While I haven't been playing World of Tanks during my holidays, I did watch some streams on Twitch. One of the most popular WoT streamers is Quickybaby, and what he did in July was work on the hardest series of campaign missions, which give one of the best tanks in the game as reward. That was instructive insofar as this was visibly frustrating even to one of the very good players of the game. And it made me think that enjoyment of World of Tanks doesn't necessarily come from playing well, but from achieving the goals that you set yourself. Set your goals sufficiently high, and even a top player experiences a lot of setbacks and frustration. Set your goals low, and even a mediocre player can achieve them.

Quickybaby has an overall win rate of 60%, which is about the best you can hope for if you play really, really well. But if you do a bit of basic math, 60% win rate obviously means that 40% of games don't work out as you wanted them to. And I would argue that if you have no control over the 40% of games that you lose, it stands to reason that there is a similar amount of games where you end up winning, but that win also wasn't controlled by you, but would have happened with or without you. So even a top player is "carrying" only 20% of his games. A mediocre player is rarely carrying his games, and the outcome is mostly determined by other players.

It is that overwhelming influence of other players, even on the results of very good players, that made those missions so frustrating for Quickybaby. The missions frequently required a great outcome in several games in a row. If you play a couple of great games and then fail, you need to start over. If you fail not because of your own mistakes, but because of the way your team played, that can be extremely frustrating. You can even fail because your team is too good compared to the enemy team, and the battle ends before you have reached the required number of kills or damage.

On the other end of the spectrum, World of Tanks has a lot of goals that you can't possibly fail. There are easier campaign missions, where instead of having to do let's say 15,000 damage in 3 battles, you have to do 15,000 damage in as many battles as it takes. Sooner or later you'll get there. Progressing along a tech tree from tier 1 to 10 is the same thing; it might take you a while, but as you always gain some xp in every battle and can't lose any xp, one day you'll certainly make it.

So unless you absolutely need a specific reward from a specific campaign or event, you can often just set your goals yourself at a level which isn't frustrating for your particular skill level. For example I am hearing a lot of bad comments on the current Homefront event, because reaching the top reward is hard and a big grind. For me that same event is a lot more fun, because I just want to reach tier II with some tanks and get the camo rewards. As permanent camo isn't cheap if you buy it in gold, I'd even say that those camo rewards are pretty generous compared with the effort you need to put in to get them. You need 35 division points to get that reward, and each battle gives you between 4 and 10 points. I got my first camo after 7 battles, which isn't too bad, considering the disadvantages of a late start. Getting all three Russian camos is basically just a question of showing up, and if I do well occasionally, I could get some of the American / British ones as well. Even the worst possible outcome of a battle, I lose and place last in the team, still advances me not too slowly towards my goal. So there is very little frustration involved.

Now you might argue that if you don't set yourself very challenging goal, you also don't have that much pleasure from achieving them. But I would say that I'd rather try to achieve challenging goals in real life, where the rewards are more real. As the rewards of video games are just virtual, I'm okay with just putting in some virtual effort. :) In the end the purpose of a game is to have fun, and frustrating yourself by overly ambitious goals isn't going to achieve that.

A reader asked me about my thoughts on WoW Classic. I'm not planning to go anywhere near it. I'm simply not interested at all. I am even convinced that a good number of players who are interested in WoW Classic will be thoroughly disappointed. Because you simply can't turn back time.

We had a great time in World of Warcraft when it was still young, 15 years ago. But we were 15 years younger as well, and very enthusiastic about this new experience, unlike anything we had played before. And that enthusiasm made us willing to do things which in hindsight are a bit crazy: playing long hours, organizing our lives around raid schedules, accepting all sorts of bugs and inconvenient game mechanics as well as weird rules on how to distribute raid loot. Today we still remember how we first brought down Onyxia, but we don't remember so well what we had to go through to get there.

I think that people will flock to WoW Classic to try to recreate those experience. Some are already planning their Molten Core raids. However for a lot of people that will end up with the realization that you start WoW Classic at level 1, and that it takes bloody forever (compared with today's WoW leveling speed) to get to level 60. Most of your friends are gone. And that even if you arrive at "putting the band back together", that band now consists of a bunch of grumpy middle-aged men, who aren't willing to take the same shit as 15 years ago.

