lure of Titan's Grip. Now several people tell me that protection warriors and holy priests are now much better for dealing damage after patch 3.0, so there is less of a problem of choosing a spec which is good for groups, but bad when you can't find one. But then of course that opens up questions about the use of the other talent trees. I think we will always remain in a situation where certain specs for these classes are more optimal for certain activities and less optimal for other activities. If Blizzard really introduces the promised spec toggling in a patch next year, classes whose identity is more strongly linked to their talent build will profit from having an easier time when switching from one mode of gameplay to another.

I do have less experience with playing other classes in WoW, but I can only imagine that identity is even more of a problem for more hybrid classes, like druids or paladins. I hear a lot of complaints about overpowered retribution paladins now actually being able to tank, heal, and deal damage at the same time. I have no idea in how far these stories are true, because I don't PvP much in WoW. But I can see the problem of rushing towards an enemy on a PvP battlefield, seeing he is a paladin, and not knowing what identity to expect. Is the guy a tank, a damage dealer, or a healer? My strategy towards him might be different depending on his role. With a druid at least I see what form he has. How much of an identity problem those hybrid classes have depends probably from one player to another. But at least a druid should already have experiencing in switching roles, even mid-fight, so the option of a second talent build won't cause him much of a problem.

Overall I think that introducing spec toggling will be a good thing. It won't solve every conceivable problem, but it will give players more options. And that more options are needed is not a question of identity, but a question of how useful different roles are in the different modes of gameplay. I prefer having a game in which you can do different things, solo and group, PvE and PvP. Being effectively excluded from some parts of the game because you play a class with a strong identity, which is useless for certain activities, is a bad thing. I'd rather have the culture shock of having to live with a different identity when e.g. I'm suddenly a melee dps class in PvP instead of being a tank in group PvE, than to have no useful role in PvP at all, or being forced to pay lots of gold to assume that other identity. As a warrior and priest I can see the advantages of dual specs more clearly than somebody playing mostly a mage can. For my mage the talent switch will be more or less fluff, for my warrior it solves some of his fundamental problems.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:51 PM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
Looking for WoW warrior and priest talent builds

In my head I'm working on a post on World of Warcraft talent builds. But right now my thoughts are in a big muddle, because I'm mixing theoretical considerations with my practical problems. So I decided to split the subject, post the theory stuff later, and in this post talk about my WoW characters after patch 3.0.2.

I played for several hours post-post now, but spent most of that time learning Inscription to 350. What I haven't done yet since the patch is any form of adventuring. And the reason for that is that I always have problems deciding on talent builds.

The only one of my characters that has his new talents already is my mage, because that was easy. I decided to stay "deep frost", and that meant I only had to decide on a few talents I *didn't* want. I took the full frost build from this site, because it appeared to offer the best mix of talents for all possible situations, from solo PvE to dungeons to PvP. And my mage was deep frost before, so most of the talents are familiar to me. My only worry is that Northrend could turn out to have lots of frost resistant mobs, but then, if they really introduce the dual spec option in the patch after the WotLK release, I could always make a fire spec as second build.

I haven't decided at all on a talent build for my warrior and for my priest. The warrior has been protection spec, and I do want him to remain a tank. But as I'll never be a raid main tank, and I *do* have to do some solo PvE if I want to level him up to 80 after the expansion, I need a build that isn't completely gimped for damage. Tempting as Titan's Grip is, I don't really want to level up with a fury build, and change back to tanking later, I'd like to be able to tank through all Northrend dungeons on my way up. Can anyone recommend a good blog post discussing the various talents and options for builds for tank warriors?

The priest has a very similar problem. I want him to remain a healer, but previously I did have a discipline / holy hybrid build 23 / 38, which included the spirit buff and the wand specialization. Priest soloing for me was pulling with some spell, bubbling up, and killing the mob with a wand. But due to the fundamental changes to how stats work, I'm not even sure any more if the spirit buff is still good, and how I would have to spec to make a healing priest which can still solo. My priest is most likely to end up in a raid, but I don't want to be gimped for damage, and I never liked shadow. Again, I'd be grateful for a link to some site discussing possible builds.

Of course if you have a great build you think would suit me, you could also link me that.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:35 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
WAR light

Mythic is setting an admirable pace with modifying Warhammer: Age of Reckoning to the desires of their players. Today they announced their latests surprise: A different version of the client, inofficially called "WAR light". Players were complaining about long load times and the time it took to get into the game past all those splash screens and EULAs and whatnot. And the 12 GB regular client is slow to install, and eats up lots of hard disk space, especially if you want to play on a laptop. But 90% of the game isn't even used by most players most of the time! So the idea for a lighter form of the client was born.

When you log onto WAR light, you don't enter the world of Warhammer Online, but just a series of lobby screens. You select your character on the first screen, and then are presented with a screen listing all the waiting queues for the various scenarios. This is actually an improvement over the regular client, because in WAR light you get the info of how many scenario instances are already running, how many people are queued up, and what the average wait time is. Good idea: You even see the scenarios of the other tiers, not just yours, so you can quickly switch characters if there is more action elsewhere.

Once you are in the scenario, WAR light plays just like regular WAR, only you are limited to low res textures. But honestly, for PvP you wouldn't really want to use high res textures slowing down your PC anyway. But you can't enter any part of the WAR world except for the scenarios. That can get a bit annoying if you got too much loot and your inventory is flowing over, as there is no access to auction house and mail. But the obvious advantage is that the huge amount of data from the open world, all the mobs, and quests, and public quest events, and tome of knowledge aren't needed, which makes the WAR light client far smaller and faster than the regular client.

As you can level up from 1 to 40 in WAR doing nothing but scenarios, and quite a lot of players do so, because it is the fastest method, the WAR light client covers nearly all the needs of the average player. Why install a huge game of which you don't need 90%?

DISCLAIMER: WAR light doesn't exist. It's an utter lie. A bitter parody on the current situation, where people actually play scenarios to the exclusion of everything else, and really don't use 90% of the game. But while WAR light is just fiction, we have to ask ourselves why it, or a game like it, doesn't exist. Apparently lots of people are quite content to speed-level through scenarios, without bothering to explore the huge and rich world of Warhammer Online. So why did Mythic have to bother programming those 90% of the world that only a small minority of players actually uses? They could have done WAR light in half the time and less than half the budget if they had limited themselves to scenarios and the endgame. It seems nobody is interested in the game before the level cap anyway! So why not use that?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (28) comments Links to this post

 
WoW patch 3.0 thoughts

So I patched WoW yesterday to version 3.0.2, but didn't have much luck playing. Some servers suffered from severe lag, and lucky me was on one of the affected servers. I was trying to use the auction house and mail, but that either took forever, or ended in a "world server down" crash. This morning things looked better, and I had actually already sold a good amount of the low-level herbs which I had bought for 5 silver each and put on auction for 1 gold each. Herb prices exploded, and I've even seen a guy trying to sell a stack of herbs for over 500 gold, but I guess he didn't find a buyer.

One new feature from the patch notes struck me as funny: I don't know if it was just a regular improvement, or if somebody from the WoW team was making fun of WAR, but in WoW you can now shift-click on auction house mail to auto-loot it. One single click to open the mail, take the attachment, and delete the mail. You're missing out on the information who bought your item for how much, but in most cases you don't really care, and auto-loot is optional anyway. May I suggest a "auto-loot ALL mail" button next? In any case, already now the difference in quality between the WoW auction and mail system and the same system in WAR is striking. WAR has some good ideas, like the ability to sort items by price per item, or having a separate AH mail box, but the execution and user-friendliness of the WAR system is abysmal. The WoW system has undergone many patches and been continuously improved, and that shows.

That started a train of thought on whether games are always getting better with each patch and expansion. As long as you are just looking at functionality, I think they are. No developer intentionally patches something in to make his game worse. Of course some patch changes are done to improve game balance, which can include nerfs to this or that class, which tends to be not popular with the affected players. But even those nerfs are done for the greater good of better game balance. Somebody starting World of Warcraft today would find most game features in a better state than 4 years ago, when we veterans played it. Just one example, the latest patch moved all mounts, pets, and various tokens like Badges of Justice or Marks of Honor out of the inventory and into a special tab of the character screen. A previous patch added the keyring. Back in the days (you know, the time when we went to school and back through 3 meters of snow, uphill, both ways) all keys, mounts, pets, and tokens took up valuable inventory space. I probably deleted most of the pets and vanity items from various events, because I simply didn't have the room to store them. Now things are much better, and apparently you can even get deleted pets and keys back by talking to a stablemaster and blacksmith.

But even as the functionality of WoW improves with patches and expansions, the game experience doesn't necessarily. Wrath of the Lich King introduces both more high-level content and first hero class, which starts the game at level 55, not level 1. Thus any *real* new player in WoW, who starts with a real new level 1 character, will find the world around him very empty. He'll rarely meet other players outside the big cities, and he won't be able to find a group of his level for the various dungeons. He'll be able to see that WoW now has a LEEEEEEEROOOOOOOY achievement, but won't understand what that one is about. He'll never do a proper Molten Core raid, or even Karazhan. If he has a veteran friend he can level up with triple xp, and get boost runs through dungeons, or even see MC or Onyxia if some guild kills them for fun at level 80. But that will be just a pale image of what we experienced when we played through that content.

