Creating a better community

In a recent thread about game communities Espoire asked how to create a better community for a game. This is an aspect of MMORPGs which appears to have been widely neglected, as many players feel that older games often had a better community than modern games.

Unfortunately part of the problem is that some factors that would help to improve the community have fallen out of favor with developers and players alike. One such factor is simply size: Small games tend to have a better community than large games. But as the number of players is also roughly proportional to revenue, game developers obviously prefer games with more players. One could artificially create smaller communities by cutting the game into small servers, but that would have the negative effect of longer waiting queues for battlegrounds and dungeons. You'd also have to suppress the ability to transfer between servers and change names to avoid that players escape social consequences by hiding or fleeing.

Similarily out of fashion are the tricks that the original Everquest used to foster a better community: Long downtimes between fights, and a harsh environment basically forcing the players to cooperate or perish. Forced grouping and 15-minute stretches of mana regeneration giving players the time to socialize are unlikely to reappear in a modern game.

So what can developers still do to foster a better community? One trick is currently applied in some cheap Asian grinder MMORPGs, and works reasonably well there: Giving veteran players rewards for mentoring new players. The first Asheron's Call had a similar system with lieges and vassals, which also resulted in veteran players having a vested interest in new players doing well in the game. A similar trick is having a system in place like City of Heroes / Villains, where players can temporarily adjust their levels to be able to play with others of higher or lower level. With rewards from dungeons being increasingly some sort of points instead of gear, that would actually be feasible now even in World of Warcraft. If you can give a player justice points for running a level 85 dungeon on normal, then why not give him points when he lowers his level to run an older dungeon on normal with some leveling friends?

Of course one could say that all these tricks of social engineering that make people be nicer to each other are somewhat creating a fake niceness. Veterans aren't really helping new players because they like them, but because it gives them an ingame benefit. But of course that is the best we can hope for as long as we demand that the improvements to the community come from the developers. We can't get to a really better community, where all the goodwill is felt from the bottom of the heart, without the players themselves contributing to that. I still remember my first day in Everquest, where a complete stranger helped me and even gave me a magic necklace, for no gain to himself. It is hard to blame developers for the fact that such behavior has become so rare.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:09 AM Permanent Link  (49) comments Links to this post

 
Is "bad" a valid style of play?

A reader alerted me to a humorous post on the US WoW forums, where a warlock claims that "bad" is a valid style of play. He says:

I play a warlock. I, and many other warlocks, have been wanting green fire since vanilla. Maybe since before the game came out, we wanted to be wizards who could throw green fireballs. Now, finally, we have Fel Flame, and it is green. So the way I want to play is to only use Fel Flame, and to shoot green fireballs like a machine gun until things catch on green fire and green burn to death, screaming. I think Fel Flame is lots of fun.

But Blizzard says I'm not supposed to shoot green machine gun fire; there is a "rotation," which is a special order I am supposed to push buttons in, or else I am "bad" and the group I am in will "fail." Why is this the right order to push the buttons? Nobody knows. I feel like I am playing "Simon."

Anyway, in the last expansion, there was a different order I was supposed to push the buttons in. In the last expansion, the bad affliction warlocks liked to cast Soul Fire. In this expansion, the bad affliction warlocks are the ones who don't like to cast Soul Fire. How am I supposed to keep up with this? I heard about this site for jerks I am supposed to go to, but I am not going to do that. I am pretty sure it is a keylogger.

Now I'm pretty sure that most of you believe that "bad" is *not* a valid style of play. Which is curious, given the heated discussion about social responsibility. The warlock who doesn't feel a responsibility to play "good" is using exactly the same arguments as the DPS who don't feel a responsibility to switch roles: His way is more fun, and the other guys are just a bunch of anonymous strangers.

So where exactly is the difference? Why would 4 people who are absolute anonymous strangers to you, and to whom you don't feel any responsibility nor goodwill suddenly oblige you to play good just because the Dungeon Finder randomly grouped you with them? Imagine a dungeon that needs about 15k of total DPS: Why would three DPS each feel a responsibility to do at least 5k damage per second each? If our warlock does only 2k, another player does 5k, and a third 8k, the overall result is the same. And our warlock wouldn't be penalized at all, he could still roll need on all items he wants as much as the 8k guy, and will get the same amount of justice points.

But instinctively we feel that would be wrong. We'd call it "leeching" or something similar. Suddenly World of Warcraft is a team sport, and we feel a social responsibility to those 4 anonymous strangers. Why is that so? And why is there such a sharp division line, where we have a strong respnsibility to random players who are grouped with us, but not to the same players when we are not in a random group with them?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:27 AM Permanent Link  (37) comments Links to this post

 
Best expansion ever - for a different audience?

In yesterday's post somebody commented that "Lets face it - outside of raiding there is very little to do in WoW that is fun." Which immediately made me think of my wife, who is playing World of Warcraft casually for 6 years and has never raided, nor even entered a dungeon. And Cam commented in a post before that: "You can probably fix your angry troll problems, Tobold, by adding a big 'IF' in front of all your posts. Since folks can't seem to get that this was the original implication.", which struck me as very true.

While we often talk about dungeons and raiding, I believe that there are millions of World of Warcraft players out there who aren't at all interested in that sort of content. And I'm not talking about Gevlon's hypothetical "wants to group but is too stupid to" moron & slacker. But about people who simply don't *want* to group. Usually this kind of players has lots of alts, because that way he can access more of the sort of content he is actually interested in: Questing, crafting, exploring.

And I wonder how that sort of player sees Cataclysm. I could imagine that if you like questing, the combined Shattering / Cataclysm might be the best expansion ever, because it created several thousand new quests. There are two new races with new starting areas with very different styles (comedy for the goblins, victorian drama for the worgen). And even starting a new character of an old race is a new experience, as so many zones have changed so much.

The other kind of players, the ones Larisa calls the bitter veterans, the ones who think Cataclysm is the worst expansion ever, maybe need to realize that they aren't even the target audience here. It's a bit like going to a cinema and seeing the latest Disney movie, and then ranting that this is the worst horror movie ever. You're in the wrong film, hell, you're even in the wrong movie theatre! Blizzard wasn't even trying to make an expansion for the bitter veterans, having fully realized how futile that is.

I've been saying for years that the hardcore are Blizzard's worst customers, being less numerous, using the most resources, and paying not more than everybody else for it. While Blizzard still supports the raiding style of gaming, this might not be where they actually make their money with.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:16 AM Permanent Link  (35) comments Links to this post

 
Nerf or bringing the flow back?

I usually don't read patch notes of the public test realm for World of Warcraft, for the simple reason that it's a test realm, and the patch notes tend to get changed before going live. But one bit of news about patch 4.0.6. caught my eyes: In future you will be able to farm justice points in normal dungeons. The daily normal random dungeon has it's justice point rewards doubled, and the bosses in the "reputation" dungeons now give 30 JP each, up from zero.

The result will be that people who currently have problems doing heroics for whatever reasons (too long, too hard, too likely to fail in a PuG), can run normal dungeons instead, and get beyond the iLevel 333 reward level of the items dropping in normal dungeons. And as success always depends on a combination of skill and gear, this ultimately will make heroics easier.

Now of course some people like heroics in their current difficulty level (I like them in guild groups), and will claim that this is Blizzard catering to the lowest common denominator and nerfing heroics. But for those who feel stuck, because they already got all possible gear from normal dungeons and can't make the jump to heroics, this change will bring back the flow of the game. Having the option of running normal dungeons to improve gear, instead of farming daily quests for reputation gear, is more fun to a lot of people.

So what do you think about these changes? Are you crying "nerf", or are the justice point rewards in normal dungeons bringing the flow back into your WoW?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:24 AM Permanent Link  (26) comments Links to this post

 
Making it personal

I'm still somewhat bemused by not just the amount of bloggers responding to my thesis that MMORPGs are a team sport in which players have a social responsibility to get a team filled, but also by how violent some of that response was. The Noisy Rogue called the post a fucking stupid pile of dogshit, and me stupid and a moron among other things. Nils called my statement bizarre. Iggep called it a seriously controversial statement. And Callan finds me genuinly scary. Even Bigbearbutt wonders "Did he mean whatever it was in the way it’s been taken?"

Well, to help people understand what I meant, and to analyze why the reaction was so strong, I'd like to reformulate the argument by breaking in down into bits:

1) The queues for DPS in the Dungeon Finder of World of Warcraft are long, and it would be better if they were shorter.

So far, so good, I don't think anybody actually disagreed with that part.

2) For queues to become shorter, either Blizzard needs to change how World of Warcraft works, or players need to change their behavior, or both (Blizzard adds incentives that makes players change their behavior).

Still not very controversial. Other than players and/or Blizzard, I don't see who else could do anything that would change the length of Dungeon Finder queues.

