Fail PUG!

The death of the hybrid

2011-12-03T05:00:00.000Z

One of the things I miss most about pre-Cata WOW was the freedom to experiment with different builds, to come up with the one that suited me best. The re-vamped talent trees of Cataclysm mean that you are effectively locked into one tree for a long time and can only ever access the lower levels of the other trees. Blizzard's stated reasoning for this was that:

many of the old talents were "must haves" for serious raiders, so they may as well be rolled up into the underlying spells;
by focussing people into a single tree early, it made it easier for new players to make a decision;
keeping players largely in one tree made it possible to give players signature abilities early on.

If anything, things will become even more extreme in Mists of Pandaria, where talent trees are eliminated altogether and each class is effectively reduced to three sub-classes, plus a few minor "froth" options, with no substantial decisions to be made beyond that.

The problem is, I liked doing the "wrong" thing. I had great fun mixing damage and healing with my restomental shaman in BC. My build wasn't optimised for a single task, as it would be for raiding, but designed to fit in well, depending on who else was available. In the days before dual-spec and dungeon-finder, being able to fill multiple slots with a single spec was both useful and fun.

I wasn't alone; there were elementalist mages, shockadins, restokin ... flexible, but sub-optimal specs were everywhere. My panzerkin druid main-healed, tanked and DPSed most of the instances up to Nexus. I wouldn't have lasted thirty seconds as a raid tank, but that wasn't the objective.

It's that right to be "wrong" that I miss, to ignore the cookie-cutter builds and go make something of my own. I don't want all my decisions made for me, I want the freedom to experiment and try out fun things. They mostly won't work, but that's fine; experimenting is fun in its own right.

That's not a chest, it's a ....

2011-11-27T09:43:00.001Z

Our hero models some "leg armour" that's more "Sith Pride disco" than "Dark Overlord."

Another day, another "AAA" MMO arrives with half the player-characters sporting ludicrously oversized chests and being given "armour" that amounts to little more than a pair of Lycra hot pants. The twist is that this time it's men who are getting this treatment in SWTOR.

There are, essentially, four different male human body forms available:

1. So incredibly weedy looking that he looks like he'd suffer serious injury in a dandelion fight with Mr Muscle (that's the old-fashioned wimpy version of Mr M, by the way, not the new, errr, muscly version, which is silly. Nobody expects Mr Tickle to go around tickling people or Mr Angry to go around being cross with everyone ... they do? ... anyway, that's beside the point ... which is that it's a very wimpy look). Not fey-elf wimpy, just spindly-feeble wimpy.

2/3. Almost identical (except for size) barrel-chested monstrosities that make the steroid-abusing human males of WOW look like they really do need to work on their pecs some more. And by barrel-chested, I really do mean barrel-chested; imagine the male equivalent of Jordan, but where the silicone has been replaced by the body of an R2 unit. At least it answers the perennial MMO question of where player characters store the 37 weapons, 13 sets of armour, 9 mounts and 3214 portions of Betelgeusian string-cheese they carry around all the time. These guys have a hollow chest cavity big enough to hide a ~~fully functioning battlestation~~ totally-non-suspicious-don't-mind-me moon inside it.

4. A look that might charitably be described as "Captain of Industry". You know the cartoon pictures of fat-cat bankers the papers have been fond of over the last few years? Now go half-way between that and Jabba the Hutt. Then a little bit further back, but still quite flobbly ... a bit more ... that's it. Seeing an army of these guys wheezing across the battlefield is enough to strike fear into the dark heart of Darth EvilMcBastard, but only because he bears an unfortunate resemblance to a doughnut. The rest of the Sith will just shake their heads in bafflement as they slaughter them. No wonder the Republic is losing if they've let recruiting standards fall this low.

What you won't notice in that list is anything remotely resembling a normal male body shape. Whilst I'm totally in favour of having body shape diversity in the game, none of the available male character models look anything like Lando, Han, Luke or Obi-Wan, which is a bit odd in a Star Wars themed game.

Of course female players have had to put up with this sort of rubbish for a long time, but I'm not sure the right solution is to make male characters look stupid too. How about a wide range of options (including fairly ordinary) for everyone?

The one true skill

2011-09-01T19:33:00.004+01:00

Image credit: Magefeathers on Deviant Art

Many of you out in MMO-land won't have heard of this, but WOW isn't the only game that's been undergoing something of a Cataclysm recently. The chess world has been in uproar over the changes made to that game to update it for the modern era. In case you haven't caught them, here are the key points of FIDE's announcement:

There is a big problem in the chess world with people copying tactics (and in some cases entire openings) from commercially-sold guides (often written by famous players who are cashing in on their status) rather than working things out for themselves.
These so-called "chess books" have become so widespread, that they've become an accepted part of the game. Even top players shamelessly copy openings devised by others, such as Alekhine or Ruy Lopez.
Even worse, many players now take advantage of breaks in play to analyse their games using chess bots. Some of these are so powerful that they have beaten world champions.
To counteract these problems and "bring back the skill", FIDE have decided to make radical changes to the game. The out-moded concepts of preparation and learning have been replaced by the one true form of skill: reaction speed. All chess clocks will be replaced by a device with a light on it, which will illuminate at random intervals of less than ten seconds. When the light comes on to indicate the player's turn, he or she will be required to move within 0.5 seconds or forfeit the game.
Balance problems (where some pieces are clearly more powerful than others) have been resolved by making all pieces and pawns move in the same way - to any unoccupied adjacent square. A FIDE spokesman explained that the loss of "piece identity" is the only way to ensure true balance. The cosmetic appearance of the pieces will be retained.

Of course, all of the above is a pack of lies and would pretty obviously ruin chess as a game. The whole point of chess is to be slow-moving and thoughtful, where background reading and preparation pay and twitch skills are irrelevant.

Yet when similar changes happen with WOW, few people object. What was once a fairly slow-moving, thoughtful game, where a lot of the skill lay in optimising your character for encounters, has been homogenised and reduced to a giant twitch-fest because (horror) some people were reading boss-strategies and optimised specs online.

For example, rotations have been "improved" by making them "more reactive" to stop people practicing and perfecting a fixed rotation. Learning to play has been replaced by "how quickly can you press the button when the light comes on?"

Now it's the tanks' turn. Building threat (a generally slow process that can be planned in advance) is out, reactive mitigation is in. Unfortunately, that's another, more extreme, Pavlovian twitch challenge: "light on, press button quickly or die".

One of the reasons I started playing WOW was the emphasis on thought and planning rather than twitch. Perhaps it’s this creeping “Simonification” of the game that’s losing customers. It’s not making it easier or harder, per se, just differently hard. Whereas before the thoughtful, slow people won, now it’s the fast but dumb.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with twitch games; what is a problem is changing the target demographic of your game long after it was established. It's not so much that people are leaving WOW, it's that WOW is leaving them.

Goodbye Google+

2011-08-28T18:44:00.000+01:00

I've ranted before about the intrusive nature of the real names policy in Google+. There's an excellent example of what can go wrong in this CNET article:

"If you do not edit your name to comply with the names policy by , your profile will be suspended: you will not be able to make full use of Google services that require an active profile, such as Google+, Buzz, Reader, and Picasa. This will not prevent you from using other Google services, like Gmail..."

Fortunately, there's a way round this: remove the Google+ features from your account. You can find out how to do that here. Even better, when you've done it, you get to explain your reasons for leaving, so you can make it clear that it's because of the lack of privacy.

Goodbye Google+. I'd say it was nice knowing you, but it wasn't. At no point did I find anything remotely useful there. Although, to be fair, I don't see the point of Twitter or Facebook either, so maybe I'm not the target audience.

It's good to be anonymous again.

