Migrating to a New MMO

I hate leaving a good MMO and once I find one I tend to stick around for a couple of years. However, all games eventually grow old or the developers start to get lazy and it becomes time to try out new things. This year with Age of Conan and Warhammer both coming out I have a feeling one of them will replace my current favorite. In fact I think quite a few people might migrate from an older MMO this year to one of the newer offerings. And I bet most of us will have a similar problem, "How do we get our friends to follow us?"

It's not that most of our friends have problems affording a new game but instead it’s that people have different speeds at which they get bored. Factor in the different amounts of play time your friends have available and some are just going to burn through content quicker. It's because of this that it's actually very hard to have a group of real life friends move from one game to another. The only time I think its possible is during the first few days when a new "big" MMO comes out. While we all claim to hate hype it does make it easier to convince people to try new things.

Even if you convince your friends to migrate to a new MMO with you there are still a ton of rookie mistakes that can be made. Almost no one wants to play a class which was similar to what they played in the last game. This of course means that your previous group make-up has to be redefined. Leave it up to chance and then laugh your butt off when all your friends login as rogues. You might also want to establish some ground rules for leveling, questing and joining guilds. No matter what happens your group will eventually split apart but with some good planning you might be able to make it so that it doesn't happen until the end game.

Successfully Migrating a Group of Friends to a New MMO

Don't force friends to play classes they don't like

This will just make them not want to play and they might actually start going outside and having a life. Or even worse going back to Everquest.

Make sure the new class types for your friends match their personality

Attention deficient friends should not be the main healer. Also people who really hate dying probably shouldn't be the main tank. aka "the no cowards in plate" rule.

Only try to move friends to a "new" MMO

I made the mistake of suggesting LOTR to my friends 4 months after it released only to have them pull every negative blog post about the game to describe why they didn't like it. Games that have been out awhile just don't have that "new" MMO smell anymore and someone always seems to have reason why they will never play it.

Migrating only works when friends are tired of the current game

Most MMO companies are terrible at releasing content and there's a natural tendency for them to slowly switch developers from patches to paid expansions. Eventually, this causes too long a time period with no new or original content and you'll hear the words "I'm bored". This is a sign that you might be able to suggest a new game to your friends.

Keep an eye out for those power levelers

Some friends just have this amazing ability to quickly finish quests and fall ass backwards into levels. It’s a good idea to introduce these people to alts or risk them hitting max level while the rest of you are still killing bats outside the city walls.

Guilds will break up your friends group

It’s a good idea just to make your own small guild in the beginning. You could also join a casual guild that doesn't mind taking everyone in. The idea is not to have another factor which could cause one of your friends to burn through content quicker.

Run Dungeons

The primary benefit of having a friends group is that your teamwork gets better and better the more you play. If you apply this to running dungeons then you can become very successful as everyone learns their role. This leaves more time for goofing off and generally makes the game a lot of fun.

Guard your Healer

Healers are always in demand especially in new games where most healers aren't that well equipped at the max level. If you've been running dungeons then chances are the friend who plays a healer is going to be a lot better equipped at the max level than most people. This is the kind of target that young hard core raiding guilds drool over.

Making Micro-Transactions Work

I've been very negative on the idea of micro-transactions in the past because I see too many parallels between them and the video arcades of the past. In fact the idea of being nickle and dime to death is still very common in our culture. I've seen it pop up in commercials for banks, cell phone providers and basically any industry where people think they can charge more by splitting fees into smaller increments. The free to play MMO's out nowadays are nowhere near as bad as big businesses in using small fee to extract overall higher prices from their customers. Still I think most gamers want to avoid them the problem by sticking with the subscription model.

Plus at the moment there doesn't seem to be a general consensus on where its okay to attach micro-transactions to a game. Some companies attach fees to fluff items which only allow players to better customize their avatars. Others work micro-transactions into their core game play so that those willing to spend money can level faster or have less severe death penalties. Others like Puzzle Pirates are quite honest and allow customers to play either on a micro-transaction server or a subscription server. There's a wide array of choices out there and that in itself is probably making gamers more comfortable with the subscription model. If companies really want to see a micro-transaction model catch on there needs to be a couple of common ground rules.

1) Players shouldn't be able to spend money directly to do better in the game.

2) Attaching fees to fluff items is if but isn't going to be strong enough to make money by itself

3) The game has to be as well thought out and executed as most subscription MMOs.

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The problem is trying to come up with a method of charging players without making it look like they are buying a "win" in the game. Current methods of making death penalties less severe or allowing players experience bonuses seem unfair to some people since it allows money to skew the leveling curve. Also micro-transaction games are always going to have some players who stick to the free portions of the game no matter what. This isn't a problem for the more popular free to play MMOs since it give them inflated numbers for advertising purposes.

There is one method for using the micro-transaction model which might actually meet all of the ground rules. The game Saga uses a booster pack model to let players buy additional troops and spells. Saga is unlike most MMOs in that its based on real time strategy games instead of role playing games. I haven't heard much buzz about the game which leads me to believe it's not that well executed. But I do admire their payment model which seems to relate micro-transactions to something most gamers are more familiar with, collectible card games

Games like Magic the Gathering have been using the booster pack model for almost a decade and people seem comfortable with it as a form of micro-transaction. While players can spend a lot more money to increase their number of cards its not a guarantee for success. Random luck and strategy factors in each match along with card selection. Of course this is hard to relate to most MMOs which are based on a DIKU model of getting more and more powerful items. Still it hints at how current micro-transaction models can be modified to produce something gamers are more open to accepting.

Different Dungeon Types in MMOs

Dungeons have been the backbone of fantasy video games since the first nerd used Basic to digitize his favorite D&D campaign. They provide the most interesting experiences and tend to be the best designed portions of any game. The emphasis on dungeon encounters has spread from our console games and become a strong tradition in the modern MMO. While dungeons are more commonly referred to as instances nowadays the basic experience first dreamt up by the early D&D pioneers remains the same.

In fact its eerie how little change has occurred to the dungeon experience during its translation from early video game to present day online game. Dungeons still tend to have an overall theme, a couple of mini bosses, and then a final bad guy with the best loot. Typically the only variations we see are those caused by other players in the game. Sometimes they are nice and help recover from a bad pull and other times they cause more problems then the actual mobs.

Its because of this that we've moved away from a single shared dungeon setup and now are in the age of the instance. Multiple copies of every dungeon exist for each group of players who wish to explore them. While this has made loot quicker to get and kept some of the vicious competition in check, it hasn't done much to foster the community building that happened before instances. Still there are some new ideas out there that make the best of both worlds and we might see some shifts in dungeon design in this new batch of MMOs.

Types of Dungeons in MMOs


Shared Dungeons
This is the old school style of dungeon which were common around the days of early Everquest. These dungeons were huge and open to as many players who wanted to enter. They were unusual from the standard video game model since the number of bosses was high to provide content for more then a few groups. This method of course only works in PvE games where opposing faction members don't exist. A shared dungeon is hard enough to run with griefers who can't attack you and would be impossible if they could.

Private Dungeons (Instances)
The answer to shared dungeons became the private instance which allowed groups to work through content at their own pace without other player intervention. I think they became a little too popular with developers though since they required less work to create. It did revolutionized dungeon design in MMOs though and allowed much better polished experiences to be created. As a side effect though these dungeons tend to be a bit more linear even when expanded into large raid sizes.

Combination Dungeons
A neat idea that shows up in Everquest 2 and a little bit in World of Warcraft is to have the entrance portion of the dungeon shared so that you get a little bit of the community building effect. The bosses are mostly in the private instance portion of the dungeon but you get players congregating outside which makes forming groups much easier. Sometimes developers will even sprinkle the shared portion of the dungeon with rare mobs or quest objectives to help out with group formation. In World of Warcraft this eventually led to the winged dungeon design which proved so popular in the Burning Crusade.