3) Blizzard is unlikely to make major changes to how World of Warcraft group combat works.

Here were are starting to get warmer. Many, many people commented or blogged that if the system wasn't working, it was Blizzard's and only Blizzard's fault, and responsibility to fix it. Personally I'd prefer the incentives solution. But regardless of whose fault the situation is, my point here is about probability: To be realistic, I don't think Blizzard is going to ever change let's say groups to 6 players, to make room for more DPS, or anything similarily radical.

4) If Blizzard doesn't change the game, it is up to the players to change their behavior.

Logical consequence from the previous statements: If it's either A or B, but B is unlikely, then it must be A. Albeit an argument being logical never prevented anyone to disagree with it. Most problems in multiplayer games are caused by a combination of game design and player behavior, and I believe that players thus have a partial responsibility for these problems. That is somehow better understood in sports, where people are more ready to accept the idea that there is a system of rules to which the players need to adapt, instead of demanding the rules get changed.

5) As the problem is a lack of tank and healers, the only player behavior change which would positively affect queues is some players who are currently playing a DPS role either switching role or switching character to a tank or healer.

Note the "some", which some commenters deliberately misrepresented. It should be blindingly obvious that if EVERYBODY changes to tank and healer, the queues would be even longer than they are now. The idea is to *enough* players changing role, until the ratio of tanks to healers to DPS is 1:1:3, which would be the ratio producing the shortest possible queue times.

6) If *some* players have to switch from DPS to tank/healer, then why not you? It is your responsibility too!

And this is the kicker, where people started grabbing their torches and pitchforks. This argument is not at all a direct logical consequence, but is based on values which have gone out of fashion. It goes back to the fundamental question of whether in any situation where it is clear that somebody has to do something you ask yourself "why not me?" and step forward, or you ask yourself "why me?" and hope that somebody else steps up. It is, to misquote Kennedy: "ask not what your game can do for you - ask what you can do for your game". It is J.M. Flagg's famous Uncle Sam recruitment poster:

It hurts, because it turns an abstract, general responsibility of a wider populace into a personal responsibility. Even people who agree with the first 5 arguments probably would prefer if it was somebody else who changed to playing tank or healer, and not them. Turning "somebody should do something" into "YOU should do something" is what I think provoked the strong reaction to my post.

Kids setting up soccer teams on a school yard understand that "somebody needs to play goalkeeper", after nobody volunteered, means that one of them will be forced to play that position, or there is no game. The situation in World of Warcraft is the same, only that the group is larger, more anonymous, and the problem is not whether there is a game yes or no, but how long it takes until somebody finally volunteers. That makes people even more reluctant to step up and volunteer, because it isn't as if they could strike a direct deal that they'll tank today and somebody else does it tomorrow. Now I sure used strong words in calling this situation a "social responsibility" and quoting Kant's categorical imperative. But whatever you call it, I don't believe that queues will improve unless some people switch their role. And I believe that any responsibility for "some people" in any group in the end is an individual responsibility. Not a big one, after all it is just a game, and the responsibility is shared between many players. But a responsibility nevertheless. That is my belief, part of my values, and I'm sticking to it. I hope you understand my point better now.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (63) comments Links to this post

 
Quality of the community

World of Warcraft is frequently accused of having a "bad" community; "bad" being defined as a few jerks behaving badly due to internet anonymity, and a general lack of a wider community spirit outside of guilds (If you don't believe that, just read last weeks comments on how strongly some people react even to a suggestion that they should do something for the wider community). But of course that "bad" is compared only to some utopian ideal, or to older, much smaller games, where a smaller community held together better. Cast your net wider, and you'll see that it is perfectly possible to create online game communities which are far worse than that of WoW. And the easiest way to get there is to have people play for money.

I checked out Magic the Gathering - Tactics some more, and all my experience with the old Magic the Gathering Online and various other online games tells me that MtGT is heading for the worst possible kind of community. And the reason for that is money. Not only do you have to pay to play, but the structure is set up in a way that a few players will be able to play "for free", by basically fleecing the less good players. Draft tournaments cost $2 entry fee plus $12 in boosters, handing out $12 in boosters for the winner. By selling some of the cards he drafted, the winner can get back the entry fee, and thus "go infinite", playing for free as long as he keeps winning. Pro tip for bad players: Rare draft! The most valuable cards in a booster are not necessarily those which the best players would pick. Thus if you find yourself in a draft with a lot of good players, they'll pick the cheap but good cards, and you can take the cards that'll make you lose the tournament but increase the value of your collection.

Constructed tournaments cost $3 entry fee, and even normal, ranked games cost $0.10 to participate. And the games aren't even fair with both sides having equal strength! Not only will spending a lot of money on cards get you a better deck and increase your chance of winning, but also paying for the single-player campaign will net you levels and talent points, which will make you stronger even against an opponent with an identical deck.

Experience shows that this sort of setup quickly leads to communities resembling pool halls, where the sharks prey upon the casual players. Playing Magic the Gathering - Tactics costs a lot of money, and by winning and going infinite the sharks end up playing for free, while their victims pay double.

Now other Free2Play games also have a minority pay for everybody. But the structure is usually different, the rich voluntarily pay the game company for various luxuries, while the others play for free, but without the advantages money can buy. In the MtGT structure the rich just get fleeced without getting any advantages for themselves, in fact they pay to suffer the humiliation of constantly losing. You don't need to be a brilliant social engineer to realize that this isn't sustainable: The people with money leave, and sharks stay, circling in the pool and waiting for another innocent victim to fleece.

So, unless you want to rare draft to pay $2 extra to increase the chance of finding useful cards for your collection in the 3 boosters you open, I can only advise everybody to stay well away from tournament play in Magic the Gathering - Tactics. You would most certainly regret trying.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:20 AM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
A first look at Magic the Gathering - Tactics

A reader alerted me that Magic the Gathering - Tactics had launched, and a day later SOE sent me the newsletter confirming that. So I downloaded the game, and gave the game a spin.

Magic the Gathering - Tactics is pretty much what you'd presume from the name, a mix of a trading card game with a turn-based strategy game. From Magic the Gathering the game inherits the monsters and spells being "cards", from which you build a deck, draw a random hand during combat, and play the "cards" using mana you get every turn. But combat is like many other games with "Tactics" in their name turn-based strategy on a board of squares, with tactical elements like zones of control and flanking. The mix works reasonably well.

Nevertheless I wasn't very happy with MtGT. I don't have anything principally against the Free2Play business model, but MtGT looks very much like an Allods-like overpriced ripoff to me. Not only are the cards quite expensive ($3.99 per booster), but in addition to that you also need to pay to unlock the chapters of the single-player campaign, at $5 per chapter. Yes, you get your starting deck and the first chapter for free, but then you'll basically pay $1 per new single-player battle. You can replay those battles, but only the first time gives any reward. So just buying the full campaign already costs you $20.

Due to the cards in the boosters being random, you need to spend over $50 on boosters before you have enough cards to build decks of other than your two starting colors effectively. SOE suggests you buy a virtual box of virtual boosters of virtual cards for just $83.99. *Cough* Ripoff *Cough* And to trade these cards they offer the auction house (which has filters but apparently no sort function), in which cards can only be traded for gold. And of course the gold for that you can buy for Station Cash. I haven't tried the multiplayer functions yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were tournaments which cost money too. Magic the Gathering - Tactics really feels as if it nickels and dimes you at every move you make.

I think that is a strategic mistake from SOE. If for example the PvE campaign was free, more people would play the game for longer, and then sooner or later start buying cards. As it is, you reach the paywall far too early, and one "daily" battle isn't enough to keep you motivated to play. The game isn't bad, but the cost structure risks to strangle it before it can take off.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:16 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Blogging standards

There has been a recurrent discussion about whether bloggers are journalists, and thus should be held to journalistic standards. That discussion has been frequently derailed by pointing out the obvious differences between a blog and a newspaper. You can't confuse this blog with the Washington Post, thus blogging and journalism are totally different, thus journalistic standards don't apply. The disadvantage of that approach is that blogs come across as "less than" journalism, and bloggers as wannabe journalists who failed to live up to the journalistic standards of independence, truthfullness, accuracy, and fairness. I think a more helpful approach would be to say that the methods, purpose, and resources of a blog are fundamentally different from that of a newspaper; and from that to conclude that blogging has its own standards, instead of being held accountable to the standards of a different medium. In this post I would like to explore what those blogging standards should me in my personal opinion, and in how far they are similar or different to journalistic standards. Warning: This is going to be long!

To thus develop blogging standards from journalistic standards, we first need to look at how the role of a blog is different from that of a newspaper. A newspaper, as the name says, is there mainly to report news. The principle concern, and the reason that journalistic standards exist, is that the facts have to be accurate and truthful. The worry is that a newspaper writes something that isn't true, either because the journalist was too lazy to check the facts, or because he deliberately writes something untrue, to either advance his own agenda, or the agenda of somebody he is beholden to.