MMORPGs are multiplayer games, and much of their attraction comes from the interaction with other players. As the players moved on, a huge part of World of Warcraft just ceased to exist. What is left behind is just an empty stage, and faint memories of the plays that were enacted on that stage. To populate that part of the world again, we'd need a completely different type of expansion: Not 10 more levels added to the endgame, but a cataclysm striking the old world, and changing it. New classes, maybe even new races, and most of the quests and zones of old Azeroth being changed to breathe new life into them. I wonder if we'll ever get such an expansion.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:55 AM Permanent Link  (28) comments Links to this post

 
The game I'm wishing for

Massively asks what next-gen MMO people are wishing for from Blizzard. Someone asked Tigole whether that game would be sci-fi, fantasy, or historical, and he answered "all of the above". So based on this little information, what game am I wishing for.

I'm thinking of a Victorian steampunk game, where steam-powered ships fly through space and visit fantastic worlds to trade with them. I really, really want a space game next, because that is apparently the only way to get something like a trade economy into a MMO. With trade I don't mean what is already happening on auction houses, but the idea that some goods are more abundant and cheap in some part of the world, and can be transported and sold at a profit somewhere else, where these goods are rare. That concept fails on fantasy worlds with their teleports, but works well with space games.

I want that game to somewhat resemble a cross between WoW and carebear EVE. No PvP, but a huge single-server galaxy to travel through. Mining asteroids, but with some amusing puzzle mini-game, not the boring EVE way, provides the basic resources for building various parts to upgrade your spaceship with. Various regions of the galaxy have different minerals on the asteroids, which is where the trade would come in. Another thing copied from EVE would be buy orders on auction houses. Where WoW comes in is in my dream game having tons of PvE content, like quests, or borrowed from WAR even public quests, like a fleet of space pirates attacking a planet. There would also be group PvE content, where players would need to form fleets to tackle some NPC threat.

Combat would be ship vs. ship combat, and I'd borrow a lot of good ideas there from Pirates of the Burning Sea. As the ships are Victorian, broadsides in space would be very cool, and give combat a tactical maneuvering component. There could also be planetside avatar combat on the fantastic worlds, and player avatars could explore planets, and even build player and guild housing there.

There would be no character levels, but a skill system. We could take offline skill learning from EVE, plus give out skill points for various activities, but unlike EVE I would introduce some sort of skill cap, like in Ultima Online, where you have to unlearn old skills to learn new ones. The advantage of that would be that new players could catch up to veterans. And instead of learning everything with time, players would be forced to specialize into careers that only consist of skill templates.

I don't really believe that Blizzard's next-gen MMO will look anything like this, but a man can dream, can't he?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (29) comments Links to this post

 
Hugh cooks!

It is a sad sign of this time and age that when I got a mail with the subject of "Hugh cooks!", my first thought was that one of these intentionally misspelled spam mails had gone through my spam filter. But instead it turned out to be what it said, a mail from Hugh Hancock of Machinima fame telling me that he is now making real films about cooking. Kamikaze Cookery, to be exact.

And while this has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with MMORPGs, the sight of Hugh cooking the perfect steak with the help of a vacuum cleaner and a blowtorch was funny enough that I thought you might want to see this.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:00 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Is discussion a dying art?

I was reading some blogs, following some links, and most unpleasantly stumbled upon one of the unofficial WAR forums. While there are heavily moderated, and thus good unoffical WAR forums, there are also virtually unmoderated forums about WAR which manage to be even worse than the already abysmal offical WoW forums. Somebody makes a statement of how he thinks things are, or expresses an opinion; and instead of saying "I disagree" and making a counterargument, people who disagree start various personal attacks, describe the other as being mentally retarded, call him a troll, or try to make him look stupid by correcting his spelling.

Is discussion a dying art on the internet? There is a hilarious video on YouTube about a business meeting in which the participants behave like on an internet message board, and even that is toned down compared to some of the game forums out there. MMORPG discussions tend towards the quasi-religious, with many people only accepting one true god (although that god might have changed by next week). And even in the somewhat more civilized discussion between blog these elements pop up from time to time, one blogger claiming that another hasn't got a clue, or is a fanboi, instead of engaging with his arguments.

There are very few absolute truths in this world. Sometimes the facts of a case are clear, sometimes they are disputed. And very often there are no facts at all, just subjective opinions. Me saying that I prefer WoW to WAR is completely subjective. There are arguments for it, but many of them again are based on personal preference, like me preferring PvE to PvP. Somebody else preferring WAR to WoW is equally valid. A blog is not a newspaper, there isn't even a pretense of neutral and balanced reporting. All I say on this blog is my opinion, or a report of what I've heard and believed, not an absolute truth. It is supposed to make you think, to voice your opinion, to produce counterarguments where you think I'm wrong. If you just dismiss me as and move away, the discussion is over, and nobody gained anything.

And there is enormous value in a more detailed discussion, like saying "I prefer WoW, but the open groups of WAR are really good", or "I like the crafting in WAR, but it suffers from the mail and auction house being not as good as WoW's". If we could all learn to express our preferences in a detailed and intelligent way, devs could read that discussion and improve their games with it. But if we don't use arguments at all in our discussions, and just try to shout down and insult anyone we disagree with, no sane game developer will read that. If we worship our favorite game like a golden calf in its totality, and won't allow anyone saying that maybe this or that feature is better implemented in another game, then we risk that the next game company just makes a clone of the most popular game, instead of trying to combine the best features of all previous games with some new ideas. No game is perfect, the millions of players and huge market share of WoW represent just an overall appreciation of that game; even a small game with much less players can have single features that beat the corresponding feature of WoW. But if we don't discuss, don't argue, don't talk about details, but dismiss anyone who doesn't agree with us 100% with some general statement of his incompetence, then all that information of what exactly we like or dislike is lost. And some guy in a suit will conclude that people want more games exactly like World of Warcraft, because that is all the data he has. We'd all be the poorer for that.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:47 PM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Abalieno on scenarios

It is not unusual for me to get into an argument with some other blogger about some difference of opinion on MMORPGs. What *is* unusual is another blogger complaining about me in spite of me 100% agreeing with him. Abalieno of The Cesspit has a strong opinion about WAR scenarios. He says "I enjoy scenarios to an extent, but when I'm doing JUST them they get incredibly boring and dull. A chore." That is EXACTLY what I think, and I've been writing about the issue repeatedly in the last days. Scenarios in WAR give the most xp, so everyone just grinds those instanced scenarios, so nobody is left to do public quests and open world RvR.

I proposed nerfing scenarios to give only half the xp, I proposed an automated system to diminish rewards when everyone is doing the same. And what do I get? Abalieno commenting on Broken Toys "Weird that you didn’t comment at all about population issues with PQs and Open RvR. Or maybe you thought it was covered enough everywhere else. Also, I find amusing how Tobold avoids to write those opinions on his popular blog." Can't the guy at least read my blog before complaining about me not writing about some issue? I'm sure he could have found an issue on which we actually disagree and complain about that. But saying that I avoid writing something I've been in reality bitching about all week feels really weird. Quote me from last Friday "As I said, the occasional PvP scenario is fun, but doing the same scenario ten times in a row isn't what I want." I'm with you on this one, Abalieno!
- posted by Tobold @ 9:16 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Moving the cheese

Many years ago we used to have big discussions of whether MMORPGs should be more like games, or more like virtual worlds. Like so often when describing extremes, the optimum is somewhere in the middle. The "game" part of a MMORPG supplies us with a purpose, a way forward, a goal of the kind that pure sandbox virtual worlds are missing. But the "world" part fleshes out the MMORPG, and makes it possible to combine various different activities into one product: We can have solo quests, group dungeons, various forms of PvP, crafting, and who knows what else they'll add one day, all bundled up into one MMORPG. Instead of having one, linear game you beat and then move on, you have many games interacting with each other, offering you a wide variety, and thus potentially more fun.

Unfortunately such variety is difficult to balance. Sometimes players discover that one specific activity gives better rewards then other modes of gameplay, and a majority of players starts grinding that activity for maximum rewards, foregoing the fun of variety for the lure of faster advancement. Sometimes demographics change, often because the veteran players leveled up, and there are fewer new players, leaving the lower level zones deserted. So people might *want* to play a different mode, one that involves playing with or against other players, but are stuck in solo mode because too few other people are interested in playing with / against them.

Developers often react to imbalances with patches. Nerf some too good reward, add a 20% xp bonus to underutilized zones or servers. But the older and bigger a game gets, the harder it becomes to distribute your players evenly over all of the existing content. You can't patch nerfs and xp bonuses into your game every week. Or can you?

What you can do is to make rewards variable, which is easy in the case of numerical rewards like experience points. If you accept that a large amount of players is strongly motivated by rewards, are constantly heading towards the cheese, and you want maximum variety in your MMORPG, all you have to do is to constantly move the cheese. Not manually, but automated. Instead of assigning one fixed xp reward to any given activity, you assign a minimum and a maximum value of xp reward to it, and couple it with one or several alternatives. Then you just monitor what the players are actually doing, and whenever players accumulate in one part of the game, the rewards there slowly diminish, and the rewards for the alternatives increase. That can either be done server-wide, or on an individual basis for every character. Of course you need some good information tools to communicate where the bonuses are at any given time. The effect is that if one activity, like PvP scenarios, is overcrowded, and another activity for the same character level, like group PvE, is underutilized, the overcrowded part is being less and less rewarded, until it falls to a less attractive minimum. And the previously underutilized activity is being more and more rewarded, up to a very tempting maximum. Thus grinding the same activity over and over is never the fastest way to advance. The fastest way to level is to switch between various activities, which incidentally is also more fun, and better utilizes all that content the developers made.

