Age of Conan Feats

I've talked before on the differences between skill and level based games and how a mix of the two systems seems to be the best for most MMOs. Pure skill based character progression is often overly complex and unfriendly to new players. Plus players tend to choose common skill builds anyways which basically represent a "class". Level based character progression on the other hand is very linear, allows no differentiation of abilities, and tends to get boring. World of Warcraft uses it's very popular talent system to introduce some of the benefits of a skill system into the game. Its not the first time its been done before but the popularity of WoW has made it more common.

Some like Lord of the Rings allow skills to be randomly unlocked and equipped by completing objectives while others like Everquest 2 decided to follow a tree format. Age of Conan also seems to be following the tree format but is much closer to the talent system used by World of Warcraft. Some might find this copying to be distasteful but I think most players will like the familiarity between the skill systems. Just a general browsing through the different Feats trees make it apparent that they allow players the same type of specialization available in World of Warcraft.

The trick will be if Feats comes with the same penalties as the talent system in World of Warcraft. Complaints about the high cost of changing talents are always present and often force certain classes to pay large amounts of gold to play different parts of the game. In fact some people think the way the game is balanced forces players to use the talent trees to overspecialize. Recent rumblings at Blizzard have hinted at some changes to this problem like making protection warriors able to do more damage. Still you have to wonder if Funcom blindly copied they problems with the talent system along with the benefits. Anyways we won't know for sure until players start hitting the max level and are able to use all the points in the Feat system.

Age of Conan Feat Calculator Tool

http://feats.goonheim.com/

PvP organization and Age of Conan

When developers decide to make a good size portion of their game devoted to PvP there are a couple of key decisions that control the direction it takes. The first decision is about the scope of PvP in the game. Some games that mostly want to focus on raiding have almost no PvP except for small areas that allow players who enter to attack one another. Very boring but sometimes that's all you need, like in the case of classic Everquest. Other games like EvE Online go the opposite route and have large portions of their world available for PvP combat. Still others restrict player combat to instances designed to enforce rule sets on players. Both World of Warcraft and City of Heroes favor systems like this which are often considered the most fair if not the most exciting.

But while the scope decides the type of audience a game will attract the major decision that makes or breaks a game is how the PvP is organized. Developers in the past have chosen to ally players by either guilds, factions, or just to have a free for all rule set. All three are viable and can be fun under certain circumstances. The problems come about when they don't mix well with the scope of PvP in the game. Just to give one example imagine a MMO where the only PvP took place in a few open areas with no rules or rewards. It doesn't really make sense to place faction or guild requirements on players in this game and doing so would just hamstring what little PvP existed. There are other match ups between scope and organization that make even worse sense.

Probably one of the worst things a game can do is to drop players into a MMO with massive open world PvP and no means to ally themselves with anyone. Luckily, Funcom isn't stupid and they made it so players can align with guilds or even play on a carebear server. The problem I see is that a lot of people coming from World of Warcraft are going to think they know what it's like to play on a PvP server. However, open world PvP is very different in a faction based game compared to a free for All one. And while technically Age of Conan is going to be organized around guilds I don't this will really come into effect until the later levels.

I think initially we are going to have a lot of players trying out the PvP servers and then discovering how much having factions softened the blow in World of Warcraft. We'll probably start off with something that looks a lot like Ultima Online back when it only had the PvP shard. Eventually as guilds establish themselves I expect the greifing to become less common place and the game to resemble EvE Online in some ways. However, I think Age of Conan is always going to have some problems that are unique to itself. The biggest one is going to be chat spam I bet since the game has avatar based combat and no factions to restriction communication. Even the regular servers are going to have border kingdoms and capture the flag mini games which will be sure to spawn some trash talking.

I've had cases before in World of Warcraft where I had players from the opposing faction make an alt so they could throw insults at me after a battleground. It was annoying but I could easily use a command and ignore them. In Age of Conan I wonder if the ignore list will be large enough. I expect every gank to be accompanied by a tell insulting my skill and questioning my sexual orientation. I'm sure over time these types of people will be ostracized but they are going to do a lot of damage to player morale in the beginning. The non PvP servers should be less affected but are still going to have the same basic problem.

