Once upon a time the main business of video games was arcades, because the home computer and console market was still in its infancy. And video games were designed after the same principle as other arcade games, e.g. a pinball table: Your quarter bought you a number of lives, and you played until you lost all of those. Games were designed to be lost, because if you could play for hours for your quarter, the arcade owner would only find one quarter in his machine every day.

Fast forward to today, and really losing a video game has become a rarity. I'm currently playing XCOM again, due to the recently released Enemy Within expansion, and if you get to the screen where you are told in a nice cut-scene that you lost and the aliens now control Earth, it comes as kind of a shock. Because this harsh kind of "Game over - You lost!" has become so unusual these days.

Now you'll say: "Nonsense, I'm playing League of Legends / World of Tanks / World of Warcraft Arenas / etc., and I'm losing often enough!". But are you really? You don't lose previous progress in any of these games. Quite often it is a system where you even get rewarded for losing, only that it is less than for winning. You can lose World of Tanks all day long and still get to the next tier of tanks. There is never a screen that tells you that you have permanently lost, and will need to start over from the beginning. Basically many games have a short-term combat module and a long-term progression linking the fights together. And in XCOM you can lose the long-term progression, while in many other games you can't.

Of course you could say that not really being able to lose long-term progress is an improvement of game design. As we don't operate on quarters any more, there is no business logic behind letting people lose games any more. Just the opposite: If we talk about a game with a business model in which players pay more over time (by subscription or item shop), making somebody lose and rage-quit would be counter-productive. On the other hand losing the game works reasonably well in XCOM, because the alternative is winning the game, which also ends all your progress.

I have been playing games with eternal progress where I deliberately stopped playing with an advanced game only to restart from scratch. Often you need to make a new account for that, unless there is a beta reset or something. Progressing in a game isn't all good, sometimes a game is more interesting in the early phases. So sometimes I wonder whether we need more games which you can actually lose. What point is there in "winning" if it is the only available option?

We ended the previous session with the Favorites of Selune having entered the Feygrove, an unnaturally dense forest on the slopes of the hill of Gardmore Abbey. They had spotted an elvish figure running away from them, and as they advanced that figure continued to recede. This session starts with the group arriving at a bell tower, catching up with that figure, who turns out to be an eladrin girl. And the reason they catch up with her is that she has attracted more attention: Two displacer beasts are now chasing the girl as well, and as the players arrive the beasts just have brought the girl down, and she is now lying unconsciously on the ground. At the end of the first round of combat three stirges also join the fray, descending on the girl who is easy prey.

In a pen & paper roleplaying game like Dungeons & Dragons the DM's role has two major parts: Preparing the world and adventure before the game, and improvising the details during play. Normally the sequence of these tasks is going just one way: Adventure design comes first, and what is written in the adventure then is the base for what happens during gameplay. But as I discovered in my current campaign, playing the sandbox adventure Madness at Gardmore Abbey, sometimes events during gameplay change the situation to an extent that process becomes iterative: The adventure is the base for gameplay, and then gameplay developments necessitate changing the adventure.

As I told in my campaign diary, in the previous session the players opened the door to a boss encounter, only to then decide to run away. If this was a computer game, the next time they opened that door they would find the situation unchanged, because a computer game doesn't usually have this iterative adventure design mode, and the actions of the players don't change the adventure. A pen & paper game is more flexible, and more based on what would be logical, and not forced to stick to a rigid script. So I went back to the drawing board: Why is that boss NPC in that location, what is his motivation? How would he logically react now that he found out that a group of adventurers is around?

Of course this "logic" still is more a fantasy logic than a real-world logic. Who would want to live in a dungeon in the first place? I can't just decide that the NPC in question decides to leg it and take a holiday on a tropical island instead of sticking around in some catacombs, as reasonable as that might be. The NPC has a specific role in the overall adventure, and I can't just eliminate that function from the story. In this case the overall adventure is about collecting the cards of the Deck of Many Things, and the players already know that NPC has cards, so if he fled it would be impossible to finish the adventure at this location. I could then force the players to give chase, but as the adventure is already huge, I don't really want to extend it much more.

So it is more a question of modifying the encounter with the logic of "forewarned is forearmed". If an NPC lives at the end of a dungeon he might consider the monsters of the dungeon as his lines of defense. Once the NPC becomes aware that those lines of defense have been removed, he will rethink his defense strategy. The general idea here is that the players had an advantage of surprise, and that by running away they lost that advantage. And how the encounter plays out when they come back needs to reflect that logic. You can't just announce your presence to some villain NPC and think that won't change anything.

This was just one example, but there were other changes to the adventure I did based on the actions of the players. This is quite fun and interesting. The adventure grows from a script to a living world which reacts to what the players do. That is especially helpful in the context of 4th edition being encounter-based, and the actions of the players helping to flesh out the connection between those encounters. In the end you get an adventure which is unique to your group, and not a copy & paste of everybody else's experience in Gardmore Abbey.

I appreciate the concise dry humor of Today's Gaming Drama. For example the post about Next Gen has IAP. (IAP means In-App-Purchase, the same what we tend to call an "item store"). The "drama" is about the XBox One exclusive launch title Ryse: Son of Rome. The review of that game on Polygon pointed out that you can buy 1,000 gold for under $1, but it takes on average over 2 hours to make the same 1,000 gold by grinding. One hour of grinding is "worth" less than 50 cents.

Green Armadillo is discussing the paradox of generosity: "An odd quirk of the non-subscription business model is that generosity can make paying for the product less attractive. The more stuff you give away for free, the less stuff you have left to sell people." Now I am pretty sure that many people think this is true, and there are even developers who design games based on this assumption. But me, I am not convinced. I don't think that "less stuff you have left to sell people" exists, because you aren't selling physical goods; there is no upper limit to the amount of virtual stuff you can sell to people. For example World of Warcraft has an achievement called We're Going to Need More Saddles, which you get for collecting 150 mounts: Does that suggest to you that there is an upper limit for the demand for mounts? You can always sell more.

