Dear Funcom,

Yesterday a commenter on my blog said "Something went wrong for Funcom, that much is clear. But what was it?". Today I received an e-mail from you stating that you didn't know either, and would like to find out. You asked: "What would make YOU buy The Secret World? Let us know! Funcom is committed to expanding and improving upon The Secret World and your input will help us do a better job at making The Secret World more suited to you. So take this survey and let us know how it should be done!"

Well, thanks for asking, but I feel that I can't answer because the question is posed the wrong way. You ask what would make me *buy* The Secret World, and there probably isn't anything you could do with your now limited budget which would make me buy the game and pay a monthly subscription. If you had asked what would make me *play* The Secret World, and possibly spend money on it, the answer is clearly "The Secret World going Free2Play would make me play it, and possibly spend money on it". Probably not right now, where I am kind of busy with Guild Wars 2 and Mists of Pandaria, but I expect to be looking for a game to play in early 2013 at the latest. I see a lot of strong points in The Secret World, so if I wouldn't have to pay for it in advance to play it, and pay a monthly subscription fee, I would certainly give it a more extended try than the beta weekend I participated in.

I don't think that The Secret World is a bad game. But it is niche, and not quite my favorite niche. So for me it isn't worth a monthly subscription plus purchase. Not if a game that fits me much better, like Guild Wars 2, can be had without a monthly subscription. Some of my readers tell me that The Secret World has hidden strengths, which weren't readily apparent from the first impression I could gather in the beta weekend. Those strengths would be even less apparent to somebody just seeing screenshots and a mediocre Metacritic score. If you really believe in your game and think that people would like it if they just played it, I can only recommend going Free2Play.

Regards,

Tobold

A character of any given level in World of Warcraft is limited to what zones he can meaningfully interact with: If the zone is much higher in level than his character, he can't beat the mobs or accept the quests; if the zone is much lower, the quests are grey, fights are trivial, and there are no rewards. Guild Wars 2 expands the number of zones you can play in by downleveling you so that fights remain interesting, while still giving you level-appropriate rewards. In principle that is a great idea which should help a lot, especially for casual playing and completionists.

But yesterday I came for the first time in a situation where I saw the downside of downleveling. I was in one of the story instances, and I was dying a lot. There were lots of monsters I was supposed to fight through, and this being underwater I couldn't use my turrets, plus fighting in three dimensions is more complicated in the first place. Instinctively I wondered whether maybe I wasn't high enough in level to do this instance. But a quick look to the bottom left corner of the screen revealed something strange: I was level 8, but had been downleveled to 6 for that instance. But most of the mobs I was fighting were level 8! Why the heck am I being downleveled so that mobs of my level end up outleveling me?

That instance also told me a lot about Guild Wars 2 death system: You can die your way through an instance. That happens in two steps: First of all you can keep fighting while dead for some time, and if you kill a monster during that time you get back up; albeit with low health, so if fighting multiple mobs you'll just go down again quickly. Second, if you are really, really dead in an instance, you get the option to restart from the last "checkpoint". You'll get up there instantly, at full health. And the mobs in the zone don't regain any health from you reviving or being left alone. Thus you go back to the bunch of mobs that killed you, and continue killing them. It is a war of attrition you always win, because you revive indefinitely, and the mobs die and aren't replaced.

In the end that story instance was a disappointment. Being downleveled to be weaker than the mobs is annoying, and takes a lot of the interest out of leveling in the first place. Not getting stuck in the story is good, but dying your way through the story isn't fun. And if it is a story mission for engineers, designing it in a way where the engineer turrets can't be used doesn't make for a satisfying experience either. I probably would have done better with a better harpoon, but that wasn't something I could have known before entering the instance. Not the best game design there, ArenaNet!

Guild Wars 2 reportedly already sold over 1 million copies. But Funcom had to reveal they sold only 200,000 copies of The Secret World. I am reading comments like Bronte's: "the ugly truth is self-evident: The Secret World has failed to garner the following that it frankly deserved". I'm baffled. How exactly does a game "deserve" a following?

I am a firm believer in the homo economicus, the economic theory that people aren't completely stupid, and buy exactly what they want. I believe more people bought Guild Wars 2 than The Secret World because Guild Wars 2 is the better game, and costs less to play. I generally don't post screenshots, but there are so many of the around for both of these games that you should easily be able to find representative selections; and I'd bet that if you showed somebody who doesn't know anything about these games just a pair of screenshots and asked him which game looks more interesting, most people immediately would go for Guild Wars 2.

The other major problem of The Secret World is that it has a horror/conspiracy setting which already at its base is less popular than a fantasy setting. Furthermore horror games tend to work better as single-player games, because zombies aren't scary if they are outnumbered by heavily armed players. The one thing that The Secret World does better than Guild Wars 2 is that it has less bugs, which is something I thought I would never say about a Funcom game.

Both The Secret World and Guild Wars 2 offer new variations of the old "kill 10 foozles" quest mechanics. But the Guild Wars 2 version manages to be both innovative and still very appealing to the mainstream. Highly innovative quests in The Secret World like investigation quests having you surf fake websites for clues are far more niche. This is not what the majority of players want to do in their MMORPGs.

I do not think that The Secret World "deserves" a larger following. It isn't as if by some error of marketing the potential customers failed to notice the game. The Secret World had over 1 million beta players, and if less than 20% of those then went and bought the game, that has fully rational reasons. It was a typical case of "He's just not that into you" times a million. If Guild Wars 2 has a much better beta player to customers conversion, it is clearly them who "deserve" that large following.

First things first, the the technical aspects: There is a weird school of thought among blogger thinking that if you like a game you should gloss over its bugs and technical shortcomings. I don't subscribe to that. I like Guild Wars 2, but of all the MMORPGs I have played this year, it is the one with the most things not working as intended. By ArenaNet's own admission most of the social features of Guild Wars 2 are broken at the moment: Guild chat isn't working, joining guild is buggy, the auction house is enable only for 15% of the players, in-game mail isn't working, the forums aren't working, and if you want to play in a group with your friend you risk that group getting disbanded every time you zone because of people landing on different overflow servers. ArenaNet shouldn't be proud of launching a game with more problems than Funcom did. Basically Guild Wars 2 right now is only playable as a single-player game, with interaction with other players mostly limited to strangers that are in the same location as you are.

Fortunately it is a very good single-player game. The graphics are both technically and aesthetically excellent.  The gameplay in which what you are told to do depends on where you are instead of on which NPC you clicked on works great and encourages full exploration of the map. The crafting material deposit and the discovery system are great improvements over crafting systems in previous games (although I'd wish those two would work together). Daily achievements are an improvement over daily quests. And the combat system is responsive and fun. I can see myself playing Guild Wars 2 for quite some time.

Having said that, I nevertheless need to remark that while Guild Wars 2 is an improvement and refinement over the existing way most MMORPGs work these days, it isn't a revolution. Combat is still targeting something, and using a combination of auto-attacks and hotkeys with a cooldown. And while at first it seems refreshing to not have a laundry list of quests to do, at the end of "filling a heart" you might realize that you did exactly the same as if there had been a quest hub at that location: Killed X mobs, and clicked on Y hotspots. Vistas work very similar to SWTOR datacrons. Events work like WAR public quests. Right now it is all new and shiny, and everything works together quite well, but it is all iterations on what was there before, not a radical overthrow of the genre.

That might a good thing in one respect: I managed to figure out how many things work in Guild Wars 2 through my experience of other games. Guild Wars 2 is thin on tutorials and explanations of how stuff works. I ended up watching YouTube videos on how crafting works, on the recommendation of a friend, because the game itself failed to explain anything. I can see how somebody new to the genre might get quite lost in Guild Wars 2, but it is a lot less directive in telling people what to do or explaining how to do things. Veterans probably like that, but new players could use a better tutorial.

Overall I can only recommend Guild Wars 2. Especially the cost to benefit ratio is hard to beat: Guild Wars 2 offers the quality level of a subscription MMORPG without the subscription. I checked out the item store, and at least at the start of the game there is nothing where you feel pushed towards spending real money, where you are hitting a pay wall. The most useful thing I found to spend money on was buying gems and exchanging them for in-game gold, because gold is in short supply if you want to craft. Later you might want to buy bag slots or character slots, but Guild Wars 2 is much less in-your-face pushy with promoting their item shop than most Free2Play MMORPGs. Of course that might change once the revenue from selling boxes dries up.