A blog is fundamentally different, because they are not media to report facts, but outlets of opinions. Reader don't come to let's say a game blog because they want to know facts about when a game is released, or what the retail price is; they come to read an opinion about whether the game is any good. By definition for opinions there is no absolute truth, an opinion can't be right or wrong (although the arguments supporting an opinion can be). To get back to the game example, even for a game most people consider bad, there are always some people who like that game. And their opinion is just as valid as the opinion of those who hate that game.

In view of these fundamental differences, let's have a look at what I would consider good blogging standards, starting with accuracy and truthfulness: As I would not expect readers to use a blog as their one and only source of facts, I do not consider fact-checking as essential for a blogger as for a journalist. In most cases bloggers don't even have the same means and resources to check facts: A journalist can for example call a company to check facts and get their side of a story, but a blogger simply wouldn't get an answer if he tried that. I wouldn't even consider it necessary for bloggers to always be truthful. Sometimes writing for example "fake news" can be a good style tool to get a point across. Persiflage often contains deliberately exaggerated untruths.

In many cases the facts are simply unknown, or there are only approximate numbers available. But on a blog the validity of the arguments does often not depend on having exact numbers. It is a cheap trick of trolls and people who disagree with a blogger's opinion to pretend that exact numbers matter, and declaring an opinion for "wrong", because it is impossible to get the real numbers. Just look at the eternal discussion about MMORPG subscription numbers, you'll find many examples there. But facts are simply not the main purpose of a blog, and are therefore not an important part of blogging standards.

The next blogging standard I would like to talk about is being "fair and balanced", which is linked to being independent and not beholden to a company or other special interest group. As already the classic media fall way short of this, I don't think it is reasonable to demand balanced reporting from a blogger. Blogs are about opinions, and to write a good opinion one has to take sides. A completely balanced opinion ends up not being one at all, is bland, and doesn't inspire a lively discussion. Although only a fool never changes his mind, bloggers tend to be associated with their repeated stance on similar issues. Thus readers know how to interpret a one-sided opinion in light of the previous form of the blogger. Good bloggers tend to at least cite possible counterarguments, or to admit both good and bad points in a product they review, but that is more a sign of the quality of the blog than of ethical standards for blogging. Claiming that a successful game is the worst game ever and has no redeeming features at all just doesn't sound believable, and ends up coming across as an insult to many readers. Much better to admit what a game does right to explain it's success, and then criticize it's weak points, if you want reasonable people to listen to you.

The dangers of a lack of independence of bloggers are often exaggerated. It isn't as if companies had huge budgets to bribe bloggers. The recent argument that some game bloggers dream of working for a game company one day and would therefore be biased towards writing only nice things about those is completely spurious. In the few cases where bloggers actually became developers, they didn't get there by saying nice things about games, but by criticizing games harshly, but precisely. Just look up Lum the Mad if you don't believe me. Opinions on blogs tend to be far more honest than those on commercial sites and print media, which live from the advertising money paid by the companies whose games they review. Bloggers might receive freebies, like free product to review. I believe the best ethical blogging standard here to be to require bloggers to disclose the fact that they received those freebies. Readers then have to decide themselves how far lets say a free game would be likely to influence the opinion of a blogger. This stance on blogging standards is shared by US law (which presumably (IANAL) applies if your blog is readable in the USA, not only if you live there).

If classical journalistic standards don't apply to bloggers, that doesn't mean that blogs shouldn't be held to some standards. But as it is opinions, and not facts, that are at the heart of blogging, these standards have to do more with the ethics of exchanging opinions.

One important standard for blogging in my mind is that opinions should be supported by arguments. Saying "game X sucks" helps nobody, unless it is followed by arguments about which features of game X the blogger considers to be so bad.

Another important ethical standard for blogging is to mention where principal ideas come from, and where appropriate to link to them. That is not to demand the impossible task of citing every blog which ever talked about a similar subject; but if a blogger is inspired to write about a subject because he read about it on another blog, it is only proper to cite that source of inspiration. It is that interlinking which ultimately creates the blogosphere as a virtual space for the exchange of ideas and opinions.

Finally, and in somewhat of a combination of the previous two, are the ethical blogging standards on the discussion between blogs. It is because blogs are talking opinion rather than facts, and because different opinions on the same subject are valid, that a discussion evolves between blogs and creates a large whole than the sum of its parts. That is a wonderful thing, because it often allows readers to see different points of view, and from the various arguments form an opinion for himself. But that only works if the responding blogger makes the effort to actually argue his opinion, bringing forth his arguments for his different point of view, adding new ideas, and pointing out potential weaknesses of the arguments of the other blogger.

It is this blogging standard where the blogosphere still needs to make progress. Far too often a disagreeing blog posts main argument is that the other blogger is an "idiot" or "moron", with supporting arguments being other insults questioning the integrity of the other blogger. That is both unethical, and counterproductive. Such a response not only makes the writer look like a bad blogger, it also makes neutral readers more inclined to believe the other blogger, who made his point with arguments instead of insults. "You're an idiot" is short for "I don't agree with you, but I can't come up with a good counterargument". That not only makes for poor blogging, it also is an admission of intellectual poverty.

I think that more or less covers the main points. What do you think about blogging standards? What points would you add, and where do you agree or disagree with my blogging standards?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:10 AM Permanent Link  (39) comments Links to this post

 
Differential diagnosis

Ionomonkey from Screaming Monkeys goes House and analyses the Cataclysmic WoW disease as being a lack of choice and control. Well, House would tell him that he is doing the differential diagnosis all wrong, but besides that one has to wonder whether Ionomonkey's diagnosis is the right one. Even House always makes three wrong diagnoses before arriving at the good one just before the end of the episode.

Ionomonkey's clues are heroics, guild perks, and linear leveling zones. Of these I would only consider the linear leveling zones to be really a problem of lack of choice and control. Not being able to skip quests you don't like, or go directly to a quest you like to play it again with another character is annoying like hell (and makes me wonder how a certain other storytelling MMORPG is going to handle that).

Heroics I consider to be a problem of flow. In previous expansions people kind of naturally moved from leveling to doing dungeons to doing heroics to raiding. In Cataclysm that process seems to be a much bumpier ride. By making heroics both long and hard, a large number of people end up not even being able to run one every day, and resign to do daily quests instead. That appears unsustainable to me, because I don't see people doing the same daily quests for the next 22 months. If we believe Ghostcrawler, that actually is only a temporary problem, as the flow will appear when people got used to the new heroics, and have geared up a bit.

Guild perks right now seem to be more a theoretical than a practical problem. Due to the cap on guild experience, a large number of guilds have exactly the same level of guild perks at the moment. If guild perks work to prevent guild hopping, that is hard to see, and not necessarily the worst outcome. And while pugging is certainly less pleasant than guild runs, I don't think we are at the point where I could agree with Ionomonkey's statement that "Either join a guild that can or be done with your progression on that character.".

So to get back to House and his differential diagnosis, we would be wise to consider a wider range of possibilities, and then start eliminating those which don't seem to apply. That starts with the possibility that there is actually nothing wrong with the patient. What evidence, besides the word of a few bloggers, do we have that Cataclysm is ailing? Then we should consider the possibility of the disease being something much simpler: Burnout. Frankly, it wouldn't be the first time that a third expansion failed to really counteract the natural process of people getting bored with a game faster than the developers can renew it. I hated Shadows of Luclin. And finally there are probably a range of other explanation of what ails World of Warcraft right now. Given a list of known bloggers, one can even predict what each of them would claim is the reason for this unproven disease, from "dumbed down" to "not immersive enough" to "too many morons & slackers".

So what do you think? Is Cataclysm doing well or is it ailing? And what are the reasons for its success, or your diagnosis of its disease?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:00 PM Permanent Link  (87) comments Links to this post

 
Freedom of choice

So as this has somehow mutated into "philosophy week" on Tobold's Blog, I'd like to explore further the philosophical notions that "this is just a game", "morality / responsibility doesn't apply in a game", and "I'm here voluntarily, so I should have complete freedom of choice". Let's accept these notions for a moment, and see where that leads us in a thought experiment:

Think of whatever you hate most in the behavior of other players in World of Warcraft or another MMORPG: Naked night elves dancing on mailboxes, ninja looters, people not moving out of the fire, whatever. And now think what you would answer to somebody defending that behavior you hate with "this is just a game", "I don't have any responsibility here", or "this is my freedom of choice". Why would anyone have a responsibility to not deliberately wipe your group, or to do over 1k damage per second when playing a DPS in a heroic? If you have total freedom of choice over what to do, what would keep others from having that same freedom of choice and using it to do things that you hate?