In my opinion the danger of making an unsuccessful Free2Play game is much more on the side of you being not generous enough. If I play a new game, and from the first minute I play I constantly get pestered by the game to spend money on it, and the game visibly is trying to make my experience as a free player as uncomfortable as possible, I simply stop playing. It isn't as if there weren't enough other games out there, of any genre.

But if a game lets me enjoy the gameplay for free for a while, so I grow to like the game and get attached to it, I'm far more willing to open my wallet. Even for things I don't strictly need. I spent $100 on Card Hunter not because I needed to, but because I loved the game and wanted to support it. I spent money on Marvel Puzzle Quest after thoroughly enjoying it, and liking the prospect of having a larger space for more different heroes. The game didn't force me to spend money, it even offers all this for free if you prefer grinding. But once I like a game, I'm more willing to pay for comfort.

I am also totally okay with the old "pay before you play" concept. I still buy a lot of games on Steam or in app stores like that, just based on announcements or reviews. But I believe that once you decide that your game should be Free2Play, it has to be actually free to play to some reasonable extent. You can't pretend your game is free and then shove a paywall in the players face right at the start. You need to be generous to engage players with your game. There is always enough stuff left to sell people, because people will buy the most useless virtual crap if they love a game.

I agree with most of what The Godmother says in her reply to my first post on this issue: Informed choice for players is a good thing. My problem is that as soon as you attach numerical values to a choice, for most people that choice vanishes. Let me explain in an example:

A) You ask a hypothetical adventure guide what to do. The adventure guide knows you like dungeons from your previous behavior. So it offers you two options: The Catacombs of Dread, where an evil necromancer is summoning lots of undead, or the Castle of the Ogre King, filled with goblinoid monsters. Result: Real choice!

B) You ask a hypothetical adventure guide what to do. The adventure guide knows you like dungeons from your previous behavior. It also sees that your current boots are of low iLevel compared to your level. So it offers you two options: The Catacombs of Dread, where you can find Boots +39 for your main stat, and the Castle of the Ogre King, where you can find Boots +41 for your main stat. Result: Everybody goes for the castle, because the reward is 5% better.

In case A a player is assumed to visit the dungeon for fun. Different people find different things fun, so there is no obvious best choice. In case B the player is assumed to do content for a reward, and some rewards are clearly better than other rewards, leading to an obvious best choice. I've been playing MMORPGs in the past where some content was clearly giving out better rewards than other content of the same level, and the result was always that a large majority of players opted for the better reward. And that even in games where the game itself isn't telling you where the better reward is, but you need to find out on the internet or from other players.

So while it was the planned adventure guide which started my consideration, it isn't actually the idea of giving out information in-game that bothers me. Or rather it bothers me only insofar as it might make a bit too obvious slight differences in rewards between similar activities, leading to the activity with the better reward becoming the much preferred one. But the "linearizing" I refer to is mainly the idea of leading the player by the nose with the help of increasing numerical values. We have huge virtual worlds, and instead of using that vast space, we create an optimum min-maxed path through them, along which everybody goes. Go of the path, and you'll be told to "Learn2Play, n00b!". The linear path *is* the game.

I was reading a positive review of a not-so-much noticed feature of the next World of Warcraft expansion, the Adventure Guide. Quote: "people in game need something sometimes to tell them what to do, and where stuff is, and its something I've wanted in game for quite some time. This, ladies and gentlemen is your Adventure Guide, and it tells your character what they're missing in game.". I'm not sure that I would formulate it like that. And I'm even less sure that an Adventure Guide is what I'd wanted in a MMORPG.Specifically the problem I have is with the game telling players "what to do" and "what they're missing". I would rather have the game tell me my options, that is what I could do, not what I should do.

Basically the idea I am not fond of is that at a given level the game determines that I should have a certain iLevel of gear, and that if I don't have that gear for every slot, I must certainly be looking for it. We take Jane Austens "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." and turn it into a "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a player in possession of a good level must be in want of gear.". But must he really? Isn't that again a game design which ONLY addresses the need of the achiever kind of player? What if the player is actually playing for the story, or for meeting other people, or for crafting, or for some other purpose?

I think the concept of "you must want gear" is particularly badly adapted for the endgame. What if a player doesn't like dungeons and raids? An Adventure Guide telling a player that he should do this raid to get that gear totally fails to acknowledge that if the player doesn't want to go raiding, he doesn't really need raid gear in the first place. You only need to raid to raid more. The gear you can find that way is only marginally useful if you are doing lets say daily quests to grind for a mount, or if you are collecting pets. And it is completely useless for tending your farm or crafting.

What I like about MMORPGs is the sense of a virtual world with lots of options. It shouldn't be a linear game where you just follow a pre-determined path. We have gotten to the point where developers consider lots of options to be a distraction, and program in tools like the Adventure Guide to show the players more clearly that there is a linear path they are supposed to follow. Now there are some very good linear games that aren't MMORPGs. If I wanted linearity, why would I play a MMORPG?

[P.S.: Part of an unofficial "Jane Austen on MMORPG blogs" challenge. See Bhagpuss or Zoso.]

As far as science knows, there are no aliens. Or if there were, they live so far away that they could never visit. So SciFi about aliens is more fiction than science. Nevertheless, killing aliens in XCOM: Enemy Within is great fun. The expansion came out Friday, and I've been playing all weekend.

If you consider XCOM: Enemy Within as a standalone game, you would probably have to say that it is way too complicated. But as an expansion of Enemy Unknown it succeeds: The added story lines and options bring more variety into the game, which is exactly what the fans wanted. You can now further modify your soldiers with cybernetic implants, with genetics modifications, or give them bonuses in the form of medals. There are new types of missions, like the EXALT infiltration missions. And there are a lot of new technologies to research.

