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.

Ten Things that will make a WoW Killer.

Just recently Activision boss Bobby Kotick gave a speech that basically warned any investor away from investing in MMO development because of the success of World of Warcraft. He cited recent failures in the MMO market and claims that even a 500 million to 1 billion dollar budget might not guarantee the same success that Blizzard has experienced. This is pure hyperbole but highlights a point that has become very apparent in MMO development. Investors are starting to back away from funding projects because of World of Warcraft.

Originally the super-MMO was a boon to the industry since it proved that the customer base could be grown. But now after so many new games failing to drawn even a fraction of World of Warcraft’s numbers we are starting to see venture capital withdraw from the market. No one really understood what made the game such a success and it looks like no one is going to be able to repeat it. Microsoft recently withdrew from the Marvel MMO quoting that Blizzard's dominance in the market prevents any definition of what they would call success. Other studios have had a string of poorly performing MMOs and are starting to restrict funding for new projects.

However, it’s not like World of Warcraft's secret to success is a big mystery. A large part of its success was that it was different from every other MMO on the market at the time. It was the only casual MMO in a sea of harsh death penalties and time intensive grinds. Now after the market has been copying the leader for four years being casual is no longer something special or different. Also a lot of new MMO's made the mistake that being casual meant there didn't need to be any depth to the game. Playing loose and fast with the item progression in a DIKU based game is just a bad idea. So far only Lord of the Rings has managed to be casual without sacrificing depth but they ran into some other problems which nipped their subscriber growth in the bud.

1) Unique Art Style
A lot of people like the cartoony art style of World of Warcraft and a lot of people hate it. One thing both these people agree on is that it’s easy to tell a screenshot is from the game compared to any other MMO. A WoW killer will have a unique art style which doesn't necessarily have to be cartoony. I personally like the cell shading from Champions.

2) Gentle Leveling Curve that can be done Solo
Games with a lot of levels but with a gentle curve are the best bet since item and ability rewards can be spaced out to give a sense of progression over a longer time. Games like D&D and Guild Wars can have problems keeping up a sense of progression.

3) Clear Benefits to Grouping
Almost all games stick with item rewards from instances as the main benefit for grouping. But as the player base moves to the higher levels the item rewards become less beneficial since they're less people available for grouping. Groups should actually see an individual increase in +XP per mob as they add more people to their group. Casual based games already allow constant killing of weaker mobs when soloing and grouping doesn't increase that rate very much.

4) Good quests, not an over abundance of crappy ones
This is one of the worst things I've seen in almost every MMO released since World of Warcraft. Lord of the Rings was especially bad since they had these amazing and interesting Chapter Quests then a million kill twenty of this mob type quests. What I like to see are automatic experience rewards and titles given out for killing large amounts of the same type of mob similar to LOTR. That way gamers never have to read bad fiction trying to explain why there is a quest to exterminate 100 rats.

5) Actual Dungeons and not just Quest Instances
There needs to be something that teaches players how to work together as a team for endgame PvE and PvP. I would suggest instances that range from standard dungeon encounters to ones that use teamwork in a PvP environment. For example you could have an instance that would require a group to guard several objectives from waves of NPCs that would try to capture them. The mistake a lot of games have made recently is to make every quest go into a generic instance which looks crappy and computer generated. I'm looking at you City of Heroes and Lord of the Rings.

6) Gear progression but with some Permanence
Just because your playerbase likes getting new items doesn't mean they need a new one every 5 minutes. Tabula Rasa is horrible this way since gear has no value when every slot gets replaced 3 times per level. Also there needs to be a balance between bind on equip, bind on pickup, and items with no binding. World of Warcraft actually has too many bind on pickup items which can sometimes result in an instance run benefitting no one in the group. Tabula Rasa is going to implode on epics soon since there is no binding on any items, not even ones from quests.

7) Separate ability effects in PvP and PvE
It’s a pain in the neck to code but every ability should have one effect on mobs and one effect on other players. Warhammer has some great ideas with about making healing and tanking classes effective in PvP without forcing them to change their class role in PvE as well. World of Warcraft accidentally opened the doors on making PvP popular and any future game which ignores this side of the game isn't going to gain a lot of subscribers.

8) Consensual PvP systems with balanced rewards
There's no reason to have PvP unless some good rewards are also offered. In general the more organization involved in the activity the better the rewards. Guilds should be able to organize a raid to either take down a large PvP objective or a raid instance and get the same quality rewards. Groups should be able to get these same rewards but at a much slower pace. Solo players should even be able to get the same quality rewards but it should take 5-10x longer then the raider.