Not only does such a system automatically rebalance the initial imbalances in the game, it also reacts well to changes in demographics. For example when less people are around and finding a group is harder to do, the reward for grouping automatically goes up, until players are rewarded sufficiently for overcoming the barrier to forming groups. And the system is far smoother and more flexible than adding or removing rewards by patches. You can still make manual changes, but if for example you increased PvP epic rewards and suddenly everyone is moving into battlegrounds, the system rebalances itself by slowly decreasing point gains for PvP battlegrounds and increasing point gains for alternative activities. You move from having preferred and deserted content, to a game world in which all content is equally attractive.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
WoW micro-transactions

Keen reports with loathing that somebody found a "paid character customization" button in the Wrath of the Lich King beta files, and Blizzard reluctantly admitted that this was a feature they are planning for the future. He talks about cash cows, which by definition are "products with high market share in a slow-growing industry". Is WoW a high market share product in a slow-growing industry? I think so. Not that the MMORPG genre couldn't grow any further, but at least temporarily we reached more or less a plateau. WoW has the highest market share in this (in dollar terms, don't start to tell me how many millions play this or that free-to-play game, it isn't relevant). And Blizzard is trying to make the most possible money out of that situation, by introducing micro-transactions. You can hate companies for wanting to make a profit (welcome to the real world), or you can hope they'll invest that cash back into the next big MMO (which was revealed to *not* be World of Starcraft, WoW2, or World of Diablo). In any case, companies wanting to make a profit is just how things are.

Whether we should loathe that or not depends on what is actually for sale. To me "paid character customization" sounds pretty harmless. Really, if they only sell visual character customization, that is totally okay with me. Nobody is hurt if somebody else can buy himself a halo and angel wings outfit for $20 from Blizzard. Where I would start balking is when that outfits gives +500 bonus to healing spells (just an example, I know that +healing bonus is out with WotLK). Because if the paid character customization actually improves your characters stats, we'd start seeing raid spots being reserved for people who paid up, and certain paid outfits would become mandatory for certain classes.

One of the things that many games with micro-transactions sell is some sort of scroll or potion that gives you a temporary buff to the rate in which you earn xp or gold. Blizzard is actually already selling that, as part of their "recruit a friend" campaign, which for many players turned into a "level an alt by two-boxing" paid triple-xp extravaganza. I'm not a fan of that either. True, the people who tend to have the money to pay for faster xp gain are usually those who have less disposable time, so in some way it balances their leveling speed against the leveling speed of those who can play all day. But I don't like the whole "lets rush through this game as fast as possible" attitude, because I don't subscribe to the idea that the endgame is the real game.

So I hope Blizzard is just selling stuff like haircuts, armor dyes, cloak textures, and fancy effects around your weapons. I wouldn't necessarily want to buy any, but I wouldn't mind other people buying them. Do you loathe your neighbor for buying a Porsche, or do you realize that due to traffic and speed limits it takes him exactly the same time to get to work as you? If paid character customization is just about visual status symbols, then I don't fault Blizzard for adding it.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:20 AM Permanent Link  (45) comments Links to this post

 
Where is the PvP?

In all the discussion about Altdorf "fallen" (with everyone having a different definition of "fallen"), I failed to link to one of the most important blog posts on the subject: Saylah from Mystic Worlds asks the fundamental question about early morning raids of "Doesn’t that really just make it a PVE encounter at that point???"

Everyone says how Warhammer Online as a game is all about RvR / PvP, with players fighting other players. And then the endgame consists of first avoiding enemy players by attacking them when they sleep, and then a phase in which BY DESIGN the enemy players are locked out of their city, and the attackers play a big PvE raid public quest to kill NPC defenders and ultimately the king. So at best this is half-half PvP and PvE. And if you attack early enough it becomes 99% PvE. It's like playing WoW on a PvP server, where you might need to do a little PvP to get into the raid instance, but once you are in there, it's only PvE. So Emperor Karl Franz is still alive, and hasn't been beaten yet. But does that really matter if he is just a PvE raid boss? The attackers *did* finish the PvP part of the sequence to capture the enemy city. Anything after that only involves overcoming a completely arbitrary PvE boss fight.

So in the end WAR is a PvE game somehow involving the players of the other faction. But if people actually *wanted* to play PvP, they wouldn't plan early morning raids. Instead the attackers just want to win, and the easiest way to win is to PvE, not PvP. Makes you wonder if the game shouldn't be designed in a way that the fewer players are online, the stronger the NPC defences of the cities are, so attacking during prime time would actually be *easier* than attacking in the early morning.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:38 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
WAR Crafting: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Personally, I love crafting systems in general. And the WAR crafting system has some very good ideas at its core. But it also inherits some very bad ideas from other games, and is plagued by ugly bugs. In this post I'll try to sort into good, bad, and ugly categories the various features of the WAR crafting system:

The Good: WAR crafting is based on a very different design philosophy than crafting in most other games. Crafting in WAR is not in competition with other ways of acquiring things; you can't craft weapons or armor. Instead you craft consumables, that is potions and talismans to enhance your gear. This cleverly avoids having to make lots of useless gear nobody needs. It is a lot easier to sell 20 healing potions than to sell 20 bronze daggers. Interestingly the gathering skills in WAR are also non-competitive. There are no resource nodes which you have to get before some other player. Instead you get most ingredients from scavenging / butchering the mobs you kill, or disenchant magic items, or grow plants. Another huge improvement to crafting is getting rid of fixed recipes. You don't need to hope for some ultra-rare recipe drop from some boss mob in a dungeon to craft something, you just mix the ingredients and go. Rarer ingredients and critical successes give better items. Except for the scavenging part, crafting in WAR is decoupled from your character level, which enables those players who prefer to play crafters instead of adventurers to do so.

The Bad: The flaw that WAR inherits from previous games, like WoW, is making ingredients the limiting factor of crafting. Any crafting system must have some limiting factor, as creating anything in a virtual world must involve some effort. But systems that require time or player skill (not character skill) are usually better than systems that are limited by tradeable ingredients. Because if somebody has enough money, he can simply buy all the ingredients on the auction house, and power level his crafting. That not only encourages gold selling, it also leads to players ignoring crafting at the lower levels, and then power leveling crafting later, when they have the higher cash drops from the higher level monsters. The only part of WAR's crafting system that requires time in addition to ingredients is cultivation, as it takes 2 minutes to grow a plant. And of course for scavenging / butchering you are limited by the speed at which you can kill monsters. But for everything else you can just load up your inventory with bought ingredients and advance many skill levels in a very short time. I would much have preferred some sort of mini-game or puzzle, requiring some attention and time, to make crafting more interesting. As long as crafting as process is trivial compared to adventuring, crafting will never be a real alternative mode of gameplay.

The Ugly: WAR crafting suffers from a range of bugs and inconsistencies, as well as from its link to the horrible mail and auction house system. For example some magic items can't be salvaged (disenchanted). Now that could be by design, but then it is hard to understand why what items can be salvaged changed with the last patch. And currently there seems to be no general rule as to what items can and cannot be disenchanted, I had two magic shaman belts of similar level of which one was salvageable and the other not. I can only assume that there is some bug behind that, or otherwise there really should be some indication for every item whether it can be salvaged or not. Other inconsistencies are for example that the apothecary window has a handy "repeat last recipe" function, but the otherwise very similar talisman making window doesn't have that. And there are a couple of minor bugs, like not clearing the contents of a crafting window correctly, or how buying stacks of ingredients works only half of the time. The most annoying thing is how user unfriendly the process of for example making 20 talismans and selling them is. Every step from crafting, to putting the item on the auction house, to getting the money from the mail, seems to have been designed to require the maximum possible number of mouse clicks, plus some false alarm warning messages when you try to delete a mail you already took the money from. The situation is aggravated by the fact that you can't craft anything using only ingredients gathered from one character. You must either buy ingredients from the auction house, or make several alts with different gathering skills. And even if you decided to buy ingredients from the auction house, the fact that it is currently impossible to search for e.g. all apothecary ingredients of crafting level 50 makes the process quite difficult. The only good news is that presumably the bugs will be fixed and the user interfaces improved with time. Further possible improvements would be a better tutorial, and maybe even integration of discovered recipes into the tome of knowledge.

In summary, assuming the bugs and UI problems will be fixed, the WAR crafting system is quite good. We are not a the level of a virtual world yet, where crafting would be an activity of equal complexity and interest as adventuring. But as optional game element to provide optional stat enhancements, the WAR tradeskills are already very nice. And they are useful, a couple of potion buffs and enhanced stats from talismans can really boost your power. It is clear that Mythic didn't put as much effort into crafting as they put into other parts of the game, but their basic concepts behind it are solid enough.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Altdorf fell for real this time

Via Kill Ten Rats I learn that Altdorf has been conquered for real for the first time. Even Mark Jacobs acknowledged the capture, albeit with a reservation that he still has to check whether any exploits were used. Of course there is the usual discussion whether raids in the small hours of the morning are fair, but Mythic seems to be okay with that. One participant reports the whole thing taking 5 hours from start to finish, against 0 defenders, which should have given Order some time to mount a defence if they hadn't been asleep and offline. I think part of the problem is WAR not having international servers, on international servers there are no times when everyone sleeps.