Having said that, the game still suffers from the same two major flaws: You still just follow a linear story which is the same every time and thus not very motivating in the long run. And you still can lose a combat or even the game by bad luck, because your soldiers or a complete country panicked and starts a fatal chain reaction. I find it especially annoying that you can only do panic reducing missions if one randomly pops up, so once you deployed your satellites there is not much that you can do if the alien abductions randomly happen in two major crisis areas at the same time. Panicked countries quit the council, cutting your funding, and that might then cause you to not have the resources you need, until you find yourself in a death spiral half way through the game and need to start over. On the other hand you could say that those two flaws to some extent cancel each other out: As you already know how the story ends, it is less annoying if you don't make it to the end. But of course when you start over you WILL miss all the nice gadgets you built up in the previous game.

Apart from that XCOM: Enemy Within does most things right, and you quickly get into a "just one more battle" mindset that has you playing longer hours than you had foreseen. Recommended!

I know the traditional time to make predictions is right before a big event like Blizzcon, or right at the end of a year or the beginning of the new one. But I wasn't planning on do any of those. I would just like to make a single prediction on one single feature of one single game expansion: The WoW expansion Warlords of Draenor. My prediction is the following:

At some point not later than 12 months after release of Warlords of Draenor, you will in addition of getting your one free "level to 90" pass be able to buy more of these "level to 90" passes for real money from Blizzard.

You heard it here first! :)

The reason I feel confident to make this prediction is that neither of the alternatives makes much sense. A single character per account leveled to 90 for free will not suffice for many players: They might play on more than one server, they might have several Goblin/Worgen/Pandaren alts they never had the energy to level to the cap, they might need a new raid character quicker. On the other hand Blizzard is not going to give out unlimited free passes per player: If you can make people pay to change server or name, selling them levels is obviously the much easier sell. And if free level 90 would be available for all characters, you might as well shut down the level 1 to 90 game.

Basically the free pass is a test balloon. It will be well received by most people, and by doing so it will destroy the argument that leveling is a necessary "learning step" for a high-level character. And it is a bit like handing out free samples of drugs on a school yard, people will quickly demand more of the same. As the feature is already programmed in and is in demand, there is nothing easier than adding it to the store for account services and mounts / pets. Pay to level is the logical next step after free leveling.

Man, I miss my old Competition Pro Joystick. That was the input device of choice for games on the ZX Spectrum and Amiga back in the days where games that involved flying were still popular, e.g. Elite. This week, a quarter of a century later, I installed the freshly "released" World of Warplanes, and playing that with WASD and mouse just feels wrong. And as I am already at an age where fighter pilots are in retirement, I'm not really good at World of Warplanes either. Even the level 1 airplanes you fly at the start are considerably faster than the tanks you play in World of Tanks, and having a third dimension to deal with makes orientation more difficult. Combat is a lot faster, more reaction based, and a lot less tactical than in World of Tanks. As far as I can see World of Warplanes isn't a bad game, but it sure isn't the game for me.

What I liked about World of Warplanes was that outside combat the system of tech trees and upgrading your planes is the same as in World of Tanks. As I once had a press account for World of Tanks and received free gold every day I logged in (until they wisely decided that I wasn't of much use to them any more and canceled that), I was also happy to learn that the gold carries over from World of Tanks. I think that is a very good idea. Many games have currencies you buy for real money and then spend for goodies in the game, but they all suffer from you never being able to buy exactly the amount you need. A currency which is good for more than one game is an improvement.

Overall I think that World of Warplanes will have it harder than World of Tanks. It already has a viable competitor in War Thunder (in open beta), and it is not just a cheap clone. And the number of games that work in similar ways but use different sorts of vehicles is growing as well. With World of Warplanes needing a very different set of skills than World of Tanks, it isn't even obvious that they can draw upon the same customer base. Personally I will just play a bit more to try to fully understand the game (right now I don't understand what the ground installations are doing in the game, they were never explained in the tutorial). And then I'll wait for World of Battleships and return to 2 dimensions and slower, more tactical movement.

I mentioned Bartle types in a comment yesterday. Now I know these are disputable, and especially the Bartle Test, which wasn't created by Dr. Bartle at all, isn't really providing scientifically correct results. But people in the MMO blogosphere tend to know the concept, so it is useful as a base for discussion. I found one source which said: "The website shows that sixty percent of the people who have thus far taken the test are Achievers, fifty-three percent are Killers, forty-seven percent are Explorers, and forty percent are Socialisers". (Note that Bartle test numbers always add up to 200%, not 100%) While I wouldn't bet on those numbers being correct, I do consider it likely that overall there are similar number of people in each Bartle type, and that achievers are a bit more numerous than other types. But be that as it may, my question is whether modern MMORPGs are still supporting all four of those Bartle types.

I wrote yesterday about exploring not really being much of an option in many MMORPGs any more. Many games now show the way to your destination somewhere in your UI. And games like Guild Wars 2 (and if I hear correctly Wildstar as well) replaced the "find a destination" aspect of exploration by a jumping puzzle.

Killers have been out of luck for years: Free-for-all player killing has nearly completely disappeared, even the majority of EVE players are rather safe from being killed most of the time. And it is arguable whether a carefully balanced battleground provides the same motivation for a player killer.

Socializing has taken big hits too: You don't need a group to play through most of the content. Gone as well are the times of "we need to wait 20 minutes for the boat, might as well chat with that stranger". Even the most socially advanced activity of a MMORPG: Planning a raid now can be done without people exchanging any words.

What remains is games that seem to be pretty much exclusively tailored for achievers. Which, judging by the comments I get, suits some people just fine. But even there developers realized that it was impossible for average players to have a constant stream of real achievements, so they designed "achievement systems" which basically handed out rewards and medals for just showing up and playing the game. A few real achiever types started making an achievement out of NOT receiving certain achievements in the game, because it turns out that not getting them is a lot harder than getting them. If in a typical MMORPG which is all about kill ten rats quests you get achievements for doing quests and killing monsters, it is harder to try to level up without getting those achievements.