Public Dungeons
I've heard of another interesting idea which Age of Conan is supposedly trying out in some of their dungeon designs. Basically the idea is to a create a bigger and less linear dungeon then what has become standard with private instances. Then use the power to instance very sparingly based on the player population in the dungeon. This way you could design a dungeon that could allow more interaction between players but not force everyone to be fighting tooth and nail for boss spawns. The only problem is how this plays out on PvP servers but it could easily be nipped in the bud by disabling it in the dungeon environments. I've always hated keeping track of the different instance versions in City of Heroes/Tabula Rasa but I could put up with it in this case.

What Eastern Studios don't understand about Western Gamers

I started writing up an article about some of the different dungeon types in MMOs and I got stuck on the part about procedural generated dungeons. Nothing makes me more mad then getting quests that are linked to private instances which all look the same. City of Heroes was the first game which made me want to gouge my eyes out after entering Warehouse #2395930 which looked just like the last twenty warehouse missions I had gotten. I admit that Cryptic and not NCSoft was probably responsible for that travesty. I eventually forgave them and made the excuse that they were a small studio at the time and probably didn't have the man hours to make each instance unique.

Then about three years later I notice the same trend of repeating instances in Tabula Rasa though not as obvious as it was in City of Heroes. It didn't make me want to gouge my eyes out but I still hated the sense of déjà vu I got walking through every cave and base in the game. In the early levels I had to rescue some researchers from a cave infested with flying squid monsters, then it was flying bat monsters, and finally it was invisible dog monsters. Everything looked the same except for the type of monster in the instance. It seemed like they were more concerned with cranking out as many instances as possible instead of trying to make them good experiences.

I don't mean to pick on NCSoft which has managed to draw me into two games which I consider fine short term MMOs. The problem is that I'm seeing lots of bad design philosophies in products from eastern studios. I mean some like Maplestory seem to work in a subset of our MMO market today but only because they are picking up teens which face the credit card as a barrier of entry. With Disney and MTV ramping up their virtual world offerings I'm wondering if games like Maplestory can continue to do so well. Plus there's just something that seems backwards about a game that has to be localized for America by including more than one skin tone.

While I realize that America is a melting pot of cultures compared to some parts of the world I wonder if games from Korea and China might be too narrowly tailored for their population. Their games seem to stress massive quantities of instances and items over having quality ones with personality and unique graphics. Avatar creation especially in the free to play ones seem to have less emphasis on being able to create an individual. It's pretty sad when a MMO has fewer options to customize avatars then even World of Warcraft. Combine this with some of the well known problems with games like Lineage and there are obvious differences between eastern and western market trends in MMOs.

At the moment I bring this up because quite frankly there is an over abundance of cheaply made and horrible to play MMOs out there. While games published by NCSoft and Nexxon have some redeeming value the hordes of click to move games out there most decidedly do not. There is just something that we stress importance on that is often missing in these games and I think it breaks down to differing design philosophies brought about by different cultures. So for anyone that happens to wander across this rant I just want to highlight some of those differences.

1) We tend to like quality over quantity in our games.

2) The ability to customize our avatars is important even if we all end up wearing the same type of armor.

3) While we know it defies logic we really like the ability to solo in our massive multiplayer games.

4) In general we want PvP to be even and not who has the most friends.

5) While we appreciate the idea of a micro-transactions, it’s not going to catch on until you get a good game using it.

6) In general we consider a unique experience to be a good one. One instance should never look like another.

7) The leveling grind disappeared from our MMOs on November 2004, we're not going back.

8) Click-to-Move is for Diablo Clones not MMOs.

9) We are not enamored with cutesy anime models, no matter what the marketing department tells you

10) Most of us want our MMOs to stay games and keep the real world economy out.

How-to know when a MMO is about to be Delayed

MMOs are a strange subset of the video game family that share the common ability of all PC games to ignore any sort of firm release date. This of course violates the tradition of console games which apparently make their developers sign blood contracts to get games out on time. This tradition of releasing games on time no matter how crappy was established by the first movie tie-in, E.T for the Atarti. Supposedly, it was so bad that it almost killed the console industry and forced Atari to fill a landfill with unsold copies. So it seems there is a precedent for allowing developers some power to delay a game if it sucks.

MMOs on the other hand have started running wild with this ability and abused it much worse than anything else on the market.... discounting Duke Nukem. It’s not uncommon for a MMO release date to be moved back two or three times. Heck some like Vanguard seemed content to do it over and over again until they just ran out of money. Others like Gods & Heroes even let the pre-order boxes go to the stores before they decided they would lose less money by just canceling the game. In fact in this day in age it’s really hard to even get a sense if a MMO is going to be pushed back or canceled. There are always guys in suits or well caffeinated spokesmen named Paul there to tell you everything is okay. Then bam! You got another six months of waiting.

All in All, you really have to blame World of Warcraft. How dare they show the world that a MMO can actually have a stable launch if they wait until the game is done. Now they have everyone copying them and screwing it up horribly. Look at Vanguard and Tabula Rasa which both suffered long histories of delays and still didn't release with any sense of being complete. It seems that the "whole delay until its finished" mentality only works if the original product was any good in the first place. If that's not bad enough you also got to look through all the hype and marketing to get a good idea if you're just plain being lied to about the release date.

So here is my gift to you fellow readers. Simply scan any developer interviews or Q & A sessions for the following terms I've listed below. For each term that shows up you can pretty much add on one month to the current release date.

"just working on the polish"
Nowadays the most common word used by MMO developers is polish. It used to be Next Generation but thankfully Vanguard overused it into oblivion and we'll probably never have to hear it again. If a developer is talking about polish then it means their game is still rough. The core might be there but it's going to require a little bit of extra effort. If a couple months before release a developer mentions polish more than twice then you probably get yourself a new release date soon.

"looking solid"
Ah, nothing reveals that your current beta build is mediocre then by describing parts of it as "looking solid". Solid by itself isn't that bad since it usually implies well tested and proven. But by describing any section of a game as "looking solid" it seems like a Freudian slip saying yeah it looks great but its crap to play at the moment. This is a key give away that the game is due for some "me" time and you’re not invited to join it quite yet.

"focusing on the fun"
The slightly worse version of "looking solid" is "focusing on the fun" which basically says all of the same things but tries harder to paint a rosy picture. I find it more annoying cause "focusing on the fun" is something you're much more likely to hear from a marketing person then a developer. It’s a psychological tactic to make the description of the current development work not alarm anyone. However, if you think about it, fun isn't really something you apply to a game right before release. I'm pretty sure it has to be part of the core game design.

"commitment to quality"
This one I really hate but it’s a bit more honest than some of the other terms. Basically if a developer or spokesman starts talking about their "commitment to quality" then they are trying to break the news of a delay gently. You know its coming but they're trying to be real sensitive to your feelings and thus are slowly leading up to the dreaded announcement. It's basically the "It's not you it's me" of delay justifications.

"working on balance"
This term is a sign that the development team has fallen into the trap of believing they can actually balance anything before players get their hands on it. I'm sorry but developers always suck at min/maxing or finding holes in the rules. And honestly they're so worried about NDAs being broken that the keep the testing population small enough to cripple any chance of finding obscure balance problems. This term can mean anything from a small delay to a large delay just depending on when the developers finally realize that they need "real" players to see how a game really works.

"sometime in the Fall"
A simple term used by marketing departments worldwide to trick players into believing a release date could possibly be in September. I hate to burst your bubble but it’s never September. Unfortunately, the marketing department for most MMOs use the same tactics that console games follow. I guess companies forgot that the majority of MMO players aren't dependent on receiving their new game as a present from Mom and can actually afford 50$ for entertainment.

"our definition of success"
Oh this one isn't pleasant to hear and it's used not only for delay announcements but also for cancellations. I think I last heard it when Microsoft and Marvel dropped out of their MMO with Cryptic. Luckily that worked out for us in the end with Champions Online forming. But we don't always get happy endings and this term in an official announcement is a sign that someone isn't happy. It means management knows that the current build would fail upon release and they are about to spend a lot of time fixing it or just going to cancel it.

"since World of Warcraft"
The number one excuse for any game delay seems to involve somehow blaming it on World of Warcraft. I mean it is totally their fault that standard operating procedures for MMOs no longer include crashing every hour. However, by the very nature of WoW being the 800 lb gorilla in the room developers tend to shy away from talking about it. If they do start mentioning it in any way then you rest assure they are about to try to redirect some blame for something they did which will piss everyone off.