Death to the living

2011-08-12T13:53:00.005+01:00

In recent posts by Cynwise and Shintar (and the comments associated with them), there's been an interesting debate about whether the Forsaken could be considered evil. I'm not inclined to buy the "an entire race is evil" theory, but it does raise the question of whether the leadership of the Forsaken (which is pretty much Sylvanas alone these days) are evil. At the core of this is the use of blight and the extent to which Sylvanas intends it to be employed.

1. Did she know of & approve of the development of the blight in general?
I don't think many people would dispute that.

2. Did she intend to use it against the Scourge?
Again, I'd say yes.

3. Did she intend it to be used at Wrathgate?
It's hard to be sure about this one. My suspicion is that Putress was given instructions to use it if he thought there was a good chance of taking out Arthas in one hit. Would anyone have complained about the loss of Bolvar and Saurfang Jr if Arthas had been defeated at Wrathgate?

OK- perhaps Varian would have made a fuss for form's sake, but one suspects that in private he'd have been quite happy to sacrifice a potential rival in return for a quick win against the Scourge. Was Bolvar a potential rival? If he got home and saw what Varian was up to in Westfall, quite possibly.

4. Did Sylvanas intend it to be used as a weapon against the living at some point should it prove necessary?
Again, I'd say yes.

5. Is the eventual use of blight against the living her plan A, or merely a "don't mess with us" deterrent that would only be used as a last resort?
Pre-cataclysm, it would be possible to argue this one either way. However, the invasion of Gilneas clearly shows that Sylvanas intends to deploy blight liberally as a weapon of war. Whether this is fundamentally more evil than disembowelling people with spears or charring them to a cinder with fireballs is a question for another day.

6. Is Sylvanas "scheming quietly about how to destroy all life on Azeroth and how to become the Ultimate Queen of Uber Evil".
The key part of this question may be the word "is", i.e. the use of the present tense. As Rades has pointed out in his series of posts on Sylvanas, it's entirely possible that she has changed as a result of her raising by the Valk'kyr; indeed the "Sylvanas" we see now may not even be the same person as the one we saw before. The Arthas part of the Lich King has been defeated, but it's less clear that the Ner'zhul part has been.

Perhaps the clue lies in the suspicious changes of appearance she's undergone over the years. Are these really the same person?

Who'd have thought that joining the ranks of the undead made your lips progressively poutier?

Hidden in plain sight

2011-08-05T09:45:00.001+01:00

When getting over-excited about the ~~certain-to-happen-omg-thank-you-Blizz~~ highly speculative Mists of Pandaria expansion for WOW, I, along with some more balanced commentators got very focussed on the Pandaria bit of title.

But maybe that's not the important bit. Pandaria may be the setting, but perhaps the theme of the expansion is actually being driven by the first word of the title: mists. There's an unfinished story from Cataclysm that has always felt as if it needed a sequel: that of the Kvaldir. We don't know much about them, other than that they attack the land from the mists, can summon kraken, and they are at war with the Naga beneath the sea.

That would tie the expansion neatly into the previous two and starts to shape the factions we might see, Proabably Naga and Vrykul as the main threats, with the Pandaren as the local friendly NPCs. Sadly, I think it's hard to see Blizzard assigning Pandaren to player characters to either of the current factions, as it would cause to much annoyance to the side that didn't get them. Lore-wise, they'd probably be slightly horde-inclined (as were the goblins), but it would be easy to update the story in the light of recent events to amend that. All it would take would be (for example) a Pandaren leader being rescued by an Alliance ship to shift that slight connection.

Here's hoping...

Everybody was Kung Fu fighting...

2011-08-03T19:41:00.001+01:00

According to MMO Champion, Blizzard have just registered "Mists of Pandaria" as a trademark. Please, please, please...

Embarrassing Carl Douglas impersonation in 5..4...3...

Now, this is an idea for an addon!

2011-07-31T09:49:00.001+01:00

It seems that researchers have developed software for identifying someone's gender by their word usage on Twitter.

Anyone fancy porting it to Lua? Oh, the fun we could have in Silvermoon...

P.S.

Free tip: Googling "Ladyboy Warcraft" will not produce blog-illustration-friendly images.

This message will self destruct in five seconds

2011-07-27T17:20:00.004+01:00

Here we go again. A year ago, Blizzard decided it would be a terrific wheeze to force people to reveal their real names when posting on the WOW forums, despite the obvious problems of harassment that could lead to.

Now it seems to be Google's turn to have a fit of July madness. According to The Register, using your real name will be mandatory for anyone using Google+ and you'll have to prove your ID with a passport or other official document. My answer to that is the same as my answer to Blizzard and Facebook:

I do not choose to give you my personal information for you to hawk around the internet to any fruitcake who takes a random dislike to what I say. It is not there for prospective employers to Google and decide that they don't want the kind of weirdo that writes about video games. I will not hand over information to "prove" who I am that could be used for identity theft if when you get hacked, either.

My identity as a blogger and my identity in real life are completely separate and keeping that separation is more important to me than carrying on using Blogger. So if this blog stops updating or vanishes randomly at some point in the future, you'll know why. I won't co-operate with the gradual erosion of privacy on the internet and I suggest that you don't either.

See your trainer

2011-07-23T17:35:00.003+01:00

So, Erom has finally made it to the giddy heights of level 10 in my rusty man challenge. So far, there hasn't been a fight that Arcane Shot + an angry pig can't handle. It hasn't seemed particularly slow, either.

So why does it all feel so unsatisfying? Well, without the little rewards that come from new pieces of gear, abilities and talents, the game feels pointless. Considering how I've mocked those who play for gear, not challenge, this is deeply hypocritical.

Without the new toys every half hour or so, the incredibly repetitive nature of the content itself becomes more obvious than a naked elf on a mailbox (and Cataclysm levelling is quite good by the standards of the genre). By adding new skills and talents every few levels, this gets disguised - the encounters seem different because we have more buttons to press, even though the mobs themselves are almost identical.

I wonder if that's a clue to bringing some of the interest back to the solo game - make the encounters much more different. If anything, Cataclysm has taken a step in the other direction - for example, fire elementals are no longer immune to fire. Make the poison from scorpions hit like a truck, so that dispelling it is worth the bother; make melee mobs nasty enough for ranged types so that they have to kite, rather than simply spell them in the face. Anything to make different encounters need different tactics.

Aeeiiiih! It burns! It burns!

2011-07-22T08:38:00.004+01:00

Blizzard have just posted an excerpt from the latest Warcraft novel, "Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects".

Seriously, is this thing intended to make buy the novel? The writing is unimaginably ponderous. Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"? Perhaps in Azeroth the commandment has been reversed. I can't think of a single blogger in my reading list (many of whom don't have English as a first language) who couldn't do a better job than this.

Scarily, Christie Golden is apparently one of the better Warcraft writers. If what I've read in other reviews is correct, Richard A. Knaak is even worse. I'm starting to see why some fantasy fans revere Tolkien so. I'd always thought of him as a rather mediocre plodder who couldn't write character. Compared to the lazy, unimaginative novel-a-month genre-fiction writers, though, he's like Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Ishiguro rolled into one! It's a sad state of affairs when game designers can write better dialogue than a "New York Times bestselling author".

The sad thing is, I'd quite like to read a well-written novel set in the Warcraft universe. Twilight of the Aspects isn't it.

Right, I'm off to read "The Comeback Girl". It's got five stars on Play.com, so it must be good!

One button WOW

2011-07-21T17:20:00.002+01:00

Want to know what's wrong with the WOW Ironman challenge? Not silly enough, I say. All this "no talents, gear or glyphs" nonsense is just EZ-mode. If you're a real ~~man~~ orc like Erom (pictured above with his trusty boar Varian), you like a bit of a challenge.

Erom is on a mission. To get to max level with all the constraints of the ironman and one tiny extra one. No training - no abilities, no professions*. Erom doesn't need any of that sissy book learning - just Arcane Shot and an uncontrollable AI pet.

Let's see how far he can get. In his pants...

Edit: I've decided to call this the "Rusty man challenge".

