Alternative leveling methods

I have 4 level 80 characters in World of Warcraft, and I deliberately played them in a way to experience the maximum amount of content, e.g. making the 4th one Alliance to play through Alliance-only quests. While I don't have the achievements to prove it (achievements are character-specific, not account-specific), I'm pretty certain I did 99+% of the quests in World of Warcraft. So for my 5th character to level I experimented with alternative leveling methods, which would not be based on questing.

As you might remember, I leveled my druid to 60 using the Recruit-A-Friend feature, and dual-boxing. That still involved some questing, but significantly less, due to triple xp. But I can't really recommend that method, as it is relatively expensive and complicated to set up, and is limited to leveling to 60. From level 60 onwards, and now up to level 75, I used another way of leveling, nearly quest-free: The Dungeon Finder. Profiting from the eternal tank & healer shortage, I dual-spec'd restoration and balance, as these two specs use pretty much the same gear, and usually went dungeoneering as healer. I also tried doing dungeons as moonkin, but that was only viable in parallel with grinding library guardians to get the schematic for Jeeves, because waiting times for dps are far longer in the dungeon finder.

One of several reasons I wanted another high-level character for was tradeskills. My druid has enchanting and engineering, both of which I didn't have to the highest level on other characters. So making level 75 is a milestone, because it will allow me to still max these out in Cataclysm, 75 being the minimum level for reaching the Cataclysm skill cap. Engineering is more for fun than for being useful, especially since there is very little you can do for other characters, but having an enchanter able to make scrolls is obviously good for my other level 80s as well.

The only quests I did from level 60 to 75 were a handful of easily accessible dungeon quests. The biggest disadvantage of that method is that one is missing out on all the lore, but as I already played through all that lore with other characters, that wasn't really a problem for me. Leveling speed through dungeoneering was at least as fast as through questing, if not faster, as long as I used the rest xp bonus, which applies to dungeon mob kills, but not quest xp. I missed out on all quest items, but that only emphasized the fact that quest rewards for regular solo quests in World of Warcraft are generally useless and far inferior to dungeon loot. In Outlands I got some reputation from running dungeons, but not enough to net me any useful reputation rewards. In Northrend I didn't even get to friendly with any faction through dungeoneering, and ended up spending a few justice points for commendation badges to be able to get to friendly for the tabard which will allow me to gather more reputation in higher level dungeons and heroics. But that isn't strictly necessary, the reputation rewards are far worse than what you can buy for justice points, and the head / shoulder enchants are bind to account nowadays, so I can get them via other characters.

So while waiting for Cataclysm I'll probably still level that druid to 80 with the same dungeoneering method. That is not something I would do with a first or second character playing through an expansion, as I actually like playing through the quests and lore. But playing through the same quests repeatedly is tedious, so for a 5th character the Dungeon Finder provides a good alternative leveling method.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:38 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
One-way street

Have you heard of the Free2Play game that was so successful that after a year they changed to a monthly subscription business model? No? Me neither! While the reverse story, games starting out with monthly subscriptions and changing to Free2Play is becoming increasingly common, that move appears to be a one-way street.

There is a general perception that the "successful" games can get away with a monthly subscription payment plan, while those games that fail to make it into the top tier are forced to switch to Free2Play. Nobody expects World of Warcraft to go Free2Play, or SWTOR to be released as Free2Play game from the start.

But if the business model was only a question of how successful a game is, then how come that the more successful Free2Play games never change to a monthly subscription model? What does that tell us that a switch appears to be possible only in one direction, but not the other? Just two years ago, any mention of microtransactions or Free2Play evoked a big howl in the comment section of this blog, about how that would be the end of MMORPGs. Today the move towards Free2Play appears nearly inevitable. What changed?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:40 AM Permanent Link  (31) comments Links to this post

 
Where have I heard that news before?

Champions Online goes Free2Play. Film at 11.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:29 PM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Try it, you'll like it!

The reviews for Final Fantasy XIV are rolling in, a month after release because Square Enix had asked reviewers to wait "three to four weeks post launch" before reviewing the game in order "to give the online game time to mature." Apparently maturing didn't help much, and Metacritic records an average score of an abysmal 50 out of 100, with the user reviews being even worse. I especially liked the Gamespy review saying:

I can't help but feel that FFXIV is cosmic punishment, meted out by some avenging massively multiplayer online deity for my years of complaining about the state of modern online RPGs. They're too simple, I've whined; too hand-holdy, too easy, too friendly, and too safe. FFXIV is none of these things. It is the definition of obtuse: poorly designed, aggressively underexplained, and shoddy in almost every respect that matters.

But then of course *some* people love Final Fantasy XIV, and are complaining that these bad reviews are unfair. That is a recurring event in the discussion of game reviews, and especially game review scores. It is somewhat inevitable: How do you boil a complex interaction between thousands or even millions of players and a game down to a single number? What exactly does a review score express?

The one thing a review score never is, is "fair". If you look at sites where players can score a game, you will quickly see signs of manipulation. A natural distribution of scores would be a Gaussian bell curve, but in reality you often see extreme scores of 0 or 100 put in to manipulate the average. Most famously the review scores on Amazon get manipulated all the time, for example by groups of people giving the lowest possible score to a game because of it's copy right protection scheme. Review scores of professional reviewers often are designed to avoid extreme scores, but because the reviewed games come from the companies that pay for advertising in these professional publications, the average is skewed towards a higher value. A score of 75 is an average game, a score of 50 is abysmally low, and lower scores are only given out to low budget games.

Even taking all of this into account, a review score can never measure how much the fans of a game will love it. Or how much other people might hate the game. The best a review score can come close to doing is to give an idea of the probability that an average player will like a certain game. If you had to recommend a game to somebody about whose gaming preferences you know absolutely nothing, a game with a high review score gives you a better chance that a recommendation of "Try it, you'll like it!" will be okay.