I managed to create a Guild Wars 2 character this morning before having to go to work. It is a rabbit. Or rather a humanoid which looks like a rabbit, and is called an Asura. Wielding pistols, as I chose engineer as his "profession" aka class. Next month I will create a panda monk in WoW, like everybody else. I already play a humanoid cow in that game. None of these are the weirdest race I've ever played, because that distinction probably has to go to the three hamsters I played in Allods Online: They play like one character, but are shown as a group of three, for example with two of them on top of each other holding a bow, while the third one pulls the arrow.

Everquest has lizard-men and rat-men. And there are lots of games in which some of the other races aren't completely serious either, for example the gnomes and goblins in World of Warcraft, even if they aren't fluffy animals in human form. I have a female warlock in WoW with pink pigtails, summoning sinister demons. I wanted to call her Dottie, but the name was already taken. And once you visit Asian games, you will see a lot more silly races.

There is a huge amount of silliness going on in nearly every MMORPG, in quest descriptions, the way how certain races look, dance moves and other emoticons, and in lot of other places. I really don't understand the people who chose to ignore all of that silliness in the history of MMORPGs and pretend that the Pandaren are the first time a game introduced silliness, somehow spoiling their game and turning it from something dead serious into something childish. It isn't as if Blizzard had lots of other options to introduce new races into the game that aren't silly. Next expansion will probably be murlocs.

Keen is pondering people reaching the Guild Wars 2 level cap before the game is even officially released. I can easily imagine the train of thought going on in some players:

1. "I must rush to the level cap, because that is where the real game is."
2. "Yay, I reached the level cap, now let's look at the endgame."
3. "Hmmm, the endgame doesn't offer anything new."
4. "Unsubscribe"

Much has been written about how MMORPGs before, up to and including World of Warcraft, tended to grow over time and peak many months or even years after release, while post-WoW games tend to peak at the end of the first month and are in serious decline 3 months later. I would bet that this trend correlates with the leveling speed of modern games.

Sure, you would get some people bitching and moaning if you released a MMORPG today which took 3 to 6 months to reach the level cap. But as usual what people complain about and what they act upon are two very different things: In a game with slow leveling they would complain and keep playing; in a game with fast leveling they would say, if asked, that this is what they wanted, but they'll unsubscribe after a month or three.

In short: I believe that making MMORPGs with fast leveling is a serious business error.

I'd love to tell you how much fun I had playing Guild Wars 2, but in reality I haven't even beaten the first enemy of the game yet: The login server. Deviously that login server is needed *twice* to play, once to get the client to start, and once at the end of character creation. Thus when I finally cleared the first hurdle and could create my character, all my effort was in vain. The character never got saved, I never got into the game, and after some time I got dropped back onto a character selection screen with no created characters at all. Plus somebody stole my name "Tobold".

What I find dishonest about the experience is that when THEIR login servers aren't working, you get an error message suggesting that the problem is on your side, with firewall or security settings. I wonder how many people frantically fiddled with firewall settings they didn't half understand last night, when in fact the problem was on the server side. Why can't we have error messages that at least state the login server being overloaded or down as one possibility?

Facebook greeted me with the following advertisement from Mitt Romney:

"You’re Invited to a Republican National Convention Farewell Victory Rally with Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and the Republican... — Friday, August 31 at 7:30am in EDT."

Dear Mitt Romney,

Thank you very much for your invitation. But besides the fact that I am European and thus not eligible to vote, I would also like to say that this is maybe a bit too early to already say Farewell to Victory. Hang in there, polls say you have a 50:50 chance of winning this. Being used to European standards of health care and egality, I would personally vote for your opponent. But I do think that you add a valid point about the size of government to this election, even if it is marred by the extreme one-sidedness of the proposed reductions and tax reliefs.

Regards,

Tobold

For both Diablo III and Star Wars: The Old Republic over here there was a huge difference between pre-order price and retail price: 60 Euro compared to 40 Euro. Thus I didn't pre-order Guild Wars 2 for 55 Euro. But it turns out the difference is less for GW2, the retail version still cost 50 Euro, just 5 Euro less than pre-order.

While I would still prefer that the download version is *cheaper* than the retail version, I can understand the marketing reasons which prevent that. No company wants to piss off the retailers. Given that, I find 5 Euro difference not so bad. Now if I could only know in advance what the retail price will be, and then I could make a decision of whether to buy a pre-order or not for the next game.

The end of Cataclysm is near, and I haven't got a clue how the story of Deathwing ends. Which isn't surprising, because I haven't seen Illidan or the Lich King die either. Basically World of Warcraft tells the beginning of stories with cinematics that everybody can see, and the end of those stories in the last raid of an expansion. There are two problems with that approach: First, only a small percentage of players gets to see the end of the stories, and second the players who get to see the end of the stories usually aren't much interested. They raid because of the challenge, the achievement, the loot, and lots of other reasons other than an interest in the lore.

Thus when Mists of Pandaria was presented without a big bad boss, I actually considered that an improvement. For World of Warcraft that is. I would say that the way other games, like Star Wars: The Old Republic, tell their stories without requiring players to raid to see the end is superior to the WoW way.

I remember when Magisters' Terrace opened up, it had a cinematic sequence in the middle explaining things about the Sunwell. And me and some other people in the group I was in were watching that, because we were interested in the lore. With the predictable outcome that the other group members chided us for not pressing escape to skip the sequence, so as to finish the dungeon a minute earlier.

Right now in World of Warcraft I'm busy with gearing up my priest, only so that I can see the Caverns of Time dungeons added in patch 4.3. I'd happily visit them in normal mode, but unfortunately they only exist in heroic. So if I want to see that story, I have to be able to do the hardest heroics in the game, which includes having the gear for them.

I think it is likely that the people who like the lore most are those who aren't all that interested in high-end dungeons and raids. And that the people who are interested in high-end dungeons and raids are not that much interested in the lore. There is a mismatch here between where the content is, and what kind of people want to see it.

In a time and age where saying "I played World of Warcraft this weekend" is being interpreted as "Tobold hates Guild Wars 2", I think I need to make a short statement of intention: I am going to buy Guild Wars 2 on release or shortly after. If I had wanted to play earlier, I would have had to pay €15 more (€55 pre-order price vs. €40 retail price). And I would have had to endure yet another MMORPG launch, which experience tells me to avoid, both for the technical problems and the gameplay problems when everybody has the same level and is in the same zones.

I will play Guild Wars 2. Later this week, or at the very latest next weekend. At the moment I am completely neutral and could not possibly tell you whether I will like Guild Wars 2 more or Mists of Pandaria. I will play them both and see for myself. I am trying deliberately to avoid the whole hype-to-disappointment cycle, and just judge each game on its merits. Or rather on my own very subjective criteria for what "fun" is. So, "NO!", I am not willing to accept YOUR very subjective criteria for what fun is instead.

My apologies to John le Carré for butchering a title from his books, but after a year-and-a-half of absence my priest feels like he came in from the cold, having been frozen in time. And it is somewhat curious how time solved some of my problems. When I left World of Warcraft in April 2011, said priest was in trouble: I had done all the normal dungeons and was wearing all the gear you could get from them, but when I tried the next step, heroic dungeons, the groups I was in weren't doing so well. Which might or might not have been my fault, but as a healer I tended to get blamed even if it wasn't my fault. And as I couldn't do heroics, I couldn't get geared up for heroics neither, a vicious cycle.

Now I'm pretty certain my skills haven't gotten any better during my absence. If anything, I'm older, slower, and a bit rusty on healing. But it turns out that I can run heroics now. Yesterday I even did Zul'Gurub, which presumably is harder than the first batch of heroics, and I was healing just fine. Okay, I caused one wipe because I didn't know I had to move into the green bubble on the final boss (I tend to stay out of the colored spots, which works fine as basic strategy on most bosses), but on the second try we did it without problems. The only problem I have with heroics now is that they feel very rushed in most cases, so although I have a cheat sheet printed out with what I should do at each boss, I never get the opportunity to read it because the people pull so fast. Even just drinking for mana is difficult to find time for. And yet I'm racking up valor points (after having reached the weekly cap for justice points from normal dungeons).