I believe that everybody's freedom ends where the freedom of the next guy begins. Thus in every activity involving more than one person, even if it is "just a game", there is some sort of responsibility involved. Because everybody having complete freedom of choice is by definition anarchy. Freedom of choice must have certain limits, and these limits are somewhere where your freedom impinges on the freedom of others. Now of course we can have an endless discussion of where exactly these limits are, and whether your choice creating a waiting queue in the Dungeon Finder isn't harmless enough to allow that freedom. But I can't accept total freedom of choice without limits, not even in a game.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (53) comments Links to this post

 
Morality

A lot of the people disagreeing with my concept of social responsibility used various forms of an argument which basically is: "Who are you to tell us what is wrong or right?". And that is a very good question. What makes me think that I can claim that there is a social responsibility to sometimes play a class or role which is needed instead of saying "It's just a game, I want to play DPS, and nobody can tell me to play something I don't choose"? Fortunately the question of what is right and wrong has been extensively discussed by clever people hundreds of years ago. And one very good test was proposed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. It is called the categorical imperative, and invites you to simply think what would happen if everybody acted exactly like you. If that leads to a situation that would work nicely, the act is good. If everybody acting like you would lead to a collapse, the act is wrong.

So lets apply this test to the DPS situation: If everybody in World of Warcraft would play only DPS classes or roles, and refuse under any circumstances to switch to a healer or tank role, what would happen? To me it appears obvious that this would lead to World of Warcraft being effectively only playable as a solo game and in PvP. Dungeons would have to wait until people would have sufficient PvP gear to so completely outgear them that they could be done with 5 DPS. And to do a raid you'd need to go back to one of a previous expansion.

The position to play only DPS and refuse to ever play another role only works because *other* people are willing to tank and heal. That is what Kant would consider morally wrong, with the argument being that if you are unwilling to do something, you shouldn't oblige somebody else to do it in your stead. And just counting on the people who really *like* to play tanks and healers doesn't work either, because obviously there aren't enough of them around, or we wouldn't have the problem and the discussion in the first place.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:14 PM Permanent Link  (73) comments Links to this post

 
Social responsibility

Scarybooster is upset, because he noticed that as DPS he can be quickly kicked out and replaced in a pickup group. Now I have something nice and something not-so-nice to say about that. For comfort, Scarybooster can rest assured that getting kicked out by jerks happens to everybody, even less easily replaceable healers. In fact, in my experience, healers are more likely than other roles to get blamed for the mistakes of others, and kicked because the group wiped, even if they played perfectly.

But I must also say that if the DPS feel uncomfortable for being easily replaced and having to wait long in a queue afterwards, that is perfectly fine with me. In fact, I wished they had that feeling a bit more often, or even that Blizzard would add additional rewards for healers and tanks, or diminished rewards for any role whose queue was much fuller than those of other roles. Because I do see MMORPGs as some sort of team sport, and people who choose to play DPS in spite of perfectly knowing that there are far too many of them for group activities, but still insist on queueing up for team activities, are shirking their social responsibility towards the other players. Just like in a sports team not everybody can play on the most sexy position, and some players have to play on the less exciting or more difficult positions, in a World of Warcraft group there is only room for 60% DPS players. That is already more than half, and the fact that this 60% of spots for low-responsibility, easy mode players still isn't enough, is a symptom of how selfish the large majority of players is. And that this gets worse every year only shows that Blizzard isn't rewarding tanks and healers enough for taking their social responsibility, and doing a harder and thankless job, so that other players can play their DPS.

In guilds that often works better, and I've frequently seen people switch to a healer or tank after seeing too many DPS turn up for a raid. But for random pickup groups the DPS prefer to remain selfish, and would rather have themselves and all the other selfish players rot in a waiting queue for 40 minutes than to admit that *somebody* must play the healer and tank, and if everybody counts on that somebody being somebody else, the whole system doesn't work. It is time that some of the people who always leeched from the greater social responsibility of other people finally man up and start playing healers and tanks themselves! And if they continue shirking that social responsibility, it is time that Blizzard does some social engineering towards a more balanced player base.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:30 PM Permanent Link  (105) comments Links to this post

 
Social benefit

Tamarind of Righteous Orbs nailed my attitude towards Cataclysm heroics by saying:

The thing is, spending time with guildies can be, and should be, seen as an end in itself. Presumably we’re hanging around in a guild because we like the people there. Playing together is for funz. Whereas running dungeons with pugs is merely a means to an end – we’re doing it for in-game rewards, there is no additional social benefit.

In Cataclysm I only tried very few PuGs, which all sucked horribly (up to and including joining a group which was in combat, and already wiping, so apparently they had pulled in spite of their previous healer having left.). So now I rather do guild runs, even if those go to normal dungeons where I can gain nothing but a bit of reputation. Because the longer I play, the less I care about how shiny my gear is. I'd rather have the "social benefit" of having fun in a guild group, than a gear upgrade from a pickup group.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:53 PM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Challenging the weakest

I was thinking about what to write about Ghostcrawler's Wow, Dungeons are Hard! "blog" post. I wanted to discuss that there is not just one type of "hard", and how that leads to heroics in Cataclysm being so bad right now. And then I realized I had already written that post a year-and-a-half ago. To quote myself:

Type A: Challenging the Strongest - This type of raid encounter is characterized by the individual challenge not being the same for every player in the raid. A typical example would be the simple tank'n'spank raid boss with lots of health, lots of damage, and few or no special abilities: In that case the challenge falls hardest on the tank and his healers, whose skill and gear is essential for success. In a type A raid encounter, at least some players have a large margin for errors. If somebody makes a stupid mistake and dies right at the start, that doesn't necessarily cause a wipe. In fact the raid encounter is beatable with less than the maximum number of players in the raid, so everybody else is just an extra. This allows the raid group to bring weaker members to gear up, or even sell raid spots.

Type B: Challenging the Average - In a raid encounter of this type, the raid as a whole has to come up with a defined level of performance. A typical example is raid bosses with an enrage timer: The raid has X minutes to deal Y million of damage to kill the boss, or they wipe. Thus you can easily calculate the damage per second that the raid has to deal on average. That does not mean that everybody has to deal the same damage; it is possible for some very good players to compensate for the lower damage of less skilled or geared players, or even a single early death. Nevertheless a certain minimum performance would be recommended from everyone, because several early deaths or complete incompetence from too many players would make it impossible for the raid group as a whole to get to the required level of performance.

Type C: Challenging the Weakest - In this type of raid encounter special boss abilities are used which result in errors of any player causing a wipe. Usually this is done with some sort of debuff, which requires a fast reaction from the victim to not hurt the whole raid. As the debuff is random, the raid group cannot afford to bring anyone not likely to react fast enough, as that would cause a wipe for everyone.

Note that players generally consider that the overall challenge of a raid encounter goes up from type A to type B to type C. But in fact the difference is mainly affecting the weakest players in the raid group. For the strongest players there is no inherent difference in the degree of individual challenge in the three types.

Basically the problem with Cataclysm heroics is that they are type C hard, challenging the weakest. A good example is Baron Ashbury in Shadowfang Keep, because he is so bad that he gets nerfed in patch 4.0.6: He has TWO self-heal abilities that must be interrupted, and if not everybody gets their interrupts times exactly right and coordinated with each other, it's a wipe. You can actually be in a group which is completely unable to kill him, if you get not enough classes with interrupt abilities. But there are a lot of other examples, and even on trash mobs in Cataclysm heroics everybody is required to play better, e.g. using crowd control correctly.

And that is the problem. Wrath of the Lich King heroics worked well as PuGs not just because they were easy, but because the little challenge they had was of a type A or B, where the tank, healer, and best dps could easily carry the inevitable bad dps player or two. That doesn't work any more in Cataclysm. And this especially regards dps classes, because even those who didn't let themselves get carried through WotLK PuGs spent the last two years training themselves on optimized damage rotations, often including AoE, and are barely aware that they have crowd control abilities. A "good" dps in Cataclysm is one who knows about crowd control and aggro management, not the one on top of the dps meter, which basically requires them to relearn their classes completely.

Now in spite of what the elitist jerks say, World of Warcraft has more decent players than bad ones. But in a type C 5-man group your chance to succeed equals the chance that a random player is good enough to the power of 5. So even if you'd assume a high percentage of 80% good players, the chance of success of the group is only 33%. If you believe only 50% of players are capable, the chance of the group to succeed goes down to 3%. Because everybody in the group has to be good, the success or failure depends on the weakest player, and the chance to have not a single weak player in a random pickup group is slim.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (36) comments Links to this post

 
Anyone playing DC Universe Online?