But ultimately the idea of Dr. Bartle was that people play MUDs (and by extension MMORPGs) out of different motivations. And the Bartle Test suggested that most people have a mix of motivations, and aren't purely 100% motivated by just one thing. Thus for example the concept of somebody having grown bored of the game, but continuing to subscribe because his friends are still playing. By turning MMORPGs into games which are nearly exclusively about achievements, and don't give much room for exploration, killing, and socializing, you end up with people being less motivated to play. Which could explain why people leave new games after such a short time these days.

In many points I agree with Chris that there is no good reason to complain about SOE selling $100 founder packs for the Free2Play Landmark supplement for EQ Next. If a fan wants to spend money on his favorite brand, why not? And wouldn't SOE be stupid to not charge for this and leave money on the table? If you don't want to pay, you can still get the same product, or rather a better product, for free later.

Syl has a brilliant history of the kill ten rats quest. While I am not quite sure that achievements are to blame, I do very much agree that the degree of guidance players receive for quests has very much increased over the years. I still remember getting a quest in Everquest that just told me to find a dwarf, and didn't mention that said dwarf was on the other side of the next continent, over 1 hour of travel away. Now to some extent the players basically asked for more hand-holding, because at the time there were sites like Allakhazam which mainly served to provide quest solutions for players. If the quest itself doesn't give you enough hints to be able to solve it, the internet will. But I agree with Syl that by now questing is bordering on the ridiculously trivial. I've even already played games where you can auto-run to the quest location!

For those of us who have been playing these games for a while, this clearly goes in the wrong direction. The better we get at these games, the more guidance we receive. Clearly that should be the other way around. So I was wondering whether one could make a MMORPG in which questing becomes more difficult with level, because the degree of guidance is decreased. When you start out as a new character you'd get a glowing path leading you to the sparkling rats, in mid-level you only get the location of the rats indicated on your maps, and at high level you only get general directions towards your quest target. Shouldn't a "level 90" quest be actually harder to solve than a "level 1" quest?

In the previous session the Favorites of Selune had cleared two more rooms of the catacombs of undead. Only two more doors remained unexplored in that part of the dungeon, and by the layout they appeared to lead into the same room. So I was expecting the players to do that final encounter of that dungeon next. But I was wrong. The session starts with the players looting the room they just cleared, finding the Bowl of Bahamut's Blood, one of three sacred vessels they were asked to find by Sir Oakley. They also find a lot of murals depicting the various battle campaigns of the Templars, against orcs and yuan-ti.

Then they open one of the doors leading to the final room of the dungeon, and find a sinister looking human surrounded by undead. And for some reason that scares them so much that they close the door again and run away, in spite of them being able to sense that the human holds cards from the Deck of Many Things. [I'm afraid there was a bit of meta-gaming involved in that decision: The players are close to the next level, and that encounter appeared to be some sort of boss fight, so they preferred to do it at a later point.]

Outside the dungeon, feeling safe from the undead in the light of day, the heroes then remember the quest they have: Scout the orcs living in the village on the slope of the hill. As they are on top of the hill, they just need to find a good spot to look down upon that village, which should give them a pretty good idea. The hilltop is surrounded by a wall, which has one archway leading to the side of the hill overgrown by forest, and a big gate building leading towards the village. So they decide to go to the gate building. The iron gate is completely rusted away, and they enter the building and spot a drake in the second room. Combat commences.

The drake turns out to be not alone. Two gargoyles descend from the roof, and two rust monsters were hiding around the corner in the second room. But the players either don't know what a rust monster is, or don't recognize it, and engage them in melee combat. They even continue to do so after their arms and armor starts rusting. That ends by them learning the hard way why other players fear rust monsters: The warrior's magic armor and the rogue's magic dagger are destroyed. A series of low attack rolls keeping the rust monsters alive didn't help there. The wizard keeps the drake at bay by blocking the doorway with a conjured sphere of flame, the heroes kill the rust monsters and gargoyle, and then manage to kill the drake who was starting to run away towards the orc village. Although the monsters were rather low level, the players end up more scared than in the dungeon full of undead, fearing an attack from the rival adventurers which are still around somewhere. So they fulfill their quest by using their bitterly gained vantage point, counting around 15 camp fires in the village with apparently about 10 orcs around each. They also have a quick look at the forest side of the hill, finding that the forest there is unnaturally dense and wild compared to other vegetation of the region, suggesting a somewhat magical origin from the Feywild. With that information they leave Gardmore Abbey and return to Winterhaven.

They report their findings to Lord Padraig, but as they consider him somewhat of a rival towards their other goal of finding the cards of the Deck of Many Things, they don't mention the second card they found, nor the rival adventurers and "necromancer" they identified as holding cards. Lord Padraig is intrigued by the Feygrove they found, and asks them to look for potential allies there. They replace their lost armor and weapons: Using the updated rules on common, uncommon, and rare magic items they can't just buy magic items with daily powers like the ones they lost, but they can buy regular +1 scale mail and a +1 dagger, so at least their combat bonuses are restored to the previous values. While the warrior would have liked to stay a few days in Winterhaven, the other outvote him and they go back to Gardmore Abbey at dawn the next day.

The adventurers decide to go to the Feygrove next. They have two options here: Go in from below through a big hole in the outer wall, or come down from above from the hilltop. They decide to go through the archway from the top, with the two elves in front, hoping for a friendlier reception that way. On entering the forest and following a winding path they detect some movement ahead of them, and catch a glimpse of an elvish figure moving away from them through the forest. They stop to indicate their non-hostile intentions, hoping that somebody will be sent towards them, but nobody comes. So they continue along the winding path towards a belltower they saw from above. Here we stop the session.

I am currently playing Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign, which is a nice game if you like match-3 games and can overlook the Pay2Win aspects of this implementation. So I was playing and getting my superheroes to about level 24, when I ran into a problem: There weren't all that many PvE missions around level 25, and then it jumped directly to level 30+ missions marked as "impossible" (even if you can sometimes beat "impossible"). In Marvel Puzzle Quest that is a problem, because once you played a mission often enough to get the 4 rewards, you only get a tiny reward if you beat them again, making it basically impossible to grind your way towards higher levels.