* Apart from riding that is. Even Erom isn't that stupid.

Looking good?

2011-05-29T19:39:00.005+01:00

One of the perennial problems of MMOs is female dress. It started off as a problem in computer games, because the original target market for them was nerdy teenage boys, for whom a glimpse of pixelated flesh was about as close as they were going to get to the real thing, so that was an effective sales tactic.

Unfortunately, it hasn't gone away since MMOs became all growed-up and mainstream. Clichéd chain-mail bikinis still abound, even though the games are played by many women and, well, how can we put this ... ~~men who have seen a real naked woman, so don't need to play the game one-handed people~~ guys who don't get their kicks from pixels.

Game companies rightly get a lot of grief for this, so a popular work-around has been the introduction of appearance slots in the game, to allow the players to choose their look, rather than have it dictated by the designers. Unfortunately, people are still people, so they don't always do what others might hope. Here's an example from Rift today (Rift allows you to have one set of gear for stats and another for appearance).

Epic gear with the good stats on it, looking as intended by the game designers:

Appearance gear chosen by the player:

Oh well...

A modest proposal

2011-05-23T18:20:00.001+01:00

In that broken game known as "real life" it is possible for low-skill players to obtain the same items as high-skill ones simply by grinding. For example, someone who flips burgers for ten thousand hours can save up for the same fancy car as a top engineer. Surely this can't be right! As many MMO players will tell you, it's it's skill that should be rewarded, not grind.

To fix this, I propose the introduction of three classes of currency to be used to reward different tasks, just as we have green, blue and purple items in WOW.

Turnips should be awarded for unskilled manual labour. They could be used to to purchase basics, such as bus tickets, pornography, burgers and gin.
Spanners should be awarded for skilled manual work. They could be used to purchase comfort items, such as basic cars, Royal Wedding Souvenirs and package holidays.
Crowns should be awarded for skilled intellectual work. They could be used to purchase luxury items, such as iphones, books, computers, ~~epic mounts for posing around town on~~ Ferraris, private education for your children (heirloom schooling), armani suits, servants, seats in parliament, etc.

That way only the most skilled should have access to the most epic items in life and others are inspired to try harder by their example. Don't listen to their whining about plumbers and care workers being just as important as bankers. That's just socialist nonsense which encourages morons and slackers.

Rapture, what rapture?

2011-05-21T18:16:00.003+01:00

Ooops!

Oh, well that was rather a let-down. No earthquakes at 6pm here in the UK. No signs of salvation either. In fact the only thing that seems to have been affected is the Family Radio website, which has crashed mightily. The wrath of God?

I would mock, but this charlatan has extracted vast quantities of money from his poor gullible followers. Perhaps they can get some of it back by eBaying their rapture T-shirts. I suspect they'll be collector's items for gloating atheists.

If the cap doesn't fit...

2011-05-20T20:13:00.002+01:00

The cap on raid numbers is something of an established tradition in MMORPGs. The original reasoning was simple: if you don't have it, what's to stop a hundred idiots from simply rushing in and zerging everything?

I've spent quite a while in Rifts recently, where that's more or less exactly what happens (at low levels anyway).

Twenty DPS, one healer (me) and no tanks? No problemo! Just add more DPS and zerg that bad-boy down!

The thing is, it's all rather fun. Keeping a rampaging mob of half-wits alive is way more challenging than healing that I-have-a-horrible-feeling-you-could-solo-this-place-and-are-just-bringing-us-along-to-be-kind tank you've played with for years. Which made me wonder ... would it be so bad if raids were like this?

On the plus side, it truly would allow anyone who wanted to to "see the content". What's more, it would remove the non-linearity in difficulty that plagues many games. WOW, for example, only has two difficulty levels for raids: normal and heroic. If you're slightly below the ability needed to pass that threshold (e.g. your guild is good enough to kill Arthas with 11 people, but not 10), you get nothing. By removing the raid cap, that problem automatically goes away.

Of course it might be argued that this is unfair on players who are good enough to do the instances. Why should lesser mortals be allowed the purple shinies that were intended for the elite? Well, that's only relevant if you if you get your kicks from feeling superior to other people rather than the challenge of the encounter. It's not like the game is going to run out of epics if all the peasants get them. Besides, the skilled players would still gear up faster, because the loot is split fewer ways. If it takes fifty of you to drop a raid boss, you aren't going to see much gear at the end of it. Essentially, the system is self-limiting. There's no point in a skilled guild zerging, because the raid-lockout remains, so you still get your weekly kill, but the rewards are spread thinner.

Perhaps it's time to remove the cap.

Ringers

2011-05-07T09:10:00.005+01:00

In most sports, bringing in someone else to play the game for you (a so-called ringer) is regarded as cheating. If you got someone from Paragon to play your character for you, so you always got top DPS and hence raid spots, boss kills, loot etc, would that be cheating? Most people would say yes. But we do that all the time with other aspects of the game, rather than the actual button pressing in a fight.

Did you copy that spec or rotation from Elitist Jerks (EJ) or work it out yourself? What about the tactics you use? Does your guild require everyone to view the fight videos on Tank Spot before they raid or do you kill the bosses using your own ingenuity?

In either case, if you got someone else to do the work, you cheated, just as surely as if you'd got someone from Paragon to play your character for you. The trouble is, if you spend the time to work it out yourself, as Tobold advocates, you get accused of letting the team down; being too stupid or lazy to look up the "right way". It's a topsy-turvy world, where the guy who solves a problem himself is regarded as a moron and slacker, while the guy who copies somebody else's work is regarded as intelligent and dedicated.

Of course, it could be argued that the EJ copy & paste method is how the game is supposed to be played, that the true challenge is in the execution. The trouble is, that turns MMOs into an elaborate and expensive game of Simon Says, which is boring in the extreme. Blizzard have been reduced to making WOW a twitch game, not because that's what they originally intended, but because it's the only kind of challenge you can't copy and paste your way past (or can you?). Raids are tuned on the assumption that people will cheat, making them almost impossible for people who try to solve the problem themselves.

By cheating, copying the work of others, we the players have broken MMOs. You can't cheat and then complain about lack of challenge (essentially what was happening in Wrath). If you want challenge, stop bloody cheating! Work the encounters out yourself, rather than watching the how-to video on Tank Spot. Do your own experimentation and theorycraft to optimise your build, don't just copy and paste from EJ. Do your own homework, rather than copying someone else's.

Otherwise you're just pressing that cheat button.

Warcraft good, Facebook bad

2011-04-27T18:40:00.008+01:00

Image courtesy of xkcd

We all know the stereotype: the lonely angst-filled teen stuck in the basement playing video games, whilst the normal kids are out socialising or, as is the modern way, chatting to about 58 billion people simultaneously on MSN, Facebook and SMS. It's sites like Facebook that de-weirded the Internet: talking with your friends is something a normal healthy kid would do, instead of all those stupid orcs and spaceships. Prepare for some bad news, folks...

Well, not so much bad as ... interesting, which is what what good research should be. A team from from Queen's University, Kingston in Canada has been looking at the connection between different kinds of screen time and risky behaviour in teenagers (I'm afraid you have to pay or have some kind of academic access to get a full copy of the paper). Carson, Pickett and Janssen took a measure of risky behaviour (you can see full the details in the paper, but essentially it was a combined measure of smoking, drunkenness, non-use of seat-belts, illicit drug use and non-use of condoms) and compared it with three different kinds of screen use: watching TV, general computer usage and playing video games. As you'll see from the graph below, teenagers who spent a lot of time using their computer "normally" showed a much higher rate of risky activity than those with low computer usage. The amount of time playing video games had very little effect.

My own graph, produced using the data in the paper. Any mistakes or misunderstandings are probably down to me!