But what I found more revealing was one comment saying just "slightly over 3 weeks 1-> 40 -> City captured". He meant it as compliment, but to me the phrase pretty much sums up what is wrong. WAR is a huge game, with lots of zones, a great amount of content, and theoretically a large variety of options what to do at any given moment. But there are so many people who skipped all this content, just selected the one option that leveled them up the fastest (scenarios), and after slightly over 3 weeks basically "finished" Warhammer Online. What will they do next? It's unlikely they'll reroll an alt and start playing the game in all tranquility, starting to explore all the other options. There is a serious risk that they'll organize a few more Altdorf raids, until they get bored with that, and realize there is nothing else to look forward to. They fast-forwarded the film, they flipped through the book to read who the killer was on the last page.

That is a collective failure between players who think the only real game is the endgame, and the developers who enable fast leveling and tout their endgame as being the most important part. It is a failure, because it reduces a huge game to a tiny part. People can still grind scenarios for a while until they are renown rank 80, but then even that option disappears. There will be nothing left but trying to take control of the same zones over and over. With Destruction winning most of the time, due to them simply outnumbering Order. How often will players repeat that same exercise before it bores them to death and they leave?

The whole time-scale is wrong. How long is WAR supposed to last? I'm sure EA and Mythic were counting on several years, with EQ and UO still alive after 10 years, and WoW going strong after 4. But while in WoW it famously took one crazy guy only 28 hours to level from 60 to 70 when TBC came out (and there will be another crazy guys doing something similar in WotLK), WoW isn't over at the level cap. Even the best organized guilds took months until they reached the final raid boss, and then Blizzard added more raid dungeons. Mythic isn't going to add tier 5 zones after this, Altdorf / Inevitable City is all there is. Soon somebody is going to kill a king, and then there is nothing left but repeat performances.

Now somebody is going to say that those repeat performances of city sieges is what they want. To which I reply why did Mythic bother developing the rest of the game? If somebody is supposed to play this game for 4 years, but only spend 4 weeks of that leveling to the cap, and the other 3 years and 11 months doing city sieges, then why spend so much money developing the leveling part? For half the budget they could have made a city siege only game, where characters are created directly at the maximum level.

I don't believe that a significant number of players are going to play Warhammer Online city sieges for years. MMO players are notorious for their attention deficit disorder and their love for new, shiny things. After killing the king a couple of times, they'll just leave WAR in search of a new game. And that is a shame, because in their rush to get to that point, they missed a great game. They will have finished WAR, but never really played it. Which isn't only bad from a game design point of view, but also not the greatest business plan.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:52 AM Permanent Link  (37) comments Links to this post

 
Turning your biggest strength into your biggest weakness

I really like the open groups and public quests of Warhammer Online. But MMORPGs are Skinner Boxes, in which we, the rats, are trained toward specific behavior by the rewards given out. WAR is offering a lot of different activities to choose from, more than other games, but players tend towards the activity that gives the best reward to effort ratio. And in WAR that is definitely scenarios. So even on high population servers, after having to queue to get in, you can still press the open group button and find no group with more than 2 players in a 10 minute radius. Needless to say that 2 players can't finish a PQ or take a keep. Everyone is in instanced scenarios instead, even for Destruction they are now starting in fast sequence, albeit usually always the same if you use the "join all" button.

I would say that open groups, making it easy to find people to play with, is one of the biggest strengths of WAR (maybe WoW should copy it). But if you have great group content and players find themselves excluded from it, because there aren't enough other players around to play with, that strength turns into a weakness. WAR has soloable quests. They aren't bad. They aren't special either. And there aren't enough of them. Even Mythic realized that and will allow us to do the same quest several times. Which isn't quite the same as adding more quests to the game. And it isn't the core of the problem, because we only need more quests for soloing because we can't group. The better solution would be to make grouping outside scenarios more attractive and likely.

I suspect that one part of the solution is technical: More players per server. The current numbers worked great when all of us were in tier 1. But now half of the players are in tier 3, and the other half distributed over tiers 1, 2, and 4. With 6 races, 20 chapters per race, and several PQs per chapter, there simply aren't enough players around to man the PQs. It is really crazy to first have to queue, and then have an underpopulation problem. I can only assume the limit is hardware related, not game design related. Or Mythic is limiting the number of players now, so that there aren't overpopulation problems later, when everyone is level 40 and in tier 4.

The other part of the solution is to make scenarios less popular. Nerf scenarios! Simply half the xp and renown earned in scenarios, and maybe give a bonus to xp in PQs, and suddenly players will be back in the non-instanced part of the world. Do NOT assume that players are in scenarios because they are the most fun. Remember, we are just rats, we go for the biggest cheese. If you had the world's best content on one side, and a boring red button on the other side pressing which once a minute gives twice the xp than the fun content, you'd see 90% of your players camping the red button. It is the job of the game developer to balance rewards so that every type of content gives a similar reward, and players can really do what is fun to them. Which won't be the same for every player.

WAR is slowly degenerating into a game that is reduced to a very small number of PvP scenarios: Nordenwatch, Mourkain Temple, Tor Anroc. People figured out that scenarios give better rewards than anything else, and that certain scenarios give better rewards per hour than others, so camping those is all they do. And even if you aren't a big fan of scenarios, you end up grinding them. Because leveling up by questing is so slow, and you can't find a group for PvE public quests or open world RvR anywhere. I'm not really interested in "WAR redux", a game reduced to leveling to 40 by playing nothing but the same scenario for 10 levels.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (32) comments Links to this post

 
Open Sunday Thread

So, what do you want to talk about today? It's the open Sunday thread again, where it's your turn to write, propose subjects, and discuss.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
Blizzcon announcement: Starcraft II will be episodic

While an anonymous poster and Zarkil were the first to guess that Mike Morhaime only announced a new Diablo III class, the Wizard (how original), the real news came somewhat later at the Blizzcon 2008: Starcraft II will not be one game, but three. You can buy the main campaign for the three races as separate packages. Is that a cheap money-tripling scheme from Blizzard or a useful service? Discuss!
- posted by Tobold @ 9:35 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
WAR announces 750,000 registered players

Mythic has a press release announcing 750,000 "registered players". Interesting term. I'd guess a "registered player" is more than a "copy sold", but less than a "subscriber", what do you think? In any case Mythic is also increasing their marketing effort, so there is a good chance that they'll reach the predicted 1 million players before Wrath of the Lich King causes a decrease in subscriptions again.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
A WAR plan

As I stated in the previous post, I plan to quit WAR and go back to WoW in a month, and I stated my main reasons in that post. This post is about what I did in WAR up to now, and what I plan to do until I quit. Due to personal and work related stuff getting in the way I didn't play quite as much as I would have wanted. But I did level a shaman to level 19, I learned both salvaging and talisman making to over 125, and I currently own a fortune, 150 gold, ten times what a level 20 mount costs.

So where do I go from here? Obviously I want to reach level 20 and buy a mount. I might want to continue to level 21 or 22, and see some tier 3 content, the next group of scenarios, the bigger keep battles, the public quests. But then I think I'll stop playing that shaman, because I feel I made a mistake rolling a healer in WAR. As Serial Ganker Sid67 so correctly remarks healing is a frustrating and thankless job. And as you can read in the Book of Grudges, many people in PvP target the healers first, because that is the clever thing to do. Last night I was in a scenario where somebody shouted "Don't try to kill the tanks. Tanks are not targets!", and that really made me want to play a tank. In RvR I do like doing the strategic stuff, capturing flags, guarding our flag, and a tank is much more suited for that. And if the enemy is persuaded that tanks should have diplomatic immunity from being targeted, that just increases my survivability even more. As a healer I just die too often.

And it isn't just PvP, I'm not really happy about my shaman in PvE either. Healers aren't all that great in killing mobs, no surprise there. But in World of Warcraft that is balanced by healers being absolutely needed and sought out. As I wrote about my WoW healer, playing a holy priest in WoW is a social engineering choice: You might have trouble soloing, but you'll always be able to find a group, and you're first in line for raid spots. WAR doesn't work that way, because nobody assembles groups. Groups just happen, they assemble themselves. And if there is no healer, people just play without one. There might be a general idea of "we can't attack that keep without healers", but that doesn't lead to "we should look for a healer and be nice to him". Instead the best you can hope for is no feedback at all, because otherwise all you hear is "why didn't you heal me!". And only in good guild groups did I ever see a tank trying to actively protect me with his special damage redirection abilities or by trying to stand between me and the enemy. So usually in PvP I'm the first to die, and while waiting for the respawn get angry comments of why the hell I'm not keeping the others alive. Doh! Because I'm dead, dude!

So I think that shortly after reaching level 20 with the shaman, I'll switch to my black orc, currently level 6. The good thing is that tanks in WAR, just like in most other games, are heavily dependant on the quality of their gear and stat bonuses. So having a main who is both rich and able to make great stat boost talismans should make playing that tank easy. I think I'll move over to the dark elf area, and level up there, to play through another series of quests. That leaves the chaos area in case I come back to WAR later and want to play a damage dealer, like a surfer dude Magus.