So I was asking on the forums what to do, and was told to do PvP. Bleh! I don't like PvP in most games, with only a few exceptions like World of Tanks. My experience with PvP games is that matchmaking rarely works well, so get a rather unfun game of one side roflstomping the other. And then most people have a problem with the concept that in well-balanced PvP on average you MUST lose half of your games. So there are lots of problems with sore losers (not to mention bad winners). I hadn't even tried PvP in Marvel Puzzle Quest because it is a match-3 game, and thus by definition turn-based. I have long experience with trying to do turn-based games online against other players, and there are always problems with people moving slowly or even deliberately stalling, or disconnecting or throwing games when they are about to lose. For example in Card Hunter since release there have been several patches addressing that sort of problems in PvP with new timers introduced because people were trying to make their opponents concede by stalling.

But when I mentioned those concerns on the forums, I was informed in the usual polite forum form ("lol u suck") that PvP in Marvel Puzzle Quest doesn't work like that. While that did confirm my suspicion that I wouldn't have wanted to play against Mr. Lol-u-suck, I found out that I didn't have to. Because PvP in Marvel Puzzle Quest has a rather surprising feature: You don't actually play against other players. Instead there are so-called PvP tournaments in which you only ever play against the AI. The AI just uses the superheroes of some player and pretends you're playing against him. In reality it is just a story-free form of PvE.

Not only does that turn Mr. Lol-u-suck into a perfect gentleman when you play against "him". They also managed to set the whole thing up in a way where just like in PvE you nearly always win. If you lose a game, you get two more attempts; and while you can use fresh heroes, your "opponent" is playing with the heroes previously damaged by you. Okay, you get a bit less rewards for that, but it very much tilts chances in your favor. And as Mr. Lol-u-suck is never even informed that he lost a game against you, he won't react badly. [CORRECTION: If you are online, you *do* get an information that you were attacked and lost rank. And then you can take "revenge" by counter-attacking. Against the AI, still. And only once, unless your counter-attack is again counter-attacked by the other player.]

So this morning I tried a few PvP games in the current tournament, which lets you play "against" 199 random players. I have a sneaking suspicion that those groups of 200 are determined from the start, from the full player database, without even asking people to sign up for the tournament. So I played against people with level 1 heroes. Unsurprisingly I quickly won a lot of games, and suddenly found myself on rank #8 of the ladder. I've dropped down a few ranks due to other people playing and gaining points, but I will definitively "do well". And get rewards for every game I win, plus for my ranking at the end.

That brings me back to Pay2Win: For PvE I had spent money on Marvel Puzzle Quest, which enabled me to increase my "inventory" size and have more different heroes. That was done because different heroes have different powers, and it is fun to figure out good combinations. But it turns out that this also happens to be a winning strategy for the pseudo-PvP mode: Your main obstacle in PvP is that your heroes will be injured in each fight, and you'll have to wait for them to heal up or use healing kits (which slowly regenerate if you don't buy them). But with many different heroes I can play quite a number of games before all of them are injured. And the more games you play, the higher you rank. It is a game designed for casual players like me who don't mind dropping some money on a game to do well in PvP. I chuckle to think how angry that will make the typical PvP-fan.

Bigeyez mailed me to hear my opinion of the new World of Warcraft expansion announced this weekend at Blizzcon: Warlords of Draenor. I would like to reserve a more general judgement to the point where I actually play it, if I decide to do so. This is actually the first WoW expansion where I am not already sure that I will buy it, although that has more to do with the game up to now than with the quality of the expansion. So I do not want at this point to talk about most of the announced features, from player housing to changes to raiding. I only want to talk about one tiny feature: The ability to boost at least one of your characters to level 90 with level-appropriate gear, even if that character was level 1.

To me that single feature defines Warlords of Draenor as expansion. It tells me which direction this expansion takes: Vertically up. The expansion is all about new stuff from level 90 to 100, and the devs would very much like us to forget about the level 1 to 90 game. Apparently somebody asked the devs whether it wasn't problematic to let new players start at level 90 without ever having learned their class, and was told that the proving grounds would make playing through level 1 to 90 unnecessary. Basically the devs and many players see levels 1 to 90 just as a training exercise for the "real game", and now that has been replaced by a better training mode.

So we are being told that when the expansion comes out, World of Warcraft will be all about levels 90 to 100. You will play nearly exclusively on the new continent, maybe sometimes visit the capital cities for some features, but will have no reason whatsoever to enter over 90% of the zones of World of Warcraft. If by some server glitch the old zones ceased to exist, most players wouldn't even notice. I find that rather sad, so much wasted space and potential. I had hoped for more Cataclysm-like renovation of old zones, with Warlords of Draenor not just offering new zones but also redoing the Burning Crusade zones. Instead we are told just to skip all that old stuff.

A decade ago we used to talk about MMORPGs in terms of "world" versus "game". Warlords of Draenor cements Blizzard's position that they want WoW to be all about the game, and more specifically all about the end-game at the level cap (level 90 to 99 will be done with quickly). This isn't about leading a virtual life in a virtual world, this is about playing a game and "winning" it. Which is something I never was interested in to start with, and then find MMORPGs to be particularly bad at.

There is no "world" in World of Warcraft, which is somewhat ironic given the name. But well, Everquest wasn't a game about quests either, so people in this business appear to have problems expressing their concept for their game in the name.

In the previous thread there evolved a discussion whether opinions can be wrong, and I argued that they couldn't be. But then, just like in that previous thread, it all depends on how you define the word itself. Wikipedia says about opinion that "In general, an opinion is a judgment, viewpoint, or statement about matters commonly considered to be subjective, i.e. based on that which is less than absolutely certain, and is the result of emotion or interpretation of facts. What distinguishes fact from opinion is that facts are verifiable, i.e. can be objectively proven to have occurred.".