So why play on a PvP server in Age of Conan if it’s going to be that insulting and ganktastic? Well for some people the opportunities to be a griefer are going to draw them to those servers. Others like myself are probably used to the sense of excitement and the way small scale battles randomly pop up on PvP servers. It's not for everyone and that's why Funcom included normal servers so they didn't alienate everyone. I just want to make it clear that the choice of whether to play on a PvP or Normal server is going to have much more of an impact in Age of Conan then other games.

Will Raiding in WotLK end Guild Hopping?

Well Blizzard had been hearing about some of the early hype for Age of Conan and thought this might be a good time to remind people that they also have a new game coming out soon. This was the flood of information that we were waiting on. Very few details had been given about the expansion before this point and I had theorized in an earlier post that Blizzard was probably saving a couple of big selling points. I was expecting these revelations during a press event like Blizzcon or the Paris Invitational but obviously Blizzard feels that even the unproven Age of Conan might be able to steal some customers before the expansion is ready. This unfortunately hints that it might be awhile before Wraith of the Lich King releases but at least we now know a bit more about the game.

The overall news is very exciting and contained information about death knights, zones, and instances in Wrath of the Lich King. If you want to know all the details then I suggest looking at http://www.wowinsider.com/ which went through a frenzy of posts last Friday (May 9th). I was mostly interested in the information related to Blizzard opening up raid instances to more casual players. It hints that maybe they have actually been listening to us when we talk about how much we dislike not being able to see all the raid content. One of the constant problems I have with World of Warcraft was that the end game was really ruined for casual guilds because of guild hopping. There are feeder guilds which do Karazhan and Gruul and they almost never progress to the next tier because they are constantly losing players to the higher end guilds.

It seems every guild I've been in during the Burning Crusade has either been forced to merge or break up because of guild hopping. Most guilds that progressed through the Karazhan/Gruul hump were those that required raid attendance and were less "fair" on their loot distribution. This usually meant main tanks and people with perfect attendance had priority over other players despite any sort of DKP system. I consider this a fair description of a hardcore guild and I had enough of that kind of shenanigans back in the days of Everquest. When guilds go hardcore they tend to leave the people with less time behind and start recruiting other players who want to progress and have time to spare. This is what is responsible for guild hopping and it really prevents World of Warcraft from having a casual PvE end game.

That's why the changes to raiding in Wrath of the Lich King are going to have such an impact. I'll go ahead and list the ones I'm talking about just in case this is the first you've heard about them.

1) Raid Dungeons will have a 10-man and 25-man setting with different lockout timers
2) The 10-man loot tables will be a tier below the 25-man loot tables
3) A new token system like Badges of Justice will also be used

The first thing to notice is the that the different timers between the 10-man and 25-man versions should allow guilds to more easily help new members gear themselves up. Plus players will be able to gain valuable experience in the 10-man version which will help when the entire guild tries out the larger version. There still might be problems with different 10-man "teams" in a guild having different success rates. In Karazhan this was a major source of guild hopping since there was often a single A team which could clear the zone with no problems while the guild as a whole was unable to defeat Gruul. This new system should make it easier for a guild to break the 25-man barrier since the 10-man version can basically be used as training.

The loot tables also seem fair with the 10-man version being a tier below the 25-man ones. This should also help in situations where a guild has moved onto a new dungeon but you are still missing an item you really wanted. You can simply do the 10-man version of the new raid dungeon to complete your set. I'm not sure if the loot tables for the 10-man versions are exact copies of the previous 25-man instance but it would make sense. I'm sure the progression will look something like this.

Probably Loot Progression

Raid Instance1(10-man): Loot Table 1 (5-man Heroic Epics)
Raid Instance1(25-man): Loot Table 2 (Tier 1)
Raid Instance2(10-man): Loot Table 2 (Tier 1)
Raid Instance2(25-man): Loot Table 3 (Tier 2)

It’s also nice to see the returning of the token system since Badges of Justice have really kept the instances alive in the Burning Crusade. Without Heroics and Badges of Justice I'm sure almost no one would be running the single group instances anymore. It will be interesting to see how they decide to award tokens in Wrath of the Lich King. It’s almost guaranteed that the 10-man versions will award less than the 25-man versions. I would expect a single token from bosses in a 10-man instance versus two tokens from bosses in the corresponding 25-man version. Still what will Blizzard do about the higher end raid instances? Will the 10-man version of the highest tier raid instance drop less tokens then the beginner 25-man raid instance? It may be a minor point but small guilds might depend on token gear to fill out gear gaps before they jump to the next 10 man instance.

