Are virtual rewards a trap?

Games can be won or lost, they can be challenging, they can be social, they can (or even should) be entertaining. But in most cases games don't pay you. There are exceptions in the case of gambling or professional sports, but in the huge majority of cases people didn't play for profit. But then came persistent online games with their virtual rewards, titles, and achievements, and suddenly it seems for more and more people those virtual rewards have become more important than playing the game or the other motivational factors to play.

Now in principle there is nothing wrong with handing out a virtual award in a game, as a trophy and reminder of a game well played. The problem arises when that trophy starts to dominate thinking, and influences player behavior too much. There are lots of examples for that:

• Player doing something they consider "not fun" for long periods in a game, just to get the virtual reward.
• Players willingly removing the challenge from a game, to make sure to get the virtual reward for "winning".
• Players not playing with their friends, because they found a group of strangers to play with for faster virtual rewards.
• Players buying virtual rewards for cash, because getting them by playing is too tedious.
• Players judging the value of other human beings by the quality of their virtual rewards.

I'm sure you can think of lots of similar examples. Basically the problem is when people forget what they started playing for in the first place, and just do anything, however counterproductive to the initial reasons for playing, just to get virtual rewards faster.

And I would argue that this is a trap. While you *can* buy an olympic medal on EBay, or get one by other means than actually winning an olympic event, the medal by itself is meaningless. Virtual rewards are even worse, because they aren't real. One day you will stop playing, or the servers of the game will shut down, and then all those virtual rewards will evaporate into nothingness. And it is likely that the memories of how we played will last us longer than the memories of the trophy itself, and with that come possible regrets. I still remember the mammoth cloak I camped in EQ a decade ago for a grand total of 16 hours, but more because that sounds so incredibly stupid today, while I have completely forgotten what stats that cloak has. Anyone still remember the stats on his Molten Core loot? No? The memory of that time when your guild split up over that loot probably remains longer.

The danger of that trap is that companies will use virtual rewards to make us pay good money for games that aren't good, that neither challenge nor entertain. It was reported that Zynga is one of the most profitable companies ever. What message does that send to possible investors and game developers? Now it is easy to shrug that off and claim that Zynga makes its money with stupid people playing Facebook games. But there is no MMORPG, however complex and challenging, where you can't observe that same obsession with virtual rewards. If players indicate that they want virtual rewards more than they want challenge or entertainment, that is exactly what they will get. Maybe it would be better sometimes to stop and to ponder whether our current action in game are actually promoting our fun, our social ties, or our skills, or whether we just do something boring, mean, or stupid for some virtual rewards.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:46 PM Permanent Link  (28) comments Links to this post

 
iRoam

I still don't have an iPhone, iPad, Android or other so-called smart phone. In theory I should be the ideal target customer: I spend a lot of time on the internet, I love gadgets, and I could afford to buy such a device. The reason why I still don't have one is particular to Europe: Excessive roaming charges. Roaming, that is using your mobile phone outside your country, used to be extremely expensive even for regular mobile phone use. Then the European commission stepped in and limited roaming charges to under 50 cents per minute, but failed to similarily limit roaming charges for data transfer. Thus a short search on European roaming charges for surfing with your smart phone turned up rates around €1.50 per minute ($2 per minute), or €25 per month with a 50 MB limit ($35/month) with any extra MB costing €3.50 ($5/MB). Twice that outside Europe. My provider even helpfully offers to automatically block data transfer if I accidentally go over €200 in roaming charges in a month.

As I drive to work, and have computers both at home and at the office, my mobile surfing would most likely happen when I'm traveling or on holiday. And with Belgium being small, that usually means quitting the country. As much as I like the internet, I'm certainly not going to pay $10 for the privilege of reading my blog comments or e-mail for 5 minutes in a train. So for now, mobile surfing remains unaffordable for me.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:41 PM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Story-telling in MMORPGs

A reader wrote me about how much he enjoyed the post-Shattering Forsaken story-line:

I wanted to share with you the most fun I've had questing in WoW the past five years. The new Forsaken storyline is truly stellar! From the starter zone in Tirisfal Glades through Silverpine Forest, Hillsbrad Foothills and finally in Western Plaguelands, the questing here has reminded me why I love this game so much. This past week I leveled a new undead character through those zones after hearing about how incredible the new Forsaken storyline is from other players (and wanting to experience the conclusion of the the awesome Worgen storyline started with the Alliance faction). I started to hear so much about it became too difficult to avoid being spoiled before I experienced it myself, so I just forgot about my Alliance main character and spent a week -- a gloriously fun week -- being a new Forsaken in the Horde.

Drama, comedy (oh, the comedy!), intrigue -- it's all there, just like in a movie, and this is a five-star movie to be sure. I highly recommend leveling a new undead character to experience it. Do ALL the quests in each of the zones I mentioned to experience the whole story.

There's even a short series of quests making fun of silly players (who some would call M&S) and their silly behaviors in game. I'll leave it to you to find and experience that comedic quest on your own. Have fun!

There is no doubt that the quality of story-telling in World of Warcraft has improved over the years. I played through various newbie zones myself after patch 4.0, and through the Worgen and Goblin areas after Cataclysm, and the new player experience with regard to story has improved by leaps and bounds. Okay, not everybody will like the kind of bling comedy story of the goblins, but it is hard to argue that the way the story is told hasn't improved.

At the other end of the spectrum, story is either absent, or is simply ignored. It is safe to assume that when you are on the 10th wipe of your 12th raid to the same dungeon, you don't care what the bloody story of that place is. Gevlon, who unexpectedly enjoys the early game story-telling, compares that early experience to passively watching TV, because you don't have to put any effort into playing well to experience it. In the end game of heroics and raids the pace becomes considerably more frantic and hectic, and simply doesn't allow for the time to enjoy any story-telling (nor socializing, but that is a different subject). Most raiders complained about the story-telling finale of Icecrown, because they were interested in the fight itself, the achievement, and the loot, not the story of the Lich King. Cut-scenes before and after the fight only get into the way of "serious" raiding.

But even in the early game, gameplay considerations get into the way of story-telling. As much as story-telling has improved since 2004, there is still a major element missing: Player decisions. In Hyjal there is one quest where you can decide whether to kill or release a prisoner, but the decision has no consequences for you or the story. And that is as good as it gets, all the other quests don't give you any choice at all. Actually you have LESS choice in Cataclysm than in previous expansions, because previously you could skip quests you didn't like. But the level 80 to 85 zones are mostly linear, so that if you refuse to do the early quests, you will never get the option to do the quests of the rest of the zone.

So, funnily enough, the browser game I'm currently playing, Echo Bazaar, offers better story-telling for a fraction of the budget that World of Warcraft has. In Echo Bazaar I can often freely decide in which direction I want to send the story, and my decision has consequences in opening up other branches of the story-line. WoW doesn't offer anything like that. And as much as they like to hype their "fourth pillar", I'm not yet convinced that Bioware will let me make really important decisions in Star Wars: The Old Republic; I'm afraid they will fob me off with fake decisions which don't have consequences for more than the immediate quest instance that I am in.