And by that measure, I think the reviews of Final Fantasy XIV are fair enough. Even the fans agree that FFXIV isn't for everybody, and that a random player stumbling upon the game has a high probability of being disappointed. That doesn't mean that some people can't love the game dearly. Nor does it mean that Final Fantasy XIV doesn't have good features. Even the bad reviews praised the artwork, the crafting system, and the profession switch system. But the reviewers are right to state that if an average player tried the game, he probably wouldn't like it. And that is the best a review score can do.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:16 AM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
WoW patch punishes button mashing

Due to the way I play World of Warcraft, I barely noticed the new ability queue system. I do not mash buttons, but press them when appropriate. In the new ability queue system, if you are on global cooldown or in the middle of an action, and press another hotkey, the game remembers that, and queues the ability, performing it after the first one is finished. If you play it right that is going to improve your ability output, because it gets around the problem of lag making you think you are still on cooldown, while in reality you are not.

But some people complain about the new ability queue, because they are apparently unable to hit a key just once. They are the button mashers, if they want some ability to go off, they hammer the key until it does. Only of course that with the new ability queue if you button mash, you will launch abilities twice which you only wanted once. WoW now actively punishes button mashing, and that is good. There is really no reason why a game should respond better if you hammer your keys instead of pressing them once.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:45 AM Permanent Link  (64) comments Links to this post

 
Blizzcon announces absolutely nothing

There has been a lot of speculation what the big announcement at this year's Blizzcon would be, but nobody had guessed this one: Absolutely nothing. I paid DirectTV for watching an opening ceremony in which the "major" announcements were that the Lich King has been killed half a million times, and that yes, in fact you will be able to download Cataclysm on release day. For being a CEO, Mike Morhaime sure is a bad speaker. Chris Metzen spoke a lot better, but had absolutely nothing to say, and instead gave a presentation about geeks playing with transformer toys. Unless Blizzard is planning a surprise announcement on day 2, which they never did, this year's Blizzcon was a non-event, announcement-wise.

There are some interesting tidbits from the panels, about dungeons and raids, and patch 4.1. But if the biggest announcement is enhanced dungeon maps for World of Warcraft, I'm sure lots of players will be a bit disappointed.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:26 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
Failure is always an option

As this post is likely to be deliberately misinterpreted by a certain brand of troll, let me start with this statement: I am very much in favor of Cataclysm making World of Warcraft harder. I specifically like the changes that make healing more tactical, where the healer has to make intelligent choices not only who to heal, but also which spell to heal with. But I also welcome the return of crowd control, and the necessity of careful selection of your target, instead of mindless AoE damage.

Having said that, in spite of preferring situation B to situation A, I'm a bit worried about how we will get from A to B. While I don't like blanket statements like "WoW is too easy", it is certainly true that the excessive rewards for heroics in Wrath of the Lich King did lead to groups being generally overgeared for the heroics they were running, which in turn led to extremely careless gameplay habits. Not so much for the tanks and healers, but very much so for the damage dealers. Not only have they forgotten all they ever knew about crowd control, but in many cases they barely know about how to intelligently select which target to attack any more. If you can kill everything with AoE spells, that is what you will do. Furthermore the excessive use of addons like Gearscore and damage meters has led players to believe that the best damage dealer is the one on top of the damage meter. That is likely to cause problems in Cataclysm.

In the overgeared situation of WotLK heroics, the normal situation before patch 4.0.1 was that the tank could hold all aggro, whatever the damage dealers did, and the healer could keep everybody topped up to maximum health whatever happened. That situation where failure wasn't an option is about to change. Patch 4.0.1 already made the aggro holding part much harder, and healing will become harder once people level up and stop being insanely overgeared for the content they are running. What is the typical damage dealer going to think when his group just wiped? Will he think "Oh, I shouldn't have used that AoE spell while the tank was still charging!"? Or will he think "Stupid fail tank didn't hold aggro, stupid fail healer didn't keep me alive!"? My guess is the latter.

Damage dealers need to learn that failure not only is always an option in Cataclysm, but also that they now carry a big part of the responsibility for that failure. Be that from crowd control or from targeting, a good dps is not just the highest number on the damage meter any more. Too bad I doubt that anyone will ever program a good performance meter addon which gives out bonus points for crowd control and big penalties whenever a damage dealer pulls aggro.

Unfortunately the most likely outcome for some time is an endless wailing of dps players about how bad the healers and tanks are. And that leads me to fear another problem: An increased tank shortage. Let's not mince words here: Tanks got shafted by patch 4.0.1, and there is nothing to suggest that Cataclysm will improve their situation. My healing priest is dual spec and his damage output as shadow increased from 3.5k dps to 4.5k dps with the patch while wearing his healing gear!!! My protection warrior deals only half that damage in his tanking gear, because replacing defense by dodge didn't change the need for tanks to carry around two sets of gear. And melee damage took a big hit compared to spell damage in general in patch 4.0.1. As a result I would need to gear up my tank twice as long as my healer, and still not get close to the same damage output in my second spec. And as tanking already has become a whole lot more difficult, playing a tank just isn't fun any more: He is worse off now both in group and solo gameplay, and gets insult added to injury. While druids probably will remain popular, due to more races available to them in Cataclysm, and their now much overpowered moonkin damage output, paladins will certainly drop from the top of the popularity table, and warriors risk falling down to the bottom of it, with only Spinks remaining as protection warrior.

I do hope that with time all this will balance out, in part by Blizzard improving the balance between spell damage and melee damage, in part by people getting used to the new realities and learning how to crowd control and watch aggro. But until we get there, I'm afraid we can expect some unfriendly moments in World of Warcraft.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (32) comments Links to this post

 
Minecraft besieged

A group of players is trying to bring down the Minecraft servers with a distributed denial of service attack because they feel that the guy who single-handedly wrote the program isn't adding content fast enough. No comment, I'm speechless about this degree of sense of entitlement.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:58 PM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
Is that still "single-player"?