In other words, if your kid spends all day playing WOW, it's fine. It's all that "normal" internet usage you want to worry about! The authors speculate that the increased impact of computer use compared to watching TV is that the latter is far more effectively regulated, so it's easier for teenagers to access "unsuitable" material. I'd suggest another contributing factor: social networks vastly increase the quantity of peer-pressure that kids are subject to, so the pressure to copy what all the cool/rebellious (depending on whether you're a teenager/parent) kids are doing also increases.

So delete little Johnny's Facebook account and buy him Call of Duty. Just think of the children!

Beyond irony update (28/04/11): South Korea appears to be moving to limit children's game play time. The article doesn't mention any such limits on TV or "normal" computer use. Evidence of harm? Who needs it?

The cheat button

2011-04-26T14:21:00.007+01:00

I’d like you to join me in a simple thought experiment. Imagine a simple change to WOW: each player is given an additional ability, called, simply, Cheat. It’s not bound to any key by default, but it’s there if you want it. It does one thing – it instantly kills whatever (non-player) mob you are targeting.

Finding a particular encounter too difficult or annoying ? Simply press Cheat and carry on with the rest of the game.

Getting tired and frustrated after banging your head against a particular boss for weeks? Don’t let your raid guild fall apart - just press Cheat and there’s automatically a raid wide vote on whether to kill the boss and move on. A single veto and you carry on as before.

People have been using cheat codes in single player games for ages, to avoid content they dislike. What’s the difference? MMOs aren’t a zero-sum game. By getting the shiny epixx from Mr Bigboss, you aren’t preventing anyone else from getting them.

As a result, this change wouldn’t affect people who enjoy raiding for the challenge it poses: they can get their fun as before, with the personal satisfaction of knowing they did it the hard way.

The only people who might be bothered are those whose real reason for raiding is to collect status symbols to show off to other players. If everybody gets the Mighty Halberd of Foozlecide (with New, Improved, Shadowfire Animation!), how is anyone to know how ~~insecure and attention-seeking~~ l33t the status-raiders are?

But you aren't one of them, are you?

Forking Games

2011-04-18T21:27:00.003+01:00

One of the perennial problems game designers face is the tension between the requirements of fun PVE and PVP games. PVE thrives on variety (it's rather boring if the only difference between mages and warlocks is the colour of the light that comes from their fingers), whereas PVP thrives on homogeneity (or at least there's less whinging on the forums about how it's not fair that warlocks have fear but mages don't).

As a result, designers find themselves subject to a never-ending series of complaints. Improve things for PVP and the PVEers complain and vice versa.

Of course there is a simple solution to this: take the Darkfall route and simply design your game around one audience and let the others go hang. The trouble with this is that it isn't necessarily compatible with the mass market, as many people enjoy both aspects of the game.

So, what's to be done? Well, one solution is to simply have two versions of the game, each optimised for a different audience. For many games, this is unworkable, as the player base is too small to support it. For WOW, however, it's a different story. Fork it into eWOW and pWOW and Blizzard would have the top two MMOs, potentially with a more loyal player base, as it would be easier to make changes to meet the needs of the two communities. The eWOW rules would apply on what are currently PVE servers and the pWOW ones on PVP servers.

Incubus

2011-04-17T21:50:00.002+01:00

There seems to have been a massive reaction to the news the Blizzard are working on multi-sex versions of warlock demons, with a particular focus on half-naked images of Vin Diesel for the incubus.

I'm not so sure. Let's look at the current succubus: winged, half naked, skimpy leather outfit, sexy and deadly. There can be only one male equivalent:

He's so shameless, he'd probably do the voice for it as well!

Blogsy

2011-04-09T23:00:00.002+01:00

I'm currently experimenting with the new Blogsy blogging app for the iPad. The iPad is crying out for a decent piece of blogging software and the app I've been using until now (Blogpress) can be pretty clunky. In theory, Blogsy is much more capable (it's had good reviews), but right now I'm finding it rather counter-intuitive. I can't work out how to save things and the first draft of this post just vanished into the aether when I lent the machine to someone else.

Links also seem to be beyond me. I know it does them, but how? Maybe I'll get the hang of it in time, but I've had to switch to the regular web-browser based Blogger to finish posting about a new blogging app. Not a good sign...

Update: As you'll see from the first comment below, one of the Blogsy developers has taken the trouble to comment and offer support. That's excellent customer service and suggests a bright future.

Update 2(14/04/11): Blogsy ate another of my posts today, one I'd been working on for days. I honestly can't recommend it in its current state. I do appreciate that the developers are working hard to improve it, but it simply isn't working properly right now.

The rise of theorycraft

2011-04-07T08:00:00.001+01:00

Sometimes you have a good idea for a blopost and someone else not only beats you to it, but does it better as well.

Eddie Carrington (AKA Brigwyn) has an excellent post on the harm excessive theorycrafting can do to a game here. It's worth a read.

The long tail

2011-04-06T20:42:00.002+01:00

One of the more fashionable business concepts of the early 21st Century has been the long tail. This has taken off because organisations like Amazon are able to hold a much larger quantity of stock than conventional retailers, so are able to cater for a wide variety of minority tastes that a high-street shop could never hope to match. They can do this because their business model locates the product storage in cheap out-of-town depots, so the cost per item is much lower. In principle, all-digital stores (such as iTunes) should be able to cater for an even wider range of tastes, as the cost of storage and delivery for purely digital goods is even lower.

MMO makers are in a similar position. The cost of creating and storing new content is very low, so games like WOW can afford to include features that appeal to minority tastes, such as role-players or hardcore raiders. If someone sits on a virtual chair or kills an Internet dragon, they don't wear out or need to be re-made. The only thing that limits their re-use is the boredom of the players; a thousand people can sit on that chair simultaneously, but the same player won't want to sit on it a thousand times.

One of the things that makes life difficult for new entrants to such a market is the ability of large incumbents to spread the (already low) cost of new features over a wide player base. One of the interesting things about Rift is how the developers appear to have addressed this. They can't match WOW for player numbers to spread costs over, but there is another way. By developing tools that allow them to create content more efficiently than Blizzard can (as demonstrated by the rapid release of new content in patch 1.1), they can compensate for lower initial subscriber numbers and hence add in enough to attract a wider audience over time. It's a tactic that Blizzard will find hard to counter: re-working the ageing WOW engine to allow for rapid content creation is a significant undertaking, particularly when the top developers are away working on the mysterious Titan project.

Titan may well be the plan, of course. Whilst it would be hard to port WOW to a new, more efficient engine, it's far from impossible. Whether it's cost-effective is another matter. Given that player boredom kills everything eventually, it may well be simpler to let WOW gradually fade and move on. After all, it would still be profitable if it lost 90% of its subscribers. That's a real long tail.

It's the taking part that counts

2011-03-29T16:57:00.004+01:00

Photo: Hans-Petter Fjeld (CC-BY-SA)

I've been playing quite a bit of Rift recently. For all the accusations of it being a WOW clone (not a fundamentally bad thing, by the way), it does differ in one important respect: the approach to grouping.

Most group content in WOW is tightly regulated: five-mans are tuned for ... errr ... five people; raids are designed for ten or twenty-five. If you've got 11 people available for raiding tonight, someone has to miss out. You can't just wander up to an instance and help out, either - if your name's not on the list, you're not coming in.

That's a deliberate decision on Blizzard's part: raiding is intended to be hard, so that the most skilful players get the best rewards. The down side of this approach is that it's a very non-linear reward system. If your guild is skilled / geared enough to drop the boss with 25 people, congratulations - you win shiny purplez! If you're only good enough to do it with 26, tough luck - you get nothing.

That's led to a high-pressure environment; you have to justify your place in that 25. That brings further non-linearity: if you're the 26th best player, you get nothing whilst the 25th best is showered in riches. It's also a pain for guild officers, as someone has to make the decision as to who makes the cut for the raid, which isn't always clear. How do you fairly judge soft skills such as teamwork and situational awareness or balance current performance vs potential? There's probably only a marginal difference between number 25 and number 26, so whoever misses out may well feel miffed.