9) Gentle Introduction to Raiding
If your end game is raiding oriented then you should make the first raid instance easy and not require a key or attunement quest. If you want content that gets used by both the hardcore and casual players then have a normal and heroic mode for the raid instance. What not to do for end game raiding can pretty much be covered by looking at aspects of Karazhan.

10) Use a combination of a Class and Skill system
Games need to have systems that allow players to differentiate their characters in ways that affect game play and not just appearance rewards like titles. The talent system from World of Warcraft is a good example but unfortunately allowed too much specialization and basically created all new classes. Lord of the Rings also ran into problems by having no customization options for classes resulting in an unchanging and boring play style once you mastered the basic mechanics.

I don't really believe gamers are fickle though I do believe the law of gravity effects virtual worlds. Basically the larger a MMO population, the more gamers feel attracted to the game. If you want to beat World of Warcraft then you need to make a list a hell of a lot longer than the one I made. The most important thing is not just to list what Blizzard did right did so you can copy it. Designers especially need to point out features which they think can be improved. This post ran a little long and if you’re still with me I thank you. Feel free to leave a comment about a feature you think needs to be in the WoW Killer.

Can NCSoft gain more of a following in the West?

NCSoft released their financial records a couple weeks ago and there were a couple of surprising things contained within. The number one bit of data most discussed was that revenue wise Tabula Rasa only brought in 5.4 million dollars. City of Heroes/Villains brought in the same amount of money which either speaks highly of that game or poorly of Tabula Rasa. At the moment I'm kind of mad that I paid 45$ before Christmas for TR only to find a collector's edition on sale for 15$ this month. The game is a lot of fun but I detect the note of desperation starting to permeate the servers. I try not to think about the words "Auto Assault" when I'm playing but they do tend to echo in my head.

It’s hard to believe the last two new games released by NCSoft have fallen flat on their faces. Only the excellent expansions for Guild Wars have given NCSoft any real penetration into the North American market. The two Lineage games remain popular in Korea but haven't been widely played in Europe or North America. Both games only contain a small fraction of players from the west despite heavy marketing when Lineage 2 first came out. City of Heroes maintains a decent base over 100,000 judging by their revenue but it’s a ticking time bomb. Cryptic Studios has already announced Champions Online and thanks to Marvel/Microsoft dropping out of the picture they now have the power to really go wild with the development.

The one big release planned by NCSoft for this year is Aion the aerial combat MMO. In this game players assume the role of angel like creatures who are at war with dragons. Sounds interesting and different from almost every other North American MMO being released this year. Unfortunately, you can't ignore that fact that Tabula Rasa and Auto Assault were both hyped as unique experiences also. Apparently while NCSoft is very good at thinking outside the box they aren't that good at developing depth of play. Still the art looks very good, like most of their games, and the widespread use of flying mounts in World of Warcraft might have interested some players in aerial combat.

Despite Aion I still think NCSoft's best bet is to concentrate on developing Guilds Wars 2 for the North American market. A lot of gamers are still against paying subscriptions and that’s a prime target for a box sale only game. Instead though I bet they'll focus on a couple more free to play games like Dungeon Runners with alternative methods of payment. North America has been pretty resistant to non subscription games and most free to play models fail since western gamers just tend to ignore the premium accounts and micro-transaction parts of the game. In fact only Maplestory and Runescape have made strides into the U.S. and constant debates are waged on how much money they actually make and their true popularity.

Guild Wars 2 is just a good decision since it's as far as I know one of the only games that follows the box only payment method which means it has an audience which isn't being attracted to other games this year. Also one of the big complaints about Guild Wars was its lack of a persistent world and overuse of instances. ArenaNet is planning on changing these issues and a few other things in Guild Wars 2 to make it more like a MMO. I don't know why but I swear NCSoft games always tend to concentrate too much on instancing and are constantly making me keep track of zone names and numbers. Despite making me hate instances I like NCSoft since they are obviously willing to try other genres besides fantasy. However, if Aion fails spectacularly with all the big name games rolling out this year it could be a very bleak future for NCSoft in the west.

Could May 2008 turn into MMOpalooza?

Recent rumor had the release date for Warhammer being pushed back again after an article confused the difference between fiscal year and calendar year. A spokesman was quick to step up and clarify that Warhammer was still looking at a 2008 Q2 release date which would put it out between April and June. Age of Conan also looks to be on track and sticking with their end of May release date which will put the two game's release dates very close together. I wonder if people from Funcom and EA Mythic were giving each other the evil eye at the recent Game Developer's Conference?

