The Many Relms of Relmstein

Subscription based games getting greedy with additional fees/services

2011-06-16T05:00:00.000-07:00

MMOs have enjoyed a great advantage over other types PC games during the last decade. As piracy became easier and sales numbers started to fall, game developers started to put less emphasis on the PC market. A lot of game studios decided to pay licensing fees to the major consoles and the aisle at Best Buy for PC games shrunk. However, if you look at that last aisle of PC games you'll notice that a good portion of the remaining ones belong to either the FPS or MMO genre. Both genres depend on rich multi-player environments to supplement the main game play and this keeps players engaged. Traditionally, MMOs was the only genre that charged monthly for this feature, but first person shooters are starting to change as they chase a "service" model.

Activision has been in the gaming news a lot because of their plan to add a subscription service onto the Call of Duty franchise. They don't have the complete list of neat features you get compared to the normal version yet, but they seem to be following in Blizzard's footsteps. Namely, a lot of mobile applications that give you access to stats and parts of the game while offline. Call of Duty may not have an auction house, but I'm sure Activision can find something similarly vital that would benefit from mobile access. I'm not exactly a fan of this model, but it does seem to be in vogue with content companies lately. Hulu even uses it to sell their Hulu Plus subscription service.

So why are game companies so in love with switching everything over to a service model? Cause it's much more profitable. I'll give you an example. Most cable providers offer phone service which they try to sneak into cable television packages. In general it costs about 30$ a month to use. However, anyone with some Internet know-how could use an alternative voip product like Google Voice, Skype, or hell even Magic Jack and pay considerably less. However, cable companies are the gate keepers in this scenario and this gives them a lot of power to push/advertise their service. It's like how EverQuest used to bug you to buy stuff whenever you logged into the game. It's the core reason why some people want Net Neutrality. It certainly doesn't take a genius to calculate how much an overpriced service sold to a captive audience can make, just look at the cost of traditional text messages.

The one reason I was always been a fan of the plain old subscription model for MMOs was that I felt it was easier to keep track of costs. I know how nickle and dimeing works since I grew up when most malls still had arcades. You've never seen money disappear so fast. This has kind of influenced me away from Free2Play games, but I'm starting to change my mind. Subscription MMO's are getting to be almost as bad as Free2Play games with World of Warcraft leading the pack. Services to move/rename/faction change your characters? Planned services to allow cross server grouping with friends? Most of these services just allow you to get around artificial barriers put in place by the game developers in the first place. No different from item shops in Free2Play games which sell teleports or double experience potions. Worse even since they already have you on the hook for the base subscription fee.

It's enough to make me really look forward to a MMO like Guild Wars 2 which will just has the flat cost of the box. How old fashion!!! I always thought the subscription model wouldn't influence game design like item shops do in Free2Play games. However, it's starting to look like that's becoming less true. Maybe in time for the next WoW expansion they can have an gold membership elite plus service that gives your priority access to the instance queues. It sounds cynical and far fetched, but it wouldn't surprise me. Anyways, I'm going to try out Spiral Knights on Steam and hopefully learn to appreciate something that doesn't try to hide the nickle and dimeing.

Crafting Companions for Success

2011-06-13T16:25:00.000-07:00

I've written several posts in the past about my love for crafting systems. One of the main reasons I tried out Lego Universe was that I was hoping to finally see user generated content play a major part in a MMO. Alas, I was disappointed that the "time to penis" caused the removal/suspension of this core feature. It seems like a lot of gaming companies have decided to just give up on trying to integrated user generated content with any core game mechanics. Sure you see a lot of support for user interface add-ons, but these are downloaded through third party sites. This is probably the main reason they are allowed since it protects game companies from potential lawsuits and bad PR incidents.

Still, its obvious that crafting systems in most games need improvement. The gather resources and click "combine" model has been relatively unchanged since the early days of the genre. It's boring, time consuming and prevents us from getting to the action (killing bad guys). Luckily, I have seen a couple new games trying to address these issues. In fact, both Diablo 3 and The Old Republic seem to trying to combine crafting with a type of NPC training mini game. Think of it as the pokemon method of crafting where you have to train your NPC so he becomes stronger and can make you better stuff. Diablo 3 even increases the shop size of your crafting companion as you level him up on a diet of gold and salvaged loot.

The Old Republic is going even further by allowing your crafting companion to fight with you during the early part of the game. Since his fighting prowness doesn't scale much as you level you probably won't group with him in the later levels. Insead you get to assign him missions, which he automatically completes over time. It looks to be similar to the time based training in EVE Online. You assign one of your NPC's a gathering mission and the next time you log in he presents you with the materials. I'm believe this type of crafting system should help counteract a lot of the gold sellers who depend on resource gathering bots. On the other hand the video describing the system hints that it takes a decent amount of time to make items.

This might not be too much of a problem if the times aren't too long. After all you can be out running instances while your NPC is slaving away putting together your new light sabre. I guess it would only be annoying in cases where you got a rare item and wanted to turn it into a bad ass piece of equipment right away. Then again patience is a virtue and it's not like you have to personally hit combine 10,000 times to make it. If anyone ever crafting in EverQuest or Ultimate Online you know what I'm talking about. Anyways this idea of a crafting companion looks pretty fleshed in the Old Republic and halfway decent in Diablo 3. I hope this is the start of designers putting a little more effort into MMO crafting systems.

2011 Status Update

2011-06-10T23:29:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in quite awhile as most of my free time has been destroyed by a combination of work and a decreasing ability to stay up past midnight. Once again, it came down to either writing about MMOs or getting to play them. I have been able to play a few new games since the last time I wrote including: Lego Universe, Cataclysm, and even some Rift. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to experience much of the raid content in these games, so my perspective is mostly from a single group.

Lego Universe was a lot of fun and I got to try it out in beta right before they went live. Net Devil had some really great ideas for the game, but the time to penis was a big issue for them. Part of the appeal of the game was supposed to be about being able to show off your giant Lego structures. Well that feature was pretty much disabled from the time I started playing. Some people were talking in the forums about giant phallic towers complete with fountains on top that lead to the ban on visiting other people's architecture. Other then that the game was like a simplified version of Legend of Zelda with some mini games thrown in. Fun for a couple of weeks but, not enough content for a full MMO.

After that experience I jumped back in DIKU land and started on a bit of a tank lark. Both Rift and Cataclysm have LFG tools and I enjoyed the instant queues for dungeons by wearing the heavy plate. One side effect of this was I found out what happens when you're the only tank online. A nice casual guild can get very authoritative and all of a sudden you start thinking twice about logging in and finding yourself being bugged to raid for five hours. This wouldn't have been so bad if I had the gear for it, but our guild had switch exclusively to ten men raids and gearing up multiple off-tanks had not been a priority.

Instead, me and a couple friends had been mastering heroic dungeons and we had a lot of fun for a couple of months. We did seem to burn out quicker on Cataclysm then Wrath of the Lich King though. Leveling was just too linear with the limited number of zones and most of of us already had a lot of max level characters. The old world revamp of Azeroth was very nice, but you hit the Outlands like a brick wall now. Eventually, a couple of us decided to try out Rift while some other friends decided to take a break from online games.

I love the class system in Rift. In my opinion it's the closest to perfection out of any fantasy MMO. The problem was that after a couple of months it became clear Rift was too much like the other fantasy games. The rift closings was nice change of pace, but we had accidentally leveled on a PvP server and didn't realize the implications until later. In the later levels you are expected to supplement questing with rift farming and things can get a bit slow if your faction is constantly outnumbered. Rift did have great expert dungeons which had more bosses then the normal versions. Unfortunately, just like Cataclysm this quickly got old for some of my friends.

Rift is probably the second best MMO I've ever played, but its too much like World of Warcraft. It would have been great if my friends and I had come to Rift from some other game. But starting Rift right after Cataclysm made the burn out happen much quicker. I think fantasy MMO's are going to be on hold for awhile and we're waiting for something different. At least one buddy of mine has become a rabid Old Republic fanboy and that seems to be the next target. There's also some talk of playing Diablo 3 as a group. A number of us still use Battle.Net to play Star Craft 2 mods so I wouldn't be surprised if we did that. At the moment though I'm MMO-less and enjoying the freedom to research and write about what's on the horizon.

The Future of Guilds and Raiding

2010-04-26T14:54:00.000-07:00

It was announced recently that Blizzard would be reworking the raid lockout system in Cataclysm so that players would be limited to a single version of each raid instance. This means that 10-man and 25-man player raids would share the same lockout timer and heroic encounters would remain on a per-boss basis. Both versions would have the same loot tables though the 25-man version would reward more items and badges. Blizzard is hoping this will provide an incentive for guilds to run the larger raids when possible. Blizzard has also promised that the difficulty level between the 10-man and 25-man versions will be very similar though I personally think this will be a lot harder to implement then they realize. Overall, the changes aren't bad, but do reveal a strategy to slow down the time it takes for a guild to progress through a raid tier.

I know with Icecrown Citadel that Blizzard was a bit dismayed about how quickly the Lich King was killed in the 10-man version. This mostly occurred when guilds ran both the 10-man and 25-man versions each week and were quickly able to gear out a core team of players. Not every guild followed this pattern though. A lot of small guilds simply ran the 10-man version while allowing members to individually try to PUG the 25-man version. Larger guilds like the one I'm in would run the 25-man version for our mains and then use the 10-man version to gear up alts and new recruits. Unfortunately, this created situations where I sometimes ran through Icecrown Citadel three times each week. I'm already a little burned out on the instance and I know other players are in the same situation.

That's why I don't necessarily dislike having the different versions of a raid instance share a lockout timer. There is definitely an unnecessary push to do both versions of a instance when it allows your guild to progress faster. Still the jaded gamer in me says this is just Blizzard trying to make sure that raid content can be stretched out for longer periods of time. World of Warcraft is still no where near to having an expansion each year and the 5-6 month lull periods between new content kills any potential growth. Blizzard also is going to have to be very careful with combining the raid lockouts and I can already see some issues.

1. Difficulty Balance
Unique raid encounters are a lot more fun then classic tank and spank fights, but the mechanics of each fight can greatly change in difficulty based on the number of players participating. Simply lowering the damage done by an ability isn't going to cut it when trying to balance 10-man and 25-man versions. Some encounters in Icecrown Citadel like those in the Blood Wing use abilities which depend on players spacing out evenly at certain intervals. This is very easy in the 10-man version and a pain in the ass on the 25-man version. If Blizzard really is serious about equal balance between raid versions then they are going to have to cut back on this type of fight mechanic.

2. Reward Balance
It's no secret that players will min/max the hell out of a MMO given a chance. The 25-man versions must offer a noticeable difference in rewards to guarantee that larger guilds don't die out. Having the 25-man version drop one more badge and item isn't going to cut it when the ilevel is the same on both loot tables. Organizing 25 players and getting them to show up each week is a huge headache for guild leaders. Plus most high level raid encounters already have too many encounters where one player can screw up (or disconnect) and can kill everyone in the raid. If the new raid encounters are filled with similar instant death mechanics then it's going to make the 10-man versions much more attractive. I'm not sure if just increasing the number of rewards is enough of an incentive.

That being said they're a number of benefits to merging the raid lockouts.

1. Decrease Burnout Rate
I don't think anyone really wants to be doing the same raid instance multiple times each week. Maybe at first when the instance is new, but the law of diminishing returns quickly kicks in and it stops being fun. The decision to split each raid tier across several instances should also help out.

2. Decrease the number of days guilds need to raid
Most hardcore guilds should be able to cut the number of days they raid in half. While some players might dislike the notion it should encourage guilds to do other end game activities besides raiding. Don't forget there will be a new guild leveling system and it might be beneficial to organize a night when you work on gaining the next guild level.

3. Encourage guilds to PvP
Rated battlegrounds are going to be major change for World of Warcraft, but I think their success is dependent on a large number of guilds participating. Right now guilds tend to stick with either PvE or PvP content and there really isn't a lot of crossover. I'm hoping the new guild leveling system combined with the reworked raid lockouts causes more guilds to be involved in both parts of the game.

Cure for the Common Quest

2010-03-31T16:49:00.000-07:00

Questing has long been a venerable tradition in MMORPGs and was inherited from it's Dungeons and Dragons ancestor. Originally, quests were rare and used to award players for completing tasks or dungeon crawls. However, this changed after a couple of years and quests started to be used more as a leveling mechanic to direct players to new areas. This was a much better use of quests and it made earning levels more fun. However, developers for a number of different MMORPGs started to approach quest creation in a machine gun like fashion. All of sudden a large number of games in the genre had quests that were very similar to one another and usually involved killing/gathering x number of y mobs/items.

This created a situation where players started burning out on questing and "lack of originality" became a common complaint about the MMO genre as a whole. Afterall, the entire point of using quests as a leveling mechanic was to break up the boring process of just killing mobs for experience. Thankfully, within the last couple of years we've seen serious attempts to spice up questing and some new ideas have started to show up. These ideas generally fall into three basic categories which seek to improve different aspects of questing.

1) Area Wide Quests - making quests more social
One of the problems with quests is that to make them truly epic and interesting the difficulty level has to be increased to give players a challenge. Without challenge there is no sense of accomplishment and questing remains bland. Unfortunately, since most MMORPGs use a class system it can often be more of a challenge to build a working quest group then actually doing the quest. Area Wide quests attempt to address this problem by automatically building raid groups when the quest starts. It's more like an automated mini event then a quest, but they are very entertaining when done right. I've seen them implemented in both Warhammer and Champions Online, but they do tend to run into problems when zones have a lack of a players.

2) Storytelling - making quests more interesting
A lot of players really enjoy the role playing elements found in MMORPGs and like quests to be more then simple objectives hidden inside a wall of text. Developers have learned to incorporate things like voice dialogue, cut-scenes, and environment changes into quests to make them more exciting. The best examples of this that I've seen so far was the starting island of Tortage in Age of Conan and the Wrathgate event in World of Warcraft. Bioware seems to believe heavily in this method and is building a large and detailed story into their Star Wars:The Old Republic game. While I enjoy the story elements found inside MMOs they tend to loose their entertainment value when leveling multiple characters through the same content. Then again I hear Bioware will be doing unique quest paths for each class in the game. Age of Conan did this throughout Tortage, but didn't have enough money/time to continue after the starting zone.

3) Unique Gameplay - making quests more fun
The best method for improving questing in my opinion is to move as far away from the kill ten rats template as possible. World of Warcraft gets a lot of blame for turning questing into a repetitive grindfest, but they improved their act greatly in the last expansion. Wrath of the Lich King is filled with unique quests that often use specialized vehicles and items. Some of my favorites include riding a storm giant around to kill an army of undead and having to navigate a minefield to rescue a goblin. It may take extra development hours to put the effort into the quest, but it gains a repeatable entertainment value. Of course not every game has the budget to do this.

The best method for eliminating boring quests would be for every MMO studio to try to implement improvements in every category. Unfortunately, this would probably increase the development hours and be insanely expensive. What we'll probably see over the next few years is games specializing in one area and only those studios bloated on success or venture capital trying to improve across the board. It's almost a catch-22 situation, but it doesn't mean small studios are out of the running. Even a game like World of Warcraft has it's weak spots and a new game can always focus on improving in an area where Blizzard is a bit weak. I have a feeling that The Old Republic will explode onto the scene next year and show that good storytelling doesn't just involve pop culture references and jokes.

Will WoW crafting ever be improved?

2010-03-29T12:49:00.000-07:00

Massive multiplayer online games have only been around for a relatively short time period and yet it's become apparent to most developers that to succeed in the genre you need to continually update your game's content. Players get attached to the characters they create and don't really want the game to end. This allows developers to use classic RPG elements like hitpoints and experience levels to extend character advancement to almost infinity. The only tricky part comes from making sure that new content is available to a majority of your players and not locked behind a single end-game activity like raiding.

While constant content updates are a important part of retaining subscribers, it's almost equally important to improve how the players interact with that content. The LFG tool and the introduction of random daily quests in World of Warcraft are designed to increase the social aspect of the game. This has long been a weak point in the game, since the rate of experience gain has been so poor in groups. Now almost everyone uses the LFG tool when leveling up characters and more people are willing to try healing/tanking because of the improved queue times. Combined with some of the recent PvP changes and it shows that Blizzard is willing to completely revamp various aspects of their game until they get it right.

What puzzles me is that Blizzard has never done a serious revamp of crafting in World of Warcraft. I can't help but get the feeling that they see professions more as a money sink than as a legitimate part of the game. This was very obvious towards the end of Vanilla WoW where most players recognized crafting was useless and only maxed enchanting or alchemy for stat increases. There was a small market for crafting epic bind-on-equip items, but those required high level raid encounters to get the materials. It wasn't until the Burning Crusade expansion when Blizzard started giving each profession their own enchants/item enhancements that they were able to breath life back into crafting.

However, I'm not sure if you can really call this crafting since professions are still mostly leveled up based on what kind of stat bonuses they give rather than what items they can make. There is almost no demand for gear made from crafting since: a) it's insanely expensive with low level mats being overpriced and b) sucks compared to dropped gear. Also the lack of customization when crafting an item is a major drawback. I've tried out a majority of the different MMOs on the market and World of Warcraft crafting continues by far to have the least customization and usefulness. Even classic Everquest allowed players to at least dye their armor different colors. I'm not sure why Blizzard doesn't even have this option available. It's not like they are afraid of poor color coordination as the Burning Crusade showed us.

While World of Warcraft continues to keep my attention because of their high quality PvE content I keep my eyes open for games which look like they might beat Blizzard at their weak spots. This is why I tried out Warhammer and Age of Conan since at the time I was very disappointed with the PvP options in World of Warcraft. While I don't put as much importance into crafting as combat, I don't believe it should be ignored to the level it has been in World of Warcraft. I know allowing players to create customized items and houses is a scary prospect to some developers. The time to penis is practically a universal law on the Internet nowadays.

Still, this shouldn't hold them back on improving a part of the game which is severely lacking. Look at a game like Lego Universe which will be built almost entirely around the concept of crafting. There's an opportunity there to build a very strong community around player created content. I know Blizzard realizes how important player created content has become in online games. The map editor for Warcraft III not only tied the community together, but also created an entire sub-genre of strategy games called tower defense. It's just a shame that almost no tools for creating items has been put into their most popular game. Afterall, I'm sure everyone is starting to get tired of looking like everyone else.

Wintergrasp Woes - the raid drop exploit

2010-03-16T08:37:00.000-07:00

Lake Wintergrasp seems to embody every video game feature that looked good on paper, but never quite lived up to it's potential on implementation. It's not that it's Blizzard fault since they have been trying to address the problems with the zone since day one. If they had just ignored the problems then I could justify nerdrage and blaming them for a horrible gaming experience. Instead, I have to give them kudos for the large number of mostly beneficial changes they've made to the zone over the last year. This includes reworking the daily quests, introducing Tenacity, adding a queue system, and making it slightly easier to defend the fortress.

Of course none of these have any effect in most games since the number of people inside a normal Wintergrasp quickly stressed out the servers and cause horrible amounts of lag. Thus most prime-time Wintergrasp games involve the attackers simply steamrolling through fortress walls as the defenders get to attack every 10 seconds. It doesn't matter if you have five stacks of Tenacity if you can never hit anyone because of the massive amounts of lag. Previous attempts at world PvP areas were never popular because the rewards were uninspired and there really wasn't any reason to do it. However, with the Vault of Archavon providing a chance at the newest tier pieces the Wintergrasp battles are always popular.

This popularity does make Lake Wintergrasp a target for exploits since there are multiple benefits to winning a game. Fortunately, it didn't seem like the open world zone concept was as vulnerable to this issue as battlegrounds and arenas. In fact, this weekend I ran across the first major exploit I've ever seen in Lake Wintergrasp. Players on one faction were joining the Wintergrasp queue with their alts in small raid groups. This allowed them to maintain raid leadership when the game started and they could kick people from the raid groups as soon as they zoned into an active Wintergrasp. As a result my faction had to manually form raid groups using general chat and the time it took to access siege engines was greatly increased for us.

The people doing this were using multiple alts and I know a majority of them were reported. Still it doesn't look like any action has been taken against them yet. I'm not sure how hard the code change would be required to fix the issue. Lately, Blizzard has been focusing on the next expansion and I've noticed they've stopped tinkering with Lake Wintergrasp. Which is unfortunate, since the queue system for Wintergrasp really needs to be changed to prevent joining as a raid or else have the raid kick feature disabled. Either way I don't think this exploit will become too popular since it's highly visible to players and sure to be reported quickly. I just hope the Cataclysm PvP zones are better set up to deal with players have characters of both factions on the same server.

Blizzard's New MMO and the FPS rumour

2010-01-25T14:17:00.000-08:00

I've heard a large amount of rumors concerning Blizzard's new MMO over the last couple years and very few facts. What little information we do have is based on vague developer interviews and logical assumptions. It's frustrating not to have any details, but I can understand why Blizzard is holding onto secrecy for as long as it can. The premature advertising blitz of several recent games has been blamed for creating an environment of hyperbole which raises player expectations too high. These games tend to have an impressive amount of initial box sales, but disappointing subscription numbers. Another reason Blizzard might be keeping quiet is that there are a large number of World of Warcraft clones in existence. You could be pretty sure that Blizzard's new MMO will have a similar wave of poorly implemented imitators.

Not that World of Warcraft started off as a unique snowflake of a game. In fact the only new thing that Blizzard brought to the MMO marked with World of Warcraft was a sense of polish. However, it was such a difference from the poorly implemented and buggy competition that World of Warcraft turned into the monster we have now. With Blizzard's new MMO we can probably expect the same trick just with a different "type" of MMO. That's why reports that Blizzard's new MMO will be a hybrid first person shooter sound credulous to me. There's been three or four games that tried mixing elements of FPS games with the persistency of a MMO. None have experienced anything resembling success though and there seems to be a problem getting the right mix of features from each genre. It would take a company like Blizzard with a mantra of "as long as it takes" to pull it off I think.

Also the rumour of a FPS MMO does seem to match what little information we have on Blizzard's next game.

1) It has a more sci-fi then fantasy setting
2) It's not based on an existing Blizzard license
3) It will be a very different game from World of Warcraft

Then again there are probably a dozen other rumors that also fit the sparse "facts" we have. There's a high chance that NoFrag simply chose a rumour at random and ran a news snippet claiming an inside source had confirmed it for them. I'm sure they got a nice boost in traffic from the story. I expect we might find out the truth at this year's Blizzcon and other bloggers have the same thought on the matter. One thing that I haven't seen pointed out though is that the expanded leaderboard and matchmaking functionality of the new .BattleNet would integrate well with a FPS MMO. Just an observation though.

Abusing the LFG Tool

2010-01-20T09:02:00.000-08:00

I love the new LFG tool in World of Warcraft. It's been a godsend and helped erased the memory of Blizzard's past failures to make grouping easier. The reworking of the daily dungeon quests plays a big role in it's popularity, but I like to think it adds a lot of functionality to the game besides just being an emblem farming tool. I'm sure we'll see the majority of players make use of it when leveling up new worgen/goblin characters in the next expansion. The only problem I have with the LFG tool is that the unbalanced queue times for DPS classes are causing some issues. I understand that Healing and Tanking are the less popular roles in the MMO trinity and I don't really have a problem with them finding groups faster.

The problem is that I'm starting to see a trend of Healers and Tanks treating pick up groups as disposable commodities. The instant queue times seem to encourage some players to automatically drop group at the first sign that the heroic won't be complete in 20 minutes. Usually, everyone in a random pick up group has a high enough gear score that a normal heroic is joke. However, every now and then you get someone new to their class and they might slow things down a few minutes. I was running Azjol-Nerub and a hunter's pet accidently pulled Hadronox before the giant spider could web the entrances. No biggie, easy dungeon and it was the first problem in the run. However, the healer chose to berate the hunter for being an idiot and then left after the hunter claimed it was just an accident. Damn back to another 15 minute queue.

It's even worse when you get one of the newer dungeons since players can still be farming a specific item off the first or second boss. It no longer surprises me when the tank or healer sudden abandons group in the middle of the Pit of Saron or the Halls of Reflection. It only happens about 10% of time but, it's one of the most annoying things in the game. Also most players don't know you get put in the top of the queue when finding a replacement. Thus most of the DPS will leave right away after someone drops from the group. I once had a friend tanking in Halls of Reflection and he accidentally disconnected after the first boss. Everone abandoned ship so fast I didn't even have time to type in "he just DC, will brb". Players are just starting to grow use to this behavior.

I'm not that worried about this trend right now when most people are overly geared for heroics. However, it might start becoming a major issue in the expansion when player's can't just breeze through dungeons. I play a paladin and a shaman which thankfully means I have access to instant queue times. However, warlocks, rogues, mages, and hunters can only DPS and are really hurt by a dungeon group being broken up early. I'm not sure what Blizzard can do to fix the issue, but it's becoming obvious that these classes will gear up at a much slower rate. The only real way to avoid the problem is to queue up for dungeons with a friend who plays a tank or healer.

Icecrown Citadel part 1

2009-12-11T21:21:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons I haven't been writing as much was that I joined a decent raiding guild that runs some of the top end content in World of Warcraft. Thus I was lucky enough this week to be able to jump right into Icecrown Citadel when the patch went live. So far it's been a welcome change from the Trial of the Crusader which had become ridiculously boring. The scenery of the large arena quickly became stale after the first couple of weeks of the Argent Tournament. I'm very glad that Icecrown includes a large environment for the raid to move through even if it means clearing trash once again. In addition, Blizzard has better scaled the encounter difficulty so that the first boss in the instance is not one of the hardest. The Beasts of Northend encounter had been a major chokepoint in the Trial of the Crusader.

I'm tempted to write a long post since its been awhile but I just want to highlight my basic experience with the raid instance and what gave my guild trouble. There are very good strategies all over the internet if you want the details.

Trash:
There are some fairly large trash pulls in the begining of Ice Crown though luckily they are vulnerable to crowd control. Thus you can make the pulls a bit easier if you have classes that can stun/root undead mobs. I think this was the first time I've seen a priest use shackle undead since Karazhan. They're a few specific trash mobs that can be dangerous and you'll want to watch out for them.

Skeletal Casters:
Use a spell which causes a line of frost spikes to travel along the ground in a straight line.

Giant Skeletons:
They are entombed in the walls and will come to life when someone gets within range. Huge amount of hitpoints and you don't want them adding in the middle of a pull.

Nerubians before Lady Deathwhisper:
They cast a debuff on someone that will cause that person to keep the Nerubian alive and mostly kill the target if they don't run out of the raid. We just kept everyone stacked on the target and had the debuffed person run out. Just watch out if your tank gets the debuff since the off-tank will need to taunt.

Lord Marrowgar (1st Boss)
Very easy fight and we only wiped a couple of times since we didn't really go over the strategy ahead of time. He's basically a skeletal abomination who has a lot of bone themed abilities and looks cool as hell. His main attack hits multiple targets depending on threat level so it's required to have more then one tank on him. His other common ability is a ground based attack that travels in a straight line. This forces everyone in the raid to constantly adjust their position. Our melee dps quickly figured out he has a pretty large hitbox and it's easy to avoid the attack if you stand back a bit.

The most important part of the fight though is to free players that have been impaled on bone spikes. The bone spikes root a single target and deal 10% damage each second, but can easily be targeted and killed. Other then that you just have to watch out for when Lord Marrowgar falls to pieces and forms a whirlwind of flying bones. In "Whirlwind of Death" mode he randomly picks a target and then chases them around while continuing his ground based line attack. This is the part where everyone gets to run around like a chicken with their head cut off until he reforms. It's a very fun fight and Blizzard really did a good job with this encounter.

Lady Deathwhisper (2nd Boss)
This was the chokepoint for my guild on the 25 man version. She looks like a female version of Kel'Thuzad and starts off with a mana sheild that you have to destroy to get her into the 2nd phase. Throughout the 1st phase she summons cultists from three sides of the room at timed intervals. Some of these cultists are immune to physical damage while others are immune to magic damage. This wouldn't be so bad except that she randomly empowers the adds which turns them into undead and increases their hitpoints and damage. To make matters worse the adds can also mutate which snares them, but makes them hit insanely hard. At this point range classes have to kite the mutated add since they can't be tanked. To further complicate the fight the cultists can randomly cast a suicide spell which explodes them for massive AOE damage.

Luckily, the main boss herself is kind of a wimp and during the 1st phase will only cast random mind controls and a large area death and decay. During the 2nd phase after her mana has been depleted she will summon suicide ghosts which will target a single person and explode for AOE damage when they get within melee range. The only dangerous spell she herself has is a frostbolt spell that hits really, really, really hard and needs to be interrupted. She has a ten minute enrage timer and you will probably win if you can get her into phase 2 within 7 minutes.

As much as Lord Marrowgar was a fun fight this fight sucked. The problem is that dps and crowd control need to be tightly coordinated across three seperate groups which are all doing different things. If too much dps is taken up by killing the cultists the mana shield doesn't go down before the enrage timer. The more common problem for my guild was that adds would slowly overwhelm us as we would lose dps to mutated cultists and suicide explosions. Eventually, we figured out all the little tricks and our dps stayed alive. I would not want to do this fight with a pick-up-group since it requires every dps class to have good situational awareness and not just rely on gear.

The last two fights were much more fun and I'll write about them next.