Imagine a MMORPG comes out and nobody notices. That's the impression I had about the general lack of reporting in the MMO blogosphere about DC Universe Online. Now I've finally seen the first review, from Gamespy, and they say: "Everything about this game is so unbelievably bad that I do not know where to begin." As far as I could make out from the review, it is an "action" MMORPG, with that "action" being frantic mouse-clicking, and the "MMORPG" part being lots of grindy kill ten foozles quest. Guess we haven't missed much.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:34 AM Permanent Link  (26) comments Links to this post

 
Hacker attacks Runes of Magic

Frogster, the company running Runes of Magic, announced they are under attack from a hacker, who threatens to publish login data unless his demands are met. His demands are a curious mix of demanding Frogster to stop moderating their forums, to the curious "better treatment of Frogster employees worldwide". The latter for me sounds suspiciously like an insider job. Frogster promptly called the police, and of course the amount of damage the hacker says he can do and what Frogster says he can do are very different. Time to start worrying about the safety of your online game accounts.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:29 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Scarybooster's interview with Tobold

Scarybooster has an interview up with a guy who pretends to know enough about it to give advice about blogging.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Pseudo-MMO games

I think I spotted a new breed of games, which I call pseudo-MMO games. Right now they only exist in beta, but I do believe that this could be a growing development. They are made by big game companies, have a sizeable budget and high quality, and play very much like a single-player game. But they are online, Free2Play, and have multiplayer features like the ability to chat or trade with other players online. Biggest example is Age of Empires Online, from Microsoft. Ubisoft has The Settlers Online, currently only in the German version. Firaxis is working on Civilization World, on the Facebook platform.

Traditional single-player games have their problems: They often are hit-or-miss, with a few blockbusters making big money, and many games not being profitable. They often make most of their revenue right at release, while later they don't sell very well, with the business further being eroded by used-game sales and piracy. No wonder the makers of single-player games are jealous of the MMO games, which can be profitable for longer stretches of time. Online account theft is harder than piracy, doesn't generate the same sort of sympathy for the thief as piracy does, and you can even get the customer to pay for measures to protect their accounts, like an authenticator.

A first attempt to get the benefits of MMO games for single-player games was the introduction of downloadable content (DLC). While this will certainly continue, it isn't a 100% success. Often DLC gets chided for being a rip-off, like the famous Oblivion horse armor. And people still manage to pirate the game and DLC in spite of the online account.

So why not make massively multiplayer online games right away? Of course many people do. But making true MMO games isn't quite as easy. And some genres, like strategy games, have serious design issues with being massively multiplayer: In typical browser MMO strategy games players often end up being ganged up upon, and attacked during periods where they are offline. There is a market for that sort of game, but don't expect people to spend too much money on building up an empire that is going to be destroyed by jealous neighbors. So browser MMO strategy games are usually low-budget affairs, with minimal customer support, run by small companies specialized in that sort of game.

But now big game companies have learned some tricks from modern MMORPGs: Using tricks like instancing and phasing, you can create a single-player experience in a massively multi-player game. And that has led to the development of the pseudo-MMO games. While being online strategy games, large parts of these games are PvE. The central part of the empire the players are building is completely protected from attacks by other players, PvP only happens in battleground-like instances. Thus players are willing to invest money into building up and decorating their empire. So these games can run on a Free2Play business model, attracting lots of players for being "free", and then enticing them to spend money.

While there are certainly influences and features in these pseudo-MMO games which will remind you of Facebook games, these are actually high quality strategy games with real gameplay made by established big game studios. And they are true online games, impossible to just pirate by copying or hacking some DLC access code. While their multiplayer components aren't strong, they do have chat and the possibility to trade resources among players, as well as the ability to show off your empire to your online friends. They combine many of the best features of browser strategy games with the best features of single-player games, while avoiding most of the pitfalls of their parents.

While this is still early days, I do think that these kind of games have a bright future. With a few exceptions like Starcraft 2, the strategy game genre isn't doing all that well at the moment, and could profit very much from a move towards online, like RPGs did. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the classic strategy game series will revive online in the coming years.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:22 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Don't let hardcore gamers develop games

Via Scott Jennings, I stumbled upon an interesting blog post on how hardcore war games are nearly unplayable these days. I read it, and pretty much agreed with it. I'd like to play hex-grid based war games, but the games actually available aren't playable for beginner or casual players. They are made by grognards for grognards. (Feel free to suggest a hex-grid war game for casual players to me if you know one.)

In an interesting coincidence I have a recent e-mail from Hagu in my to-do inbox, asking me to talk about a theory of his that we need developers who are worse gamers. Quote:

"the problem with sandbox games is they need developers who are worse gamers"

Kind of like the Peter Principle q.v.

You take motivated, talented gamers who get promoted and eventually are developing a game. These are much more likely to get sucked into the Darkfall rabbit hole (a "good" game for a niche market) than if you took an executive who wants to produce a profitable, high quality, popular game and then decides it should be a sandbox MMO. My guess is you would be better served if the majority of tactical implementers/developers were good gamers but not the strategic designers/executives. Almost all of the suggestions I read on the EVE forums were for things that would restrict the target market of EVE and reduce CCP's profitability;

I think there is some truth in that. While Hagu uses EVE as example, the same thing did happen to WoW: For years the huge majority of players was excluded by design from raiding, and the guy who designed it that way was Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan, a guy hired because of his experience as hardcore raider in Everquest. When he left for the "Titan" project, the people designing raids went for making them popular instead of hardcore, and that added quite a bit to the longevity of WoW.

Left to their own devices, developers simply make the kind of game they would want to play. If they are hardcore, they'll design hardcore games or features. That is great for them and people like them, but hardcore is by definition niche, built to keep out the mass-market rabble. That just leads to a death spiral: Company with hardcore gamer developers makes hardcore games, sells few of them, makes little money, has little budget for the next game. So they cut features, don't bother with a tutorial, have quality control issues, and the next game is appealing to an even smaller number of hardcore players. If they are lucky they stabilize at some level where they can keep making games and paying their developers. But they'll never make that blockbuster hit game.

An average gamer as developer would be more likely to make a game that appeals to average gamers. Unsurprisingly there are a lot more of those around. Game sells well, and there is enough money around to make a better game, with more content, better graphics, better polished, and higher quality.

So how about that theory that a less hardcore player could develop a more popular and better sandbox game? Markus Persson, the guy who single-handedly created Minecraft, worked 4 years making casual games for King.com. Minecraft sold a million copies. That seems to be working nicely.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:33 PM Permanent Link  (29) comments Links to this post

 
Cataclysm heroics

After a few partial runs, I finally finished my first Cataclysm heroic last week. It was a guild group, Throne of Tides, and we had great fun. But it took us 3 hours, due to a combination of being extra careful, using crowd control, and wiping several times. I've been to raids that went faster and took less effort.

Now I don't mind Cataclysm heroics being more challenging, but 3 hours of uninterrupted play session, with the need to remain focused and concentrated all the time, even on the trash, is not something I'm able to do every night, after a hard day at work.

I notice that this is a general trend in my guild. In spite of us being a "raiding guild", albeit not the most hardcore one, there is relatively little heroics activity right now in the guild. Many people spend significantly more time doing daily quests than running heroics. As a result progress is generally somewhat slow.

That might not be a bad thing, I'd rather have slow progress now than being already burned-out from heroics in a month. After all, Cataclysm will have to last us for two years, and the amount of new heroics that will still be added with content patches will be limited. I presume progress will be auto-accelerating: We slowly get better gear and experience with all the heroic encounters, which leads us to running heroics faster, which leads to us getting gear faster. So even if progress is slow now, the outlook isn't all that bad.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:00 PM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post

 
A comment on archeology

My warrior made level 85 this weekend, having gained over 90% of the xp from level 80 to 85 by doing archeology. Using rest xp that wasn't all that much slower than questing, and as I have too many alts and didn't want to do all the quests several times, that was a good way for me to level.

As a way to get gear, archeology was a failure. After hitting 450 skill, I went through the 1,200 troll fragments I had gathered, roughly equivalent to 100 dig sites, and of course the epic 2H sword didn't drop. That might just be bad luck, but other people report similar bad luck with many more fragments, while some people just get lucky and find it fast. Like all low-chance random drops, luck is not reliable enough for a gearing-up strategy.

I did however make crazy money selling Tol'vir Hieroglyphic for 1,000 gold. And got a few blue fun items with various effects, including a pet and a mount. So combined with the leveling, I don't consider I wasted my time with archeology. But if you are already level 85, I'd advise against doing it just for the epics.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:27 PM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
A prediction

The next World of Warcraft expansion will come out in the second half of 2012, and include some sort "public quest" system, that is multi-player quests you participate in by just walking into the area where they are happening, without having to click on a quest giver.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:50 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
... and while we are on the subject of building on sand ...