Of course the big mystery is when the hell is Blizzard releasing its next expansion? They haven't even announced an estimated date yet! Recent forum mutterings have drawn parallels between the class changes in the recent 2.4 patch and the famous Before the Storm patch that prepared for the Burning Crusade. In general Blizzard likes to work in 3 month cycles and has said that the Sunwell will most likely be the last major patch before the expansion. If the 2.4 patch goes live early March this would give credence to an early summer release. Just one point to mention is that Jeff Kaplan has been reported as saying they do have more patch content in case Wrath of the Lich King needed more time. I'm thinking most likely the level 80 revamp of Naxx is already done and it could be tuned down to 70 in case of an emergency.

Still it looks like there is a distinct possibility we could see three new games all released within a month of one another. This would be an event unheralded in the history of MMO games though there have been several side by side releases. Such contests have almost always resulted in one obvious winner and one loser since gamers can't really afford or concentrate on two new MMOs at the same time. Also provoking the issue is the summer timeframe for all three games. The summer is often a rough patch for guilds in MMOs with vacations often causing key members to be take breaks or even quit. However, with summer vacations also comes lots of free time which needs to be filled with entertainment. This is why the movie industry targets the summer so heavily. New MMOs could see this time period as the perfect opportunity to break players away from their established favorites.

Funcom is probably the least worried about competing since they see their market as different from Warhammer and Wrath of the Lich King. This is probably why they were the only ones to give a firm release date. However, I'm sure both Blizzard and EA Mythic are worried about the effect of a mature rated MMO. Could it establish a dominant bond with male players by its use of gore and boobies? Over the last few years designers have stressed political correctness in an attempt to appeal to a wider market, the reason a lot of the troll /silly jokes were removed. It’s almost refreshing to see someone ignore this and design specifically for a niche. Most people predict Age of Conan won’t surpass 200,000 but no one really knows the market for a mature MMO aimed at guys.

What should really be a two game competition between Warhammer and Wrath of the Lick King might be started off early by Age of Conan. As Hillary found out this primary season you can never guess how an unknown variable will affect a popularity contest. OMG, did I just draw a parallel between the presidential race and MMOs? All attempts at humor aside one has to wonder if this is a plus or negative for the players. Most MMOs because of their progressively increasing items and levels eventually become hard for new players to pick up. By the time a year has pass they’re riddle with inflation and a lack of low level players to group with. I would rather have my new MMOs spread out over the course of the year instead of all jam packed together. Then again I admit a burning curiosity to see who would win in a three way death match.

2.4 changes should keep "Ringers" out of Arenas

It’s funny but based on my arena rating I've always just assumed that me and my friends suck at PvP in World of Warcraft. We have okay class balance but we never seem to be able to get our rating above 1600. We do tend to win a lot in battlegrounds and we made a good run of it this weekend in Warsong Gulch. We only had a premade of about five people but we managed to beat numerous full premades and won about 20 games in a row. This was the most success we've ever had and actually resulted in me spending left over WSG tokens on potions. Never thought I would see that day!

However, in the arenas this weekend we got our normal ass kicking with every win giving us only around 8-10 points and every loss costing us about 16 points. It’s funny but our win/loss ratio is about 2-1 but we actually end up barely increasing our rating. Well it was about half way through our 5th game when we noticed that a lot of the teams that beat us in the mid 1500's had one or two people in full sets of Vengeance (S3 arena) gear. These were the teams with apparently much worse ratings then us and yet somehow they managed to have people who had already achieved the 2000 rating requirement for the shoulders.

Unfortunately, it’s become common practice for players to switch to lower rated arena teams once they have fully geared themselves out in the latest arena gear. Since the arena matching system is currently based on team ranking it ignores the obvious advantage a fully geared season 3 player brings to the table. The practice is especially brutal since most of these Ringers are high damage classes with MS warriors being the most common. This makes it especially hard to catch up at the end of an arena season especially if you didn't have an active team for the first month or two.

It looks like Blizzard has noticed the problem and is changing the matching system in patch 2.4 to prevent Ringers from smashing lower ranked teams. In the next patch you can expect the matching system to use the highest personal rating of a team member to match them against their opponents. All of a sudden having someone with a personal rating of 2000 in your team doesn't seem like such an advantage. This should reduce the amount of teams in the 1450-1650 rating range which make use of Ringers to artificially boost their arena rating.