So the scripted nature of quests in MMORPGs and the preference of players for a fast-paced "challenging" action game both get into the way of good story-telling. So more and more I'm asking myself whether the unholy marriage of two very different games in World of Warcraft, the "leveling game" and the "end game" is really a good idea. Wouldn't it be better to have one virtual world full of stories, player decisions, consequences, and lore, and a completely different game of challenging cooperative multiplayer PvE encounters? A player who currently is mostly interested in the end game is rushing through the leveling game, with all the story-telling being perceived more as an obstacle than as a source of entertainment. It seems to be difficult to create a game where players care about the story while at the same time worrying about how much damage per second they can put out.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:00 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
Zul'Content competition

In a timely fashion the news of today develops my point from the previous post a bit further: If we assume a market full of MMORPGs with relatively similar gameplay and mechanics, the competition in that market would presumably be about content. Just like competing TV channels, the question would become who offers the most engaging content at any given time. This is one area where Blizzard appears vulnerable, as for most players the amount of content offered in any one expansion plus related patches is not sufficient to fill up all of the two years Blizzard needs to bring out the next expansion.

On the other hand, any minor content addition to World of Warcraft automatically becomes big news. Thus today's headline on many MMORPG sites is not "Rift head-start launches", but "WoW brings back Zul'aman and Zul'gurub". With the conspiracy theorists of course claiming that this is deliberate timing by Blizzard.

Whether that is true or not, just the fact that some people can believe that shows us how far ahead in the content competition game World of Warcraft is. On any reasonable scale, the release of a whole new game with lots of zones and features would rank far ahead of an announcement that in some time in the future a 6-year old game will recycle two old raid dungeons as 5-man heroics. But no, most players are far more excited by another chance of getting their 17th "rare" mount than by a new game launching.

I am not a psychologist, but I would guess that this is coming from something like an endowment effect for virtual goods. Not only do you value the character you already have more than a similar character you could create in a new world; but also the "rare mount" in the game you are already playing is perceived to be more valuable than a similar "rare mount" in a new game.

I like trolls, at least in WoW, not so much on blogs, so I'm looking forward to playing Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub again, albeit hopefully shortened significantly, or split into wings. But as long as "WoW adds a third and fourth recyled old heroic dungeon to the game" remains big news, other games will have a hard time getting anywhere in the content competition.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:26 PM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
Would more be better?

Today the head-start period for Rift begins, and I have no idea how well it will do. But I do know that Rift is not completely unlike World of Warcraft. It has the same basic "theme park" guidance by quests structure, it has classes, levels, talents, spells, and a combat that works very similar, and even the user interface is somewhat similar to that of World of Warcraft. I also know that Star Wars: The Old Republic will also fall into the same basic scheme.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, everybody can with a similar degree of accuracy predict how the gameplay and controls of Crysis 2 will look, without people blasting it as a "Half-Life Clone". But it opens up an interesting question: Imagine that Rift and SWTOR and a couple of other games manage to reproduce the same quality of World of Warcraft, and all have a similar gameplay, with minor variations (Rift has rifts and the soul system, SWTOR has light sabers and space ships, another game has another setting or added feature). Would we be better off in such a world with many MMORPGs with minor variations all being similarily successful?

The reason I'm asking is that I can easily imagine me playing my WoW priest for an hour, and then switching to a SWTOR Jedi and play another hour. But then I also have two servers full of alts, Horde and Alliance, and already frequently switch character during an evening. And I know that other players prefer having one "main", with alts just being there for bank storage or crafting. I have a hard time imagining somebody who doesn't like alts being all that willing to switch frequently from one game to another. Furthermore, given the monthly subscription business model, playing several games in parallel can become costly.

So how does a future look in which several MMORPGs have multi-million subscribers? I don't think the "WoW Killer" scenario, in which one new game rises to several million players while World of Warcraft crashes to under a million subscribers is even remotely possible. If we want other games to succeed on a massive scale, we need to be able to imagine several of them living side by side. It certainly works for most other types of games, but are MMORPGs somehow special due to their larger time requirements?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:01 AM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
Perfect number of servers

Rift launches tomorrow, and has published a list of server names. Which promptly caused a discussion between some people preferring a single-server architecture like Guild Wars, EVE, or City of Heroes have, and others preferring strictly separate servers for a "better community".

I am torn on that issue. I never liked being in copy #57 of a city zone, and having to make sure that I'm in the same copy as the friend I want to meet. Single-server solutions without instances only work for space games with a huge universe, and even there you get some especially popular places with permanent lag problems. But the separate server model has problems as well: What if you find that you and a RL friend of yours are on different servers? But if you allow server transfers, many of the "better community" advantages go out of the window. And anything players queue up for, be it PvP instances or PvE dungeons, results in larget populations leading to lower queue times, which is why WoW has these set up for server clusters these days.

The worst disadvantage of having separate servers is that they don't deal well with shrinking populations. That used to be not an issue for the earlier games, where MMORPGs typically had a long growth period and a slow decline. But since WAR and AoC showed that the decline can be rapid and start as early as after the first free month, the multi-server model looks more and more like a risk. Shrinking populations mean either too many servers being underpopulated, or server mergers, which make for very bad press and suggest to the players that the game is dying.

Thus in the balance I think a single-server model with instances is probably the least bad solution. But I'm interested in hearing your opinion on that issue.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:52 PM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
Blogger of the Year 2011

What would you say if I set up a website with a few blogging friends, and organize a vote in various "Blogger of the Year 2011" categories, with a jury award from me and my buddies, plus a reader's vote from a predefined list of mine and my buddies' blogs, virtually guaranteeing that my and my friends' blogs all received lots of jury and reader awards? Sounds completely ridiculous? Well, then have a look at the sponsors of the Browser Game of the Year award website: You guessed it, it's a bunch of the browser game companies running the games that received the awards. Clicking on any of the links there will lead you to the GalaxyNews portal page for that game, with GalaxyNews also running the Browser Game of the Year website. Doh!

I've been playing the browser game Die Siedler Online (The Settlers Online) from Blue Byte / Ubisoft since August of last year, first in closed, then in open beta. The fact that I've been playing this for months now should tell you that this is in fact a good game. But I haven't written about it yet for two important reasons: 1) It is up to now only available in German. And 2) it is far from being complete. The whole multiplayer part is still missing. There is chat, and there is trade, but neither PvP nor cooperative PvE are implemented yet. Also missing are various statistics and convenience functions, and all content beyond level 30 is still greyed out. I really like the design where your initial city / island can never be attacked by other players, but as long as that initial island is all that is there, the game can't possibly be considered complete.

I would consider Die Siedler Online to have strong potential as a good browser game. But advertising it as the "Strategy Browser Game of the Year 2011" is borderline fraudulent. I'm not even sure there is a big market for such a game outside Germany, as the game is heavy on economic simulation, and light on combat. You need 3 different buildings to produce the most basic wooden planks! I love it, but I'm not naive enough to believe that this comes anywhere close to lets say US mainstream gameplay. The game also has a curiously front-loaded item shop business model, where the first 50 to 100 bucks spent bring you huge and permanent advantages, while any further money spent is less effective and not permanent. And for a browser game Die Siedler Online is a bit too time-demanding day by day, because of what I consider a design flaw, that if you increase the level of your buildings you need to click more every day to refresh resources. Thus while I would recommend Die Siedler Online to some people I know speak German and are into that sort of semi-peaceful city building game, I think that award is both premature and not really fitting for such a niche game.

Your "Blogger of the Year 2011",

Tobold
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
Standing in the fire

While replying to a comment of the previous post, I suddenly noticed an interesting connection with the "moron" discussion of earlier this month. You all know the expression of somebody "standing in the fire", describing a bad player in a raid. It is the most common description of a bad player, so common that Blizzard has both a loading screen message and an achievement mentioning it as a running joke.

But if, as many raiders claim, you are either a good player or a bad player (aka "moron"), and the bad player is best described as the guy standing in the fire, then by definition the skill of the good player is to *not* stand in the fire. Which is exactly what I've been saying.