NCSoft's worry over server consolidations hamstrings Aion

2009-09-24T10:56:00.000-07:00

I had been looking forward to Aion for awhile now since I heard a lot of good reviews from people who participated in the beta tests. The combat looked similar to World of Warcraft with a couple of additions like "combo chains" to make things a bit more interesting. Also the mobs and artwork looked unique and different from the standard fantasy fare I've gotten used to seeing. Playing through one of the starting zones I saw a couple monsters that resembled nothing like I've seen in a MMO before. There was this one mob that looked like it was produced by a kangaroo and a giant guinea pig getting it on. Aion may only bring a few new features to the MMO world, but the art assets alone make it worthwhile to try out. They have a race of hamster men for god's sake.

That's why it’s such a shame that I'm having a difficult time logging into the Aion servers. After finally getting everything patched I was surprised to see such a small number of servers available. Only about twelve servers were online and they were evenly split between west and east coast. That wouldn't be so bad except all the servers in my region had queue times over an hour. I realize that new MMOs are never issue free, but putting an hour wait in front of someone who just bought a game is a bad idea. The specter of Tabula Rasa may be influencing NCSoft in this matter since that game suffered from severe server consolidation quite early on in its lifetime.

Tabula Rasa seems to have left a lasting bad taste in NCSoft's mouth even though it wasn't that bad of a game. I had fun playing my chain-gun wielding space marine even though parts of the game were poorly designed for an MMO. This became particularly obvious at the end game and a lot of people left after reaching max level. Judging by the amount of servers Tabula Rasa went from around 80k players during its first month to about 15-25k players soon after. Still there was a large niche of players who really like the mix of FPS and RPG elements and probably could have supported the game financially. Unfortunately, NCSoft is not a fan of niche games and there was also the matter of legal disputes with the game's creator.

The experience with Tabula Rasa seems to be making NCSoft overly cautious about adding servers to Aion during its first week of release. Kotaku has an interview up with some of the Aion managers who remark that this strategy is for the long term health of the game. Everyone remembers how bad the server populations crashed with Warhammer and Age of Conan last year and NCSoft would like to avoid the same fate with Aion. Their logic seems to be that news of server consolidations creates a very bad image and causes players to avoid a game. Thus, NCSoft would rather deal with pissed off customers who want to play then players avoiding Aion because of server consolidations.

I admit throwing numerous new servers into a game is usually a bad idea and can cause server consolidations further down the line. However, using this as an excuse to justify multi-hour queues is just a bad idea. Even hinting that you might be worried about server consolidations implies a lack of trust in your MMO to keep people entertained at the end game. Both Warhammer and Age of Conan had problems with their end games though for different reasons. One was poorly thought out and the other suffered from horrible bugs. Aion however has been out in Korea for quite awhile and shouldn't suffer from any of these problems. The code should be well tested and the end game should be fully developed.

The fact that NCSoft is moving so slowly with server rollouts makes me realize they just don't understand the reasons for the massive server consolidations that plague several MMOs last year. Worse is that they might be under the mistaken impression that it's just World of Warcraft's dominance in the West that causes this initial surge of interest in new MMOs. While WoW's long standing kickassery in the subscriber department has played a role in the matter, it doesn't dictate that every MMO will lose massive numbers after the first month. Thinking that this trend is unavoidable and being stingy with initial servers is just going to backfire and cause customer resentment. I'm crossing my fingers that this nonsense ends soon. I'm starting to get tired of logging onto west coast servers when I get home just because every east coast server has an hour long queue.

The Cataclysm Revamp part2 - Path of the Titans

2009-09-21T12:35:00.000-07:00

One of the most surprising features announced for the Cataclysm expansion was that it was only going to extend the end game by five levels. This goes against the trend set by the previous two expansions, but seems reasonable since Cataclysm is going to be focused on reworking the 1-60 content. However, trying to sell an expansion that didn't add any levels to the end game might have been hard to market. Blizzard obviously wants players to feel like they are getting their money's worth when they buy the new expansion. Thus the decision was probably made to add at least some new levels to the end game. This shorter leveling stretch though is going to make Cataclysm feel a bit different from previous expansions.

We'll be getting five new leveling zones in Cataclysm even though the level cap was only raised to 85. This gives us a much higher zone ratio then Northend, which only had eight leveling zones (not counting Crystalsong or Wintergrasp). Hopefully, this means that there are multiple questing paths to reach max level just like in Wrath of the Lich King. On a negative note this could also mean that Blizzard artificially stretched out the levels in Cataclysm by increasing the experience requirements. This doesn't really fit their style though and I don't think Blizzard would copy a design decision which has proven to be a bad idea in other MMOs.

Instead, I think a portion of the questing in Cataclysm will be devoted to the new Path of the Titans system. This system expands on the basic idea behind inscriptions and offers players another way to advance their characters besides gear and levels. Players basically align themselves with one particular Titan and then will be able to earn additional glyph slots and abilities to place in them. The system bears a remarkable resemblance to picking a deity for your character and I'm sure that's how the idea got started. Unfortunately, Blizzard was a little tight lipped on how you characters actually progress through this new system.

I suspect we can look forward to some sort of reputation or token system for progressing along the Path of the Titans. I'm leaning towards a token system since Blizzard made heavy use of tokens for the Argent Tournament. I wouldn't be surprised to see Tol Barad serve as the daily quest hub for this purpose. If my memory serves me correctly then the devs have already announced that Tol Barad would be a quest hub similar to the Isle of Quel'Danas. However, they didn't say if the daily quests would grant gold, pvp tokens, or be involved with Path of the Titans advancement. It's quite possible that Tol Barad will just be for PvP quests and Uldum is the hub for Path of the Titans stuff.

The Cataclysm Revamp part1 - Unbalanced Combat

2009-09-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

Blizzard shocked and delighted its fan base when they announced that their next expansion would be a revamp of the old world content. The lands of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms sit mostly empty nowadays with only a few low level characters moving through them. Such a large amount of underutilized space is a waste of resources and makes the game less accessible to new players. People new to the game often have to depend on "recruit a friend" bonuses to get caught up with the rest of us. The game really isn't that fun if your only contact with other players is when they gank you.

This could even become a major issue when Cataclysm is released. The re-worked zones are sure to attract explorers from every level and not just newly made goblins/worgen. On the PvP servers you should expect a lot of interference from higher level players as you are trying out the new quests. This expansion will probably revitalize open world PvP in some areas of Azeroth, though it's sure to be a nuisance to anyone making a new character. This sort of makes me suspect that Blizzard might have something up its sleeve to deal with the problem.

One of the numerous minor changes to the game announced at Blizzcon was the reworking of how players upgrade their spells and abilities. Instead of constantly visiting your class trainer to get more powerful versions, your spells and abilities automatically upgrade themselves as you level. This suggests that Blizzard might also have the functionality to decrease the power of spells and abilities based on level. This is pure conjecture, but we could see a downgrading of damage when players fight characters that are grossly below their level. This would also have to take into account basic melee damage, but it's not entirely impossible.

The idea would be to make it so players leveling new characters couldn't easily be one shotted by maxed level players. In the previous two expansions not that many people were playing new characters so this was never a major issue. However, after the Cataclysm the number of players leveling once again should be through the roof. That's going to be a pretty tempting target for players who are going to be 20 to 60 levels higher. Some classes will be able to use AOE abilities and massacre entire low level quest hubs in a few seconds. There was no motivation to do this when these quest hubs were mostly empty (no bragging rights), but that changes in the expansion.

Even if Blizzard doesn't have some way of dealing with unbalanced combat we'll probably at least see some changes to limit ganking. At the very least I expect low level quest hubs to have their guards upgraded to level 85. There also might be some attempts to encourage players to protect low level quest hubs with their maxed level characters. Unfortunately, the problem is that the level difference is so great that most gankers will be able to wipe out a bunch of low level characters quickly and escape any consequences. That's why I really hope Blizzard is aware of the issue. Otherwise I might just be leveling my goblin and worgen in dungeons only.

Most Annoying Mobs in MMOs

2009-09-08T00:04:00.000-07:00

I've been playing World of Warcraft more often since the last patch and I must say I'm enjoying the revamped badge system. It's worthwhile once again to do the heroic daily quest and I'm finding myself back in dungeons I hadn't seen in awhile. It's a shame that some dungeons just aren't popular and would probably never see any use if not for the heroic daily quest. Mostly it's just a matter of annoying boss fights like in the Halls of Stone or the Occulus. But I've noticed a couple I dislike because they have certain mob types I find annoying. Everyone has that certain monster or class they hate fighting. I known I've accumulated a list of them over the years though its probably different from person to person.

5) Spiders
Spiders are probably one of the most common mob types after good old fashion rats and bats. Players can expect to see them at almost every level in a game since most game developers simply justify stronger spiders as being larger. Their overuse isn't the primary reason I find them annoying though. Instead it's because developers have taken the web spinning ability of the common spider and translated it into root and snare effects in most games. Throw a couple bosses who can encase you in web cocoons and the annoyance factor goes through the roof. Plus there's just something creepy about a human being caught in a web, probably goes back to that old sci-fi movie: help me, help me, help me.

4) Giants
I list giants not because of their ability to "grind your bones to make their bread" but because of the way large objects are rendered in online worlds. Giants should stick out like a sore thumb because of their size. However, every MMO giant seemed to have attended Ninja School with Bang (obscure NES reference) and learned how to become invisible to players until 10m away. To make matters worse giants are never static spawns and instead seem to enjoy taking power walks across entire zones. Sometimes the developers feel sorry for us and toss us a bone like a sound effect when a giant is nearby. However, more often then nought a player trying to eat/drink will fall victim to these deadly and mysteriously silent predators.

3) Vampires
The problem with vampires is that they're just too damn popular for their own good. Try to make a list of every ability that is attributed to vampires in popular fiction. I gave up after seven. This large talent pool basically gives the developers free reign to create super mobs. Luckily, most games save vampires for boss fights and thus players don't have to fight through armies of mind controlling, flying, invisible, wizard, re-generators, who command undead and shapeshift. When you do see a vampire boss though you can expect the most powerful abilities to be present though. Usually this involves at least one kind of life or mana drain just for the fun of it.

2) Goblins
Goblins always seem to be described as cunning and cowardly in fiction. The cowardly part is certainly true since goblins have been some of the best "runner mobs" in almost every MMO I've played. They also tend to congregate in large groups and tame/hire/make really big pets. Run into a goblin whose not afraid of you and chances are he's got a large ogre or some kind of mechanical monstrosity in the next room. Oh and the cunning part usually translates into goblins being able to choose from several magic using classes. That way they can root or snare you before they run away to find their 3,000 friends.

1) Humans
Humans are practically their own hybrid class in most MMOs. Developers tend to treat them as a blank slate and allow them to be any class or learn any skill. Humans are never particularly tough, but they have this annoying ability to work well in groups. Clearing a dungeon filled with humans is never simple and often involves finding "that damn healer" before your party runs out of mana. Human mobs basically use the same tactics as players and it's only our taunt abilities that allow us to win against them. Plus the only mob type that can give goblins a run for their money in the cowardly department are humans. Keeping an eye out for runners is always a requirement when fighting them.

These are just my own personal dislikes and I'm sure everyone has that one type of mob they hate to fight in game. Feel free to put it in the comments since I'm interested to see if I left out any obvious contenders in the "most annoying mob" contest.

Micro Review of Micro-transactions

2009-09-03T10:40:00.000-07:00

Bringing up micro-transactions in a blog post is a lot like trying to talk about global warming. Everyone has a different opinion on the matter and their own preferred way of addressing the issue. A lot players hate the idea of micro-transactions and like to pretend that it's not a viable business model. On the other hand you have people who fervently think it’s the wave of the future and ignore its lack of success in the western world. To further complicate matters there are several different ways of implementing micro-transactions in a MMO. Some games use them in conjunction with a subscription fee while others are entirely dependent on the sales of fluff items. For the most part games that micro-transactions based are often designed to cost hardcore players more than casual ones. You know the same audience that mostly blogs and posts the most about MMOS.

Types of Micro-transactions (DIKU based)

Buying
The basic micro-transaction plan which a lot of free2play games use. Players straight out buy items for their characters by paying a small fee. Most games make use of a virtual currency for these types of transactions so players are forced to buy (coins, doubloons, and tokens) in bundles. Games that use this model have to be very careful that they don't ruin the illusion of competition. As a result most items in this model are fluff items that just change the appearance of characters or the rate at which they gain experience/money. Unfortunately, a majority of players don't care about these types items and simply play the game for free. At the moment there seems to be two solutions to this problem. Either make the game play very grindy so players are greatly encourage to buy items or add a small subscription fee to stabilize revenue.

Renting
This micro-transaction model personally frustrates me, but several new games that use it have enjoyed moderate success in the market. In this model players don't actually buy items, but instead pay a small fee to rent them for a period of time. These items usually give the player special abilities and don't directly increase the stats/gear of their characters. The most common abilities include faster mounts, limited teleportation, increased storage space, and increased experience rates. Most subscription based games have these types of features built into their game design, while the micro-transaction model allows players to pick and choose them ala cart. Problems do occur though when a player tries to rent all the features they are used to having in a subscription based game and realize the micro-transaction one actually costs them more per month.

Ebaying
MMO's that follow the Ebay style of micro-transactions don't worry about maintaining a balance between items that can be bought with time or those that can be bought right away with cash. Items sold in their stores are often equal or more powerful then the best in the game. Free Realms is probably the poster child of this model and was designed to combine the mini-game aspect of websites like Neo-pets with "lite" MMO styled adventuring. This model only seems to work if the customer base doesn't care or is too young to understand that money greatly affects the game play. I suspect this model will always be limited to MMO's targeting children or poorly made Free2Play games that don't worry about balance issues.

My descriptions of the different types of micro-transactions probably reveal that I'm not a fan. However, I'm not going to deny they provide huge advantages to certain types of MMOs. In general, Free2Play MMOs work well with micro-transactions since it allows them to quickly build up a large community and achieve a critical mass of players. However, a lot of times the revenue brought in by micro-transactions aren't enough to support a high quality game. That's why games that use micro-transactions often rely on grindy gameplay to force the use of an item store or small subscription fees. The only micro-transaction model that seems to be able to stand on its own two feet is the one that rents out items. However, this model greatly mirrors the subscription model except that it allows players to pick and choose the features they want to pay for each month.

My preference in payment models is most likely a symptom of my laziness. I don't want to deal with keeping experience potions on my character or tracking when my individual item rentals are going to expire. That's why I'm probably going to stick with subscription based games in the future. However, if I was forced to choose some form of micro-transaction system I would prefer a tiered model where game time and items were bundled into differently priced packages. That way I could have the option of buying a smaller package when I knew I wouldn't have much time to play and I wouldn't have to keep track of everything.

WoW's Cross Server Instances

2009-08-30T22:07:00.000-07:00

At Blizzcon this year there was a definite sense of anger from the players towards the instance situation in World of Warcraft. At several panels people randomly shouted "Cannot create additional instances" during lulls in the discussion. When someone finally manage to bring up the topic during a Q&A session, the developers acted surprised. Their response was that the issue was already resolved and being implemented on the servers as they speak. Most people thought this meant Blizzard was finally selling off some of their money hats and buying more processing power.

However, it looks like Blizzard is approaching the problem from a different route and focusing on creating a giant server pool for the instances. This should allow individual servers to avoid the "cannot create additional instance" problem that occurs during peak hours. The theory goes that different servers are in different time zones and thus not every realm will put a large strain on the instance server pool at the same time. I'm not sure if this will fix the issue completely, since emblems of conquest have revitalized dungeon running. At the very least it should help during the weekdays when the prime time is for concurrent users is small (7-11pm). Plus, the change does allow Blizzard to introduce a new cross server LFG tool.

Cross Server LFG system
1. Groups have to be formed using the LFG tool.
2. The instance portal on each server then links to the same zone.
3. As a side bonus the system will reward people who use the tool to form PUGs.
4. Rewards are based on successfully completing a dungeon with a PUG.
5. Should allow players to experience low level dungeons again (worgen/goblins)
6. They expect it to be ready for the Icecrown patch (probably ~Feb 2010)

Blizzard was vague on what kind of rewards would be given out for successfully completing a dungeon using the new LFG system. I don't expect anything major or else you would have players trying to game the system. Most likely by having premade groups form up using the tool. Instead I think it will probably be something along the lines of an extra emblem or perhaps some honor. The system is a great idea and complements the new expansion well. New worgen and goblin players should be able to get groups and explore some of the interesting low level dungeons like Wailing Caverns and Black Fathom Depths.

The only problem at the moment is the actual process of moving each realm into the giant server pool is kind of complex. It seems Blizzard has had to cap the number of instances for realms which haven't been moved yet as servers are being juggled around. Thus for some realms the "cannot create additional instance" problem has gotten worse during the last couple of weeks. Apparently, moving all the realms at the same time wasn't an option so they've been doing it piecemeal. If you're interested there's even a list of which realms have already been optimized. Unfortunately, my realm still isn't on the list so most of my weekend was filled with daily quests and not dungeons. By the rate Blizzard is working on the issue though it looks like September 2009 should mark the end of the dreaded instance shortage.

Cataclysm’s Rated Battlegrounds

2009-08-26T16:06:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting system revamps announced for Cataclysm was the introduction of rated battlegrounds. This should be a welcome change since its promises to balance out the PvP systems in World of Warcraft. At the moment the arena system dominates the PvP landscape and often gives an advantage to players in Wintergrasp and Battlegrounds. This is mostly because the arena system is the only way for melee classes to achieve decent PvP weapons. After the Burning Crusade the developers made a decision to tightly control epic weapons since so many people stopped raiding. This is why arena weapons during the Wrath of the Lich King have never been made available for honor.

It wasn’t necessarily a bad idea to reign in the free epic weapons, but it’s gone too far in the opposite spectrum. Arenas may be almost exploit free and have better matchmaking system nowadays, but its still a poor decision to make it the main gateway for PvP gear. The very nature of combat in World of Warcraft makes small squad based fights very dependent on gear and luck. Battlegrounds and to a lesser degree Wintergrasp depend a bit more on coordination and strategy. In arenas things are simple and you just have to kill your enemies, while in battlegrounds you are more concerned with objectives and defeating them. Both are viable forms for PvP so it does seem a bit weird to reward one over the other.

Main Problems with Arenas being the main PvP Gear Gateway
1) WoW combat is still rock-paper-scissors to a certain degree
-certain team combinations will always have an advantage over others because of class
2) Arenas are more heavily influenced by class nerfs and buffs then battlegrounds
3) Arenas tend to emphasize reflexes and gear over the strategy aspect of PvP
4) Allows highly ranked to arena players to faceroll their way through battlegrounds

How the Rated Battleground Systems Works

Players:
-Each player has a personal battleground rating
-Winning matches increases the rating while losing has no effect
-The same matchmaking system used in arenas will decide rating changes

Battlegrounds:
-Each week one battleground will be playable for rated matches
-Rated battlegrounds required a full pre-made raid to queue
-No special battleground team has to be made
-Blizzard said to expect three new battlegrounds

Rewards:
-Battleground Ratings will allow access to arena weapons/armor
-Rated Battlegrounds will reward arena points after each victory
-Arenas will also be changed so they give arena points after each victory
-Your previous week’s rating limits how many points you can earn that week
-The old Battleground titles will once again be available as rewards
-Top Performers in Arenas and Battlegrounds will also get epic mounts

As you can see there are some pretty big changes to both the battleground system and arena system in the upcoming expansion. It looks like Blizzard is serious about making both systems viable ways of gaining PvP gear. Also since rated battlegrounds require pre-made teams you can expect players to police the system and kick out any bots or slackers after a single match. Most likely the only reason Blizzard has been so hesitant to reward battleground play in the past has been because of the honor farming problem.

Blizzcon 2009 Dance Contest

2009-08-24T20:27:00.000-07:00

Well once again none of my pictures of the costume contest came out too well, but my little video camera was able to film the viewscreen for the world of warcraft dance contest. The winners seemed a little random this year. Though the first place winner definitely showed some impressive footwork.

1st Place Winner - Dwarven Female Dance

2nd Place Winner - Human Female Dance

3rd Place Winner - Dwarven Male Dance

Some other contestants who I thought were good and got passed over.

The Blood Elf Ninja Dance

The Inflatable Tauren Dance

Bloodelf Female Dance

Blizzcon 2009 Takeaways

2009-08-24T15:43:00.000-07:00

I was lucky this year since I had a friend who managed to charm tickets from the Blizzcon website. There were three of us refreshing the website constantly, but somehow he managed to get in as number 20 in the queue while I was number 8,000. Blizzard has to come up with a better system for selling Blizzcon tickets one day. Even one of the VPs admitted that in the future they might just have to move the convention out of Anaheim and get a bigger venue. This year there were about 26,000 people attending and things were definitely more crowded even with the added hall.

Still being stuffed into a convention hall with 26,000 nerds was a small payment for getting a lot of first hand experience with the next generation of Blizzard games. Just like last year they had demos for Starcraft 2, Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft. Starcraft 2 had the Terran singleplayer campaign up and running though I spent all my time trying to kill my friends in multiplayer. The Diablo 3 demo had the new monk class and allowed the exploration of a desert zone with multiple cave-like dungeons. It always had the longest line, but was proably the most enjoyable demo. The World of Warcraft demo had the goblin and worgen starting areas, but overcrowding made it hard to complete any of the quest objectives.

Instead of spending all my time in the Cataclysm demo, I focused my attention more on the World of Warcraft panels. There were some pretty big announcements and not all of them related to the new expansion. I’ll try to order everything in a time frame in case you want to browse

Revamped Onyxia Encounter (Nov 2009)
10-25 man raid with upgraded gear (showed a 2-hander with 700-1000dmg)
T2 helms from Ony keep the same look

3.3 Icecrown Citadel Patch (around late 2009, early 2010)
Will include three 5-man dungeons (wrathgate type elements)
Cross-server LFG tool for dungeons
Guide system that will reward people who forms groups in LFG and complete dungeons
Icecrown Citadel (12 bosses including Sindragosa and Arthas)
-awesome fight involving a horde/alliance airship battle

Cataclysm Expansion (probably 2010)
-All the leaked features like goblin and worgen (worgen have cool hats)
-Hunters and Warlocks get major revamps (no mana, soul shards changed)
-All of Kalimdor and E. Kingdoms revamped and made flyable
-Heroic Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep
-Rated Battlegrounds which give arena points (requires pre-made team)
-New advancement system called Path of the Titans
-Elimination of Spellpower, Mp5, Defense, Armor Penetration (stats simplified)
-Guild Leveling System and Talent Tree (raidwide Rez, Summon, Etc)

7 New Zones (2 newbie 1-15 zones)

4 New Raids (all apparently done at release, so say devs)
The Firelands (Ragnaros no longer "too soon"), Skywall, Blackwing Descent, Grim Batol

10 New Dungeon Instances
Grim Batol, Uldum (2), Deepholme, Skywall, Abyssal Maw (2), Blackrock Caverns, Heroic Deadmines, Heroic Shadowfang Keep

I’ll have some pictures and videos of the contests to put up as soon as I have everything organized. I'm very glad that Blizzard is going with a revamp of the old world instead of just focusing on end game content. However, the sparse amount of video and details make me think that this expansion is still pretty far away. Most likely its more then a year away. Luckily, Blizzard seemed pretty sure about SC2 being ready for a 1st quarter release since only the BattleNet revamp is holding it back.

Building a Better Battleground System

2009-06-30T17:10:00.000-07:00

The battlegrounds are going through a lot of fine tuning in the upcoming patch. It's not surprising since the developers have admitted that PvP in World of Warcraft is a little too focused on arenas right now. I seems like Blizzard might slowly be moving towards another revamp of the honor system in the future. However, before they upset the balance of power between arena and honor points they probably want to look at sprucing up the individual battlegrounds. At the moment a couple of battlegrounds are vulnerable to stalemates and honor farming expeditions and players can often find themselves trapped. Warsong Gulch is the poster child of the never ending death-match and a twenty minute time limit is a welcome addition.

The resource gathering battlegrounds are not quite as broken as Warsong Gulch, but Blizzard still has a couple of good modifications in the works. Both Arathi Baisin and Eye of the Storm are having their victory conditions changed so that only 1600 resources are required to win a game. Also it looks like Blizzard is finally rewarding players who defend flags by giving flags an aura which increase honor gains by 50%. Another corresponding change is that flags now only take eight seconds to capture instead of ten. This should encourage teams to have players on guard duty or else be very vulnerable to ninjas.

Strands of the Ancients is also getting a slight update, which I think is good idea. The Wrath of the Lich King battleground has surprisingly become a favorite for alliance players and their faction does seem to win it more often. I attribute this to the alliance always starting on offense first which seems to give them a slight mental edge when they manage to take the relic chamber. A sizable percentage of players don't like putting any effort into a game which at best can only become a tie. Thus, the horde suffers from more AFKs mid-game then the alliance. Randomizing the starting position should fix the issue though I'm sure it will make earning honor harder for alliance characters.

Beyond the small tweaks to battlegrounds in Patch 3.2, we can probably expect some major changes further down the line. I have a feeling that we'll be looking at something that allows epic weapons and armor to be earned without a high arena rating within the year. That's not to say that Blizzard will just hand out gear upgrades to anyone with a working battleground bot. Instead, I think we might be looking at some sort of battleground rating system. In the past Blizzard experimented with a match making system for battlegrounds that used the ilevel of a player's gear. It was quickly taken out though, since it caused the queue times to dramatically increase.

However, the current matchmaking system for the arenas is very efficient and I think it could be adapted to the battlegrounds. This might just be the perfect solution to the bots and afk players which have consistently plagued battlegrounds. The current system simply rewards players for being in a battleground and the reporting system really only works in the longer Alterac Valley. If a personal battleground rating was used on some higher level PvP gear it could solve a lot of balance problems in PvP. Currently, the smaller arena brackets suffer from better geared "Ringers" who run friends through late at night. This often results in players who attempt to bring their arena rating up fairly getting pounded. Battlegrounds are much more resilient to this type of manipulation since the games are opposing factions only.

Pimp My Gear

2009-06-29T00:10:00.000-07:00

I was a little mad when Champions Online and Jumpgate Evolution were delayed, but before I could even fume about it I actually got an invite into the Champions beta. I'm not going to go into any details, but I'm glad to see that Cryptic is keeping true to their history of awesome creation tools. I was always impressed by the character creation process in City of Heroes even if I found the actual gameplay quite boring. In fact a lot of my friends also thought that creating a costumed crime fighter was more fun than playing the game. In college I would often come back from class to find that my roommates had filled all my character slots with cyborg pirates. It's a shame that no other MMO developer has allowed players the same level of customization.

I guess the major reason is because most MMOs work off the diku model, which means that character progression is all about equipment upgrades. If equipment visuals were set at the beginning of the game then most players would probably start off with the most awesome looking weapons and armor they could imagine. Half the reason players like climbing the gear progression ladder is because the higher level stuff tends to look better. Thus, just putting a costume generator from City of Heroes/Champions into a WoW clone is probably a bad idea. Still this doesn't mean that a such a system couldn't be adapted for an equipment based game.

I think one good idea would be to meld the City of Heroes character creation system into crafting. It would require some fine tuning, but such a system would probably create a strong game economy as some players made their own gear. Developers could even use item rarity to limit the "awesomeness" of weapons and armor. A plain looking pattern or design could require crafting materials from low level mobs while the more spectacular ones could require items from dungeon bosses. While not everyone would want to design their own gear, I think a lot of players would appreciate more variation in equipment. This is especially true at the end game of MMOs like World of Warcraft where tier sets tend to make everyone look the same.

It's a very boring system and I don't know any valid reasons why everyone should look the same. I've heard the argument that it's good for PvP so that you can visually recognize weaker and stronger targets. That may have been true in the past, but the user interfaces for these types of games have improved over the years. Most now allow opponents to see hitpoints and mana, which are pretty good indicators of a player's equipment status. I don't think there is any good reason for not opening up a complex crafting system which allows players to customize the visual look of items they make. I realize that a lot of developers are afraid of "the time to penis", but City of Heroes has managed to avoid the issue.

I really hope the MMOs that come out over the next couple years start adopting the same level of customization seen in City of Heroes. I'm getting awfully tired of everyone looking the same when I raid or PvP. It's especially painful when the graphic artists are rushed and you get some of the ugly armor sets seen in Wrath of the Lich King.

Please Play Our Game Less - Go Outside or Something

2009-06-26T13:51:00.000-07:00

Most players are aware that the next patch for World of Warcraft will be changing Wintergrasp into a somewhat bastardized mix of open world pvp and battelground instances. I almost used the term "hybrid" to describe this change, but I think that implies beneficial traits being mixed together. Nothing can be further from the truth in this situation since the changes are designed to make Lake Wintergrasp less popular with players. This trend was noted by a lot of different bloggers earlier in the year when Blizzard switched the Wintergrasp quests from a daily format to a weekly one. There's a definite sense of irony in trying to make parts of your game less popular so you can avoid latency issues.

It's not like changing the quests to a weekly format had any real effect in making Lake Wintergrasp less popular either. Both factions still desire loot from the Vault of Archavon and tokens for winning games are still useful for freshly minted level 80 players. That's probably why Blizzard has decided to take the limiting factor of battleground queues and mix it with the reset timer of world PvP objectives. Thus the servers only have to deal with about a hundred players being squeezed into a small area once every three hours. Of course I'm pretty sure more then a hundred people want to participate in Lake Wintergrasp, but hey it's their fault for playing such a popular game in the first place.

