Turn-based MMORPG

A reader wrote me after having loved the turn-based combat of King's Bounty with the question: "Why oh why couldn't this be integrated nicely into a MMO?" The idea being that the general part of the MMORPG would run in real-time, but combat would be turn-based.

If you think that is impossible, I have to point out that this already works quite nicely in Wizard 101. Of course players don't get all that much time to complete their "turns", only some seconds. But between having to react in fractions of a second, and getting 10 seconds for your turn, there is a huge difference. The main advantage of turn-based combat is that designers can't hide their trivial combat moves behind the "challenge" of twitch-based combat; in turn-based combat players need to think more, and get the time for thinking.

Turn-based, tactical combat works best if you don't just control a single character, but a whole army. Again, that does exist in MMORPGs, for example in Atlantica Online, albeit without the troops moving over the battlefield like in King's Bounty.

So, in summary, turn-based MMORPGs seem to be possible, but the examples are few and far between. In fact, turn-based single-player strategy games appear to be nearly exclusively be produced in Eastern Europe these days, with the rest of the world creating rarely anything but real-time strategy games. So turn-based games in general are evidently a niche genre, and turn-based MMORPGs even more so. A pity! If you know any good turn-based MMORPGs, I'd love to hear about them!
- posted by Tobold @ 9:22 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
I'm so happy I lied to them

I just got mail from the PlayStation Network:

Valued PlayStation Network/Qriocity Customer:

We have discovered that between April 17 and April 19, 2011, certain PlayStation Network and Qriocity service user account information was compromised in connection with an illegal and unauthorized intrusion into our network. In response to this intrusion, we have:
1) Temporarily turned off PlayStation Network and Qriocity services;
2) Engaged an outside, recognized security firm to conduct a full and complete investigation into what happened; and
3) Quickly taken steps to enhance security and strengthen our network infrastructure by re-building our system to provide you with greater protection of your personal information.

We greatly appreciate your patience, understanding and goodwill as we do whatever it takes to resolve these issues as quickly and efficiently as practicable.

Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state/province, zip or postal code), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence that credit card data was taken at this time, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, to be on the safe side we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained.

Fortunately for me the PlayStation Network is not very user friendly even if it works. When I created my account, it asked me what country I was living in. It turned out that if I said the truth, Belgium, I could only run the Playstation Network in Dutch or French. I really didn't want that, but the only way to get the thing to run in English was to pretend that I lived under a fictious address in the UK. That caused all sorts of hassle later, as then of course I couldn't use my credit card, but had to buy game cards to load up my PSN wallet and buy games. And bizarrly the Playstation Network account management doesn't allow you to change which country you live in, thus if you move to a different country you can't update your address.

But in consequence the PSN hackers got a fake address from me, and no credit card data. Enjoy!
- posted by Tobold @ 6:47 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Power gain per level

Klepsacovic plays Pirates of the Burning Seas and is positively surprised that he can group in a meaningful way with a player 20 levels above him. Why does that work in some games, but not in others? A big part of the answer is that how much power you gain per level is completely arbitrary, and varies a lot from one game to the next.

In World of Warcraft the power gain per level is relatively large. There is easily a factor of 1,000 between for example the damage per second of a low-level character and that of a level-capped character. As a consequence grouping with somebody 20 levels above you results in an experience which is probably boring for one of the two players. If you fight mobs appropriate for the lower level character, the higher level character just one-shots them. If you fight mobs appropriate for the higher level character, the contribution of the lower level character to the fight is minimal. And with loot being strongly correlated with level, it would be hard to find a target that gives useful loot for both characters.

But that is a design decision, and not inherent to MMORPGs in general. It would be totally possible to make a MMORPG in which your power went up by only a very small amount every level, so that a max level character is only twice as powerful as a level 1 character. In such a game it would be much easier to make meaningful groups with players of widely differing levels. And you could even design it in a way that the loot would be useful for everybody: With characters having less difference in power level, there would be less of a need to have level restrictions on loot.

A game with a lesser difference in power between levels would also lead to zones remaining useable for longer. Monsters in one zone remain challenging for a wider level range, and their loot remains useful for longer too. Ideally you'd get rid of the strong level restrictions on quests, so that any group can find a suitable challenge for themselves, regardless of how many players are in the group, and what their level differences are. A player with 20 levels more might still *want* to group with somebody 20 levels lower, because the lower level player's contribution would still be significant enough for the higher level character to be able to tackle a more difficult challenge than if he would solo. And although it isn't my prime concern, obviously a game with less power difference between characters would also be automatically much better balanced in PvP.

I do think that getting more powerful with levels is an essential part of RPGs in general and MMORPGs in specific. But it is the perception of advancement that motivates players, while the actual size of the power gain is secondary. It is great to know that if you have trouble with some mob, you can level up and kick his ass later. But the extreme power gain many modern MMORPGs have per level leads to nobody even considering to go back and kick that mob's ass, because it is now so trivial to be not even fun any more, and the possible rewards are useless now. Everybody just fights his "level-appropriate" fights, and as a consequence in spite of all that power gain you don't even notice you are getting stronger! In many games you actually *feel* weaker after leveling up, because the designers made it harder at higher levels. You run Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep with relative ease around level 20, and when you return at level 85 the same dungeon is now much harder in it's level-appropriate for 85 version.

Thus I do think that diminishing the power gain per level would be generally a good idea for MMORPGs. I hope developers of future MMORPGs stop the ongoing power inflation and hand out power gains much more sparingly. I think that would result in better games. What do you think?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (38) comments Links to this post

 
How can we discuss the viability of public quests?

I have a blogging conundrum: I am very interested in MMORPGs in general, how they work or don't work, how they could be made better, and what features or design decisions are good or bad. Thus I would very much like to discuss the viability of public quests in level-based games. The inherent problem I see in this feature is that people "outlevel" zones, and with time lower-level zones become underpopulated, leading to there not being enough players around for the public quests. The problem is that I can't possibly discuss that theory without a certain recent game coming up in the discussion or in the sources I'd link to. And then the fans of that game turn up, accuse me of being biased against their game, and being a fanboi of a game I just quit (as if that would make any sense).