If, however, you claim that being a good player involves taking complex individual decisions requiring high intelligence, and thus good players are downright geniuses, then a huge gap opens up between somebody too stupid to move out of the fire and those "geniuses". It is ridiculous to claim that whatever you are doing is complicated as rocket science, and at the same time claim that anybody not able to do it is a "moron".
- posted by Tobold @ 7:30 PM Permanent Link  (39) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft skill

Dee from Lost in Azeroth ponders what makes MMORPGs hard, what skills you need to play them. I like her list, but I think that not having actually played Everquest she wrongly judges EQ as not needing any of those skills and just being a grind, comparable to weeding a garden. I think she got that one the wrong way round, so I'll have a look at her list and apply it to World of Warcraft:

#1. They require long-term planning: I would agree that principally you need some long-term planning, e.g. asking yourself whether you want to play a healer, tank, or dps. Unfortunately over the years in World of Warcraft it turns out that this long-term planning is frequently sabotaged by Blizzard's patches. For example if you always want to play the class and spec that gives the highest damage per second, you will be continuously frustrated, because every patch nerfs the strongest class and makes some weaker class stronger. When I rolled my priest, I did so with a long-term plan to be the best healer possible, but over the years other classes were often better as healer. In exchange I suddenly find myself in Cataclysm having one of the strongest DPS classes, an option not even remotely considered when I created that character. A friend of mine plays a warlock, and he paused WoW for 2 years during WotLK because he couldn't stand that his character was suddenly the worst damage dealer around. So, long-term planning and WoW, not a good match.

#2. They require short-term strategy: If I took the list of Dee's example questions here ("What button should I press next? What synergy can I get between skills? What gear should I equip? Is there a spell this mob is particularly weak to?") and posted it on a WoW forum as question, somebody would first insult me as a n00b and then direct me towards Elitist Jerks. In World of Warcraft there are rarely mobs that are particularly weak to specific spells, thus the question which gear to choose and which spell rotation / priority list gives the best result has a single and unique answer. Yes, that is a "short-term strategy", or rather "tactics", but modern World of Warcraft does *not* require you to figure those tactics out. Nor does it require you to figure out boss tactics. You not only *can*, but are actually *expected to* to have looked up the best possible answer on the internet.

#3. They require resource management: Many of the resources Dee mentions are gold. Her question of "should I use my last health potion?" actually should never come up, unless you are woefully unprepared. During most of the game, the leveling part, gold tends to be not a problem at all, and once you reach the raiding part, you should know how to make enough of the stuff to pay for repairs and flasks. Mana management does exist, but only for healers (which is why I play one). If you'd suggest using spirit gear for your mage for better mana regeneration, you'd be laughed at.

#4. They require people skills: This is actually the one point where most people complain about World of Warcraft: WoW *doesn't* require people skills for a huge majority of the game. Not only can you level up to the cap solo, but you can use the automated Dungeon Finder and the Auction House to avoid having to use people skills when interacting with other players. You might need people skills for raiding, but even there I have seen obvious examples of people who raided with no people skills at all. People skills are at best secondary, most raid leaders would rather invite the less nice but better performing player than the other way around. Trade chat invites demand gearscore, not number of friends.

I would say that Everquest had all these skill requirements far more than World of Warcraft. A character that levels up much slower and doesn't have a convenient dual-spec option requires more long-term planning. There being less people analyzing all the options and posting them on the internet ends up with players having to do more of the short-term strategy. Resource management is more important when resources play a bigger role in the game. And if you need other people for most of the content and can't be grouped with them automatically, you need more people skills.

The fundamental problem with World of Warcraft is that you can do nearly everything without having any of these skills. And then there is raiding, where the required skill-set consists mainly of memorizing a dance for each boss and executing that dance perfectly. I totally agree that this is "a skill", but it is a skill which is more akin to completely different video game genres than to pre-WoW MMORPGs or even other computer RPGs.

Thought experiment: Take two people of equal talent who never have played World of Warcraft or any other MMORPG before. Let the one train various action arcade video games. Let the other train various games requiring long-term strategy, short-term tactics, resource management, and people skills. Give both identical information from Elitist Jerks and whatever raid-boss killing site. And then let them both try a raid in World of Warcraft. Which one of them will perform better? I think the guy who trained action arcade game skills will do significantly better than the guy who trained strategy games skills.

Again, I'm not saying that action arcade game skills aren't "skills". But I would claim that there is some bait & switch fraud involved: When you start World of Warcraft you are under the impression that this is a game about long-term strategy, short-term tactics, resource management, and people skills. Only once you reach the level cap you find out that actually it isn't, and that you now need a completely different skill set, which was never trained or demanded from you before in the game. I could imagine two very different MMORPGs, both being better than WoW: The first being a game where you need arcade action game skills from level 1, getting increasingly difficult until you get to something looking very much like WoW raiding. The second being a MMORPG which starts like WoW, and which ends with some sort of gameplay which *still* requires planning and strategy and tactics and resource management, but no twitch skills whatsoever.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:28 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Echo Bazaar

I stumbled upon Echo Bazaar while watching an Extra Credit video on The Escapist about non-combat gaming. Echo Bazaar also netted the "Best Browser Game" award from The Escapist, reason enough to have a look for myself.

So, Echo Bazaar is a browser game, with a link to social networks. That is you can sign into the game either via Twitter or via Facebook, although technically Echo Bazaar is not a "Facebook game". Echo Bazaar creates one of the most interesting virtual worlds you have seen for a while, Fallen London: A Victorian era goth version of London which sunk under the earth, and is now somewhere in the vicinity of hell. Thus you meet a cast of Victorians plus undead and devils, and you are trying to make your way through that society.

Helping you in that endeavor are your 4 character stats "dangerous", "watchful", "persuasive", and "shadowy". The success of any action you perform in Echo Bazaar is either based on sheer luck, or an ability check against one of these 4 stats. And even a failed check increases your stat, with harder checks giving you faster advancement. But of course the easier checks are more likely to succeed, ending you up with better rewards. Besides the stats you also have other "qualities" you collect as rewards from your adventures. For example you can have various connections to groups like the Bohemians, Society, Criminals, or Hell. Or you can have more mysterious qualities like being "Protégé of a Mysterious Benefactor".

Gameplay proceeds by you choosing either an opportunity card, or a "storylet". Opportunity cards are random, you start out with six of them, and if you play them, they slowly regenerate. Storylets are available depending on your location (Look for the grey Travel button to the right of the opportunity cards), and your stats and qualities. Every opportunity and storylet tells you a small story drawing you deeper into the world of Fallen London, and usually presenting you with several options on how to proceed. If those options include a skill check, the difficulty of that skill check is displayed. Choose an option, see how the small story continues with success or failure, increase your stats, and get other rewards. But you also risk to get negative qualities, like being haunted by nightmares or causing scandal, which you then have to try to get rid off.

Echo Bazaar is free to play. You can buy "Fate" points, which enable you to buy more actions per day, or unlock some exclusive story arcs, but it is totally possible to play the game without paying anything. Also it is totally possible to "solo" Echo Bazaar, but there are some actions you will need a Facebook friend for. Thus, don't hesitate to befriend me on Facebook and send me Echo Bazaar requests in case you decide to check this game out.