I might be overdoing the sarcasm here, but Blizzard seems to have this new attitude of ignoring any problems brought on by limited server resources. They may have broken all sorts of sales records with Wrath of the Lich King, but they sure aren't in a hurry to use that money on additional processing power for servers. I can't entirely blame them for not rushing to upgrade since the number of concurrent users has been dropping over the last few months. No reason to rush and spend money in a tough economy when the demand might not be there in the future. Hell, I can even run instances during the weekdays now without constantly running into the dreaded "Server cannot create additional instances" message.

However, Blizzard is walking a fine line by avoiding architecture upgrades by implementing bad game design. The next patch may reduce the lag problems in Lake Wintergrasp, but it's sure to cause a lot of resentment when people keep missing the queue. Also I wonder about the proposed changes to emblems in the heroic dungeons. I think it's a great idea to let dungeon players catch up with raiders. However, it's sure to have large numbers of players flocking back to heroic dungeons just as the new raid zone goes live. On the weekend it can still take me 10-15 minutes to create an instance for my group and I'm expecting the problem to only get worse after the patch. Hopefully, Blizzard has some sort of solution and it doesn't involve re-working the daily dungeon quests into a weekly format. Otherwise I fear World of Warcraft might be starting to implode from the weight of its own success.

Death and Passing on your Virtual Assets

2009-05-27T19:41:00.000-07:00

I don't really have that much experienced with real money transfers except in the form of spam advertisements. I know there's a pretty big market out there for selling gold to players and that this drives the theft and hacking of accounts. It's not all illegal though since I know some players routinely sell off their characters and virtual savings whenever they get tired of a game. While almost every game out there has a EULA that supposedly prevents players from cashing out, it's usually ignored. Theoretically, anyone whose played an online game for a couple months and earned some virtual cash could probably get a couple hundred dollars for their account. Some dedicated individuals who've raided or traded their way into a virtual fortune might be able to squeeze a couple thousand dollars from an auction site.

It's no wonder then that online services that protect virtual assets are also starting to mention game accounts. Usually, services like Asset Lock or Legacy Locker are for people that have a lot of money tied up in online sites like ebay or paypal. If you suddenly die then it can be quite hard for your immediate family to get access to any of your accounts. You could just write your account information down on a piece of paper and put it in a safety deposit box, but most of these services are cheaper. It's almost like a digital will without the lawyers. It's still not the most useful thing in the world and it seems kind of gimmicky at the moment. However, I'll admit that over the last ten years I've gone from maybe one or two online accounts to around twenty. Some of these accounts are just things like email, but a surprising number of them do have monetary value.

Like this CNN article says, we are spending more of our lives online and people are actually starting worry about this kind of stuff. This seems like an obvious sign that society is starting to associate more value to virtual property as they spend more time online. It's not actually that unbelievable. After all, the value of real world currencies have nothing to do with the ink and paper they are printed on. Virtual items tied up in accounts are the same way. They're worth what people will pay for them and in some instances that can be a lot. And since established institutions like banks are mostly absent in this market we are seeing companies pop up in their stead. It may be a little early for these companies to make a lot of money now, but in ten years who knows? I'm just thinking how much fun it will be ten years from now to track down this post and comment on how my bank finally started a similar service.

Blizzard Authenticator: Coming to a Credit Card near you

2009-05-26T15:56:00.000-07:00

User accounts for virtual worlds are the preferred target of high tech thieves nowadays. Not only is it relatively easy to liquidate stolen digital property, but there's almost no risk of prosecution. Virtual property isn't really understood by most courts of laws around the world and a majority of legal systems would find it hard to define stealing such items as theft. However, just because it's difficult to establish real world value for virtual property doesn't mean it's worthless. In recent years, digital criminals have devoted more effort into setting up phishing scams and trojan installers for game accounts then credit cards. This shows that there is obvious real world value to these accounts.

As World of Warcraft has grown into the largest subscription based MMO its become the main target of scams and computer viruses seeking out account information. It's safe to say that as the criminal activity targeting the game increased so has the load on it's customer service system. Since each case requires a fair amount of time to investigate and fix, the costs associated with customer service have risen. Also since Blizzard has several high level competitors they can't simply ignore requests to restore hacked accounts. It's because of this situation that Blizzard eventually introduced the authenticator. This relatively simple device can be registered with a player account and then provides a different password every time the player wants to log in.

I'll admit that it's a small increase in effort to log in with an authenticator, but players who have been repeatably hacked feel like it's worth the trouble. The device seems to be working quite well in preventing compromised computers from gaining control of World of Warcraft accounts. In fact it seems to be working so well that Visa is exploring a similar system for it's credit cards. Currently being tested is the Emue card which has a screen on the back which generates an additional pin number for every transaction. This doesn't help much if the card is physically stolen, but more then half of all credit card fraud is committed online nowadays. Thus just like the Blizzard Authenticator, the Emue card protects it's account holders with a layer of protection that can't be broken online.

The relative similarity between the two systems makes me wonder if Visa and Blizzard are using the same security company. Since game accounts and credit card information are two of the top targets for online crime I guess it makes sense that they use the same security measures. Of course just like the Blizzard Authenticator, the Emue card will probably only be adopted by people who've had their information stolen before. Still since Visa is planning on making the system backwards compatible that means stores will be able to handle both types of cards. If the Emue card becomes widely available for free then I expect anyone who shops online will adopt it pretty quickly. And the fact that the Blizzard Authenticator system has been working so well makes me believe this is a pretty secure technology and not a simple gimmick.

Can Blizzard survive being the most bankable game studio?

2009-05-12T09:54:00.000-07:00

Blizzard Entertainment was recently announced as the most successful game studio this year as calculated by Develop magazine. I'm not really sure what qualifies them to rank game studios, but their website says their calculations are based on sales data, critical success, and industry standing. Still it seems suspicious since the Develop 100 had Blizzard Entertainment ranked 46 spots lower last year. I know Wrath of the Lich King moved a lot of boxes, but World of Warcraft has been dominating the PC sales charts hand and hand with the Sims for the last four years. So why are trade publications only now starting to notice?

Well its no secret that Blizzard doesn't make bad games. The management for the company seems slightly different from other game studios and allows for long delays in production to fine tune a game. That's not to say they would allow a project to become vaporware or a 100 million dollar disaster like Tabula Rasa. Just look at Starcraft Ghost which Blizzard had no problems axing when it became apparent the quality wasn't there. Blizzard's dedication to quality isn't something that recently appeared and earned it a spot on the list. No the real reason is most likely that it's becoming more widely known just how much money World of Warcraft is earning from subscription fees alone.

I've long suspected that Blizzard has been making close to a 100 million dollars a month on subscriptions and it's recently been confirmed in several earnings report. Additionally, a subscription service whose only real cost is server maintenance and customer support has to have a great profit to revenue ratio. It's been theorized that a AAA MMO takes about 50 million dollars to develop and that number has been thrown around a couple of times for Warhammer Online. That means even if only half of the subscription revenue is profit then Blizzard still recoups its initial investment on World of Warcraft every month of the year.

Those kinds of investment returns just stand out like a sore thumb and it's probably why Blizzard was swallowed up by Activision. I just hope Blizzard can survive the future as the most bankable game studio while still producing high quality products. Last year there were some rumblings about the decision to split Starcraft 2 into three separate games. Some people thought it seemed a little too much like a naked money grab, something a mega studio like EA or Activision would do. While the giants of the game industry are very good about squeezing every last cent from a franchise they also make a lot of lackluster crap in the process.

With a good percentage of the profits earned by Activision this last quarter coming from World of Warcraft you have to wonder if Blizzard will be pushed to maintain this pace. It's fine if they are able to keep their revenue up by making the same high quality games we've come to expect from them. If all three Starcraft 2 games introduce a fair amount of quality content then I'm not one to complain. I think most gamers have come around to the idea simply because it gets the multi-player version into our hands faster. However, the next "innovative" idea might not have the same silver lining. It's makes me wonder if Blizzard can juggle quality, quantity and profits equally in the future or if short-term profits will start to become the priority.

Off the Beaten Path - New MMOs for the Summer

2009-05-05T10:12:00.000-07:00

There's a couple of new MMO's coming out over the summer and I'm glad to see that they are quite different from the standard fantasy fare. Last year I tried out Age of Conan and Warhammer Online when I got tired of World of Warcraft. The year before I dabbled in Lord of the Rings and the Rise of Kunark expansion for Everquest 2. While all four games had very different game mechanics, they still used the same type of background setting. It's been awhile since a decent MMO came out that wasn't a fantasy hack and slash adventure. Not that I'm totally repulsed by the genre anymore, I'm just looking for a breath of fresh air.

Luckily, it looks like next month's Jumpgate Evolution will satisify my desire to try something different. It's being advertised as an EVE Online that's actually fun to play. While I don't have the best reaction times in the world, I'm still looking forward to trying out a MMO based around real time spaceship combat. The only previous experience I've had with a twitch based MMO could be considered Tabula Rasa. However, that game's equipment system seemed a little too disposable and FPS-like for me to enjoy. As long as Jumpgate Evolution has a decent equipment and talent system then I'll probably stick with it for a couple months.

Even if Jumpgate Evolution is a free-trial month only game, there's still Champions Online right around the corner in July. I've been following the development of this one for awhile now and I'm very impressed with the graphics. I'm a fan of the "stylistic" graphics approach and the cell shaded look fits my preferences quite well. I'm afraid that some of the same design flaws from City of Heroes might also make it into Champions Online though. I'm hoping that Cryptic Studios stayed away from procedural generated content this time around and that leveling through missions isn't so repetitive. I'm also hoping for a better equipment system, since I always felt like the original enhancement one was too trivial for a MMO.

After the summer there a couple MMO's that are floating around release days in the fall, but haven't set them in stone yet. The major one is probably AION: Tower of Eternity which is being released by NCSoft. NCsoft isn't exactly a favorite on my list of MMO publishers at the moment. They seem a little too eager to abandon low performing MMOs and they've cut back their presence in the West a bit. Still a game where angels and dragons get to fight aerial battles does sound very cool. The reviews from Korea and China also seem favorable for the game though popularity doesn't always translate across the pacific. If the game is actually entertaining and avoids a lot of the pointless grinding associated with the Lineage brand then it might nice to try out.

Ulduar and encounters with multiple difficulty levels

2009-05-04T15:13:00.000-07:00

While I'm primarily playing World of Warcraft at the moment, I've been unimpressed by the length of time its taken Blizzard to add content onto the end game. It's not that the current raid content is too easy, just that there wasn't enough initially in the expansion to support raiding guilds. It's a situation very similar to when World of Warcraft first launched and Molten Core/Onyxia was the only raid content available. Blizzard has taken steps to fix the issue by filling the new dungeon, Ulduar, with encounters that have multiple difficulty settings. The theory goes that as guilds gear up and get used to clearing Ulduar they will start doing the encounters on a higher difficulty, which will stretch out the life of the new content. It makes sense on paper and worked very nicely with the Sartharion fight. However, I wonder if it will have the same effect when used in a full length raid dungeon.

The problem I see is that a raid dungeon is structured differently from a single boss encounter and may not get the same mileage from having multiple settings. Guilds would usually save Sartharion until the end of a raid night then try a few attempts at a harder difficulty level. If the guild leaders didn't think they were going to win, they could always make the encounter easier by killing off a drake. The encounter was only as long as the guild wanted it to be. This is a bit different from a raid dungeon where after failing on a harder difficulty setting a couple times, a guild still has to complete the rest of the dungeon. This basically stretches out the length of time a guild spends in Ulduar compared to the early dungeons.

I do hear that the boss encounters in Ulduar are better designed then Naxxramas and are very unique. A friend of mine was recently giving me the rundown of a fight done on motorcycles, where you set fire to oil slicks. Still, no matter how entertaining the vehicle mechanics are in a encounter, its a bad idea to artificially keep players in the same dungeon. Players will get bored of the same fights in the same dungeon even if the difficulty can be changed. It makes more sense to put varying difficulty encounters outside the main dungeon so guilds can challenge themselves while visiting a different location. Of course none of this would be a problem if more then one raid dungeon per tier was available to guilds. However, I'm guessing the Blizzard staff is stretched pretty thin between all the new games in development. Plus, they most likely haven't yet streamlined the process of making 10 and 25 man versions of each raid dungeon.

In the future, I am hoping the next full length raid dungeon is accompanied by more single boss encounters. There's still a lot of room for additional dragons in the Wyrmrest Temple and other single boss locations could be added. Anything that encourages a raiding guild to move between raid instances is a positive in my mind. As it stands now I'm thinking that players will burn out quicker on Ulduar then they did on Naxxramas.

It Burns, it burns: Paladins and the changes to Mana Regen

2009-04-27T18:04:00.000-07:00

I was a little fearful when I first heard that Blizzard was reworking mana regeneration to make boss fights more challenging. I agree that most guilds effectively had unlimited mana with all the improved talents in Wrath of the Lich King. Still I couldn't help but feel that this was a perfect opportunity for an unintended consequence to sneak into the game. My fears weren't exactly put to rest when I first logged in after the patch and saw that I had lost around 150 mana regen on my paladin. This was especially troubling since my retribution gear isn't exactly loaded down with intelligence or mana regeneration. Luckily, I'm used to hitting divine plea whenever it pops and it seems to keep my mana bar going along with occasional replenishment.

Still one thing I've noticed is that this seems to have made paladins even more vulnerable to mana drain and mana burn. Paladins have always been particularly powerless against these two spells, but now it seems you only need to be hit by it once or twice to be rendered useless in a fight. Shamans and Hunters also have to go through the same issue, but generally have larger mana pools. Blizzard's constant experimentation with paladin itemization has created a class with a very small mana pool and a large dependency on it's mana regeneration abilities. As a result I'm seriously thinking of changing out a couple gem sockets to get a slightly bigger mana pool for my retribution paladin.

I'm not quite sure if Blizzard wanted to improve the importance of mana management in PvP situations also. The recent changes to replenishment in PvP makes me suspect that it might have been done on purpose. I know feral druids in particular were famous for switching forms and using healing spells before jumping back into high dps mode. I'm guessing now with mana drains/burns being so effective that this is no longer a good idea. In general, the changes to mana regeneration are going to greatly shorten the times for arena matches. Since they were already pretty short I'm not sure if this was the best decision for Blizzard to make.

Stuck between a rock and a cannot launch additional instances message

2009-04-24T08:20:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been helping some friends out by running non-heroic instances with their alts. It's fairly easy to mix and match our characters so that we can complete a dungeon quickly and still have a good mix of classes that use different armor types. Most of my friends have two talent builds and one of them is usually a damage build. Thus when we do an alt run we avoid using any tanks and just have all the mains switch over to their dps build. This allows us to speed through the non-heroic instances at the cost of a rare death or two on a large pull. It's a good system especially if we get two paladins using divine storm and seal of light. However, we been having problems recently with creating instances and keep getting the dreaded "Cannot Create Additional Instances at this Time" message. Last night it took 15 minutes of knocking our head against an instance portal before we finally got one created for our group.

Most of the issues are being caused by the high number of people returning to World of Warcraft for the Ulduar patch. I understand that the concurrent users for the game are highly cyclical and peak around patch releases. However, it seems as if Blizzard is using this as an excuse to ignore the problem or simply roll out additional resources at a slower pace. There's also the possibility their key network people are involved in milestones for other projects at the moment. Whatever the root cause the problem has grown much worse this week and seems especially noticeable if you try to do anything, but a heroic Northend dungeon. I'm guessing that Blizzard has some sort of resource queue on the instance servers which gives priority to certain instances. This is a real pain at the moment since it seems to me that lower level characters doing non heroics are more vulnerable to being stuck outside an instance. Plus, if a non 80 is stuck outside an instance for more then three seconds it seems to send a whisper to everyone on the opposing faction.

I don't really mind a makeshift battle royales when there is a fighting chance of winning, but its almost always a massacre when running a non 80 group. The entrance for normal and heroic instances are shared and that means you often have mid level seventies in blues fighting against players in Naxx gear. It's not pretty, especially since the "Cannot Create Additional Instances" message means the victors will definitely be corpse camping the losers. I used to think if you had some patience this wasn't too bad an issue. You just wait until the higher level group finally gets into an instance then you rez. However, a couple of times I ran into situations where after rezzing my group still couldn't create an instance and then a new group of eighties appeared. It can be very frustrating and if you have any PUG players in your group they tend to leave. Also I've seen evidence of high level players creating an instance and leaving one person inside it so they farm honor from people who are stuck outside.

It's an ugly situation right now and there's a few things that could be done in the future to prevent the issue.

1) Create additional instance servers for the love of god.
How expensive could they be? I have a feeling its not a matter of cost, but simply that all of Blizzard's network engineers are involved in getting the new Battle.Net ready for Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and the new MMO.

2) Design new dungeons with separate entrances for heroics and normals
It's doesn't require much additional effort and even a little distance between the two would prevent slaughters.

3) Improve the resource handling of instance servers
I'm not sure what sort of system is currently used by Blizzard. I hope they at least take into account how many people are in a the group that is trying to create an instance. A single level 80 trying to make money in a old world instance shouldn't have priority over a group of 70's trying to do a non-heroic nexus run.

Exorcism and the Pally Burst Damage Problem

2009-04-23T15:33:00.000-07:00

I haven't been playing MMO's as much recently with work being pretty busy and forcing me to cut down on the days I could raid. For the last couple months it pretty much came down to being able to play games or write about them. However, with the release of the Ulduar patch in World of Warcraft I thought it would be a good idea to go ronin for a bit and leave my guild. This gives me some actual free time to try out some of the non raid content in the patch and experiment with the new dual spec system. I'm still playing a paladin as my main and as a hybrid class he probably benefits the most from being able to keep two different specs. That's not to say other classes don't benefit greatly from the dual spec system. Even pure dps classes like rogues and hunters can tailor their talent choices for PvE or PvP damage.

Since I wasn't going to be raiding much I decided to try out having two damage builds for my paladin. My primary build was a classic retribution build which goes slightly into the protection tree for some increased survivability. However, for my secondary build I wanted to do something a little more off the wall. Since I have a decent collection of healing gear in the bank I decided to try a shockadin build by going just deep enough in the holy tree to grab holy shock. It wasn't that bad of a PvP build since holy shock, exorcism, and judgement dealt a nice amount of burst damage. Plus, the build had enough holy talents where it was possible to heal team members in arenas. I didn't get a chance to test it, but I figured that a paladin could quickly unload all three instant cast spells and still keep two team members alive.

Of course the problem with exorcism is that it's a class-wide spell and pure retribution paladins also got a decent boost to their burst damage from it. Blizzard obviously noticed this at the last minute and decided to change exorcism so it doesn't work on other players. It's a shame to lose a interesting build, but I can see why Blizzard felt they had to nerf the ability. Paladins have long had a problem with all their abilities being dependent on cooldowns instead of a system like rage or combo points. This allows very nice burst damage, but also makes their sustained damage much weaker then other classes. Blizzard was pretty much forced to make exorcism usable on living mobs since Ulduar doesn't have undead mobs. However, adding another ability dependent on a cooldown just further aggravated the burst damage problem.

Blizzard really does seem stumped on what to do here and moderators on the forums have actually asked players to share ideas. Rohan's idea of using stacks of vengeance as a resource which are consumed by special abilities is pretty good. I also like how Warhammer Online had a lot of hybrid classes that had abilities that were dependent on players healing and dealing damage. This isn't exactly doable for World of Warcraft at the moment, since the targeting system in the game makes it hard to switch back and forth. However, paladins do have a number of self healing abilities. Thus if new damage abilities were conditional on paladin's having a full health bar then you could successfully prevent overwhelming burst damage in PvP situations. It's an idea somewhat similar to the current incarnation of Seal of the Martyr.

Using Full Health to limit burst damage:

1) Change some current paladin abilities to work like seal of the martyr
Example: Make Crusader Strike hit harder, but also deal damage to the paladin.

2) Add an ability which can only be used at full health
Example: Righteous Scorn = Exorcism that can only be used at full health, but deals damage to the paladin. The cooldown could be rather short so that during a raid the paladin could use it more often if they are being healed.

3) Adjust healing effects on abilities like Divine Storm
Example: Ideally a paladin would have to use multiple Divine Storms to recover from the damage dealt by Righteous Scorn.

Which MMOs could be shut down in the near Future?

2009-02-23T19:29:00.000-08:00

SOE recently announced that the last full developer for the Matrix Online was leaving the company this month. The sci-fi MMO had been picked up from Warner Brothers after a disappointing launch in 2005 and been on life support since then. Luckily, the all-access pass has generated enough interest in the game that SOE felt justified keeping a small development team on the project. By all accounts this small dev team has mostly consisted of just Ben "Rarebit" Chamberlain over the last few months. The quality and amount of updates are expected to go down as a result.

The news about the Matrix Online got me thinking about some of the 2009 predictions I made. One of which was that SOE would have to take a couple of MMOs off their all-access pass to make room for new games. While it probably costs very little to keep an already established MMO running there are other reasons why companies shut them down. Some publishers like NCSoft simply see under performing MMOs as an embarrassment which negatively effects their brand name. Still others like SOE have been keeping several games running which barely break even on subscription fees and take resources away from more populated virtual worlds.

In particular, SOE has two games on their all-access pass which are barely played by subscribers. If my understanding of the pass is correct then each game receives a percentage of the subscription revenue based on how popular they are. Planetside and the Matrix Online both have niche fan bases and I wonder if they can continue to support themselves. The recent announcement by SOE makes me suspect that future development for the Matrix Online will be sparse and that it could be shut down in the near future.

NCSoft is the other company that will be probably be shutting down more then one game in the near future. Tabula Rasa is scheduled to go offline at the end of this month even though subscription numbers were projected to be good enough to keep the game's servers running. Still as I said before NCSoft isn't interested in maintaining hobby sized MMO worlds that barely turn a profit. This policy is what has me worried about City of Heroes. Champions Online will launch this year and DC Universe won't be far behind it. While City of Heroes/Villains is currently staying above the 100k subscription mark I wonder if it can maintain those numbers in the face of so much competition.

Funcom is almost not worth mentioning since all of their games seem to be on shaky ground at the moment. Both Anarchy Online and Age of Conan were released with horrendous bugs and needed further development time. I get the feeling that Funcom is incapable of moving into the post-WoW era of MMO development and might not be around for much longer. If their next game, The Secret World, isn't a decent hit then I suspect the company might be sold off. At least Age of Conan is a good enough game that I could see another publisher keeping it running.

Turbine is probably the only development studio I'm not worried about. Even though the original Asheron's Call can't have more then 50k subscribers, I think it's enough to keep the game afloat. After all Dungeons and Dragons is only projected at having around 70k subscribers and Turbine is still producing updates at a decent rate. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if Turbine eventually started their own all-access pass since they are gathering a sizable library of quality MMOs. Of course they would probably need to announced their next project to get a lot of interest in their all-access pass. Here's hoping that the rumors of Turbine acquiring the Harry Potter license has some truth to it.

Keep in mind this is just based on my opinion, but I suspect the following games of being shut down within the next year or two for a variety of reasons.

Guaranteed Closing in 2009
Tabula Rasa

Suspected Closing in 2009
Matrix Online (Crowded All-Access Pass)
Planetside (Replaced by newer FPS MMO The Agency)

Suspected Closing in 2010
City of Heroes/Villains (Competition from CO and DCU)
Anarchy Online (If Funcom bankrupts)

Jeff Kaplan officially moves on to the new Blizzard MMO

2009-02-13T12:01:00.000-08:00

Everyone has their own two cents on what Jeff Kaplan leaving World of Warcraft means for the game. Most agree that the decision to move onto Blizzard's new MMO is related to the raid changes that Wrath of the Lich King brought to the game. One theory is that upper management demanded a reduction in raid difficulty and that caused a irrevocable difference of opinion with the lead developer. It's not a far fetched theory since Tigole has been know for being outspoken in his design ideas and achiever like mentality. After all as the developer who coined the phrase "welfare epics" he's sort of become a symbolic representation of everything casual gamers hate about raiding. Still if I remember correctly, during last year's Blizzcon he was already saying that a majority of his time was devoted to the new MMO.

This probably means that he's been working on the project for quite some time and hasn't been that involved with Wrath of the Lich King from the start. That not only explains why the raid content in the new expansion is easier, but also why there is so little of it. It must have somewhat slowed the development team down to lose their expert raid designer. While I'm not a fan of Jeff' Kaplan's high level design ideas, I'll admit that he does quality work. Under his lead the raiding in World of Warcraft had excellent art direction and some very interesting boss encounters. Of course most of us never got to see this content so I'm not that sad to see him moving on. In fact, one of the first posts on this site was about his focus on raid content and the problems it was causing. I only hope that Blizzard's new MMO benefits from his expertise without running into the same problems.

I also have to say I'm very interested to see what Blizzard's new MMO is all about. I've been holding out for one set in the Starcraft universe, but I just don't see that fitting in with Jeff's design style. In fact I'm starting to think more and more that Blizzard is working on a new fantasy IP for their next game. Jeff seems like a fantasy guy and I just don't seem him designing raid encounters for spaceships and marine squads. Then again I could be wrong, maybe after six and half years he's tired of elves and orcs.

Visiting the Old School

2009-02-03T14:57:00.000-08:00

Just a few days ago I actually ran through all of Blackwing Lair for the first time ever. It was a big moment for me since my original raiding guild had just started doing that instance before we took a break from raiding. Before that we had ignored a lot of the higher end raids and primarily focused on Molten Core, Onxyia, and Zul'Gurub. It was slow going to get loot from old world instances especially for a casual guild that only raided three nights a week. I remember sometimes going three weeks without any upgrades and I know some people who played more popular classes having even worse dry spells. That's probably why my guild sort of went on hiatus when the new honor system came out. All of sudden it became possible to see your progression towards earning a upgrade and everyone sort of forgot about seeing BWL, AQ, or Naxx.

Wrath of the Lich King changed all of that of course. It wasn't just that Blizzard reused Naxxramas for raid content either. The achievement system revitalized the idea of going back and playing tourist in old raid zones. Not only could players get a chance to see content they missed, but they could make some money at the same time. Daily quests may be a faster way to make money, but they get boring real quick. Also I don't know about you, but the old world armor sets seem to have more pizazz then what we have now in Wrath of the Lich King. Tier 7 makes me want to gouge my eyes out, especially when compared to the glorious Tier 2 from Blackwing Lair. I'm convinced half the interest in old world raid zones come from people who regret deleting their earlier armor sets. I'll have to admit I'm one of them.

It's funny that while I'm having a lot of fun in Naxxramas, I'm equally enjoying the other old raid zones that didn't get upgraded loot tables. It's all new content to me and I guess part of it is the challenge of figuring out how to do old raid content with a single group. None of us know these fights from previous experience so we are learning by trial and error. We could easily look it up on wowhead, but that would defeat the purpose. Encounters like Chromaggus and Ebonroc have tricks to them and it's actually fun to figure them out yourselves when a single misstep doesn't kill everyone. I think that's the idea that Blizzard is chasing with the move to more casual raiding. They may have started out by making the raids in Wrath of the Lich King a little too easy, but they are on to something. Now if they could just get the artists back from their other projects so we could get decent looking gear again.

Should developers design raids around Latency?

2009-01-30T07:49:00.000-08:00

Over the last couple weeks I've been having fun learning the raid encounters in Wrath of the Lich King. I've mostly been absent from the raid scene since the Karazhan hump broke up a couple of my guilds. However, I was tempted back after I kept hearing how casual the new raids were in the expansion. So far it seems true and I've found both the 10-man and 25- man versions a lot of fun. The fights I especially like are the ones that are more involved and require coordinated movements. I think my favorite is the DDR like strategy required for Heigan, but Thaddeus and Grobulus are also fun. However, I've noticed that these fights can be inherently harder on the 25-man versions because of random latency issues.

The effort of coordinating twenty-five players is always going to be harder then coordinating ten players, but that's not the only reason that the heroic raids are more difficult. Increasing a raid to twenty-five players also makes a raid more vulnerable to one person with latency issues causing a wipe. This is especially true on Thaddues where one person with the wrong polarity at the wrong spot can kill everyone. Sometimes just a second delay on a player's screen is all it takes. If that weren't the case then the frogger slimes after Patchwerk wouldn't claim so many people. I shudder to think how Naxx must have been back when it required a raid of forty players all having good latency.

I guess this is why back in the day Naxx was for hardcore raiders only. Hardcore raiders not only had the free time to devote to these encounters, but they also had stable Internet connections. Guilds that got to Naxx back when it was forty man had to kick anyone who was slow on coordinated movement encounters. The worst part is that it's very tricky to tell if a player was being slow because of skill or if they simply had a small bit of lag on their connection. Designing around latency has always been an issue with MMOs and limited their design. The reason auto-attacks and hot buttons are used by everyone is because real time combat is vulnerable to lag. Just look at how useless combos were in Age of Conan's PvP combat.

The developers originally designed fights like Thaddeus because Naxx was supposed to be for the most hardcore raiders. This meant the developers could assume everyone had perfect Internet connections. Now though with raiding being more casual it's probably irresponsible to design encounters like it. Oh, I admit the idea of the polarity shift mechanic is genius especially on a Frankenstein like monster. However, it shouldn't kill everyone in the raid if someone has a connection that lags out every once and awhile. At most latency issues should kill the one person in the raid who had them. This means that a casual guild only has to make sure the main tank and his healer has ironclad connections. If Blizzard is serious about keeping raid encounters more casual then they might want to take into account that all cable modem connections are not created equal.