How can we have an intelligent discussion of game features without descending into tribal warfare? What I really want to know is whether public quests are something you'd think would improve some hypothetical future MMORPG, not whether "your game is better than mine".
- posted by Tobold @ 4:29 PM Permanent Link  (62) comments Links to this post

 
Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes is the love child of Heroes of Might & Magic and Puzzle Quest. It used to run only on the Nintendo DS, but high-definition versions just got released as downloadable games for the PS3 and XBox 360 for a very affordable $15. A free demo is available. I bought the game 2 weeks ago, and quickly got hooked, playing the single-player campaign(s) through in 35 hours.

The single-player game is divided into 5 campaigns, telling a continous story. In each campaign you play with different troop types, starting with the elves, then moving on to the knights, and so on. In each campaign you collect the 8 existing troop types (3 core, 2 elite, 2 champion, and 1 secret unit), and battle various enemies with the army you form that way. Unlike in the HoMM series, you have unlimited numbers of core troops, and need only 1 each of the other troops to be able to use them, the rest is just backup if you lose troops. Each campaign has a linear story to follow, but also offers side-quests and "random" battles in some places, which are useful if you want to level up your hero and his troops.

Each battle is a turn-based puzzle. Starting from a random placement of troops, you have a small number of moves each turn in which you try to stack the same color and type of troops in rows or columns of at least 3. The column stacks then "charge up" over a number of turns, before attacking. The row stacks form walls to intercept the enemies' attacks. As in most of these puzzle games, the skill lies in forming combos and chains, for extra moves and more powerful attacks.

As you use the troop icons themselves for the puzzle, that feels less abstract than Puzzle Quest, where you just move colored balls. The troops are animated when attacking, so you see elven rangers firing arrows, nightmares charging, and wizards throwing fireballs. Both the hero and the troops gain xp and levels, getting more powerful over time. But troops are level capped at level 5, and the hero at 10, so you can't simply do random battles until every fight becomes trivial. That keeps the game challenging, and particularly the last campaign is pretty hard to win.

I can't tell you about multi-player as the PlayStation Network has been down for days now. The single-player game has medium replay value, as while the battles are always different, the story and boss fight will be the same the second time through. But given the price, I'd say that is still good value for money. Recommended.

[By the way, if you are waiting for Might & Magic Heroes VI, I have bad news: The release date just got postponed to September 8th.]
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
WoW's target audience

Syncaine asked a very good question, which necessitates its own thread: As for WoW, do you really think the target audience is the same for the game today as it was in 2004? Or, is it possible that Blizzard changed WoW between 04 and 2011, and has replaced those who originally played with those looking for a slightly deeper Farmville?

I can't say what audience they are shooting for, or what their intentions are. But I *do* know that whatever the target audience is, they are very inconsistent in approaching it. While during WotLK I might have answered you that yes, WoW is heading towards being the easiest and most accessible MMORPG (and nothing wrong with that), I find the target direction for Cataclysm extremely confusing: The leveling game has been made easier, to the point where my ultra-casual wife is complaining that she is leveling new alts too fast (without ever having even seen a heirloom); but the heroics and raiding game has been made far more difficult and time-consuming than in the previous expansion.

I honestly think that EITHER game would be okay, an ultra-easy game, or a game that is consistently challenging. But making the leveling game easier and the endgame harder makes no sense to me at all, because there was already a rather nasty gap between the two before. Why would you want to make your casual players level FASTER, and then not offer them anything to do in the endgame? Why would you design a challenging game, but not use the opportunity to teach players how to play their class during the leveling part? I really wished Blizzard would make their minds up about who exactly is their target audience. As the old saying goes, you simply can't please all the people all the time.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:59 PM Permanent Link  (35) comments Links to this post

 
Mine Things

Somebody spammed several of the threads with a link to a browser game called Mine Things. Mine Things is running a standard word-of-mouth advertising campaign, where players get a link with a reference number, and new players signing up using that reference and spending money on that game give advantages to the referrer. I don't mind people placing that sort of links in threads talking about browser games (e.g. this one), if they add a bit of intelligent comment of why they would recommend that game. But with just the link spammed over several threads, I just deleted the spam. Nevertheless I did have a look at Mine Things, and found the game interesting enough to sign up, so now I got my own referrer link to Mine Things. :)

So what do you do in Mine Things? Well, surprisingly, you mine things. At an EXTREMELY slow rate. Different browser games work of different time scales, which is good because players have different amounts of time available. Mine Things is the most extreme time-lite browser game I've come across yet. You basically need to log on every 20+ hours to recharge your batteries. Playing this for 5 minutes twice a day, e.g. in the morning before going to work and in the evening, is totally sufficient to keep Mine Things running at near optimum efficiency. It would be actually quite hard to play this for more than half an hour at a time without running out of things to do and having to wait again. You have been warned, that pace is obviously not suited for everybody.

Mining runs automatically, no action required from the player. You start out with one starter mine, which is manned by a mining robot who mines at a speed of 30 buckets per hour. As far as I read you find something every 185 buckets, thus at the start you'll only find something every 6 hours. That tends to come as a shock to new player, especially since in the tutorial you find things every 30 seconds.

Mines can be set to either mine things or gold. At the start, and if you don't want to spend any real money, it is recommended to mine gold, which will give you a steady income. The gold can be used to buy equipment for your robot, which will increase his buckets per hour, and thus make him find gold or things faster. Once you have a bit of gold and equipment, you can switch to mining things.

What are things? Things can be pretty much everything. Many of them have no use of their own, but can be combined into "melds". You can't wear the "dress shoes" and "sneakers" you'll mine as some of the common finds of your starter mine, but you can combine those two into a meld. And the number of different melds you have thus created is your "level" in Mine Things. The more melds you have, the more professions open up to you, giving you access to other parts of the game. Thus leveling up requires you to find or buy a lot of things. Things can also be useful, like equipment for your mining robots, or vehicles to travel between cities, or weapons, or various other things. By the way, the number of melds also increases your battery timer by 1 hour each.

Now each mine produces up to 50 different things, in 5 levels of rarity. And there are 18 different types of mines, with different sorts of mines being available in different cities. But you can make melds only in one city, your home, and while you can move to a new home, that move disassembles all your melds. Thus you need to gather items from different cities, which means transporting things from one city to the next. This is where Mine Things becomes interesting to me: At the heart of it Mine Things is a game about trading. Different professions can either transport things on land or on sea, or they can try to rob such transports on land or sea, or they can chase such pirates and highwaymen. Items tend to be cheap in the cities where they are mined, and more expensive in cities where such a mine isn't available. 7 years ago I wrote a post about a game I wished there was, which would have trade and dangerous journeys to transport goods. Of course I would have wanted that to be MMORPG in 3D. But from all the games I have seen (except SciFi space games), Mine Things comes closest to that design I wrote about.