I don't remember having read anything about the heroics having been nerfed a lot during my absence. Maybe it is simply that the other players are now both better trained and better equipped. If the rest of group is doing well, the job of the healer is getting easier, even if he is slow and undergeared. That allows me to visit the dungeons I haven't seen yet, those that aren't even available on normal, like Zul'Gurub.

Having re-installed a lot of addons I used to have, including Recount, I noticed that there are huge differences in performance levels between dps players; you see everything from 5k to 25k dps. Presumably there are also huge differences in the quality between different players playing healers, or different players playing tanks, but those are harder to measure. And that makes me wonder how heroics will be in Mists of Pandaria. As a rather average player, will I be stuck again after finishing the MoP dungeons on normal? Will I have to wait until the other players have become a lot better at MoP heroics again before I can set a foot into them with my priest?

The reason I wonder is because if Mists of Pandaria heroics are a repeat of Cataclysm heroics, I might want to level up another character as my main. For example my frost mage. I find that one easier to level than the priest (even with shadow dual spec). And let's face it: If you are a mediocre player in a 5-man group, you are far better off with a dps class. Your lack of performance can more easily be compensated by the other players, and even when underperforming you are less likely to be blamed. Generally I do like healing in a dungeon more than I like dealing damage, but if the tuning of MoP heroics and the expectations of the other players require healers that are much better than me, I might have to give up on dungeon healing. Man, I miss vanilla WoW, where I was considered a good player in a hardcore raiding guild beating BWL. The skill required from a healer these days have nothing to do with what was needed back then.

What I like about roleplaying games in general is the tactical aspect of combat. Obviously there isn't much of that when soloing, which is why I have grown generally bored of kill ten foozles quests. And over the years I felt that raids moved away from being something tactical to being a separate game that was about memorizing sequences and hitting the right button fast enough (which is somewhat ironic given the merger of Blizzard with Activision, publishers of the Guitar Hero series.) Thus the part I'm still interested in is small group dungeons.

So I have been running dungeons on normal with my holy priest since his return to World of Warcraft. Normal for several reasons: To get back into the game, to meet less elitist other players, and because due to the currency conversion next week the justice points I earn in normal dungeons actually have the same value as the valor points from heroic dungeons. I will eventually switch to heroic dungeons, for the greater challenge, better loot, and because the new dungeons are only available in heroic. But for the moment the normal dungeons are a nice way to get back.

Other than that I haven't found really good things to occupy myself with in WoW right now. I tried the daily Firelands quests with my frost mage, who was the only character I had who had done Mount Hyjal quests far enough to unlock the dailies. But I'm not really feeling like doing the same quests for another 9 days to unlock the next step. And the rewards of activities like archeology apparently haven't kept up with the gear inflation from dungeons and raids. In any case it is too late to do anything for rewards this late in the expansion, the main point for all activities now has to be that they have to be fun by themselves. That pretty much only leaves running dungeons for me.

What are the activities in WoW or other MMORPGs which you consider fun by themselves, so that you would do them even if the rewards were bad?

So I finally decided to resubscribe to World of Warcraft, in time for patch 5.0.4 and the events that pre-expansion patch will bring. I haven't played WoW for a year-and-a-half and feel like a complete n00b. What I would like to do is explore the new dungeons that have been added since. But those have a minimum item level requirement that my characters don't meet. Thus I need advice: How do I get my item level from 343 up to 353 the fastest?

Well, actually not the fastest. I know the fastest way, which would be buying a set of item level 377 Vicious PvP gear. But I wouldn't want to turn up in a heroic instance in PvP gear and get immediately vote-kicked. So what is current best method to get item level 353+ PvE gear for a Holy Priest?

It is an understatement to say that the shares of Facebook and Zynga are not doing well. Nevertheless I believe that investors still haven't grasped the full extent of the problems facing these companies. There are major trends in the way people use computers which could potentially kill Zynga, and seriously hurt Facebook. Consider this: This week's news about Facebook was that they launched a new iOS app allowing people to access Facebook on their iPhone or iPad twice as fast. They clearly understood the trend of "social" internet-use going mobile. But they missed over half of the picture: 53% of Facebook users play games, and 50% of Facebook logins are specifically to play a game. And even with the new app, you can't play Facebook games on iOS.

Facebook games are Flash, and iOS doesn't support Flash. Furthermore the more open Android mobile operating system will stop to support Flash in the future. Mobile Facebook will be Facebook without games, and that is just half of Facebook. Facebook without games makes no money at all for Zynga, and significantly less money for Facebook. Thus the more people are taking their social surfing mobile onto tablets, the less money Zynga and Facebook are making.

This is not some weird conspiracy of Apple hating Adobe, it has solid technical reasons. Flash takes a heavy toll out of processor resources, and tablets and smartphones have less of them. I have a high-end PC and Facebook games like Castleville are running more sluggish on it than a first-person shooter in high resolution. I installed an app on my iPad which allowed to run Flash games, but the result was simply unplayable. And the app refused to run on a 3G connection, it only runs on high-speed WiFi because Flash is so demanding.

I think Facebook might actually be a better place without the games, because its social model somewhat clashes with the spam that the games produce. Facebook works best with real friends, but Facebook games work best if you collect hundreds of fake friends with whom you only exchange virtual items in games, but who you don't otherwise know at all. So while the lost revenue might hurt Facebook, overall they can survive the trend to mobile. Zynga is another kettle of fish: They simply have no future on a Facebook running on tablets and smartphones. And while they might move to iOS games, that completely changes their market situation: Zynga is a big fish on Facebook, but a minnow in the App Store. Their whole business model of gaining huge number of players by spam to friends doesn't work outside of Facebook. My guess is they will do worse and worse in the future.

League of Legends is trying to become a spectator sport. And its developers are arguing that to achieve that with a videogame, the game has to be relatively simple, with what they call "clarity": A spectator has to be able with a glance to see what is going on. They argue that a game can be visibly simple, without being too easy or casual to play.

This is something I have always felt to be a flaw of the MMORPG endgame: Watching a WoW raid video makes for a lousy spectator sport, as it isn't at all clear what is going on. You basically need to have done the same raid boss yourself to understand what is happening in the video. Part of the problem is that raid videos are always from the view of a single player, thus don't show what the other players see or decide to do. And good luck with trying to guess from the general fireworks of spell effects (if that haven't been turned off in the first place) who cast which spell or used which ability.

League of Legends is doing somewhat better there because it is a game about pushing a front of war, and the minimap shows where that frontline in running. In a WoW raid progress is more deceptive: You can have the boss at 1% health when his enrage timer goes off and wipes the whole raid. And the "Simon says" raid mechanics of WoW, because they are completely artificial and have no logic, don't lend themselves to being good entertainment for watchers. Often a raid group resembles more a chaotic ballet than a fight.

While I have been at a "Blizzard Invitational", where the program was dominated by public performances of people playing Starcraft or Warcraft, personally I never was much interested in eSports. How about you? Do you think this is something we will see more of on TV? Or are the games we play lacking the clarity that would turn them into good spectator sports?

• Piracy: Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot recently said: “It’s around a 93 to 95 per cent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage as free-to-play”. The business of selling videogames can only exist if people actually buy them instead of stealing them.
• Resales: If I buy a used car, I get a car that is not quite as good as a new one. If I buy a used videogame, I get the same pristine play experience for less money. In most places the law decided to treat those two cases the same, insisting on a customers right to resell games. Third party companies jumped in, buying and selling used games, making the business of selling new videogames less profitable.

Arguably both of these problems share the same root cause: The digital nature of videogames. The business model of a company selling goods to consumers is based on physical goods which deteriorate with use and can't be easily copied. Game developers tried different other business models, like "give me money if you like my game", but those horribly failed. So out of desperation was born the "videogame as a service" business model. You could say it was the MMORPGs fault, but to anybody in the industry it was quite obvious that games like Everquest or World of Warcraft had far less problems with piracy and resellers, while earning far more money per customer. And the law said that if you buy a service, you don't have the right to resell it. You can't resell a haircut or used movie ticket. Thus we are currently experiencing a transformation of the industry, in which in various ways videogames are transformed into services.