Did the bugged Arena Matching System include ilevel?

2009-01-22T12:56:00.000-08:00

The aftermath of 3.0.8 continues to be felt as both Lake Wintergrasp and the Arenas were closed down soon after the patch went live. I was lucky enough to get a few games of Lake Wintergrasp in on Tuesday, but didn't have time to delve into any arena games. Apparently the entire rating system had become broken with matches resulting in weird and excessive rating changes. Sometimes a team's rating was changing by more then 50 points per match. The source of the problem was a new matching system that was snuck into the patch. Testing the arena point system is almost impossible on the PTR and apparently the issue snuck by internal testers. Hopefully, this isn't a sign that Blizzard had to lay off some of their QA staff like Warhammer.

Most of the items that were include in the patch were supposed to be bug fixes for items and classes. It doesn't really make sense to also include an update to the arena matching system. The previous system worked quite well at matching teams against one another based on their respective ratings. The addition of personal ratings prevented people from smurfing or buying spots on higher ranked teams. However, I've mentioned before that "ringers" or well equipped people joining lower ranked teams would still be a problem. This is because the matching system never looked at item ilevel when determining match-ups and thus ringers would pop up as players maxed out on current PvP gear.

I suspected that the new matching system might have used some sort of new value connected to a team's item ilevel. A similar system was introduced to battlegrounds a couple years ago, but had to be taken out because it caused queue times to become too long. Arena games are a different animal altogether and players most likely wouldn't experience the same increase in queue times. However, it looks like whatever change Blizzard made to the system adversely affected the rating changes. This is just conjecture, but I believe this new hidden value for match-ups was causing point changes to team ratings to be applied twice.

We'll know for sure when Blizzard reactivates the arena system though who knows if they will move forward with the new matching system or continue to use the old one. I personally dislike the practice of ringers and find a rating system that uses a combination of ilevel and current team rating the best for match-ups. However, I dislike that Blizzard felt the need to sneak this into a patch. I guess we all know how sensitive the issue of arena epics are to some players and Blizzard obviously wanted to avoid player outrage.

If the change in the matching system did add some sort of ilevel value to the formula then it would mean that lesser geared players could more easily increase their rank. Blizzard might have decided to not mention the change in hopes of avoiding trolls from bringing up the "welfare epics" issue. Then again this could have been a small change to the arena matching system formula which was mishandled. Though it does seems unusual for a small change to an old system to cause that many problems. Blizzard usually experiences unintended consequences on new content.

Lake Wintergrasp and Patch 3.0.8

2009-01-21T11:25:00.000-08:00

There were some changes made to Lake Wintergrasp in yesterday's patch which have influenced the standard strategy for the zone. The attacking faction still has the advantage, but the increased hitpoints for the exterior walls makes it harder to take the fortress from the sides. The horde in particular were fond of taking the back western wall and destroying the goblin workshop. This had the advantage of being close to the attacker's western graveyard, but far away from where the defenders respawned. However, this strategy only worked since the fortress cannons could easily be taken out by range classes. With the recent changes to the zone you can see how this won't be as effective.

Patch Changes that effect Wintergrasp Strategy

-Wintergrasp PvP vehicles have had their health increased.
-Wintergrasp Tower cannons have had their health increased.
-The Wintergrasp Fortress Exterior walls have had their health increased.
-The Fortress Keep door now has had its health decreased.
-The Orb is now instantly clickable.

Blizzard probably increased the health of the cannons to make it harder for individual players to take out the fortress defenses. The fortress cannons play a big role in stopping incoming siege weapons especially when the gunners spot them from far away. Games were ending much sooner then they should since players were able to ride under cannons and destroy them and then bring in the heavy siege weapons. I noticed that warlocks and shadow priests were particularly good at this since their instant cast dots allowed them to do a lot of damage even if they were quickly killed by alert defenders. The increase in cannon health should make it so that siege engines are necessary for defeating fortress defenses and not just knocking down walls.

This should slow down the pace of Wintergrasp a bit and make it so that 8-10min games happen less often. That's not to say Blizzard wants the attacking side to lose. The design of Lake Wintergrasp still favors the attackers and it makes sense to encourage the zone to change sides often. The problem was that the previous setup gave the attackers too much of an advantage and games were ending too quickly. The exterior walls and cannon health was increased to make Wintegrasp last longer, but the keep doors had their health decreased. It may take longer to get into the inner courtyard but once the attackers are there the game should be practically over now. This is especially true since the orb is now instant clickable and can't be defended by constant AOE attacks.

So what are the strategies for Wintergrasp now?

Defenders:
Catapults are going to be more handy for defending cannons from players. They've always been the best anti-personal siege weapon, but were fairly easy to destroy. The increased health should make the catapult less of a push over when facing groups of players on the ground.

Demolishers and Siege Engines are still going to be needed for taking out the attacker's workshops. The trick is to destroy the workshop and not just take control of it. Unfortunately, from what I've seen, defenders often move directly into the workshop instead of supporting the siege engines bombing it. This usually causes the defenders to take control of the workshop and prevents it from being destroyed. As a result when the attackers respawn they can easily retake the workshop and resume launching attacks close to the fortress.

There's no longer any reason to have aoe classes in the Orb room since its instant clickable. In general with the new patch there's more reasons for defenders to be fighting outside of the fortress. Basically once the attackers are in the inner courtyard the keep doors are so weak that the game is practically over.

Attackers:
The side walls will take longer to destroy and it should be harder to suicide attack the cannons on them. Walls should probably only be a target when there's no defenders outside to prevent attacks on the cannons. It doesn't seem like you can simply ignore defenders and quickly destroy the cannons anymore.

The front gates are weak compared to the walls now and should be a priority. The increased health on vehicles means they should be able to approaching the front gates and get a couple ram attacks off before being destroyed. Standing back and firing from a distance should only be done when firing in a tower's blindspot.

I think catapults are less useful to attackers now since demolishers and siege engines have more health. It used to be a problem getting vehicles into ramming distance and catapults helped defend the slower moving vehicles as they got into place. Now with the increased hitpoints I think there's less reason to bring catapults into the fray unless there are large groups of defenders outside the walls.

Tips for Twinking

2009-01-15T14:21:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if it's a sign that I'm getting bored with Wrath of the Lich King, but I started twinking out a druid that I've had sitting around on my account forever. I don't know exactly why I decided to start playing low level characters again, but it probably has something to do with the hundreds of stone keeper's shards burning a hole in my wallet. The new account bound gear has decent stats even at level 1 and makes it fun to start all over again with a new class. Of course by fun, I mean that you're completely overpowered and just face stomp everything in your path. Its very therapeutic to visit areas that terrorized my early characters and then lay waste to the surrounding area.

Blizzard showed some intelligence when they designed the new account bound gear. Players can either buy PvE gear using emblems of heroism or PvP gear with the stone keeper's shards. If you want to do the specialized low level battlegrounds then the PvP gear is the way to go. Just keep your eyes open for when your faction controls Lake Wintergrasp and then join a heroic dungeon group. Certain dungeons like The Nexus, The Old Kingdom, and Gundrak have five bosses on heroic and are perfect for quickly getting shards and emblems for both sets of gear. If you just want to level your character then make sure to grab the daily heroic quest each day from Violet Hold for two extra emblems. Personally, I used a combination of both so I could quickly get my character ready.

Basic Account Bound Equipment
Weapon: Both PvP and PvE versions
Shoulders: Both PvP and PvE versions
Trinket: Just a PvE version with spellpower or attack power

If you're playing a caster just be warned that the PvP staff seems a little bit more expensive to buy at 325 stone keeper's shards while the PvE version was only 65 emblems of heroism. If you really want to go overboard then you can track down some of the old ways to enchant items that didn't have level restrictions. One of my friends found out that the Zul'gurub shoulder enchants can be done on an account bound item with restricting it. Using a newer method like the aldor/scryer enchants prevent it from being worn by lower level characters. I'm not sure if this will be changed in a future patch since it does require you to have a character exalted with Zandalar. At the moment as long as the method of enchanting or improving the item doesn't have a level restriction then it shouldn't mess with the eligibility of lower level characters to wear it.

Also some of the enchanter recipes can still be done on low level gear. The only problem is that a lot of the low level materials are expensive or missing from the auction house. I think Tobold is right and too many enchanters switched to inscription and now we have a dearth of dis-enchanters in the game. I know on my server the greater planar essences sell for 10gp more then the greater cosmic essences because of low supply. Still any enchant that increases hitpoints or stamina is worth the cost of buying hard to find materials. Just remember that if you are planing on leveling your character instead of playing battlegrounds then its best not to spend too much. The pace of leveling is much quicker and normal enchanted items quickly become obsolete unlike the account bound items.

PvP gear less vital in WotLK

2009-01-13T04:00:00.000-08:00

The group of friends I play with has pretty much mastered the heroic dungeons in Wrath of the Lich King. We haven't yet finished all the achievements, but we've put a healthy dent into the list so far. As a result of all the heroic runs we find our characters maxed out on gear and emblems of heroism. We're trying to get into the ten man raids, but trying to get more then seven friends on at the same time is like herding cats. While waiting to get a working raiding group set up I tried out some PvP over the weekend. During the Burning Crusade I mostly focused on arenas and battlegrounds and got most of my gear upgrades from these activities. Imagine my surprise then when I found out the PvP rewards in Wrath of the Lich King weren't really upgrades compared to the heroic dungeon gear.

It looks like PvP rewards have been seriously cut in power because of the entire "welfare epics" problem from the Burning Crusade. Raiding in general suffered as a viable end game activity in the last expansion because the rewards for PvP were easy to obtain. Then again raiding had long enjoyed an obsessive focus from Blizzard's developers so I considered it fair turnaround at the time. This expansion though seems to have a more balanced reward system for both end-game activities. The different methods of earning similar quality gear makes it easier to equip your character no matter what you prefer to do. Also it seems that Blizzard has made it so players can effectively compete in arenas in both PvE and PvP gear. This is mainly because of two key changes to stats normally found on PvP gear.

1. Resilience
The developers were trying to put more importance on dealing damage and less on crowd control in this arena season. One way they achieved this was by putting less resilience on gear and making it less effective at preventing damage. So while a massive amount of resilience might help a little bit, it won't make you an indestructible juggernaut anymore

2. Stamina
I was very surprised by the small increase in stamina that most PvP gear has compared to PvE items. There was huge difference in hitpoints in the Burning Crusade depending on if you were wearing PvE or PvP gear. It looks like the developers decided to make that less of a factor in Wrath of the Lich King by making the stamina difference much smaller.

There are a couple other changes in Wrath of the Lich King that help prevent PvP or PvE from gaining the upper hand over the other. The ten man versions of raids make it possible for pick up groups to access higher level items and allows casual raiders to compete with the better geared arena teams. Also the improvements to the arena reward system helps prevents highly ranked players from unfairly keeping their rank by trading wins or smurfing. The only problem I see is in the introduction of new gear. But as long as Blizzard starts a new arena season whenever they introduce a new raid dungeon it should be fine. I do worry that players might be able to gear up too quickly in this expansion by doing a combination of PvP and PvE, but I don't know if this means they will burn out faster.

Relmstein's 2009 Predictions

2009-01-12T08:49:00.000-08:00

With everyone making grandiose predictions for 2009 I realized I'm a bit behind the curve since I didn't even bother to make any for 2008. I remember I did say this year would be all about PvP with Wrath of the Lich King, Warhammer, and Age of Conan coming out. But I must say I had no idea that Age of Conan would launch without a basic PvP system and people would only play Warhammer's scenarios. I thought for sure that Wintergrasp would be a pale imitation of a Warhammer keep siege, but I must say I'm having fun except for all the lag. As you can tell if I had made predictions for this year I would probably have been wrong on most of them, with maybe one or two exceptions. Still with so many bloggers putting the reputation of their intuition on the line this year how can I stay out of the fun.

1. No Micro-transaction based game will catch on this year
I get tired about people claiming that micro-transactions are the wave of the future. I just don't see this payment system becoming more widespread when a decent amount of western gamers see the subscription model as having better value. Micro-transactions will continue to enjoy some success in youth oriented games where players don't have access to credit cards. However, I feel that a large amount of gamers leave these games behind as they gain a steady source income and credit cards of their own.

2. At least one non-western MMO will become big in America.
A lot of MMOs last year were subjected to massive advertising campaigns and had problems with being over hyped by their fan base. This created a lot of unrealistic expectations with players and actually hurt the game in the long run. While initial box sales are important, the financial success of MMOs have always depended on establishing a reputation with gamers. I think this year a small foreign game can catch the market by surprise by circumventing the hype machine and allowing players to form their own opinions. EVE Online managed to do this quite well and other games can follow in its footsteps.

3. People will grow tired of Wrath of the Lich King in the summer
Blizzard really did put in a great amount of effort with Wrath of the Lich King and produced their best expansion yet. However, since the development time frame hasn't improved I see this expansion following the same pattern of decline as the Burning Crusade. The initial surge in subscription numbers should stop three months after release and the numbers should start to decrease after six months. Games released after the summer of this year should see a boost in their initial sales. Though we won't see anything like Age of Conan's surprising box sales until a year after Wrath of the Lich King.

4. Blizzard will announce their new MMO this year.
Someone will either spill the beans or kidnap a Blizzard employee to find out the truth. I still have my fingers crossed for a Starcraft MMO, but a new franchise is also very likely. I don't think Blizzard wants to cannibalize the subscription base for World of Warcraft so they are dragging their feet on announcing the new MMO. However, news from last Blizzcon made it clear that several lead developers (Jeff Kaplan) were spending most of their time on the new MMO. This hints that too much work is being done on the game to keep it quiet much longer.

5. The Old Republic will become over hyped
I'm disappointed in how many empty promises have already been made about the game. Bioware might actually mean what they say, but we heard a lot of this stuff before. I think the last three games that came out promised that player actions would really matter and that the game would have an epic storyline. Instead we've gotten mostly static worlds with recycled plot lines. If Bioware just promised to make a game better then Star Wars Galaxies and keep George Lucas away from the project I would be satisfied. Instead I fear the game will be overhyped and suffer the consequences.

6. Warhammer will become the 2nd biggest MMO in the west.
I really don't think Warhammer is dead though it needs some major changes before it becomes the PvP game that was promised to us. In the last patch a lot of things have already been fixed, but no one really cares because of Wrath of the Lich King. If Warhammer just keeps improving itself though it can take advantage of Blizzard's slow development cycle. I wouldn't be surprised if Warhammer surges in the summer this year especially if no new releases make a splash in the market.

7. Champions Online will consume the subscription base for City of Heroes
A large part of the attraction of MMOs is the constant introduction of new content. Unfortunately, for NCSoft this means that Champions Online will have a huge advantage over City of Heroes when it releases this year. Champions Online will have similar gameplay, but will also be filled with new zones, stories, and costumes. While I know the current City of Heroes fanbase is very dedicated I think they will start to desert NCSoft pretty quickly. Of course the future of Cryptic is cryptic because of Atari buying them out so there could be some surprises.

8. The Star Trek film will increase interest in the MMO
The trailer for the movie looked very good and J.J. Abrams is skilled at making great entertainment. This is basically free advertisement for Crytpic and if I were them I would have something to release in conjunction with the movie. I guarantee the web traffic on the games site increases drastically after the movie's release. It might be two years until the game is release, but it's never too early to start building a community around a MMO.

9. SOE will slash games from its all-access pass
SOE will finally have to make a decision to remove some of the older games from its all-access pass. Quite frankly I'm not that impressed with SOE's upcoming lineup of games and think most of them will have to be put on the all-access pass to turn a profit. This will cause the revenue to become a little too spread out and some games will have to be removed from life support. I have a feeling Planetside is the one most in danger.

10. If SOE has a hit, it will be Free Realms
While I'm not a big believer in micro-transaction games I do believe they serve a niche. There are a lot of low income gamers and young gamers dependent on store bought game cards who can't use subscriptions. Most of them are forced to play games like DOMO, Rappelz, and Maple Story. These games are heavily influenced by anime and eastern game design, which doesn't necessarily have universal appeal. There might be decent demand for a micro-transaction game which uses western art and game design. Free Realms could disprove my number one prediction.

Ten Things I learned from the Loremaster Achievement

2009-01-08T10:32:00.000-08:00

Ever since the achievement system came out I've been working on gaining the Loremaster title bit by bit. I've been playing my current character for quite some time and I thought I was familiar with almost every quest in the game. However, I quickly found out that I was severely mistaken since almost every zone had a few surprises waiting for me. It's really nice to see that I haven't seen everything in the game yet even though I've been playing since launch. I found quests off dead bodies at the bottom of huge ravines and up steep hidden paths. I really would like to put together a guide, but it would probably be a couple hundred pages. Instead I just decided to do a quick overview of the quests, mobs, and trends that stood out the most as I traversed Azeroth, the Outlands, and Northend.

1. Evolution can be Dangerous
I was doing a really annoying quest in Blade's Edge mountains that had me evolving netherdrake eggs for the deranged gnomes in the area. Using some sort of time ray I fast forwarded unhatched eggs into either proto-drakes, whelps or mature netherwings. Imagine my surprise when one of the eggs turned into an elite ?? dragon who started to giving me a speech about being freed from the time in between spaces. After declaring he would now destroy the world I gave him another shot of the time ray which caused him to shout Nooooooooo! and then turn into whelp. I couldn't stop laughing for ten minutes.

2. Ashenvale and Azshara suck more then Stranglethorn Vale
I always wondered why Ashenvale and Azshara were so lightly populated with people. After running and flying across both of them multiple times trying to track down quests, I now have my answer. Both zones are poorly constructed and prevent anyone from traveling in a straight line on the map. Azshara not only has this problem, but also has very few quests and has a lot of unfinished projects. The Forlorn Ridge in the zone was supposed to be another battleground but never got put into the game. Ashenvale got more quests when the Burning Crusade came out, but it's still a nightmare to travel across. Also all the guards in Ashenvale are low level, which attracts a lot of bored gankers from both factions. Overall I now have a couple zones I hate more then Stranglethorn Vale.

3. Blizzard is fascinated with poop
I heard this theory proposed on the wowinsider show and I hate to say that the evidence just keep mounting up in support. I know in Nagrand I had to devle through antelope crap for cherries and the same process repeats itself a couple times in Wrath of the Lich King. In Borean Tundra you have to poison worgs to give them the runs and reclaim microfilm they ate, yuck. And in the Howling Fjord you have to throw firecrackers under bats so you can scare the guano out of them. However, the worst is probably in Grizzly Hills where you actually have to gather the reagents for a laxative since you accidentally swallowed some priceless seeds. To complete the quest you have to use an outhouse which causes loud grunting noises and foul dust clouds to come rolling out. While I appreciate juvenile humour I think Blizzard may be over-using the gag.

4. Critters can Attack
I think Blizzard got tired of critters being the low man on the totem pole in Wrath of the Lich King. I noticed a couple events where they got tired of being pushed around and made a scene worthy of a FOX special. In the Howling Fjord if you try to get the Friend of Fowl achievement by killing 15 turkeys you'll earn a feathery reprisal. Also in the Grizzly Hills you can watch the young deer, Bambina, and his friends wonder around the northern alliance camp. If you watch them long enough you'll see a hunter come out and shoot the mother of Bambina. This isn't the Disney version though since this enrages the deer and it kills the hunter. Made me much more wary of killing critters though I still joined Nessingwary for the big hunt.

5. Doing the newbie quests will earn you multiple achivements.
I knew the easy way to complete the old world achievements was to go back and do the newbie zone quests. What surprised me though was the amount of faction each one gave you. Most of the early quests not only give you reputation with the quest giver, but also with the other alliance/horde races. As a result you can also quickly gain the Ambassador title just by questing in each race's starting zones. The other achievement that I earned almost by accident was the one to gain 50 mounts. Each race has 6-8 mounts and becoming exalted with them greatly reduces the price. To get the last 10 or so you just need to buy a couple of flying mounts and become exalted with one of the Outlands factions with mounts. I suggest the Kurenai since they sell Talbuks for only 50-80gp at exalted.

6. The Fallen Hero of the Horde is Long
There's a infamous quest chain in the old world that comes form a orc ghost located between the Swamp of Sorrows and the Blasted Lands. The chain has about a billion steps but resulted in a trinket and large bag that made it worth doing back when Dire Maul was the newest dungeon in the game. Still since the quest chain runs between both continents its well worth doing if your trying to get the classic loremaster achievement. I just wish it didn't sent you to Azshara, you all know how I feel about that zone. I will say one thing though is that I really appreciate long quest chains that result in a useful item. Northend had a couple ones set up in a similar manner and only required a small group for the last step.

7. Arugal is still tough
One my favorite dungeons in the game is Shadowfang Keep. It's a bit larger then most modern day dungeons, but isn't a sprawling mess like Maraudon or Wailing Caverns. There are a lot of similarities between it and Karazhan including that both are ruled by a mad wizard. The lord of Shadowfang Keep is Arugul who is the creator of the worgen and master of teleporting between hard to reach platforms. Probably trained under Gannon or something. Anyways I was surprised to run into a quest chain in the Grizzly Hills that eventually revealed that Arugul had been revived by Arthas. I was kind of expecting him to be a push over like most of the elite quest mobs, but he actually put up a decent fight. If you find yourself doing the quest chain be careful because once again he's on the top of a tower and surrounded by lots of werewolves.

8. Goblins are Awesome
Hunting down the last quests in Kalimdor would have been impossible without the surprising amount of goblin quest hubs spread throughout the land. And the best thing about goblins is they don't discriminate. Even outside the gates of Ogrimmar I was able to find a goblin willing to let met kill some harpies for him. Also in every goblin quest there's a good chance of at least one explosion happening at any point. I was seriously thinking of giving up on the Kalimdor achievement until I remember the race track in thousand needles. The goblins and gnomes there made it possible finish though it they did send me back and forth between Booty Bay a lot.

9. Every zone has at least one hidden escort mission
As I became desperate to find more quests in each zone I noticed there seemed to be a lot of escort quests I had missed. I know no one likes escort missions, but half of old world ones start with NPCs that are hidden in the middle of nowhere. I can only conclude that even the Blizzard developers hated these quests and really didn't want people finding them since they would probably complain. And there is reason to complain since most of the old world escorts are on timers and are either tuned too fast or way too slow for the quester. Also it seems like most escort NPCs are secretly suicidal and would like nothing more then to take you with them. Thankfully, the design has improved for escort quests lately since most of the newer ones have the NPC following you at the pace you set.

10. The quest quality in the game has really improved.
Azeroth: Quests are repetitive kill and collection types which require lots of travel.
Outlands: Quests are still repetitive, but better positioned to reduce long travel times.
Northend: Quests have little redundant travel and have unique methods of completion.

I would have to say my favorite quests are the ones that require you to travel around in vehicles. It didn't matter if the vehicle was a stealth flying machine in Icecrown or a pissed off storm-giant in Zul'drak, I really enjoyed them. I'm looking forward to seeing how Blizzard expands upon this idea in the future. I'm crossing my fingers for flying PvP zones with vehicles.

Little Big Planet gets a Movie (sort of)

2009-01-06T14:24:00.000-08:00

Little Big Planet may not be a MMO, but its provided me with hours of entertainment that I usually only find online. The best part of the game is seeing how other people use common household items to design monsters and animated landscapes. It's like someone took Super Mario Brothers and mixed it with an episode of Fraggle Rock. Anyways while browsing the interwebs I found a short animated movie that the makers of Little Big Planet probably used for inspiration. What's especially neat is that its being made into a full feature film this year and Tim Burton will be producing.

You can see the resemblance between the game and movie main characters.

The original short film actually came out in 2004 and its surprising that I've never heard about it. Then again so many really bad movies win film festival awards that I do tend to ignore them nowadays. Anyways check out the trailer on youtube and tell me what you think. Hopefully, if MMOs ever go the movie route they'll use CGI on scale with this.

Trailer for 9 the Movie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIpZxBczWUg

The Original Short Film
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0sCy_WwDWM&NR

Cartoon Network's MMO: FusionFall

2008-12-18T12:18:00.000-08:00

It seems just like yesterday that the kid friendly Wizard 101 was launched to the sound of a million Harry Potter fans squealing in delight. Despite not having the rights to that most illustrious license they've still managed to create a fairly nice wizard MMO. I'll admit that most fans of the game seem to be those who like things "cute", but others simply enjoy having a game they can play with their little ones. You have to admit that sometimes the focus of World of Warcraft and other MMOs really isn't the best place for kids. You leave a child alone in a competitive online world like most MMOs and you run the risk of making one of those XBL brats.

That's why I'm glad to see something like FusionFall being made by Cartoon Network. The trailer makes it look more like a 3D flash game then a MMO, but it's a nice to see another teen oriented game world. I noticed that the non traditional MMOs designed for kids are also the ones that tend to try out new game designs. Wizard 101 bases combat around a card game and it looks like FusionFall will play more like an action-adventure game. The weapons are varied and I've seen all kinds of cartoonish bazookas and guns. They also seem to be going for some humor since I swore I saw someone beating a monster over the head with a giant turkey leg.

The real draw for FusionFall is going to be the characters of course. It looks like Cartoon Network took almost every popular show its had over the last ten years and put the characters into the game. Of course to appeal to their target audience they magically aged everyone into a teenager. I thought the idea was a little bit ridiculous at first, but it looks like they put some thought into it. Dexter is apparently a young resistance leader who provides most of the hi-tech weaponry in the game. I also think I saw grown-up versions of the Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack running around. Overall it reminds me of a cartoon version of City of Heroes in some ways.

It'll be fun to see how Cartoon Network moves forward with the game. I know they are planning on have a small portion of the game free-to-play much like Wizard101. It's still up in the air though if the main game will be based on subscriptions or micro-transactions. I believe the small studio that designed the game said they were avoiding the traditional leveling system found in MMOs. Instead they have some sort of skill and item system which players use to increase their powers. If it follows the trend of other youth oriented game they'll also be lots of outfits and fluff to collect. I'll most likely be trying out the free portions of the game and seeing how it plays. While it most likely won't be complex enough to be serious competition for AAA MMOs, it does look like it could be fun.

www.fusionfall.com

Gearing up for Arena Season 5

2008-12-17T14:20:00.000-08:00

I had just started to feel well geared again when the new arena season arrived yesterday. I hadn't really been paying attention to when the season was going to start and I'm embarrassed to say most of my gear was tuned for DPS and not survival. As a result I wanted to avoid jumping right into arena matches and try some other PvP activities beforehand. This resulted in me discovering that my newly inflated hit points meant nothing without the resilience to back it up. I had forgotten how much I had increased my critical strike rating while leveling and that other people were probably doing the same thing. I mean everyone started off losing a lot of crit each level in Northend. But overall the new gear at level 80 seems to allow much higher critical strike ratings then we had previously.

And if you've ever done any PvP in World of Warcraft then you know that high critical strike ratings means instant death for anyone not wearing resilience gear. The only fun I had at all last night was when I had seven stacks of tenacity in Lake Wintergrasp and was going around hitting tanks for 8,000 damage. My hit points had actually ballooned enough with the tenacity buff that it didn't matter everything was hitting me for double damage. Still this made me realize that if I honestly wanted to try PvPing this time around I might actually have to collect two sets of gear. I don't really have a problem with using multiple sets of gear even though my bank is dangerously overfilled. The problem is how to go about it since I failed to think ahead and save up some honor.

Methods for preparing for Arena Season 5

1.) Use current dungeon gear and stuff high-end resilience and stamina gems into every slot.
Cons: Expensive and not as good as PvP gear. Will decrease effectiveness in PvE.
Pros: Saves bag space

2) Buy a set of player made gear that has resilience. (saronite, frostweave, etc)
Cons: Will have lower stats then normal level 80 gear. Will take up bag space.
Pros: Better resilience then trying to use PvE gear

3) Use the blue honor gear
Cons: Very time intensive to get, unless you had honor squirreled away.
Pros: Good advantage over other beginning arena teams

4) Just wear PvE gear while earning honor and arena points
Cons: Your rating probably won't be high enough to get many items
Pros: No cost and eventually you will be able to spend those arena points

I'm leaning towards either method 1) or 2) at the moment. I have a friend who can make the saronite plate gear and its might be the best solution since I only have 10,000 honor. I wasn't expected the battleground items to cost so much, but it looks like Blizzard raised the amount of honor you earn per battleground. It might be awhile before I get into the PvP groove again, but it still looks like a viable method of progressing in the game.

Arena Season 5

2008-12-16T11:37:00.000-08:00

The PvP patch is coming today and starting off the new arena season for World of Warcraft. With it comes the delightful addition of PvP armor and weapons that are sure to be on most player's Christmas lists. Still there are some changes to the way things works with the newest arena season. Blizzard has learned a lot about PvP rewards from the previous expansion and they're trying not to repeat any mistakes. In the Burning Crusade they made the season one arena gear a little too powerful compared to the gear from heroics. This sort of resulted in a dead period where people mostly ignored heroic dungeons. It really wasn't until the Badge of Justice loot started to get better that heroics and Karazhan started to see a resurgence in popularity.

This time around it looks like Blizzard is allowing multiple ways of getting the arena gear. Players will be able to use emblems, honor points, and arena points to gear up for their cage matches. Blizzard also seems to be using a more complex tier system this time around. The new arena season looks like it will have three tiers to start with. Most likely as new arena seasons are introduced the lowest tier will be dropped.