Now Mine Things certainly isn't a perfect game, if such a thing even exists, and it has its flaws. I think many players of the "gimme now!" fast action attention deficit disorder generation will find Mine Things far too slow for their liking. And like in EVE there is a way to buy something in-game with cash (in this case mines), and sell that on for the in-game currency. I did that to accelerate the otherwise extremely slow start, but of course the ability to buy in-game currency legally kind of defeats the purpose of a game about trade and economy. The alternative is taking a loan or gift from a more advanced player. The cash shop is also used to buy increased inventory space, or to buy extended batteries that will keep your mines producing in case you are on holiday and can't log on for an extended period of time. Compared to other browser games I've played recently, the cash shop stuff is rather unobtrusive, and reasonably priced.

Well, if you are interested in Mine Things (Tobold's reference link), I'm playing on the Bromo server (Different servers have different maps!). You can send me an e-mail if you decide to play and want to know my character name.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:09 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Turning back time

Spinks is posing a challenge: "Open a new trial account in WoW, pick a character based on looks/ class description, and play it up to level 10. Then see how fun you found the gameplay." Well, apart from the "trial account" part, I just did that in Cataclysm, leveling up a new goblin hunter and worgen warlock. And I found the experience fun enough. In particular I found the quests more fun than the equivalent first ten levels of playing two characters in Rift, which I also did around the same time. But of course that is highly subjective. And not really a good measure, because it is impossible to turn back time.

"Fun" doesn't exist in a vacuum, it is a feeling which melds from the what you are currently doing and all your previous experience. Me, personally, I'm a bit sick and tired of the standard kill 10 foozles quests, so subjectively I liked the WoW new player experience more than the Rift new player experience, because the new WoW starting zones have a lot more non-standard quests, more use of vehicles, scripts, and other "modern" quest telling gadgets. Somebody else might be sick and tired of how classes and talents work in WoW, and might find the Rift new player experience with its souls more fun. Or he might find WoW too static and prefer the slightly less static rifts in Rift.

Thus unless you take a really new player who never played MMORPGs before, and let him play through the newbie experience, it is impossible to get an accurate reading of how "fun" a newbie zone is. Everybody falls in love with his first MMORPG. People who started with EQ will still reminisce about how great that was, before this or that developement "ruined the game". And so on with every MMORPG, every veteran player can tell you exactly what "ruined the game" of his first MMORPG. When in fact people simply burned out, and are just blaming some minor changes in the game to a mental development which took place in their own heads.

I burned out from World of Warcraft, which is why I cancelled my account. I need at least some months of break before I can play a similar quest and level-based game again, which will most probably we Star Wars: The Old Republic. As I realize that the burnout is in my head, and not the fault of WoW, I don't believe in the solution of just switching to a new game already now, which is over 90% similar to WoW. I'm pretty certain that in the coming months there will be a lot of people realizing that once the new shiny feeling has worn off, Rift plays a lot like WoW. And as their burnout with the WoW-like gameplay is in their heads, they will burn out from Rift quickly. Watching the MMORPG blogosphere I can already see the writing on the wall. That is not the fault of Rift, but the natural effect of playing through similar gameplay for thousands of hours over the last years. Some people will blame some change in Rift ("that new patch totally ruined the game"), others will bizarrely find a way to blame WoW for their Rift burnout. But the simple fact is that you can't turn back time and "unplay" the thousands of hours of MMORPG you already did. "Fun" is something that suffers from diminishing return.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:09 AM Permanent Link  (26) comments Links to this post

 
Playing together

While I cancelled my subscription, I still have a month paid for in WoW, so I'm still occasionally playing a bit. Today I was playing around with my level 17 goblin hunter, doing quests in Azshara. Goblin humor isn't everybody's thing, but I can smile about SFGs (Surface-to-Face Grenades).

My wife is sitting next to me, on her computer, playing her new paladin. Same server, same faction, and as it happens level 17 as well. So we think for a moment what we could do to play together which would make any sense: Monsters or quests you'd want the help of another player for, or at least things we could do together which would go faster or smoother than if we did them alone. No luck, there isn't anything. Quests are faster solo, and for dungeons you need more players. Tackling higher level mobs together makes no sense, as we can't get any quests for those.

There is no use for playing together with one other player. I find that somewhat sad.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:57 PM Permanent Link  (36) comments Links to this post

 
EQ2 thinks about skipping right to the endgame

In news very relevant to the recent discussion here, EverQuest II Producer Dave “Smokejumper” Georgeson floated an idea for debate about a "return to EQ2 and buy Destiny of Velious, and you'll get a free level 90 character of your choice" winback campaign. I think that is a very good idea. If the leveling game has very little to do with preparing you for the endgame, and thus ends just as being an obstacle with very different gameplay from what you actually want to do, then why not just skip that part?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:45 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Don't criticize Farmville!

I was shocked, shocked I'm telling you, to find out that some of the people loudly criticizing Farmville had not played that game for the minimum required 100 hours. You'll need at least that much to unlock the yellow cucumber farming, and that totally changes the feel of the game! How can anyone claim that Farmville is not a good game without having given it a proper 100-hour trial?

I've been hearing arguments of that sort for different games a lot over the years. It is a widely used strawman argument against all sorts of people writing about games. The reason is very simple: By "allowing" only people with tens or hundreds of hours to criticize your favorite game, you already made sure that the pool of reviewers consists only of diehard fans, thus skewing the score in favor of the game.

But as Brenda Brathwaite, of Wizardry and Jagged Alliance fame, says:

Focus on second-to-second play first. Nail it. Move on to minute-to-minute, then session-to-session, then day-to-day, then month-to-month (and so on). If your second-to-second play doesn’t work, nothing else matters. Along these lines, if your day-to-day fails, no one will care about month-to-month, either.