Is Stealth worth the Trouble?

There's been a recent uproar on the Warhammer beta front with EA Mythic backtracking on promises to keep the stealth mechanic out of their game. Many blogs over the last couple of weeks have covered the story and spun it towards issues of beta leaks or developer integrity. I see the issue a little bit different and think the interesting part of the story is that so many players are against having a stealth mechanic. It's not exactly a game breaking design flaw like buff bots or warlocks. Yet it obviously evokes strong feelings of animosity. I guess you have to look at where the majority of Warhammer's fan base is coming from to understand the very loud outcry.

Basically most of Warhammer's fan base is coming from World of Warcraft. So it's not that the players hate the stealth mechanic that EA Mythic introduced in their last beta build. Instead it's that stealth from World of Warcraft has such a bad association with it that most people think it breaks PvP to have it in a game. The element of surprise has always been important in real world combat and this seems to be holding true in the virtual world also. Add in the popularity of stealth classes for farming and you have a situation where there are always going to be stealthed classes fighting near lower level players who are leveling and questing. Thus you get a lot of people who don't have exactly fond memories of the game mechanic and see it firmly as a ganking tool.

Warhammer attempted to avoid the whole stealth issue by not having any form of it in their game. Though they obviously ran into some problems with the survivability of lightly armored melee classes. I'm sure those classes were simply getting slaughtered too quickly since they had to close the distance against range classes. Now a logical response might be to give them a bonus against range damage but that could be construed as a nerf against casters. As a result I'm betting stealth managed to sneak into Warhammer since it could be used to close distance and didn't nerf any abilities. Of course EA Mythic thought that people would be logical and see their version of stealth was completely different from WoW. Boy, were they wrong.

Right now we have a situation where developers have to treat stealth very carefully. Just like fear the ability is only mildly useful in PvE content but it can be game breaking in PvP. The situation can also be made better or worse depending on what other abilities a game gives their stealth classes. It's honestly become such a balancing act that new MMOs have come up with different approaches for what is a very traditional ability in fantasy games.

1) No Stealth
This seems to be the most popular stance with the hardcore PvP crowd who aren't partial to the stealth mechanic. They argue it’s too hard to balance in a MMO and leads to exploits and ganking. Some people like the excitement stealth adds to the game. Though most people agree this applies to balanced PvP encounters. EA Mythic was running with the no stealth design for quite some time and had attracted a wide following of people. The common opinion seemed to be that Warhammer would deliver the balanced PvP that had long been promised by Blizzard but never really delivered.

2) Everyone gets Stealth
The thinking behind this approach is that stealth is a cool game mechanic but to avoid balance problems everyone should get it. Age of Conan is using this approach which seems to go very well with their organized guild warfare system. Can anyone say mass ambush? They are going to allow one class, the Assassin, to have a better form of stealth but apparently everyone gets the basic ability. This could cause some balancing issues where Assassins might get an advantage in ganking players. However, if rumors are true then this game sounds a lot like EvE Online where being a ganker/pirate carries its own risk of player reprisals.

3) Only PvE, So Who Cares
As mentioned before stealth is only a so-so ability in PvE oriented game play and the developers don't have to worry about it being used to terrorize the newbie zones. Plus no one is going to use stealth to kill a NPC that has 100,000 more hp then them. The worse thing is they might be able to sneak their way into some extra gold by opening treasure chests. Unfortunately, the recent trend in MMO's is to focus on end game PvP since it takes less development time then raid dungeons. As a result it could probably be awhile before we see another PvE game that includes a traditional rogue class.

In the end the changes to how MMO's treat stealth are a direct result of player feedback. It seems if you go by general game forums then most players would prefer not having stealth in their next MMO. At the very least people don't want it combined with stun attacks and burst damage. It will be interesting to see if games without a traditional form of stealth suffer in subscription numbers or if it has no effect whatsoever. Already some lines seem to be drawn in the sand with the different approaches Age of Conan and Warhammer are taking. Some people are already theorizing that Warhammer will be the ultimate balanced PvP game while Age of Conan will be a twitchy gankfest. Could the stealth mechanics in each game already be influencing opinions even before open open beta?

MMO Lore: Why So Serious?

I hate to steal a marketing line from the upcoming Batman movie but it seemed to resonate with the issue so well that I had to include it in today's title. Most of the lore in today's MMOs is standard epic fantasy usually revolving around an insurmountable evil that plans to darken the land. Yet as these games get older we see more and more evil overlords being introduced. Players defeat the villain only to have another villain show up a year or two later who is about ten levels stronger then the last one. Eventually, you get the feeling you’re stuck in a time loop but with the details being slightly different each time around.

The whole premise is a bit ridiculous and yet most MMOs try to lay out their storyline and quests like the most serious of D&D dungeon masters. The devotion to fake authenticity can get a bit annoying like a living history town that makes you park your car half a mile away. You're invited into the fantasy but you have to ignore the obvious plot holes and play along with that guy who uses "thou" all the time. The problem is of course that a lot of people who play MMO's don't actually want to role play anything. We've been brought up on console games where RPGs were more like we watching a story while leveling then actually pretending you were the main character.

Thus when you surround the average "gamer" with actual role players who grew up on LARPing and D&D you get some interesting conflicts. The developers are actually on the side of the role players for the most part since they try to stay true to either their license or the epic fantasy template handed down by Tolkien. In fact I have to say that World of Warcraft was the first MMO I ever ran across where the developers broke from the mold. Their lore still tells a sweeping fantasy story but it’s filled with pop culture references and jokes just designed to get a laugh. Blizzard has always had a sense of humor in their games and you can't be surprised this came through in a content intensive MMO.

This style definitely annoys the hell out of the serious role players who once they emerge themselves in the fantasy don't want anything to disrupt it, especially really bad puns. I guess it makes it hard to role play when one quest giver could have an appropriately sounding elfish name and the guy next to him is named Haris Pilton. On the other hand I think the average gamer appreciates the attempts of Blizzard to make sure their fans know it’s only a game. After all most people would just feel stupid if you asked them to act or role play anything. They may appreciate a fantasy novel or video game but you aren't going to catch them dressed as a wizard at the next renaissance faire.

Why it would be sad to see all MMOs treat their lore as loose as Blizzard I think games need to start taking themselves less serious. It always going to be important to have a really great story behind every MMO but the style Blizzard has adopted makes it easier for people not to feel silly while playing a game as a fantasy creature. You can look at it this way. What's the number one thing people do when they've gathered a bunch of strangers in a room? If it’s a lecture then you start with a boring story that probably sounds a lot like every other story. However, if you want to break the ice and get people talking then you tell a really funny joke. In the end I guess you can call World of Warcraft the icebreaker of MMOs.

Daily Quests: The Federal Reserve Rate for WoW?

I have long complained that Blizzard was selling itself short by not hiring economists to better model their virtual economy. A lot of design decisions the company has made encouraged gold farming and other undesirable behavior. I was therefore pleasantly surprised with the introduction of daily quests which actually attacked the causes of gold farming instead of just dealing with the symptoms. While some people complained about the immersion of quests that you repeat each day, most people actually enjoyed them compared to straight up grinding mobs for cash. Also the revamp of the potion system served as a corresponding feature and pretty much freed most of the hardcore raiders from the clutches of IGE.

Patch 2.4 continues the trend of Blizzard starting to influence player behavior through economics instead of technologic controls that just piss off their customers. They have increased the daily quest limit to twenty-five and the Sunwell is filled with easy quests that take about ten minutes and reward 11gp. As a result the demand for buying gold has really gone down though inflation is starting to sneak into the game. Still inflation only affects player controlled items while NPC items like mounts remain unaffected. Many believe this is a last ditch attempt to make sure everyone has the chance to get an epic mount before the expansion. We already know it’s a temporary measure since the Sunwell daily quests are expected to disappear once phase 4 is complete.