What all this means is that what may start of as a tiny difference in player ability can end up with a huge difference in reward, as the slightly better player gets better gear, which increases the gap further with every raid.

Of course, its very easy to say what's wrong with the way MMOs work; it's much harder to come up with workable alternatives. That's what makes the WAR idea of public quests, as refined by Trion into the rift system, so interesting. This takes completely the opposite approach. Anyone can join in a rift and help out - in fact, it's actively encouraged through the public group system. Because there's no limit on the number of players that can join in (other than frame rate and lag, anyway!), there is no real reason to exclude someone - even lousy DPS is better than none. There is no issue with "seeing the content" in Rift, as even ultra casuals can drop in on a rift if they happen to be in area.

Under this system, the problem changes from "who gets to participate?" to "who gets what reward?". And that's where things start to get sticky: how exactly do you measure contributions so that skill and effort is fairly rewarded?

It's this issue that tripped up Mythic early on, with some people concerned that the rewards seemed random. What makes measuring contribution hard is the question of what gets measured. Some things seem easy enough, like damage or healing done, but how do you measure debuffing or tanking? Trion talk nebulously about measuring "activity", but it's hard to see what this means other than buttons pressed: it doesn't measure actual usefulness.

This leads to what economists call perverse incentives. People get rewarded more for silly things like standing there spamming insta-cast buffs on themselves than actually contributing to the fight. This problem doesn't happen in WOW because the people rating your performance are well, people, rather than an algorithm which can be gamed.

Long term, this may be the greatest threat to Rift - it's hard to imagine any contribution rating algorithm defeating the theorycrafters for more than a few weeks. It's a noble effort, though, and I hope I'm proved wrong.

The drunkard's walk

2011-02-27T12:06:00.003Z

One of the more entertaining problems that mathematicians have addressed is what is known as a drunkard's walk. You can tell it was invented in a pub:

"Hey, what would happen if we were so pissed that we just wandered in a random direction, for a bit then wandered off in another one? How long would it take us to get home?".

"What do you mean, if? Hic!"

I've been spending a little time in the Rift beta and preview recently and some of the design decisions feel a little bit like that. One minute, I'd find myself thinking "That's fantastic! Every game should have that." and then the next I'd be sighing "Seriously, have you learnt nothing in the last six years?".

The character creation process is a good example of this. The drunken walk begins in the brighly lit streets of factions. I like the way they've done this, with the faithful Guardians pitted against the technological Defiants, each blaming the other for what's happened to the world. Like WOW, they've avoided the lazy "good and beautiful " vs "evil and ugly" clichés that pervade this genre.

Wandering into the "racial choice kebab house", the menu seems rather limited. There are only only four really different player races: human and elf (both sides have these), plus dwarves for the Guardians and a big race for the Defiant (the ~~barmey~~ Bahmi), so the choices are relatively limited.

Fortunately, there there is a wide variety of sauces available to liven things up, via the fabulous level of character customisation. There may be only four races on the menu, but the level of control of facial features, hair styles, markings, skin colour makes up for that. Two members of the same race can look very different. Particularly praiseworthy is the ease with which convincing non-European looking characters can be made. Too many games seem stuck in the "only white people are human" stereotype that comes from the European origin of many fantasy novels. Whilst some games (DDO and Vanguard) have tried this in the past, neither really made it big, so it's good to see a potentially A-list game admit the existence of non-white people, even if it's been a long time coming.

[rant]

Seriously Blizzard? How hard would it be to add some additional skin tones and facial types to your humans? Way easier to code than new hairstyles, I'd suggest. Pull your finger out and sort this. Now.

[/rant]

After the relative harmony and diversity of the kebab shop, our drunk then proceeds to make a complete fool of himself with the young ladies in the vicinity, insisting they disrobe for his entertainment and getting rightly slapped for it.

[rant]

Seriously Trion? How hard would it be to put some clothes on your female player characters? They're soldiers, not strippers. There are plenty of good-looking female clothing sets in game, so pull your finger out and sort this. Now.

[/rant]

Staggering back into the street of starter zones, our drunk is pleased to notice that his vision isn't too blurry yet. The graphics in Rift are excellent. Different in style to WOW, in that they go for the more "realistic" look (which has tripped up many games in the past as they struggled with poor performance), but it still runs well without the latest graphical hardware. They've got the balance between graphical quality and performance just about perfect here.

Unfortunately for our drunk, there aren't many available routes for getting home. That's OK the first time, but he'll get bored with it if he has to make the same journey every week. The decision to use only two starter zones seems like quite a blow to re-playability for Rift. They've definitely gone for the "quality rather than quantity" approach here. It's a relatively small world, which is fine when you're playing it for the first time, but could get old within a year.

Fumbling for his change for the night bus, our drunken mathematician manages to scatter it all over the pavement. He reaches down and picks up a coin and Hey Presto! they all appear in his hand. I love AOE looting, I really do. It's one of those "why did nobody think of this before?" moments.

Sitting on the bus, the drunken mathematician thinks back to the conversations in the pub that led to him getting so drunk in the first place:

"What would win in a fight between a crocodile and a bear?"

"Crocodile!"

"No, bear!"

"A croco-bear would beat both of them!"

Rift's soul system is incredibly flexible, allowing you to blend together the attributed of three classes. Want to be half-paladin, half-riftblade? No problem. Pick the right 3 subclasses of cleric and you could be the mythical dpshealtank.

I remember when WOW felt like that and we were all marvelling at the innovation that was talent trees. Finally, an end to all characters of the same class being the same, we could build our own little custom warriors, with a little bit of DPS, a bit of tanking and a dash of PvP. Then the mathematicians came. Not drunk ones this time, but sober. And they found the optimum tank spec and the optimum healing spec and posted it on the internet and social pressure did the rest. There was one "right" way; do anything else and you're an idiot. Ironically, by giving people choices, choice had been removed. Right now, I love the soul system, but I fear that Rift will be reduced to a handful of "correct" combinations within a few months. The sheer number of possible combinations means that balance is likely to be an issue for some time.

Is Rift worth buying? Overall, I'd say yes. It has some significant issues, but it's probably the second-best MMO out there right now. I doubt it will have the longevity of WOW, but it's pretty good and should prosper in the short term just by being a change of scenery. Also, it's important to send a signal to the market that new MMOs have a fair chance of making a profit. That encourages investors and brings us new games, which is all for the good.

The four faces of Warcraft

2011-02-11T16:51:00.002Z

As I discussed in last week's post, there are two different dimensions to the word "hard" when applied to MMOs: time and skill. Different players may want different things from the game, which makes it hard to accommodate all of them. To illustrate this, consider the four examples in the diagram above.

The fun-lovers see their games as a form of entertainment, no different to going to the cinema or the pub. They aren't particularly looking to be challenged and if they get bored they'll happily go do something else. Fundamentally the game just isn't that important to them. "It's just a game" is their motto and they really can't see why everybody else gets worked up about what should be a bit of fun. They'll happily solo for a while or maybe queue for a quick dungeon finder instance, but they certainly aren't going to take things too seriously and find it baffling that people "waste" time reading Elitist Jerks and min/maxing their characters. No point in turning a game into a second job. They're the ones who are up in arms about the harder heroics in Cataclysm - why on earth would you want to make a game less fun?
Favourite other game: Guitar Hero.