Main Set Pieces and Weapons (chest, legs, etc)

Tier 1 - Blue Arena Gear (Savage Gladiators)
(Honor and Arena points: No Ratings) or Emblems of Heroism
Equal to the Blue level 80 gear from Heroic dungeons

Tier 2 - Epic Arena Gear (Hateful Gladiators)
(Arena points: Ratings from 1600-1800) or Emblems of Valor
Equal to the Epic level 80 gear from Heroic dungeons

Tier 3 - Epic Arena Gear (Deadly Gladiators)
(Arena points: Ratings in the 1900-2100)
Equal to 25 man raid gear but with more PvP stats (stamina, resilience)

Secondary Set pieces and accessories (bracers, rings, etc)

Tier 1 - Epic Arena Gear (Hateful Gladiators)
(Honor Points: Ratings in the 1600-1800)
Equal to the Epic level 80 gear from Heroic dungeons

Tier 2 - Epic Arena Gear (Deadly Gladiators)
(Honor points: Ratings in the 1900-2100)
Equal to 25 man raid gear but with more PvP stats (stamina, resilience)

I must say that I was not a fan of the introduction of rating requirements to PvP gear. There were too many ways to cheat the early versions of the arena system. Even with rating requirements a lot of players simply bought spots on high end teams or created a smurf team. By the time Blizzard ironed out all the bugs the cheaters were already a couple tiers ahead of most other players. This gear advantage made it impossible to compete fairly and I found myself wandering to other games that promised PvP glory. The same thing could happen again, but not unless a new flaw in the PvP reward system is found. Otherwise I think Blizzard has a fair chance of keeping a static, but somewhat satisfying PvP game going for quite some time.

Some good Arena Gear Links:
MMO Champion and WoWhead

Having Fun in Heroics

2008-12-15T14:12:00.000-08:00

I've been real busy at work for the last month, but thankfully this breakneck pace tends to wind down for the winter holidays. It has put a damper on my free time though and the only game I've been able to enjoy has been Wrath of the Lich King. Luckily, the dungeons are proving to be quite entertaining if a bit too easy. My normal group of dungeon runners has pretty much skipped normal mode and jumped right into the heroics. In the Outlands if we had jumped straight into heroic mode this would have meant were almost out of PvE content. Thankfully, though it looks like a lot of ten man PUG groups form for Nax and the Wintergrasp raid instance.

In general, its been much easier to find pick up players to fill out our heroic runs in this expansion. I guess some of this could be related to the ease of the dungeons. More people feel comfortable doing heroics since they don't feature trash mobs that hit you for 10,000 damage. Still I think the revamp of the reputation system has also helped pick-up-groups in the expansion. Since you can earn reputation for any faction just by wearing their tunic, there's less fighting over specific dungeons. I know in the Burning Crusade people only ever wanted to run Mechanaar or the Daily Heroic. Mechanaar and the Daily Heroic was considered easy badges and the other dungeons were considered to be "not worth the effort".

Also the heroics were actually a little too hard in the Burning Crusade. It was considered much easier to run Karazhan and Zul'amon for badges rather then try to do them. In the Wrath of the Lich King most of the dungeons are simple and fairly quick to run. Most can be done in under a hour even with some accidental wipes. Heck, a few barely have any trash mobs at all and are just filled with boss encounters. The ones that are a bit longer often have better loot tables. Halls of Lightning in particular is more challenging then some of the other dungeons, but has the only epic two handed weapon from the heroics.

Anyways, I'm glad its been pretty easy to pick up additional group members since I'm currently in a very small guild. We're mostly real life friends and co-workers who been playing MMOs together for awhile now. Heck, some of them used to clear Kurn's Tower with me back in the original Everquest. We've seen how raiding has changed with the more modern games and how the classic hardcore approach has faded in popularity. Wrath of the Lich King may be a little too easy, but it gives us much more freedom to approach raiding without sacrificing our first born to a guild. As a result this might be the first game where we actually have a chance of seeing all the raid content.

Cooking now rules the Secondary Professions

2008-12-04T08:02:00.000-08:00

When I first started playing World of Warcraft back in the day the best secondary profession to have maxed out was fishing. This was simply because it was great for making money. The random trash that you caught actually sold for a decent amount to vendors. People were making a fortune just by sitting in Ogrimmar or Stormwind and building up their fishing skill. If you were willing to travel a bit you could make even more money since several in-demand potions required special types of fish. Underwater breathing in particular was highly sought after since there weren't as many ways to get it back then. As more options were added to cooking and alchemy it became less dependent on fishing.

I think it was about this time that bandaging started to become more important. A lot of classes didn't have self healing capabilities and it became necessary for them to max out first aid. I know warriors in particular found it necessary especially if they wanted to level by solo questing. Blizzard most have thought this was unfair and they've slowly added many self healing abilities into the game. However, I don't think the first aid skill has scaled up at the same pace as gear in the expansions. In the original World of Warcraft a heavy runecloth bandage always returned a sizable amount of health. But the increases of stamina on modern gear have made it so bandages returns a much smaller percentage of health.

I know a heavy netherweave bandage in the Burning Crusade returned 3,400 health, which was about half my life before I got my hands on epic raiding gear. Nowadays though a heavy frostweave bandage in Wrath of the Lich King returns 5,800 health which is only about a third of my life in level 78 gear. I know several people who have over 20,000 hitpoints at level 80 and this is without any epic gear. While bandaging seems adjusted for standard gear inflation it seems to quickly fall behind at the end game. I think this plays a big role in why it's not as vital a secondary profession as it used to be. Even the higher level dense frostweave bandage probably won't heal more then 50% of a player's life if they have Naxxaramas gear. It's gotten to the point where eating cooked food is better then bandaging since its easy to get and adds decent stats.

Cooking used to just help players recover mana and hitpoints faster then if they ate normal bought food. It was a handy profession since it saved you from buying food or drinks, but it wasn't particularly vital. This of course changed when Blizzard added a few high level recipes that increased player statistics. Raiding guilds started using stat food as part of their strategy to max out buffs for raid encounters. This did cause some resentment for casual players since early stat recipes like Chamaeroks Chops often required raid encounters to learn. Eventually, Blizzard decided that stat food should be more widely available and gave them to trainers in the Burning Crusade.

Wrath of the Lich King followed the same trend and several powerful recipes can be learned from the trainers in the starting zones. Most of these recipes use drops from normal mobs and raise vital stats like stamina or crit rating. Even more impressive is that once a player has maxed out their cooking skill they can learn recipes which give them different abilities. Dalaran has a daily quest which gives out special recipes for gaining the ability to track humanoids or beasts. There's even feast recipes that allow players to basically lay out a mage table. People can then click on the feast to regain health, mana, and even gain a bonus stat. Its a great way to start out a dungeon run and nothing beats shouting out FEAST like in those snickers commercials.

Quickly getting a good 2 hander in WotLK

2008-11-25T13:41:00.000-08:00

So far in Wrath of the Lich King I'm not having a lot of luck upgrading my 2-handed weapon. With Titan's Grasp you would think that Blizzard would ramp up the number of big 2-handers in the game, but it still seems hard to find a decent weapon. I remember this was also a problem when people first started raiding in the Burning Crusade. There was such a lack of weapons that a lot of raiders participated in the arenas just so they could save up points for one. Blizzard didn't like this and eventually added arena ratings to all the PvP weapons. I know a decent weapon can make a big performance difference on a character so I really can't fault Blizzard for wanting to make them a bit harder to acquire.

Dungeon crawling is the primary way I've been looking for upgrades and four of the twelve single group dungeons do offer a 2-handed weapon. Utgarde Keep offers a good entry level axe off Ingvar the Plunderer that is about equal in dps to the arena season two weapon. After that it dries up a bit until a midlevel dungeon called Drak'tharon. Here you can get a nice 2-handed sword called the Troll Butcherer off the first boss. Its a very easy fight though the first couple pulls in the dungeon can be a pain. The other two 2-handed weapons from the non-heroic dungeons are found on the high level 80 dungeons. Both the Occulus and the Culling of Strathholm offer decent upgrades. However, if you're like me you probably want an weapon upgrade before getting to level 80, especially if you need to defend yourself on a PvP server.

Thankfully, there are a couple other ways that you quickly earn a decent a 2-handed weapon in Wrath of the Lich King. There are at least two quest chains that aren't that hard and provide decent upgrades. The first one is called Last Rites/Hellscream's Champion and can be found in the Borean Tundra. It may require the help of one or two people on the last part, but it can be done in the low 70's. If you're using something worse then the first arena season weapon then you probably want to do the quest. At 75 if you have a decent group, you can visit the Ring of Anguish in Zul'drak for another upgrade. This questline works just like the Ring of Blood did in Nagrand and there's even an achievement for doing both.

The Ring of Anguish 2-handers are probably the best available to you until the level 80 dungeons or some of the low end heroics. However, if you don't mind leveling by grinding reputation then you have some very nice options open to you. A couple factions like the Knights of the Ebon Blade, Argent Crusade, and the Kalu'ak offer nice weapons at revered and exalted standings. The easiest one to level up is the Kalu'ak faction since you can get quickly get to Honored by doing thier quests. The Kulu'ak have quest hubs in the Borean Tundra, Howling Fjord, and the Dragonblight. What makes it even better is that they have a system of giant sea turtles that link each quest hub together so its easy to do their daily quests. At revered you can land a level 78 polearm which is better then the Ring of Anguish reward. And if you are a master fisherman you can get a pretty sweet level 70 fishing pole with great dps, though it can't be used for special attacks.

Plate Classes: Overpowered for how long?

2008-11-24T13:47:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting experiment being conducted in Wrath of the Lich King at the moment involving class balance. As Tobold pointed out the main tanking classes have all recently gotten bonuses to damage dealing in the last couple of patches. Normally the tanking classes are handicapped on damage dealing because of their high survivability. However, for some unknown reason Blizzard decided that it was imperative that they reverse this design trend. As a result warriors, paladins, and death knights are showing a remarkable ability to kill mobs in the expansion with very little risk of death. I've even noticed that these classes also seem to have the advantage in PvP at the moment. I know while leveling I've pretty much been attacked by nothing but Paladins and Death Knights.

So why did Blizzard decide to reverse a policy they've stuck with for four years and release a swarm of armor plated gankers into the game? Well, the main reason was probably the lack of tanks in the Burning Crusade. Blizzard made major improvements to paladin and druid tanking abilities, but still couldn't encourage players to specialize in that job role. It was too much of a pain to switch talents and collect two different sets of gear. Healers suffered from similar problems, but the change to the +healing stat helped them solo a little bit more effectively. Also the mobs in the Burning Crusade were tuned for classes wearing protection gear and having tanking talents. A lot of dps casters like druids, shamans, and priests could switch over to a healing role without changing out talents or gear. Yet dps plate wearers often ran into problems trying to fill in as a tank.

It looks like Blizzard has learned from the last expansion since the Wrath of the Lich King dungeons have less stringent requirements for tanking. I know my level 72 paladin was able to wear all retribution gear and having nothing but retribution talents and still tank the Nexus. In my opinion this pretty much means any plate wearing class can tank the non heroic dungeons without having to change out talents or gear. This effectively raises the pool of available tanks in the game and avoids a lot of issues the Burning Cruade ran into. However, this doesn't mean that plate wearers will remain top dog forever. Eventually, as more and more people hit level 80 the pressure to open up the new PvP season will build. Once that happens the plate wearing classes are going to stick out like a sore thumb.

I wouldn't be surprised to see that the first PvP season of the expansion goes live along with a major nerf patch. Something specifically designed to make sure tanking classes don't keep survivability along with their new found dps powers. The nerfs don't even have to be that major. I've already seen Blizzard announcing a couple in the forums and being quite honest about them. One example is that druids are scheduled for a change to how their armor class bonuses are applied to jewelry slots. It's a very small change, but the high amount of armor class on some rings in the expansion makes it important. The other tanking classes should also expect similar adjustments to any ability that raises survivability without requiring points in protection.

It's just conjecture on my part, but it seems that Blizzard wanted to encourage as many people as possible to level up a tanking class before balancing them for actual PvP. I know a lot of people hate that a PvE oriented game is balanced around a few PvP activities. However, I don't think Blizzard really has a choice. Maybe if they designed for PvP in the initial game they could be like Warhammer and have each ability work different in PvP and PvE. Now it would just be too time consuming to rework everything. Thankfully, I think the dual talent build system is almost done and I expect this to alleviate a lot of our problems. Plate classes shouldn't be able to survive a nuclear blast and keep up with a rogue on the dps meter. However, they should be able to freely change between the two.

Does WoW use PvP as filler between expansions?

2008-11-18T11:14:00.000-08:00

I've noticed with the recent release of Wrath of the Lich King that a lot of people have started changing their minds about World of Warcraft. The game had been getting negative criticism about lack of innovation and poorly designed PvP systems. Some players hated that arenas had become the primary way of earning gear and that Blizzard was heavily promoting their game as an e-sport. Now all seems to be forgiven though as Blizzard is back to handing out highly polished PvE content. In fact initial impressions are probably even more favorable for this expansion. The difficultly level is more in tune with the majority of the playerbase and the lore is more traditional. No alien space paladins crashing their dimensional ship this time around.

Still it's only a matter of time before a majority of the player population once again reaches level 80 and starts in on the end-game. While raiding will probably be popular you can also expect arenas to make a come back. No really knows if they will once again become the primary focus of the game though. Remember the Burning Crusade raid progression was severely messed up and Blizzard hadn't yet put rating requirements on all the PvP gear. These two factors might help prevent arenas from dominating the end game like they did at level 70. I know a lot raiders felt that arenas steered players away from raiding and this probably generated a lot of negativity about the future of Worldof Warcraft.

Developers have to remember that players follow the path of least resistance. I hate quoting Raph Koster but I'm sure he said something along the lines of "Given a chance players will optimize the fun out of a game to achieve the fastest progression." Blizzard failed to account for how difficult it was to organize raids and how much easier arena rewards were to attain because they didn't require one. On paper the rewards for arenas and raids might have looked similar, but that wasn't the case in the game. Keeping a guild together while it made its way past Karazhan was a monumental challenge and pick-up-groups could often only do the first couple of bosses. Hopefully, history won't repeat itself with this expansion. Blizzard seems to be better at balancing the rewards and I think arenas and raiding can prosper side by side.

After all it's not like Blizzard can just ignore the demand for PvP content. Age of Conan and Warhammer both had impressive sales due to the fact that players now have an appetite for PvP in their MMOs. Plus PvP content usually requires fewer artists and developers then a new raid zone. I think Blizzard effectively used the arena seasons to keep people interested in the game and freed up some developers so they could work on other projects. That's not to say its easier to develop PvP content just that it requires less maintenance to keep it current. Once you have the reward system working in balance with other parts of the game, PvP systems are simple to keep updated. However, I don't think people play World of Warcraft for the arena seasons. Wrath of the Lich King has pretty much shown us that World of Warcraft is still the PvE King.

Initial WotLK thoughts

2008-11-17T09:22:00.000-08:00

I hadn't really planned out what I was going to do when I first started playing Wrath of the Lich King last week. I have had very little free time nowadays and been working a lot of extra hours. Still I've been impressed so far with what I've seen in the expansion. It feels bigger then the Burning Crusade, which probably has a lot to do with it having ten zones instead of seven. Also the two separate starting areas seems to contribute to the feeling of size in the expansion. I'm glad they put a dungeon in both areas since that seems to be making them equally favored by the players. So far the questing seems up to the high standards of Blizzard and remains chock filled with pop culture references. I particularly enjoyed the DHETA quests which force you to go against Nessingwary's hunters.

I've done both the Nexus and Utgarde Keep a couple of times and I'm enjoying being back in a dungeon oriented game. Warhammer was great and I'll probably keep my account running for awhile, but it's dungeons were a little too different for my tastes. I'm a little worried that the number of group instances seems to be lower in Wrath of the Lich King. The Burning Crusade had fifteen single group instances spread across five different dungeons. In Wrath of the Lich King it looks like there are only twelve though they are spread out a bit more. I'm hoping that the 10-man version of the raid instances are easy enough that they sort of count as single group ones. I just hope the recent death of Malygos by TwentyFifthNovember doesn't encourage Blizzard to overbuff the raid content in a hotfix. People with lives want a chance also.

The raid content seems interesting in the expansion, but just like the single group dungeons there much less of them this time around. When the Burning Crusade launched there was the massive Karazhan raid zone, 3 smaller sized raid zones, and then 2 single boss encounters. So far in this expansion it looks like Naxx will serve in a similar capacity as Karazhan, but at the moment there are no smaller sized raid zones. There does seem to be single boss fights in the Obsidian Sanctum, the Eye of Eternity, and the Vault of Archavon. Still as TwentyFifthNovember is finding out there is much less raid content to burn through. Blizzard has plans to quickly patch in raid content for Ulduar and eventually the Icecrown Citadel, but it's probably not happening any time soon.

Still there's no reason for the power levelers to despair. Blizzard is being smarter this time around and has put in some encounters that allow raiders to adjust its difficulty. The Obsidian Sanctum in particular can be done so that you fight the main boss with several mini-bosses at the same time. You can kill the mini-bosses ahead of time, but the more that you leave up the better the loot. I wouldn't be surprised if the other aspect encounters are set up similarly so the content can be done by guilds in different stages of progression. After all the big failure with the Burning Crusade was that they tuned everything for the very high-end guilds and locked almost everyone else out of the content. This new way of thinking might make it a little bit longer for a raid zone to be developed, but it should allow a lot more people to experience it.

A Game Divided

2008-11-11T11:42:00.000-08:00

I've haven't ended my subscription to Warhammer yet even though I've had very little time to play it lately. The few times I did login it seemed like the player populations have become even more disproportionately distributed. I'm not just talking about the Destruction versus Order imbalance either. Certain zones and scenarios in the game are ghost towns while others are overflowing with players. This isn't exactly breaking news though and a lot of bloggers have mentioned how this population imbalance is effecting RvR and public quests. However, the issue seems to be growing worse over time and Mythic seems to be having problems directing traffic so to speak. Warhammer is one of the better MMOs out there, but it has some problems with it's game design which is dividing the playerbase at an accelerated rate.

The Dividing Factors:

Tiers
The tier system seems like it would be a good idea at first glance. Mythic divided the forty ranks in the game into groupings of ten and then designed game mechanics to prevent the higher ranked groups from bothering the lower ranked ones. Warhammer is supposed to be a more casual PvP game then games like Fury or Darkfall so it makes sense to cut down on ganking and other types of bad behavior associated with player combat. However, this also puts limits on player socialization and their ability to help one another out. The power levelers in the game quickly reached the top tier while the slow levelers were quickly left behind. Warhammer accidentally created a system that effectively divided its playerbase quicker then any other MMO I've seen before.

Usually the longer a MMO exists the more spread out the population becomes across all levels. World of Warcraft avoids this by taking so long to make expansions that even snails have time to hit max level. But other games have to rely on mentoring or sidekicking features which allow players to temporary boost or decrease their level so they can group with friends. Unfortunately, the tier system makes this very hard to implement in Warhammer and Mythic is also probably worried about people skipping the lower end content to get to the end game. The scenarios in Warhammer prove that Mythic is familiar with the idea of temporary adjusting levels/ranks. Its just a matter of getting a design nailed down to make it work outside an instance.

Separate Continents
I know the concept of putting different races and factions on separate continents is popular, but in this case I think its yet another factor which is causing the player population to be unevenly distributed. Players pick their favorite race no matter what and some races are just more popular. Even though Mythic provided instant flight points between some of the different racial zones it hasn't lead to any sort of balance. I'm not a lore expert in Warhammer so I'm not sure if it was absolutely necessary to isolate each race's war progression. I think the smarter thing would have been to interweave the progression a bit more. Maybe have the RvR areas between different races intersect at different tiers.

Example:

Uneven reward distribution
The other big problem is that the reward system encouarges grinding scenarios over fighting in RvR areas. Even the public quests seemed to give better rewards then actually taking down a Keep Lord. Not to mention that difficulty in gathering the numbers for taking down a Keep Lord and then winning a roll. I get the feeling that Mythic was so excited about RvR that they overestimated its popularity and kept the rewards small. Luckily, this is the one area where Mythic is moving very quickly to fix. Adjusting the rewards should help make the RvR battles more attracted for players. However, the primary reason people grind scenarios is because the experience is good. Mythic really needs to look at either nerfing the experience from scenarios or making RvR sieges just as good for leveling.

Suggestions
These three issues are only moderate problems, but together they manage to steer a large percentage of players into just a few areas of the game. This leaves the rest of the world feeling deserted which is probably not a good thing if Mythic wants to retain any new players. It's a little too late for a redesign of the game to make it less dependent on an even population spread. Instead Mythic is going to have to introduce some new features which encourage players to spread out a bit more. Adjusting the rewards in the RvR areas is step in the right direction, but they need to think about some more major changes.

Automatically lower the ranks and limit the abilities of players who enter lower tier areas
Introduce a sidekick system for lower ranked players
Introduce controllable objectives that act as portals between the different racial RvR areas.
Introduce a revolving renown/experience bonus that moves between each race's RvR area.

World of Warcraft: A Jack of All Trades

2008-11-09T20:09:00.000-08:00

Wrath of the Lich King is getting close to release and I can tell by the amount of people on the servers that a lot of players are returning to the game. World of Warcraft seems to have a siren's call that the general MMO populace just can't resist. Some think World of Warcraft's continuing popularity is due to it being the first MMO for so many people, but I'm not so sure. I know game nostalgia can be a powerful force, I still find myself playing the original Master of Orion sometimes. However, MMOs are constantly getting more content and changing their mechanics. Unlike a console game you can never go back and get the same experience in a MMO. Instead it seems more likely that people return to World of Warcraft for some other reason.

I like to think of World of Warcraft as the biggest snowball in the history of video games. It just keeps rolling around picking up innovation from other games and making itself larger. Only niche areas like player housing, which Blizzard ignores on purpose, escape being assimilated. This is why making a new MMO with the same scope of content would be so incredibly expensive. And while I don't think it would take a billion dollars, it would definitely require more money then anyone else has spent. Just look at the amount of money EA spent on making Warhammer. It was probably similar to what Blizzard originally spent on World of Warcraft, but so much has been added since then. Warhammer clearly crushes World of Warcraft in a lot of specific PvP areas, but that doesn't seem to be enough to let it challenge Wrath of the Lich King.

Based on recent trends it seems like a decent number of people are leaving Warhammer to go back to World of Warcraft. I don't think its because they are looking back at World of Warcraft through rose colored glasses either. Blizzard does a great job of designing content for all the different play styles that people have. There's quests, dungeons, raids, arenas, battlegrounds, and even an attempt at a Warhammer's RvR zone. All of this content has been slowly improved since the game has been released. It doesn't matter that other games may be able to beat World of Warcraft in one or two areas. The combination of having "decent/polished" content in so many different areas seems to have a cumulative effect on the game's popularity.

There's a common description for hybrid classes in MMOs which goes "jack of all trades, master of none." It's a nice way of saying that you can do a bit of everything, but don't expect to be the best in anything. This sort of reminds me a lot of how World of Warcraft is put together. It's player combat isn't as good as Warhammer, its raiding isn't as good as Everquest 2 and its economy definitely doesn't run as smoothly as EVE Online. Yet for all the problems of being a jack of all trades it seems that it's worked out for the game. There's a finite amount of content in any MMO and players don't like focusing on a single area as much as you would think. Most players want to run dungeons, fight some other players and maybe raid every so often. While Blizzard probably isn't the best in any of these areas they do offer high quality content in all of them.

Based on the success of World of Warcraft and its expansions I can only guess that they have the right idea. Don't spend all your development time trying to be the best in one specific area, just have decent content in all of them. After all sometimes that old saying is worded as: "jack of all trades, master of none, though better then a master of one."

Class Warfare destroys WoW's Class Forums

2008-11-04T13:48:00.000-08:00

One of the interesting things I noticed about the World of Warcraft forums is that despite its toxicity, it still manages to attract a lot of players to its murky depths. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the World of Warcraft forums had one of the highest participation rates for any MMO. This is partially because its only lightly moderated and it breeds trolls like a festering swampland. However, Blizzard also has a long history of responding to player opinions and outrage on the forums. The number of hot-fixes and patch revamps caused by out of controlled forum posting is almost too high to count. While this probably isn't the best way to balance a game, it did prove that players had some influence over the direction of the game.

Unfortunately, this has caused posters with specific agendas to flock to the forums. In the early days of World of Warcraft the agendas being pushed were "hardcore raider" versus the more "casual player". This has mostly disappeared though as Blizzard finally hired enough people to produce content for both groups of players. Nowadays the big arguments on the forums are mostly about classes trying to get themselves buffed or their competition nerfed. I don't want to name any specific classes, but the last couple of big forum "riots" mostly originated from the class forums. Blizzard has mistakenly changed nerfs and buffs too many times based on fabricated forum feedback. Unscrupulous players know that organizing a mass protest and filling up a class forum with complaints is the best way to get a nerf or buff overturned.

Blizzard's not stupid though and it looks like they are trying to come up with ways to combat this trend. This is probably why they are talking about getting rid of the class forums and replacing them with the trio of tanking, damage dealing, and healing forums. I believe that Blizzard thinks this will make it harder for specific classes to organize the virtual riots that have made the WoW forums so infamous. Not only should this reduce class warfare, but it should also reduce campaigns against specific talent trees. I mean how long were the retribution and shadow trees held back by negative feedback in their own class forums? It does make sense to realign the forums this way, buy only if you ignore the history of the class forums.

Each individual class forum has a long list of macros, help threads, and design discussion which isn't related to the class warfare problem. Deleting these forums runs the risk of permanently losing a lot of useful information. Also in the future it might be harder to organize this kind of class specific information since multiple classes will be sharing the same threads. The decision wouldn't be that bad if World of Warcraft was a new game just starting out and Blizzard wanted to forgo class forums. Then individual fan sites would just pick up the slack and have their own class forums. Mythic doesn't have any forums and manages to avoid a lot of the headaches that Blizzards runs into. Then again they have had problems getting information out to their players when a technical problem pops up.

All I know is that a change in WoW's forum structure might be called for at the moment. We do tend to go through blue posters pretty quickly and we've seen them suffer mental breakdowns before. The class bickering and jockeying for position probably contributes to that. Anyone else notice how Ghostcrawler frowned throughout every Blizzcon panel he was on? Maybe in the name of not driving our CMs insane we should try these changes out for awhile. If it doesn't work then maybe we would just have to use fan sites like Elitist Jerks and MMO-Champions.

P.S. Yahooo, Blogger tells me this is my 300th post.

Will issues from TBC repeat again in WotLK?

2008-10-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

I'm excited that Wrath of the Lich King is just around the corner, but I'm tempering my enthusiasm with some memories of the Burning Crusade launch. In particular, the recent buffing and nerfing of paladins reminded me that Blizzard did the same sort of "fine tuning" on the class right before the last expansion. Now, this poor attempt at balancing one class can't really ruin an expansion, but it does serve as a reminder that Blizzard doesn't always learn from their mistakes. Still it looks like Blizzard has made a lot of improvements to avoid some of the issues that popped up in the Burning Crusade. I'm just hoping these improvements don't end up causing issues of their own.

Dynamic Spawn System Problems
The dynamic spawn system was supposed to be a way of helping players complete quests which required them to kill a certain amount of mobs in a small area. The more people in the area the faster the mobs were supposed to respawn. Of course the problem was that everyone on the server was crammed into Hellfire Peninsula and this caused the system to behave erratically. Often people found themselves being overwhelmed as mobs they just killed respawned right away. Blizzard is trying to get around the problem this time around by having two starting zones. Hopefully, they have also better optimized the code for the system since I think even more people will be playing this time.

Outdoor PvP Objectives
While the Bone Wastes and Halaa were both popular PvP objectives they were also very easy for the more numerous faction to control. This is always going to be a problem for open world PvP games, as Warhammer is finding out at the moment. However, it looks like Blizzard has an idea to offset the numbers advantage. Rather then giving more "dumb" NPCs to the outnumbered side they are going to give a buff called Tenacity which increases damage based on the imbalance. The more a faction is outnumbered the more powerful their attacks become. At the moment this buff is supposed to just be active in Lake Wintergrasp, but if it proves popular we might see it in other zones with PvP objectives.

Missing out on the Leveling Truce
This is something that is completely out of the control of Blizzard, but it was pretty devastating to anyone trying to level on a PvP server. Basically the first week after release the two sides had an uneasy truce where they mostly concentrated on leveling. However, by the time the first weekend rolled around both sides had max level people back in the starting zone trying out their new found gear and level advantage. Anyone who didn't start leveling right away in the new expansion had a hard time in the Hellfire Peninsula afterwards. I only hope that the distance between the two starting areas in WotLK discourages new level 80 players from immediately ganking.

Raid Blockage at Karazhan
Most people feel that Blizzard made a mistake by designing the entry level raid in the Burning Crusade for only 10 players. Overall it created a lot of problems gearing up average guilds for the next raid encounters and was indirectly responsible for a lot of guild break-ups. Of course in Wrath of the Lich King all raids can be played as either 10 man or 25 man versions and Blizzard is hoping this solves the issue. However, some people think this will end up discouraging all 25 man raiding as players automatically go for the easier encounter. I'm not so sure this will become a problem. However, a lot depends on Blizzard keeping the 10 man versions easier so casual guilds can actually finish them, while making sure the rewards for the 25 man versions are worth the extra effort.