Decisions, decisions. I still haven't decided yet whether I want to buy Mists of Pandaria and play some months of World of Warcraft. I'm tending towards no, but that is in no way based on my feelings towards pandas. I find the discussion of pandas in various blogs a bit ridiculous. I've been playing a cow who is a druid already, so why should a panda monk be more silly than that? No, for me the problem with MoP is more related to what Cataclysm did and didn't do.

You see, if I play a panda from level 1, I am pretty certain that this will be reasonably entertaining up to level 60. Due to Cataclysm having redone old Azeroth and me not having played through all the remade zones yet, there would be plenty of content for me to explore up to level 60. But then there is Outland, which I hate with a passion. And Northrend, which wasn't bad, but I did already often enough. And the horrible, horrible linear Cataclysm level 80 to 85 zones. Furthermore due to way the leveling curve works, I will reach need at least as much time from 60 to 85 as I needed from 1 to 60. And then I can only hope that Blizzard learned something, and the MoP zones from 85 to 90 are better than the 80 to 85 zones.

When discussing whether the "faster leveling speed" items in the Guild Wars 2 item shop constituted "pay to win", most commenters felt that those didn't matter, that levels and leveling speed didn't matter in a MMORPG. I wonder why Blizzard isn't selling a "Character Level Adjustment" service for $9.95 per character, where you simply enter a target number and get your character leveled up to the level you want him to be, including a set of level-appropriate gear. The mechanics for that already exist, if you accept a "scroll of resurrection" from a friend you can level up one of your characters to 80. So why not allow the panda monks to skip from 20 or 60 directly to 85 for a fee?

Besides customer satisfaction, selling levels would also solve another problem of Blizzard: Third-party power-leveling services. These are a headache for Blizzard, because people who use those services necessarily need to give their password to somebody else, and then get into all sorts of troubles with their accounts getting hacked. By selling levels, Blizzard could make these power-leveling services out of business.

If people could buy levels, Blizzard could also stop to speed up leveling with every expansion. At the lower levels, leveling already feels far too fast compared with the available content. It feels like you enter a zone, kill a mob, and already outlevel that zone. If those who don't want to level up manually can skip the content, those who enjoy the content can explore it at their leisure instead of being force-fed it as fast food.

Stubborn has a brilliant post up on individualism vs. collectivism in WoW. While I wouldn't argue against the table he has in that post that explains the difference, there is a much simpler way to explain it: Collectivism is what in real world politics is called "left wing" or denounced as "socialist". Individualism is what in politics is "right wing".

Now historically the US is to the far right of Europe in politics. In Europe a right-wing politician called Bismarck introduced universal health care in 1883. In the US a left-wing politician is still struggling to get that implemented 130 years later. Thus with the US being very much individualist it isn't a big surprise that the big MMORPGs, which after all tend to be produced in America, are individualist. Even for group activities, like raiding, the importance is put on the individual performance and individual loot rewards. "Carrying the weak" is a collectivist idea which has lost track over the years in World of Warcraft. You don't form a guild with your friends, you make friends with your guild mates, which are selected on basis of their individual performance.

EVE Online, a European game, is far more collectivist, with the goals being conquest of a part of space by a corporation (=guild) or alliance of corporations. An extreme individualist (like Gevlon) can make a killing in the market, but won't be able to conquer the galaxy.

Even more collectivist games, like A Tale in the Desert, don't attract all that much attention, nor very many subscribers, but then it is very low budget. The sense of belonging to a group is something that a collectivist game does much better than an individualist game. The often bemoaned trend of us "playing alone together", of the "massively singleplayer online RPG", is the result of individualism. A well-made collectivist game thus could potentially gain a lot of customers that feel left out of the current crop of individualist games.

Compared to computer games, pen & paper roleplaying games have better and more roleplaying. Nevertheless most systems, and especially the fantasy RPG systems, always had strong elements of hack'n'slash, going into dungeons to kill monsters. In my D&D campaign in the previous session the party entered a mini-dungeon with the purpose of killing a skeletal mage named Yisarn, and fought through two battles with goblins. In this session they faced Yisarn, resulting in a rather epic "boss fight". That was a lot of fun and exciting, but didn't give rise to much roleplaying.

The group started out with an extended rest outside the dungeon, which recovered their daily powers but lost them any possible element of surprise. After that they faced the first pre-fight tactical decision: There were two doors leading from where they were, not far from each other and in the same direction. They didn't know whether those led into the same room or different rooms, so they decided to barricade one of them with a table, and standing ready to attack behind the other. Which was pretty much exactly the sort of attack Yisarn had prepared his defenses against.

They opened the door and saw a large room, with in fact both doors leading into it. Besides the skeletal mage Yisarn there were two skeleton guards, and a giant spider in a huge web. The players got in some shots against the mage, but then things started to go downhill: The first person trying to enter the room triggered a spiked pit trap, which he managed to not fall into, but it stopped them from advancing into close combat range. So the players were still bundled up nicely at the door when the spider shot them with an area attack web, which blinded and immobilized several players, while Yisarn was shooting ice darts at them which slowed them down.

This set the theme for the battle, which was one of reverse crowd control: Instead of players using crowd control on monsters, the enemies used crowd control on the players with good success. The fighter ran over to the other door, removed the barricade, and promptly fell into a second spiked pit. He climbed out into the large room and got into a fight with the skeletons, with the ranger helping with arrows from the other side of the pit. The other players took a while to get out of the spider's web, especially the warlord who failed several saving throws in a row. It was lucky that the player of the ranger was still on holiday, and the player of the warlord controlled the ranger, because otherwise that would have been a rather boring session for the warlord player. This is one of the reasons why I don't use crowd control on players frequently, although it was appropriate for this particular battle.

The wizard of the party managed to chase Yisarn around with a summoned flaming sphere to good effect. The other players one after the other managed to overcome webs and pits to join the fight in the room. But the fight was tight: The group used up all their healing potions, two players were bleeding to death (one of them twice), and one of them got saved only at the last moment. I didn't fudge any dice or use and deus ex machina devices; I didn't even keep track of player hitpoints, so the party might well have lost a character or two in the fight. But they managed to kill Yisarn, got all of their healing out, and then the fight turned their way. I think they'll remember this fight for some time, it was really interesting. It could have gone better for them, but while they had a lot of good tactical ideas, those ideas weren't always well coordinated, with different players pursuing different tactical approaches.

With this epic fight the players reached level 3. I find 6 sessions per level to be a good progression speed, seeing how we only play every other week. The group also found some treasures: Yisarn was using an orb implement to cast his spells, which the party wizard now has. And among gold and gems the group also found a sealed lead box marked with a rune for danger. After some hesitation they opened the box and found the powerful magic holy symbol of the missing cleric of Selune, who had apparently perished against Yisarn.

Having fulfilled their task for the woodsinger elves, the players returned to the elves' camp and persuaded them to send 60 archers to help the rebellion against the Iron Circle. While they "trained to level up" (the concept doesn't officially exist in 4E) in the elves' camp, a messenger from the rebels in Albridge reached them with news: Their strategy of drawing the Iron Circle out of their keep in Harken had worked. The Iron Circle was gathering all its troops to march against the rebels in Albridge. Now the players will have to lead the rebels into battle against the Iron Circle, hopefully defeating them soundly enough to be afterwards able to mop up the rest of them in their keep. But that will be for another session.

If you thought that Azeroth had it bad, being torn up by a catastrophic Cataclysm, spare a thought for the poor inhabitants of the D&D world of the Forgotten Realms: They already had two world-shaking catastrophic events, the Time of Troubles and the Spellplague, and are about to experience a third, the Sundering. At GenCon WotC announced that the Forgotten Realms would become the primary world for D&D Next, and that a series of novels from different authors describing the Sundering would lead up to that.

While I read the early Forgotten Realms novels, I already skipped the Time of Troubles and the Spellplague, and I won't be reading about the Sundering either. These events simply don't have room in my Forgotten Realms campaigns. I don't want a world constantly shaken by huge events, where the pantheon of gods is repeatedly changing, and the heroes are characters from novels like Elminster or Drizzt Do'Urden. And I don't want to have to read hundreds of Forgotten Realms novels to be able to run my game.

In my campaign the players are the heroes. Due to an absence of CNN the players don't even know what is happening in other parts of the world. If they hear of a war it is because they have an opportunity to play a major role in it. And I don't make them feel small by letting them meet heroes much more powerful than they are. Whatever parts of a world I create, I create for them. There might be powerful adversaries or NPCs, but those aren't designed to steal the show from the players.