I'm back home from holidays. Which also means that I am back on a PC and can play World of Tanks again. I deliberately didn't take a laptop on holidays, to take a break from the game, but now I am eager to return. And is if to celebrate my homecoming, World of Tanks is running an event called Homefront.

Homefront is one of the few ways to play World of Tanks against AI-controlled bots. In this particular version a team of 5 players defends against multiple waves of bots. The players don't bring their own tanks, but get to choose one of six possible teams of 3 (in a few cases 4) tanks. You select which tanks you want to start with, and when that tank is destroyed you can take another one, until you run out, or you defeated all enemy bots. At the end you get "front" points as well as "division" points for the team you chose. Collect a number of points and your division levels up, giving you better tanks and a few other rewards.

Of course due to my holidays I missed the start of the event. So now I only have level I divisions, while many other people are already at level II or III. And the matchmaker doesn't care, and just puts me into groups with players playing those higher levels. That sucks both for me and for them, as the enemy strength is based on the strength of the strongest player team. So I constantly am the weakest player against enemy bots that are too strong for me, and I'm dragging the team down. I'd rather have a slower matchmaking that puts players of the same level together.

What annoys most people is that you can't play Homefront all that often. You get only 2 fuel per day automatically (and I got them even when not logging on), plus you can earn another 2 fuel per day with easy missions, plus you get some bonus fuel for leveling a division up. Overall you can't get more than 84 fuel, so you can't play Homefront more than 84 times. And you would need to play very, very good to achieve all rewards of the event in those 84 battles. However I would say that if I had started from day one, it would have been possible for me to get all the rewards of one front, east or west, but certainly not both fronts. Being late, even that is probably not possible any more. But it should be possible to get the three divisions of one front to level II, and thus get the camo rewards.

I don't really like that you can spend gold (that is to say real money) to level a division up to level II or even III. If they absolutely wanted to monetize this event, Wargaming should just have sold fuel. The people who spent money of level III divisions early ended up being unhappy, because they were always in games with lesser level team mates, and ended up losing all the time. And because the divisions only exist during this 12-day event, spending money on that team seems a bit of a waste.

So what is an auto battler / auto chess game? Well, apart from some versions having an 8x8 squares board, it has nothing to do with chess, so auto battler is probably the better term. An auto battler is a game for 8 players in which each player recruits various heroes (often from the MOBA the game is based on), places those heroes on a board, and then watches his heroes battle enemy heroes or monsters. The game is organized in rounds, there are usually around 40 round until there is only one winner left. Between rounds the players can buy heroes from a random selection and rearrange their board. Every player gets gold every round, but you get more gold if you won, have a winning or losing streak, and if you have gold saved you also collect interest. Apart from heroes you can also spend your gold on xp for your player level, which determines how many heroes you can take into battle, or on rerolls, which gives you a new selection of heroes to buy. During battle players do absolutely nothing, there isn’t even chat, and so this is a multiplayer game in which players don’t interact with each other. It’s the least toxic multiplayer game I know. :)

DotA Underlords can be played not only against other players, but also against bots. Which is great for a mobile version of the game, because otherwise it is difficult to interrupt a half-hour game. DotA Underlords even allows you to gain player status xp and levels, which are purely cosmetic, while playing against the highest level of bots without the pause function. For your first games I’d recommend that pause function, because the game is rather complex, and the normal timer assumes you already know what all the heroes do.

Although the different versions of auto battlers have different sets of heroes, the game rules are nearly identical. There are minor variations on drafting heroes, but otherwise each game uses the exact same formulas for earning gold and xp, and the same heroes tier structure. So if you learned how to play one of them, you know how to play them all, you just would need to learn a new set of heroes. I guess most people will just stick to a single auto battler.