Echo Bazaar is full of danger, adventure, and intrigue, but it doesn't have a classic combat system. You might get into fights using your "dangerous" stat, and you might even equip a weapon or get wounded. But in the end that will be handled exactly like the skill checks you used to for example "Study the Hidden Language of Tattoos", or "Mock an Insufferable Poseur". Echo Bazaar has an unique graphics style, but no animations, and most of the story-telling is done by text. But unlike your usual MMORPG quest texts, the storylets of Echo Bazaar are quite interesting, and make you eager to explore more of the lore of Fallen London. My recommendation: Check it out!
- posted by Tobold @ 10:09 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Not a Dungeons review

I foolishly pre-ordered Dungeons on Steam. A remake of the classic Dungeon Keeper, what could possibly go wrong? Well, a lot. Dungeons hides the fact that there is simply not very much to do (there are only really 3 kinds of rooms to build) by barraging you constantly with trivial missions. And as your Dungeon Lord needs to do most of that work manually, the game often becomes hectic but rarely becomes fun. I recommend trying the demo before buying this, I know I should have done that.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:16 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post

 
A game of consequences

So we've been discussing this week the advantages and disadvantages of games either being hard/tedious or easy/convenient. And Hirvox is asking a good question: "To be more generic, do you think that it's even possible to have a good community in a MMO without the "tedious hardship"? And if not, can we at least disentangle hardship from tediousness?"

What I think is that it is impossible to have a good community, both in terms of people treating each other with a minimum of respect, and in terms of people at least trying to play reasonably well, if your actions in the game do not have significant consequences.

While some people some of the time will be nice to each other just because they can, and try to play well, just because that is the game, it is utopian to believe that all the players all of the time will naturally behave that way. So why do veterans remember people in Everquest being generally more cooperative and better players than in World of Warcraft? Because in Everquest the harsh game would just smack you down if you weren't. Play badly in EQ, and you lose levels. Get a reputation for playing badly or being a jerk, and you'll end up on a "black list" of people not to invite into a group, and you can't progress any more. Because the game *requires* people to cooperate and play reasonably well to advance at all, the people not able to do so are quickly weeded out. And yes, that involves hard punishment by the game, and that will be perceived as being "tedious hardship" by those who fail to live up to the standards.

In World of Warcraft on the other side, your actions don't matter. As I was trying to explain earlier, people don't stand in the fire because they are intellectually incapable of getting out of it, but because they simply don't care. There are no negative consequences of your actions. Repair cost are a joke, there is no xp loss, and the huge number of players combined with the option of changing your name and/or server means you can't be blacklisted. Especially as a DPS class, where there are always at least two other players fulfilling the same role as you in the group, you might even get away with playing horribly, standing in the fire, and *still* end up with a justice point reward for killing the boss. You can behave like a terrible jerk to other players, and make inane "anal" jokes in trade chat, and there simply are no negative consequences. It is a fool's paradise. And yet that sort of game is also extremely convenient. As there is no risk, no consequences, you can play how ever you want. Fishing in Northrend at level 7? Can be done! Leveling a gnome without ever killing a mob? Why not? Raiding undergeared? Nothing there to stop you.

In a game with no consequences, there simply is no right or wrong way to play the game. I *know* why I play World of Warcraft instead of Everquest: I am looking for a fun and relaxing game for the evening, and not for a huge responsability and a second job. And as long as you aware which game is which, any choice is valid.

But what you can't do is have the best of both worlds. If you find Everquest too tedious and hard, and do not want to have negative consequences for your actions, then you must live with everybody else also not suffering these consequences. Whatever insult you use to describe them, the guys standing in the fire made exactly the same choice as you did with exactly the same justification. The convenience of jumping in and out the game, a guild, or a group at any time with no consequences cannot be separated from the "the quality of the community". If you want certain standards of behavior, or a certain minimum level of efficiency, you need to accept the "tedious hardship" of being punished for not meeting those standards. Either there are consequences for everybody, or for nobody. You can't have a game where you have complete freedom, but everybody else has to do as you want.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:28 AM Permanent Link  (46) comments Links to this post

 
What is hard?

Yesterday's discussion on the EQ progression server made me realize that in the fast-living age of the internet, Everquest is such ancient history, that it is mostly forgotten. Millions of today's MMORPG players never set a foot in that game, and only have hear-say knowledge of it. Particularly the comments revealed a substantial lack of knowledge of why exactly Everquest was considered to be hard. So let me make a list:

Time: The one thing people *did* remember correctly about Everquest was that it took considerably more time than modern games. A survey once estimated the average time to level cap at 2,000 hours, while today a game like WoW can be leveled up to the cap in under 200 hours. It took a full 15 minutes for a mid-level caster who was out of mana to get his mana back to full. And some mobs only spawned every 8 hours, or even only once a week. But the comments yesterday made it clear that people fail to realize that a longer leveling time has a significant consequence: Better players advance faster than less good players. In Everquest a bad player would not only advance slower, he would actually never reach the level cap, which brings us to the second point:

Penalties Everquest was hard because it had severe punishment for failure. When you died, you lost xp, and potentially even levels. The idea of "let's wipe 20 times at this boss to learn how to do him" is completely foreign to EQ, because by that time you would have lost 2 levels and would probably be unable to kill the boss. You had to get things right on the first try, or at least not have too many failures. Furthermore when you died you respawned at your "bind point", not a conveniently located graveyard. And you were naked, with all your equipment being on your corpse. Thus the "naked corpse run", where you would need to run back naked to recover your gear. If you didn't make it in time, your corpse would despawn and your gear would be gone for good.

No crutches: Addons and other programs were not allowed for Everquest. Some people even got banned when somebody wrote an application that allowed to control the Windows Media Player from the game to select background music. Thus there were no Healbot, Decursive, Deadly Boss Mod, Threatmeter, Damagemeter, Gearscore, or any other mods and addons to the game. There wasn't even Skype/Ventrilo/Teamspeak back in 1999. Do you know any guild in WoW that raids without the use of addons and external programs like that? And the standard UI of EQ wasn't very helpful either: No maps, no indications where your quest targets were, no glowing sparkles on anything you could click on.

No instances: Every dungeon and rare mob only existed in one single copy per server. If you wanted to kill the Frenzied Ghoul for the Flowing Black Silk Sash, you had to hope that nobody else was already camping him. If you entered a dungeon you might advance fast because the monsters were already dead, only to have them spawn behind you, blocking your way out. And then you'd hear somebody shout "TRAAAAAAIIIIINNNNN", and see a guy rushing past, fleeing towards the exit, followed by a load of monsters that would attack you if you got into the way. A "raid calendar" in EQ was an agreement between guilds who got to raid what raid boss on what day.

Forced grouping: Apart from a few special character classes, the majority of classes in EQ were unable to solo past the newbie zone. If you wanted to kill a mob that gave you xp, you had to find a group first. And there were no meeting stones, Dungeon Finder, or other fancy tools to help you. You just went to the zone of the appropriate level and shouted to find a group. And then you shouted a "camp check" to see which mobs were already camped.

It is this list of various difficulties that makes me think that the modern "leet" players wouldn't get far in Everquest. But if you don't believe me, I have an extremely simple challenge for you:

Create a character on one of the new EQ progression servers, level him up as much as you want, and then run from Freeport to Qeynos (or vice versa). That's it. Just cross the main continent of EQ on foot. I've done that repeatedly at the time, and with quite low level characters, so I know it is possible. But I believe this to be already too hard for most players who started MMORPGs only in the post-EQ age.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:28 AM Permanent Link  (58) comments Links to this post

 
Party like it's 1999

Today a new "progression" server opens for Everquest, called Fippy Darkpaw. On that server you will be able to play Everquest like it was when it launched in 1999, without the expansions. The expansions will open up later, at a pace determined by the players.