In a way this is a major advantage of pen & paper roleplaying over MMORPGs. If in LotRO you are on a quest to kill 10 rats and run across Gandalf and Aragorn, that doesn't make you feel like the hero of the story, but rather like a bystander. World of Warcraft has the same problem, where even if you kill the Lich King the cinematic sequence then tells the story of other people. Not to mention the "too many heroes queuing up" problem of nearly all MMORPG: The average orc invasion in a MMORPG has more heroes fighting the orcs than than there are surviving orcs in the invasion force. Having to wait for monsters to respawn doesn't create a sense of those monsters being a menace and you being the hero.

In a pen & paper game all these problems can be solved, because the group of players can be made to be the only heroes around, and thus the most important people. That allows for far more epic and heroic stories to be told. And characters from novels would just get into the way of that.

Cloud gaming service OnLive this week entered a form of bankruptcy and layed off "over half" of its employees. The usual internet kerfuffle broke out, with accusations flying in all directions, as employees discovered that receiving company shares isn't much of a benefit if that company is broke and will never reach the IPO. During the explanations some interesting numbers emerged, like the company having 2 millions registered users and 8,000 servers, but people actually playing were only between 800 and 1,800 depending on the time of day.

Recent reviews suggest that this might be due to OnLive only working well if you have a very good broadband connection to the internet of over 5 Mbps. Personally, I live in a densely populated country and have 30 Mbps VDSL (a technology in which broadband speed is not shared, thus doesn't diminish at peak time); but many people either have slower internet, or have cable internet, where your speed goes down when your neighbor starts surfing the internet. Other concerns cited by various reviewers were a limited library of games, and newer games being somewhat expensive. On the plus side the service enabled you to play PC games on a dedicated $99 microconsole, your iPad, your Mac, or even your smartphone.

OnLive management insists that the service will continue, keeping things running to pay off the debts. And there are the usual patent disputes between it and the competition. But the wider question is whether cloud gaming is actually a good idea, and something we will see more of in the future when everybody's internet access is faster. And that question is related to questions over the viability of the multi-million dollar video game, as cloud gaming doesn't make sense to play Angry Birds. Will we reach a point where the savings on hardware and game price make it worth while to "rent" our games in the cloud and be able to play them just as well? I'm not sure.

A third version, or rather a version 2.1, of the D&D Next playtest material was released yesterday for the start of GenCon. As lots of people had complained about Vancian magic (the kind based on memorizing spells), the new version added a warlock and a sorcerer, using two different magic systems. Thus if you don't like Vancian magic, you can use a different system. Everybody happy? I don't think so.

Of course there are some players who are so deeply into lore or into rules details that they really care about whether a spell is memorized or cast using some sort of spell-point system. But what most players care a lot more about is class balance. Vancian magic in D&D Next was criticized because it messes up class-balance, making casters too powerful at higher levels. And unfortunately the two new systems share that same trait, and thus don't solve the problem.

The problem is so old, it even has a name: Linear fighters, quadratic wizards (or LFQW). The idea behind the name is that the power of spell-casters grows as a quadratic function of their level, because they gain two things whose power multiplies with each other: More spells, and more powerful spells. For example the D&D Next wizard has 3 level 1 spells at level 1, but 4 level 1 spells, 3 level 2 spells and 2 level 3 spells at level 5. So not only does he go from 3 spells per day to 9 spells per day, he also goes from burning hands to fireballs, which deal twice the damage. In 2nd edition AD&D, a level 20 wizard could flatten a whole battlefield with a meteor swarm, open a gate to other dimensions, kill somebody with a single word, stop time, or even make a wish. A level 20 fighter could hit an enemy in front of him twice with very little probability of missing. WotC never figured out why the minmax kind of players prefered wizards, and very few people wanted to play high-level fighters.

So what WotC has to work on in D&D Next is not the magic-system, but how to guarantee that the fighter at higher level has an equivalent number of options and power as a spell-caster. Sorcerer and warlocks are nice, but don't solve the problem

Depending on which continent you live and what kind of games you prefer, you might be interested in two major game conventions this weekend: Gamescom in Germany for video games, or GenCon in the USA for roleplaying games. Unfortunately I find myself on the wrong continent, as usual. I don't want to visit Gamescom to stand in line for 4 hours to be allowed to play a video game for 5 minutes. I'd love to be at GenCon, but it is too far away. So I'm watching the news from GenCon, and I like what I hear from the WotC keynote.

In the year 2000 I was playing Everquest. The first thing I did when logging on every day was to check with my guild who was online and where they were playing. Most of the time I found a guild group to level with. If not, I grouped with other people. I rarely played alone.

In the year 2005 I was playing World of Warcraft. I was for some time in a hardcore raiding guild, and after completing Molten Core we tackled Blackwing Lair, where we spent several evenings per week together for months until we reached the final boss. When not raiding, I was often doing dungeons in groups with my other characters. Sometimes I played alone.

In the year 2010 I was playing World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, and at the end of the year Cataclysm. I rarely raided any more. I still did dungeon groups, but more often with random strangers than with people I knew. I was playing alone a lot of the time.

In a way World of Warcraft was my last MMORPG played in a "massively multiplayer online roleplaying" way. The games I played since then where massively singleplayer. In Star Wars: The Old Republic is spent nearly all the time playing alone, and only did a few flashpoints, and no raids at all. If I want to play with other people, I play World of Tanks, or pen & paper Dungeons & Dragons.

Now you could say that this is just me turning into a lone wolf. But I would claim that it is also the games pushing people towards being lone wolves. We went from game where playing solo was nearly impossible to games where playing together is discouraged. If you group while leveling in a modern MMORPG, your leveling speed goes down instead of up. Group activities like running dungeons have been turned into something which is completely optional, and now often less efficient than soloing. Endgame groups have turned from "bring the whole guild" events to exclusionary activities for a select few which have to carefully watch to keep out the average player. Warhammer Online invented the fake group, where you joined an uncoordinated pseudo-group just by being at the same place as other players, and now we'll have the same model in Guild Wars 2.

I wonder in how far the decline of the MMORPG genre (when have you last heard of a MMORPG gaining subscribers after launch?) is related to the lack of social interaction between players in the MMORPGs of today, especially at lower levels. If it walks like a singleplayer game, quacks like a singleplayer game, looks like a singleplayer game, then maybe we shouldn't be surprised that it has the longevity of a singleplayer game.

Azuriel is analyzing The Secret World sales and subscriptions. So Funcom had two scenarios of how things would go, a pessimistic "Conan-like" scenario with a million boxes sold in the first year and 280,000 average subscribers, and a "target" scenario with 1.3 million boxes sold and better retention to 490,000 average subs. According to the numbers Azuriel found, TSW only sold 50,000 boxes (not including digital sales). And Funcom has said that their sales were "less than half of the Conan-like scenario". As Rohan remarks, 90% of the people who tried TSW in beta decided it wasn't for them.

But while the numbers are dire, and I count myself to the 90% who didn't buy it after having played the beta, I don't think The Secret World is a "bad" game. I'd rather call it a "niche" game. It has a bunch of strong points and innovative features. And if you want to play a Lovecraftian Horror MMO it isn't as if you had plenty of choice. But different people are bound to care very differently about the new features and the new setting. On the one side you have people discussing how to use an iPhone app to decode Morse code in one of the puzzle quests, while on the other side you have people who will just look up the final solution of such a quest on Google without bothering to go through all the riddle steps. On the one side you have people who would love nothing better than to wander a Lovecraftion New England town, on the other side you have people complaining about there being "only zombies to kill" in the early stages of the game.

I understand that problem very well, because I've been there, done that: Back in the 80's I once tried a Call of Cthulhu campaign with my regular D&D group, and it was a disaster. The players were supposed to be scared of a werewolf, but instead wrapped hand grenades in silver teapots to kill him. Horror games don't work as well if monsters aren't scary but considered as a loot and xp pinata. Entities like Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth are supposed to be scary, instead of featuring in a YouTube video of raid boss kills, or having their loot tables discussed. I think a large number of people approached The Secret World with a typical MMORPG attitude which isn't really optimal for the genre and the game.