Blizzard is getting closer and closer to cutting out most of the cheats for the arena system. People will always try to game a system to get rewards faster but for the longest time PvP has been more vulnerable to it then PvE. It’s only natural since massive PvP systems in MMORPGs are a lot less common then standard reward systems which use dungeons and raids. Still it looks like progress is being made and one only has to look at the greatly reduce gold spam to see that Blizzard can effectively change their code to restrict undesired behavior. Now if only they would work on the hack that allows people to start early in Eye of the Storm.

New Blog Layout

I went ahead and finally switched from classic blogger to the new and improved version. I had been eyeing several XML templates and decided to just take the plunge and switch over. I might be trying out several others until I get that perfect fit. Leave a comment if you have any suggestions and tell me if this layout is easier to ready.

Are MMO developers starting to overly specialize?

Yesterday the story about Cryptic Studios and its new game Champions Online gave me pause. While I like the fact that they are trying to make a better game than City of Heroes, I can’t help but get the feeling of butterflies in my stomach. The problem is that the one thing I’ve learned from watching the MMO market since 1999 is that sequels never do as well as their original. Games like Everquest 2, Lineage 2 and especially Asheron’s Call 2 have never gained as many subscribers as their predecessors and in some cases have had to be shut down.

It’s funny that Cryptic Studios would want to pigeon-hole itself into a super hero shop since they obviously have great talent. Now rumors have almost confirmed that they are working on the Star Trek MMO which they probably acquired from Perpetual. Still even if that is true they are going to need their first independent release to be a blockbuster. City of Heroes/Villains never really got above the 200,000 mark and that makes me doubt Champions Online can either. Now some may point to it being playable on the Xbox 360 as boosting its numbers but I don’t know how console owners will react to subscription fees. Whatever their numbers end up being, the point is that a studio obviously feels comfortable in the super hero genre.

Honestly, they aren’t the only studio who has a comfort zone. Just look at every major MMO studio and publisher and you’ll see that most have defined a niche where they do their best work. If they get involved in a game outside their area of expertise it tends not to do so well. SOE has had tons of bad experience with titles like the Matrix, Planetside, and Starwars Galaxies despite being the market leader for quite some time. NCSoft also has similar problems with a lot of recent non-fantasy titles falling flat on their face. Tabula Rasa is a personal favorite of mine but it’s recently release revenue numbers are atrocious.

EA Mythic – Fantasy PvP
Ultima Online Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer

SOE – Fantasy PvE
Everquest, Everquest 2, Vanguard

NCSoft – Fantasy PvP
Guild Wars, Lineage, Lineage 2

What’s unusual about Cryptic is that they’ll be the first studio to define a non fantasy niche for themselves in the MMO market. CCP is the other studio which has had a successful non-fantasy game but has shown no signs of developing anything other than EVE Online. So even if Champions is only a moderate success Cryptic will become the premier developer of non fantasy MMOGs. However, I can’t help but think it would have made more sense for them to try their hand in other genres. I guess at the moment the fantasy genre looks taken with Age of Conan, Warhammer and WoW stuck in a death match this year. I just hope in the future that I see more then super heroes from Cryptic Studios.

Cryptic loses Marvel license but doesn't seem that broken up about it.

Cryptic Studios has been the unfortunate victim of their publisher getting cold feet at competing with World of Warcraft. Rumors had been circling around since November but it wasn't until last week that the head of Microsoft game studios announced that they didn't think it was possible to be financially successful in the current market. With Microsoft leaving they also take Marvel and the 60 years of back stories and characters that Cryptic Studios was planning on using for their game. Things don't look too grim though since Cryptic Studios quickly managed to get a hold of the Champions license.

If Champions sounds familiar then you probably experienced it at some point as the popular table top role playing game. It has a long history with paper and pencil gamers and its rule system for creating superheroes is seen as a natural fit with a MMO. While not as extensive as Marvel it does provide a large amount of lore which by its very nature was intended to be used in gaming. Recent comments from Jack Emmert and other heads at Cryptic suggest that the game is already playable and only content and polish is needed. A rough translation of that is that Cryptic just has to strip everything Marvel from the game and start replacing it with lore and characters created through the Champions license. At least they own this one and won't have to worry about a similar set back in the future.

I've said before that a MMO should use a license like a suit of clothes. It provides flash and context for the game but it shouldn't affect the underlying design. A lot of the problems I had with Lord of the Rings were caused by design decisions Turbine made strictly based on the game's lore. A fantasy game without magic seemed overly restrictive to me and indeed seemed to limit the skills and abilities of each class. If you go to the Champions-Online website which just went live a few days ago you can see that Cryptic is actually optimistic about the license change. The Marvel universe may have been a treasure trove of villains and back-story but it also would have severely limited Cryptic in what they could implement.