If you play without the pause function, which is the only way to gain player status, you have a limited time between rounds to make decisions. But this is in no way a twitchy game, and if that is still too fast for you, the paused version is as much fun. So this is really a strategy game, and well suited for older players with slower reflexes. Furthermore every game starts at zero, there is no “progress” carried over from previous games, so you don’t need to worry that you’ll never catch up to the people that started earlier than you. But the games have a lot of variety due to the chance involved in what heroes are offered to you, and making the best mix of heroes with their synergies determines the winner. So the battles aren’t always the same, and that keeps the game interesting.

I have no idea how the game companies will ultimately make money with these auto battlers. DotA Underlords is still in “pre-season” and not only is free to play, but there isn’t even a shop yet. I assume at some point you will be able to buy cosmetic stuff. So this is safe for you to try out, at least for your money, not your time. :)

The game of “Real Life” is another open world game, with great graphics but sometimes somewhat grindy gameplay. But I have been fortunate and/or skilled enough in “Real Life” to reach the stage where money isn’t a constant worry anymore. People still disagree whether that is a win condition. In any case it teaches you that in fact the problems in life that you can solve by throwing a bit of money at them are in fact the easier ones. So I decided to solve my Zelda problem with a bit of money, and just bought the game again, this time the downloadable version instead of the physical cartridge. The Switch was playing nice, and kept the download reasonable, probably because the game was already installed from cartridge.

So now I started playing Breath of the Wild again, starting over from the beginning. My plan is to follow the main story only as far as needed to get the main abilities and then to concentrate on exploring, gathering, and crafting. For example I never got all the Korok seeds in my first playthrough. There is obviously a risk that I get bored again of the game in a few days and wasted 70 Euro, but right now I don’t mind.

World of Tanks, which I have mostly been playing this year, has more or less infinite replayability. Even if you end up with the same tank on the same map, the actions of the other 29 players in the battle won’t be the same, so the battle will be different. The replayability of a game like Zelda is a lot more limited, because it is a game of exploration and discovery. Once you have discovered something unexpected, like drawing a bow next to a fire and discovering that this turns your regular arrows into fire arrows, you can’t unring that bell. On the next playthrough you will still know this, and be unable to have another “wow, discovery!” moment. The second playthrough of Zelda is necessarily much less exciting than the first. If I want to recreate those moments, I either need to wait for Breath of the Wild 2, or play a completely different open world exploration game, and then I can’t think of one as good as Zelda. Still I’d probably have more fun playing one of the newer Assassin’s Creed games that I haven’t played yet rather than playing Breath of the Wild again.

The great thing about Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is that a) you can go anywhere you want due to the climbing mechanic, and then b) there will be something there to discover. Most other open world games either have lots of areas you can’t go to, blocked of by visible or invisible walls, and/or you can get to the top of the mountain and find that there is nothing interesting there. In Zelda there would be at least a small riddle up there that rewards you with a seed, used to enlarge your inventory. I haven’t really found another game since Zelda that does this as well.

So I have been trying Xenoblade Chronicles 2 on the Switch. I read reviews about it complaining about the combat, but as one of the main complaints was that combat was slow and not as “real time” reaction based as it seems, I thought this would be the game for me. I prefer turn-based combat anyway. Unfortunately it turns out that even I don’t like the combat system in this game. Not because it is too slow, or too complex, I am fine with that. But because it doesn’t give you very good feedback about what is happening. I am in chapter 3 now, so I have a full party of three characters, each one with at least one “blade” sidekick. But of those 6 characters fighting, I control only one, while the other 5 do their own thing on auto-pilot. Yeah, I can launch their main ability in order to build a blade combo, but that is all I can control of the other characters. So I am playing on the small Switch screen, there are 6 of my characters fighting X enemy characters, and I barely have a clue about what is going on. They usually win, but it feels as if they also would have won if I had gone for a cup of coffee instead of pressing buttons. That is not very satisfying.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is certainly a nice JRPG with an interesting world and story, fun characters, and lots of cinematic highlights. But to me it feels way too passive, with me having no control, neither in combat nor in the story. There are no dialogue choices, the story is completely on rails. There is no open world, not much exploration, and as I said not much control in combat. I could certainly occupy myself for many hours just playing through the story or doing some grinding (salvaging or combat). But I feel that I could have more fun with another game. I just need to find the right one.