Rewards for Heroic Dungeons
I was very disappointed to find out that a lot of the heroic dungeons in the Burning Crusade didn't have improved loot tables except for the final boss. Blizzard's reasoning was that dungeons designed for level 70s already had better quality loot and didn't need a new loot table for every boss. Unfortunately, this ended up not providing enough of an incentive for players to run heroics. It really wasn't until badges were added that people flocked to them. At first though players simply ran Mechannar over and over again until the heroic daily quests were added. This just goes to show you how difficult it was to tune heroic dungeon rewards. With WotLK Blizzard seems off to a better start since heroics will apparently have a different loot table for each boss and give the same badges as the 10 man version of Naxxramas. This should make them stay popular in the long run compared to the Burning Crusade heroics.

As you can see Blizzard has made some serious attempts to avoid a lot of the problems the Burning Crusade expansion had when it released. However, some of these ideas are untested and could have ironic and unintended consequences. I'm especially interested in seeing how Lake Wintergrasp works out and if the Tenacity buff actually makes it into the game. I've only heard about it from the PvP panel at Blizzcon and I'm not sure if its even in the Beta at the moment.

Zombie Plague goes bye-bye

2008-10-27T14:27:00.000-07:00

Apparently, I picked the wrong weekend to move into my new place since I seemed to have missed all the fun zombie shenanigans. I had previously tinkered with the zombie plague last Thursday, but the 10 minute timer actually made it kind of boring. A friend and I had tried to start a zombie revolution in Stormwind and failed miserably because of magically spawning guards. Taking our disease ridden corpses on the road we tried taking over Goldshire, but were eventually thwarted by a few level 70s. We always managed to get reinfected by our minions, but the wait was simply too long to make the even any fun. I had no idea they were planning on reducing the infection timer and that it would cause mass chaos on some servers.

In particular the PvE servers were crying bloody murder as they were.... well.... murdered bloodily by the zombies. I had forgotten that some people react violently to being killed by other players. While I'm not a hardcore PvP fan, I do like the danger that comes with the territory. I still curse violently and often when I get ganked, but pure PvE servers bore me now. When I first heard about the zombie plague I thought it would be a great event which would be fun in the short-term. I'm sure Blizzard thought it would be popular especially since players still talk about the corrupted blood plague. Anyways I haven't been on in the last few days so I'm not sure how bad the zombie problem became. I did hear it became pretty hard to quest over the weekend.

However, most NPCs respawn within a couple minutes and it's not really that hard to wait. I know in Shattrath the battlemasters kept getting infected and I had to fly to Nagrand to queue up my team. It was annoying, but nothing to make me want to log onto the forums to complain. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of players disagreed with me on this point and Blizzard is being forced to end the event today. I'm not sure if the plague could have been designed better so it didn't interfere with people trying to level. In my opinion a lot of its charm was because it was so chaotic and destructive. Then again I'm a bored player with multiple level 70s counting down the time until Wrath of the Lich King. I'm sure someone who was just trying to level over the weekend had a different opinion.

I just hope this doesn't discourage Blizzard from designing future events that are more dynamic in scope.

Ten ways to make the most of Hallow's End

2008-10-23T11:54:00.000-07:00

1. Vomit all over your group mates by eating too much candy.
The trick is to position yourself so it hits them right in the face while they are eating/drinking.

2. Continuously keep all group members in leper gnome form.
Make sure to keep yourself in human form and continually shout "Humans are superior"

3. Make your own poems to summon the headless horseman.
Horseman rise ... Your fate is set... We'll keep killing you... Until, you drop that pet!

4. Give free candy to new characters at the stating areas.
Ask if they want to see your van. Link the shortbus ascii art if they say yes.

5. Make Ash proud by killing a thousand zombies from Arthas's plague.
Make sure to say things like "Groovy" and "Come get some" or else it doesn't count.

6. Shout "The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire" when the Headless Horseman attacks the local towns.
Act like you don't know what people are talking about when they start saying LOL.

7. Wearing a Tauren Female mask walk into an auction house and ask people "So come here often?"
Avoid male gnomes though, based on several machinimas they have the "bovine fever"

8. Modify the Horseman's death cry for PvP.
So eager you are, for my blood to spill. Yet to vanquish me, 'tis my nearby main you must kill!

9. Organize a quidditch match using flying brooms and a leather ball in an arena.
I know its not possible atm, but really Blizzard should go ahead start working on it.

10. Use the zombie plague to raise an army of undead, but instead of attacking Stormwind reenact the Thriller video.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_Thriller

P.S. Not my best top ten, but I've been getting ready for a move.

WoW achievements: Less rewarding, but funnier names

2008-10-22T18:37:00.000-07:00

I'm still enjoying the WoW achievements and using them as an excuse to hunt down hard to find quests. When I get tired of footing it through the less populated portions of Azeroth I take a break and do some leveling in Warhammer. Switching back and forth between the two games keeps things interesting though it also makes some things stick out. In particular. the Tome of Knowledge seems a bit more rewarding then the achievement system in World of Warcraft. There's no doubt that Mythic put more effort into their system, just look at all the unlockable journal entries. If you want that kind of detailed lore about World of Warcraft then you have to visit the nerds at WoWInsider. However, even if you exclude the lack of lore tracking it seems like that there is just less achievement in the WoW achievement system.

I guess it makes sense if you look at some of the differences between the two games. As Rohan was talking about earlier the unlocks for the Tome of Knowledge are largely hidden from the player. There are some hints in there, but it doesn't just come right out and give you a list of all available titles, tactics, and trophies. I guess it makes sense that Warhammer has more fluff rewards in their achievement system since it's slightly harder to earn them. Not that all the rewards are cosmetic since apparently there are some tactics and ability rewards which make you more powerful against other races. World of Warcraft on the other hand just seems to have titles and a few other rewards. And a lot of those can only be partly earned until Wrath of the Lich King come out.

Over all it seems that the WoW achievement system was an idea that was implemented half way. You can kind of tell just by the fact that achievements give points. Why give points if there's no rewards you can buy with them? There's already a tracking counter for how many achievements you have completed overall. I find the point system suspicious and think it hints that the original intention was to have purchasable rewards. Whether the idea was changed because of design constraints or lack of developer hours, I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if developers were yanked off the achievement system to finish the expansion on time. I mean who knew that achievements would be so popular that they would cause the instance servers to crash?

If you want my conspiracy theory the achievement points were probably planned for the character customization feature. Maybe instead of paying gold at the barbershop you would be charge achievement points or required to have earned a certain amount of them. The other darker thought was that the future paid character customization feature was going to run on achievement points until Blizzard decided to go micro-transaction. Either way the blues are coming across strong that achievement points are just for tracking purposes. It's too bad since it really detracts from the overall value of the achievement systeml. If there was a system for spending the points then maybe it could maintain it's popularity with the players. As it is now I can't help but think that most players will forget about them once the expansion comes out.

Did WoW Achievements overload the instance servers?

2008-10-20T09:12:00.000-07:00

I didn't get to play as much as I wanted to this weekend, but I did manage to get into World of Warcraft for a bit. I really enjoy the achievement system they put into the game even if it's a bit harder then Warhammer's system. I've made up my mind to get the Loremaster achievement which requires tracking down and completely a huge number of quests in every zone in the game. It's been a lot of fun so far since every zone has a counter and I basically fly around looking for quest icons to show up on my mini-map. I really wish this feature was in the game when I first leveled my characters through the Outlands. I've found a ton of quests I've never done before, including quite a few escort missions I missed. Anyways, while in the middle of my quest-a-thon a couple of friends invited me to run some of the old world dungeons.

Its seems that another popular achievement added to World of Warcraft involves finishing all the dungeons and raids in the game. The new talents are making this very easy and I think most of the old world dungeons are now soloable by any class. I know my group of three easily did both sides of Stratholm in little over a half hour with no problems. What really surprised me though was that number of pick-up-raids I saw forming for the old world instances. I saw people forming raids for AQ40, ZG, BWL, and even the classic Molten Core. A lot of this content has never been seen by newer players and the achievement system seems to have drummed up the necessary support. I know I really want to do the C'thun fight after hearing one of my friends describe the giant eyeball boss.

The only negative aspect of the achievement system is that it looks like it encouraged enough people to visit the old world that it caused some technical problems. Anyone familiar with raiding knows that each raid instance is on a separate server from the main overworld. Also I believe instances work across game servers. Thus if an instance goes down for one server, it probably means it went down for several. Over the weekend it would seem that the high amount of traffic from achievement junkies kept crashing instances. Part of the problem was probably that most old world instances were running on old world hardware. I know the Scarlet Monastery had few problems over the weekend and I assume Blizzard had previously updated the hardware because of the Headless Horseman. However, I bet everything else from Dire Maul to Zul'gurub was on something a lot older.

Blizzard really is a victim of their own success sometimes. It looks like they had no idea achievements would actually motivate a large amount of players to do old content. Now there could have been other bugs in the patch that caused the instance crashes. The battlegrounds did go down repeatedly over the weekend and I know they are running on top of the line hardware. Still just based on observations it does look like old hardware was simply overwhelmed by player traffic. It's yet another example of the unintended consequences which continues to plague Blizzard's game design. I'll admit that achievements are a very poor reward and shouldn't really motivate players like gear or money. However, Blizzard forgot that most players have maxed out everything else and achievements were the only "improvement" they could make on their characters. Looks like even a small carrot on a stick can cause a stampede.

Warhammer's numbers in the face of WotLK

2008-10-16T15:05:00.000-07:00

Just how much will the the release of Wraith of the Lich King effect Warhammer's subscription numbers? Well if you follow the press releases then you know that Mythic just recently announced 750,000 accounts registered for their game. That's around the same number Age of Conan announced after three months. I have to give kudus to Mythic for getting those numbers within the first month of release though now the competition gets tough. World of Warcraft is the better PvE game and you can expect any raid and dungeon fans to probably migrate back during the upcoming month. Still no one really knows just how many of the current Warhammer players prefer the path of PvE content.

There have already been recent claims from Paul Sams the COO of Blizzard that half of the players who left for Warhammer have come back. This is probably true, but it's not as bad as it sounds. A lot of the current players in Warhammer are probably players who quit World of Warcraft quite awhile ago or came from other games. The numbers Paul Sams is quoting is probably just the accounts that were closed in mid-September. I sincerely doubt that all those 750,000 accounts were all people who recently quit World of Warcraft. You also have to count in the trend of World of Warcraft expansions attracting back players who have been absent from the game for quite awhile. As we have seen the WoW expansions usually only have enough content to keep people interested in the game for about 4 months, but they tend to take two years to develop. This results in a lot of people who come back to the game around expansion time.

So in a worst case scenario where everyone playing Warhammer came from World of Warcraft and half of them have now returned. Warhammer would still have 375,000 players.

A more accurate scenario of Warhammer's numbers are probably

300,000 players who didn't come directly from WoW
450,000 players who came from Wow
-------------------
750,000 players

If half the players who came from WoW have returned then that would mean that 225,000 players have come back to the world of Azeroth. But since the WoW expansions generally attract a lot of returning players who have stopped playing the game, I would predict a portion of those returning players are not actually coming back from Warhammer. Now if World of Warcraft didn't have an expansion coming out then I would say most of those returning players would be coming back from Warhammer. Also you have to count in the players like me who are probably going to play both games for awhile. Just because someone decided to re-open their WoW account doesn't mean they are canceling their Warhammer one. This is probably a small number of players, but it could still account for 25-75k players.

In the end I would expect the active subscription numbers for Warhammer to grow, especially considering how effective they have been at patching. Age of Conan had a horrible patch history and often broke more things then they fixed. This was probably a key factor in Funcom not being able to hold onto the massive number of people who tried out their game. In the case of Warhammer, you don't have to worry about developer incompetence driving away players. Warhammer is really only competing with the content in World of Warcraft. And while I've seen some impressive things in the WotLK expansion, I haven't seen anything that would cause a mass exodus. In the end I expect Warhammer to hold onto at least 500,000 subscribers throughout the month of December and then continue to grow as people start finishing the content of WotLK.

Warhammer: Casual but not User Friendly atm

2008-10-15T08:48:00.000-07:00

I've noticed that several bloggers are impressed with the speed that Mythic has reacted to complaints and bugs. Their recent patch is very solid and it addresses a variety of issues that I've seen brought up. In particular I was glad to see that it's now impossible to roll need on items that you cannot use on your current character. The open grouping system in Warhammer is great, but it means that you're often grouping with complete strangers. No one seems to trust anyone in these situations and I saw a lot of people simply rolling "Need" all the time. Scenarios could get really ugly especially when a blue item for a class dropped and someone who couldn't use it won the roll. I was hoping for scenarios to eventually use a loot system more in line with the public quests, but this is still a good fix.

I also noticed another fix involving scenarios which allows you to queue up for all of the ones in the same tier at once. It's just a quick time saving change to the game, but then again Mythic really needs all the help they can get in that area. There seems to be a lot of time wasting mechanisms build into the game at the moment that need to be polished out. Right from the start, the process for logging into Warhammer is unwieldy and requires you to watch multiple logo screens and then click on a EULA agreement. I've got my fingers crossed that Mythic eventually takes that out of the game. Also I was sadden to see that the mail system still requires a ridiculous amount of clicks to take an item from the mailbox. I'm trying to work on my cultivating skill at the moment and my friends are sending me all the seeds they find. It's very tedious to extract them from the mailbox.

The quest tracking system is another feature which is still unfriendly compared to other games out there. I probably find it annoying just because I tend to quest more then I do scenarios. Still, I think I should be able to abandon a quest or simply turn off the tracking feature from the quest tracking window on my screen. Instead I'm constantly referred back to the Tome of Knowledge which covers up the majority of my screen and magically summons an enemy player out of nowhere. It reminds me a lot of the early days of Everquest where casters were forced to look at their spell book if they wanted to meditate and regain mana. It's very annoying especially since from what I've seen of their scripting and customizable UI windows it's an easy fix. In fact I'm pretty sure someone has an add-on out there at the moment that does just that. However, as popular as add-ons are in MMOs I'm sure a lot of people don't like using them. I hated with a passion having to update mine in World of Warcraft after every patch.

Also I realize now that as much as I disliked the official World of Warcraft forums they did give me a place to sniff around about future changes. I feel the fan forums of Warhammer are more of a one way street for information. Mythic can get an idea about our opinions on the game, but we really have no idea what they are planning. The announcements they do drop throughout the different fan forums tend to be short term news updates. I'm not sure such a lopsided communication channel can support a large MMO community. As Lum the Mad mentions the Warhammer Alliance is the primary fan forum site, but it seems to have a low amount of traffic for such a large game. I think its because a lot of casual players have no idea which fan forums are actually checked by Mythic. It's all rather confusing and since they have no assurance their voice will be heard they simply decide not to bother.

Luckily, for Warhammer none of the things that makes their game non-user friendly are that hard to change. In fact, I expect a lot to be fixed within the next couple months. If you're worried that this is too long and it will give Wrath of the Lich King an advantage then I wouldn't worry too much. While Blizzard has had four years to polish its UI and game mechanics to be extremely user friendly, they still can't compete with some of the class design that Mythic has implemented. Warhammer's classes are just better suited for PvP and Blizzard can't rework theirs without alienating a lot of players. Blizzard is looking into a dual spec system, but it won't be out until after the expansion. Plus as some bloggers like Rohan have pointed out, the dual spec system could easily backfire. Warhammer needs very little time to bring its UI up to par and I don't see WoW stealing many PvP fans back in that time. Then again it remains to be seen just how much of the current Warhammer population are PvE fans trying out new content.

Blizzcon /Silly Contest

2008-10-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how to rate this new contest since humor is so subjective. Also I think jokes dealing with World of Warcraft had the advantage since fans of the game definitely outnumbered fans of the other franchises. In particular there were a couple Deckard Cain impersonations/jokes which I don't think the audience understood. There were also like a hundred applicants and to save time Joy Mohr was told he could yank the micro-phone if the contestants got too long winded. Jay being the man of the people told the audience that we could boo the contests off the stage. This proved useful since some people just used the /silly contest as an opportunity to do shout-outs to friends or even try to recruit for their guild.

The highlight of the contest was definitely seeing some people desperately fail at being funny. One comic duo obviously thought they were giving the audience comedic gold and yet got boo'd off the stage after a few seconds. Towards the end of the contest you could tell the audience was tired of bad jokes and started booing sooner and sooner. This made one girl so nervous she completely froze up and forgot her joke. Later on in the evening when she walked up for the dance contest Jay asked "Do you remember what dance your doing for us?" There were a couple nuggets of gold in the contest though only one actually placed. I don't know who the judges were, but their sense of humor didn't quite match mine.

My favorites from the /silly contest

Joke 1: (This one actually won 2nd place)
What is the favorite class of the ladies of Azeroth?
"Male Enhancement" Shamans

Joke 2:
What's the difference between a resto druid and Superman?
Superman has a weakness

Joke 3:
How many murlocs does it take to bring down the blizzard store?
Just One, (the Failoc)

Joke 4:
A Tauren and a Gnome walked into Deadwind Pass and the Gnome says "Man this zone is scary" and the Tauren says "You're telling me, I have to walk out of here by myself."

I'm paraphrasing some of these jokes and apologize for messing up any of the punchlines. The first place winner was a guy from England who no one but the judges could understand because of his accent. If anyone has the text feel free to post it in a comment. I think it involved a comparison between an ex-wife and curse of agony.

Blizzcon 2008 Dance Contest

2008-10-13T20:19:00.000-07:00

I actually managed to get a seat with a decent view of one of the screens and was able to shoot some video of the dance contest. I posted the winners and some of the other contestants that I thought were in the running. Overall I was much more impressed with the dance contest then the bad humor of the /silly contest.

The Contest Winners

1st Place Winner - Undead Female

2nd Place Winner - Troll Male

3rd Place Winner - Ogre/Moonkin

Some of the Runner-Ups:

Gnome Female

Orc Male

Orc Female

News from Blizzcon

2008-10-13T11:31:00.000-07:00

Well I'm back home and must say that Blizzcon went really well this year. I was amazed at how everything was put together and the level of detail into promoting all three of their franchises. I spent a majority of my time at the panels and was actually surprised a couple of times. I also managed to get information on some of the topics I came up with before leaving.

1) More Offensive abilities for Healing and Tanking classes
It looks like Blizzard isn't going to redesign any classes and take advantage of some of Mythic's ideas regarding healers and tanks. However, it does look like they are adding more base abilities for these classes so they can do damage despite being heavy into the holy or protection trees. In particular they mentioned cleaning up the protection tree for warriors so that more points could be spent in Arms or Fury. They also mentioned the new damage spell for priests called mind sear and how the changes to spell power would make it effective.

2) Assurances that 10-man raids will be more accessible
Nothing specific on how the ten man raids would be structured in comparison to the 25 man versions. However, the itemization developer for dungeons did cover that the 10-man versions of raids would use different badges then the 25-man version. This assures me that the developers are making sure that rewards are separate for both versions and not interdependent. This should allow the developers to more easily balance the 10-man raids for pick-up-raids.

3) Progress on the Warcraft movie
Nothing at all about the movie. I'm starting to suspect that it has been canceled or put on the back burner. Then again the addition and expansion of the Cinematics team at Blizzard has made me suspect that they might be considering doing the movie themselves as a pure CGI affair. I know Starcraft 2 is going to be split into three products and that each one will come with a lot of cinematics so that could also be the reason for the team's expansion.

4) Hint at their next MMO in development
Nothing concrete except the development style of Starcraft 2 which is going to heavily depend on introducing new characters and storylines for each campaign. This is remarkable similar to what Blizzard did with Warcraft 3 and I think is a pre-cursor to the Starcraft lore being prepared for a MMO.

5) The roll-out plans for additional Hero Classes
Nothing at all about additional Hero Classes. I can't even infer anything since Blizzard really is watching closely what happens with the Death Knight before making any more hero classes. I do like the Witch Doctor a lot from the playable Diablo 3 demo and I'm crossing my fingers they adapt it for World of Warcraft.

6) Starcraft 2 release date
Starcraft 2 will be released in three separate games, with each one having a different single player campaign. The first campaign about the Terrans will be called Wings of Liberty and was hinted at being ready for 2009. If you only care about the multi-player aspects of the game then don't worry, all three races will be playable in they first campaign. Blizzard is hoping the cinematics and challenge of the different single player campaigns can sell each separate product. I think they might have some luck in this regard as long as they approach the Zerg and Protoss games as expansions and don't try to charge 50$ for each game.

7) Other Diablo 3 classes
The Wizard was announced and given her own gameplay trailer at Blizzcon. She had a lot of spells which are new to the Diablo universe including a disintegration ray and the ability to create bubbles of slowed time. Also interesting was the ability to create multiple copies of herself which is an ability I think mages in World of Warcraft might be getting.

8) Information on the new Battle.Net
Nothing in the panels about their plans to update Battle.Net. Most likely it will have to be up and running before the beta test for Starcraft 2 starts. Since beta keys for the game were included in the Blizzcon goodie bag I'm assuming we should hear more about it soon.

9) Plans for additional character/item customization
There are plans for additional "paid" character customization. Most people are theorizing that this will be a micro-transaction system that allows you to customize your character's avatar even more so then the barbershop. No details were given by the developers and I'm not even sure if this involves paying real money or in-game money for customization options.
gamepolitics.com article

10) Any tools for player created content in the pipeline
Nothing on housing or more advanced forms of crafting were announced.

P.S. I'll be doing several posts on additional information from Blizzcon in the future including some stuff on their contests.

What I hope to see at Blizzcon 2008

2008-10-08T13:41:00.000-07:00

I'll be at Blizzcon this year as I got lucky enough to have a friend win a couple of tickets in the raffle. Even though I'm not playing World of Warcraft at the moment I'm very interested in how they respond to some of the ideas Mythic has recently introduce in Warhammer. As a lot of bloggers have already noted, there are a couple of ideas which Blizzard seems more then happy to just directly copy. In particular the ability to queue up anywhere for a battleground is supposed to be coming soon to World of Warcraft. I don't know how technically difficult it was for Mythic to do this in Warhammer, but I'm glad they did. For the longest time Blizzard has had very little real competition and hasn't really had to look at improving basic game functionality.

Now I'm not saying every idea Mythic has come up with has been a winner. There are multiple problems with their User Interface including the touted Tome of Knowledge. Quest tracking is also a bit non-intuitive and often requires players to go through unnecessary sub-screens. Still a lot of the basic game design of Warhammer Online is going to challenge World of Warcraft to do a better job. In particular I'm hoping that Blizzard will re-examine how healing classes are played in World of Warcraft. I've been following several beta reports and it looks like pure healers are still some of the more boring classes to play in the game. Warhammer Online has shown that healing and tanking classes don't have to be impotent in PvP combat and I'm sure Blizzard has taken notice.

I will be closely following the class discussions at Blizzcon and see what kind of improvements they have planned for tanking and healing classes. I'm also interested in just how accessible the future raid content will be to the casual gamer. It doesn't matter if raids have a smaller version if they are still filled with class required encounters and annoying trash respawns. A pick-up-raid should have a decent chance of clearing the first 10 man raid. I'm also hoping that Blizzard keeps the same level of quality for it's single group dungeons. I've heard a little bit about the dungeon done while flying on dragonback and I'm hoping to see it in action. The quality of the Altdorf Sewers dungeon in Warhammer was disappointing and I must admit I do miss the dungeon crawling of World of Warcraft.

If I talked about everything I'm hoping to find out at Blizzcon I would probably fill a textbooks. So in the interest of not becoming a wall of text I'll go with my favorite weapon of choice: the list.

1) More Offensive abilities for Healing and Tanking classes
2) Assurances that 10-man raids will be more accessible
3) Progress on the Warcraft movie
4) Hint at their next MMO in development
5) The roll-out plans for additional Hero Classes
6) Starcraft 2 release date
7) Other Diablo 3 classes
8) Information on the new Battle.Net
9) Plans for additional character/item customization
10) Any tools for player created content in the pipeline

Age of Conan on the Big Bang Theory

2008-10-07T13:30:00.000-07:00

I don't know why Monday night television is so crowded with good shows but I've been constantly keeping my DVR busy by recording shows on CBS, FOX, and NBC. Last night I decided to watch the CBS sitcoms live since with the way the economy has been going I needed a good laugh. Much to my surprise the very nerdy Big Bang Theory had an episode oriented entirely on Age of Conan. They have used MMOs before on the show for punchlines, but this was something different. The episode actually explored some of the underlying causes of game addiction without being overly preachy. It was also hilarious which is probably one of the reasons the Big Bang Theory is one of the better performing comedies this year.

It didn't have as much in-game footage as the touted "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode of South Park. Still there were a couple good scenes involving in-game footage which were quite funny. At one point the neighbor Penny cuts off the head of a friend who was attempting to coax her out of the game. It didn't look like they used any special tools for the Machinima, but the graphics were still quite nice. I couldn't help, but wonder what kind of computer they had which could play Conan that well. Anyways, I'm sure this episode was filmed earlier in the summer when Age of Conan was still going through it's growth spurt. Despite it no longer being the most popular game it's still nice to see a MMO get some screen time on television.

I was a bit worried at first when the show went the MMO addiction route, but the writers didn't overly exaggerate the dangers of it. In fact if you compare it to the standard Dr. Phil drivel, they were pretty fair on the subject. Of course the fact they got most of the terminology and game mechanics correct probably means the writers are MMO players themselves. They pretty much nailed the common cause of MMO addiction being that it gives people a false sense of achievement. In the episode the neighbor Penny was depressed from getting booted from an audition and was feeling like she hadn't done anything with her life. It's a fair portrayal of something that might cause a person to fall into online gaming addiction. And I thought the humorous slant and the fact Penny quickly recovered kept it from being offensive to gamers.

P.S. Most likely CBS will make it available on their online site soon.

Episode: The Barbarian Sublimation
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/big_bang_theory/

Order limited by lack of Tanks

2008-10-06T11:32:00.000-07:00

When I first heard that Mythic was cutting some of the classes in Warhammer I didn't really think it would have that much of an effect on the game. After all, each faction had multiple classes which could fulfill the same purpose in the game's PvP or PvE content. There shouldn't have been any problems. Of course I forgot to factor in the popularity of human races in fantasy games. They're almost always the majority in any game since people are more comfortable using humans as avatars then misshapen fantasy races. This seems to be holding true in Warhammer and it looks like Mythic has greatly lowered the overall number of tanks for Order by cutting the Empire tank class.

At first I thought the tank shortage would be limited to only the Chaos vs Empire scenarios. Nordenwatch in particular suffers from a lack of tanks which can make it hard to take chokepoints (that damn bridge). However, problems remain in the scenario even after cross server queues were added to the game. There simply aren't enough players trying out the other tanking classes for Order to have a balanced fight against Destruction. It also doesn't help that a lot of the scenarios are specifically balanced around having a tank for flag holding. No other class has the survivability necessary for running a flag between objectives while taking damage.

It's not just scenarios either as I ran into problems gathering tanks for a Keep Raid in Troll Country. It might not be as bad in the other racial areas, but in the Empire/Chaos zones its very rare to see any tanks. I had always thought that the lower tier Keeps would be a goal that a pick up raid could accomplish. The other battlefield objectives in the zone had easily been captured and over time Order players gathered at the keep. It was nice to see how the mechanics of the keep raids work and someone even brought a battering ram. That's as far as it went though since we only had one tank who was even close to being appropriate level for tanking a Keep Lord.

So far in the game I've only seen Order capture keeps in the Elven and Dwarven areas. I am not sure if these were captured by a pick-up-raid who could get tanks or if it was the result of a guild raid. Either way the tier two keeps aren't that hard to capture, though fighting a Keep Lord and five Champions can be rough. It was really only the lack of tanks that kept us from winning. Thankfully, healers aren't that hard to find since the Warrior-Priest in particular seems to be popular. I'm hoping as more people switch to Order to take advantage of the shorter queues the tank issue will slowly resolve itself. Still it would go much quicker if Mythic quickly introduced the missing Empire tank class.

Wow, WhistleBlowerZero was actually right.

2008-10-02T09:26:00.000-07:00

I normally like to focus my ramblings on MMOs, but every once and awhile I'll dig into an issue that I think will have a broad effect on the entire gaming market. Notice my obsessive following of the DRM debacle for Spore. Still I try to limit myself from doing these kind of posts too often and boring everyone. If you follow any of the regular gaming news sites then you probably remember the story about the disgruntled ex-GameStop employee. After getting a new job he decided to make a series of YouTube videos which highlight the way GameStop stores are run. It's a fascinating series of videos that grabs the attention in much the same way as a brutal car accident. Several practices he described were downright immoral and a couple were probably illegal in some states.

The videos are done in the same style as Zero Punctuation and used photoshop images to successfully be entertaining while highlighting questionable GameStop practices. The one that most stuck in my mind was that employees were encouraged not to ask questions when people came in with multiple sealed copies of a new game. It was obvious that they were stolen, but the store made a huge profit reselling them since the "sellers" always wanted cash. You see GameStop buys games at two different price points. You get a bad deal if you just want store credit, but you get a really horrible deal if you actually want cash. Some of the descriptions of these "sellers" from the ex-GameStop employee were quite vivid. I especially like the point where he said there was just something wrong about a crackhead selling stolen goods in a store filled with 14 year old kids.

Anyways either someone was watching those videos or the world just loves big coincidences. By way of Kotaku I came across a story about a police sting on GameStop stores in Memphis. Undercover officers had no problems selling video games to clerks even after they made it clear they were stolen. It apparently happened enough that the police arrested eight different clerks. The regional GameStop VP had to suspend the practice of buying used games in Memphis area stores and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of investigation. Still if the videos of WhistleBlowerZero are to believed then dealing in stolen property is only the tip of the iceberg.