Already pie in the sky features are starting to be announced on their website that would have been a lot harder to do under the Marvel license. One feature is that players will apparently get to design their own arch-foe and eventually decide if they were going to permanently defeat them. The whole process reminds me of an episode of the Venture Brothers but it also has a certain appeal to it. Enhancing this appeal is the new art style being used for Champions which is a form of cell shading that is very reminiscent of comic books and games like Viewtiful Joe. This could work out for the game since we've all seen the advantages World of Warcraft gained by going with a unique art style.

The feature list from Champions reads like a wish list of everything players wanted added into City of Heroes. More customization on abilities, a more extensive loot system, and no more randomly generated mission instances. It’s actually amazing that NCSoft didn't try to force a no compete clause on Cryptic Studios when they sold City of Heroes. The odds that NCSoft can improve City of Heroes enough to compete with Champions Online is rather slim and you can probably expect a lot of subscribers to jump ship. Still Champions Online isn't scheduled to release until early next year so NCSoft has some breathing room.

Check Out the Website if you want the Overview:
http://www.champions-online.com/

What does WoW's success mean for a Mature rated MMO?

I recently just found out about a small feature in Tabula Rasa that I didn't find mentioned anywhere in the manual. Basically, mobs in Tabula Rasa don't always die right away and they'll sometimes do a death scene reminiscent of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. At first I just thought this was an annoying game glitch that forced me to wait a couple extra seconds to get my experience. But apparently you can prematurely end their death antics by running up to them and pressing "F" which performs a finishing move and grants you double experience. If that wasn't enough the finishing moves often involve you kicking the enemy and causing its head or entire body to explode. It reminded very much me of old mortal combat fatalities and I'm ashamed to say it gave me a little chuckle.

Thinking back I realized I hadn't seen anything that violent in a video game for quite some time. World of Warcraft has been my major MMO home since it came out and I've almost forgotten that video games could sometimes go into the same realm as R rated movies. Most people would argue that was a good thing. After all isn't there enough Grand Theft Auto and Manhunt clones out there causing negative publicity for video games? Well that’s true on one hand but on the other you've have games like Bioshock and Assassin's Creed which would definitely be R rated if they were movies. Both these games happen to be very good but probably would have been transformed into horribly bland crap if they had their violence watered down for a less mature rating.

I realized at this point that part of World of Warcraft's strategy to increasing accessibility to the MMO market was intentionally keeping its "rating" low by using stylized combat violence along with its cartoon art. It’s kind of a weird strategy for a game that has the word "war" in its title but sound reasoning since they were planning on releasing in China. The Minister of Culture for that country has some strict rules for games especially foreign titles. Blizzard was eventually forced to add some flesh to the arms and legs of the undead race but that was it. Apparently, skeleton arms are anti-communism or something. I've tried games with more realistic art like Everquest 2 and Lord of the Rings but I quickly discovered I missed the models from World of Warcraft, especially the large-ass shoulders. I can see why Blizzard made the decision to use cartoony and stylized art.

However, just became I like stylized fantasy doesn't necessarily mean I want bloodless and fluffy combat. My childhood years are long behind me and I think my medium of entertainment deserves the right to maybe kick it up a notch. Some publishers have realized that a majority of their MMO audience is way past the 12-16 year old bracket that most news coverage always tries to associate with video games. I think that’s why we see Funcom taking a chance by pushing a mature rated Age of Conan and other games also experimenting with less adolescent styles of combat. Even the much anticipated Warhammer is going for a darker and more violent universe though they are keeping the cartoonish character models. In fact recent allegations that Warhammer looked too much like WoW were met with some scathing remarks on just how little war happened in Blizzard's popular MMO. I think the term "hippy playground" was used.

While this is just over confidence and marketing hype aimed at their largest competitor it did make me think. Maybe it’s time developers quit trying to capture a wide market by being as inoffensive as possible and realize that good art is a little offensive. I mean I don't want Rockstar games to get into the MMO market but then again I don't want every publisher to water down their games until everything plays like Hello Kitty Online.

Has over use of Crowd Control unbalanced WoW PvP?

It used to be back in the early days of World of Warcraft you knew what classes could effectively take one of your teammates out of a fight with a well time crowd control. Mages had the dreaded polymorph and warlocks had the very frustrating fear. Both were annoying but easy for support classes to dispel or cleanse away. Still the spells were useful for interrupting healing classes and people often clamored for similar abilities. Well since that time you can tell that Blizzard has moved away from long duration crowd control spells and started spreading short duration versions to everyone in an attempt at balance.