So with the raising and expected lowering of the daily quest limit I can't help but see parallels to the nominal interest rate controlled by the Federal Reserve. The higher the number of daily quests the less players are interested in buying gold and the less money the farmers make. In this analogy the farmers would be the banks which seems accurate since farmers have often been accused of selling back players their own gold. Still Blizzard can't simply always make gold easy to earn or else inflation becomes too much of issue and demand for player controlled items start to cause an incentive to buy gold. This of course defeats the purpose of having daily quests in the first place.

As a result we can probably expect this over abundance of daily quests to be a short term trend developed especially for the transition between patch 2.4 and the expansion. Not to say we'll never see another event like it but it will be a long time before it comes again. The expansion will be filled with lots of regular quests and they'll be less of a need for daily quests until people start hitting max level again. Still it’s interesting to see Blizzard experimenting with methods to inject currency into the economy instead of just trying to suck it out with ridiculous mount costs. It hints that maybe they're taking a page from EVE Online and have started to develop plans for fixing scarcity and demand in their own virtual world.

Butting Heads: Collision Detection in MMOs

Collision detection is not a new concept and yet at the moment its being over hyped as a feature in this year's upcoming MMO releases. The reason for this is that both Warhammer and Age of Conan are more PvP oriented then traditional MMOs have been in the past. In PvE oriented games the ability for virtual objects to recognize physical boundaries is interesting but doesn't really have a huge impact on game play. This changes when players are actually fighting each other since there are interesting ways to exploit the lack of collision of detection to avoid taking damage from spells.

MMOs like World of Warcraft are always going to have their PvP game crippled by not having collision detection. Melee classes are amoung the most popular and they can use line of sight and a lack of collision detection to take advatage of casters. This can be seen in how poorly casters with long casting spells perform in the arenas. Targets can simply step inside of a player right before the spell goes off to avoid its effects. This tactic is less effective in open world fighting where escape is an option but it's always going to be prevalent in environments like the arenas.

Some Different Types of Collision Detection
Most computer games use a simple type of collision algorithm that responds after it has detected virtual objects trying to occupy the same space. The big differences between games are how the server responds to a collision.

Water
Inanimate objects like walls and buildings are treated as solid and the server quickly resolves any collisions with them to prevent movement. However, there is no server response for players colliding with one another and everyone is treated like they're made out of water. Some people think this method is just the result of lazy programming but there are actually some good reasons for its use. Collision detection for objects that constantly move can require intensive computational power especially in the large player occupied cities seen in World of Warcraft.

Mud
The initial response of the server is to treat every collision as a solid but the rules for collision detection get progressively weaker as two virtual objects press against one another. Classic Everquest was notorious for this style of collision detection which was probably intended to make sure players couldn't physically block off entrances to buildings or dungeons. The side effects were funny though since players could often press against certain walls and other solid objects like they were mud. Often they couldn't pass completely through them but it was easy to switch views and look into rooms. Also some doors and bars were vulnerable to pressing through at a certain point or using other tricks. Often times you would find monks feigning death at doors and getting back up repeatedly to trick the server into pushing them through a door.

Stone
Some PvP games have flirted with absolute collision detection systems which prevent a lot of the line of sight exploits that players can use against one another. However, games that treat everything as solid sometimes have issues with players getting snagged on small inanimate objects or even each other. Also while treating everything as solid fixes jousting and some of the other weird PvP tactics it can also cause other problems. Frankly, people can get in front of you and actually slow you down. Get a group of small players who want to be jerks and you can make it very hard for someone to move by surrounding them. This is why most games recently have avoided collision detection between players all together.

Combination
Warhammer is going with a neat trick of using the Stone method of collision detection between players on opposing factions and the Water method for those on the same side. This way the PvP exploits are fixed without introducing any greifing possibilities. Now there are still problems like enemies blocking doorways but this becomes more of a tactical issue then a design flaw. Most likely we'll see games go for this type of collision system in the future which will put quite a strain on older games. Modifying collision detection isn't a simple task and it will be hard to implement in games where opposing factions often use the same cities/towns.

Relmstein's State of Play

I haven't talked much about Tabula Rasa in the last month and most people could have guessed that I had finally canceled my account. It was a fun two and half months but in the end the game had a lot of game design that made it ill suited for long term play. In fact this seems to be yet another game that NCSoft forced to be called a MMO even though it would have been better as a console or single player experience. The number of times I made a wrong turn and had to back track through an area that had already respawned was ungodly. It reminded me a lot of early dungeon RPGs where accidental leaving a room would automatically respawn everything.

I'm still playing World of Warcraft and enjoying the PvP side of the game no matter how unbalanced it has become. Arenas have especially gotten rough since the proposed changes to the matching system did not go in with the patch. As a result my teams often find ourselves playing against classes with the Season 3 weapons. While some of them are ringers others are just players who already farmed the rating on a 2v2 team. We seem to be stuck around 1600 but we don't have exactly have the best class balance. We do a lot better in the 5v5 bracket but almost never have all our team members on at the same time. A lot of our friends have cut back on their play time even with the new patch.

I'm looking forward to starting out in Age of Conan next month. It's not that I think it will be the game of the year or anything. Instead I just want to experience something that has a different play style then World of Warcraft. I've been doing PvP for so long in that game that me and my friends were very rusty in running dungeons. It's embarrassing how many wipes our first Magister's Terrace run had. Admittedly our only crowd control was a hunter and none of us knew anything about the boss fights. Still that little experience has whetted my appetite for more dungeon runs. The only problem is that World of Warcraft only has one new dungeon and it doesn't have any upgrades for our characters. Since I think the expansion for World of Warcraft won't be out until at least June it looks like Age of Conan will have to supply my dungeon crawling needs.

How-to Survive Playing a Healer

I've played a wide majority of classes in MMOs over the years and I've found myself experiencing every role in the combat trinity. All of them have their perks and downsides which are mostly set by the game design. However, sometimes the downsides of a playing a certain class are primarily set by player behavior and the peer pressure they exert. Its because of this that the role of healer can be particularly grueling. World of Warcraft was the first MMO where I focused on a healing class in the end game and I became quite familiar with how they were treated. Deaths were always my fault, I got constant tells asking me to heal while already grouped, and people often pressured me to stay on longer then I wanted to play.

Luckily I'm a mildly anti-social sort and my responses to those situations were always, "get bent", "get lost", and "get real". Unfortunately, I had chosen to play a paladin and found myself in these situations quite often since everyone assumed I was a masochistic healbot. I wasn't alone as a lot of people fell for the holy warrior image that Blizzard had expressed through their lore and class descriptions. Still as easy as it would have been to blame Jeff Kaplan (and I do) I could have just switched classes. But as much agony as it was to only ever use two buttons on my hotbar I grew to like the benefits of being a healer. While grouping I had a stronger say in what instance we ran and often it was very easy to make a group.

These benefits of course disappeared the second I joined a raiding guild. The guild leaders decided what instances we ran and of course most of my friends were in the raids and not available to do anything else. Also have you ever tried to do anything else as a healer during raid time. No matter how much you don't care it can get tiring ignoring a million tells and raid requests. The primary benefit of playing a healer was gone and I like many other healers was approaching burnout. The funny thing was that the arenas basically saved my interest in staying holy and I had a nice long career as a healer through seasons 1-3. Just relying on PvP to keep you sane isn't enough though and not every healer is going to like that part of the game. That's why I decided to write down some tips on how I survived playing a healer.

Tips to Surviving as a Healer

1) Be proud of your Healing Crits
Healing in a fight instead of directly attacking does not meet the primal instinct we have to smash faces. We can try to ignore our instincts and take satisfaction at contributing to the group's overall success but few people can actually do this for very long. To avoid developing a chip on your shoulder its important that you be proud of your healing and not get jealous of the dps. Every time they link the damage meter just respond with the healing meter. Also make sure to brag about your highest healing crit of the night.

2) Do not join a guild unless you have some voice in it.
When you join a guild as a healer there's a tendency to treat you as a commodity. You'll log on and guild chat tends to have messages like "5 healers. Ok was can go now" or "Finally our healer logs on". Your plans are sort of made by committee and you lose a lot of the influence you had the group level. While you can always leave a guild that overworks you, it's much easier to just make sure you'll have some voice in the decision making. Either make sure you have good friends who are guild officers or just do what most priests do and start dating one.