So how does this affect MMOs in any way whatsoever? Well it's a long convoluted chain of thought but the basic premise is that MMOs alone can't keep the PC market afloat. It's great news that MMOs are immune to piracy and a company will never try to slap restrictive DRM on one. However, the massive amounts of money that used game stores make are the main driving factor for invasive DRM schemes. It's not that piracy is an issue as much as sharing and trading software. Companies like EA hate the used game market in a manner very similar to how MMO publishers hate gold farmers. They both see the practice as someone making a lot of easy money off a product they developed. Stories like the one about the GameStop sting operation probably encourage tougher and more draconian types of DRM for both console and PC games.

Update: WhistleBlowerZero's account has since been suspended by YouTube and all 9 videos he made removed. Will look for another place where they are linked. Copyright is not an issue here, though a defamation lawsuit by GameStop could be.

Altdorf Sewers

2008-10-01T08:58:00.000-07:00

So I have been mostly sticking to public quests and scenarios so far in Warhammer, but last night a couple friends suggested trying out the first PvE dungeon. We're lucky that we planned out our characters ahead of time and had great class balance. Warhammer may be oriented on PvP, but it still depends heavily on the trinity of healer, tank and dps. Since I got to the Altdorf sewers first I thought I would explore a little. I've gotten used to being a little bit immortal with my Warrior Priests and thought I could easily tank a level 15 champion mob. Unfortunately, fighting three of them at the same time quickly overwhelmed my divine strike healing and made me realize that tanks were still very necessary.

The Altdorf Sewers are divided into three very small wings which are located in the Slums area near the Bright Wizard college. All of them are filled with varying types of Rat Men who usually come in packs of three. Some of the wings do include priests who will stand back and heal their allies and nuke you with nasty poison attacks. In general the bosses will drop two green items with one of them being part of a class set. The items were generally an upgrade over the public quest gear I found between rank 15-17. Unfortunately, a lot of the gear was for classes we didn't have in the group though our tank did get a set breastplate.

Altdorf Wing 1:
This is the instance furthest away from the flight master and has two guards standing outside. Its filled with level 13-14 rat mobs, but without any of the annoying casters that appear in later wings. They do come in groups of three and can probably overwhelm none tank classes. We actually four manned this wing later in the evening with classes between rank 15-18. The one boss in this wing is a giant Rat Man, whom one of my friends described as Splinter on steroids. He will quite often do a ground pound attack which does a decent amount of AOE damage. If you don't have your resistances through the roof then you really need to run back as soon as you see the dust start to rise off the ground. Other then that its an easy fight as long as you have a tank and a long range healers. Healers who have to deal melee damage might have problems.

Altdorf Wing 2:
We actually ran this instance first since its the easiest one to find. The mobs are slightly higher around rank 15-16 and you'll start to see those annoying priests I mentioned earlier. Always take out the priests first since they have less hitpoints and I think their attack spell is AOE based. This wing is slightly larger and actually has two bosses. The first is a Chaos Mutant called the Bulbous One and is basic tank and spank fight. At the end he did get a couple high hitting crits off on our tank so he might have some sort of enrage ability. Just make sure your healers are awake and you'll win.

The last boss fight is actually the hardest one in my experience. It's two Rat Men commanders who can't be tanked since they constantly aggro dump. To make matters worse whenever they aggro dump they drop puddles of nasty poison on the ground which deal a lot of damage. You need to keep moving and make sure you are not standing on those puddles. Unfortunately, this can be hard since several people in my group reported not being able to see them on their screen. Also annoying is that the bosses also easily get stuck on the terrain and reset back to full life. Make sure you fight on even ground and that should reduce the chance of a reset. The one good thing about this fight is that they don't respawn if you wipe. So you can kill one, wipe, then come back for revenge.

Altdorf Wing 3
This one is actually very similar to the first wing except the mobs are now rank 17 champions at a minimum. They also come in groups of three like the previous wings. I'm assuming that three is the magic number that makes a tank class required for a dungeon run and I wouldn't be surprised to see it in the next set of dungeons. I actually haven't fully run wing 3 yet, since our group broke up before finishing it. Apparently it only has one boss and he's just like the Steroid Splinter you fight in the first wing. Based on popular opinion this wing is easy as long as your group is rank 17.

Conclusion:
I'm not sure if the Altdorf sewers is worth the effort of gathering a group together to run it. The experience and money drops was very small throughout all the wings. The loot off the bosses would have been fine except out of the eight pieces that dropped only two were usable by classes in our group. Also the wings looked similar and nothing in particular stood out to make the dungeon cool or interesting to crawl through. I'm hoping this is Warhammer's equivalent of the Stockades and the higher tier dungeons are better designed and look cooler. The twin commander fight in wing 2 is challenging enough to be fun, but is bugged by random resets and certain players not being able to see the poison puddles.

I'd recommend the sewers for maybe a one time run just to stay in practice for future dungeon crawls. I do hear the 20-30 dungeons drop blue items, but the green items from the sewers aren't necessarily bad. The problem is that most of it might not be usable by anyone in the group. I would like to see some changes that reduces the randomness a bit and maybe have the loot tables use repairable items. They seem to change into different items based on whatever class wins them. Also the experience and money drops should probably be adjusted to be a bit more competitive with public quest, scenarios, and soloing. As a finishing touch a dramatic encounter would be nice, something like a Rat Man summoning a giant crocodile.

Upcoming Line-Up of Lesser Known MMOs

2008-09-30T14:27:00.000-07:00

While I'm having fun in Warhammer at the moment I know some people are looking forward to to other MMOs that are just around the corner. I'm not just talking about Wrath of the Lich King either. There's a decent line up of smaller sized games lined up to release not that far from now. Most of them are waiting for the Warhammer vs Warcraft fight to die down a bit before releasing, but we should see them in Spring 2009. Even more exciting is that fact that most of them aren't your traditional fantasy MMORPG.

Chronicles of Spellborn - Nov 28th 2008
This game is the only traditional fantasy game out of the bunch, but it follows a weird dystopian setting where the world has been shattered. The combat system uses elements of First Person Shooters and players have to target their opponents. The game has nine classes, but the game is more oriented around a complex skill system. The game seems to be following more along the model established by Ultima Online then normal DIKU based games. In fact in the game items are mostly decorative and have no effect on player stats. It should be an interesting game though I doubt it will be for everyone. Still if you're not a fan of either Warhammer or WotLK , but like fantasy games then this could be for you.

Aion - Q1 2009 already released in Korea
This game is coming from eastern studio NCSoft and is far from the traditional elves and orcs type of MMO. Players get to choose between two different types of angelic looking races who are war with each other. One is a very standard looking angel and the other is more a raven feathered one. A third NPC faction is in the game which is made of dragon looking beings which will sometimes be allied with one faction or the other. Combat is traditional and oriented around a class based system which most MMO fans should pick up right away. The big selling feature of the game is that elements of flight are heavily incorporated into the game. As you level up you can fly for longer periods of time which open up special skills and the ability to visit more locations.

Jumpgate Evolution - Spring 2009 (could change)
The eventual success of EVE Online has encouraged a couple other companies to try making their own space based MMO. Jumpgate Evolution seems to be the one most closely following in EVE Online's footsteps and is sticking with mostly ship to ship combat. Blackstar and StarTrek Online on the other hand have decided to incorporate large portions of avatar gameplay. Blackstar is still shopping for a publisher and StarTrek Online is still a long way off, so Jumpgate Evolution is likely to be the only space based MMO we see for awhile. It should be an interesting game since NetDevil has promised a experience more friendly to new users then EVE Online. If you've followed the recent Zero Punctuation review of EVE Online then you know the game's heavy dependence on numbers and complex skills systems greatly limit its appeal.

Stargate Worlds - Spring 2009 (could change)
I'm probably the least excited about this game though I'm a huge fan of the shows. The game uses first person shooter combat and is organized around working in small squads. They are going with a class system though apparently everyone will be able to learn the medic skill and thus be able to heal. The real draw for the game will be that its supposed to be very true to the Stargate license and will allow players to choose among the most popular races. The Stargate lore also works perfectly with instancing and provides an easy method of transportation between the different worlds. The only reason I'm not excited about this game is because of Tabula Rasa which turned me off FPS elements in MMOs.

Champions Online - Spring 2009
Cryptic Studios started working on Marvel Online with Microsoft after they sold the rights for City of Heroes to NCSoft. However, Microsoft and Marvel decided the MMO market was too crowded and they pull out of the project. Using the proceeds from the sale of City of Heroes they bought the license to the popular table top rpg, Champions. Using the Champions license and the backbone of the work they did on Marvel Online they have quickly created a decent looking game. Champions Online uses a interesting style of cell shaded graphics which gives it an authentic comic book feel. The combat is supposed to be similar to City of Heroes, but with powers sets and abilities being much more customizable. Also Cryptic has sworn to avoid a lot the procedural generated content which turned so many away from City of Heroes.

Some Fine Tuning for Warhammer

2008-09-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

So far I haven't found many bugs in Warhammer, which is a great change of pace after playing Age of Conan for a couple months. Still you can tell that Mythic had to rush the game out faster then they wanted to since they're a couple holes in the their user interface and basic game design. I know its unreasonable to expect a newly released MMO to have all the ease-of-use features that older games have in them. Still some of these items should have become apparent in beta testing and I'm not really sure all of them can be categorized as low priority. I guess we should just be glad that Mythic isn't churning out a ton of broken patches to try to fix these issues. I know Funcom went that route and sometimes their patches introduced more problems then they solved. Then again it would be nice to get some of these addressed within the next month.

1) Public Quest Difficulty Levels
Some public quests are just much more difficult then others. In particular there's a couple chapter 5 and 6 ones that have a Lord at the last stage of it. I'm guessing this type of mob is a step up from Hero and they hit insanely hard for their level. So far I've never seen any public quest with a Lord at the last stage actually get completed. Most of the time on the Order side I only see 3-4 people in a public quest, but I've also seen groups of 12-15 fail against Lords. I don't know if the loot for these public quests are higher, but they seem to be exponentially more difficult.

2) Restrictive Class/Race Itemization
I never really played a Mythic game before so I'm unsure if this is their normal itemization scheme. Basically almost every item dropped in the game is restricted to one class and sometimes one race. This would seem to make getting gear quite impossible except that it looks like loot tables are dynamic. When an item drops it sometimes actually appears different to everyone in the group. Thus someone may see Warrior Priest boots and someone else may see Witch Hunter boots. Its very confusing and a lot of fights break out because it looks like someone is rolling "need" on items they can't use. Of course a person really could be rolling "need" on an item they can't use, but there's no way for other people to verify. This has created an environment where everyone just rolls need.

3) Chicken Mechanic needs some fine tuning
Some classes are going to have problems with the chicken mechanic while trying to finish PvE content. In particular this problem pops up in public quest areas where some players are still flagged for RvR. My Warrior-Priest has some attacks that automatically heal anyone around me. If anyone around me is flagged for RvR then it also flags me if I heal or buff them. Then BAM, I'm a chicken. I'm not sure if this is intended or not, but it makes finishing content a pain in the neck. This happened to me after I had just leveled to rank 12 in the middle of a public quest with rank 10 mobs. It wasn't like I was doing really low level content.

4) Ability to link Items to other players
I thought this was a basic functionality that every MMO was supposed to have. Some people told me that Mythic had some weird rules about linking items in Dark Age of Camelot, but I believe they just prevent linking items in general chat. I have no idea why you can't link items in Warhammer, but I'd be willing to bet it has something to do with the unique itemization and loot distribution that Mythic uses in the game. Age of Conan had a similar problem where item statistics reflected the buffs and damage modifiers of the person looking at the item.

5) Right click functionality on names in chat
Just a small personal peeve here, but player names that come through the chat window have no right click functionality. I've gotten used to easily reporting spam, adding someone to ignore, or inviting someone to my group by using this feature. I understand the open grouping system makes it easier to fill groups, but it doesn't really work over long distances. It would be helpful to be able to just right click on a name especially when getting requests for a group invite through a tell.

I was going to list out a couple more items I noticed, but I see there are already forum threads and blogs that have gone into much greater detail. On mine own personal list I really only consider the first item to be game breaking at the moment. The others are important, but players can work around them. Though as people get max rank and items start becoming more important the itemization issue is going to turn critical. Mythic needs to greatly improve the Auction House functionality so that its easier to redistribute the items that everyone is rolling need on. They also could tinker with the looting system so its more obvious when people are rolling on items they don't need. I see what Mythic was trying to do by basically making a token system where the token trade-in is done automatically when loot is rolled for. However, they need some transparency in the system since it's very ninja friendly at the moment.

Five Reasons Destruction is more popular than Order

2008-09-24T12:58:00.000-07:00

The population imbalances that currently exist on many of Warhammer's servers seem to be the direct opposite of how players distributed themselves in World of Warcraft. It's a little weird that evil races would be so popular in one game over the other especially considering their similarity. Yet the trend does exist as most Destruction players have noticed long login queues and very few opponents in the RvR zones. As I mentioned a couple days ago, this probably has a lot to do with Order players taking advantage of the quick scenario timers to earn renown points. However, this doesn't explain why so many people initially decided to choose Destruction in the first place.

If you travel back in time you might remember the article from Terra Nova where a writer accused the Horde faction of being evil. This is laughable in the face of some of the Destruction quests in Warhammer, but back in 2005 the Horde were considered the "bad guy" faction. I believe the article was originally written to highlight moral choices in video games, but the author also hinted that it was the reason why the Horde were so unpopular. Other people also pointed out that their races tended to be ugly, especially the female versions. It was thought that this discouraged many players from choosing to play Horde. Also since battlegrounds weren't in the game at launch there was no queue advantage for being on the smaller side.

Warhammer Online launched with both scenarios and no traditional raid content. You would think this would discourage people from choosing the more populous faction. Unlike classic World of Warcraft there just aren't as many immediate advantages to being on the larger side. A numbers advantage may help in the RvR zones, but a lot of those depend on participation from both factions. In fact I believe a lot of quests located in the RvR zones require players to kill a certain number of enemy opponents. Trying to accomplish this on a server with a 2:1 population ratio is going to be impossible and I think most people realize it. So why are people stilling queueing up to play Destruction?

There are several theories out there.

1) Mythic really hyped the side of Destruction
I don't think Mythic favors one faction over another, but all the early promotional material focused on Destruction. It wasn't until a few months ago that I started getting more information on the Order classes. I think that Mythic started polishing the Destruction side first and it affected the availability of material to the marketing department.

2) Goblins are just plain cool
In general the short races tend to be less popular in most games. However, goblins seem to buck the trend with their gremlin like appearance and insane sense of humor. There was a very strong demand for goblins to become the new playable race in the Burning Crusade expansion. I remember several polls where they came out as the number one choice by players. In Warhammer Online they have two very well defined classes with a lot of information that was released early on.

3) Both sides have humans
One statistic that remains the same throughout almost every fantasy MMO is that humans are the favorite race. It seems in general that people are more comfortable playing a character that looks human. In World of Warcraft only the Alliance had humans and it probably contributed to their popularity over the Horde. In Warhammer since both sides have access to this most superior race it doesn't negatively affect the population balance.

4) Destruction really is Evil
An interesting theory is that the Horde weren't made evil enough. Starting with Warcraft III, it seems that Blizzard decided to portray the Horde as a collection of "noble savage" races who just wanted the freedom to form their own nation. Players who might like role playing as bloodthirsty monsters saw little difference between the Horde and the Alliance. Thus when one side had an obvious advantage in world combat they had no problems switching. Mythic has made it quite obvious that their is no moral ambiguity with Destruction, they are bloodthirsty monsters.

5) PvP fans like Destruction
In World of Warcraft the Horde quickly gained a reputation for being the better PvP faction. The quicker battleground queues and smaller number of raiding guilds made the faction focus more on player versus player combat. Also Blizzard had attempted to increase the faction's popularity by giving them superior racial abilities which gave them a slight advantage in the arenas. Since Warhammer Online is more PvP focused it make sense that it attracts more Horde players then Alliance. This unfortunately hints that more Order players will leave the game when Wrath of the Lich King comes out.

EA keeps SecuRom, eases install limit

2008-09-23T14:10:00.000-07:00

I know it seems like Spore's DRM problem is becoming my own personal crusade, but overbearing copyright laws have always gotten me angry. EA has made some very bad decisions with the game and keeps proving that it has no intentions of changing its ways. They should be trying to avoid bad PR. It's certainly not going to help them compete against Activision-Blizzard. What's really frustrating is that Spore doesn't even need DRM controls to fight piracy. EA could easily make it so new creature download/uploads could only be done with a valid copy of the game over the internet. People without an internet connection and pirates could still play the game, but they would be missing half the fun. There would be a major benefit to having a legitimate copy of the game.

Instead EA is sticking with SecuRom which really doesn't make any sense. Some people think EA is trying to fight against the used game market, but I thought that was more of a console problem since most stores don't trade in used PC games. Another theory I've heard is that EA doesn't want the cost of running a server constantly like a MMO without having subscription revenue. If this is true then it hints that they do plan to eventually close the servers which validate new installations of Spore and transfer creatures? If you read through all the EULA information then you know they have the legal right. I'm sure they don't want to anger their customers any further, but a few years down the line they probably figure few people will be playing. The ability to prevent new installations of a game could be their eventual approach to forcing episodic gaming.

I didn't think much about this theory at first, but EA recently lessened some of the restrictions on Spore's DRM controls. EA decided to increase the number of installations up to five and push a patch which would allow multiple accounts on the same copy of Spore. These address most of the issues that casual gamers had with the DRM. However, they are still going to keep SecuRom active on every copy of Spore. This tells me that EA considers keeping SecuRom more important then preventing game sharing or used game sales. Either their shareholders are really out of touch and are insisting on DRM or else EA really does plan on eventually turning off all future installations of Spore. On thing for sure is that with Spore being cracked and available before the commercial release, is that it does not prevent "zero day" piracy as they claim.

Update 9-24-08:

Class Action Lawsuite filed against EA for Spore DRM.

http://www.courthousenews.com/2008/09/23/_Spore_Hijacks_Computers_Class_Claims.htm

For Order: Scenarios > Public Quests

2008-09-22T11:54:00.000-07:00

I've noticed that some of the concerns people had about public quests are starting to come true already. Not that they are anti-social or encourage any other type of negative behavior. Instead it looks like a lot of them cannot be finished because of the wild population imbalance on some servers. Several notable bloggers had expressed doubts that public quests would remain fun as Warhammer Online got older and less people were leveling characters. I had expected this to be the case eventually, but thought it would be a couple years. However, after leveling several human characters through the chapter 1-5 areas I've noticed that a lot of the public quests areas are permanently empty.

The problem is that the faction imbalance has become so great that on most servers the Order faction has almost instant scenario timers. Players are thus flocking to scenarios since they can quickly earn both experience and renown points. Not only does this quickly level a player, but the renown points basically give double rewards. Ranks of renown not only open up access to powerful armor sets, but they also can be spent to boost character stats. Public quests on the other hand often have lesser rewards that take much longer to earn. Also they do not give out the renown points which play such a crucial role in improving your character.

As a result the rewards are clearly in favor of players doing scenarios to the exclusion of public quests. About the only ones I've seen with any players participating have been those near the major towns. Now in the Tier 2 area I did notice that the rally master offers a blue quality item for maxing out influence. This might encourage some people to do public quests, but from what I've seen the renown gear offers complete sets of items of better quality. It might have been better if Mythic had designed the system so that rewards for certain item slots couldn't be earned through RvR. Then again Warhammer Online is supposed to be PvP oriented so I could see some players complaining if they were forced to do public quests.

The problem only really exists for the Order at the moment, so a player could always re-roll if they wanted to level by doing public quests. Destruction may have hour long scenario queues on some servers, but they also have mass numbers on their side. I've seen them dominate the open world RvR areas and I'm sure they have more then enough players for all their public quest areas. After all it makes sense to move between each public quest in the same chapter since they have different rewards in their loot bags. Hopefully, over time more people will roll Order and the scenario timers will start to balance out. If not I'm already dreading trying out the end game RvR battles. The funny thing is I just wanted to play a squig herder, but after playing WoW I refuse to do long queue times ever again.

Video Games Almost Mainstream

2008-09-16T16:27:00.000-07:00

It's nice to see the news media not putting a negative spin on a video game story even though the two industries have long been arch enemies. Still it's pretty hard to shine a negative light on the recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center. I guess they could frighten older viewers with the study's finding that 97% of teenagers in America play video games. But quite frankly that's getting old. Most parents who aren't completely nuts know that video games don't turn children into vicious, psycho killers. Only politicians who like appealing to reliable senior citizen voters still spout out such nonsense and associate video games with things like laziness, low intelligence, and violence.

If you think I'm wrong just look at the recent primary season where several candidates tried to drum up votes by making such claims. Even the youngest guy running has gone on about how video games make today's youth lazy. It's been standard practice to do this since the game Mortal Kombat first caught the attention of politicians. Luckily, things have changed in recent years to give the video game industry a better degree of respectability. The number one factor has to be the huge amount of money game releases like Grand Theft Auto IV and Halo 3 have brought in. When you have an industry that all of a sudden makes more money then Hollywood you can't help, but realize its not the whipping boy it use to be.

That's not to say that some people don't continue to scare uneducated parents with imaginary threats to their children. Not too long ago we had the Virgina Tech shootings which drew every pop psychologist and psycho claiming that the killer had been trained on video games. Of course this proved false and in fact the killer was probably more influenced by the wide media attention such school shootings always attract. It's not just violence either the media also loves to jump on any kind of sexual reference in a video game. Even though games are often much less sexual then a PG-13 movie they often have scenes blown out of proportion.

Who can forget the Mass Effect coverage on FOX News where they didn't even try to get any of their facts straight. I particularly thought the SexBox title was hilarious, but it displayed such a staggering amount of ignorance that my head hurt. Thankfully, if there's one thing the Pew study showed is that video games are well on their way to becoming mainstream. Ten years from now it will be impossible for the same kind of story to be aired by any news outlet. Of course by then I'm sure my generation will be worrying about how dangerous virtual reality pods are to our children.

P.S. Also interesting to note is that the Pew study found that MMOs were played by around 21% of teenage gamers.

Warhammer Queue Conjecture

2008-09-15T14:04:00.000-07:00

The head start for Warhammer Online kicked off without too many problems yesterday as players who ordered the collectors edition begin to sign into the game. The only issues seemed to be related to the queue system which quickly started enforcing timers on the more popular servers. As many bloggers have noted the two faction system used in Warhammer is particularly sensitive to population imbalances compared to Dark Age of Camelot. As a result Mythic has been forced to use a queue system to make sure the player population never favors one faction over the other. This is especially important during the game's start since many players will be jumping into the RvR areas and Scenarios right away. If one faction is more numerous then the other it could ruin the early PvP experience for the players and hurt the game's numbers.

Mythic will most likely relax the stringent queue system after the initial burst of players have finished choosing their primary servers. It's natural for servers to have spikes in populations and I think Mythic just wants to avoid the skewed population problems that initially hurt World of Warcraft's battlegrounds. Blizzard eventually managed to fix their problem by creating battlegroups which allowed cross server battles. Unfortunately, the same trick won't work for Warhammer Online since it will have multiple RvR zones which are part of the open world. The queue system is always going to be needed to balance the fighting in these areas. At the moment it looks like pre-made guilds are just going to have to be careful about what Warhammer servers they attempt start on.

Rough estimates on standard MMO servers
-The average MMO server tends to have between 5,000-10,000 simultaneous players
-High population servers are ones that continually approach the upper limit
-High population definitions have very little to do with the number of characters on it

SWAG Estimates on Warhammer Queue
I would guess that Mythic wants less then a 10% difference between the two factions as the servers are initially populated with players. I'm also guessing this difference is hooked into a weighted round robin system so that a entire faction is never prevented from ever getting into a server.

Example:
Say Warhammer runs on a server able to handle 12,000 active players with no problems. If it were at full capacity then it would only allow a difference of 1,200 players at 10%. This give the smaller faction around 5400 players and the larger faction 6600 players. If the queue system was weighted on a 1-10% difference then it would award the next 10 slots to the smaller faction before awarding 1 slot to the larger faction.

There are both good and bad points to using a faction based queue system. The major benefit is that it will balance open world pvp content on each server. World of Warcraft has long had a problem with open world PvP objectives like Halaa and the Auchindoun Wastes always being held by the more populous faction. This tends to make earning the rewards almost impossible for the smaller faction unless they attempt it late at night. A side benefit is that will also prevent the scenario queue times from becoming too unbalanced. The only problem is that players are likely to hate the queues especially in cases where unstable connection or computer crashes result in a long wait to get back in. Such a system pretty much makes raiding impossible very difficult to coordinate which might be why Warhammer Online only has large scale PvP encounters.

Spore's DRM backlash branches out

2008-09-14T21:38:00.000-07:00

I was surprised to see that the backlash against Spore's DRM has spread from Amazon.com to other review sites. Even the famous Metacritic.com is being affected as the user review for the game has gone down to a 5.1 out of 10. Most of the comments are talking about the uselessness of such protection schemes when the game shows up on bit-torrent websites before its even officially released. Even worse some people are claiming that this version of SecuRom still accidentally disables disc-drives and causes computer crashes. This was a problem with an earlier version of the software and it looks like the problem can still occur on some machines.

Such a large number of negative reviews does tend to get noticed and not just by IT and Gaming journals. Both the Motley Fool and Forbes have released articles about EA's decision to continue including the invasive DRM in their games. They look at the issue from a financial point of view in that SecuRom actually seems to be encouraging piracy rather then preventing it. Not only that but it continues to provides bad PR which a imposing company like EA can ill afford. As more mainstream journalists start picking up this story I can only see the decision coming into question more often.

I already noticed that the Washington Post picked up the story on Sunday and highlighted some of the key problems with the DRM scheme. Other news sites have followed and found interesting things like the game not allowing multiple Sporepedia accounts on the same computer. This wouldn't be so bad except that the manual specificaly mentions that you can have multiple accounts so families could keep their creatures separate. What's worse is that common bit-torrent tracking sites have reported that the hacked version of Spore is fast approaching the most illegally downloaded game ever.

Apparently, it has already reached over half a million downloaded copies through different bit-torrent web sites. Most games quickly fall off the top spot of these illegal sites, but it seems as if Spore is bucking the trend and staying at number one. Most people are theorizing that the word has gotten out about SecuRom and its causing tech savy people to risk downloading the dangerous "warez" versions of the game. The thinking seems to be that if they are going to risk their computer crashing from a virus then its best not to pay 50$ for it. Illegal software has always had this risk and normal gamers tend to avoid "warez" because of this reason.

However, the stringent DRM on Spore seems to have created so many issues and worries that it's actually more of a problem then any potential virus. Thus a move to reduce the losses from piracy by EA has actually made them worse. As Spore continues to get negative reviews on Amazon.com the game is slowly dropping down the video game bestseller list. It seems that DRM opponents have finally found a successfully strategy for getting the word out to the average consumer. In the past, such movements for Mass Effect and Bioshock have failed since they were mostly limited to technical forums. EA has to be worried about something similar happening for the release of Red Alert 3 next month though they are raising the install limit to five for that game.

Should you migrate to Warhammer?

2008-09-12T12:54:00.000-07:00

Well Warhammer Online is lining up to be the big man on campus this month and it looks like a lot of people are at least going to try out the game. Sales predictions for the game expect it will do at least as well as Age of Conan, which sold around 700,000 boxes in it's first two months. Of course demand for Warhammer Online is expected to be much higher and some people estimate the game can easily move 650,000 units just in September. I'm more of a subscription precognitive myself and I see the game pulling in around 2 million players by the end of the year. Still just because the game is going to pick up momentum doesn't mean you should jump ship just yet. This is especially true if you are new to World of Warcraft

Warhammer shares a lot of similarities with World of Warcraft despite what some people will claim, but it's not an exact clone. Just because you like one doesn't mean you are going to like the other. In fact, the entire gameplay emphasis is very different in Warhammer Online then World of Warcraft. It's much more oriented on accomplishing goals in groups or at the very least an organized mob of players. The closest thing I can think of as a comparison are the Sunwell Island quests that Blizzard required players to do to open up Magister's Terrace. However, Mythic is much better at this type of gameplay and even has a loot system that rewards everyone who helped out.

On the other hand I have a feeling that World of Warcraft is going to continue to produce superior quality dungeon and raid content in the next expansion. Warhammer Online doesn't have introduce a dungeon until its midlevel and I believe it will have a much smaller emphasis on single group content. This hasn't exactly worked out for games like Lord of the Rings Online in the past, but then again Warhammer Online has much more PvP content. Indeed there actually 80 PvP levels in the game which control the distribution of gear in the game. These levels are objective goals and not subjective like the arena ratings find in World of Warcraft. Theoretically this mean everyone should be able to earn them eventually. This is much more acceptable to the casual PvP crowd though it may disgust classic PvP fans from Ulitima Online.