That was pretty much the definition I had in mind. Thus the example of people having the "opinion" that the Holocaust didn't happen, or that Earth is flat, or whatever, doesn't meet the definition. These people simply got their facts wrong. It is *because* opinions are subjective and can't be wrong that these people would like to present their beliefs as a different opinion instead of a pig-headed denial of well-established facts. Sometimes certain world views or believes clash with reality, and some people have found it easier to deny facts than to change their view of the world.

If you do a training on management, you might come across a funny test where you are given a series of statements and need to decide whether they are factual or judgmental. That is surprisingly difficult to get right on the first go, as it is extremely hard to make a statement without using judgment or inference. Once you did the exercise you quickly realize that pretty much every statement made on the internet is subjective, a judgment, viewpoint, or in short an opinion. We don't put "In my humble opinion ..." in front of our sentences because if we wanted to do it right, we'd need to put it in front of ALL of our sentences.

If I say "World of Warcraft has millions of players", that is a statement of fact. But would I use such a statement of fact in a blog post? Because it is a very well-known fact, it isn't very interesting. Most people would consider that statement so blindingly obvious, that they wouldn't even consider it to be a very good argument. Thus I would be more likely to use a more judgmental statement like "World of Warcraft is very successful". And then the arguing starts. Because "success" is subjective, my statement is just a statement of opinion, and somebody can have a very different opinion on the subject. For example I have heard it argued that a game with a few hundred thousand players which is still growing was "successful", while World of Warcraft which is losing that many players every quarter is not. Would that opinion be "wrong"? I don't think so. Not that I would agree with it, because I tend to think in absolute numbers and economical concepts like profits rather than in terms of trends. But because I am aware that concepts like "success" are subjective (unless you define success criteria before measuring the results), I can only say that it is an opinion I disagree with, not that it is strictly speaking "wrong".

Of course we do get into choppy waters if we consider that "right" and "wrong" are words which have *both* an objective meaning and a subjective meaning. There are opinions which I would consider morally wrong, even if they are subjective and not in denial of any facts. If somebody makes a statement that "we should bring slavery back", most people would consider that opinion "wrong". But it is not about facts at all. It is a subjective judgment where the majority of humanity happens to agree that slavery is a bad thing, so anybody with a different opinion just feels wrong. That goes so far that modern films about historical characters might represent that character in a way which is factually wrong in order to make him look morally right.

I would say that everything I write on my blog is my opinions. And those opinions aren't "wrong" or "right". But they can be more or less convincing, and more or less well argued. Which is exactly why some people react sometimes extremely badly to my writings: I state an opinion which they disagree with, but they lack the rhetorical skill to argue properly against that opinion. There is nothing worse than somebody making a very convincing case against your core beliefs. No wonder these people then are foaming at the mouth and shoot off all sorts of insults in the comment section, or on their blogs, or on Twitter.

The one thing I don't understand is why some of them keep hanging out on my blog to fire off the occasional hate comment. There are lots of blogs of evil little bastards where I just can't stand the opinions being argued; and that problem was extremely easy to solve by me not visiting those blogs once I realized it isn't just one disagreeable post but many of them. I would very much recommend some of readers to do the same. If you *know* that I hold opinions you very much object to and repeatedly write about them here, why would you want to hang out here?

Godwin's law, in its original form, says that "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.". These days people use a different version, because otherwise they would have to explain what Usenet was. But in other respects the law is also becoming a bit dated, comparisons involving Nazis or Hitler have actually become less common, although they are of course still around. If I would formulate Tobold's law today, it would say "As a blog discussion grows longer, the probability of arguments being dismissed as trolling or strawman approaches one.". Of course that is also quickly becoming outdated, in ten years you'll have to explain to people what a blog is. All the nasty gossip and chatter has moved to Twitter these days.

Wikipedia defines trolling as: "In Internet slang, a troll is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a forum, chat room, or blog), either accidentally or with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion." But most people tend to not consider all of that definition. A very wrong, but common definition is that "if something upsets me, it must be trolling". Thus even if an opinion posted somewhere is not at all extraneous, off-topic, or disrupting normal on-topic discussion, it will be accused of trolling. Even a blog post itself, which obviously by definition can never be "off-topic", as it defines the topic, will be called trolling.

So yesterday both my post and The Godmother's post I linked to where accused of being trolling. Neither of them were. They were two posts expressing very different opinions on the same subject. And if you had an opinion on the matter, it was likely that either one or the other would upset you. While of course the topic was controversial in itself, both posts went to great lengths to not be unnecessarily inflammatory. The Godmother expressed her opinion in the form of questions and links. And if I had wanted to be trolling and inflammatory, the post would have written itself easily, given material like somebody calling herself "Bitter Gertrude" complaining about the culture of beauty invading her beloved cosplay. A trolling post would have made the obvious remarks about her motivation and jumped to conclusion about her looks. Actually you can find those trolling comments in the comment section of the post in question.

The thing is that one thing hasn't changed from Usenet discussion to blogs to Facebook and Twitter: Most of the content written in these places is not a discussion of facts, but a discussion of opinions. That automatically leads to the famous someone is wrong on the internet reaction by others. Not because of things that are actually factually wrong, but because for every opinion out there, there is an opposing opinion. There is no true or false to questions about how female cosplayers should dress, there are only opinions.

As The Godmother appeared to be just learning, any opinion you state on the internet is going to provoke some people to disagree. Which is the completely normal process. Either what you write is being completely ignored, or somebody is going to disagree with it. It would be a pipe dream to hope that you write something and get lots of agreeing comments and replies to it. Even if many people do agree with you, they won't feel the need to write anything themselves if you already expressed their opinion reasonably well. It is those who disagree who will feel the need to respond.