3) Invest in Alt Characters
Make sure you have a lot of alternative characters you can play. Don't be surprised when guild officers try to find out the name of every character you play and more often than not succeed in tracking you down on raid night. Basically pretend you’re a movie star and they're the paparazzi. If you can avoid them you might actually get some "me" time but if you get caught your stuck signing pictures all night.

4) Instead of #3 you could always just grow a pair
Never underestimate the effectiveness of simply telling people "No". Some people might not understand you don't want to raid every night and will try to throw all sorts of begging/rules/naked photos in your face. The simple matter of the fact is that if 24 people all asked you to do something do you feel obligated to do it? If you answer "yes" then stick with tip #3 and avoid looking in mirrors.

5) Routinely let someone die
Besides being funny it’s important that your dps and tanks don't get too complacent. If you have a string of raids where your healing is too perfect then they start expecting it every time. Unfortunately, healing is just like playing a game of whack a mole and at some point too many moles are going to start poking their heads up. It's better that they expect a few deaths then have them accused you of watching "Lost" while raiding.

6) Have a friend who is a Warrior
Doing battlegrounds as a healing class is a lesson in futility unless you have a murder machine to follow around. This also makes it easier to form a group for instances, quests, arenas and pretty much everything in the game. Basically warriors are the yin to your yang and as much as paladins and druids have been improved as dps and tanks they still aren't as good as most warriors. This isn't to say that warriors are better than the other dps/tank classes just that it’s easier for warriors to get the items for arms and protection.

7) Explore PvP
As much fun as it is to become an expert in ever stun ability in the game they’re other benefits to healing in a PvP environment. One benefit is that the gear rewards for PvP tend to be better for soloing and decrease the time it takes to do quests and dailies. The other is that healing is much more exciting in PvP then it is for most PvE raids. While bosses always react the same way in a dungeon, I can guarantee you that player strategy in the arenas will change every minute. Each match is like a unique blood covered snow flake.

8) Set a Deadline
Raids runs late and you hate to ruin everyone's fun by leaving but on the other hand going to bed at 4am and waking up two hours later is for college students cramming for midterms. Establish a maximum time you want to be playing and give plenty of warnings in raid chat leading up to that time. Most guild officers won't begrudge you a deadline since its a lot better then faking a disconnect which is what most healers actually do to get some sleep. Or so I've been told.

9) Bring Real Friends and Family
Having someone you can talk to about the game in real life tends to make the experience much more enjoyable. Couples tend to do really well in World of Warcraft and I've seen a large percentage of them become cornerstones in guilds. Another advantage is you can totally embarrass a friend in real life by bringing up that they play a MMO. If they gender bend make sure to mention their character's name and tendency to wear chain mail bikinis.

10) Do Different Things
Don't get stuck in a rut doing the same things over and over again. Just because your talents maximize your healing doesn't mean you have "Raid Healbot" stamped on your chest. Try forming up groups to do wacky things like raid towns or complete elite quests. You'll be surprised how many people want to be on a healer's good side and want to help. I'm not sure why. It's either because they'll want help with something later down the line or else they think you’re a girl.

Blizzard Joins Live Gamer

Live Gamer was proud to announced Blizzard Activision as the newest game publisher to sign up for its legitimized RMT platform and services. Blizzard Activision currently runs the largest MMO in the marketplace which has long been the target of disruptive and shady gold farming practices. Recent pressure has been mounting on World of Warcraft which had seen a large increase in the number of automatic programs playing characters to farm honor and gold. With the recent loss to the makers of WoWGlider in the courtroom the options available to Blizzard were limited.

Quotes from the Announcement:

"We here at Live Gamer provide a solid and protected method for players to purchase in game currency and items without the risk of dealing with the black market. Our interface is user friendly and accepts any credit cards even those not directly linked to your account. Our philosophy is simple, muscle out the black market by offering better services and cheaper rates no matter the effect on the game. We might have no prior experience balancing virtual world economies but we picked up a couple economists from Bear Stearns and they seem competent enough.

We would like to assure all the players of World of Warfarecraft that nothing is going to change the way they play the game. Mount costs will still be set by arbitrary and mysterious figures in black robes. Its just instead of game developers trying to prevent inflation these new mysterious figures will be ex-bankers and venture capitalists. In fact instead of worrying about mounts I would be more concerned about items controlled by players. As more real world currency is spent to introduce new virtual items and currency you can expect the value of gp in the game to sink like Brittney Spear's singing career. We recommend setting up an account with Live Gamer right away so you aren't left behind."

When is a Bug not a Bug?

There was an unexpected bug after patch 2.4 that Blizzard quickly jumped on and had fixed by Thursday. This really wouldn't be worth mentioning except that the bug actually fixed a long standing exploit in the battlegrounds that annoys the hell out of me. While patch 2.4 supposedly made it so that pre-made teams are more often matched against other pre-made teams there's still a handy method for getting around it. Every pre-made uses "scouts" which are single players that enter into a battleground and makes sure they aren't playing against another pre-made team. If everyone on the opposite side is from the same server they assume it's a pre-made team and they tell the leader to queue them up for another battleground.

This is annoying to me for two very good reasons. The first reason is that it makes it so that pre-made teams mostly play against pick up groups and it artificially increases the rate at which they gain honor at the cost of other players. Some would argue that putting the effort to organize a pre-made should grant them an advantage but truthfully it's overkill. The second reason is that it creates a lot of games that start with an unfair advantage between the two factions. If a pre-made queues out of a game then chances are that one side is only going to start with 3-4 players. In games like Arathi Baisin and Eye of the Storm where you have to defend your flags an initial number disadvantage usually allows the other side to increase the score where it's almost impossible to catch up.

The bug in 2.4 that accidentally addressed the scouting exploit was one that caused all the server names to be improperly displayed for players. Players all saw each other's server names replaced by a generic "BG#" tag. As a result scouts couldn't tell if the other side was from the same server and thus a pre-made team. For one glorious day I didn't run into a single pre-made team as most of them got stuck playing each other. All of this was over as soon as the hotfix was applied and this weekend was filled with Arathi Baisin's starting (15 vs 3). As much as the 2.4 changes to the matching system were supposed to force pre-mades to play against one another it still wasn't as effective as a bug in Blizzard's code.

So to answer my question of "When is a bug not a bug?" When it fixes an exploit.

Instant Honor Calculations and killing the RNG

I didn't have a lot of time to test out the 2.4 patch content last night so me and my friends just played a couple games of Arathi Baisin in the hour we had. I must say that not having diminishing returns on honor was very noticable especially in the way that honor automatically showed up on your PvP tab. It seems that in general that battleground rewards are becoming more and more tangible to players. It used to be that you had to PvP your heart out until the weekly maintenance recalculated the honor rankings. You never really knew if some botter was going to knock you out of achieving the rank you wanted. This made the rewards very nebulous since you never knew what week you were going to get them.

Then Blizzard made the huge improvement of changing battlegrounds to work on a currency system and every day you had a rough estimate on how much closer you were to your reward. That rough estimate did get annoying pretty quickly especially with the increase on diminishing returns after the first week. The amount of times I ended a night with a honor estimate that was no where near what I got the next day was uncountable. Nothing better then logging into the game to find yourself a couple honor short of that upgrade. Now without diminishing returns honor can be calculated right away and no one should ever suffer from that particular problem again.

I really see this as a sign of Blizzard changing the overall reward system in World of Warcraft. The random nature of loot is on its way out and showing your player base their exact progress is in. While loot tables will probably always exist in fantasy based MMOs they can be supplemented with other reward systems to prevent the random number generator from screwing us over and over and over agin. Random dice rolls to determine loot have been in these types of games for too long simply because that's the way it was done in Dungeons and Dragons. With the badge system and automatic honor calculations we have a much better idea of of the time investment required to get the next item. The days of gambling and being slave to the RNG for our rewards are numbered. (couldn't resist)

Fixing the Randomness of Instance Loot

Over the past six months we've seen a major change in how people are gearing up their characters in World of Warcraft. It used to be that group and raid instances were the best way to gear up your characters but with the introduction of multiple sets of arena gear it’s been quickly overshadowed by PvP. It's only understandable that people would eventually get tired of PvE content since its static and the enemies never change tactics. However, the problem is that even new players are skipping dungeons simply because of the random nature of rewards in most instances. Most players simply see it as a smarter decision to collect honor which guarantees a small bit of progress towards an epic item. This beats the small chance of getting an item from a dungeon to drop and actually winning the roll.