The racers are looking to be challenged. They don't want to spend their life "grinding to get to the real game". They're the ones you see on the forums demanding faster levelling or AOEing their way through todays instance at breakneck speed. If there were an option to buy a pre-made max-level character, they'd take it in a shot. Racers are baffled by the silliness of the fun-lovers - why bother playing at all if you're not going to take it seriously? They look down on those who waste their lives away playing the game many hours at a time - it's skill that should be rewarded, not time spent.
Favourite other game: Left4Dead

The gardeners aren't all that fussed about being the best at the game - why stress so much about a bunch of pixels? They use MMOs as a way of relaxing after a stressful week: the last thing they want is a bunch of over-excited raiders getting all sweary over a boss-fight. WOW is full of gardeners, working on achievements, collecting pets, role-playing or levelling another alt. They're baffled by the racer's need to "win", but equally wonder why the fun-lovers bother playing a game they don't care that much about.
Favourite other game: The Sims

The masters are perfectionists, seeking to optimise every aspect of their characters. If you're going to play the game, at least do it properly. They look down on the "lazy" racers who aren't prepared to put the work in to get the best rewards - hard work should be rewarded in game, just as it is in real life. They find the fun-lovers deeply irritating and dread the day they end up in a group with one. Masters are the ones you see telling "hilarious" stories about spellpower-equiped death-knights, because they do a detailed inspection of everyone they group with. Masters are the ones you hear complaining about how the game has been dumbed down since Vanilla and wishing for a return of real challenge.
Favourite other game: Everquest (pre gates of discord)

Blizzard's problem is that whenever they make a change that makes one of these groups happy, they're going to annoy one of the others. That's what accounts for the seemingly contradictory feedback they receive.

How hard should an MMO be?

2011-02-03T22:24:00.004Z

Tobold wrote an interesting piece yesterday challenging the idea that playing in groups should be "harder" than soloing. Of course this raises the important questions of what we mean when we say a game is "hard" and how much difficulty is a good thing anyway?

Part of the problem is that we mean different things by the word "hard"; it can refer to something that requires either a great quantity of effort or particularly high skill and the two aren't necessarily comparable. Who's to say whether hauling coal is harder than quantum mechanics?

Older MMOs were hard in both senses. For example, EQ1 requires both skill to raid and a very long grind to get to the point where you could. In an attempt to streamline things, more modern games such as WOW have reduced the quantity of effort required to get to the highest level content, without necessarily reducing the skill requirements at the high end. It's telling that original WOW design team was dominated by high-end raiders from EQ - Vanilla WOW was aimed at that audience, with its emphasis on getting to raiding quickly. This philosophy reached its logical conclusion in Guild Wars, where it's possible to pay to skip the levelling stage completely.

The problem with this approach is that whilst you've reduced the amount of unchallenging content the high-end players have to plough through to get to the end game, you've also reduced the amount there is to do for those who either don't want or aren't able to do the raid content. Every time you make the game start quicker for raiders, you make the game end quicker for everybody else.

Consider the extreme case of a game where there is no levelling content, just one incredibly challenging boss to defeat at the end. A fight so hard (in the skill sense) that only the likes of Paragon could ever defeat it. How much fun would that game be? Now imagine the opposite extreme - a game where you could "win" by killing 28 bazillion boars in the style parodied by Southpark. Not much fun either.

A balanced game design needs both kinds of "hard" to be fun, but it also needs them in the right amount. Make your hard-as-in-skill bosses too hard and people will give up on raiding through frustration. Make them too easy and people will ... errr ... give up on raiding through boredom. Make your levelling game "kill one boar" and all the solo/small group players will run out of things to do and leave. Make it "kill 28 bazillion boars" and the raiders will give up through boredom before they reach the endgame.

Lessons have been learnt...

2011-01-25T15:01:00.004Z

Who'd be a game designer, eh? A month or so into Cataclysm, people are already complaining.

It goes like this:

BC players: "Waaaaahhhhh! Heroics and raids are too hard - WOW sucks and we're going to leave!"

Blizzard: "OK - we've listened to your feedback and made gearing up much easier in Wrath via fast-playing heroics and Dungeon-Finder."

Wrath players: "Waaaaahhhhh! Heroics and raids are too easy - WOW sucks and we're going to leave!"

Blizzard: "OK - we've listened to your feedback and made heroics much harder in Cataclysm, so you need a guilded group to complete them and they take several hours."

Cataclysm players: "Waaaaahhhhh! Heroics and raids are too hard - WOW sucks and we're going to leave!"

Meanwhile, the subscriber numbers have climbed steadily and then plateaued at around 12 million, vastly in excess of any other MMO out there.

So what's going on? Is the player base just a bunch of spoiled brats who will complain no matter what Blizzard do?
I don't really think so. The (rather boring) truth, is that a lot of different people play WOW and they want different things from the game. Some want to test their elite gaming skills, some want to interact and socialise with their friends in a stimulating but not ball-breaking game world and some just want to pwn n00bs in PVP. Even worse, not everybody wants the same thing consistently. Some may want to do hard-core raiding a few times a week and potter about chatting the rest of the time.

Blizzard do quite a good job of providing something for each of these competing player-groups, but it's impossible to design a game that is both ultra-hardcore and casual-friendly at the same time. So the people who don't like the current balance make a huge fuss, Blizzard changes the game in response to feedback, then those who liked it the way it was complain and the cycle continues.

The problem here isn't the game, it's the players. We all need to accept that a perfect game for us isn't a perfect game for everybody else and stop making such a fuss when things don't go exactly our way. I liked the casual-friendly style of Wrath - it allowed me to get into raiding when it would otherwise have been impossible for me under BC and Vanilla, but I also know other people who liked raiding in BC but couldn't be bothered with it in Wrath. You simply can't please all of us.

I'd suggest an alternative policy for Blizzard:

Discontented players: "Waaaaahhhhh! Heroics and raids are too easy/hard/potato-shaped/orange/whatever - WOW sucks and we're going to leave!"

Blizzard: "We're professional game designers. We know what we're doing. You have to understand that other people have different opinions and we can't just build a game to suit you alone, or it would have only one subscriber. There are plenty of other MMOs out there if you don't like this one. Feel free to try them and you'll be welcome back any time you decide the grass isn't always greener on the other side of the fence."

Nerfbat incoming?

2011-01-14T09:54:00.000Z

MMO Champion are reporting that Paragon have completed the world first Heroic Kill of Nefarian. What I find interesting about this screenshot is the number of dancing bears at the back. Eleven druids out of a party of 25. Now I love druids, they're a wonderful flexible class that can tank, melee DPS, ranged DPS or heal depending on spec, but 11/25? That suggests a slight imbalance.

I'd suggest all you druids out there get into kitty form and stealth-up quick, before Ghostcrawler finds you.

The holy hand-grenade of Antioch

2011-01-12T16:09:00.001Z

One of the things I'm enjoying in Cataclysm at the moment is just wandering around and visiting strange areas of the map that were previously unreachable. One of the odder parts that I've found recently is just north of Thunder Bluff, at the top of the path labelled Stonetalon Pass.

There you can find an area full of very strange critters indeed.

Killer rabbits:

Knife-wielding prairie dogs:

Mice with shotguns:

If anyone has the remotest idea what these strange creatures are doing there, I'd love to hear it. Even more strangely, they appear to change back and forth between this form and normal critter form from time to time. It's a mystery...

Fire phasers!

2011-01-06T19:28:00.000Z

Phasing is a potentially significant advance for storytelling in MMOs, because it allows the world to evolve around you without breaking it for others, so Blizzard are to be congratulated for exploring the idea in WOW. It's been used to good effect in the post-Cataclysm Silverpine Forest, where the Forsaken are locked in an evolving war against the Worgen. From an individual's perspective, it looks much like a single-player RPG. And that's the problem...

Fundamentally, MMOs are not single-player games. They aren't ever going to do as good a job on that front as the genuine article, because they have so many other constraints on them. Turning an MMO into a pseudo-single-player game means that not everybody is in the same reality at once, which starts to gnaw away at that feeling of being in a virtual world. That's already been eroded to quite an extent through the use of instances and dungeon finder and this is one step further.

Let me give you a concrete example. Yesterday, I needed to level herbalism on one of my alts, so I went to Silverpine, which was the appropriate level zone. I was pleasantly surprised by how few other people were there and managed to gather many herbs quickly. Why was the zone so empty, when it's such good fun? Well, it wasn't of course. There were many people there, each occupying different phases of the zone, so they never interacted. If you've never done the Silverpine quests, you can quite happily wander around in this alternate reality picking herbs to your heart's content. It's easy, but it's hardly challenging and it's barely an MMO at all.