I'll probably be playing that black orc until November 8. The GOA account site finally came up, and I saw that the combination of the "free" month I got with the box, plus CE pre-order free time, plus free days for the problems with the headstart add up to me being able to play until then without ever giving GOA my credit card details. Would be silly to subscribe on the 9th, only to quit the game on the 13th. I'll sign back up when I grew bored of Wrath of the Lich King.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:23 AM Permanent Link  (29) comments Links to this post

 
Tug of WAR

On November 13 me and many other MMORPG players will have to make a decision: Do we continue to play Warhammer Online, or do we go back to World of Warcraft and the new Wrath of the Lich King expansion? So somewhere in my head there is a little virtual decision gauge, which looks like this:As you can see I'm currently tending towards leaving WAR and playing WoW / WotLK instead. And when I think what influences that decision, I find that curiously Blizzard has nothing to do with it. I'm not even following the pseudo-news of the various WotLK beta developments any more, they change and reverse too quickly. I simply assume that I have a pretty good idea of what Wrath of the Lich King will be: More of the same, an opportunity to play my characters for another 10 levels, and a bunch of tweaks and changes which cause some people to hyperventilate, but don't really change the way World of Warcraft plays. So my decision on which game to play is based on mentally comparing the WoW I know well with the current state of WAR. And the reasons why that decision tends against WAR are as follows:

• PvE content: From level 1 to about 15 I was happily playing WAR as a PvE game with the occasional PvP sprinkled in whenever I wanted. But then leveling up got slower and slower in the tier 2 zones, and I was running out of quests. After some discussion with other players it turned out that I was doing not enough scenarios. A quick comparison revealed that in the same time that it took me to do a quest for 2,500 xp, I could make 5,000 to 10,000 xp in Stonetroll Crossing, plus get renown. Questing is too slow. Having been unable to play for two weekends I'm already falling behind my guild mates, who are mostly doing tier 3 stuff. And if I want to catch up quickly it appears I'll have to grind PvP scenarios all evening long. Bleh! As I said, the occasional PvP scenario is fun, but doing the same scenario ten times in a row isn't what I want. And if PvE content is getting thin and less rewarded in tier 2 already, I'm dreading what it will be like in tier 3 and 4. Having played only low-level characters in the beta I had been convinced that WAR was a decent PvE game as well, but that doesn't seem to be valid for the mid to high levels any more. :(
  
  
• Population imbalances: There are various population imbalances in WAR. The best known is that Destruction outnumbers Order, leading to login queues and long waits for scenarios for my Destruction character. But with time I also noticed that even when my server is so full that I have to queue to get in, there aren't enough Destruction players in the greenskin tier 2 areas to successfully complete a public quest. Everyone rushed past me and is already in tier 3+. My public quest experience is reduced to grinding the first stage for the influence reward, then failing to do anything in stage 2, and waiting for a reset. That pretty much removes one of the major attraction points of WAR for me. The fundamental cause of that is probably a too low total server capacity, there are only enough players allowed on the server to really populate well the most popular areas. With public quests needing a certain minimum population around, this is going to be increasingly difficult as people level up, and PQs might not be a viable option for alts any more.
  
  
• Polish: That dreaded word, but somebody had to mention it. WAR is more polished than AoC, but considerably less polished than WoW. There are still quite a number of minor, but annoying bugs. Some features, like tome tactics, are still not fully implemented. And some other features, like the mail and auction house system, have obviously been produced in a hurry and are not user-friendly at all. The crafting system is still somewhat half-baked and not well balanced. And the list goes on and on. Whatever you want to call that, and I'm just using "polish" for it because it is a well-known term, the production quality of WAR isn't quite up there where WoW is.

Don't get me wrong, nothing on this list is unexpected, or would make WAR unplayable. I'm still having fun, and I'm certainly going to play WAR for another month. But as I said, at some point there is a decision to be made. I believe that Wrath of the Lich King will have the usual Blizzard quality level, and that playing WotLK will be most fun if I level from level 70 to 80 when everyone else does it. So unless something causes a major change to my decision gauge, I'm going back to WoW mid November. Maybe I'll be bored of WotLK after three months and switch back to WAR then, but for the time being WoW wins.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (37) comments Links to this post

 
Groundhog Day

In the 1993 film Groundhog Day Bill Murray plays a weatherman who due to his evil ways is cursed to repeat the same bad day over and over again. That turns out to be an absolute nightmare, because while the character develops over time, the world around him stays always the same, and any attempts to change it remain futile. As the last open Sunday thread revealed, many of you are stuck in the same nightmare: The MMORPGs we play stay always the same, have no end, and there is no way to change the world. The characters develop, but when we go back to the Barrens, Mankrik is still looking for his lost wife, after 4 years and several million players telling him where she is. By moving through a series of static sceneries, an illusion of progress is created. But if you move back, or play again with a different character, you see that nothing ever changes.

Being stuck in the Groundhog Day of a static world not only affects replayability. It also diminishes the motivation to play through some content even for the first time. Because we are limited to a static world with respawns, our quests are mostly limited to "go somewhere and kill some monsters" or "go somewhere and click on something / someone". There are no decisions to be made, no moral choices to be pondered, no roles to be played. The story of our virtual lives is a sequence of unconnected short stories with no consequences, about as interesting as reading through Thottbot, and giving us no more motivation than when we played the laser cannon in Space Invaders.

So how can we escape from Groundhog Day? In all fairness it must be said that developers are trying out some things. A Tale in the Desert has a world that is to some degree changeable by the players, who can even vote on changing game rules. And it has a beginning and an end, being currently in the third "telling". The Lord of the Ring Online has a series of "book" epic quests, telling a story that spans the whole game, and is related to the saga in the Tolkien books. Age of Conan up to level 20 has an interesting system where you can switch back and forth from multiplayer standard quest gameplay to an epic solo destiny quest (AoC would have been a decent game if it had continued that until the level cap). And even World of Warcraft with the Wrath of the Lich King expansion introduces a kind of destiny quest series in several phases for the new Death Knight class. The same area exists in different phases of the story, which allows the environment to appear changed. Of course the change is scripted, because there is only one possible course of action.

And that leads us to the root of the problem: How do we handle change in a multiplayer game? If the first player to tell Mankrik about his dead wife made Mankrik walk off and arrange the funeral, what would there be left to do for the next player who passes? The most change we can have in a multiplayer game is something like the keeps in Warhammer Online, which permanently switch between two possible states, being controlled by one side or the other. When Order controls the keep, there isn't much to do for an Order player, until Destruction decides to launch a raid and tries to capture it. That principle is something that could be used for PvE quests as well, lets say one faction giving people quests to kill the wolves so that the loggers can harvest wood, and another faction asking players to chase off the loggers so that the trees can grow back and the wildlife regenerate. So players can cause a change in the game world, but that change is reversible, and there is still a good chance that when you play the game again the wood is in the same state as it was when you first saw it.

But if changes to the multiplayer game aren't possible, or limited to reversible changes, we might have more success if we sneakily introduce a singleplayer game into our MMORPG. The "Tortage at night" destiny quest in AoC does exactly that, and the Wrath of the Lich King Death Knight starting area works in a similar way. But we could do even better, because virtual worlds are not subject to the same physical laws as the real world. Two people walking through the same door don't necessarily have to come out in the same room. And the same NPC doesn't necessarily have to be in the same situation when talked to by two different players. This allows us to get rid of that horrible concept of having half a dozen NPCs with unrelated quests standing around in the same village, and the player filling his quest journal with too many stories he can't possibly all remember.

So what I propose would be every player having one, individual, epic quest line, with possible sub-quests and branches. Instead of getting quests by clicking on an NPC with a glowing symbol over his head, the player starts the game with a quest that is the start of an epic saga. Whenever he finishes a main quest, he'll get to the next step. But because the next step is individual, and only visible to him, this allows us to introduce both random factors and choices. Basically we end up with a MMORPG version of the Choose Your Own Adventure or Fighting Fantasy books. If you saved the princess the quest line will continue in one way, but if you used the opportunity and stole the dragon's treasure while he was munching on the damsel, the quest line continues in a different way. And unlike the books, we can even further individualize the story: Random or environmental factors could determine how the quest continues. Few people currently hunting wolves in this zone? Lets send the player on a quest part that asks him to hunt those wolves. Or have a random roll determine whether the next step is hunting wolves, bears, or boars. With both choices and random factors influencing the story line, playing another character will never be the same. And the player would only follow one epic main story, with a few limited side-quests clearly marked as such. That will allow grander stories, being more interesting to the player because they involve him much more. To some extent it would even be possible to replace the training of spells and abilities, or the choosing of talents, by a new mechanic in which you receive your spells and abilities as quest rewards (something already done in the Death Knight starting quest series). Instead of choosing a talent tree, you choose a story tree, and by, lets say, deciding to help the tundra people fight the ice giants get access to new fire spells.

On your individual level that plays much like a single-player RPG, but zoom out and overall there is still a multiplayer game behind it. Because that same tundra and the same ice giants that are involved in the fire spell part of the quest tree of some mage could figure in another role in the quest line of another class. He'd be looking for something different, some other reward, but would still be asked to fight the same monsters, so there would still be an interest in grouping up and forming adventuring parties to go somewhere. Who says that everyone in a group must have exactly the same quests to go to some dungeon? They could be looking for different things in there, and some players might join them just for the fun and loot, without having a quest for the place.