The sad thing is that modern MMORPGs are so bloody expensive to make that making an innovative niche game isn't really an option. I see the reverse effect on my iPad: Games are cheap to produce, so in consequence there is a huge amount of experimentation and innovation (as well as garbage). But if Funcom's pessimistic scenario had a 43% profit margin, and they didn't even reach half of it, they are losing money on The Secret World, which is why they are firing people. And that won't encourage them or others to make another innovative MMORPG.

A reader pointed out a site to me which offers play-by-post roleplaying on a virtual tabletop: RPGWithMe. The site looks very good, but apparently hasn't got critical mass in users yet to get enough campaigns going. RPGWithMe already supports different pen & paper systems like Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition or Pathfinder. And they have a Kickstarter campaign running to enable more systems.

As my D&D 4E campaign, which I DM, is only playing twice a month, I'd be quite interested in joining a play-by-post game as a player somewhere. So I do hope that RPGWithMe is taking off and offering me that.

I live in an entertainment third-world country, Belgium. In spite of having a decent GDP per person and being in heart of Europe, national borders are keeping international entertainment out of Belgium over the Internet. Netflix, Hulu, you name it, I haven't got it. "Sorry, this service isn't available in your country yet." It is bloody annoying.

What I would be most interested in in watching TV series over the internet. Right now I have to import the DVDs, and play them on a "hacked" DVD player with regional coding removed. Or I wait about a year and pray that the DVD is released in Europe too, which isn't always the case. So when I got the news that the BBC iPlayer is finally available in Belgium for the iPad (it still is blocked on the PS3 and the PC), I jumped on it. I downloaded the BBC iPlayer app, tested it was working on the iPad, and then bought the Apple TV set top box to be able to stream the show onto my TV.

The good news is that this works. For small values of "works". Although their website said the iPad app should display subtitles, and "90%" of their shows would have subtitles, I couldn't find a single show that actually had subtitles in the "free" part of the BBC iPlayer. So now I wrote to the BBC asking them if that is working as intended, before I pay for a subscription and check whether at least the paid-for content has subtitles.

The Apple TV set top box by itself also works, but again is hobbled by me living in Belgium. The iTunes store sells TV episodes, but not in Belgium. And the number of films on offer is tiny, especially those in original version and not dubbed in French or Dutch. Home sharing doesn't work for some reason, even if I turn my firewall off. But at least I can now watch YouTube on the TV.

Using AirPlay allows me to see anything I can have on the screen of my iPad on the TV, but there are two modes: A regular mode which works well for video, and a "AirPlay Mirroring" mode, which should work for everything including games, but stutters. And besides the BBC iPlayer, I haven't found any video services that work in Belgium on the iPad: For example the BBC's competitor ITV has an iPad app just like the BBC, but it isn't available in Belgium. Netflix, Hulu, LoveFilm, none of these are available over here. I live in an entertainment third-world country.

Stabs has a rather brilliant analysis of Dust 514: The difference between a good player and a bad player is too big. The dirty secret of MMORPGs is that playing them isn't hard for 99% of the content. As a result the difference in performance between a veteran and a new player for doing most of the game, e.g. doing quests, leveling up, normal dungeons, isn't all that great. Multiplayer first-person shooters are a very different kettle of fish: They are actually skill-based. So if the game allows it (and Dust 514 does), you can be killed repeatedly by players that are much better than you without ever having any experience of success.

That causes a rather unique problem for Dust 514: The players who are actually good at it, because they already played competitive multiplayer shooters for 10,000+ hours will not be all that interested in the game, because compared to the top games in the first-person shooter market Dust 514 is just an also-ran. And the players who are very interested in Dust 514 because of its link to EVE are for the most part not very good at playing it because they spent their time conquering galaxies instead of learning how to shoot. The number of people who are both good at EVE and good at Dust 514 will be very small.

I think CCP is setting themselves up for an epic fail here. The integration of Dust 514 turns the game into a sort of "open world free-for-all PvP" game, but that sort of setup exacerbates the virtuoso problem where players of vastly different skill levels are matched against each other. I don't think the fragile egos of the kind of people who enjoy EVE because it allows them to gank other players will be able to handle being permanently on the receiving end of the ganks in Dust 514.

The second round of public playtest for D&D Next was released yesterday. As I have been very critical of D&D Next, I would like to at least remark that this second version is noticeably better than the first version. And I don't mean the degree of polish (which is only to be expected). The second version does fix some significant problems the first version had with tanks being unable to tank and not having a reasonable amount of options in combat. There are also lots of other minor rules improvements.

Having said that, class balance is still a sad joke in D&D Next. Among the pregenerated characters the pseudo-ranger human fighter appears completely gimped and useless, while the sun cleric appears extremely powerful at low levels. And the spellcasters still advance in a quadratic fashion (gaining both more spells and more powerful spells), compared to the linear power progression of non-spellcasters gaining combat stats.

Psynister has a great analysis of the Guild Wars 2 item store. You can buy some fluff, some utility stuff like inventory space or easier bank access, and you can buy faster progress and more magic items. The "mystic key" is the kind of item that got Cryptic Studio in trouble with the authorities in the Netherlands, who consider having to pay money for random virtual items to be a form of gambling. And you can buy a 50% better chance to find magic items, as well as faster xp gain.

Now technically you can't win a MMORPG. But in a PvP game like Guild Wars 2, of two players with similar skills and played time, the one who spent more money on mystic keys and magic find is probably going to do better. And if you consider strutting around with a higher level and better gear than the other players a form of "winning" in a MMORPG, the Guild Wars 2 item store certainly allows you to pay to win.

The other side of the argument is that levels and gear don't matter. Certainly you can play the PvE part without taking the level and gear of other players into consideration, so how much faster progress you buy is just a matter of tuning advancement speed to you personal preferences (although weirdly no game ever offers slower advancement for money). And in PvP it all depends on how matchmaking is done. As long as having a higher level and better gear only serves to give you stronger opponents, it isn't really pay to win.

So what do you think about pay to win in MMORPGs? What sort of items in the store would you consider to be "pay to win"? What do you think about the item store in Guild Wars 2 in particular? Fair or not?

There is a very interesting podcast out from WotC in which Mike Mearls explains D&D Next to the Penny Arcade guys. I especially liked the part where Mike summarized D&D Next with "In the new edition your characters will suck, you're half as powerful as you used to be" (at 20:19 in the podcast).

Now I do understand his reasons for the change: The basic unit of 4th edition is the encounter; the basic unit of D&D Next will be the adventure day. While in 4th edition you can recharge a good portion of your power in a short rest between encounters, in D&D Next the encounter powers are gone, and there are only at-will and daily powers left. And in the core rules some classes don't even get daily powers. Thus you end up with a much simpler game, with a lot less tactical options, much shorter encounters, less player power in combat and *potentially* more time spent roleplaying. Although in the adventure they provided with the playtest the group could as well end up fighting monsters all the time, with the only roleplaying being about retreating back to town and resting up.

What struck me was how they were discussing the "problem" of 4th edition essentially being bad players and/or bad DMs only doing what it said on their cards. Because that isn't really a rule system problem. My campaigns don't have that problem. Neither, apparently did Gabe's, who says at 16:12: "I already felt like I could do whatever I wanted with these (4E) rules. So I don't understand why I need a new set of rules to do whatever I want with."

And that is true regardless of what version you are currently playing, be it 4E, 3.5, or even Pathfinder. Even Mike Mearls says (at 16:40): "Honestly at the end of the day, if you're playing 4th and you enjoy it, there is no reason to stop playing". Which is exactly what I plan to do. I just hope WotC isn't trying to sabotage that by further dismanteling the 4E support on D&D Insider.

I am a firm opponent of review scores. Imagine somebody was wondering whether he should rather take up chess or basketball: How could a site which gives a review score to chess and basketball be of any possible help? Different games appeal to different people, and pretending that you can put a number on a game which is true for everybody is just plain crazy. And it can have negative consequences on innovation.

Case in point: The Secret World. It got a "low" metacritic score of 72, causing Funcom's shares to tank, and the company to announce layoffs. But the metacritic score was just an average of some people absolutely loving the game, and others not being impressed with the unusual setting, progression system, or pure technical performance. The relevant number for a subscription MMORPG is obviously the number of subscribers and the time it manages to hold onto them, not the review score.