This month a story was making the round of gaming blogs that Blizzard was banning players for cheating in the single-player part of Starcraft II. That turned out to be not totally true: Starcraft II has a built-in cheat mode, and using that is perfectly legit. What Blizzard does is banning people for using third-party cheat software, which could potentially be used both in single-player and multi-player mode. Furthermore third-party cheat software in single-player mode could be used to get achievements which are visible in multi-player. The people who launched the "Blizzard is banning players for cheating in single-player mode" story just happen to be the people selling the third-party cheating software, so the first versions of that story weren't quite as balanced as they could have been.

Cheating in multi-player is a problem, and nobody is more aware of that than Activision Blizzard. While Blizzard is doing quite a good job of keeping World of Warcraft free from cheaters, the Activision part of the company bungled that issue for Modern Warfare 2. MW2 is reported as having become nearly unplayable in multi-player due to widespread cheating.

On the other side is a huge number of players who think that cheating in single-player mode is perfectly okay, having spawned a huge industry of cheat codes and third-party cheat software. A Google search for "cheat" turns up 63 million hits, most of them about video games. Games like Civilization V even come with big toolboxes enabling players to "mod" the game in any way they want, which includes ways to make the game much easier. There is nothing that stops you from making a Civ5 scenario in which you start with a tank against the AI opponents' spear men.

So the question is whether a company has the right to ban players from using cheat software, even if that software isn't actually used in multiplayer mode. The Blizzard Warden anti-cheat software takes a "better safe than sorry" approach and reacts to players having cheat software installed, whether it is used or not. Probably the Starcraft II anti-cheat software is based on similar principles.

Ultimately we have to ask ourselves whether a game which requires you to be online to play it and which has lots of online functionality like achievements and such can truly still be "single-player". What use is an achievement system visible to other players if it is allowed to be manipulated?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:35 AM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
A personal history of MMORPGs

A reader was asking me about my personal history of playing MMORPGs. I’m afraid this is going to be a long story, but here it is:

Let’s start with the pre-MMORPG era: I started roleplaying games back in 1984, but that were pen & paper games. Computer roleplaying games came later, for example Pools of Radiance on the Amiga in 1988. My first contact with online roleplaying was LPMUD in 1990, played on a mainframe using a terminal displaying green letters on black background, no graphics.

My first “real” MMORPG was Ultima Online, but I only dabbled shortly in that in 1999. At the time I still connected to the internet via modem and telephone, and unlike in the USA in Europe local calls weren’t free at the time. The first month of UO resulted in me getting a phone bill of 500 bucks, which quickly ended my first foray into the world of MMORPGs. In early 2000 I got my first ADSL broadband (1 MBit/s) with flatrate, and played UO a bit more, seeing the world split into overcrowded PvE-Trammel and underpopulated PvP-Felucca.

From 2000 to 2001 I played Everquest. I started when the first expansion Ruins of Kunark came out, and stopped shortly after the release of the third expansion, Shadows of Luclin, which I hated. I played EQ for 19 months (free month plus three 6-month subscriptions), making EQ the only other MMORPG I played for over a year besides World of Warcraft. In spite of playing my main over 1,000 hours, I only reached level 42 out of 60 at the time. It was estimated then that it took on average 2,000 hours to reach the level cap in EQ.

For the next years I flitted from MMORPG to MMORPG. I played Dark Age of Camelot, but already then disliked PvP, getting one-shotted by archers in the lowest level PvP zone. I was playing Anarchy Online on launch day, still remembered as the most catastrophic launch of a MMORPG ever. I played Earth & Beyond, but not long enough to witness it getting closed down. I played in the beta of EVE Online, bought the game on release, and gave up on it before the free month was over. I played A Tale in the Desert twice during the first two telling, and again this year. I got bored with Star Wars Galaxies in 2003, long before the NGE, although I much liked the harvesting system of the game. I tried out Final Fantasy XI when it launched end of 2003, and played for 5 months. I played City of Heroes on US servers, but got quickly bored of the endless repetition of the tile sets used for the random dungeons. I tried Horizons, Lineage II, Ryzom, Puzzle Pirates, Ragnarok Online and Guild Wars, but didn’t stick with them long.

In 2003 I also started this blog, at first posting very infrequently, but speeding up in 2004. In May 2004 I predicted The Future of MMORPG being games that would be less buggy, more innovative, and faster paced. Well, at least I got two out of three totally right, but the “more innovative” prediction isn’t quite there yet: The MMORPGs of today *still* use the same hotkey combat, and level / class system that EQ did, my Universal Strategy Guide from 2004 stills applies to most games, and nobody ever implemented my idea of a MMORPG based on trading card games. I wrote a while for Grimwell.com, but then returned to my own blog when Grimwell moved on.

In September 2004 I played World of Warcraft for the first time, in the US stress test beta. I posted my opinion about the game then, and it is surprising how much of that opinion is still valid 6 years later, in spite of the many changes since. I wrote about the strength of the game being polished, and the excellent guidance through the quest system, balanced by the weakness of too much soloing making this a not very social game. But being European I wasn’t supposed to be able to play WoW before 2005, so I tried out Everquest 2 and started playing at release. But that launch was quite horrible, with servers being down very often, and gameplay frequently being changed in a major way through patches. So I managed to get a US account for World of Warcraft and played there until the European release. I switched to the European servers on day 1 of WoW Europe and played there ever since, with a few breaks in between. I ran a journal of my adventures in WoW for some time, wrote about some major guild drama I had with my original guild, temporarily joined a hardcore raiding guild during vanilla WoW and finished BWL with them, got gkicked for taking a holiday, and made peace with my initial guild to which I still belong.

As I didn’t want to turn my blog into a World of Warcraft blog, and my interest in WoW naturally has its ups and downs, I played a lot of other MMORPGs since, usually for short periods. I tried Dungeons & Dragons Online, and bought a lifetime subscription to Lord of the Rings Online. I played and watched fail to different degrees Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, Hellgate: London, Warhammer Online, and Age of Conan. I tried Vanguard, Champions Online, Aion, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Star Trek Online, and Final Fantasy XIV in their betas. And I played a bunch of smaller online games, like Luminary and Atlantica Online, tried some browser games, and even tested Facebook games. Not to mention countless single-player games.