Several ideas for fixing the loot system in PvE content have been thought up and the developers have even used one recently to make raiding a bit more rewarding. The developers basically copied the token system idea used in the battlegrounds and made it so that badges of justice would drop from bosses in 10 man and starting today 25 man raids. This has the effect of giving better equipped raiders a motivation to visit lower end instances and perhaps help newer players with the content. This has had the negative side effect of draining away most of the heroic dungeon players but it seems like a small price to pay to better balance raiding against PvP.

Another idea for improving instance loot is moving away from gear which is only good for one of the classes that can wear it. You can see the developers starting to implement this by the itemization changes for paladins where their gear is having spell damage replaced by melee haste. This way in the expansion a piece of plate armor can have melee haste or strength on it and be good for both paladins and warriors. Blizzard apparently has plans to do this for most of the different types of armor so that more loot dropped in instances is useful to the classes who can wear it. This would help to a certain extant but still wouldn't address the problems caused by the different talent trees for each class. For example a holy paladin wouldn't be interested in anything a fury/arms warrior or retribution paladin would use.

I think that there is a nice solution to addressing the different itemization needs for classes caused by talent trees. Quite frankly the current gem bonuses on gear are underused at the moment and most people don't even bother getting the correctly colored gems. The bonuses are simply too small and really don't add anything to the gear. In the expansion though I can seem them being used to increased the number of different classes who could use an item. Picture an item with different gem bonuses and the one that is active is dependent on a master gem slot. Put a red gem in that slot and the item gains intelligence and spell damage. Put a blue gem in that slot and it gains intelligence and +healing.

Example Item:
Gauntlets of Extreme Usefulness
Type: Plate
AC: 1200
Sta: 25
Master Gem Slot: ( )
Red Bonus: 20 str and 20 critical strike
Yellow Bonus: 20 int and 40 healing
Blue Bonus: 20 sta and 20 defense

Why would an item system like this be more useful than simply switching all dungeons to a token based system like badges of justice? This was the first question that occurred to me and it was easy to answer once I thought about the benefits to talent respecs. This system would easily allow players to change their talent tree focus without forcing them to collect an entire new set of gear. A tanking warrior who wants to go mortal strike for a bit could simply buy a few red gems to change his gear.

This would almost eliminate the problem of loot dropping in a dungeon which no one in the group could use. Players are already used to customizing their gear with gems and I think this would be a logical expansion to the system. The only problem of course is that it would make fights over items much more common. Though there would be a high amusement factor in seeing a feral, moonkin, and resto druid all fighting over the same item.

Keeping Outdoor PvP Objectives Relevant in WoW

It's no secret that Blizzard hasn't had the best of luck in designing outdoor PvP objectives. In the early days most objectives were player made and mostly consisted of wiping out low level newbie towns. When the battlegrounds were first introduced this practice greatly decreased as most people worked on faction grinding and trying to obtain a rank which actually gave rewards. However, it soon became apparent that there was something quite fun about having battles in the overworld which was missing in the closed instances. As a result Blizzard has spent a considerable amount of time trying to recapture the player made fun of early pvp. They've had a lot of missteps along the way but they seem to be improving their attempts with each try.

The Four Iterations of World PvP

1) Free for All World PvP - Rogues rule
This system is described by some as the golden age of PvP but there were a lot of problems with it. Generally, the people who are most nostalgic about the early days played rogues. Without any sort of real objective to encourage player cooperation it usually was all about 1v1 combat. Having the ability to stealth gave a huge advantage to rogues in 1v1 combat and about 85% of all world pvp at this time started with the victim hearing the stealth sound.

2) Tarren Mill vs South Shore - Ranking System accidently cause large scale war
When the ranking system was first introduced the battlegrounds weren't quite ready and Hillsbrad Foothills became the zone of choice for earning honor. It was an area easily accessible by both factions and PvP became more about large scale battles and roving death squads rather than just ganking. Battlegrounds killed the everlasting war in Hillsbrad but the memories still linger since the towns for both factions are still quite often ransacked.

3) Silithus and Plaguelands Objectives - Is a Buff a reward?
After the battlegrounds were introduced the large scale conflicts pretty much disappeared from Azeroth. It wasn't until sometime later that Blizzard tried to encourage world PvP again by using zone wide buffs as a reward. The problem was that while the buffs were useful for those running instances in the zone, it wasn't enough of a reward to draw people into the conflict. Blizzard learned that rewards needed to be more permanent then buffs to encourage players to organize for large scale battles.

4) Outlands Objectives - Rare Items are deffinitely rewards
Blizzard learned a little bit from their past mistakes and put rare quality items up for grabs for those who farmed the objectives long enough. In the beginning this worked out fine though there was some exploiting in Hellfire Peninsula. Eventually this lead to the idea of the daily quest which allowed the developers to better control the rate at which rewards were granted. Objectives that gave zone wide buffs or advantages were less successful unless they were also tied to rewards. This can especially be seen in the popularity of capturing the spirit towers which allow tokens to be earned in the Auchinduon.

As you can see Blizzard originally thought that players needed little encouragement to form up for large scale battles like in the days of the Hillsbrad Foothills wars. As a result their first attempts at world PvP objectives were laughable and could be considered failures. It really was the introduction of the honor ranking system that caused so many people to fight at the midway point between Southshore and Tarren Mill. Of course once you have a large amount of people doing something then you start to build up interest. The opposite is also true that as less and less players participate in an objective then it snowballs into obscurity.

This is the problem facing the world objectives in the Outlands where the rewards have not been updated to match the PvP or PvE parts of the game. Some objectives like the Hellfire Peninsula stadiums have useful rewards for those leveling up. However, it’s impossible to get any tokens since both factions are required to be participating at the same time to earn rewards. Nothing is more frustrating than waiting for a stadium to decay all the way back to neutral so you can recapture it. So with the current ghost town state of the current PvP objectives one has to wonder if Blizzard will be able to keep interesting in Lake Wintergrasp.

Lake Wintergrasp is supposed to be a siege warfare zone with capture points and a play style that mirrors the RvR of Warhammer. One can only assume the rewards will be useful while leveling through the zone but what happens once everyone hits max level again? I'm taking a leap of faith here that Blizzard has learned its lesson and knows that if they want to keep an objective from becoming a ghost town they need to update the rewards. While some argue that this just encourages exploiters I can't seriously recall a time that PvP was anything other than ganking unless a reward was involved. There needs to be something to draw players to the zone and work together for a common goal.

In my opinion the Lake Wintergrasp rewards will:
1) Initially, be rare items similar to what you would find in level 80 dungeons.
2) Eventually, be switched to a token system that mirrors badges of justice.
3) Deffinitely, updated each arena system to avoid becoming a ghost town.
4) Never, be as powerful as arena items.

All in all I have good feelings about Lake Wintergrasp and I think it might become what the developers wanted Alterac Valley to be. A big ass battle that actually gives rewards without resulting in 16 hour stalemates.

How-to Interpret Beta Impressions

As I've mentioned before I've been having fun in Tabula Rasa for the last couple of months. The game is quite different from any MMO I've played before and I like to think this is a good thing. Unfortunately, the game experience for Tabula Rasa hasn't grabbed me like a normal MMO though it’s still been entertaining. This was the sentiment originally expressed by beta testers though most said it wasn't enough to justify a subscription fee. Such an opinion usually dissuades people from trying a game even though it might be something worth experiencing.