Despite minor details like how tokens are awarded the majority of these raid changes are going to make it much easier for guilds to progress through content without having to impose "job like" restrictions on their members. If Blizzard does a very good job of balancing the content it should even be possible for small guilds of 15-20 to progress through all of the raid content just by doing the 10-man raid instances. Some have reservations about this and think it might affect the number of people who run the 25-man versions but in general I think it's just going to enable casual guilds to actually see all of the content in the game. It's often been said that most people guild hop just to see new content and only mildly care about gear upgrades. If this is true then these changes should do a good job of eliminating guild instability in World of Warcraft.

Can Age of Conan survive is Open Beta?

Age of Conan really dropped the ball on its open beta through Fileplanet. While there had been rumors about the game's performance being spotty on some computers, it wasn't really confirmed until last weekend. It's a shame since the game has some interesting game design behind combat and skill training. None of that is going to produce any positive buzz though if 10% of the testers are crashing every hour. Just by the nature of the internet the portion of players who did have problems are going to get their experience posted about the most.

Now Funcom has admitted they pushed some patches right before the beta which made the client unstable and caused some poor performance. They have assured gamers that the problem will be better by launch but of course this sounds like the same crap every developer has said when pushing out an unfinished product. Everyone says that World of Warcraft has set new standards for launching a MMO but in my experience most games still release unfinished. I mean can you really call it an industry standard if no one follows it?

It's not that Age of Conan is the next Vanguard which some gamers are starting to say on a lot of forums. I beta tested Vanguard before release and in general it was much less of a finished product then Age of Conan. Also I don't think Funcom is being forced to release early because of monetary concerns. The more likely scenario is that they are releasing early to take advantage of Warhammer pushing back their release date. It’s not like Sigil where they are desperate to raise funds by releasing with a ton of bugs.

Age of Conan is going to be worked on and patched by its development team at a decent rate even after launch. I don't expect mass firings if they don't sell 400k boxes or to end up in the SOE all-access pass graveyard. I do expect them to get about 300,000 initial players which will slowly increase as more time without Wraith of the Lich King and Warhammer passes. I thought that Season 4 being timed around Age of Conan's launch might help prevent some players from switching games. But I think Blizzard has made some recent changes to Season 4 which is going to make PvP less popular in the game.

I really think that Age of Conan has been handed a very opportune time to release. Most of its competition only has old content at the moment and Warhammer/WoW seem content to duke it out later in the year. While their game play is unfamiliar I don't think it’s enough to alienate players unless it's accompanied by bad game performance. The intensive button hitting to execute combos is going to appeal to most casual players I think. Its might cause some problems with raiders and other players who stay on for long periods of time but you can expect macros to be created to help alleviate the problem.

As long as Age of Conan can keep their servers up on launch day then I fully expect them to pull off a successful MMO. I pre-ordered it myself and I'll probably be playing as soon as I can login despite some so-so reviews about the open beta. The one thing about Vanguard was that a lot of people broke the NDA to scream "stay away". I mean people were breaking the NDA so often that it made the Warhammer beta look airtight. This stands out from Age of Conan where most of the so-so reviews for it have been based on the open beta/pvp weekend. This probably means that the people in closed beta still care about not getting banned for breaking the NDA. This seems like a good sign to me and I'm keeping the pre-order. If I'm wrong then I'm sure we'll hear about it from around 5 billion blogs on May 17th.

Summary: Yes

Updated Arena Rating System

Back in 2006 I wrote a post on the Arena Rating System which still gets linked to all over the place. It's been driving me crazy that people might be reading a 2 year old post to get current information about the constantly changing arenas. I finally found the time and sat down and rewrote the post using the most current information I could find. I promise not to make a habit fo reposting.

http://relmstein.blogspot.com/2006/09/arena-rating-system.html

Team Rating
The initial arena system was based on the ELO chess system where teams had a rating that changed depending on the toughness of their opponents. I'll leave the basic explanation of team ratings the same since they haven't changed that much. Team ratings are still primarly how arenas points are rewarded and how team's are matched up against each other. Players who have used holes in the arena system or switched between a lot of different teams will find that their personal rating is used instead of their team rating.

example:
Lets have team A and team B who meet in the arenas. Team B has a moderately higher score then Team A which means their odds of winning are calculated as being higher for the match. This means that Team B's rating will decrease more if they lose and increase less if they win. Team A's rating on the other hand will do the opposite. There is also an arbitrary number in the formula which decides the maximize number of points lost or won for the match. I'm using the number 30 but honestly this number probably changes based on the rating difference between teams.