As you can see, it is quite a long and varied history. And in spite of the prevalent pessimism, I must say that MMORPGs got better over the last decade, and I am confident that they will further improve.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:37 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Greatest failure in the history of MMOs

Yes, I've seen EA Louse. I didn't find it especially interesting, because the discussion of why a game failed two years ago isn't likely to bring anything new to the table except for office gossip. The only new part is this:

And Bioware? Don’t make me laugh. They’ve spent more money making the Old Republic than James Cameron spent on Avatar. Shit you not. More than $ 300 million! Can you believe that?

And you know what they’re most proud of? This is the kicker. They are most proud of the sound. No seriously. Something like a 20Gig installation, and most of it is voiceover work. That’s the best they have. The rest of the game is a joke. EA knows it and so does George Lucas,they’re panicking , and so most of Mythic has already been cannibalized to work in Austin on it because they can’t keep pushing back launch.

Old Republic will be one of the greatest failures in the history of MMOs from EA. Probably at the level of the Sims Online. We all know it too ……

Just for the record, I do believe this. I repeatedly voiced my doubts over the value of the "fourth pillar" of story telling by voice-overs in a MMORPG, seeing how the ability to skip quest texts was one of the first addons programmed for World of Warcraft. Just do a simple thought experiment: Imagine World of Warcraft was patched so that you can't skip quest texts any more, but would be forced to listen to them being read out slowly every time you wanted a quest. Would that want to make you play WoW more, or would you feel a sudden urge to punch your screen?

Everything I've seen from Star Wars: The Old Republic screams "WoW clone with voice-overs" to me. There is no way this game can possibly live up to the hype. In a year we will all be posting "Why SWTOR failed" blog entries.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:36 AM Permanent Link  (52) comments Links to this post

 
Healing is a transferable skill

When I have an idea for a blog post, but no time to write a full post, I note the idea in an e-mail to myself. One such idea, fallout from the Great Skill Debate, was about transferable and un-transferable skills learned when raiding: The transferable skills are those where you learn how to play your class and role well, and can be transferred to the next boss fight. The un-transferable skills are those where you learn the scripted Simon Says moves of a particular boss, which won’t help you for any other encounter.

I was thinking about that idea this week due to patch 4.0.1 of World of Warcraft, because I can’t remember any other patch or expansion which did so much to reset the transferable skills, changing the way in which many classes are played. I started playing my druid, first with a healing spec, then with a moonkin spec, and was surprised how different that felt from before. With the spells having the same names and icons as before, it was particularly noticeable for druid healing that the same spells now had very different effects. On my first dungeon run I kept wondering what effect was always dispelling the Thorns buff I put on the tank, until I noticed that the duration had been slashed from minutes to seconds. Rejuvenate has a much shorter heal over time effect now, while Healing Touch is a lot beefier. Druid healing now resembles priest healing more than it did before.

As moonkin I not only had some new and different spells, but also a new game mechanic, with eclipses now not being random events any more, but being triggered by a defined number of spells. As I was soloing that was a huge improvement: While in the old system the mob was dead when the eclipse triggered, and then the eclipse ended before I reached the next mob, in the new system you are automatically under the effect of one eclipse half of the time. That plus Starsurge boosted my damage output significantly.

Then I started looking into the talents of the next character, my paladin, and noticed that there were even more changes for the paladin than for the druid. In this case the damage output was nerfed, but with retribution paladins having been so seriously overpowered that was only to be expected. But again I found new game mechanics, holy power in the case of paladins, and enough changes to all spells and abilities to again change completely how this class is played. I haven’t studied my other three level 80 characters in detail yet, warrior, priest, and mage, but just seeing that there is no more defense stat assures me that the life of my tank will be fundamentally changed as well.

Now I’m happy that there are still over 7 weeks until Cataclysm comes out, because that gives me time to acquaint myself with my characters which feel so new. As much as I like the feature of WoWTal to export a talent build directly into World of Warcraft, I do not want to simply copy and paste the most popular build for my various classes without thinking. There are three reasons why I prefer to study what the talents do and try to figure out the best build for myself: 1) It is more fun. 2) I gain a deeper understanding of my character’s skills, which allows me to play him better. And 3) the most popular build is often a raid build, and not necessarily optimal for a non-raiding character doing 5-man dungeons or quests.

Many people believe that there is no room for that sort of thinking and understanding in MMORPGs. Get the boss strategy from YouTube, get the best build from Elitist Jerks, and then train your spell rotation on a target dummy to get the “muscle memory” in your fingers for the highest damage per second, and you end up with an approach to raiding that doesn’t require thinking. It reduces the whole exercise to the un-transferable skills that are specific to each encounter, and have nothing to do with being able to play your class well. But that unthinking approach not only runs into trouble when a patch changes skills, it also is inherently unsuited for playing a healer. You can’t play a healer without thinking, without observing who is what health level and going down how fast, and then making a decision about what kind of healing spell to use to save everybody. Maybe the need to think and decide instead of just mashing buttons makes healing inherently somewhat slower than dealing damage. But a healer who doesn’t pay attention for 5 seconds can cause a wipe, while a damage dealer only risks to lower his position on the damage meter. That is the challenge I love.

As I only raid with healers, I prefer the thinking and understanding approach to talents and spell rotations over the muscle memory approach. It might take me a bit longer until I fully understand all the changes of patch 4.0.1, but that initial effort will pay off: Playing a healer well is a transferable skill, which is independent of which boss the raid or group is tackling. And fully understanding the fine differences between various healing spells enables me to choose the right one in many different situations. No video guide from the internet can replace that.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Major changes to the glyph business

Blizzard decided to sabotage my project to blog less by releasing patch 4.0.1, bringing many significant changes to World of Warcraft, about which I could talk for hours. But in the spirit of not stressing myself, I'll first experiment with all these changes and post about them only slowly over the coming weeks. Nevertheless one change, which has been widely overlooked, touches a subject I've been discussing a lot: The glyph business. So I'll discuss that in this post.