Of course designing epic quest trees for every class, with random branches and sub-quests, is a lot of work. But would that really be prohibitive in a MMORPG development project that already has 300 people working on a game for several years, costing $50 million? Compared to creating fancy graphics, creating better stories is relatively cheap. And in my opinion it would be the better investment, because players completely ignore the sparkly spell effects after having seen them once or twice, while epic destiny quest sagas would last them a long time. And you wouldn't need those thousands of short story quests any more. Because players would stop being errand boys doing favors for everyone they meet, but become heroes on an epic journey to a destiny. And yes, that destiny would have an end, somewhere at the level cap. The end wouldn't delete that character, and he could still walk the land as a grizzled veteran and participate in whatever PvE or PvP endgame the MMORPG has. But maybe there would be a lesser percentage of the player base all huddling in the endgame, because making a new character and following a different destiny now sounds more attractive. Expansions could add new destiny quest lines for new character classes in new zones, instead of just adding 10 more levels to the end. And the MMORPG genre could grow up into a medium telling stories, like books or movies do, instead of repeating the same Groundhog Day over and over. Wouldn't that be great?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (38) comments Links to this post

 
Tome Tactics

Syp has a great post on tome tactics over at Waaagh!, something I wanted to write about as well today. He was faster, so I'm keeping myself short.

I gathered my first two tome unlocks needed for my first tome tactic yesterday, killing 20 level 12 dwarves in Barak Varr, then one level 17 champion bandit in Ostland. Then I went to the library in Inevitable City and tried to get my tome tactic. No success, couldn't find the vendor. Googled for him, and found out that the vendor isn't currently in the game. Doh!

So yes, you can unlock tome tactics in your tome of knowledge already, but no, you won't get the actual tactic before Mythic patches the vendor back in.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:52 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Guess the BlizzCon 2008 announcement

The BlizzCon 2008 starts Friday, and traditionally Mike Morhaime walks onto the stage at these sort of events and announces some big news, like a new Blizzard game. But as he already announced Diablo III in Paris this year, and the release date for Wrath of the Lich King has already been announced as well, it is hard to guess what he'll announce at the BlizzCon 2008 this weekend. Nothing? Patch 3.0 for WoW? World of Warcraft II? World of Starcraft? Something completely unexpected? Or something lame like when exactly in 2009 Starcraft II will be released? Or will Mike not appear at all, being busy searching for where his $4 billion went?

As my crystal ball fails me, this is your chance to out-prognosticate me. What is your guess for the big announcement of the BlizzCon 2008? Only prize I can offer is a mention in the blog post about the announcement for the first non-anonymous poster who guessed it right. 15 minutes of fame, isn't that something? So go, give me your best guess!
- posted by Tobold @ 11:36 AM Permanent Link  (36) comments Links to this post

 
Please copy more

Tigole recently announced on the World of Warcraft official forums that Blizzard wants to improve their battlegrounds. Syncaine thinks Blizzard is just copying from Mythic, because "queue for Battlegrounds from anywhere" or "EXP gain through the PvP system" sound very familiar. But Syp has a better theory: "What if, I thought, what if what Blizzard and Mythic and all these other MMO companies claim is actually true: that competition is great for the lifeblood of the entire industry?"

The thing is that there is a pool of features that has been created over time by all companies involved in developing MMORPGs. Some of these features are thought of as being mandatory, other optional, but that assignment can change over time. And while every company that makes a new game borrows heavily from the existing pool, it also adds all their new ideas to it. And it isn't just ideas, every game also provides a test bed for all those features and combination of features. What works, what doesn't work, and if we do this differently than everyone else is this going to be better or worse?

And in the end that is a good thing. WAR fans fighting with WoW fans who stole what from whom is silly. Both games learning from each other and improving their games is great. Yes, of course I want WoW to have the feature that I can join a battleground from everywhere. Why wouldn't I? Why would I want to say "WAR already has this feature, so WoW shouldn't copy it"? I very much enjoy how I can do a scenario in the middle of a kill ten foozles quest in WAR, and get right back to killing the remaining foozles afterwards. It's an extremely useful feature for integrating PvP better with PvE, instead forcing people to deliberately stop PvE, go to a city, and click on a war master every time they want a quick battleground PvP.

And there are still lots of features of World of Warcraft, where I would wish that Mythic would learn from, for example the mail system or the auction house system. My dream: The WAR and WoW devs take a "mail and auction house design workshop" together, and WoW introduces things like WAR's separate auction house mail tab, while WAR learns from WoW how to make mail more user friendly and design an auction house sorting system that actually works. Once they are there, they could study other options, like the blind auctions of Pirates of the Burning Sea and Final Fantasy XI, or the buy orders from EVE. Or they could invent new features, like an "take all auction mail contents" button. There are better ways to do things, and I'd like all games to implement them.

That is not to say that all games should be identical clones. The important thing is to have differences in fundamental gameplay. As I repeatedly tried to explain, WAR doesn't play like WoW, unless you force yourself to do only what you would do in WoW. But just because I want different games to offer me choice, and to play differently, doesn't mean I'm against best practices. A mail system isn't something that offers a huge amount of creative freedom, it either works in a user-friendly fashion, or it doesn't. Auction house systems can have fundamental differences in design, but again there are best practices for the user interface. When I put the same item up for sale twice it is just nicer if the program remembered the price I just entered for the first item, instead of me having to type everything again. So if one game already has that feature and another introduces it, I'm certainly not complaining about plagiarism. Hey, I reprogrammed the WAR keys so that the same keypress does the same function as in WoW, because having to press different buttons for the same function was driving me crazy. Keep your creativity for the development of gameplay, and please, copy more of the best practices of user interface design. All of you devs!
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Anyone here a WiFi expert?

My new netbook shows the same symptoms as my other laptop, not being able to connect to some WiFi hotspots. What happens is that I select a WiFi hotspot to connect to, it stays a long time on the "waiting to acquire network address" step, and finally gives me "limited or no connectivity" error message. All I know is that somehow my laptop doesn't get a valid IP address from the network, but I don't know what I can do about it. The same laptops have no problems whatsoever to connect to my home WiFi and to some hotel WiFi networks, but then fail to connect at other locations.

Anyone here got an idea whether that is just a problem of the networks I try to connect being borked, or whether I could connect to them if I just changed some setting on my laptops under Windows XP?
- posted by Tobold @ 11:44 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
Advanced Talisman Making in WAR

I was traveling from Friday to Monday, having only my game-free netbook with me. And last weekend I couldn't play either, so I'm really falling behind with my leveling in Warhammer Online. Most guild members are in tier 3, and I'm still smack in the middle of tier 2, at level 16. But the few occasions where I had the time to play a little, I spent with crafting. And when I wasn't there, my goods were still selling on the auction house. I'm up to 120 gold, which is 8 times the price of the first mount you can buy at level 20.

I made most of that money from salvaging, making and selling ingredients to other talisman makers. Unlike the real world, where people do professions to make a living, in MMORPGs people do professions for fun, usually financed by adventuring, and more often a money sink than a money maker. As I had enough money now, I started on the talisman making money sink, to see whether ultimately by getting my skill up I could do useful or even profitably things.

The most important thing about talisman making is that the "name color" rarity of the talisman you make depends nearly exclusively on the rarity of the magic item you salvaged (disenchanted) into a fragment. A green name magic item gives a white name fragment, resulting nearly always in a white name talisman, which is pretty much worthless on the auction house. Only if you manage a critical success will you get a green name fragment and green name talisman, which sell a bit better. The only exception is if you disenchant a magic item which gives a bonus to wounds into a wounds fragment; then you get the same color as the item you disenchant, green item gives green fragment, gives green talisman.

What the other ingredients do is not directly obvious. The container does nothing, there appears only one type to be in the game anyway. The gold essence, curio, and magic essence appear to be modifying how high a bonus your talisman will have, and how long the duration is. If you take only the basic level 1 ingredients you can buy from a vendor, you'll get only "weak" talismans. But that appears to be sufficient to get up your skill, so I got my talisman skill up to 95 by salvaging renown items into fragments, and making weak talismans from them, which I then gave away to guild mates or vendored. No profit to be made there.

Then I tried to make better talismans that would sell better. Buy green renown item, salvage into white fragment, combine with hellishly expensive gold essences, curios from the auction house, and magic essences produced as secondary product from salvaging, and you get a white talisman with slightly better bonus and better duration. Looking at auction house prices for talismans it became clear very quickly that there was no profit to be made there. Having over 75 skill and using crafting level 75 materials I could consistently make "lesser" talismans, better than "weak" or "inferior" ones, but while they weren't bad, they just don't look sexy with their white names. And then I saw an epic talisman on the auction house for 75 gold, and while I don't believe that one will sell, I realized that making purple talismans was the way to go.

So I searched the auction house for epics with +wounds bonus, and found a level 11 one for just over 3 gold. Salvaged it into a purple fragment, combined it with the best ingredients I had, and made a purple name talisman. +14 to wounds, no time limit, not bad. So I put it on the auction house for 15 gold, over twice the value of the initial epic and the other ingredients combined. And it sold a few hours later! Of course then I went and made a second, identical one, and put it up again, hoping to sell it by tonight. The limiting factor will be getting hold of cheap epics, but fortunately I don't need high level ones for this. I just wished Mythic would make the fragments for the other stats also be the same color rarity as the salvaged item, and not one step lower. I don't see why it isn't the same for all stats.

So this is where I see talisman making now: Salvage cheap (relatively) green renown gear and use basic ingredients to level the skill up, then use fragments from salvaged rare and epic gear combined with expensive ingredients to make good talismans for myself and for selling. I should be able to get past 100 skill level in talisman making soon, allowing me to use even better ingredients. I don't even know what the crafting skill cap is, but it doesn't seem to be related to rank (character level), if I'd spend enough gold I could reach it. But as the "epicness" of the talismans I can make doesn't depend on crafting skill, I'm not sure the expense would really be worth it.