I really, really wished that all the people who are constantly complaining about how World of Warcraft dumbed down MMORPGs would put their money where their mouth is, and play for a while on the Fippy Darkpaw server. Having played EQ myself a decade ago, my personal guess is that none of these people could even make it to level 50 on Fippy Darkpaw, let alone start raiding. Hell, probably even level 30 in the original EQ would be too hard for most players today. The majority of people complaining about games being too easy today don't even *know* what a really hard game looks like. I'm telling you, level up a character on Fippy Darkpaw, and then we can talk whether a hard game is really what you want.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:07 PM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
Bring the player, not the class

Imagine that after a lot of wipes you finally managed to down raid boss A with your mage. Which of the following ventures is more likely to succeed: Switching to your equally well geared hunter and downing raid boss A again, or staying on your mage and trying raid boss B, which you never tried before?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:44 AM Permanent Link  (28) comments Links to this post

 
My Cataclysm raid plans

I don't have any.

Let me explain my view of how raiding has changed with an analogy: As a healer, raiding in Vanilla was like solving a Rubik's Cube. You had to *think* to succeed, and you had to think fast.

Raiding got faster in Burning Crusade. By the time Wrath of the Lich King arrived, the Rubik's Cube had become much simpler.Only now you had to solve that 2x2 Rubik's Cube while racing downhill on a skateboard through a complicated obstacle course. Thus the actual healing was extremely easy, and all the problem was to do it while constantly having to move and to react, jump through hoops, keep a distance of exactly 8.7 yards to all your neighbors, while keeping hopping on one leg.

Cataclysm promised to bring the 3x3 Rubik's Cube back for healing, and to a certain extent they did. I am having fun in dungeons because I have a meaningful choice what spells to cast, how to preserve mana, and when to blow my emergency healing. Unfortunately they didn't remove the skateboard downhill obstacle course. I am still supposed to be constantly moving in many heroics encounters and all raid encounters, and keeping prescribed scripted distances not just from various bad stuff but also from everybody else in the raid. Raiding still is mainly Super Mario Simon Says. It is now "harder", but only because you need to keep up the movement and simultaneously make meaningful choices about what spells to cast. The main difficulty is still the jumping around, and not the tactical choices. The main raid gameplay is still wiping with the same group of people until everybody knows all the scripted moves of that specific encounter; and then move to the next encounter where you wipe again until you have all the moves for that encounter in your muscle memory.

Sorry, but that isn't my sort of game. I don't disrespect the kind of people who like highspeed skateboard obstacle courses, but I just want to solve complicated Rubik's Cubes. I have nothing against having to react a few times during a fight to some boss special ability, at a Molten Core kind of level for example, but once the reacting and moving becomes practically the whole game, I'm simply not interested any more. I am looking for a tactical dungeon strategy game, not an action arcade dungeon jump-and-run.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:30 PM Permanent Link  (38) comments Links to this post

 
I was an evil exploiter

As most of you haven't read all my older posts, I'd like to link back to a post of mine from 2005, on how I was playing a game in what I thought was a "clever" way, but was seen by the gamemasters as "evil exploit". Can you imagine there were massively multiplayer games where players sent in their commands by post, and received printouts of the results? That was a quarter of a century ago, but feels even longer.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:16 PM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Blizzard bans 250,000 players for exploiting Whiptail spawn bug

If you just panicked, you are probably aware that patch 4.0.6 introduced a bug in the spawn rate of Whiptail in Uldum, making it possible for a large number of players to farm huge amounts of that herb in a short time. The headline isn't true. Yet. But I think it is a good opportunity to discuss exploits.

The spawn rate of Whiptail right now clearly is a bug. It would stretch credulity for anyone to claim that he wasn't aware that being able to gather 30 stacks of herbs in an hour in spite of heavy competition was working as intended. But everybody's reaction on hearing about the bug is to rush to Uldum and participate in exploiting it, before Blizzard hotfixes it.

This is clearly exploiting, and a bannable offense. If Blizzard actually *would* ban everybody involved, they would have every right to. They just probably won't ban, because it affects too many people, and the damage is limited to what will probably end up as a small crash in prices of that herb, inks, and Darkmoon cards. If Blizzard hotfixes the bug soon, there is no lasting damage done.

Nevertheless we have to ask ourselves why we are willing to exploit such bugs. Some commenters will probably come up with sophisticated justifications, but at the heart of the matter exploiting bugs is cheating. The rule that exploiting a bug is bannable is there because no game company can guarantee that they'll never have an exploitable bug. Now a fast spawn rate for one sort of herb isn't all that serious, but how eager people are to exploit this shows us that they'll probably also would exploit more serious bugs. Star Wars Galaxies once had a serious gold duping bug, which led to a mass banning of players and a huge rollback.

So, what do you do about bugs like these? Report them, or exploit them?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:46 AM Permanent Link  (37) comments Links to this post

 
Why there are no morons in World of Warcraft

Words have meaning. And while in the real world you can say "Yes, sir" and modulate your tone from anywhere between full subverience to open rebellion, on blogs and forums the only communication possible is verbal. Thus if you use words without adhering to a commonly understood meaning, you are basically just talking to yourself, or maybe a small fan club of people you taught "your" meaning of the words you are using.

A moron is a person with an IQ of 51 to 70. Which makes him cleverer than an imbecile (IQ 26 to 50), and much cleverer than an idiot (IQ 0 to 25). But these terms aren't used scientifically any more, because they became commonly used as insults. But words having meaning is true for insults as well. If you call somebody a "jerk", you not only indicate that you wish to insult that person, you are also saying that it was some sort of not nice behavior that made you choose this particular insult. Choosing "moron" indicates that you think that the other person is not very intelligent.

The reason why "moron" is not a good word to use in World of Warcraft to describe bad players is that there is little or no correlation between intelligence and how well a person plays WoW. Joke videos apart, it is almost certain that Stephen Hawking would be extremely bad at playing World of Warcraft, in spite of an IQ of 160. But even children with mental handicaps can become surprisingly good a playing MMORPGs. Neither World of Warcraft, nor any other MMORPG, are actually intellectually challenging. Training and dedication are much stronger correlated with performance in MMORPGs than intelligence is. The highest performance can in some cases only be reached if you *don't* think about what you are doing, but rely on muscle memory instead. The pinnacle of MMORPG performance is in raiding, and apart from the very first raiders who actually have to develop a strategy, the process of raiding does not require anything more than average intelligence, and good reaction time.

By specifically insulting a bad player's intelligence, you also express your belief that the situation is permanent, that this bad player will never become a good player, because of hardwired intelligence limitations. But in reality whatever keeps the bad player from doing better is almost certainly not hardwired. It might be a simple lack of training, a lack of time, or a lack of motivation. But if you take the guy who is currently doing 1k dps in a pickup group and offer him a million dollars if in 6 months he can get his damage output up to 10k, you would most certainly lose your money. Given time and motivation, anybody who got as far as just joining a heroic is also able to do very well.

The big disadvantage of reacting to any sort of bad behavior with insults is that this approach actively prevents you from coming up with constructive criticism. Even if we bloggers are just armchair game designers, identifying the reasons for why something doesn't work as we want wrongly can only lead to us proposing a wrong solution to the problem, or none at all. If you claim that the "morons" are holding World of Warcraft back, the only solution you could come up with is requiring an IQ test before being allowed to play the game. And as that is not the real reason for people playing or behaving badly, that solution would not improve anything.