A blogger could avoid that by writing completely bland posts without any opinions in them, but what would be the point of that? You blog BECAUSE you have opinions you want to express. And defending one's opinions and convictions isn't trolling. I KNOW that some of my opinions are controversial, e.g. I am against piracy, and that is a controversial opinion in Somalia and on the internet. That doesn't mean that when news on the subject come up and I want to discuss them I should fold and not say what I think, just because it might upset some people. Real trolling is about cheap one-liner comment, and has nothing to do with bloggers defending their opinions, even if those opinions aren't popular.

There is rarely a week in the blogosphere that goes by without some sort of feminist protest against the way video-game characters or real people dress. So it would have been wise of me to completely ignore this post on cosplay and the articles linked there. After all, we all agree that female armor depicted in video games is not very practical if you consider the function it is supposed to have: Prevent damage. But then I had male characters in games like World of Warcraft with all sorts of wings, horns, or gigantic shoulder pads serving no practical purpose whatsoever. And somewhere I think there is a fundamental difference between talking about video-game characters and real people.

Overly sexualized video-game characters are a problem. World of Warcraft offers some ways around skimpy armor, like transmogrification. But not every game does. And when you can't wear certain pieces of armor because they make your character look a certain way you don't want him to look, that can be a problem. If female characters are visibly designed to be played (and watched) by male teenagers and don't appeal to female players, those female players do have a right to demand at least a choice. And game companies which want a wider audience would be wise to listen.

But what about real people going to a game convention dressed up as a character? I feel deeply uncomfortable with the concept of telling any of them that they "shouldn't dress like that". How is a feminist telling a girl that she shouldn't dress in the famous Princess Leia slave costume any different from a muslim cleric telling a girl that she should wear a burqa? How is it different from any other social conservative telling other people how to live? Sure, you can have personal values which would make you not want to dress like that, but how can you impose those values on others?

I feel it is somewhat insulting to assume that the girl in the skimpy outfit at the games convention doesn't know what she is doing. Obviously she is in no danger of being attacked with a sharp instrument, so why should she worry about whether her "armor" has any protective properties? The guy in the full-plate armor made out of rubber foam wouldn't do well in a real sword fight either. I do believe that people choose their cosplay costume with a lot of thought on how they are going to look. And if they look sexy in it, it is because they WANT to look sexy. Even a "booth babe" who didn't choose her own costume at some point made a conscious decision that she would be willing to look like that if the money was right. And the girls who actually made their own costumes with a lot of effort are very well aware that it isn't much use for either keeping them warm or keeping looks away. As long as a costume is within a country's decency laws, how could anybody have the right to tell them to not dress like that?

I support everybody's right to not go to conventions where people are dressed in a way that he doesn't want to see. But if you go to those conventions you need to respect the right of people to dress like they want. Different people have different personal values, and you can't impose your values on others.

I very much like games like the Settlers or Anno series, in which you build a village and balance a simple economy. As gaming has become increasingly mobile, this kind of game works well with game mechanics based on real time: You spend some minutes a few times per day taking care of your village, and crops grow or building get constructed while you are offline. This year I have been playing Anno Online, a browser game, and The Tribez on my iPad. Now I'm looking for something new.

Unfortunately that isn't all that easy. While there are many village building games, they often come with one of three major flaws: Either they are like Clash of Clans games in where you build a village only to get it destroyed in free-for-all PvP, or they are excessively "social" and require you to have a hundred friends to progress, or they are constantly begging you for money.

In a previous thread somebody recommended me Townsmen for Android, but I found that to be near unplayable due to excessive begging: There is a big advertising blocking a good part of the screen that you need to pay money to remove, and you playing is interrupted by more advertising which you need to pay money to remove. I checked some reviews of the game and found that apparently you can't even get very far without spending lots of money, so I don't think I'll be playing that. The Tribez is also Free2Play, but less aggressively so, and once a game lets me enjoy it for a while I might even be inclined to pay for some extra comfort.

I very much abandoned all games on Facebook and "unfriended" the hundreds of fake friends I had there. While I liked games like Castleville, I disliked the whole fake friends requirement. And I think Facebook is making a grave mistake by having a games platform that doesn't work on iOS and only badly on Android. Is anybody playing Facebook games on his tablet or mobile phone? That is where games are today, and I feel Facebook is missing out there.

So if you know of any good village / city building games which aren't about PvP or require lots of friends or money, I'd be interested. Especially on Android or iOS.

The MMORPG blogosphere has recently been full again of nostalgia for the good old days of games like the original Everquest, including attempts to "make games like that" again. It is generally acknowledged that the community was better in the olden days. So the thinking goes that if we had like back then again, we could get the community of back then again as well. But what if it isn't the games that have changed? What if it is us, and our environment? What if we have grown bored of talking to strangers in our games?

I played my first "multiplayer online" game in the early 90's on a university mainframe computer with a text-only, green or amber letters on black background screen. It was games like LPMUD, and "social network sites" were called bulletin board systems (BBS) at the time. I chatted online with Americans who had never spoken to a European in their life before, and were rather fascinated by the concept. A decade later, when I made my first steps in a 3D virtual world in Everquest and was kinda lost, I met a stranger in the game who not only gave me directions but also a magical necklace which helped a lot. Meeting people online was still a fascinating idea.

Fast forward to today, and meeting somebody in a MMORPG is an "oh crap" moment, because you instantly fear that the guy you see before you is after the same mobs or resources as you are. I've seen a website that offered me to share my experience on 284 different social networks. And every game, including Solitaire is now online multiplayer. Meeting strangers online, in a game or socially, has gone from being fascinating to being an everyday experience. It isn't new and exciting any more.

Besides having gotten boring, our technological capacity to meet strangers from all over the world might also have grown much larger than our capacity to handle social relationships. Science tells us that the capacity of beings to connect socially with others depends on the size of their neocortex region of their brain. And while humans beat everybody else on the planet in that respect, our so-called Dunbar's Number is thought to be around 150 stable social relationships. The 18 to 24 year old Facebook users with an average number of friends of 510 are only making a mockery of the word "friend", they aren't actually capable of maintaining such numbers of social relationships.