This brings me to the point of this post. When do you listen and trust the beta testers for a game? In some cases like World of Warcraft you pretty much hear nothing but good news about the game. Other games like Vanguard you get people breaking the NDA to warn people away from the game and they turn out to be right on the money. But what about games like City of Heroes and Age of Conan which get mixed reviews? I remember back in 2004 that a decent amount of beta impressions for City of Heroes were negative. A lot of testers said the game was fun but the lack of items and end game content made it not worth buying.

City of Heroes still became quite popular because it broke from the fantasy genre and had a very nice character creation system. The beta testers weren't really wrong about the game experience which most people admitted was kind of fun. On the subject of whether the game was worth buying though most beta testers were speaking from months of experience with the game. In the end if a MMO keeps me occupied for three months and only costs me 50$ + 15$ + 15$ then I consider it a good deal. If you're just looking for something new and don't care if the MMO has years worth of content then you have to ignore certain opinions a beta tester might express.


Pay Attention to the Beta Tester On

1) Was the game fun?
The number one thing to look for in a beta impression write up is the word "fun". Chances are that if at any point a tester thought the game was fun then most likely it's worth playing. Every game in beta is going to have a few issues which annoy players and they are going to be pointed out. The key is that if the issues were game breaking then the tester would have used a different word.

2) How buggy was the game a month before release?
Bugs are always a part of any MMO but it’s become standard practice not to release a game with a bunch of obvious ones still in the game. If a beta impression a month before release is talking about bugs in combat or other areas of core game functionality then chances are the company ran out of money and is trying to release as quick as possible. This is important in that if the game doesn't gain a huge amount of subscriptions right away they might just pull the plug on the servers.

3) How much time did the beta tester spend with the game?
I never got a character past level 12 in the Vanguard beta before I quite playing. As such my opinions on the overall game were considerably incomplete and I didn't try to write a review. The best beta impressions are from testers who stuck with a game for a couple months and didn't just play tourist in the newbie zones. When reading a review that looks based on a long-time tester make sure the comments section is not filled with people saying his facts are wrong.


Feel Free to Ignore the Beta Tester On

1) Whether the game was worth a subscription.
Most beta testers are pretty much given a free game to play for three months. Since they got their game play experience for free they are going to be much stricter on whether they would pay for the game. If a bug filled beta test kept someone entertained for more than a month then chances are it’s worth the cost.

2) Opinions on the art assets
There are basically two types of art assets used by MMOs at the moment. One is realistic like EQ2 and LOTR and the other is stylistic like WoW and Warhammer. Everyone has their opinion about the two styles so beware of phrases like "the graphics suck" in a beta review. It could either mean the art assets are very poor or that the tester was simply not a fan of the style that was used.

3) Opinions on the end game
By the very nature of a beta test it’s almost impossible to get an accurate impression of the end game. Games like LOTR and WoW both released with very limited end game activities but added content at different rates. The state of a MMO's end game is more determined by its patches then by its initial development.

Ten Toxic Troll Tricks from the WoW Forums

I was once a firm believer that every MMO should have its own forums and that they should be managed by the developers and not left to community fan sites. After all by using multiple fan sites the opinions of the player base is fragmented and it becomes harder for developers to research player reactions. That was my argument back then. It’s changed dramatically since World of Warcraft surpassed the million player mark and I found my daily journeys onto their forums starting to resemble walking through toxic waste. There are numerous moderators trying to keep the community in line but the massive number of subscribers just spawns too many trolls.

I've since given up the good fight and now depend on rss readers and community fan sites to read and discuss the play mechanics of my favorite MMO. It’s ironic that I eventually started using methods that I argued against so much. There are still large parts of the World of Warcraft forums that are uncorrupted but any sign of a serious discussion attracts the army of ravenous trolls which lurk in the muck. I haven't visited the official forums for over a year but I have a pretty good idea of what still goes on.

Top Ten Troll Tricks

10) FTL :-(
"For the Loss" is the least powerful of the forum troll attack moves. It’s a basic maneuver which uses lewt speak to back up a claim usually meant to inspire others to anger. The troll doesn't really believe in the claim but instead is trying to give the impression that a single ability/class/developer/game mechanic is directly responsible for a player's bad experience. An example could be "My Warlock dies all the time, Cloak of Shadow FTL".

9) Nerf [insert class or ability here]
The staple of any MMO forum troll's arsenal is the Nerf attack. It's an overused and weak attack especially when compared with the more specialized trolling techniques. However, by its very nature the nerf attack is very versatile and can be used for a multitude of purposes. Making nerf posts against classes in their very own forums is a popular pastime on the WoW forums and helps foster class animosity. Witness the recent fight between warlocks and mages over warlocks getting their life tap nerf canceled. I wonder just how many posters in the warlock forums were actual mages and how many were trolls?

8) FTW!!!
"For the Win" started out as an opposite expression to balance against FTL and was meant to be exclaimed during victory. However, it’s been corrupted by the trolls and is now mostly used sarcastically in the same manner as "For the Loss". Trolls depend on people not being able to tell if the term was used sarcastically in their posts and thus they can appear to support and be against a topic at the same time. One example could be "I love paladin healing. Only 2 spells FTW" Is the poster a fan of the simplified healing mechanics of the paladin or does he find it boring? Who Knows? Let’s spend 5 pages fighting about it.

7) /GQUIT KTHXBYE
This is one of the more entertaining type of troll posts and much like a traffic accident it catches the eye of everyone passing through. Unfortunately, just like in real life it causes a massive slowdown since everyone has to stop on by the thread and find out what's happening. These posts almost always "out" an unfair relationship in the guild's upper tier of officers and usually throws out every rumor they can about the guild. Half the time the poster is on a level 3 alt and might not even be the person who left the guild.

6) L2PLY
An instant classic that became such a popular rebuttal that it even got its own music video. The most effective troll techniques are insults because people naturally want to defend themselves even if the entire thread is garbage. It’s also an effective way of crushing the spirits of new players because nothing tastes sweeter then noob tears. *actual ingredient in Ben and Jerry's Ice-cream.
Myndflame L2PLY Video

5) Dev Plays a [Insert Class Here]
This is a highly developed form of troll attack which is often accompanied by fake evidence. Recently the nerfing of elemental shamans was met by accusations that Kalgan (Tom Chilton) played on an arena team which lost to burst lightning damage quite often. I believe the "evidence" was a player who called the shaman nerfs before they were implemented on the test realm and supposedly Kalgan's arena team. Luckily, the overuse of nerf attacks on the forums makes it very easy to find any all sorts of different predictions for every type of class, talent, or ability.

4) Thread Necromancy
The only thing more powerful and hated then a warlock is of course a necromancer. Thread necromancers were a real problem for a period of time but luckily moderators now quickly lock any old threads that mysteriously rise from the dead. The basic premise of the attack is that trolls would search very far back in the forum archives to find threads which could be mistaken for being about a current topic. They would then post a comment to make it look like the discussion was still recent in the thread. This was especially effective if a CM had posted in the thread since their comments could be taken out of context.

3) Theoverlylongtrollpostwithnospacescopiedfromothertrollposts
Trolls aren't the most original manner of internet monster and sometimes they just don't feel like writing their own posts. So a common and brain scrambling tactic they sometimes use is to copy bits and pieces of other posts to make a loose collection of thoughts and ideas which tricks the reader into thinking there might be a point somewhere in the mess. In reality the post is an undying mound of garbage made of political opinions, philosophy, bad game design, history, and religion and is technically related to fruitcake despite not being edible. *fruitcake is only supposed to be edible and usually isn't.

2) N RL IM [insert famous/rich/attractive here]
Ah one of the more insidious troll tactics on the face of the internet. I said earlier that the most successful troll attacks are insults and this goes double when they invite people to pay attention and insult themselves. These threads usually start off with some thread making fun of everyone who plays a MMO and ends with something like "I'm glad I'm married to a supermodel, make 200 thousand a year, and not a loser like you guys." Everyone knows he's lying and mostly like resembles that guy from the "Make Love Not Warcraft" episode of South Park. The problem is that knowledge isn't enough and the weak willed can't help but call the troll out on it. In the end the troll wins because he gets attention and the keylogger url on his signature now has a better chance of being copied and pasted.