Once you look at the "morons" discerningly, and really identify *why* they are behaving as they do, you can come up with a game design for a MMORPG which would actually be better. Game designers can fix bad behavior with social engineering and incentives, so you could lobby them to do so, if you had an actual solution. They can't fix the intelligence of their players. And honestly, they aren't even likely to listen to somebody who just throws around insults. As the philosophists say, "To insult is to assert or assume dominance, either intentionally claiming superiority or unintentionally revealing lack of regard." That only attracts a similarily trash-talking audience.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:50 PM Permanent Link  (61) comments Links to this post

 
Average players

Gevlon estimates that there are 1 to 2 million morons playing World of Warcraft, and concludes with a postscriptum: "PS: of course there are not just good players and M&S, there are casuals too, who just play for the content. But they are a minority and I doubt if Blizzard would be happy if they would only get the $15 of good players and casuals." Wait a minute, a player is either a good player, a moron, or a casual? What about the average player?

If you sort a population by any measurable criteria, like their height, their IQ, or how talented they are in a video game, you will almost always get a curve which is so universal that it is called a normal distribution, also known as Gaussian distribution or bell curve. It basically tells you that most people are of average height, IQ, or video game talent, and that both extremely (small, dumb, bad player) and extremely (tall, clever, good player) populations are very small. The curve is also symmetrical, meaning the number of people at the both extremes are the same, e.g. exactly as many people are morons with an IQ lower than 70 than there are brilliant people with an IQ higher than 130.

Now the bell curve centers around a natural average. For IQs the curve is normalized, so that the average IQ is by definition 100. Other natural distributions don't have such a normalization, and people making subjective judgement cutoff points between good, average, and bad might not place them symmetrically. If you have an IQ of 130 and believe that anybody less clever than you is "a moron", you end up living in a world where 97.5% of people are "morons" in your eyes. If you not only have an IQ of 130, but also understand what a normal distribution is, and use a scientifically accurate standard definition of "moron" being less than IQ of 70, suddenly there are only 2.5% of "moron" in the world, and 95% of average people between 70 and 130.

If you say that 1 million "morons" are playing World of Warcraft, and you fairly put your cutoff points symmetrically, saying that a "moron" is as far away from the average as the "good player", you also get 1 million good players. And you get 10 million average players. You can put the cutoff points somewhere else, but in any reasonable definition of "good", "bad", and "average", you will always get a much bigger population of average players than of good or bad ones.

Ignoring the existence of the average is what Gevlon would call an "ape subroutine", a social mechanism where people tend to think in terms of "us and them", or "black and white". It is rather typical of certain WoW players, who tend to define "good player" as "playing as good as me", and then use some sort of insult as term for "everybody not playing quite as good as me". It is an extremely social reflex of status thinking to pretend that there are "good players" and "bad players", with nothing in between. Very few people want to admit they are average (For the record: I'm a pretty average WoW player, as far as I can measure that.). Thus you get that endless stream of comments on various blogs and forums on how Blizzard is catering towards "the dumb", or "the lowest common denominator", or "the morons and slackers".

Blizzard, who have much better data than we have, and better business sense, probably realize that there are very few really dumb players in World of Warcraft, and very few exceptionally good players. The huge majority of WoW players is average. And the only design decision which makes business sense is to make World of Warcraft reasonably challenging but doable for the average player. Depending on how large or narrow you define average, between 50% and 95% of players are average. That is where the bulk of their income is, and World of Warcraft *has to* be fun, that is challenging but doable, for that bulk of players.

And that is exactly what they do. For example Gevlon cites the "cloth geared, ungemmed warrior tank". Now how exactly is the recently introduced 15% buff for random pickup groups helping that warrior in cloth armor to tank? It appears pretty obvious to me that even after the buff that "tank" will still be exactly as unable to run a heroic as before. On the other hand there is the average tank, who is wearing a not perfectly matched mix of blue gear from quests and normal dungeons; who has gems and enchantments, but is maybe missing a few here or there because he counts on replacing those pieces, and who didn't buy the most expensive version yet either; who has a reasonable understanding of what all of his buttons do, but might not be aware of the latest spell rotation or priority list from the theorycrafters at Elitist Jerks; in short: The average Joe. That is exactly the guy who will profit from a 15% buff, because it is just enough to change the game from "too hard for the average guy" to "doable and reasonably challenging for the average guy". It is exactly that guy that Blizzard is catering for, that Blizzard is designing their game for. Because that guy, and the average healer, and the average damage dealer, are making up the huge majority of Blizzard's playerbase.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:34 AM Permanent Link  (30) comments Links to this post

 
The state of inscription

Of all the World of Warcraft professions, I would say that inscription changed in character the most from Wrath of the Lich King to Cataclysm. In WotLK, inscription was mostly about glyphs. Patch 4.0 killed the demand for glyphs, as you now keep your old glyphs when you respec. It also significantly increased the cost of production of glyphs, ending the previous situation where sometimes you could make a glyph for 1 gold and sell it for 60. In Cataclysm inscription didn't even get any new glyph recipes. You had the choice of skilling up either fast by making very expensive off-hand items, or slowly and cheap by making forged documents every day.

Nevertheless, once you reach 525 skill in inscription, the profession is still a money maker, at least this early in the expansion. The thing to make are Darkmoon cards, leading to level 85, iLevel 359 epic trinkets. Some of these cards sell for up to 4000 gold, while others are only worth a few hundreds. You know there is a tank shortage in the game if the tanking trinket costs only a fraction of the dps trinkets.

There are two reasons why Darkmoon cards are a money maker: There is a significant amount of "work" involved, and the prices for raw materials (herbs) are all over the place. I've seen prices for Cinderbloom, the most common Cataclysm herb anywhere between 2 and 8 gold. One factor here appears to be gold farmers: I recently bought 83 stacks of Cinderbloom from the same seller on the AH at just under 3 gold each. It is hard to imagine how a regular player would gather 83 stacks of herbs and then sell them at low prices to turn them into money quickly. Those 83 stacks of Cinderbloom netted me 88 inferno ink, so my cost were under 60 gold per ink. I could have sold the inks for easily twice that, but I decided to turn them into Darkmoon cards. I got reasonably lucky with the distribution, not getting too many of the low value Stones cards, and was able to turn my initial investment of under 5k gold into 15k gold. Not a bad profit for an hour of milling herbs and crafting.

Of course that sort of profit depends a bit on luck, on picking up herbs at low cost from the AH, and on being lucky with what cards you get. With time the value of those epic trinkets is going to fall, and then inscription will stop being highly profitable. I wonder what Blizzard thinks should be the sustainable business with inscription.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:41 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
A fundamental shift towards variable difficulty

Whatever game or sport you consider, there is always a distribution of how good people are at it. The average player is unlikely to beat Kasparov in chess, and the kids kicking a ball around in the neighborhood won't beat Manchester United. But that usually doesn't matter much, because these games are played against other players, and you just need to play against people of similar skill to keep up a good challenge for everybody. Computer games are a different matter, because very often players play *against* the computer, which means overcoming a completely arbitrary difficulty level given by numerical parameter. To make single-player fun for everybody, these games usually have a difficulty setting in the options, so beginning or unskilled players can still play the game on easy, while highly skilled veterans find fun at the "impossible" difficulty level. It is one of the flaws of MMORPGs that they haven't found a way yet to offer variable difficulty levels. As a result more skilled players are forced to play through too easy content, and less skilled players are excluded from some content which is too hard for them.