One major reason why review scores have no information value is that nobody can agree what exactly should factor into them. Games have received low scores for having DRM, while obviously many legit players wouldn't think that being prevented from stealing the game should be reason for a downgrade. The Secret World got a lot of flak for its bugs, but different players are bothered to very different degrees by a game having bugs, and have very different acceptability standards for bugginess. The Secret World was "less buggy" than previous Funcom games like Anarchy Online on release. How important is polygon count for a game? How much do you add or substract to the score of a MMORPG because it is NOT a generic fantasy setting? You'll never get a group of people to agree on any of these questions, so how can a review score represent anything?

Reviews should simply tell people what they consider good or bad about a game, and describe it as good as possible. Explaining how The Secret World uses a skill wheel instead of levels does give valid information to both people who love levels and to those who hate them. Rating that feature on some 1 to 10 scale and then producing an aggregate score over many different features just tells the reader nothing much.

It is possible to play a version of roleplaying games in which combat is resolved by the players actually trying to hit each other, albeit with foam weapons. That this form of roleplaying combat has remained rather niche has two reasons: First some people feel silly waving foam swords in the air, and second a players skill in hitting somebody with a foam sword doesn't necessarily correspond to what he imagines his fictional character having as sword skill. The same two arguments, albeit to a lesser degree, apply to determining success with skills. Not everybody enjoys playing out loud the haggling with a NPC merchant, and you can have tongue-tied players playing suave characters. And that is just the social skills, nobody wants to have to determine your chance of swimming in chainmail by an actual physical exercise, unless you're out to win a Darwin Award.

While one roll of a die can determine whether you hit an orc with your sword, a combat is a structured encounter that pieces together multiple of those dice rolls of multiple players and forms a greater whole out of them. Skill checks tend to be just single rolls. So in 4th edition the makers of Dungeons & Dragons had an idea: What if they could create a structured encounter that pieces together multiple skill checks of multiple players into a greater whole? And so they created the rules for skill challenges.

It has to be said that skill challenges were not a big success. The original rules were clunky, and Wizards of the Coast spent years of trying to explain them in Dungeon Magazine, and revising the rules in the Dungeon Master's Guide 2. The fundamental idea isn't a bad one: Pose a problem which can be solved by succeeding in a number of skill checks, with every player contributing not only whatever skills his character learned, but also some basic roleplaying in explaining why a certain skill will help solving the problem. Ideally that works a bit like a combat, in which every player states what he is doing, with some description beyond just rolling dice, and after a while the group has collectively overcome the problem. In practice that bloody hard to pull of, because somehow it doesn't feel as natural as a combat.

For the DM the problem already starts at the beginning of the skill challenge: How much of the rules governing his skill challenge does he tell the players? If he lays open all the rules ("you need 10 successes before having 3 failures, and here are the possible skills that can contribute"), everybody just minmaxes the problem by rolling on his best skills with little or no roleplaying. But if the DM doesn't tell the players they are in a skill challenge (as some people propose), then they are likely to propose all sorts of solutions which have nothing whatever to do with their skills. And as at every table there sit some people who are more extrovert than others, a few players tend to monopolize free-form out-of-combat problem solving. Such free-form roleplay is great, and is an important part of D&D, but it doesn't a skill challenge make.

I can't say I found the perfect solution for my 4E campaign yet, although I'll keep trying. The players at my table have different degrees of engagement, and finding a format which will keep everybody engaged, and prevent the most outspoken players from totally dominating the discussion would be a boon. Plus I think that having skill challenges makes the skill system a bit more interesting, which is important because 4th edition player powers are heavily concentrated on the combat side. The examples given in the DMG2 suggest that the players know that they are in a skill challenge, and know that they need a series of successful dice rolls to get through, but the examples are unrealistic in that the players always choose actions or rolls that just happen to be those foreseen in the skill challenge. I'd love to see a successful skill challenge working as intended seen played out in one of those "Chris Perkins plays with a bunch of celebrities" official WotC videos; but the only one I found involved only one or two skills, and ended up being played by a single player while the others were involved in combat. Not what I was looking for.

I think I will tell the players that they are in a skill challenge, and ask the usual "what do you do?". When the usual players come forward with their ideas, I tell them to roll whatever skill check would be relevant for that idea, but also tell them that this will occupy them for a certain time. Then I ask the remaining players what they'll do in the meantime. If somebody just proposes to roll, I'll ask him to describe what his character is doing, to encourage them to roleplay.

What do you think? Have you played skill challenges in your D&D campaigns? How were they handled?

One of the arguments I've heard repeatedly in the discussion of Star Wars: The Old Republic going Free2Play was that people play subscription games more intensively, due to a desire to "get their money's worth". And I was wondering how that would factor in the upcoming battle of the titans between Guild Wars 2 and Mists of Pandaria.

Many people, me included, are looking forward to Guild Wars 2; much more than to Mists of Pandaria. But this is now, before the release of Guild Wars 2, where GW2 appears to be new and shiny, and MoP just another expansion. Will that still look the same on September 25th? Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and I consider it perfectly possible that on September 25th Guild Wars 2 will be yesterday's news, and Mists of Pandaria will be new and shiny.

I do believe that some bloggers are a bit too quick to write off World of Warcraft. Yes, the game is down to 9 million subscribers, having lost another million in another quarter, but that was also yet another quarter without any significant content update. While the absolute peak of WoW might be behind us, I'm sure that Mists of Pandaria will add at least 2 million subscribers to those 9 million. The main flaw of Cataclysm was lack of content, lack of updates, and nothing fixes that better than a new expansion.

Azuriel reports from the Diablo III auction house that 1 million gold can be bought for $3.10. He also tells about farming 140,000 gold in 40 minutes, which calculates to 210,000 gold per hour, at an hourly wage of about 60 cents. I just checked the EU Diablo III RMAH, and gold is €2.90 per million. My character, who is still on normal, only has 30,000 gold, and with 1 million gold I could probably play through the game on normal up to the end and always wear only the best in slot equipment. For 3 bucks. In short: Gold in Diablo 3 is "too cheap" for me.

In the Facebook game Castleville from Zynga, I recently bought a land expansion for 1.2 million coins. The biggest bundle of coins you can buy for cash is 75,000 coins for $100. If I had wanted to pay for that land expansion with cash, I would have had to pay $1,600. In short: Gold in Castleville is "too expensive" for me.

While these games are very different, and the problems appear to be diametrically opposed, the core problem is in fact the same: Game economies in games with levels tend to inflate with level. An hour spent in the game farming gold will net you a very small amount at level 1; but at whatever counts as high level in the same game, you will earn several orders of magnitude more per hour.

As long as you just play those games without any form of exchange or trade, that works okay: At low levels you earn low amounts of currency, but also have low expenses. At higher levels you earn a lot more, but also spend a lot more. Where the system breaks down is when currency can be transferred between low-level and high-level character, or there is a common auction house. Suddenly your level 5 character in World of Warcraft can sell a stack of copper ore for 20 gold, while doing a quest only earns him 1 silver.

Adding a real-money option makes the problem worse, because the price of virtual gold is set by factors that don't depend on your level, while your virtual gold needs depend on your level. Thus my "low level" Diablo 3 character needs relatively little gold, which is extremely cheap, due to the price being set by the lowest hourly wage a high-level character is willing to accept for gold-farming. My "high level" Castleville character needs relatively large amounts of gold, which is expensive, because Zynga has fixed a price at a level where they think low-level characters might still buy it. In EVE Online people tell me that "pay to win" isn't an option, because it would be too expensive at the high levels; but exchanging a single PLEX for ISK totally floods a new character with more virtual currency than he could otherwise earn in a month.

The solution would be games in which the earning power of characters doesn't change with level or time. If every character in the game would earn about 100 units of virtual currency per hour in the most profitable form of "farming" for him, the value of that virtual currency would remain the same for him however far he is in the game. And then exchanging that virtual currency between players in trade for virtual items or real cash would not cause any inflationary problems. A sword which would take a level 1 character about 1 hour to achieve would be worth about 100 virtual currency, and an epic sword that would take a high-level character about 1 hour to achieve would be worth the same. As items tend to have level-restrictions, the time-to-money exchange rate remains the same without causing  trouble in the player-run economy. If the low-level sword costs 1 virtual currency and the high-level sword costs 10,000, the economy is getting weird. And if you can buy 100 virtual currency for $1, the low-level character can buy his 1-hour-sword for 1 cent, while the high-level player would have to pay $100 for a sword that takes the same amount of time to get.