You might have noticed that I'm writing a lot this week. This is not a return to a multiple-post-per-day writing schedule, but me getting some writing done before the work stress start again next week. So while I currently still have time to read blogs, I couldn't help but notice two rather identical posts from Scarybooster and Darren (quoting Scott Jennings), predicting the death of the big budget, subscription MMORPG model in case that SWTOR fails. That is putting a lot of weight on exactly the wrong game: Regardless of how many copies Star Wars: The Old Republic sells, and how many subscribers it will have 6 months after release, it is already certain that a large number of news outlets will report SWTOR as being a failure. Any number that is remotely realistic will appear too small compared to the hype, and taken in the context of a completely invalid comparison with the "12 million" World of Warcraft players. WoW did not have 12 million players after 6 months, and still doesn't have that number in the market in which SWTOR is released.

Gamasutra yesterday reported that Turbine tripled their revenue from Lord of the Ring Online by going Free2Play. While Ten Ton Hammer has a point saying that the subscription model is not going to be completely replaced by Free2Play, it simply isn't true that Free2Play is the same as "shitty, low-budget game". Lord of the Rings Online certainly wasn't cheap to produce, and if it can be profitable as Free2Play, so can other big budget games. And I predict that Guild Wars 2 will be a huge commercial success as well, with yet another business model.

If Star Wars: The Old Republic is either a real or a perceived failure, that doesn't prove anything beyond suggesting that Bioware should have stuck with single-player RPGs. No investor would consider "development studio fails with their first ever MMORPG" as proof that MMORPGs can't be profitable. Of course anyone wanting to make a $100 million MMORPG these days is going to carefully consider what kind of business model would work best, instead of blindly going for a subscription model. But that spells neither the death of the subscription model, nor the death of the big budget MMORPG.

What would it take to really kill the idea of big budget, subscription MMORPG? A catastrophic failure of "Titan" to the point where the game is shut down or at least Blizzard admitting to not having recovered the development cost of that game, and stopping to develop new MMORPGs. Does anyone really believe that Blizzard is going to stop developing "Titan" just because SWTOR doesn't outsell WoW? Or that other game companies will abandon MMORPGs after Blizzard made another huge pile of money with "Titan"?

So, the general idea that a catastrophic failure of a major MMORPG could cause game companies to retrench from the MMORPG market one day is certainly possible. But that major MMORPG won't be SWTOR, and the fateful year won't be 2011. One could have written the exactly same sort of doomsaying posts three years ago, predicting the death of MMORPGs if Warhammer Online would fail. Just didn't happen. And there is nothing special about SWTOR which would make it deserve such a key position for the future of gaming either. Maybe EA is just bad at making MMORPGs.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:49 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
How to make a sandbox MMORPG with half a million subscribers

The state of mind of the fans of sandbox MMORPGs is such that me just listing numbers of games and subscribers gets reported as "Tobold predicts the death of sandbox MMORPGs", while in fact I wasn't predicting anything, and just asked for confirmation of the state of the sandbox MMORPG genre in facts and figures. I do believe that the state of the sandbox MMORPG genre isn't as good as it could be, and frankly, the sandbox MMORPG bloggers and fans are to some extent to blame for that: They never moved out of the denial and anger states of grief into anything more productive. Denial ("The sandbox MMORPG genre is doing fine if you only look at a single, 8-year old game, don't look at the number of games produced, and only compare the success of the most successful sandbox MMORPG with the 10th most successful themepark MMORPG"), and anger ("Yet another MMORPG got produced that wasn't sandbox, and while I didn't really play it, I already know the game is utter shit") don't really help the sandbox MMORPG genre in any way, and actually hurt it, by making it look as if only crazy people were interested in that sort of games. Which isn't true at all, lots of data suggest that a good sandbox MMORPG could easily get half a million subscribers. We just need to ask ourselves what it would take to make that successful sandbox MMORPG game, and why nobody is trying.

I love good sandbox games, and actually spent quite some time last year promoting one of them, A Tale in the Desert. I would really like to see a sandbox MMORPG to succeed, and thus would like to discuss what it would take to make that happen. And I think the key is in a quote from Michael in yesterday's thread:

I'm always looking for a sandbox game where I can build my sand castles without constantly worrying that someone will come by and stomp on it.

If you look at the spectacular success of Minecraft, or other highly successful sandbox single-player games like The Sims, you'll quickly notice that they are based on people having fun building stuff, and not on PvP. Or like Hobonicus said in the same thread:

Unfortunately, games like Darkfall have gone too far in the wrong direction and given a bad name to sandbox. If a developer could give it a real shot, without trying to be a niche hardcore shallow PvP gankfest game (don’t get me wrong, I love PvP but only when it has purpose), they could do wonders with today’s technology and knowhow.

It is a simple observation, which is universal to all sorts of MMORPGs, that players appear to be extremely attached to their virtual possessions. Just imagine any MMORPG having an accident with their data center and deleting all characters: Even if the game itself was still there unchanged, large numbers of players would quit on having lost their character, instead of starting over. And if such strong attachment can be observed to the "sword of uberness" that a player found by random chance in some dungeon, how much stronger do you think a player's attachment will be to something he created on his own, using his own imagination?

Some players remarked that it takes considerably more effort to create something in a virtual world of a sandbox game than to just collect something following the rails in a themepark game, and speculated that sandbox games are less successful because so few people are willing to spend that extra effort. But if that were true, it would be hard to explain why sandbox games are doing much better among single-player games. In fact the general trend among single-player games is moving *away* from rails and towards more open worlds, and more possible creativity. It is only in MMORPGs that the trend is the other way around.

Thus I do believe that a sandbox MMORPG which was all about building and cooperation could do extremely well, and easily reach half a million subscribers if made with a decent budget and effort. It is the unholy marriage between "sandbox" and "free-for-all PvP" that is holding the sandbox MMORPG genre back, not the unwillingness of players to be creative.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:30 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
The unfamiliar valley

In robotics and 3D animations there is a hypothesis called the uncanny valley, which states that people accept robots or 3D avatars that either look exactly like humans, or that are very different from humans, but that they are revulsed by them if they are "almost human". I was wondering whether a similar "unfamiliar" valley exists for MMORPGs, and in how far that valley will hurt Rift.

My theory starts with a personal observation: I do consider Rift to be a perfectly good game, but I feel no desire whatsoever to buy it. I did buy Cataclysm, because it is exactly like World of Warcraft, and I will most probably buy Star Wars: The Old Republic, because it is sufficiently different from World of Warcraft. But for Rift I would have to relearn a lot of stuff, e.g. how the different classes and stats work, and I would have to level up new characters, find a new guild, make new friends, all to finally end up doing pretty much the same as I'm currently doing in World of Warcraft.

Now that could be just me, but I'm wondering if that feeling isn't more common, in view of comments I received on my previous Rift post. Cataclysm famously sold millions of copies in the first 24 hours, indicating people do want "more of the same". But an expansion offers that "more of the same" bundled with familiarity. Cataclysm changed a lot, but not so much that players are now unfamiliar with the new World of Warcraft. A lot of the knowledge of the game they have is still valid, and in spite of the gear reset they still have access to a lot of the committment they invested in World of Warcraft, be that in the form of character development, or in the form of social contacts.

If you switch to a different game, you will be unfamiliar with many things. You might be able to apply some of the knowledge from previous games (e.g. a mage in Rift still pulls mobs from maximum distance of his fireball spell, just like he'd do in WoW), and you might bring a part of your friends or guild over to the new game. But there are certainly things that you will have to learn, because the new game is somewhat different, and your circle of social contacts will be different in the new game as well. You might be willing to accept that unfamiliarity, if in exchange you get a sufficiently different game experience. But are people willing to accept the unfamiliarity just for minor variations of the game experience? Or is there an unfamiliar valley between "more of the same" and "something completely different"?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Warrior tanking in Cataclysm?

My "main" in Cataclysm is supposed to be my holy priest. I do like healing in dungeons. I'm just not currently getting anywhere with that priest: I'm 85 and all decked out in the best possible gear one could get from running "normal" dungeons, but my guild has a serious tank shortage, and I haven't finished a single "heroic" dungeon yet. I could try to pug heroics, but from all I hear that isn't really a good idea right now.

My warrior is already level 84, and that without questing. I only did a few Vashj'ir quests to get the seahorse, and some minor quests for opening the portals to the other new zones. I made some xp with collecting herbs, but the large majority of my xp came from doing archeology. I'm only skill level 300, but I have already nearly a thousand troll fragments in reserve. The idea is to level to 450 using only the other fragments, and then use all the troll fragments in the hope of getting the epic 2H sword, Zin'rokh - Destroyer of Worlds. And yes, I know, even with a thousand fragments I'll still need a good amount of luck to get that one. But hey, at level 84 with rest XP every time I find fragments I get 30k xp, so in 100 dig sites I'll be level 85.