The most notorious of these new crowd control abilities is definitely the druid cyclone which is superior because it can only be broken through the PvP trinket. Recent changes to blind have made it almost as annoying as cyclone to break though some shields will also do the job. Theoretically there isn't anything wrong with having a hard to break crowd control spell but in PvP there are always side effects. Both rogues and druids have other abilities like vanish, travel form, and stealth which work very well in combination with blind and cyclone. In fact it works so well that both classes are highly effective in the smaller arena brackets at escaping death then returning quickly to sap or heal.

I'm not trying to argue that any one class needs its abilities nerfed or taken away. I'm stating that PvP has been deeply influenced in negative ways by the over abundance of crowd control. In particular the large amount of stun and silence procs in a couple of class trees have had an even more widespread effect then cyclone or blind. The widely spread ability to silence or stun an enemy for 1-2 seconds every 8-10 seconds is hell on classes that depend on long casting spells. In particular paladins and shamans are forced into the 5v5 bracket where they aren't the only healer for a team. In smaller brackets healers have to be able to cast an instant heal or a heal over time.

Another interesting side effect of the over abundance of short duration crowd control is that it made physical burst damage the most effective way to kill someone. Burst damage has always been the best way to kill someone in PvP but high damage spells require a decent cast time after initial cooldowns have been blown. This makes them very vulnerable to silence and interrupt abilities like earth shock and kick. However, mortal strike is unaffected by these and warriors are uniquely built to recover from short duration stuns with their intercept ability. As a result mortal strike warriors are easily the better choice over destruction warlocks or mages for doing burst damage in the small brackets.

If Blizzard is interested in a better spread of classes in the different arena brackets then they have their work cut out for them. I will admit they have done a great job recently with the hunter changes. Hunters used to be a joke in the arenas but now I see them much more often. They haven't quite reached the levels of warriors but I think the strength of the beastmaster tree will eventually make them second place for the burst damage spot on a team. However, what Blizzard really needs to do is replace some of the current short duration crowd control abilities that only affect casters with ones that only affect melees. Root would be a good method to use since it’s not overpowered but definitely effects melee more than casters.


Last Month's Arena Team Breakdowns
http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/01/31/blood-sport-warrior-druid-overpowered/

Spore may pollinate player made content

Three years after the initial announcement of Spore an official release date has finally been set. Things had been getting rough for the game with an extended timeline pushing its development cost much higher than EA would have liked. I'm sure if any other developer then Will Wright had been in charge of the game it would have been shelved last year. However, the legendary game designer has long had a habit of making fun games which are easily expandable. This works very well with EA's method of making expansion packs and sequels with only small variations to the original game. While gamers mostly hate the practice it does give EA the capitol to spend on off the wall projects like Spore.

The main reason why I'm covering a regular computer game on this blog is that Spore has some interesting game designs which could eventually be adapted into our favorite MMOs. The creature creator in Spore is basically an easy to use 3D modeler and shares some similarities with avatar creation in games like Second Life. Will Wright has basically designed the game so that a central server takes the creatures made by players and populates the game universe with them. So eventually when your race of bee people start moving onto new planets they'll run into races made by other players. Since the game uses a player's choices to determine personality, aggressiveness, and intelligence you'll sort of get a feeling for each race's creator.

This basic premise of attaching a game to object creation gets around a lot of issues that MMO fans have with sandbox worlds like Second Life. Spore could almost be seen as a test for player made content in modern video games. If it sells well perhaps we could see future MMOs experiment with more free form avatar or even NPC creation. Why be limited to a race designed by a game company when you could use a 3D modeler, some base attributes, and your imagination to come up with something much better? Some people might think that game licenses would have problems dealing with the introduction of thousands of unique creations but honestly we've all seen how lore can be stretched to meet a poorly imagined race (cough draenai).

Plus the ideas explored with the creature creator in Spore could also be adapted for several different areas in MMOs. A weapon and armor creator could easily be controlled by a game system dependent on the discovery of ancient scrolls. Work your way to the end of a medium difficulty dungeon and be rewarded with the knowledge on how to add a cool cross guard to your swords. The stats of items you create could be controlled by different types of tokens dropped off bosses with varying degrees of difficulty. It’s like how heroic bosses have primal nethers used for low level crafting epics but higher level crafting epics require raid bosses. It’s funny but if you look at World of Warcraft you'll notice they made huge advancements in accessibility and leveling but really use a sub-par crafting system. This unfortunately may have influenced many developers that crafting systems weren't really in need of improvement.