1) Hardcore vs. Casual
If ever a troll is having problems coming up with a pointless topic or wants to derail a good discussion about the game then they can simply call up the Hardcore vs. Casual argument. This is the bane of any moderator since it has a habit of being hard to kill. A nice long thread on reward structures can quickly be ruined by some troll nudging it into a Hardcore vs. Casual debate. It doesn't matter if it’s locked right away since five new threads all on the same subject will quickly appear accusing the moderator of favoritism. The whole argument basically hinges on outdated stereotypes accompanied by outdated game design. If it rears its head in your forums often then chances are the developers were lazy at some point with the end game.

CTL+ALT+DEL Comic on the Subject

Is Collision Detection necessary for good PvP?

The most annoying thing about a lack of collision detection is how much it changes the mechanics of melee classes in PvP. Without this law of physics existing it becomes quite possible for two objects to be in the same place at the same time. Throw in the time honored tradition of requiring line of sight on everything and you get some weird side effects. My favorite one has to be jousting where slow 2 handers are used by people to land a hit then they run through their opponents. Sometimes you'll see two melee classes both trying to use this method which is how it got the name of "jousting".

Another common problem of not having collision detection is that it makes spells with a cast time very hard to get off in close quarters. If you watch your target's cast bar then step through them right before they finish the spell you can almost always avoid it. Most casters are well balanced enough to have an AOE or CC spell for such a situation but some classes like shamans are limited in their options. As a result a lack of collision detection inherently gives classes that have instant cast abilities and spells a distinct advantage.

This becomes a problem only when you a few classes limited to spells with long cast times. It doesn't matter if they get better mana efficiency or deal more damage if they can never get the spell to hit a target. This is a contributing factor to some classes being non existent in the lower arena brackets. You think it would be easy to fix the problem but in several cases it would actually change the entire balance of the class. Thus we see Blizzard having to experiment by adding and removing effects to talent trees instead of just applying class wide changes.

It’s probably easy to avoid most of these issues if class balance is designed around collision detection from the ground up. This way classes which have an abundance of instant spells and abilities aren't favored as much when fighting other human opponents. Oh it will still be hard to get spells with a cast time off but it will at least make it possible in close quarters combat. In the upcoming game Warhammer people are already thinking about using tanks to block melee classes from casters. In that game collision detection only works on enemies so it would be possible for tanks to block while casters could still attack through them.

This looks like the evolution of the PvP model and you can already see how this is going to cause strategy to become more important. I don't think we'll see military formations in the game but we'll definitely see tanks become more useful in protecting healing and damage classes. What will have to be closely watched is if Blizzard decides to follow suit and change their game to use collision detection. It might be a coding nightmare and as a result they may wish to see if it adds to or detracts from the PvP experience in Warhammer before jumping on ship. The question thus becomes if it works really well in Warhammer will all MMOs in the future have to use collision detection to have a competitive PvP game.

Is Arena Season 4 being delayed because of Age of Conan?

I haven't written a good WoW rant in awhile and I have to blame the developers who haven't given me any good source material lately. Oh well, I guess you can expect "welfare epics" level material to be handed out every day. I did have some high hopes that with the patch about to roll out we'd see some developers come down with foot n mouth disease. Surely the developer reasoning behind repealing the warlock nerf would be laughable but no they came equipped with numbers. Stupid logic. Luckily, besides the nerf roulette the lead designer Kalgan did stop by the forums to drop a bomb on PvP fans. Arena season 4 won't be coming out with the next patch or anytime soon.

Kalgan basically said the purpose of arena gear is to allow PvP players to keep up with raiders and not pull ahead of them in gear quality. Thus the next arena season will be put on hold until players have unlocked the new raid zone. Apparently, everyone is supposed to stop doing PvP and start doing the Sunwell dailies in the same fashion as the AQ opening event. At least this time everyone should be making money and not just crafters. Also with the changes in patch 2.4 there should be a lot of new material that can be bought with badges of justice. It’s not that hard to picture people concerned with gear switching from arenas to heroics while the Sunwell is being unlocked.

The problem I have is that not everyone is concerned just with gear and grindy opening events are almost always boring. They also tend to be a sign of developers stalling for time. I know that Tigole said they had emergency patch content after the Sunwell if the expansion wasn't ready. However, I wasn't expecting for that content to be arena season 4. I mean he could be referring to the some hidden patch content scheduled for the summer but I have a sinking feeling that's not it. No instead what looks to be forming is a late March release for patch 2.4 then Arena Season 4 hitting us sometime in May. I think this is real ballsy of Blizzard if this is their answer to the Age of Conan release.

Stringing out content like this is just going to spur the number of people who will try out a competitor's game. I can kind of see what Blizzard is thinking but I don't think it’s going to work. Age of Conan has some nice PvP mechanics which aren't going to be offset by a 3v3 tournament and a new arena season. This goes double for Warhammer which could still actually release during the 2nd Quarter. In reality, not having Arena Season 4 match the Sunwell release is just going to frustrate the player base which has adopted to the PvP play style. They'll be plenty of loot and gold for players in the new Sunwell content but there are going to be some people who won't like it especially if they've become use to fighting human opponents. This decision could backfire and actually force people to leave before Age of Conan or Warhammer comes out.

Community by Critical Mass

Out of the discussions from the last post it seemed that a lot of people thought that a strong community was one of the most important characteristics of a successful MMO. This seems to be true since there is definitely a relationship between how long people play a MMO and how many friends they have in that game. Gaming experiences usually are more rewarding when interacting with other humans rather than just a non responsive AI. Over the last 10 years we've seen a rise in games which are oriented around human interactions either by utilizing online connectivity or group game play. First person shooters now rise and fall based on their online features while games like guitar hero and Wii bowling have found their ways into bars.

MMOs seem to get the best of both worlds since they're usually structured around group game play and require an internet connection. The advantages to the genre are really only offset by the increased fees to maintain and develop the online portion of the game. Initial gamers were hesitant to pay extra fees and people who did pick up a MMO usually didn't join with a bunch of their real life friends. This is what probably lead to designers using the "group only" design philosophy which so characterized the early MMORPG market. It was thought that by making game players weak compared to mobs that it would force them to form friendships in the game to advance. In general this method worked at retaining players but did very little to attract anyone new to the genre.

As I said in the last post World of Warcraft was unique at the time of its release by being the only MMO to not force community building with harsh solo penalties. Their end game did require grouping but since every previous level was open to soloing it seemed like a much larger game to most new players. As a result players who didn't form social ties right away stuck around much longer and weren't forced out. This is what really allowed their numbers to increase over the million subscriber mark and eventually cause the game to reach critical mass. When I talk about critical mass I'm actually talking about the player base becoming so large that eventually gamers starting finding real life friends in the game.

Once that started happening it was like communities started being imported into the game. Friends would find out each other both played World of Warcraft and would start planning on bringing in more people they knew. When multiple friends started recommending a game then you can't help but be curious. This happened with the older games to a certain extent but was usually only successful with groups of friends who were already fans of the MMO genre. The older games pretty much built all of their community ties from the ground up inside their own virtual worlds which didn't branch out much into the real world.

The game Lineage did reach an earlier critical mass effect and built up probably the second strongest MMO community in existence today. However, the game was not designed for broad appeal and instead simply benefited from the government subsidies in Korea that made broadband access so cheap and prevalent. This pretty much increased the willingness of gamers to try MMOs in that country compared to the United States and Europe at that time. The game never really gained widespread popularity in the west though it’s pretty much a success story of showing how popular MMOs can become when you remove barriers of entry.

All of this becomes important when people starting talking about how another game could never beat the numbers that World of Warcraft has achieved. It’s quite possible that World of Warcraft might not be done growing for a long time especially with recent focus on other aspects of their game besides raiding. However, this growth doesn't mean there is a lock out on their subscriber numbers. In fact World of Warcraft is estimated to have a very high churn rate for a MMO which means there is a huge ready made community of ex-WoW players out in the market. If a game could tap into this community cough*** Warhammer*** we'll probably see a similar explosion in numbers and the best part is that it might not even effect WoW that much.