That is especially annoying in the context of group content. How easy or hard group content is often depends more on planning and organization than on actual playing skill. A guild group of average players has a higher chance of success than a pickup group of stranger of exactly the same average skill, because the guild group has more trust in each other and won't quit on the first thing going wrong. Anyone who ever participated in a battleground match of an organized group against a random group will know how huge a difference that can make. In an environment where group content is hard, even good players will hesitate to join a random pickup group, because there is a high chance that it will fail because of faults other players make, or a lack of organization.

So in patch 4.0.6. (which goes live this week) Blizzard is introducing a fundamental shift towards variable difficulty into World of Warcraft, specifically boosting random groups. Now for *every* random player in the group, the pickup group gets a 5% bonus to damage, healing, and health, up to a new maximum of 15%. Previously that "Luck of the draw" buff was limited to 5%, and apparently there was a bug in Cataclysm which made that this buff wasn't actually working in most dungeons. So in future World of Warcraft will basically turn itself easier exactly for those groups previously least likely to succeed. And I think that is a very good idea. Because a MMORPG is a game, and the purpose of a game is to be fun. That is best achieved by offering everybody a challenge they have a good chance to beat. Variable difficulty is much better than one fixed difficulty level in providing fun for players at different skill level and level of organization.

Of course some players are extremely angry about these changes. Which leads to a different question: Why does it make player A angry if player B is allowed to play a computer game at a lower difficulty level? The only explanation that I have is that player A is overly concerned about his status, which he measures by his in-game achievements. If player B gets the same rewards and thus status by an easier way, player A's self-esteem is threatened, and he reacts with anger.

Gordon recently asked whether we admire or pity hardcore players, but I think he got the question wrong. I sincerely doubt that a real hardcore player, like somebody from Paragon, is overly concerned about a buff for pickup groups. I wouldn't pity anybody just for being hardcore, but I would pity the fool who considers his greatest achievement in life to be some virtual item in a video game, and who feels the need to complain about less skilled or organized players needing a buff to get there.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:48 AM Permanent Link  (56) comments Links to this post

 
Payback period

If you followed the news about Star Wars: The Old Republic, you might have heard that they retracted a previous statement that they would need a million players to be profitable, and lowered that break-even subscription number to 500,000. How misleading that can be is well visible in the reaction of Keen: Anyone on this planet knows that SWTOR will sell well and do fine on subscriptions. It’s Star Wars and Bioware. If WAR is still alive with even 50k subscribers for this long then SWTOR will do 500k sustained for at least a few months.

I do not think that if John Riccitiello speaks of half a million subscribers to be profitable, he means "half a million for a few months". The important question is how long the payback period is. Imagine that a MMORPG cost $100 million to make. The company sells a million copies at $50 each, and thus already recovers $50 million. Now imagine that they make $5 per player per month. In that case they would need to keep that 1 million player subscribed for 10 months before they break even. 10 months is the payback period for 1 million subscribers for that game. If subscription numbers drop quickly way before the 10 months are reached, it will take longer until the investment is paid back, and in the worst case the game never gets there.

So I have to say I agree only with half of Keen's statement. Yes, SWTOR will probably sell well, because both Star Wars and Bioware are very strong brands, which means many people will buy that game just out of trust. Hell, *I* will probably buy that game just out of trust. But as even John Riccitiello describes the game as "light sabers instead of swords, if you will.", I would say that there is a distinctive possibility that the game turns out to be yet another "kill 10 foozles" MMORPG. If players early on get an impression that this is basically the same game that they are already playing (and I'm not even saying which game that would be, as there are now so many games of that type), just with more voiceovers, then a subscription number curve like WAR had, with an early and steep decline is certainly possible. If players expect the second coming, and all they get is the same game with "light sabers instead of swords", they might get severely disappointed. And disappointed players are not good for the bottom line.

I have serious doubts whether EA, of all people, understands how much larger the demands of MMORPG players for novelty are. EA is used to players who apparently don't mind buying the same EA Sports game again, with only the last digit of the year printed on the box having changed. And nobody ever complained to EA that the latest shooter they brought out basically has the same user interface, controls, and gameplay as every other shooter out there. MMORPG players don't tick like that. I'm not a betting man, but if you'd ask me what the next big thing in MMORPGs will be, I'd put my money on Guild Wars 2, and not on SWTOR.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:17 PM Permanent Link  (42) comments Links to this post

 
Not a blogroll

I don't have a blogroll, mainly because I believe it is better to link to specific posts on other blogs with commentary than to just link to the whole blog. Also blogs come and go, and it is hard to keep a permanent list updated. But I do follow various blogs with the help of the Google Reader, and I just updated that list, throwing out several blogs that hadn't written any posts in 2011 yet. So I found a working OPML to HTML converter, exported the Google Reader subscription lists as OPML, and can thus now post that list here:

• *Killed in a smiling accident*


• Bio Break


• Blessing of Kings


• Boathammer


• Broken Toys


• BullCopra


• Death To Questing!


• Deuwowlity


• Elder Game: MMO game development


• Epic Slant


• Game by Night


• Greedy goblin


• I Have Touched the Sky


• Keen and Graev's Gaming Blog


• Kill Ten Rats


• Massively Multiplayer Fallout


• MMO Melting Pot


• MMO-Champion


• MMOCrunch


• Muckbeast


• Nils MMO Blog


• Player Versus Developer


• Psychochild's Blog


• Psynister's Notebook


• Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog


• pwnwear


• pΘtshΘt


• Raging Monkeys


• Raph's Website


• Righteous Orbs


• Scarybooster


• Stabbed Up


• Stylish Corpse


• T.R. Redskies


• The Ancient Gaming Noob


• The Common Sense Gamer


• The Pink Pigtail Inn


• The Psychology of Video Games


• Tish Tosh Tesh


• Troll Racials are Overpowered


• We Fly Spitfires - MMORPG Blog


• Welcome to Spinksville!


• West Karana


• World of Matticus


• | Heartlessgamer.com |

If you are reading other blogs that you think I should look at, feel free to link to them in the comment section of this post. Pro tip: The comment section uses HTML, so if you want that link to be clickable, you'll need to use the correct HTML tags around it, e.g. <a href="http://www.tobold.com/">Tobold's Blog</a>
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
PvP business plan

Rohan from Blessing of Kings has an interesting business plan for a PvP game: Let the people who are being ganked play for free, but charge those who want to attack other players. And charge even more for protection from being attacked. Brilliant!
- posted by Tobold @ 4:43 PM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
The rewards of grouping

Soloing is easy, grouping is hard. Everybody knows that. Well, at least everybody who thinks that World of Warcraft was the first MMORPG out there. Those who have been around a bit longer are maybe aware that soloing being easier than grouping is actually a complete reversal from how things were a decade ago. In Everquest in 2001 players started out soloing at level 1, but while they became stronger with every level, the monsters became stronger even more so. At some point even the "green" monsters several levels lower than you, the lowest that would still give you xp, were too hard for you to solo. People grouped not because of a dungeon finder or anything, but because most classes needed a group to kill any monsters that gave xp. If you think about it, being stronger when several people help you than if you are alone makes sense.

As soon as you make a game which can be soloed up to the level cap, that concept of needing friends to help you goes out of the window. Why would you bother to get a group together to kill 10 foozles for a quest if you can do it much faster alone? That thought quickly leads to "elite" monsters, which again are too strong to solo. And then you need better loot on these elite monsters to make players interested in making the extra effort to get a group together. And before long you find yourself in a system where players at the level cap raid for epics, while having leveled solo most of the way to that level cap. For any given monster it is obviously easier to kill it in a group than to kill it solo, but now we have strictly separated parts of the game, one in which only soloing makes sense, and another in which only grouping makes sense. And then you can reverse difficulty and make the grouping part harder than the soloing.