Team A's Current Score: 1500pt
Team A's Chance of Winning: 1500 / (1500 + 1580) = .48701

Team B's Current Score: 1580pt
Team B's Chance of Winning: 1580 / (1500 + 1580) = .51298

Now Lets say Team A won the battle then
Team A's New Score: 1500 + (30*(1-.48701)) = 1500 + 15.39 = 1516
Team B's New Score: 1580 + (30*(0-.51298)) = 1580 + -15.39 = 1566

Now Lets say Team B won the battle then
Team A's New Score: 1500 + (30*(0-.48701)) = 1500 + -14.61 = 1485
Team B's New Score: 1580 + (30*(1-.51298)) = 1580 + 14.61 = 1595

Personal Rating
Personal Rating works just like a seperate version of the Team Rating for each player who actually participated in the match. Blizzard put Personal Rating requirements on certain rewards because highly rated arena teams were selling spots to people who wanted to quickly gain points. Each player actually has a Personal Rating for each of the arena brackets in the game. Thus a person could have a very high 2v2 personal rating and an average one in the 3v3 and 5v5 brackets. If a player switches teams then their personal rating for that bracket is set back to 1500.

New rules for Season 4 (May 2008) actually use the personal rating for matching and point rewards over the team rating.

- If a character’s personal rating is more than 150 points below the team rating, they will earn points based on their personal rating instead of the team rating.
- If the average personal rating of the players queuing for a game is more than 150 points below the team’s rating, the team will be queued against an opponent matching or similar to the average personal rating.

Awarding Points
Blizzard has an arena calculator on their wowarmory.com website which can be used to tell how many points your team will earn with your current rating. Only teams that have played more then ten games that week will be awarded points. Also only players on that team that have participated in at least 30% of the matches will get points.


Exploits being Addressed in Season 4

Smurfing
Smurfing is the practice of creating smurf teams by taking a well equiped arena player and putting them on a team with a low rating. These players then artificially inflate the rating of the team and then switch back to their main team. They then use certain methods to make sure they play their smurf team which throws the match. The method works especially well in the 3v3 bracket which is easier to control the matching then the 2v2 bracket and doesn't require as many players as the 5v5 bracket. The new changes for awarding points based on personal rating will of course penalize teams that have players that frequently change teams.

Arena Scouting
Also Blizzard is making a change to arena scouting which is commonly used to make sure their opponents are a smurf team instead of a serious challenger. This method is also used in Win Trading where teams make aggreements to lose a match against a certain opponents. In general Arena Scouting is used at low population times when very few teams are in the queue. This allows arena teams to be fairly certain if both their queues pop at the same time that they are going to be matched together. If one team's queue pops before another then they re-queue.

- "If a team does not enter an arena match that is starting they will lose points equal to the amount that would have been deducted if they had played and lost."

Combat Pacing and Raiding

I've recently been suffering from a bout of ennui with World of Warcraft brought on by the direction the game has taken recently. I will probably organize my thoughts into a post eventually but at the moment I'm just going to say I've been playing other games more often. One of the games I picked back up on a temporary basis was the original Everquest which was always fun in that "OMG, I don't want to die kind of way". It’s changed a bit though and been made very solo friendly at the early levels since it’s pretty difficult to find a group. Another new feature is the addition of newbie armors quests which help jump starting your gear progression. In fact about the only thing which hasn't changed in the game is the combat pacing which is still much slower compared to modern MMOs.

While leveling in the early teens I could often pull a mob to me and turn my auto attack on and walk away from my keyboard. I usually had time to get a drink from the kitchen, use the restroom, and do my taxes before my target died. I exaggerate a bit but it’s still clear that Everquest was made during a time when time sinks were common and the term "casual player" had yet to be coined. There's a certain bit of charm in playing an old fashion game like this and it reminds me a lot of my experience replaying NES classics like Zelda, Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. While the graphics in these games are poor they tend to highlight the evolution of the game design now used in most MMOs.