At their core, MMOs are about interacting with other people and we tamper with that at our peril. It might make for some nicely plotted solo quests, but I'm not sure it's worth the price.

Grrrr.....

2011-01-02T19:51:00.001Z

There isn't much that can be done to stop the plague of LOLers on RP servers, as the Blizzard staff don't do anything. Which leaves us with petty revenge, which is the sweetest kind...

Merry Christmas

2010-12-25T10:19:00.000Z

It's been quite snowy here in the UK recently and we aren't really equipped to handle it as a nation.

For example, some people really don't get the idea of a dog sledge:

Happy Christmas to you all out there!

20 Days of Warcraft - what class & race are you most like in real life?

2010-11-28T19:22:00.001Z

This is a bit of a tricky one. If it was about which class / race combo I'd *like* to be IRL, I'd have no trouble; that would be troll shaman. I'd love to be as cool & dangerous as a troll, and ankh and astral recall sure would prove handy. Even I could manage to avoid dying IRL more than once an hour, so I'd effectively be death-proof.

In my more crotchety moments, I'd like to be a forsaken afflock, bringing slow, agonising death to those who cross me. Boring presentation? Haha! Curse of tongues! Spy a smug-looking jogger out of my window on a winter morning? Haha! Curse of exhaustion! Annoying people getting in my way in a supermarket? Fear should do the trick!

Unfortunately, the question is about what I'm really most like. The sad truth is that I'm closer to being a follower of The Way of Rincewind than the Way of the Warrior, so melee classes are right out. I tend to solve problems with my head, so mage seems the closest fit. As for race, I'd say gnome, but that would leave me a little ... short. So I'll go for three drunken gnomes standing on each other's shoulders to try to get into a bar. That's about right height-wise, plus it has the requisite level of coordination and balance.

20 days of Warcraft - favourite dungeon

2010-11-24T21:16:00.000Z

As Pilf has rightly pointed out, the word "dungeon" has a pretty loose interpretation in WOW. We old D&D hands sort of know what it means - a big base full of enemy mobs that you have to fight your way through, but in WOW the meaning has been diluted. Does the word "dungeon" include only five-mans? Raids? Does it have to be instanced at all?

I've taken the latter route when thinking about my favourite WOW dungeon. Jintha'Alor is interesting in a number of ways. Of course there's the strong lore connection to the trolls (Vilebranch in this case), combined with a strong series of quests that lead through it.

But it's also an interesting glimpse into an alternate reality, where Blizzard had taken the non-instanced, open world dungeon route that games like Everquest and Vanguard followed and it tells us a lot about their thinking and the consequences it has had for game play.

Jintha'Alor started life very close to that original EQ model. The mobs inside were all elites and needed a party to defeat. But it wasn't cut off from the world in the way other dungeons were. Everything else was instanced, so that multiple parties could progress through the content in parallel, without ever meeting. In fact that model has become so dominant in WOW now that the word "instance" is itself used as a synonym for "dungeon".

Going down the instanced route was a controversial move at the time and for some people it still is. The open-world model has a number of strengths:

It feels more realistic than the instanced world, where people walk in through a door ahead of you and then vanish from your sight.
It encourages social interaction between the players - it's very easy to team up when there are a number of people in the vicinity and coordination is needed to prevent conflict over resources.
It also encourages good behaviour on an individual level. Act like an arse in an open-world dungeon and it's not just a bunch of anonymous strangers who notice, it's all the people on your server of a similar level.

However, it's also important to remember the problems with open-world instances that caused Blizzard to move away from them:

Having all those people in the same place can induce huge loads on both the server and the player's computers. Think Dalaran with combat! Ultimately, though, this is a technical problem that could have been resolved using beefier servers, carefully placed walls and doors, etc.
The real killer-problem is the flip-side of the increased social interaction discussed above. Whilst open-world dungeons encourage cooperation on an individual level, they vastly increase the level of conflict between different groups. With only one boss to kill between them (on a long re-spawn timer to prevent him becoming a loot piñata), kill-stealing and boss-camping was commonplace. Ultra-competitive guilds would log-off en-masse where the boss spawned, then take turns to watch for the re-spawn to prevent anyone else getting it. When he reappeared, the watcher would summon everybody back from real life and they'd kill the boss. Essentially, being a leading progression guild required you to be available 24/7.
"Cock blocking" was common, where leading guilds deliberately camped bosses below their gear level to prevent others from killing them and catching up.

Instances solve a lot of these problems - you can't kill-steal, you can't be blocked from progressing and you don't have to give up your whole life to raid. Initially, they seemed great, but as WOW has developed, they've become increasingly detached from the world. Remember when the "summoning stone" was once just a "meeting stone" and you actually had to travel to a place to enter it? Now we're in an era of cross-server, instant-teleport in instances that may as well not be in the game world at all. It's more like a separate mini-game. In the rush to make everything "more convenient", we've lost a lot. The joy of travel, meeting strangers who actually mattered because you'd probably meet them again in a few days and an any sense of a broader community beyond your specific guild.

Open world-dungeons were deeply flawed as a concept, but it seems to me that the Wrath way is even worse. It just doesn't feel much like an MMO any more; just another cooperative online game like Left 4 Dead. It's all rather sad. To paraphrase Larkin:

And that will be Azeroth gone,

The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The friendly PUG of strangers.
There'll be solo content; it will linger on
In empty expanses that no-one visits;
But all that remains for us will be "go go go" and emblems.

20 days of Warcraft - favourite emote

2010-11-23T15:01:00.001Z

Coming from an RP-server, I've had occasion to use most of the built-in game emotes from time to time. But most of the time, they're too basic a tool for what I'm trying to convey. For example, /kiss doesn't tell you what kind of kiss it is - is it a peck on the cheek, an insincere air-kiss or a passionate snog.

That's why my favourite emote is ... /emote itself. With that, I can communicate greater nuances of meaning than a basic emote. Sven smiles coldly says something completely different to Sven smiles warmly or Sven smiles through the tears.

With /em , it's possible to say things without speaking, much as actors use their expressions and body language to convey mood. /dance just makes your character dance on screen; Sven dances with technical perfection, but without passion conveys volumes about your character and his emotional state.

The great thing about /em is that it can be used to add layers of characterisation in almost very RP situation. It's that flexibility that makes it so powerful.

20 days of Warcraft - favourite NPC

2010-11-22T17:51:00.006Z

My instant reaction when thinking about my favourite NPC in WOW was one name: Varok Saurfang. He's an incredible, admirable figure. He knows he participated in the horrors that the Orcs committed under the blood curse and remembers it clearly:

"I think it was the sounds of the draenei children that unnerved most of them... You never forget... Have you ever been to Jaggedswine Farm? When the swine are of age for the slaughter... It's that sound."

Yet, unlike other major characters who have lived through traumatic times in Azeroth, he has retained his reason. Neither wallowing in self-pity like Arthas, nor descending into the deranged messianic delusions of Kael'thas. Even the death and corruption of his beloved son, Dranosh hasn't broken him. He's still there, advising Thrall, restraining Garrosh. Doing his duty.

He watched my back when I got sent on the suicide-mission to kill Varidus the Flenser, and he's watching everyones else's back too - he's made it clear that he'll kill Garrosh Hellscream if he takes the orcs back to their savage past. He's a great man, a great role model, but he's not my favourite NPC.

Then my thoughts turned to one of the most memorable moments in all the years I've played WOW. The glorious, deranged figure of Grand Apothecary Putress on the rise above the Wrathgate:

"Did you think we had forgotten? Did you think we had forgiven? Behold, now, the terrible vengeance of the Forsaken! Death to the Scourge! And death to the living!"