The change appears minor, and probably won't even be noticed by the majority of players: Addons like Auctioneer or QA will in the future not be able to post multiple auctions at once. Every auction will require a "hardware" input, e.g. a mouse-click or keyboard press. If you are putting the three bind on equip items you found during your last dungeon run on auction, you will barely be affected. If you want to post 2,000 glyphs, that suddenly becomes a major hassle.

As I mentioned often, the glyph market is completely borked, because it doesn't cost anything to post a glyph, and the difference between the cost of making a glyph and what customers are willing to pay is so huge. Thus on every server I know, there are thousands of glyph auctions, with most sellers having hundreds if not thousands of auctions open, and prices wildly fluctuating between 1 gold and 100 gold for any give glyph, depending on who undercut whom when with what strategy. And that market is completely dependant on addons: It would be downright impossible to repost the same thousand glyphs every day if you hadn't got addons to empty your mailbox and repost the glyphs. The glyph business quickly went from being a game for many to being an industry for a few, with some participants being auction house gold farmers.

Sabotaging those addons is a good idea, and of course there is also that other major change to glyphs which makes that you only have to learn them once, and can later revert to glyphs you overwrote. But I'm not sure that this all will be sufficient to return the glyph market to anything resembling a player economy in a game instead of an automated gold making machine. The need for a hardware input is annoying, but not a hard cap, so some people will set up macros and keyclicking programs and hardware solutions that get around the problem. So we just get *less* people posting a thousand glyphs every day, without completely eliminating the phenomenon. What I would have liked to see would be a hard cap of lets say 100 auctions per account. That would be enough for every crafter who considers tradeskills as a game to post his goods, but would block the fully automated auction house gold farmers.

Remember: The player economy in a MMORPG is part of the game. The purpose is to provide fun to those players inclined to participate in that game. Automated trading only serves to diminish that fun, and due to the way the economy works there is no added value to the possibility of turning a few players into millionaires. As socialist as that might sound, in a game economy the entertainment needs of the many really should prevail over the exceptional cleverness of the few. There is no place for Ayn Rand in a game like WoW.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:39 AM Permanent Link  (31) comments Links to this post

 
Translating 12 million

The art of public relations is to make things appear better than they are, without outright lying about them. One prime example of this is the recent announcement by Blizzard that they now have 12 million subscribers to World of Warcraft, with a narrow definition basically defining “subscriber” as anyone who actually paid something during the last month. For various reasons having to do with SEC rules and similar legal requirements, we can be certain that this statement is true. But most people are likely to consider the series of similar press releases announcing 11 million and 11.5 million players in 2008, and conclude that World of Warcraft is a game with a very steady subscription base, growing rather slowly nowadays. And that couldn’t be any further from the truth.

During the 2 years where we were playing Wrath of the Lich King on American and US servers, World of Warcraft underwent some major seismic events in China. Blizzard changed their distributor from The9 to NetEase, which caused lawsuits, and subsequently major trouble with the Chinese authorities. During this time the servers were shut down repeatedly, for an overall duration of several months. At other times the servers were up, but Blizzard was forbidden to sign up new players. And during all this time the Chinese servers were still running the Burning Crusade expansion, with the authorities objecting against graphical display of bones in WotLK (not a trivial problem for an expansion about undead). All those problems finally got resolved, and Wrath of the Lich King was released in China late this summer, on August 31st.

Blizzard never released any subscription number data during these troubled times. Obviously if one counts only players who paid for a subscription last month and servers were down for over a month, subscription numbers for mainland China were 0 at certain times. But even if you skip that period, it is obvious that subscription numbers in China weren’t stable during that time. While some players switched from mainland Chinese servers to Taiwanese servers, a large number of players did what everybody would do when there is no new expansion in view and the servers are down: They quit. With China supplying just over half of the World of Warcraft players, it is pretty certain that the number of people who quit WoW in China went into the millions. We just don’t know how many exactly, because public relations wisely didn’t tell us.

When Wrath of the Lich King finally was released in China, and the problems with the authorities resolved, Chinese players again reacted as everybody else would: They resubscribed. The 12 million player press release is in reality a statement from Blizzard saying that they got all the Chinese players who quit back, and then some, by releasing WotLK there.

So what is the best guess about the subscription numbers of World of Warcraft in the near future? Well, Cataclysm is released on December 7th in America and Europe, and the American and European players will do exactly what the Chinese did: They will resubscribe. There will be some press release about some incredibly high number of sales in the first week. And somewhere in early 2011 there will be a press release about World of Warcraft having reached 13+ million players.

So, is World of Warcraft steadily growing? Far from that! It is best to think of the subscription numbers of World of Warcraft as being some sort of wave, with the press releases only announcing the high points, while the valleys between them are kept secret. Even if there are no future major events in China, the WoW subscription number curve will remain wavy. Because as much as Blizzard public relations would like to suggest to players and investors that interest in WoW remains steadily growing, the truth is that interest in WoW peaks with every expansion release, and drops between those releases, with minor variations due to content patches and external circumstances like summer holidays. And because expansions for World of Warcraft are still spaced 2 years apart from each other, the valleys between expansions are deeper than for other games. Speed of content creation is one of the fundamental problems of this game.

If this summer you had the impression that player activity on your server was rather subdued, and there were various problems e.g. getting raids together, you were most certainly right. Some people played alts, other played a lot less, and again others unsubscribed while waiting for Cataclysm. Blizzard never tells us the true numbers, but that must have some financial impact. Part of the player drain due to slow expansions is balanced by new players still flocking towards World of Warcraft in large numbers: WoW has been in the top 20 of PC games sales every month for years now. And it is that which explains why every expansion when it finally comes out results in a new subscription number record, due to ex-players resubscribing.