At which point the question poses itself of what I want to do with that warrior. I hadn't really planned to run dungeons with him, but if tanks are in short supply, tanking might be my best option if I ever want to complete a heroic. I'm just not sure whether warrior tanking is any good in Cataclysm. In WotLK I always felt as if my warrior tank had a big red floating label over his head saying "GIMP", because tanking was so much easier for druids and paladins. But as my druid and paladin are still level 80, I can't yet say how this works out in this expansion.

Do you have any experience in warrior tanking in Cataclysm 5-man dungeons? Is it still horribly inefficient compared to paladins and druids? Or has Blizzard balanced warriors better in this expansion?
- posted by Tobold @ 1:27 PM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
Played any good, new sandbox MMORPGs lately?

I thought I was stating some obvious facts, but apparently some people considered my remarks about sandbox games "troll bait". So in order to not derail a thread that was about something completely different, I'd like to discuss the current state of sandbox MMORPGs here, and give you all the opportunity to correct me if I am wrong.

What I believe the state of sandbox MMORPGs to be is the following:

1) The most successful MMORPG with a "sandbox" label is EVE Online. It came out in 2003, and grew steadily to now over 300k subscribed accounts (with players having multiple accounts being quite frequent). Nevertheless CCP stated that over 80% of the EVE players never leave safe empire space. And over the years there has been a lot of PvE content added to EVE. For me it isn't obvious that you can count all EVE players as "sandbox players", as obviously a good number of them is mostly engaged in activities like agent missions, which aren't fundamentally different from running quests in a themepark MMORPG.

2) Sandbox MMORPGs released after 2003 all have less than 100k subscribers, all together. Darkfall is estimated to have about 20k, Mortal Online has less. Furthermore there are about ten times more themepark MMORPGs released than sandbox MMORPGs. I'm calling that "unpopular". That doesn't mean that the people who like sandbox MMORPGs aren't feeling strongly about them, just the opposite. But it appears as if the sandbox MMORPG genre does attract a significantly smaller number of players than the themepark MMORPG genre.

3) I would not consider Minecraft to be a MMORPG, but it certainly is a sandbox game, and it certainly is successful, especially considering that it is a one-man operation and not a big budget game. That opens up a discussion of whether a sandbox MMORPG could be successful if it was more like Minecraft and less like Mortal Online.

Please, try to argue with facts, figures, and rational arguments. If your only argument is that you love sandbox MMORPGs and hate everybody who plays something else, and you just reply with a bunch of insults, your comment will be deleted. But if I made any factual errors, feel free to point them out, preferably with links to proof of the opposite. And I'd like to hear your ideas how a post-EVE popular sandbox MMORPG could look like, and why there isn't one yet.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:43 AM Permanent Link  (45) comments Links to this post

 
How different is different?

Rift announced a release date for the first week of March, and from what I've seen in the third beta event, this might actually be a game that is ready for release. At the very least "more ready" than the last half a dozen MMORPGs that were released. Nevertheless that doesn't save Rift from controversy. Pete from Dragonchasers isn't happy with some of the early reviews of Rift, especially not the one from Massively saying that after just one hour "it was more than enough for me to realize I’ve played this game about a hundred times over the last few years".

The fundamental problem of that controversy is that Pete and the Massively guy aren't actually talking about the same thing. Pete is perfectly right in saying that Rift has a number of unique features, most prominently the "rifts" after which the game is named, but also the soul system, and that in one hour you can't possibly have fully explored all these features. But Massively is also right in as far as one hour if totally sufficient to tell you what type of game Rift is. Imagine somebody let you play a new game you never heard about for one hour: Maybe you can't fully judge that game after one hour, but you most certainly will be able to say whether it is a first person shooter, a jump-and-run platformer, or a turn-based strategy game. And if it happens to be of a genre you personally don't like, you'll be able to say that too.

Rift is what I'd call a "quest-based MMORPG". Massively calls it "on rails quest grinder", others would call it a "theme park MMORPG", cynics would call it a "WoW clone". All these terms are loaded to some extent. But whatever term you use, there is absolutely no doubt that Rift is the same type of game as World of Warcraft, as Warhammer Online, as Lord of the Rings Online, and as dozens of other games. The controls are the same, the basic gameplay of doing quests to kill ten foozles is the same, even the combat system of targeting and using hotkeys for various special attacks is the same. The difference lies in the details: The Rift souls system is different from the WoW talent system in the details, the Rift "rifts" system is different from the WAR public quests system in the details, etc.

What is actually surprising here is that some people are complaining about Rift being of the same type or genre of game than other MMORPGs. It is like complaining that the latest Call of Duty game is yet another shooter with similar gameplay, controls, and combat like other shooters, just with different locations and some minor variations of features. Or complaining that Mafia II resembles Grand Theft Auto. I'm sure the experts can discuss for hours the similarities and differences between Blur and Need for Speed, or between Dragon Age and Mass Effect. But outside of MMORPG reviews you rarely find anyone complaining that a certain game is of a certain genre, and not something completely different.

Personally I love turn-based strategy games. Now if I review a new real-time strategy game and spend most of the review bitching about the fact that the game isn't turn-based, the review will end up being pretty useless. And for Rift reviews that is exactly the same: A review that is only complaining about the fact that Rift is part of the most popular and most widespread type among MMORPGs, whatever you want to call that sub-genre, is pretty useless. Yeah, Rift is not a sandbox MMORPG, get over it. Rift is also not a first person shooter, not jump-and-run platformer, not a turn-based strategy game, and not a racing game. But nobody ever claimed Rift was anything but a quest-based MMORPG, so there is really no reason to whine that it isn't something else.

To review Rift, one has to accept the fact that it is of this quest-based MMORPG genre, and compare it to other games of the same genre. What does Rift do well, or even better than other games of the same type? What does it do not as good? What innovations does it bring to the quest-based MMORPG genre, and are these new things actually fun?

If, like the guy from Massively, you hate quest-based MMORPGs, Rift obviously isn't for you. But people like that should maybe spend their time reviewing sandbox MMORPGs, if that is the genre they prefer. There are some interesting questions to answer about sandbox MMORPGs, like why they are so extremely unpopular, and why in the few games with a "sandbox MMORPG" label that have more than a handful of players, over 80% of those players are actually doing quest-based MMORPG-like content instead of sandbox content. But only complaining about yet another MMORPG being quest-based instead of sandbox isn't actually helping in any way. Why aren't all these sandbox MMORPG fans reviewing Mortal Online instead of Rift?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:18 AM Permanent Link  (26) comments Links to this post

 
Tol Barad exploit, and the path of least resistance

Heroic dungeons in Cataclysm right now are considerably harder than heroic dungeons were at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. The WoW blogosphere is full of horror stories of pickup groups failing horribly (and then unfairly blaming the healer). While the people who spent most of WotLK wailing about how WoW was far too easy haven’t manned up enough yet to admit that Blizzard did something right with Cataclysm, at least they mostly stopped complaining. But the “let’s optimize the fun out of games” brigade is already hard at work to circumvent any challenge that Cataclysm might hold. And the way they are using is exploiting Blizzard having made a massive blunder when designing PvP for Cataclysm: Tol Barad.

Tol Barad is a zone which works a bit like Wintergrasp, a PvP zone which can change hands in a battle every 150 minutes, winning which gives access to an extra raid dungeon. So far so good, but somebody who apparently had no idea about how PvP works in World of Warcraft designed Tol Barad so that the attackers need to hold 3 points to flip the zone, while the defenders just need to keep one of those points to keep it. It is easy to see that if both sides try equally hard, the defenders always win, and Tol Barad never changes hands. Statistics showed Tol Barad only changing hands once every 11 battles, the defenders to attackers win ratio was 10:1.

So Blizzard “hotfixed” an already bad idea with an even worse won: Defending Tol Barad successfully gives 180 honor points, but the reward for successfully attacking it was increased to 1800, ten times as much. In what Spinks calls The Miracle of Tol Barad, players immediately realized that this could easily be exploited by match fixing. Defenders simply lose on purpose, thus turning into attackers two-and-a-half hours later, and getting much more honor points than if they had defended successfully twice. While that is technically a bannable exploit, in practice Blizzard can’t punish anyone. In every battle the ones getting rewarded are the attackers, and they didn’t do anything illegal. And on the defenders side it would take enormous manpower and effort to find out exactly who was actually trying to defend, and who was just pretending to.