Anyways on September 7th if you go out and get a copy of Spore see how much you like the creature creator system and ask yourself if such a system could work for MMOs.

EA Announces Spore Release Date: Sept 7th, 2008

Why Blizzard's Next MMO is probably Starcraft

I don't normally deal in absolutes mostly because everything tends to be more based on opinion then any sort of binary right or wrong answer. Still if there's one thing I'm 99% sure of is that the next Blizzard MMO is based on the Starcraft license. I may be setting myself up for a lot of friendly teasing if I'm proven wrong but I think its worth the risk. I mean honestly is anything more satisfying then a nice big "I told you so"? Plus Blizzard isn't exactly hard to predict like the current stock market. I mean their games are always released when "they are ready" and are related to either Starcraft, Warcraft, or Diablo.

The last time Blizzard released a new game universe was in 1998 with Starcraft. Every game they have released after 1995 has been related to either Diablo, Starcraft, or Warcraft. Based on this you can make a pretty good guess that the next big MMO will be based on one of these three licenses. Since World of Warcraft is going strong and most predictions have it lasting until the sun burns out it doesn't seem likely that Blizzard would cannibalize itself to make a sequel. If you look at the list of MMO sequels for eastern games like Asheron's Call and Everquest you see that they almost never do as well as the orginal anyways.

So basically my own weird Relmsteinian logic points to either Diablo or Starcraft being transformed into the next generation MMO. If you follow further along my winding path of assertions you can see Diablo isn't the most likely target for being transformed into a massive multiplayer game. The primary reason is that Diablo 2 was pretty close to being a MMO itself and was only a couple steps behind Guild Wars. I can easily see Diablo 3 eventually being released with enough new features that it does better then Mythos or Hellgate London. However, at the moment I think Blizzard realizes there are a lot of Diablo clones on the market and half of them are trying to edge into MMO status.

This argument might seem weak to some people but there's another aspect to releasing a MMO. If you look at the Warcraft series they had some lore in the first game which really got expanded when they released the sequel. However, if you took all the lore and characters from the first two games and combined them together they still wouldn't equal the lore covered in Warcraft 3. MMORPGs require massive amounts of fiction to give developers a background for making classes, characters, cities, dungeons, continents, factions, and of course bad guys. With Starcraft 2 already announced it gives a great opportunity to create the same sort of lead in that World of Wacraft got from its RTS cousin.

Summarized List I've used when debating with Friends.

1) Blizzard hasn't create a new game universe since Starcraft in 1998.

2) Blizzard's established brands have much more recognition and are more likely to gain players.

3) Blizzard isn't stupid enough to make a World of Warcraft sequel within the next 5 years.

4) Between Diablo and Starcraft the Starcraft license is better position to be turned into a MMO because:

4a) Starcraft 2 was announced and could serve as a lead in to the new Starcraft MMO.

4b) Having a fantasy and science-fiction game would expand Blizzard's MMO audience.

4c) A lot of Diablo style clones are out there cluttering the market.

4d) Ooops rumors have already leaked.

4e) Matt said a Starcraft MMO would be stupid and he's always wrong.

Will removing diminishing honor returns fix the AFK problem?

Its seems that the information dam around patch 2.4 has finally sprung a leak with lot of news from the community managers spilling out onto the official WoW forums. Previous information had been mostly limited to a round of interviews done by Tigole which dealt with high level overviews of the patch. Near the end of last week though both the European and American CMs started dropping little tidbits left and right. Not everyone goes to the forums though since its basically a text version of Xbox live. Thankfully sites like MMO Champion, WoWinsider, and Blue Tracker wade around in the muck for us and have listed most of the known 2.4 changes.

Its funny because more so then the new PvE content I find myself excited by a change to the honor system. In fact the lifting of diminishing returns on honor is like music to my ears. Make no mistake I'll probably run the new Sunwell dungeon a few times on heroic but its not going to keep me entertained for another three months. Now running my new horde characters through a fixed battleground system where they can actually earn honor at a decent rate might keep me around that long.

I suspect the primary reason behind the recent AFK phenomena in battlegrounds can be attributed to diminishing honor returns. Players had gotten into the habit of playing a battleground to win until one side gained a slight advantage. Then everyone would switch over to farm mode, abandon the flags, and just try to kill each other for a little bit of honor. WSG was especially bad with the first flag capture often causing everyone just to zerg the center for honor. However, things got worse as soon as the arena rewards became available for honor.