In the case of Everquest it has made me look at where we might be going with combat pacing in the future. World of Warcraft has always been a much faster game then Everquest and this becomes especially apparent in raids. An experienced raid team knows exactly how to maximize damage/healing and is lightning fast on the instant abilities. In fact I think the global cool down is the only limiting factor for some raiding guilds. This has always made it hard to balance raid content for World of Warcraft. Back in the 40-player raids it became apparent that most encounters were doable as long as at least 25-30 people knew what they were doing. The rest could be inexperience players or even paying customers who bought their raid spot.

I believe Blizzard realized that this was a common occurrence and that it allowed hardcore raiders who could field 40 well experienced players to burn through new raid content. Most guilds though have to worry about fielding new players and teaching them the basics of how their class works in groups. In Everquest not only was the pacing slower so less split second decisions were needed but players learned group mechanics early on. Blizzard tried balancing the last couple of raid zones before the expansion towards having 40 experienced raiders. It was a disaster. Most guilds couldn't even beat the first boss and the number of players who saw the content was minimal.

I think this hints that bad things might be awaiting games that are even faster pace than World of Warcraft. Trying to balance encounters for large raids is going to be impossible when reactions times become more and more important. One of the things I'm looking forward to is being able to run new dungeons in Age of Conan. However, I wonder about the button mashing the game requires for most melee classes. If they follow the same trend as most MMOs then are they going to require their raids to clear through trash before fighting bosses. What happens when your main tank has pressed right, front, and left 12,000 times before even the first boss fight?

Exploring Tabula Rasa and looking through the beta material for Age of Conan has really made me doubt that old raid formulas can work for these faster paced games. I think PvE material can be introduced but it’s going to have to be structured completely differently then what we seen before. I expect ideas and features commonly used in PvP areas like battlegrounds, arenas, and realm combat to start showing up in raid content. People with different skill levels want different levels of challenge and static raid content just doesn't work. It forces developers to focus on the most skilled raiders to balance content and that is going to alienate the mostly casual player base that exists in MMOs nowadays.

In the future I wouldn't be surprised to see games that allowed players to set the difficultly level of a raid zone. This could be something as simple as a "Heroic" setting or even a system that automatically increased mob difficulty based on a guild rating. I'm also sure that new ideas will arise which better match fast combat to large scale PvE content. I don't really see the market moving backwards to slower combat since it seems to go hand and hand with increased downtime. While MMO players almost never agree on a subject, there's a common belief that we're better off without downtime or time sinks.

Color and Art in MMOs

I've said before that I'm not really a big fan of games that try to portray realistic avatars instead of sticking with a more stylized look. In general I think there's less imagination in trying to make fantasy look as "real" as possible. Plus all of this hyper realism tends to knock up the minimum requirements for a game. This won't stop me trying from trying Age of Conan and I've played other games with similar art styles. In Lord of the Rings I never really played attention to my avatar and kind of just thought he looked like an average looking guy. Instead what I really remember about the game were some of the fantastic landscapes especially the hobbit homes in the Shire.

The reason I bring this topic back up again was that I recently stumbled across Samurai Jack playing on late night television. I had forgotten how stylistic and quite frankly beautiful some of the artwork in that series was. It’s funny but if you check the Amazon reviews for Samurai Jack DVDs most of the one star reviews come from people complaining about the simple artwork and characters. I remember very similar complaints about World of Warcraft when it first came out around the same time as Everquest 2.

It seems like a lot of the new MMOs have stuck with copying the UI and features of World of Warcraft but really ignored the style of artwork as a reason for its success. I'm not saying everything should try and look like Warhammer/World of Warcraft. But there are a lot of examples of imaginative and simple artwork like that used in Samurai Jack which could easily be translated into 3D models. Here's a picture of a city entrance in one episode of the show I found online.

Notice how everything is laid out simple but with enough detail to make it look interesting. It kind of reminds of the entrance to Stormwind.

Anyways I just hope this current generation of MMOs realize that not everything has to look realistic. I know we're in a PvP trend and games want to show a war like atmosphere but that doesn't mean everything has to be dull green and brown. I thought Lord of the Rings was a little too in love with earthen tones and it's seemed to spread to the other games this year. In World of Warcraft they had some bombastic use of color like purple in Ashenvale or red in Azshara but it gave the zones some personality. I guess I'm hoping that at least one of the games will stand out with its art so that it’s easily identified by just a screenshot.