That is true for MMORPGs as much as for other games. A MMORPG consists of small repeating units nested in each other. A game has several zones, zones has several quest hubs, which each have several quests, quest consists of several combats, which consist of several button presses. If you have played through one zone, and tried out the available non-quest content like crafting and public quests, you've seen enough of the game to predict over 90% of its repeating content. You will know the very essence of the game, and it is that which counts for knowing whether you like a game and whether it is any good.

It is Easter. If somebody would tell you that you can't properly judge the MMORPG you are looking at, because the game gets so much better during the Christmas holiday events, you'd laugh at him. Why would anyone make a game that sucks for most of the year, and only gets good at the end? But that is exactly what some people say about MMORPGs: The leveling game is claimed to be not representative of the "real game", which is endgame raiding or PvP. But how much of a masochist would you have to be to endure hundreds of hours of bad and boring gameplay before being allowed to play the good stuff?

Guild Wars already told people who didn't want to play the leveling game that they could skip it and play PvP with instantly created level-capped characters. And some future MMORPG will do the same for raiding. Before that happens, as long as games are integrated, they need to be judged on the unskippable part. Because as Brenda said, "if your day-to-day fails, no one will care about month-to-month". You might rave and rant against rewievers not having played the game for the minimum required hundreds of hours, but the real problem isn't the reviewers here: The average player simply isn't going to put up with that much crap before deciding to quit a game. If after several play sessions the fun is still just a vague promise on the horizon, the game has failed, and the player quits, regardless of how great the endgame might be.

If I'm supposed to run through a maze, the maze has to be fun. I'm not just there for the cheese at the end. The cheese is a lie, and consists only of purple pixels.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:12 AM Permanent Link  (31) comments Links to this post

 
I can see why he isn't calling himself Lum the Mad any more

Scott Jennings picks up a thread from Massively and pretends the questions were meant for him. That results in some hilarious answers and a general impression that the players asking the questions are a lot more mad than the developer answering them.

Quoted for truth:

I know this is really hard to believe for a lot of people, but MMOs are designed the way they are because someone wanted to play that game. Really. Everquest was designed by MUD players who wanted to make a MUD in 3D. Dark Age of Camelot was designed by Everquest players who wanted less punishing PvE and good PvP. World of Warcraft was designed by Everquest and DAOC players who wanted to play a better Everquest/DAOC. Rift was designed by World of Warcraft players who wanted to play a better World of Warcraft. And so on down the road.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:06 PM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
How did guild perks work out for you?

My guild in World of Warcraft is level 24, and will reach level 25 soon. And the most remarkable thing about that for me is how little I actually noticed it. Some of the advantages are downright invisible, because nobody really notices an X% bonus to this or that. Others are weird: Why did Blizzard make the heirlooms you pay for with justice points rather expensive, and at the same time offers new heirlooms as guild perk which are extremely cheap in comparison? The one perk that ended up being most useful to some of my characters was the 15-minute hearthstone.

Apart from a few trade chat guild advertisements stating the level of the guild I haven't really noticed much of a change in guild behavior due to the introduction of guild perks. I have no idea whether they are working as intended to reduce guild-hopping. Maybe my guild is just too nice and stable to react to perks a lot after 6 years of staying together without rewards.

So I'd be interested in hearing from you whether you noticed any effect from guild perks. When they were announced people theorized all sorts of effects from being stuck with a bad guild to a positive effect on guild loyalty. Did you experience any of that? Have guild perks as a means of social engineering worked? Did they lead to small guilds dying out, replaced by anonymous mega-guilds? Or did guild perks in fact not change anything fundamental?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:25 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
World events

There is a rule of thumb for online games saying that the population of a server is between 5 and 10 times the maximum concurrent users. In other words, even during prime time at least 80% of the players on a server are offline. Another observation for MMORPGs is that if you gather X players on the same spot, the amount of data transfered goes up with X squared, because you need to send the information of every player's location to everybody else around him. Combine these two effects, and you realize that making a "world event" at a specific time and place generally a bad idea. More players log on than the servers can handle, and players at the spot can't all see each other, or there is a lot of lag.

Blizzard gave up on such world events after the lagfest that was the opening of the gates of Ahn'qiraj. After that world events were stretched out in time and in space. Trion just learned this lesson in Rift's first world event, the River of Souls. Some players got stuck in a 5-hour queue and missed phase 2 and 3 of the event, as those only lasted for half an hour. Trion having scheduled a free trial weekend at the same time didn't help.

The solution to running such world events is at the same time obvious and impossible: You need to have server hardware that can handle a far higher percentage of players being online at the same time, and in the same zone. That is a bit like building a supermarket with 100 checkout counters when on your busiest day only 10 to 20 are needed, just in case all your customers come in at the same time. I wonder if in future with the advances of cloud computing it would be possible to have huge extra server capacity for specific world event days. Until then, world events tend to disappoint a lot of players.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:14 AM Permanent Link  (37) comments Links to this post

 
Guitar Hero

I don't play Guitar Hero. That has nothing to do with whether the game is easy or difficult, or how good I would be at it (probably not very). But by just looking at the gameplay I can say that even if I was perfectly able to press all the buttons milliseconds after they flash up on the screen, I just wouldn't be very proud of that. Being able to press a button fast, without having to think *which* button to press, is not the sort of gameplay that satisfies me. I'd rather have some seconds to make an interesting choice which move to make, than having to make an obvious move as fast as possible.

For pretty much the same reasons I opted out of raiding in World of Warcraft. With every expansion raiding in WoW resembles Guitar Hero some more. The game, or some addon, tells you what button to press, and you press it as quickly and correctly as possible. That can be difficult, but the difficulty is all in the execution, and not in any hard thinking or decision making. If that is the gameplay you like, more power to you! But personally I'm not all that interested in Guitar Hero dungeons.

If you don't raid in World of Warcraft, you don't really need the rewards from heroics. That gives you pause enough to examine whether you actually like the gameplay of heroics, whether they would be any fun without the rewards. Unfortunately in Cataclysm the answer for me is "no". I am not having fun in heroics in Cataclysm, beyond getting a reward I don't really need. That stems from a combination of factors: Heroics in Cataclysms becoming more like "raid lite" with the same sort of Guitar Hero gameplay, the sheer length of them, and the bad behavior of other players. I even lost interest in running heroics with my guild after a guild mate chided me for wearing what he thought was a sub-optimal piece of gear, an event which showed again how few choices you get to make in WoW these days.