It isn’t clear how this could be sustainable indefinitely. It is notoriously harder to get an ex-player to resubscribe or a new player to sign up, than to keep existing customers playing. If people get into the habit of playing every expansion for a few months after it comes out, and then cancelling until the next expansion, one day they won’t be back. That might be from having learned the lesson of repeated burnouts, or from there being other games that hold the players interest more strongly than the umpteenth expansion. Continuous slow growth is not only a completely wrong picture of the recent past, it also is unlikely to be the long-term future of World of Warcraft. Press releases on subscription number records are just the tip of the icebergs of a far more complicated picture.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (29) comments Links to this post

 
Past and future of video games

I recently watched an old documentary, The Rise of the Video Game, from Discovery Channel, made in 2006 and first shown in 2007. The 5-part series tells the story of video games from 1958 to "the future". Only that in 2006 people still believed that the future of video games would be games like Second Life and Project Entropia. That vision of the future of video games has changed meanwhile. If you'd ask a similar panel of experts today how the future of video games will look, most would probably cite social game networks, based on the current success of cow clicker Facebook games like Farmville.

While I don't claim to have the power to see the future, I'm pretty certain that today's "experts" are as wrong as those of 2006 were. Experts have this nasty habit of only looking at what is hot today, and extrapolating just that into the future, instead of regarding the whole picture, and applicable history. Especially history is important, because it repeats itself.

So to understand what is going on today with social games, one does not need to look back further than 1983, to the great video game crash, which is also described in The Rise of the Video Game. As Wikipedia says: "There were several reasons for the crash, but the main cause was supersaturation of the market with hundreds of mostly low-quality games." Doesn't that sound just all too familiar?

While people are sometimes attracted to shiny new things, especially when "everybody else does this", in the longer term the rational and self-interested homo economicus tends to prevail. Once the "shiny new" sensation wears off, players are perfectly capable of telling a good game from a bad game. Making shoddy games to get rich quick didn't work with E.T., and it won't work with Facebook games. I always found it encouraging, a symbol of hope, that some MMORPGs sold over a million copies, only to lose two-thirds of those players after the free month, because it proves that players are able to make a rational decision to stop playing a game they found to have been less good than the hype.

Four years from now the experts will say "Social games? That was only a fad! The future of video games will be <insert extrapolation of current fad here>!"
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
Let's all go raiding!

Just a short comment today, after reading some MMORPG news: EVE Online is adding raid dungeons (and yes, they are even *called* dungeons) for 10, 20, and 40 players. Darkfall meanwhile revamped 17 dungeons, added "beginner dungeons" in safe locations to the game, and even introduced daily quests in their latest content patch "expansion".

/snicker

I'm sure I'll get a lot of fans of these games explaining why these new additions are *nothing* like the themepark features of World of Warcraft, and in no way an attempt to increase subscription numbers by imitating features from the market leader.

/snicker
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (34) comments Links to this post

 
Blog changes

I'm not having all that much fun blogging any more. Just like Larísa in her not-quite-farewell post I'm feeling stretched thin, and can't help but what the heck I'm doing this for. I created this blog to speak my mind and to discuss with like-minded people on how better MMORPGs could be made. Unfortunately the like-minded people are getting fewer and fewer. Instead the discussion is dominated by people who one way or another derive their self-worth from their leetness in some video game, and who need to constantly express their disdain for everybody else in order to keep that up. Why would I even want to talk with somebody whose biggest achievement in life is his gearscore in WoW, or his ability to gank other players in some PvP game? I have nothing in common with that sort of players, except for the bad luck of having frequently to share the same virtual worlds with them.

Post #3387, in the 8th year of this blog, and I not only know how people are going to react to anything I write, I could even write all those comments myself, correctly attributing names to attitudes. Some troll on this blog is actually already amusing himself doing exactly that, writing fake comments with fake identities, which are only slight parodies of the real ones. Not only are the comments predictable, they are also most of the time unwilling to actually discuss anything. People peddle their same old convictions and pseudo-religious unthinking support for "their" games. New ideas are quickly dismissed as "my favorite game doesn't do that, so it can't possibly work", or used for yet another diatribe against all those other "moron" players.

Successful blogging is hard work, much harder than successfully playing a game. It not only involves high levels of various *real* skills (writing skills, creativity, etc.), but also a lot of self-discipline to keep up a steady schedule; in my case about 10 blog posts per week on average. If I weigh that against the benefits I get out of blogging, I have to admit that the benefits aren't much: A couple of hundred friendly "keep up the good work" comments and mails, somewhat drowned in a larger number of negative comments, due to the fact that people are more likely to respond to something they disagree with. A small handful of free games. A few donations (in the last 3 months I got 3 donations for a grand total of $25). My net contribution to global GDP is probably negative, seeing how most of you read this at work. And if any of my writings ever influenced the design of any MMORPG, the lawyers must have told the devs to keep mum about that; but it is more likely that blogs simply don't influence game design at all.

Therefore I have decided to stretch myself less thin, and abandon the daily posting schedule. I'll play more and blog less, just writing whenever I really feel the urge to say something. I'm deliberately targeting a lower number of visitors and readers, in the hope of a less popular blog attracting less trolls (and goblins). I'll also read less blogs, kicking the eternally negative and disrespectful ones out of my feed reader. Peace of mind is worth more than being popular on the internet.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:16 AM Permanent Link  (91) comments Links to this post

 
I hate you all!

I swear Klepsacovic stole the words right out of my mouth! I wanted to write this!

Pretty much every other activity, hobby, or sport has a strong solidarity: People generally like other people with the same interests. Why is that so different for MMORPGs? There is a huge number of blog and forum posts out there doing nothing but complaining what bunch of incompetent idiots all the other players are. There are even complete blogs about nothing but that subject!

Would you send out an e-mail to everybody in your company telling them you hate them all, and consider them all to be morons and slackers? You certainly wouldn't! Then why do you feel it is a good idea to tell all the other MMORPG players that you hate them all, and consider them all to be morons and slackers?