All that suggests to me that there is little hope for getting the old game communities back. That is not to say that there couldn't be improvements: There are a lot of possible approaches where veteran players are rewarded for helping new players, and that can do a lot of good for game communities. But the time where meeting strangers from half-way around the world was a fascinating idea and automatically caused us to be nice to them is over. At best we have grown bored of those strangers, at worst we now consider them as victims we'd like to beat in the game to get some reward or e-peen. The next Brad McQuaid game will be as unsuccessful as his previous attempt to bring the old Everquest back: Vanguard. Times have changed, and the dinosaurs aren't going to come back.

I am not a big user of mobile phones. So up to this weekend I only had a simple Nokia phone with a prepaid plan and mostly used it for incoming calls. But my experience with using the iPad GPS as a city map convinced me that having a smart phone might actually be a good idea. So I went and looked what kind of a smart phone I might want to buy. The obvious choice, an iPhone, was quickly excluded because I had tried the iPod Touch of the same 4" size and found it a bit too small. But I wasn't going to phone with an 8" phablet either, so some review site researching later I decided on a Samsung Galaxy S4 with a 5" screen. So now I am the proud owner of a smart phone.

I still need to wait 2 business days until I can actually use the thing as a phone, as I wanted to keep my old telephone number. But at the same time I am changing providers, so there are some administrative hoops to jump through. My old provider offered me his cheapest subscription plan for 12€ a month, which includes 250 MB of data. But I went with the provider I already have for my internet access, landline, and TV. And moving from a "triple play" to a "quadruple play " plan ended up costing just 1€ per month, with 500 MB of data included. I'll end up paying less than with my prepaid plan even at low usage, which is a win. Of course that provider also would have offered me a 330€ reduction on the price of the phone if I had taken his most expensive subscription at 50€ a month more for 2 years; but you don't need to be a math wiz to calculate that this is much more expensive in the end. And I don't need multiple gigabytes of download capacity each month on the phone via 3G, that is what I have WiFi at home for.

So while I'm still waiting on the phone connection, the Galaxy S4 already works fine over WiFi, so I could make the acquaintance of Android and install some apps. Of course everything works slightly differently than on the iPad, but I'm getting used to that. And I started wondering what games I should install. I tried Total War Battles: Shogun, which turned out to be a mistake: It obviously was designed for bigger tablets, and the text and icons are far too small on a phone screen. So now I downloaded Dungeon Village, which is made for smaller screens. I also downloaded Marvel Puzzle Quest, and was happy to find that it is possible via Facebook to share the saved game from my iPad. But of course I'd be most interested in Android "exclusive" games that I haven't played on the iPad yet. Recommendations would be welcome.

Not that I'm planning on playing all that much on the Galaxy S4. It is just a stopgap solution for when I'm stuck somewhere without the iPad. I am more likely to use the phone for looking things up on the internet when away from the computer, and as a portable GPS device. I put widgets on the screen with stuff like weather forecast, stock quotes, my GMail inbox, a notepad, a calendar, and news. What I like about the Google Play store is that I can search for apps on my PC and it installs them on my phone remotely. Way more user-friendly than the iTunes store. Well, I see how my usage of the smart phone evolves with time. The only thing I doubt it will do is making me smarter. :)

I was reading an article on Pocket Tactics about World of Tanks Blitz, the official iOS port of World of Tanks for the iPad (careful, there are some fake World of Tanks games in the App Store). The article said "The multiplayer-only game drops players into deathmatch teams of 7 (as opposed to the 15 vs 15 battles on PC), so clearly there’s no immediate plans for cross-platform play". And a day after that I get a mail from Wargaming.net announcing, who would have guessed it, a new 7 vs. 7 mode for World of Tanks. So maybe it will be cross-platform after all? Normally cross-platform games run into problems because the interface on one platform works better than on the other, e.g. mouse working better than gamepad for a shooter. But World of Tanks is slow enough to possibly work for that.

Then I also got a mail announcing a new game from a different company: Tank Domination for the iOS. I'm not sure how good all of this will run, but it appears that tanks are rolling towards the iPad from all directions.

When people hear the word "pornography", they usually think of the sort that has a lot of naked flesh. But not all depiction of naked flesh is pornographic, it could also be art, and making the distinction is notoriously difficult. Even a US Supreme Court judge said: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it."

If unlike that judge we want to attempt a definition of what is pornographic, we might consider how it is about showing men's fantasies, things that men like watching because they consider them unattainable in real life. That very much includes showing men behaving badly, without fear of consequences. And if you take such a definition of pornography, you could also think about whether pornography really needs naked flesh. What if we take a different men's fantasy than sex and show it in such a pornographic style? And that in a nutshell is what in my opinion Top Gear is. The UK version, not the lame US version which is boring exactly because it *isn't* so pornographic.

Top Gear has three middle-aged men as presenters, average blokes with no discernible skills, the kind the middle-aged male viewer can identify with. And then these guys go and drive the unattainable cars only rock stars and soccer stars can afford. They drive them round a track to see how much smoke they produce with the tires and perform similar crazy stunts (of course those are all fakes, performed by professional drivers with the film cut to suggest that it was the middle-aged bloke driving). And the guys are allowed to do and say pretty much anything they want, extremely politically un-correct. They make xenophobic jokes, use lots of extreme stereo-types, and generally behave badly, e.g. set on fire the Christmas presents they don't like.

Just like pornography that is very much fun to watch. At least if you don't tend to get upset about people who aren't politically correct. And unlike pornography you can get away with watching Top Gear on the living room TV, with nobody minding that you are watching a car show. There is a running gag in the show where a few confused souls who actually think Top Gear is a car review show demand reviews of regular cars. That usually ends with some stunt, like Top Gear "reviewing" the regular car's performance in driving at high speed through a shopping mall, or off a ferry ramp into the ocean.

I've been watching Top Gear on the BBC iPlayer on my iPad. As the show is full of running gags and strange conventions you only understand if you watch several episodes in sequence, it is actually an ideal show for TV on demand.