From quest instructions, to gear choices, to talent choices, to what buttons to press in a boss encounter, World of Warcraft has turned into a game where somebody else is always telling me what to do, and I am expected to mindlessly follow these instructions without thinking for myself. That is considered "hard" if either I'm just given a fraction of a second to follow that instruction, or following that instruction takes many hours. That is not the kind of difficulty that satisfies me when I overcome it. And if I make any choices on my own without looking up the optimal solution, I'm considered a moron. Where is the game in that?

My World of Warcraft subscription is running out in a month, and I decided not to renew it for the moment. I'm taking a break for summer, for single-player games, for SWTOR, for Guild Wars 2, for whatever, until World of Warcraft adds some content that again interests me.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (59) comments Links to this post

 
Time to peak

Just to annoy Klepsacovic, my third post for the day. :)

Raph Koster once wrote a post on the development of subscription numbers for MMORPGs. He says that all subscription number curves are the same: A growth to peak, then a slow decline.

Thus I'd agree with Ardwulf that the 20% drop of Rift player numbers does not mean, as some doomsayers claimed, a drop to 50% by next month.

Nevertheless I have to observe that while Raph might be right that the shape of the curve is always the same, it is remarkable by how much the timescale changed. It is totally possible that World of Warcraft has peaked by now, and is declining. But WoW sure as hell didn't reach that peak in the first month.

Syncaine is going to blame the "WoW tourists" for that. But isn't the problem rather that the new games are too similar to WoW and other previous games, so they don't hold the attention of players for very long?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:15 AM Permanent Link  (44) comments Links to this post

 
Tanking gear

Quick auction house check with my level 84 tanking paladin:
Cheapest piece of iLevel 359 epic tanking gear on the AH: 30K gold.
Cheapest piece of iLevel 359 epic cloth caster gear: 3k gold.

Number of blue level 85 tanking gear items on the AH: 0
Number of blue level 85 dps items on the AH: 213

Number of tank items I can craft with my maxed out blacksmithing skill before running heroics: 0

I think I'll cancel my plan to gear up that paladin for tanking heroics. My other characters were so much easier to gear up.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:37 AM Permanent Link  (40) comments Links to this post

 
The perfect Looking for Group system

So here is my proposal for creating the perfect Looking for Group system: Every player is only allowed to run one single dungeon per day. When signing up for a dungeon, the system waits until it has 10 players from one server, that is 2 tanks, 2 healers, and 6 dps. These 10 players are then transported into a waiting room where each of them is given 10 minutes to speak to the other players: Time to convince the other players that he is the best candidate to group with. After everybody got his 10 minutes, there is a vote from all of the 10 players, and the 1 tank, the 1 healer, and the 3 dps who get the most votes from their fellow players can then start to run the dungeon.

Due to there being only one chance to run a dungeon, and the strict selection process, this system guarantees the best behaved and optimal pickup group possible. The perfect system!

Of course that system also produces just a fraction of dungeon runs any previous system did. And it is extremely cumbersome and unpractical. But with so many players complaining about every change which produces more dungeon runs faster, and effectively claiming that anything which makes dungeon groups easier to form makes people behave less well in them, this new system must be a smash hit!

[Note for the less bright people out there: This was sarcasm, not a real proposal.]
- posted by Tobold @ 8:11 AM Permanent Link  (32) comments Links to this post

 
The limits of positive social interaction

In my previous post I doubted the ability of players to remember all the jerks they meet in pickup groups, based on the research of Robin Dunbar saying that you can't have more than 150 ongoing social relationships, due to the size of the neocortex part of the human brain. But that means that not only can you not hate over 150 people, but you also can't remember more than 150 friends. Take that, Facebook!

That struck me when I read Gordon's description of a questing group in Rift: "We didn’t need to speak. Speaking was for fools and QQ kids and players of MMOs from the first decade of the 21st century. We had surpassed speaking like the homosapien had surpassed the neanderthal. We were a new breed of gamer, distant yet close, apart yet together. It’s 2011 and this was grouping."

Now it is easy to blame the convenience of open groups and automatic LFG systems for giving us groups where players don't feel the need to speak to each other any more. But that is again the players blaming the developers for something which is mainly the players' own fault: Just remember how groups used to form in trade chat! Did you see "Looking for a nice group of chatty people!" or did you see "Looking for a group of minimum gearscore 6k!"? The players simply aren't interested in their fellow players as human beings any more. They just need the other players for their performance, so they are looking for somebody with the right class, spec, and gear; not somebody nice.

Heartwarming parables on the value of underperforming people are nice to read, but find less and less application in MMORPGs. Players in groups call each other "tank" or "mage" instead of using character names. Guilds ask for performance first, personality after. And in the part of our play sessions we actually consider as "playing", as opposed to "downtime", we don't really have time to chat anyway, because we need to focus on that last millisecond of performance improvement.

I once claimed that you couldn't do a MMORPG on a console, because it would be too hard to chat without a keyboard. I'm not so sure that actually matters any more these days. I can be stone silent with a gamepad as good as with a keyboard.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:32 AM Permanent Link  (32) comments Links to this post

 
Cross-server dungeons

Klepsacovic explains the advantage of cross-server dungeons, which is mainly a significant decrease in queue time. Outside prime time that cross-server function makes all the difference, enabling you to actually find a group before you play session is over. Of course Klepsacovic is right in saying that this might be less needed during prime time. But I'm not convinced yet that the cross-server functionality actually has any disadvantages.

The main accusation against cross-server functionality is that somehow the larger population makes people behave worse, because they are dealing with "strangers" from outside their "server community". But actually there is scientific proof that this argument is false. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar showed that in primates (that includes humans) there is a maximum number of people you can have a stable social relationship with. That number, the Dunbar number, is about 150 for humans. Which means that on any World of Warcraft server, even if you only count either the Horde or the Alliance side, the "server community" is too big for a human to remember. Most of the players on your server are strangers to you. Going from a single server to a battlegroup of servers changes nothing. Especially since Blizzard introduced the cross-server ignore functionality: No mentally sane person is sending tells to some jerk he met in a bad pickup group anyway, so ignoring that jerk is all the functionality you ever need.