The worst of it is the incongruence: After telling everybody else how much they hate them and how stupid they are, the same bloggers and posters then complain how weak the community of the game is, that there isn't enough chat, and no deep social connections. Why should the Grinch be surprised that he doesn't get much love back after publicly disrespecting everyone? If instead of bashing newbies the veterans would go and help these players become better, the community would obviously be much better.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:27 AM Permanent Link  (56) comments Links to this post

 
Cataclysm official release date

While the release date was an open secret for several days, due to blue posts about the next arena season, now it is official: Cataclysm will be released on December 7th. Interestingly the press release suggests that the downloadable version from the Blizzard store will be available on the same date, although it doesn't explicitely say that.

By the way, anybody else here who thinks that a collector's edition for fully TWICE the price of the expansion is a bit overpriced?

[P.S. We all guessed wrong!]
- posted by Tobold @ 7:03 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Character skill vs. Player skill

Zubon from Kill Ten Rats persuaded me to read through an epic discussion thread of WoW-forums like quality on syncaine's blog, in which there are a few hidden pearls from commenters. I especially liked Bhagpuss' comment that:

"Call me a traditionalist, but I thought it was my character that had the skills, not me. I still automatically differentiate what my character can do or know from what I can do or know. In an ideal world I would give my character goals and sit back and watch as he tried to achieve them. My competence or incompetence with a mouse and keyboard shouldn’t impact his “Agility” or “Dexterity”."

Unfortunately the thread was too full of "WoW sucks" and "Even syncaine doesn't play Darkfall any more" comments for anyone to take up that interesting thought. So I'll discuss it here.

I don't know if you ever had the opportunity to hold a real metal sword in your hand, at some renaissance fair or something. I can assure you that even holding it for 5 minutes with a stretched-out arm is way beyond the strength skill of most people, not to mention swinging it while wearing metal armor. And obviously we don't have the magic skill to shoot fireballs from our fingertips either. So Bhagpuss has a point in saying that it is our characters that have the skills necessary to kill a dragon, not us. So if it is our characters strength and magic skills that determine our success in a game, why don't we make Bhagpuss' ideal game that he described above?

Well, that game exists since 2002. It is called Progress Quest. Instead of just making a whiny blog post complaining about the "lack of skill" needed for his favorite MMORPG, Eric Fredricksen created this brilliant parody of a game to show why a game in which the character has all the skills and the player has none won't work: There simply isn't enough for the player to do, it isn't entertaining enough to passively watch our characters act for thousands of hours.

But once we admit that there should be *something* to do for the player in a MMORPG, we need to decide what exactly. What other kind of video game should a MMORPG be like? One school of thought bases that decision on the history of role-playing games, which evolved out of war games: Thus it would make sense if a MMORPG would play somewhat like a strategy game, and success would be based on your strategic or tactical decisions. But that sure isn't the only option: MMORPGs like Puzzle Pirates show that a MMORPG can be based on puzzle mini-games, where it is your puzzle game skill that determines success. You could theoretically design a game in which your success is based on your skill in solving differential equations, but presumably there is no market for that.

Now some people believe that a MMORPG should be an action arcade game, a kind of Super Mario, in which your twitch skills (hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness) should determine your success. And these people often are using a dirty trick in the discussion: They claim that only twitch skills are "skill", while other video game skills like strategy skills or puzzle skills are "not skill". Thus they reduce the whole discussion to a simplistic and wrong black & white separation of games "that need skill" and games "that don't need skill". Note that by their definition chess is a game that doesn't need skill, because there is no twitch involved.

World of Warcraft, by design, is always trying to be the broadest possible game. To some extent very many different video game skills are needed to play World of Warcraft. WoW requires you to memorize a lot of things, it needs strategic and tactical skills, and it needs different degrees of twitch skills in different levels of content. But it also tries to include Bhagpuss' ideal of "my character has all the skills", creating a hybrid model in which increasing your character skills reduces the amount of player skills you need to bring.

And that is where the "WoW needs no skill" argument is coming from. First of all it dismisses all but twitch skills. And then it only looks at how much twitch skill is needed for content if you are already completely maxed out with gear. And yes, if you have a 6k+ gearscore, the larger majority of content of World of Warcraft, including heroics and over half of the raid dungeons, requires very little twitch skill. Even the "final" WotLK encounter, the Lich King, on the easiest available difficulty level, only requires an amount of twitch skill which is well within the reach of veteran video gamers.

But, as Gevlon likes to point out, replacing skill requirements with gear is your personal choice. If you really WANT a game that needs a lot of twitch skill, you could simply form an "undergeared" guild like he did. Or you could play through content in hard modes. It is simply not true that there is no challenge at all available in World of Warcraft. Instead what happens is that players DELIBERATELY are constantly working on LOWERING the skill requirements, through maximizing their "efficiency" of gear / talent builds / everything else, and even through the use of third-party programs (addons) which make encounters much easier. But that is like complaining that "Civilization V is too easy" after playing it through on the easiest (Settler) difficulty level and having used some mods that make the game even easier.

The reason I personally dislike the "WoW needs no skill" crowd is that I always suspect them of elitism. Their main interest isn't in playing through something hard, because they already could do that. Their main interest is in excluding a broader audience from the game, or from certain types of content. I find that counterproductive. If I would play Civ5 on immortal difficulty level, what on earth would be my interest in demanding that the lower difficulty levels of the game would be removed, so less people could play it? I am much better off letting a larger audience play the game, each at his personal prefered difficulty level, because that way the developers earn a lot of money and are more likely to make more games of that type.

Me, I would like if World of Warcraft would require more tactical skills, and less Super Mario twitch skills. Fortunately it appears that Cataclysm will at least grant me the former, if not the latter.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (39) comments Links to this post

 
Civ 5 opening moves

Last night I was experimenting a bit with opening moves in Civilization V. You start the game with a settler and a warrior unit by default. Usually the settler is already in a good position to found a city, so in your first move you found your first city, and then have to decide what to build in it.