Also factor you might want to take into consideration is that Mythic seems more against so called "fluff features" then even Blizzard. While World of Warcraft has long avoided implementing player housing, its at least finally allowing the customization of avatars by creating the barber shop. You're unlikely to ever see anything similar in Warhammer Online though there is a system where war trophies can be place on an avatar's armor. Still the lack of player housing and crafting professions in the game reveals Warhammer Online is more about player made conflict then player made content. I doubt the game will draw many fans from games like Everquest 2 and Vanguard who enjoy complex crafting systems and other detailed sub-systems like diplomancy. Indeed a lot of the people I know who aren't that impressed with Warhammer Online favor games which could be considered more complex.

There's a simple pattern to Diku based games which sort of groups games like the following.

PvE with Player Content: City of Heroes >> Everquest II >> Vanguard >> LOTRO
Classic PvE: Everquest >> Final Fantasy XI >> World of Warcraft
Classic PvP: Ultima Online >> EVE Online >> Age of Conan
Casual PvP: Guild Wars >> World of Warcraft >> Warhammer

It's very basic but you can get the casual correlations between the games. In general World of Warcraft has the broadest appeal, but mostly because it has made enough money to implement the best features from other games. I think their attempts at early casual PvP was greatly influenced by the success of Guild Wars. Other PvE games like Everquest II and City of Heroes have successfully used crafting and content creation tools to get some of the appeal that social games like Second Life and Habbo Hotel have going for them. These types of games often have complex sub-systems which can confuse new players, but experienced players find it more rewarding then simple hit-to-combine gameplay. The classic PvP games follow a more free-for-all style that some players feel is more exciting and interesting. It however does give the least amount of value to items (least DIKU) which can turn off a lot of potential players.

In general if you have liked more then two games in a category you can follow the chart to get a good guess about how you will feel about Warhammer.

PvE with Player Content: No depth and plays too much like WoW.
Classic PvE: Good for a short period of time until all dungeons beaten.
Classic PvP: Too easy and dependent on gear.
Casual PvP: Perfect until I tire of the same scenarios and RvR zones.

Instancing the Newbie Experience

2008-09-10T13:36:00.000-07:00

I tried out a decent amount of new MMOs last year and I noticed some interesting trends concerning newbie zones. It seems that a lot of developers now prefer to use shared instances to create a common newbie zone. This is very different then what I was originally used to in my games, but I've grown to like the idea. Instances give the developer more control over the beginning experience and allows scripting and storytelling that might be hard to pull off in the regular game world. Also older games can increase the currency drop rate in the starting instance to offset any inflation that occurs. Nothing is more annoying then creating a character in World of Warcraft and seeing most items your level going for several gold.

There are a couple problems using an instance as a newbie zone, but thankfully most developers seem aware of the situation. In World of Warcraft and Everquest there is a newbie zone for almost every race and this adds some re-playability to trying out different characters. Unfortunately, this also leads to balance problems with some areas being better designed and more popular then other ones. I like how classic Everquest introduced a common newbie instance later on in the game to combat this problem. A player can choose to either play through the Gloomingdeep Mines instance or go to their race's starting area. The experience and items are much better in the Gloomingdeep Mines, but someone might have already played through it several times. In general I'm always in favor of anything that gives players more choices.

Restricting players to a single choice almost always results in bad blood. I'm sure Funcom thought a single newbie zone in Age of Conan would allow them to put more time and effort into the experience. They were correct since Tortage is probably the most fun and polished part of the game. However, they forgot to account for the lack of re-playability by having a single newbie zone. The day quests are always the same and it can get old quickly if you play the same archetype since that makes the night quests also the same. The game later splits into three different areas after Tortage, but they aren't setup for low level characters. This was especially devastating for Age of Conan since a lot of end game content was broken and creating new characters was one of the only things players could do once they reached max level.

I guess from my experiences I think it might be better to have small newbie areas for each race and then introduce a shared instance later on in the game. Lord of the Rings has two shared newbie instances, but they're hardcoded to the races you play. Since I liked the humans and halflings I found myself playing through the Archet scenario over and over again. I really wish they had separate starting zones for both races and maybe made the shared instance optional. Blizzard seems to be going this route with the new Death Knight class which gets a starting instance inside the plaguelands. It seems like the instance will involve a lot of lore and equip the character for their journey to the Outlands. I'm believe players will be able to skip it though if they just want to go straight to the Light's Hope Cathedral.

Already players have asked if other classes can get inside the instance or if it will only be for Death Knights. As far as I can tell there are some specific scripted events which would prevent it from being a good instance for other classes. However, if players keep clamoring for a shared leveling instance I could see a WoW version of the Gloomingdeep Mines being made. With the way World of Warcraft is stating to get a little end game heavy it will probably happen sooner rather then later. After all players have long asked for new mid or low end content and this would fit the bill. It's funny that Warhammer Online avoids this situation since the beginning areas for each faction are linked by flight path. Also by introducing RvR areas into the early game it allows players to level by PvP which has a lot of replay value.

P.S. What did everyone think about Fringe?

Double Dipping

2008-09-09T14:07:00.000-07:00

Besides being a disgusting habit at the o'devours table, the term "double dipping" can also refer to unfair pricing schemes that charge customers two separate fees for one product. It's very similar to micro-transactions in that the seller is splitting the actual cost of a product so that the buyer doesn't feel as if they are spending as much. I've also heard it mentioned recently when referring to MMO's that run multiple payment schemes. Usually, this occurs when a game charges a monthly subscription and also has a healthy micro-transaction market on the side. While most players aren't forced to to pay the two different fees there are advantages to for those who do.

I had been looking into Wizard101 recently since it was one of the few MMOs I had seen which used a collectible card game for combat. While this makes some of the battles much longer then other combat systems it also introduces a layer of strategy missing from most MMORPGs. However, I had been reluctant to try the game since I was dreading that the game would adopt a payment system of selling virtual booster packs of cards. If anyone has experience with real world trading card games then you know how expensive this payment method can get for the players. Even worse it gives a competitive edge to those willing to pour more money into the game.

I was relieved when I found out that Wizard101 would use a standard subscription model and only charge 10$ a month. It had even setup a free tier where a small portion of the game world was free to play. Unfortunately, the good news ends there since Wizard101 also uses a micro-transaction system which allows the purchase of a special currency called crowns. I'm not 100% against the idea of micro-transactions in a game as long as they aren't structured to give an advantage to players with more money. I think certain items like non-combat pets or special particle effects are fine if people want to add a status symbol to their avatar. However, the crowns in the game can be used to buy armor sets with stats on them. That's just makes me feel a bit uncomfortable with the game since developers could balance additional content around buying crowns.

This "double dipping" isn't just a problem with MMOs exploring new payment models either. If you look at large game companies like EA they are effectively using DRM controls to potentially double dip their customers. I have a couple classic games like Master of Orion 2 and Command and Conqueror which I have probably installed 15-20 times since I first purchased them. Sometimes it was because I bought a new computer, but other times it was because I had removed the program to make room on my PC. While storage space as increased greatly on modern computers so has the size of media files. It's not unrealistic to think that gamers might uninstall a game to make room on their machines and then want to reinstall it at a later date.

I know I've been stuck on the DRM issue in Spore for two days now, but I think it has chilling implications for the entire PC market as a whole. After all if invasive DRM controls become standard I sure we'll eventually see them appearing in MMOs. But wait MMOs are subscription based, why would a company need to put DRM into one? Well you have to admit that some companies think they lose money when family members or room mates share accounts. DRM could easily limit gamers so that a MMO could only be patched onto one machine. After all most workplaces are required to have separate licenses for a single employee's laptop and desktop. It makes perfect sense to most corporate entities that the same logic should apply to game software. After all if a single company can convince people to re-buy a game after every three installs it's only a matter of time before they all start doing it. Except Stardock, those guys kick ass.

Lessons in Customer Service

2008-09-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

EA had some customer service woes this weekend in not one, but two different games. The first example is the one most people will be familiar and involves the latest beta weekend for the upcoming Warhammer Online. The America version went off with only minor hitches and most players reported much better performance then the last preview weekend. Unfortunately, the European version was a disaster with the account server not accepting any one's key codes. This doesn't come as a surprise as Tobold suspected this might be a problem a full 24 hours before the preview weekend was supposed to start. It seems funny that a game with European origins would have worse support then the United States but local distributors always play a part in these type of situations.

The problem wouldn't be so bad except of course that EA Mythic has adopted the rather dubious strategy of running a MMO without hosting any forums. This may have been viable back in the early age of MMO development, but games now deal with much larger audiences. Not having official forums opens a company up to all types of opportunities for miscommunication. I'm not sure of the reasoning behind this move, but I can only assume it's an attempt to avoid the problems World of Warcraft has had with its forums. Whatever the reason, I'm not sure the community sites where Mark Jacobs normally posts announcements can stand up to the kind of heat this type of situation creates. I really hope EA Mythic changes their mind on the forum subject or else fan site forums are going to become a cesspit of bad advertising for Warhammer. You can't expect community websites to do the same type of moderation as a full time CM staff.

The other customer situation that plagued EA was one that I thought had been resolved earlier in the year. I remember there being quite a outpouring of nerd rage when someone found out that EA was planning on using SecuRom to DRM protect Mass Effect and Spore. The bad press got so bad that eventually EA issued a statement saying they were cutting back to a "lighter" version of SecuRom. A couple of the more draconian features of SecuRom were cut back and it seemed liked the consumer had won. The story unfortunately goes very wrong since last week Spore was accidentally released early in Australia and a cracked version of Spore appear on the torrent sites within four hours.

That's right, the supposed secure DRM was cracked in only hours and available through the Internet before most consumers could even buy the game. That might not have been enough to cause a incident, but some gamers started reading the fine print on the "lighter" SecuRom. That's when it was discovered there were only three activations allowed before the DVD became a useless coaster. There was a note about being able to deal with EA's customer service department for more activations, but most people assumed you would have to mail in proofs of purchase and other forms of documentation that no one keeps. It would be like trying to collect those rebates that CompUSA and BestBuy used to advertise on their computers until they were sued into submission.

The situation has really devolved into a situation where SecuRom is rewarding the pirates for not buying the game and hurting the honest customers. I thought Blizzard was the master of unintended consequences, but other companies can make mistakes on the same scale it looks like. The story gets even better as hordes of frustrated fans of the game have taken to amazon.com to write 1-star reviews of the game. Apparently the reviews started to snowball as people looking to buy the game through amazon started reading the reviews and then writing their own. Even the big game sites have picked up the story as the number of 1-star reviews has passed the 500 mark. Of course Spore is still the number one seller in the games category but losing sales is losing sales.

Catching Blizzard's Bad Ideas

2008-09-04T14:31:00.000-07:00

I've made no secret that one of my favorite MMOs is World of Warcraft. I've played a lot of games since the genre got started and nothing has kept my attention as long as Blizzard's masterpiece. Still I don't claim that the game is perfect or even that I agree with every design decision they make. It's inevitable that MMOs make decisions about class balance or patch content that not everyone agrees with. Still Blizzard seems to be cursed with this amazing ability to introduce features which have the complete opposite intended effect they wanted. It's not like it comes as a surprise to the people who play the game either. Often players can immediately spot a change or feature which might cause problems. It's simply a result of us having more time to play the game and not having to worry about ever "working" on it.

I still remember when they introduced Naraxxamas as the last content patch right before the Burning Crusade. Blizzard had just finished patching in a series of new raid content and most guilds were still working their way through it. It didn't matter if you were a raider or a casual player the Naraxxamas patch just seemed like it would be wasted effort. This unfortunately turned out to be true since less then 1% of the player population were actually able to experience the new zone. Luckily, Blizzard gets to re-use the content for Wrath of the Lich King since no one got to the see it the first time around. Other really bad ideas mostly involved putting rewards behind flimsy objectives and time sinks. Blizzard expected players to try to achieve the rewards head on and kept being surprised as players figured out ways around the time sinks.

Things have gotten better lately as Blizzard seems to be paying more attention to how they place rewards in the game. Indeed several major patches in the Burning Crusade showed a much better understanding of how raiding and mount costs affected the virtual economy. The test server also started to get patches earlier and often allowed eager fans to run through several iterations of a patch. The beta for Wrath of the Lich King is serving the same purpose despite some early attempts to lock down information coming from it. The lifting of the NDA has proved very advantageous for Blizzard since several bloggers pointed out that an achievement for being the first to reach max level might have some bad side effects. Most people trying to get the special title would probably just share a single account, but someone might push themselves to play for a unhealthy amount of time.

I'm not really sure why anyone working at Blizzard thought this was a good idea to begin with. It definitely shows that even though things have improved, the same type of short sighted game design can still occur. Luckily, I think having design decisions revealed to the WoW community ahead of time helps catch these problems before they get implemented. Could you imagine what would happen if some kid killed themselves by doing a 40 hour WoW marathon? It may seem far fetched, but it's happened in other countries. Don't they realize this is a close election year and the video game industry is just one death away from being used as a scapegoat? Politics aside I also get tired of MMO developers giving critics like Jonathan Blow ammunition when they talk about unethical game design. Hopefully, as long as lines of good communication exist between players and developers, World of Warcraft can avoid any more ooops game design moments.

Graphic Worries

2008-09-03T13:53:00.000-07:00

News has been spreading across the blogosphere that every one's favorite 800 lb. gorilla will be eventually updating its graphics engine. That's not to say there will be giant graphics update though I'm sure some fans would love it. Instead it looks like Blizzard will be rolling out the improvements slowly over multiple expansions. I'm not sure if this is what most hardcore fans want, but I know it should help keep the older computers that can run WoW from suddenly crashing. I've never really been able to decide if people like the exaggerated graphics of World of Warcraft or if they just like the fact it can run on a 7 year old computer? I'm personally a fan of the huge shoulder armor and stylistic use of color in the game. Lord of the Rings and Vanguard both seemed to have a unhealthy obsession with gray and brown by comparison.

Leaving the issue of color usage behind its obvious that World of Warcraft is starting to look a bit dated especially compared to games like Age of Conan. Yet if WoW is already scheduling a graphics overall, what does this mean for Warhammer? I only have my experience from the preview weekend, but I wasn't that impressed with the character models. I did mostly play as the Greenskins so that might be the reason. I've also been told that the preview weekend might not have had high detail textures turned on which would make a difference. Still I wonder if Warhammer is going to have problems pulling in new gamers a couple years from now because it looks ancient. I mean I still pull out my copy of Master of Orion every once and awhile, but I know a lot of newer gamers are turned off by older looking graphics.

I think what we really need is a game to come out with very stylistic models and landscapes, but done with a high attention to detail and animation. I know that gameplay mechanics are the number one quality you should look for in a game. Still I don't think its impossible that a good MMO might come out with top of the line graphics. I mean if Age of Conan had simply waited a few more months and debugged its dungeons and PvP systems it could have been that game. If Warhammer is as successful as I think it will be initially then it should reinforce the notion that stylistic and exaggerated graphics are the way to go. As more developers try to emulate the market leaders someone is going to make a game that uses the same style of graphics but with much more impressive water, shading, and textures. That game will make a lot of money.

World_of_Warcraft_will_slowly_update_graphics_to_stay_fresh

Gamer Bill of Rights

2008-09-02T08:56:00.000-07:00

The disappointing performance of E3 this year continues to be highlighted by the success of other gaming conventions that have risen to higher prominence in recent years. PAX is perhaps one of the most well known and often has a lot of demos for upcoming games which fans are happy to eat up. Also the convention has gained a reputation as a place for smaller publishers to announce press releases to a large fan based audience. You're not going to find next year's release schedule for EA or Square-Enix being announced at PAX, but interesting information does surface. This year one story that caught my eye was that Stardock was pushing the adoption of a Gamer's Bill of Rights. With the fight between pirates and the video game industry intensifying it often seems like the average gamer is caught between a rock and a hardplace.

The amount of DRM that is acceptable to put on a game has been slowly increasing and causing headaches for customers. Also there seems to be a decrease in quality and innovation as sequels and companies that specialize in them have made a fortune in lackluster games. Huge marketing budgets for threatening and bribing review sites have become standard practice as seen with last year's gamespot scandal. Even MMO's are affected since it's become standard practice with a lot of companies to lie about what features will be in the game at release. Should Blizzard have been able to talk about the Black Temple to reviewers when it wasn't patch in until much later? Should Age of Conan been able to advertise their "PvP" mechanics even though most them still have been implemented?

The Gamer's Bill of Rights seems to address these issues and it would be nice if it was widely adopted by game publishers.

Gamers shall have the right to return games that don’t work with their computers for a full refund.
Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state.
Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game’s release.
Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game.
Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will play adequately on that computer.
Gamers shall have the right to expect that games won’t install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their consent.
Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time.
Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers.
Gamers shall have the right to demand that a single-player game not force them to be connected to the Internet every time they wish to play.
Gamers shall have the right that games which are installed to the hard drive shall not require a CD/DVD to remain in the drive to play.

Most of these are hard to apply to the MMO industry except for the one about games not being released in a finished state. We're real familiar with that one. The problem of course is that MMOs in general seem to be horribly managed and the ones that are released in a finished state are often the most expensive to produce. In my time with the genre I think only World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings, and Guild Wars fit the definition of being finished at release. The vast majority of games in the MMO genre often release with missing or broken content in the hopes that initial box sales will fund the development hours required to patch the game. This is why I think so many MMOs are guilty of overspending on marketing and fudging on their feature list so they can produce hype.

We'll have to wait and see if this Gamer Bill of Rights gains any traction within the industry. It would be nice to see more finished products in the MMO industry and a generally lessening of DRM controls for PC games. I believe Warhammer will release very stable, but it has the large budget which makes such an accomplishment easier to pull off. I'm not so sure that smaller games like Stargate Worlds and Jumpgate Evolution could justify balancing their budget towards a period of polishing the game before release. After all, there's very little motivation to make a polished product unless gamers change their spending habits. If we keep pre-ordering unfinished games like Age of Conan or putting up with harmful DRM like SecuRom we're denying that we want any rights as game consumers.

The MMO Housing Market

2008-08-28T07:36:00.000-07:00

I'm currently in the middle of searching for my first home and having fun navigating the imploding housing market. With all the stress that comes with learning about origination points and PMI its no wonder that I have housing on my mind. Still as I sit down to write this I can't help but think it's weird that player housing didn't make an appearance in either Age of Conan or Warhammer. I guess I can see how Age of Conan sort of has it with player made cities, but those require insane amounts of resource gathering to complete. I mean after Star Wars Galaxies and EverQuest 2 wasn't player housing supposed to be one of those features that would became standard on every MMO?

Player housing has to be one of the few MMO features which doesn't really run the risk of alienating anyone. No one has ever filled out a survey and marked "player housing" as the reason for leaving a game. It's the type of feature that players might not use if it was crap, but it wouldn't really detract from the overall gameplay. Plus it gives the marketing department another line item to mention in the magazine interviews. Heck, even Blizzard has long "considered" putting player housing into World of Warcraft though they have never really moved on the idea. That's probably the real reason why the idea of player housing has kind of died out. If World of Warcraft hasn't seen the need to provide customizable homesteads for their 11 million players then a lot of other developers have to wonder if the feature is worthwhile.

It's a sarcastic line of thought, but there might some truth behind it. The last game which eventually added player housing was Lord of the Rings Online. Turbine used a instanced approach to player housing which was very similar to the one that EverQuest 2 and Final Fantasy XI pioneered. Most players seemed happy with this implementation and a lot of buzz around furniture and fish trophies spread across the LOTR community. Unfortunately, player housing didn't prove to be a feature which drew back a lot players who had already left the game. This has to make some people wonder if the developers would have been better off working on additional quests or dungeons rather then what some people considered fluff.

The problem is that MMO's have become overly specialized as their audience has grown. In the early days of MMO or MUD development there wasn't such a large wedge between fans of virtual worlds and game worlds. Without the need for advanced graphics and physics programming it was easy to let players experiment with the world around them. This ended though as the rising popularity of video games seemed to suggest that more money could be made with pure game worlds. This obviously lead to some animosity between those who wanted virtual worlds on par with Cyberpunk novels and those that wanted a kick ass game they could play with their friends. As a result it now seems very hard to implement any virtual world kind of features in a game based MMO.

Thankfully, we still get some virtual world features in games since virtual items provide such an effective way to take money out of a game's economy. It seems like the only way developers can sneak virtual world features into a game is to convince the suits that its necessary for a balancing the game economy. Micro-transaction based games have even taken the practice further and monetize virtual item sales so that they can support the game. It's not an acceptable payment method for every player, but it works for some games. Of course none of these games offer the flexibility and creativeness of a true virtual world like Second Life, but it's closer then most subscription based MMORPGs.

Player housing is often used just like an expensive flying mount or any other virtual item that removes currency from a game's economy. A MMORPG that is based on pure item progression might not feel comfortable selling these items for real world money, but they have no problem using them to control inflation. So how come World of Warcraft hasn't used the same system? Well in all honesty they haven't really had a need to introduce additional money sinks into their game. The enormous, but necessary costs of epic flying mounts has done a great job of keeping inflation down. It really wasn't until after the introduction of daily quests that most players were even able to save up enough money for this benchmark item.

I hate to focus just on World of Warcraft, but I think it's important to highlight why they have avoided player housing since so many MMO publishers use them as a template. With Wrath of the Lich King coming out you can see Blizzard actually exploring some new money sink ideas like the barbershop. This hints that perhaps the daily quests have served their initial purpose and now are creating inflation. Blizzard can't really remove the daily quests so I wouldn't be surprised to see more money sinks like player housing eventually added I actually expect some form of housing before the third expansion. And once World of Warcraft starts using player housing I think the bubble will pop and we'll mysteriously see more game adopt the feature. It's a good thing too since I would much rather display my crap in a house then just have it sitting in a bank vault.

Can Guild Wars 2 appeal to veteran MMO players without alienating its fans?

2008-08-26T16:05:00.000-07:00

I'm continually surprised by the low number of MMO players who have never thought about trying out Guild Wars. I admit that I don't have room to criticize others since my experience with the game mostly involves standing over a friend's shoulder while asking stupid questions. Still the gameplay seemed smooth and I noticed very low barriers of entry for participating in the PvP matches. The series does do a few things different though and I guess that's enough of a reason for some people to avoid the game. It doesn't look like its hurt the game very much since the sales charts show the Guild Wars expansions doing well for themselves.

Despite Guild War's earlier success though, the game does look to be declining over time. Each expansion has received a lower review score then the previous one and I believe the sales charts shows the same trend. The problem is that while a lot of people go from playing Guild Wars to World of Warcraft the opposite doesn't seem to be true. What has been happening is that Guild Wars has found itself in the position of being a stepping stone into traditional MMO gameplay. ArenaNet may have taken out a lot of the grinding and gear collection found in traditional MMORPGs, but they left in the basic game mechanics.

I've talked to a lot of people who could never justify spending a monthly fee on a MMO and decided to try out Guild Wars instead. Almost all of them ended up eventually moving onto a subscription based game after a period of time. The reverse almost never happens since in comparison the classic Guild Wars game usually doesn't appeal to someone who has played a more complex game. That's not to say Guild Wars is simple, but it does limit itself in certain areas so it doesn't overwhelm new MMO gamers. This sometimes leads to people unfairly comparing it to a dumb downed version of a MMO.

Guild Wars 2 looks to put a stop to these unfair comparisons and settle once and for all that the series belongs in the MMO genre. ArenaNet seems to be addressing several long held complaints about the series in the sequel. This includes introducing a persistent over-world and including more PvE content for those who like missions and dungeons. Of course Guilds Wars 2 can't be too different from its predecessor or it will lose some of the fans who enjoy its different qualities. That's why they are looking at features which allow players to skip leveling or grinding if they aren't interested in that part of the game.

The key is that Guild Wars 2 needs to change itself to be appealing to both veterans and newcomers to the MMO genre. ArenaNet has confirmed that they will be using a powerful side-kicking system and PvP zones will equalize every one's level. This should allow players to instantly jump into PvP without having to grind first. A common complaint by a lot of gamers is that MMOs often lock all the best parts of the game behind a massive amount of level grinding. Hopefully, the announced feature list by ArenaNet should reassure fans that this won't happen with Guild Wars 2.

Warhammer Preview goes well, highlights a few issues

2008-08-25T12:15:00.000-07:00

Everyone is writing about their Warhammer Preview weekend experiences and I thought I would join the crowd and talk about a couple of the small things I noticed. The first was that the character design definitely seem a step backwards after playing Age of Conan. There is a much lower level of detail which becomes obvious from the moment you get to the character creation screen. It is a step above World of Warcraft, but just barely in my opinion. The landscapes are also similar to World of Warcraft with maybe a bit more attention given to animating certain background features. For example the Chaos starting area has sickly looking trees whose branches look like moving tentacles. Very cool looking.

Decent graphic quality is an important feature for any MMO, but most people consider it secondary to well designed gameplay. Thankfully, Warhammer has several well designed features which more then make up for any graphic shortcomings it may have. The public quests were just like how everyone described them. Very fun and usually surrounded by open groups which you can join. It was pretty hard to win a loot roll on the more popular public quests, but I quickly earned enough influence to get some upgrades. I was also surprised to learn that Warhammer has a dual targeting system so you can have an offensive and healing target at the same time. This should be of big help for the caster/healer classes like the goblin shaman.

The tome of knowledge was interesting, but I didn't have enough time to fully explore all of its features. It looks to be pretty good at organizing your titles, achievements, and any quest/mob information you might have discovered while in game. I was sadden to find out it wasn't account wide and has to be unlocked for each one of your characters. On the positive side, the tome did tie into a quest tracker which highlighted areas of the map that had quest objectives. I didn't like this method in Age of Conan at first, but it grew on me over time. I guess as long as they don't mark the exact location for every quest there's still some exploration left in the game.

Overall the preview weekend was a very good experience and definitely made me decide to keep my pre-order. There were however a couple problems that became clear while playing the game. One is that the mob pathing is absolutely horrible as Tobold pointed on his blog. I ran into the problem while playing my Squigherder which half time was fighting without his pet. The squigs were constantly running off in weird directions, getting caught on objects and sometimes would just decide not to move for awhile. It reminded me of my experience playing a beastlord in EverQuest 1, but I think it was even worse. I'm not sure what the problem is with their pathing algorithm, but I saw enough range classes taking advantage of it that I think it can be classified as game breaking.

The other problem had to do with some balance issues me and my friends saw while testing out the scenarios. One server I tried out had queue times that were over 10 minutes for my goblin squigherder. Order players on the same server had instant queues and were quickly gaining renown at an accelerated rate. I certainly hope Mythic has a viable way of balancing the factions across the servers or they are going to have problems. I haven't seen any signs of cross server queues, so I'm guessing the wait times will go through the roof once a server's population becomes unbalanced. Earlier I had heard about factional queue times to sign into each server, but this doesn't seem like a very popular idea.

Another trend I noticed was that a lot of people liked the Empire classes. The Bright Wizard and Warrior-Priest seem to be well design towards kicking ass in the beginning of the game and had a lot of fans. I also saw a lot of Witch-Hunters though they didn't seem as overpowered. I'm guessing the Van Helsing appearance of the class attracts those concerned about looking badass. I saw a better distribution of classes on the Chaos side with a slight favoring of the Greenskins. I only mention this because I can already see what classes are going to be the bread and butter of each faction and which ones are going to be like the WoW Shaman. I'm hoping Warhammer does some more tinkering with the class balance before release or at least makes sure things balance out in the later levels.

Highlighted Issues:
Graphics might turn some people off the game
Mob and Pet Pathing could be game breaking
Mechanism for balancing faction populations unclear
Couple classes are very powerful at the starting levels

How much of WoW is Steampunk?

2008-08-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

I've seen a couple blogs today talking about the addition of the Gnomish motorcycle aka "The Hog" to the growing stable of mounts available in the Wrath of the Lich King. Some see it as a sign that World of Warcraft is starting to go overboard on pop culture references in an attempt to retain players. Others just think it looks cool and point to the long history of mechanical devices in World of Warcraft. Indeed if you've followed the series through the RTS games then you know that helicopters, dirigibles, and explosives are as much a part of Warcraft as magic. I've long held a suspicion that part of World of Warcraft's charm was that it incorporated a little bit of everything into its mixture.

Still there's a large amount of anachronistic technology in the game that makes me wonder if it can still be classified as fantasy. There's a magic in the game and it tends to follow all the laws of high fantasy as established by Tolkien's work but sprinkles some stuff which seems straight out of the movie Steamboy. You can find weird trains and dirigibles being used as transportation between cities in the game and Ironforge even has an airfield hidden on top of it. Lets also not forget (though most people want to) the entire dungeon of Gnomeregan is filled with mechanical and clockwork creations. If fighting a gnome in a steam powered tank with machine guns doesn't break the fantasy immersion then I think WoW can survive a WWII style motorcycle.

I guess since steampunk is a sub-genre of fantasy then WoW feels free to treat it as a sub-genre of lore in its game. You usually only ever find mechanical inventions around the short races like gnomes, dwarves, and goblins. The rest of Azeroth seems to mostly depend on magic like civilized people. Still it would be interesting to see a MMO that used steampunk throughout the majority of its lore and keep magic in the background. I always thought the world of Final Fantasy 6 (also titled 3 in America) would be a good background for a steampunk MMO, but that could just be because it was the first time I ran into magic and machinery side by side.

Still as I've said before the MMO genre is not know for quickly reinventing itself and it seems unlikely that any studio would choose such a small sub-genre of fantasy. Still I can't help, but think there's a lot of other people who would appreciate a change of setting in the MMO world. Who knows maybe we'll get lucky and either Blizzard's next MMO or the secret "Copernicus" project will go that direction.

http://www.massively.com/2008/08/19/wotlk-mount-the-hog-confirmed/