Everyone wanted the arena season 1 gear and despite what raiders said it still wasn't readily available to the average player. The battlegrounds became flooded with people who wanted to earn honor fast and thought offense was the best way to get it. No one really guarded flags and playing a battleground to win became less and less common. With people primarily focus on offense the diminishing returns became more of a factor and I think a lot people started running into nightly honor calculations that were off by more then a couple thousand a night.

This should have made it so that people started playing the battlegrounds to win but the problem was there were just too many new players. Estimated honor calculations are instant and a lot of players just couldn't believe that they were being effected that much by diminishing returns. I think this was the point where a lot of people started going AFK. If you couldn't really earn that much honor by fighting and you couldn't get more then five people to help defend then going AFK had to start sounding like a good option. The new reporting tool was really only good for getting rid of bots and was easily bypass by a player paying a little attention to the game.

With the elimination of diminishing returns we should see a return of player participation to the battlegrounds. Of course it might just be the same offense only participation we've seen before but that's still a degree better then ten people AFK in every Alterac Valley. Speaking of Alterac Valley, this change should make it a little less painful to lose the game due to reinforcements. In fact this might be the main reason why Blizzard is changing how honor is gained. I know I was hearing more and more stories of hour long games where the losing side only got 40 bonus honor. Then again this could also be a situation where Blizzard is addressing the cause of the AFK problem instead of throwing a band aid (reporting tool) on it.

Touring Tabula Rasa's Instances

I'm still learning a lot about Tabula Rasa and honestly I've been busy lately leveling up my horde characters in World of Warcraft. I thought the expansion might be out this summer but the lack of information from Blizzard has convinced me and many others that we have long time to wait for Wrath of the Lich King. With that fact in mind I managed to convince one of my friends to try out Tabula Rasa with me. I can already tell you that just like in any other MMO the game becomes even more fun when you are playing with friends.

Wanting to be in a good position for grouping my friend chose the specialist path which he eventually intends to level up to a medic. While Tabula Rasa's end game is a little sparse at the moment he figures eventually the developers will fall back on the classic raid scenario which requires healing classes. He might be right but I'm just happy in the meantime to have someone who can heal me as I figure out how to use a chaingun. Its can be quite the learning experience for someone not used to FPS shooters. Though its not really hard to play, you do have to approach combat differently.

The first zone in Tabula Rasa has three instances all of which have a different theme though they share some common enemies. Players get sent to each instance by completing outside quest lines which eventually point you to the scary instance/dungeon entrance. A video clip plays when you enter any instance giving you a mission briefing on what you can expect. Once inside you'll pick up other quests from NPCs in there and often you'll get radio transmissions giving you more quest objectives. Almost as if reading my mind from the last post it looks like Tabula Rasa makes use of radio transmissions to cut down on having to travel back and forth in quests.

While some of the quests in Tabula Rasa were similar to standard ones found in other fantasy MMOs, the sci-fi theme allows you to complete them in different methods. Having to place bombs on generators to cut off a force field was something I'm more used to doing in the few adventure games I've played. Also most of the instances are layed out more logically then those found in current MMOs. The bad guys actually have defenses in place and have them set up to keep away pesky outsiders. I always wonder why every dungeon in fantasy MMOs almost always had a undefended entrance. It was especially funny when the last boss acted surprised that you found your way to him.

Fighting enemies in Tabula Rasa requires a bit more situational awareness then in other games. It seems to stress pulling less and doesn't have the imaginary aggro line which allows you murder a single mob while in sight of his friends. Instead the fights are focused on large skirmishes where everything in sight will attack you. The skill in fighting such a large number of mobs is knowing their weaknesses and switching to a weapon or ability that can quickly eliminate them. Using cover reduces the damage you take and helps you survive the initial fire from multiple mobs. Mobs usually fire on the first enemy they see though they will switch targets quickly for a heal or a very threat intensive attack (think bazooka or grenade).

Instances scale up in much the same manner as City of Heroes so if you go in with a full group you'll get more mobs. Soloing can be tough depending on your abilities and class but seems doable if you just level up and come back later. From my experience protecting bases and killing bosses in instances has a better chance of dropping good loot though the loot tables seem randomized. I see a lot of similarities between Tabula Rasa and City of Heroes and I can definitely see this game taking up a similar place as I wait for Warhammer and Age of Conan to release. But while I quite City of Heroes very quickly once World of Warcraft came out I can see myself holding onto Tabula Rasa.

On a side note crafting in Tabula Rasa needs some work.