After some experimentation I found that I usually got the best results by building units first: A warrior, a settler, and a worker, in this order. It is tempting to build a scout instead of a warrior, because that is faster, and the unit explores better. But scouts aren't doing very well against barbarians, and I found it safer to have two warriors.

The other alternative would be to concentrate on buildings, constructing a monument first while researching pottery, and then a granary. The risk of that strategy is other players expanding into the area where you would otherwise settle. That depends a bit on your neighbors, some leaders are expansionist, others not. But I got an expansionist streak myself, and like to control map space to secure resources.

How do you usually start in games of Civ 5? Any prefered strategy?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:29 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Nobody wants to play with you!

... if you are a damage dealer, that is. Leveling my latest character in World of Warcraft, a druid, is an eye-opening experience how much the favor has shifted in the direction of tanks and healers. It used to be that you had a choice of either playing a damage dealer, who would level faster through soloing, but have problems later to get raid spots, or playing a tank or healer, who leveled much slower, but could get into a group easier. Then Blizzard made leveling easier for tanks and healers, strengthening their soloing powers, and making it easier to temporarily switch to a damage dealing role for solo content.

The Dungeon Finder introduced another major shift in favor of tanks and healers, because suddenly leveling through dungeons is faster and more efficient than leveling through quests. XP per hour are superior in a dungeon, especially so if you have rest xp bonus left. And the item rewards from dungeons are far superior to the item rewards from quests.

But only tanks and healers get the full benefit of these Dungeon Finder advantages for leveling, because for them the queue time is reasonably short. They get the choice how they want to level, by solo questing or by group dungeons. Damage dealers get a much diminished version of that choice: They can't choose to exclusively level by dungeons, as the long queue waiting time for dps would make that unfeasible. They only have the choice to either exclusively solo like they did before, or to sprinkle a dungeon here and there into the mix, doing quests while waiting 20+ minutes in the queue.

Over time this new situation will maybe answer one interesting question: Why do far more than 60% of players prefer damage dealing classes, or damage dealing roles for hybrid classes? Some people say that this is inherent, that dealing damage "feels more heroic" than withstanding damage or healing it. Others say that most people are anti-social, and would rather solo, for which a damage dealing class is still the optimal choice. But there is also a theory that the famous "tank/healer shortage" is caused by the incentives having favored damage dealers in the past, that people simply drifted towards the classes and roles that leveled the fastest. That theory is given some credence by the fact that patches and nerfs which change the relative power of classes always result in the nerfed classes becoming less popular and the new best damage dealers becoming the flavor of the month. So if tanks and damage dealers are now the fastest levelers, maybe the tank/healer shortage will end, and players will create more tanks and healers as new characters in Cataclysm. That would balance out the situation, as with increased numbers of tanks and healers the queue time for damage dealers would decrease. Lets hope and see.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:38 AM Permanent Link  (44) comments Links to this post

 
The danger of high rewards

I remember last year's Brewfest in World of Warcraft, mostly because of the Tankard O' Terror which dropped from the event boss Coren Direbrew. At the time I made a handsome profit, because I could buy them cheap while the event was going on, and sell them on for twice to three times the money once the event was over, and the Tankard was the only iLevel 226 boe weapon in the game. I haven't even bothered to do this event this year, because it is so pointless now, something Larísa laments.

Coren Direbrew is a prime example of the biggest flaw of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, a flaw usually and badly described as "Waaaaah! WoW is too easy!". And most certainly, for most players today the Brewfest event boss is "too easy", as in poses no fun challenge at all. But if we look at the situation closer we'll notice that Coren Direbrew in 2010 is EXACTLY as hard as he was in 2009. He hasn't been nerfed, and he still got exactly the same abilities and health. If you went there with a group with the kind of gear people had in 2009, you'd find Coren Direbrew a fun enough challenge. And the same is true for the rest of the game: Blizzard didn't nerf everything to make it too easy, and most of the content would be challenging enough to be fun if you'd go there with a group equipped in the kind of gear the content was designed for.

What went wrong was not that the content was made too easy, but that players were made too powerful. Again people tend to oversimplify that fact and blame "the Dungeon Finder", but to be precise the Dungeon Finder by itself didn't make the game much easier. The real culprit is the level of rewards given out for running heroics. Dungeons which were originally designed to for people to get iLevel 200 mostly blue gear, with a single iLevel 200 epic as end reward, should not have handed out emblems with which to buy iLevel 232 to 264 gear. WotLK would have been a better expansion if the emblems would only have given out iLevel 200 to 219 gear.

The too high reward level didn't serve any good purpose: Instead of making raiding more accessible, it made several raid dungeons instantly obsolete. And because the emblems gave too high rewards compared to the heroic dungeons they were found in, players were encouraged to run heroics completely overgeared. And of course Blizzard couldn't adjust the difficulty level of the heroic dungeons, because they were in fact quite challenging for a group wearing only the kind of gear a freshly dinged level 80 would wear. But for a group in emblem gear heroics are trivial to a point where many abilities became useless, and players just AoE'd everything down. Players always run after rewards, but with the rewards for running heroics being too high, that striving for rewards only ended up destroying the challenge and the fun.

I love the Dungeon Finder, and I so hope that in the next expansion the rewards handed out for running level 85 heroics are more appropriate to the difficulty level. There must be a sweet spot somewhere between Burning Crusade where everybody was stuck in the first progression raid dungeon, and Wrath of the Lich King where emblems made the first progression raid dungeon obsolete. Nobody wants to run the same raid dungeon for a year, but handing out rewards that allow people to completely skip it is not the solution. There should be some raid progression, albeit faster than in the Burning Crusade. And preferably a Raid Dungeon Finder functionality to save us from stupid and tyrannical PuG raid leaders. Heroics should equip people for the first raid dungeon, nothing more.

What Blizzard did in Wrath of the Lich King is equivalent of handing out more levels, without actually providing all that much more content for those higher levels. Not a good idea, that only makes people burn out fast.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post