Leo Tolstoy's book Anna Karenina begins with the phrase: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The MMORPG version of this is: Subscription business models are all alike, every Free2Play game does business in its own way. Thus "Star Wars: The Old Republic goes Free2Play" is in fact not much information, you first need to check carefully what exactly you'll get for free.

Now I was reading the detailed info on how free exactly SWTOR would be, and scratched my head: If I had sorted everything which was good about SWTOR in one column, and everything that sucked about SWTOR in another column, and had labeled the good column as "free" and the sucky column as "you need to pay for this", I would have pretty much arrived at the same system. Everything a casual player could possibly be interested in is free, and only the hardcore stuff like raiding and PvP requires payment. You can play any class up to the level cap for free, with the full $300 million voice-over class story! The only thing I might possibly miss as a free player would be full auction house access for crafting:

It isn't totally clear what their "cartel coins", the for cash currency of SWTOR are going to buy, only that existing players will receive some of them in function of how long they subscribed. Inventory space? Bank space? Character slots? Maybe I can buy AH access with the cartel coins I should get for having bought and played the game previously.

EA Bioware says they have less than a million but more than 500k subscribers. My personal guess (based on watching the only subscriber I know: My wife) would be that most of the remaining subscribers are casual players doing story quests with various alts. Unless you slap those with extreme restrictions on character slots, most of them are just going to continue exactly like that for free. It appears to me that SWTOR's Free2Play own way has been designed but some developer who is a hardcore player himself, and thinks that hardcore raiding is what the majority of players aspires to and is willing to pay for. This risks ending up being the worst planned Free2Play business model of all times.

Computers in general are of not much use without software. And as few of us are able to program everything ourselves, we often need to buy that software. So since I bought the iPad earlier this week, I've been buying a lot of apps (games and utilities) in the App Store. And it struck me how there is an order of magnitude in difference in prices between the App Store and buying software for a PC: An expensive game costs 6€ instead of 60€, a useful "shareware" utility where you pay for the full version after having tried the free one cost 1 to 3€ instead of 10 to 30€, and so on.

We restarted our Dungeons & Dragons campaign, having made a summer break after the previous session. The group started with a quest to kill the skeletal mage Yisarn, which was the favor required by the woodsinger elves to help the rebellion in Harkenwold. Yisarn was holed up in an underground sanctuary in the ruins of an elven city called Dal Nystiere. The woodsinger elves had provided the group with instructions on how to get there, as well as with a vial of dragon's blood needed to teleport into the sanctuary.

When arriving at the stone circle marking the entrance to the sanctuary, the party found they weren't the only visitors. A wagon with some goblins was parked on the road next to the stone circle. The group spotted the goblins in the wagon with a perception check and attacked. Albeit their perception checks weren't high enough for them to notice another group of enemies: Tree spiders nesting in the trees around them. So while the goblins posed no problems, the tree spiders turned out to be a lot nastier, repeatedly poisoning the players. Fortunately the two dwarves in the group get a +5 bonus to poison saving throws. The combat was somewhat harder than planned, due to pure bad luck and low rolls on the player's side, but they managed to kill off the spiders in the end, without having used any daily powers.

An examination of the wagon revealed a sort of throne for transporting some more important goblin, with a heraldic symbol of the goblins of Daggerburg on it. But it was clear that the group hadn't met all the goblins yet, and the draught animals were missing as well. The ranger found tracks of lizard-like claws leading from the cart to the altar in the middle of the stone circle. The group decided that they didn't want to wait for the goblins to come out, but rather went after them. They activated the teleport with a drop of dragon's blood on the altar and were teleported into an antechamber, in the middle of the goblins and their bloodseeker drakes.

Now the bloodseeker drakes were in cages, but as I rolled a 20 for the initiative of the goblin minions, they opened the cages before the players could intervene. I didn't want to fudge the dice, but that was clearly less dramatic than it could have been. That appeared to set the scene for the fight: As they didn't have to intervene to stop the minions from opening the cage, the group instead concentrated on the goblin shaman, who only got one spell off before dying. The other goblins died quickly, but the two drakes were a lot tougher. So this time the group used some daily powers, and managed to overcome the opposition.

While there was no loot on the goblins or drakes, there were interesting looking documents on a table surrounded by protective runes. The players didn't fall for that trap, and used the wizard's mage hand spell to get the documents. They found some maps, two ritual scrolls, and a treatise on an artifact: A battle axe called Aecris, created by the god Bahamut, last seen in the possession of a "Sir Keegan of Winterhaven". Winterhaven was the village in which they had their first level adventure, but they didn't meet any Sir Keegan there. Apart from that the only clue was a cryptic phrase: "Follow the silver light". With that intriguing hint of things to come, the session ended.

I am typing this blog entry on the brand new iPad I bought today, using a wireless bluetooth keyboard. Interesting combination, for applications like Blogger this feels not much different than using a small laptop. So I decided to test this to write a blog entry with my first impressions.

Setting up the iPad and getting everything up and running was relatively painless. The only problem was getting save games from the iPod Touch to the iPad, which needed a special software called iExplorer and some fiddling. I also needed to tell iTunes not to update all apps automatically, so I could have one set of apps for the iPod Touch, and one set for the iPad. Several games and apps exist in a "HD" version for the iPad, which doesn't run on the iPod Touch.

Right now I am using the iPad with WiFi and USB cable. But I already got a SIM card for cellular network connection. And the good news is that it was free! Well, pseudo-free. I am already paying for the best internet connection I could buy (30 Mbps speed, unlimited download) plus digital TV and regular telephone from the same provider. And that bundle includes a 3G mobile internet connection with a monthly volume of 250 MB, which should be enough as long as I do the heavy downloads via WiFi and just use cellular for surfing and reading mails. I just had to go to the provider's store and pick up a free SIM card, which they told me will be activated at midnight.

I got a blue "Smart Case" with the iPad, which is looking good with the white border. I wasn't picky with the color of the iPad itself, and in the store all the black ones were sold out. The smart case cover can be folded back and serve as a stand in diferent angles, although the setup isn't terribly stable. I use the steeper angle with the wireless keyboard, while the flatter angle would be better for use with the on-screen keyboard. I heard that the flatter angle with the on-screen keyboard is preferable for taking notes in meetings etc., because it creates less of a barrier between you and the other participants of the meeting.

I already played some games that were only available on the iPad, like Titan HD and Small World (both board games adaptations for the iPad). I also transferred a lot of my D&D files to the iPad, and checked that I could read the various files with applications like FileApp and Goodreader. While FileApp was running on my iPod Touch as well, reading a PDF file on a small screen wasn't really feasible. On the iPad I can read those documents just fine, and surfing the internet is also a lot more pleasant.

The one application I wasn't happy with was the DMs Tracker for running combat in 4th edition. I tried it out but found my previous system with index cards to be more practical. And a few applications are surprisingly better on the iPod Touch, like the Tiny Tower game, whose pixelated graphics just don't look good on a high-res screen. But other than that I am very happy with my new iPad and consider it a big step up from the iPod Touch.

Maturity is a really strange word. For example nothing is surer sign of immaturity than the frequent use of "mature" language. And when Blizzard changes World of Warcraft to be more attractive to a more mature audience in a more mature market, some people accuse them of making a game for children. Why do people conflate violence with maturity, and see anything that is more fun and non-violent as being childish?

In reality the numbers are just the other way around. Violent shooter games are played by teenage males, while the average Farmville player is a 48-year old woman. If Blizzard is adding farms, panda, and pet battles to World of Warcraft, they are targeting that woman, and not children. World of Warcraft has a T for teen ESRB rating, stating that it has "content that may be suitable for ages 13 and older". Why would Blizzard target an audience that isn't even supposed to play their game?

A reader wrote me about this, and had a very interesting theory: "They certainly are aiming the game at the majority of their customers this time, not just at the hardcores with loud voices.". I do believe that the average age of the people still playing World of Warcraft happily and casually is higher than the average age of the vocal minority that was always complaining about WoW and has left. If Blizzard has realized that they should rather create more content for the people who are actually paying for the game instead of for those who shout the loudest, it can only be good for them. It would be the mature thing to do.