I believe that the perception some people have that cross-servers make the community worse is just that, a perception, and not a fact. You can't separate people from their wrongly held beliefs, but that doesn't make those beliefs reality. If Blizzard tomorrow switched off the cross-server functionality for the Dungeon Finder, the pickup groups would be exactly as badly behaved as they are now. Only that you'd wait much longer to get into one.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (54) comments Links to this post

 
Free2Play cost structures

Everybody knows that “Free2Play” games aren’t free to play, at least not for everybody. As I spent quite some time this year with various “Free2Play” browser games, I observed some interesting differences in the cost structure for different games.

I already mentioned once the Browser game The Settlers Online, still in beta, having a curious front-loaded cost structure: The first 50 bucks you spend on the game give you a huge and permanent advantage, but after that you are limited to buying temporary advantages at a much lower bang to buck ratio. Thus paying players have a big advantage over non-paying players; but players are discouraged from spending too much, and you don’t have to pay over and over for the same stuff. Other games that work with a similar structure are online games simulating collectible card games: You need to spend a stash of money to get a decent collection to really be able to play, but higher spending suffers from strongly diminishing returns.

A very different model from that are games which have a hidden subscription cost structure: To play the game comfortably, you need to constantly pay. That isn’t necessarily bad, if the monthly fee you derive at is low enough. For example in Shakes & Fidget, a simple Progressquest-like game, a mount that doubles your adventuring speed costs around 1€ for two weeks, which I find quite reasonable. Echo Bazaar is a bit more expensive, about 5€ per month for having twice as many actions as a player who pays nothing.

Far more common are games in which you pay for things which help you mostly in the short term. Thus if you play a lot, you come across lots of moments where paying would give you an advantage. But as long as you don’t play, you aren’t paying for anything. While there is some inherent fairness and logic behind that, the overall effect is often that you end up feeling nickeled-and-dimed. One main problem here is games in which the so-called “micro-“ payments are generally too expensive, and quickly add up to more than one would pay for a much better game.

One particularly interesting case I came across is DDTank, a colorful “Worms”-like multiplayer browser shooting game. A typical purchase in that game would be an energy stone which gives you a chance to upgrade your weapon, costing 1500 “coins”, which can only be purchased for real money. But DDTank is offered by different distributors, and some of them offer 100 coins for $1, while others give you 300 coins for $1. So while I’d say $5 to upgrade your weapon is expensive, $15 for the same action is certainly outrageously overpriced. DDTank is also annoying because all the gear you can get in game disappears after a few days, and you need to spend a lot of money to buy permanent items. So while the game itself is fun enough, the cost structure is driving people away.

The worst game I’ve come across cost-wise is Warstory – Europe in Flames, a browser strategy game. Again gameplay itself isn’t all bad. But the game literally asks you for a payment after every single action you do. You want to move your troops, and the game tells you to either wait 2 hours or pay. You fight, and the game tells you to either wait 1 hour for the troops to rest afterwards or pay. In between frequently advertisements pop up asking you to pay for some special offer. And the game makes it very clear that “winning” is very much a matter of outspending the competition. That all annoyed me so much that I quickly abandoned the game, although I liked their approach to browser strategy gaming much more than the same old “build a city and attack your neighbors” approach everybody else has.

A single-player game on the PC costs anywhere between 5€ and 60€. Many MMORPGs have an initial payment for the box and one free month, followed by usually around 10 to 15 € or $ monthly fee. Browser games are a lot cheaper to make, so I expect to pay less for them than for a big budget PC game or MMORPG. But I do support the general idea that at least some of the players of a Free2Play game should pay something, so that the developers get a salary and the game company can afford to run the game and develop new ones. The tricky thing is to evaluate what you’d end up paying if you play such a Free2Play game in reasonable comfort. Not only does the cost structure make it often far more difficult to see in advance what such games cost; but experience shows that there is a huge range from fairly priced games to complete rip-offs out there. It’s buyers beware, I guess.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:50 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Asymmetric challenge

Imagine the least complicated World of Warcraft boss mob possible, a simple tank'n'spank affair: The tank just needs to stand still in front of it and spam taunts between other attacks, the healer just needs to heal the tank, and the three dps stand completely still and use their best spell rotation without switching targets.

Now let's add half a dozen typical boss abilities to that fight: The tank now has to keep moving to not stand in the colored spots on the floor, the healer now has to deal with spike damage on the tank and the AoE damage on the dps, and the three dps stand completely still and use their best spell rotation without switching targets.

That is obviously a caricature, but not all that far from the truth. Most boss abilities are much more likely to increase the challenge for the tank (who is also the guy expected to have all boss abilities in memory) and the healer. DPS, especially ranged, aren't even affected by all boss abilities, and might at worst have to sometimes move out of the fire.

I am wondering if those people who expressed that they like the increased challenge of Cataclysm are playing tanks. I suspect not. To me it seems that the increased challenge isn't evenly distributed, but that there is an asymetric challenge with most of the burden falling on the tank. Which, due the theory of effort vs. fun I wrote about yesterday, leads to the tank shortage. Increased dungeon challenge means not so much more hassle for the dps, but a huge amount of increased effort for the tank, and some for the healer. Not only is the increased reward for tanks totally justified, if anything, as Big Bear Butt remarks, it isn't high enough yet.

The best method I could think of to solve the tank shortage quickly is to massively increase the availability of tanking gear. Besides the blue craftably PvP gear, there should be blue craftable tanking gear, so tanks can get a complete set of decent gear right when they hit level 85. Because who wants to group with a tank still in the process of collecting a half-decent set of armor? If the challenge is asymmetric, the loot distribution has to be as well.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:54 AM Permanent Link  (65) comments Links to this post

 
Linkage

Couldn't have said it better.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:14 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
A cataclysmic theory of fun

Everything we do in a game is voluntary. Yes, there are certain goals that you can only reach by jumping through certain hoops; but as reaching those goals is voluntary, you aren't forced to do anything in a MMORPG. You aren't even forced to play, you can quit at any time. Thus whether you play, and what exactly you do in a game is ruled by a simple calculation: Is the fun you expect from an activity worth the effort and the hassle to do it?

Of course both fun and the perception of effort are highly subjective. But given a large enough population, one can nevertheless observe certain trends. Thus in this post I'm going to look at World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion with regards to the fun vs. effort calculation.