Of course now the same people who grumbled over "forced grouping" in Everquest will complain that soloing only gets them to the nominal level cap, while the best epic rewards are still unattainable for them in group only dungeons. They would love to be able to keep soloing up to killing the final raid boss in the final dungeon. Other players prefer going to dungeons in groups, and consider the leveling part of the game to be an annoying obstacle on the way there. But would these players still group if the same rewards could be had in a solo variant of the dungeons?

Raph Koster says that "Community ties are the single biggest predictor of retention. And in the subscription game (really, in the microtransaction game too, though the effect is more complicated), retention = money. Therefore, community ties = money." But that would mean that the people who claim that WoW has the worst community ever can't be right, because it is really hard to argue that WoW has a problem with making money.

Somewhere there is a contradiction. Even the people who like groups think that game developers need to either force people into groups, or at least offer group only content with better rewards to encourage people to group. How can you have in the same game a better player retention through stronger community ties, and a frequently expressed feeling of players resenting the other players which with they are forced to group to get certain rewards or see certain content?

I believe that the strict separation of the soloing part and the grouping part of content is harmful here. I would prefer a game in which everything is soloable, but where soloing is hard, and grouping is the obviously more efficient and easier way to progress. Instead of having any content which you are forced to group for, all the content should be set up in a way that players have the choice of doing it solo, or doing it faster and more efficient in a group. Instead of dividing soloers and groupers in two strictly separate camps playing through separate content, players would sort themselves naturally, playing solo one days when they feel unsociable or don't have the time to set up a group, and playing in a group another day.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:33 AM Permanent Link  (41) comments Links to this post

 
Thought-provoking or trolling?

It nearly impossible to write anything about MMORPGs with which everybody agrees, given how very different opinions are on that subject. But even if it was possible, I would argue that it wouldn't be helpful for a blog to make posts like that: Provoking thoughts, and as a result provoking an interesting discussion, is something that I would say differentiates a good blog post from a bad one. So when I manage to pull off a post like yesterday's, where half of the commenters consider that vision of the future of MMORPGs as a horror vision, and the other half can't wait to play that, I consider that a job well done.

Nevertheless I got a Buzz telling me that my post had "gone too far", and I had to delete a comment accusing me of "trolling". Now I'd consider the wisdom of Wikipedia stating that: "Application of the term troll is highly subjective. Some readers may characterize a post as trolling, while others may regard the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial. Like any pejorative term, it can be used as an ad hominem strategy to discredit an opposing position by attacking its proponent. Calling someone a troll makes a negative assumption about that person's motives.". Depending on what definition you use for trolling, anything which is provocative could be labeled as a troll post, which given my previous definition would mean that every good blog post is trolling. I would say that being provocative isn't a sufficient definition of trolling. As Wikipedia says, it is far too easy to simply label anyone you don't agree with as a troll to discredit him.

Looking at various definitions of trolling, one frequently listed attribute of trolling is being off-topic. Now I could claim that my blog is about everything, so all my posts are on topic. But even if you'd disagree with that, you'd have to admit that provocative posts on MMORPGs are very much on topic here. If I'd post a sarcastic post on the Republican health care reform repeal being a way to turn "Hell, NO!" into law, I'd be far more vulnerable to an accusation of that being a troll post, because politics are off-topic on this blog.

Another important part of the definition of trolling is that it deliberately provokes emotions instead of thoughts. Of course that isn't always black and white, a post can provoke both emotions *and* thoughts. But I'd argue that my personal blogging style, which is heavy on text and supportive arguments, and light on profanity, is primarily aimed at getting people to think. Just because MMORPG players are highly tribal and tend to react emotionally if somebody publicly dislikes their favorite game doesn't make every MMORPG review a troll post.

After years of comment moderation I'd say I can spot a troll comment, but of course that remains subjective. One relatively sure sign is troll comments being often short, to the point of being one-liners, and often contain insults. "Learn2play n00b" is a troll comment I'd delete, while somebody writing an argument why he thinks that "bad" isn't a valid style of playing is not trolling, even if he disagrees with me, and thus I let his comments stand. I should get somewhat more aggressive with people frequently and deliberately derailing threads through off-topic remarks (/wave Nils), but often I wished I had the technical means to *move* such a comment to a new thread instead of just having the choice to delete them or not.

As I said at the start, opinions on what a MMORPG should be vary widely. I have my own vision of what I'd like MMORPGs to be, and I have an analytical mind which sometimes makes me think I spotted some trend or development. This blog is here for me to express these thoughts of mine, being fully aware that some people will disagree with my vision, or dislike developments I describe. And the comment section is here for you to express your thoughts on the topics I describe, whether you agree with me or not. Any intelligent discussion is welcome here. I will keep trying to be thought-provoking, but how emotionally provocative that is to you very much depends on your own attitude towards my by now rather well-known general stance on MMORPGs. Not only do I not want to troll you and provoke angry emotions in you, I'd go so far as to say that your anger isn't really welcome here. If you start foaming at the mouth every time somebody even mentions a certain highly successful MMORPG, or talks about casual games or play styles, maybe this simply isn't the best spot for you to hang out at. I've learned which blogs not to read to keep my blood pressure down, and can only recommend you to do the same.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
World of Warcraft in 2020

It is the year 2020 and World of Warcraft has 20 million players, a hundred times a many as the closest competitor. How did a 15-year old game manage to climb to such a dominant position? After a meteoric rise, there was a period of stagnation nearly a decade ago, during the time of the Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm expansions. Anything Blizzard tried to get people to play together failed: Easy dungeons, hard dungeons, automatic group finding, added guild perks, all these measures only increased the amount of acrimony in the community. "Pickup group" became a kind of a curse word, and dungeon queues grew to 2 hours length, as most tanks and healers quit the game or switched to DPS, fed up of constantly being blamed for the faults of others. As raiding died due to lack of tanks and healers, only 3 guilds ever managed to finish the final Cataclysm raid encounter, in spite of repeated nerfs.

The breakthrough came in 2012, with the 4th expansion, as Blizzard had realized a fundamental truth: Players simply do not want to play with others. Having always been good at "borrowing" ideas from other games, Blizzard took the henchman concept from Guild Wars, and enabled players to do dungeons and raids solo, accompanied only by NPC henchmen. That concept was expanded with time, and today players exclusively solo playing a raid group of 5 to 10 characters, being able to control one of them at will, while the AI does a great job at playing the other 4 to 9. That was a huge success, because not only are players now able to solo their way up to the final raid boss of an expansion, but they now also can use practically all gear drops to equip their small army.

These small armies of avatars controlled by a single player are now called "guilds". The old sort of guilds, having several players in them, crumbled due to players not needing each other any more, and was abolished in the 2014 expansion. When crafting for NPC henchmen was introduced, the player-run economy wasn't necessary any more either. The auction house was removed from the game in 2016. With chat then only being used for exchanging insults, chat functionality was removed from WoW in 2018.

It is the year 2020 and World of Warcraft has 20 million players, all of them playing in splendid isolation from each other. Competitors games, which still try outmoded concepts like players interacting with each other don't stand a chance. Welcome to the future of MMORPGs, now simply called OGs, because there is neither massively multiplayer interaction, nor role playing.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:33 AM Permanent Link  (78) comments Links to this post