What is ultimately the interest of talismans? I see two things there: One is that WAR does not have a raid circuit with ever improving epic gear. Once you reach level 40 you should pretty soon be wearing the best possible equipment. Then buying the best possible talismans is the only way for further improvement. The other big use I see is twinking. There are no level limitations on talismans. My level 6 Black Orc has 4 talisman slots in his low level gear, if I would be crazy enough to put epic talismans into those I could significantly increase his power. Even just wearing the scrap talismans giving +3 to +6 to his stats for 8 hours to 2 days is already a quite nice stat boost, and more reasonable given the rate at which he'll replace his gear. The richer the high level characters get, the more willing will they be to twink their alts with nice talismans. All in all talisman making thus isn't unlike enchanting in World of Warcraft, only that WoW has more restrictions on using it for twinking, and only gets an easy way to transfer enchantments to alts with the upcoming patch 3.0. But compared to WoW crafts, talisman making is more fun, because you don't have to hunt after stupid rare drop recipes. So I'm having fun, and I'm turning a profit, what more could I want?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:26 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Do queues make Destruction more hardcore?

If you want to log into a MMORPG and find yourself in a long waiting queue, there are three possible things you can do: Give up and don't play at all, yield and play somewhere without queues, or persevere and wait in the queue until you are in. It appears pretty obvious that the more hardcore players are more likely to persevere, while the more casual players are more likely to give up or yield. Waiting half an hour in line out of only having one hour to play is not a good idea. But if you plan to play for several hours, and you care very much about the progress of your guild on that particular faction and server, waiting half an hour is not so bad.

In Warhammer Online queues happen almost exclusively on the Destruction side. Thus a casual player who chose Destruction is likely to give up or switch to Order, while the hardcore players remain on the Destruction side. And I can't help but wonder what effect that will have on realm balance in the long run. Will Destruction become the side of the hardcore player, and Order be the side that mostly have casual players? With casual players being least likely to stage 3 am raids etc., this might have as big an influence on the outcome of RvR as the numerical differences.

The one thing that balances this a bit are scenarios. Order have much shorter waiting time for scenarios, and thus play them a lot more often. I do get the impression that due to having more experience in doing them, Order wins scenarios more often than Destruction. Or maybe I'm just not lucky and always get into the Destruction group that has difficulties of grasping the concept of "capture the flag". But in open world RvR, when our guild alliance is trying to find some RvR action for the evening, the question is often "is there any of the 6 keeps of our tier held by Order?". When there is, it is only one out of 6, and sometimes they don't hold any. MMORPGs being big Skinner Boxes, training people by giving them rewards for specific behavior, Order is currently being trained to prefer scenarios to open world RvR. That is somewhat counterproductive for the overall RvR game of WAR. What if there was a war and nobody from the Order side showed up? At least in the lower tiers that happens often enough already.

I wonder what else Mythic can do to make Order more popular. My first reaction to seening the collector's edition reward "heads" was "Mythic favors Destruction". Order gets blindfolds or dwarves disguised as a St. Bernard, while Destruction gets cool chaos faces, metal headplates, or the brilliant evil grin for the goblins. Some people say that Mythic looked at Alliance being more popular than Horde in WoW, and tried to compensate that by making Destruction more cool, but ended up overcompensating. Now Order needs a push to increase their popularity, especially with the hardcore players.

So I'm starting the special "Tobold WAR challenge" to all hardcore guilds: I will dismiss as trivial any achievements a guild attained while on the Destruction side. If you want your heroic deeds to count on this blog, you'll have to do them while playing Order. Burning down Altdorf is too easy, it's burning down the Inevitable City that is the real challenge. Everyone can win by playing on the stronger side, so if you want to stand out, go Order!
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post

 
Open Sunday Thread

Sunday again, my "day off" from blogging. So the floor is yours to discuss, or propose subjects for discussion.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
Emperor Karl Franz lives!

As I'm not playing on Karak Eight Peaks (EU), my reporting of Destruction taking Altdorf was necessarily second-hand and incomplete, based on the eyewitness report of an Order player, who was understandably exasperated. Now EA sent me an e-mail with a fuller picture. The most important news is that Altdorf wasn't fully captured on that server, it was only put into a contested state. The raiders did not even manage to complete the public quests that give access to the final battle against Emperor Karl Franz. Once the Order players woke up, they kicked the Destruction raiders out of Altdorf again. Nevertheless EA admits that there were bugs, and as the raid made these bugs obvious, they have been fixed now. Here is the complete clarification statement from EA:

I think your concern is completely valid and I don't fault your original blog post. I'm not here to tell you that you are wrong. Like I said, I wanted to give you more information about your concerns.

As you correctly stated, there was a bug, since fixed, that incorrectly set the postern doors in the fortress so that players from both Realms could access the inner Fortress. This allowed them to circumvent many of the fortress defenses with a smaller force than usually necessary and do it much quicker than would normally be possible.

On top of that issue, the time required for players to capture the two fortresses had been incorrectly set to 36 hours. It is now correctly set at 12 hours. This gave those same players three times the normal time allotted to achieve their goal of capturing both fortresses. This also means that without a fairly massive force, players may be able to take one fortress with a 3:00 AM raid, but not both. Instead they will have to play into the day and the chances of a successful player defense rise with every hour that passes.

On Karak Eight Peaks, Altdorf was put into a contested state and Destruction was able to initially win this stage of the fight. However, the same forces that so "easily" defeated the fortresses were unable to defeat the Bright Wizard College and Sigmar Temple Public Quests. These quests gate access to the King, so Destruction never fully captured Altdorf. Because they could not accomplish this goal, the City was held a brief time while the Destruction players attempted, several times, to successfully complete the City Public Quest, having given up on the other Public Quests. At this point, the forces of Order gladly re-entered the City and pushed out the remaining Destruction forces.

The end result of this was that while a small dedicated group was able to make use of two incorrect settings in our game to get to Altdorf, they were unable to accomplish anything meaningful once inside the City. Now that Fortresses have been corrected to work as designed, it would take a much larger force much longer to get to Altdorf.

You have to keep in mind that a City capture is a long multi-stage process that requires all of the following elements (I will use Aldorf as my example).

1) You must capture two fortresses in Tier IV within 12 hours of each other. To gain access to a fortress you must seize and hold the neutral Tier IV zone and your opponent's zone in two separate racial pairings. Once you lock down one racial pairing, you only have 60 minutes to capture its fortress. Should you fail, then that racial pairing reverts back to a neutral state and you must begin anew.

2) You must then fight in contested Altdorf and gain control much like you would in a zone. There are two Battle Objectives, a Public Quest and opposing players you must contend with in order to accomplish this.

3) Should you accomplish the first two tasks, the opposing realm is ejected from the city. At this point you have one hour to cement your hold on the city. You must complete the Temple of Sigmar and Bright Wizard College Public Quests within the next hour. If you manage this feat within one hour, you then lock down the city for 24 hours and unlock the King. If you fail, then you have one hour before the city is re-opened to opposing Realm players.

4) If you defeat the King, then you can unequivocally say that you captured Altdorf.

It's certainly possible that a massive well-organized force operating in the dead of night could seize and hold a Capital City over the course of a great many hours. Then again, if you organize a fairly large fighting force and utilize good strategy and timing to strike quickly and effectively, you should be rewarded for that behavior.

I would be happy to answer any follow-up questions you have. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to elaborate on the City capture.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:35 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
Ranking WAR guilds

There is a new guild ranking site up at Warheap, for US servers only, because Europe doesn't have a realm war website. So I went and checked out my US guild, Casualties of War, and found them way down at spot 51 of the Order guilds on the Averheim server. Turned out the list was sorted by default by "renown per member". If you sort by number of members suddenly Casualties is in the top spot, and if you sort by total renown we still come in among the top 10.

Which only serves to show that ranking guilds is inherently problematic, because what the "best" guild is depends on the criterion you choose. A small hardcore guild can certainly claim that every member put in more of an individual contribution. But what would that help if all 219 Casualties members decided to log in at the same time and attack the same keep? Numbers do count in WAR RvR outside scenarios.

In the end the main purpose of a guild is to provide a fun environment for its members. And I don't see how you could measure that on a guild ranking site.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:30 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
WAR is over, Destruction won, thank you for participating

Ten days after release Destruction captured Altdorf on the most populated European server. So much for the epic endgame of Warhammer Online. Apparently the feat was performed with a mix of devious strategy and exploiting some bugs. The most prominent bug was that Destruction could enter an Order keep by using the back door, instead of having to break down the front door. The devious strategy was doing the raid at night when Order was sleeping. I'm sure the bug will be fixed. I'm not sure anyone can do much about 3 am raids.

I've already noticed the same in the simple tier 2 keep raids I've done. If there are a good number of defenders in a keep, a keep battle is a long affair, and quite a lot of fun. Even if you lose in the end, you've seen a lot of fun action, and gathered some xp and renown points. But if the keep is undefended, a keep raid is kind of boring. NPCs aren't well known for their brilliant tactics, and WAR mobs are even more stupid than WoW mobs. The keep lord is tough, but strictly tank and spank. There are public quests that are harder and more varied than a keep raid with no human defenders. Even if you turned the keep lord into a proper raid boss, a keep raid against NPCs is always going to be easier than one against player defenders.