On the fun side Cataclysm suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Yes, getting rewards and collecting gear is fun; but after over 6 years and in the 3rd expansion most people are collecting their umpteenths set of gear, fully knowing that soon it will be replaced by the next set, making the whole exercise somewhat futile. Furthermore Blizzard tried to stop epic-inflation, and that has a negative psychological effect: Collecting blue gear just isn't as much fun as collecting purple gear, regardless of actual stats.

On the effort side, Blizzard deliberately increased the amount of effort needed to get rewards. There were a lot of good reasons to increase the level of challenge in dungeons and heroics. But the developers underestimated the secondary effects that increasing the challenge level has: Harder dungeons take considerably longer to play through, thus even if the challenge doesn't put you off, the time requirement might. And harder dungeons by definition mean more occurences of failure, and pickup groups are notoriously bad at dealing with failure. As we discussed last week, different roles in a pickup group carry different amounts of responsability, leading to certain roles being more likely to be blamed for failure, whether they actually caused the wipe or not. That considerably adds to the hassle side of the equation.

In summary, Cataclysm offers for many players less fun for more effort and hassle. As a consequence the expansion shows serious signs of fatigue after not even 6 months, less than a quarter of its expected lifetime. World of Warcraft expansion usually have a serious dip in subscriber numbers, interest, and player activity in the summer 20 months after release. Cataclysm very much risks to have that dip a year early. With Rift offering a reasonable alternative for people who want to play that sort of themepark MMORPG, and SWTOR coming out in autumn, World of Warcraft is likely to take a serious hit.

That isn't to say "WoW is dying". Half of World of Warcraft's subscribers are Chinese, and they just got Wrath of the Lich King and haven't even started with Cataclysm yet. And of the American und European players, a large percentage is casual players who never do heroics, thus aren't affected at all by the increased difficulty. While the Cataclysm level 80 to 85 zones have their replayability problems, the one thing Cataclysm did right was renovating the level 1 to 60 part of the game, offering casual and new players a lot of stuff to do. So it is mostly the less casual and veteran players that suffer from less fun for more hassle. But as it is usually that sort of players who also run WoW blogs and talk about WoW on the internet, they create a rather strong negative vibe at the moment. Which can't be good for Blizzard.

In hindsight the increase in difficulty level should have been combined with a decrease in dungeon length. Shorter dungeons counter the secondary effects of increased difficulty of taking too long and causing too much strife due to never reaching the end. But of course that is nearly impossible to fix for the developers now. They could nerf the dungeons and shower everybody with epics, but even that at this point is unlikely to keep everybody happy until the next expansion at the end of 2012. What it would take right now to revive everybody's interest in World of Warcraft is bringing out the next expansion much, much earlier, after one year instead of two; but we all know that Blizzard doesn't work like that.

So Cataclysm is going to be remembered by many as the expansion that was less fun, and more hassle. Not a successful formula, if I might say so.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:09 AM Permanent Link  (48) comments Links to this post

 
Priests are the best dps, mages the worst

A reader sent me a link to his site Raidbots.com which data mines information from World of Logs to see what classes and specs are on top of the dps meters. The winner over the last 60 days is the shadow priest, with the bottom place being taken by frost mages. Somehow I didn't count on making the best damage dealer when I rolled a priest 6 years ago. And I guess I'll have to respec my mage to fire.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:03 PM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Know anything better than bribery?

So a lot of WoW blogs are loudly complaining about the new Call to Arms system bribing mostly tanks and to a lesser degree healers to join pickup groups. Unsurprisingly the loudest complaints are on blogs that have words like "rogue" in the blog name, with the principal complaint being that it is extremely unlikely that somebody playing a pure dps class will ever get that reward. So the new system has been called an "inverted hybrid tax". I think the complainers are overlooking the fact that dps classes are the principal winners of the new system, as it is *their* queue time that will diminish, not the queue time of the tank or healer; and the justice / valor point rewards from queueing faster are a lot bigger than the bribe Blizzard offers to the tanks.

But let's assume that for some reason you don't want this bribery, or think it won't work. That leaves us with the original problem of not enough tanks queueing up for pickup groups. So how else could that problem be solved? The only reasonable alternative proposal I have found up to now is Rohan's suggestion to make groups require 2 tanks, 2 healers, and 2 dps; thus no role would carry more responsability than the other roles.

Everybody else is just wishing for miracle solutions, without even giving a hint of how those could look like. "Make tanking less stressful" is a goal, not a solution. "Make tanking easier" likewise, because the only thing Blizzard could do would be to make dungeons in general easier, but then dps would just use more AoE and the tank would still be the most stressful role.

The main problem is that it isn't Blizzard who decides who does what. For example why does it have to be the tank who sets the raid marks for kill order and crowd control? Or who explains the other players how an encounter works? In combat the larger responsability of the tank derives from the core of his role, of what "tanking" actually means in terms of aggro control and damage mitigation; but even there it is the players who often attribute responsability badly, like the dps not using /assist and not hitting the mob with the skull icon over its head, and then complaining that the tank isn't holding aggro. What would Blizzard be supposed to do about that?

So if you have any better solution to the tank shortage problem than bribing the tanks, let us know!
- posted by Tobold @ 8:38 AM Permanent Link  (71) comments Links to this post

 
Fair trade gold farming

The World Bank issued a report saying that "virtual online currencies and digital work now provide real income opportunities to poor and unskilled workers in developing countries", offering jobs by "playing online games on behalf of wealthier players who are too busy to tend to their characters themselves". Ars Technica writes about that and proposes Fair Trade Gold.

Has gold farming become so widespread that this is now considered the norm? Do people now believe that it is okay to buy gold, as long as it is "Fair Trade Gold"?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:02 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Now that seems fair!

[Sarcasm alert!]

Conclusions from yesterday's comments on the new Call to Arms system bribing people to play the less popular roles, aka tanks (or healers to a lesser degree):

1) DPS players are incompetent and anti-social.

2) Bribing people to play tanks (or healers) will cause incompetent and anti-social players to play tanks (or healers) instead of DPS.

1)+2) = The Call to Arms system will result in groups in which incompetent DPS players are grouped with incompetent tanks and healers.

Sounds fair to me! What's not to like about this?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
How do you "carry" a tank?