P.S. I bought a transport case for the Switch that comes with lots of little pockets for the little game cartridges that the Switch uses. But I wasn’t very thorough filling those pockets and left Legend of Zelda - Breath of the Wild at home, having already “finished” it. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 made me want to play Zelda instead, too bad I didn’t bring it.

I have recently finished Out of the Abyss, a D&D campaign playing in the Underdark. Sunless Sea imagines a Victorian London having sunk into something very much like the Underdark, or rather the Darklake. There is a lot of fun to be had exploring this weird setting. Every new harbor you find has new stories to tell. Often you need to transport things from A to B in order to advance these stories, which gives you some motivation for your ship travel. At the start of the game you can set yoursellf a story goal, e.g. find and bury the bones of your father, and you “win” by fulfilling this goal and retiring.

I don’t know how many more hours it would take for me to win the game, because I already got tired of constantly losing it. Sunless Sea is designed to be lost. It is a survival game in which you can easily run out of fuel, food, crew, or hull strength, and die. You can then pass on some of your stuff to your next character, but even if you have a son and made a will, your death is a huge setback. You can die a lot less by save scumming (in the default mode you only get the autosave, but you can switch to manual saving). But even if you do that, the game remains very tough and progress is very slow. If you take enough fuel and supplies for a long journey, you have very little cargo space left. While trading goods between ports is possible, profits are slim. It takes forever to get enough money for a better ship, and even then you are still stuck with a small cargo space, as the ships with more space are unaffordably expensive.

But the fundamental design flaw in Sunless Sea is that story-based exploration and survival doesn’t mix well. I understand the appeal of rogue-likes and survival games, in which every new game starts in a new, random environment. That isn’t the case in Sunless Sea; there is some minor rearrangement of the tiles that constitute the map, but the stories and characters remain the same. Your umpteenth captain is going to again transport the same tomb-colonist to the city just to the north of London, starting the same story about rescuing her father for the umpteenth time. Needless to say that gets old pretty fast.

So I am avoiding death through save scumming now. I have a pretty good fighting ship, well equipped and with a full set of officers now. I am well advanced in the story about recovering my father’s bones. I have explored most of the map and know what I must do to finish that story. But I won’t. Because once you visited most places and have heard the initial stories, and understood the gameplay well, “winning” the game is just a tedious exercise of sailing your ship all over the map for many long hours to gather all the required items to advance the story. The game simply runs out of fun long before you reach the win condition.

Overall I had enough hours of fun with Sunless Sea to not regret the purchase price. But I am not yet sure whether I want to buy the successor, Sunless Skies. I really likes the world of Sunless Sea, but found the gameplay to be underwhelming in the long run.

Most players of World of Tanks use the XVM mod, either as standalone or as part of a modpack. The mod requires you to log into the XVM site at least once every two weeks, at which point it updates your statistics. In exchange you get to see in the game the statistics of the other players. That is very helpful information, as it gives you a better idea how dangerous an enemy tank is. No, it doesn't really measure "skill", but a mix of skill and gear in past games. But that still means that the player marked as "tomato" red probably is overall less dangerous than the "unicum" purple player.

However that color coding of players leads to lots of insults flying towards the "tomatoes". Thus players not just want to get better at the game, they want to get better displayed stats. Which is not the same thing, as stats can be padded. And one of the most effective ways to pad stats is to play well equipped tanks with good crews at lower tiers, where many enemy tanks will have less good equipment and crew.

The overall result is what is called "seal clubbing", lots of more experienced players in low tier games racking up lots of kills against new players. That seriously discourages new players from continuing to play, which is the main reason World of Tanks is in decline. Nobody wants to be a noob forever, but leaving noob status requires the constant influx of new noobs, so yesterday's noob can now feel superior to somebody. Scare away the new players and the whole edifice crumbles slowly over time: The least good players leave in frustration, making the next better strata of players into the new permanent victims, until they leave as well. And so on.