Thus if some group is only interested in taking the keep, and not interested in the fun battle, all they have to do is to attack when there are no defenders anywhere near. Nobody is going to organize a keep defence watch 24/7, because when there are no attackers, guarding a keep is extremely boring and doesn't give any rewards at all. Organizing a 3 am keep raid is a certain way to easy victory, and as the current example shows, you can even take the enemy capital like that.

One possible solution, seen in other games, is making keep warfare consentual. Destruction sends a friendly letter to Order, asking them if it was okay if they attacked Altdorf next Tuesday at 8 pm, RSVP. Of course that sounds extremely silly, and not like a war at all. But at least there would be a battle involving many players from both sides, instead of one guild fighting only NPCs in the middle of the night. Alternatively there could be predetermined keep attack time windows, only during prime time. Keeps can be attacked every evening from 6 pm to midnight, plus on afternoons during the weekends and public holidays. Again, that has nothing to do with simulating a war, and everything to do with playability. But would that be so bad? In real wars people don't respawn after being killed, and real keep guards might be asleep, but never "offline". Maybe limiting the virtual war to the times where most players are online is not such a bad compromise.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:26 AM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post

 
Silence isn't disapproval

I am very aware that in the last weeks I have written a lot about Warhammer Online, and very little about World of Warcraft, except as point of reference. There are two reasons for that: Writing about the new game is more fun, and the news about WoW currently aren't reliable. If I had gotten around to write about the WoW honor point wipe, I would now have had to write about how that wipe has been cancelled. I already did write about how Deathknights are far better in soloing than Warriors, but can't tank in group, only to see that change with every beta patch. Anything you read right now about patch 3.0 or Wrath of the Lich King could very well be not true any more tomorrow. So waiting until the patch and then the expansion actually come out, playing them, and reporting about how they are is more my style than getting all huffed about beta changes that never make it into a release version.

But my silence about World of Warcraft and extensive discussion of Warhammer Online should in no way be interpreted as me liking WAR more than WoW. Both games have their good and their bad sides. I am having great fun in WAR when I'm in a large group doing public quests or RvR. But when I'm soloing I actually like WoW better, and I also like the WoW dungeons more than the WAR version. Also the current version of WoW (not the beta or PTR) is infinitely more bug free than the current version of WAR. I play WAR now because it is new and shiny, and not a bad game. But unless Blizzard is having major release problems, on November 13 I will play Wrath of the Lich King. Because then *that* will be new and shiny, and not a bad game.

I am happy that WAR sold half a million copies in the first week, and is well on their way to sell over a million by year's end. I am happy because monopolies are principally bad for customers, and we all profit from Blizzard having some viable competition. But I'm not naive enough to see WAR as a "WoW killer". I won't be the only one running after new and shiny. There *will* be a significant decrease in WAR players mid-November, with many people rushing back to WoW. How things will develop in 2009 is anyone's guess, and I don't worry about it yet. It will be interesting to see both games develop, trying to iron out their weaknesses and building on their strengths. Has WoW improved its endgame? How fun is the raid-free WAR endgame in comparison? I'm looking forward to finding all that out. Getting all religious and proclaiming one game the true god, while condemning the other, isn't really me. I find good things in most games, and never fail to see the bad sides too. I don't even expect to ever see the perfect game. A large choice of good games is all I can hope for, so I'm pretty happy right now.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Jeff Freeman takes his own life

Suicides make me uncomfortable. Not only on a personal level, but also from a writer's point of view. There appears to be some convention to report suicides like any other tragic deaths, treating it as a mental illness leading to death, not unlike a cancer causing somebody to die. I didn't know Jeff "Dundee" Freeman personally, but I did read his various blogs, and it is hard for me to believe that there was no free will involved in his death. Does that make his death less tragic, if that was what he really wanted?

So I can only wish Jeff a heartfelt "rest in peace". For a more personal obituary you need to read Raph's. I don't even want to talk about that whole unfortunate SWG NGE episode, for which Jeff was unfairly blamed, even if his family said that wasn't a factor in his death. What I can contribute is a quote of something I wrote about Jeff in the past: "I can't decide whether Jeff is way more intelligent than I am, or whether he is plain crazy. Either option scares me a bit. He has this absolutely brilliant satirical style, which is at times really, really hard to understand." That was when he proved the correlation between the number of pirate MMORPGs and the increasing real-world piracy, thereby ending the videogame violence debate. I think it is best to remember him as that brilliant satirist, without dwelling too much on whereto being misunderstood can lead.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:55 PM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Measuring contribution

I received two mails from readers, one about how WoW battlegrounds could improve by using the contribution system of WAR public quests, and one about how tanks in WAR seem to be undervalued in the contribution system. Both subjects serve to show how measuring contribution is difficult, which makes handing out rewards for a group effort difficult.

WoW battlegrounds, especially Alterac Valley, suffer from most rewards being given out just for showing up. That leads to people going afk in the starting cave, or when reporting tools were introduced, going into hiding first and then going afk. If being on the battlefield was enough to get most of the reward, then why contribute? The WAR public quests and scenarios suffer from the opposite evil, they try too hard to measure contribution, and some contributions are simply too hard to measure. You end up getting less points if you guard a flag in a scenario, or if you tank in a public quest, or do other things that are beneficial for the whole group, but aren't measurable on an individual level. As a result players are taught that it is better to behave stupidly, to leave flags unguarded, to not use taunt in a public quest, etc., because MMORPGs are huge Skinner boxes, and we are being trained towards specific behavior via rewards and punishments.

And there isn't really a perfect solution for the problem. Often some sort of mixed approach, rewarding you both for just being there and for your participation, are tried. Typical example are WAR public quests, where loot is handed out based on a dice roll based on just having minimally contributed, plus a modifier that tries to measure contribution. If three people, a tank, a healer, and a damage dealer would do a public quest together, with nobody else around, the WAR system is skewed in a way that the healer would come first in contribution, and the tank last. That is simply a question of weighing factors, apparently one point healed counts for more than one point of damage dealt, and the use of a taunt ability is either not counted at all or given a very low point value. Efficient group combat is often a matter of agro control, and that is hard to measure. And even if contribution could be measured more accurately, then you'd still get situations where the highest contributor rolled low and the lowest contributor rolled high, inversing the rewards for contribution situation. But if there was no random roll involved, there would be no good reason to join a public quest already in progress, so the current system is probably still the best possible. It should be modified to give more contribution points for taunting, because already some tanks just don't taunt at all, because their relative contribution goes up if they let the healer and damage dealer pull aggro and die.

I like the contribution system in WAR scenarios more than I like the WoW battleground system, because at least no one can leech afk. But I am somewhat disadvantaged by the WAR system, because I tend to think strategically in WAR, guarding flags or capturing unguarded ones, and end up with less renown points and xp than players who just fought stupidly for no strategic purpose. Scenarios like Stone Troll Crossing make me crazy, because it is so terribly obvious how you could easily prevent the other side from tagging the third troll stone and winning the scenario, but everyone is too busy to rack up personal kill points to do so. In many WAR scenarios I get the feeling that "capture the flag" is too complicated a concept for most participants, and they prefer to all just brawl somewhere in the middle. But of course a contribution system that hands out more points for that stupid brawl than for doing anything strategic is to blame for that. In total the side that acts more strategically wins more points, but on an individual basis you are being punished for acting strategically. At least tanks end up less disadvantaged in WAR scenarios than in WAR public quests, because being in the middle of the fight and surviving counts for a lot of points.

In summary I think the mix of being rewarded for showing up and for contributing is a good compromise. But the system should be tweaked to give more contribution points for activities that help the group, instead of just measuring points of damage dealt or points healed. Measuring contribution is difficult, and we'll never see a perfect system, but some improvements are certainly still possible.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:11 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Queues are back in WAR

The guys from Mythic had this idea which sounded so good to make the server queues more bearable: If you were logged in and somehow left the game, voluntarily or involuntarily, game crashing, or just your internet connection having a problem, you wouldn't have to wait in queue to get back into the game. You would have a reserved spot and could log on and play immediately. Marvelous, isn't it?

Until you think of the consequences: Everyone leaving the game, whether he wants to come back soon or not, has this reserved spot. And the reserved spot is taking up a slot on the server, so no other player can play instead. Result: On my server, where due to cloning the server queues had shrunk from 300 to nearly zero the queues are back with a vengeance. Last night I was number 508 in line, and, also due to the changes, the queue advanced much slower. Took me an hour and a half before I was in.

Of course I didn't sit 90 minutes in front of my computer watching the queue, I went off and watched TV with Mrs. Tobold. Came back 2 hours later, and apparently had logged in and been kicked back out for being afk. But no problem, now that I *had* been in, I was able to log in immediately, and skip the queue. And then I had to test something: I exited the game via the menu in the regular fashion, and then restarted it. Bingo, I got back in again, although the server queue was still at over 300 people at 10:30 pm. So apparently even people logging out for the night have a reserved spot blocking other people from playing. And the reservation period seems to be rather long, not just a few minutes.

So what sounded like a good idea just made the problem worse. The law of unintended consequences. I think the reservation period has to be shortened to 5 minutes maximum, which should be enough to reboot a crashed computer and restart the game if the leaving was really involuntarily. Letting lots of people reserve spots for long periods just results in there being too many people with an option to play directly, and too few people actually playing, because the others are stuck in the queue. Bad idea, really; or at least a bad implementation.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post