Great discussion today, really showing how different people think about the various group roles. I'd like to point out another comment for discussion: "However with this new bribe I am thinking, where is our reward for "carrying" new/bad/inexperienced tanks?", by rulez. I find that comment fascinating because obviously rulez believes that there are situations where the dps "carry" the tank, while I have doubts that this is even theoretically possible.

How would "carrying" a tank by dps work? How would a dps with a bad tank play differently to "carry" the tank, instead of playing "normally"?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:07 PM Permanent Link  (52) comments Links to this post

 
A comment to discuss

In the previous thread Numtini said: "anti-social behavior is concentrated among DPS classes". Do you believe this is true, and if yes, why would damage dealers be less social (or less competent, as others suggested) than tanks or healers?
- posted by Tobold @ 3:40 PM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Woot! Bribery!

In case you haven't noticed it yet, one of the fundamental credos of this blog is that social engineering is the answer to many of the problems of MMORPGs. If you don't like the term social engineering, you can also call it bribery. Like Blizzard does:

The long queue times are, of course, caused by a very simple lack of representation in the Dungeon Finder by tanks, and to some extent healers. We don't feel the tanking and healing roles have any inherent issues that are causing the representation disparity, except that fulfilling them carries more responsibility. Understandably, players prefer to take on that responsibility in more organized situations than what the Dungeon Finder offers, but perhaps we can bribe them a little.

So in future people queueing up for the most under-represented role in the Dungeon Finder (meaning tanks in 80% of cases, healers in 20% of cases, and dps in 0% of cases) will get an additional bribe reward in the form of a goody bag containing "some gold, a chance at a rare gem, a chance at a flask/elixir (determined by spec), a good chance of receiving a non-combat pet (including cross faction pets), and a very rare chance at receiving a mount".

If you consider role representation the responsability of the developers alone, this is the absolutely best possible solution. I like it. Personally I would have liked it even more if players would consider role representation at least partially to be also the responsability of the players, and would have queued up as tanks without a bribe; but that obviously was an utopian pipe dream. So, woot to bribery!
- posted by Tobold @ 9:00 AM Permanent Link  (49) comments Links to this post

 
Learning from video games

Researchers from the University of Krems, Austria, recently performed a study in which they tried to seriously teach children things via video games. They found out that this doesn't work. Playing a lot of video games, surprise, surprise, makes you good at playing video games, but at nothing else. There was no significant "skill transfer" from game to real life, even with educational games. Even children are perfectly able to completely separate virtual life from real life. Apart from learning social skills by interacting with real other people via a multiplayer game platform, games don't teach you anything. On the positive side that also means that playing GTA doesn't turn you into a car thief and murderer.

So while direct teaching through games seems to be a lost cause, researchers from the MIT are trying the indirect approach: What if your desire to play can motivate you to learn something outside the game which is useful for the game? Thus they developed a Curriculum: Teaching Computer Science through WoW Scripts in which high-school students learn computer science and programming by creating LUA scripts for World of Warcraft.

Given how people usually use such mods and addons to make games easier for themselves, I find it somewhat ironic that science thus proves that cheating at computer games is more likely to teach you something than playing them.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:49 AM Permanent Link  (33) comments Links to this post

 
Player-created content

A reader directed my attention to an article in Massively about the new Star Trek Online Foundry, specifically the part where players used the Foundry to create missions that practice their jumping skills, needed for one of the game's raids. Sure, that would be one of the valid uses of such an editor for player-created content: Create training missions for developer-created content.

Unfortunately mission editors and MMORPGs based on player advancement don't go well together. Either the players are given very little freedom on how to create new content, or they tend to use any freedom given to create missions that give the maximum amount of reward for the minimum amount of effort. Paragon had to threaten players who used the mission Architect of City of Heroes / Villains with being banned for exploiting.

That is the curse of games in which character advancement and rewards have become more important than any notions of "fun". Add an editor and players maximize rewards instead of maximizing fun, because they can't even tell the difference any more. Given the possibility, they would create the big red button which advances any character to maximum level with best in slot gear in all item slots, in spite of that button being a thinly disguised "game over" function.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
Remember me?

I was discussing Dr. Richard Bartle's opinion of Rift as a WoW expansion with somebody on chat, and the person I was talking with said something along the lines of "Oh, Bartle, that's the guy with the Bartle Test, isn't it?". Not "the co-creator of the first MUD", or "the writer of Designing Virtual Worlds", no, most people only remember that one article about achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers in online games. Or not even the article itself, but some bastardized multiple choice test that wasn't even created by Dr. Bartle himself.

In a similar vein, when Paul Barnett’s involvement in a possible remake of Ultima IV in online form was mentioned on this blog, one commenter immediately remembered Paul for his "bears, bears, bears" video. Now that was a great video, and one could say that the enthusiastic hyping of a feature which then ultimately didn't make it in that form into the game neatly summarizes people's disappointment with WAR. But I seriously doubt that Paul Barnett views that video as the defining point of his career, and the one thing he wants to be remembered for.

That makes me wonder what people remember me for. Probably not for any of my real life achievements, because I hardly ever even mention them. But even of my blog posts I doubt that the ones I think are my best work are actually the ones that stuck in people's memory, if they remember me at all. What do you remember me for?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (43) comments Links to this post

 
Public quests come to WoW in patch 4.3

Personally I had forecasted World of Warcraft to "borrow" the idea of public quests in the next expansion. But given the success of Rift, apparently Blizzard decided that this couldn't wait. So today they announced that public quests will be introduced already in patch 4.3.

Details are still a bit sketchy, but apparently the public quests will be tied to Deathwing attacks. So instead of just burning everything and giving players an achievement, Deathwing will open up invasion portals with the usual cast of Twilight's Hammer cultists and dragonkin coming through. Players in the area will receive a warning of the invasion, and have to work together to close those portals, before the invasion takes over the various quest hubs in the area. In the area around the portals there will be some open group system, and beating back the invasion will reward players with judgement and valor points to buy gear with.

Using Deathwing for the public quest system suggests to me that this is an experiment, because obviously Blizzard won't be able to use the same baddy in the next expansion. Although of course the principle is probably useable with most sorts of expansion final boss. I doubt they'll go back to Northrend and do Scourge invasions controlled by the Lich King though, as nobody is playing in those zones any more. Makes you wonder how public quest invasions will play out in the long term with players abandoning old zones.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:31 AM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post