As a result players now have the choice between doing hard heroics for a random chance on an iLevel 346 blue item or doing Tol Barad without resistance for enough points to buy a guaranteed iLevel 352 blue item of their choice (they cost between 1250 and 2200 honor). Of course the honor point items have resilience on them, but the other stats are good enough to make these PvP items perfectly useable in PvE. And even just carrying them in your backpack counts for the “average iLevel” that WoW now calculates for each character to determine what dungeons they can go to. So by exploiting Tol Barad, players can either gear up enough for raids, or at the very least use the PvP gear to make heroics easier. And because so many players *do* exploit Tol Barad, it has become virtually impossible to play that PvP zone as intended. If many defenders lose intentionally, a few defenders trying to actually hold Tol Barad won’t be able to do so. And as the theorycrafters from Elitist Jerks pointed out, it is a variation of the prisoner’s dilemma game theory problem, which is more unbalanced towards cooperation than the original prisoner’s dilemma, leading to a snowballing of cooperation once a certain threshold of exploiters is reached.

While the situation is certainly interesting from the point of view of social engineering and game theory, it is pretty bad for Cataclysm in general. Players having found a path of least resistance is removing some of the challenge Blizzard added with the new heroics. And it isn’t even obvious what Blizzard could do to fix that. Even if they were able to quickly fix Tol Barad, the genie is out of the bottle, and it is nearly impossible to reverse the situation and take all the exploited PvP gear back out of the game. As the exploit is a collaborative one, Blizzard could never selectively only remove the PvP gear from people who willingly participated in the exploit. And if they just removed all honor point gear, they’d punish everyone who gathered honor points in a legit way.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (40) comments Links to this post

 
Why do we play? - Killing Time

I recently read a review of Call of Duty: Black Ops, in which the reviewer estimated that the time it took to play through the single-player campaign was about 6 hours. Of course one can play the game through several times, and spend a lot of hours in the multi-player part as well. But compared to the nearly 6,000 hours I’ve played World of Warcraft for over the last 6 years, modern single-player games sure appear to be extremely short. Or, seen from the other side, the fact that MMORPGs are extremely long in comparison to other computer games seems to be one of the defining characteristics of the genre. If a reviewer of CODBlops wrote his review of the single-player part after 6 hours of gameplay, few people would complain; after all, he played the game through from start to finish. If somebody tried to review a MMORPG, saying he played it for only six hours, he’d get a lot of nasty comments telling him that it is totally impossible to judge a MMORPG in that short span of time.

Now World of Warcraft is a huge game. But whatever measure you use, be it gigabyte on your hard disk, or number of zones, WoW is not 1,000 times bigger than CODBlops. Playing through CODBlops in 6 hours will be an action-packed experience. Playing WoW for 6,000 hours by necessity will have periods of less action, as well as repeating the same content many times. The length that defines MMORPGs makes repetition and slow periods unavoidable. Even the most action-packed parts of a MMORPG will be repeated many times. If you are a raider, just check your stats for how often you killed the first raid boss of a typical raid dungeon; and that’s not even counting the wipes you probably had. Over the years you’ll do thousands of rather similar quests, and kill tens of thousands of monsters in rather similar combats. And even if you switch to different MMORPGs, in most cases you’ll find yourself doing more quests, and killing more monsters, in combat systems that resemble each other a lot.

In 2009 I wrote a series of posts on Why do we play?, discussing factors of storytelling, gameplay, challenge, character development, rewards, social interactions, and learning. But all these factors together give something that could be described as “entertainment”, or even “killing time”. Unless you work for a gold farming enterprise, it is most likely that you play a MMORPG to kill time in a fun way, being entertained by the factors listed above or other game features. And that you pay for the privilege of being thus entertained. The rest is just details. Whether you play for virtual rewards, for social status among other players, or for feeling leet is ultimately not important, those are just different ways of deriving entertainment from a game.

The worst case scenario for playing a MMORPG is spending a lot of time without gaining any entertainment value. Unfortunately that isn’t always possible to avoid. If for example your main entertainment interest lies in end-game activities like PvP or raids, you’ll have to spend time to level up your character, even if leveling up is something you enjoy less. If, on the other hand, leveling up is what you enjoy, and you don’t like PvP or multi-player PvE, you’ll find your enjoyment of your character diminished when he hits the level cap. MMORPGs are full of “to do this, you first have to do that” chains of activities. Many of the rewards handed out by a MMORPG are in fact keys to other activities, and so players frequently find themselves doing something they might not thoroughly enjoy, just to gain access to the rewards opening up content they do enjoy.

It is well worth to stop sometimes, and spend time to think about what you really want. The chains of activities leading to other activities pose a major danger: Putting the game on rails, which players follow, sometimes without thinking. It is easy enough to map out the steps necessary, for example in World of Warcraft, from creating a level 1 character to killing the game’s current final raid boss. Most of the steps are a purely mathematical problem, with a given theorycraft solution for maximum efficiency, and ample documentation advising you on that optimal path. What is not possible to predict for any given player is whether that path is the one of maximum overall fun. What if it turns out that in fact you don’t enjoy raiding all that much, or that killing the game’s final raid boss only gives you 5 minutes worth of satisfaction, having cost you hundreds of hours of activities you didn’t enjoy?

Once you realize that the overall goal is killing time, or being entertained, you can have a look at the factors I mentioned above on why we play. How much does each of these factors contribute to your own, personal entertainment? How much preparatory activity does each of these goals require, and how much do you like or dislike these necessary activities? It is possible to chart a path through a game, or even through a series of many different games, which would maximize entertainment value and fun. But that path is highly individual, and you can’t find a theorycrafted solution for maximum efficiency for your personal path of maximum enjoyment. Solutions like “play several alts” or “switch between several games” can well contribute for you to enjoy MMORPGs more, in spite of not being on the theorycrafted optimum path for maximum leetness and efficiency.

Of course your path is usually not something you can plan out long in advance. A big part of it is just trying out new things, and to see how much you enjoy them. For example I do like the new archeology activity in Cataclysm, but I’m certainly not going to level it on more than one character, and I still need to decide for how long I want to pursue it, before the activity becomes so boring that it isn’t worth the potential epic rewards any more. And with raiding changing so much in every expansion, I have to re-decide every time how much raiding I want to do this time.

I might not have the most efficient or most consistent path of advancement through World of Warcraft, having tried a bit of everything at various times, having played numerous alts, and having taken breaks to explore other games. But the overall effect is that I don’t regret the nearly 6,000 hours I spent in this game. It was time I had available, without taking sacrifices in my personal or professional life, and WoW was a good way to kill that time. I see so many players calling their time spent in a game “work” or “grind”, that I believe not regretting the time you spent in a game is already a goal not everybody reaches. I can’t tell you how you’ll get there, but I’d sure advise you to find your own path, and mistrust the readily available “most efficient” option.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:17 PM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Locked out

Steam was just the beginning. Once I came back home from traveling, I found that both Blizzard and Facebook had blocked my accounts for "suspicious activity", caused by me having logged in from a different IP. Facebook was especially annoying, demanding I identify my "friends" from their photos to be allowed back in. Unfortunately I'm "friends" with 288 people I found via this blog, none of which I ever met in real life, and there are only a handful among them from which I know the face. On a second attempt Facebook then allowed me to identify myself via e-mail instead, otherwise I'd still be locked out. Both Facebook and Blizzard required that I change my password.

The Blizzard message that my account was blocked was displayed prominently when I tried to log into World of Warcraft. I had also received an e-mail notification, but my highly intelligent spam filter had promptly discarded that one into the spam folder, seeing how I get fake e-mails about "your WoW account has been locked" every day. Only this time it was for real. I get a lot less Facebook phishing mails, but I have already seen some of those too.

Between all those phishing e-mails and various companies immediately locking my account if I log on from a different location, I'm starting to think that online account theft must be a huge problem these days. I hadn't even realized somebody might be interested to steal my Facebook account, but given that it might contain virtual currency that can be sold, I understand now.

Of course criminal activity causes companies to react with safety measures, and those safety measures usually end up annoying regular customers more than they hinder thieves. I'm starting to wonder how I can travel in the future without getting locked out of various online accounts.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:42 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Happy New Year!

More out of tradition than because I feel it is important, I'm reporting annual blog visitor numbers at this time of the year. From the first of January to the 31st of December 2010 this blog got 943,673 visitors, down 12% from last year where I still had over 1 million. As recently mentioned, this is intentional, and due to me having reduced posting frequency. In addition to the readers coming directly to my site, I also have 4,100 daily feed subscribers, up from 3,500 last year.

Since early April I ran an experiment to see how much money I could make from blogging, via PayPal donations. I made a total of $576.50 in 2010, from 42 donations. That is actually more than I expected, but mainly driven by a big surge when I started. In the second half of the year I made about $20 a month. Fortunately I didn't quit my day job. :) The money was "reinvested" for the benefit of the blog, mainly for buying games and subscriptions.

I would like to thank all readers, commenters, and especially people who donated, for their contribution to this blog last year. I wish you all a happy new year, and the best of success for all of your plans and resolutions for 2011.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:22 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post