What is really remarkable in World of Tanks is that the game company itself uses much better scoring systems. Everything in the game is designed to drive you towards higher tiers. If XVM wouldn't exist, seal clubbing wouldn't make much sense as it doesn't really give you much progress. It is player-designed formulas for WN8 "skill measure" that drives players to ruin the games for new players. If the "skill measure" formula would count against what tier of tank you dealt damage instead of treating all damage equally, the picture would look a lot different. And Wargaming would have an actual chance to attract new players into World of Tanks.

In the previous session the group had gathered all the ingredients to produce the dark heart, the magical object that would act as a focus for a ritual to summon all demon lords in the Underdark to the same location. They were only missing the demon summoning grimoire of Gromph Baenre, the drow archmage who had initially summoned the demon lords from the abyss. And this book was in a highly guarded location in Menzoberranzan, the capital city of the drow. At the same time they were told to leave the dark heart there.

Getting to Menzoberranzan was easy with the help of a tunnel the exiled drow archmage Vizeran had built over the years. But it was still a trip of several days. The group was accompanied by Vizeran's apprentice, Grin Ousstyl. And as they approached their destination it became obvious that Grin had a problem. So they questioned him and found out that Vizeran had lied to them: The dark heart could be placed anywhere, not just in Menzoberranzan. And Grin really would prefer if his hometown wasn't further destroyed by rampaging demon lords. However only Arkoy the cleric didn't want the demon lords to destroy Menzoberranzan, the rest of the group was quite okay with that.

In Menzoberranzan the group encountered Jarlaxle Baenre, head of the Bregan D'Aerthe, the drow spy and assassin organization. The group managed to persuade him to help them getting into the archmage's tower, as Jarlaxle also wanted to get rid of the demon lords. Of course they didn't tell him that they planned the final confrontation to happen in Menzoberranzan. With some very lucky rolls they actually got away with lying to him.

In the tower they overcame some obstacles like guardians and a magical maze to arrive in the inner sanctum. They found a female drow there, trapped in a magical circle, and decided not to free her (good choice, as she was a shapechanging demon). The got the book, and tried to get out of the city again. But as they had placed the dark heart in the city, Grin now decided to betray them to avoid the summoning of the demon lords in Menzoberranzan. But they killed Grin and a drow patrol, and then escaped.

So the rest of the plan went as foreseen: They got the book back to Vizeran, they went back to Menzoberranzan, Vizeran summoned all the demon lords, and the demon lords started fighting each other. At the end only Demogorgon was left. That started the climax of the campaign, the final fight: A level 13 group of 5 players against Demogorgon, challenge rating 26.

Playing Demogorgon as intelligent adversary, at the start of the fight I got the group good: I used Demogorgon's power to create an illusory duplicate of himself with the project image spell, and the group wasted their alpha strike on this double. Then the fight began for real, and it was tough, but not quite as tough as I had thought it would be. It took a lot of rounds, but nobody died. Demogorgon at several occasions used his dispel magic spell to remove spell effects cast by the group. For narrative purposes I described that as him corrupting the spell effect: The grasping vines the ranger had cast to hold him turned into another tentacle, the moonbeam turned into a moon shadow. The corruption didn't do anything else than negating the effect, just like dispel magic, but made it more interesting. After a long fight they brought down Demogorgon, and the campaign ended.

While I am very happy to have played this campaign to the end, I must say that Dungeons & Dragons after 5 editions still fails to work very well at high levels. Demogorgon was nearly too easy for a level 13 group, and this is one of the strongest enemies available in the Monster Manual. The only thing these strong enemies achieve is making the fights longer, not necessarily more challenging. And with the group that strong, it is nearly impossible to challenge them anymore with just regular monster fights in a typical dungeon. "You open the door and encounter 3 ancient black dragons" doesn't really work from a story point of view, and the lesser monsters pose no sufficient challenge.

I will play a shortened 5E version of the Zeitgeist campaign with this group next, and then probably Curse of Strahd. Neither of these will go beyond level 10.