He comes so close to succeeding ... wounding the Lich King, slaughtering Alliance and Horde alike. It's still not entirely clear who was really behind the whole scheme - Sylvanas would certainly like us to think it was Varimathras, but could he really have done all that without her knowing?

Great lines, glorious evil and fantastic dress-sense. Putress is the villain's villain. I do hope we haven't seen the last of him. He's not my favourite NPC either, though.

It took me a while to write this post, which is why it's a day behind everybody else's on the same topic. I kept finding interesting, distracting things to do: playing a subtlety rogue in the Cataclysm beta (finally, a rogue that feels like a rogue at low levels, not just a poorly armoured fury warrior), watching a film, going shopping, sleeping.

But there's one man (or, to be precise, several orcs) who have me beaten when it comes to the fine art of work-avoidance. I am, of course, talking about that slacker of slackers, the Lazy Peon. Despite the close attentions of Foreman Thazz'ril and his blackjack-wielding thugs (also known as player characters), the peons still find time for a quick snooze when they're supposed to be working.

Quite how the lazy peons ever made it to the dizzying heights of level four is beyond me (although their rested XP bonus must be pretty high), but it's pretty certain they won't be going any further. Why would they? Azeroth's a dangerous place, full of Alliance marauders, demonic invasions and rampaging armies of the undead.

"So, you're recruiting soldiers for a death or glory battle against the relentless forces of undeath in the frozen wastelands of the north, eh?"

"Actually, I'm rather busy at the moment. Logs to chop and all that. Is it time for tea?"

"Zzzzzzzzzzz....."

If the tempting fortunes of the gold farmers can't stir them enough to run to Orgrimmar (it's an awfully long way, you know), you can hardly expect the lazy peons to risk death for a few silly bits of loot. And we all know what faces you if you if you are foolish enough to travel as far as Outland: the dreaded booterang, hurled from above. It's a lazy peon's idea of hell.

I'm not surpised that Blizzard's statistics show a large number of players never get beyond level ten. They've chosen the life of a lazy peon. It may not pay much, but it sure beats being eaten by dragons!

Lazy Peon, I salute you. You're my favourite NPC. Now it's time for a nice kip...

20 Days Warcraft - favourite race

2010-11-20T21:05:00.004Z

One of the problems of designing a virtual world is drawing the balance between making it different enough to be interesting and being so alien and strange that people can't relate to it without making a huge investment of time and effort. This particularly applies to playable races - you can make alien NPCs mysterious and incomprehensible, because players don't have to be able to think like them to play the game, but player races have to be something that people can identify with.

The lazy default for fantasy MMOs is the Tolkein-lite world. Humans (white, european-looking ones, of course - in the clichéd world of the hack MMO, nobody looks african or asian), elves (beautiful but aloof ... yawn), dwarves (like a drink, grumpy ... seriously - what happened to sneezy, dopey, happy and bashful dwarves?), plus a smattering of ugly green-skinned races to be the bad guys.
It's to Blizzard's credit that they have managed to avoid the worst stereotypes of the fantasy world. Sure, they had to put in humans, elves, dwarves etc for commercial reasons, but many of the other races are a mile away from the usual fantasy cliché. Orcs, for example, aren't the monosyllabic grunting thugs you normally see (well, Garrosh is, but he's notable because he's an exception), they're a sophisticated tribal society with deep shamanic roots. They may not be as technologically advanced as the humans, but they have a rich culture.

How have Blizzard done this? Well, in loose terms they have taken cultural models from non-western civilisations and used them as inspiration for the other races. It certainly isn't a direct cultural copy (that would make it hard to fit those societies into Azeroth), but the similarities are there. Pewter over at The 'mental Shaman) (as part of a fascinating series on fanart portrayals of the females of different races) has described this as cultural appropriation, which feels more like a fragment of the truth than the whole story to me. Let's look at the alternatives to Blizzard's approach:

Invent cultures for the non-human races that are unlike any on earth. First of all, this is a very hard thing for a human mind to do - where do you get your cultural models from if not human experience? Secondly, it's difficult for players to identify with a culture so far from their own experience. This means they'll either get ignored or pigeonholed into simple categories like "remorseless" or "good", which lapses back into cliché very rapidly.
Don't have other races - just have different types of human. A world where the different "races" are simply different nations of people is superficially attractive. However, it would make "cultural appropriation" issues even more of a concern - at least it's clear that a Tauren is physically not the same as a Native American, so the expectations of a realistic cultural portrayal are minimised. Cultural nuances are hard to handle with the crude implements of an MMO, an effect which would only be magnified if the other "races" looked human. It would be very easy for such a game to descend into crude racial stereotyping.
Make all the playable races variants on one culture. Whilst this would avoid the pitfalls of cultural stereotyping, the price is excluding those other cultures completely. Whilst I'm sure there must be some people for whom a culturally and racially pure game would be just the ticket, I'm not sure I'd want to share a space with them.

So overall, then, I think Blizzard's approach, though flawed, is probably as good as can be reasonably achieved. It also has the bonus (on an RP server, at least) of allowing people to see things (albeit at a distance) from the perspective of a culture other than their own, which can only be a good thing.

All of this is an incredibly long pre-cursor to actually answering the bloody question, which is "which of the various races in Azeroth is my favourite?".

Whilst I probably have most in common with the eccentric, geeky gnomes on a personal level, the race I come back to again and again is trolls. Dark and savage, yet once the most powerful group on Azeroth, the trolls draw on a range of cultural influences, from the meso-american style of the cities to the western myth of the primitive jungle-dweller that Conrad used as a device to expose the barbarism of european colonialism in The Heart of Darkness. The presence of the Kurzen quest-line, set deep in the troll-infested Stranglethorn Jungle suggests that this analogy is intentional on Blizzard's part.

So whilst trolls may, on the surface, may appear to be the worst kind of ja-fake-an stereotype, there's a lot more going on there. They're the mirror that the "civilised races" dare not look in. The one that exposes their own savagery. Trolls tell us things about ourselves that we'd rather not hear.

"The horror! The horror!"

20 Days of Warcraft- favourite class

2010-11-19T16:38:00.005Z

Ama over at Specced for Drama has an interesting posting challenge here. Essentially, the idea is to answer one of twenty questions each day. The first one seems, at first sight, simple:

Favourite class and why?

Of course, the correct answer should be Shaman. They have so much utility, are deeply tied into the lore and have a unique mechanic in totems. They combine high ranged DPS with heavy armour (glorious for levelling) and have ankhs in case of emergency.

I love druids, too. Heal, tank, ranged and melee DPS in one class, with added stealth and the wonder that is swift flight form.

But ultimately, there's one thing that decides it for me: Zeppelins. I hate 'em. Sitting there waiting for the darn thing to turn up. The second you go AFK, it appears, the second you come back, it leaves.

So ultimately, my favourite class in WOW is mage. No floating about on those goblin death-traps with Arthasdklol for me. Just nice, safe, clean teleporting. It's how travel was meant to be. Compared to waiting for a Zeppelin, being reduced to a bloody stain on the ground by your feeble armour and lack of healing is merely an inconvenience.

The end of the Horde?

2010-11-08T18:00:00.001Z

When making my previous post on the 20 most powerful people in Azeroth, I was struck by one recurring theme: how little many of the Horde races would lose from leaving it.

In the past there have been good reasons for the different factions banding together under the Horde banner. They were facing a large external military threat (whether it be demonic or undead) that was best countered by large, organised armies. Come the Cataclysm, that's no longer true. The main bad guy of the expansion is a big dragon, which isn't the kind of thing an army is much use against - that's more a job for a small group of elite troops.

The Horde has always been something of a rag-tag coalition, mostly held together by the various leaders' personal loyalty to Thrall. With that gone, what's left?

Sure, there's an external threat from the Alliance, but that only really exists because of Garrosh's aggression. If the other Horde races were to distance themselves from that, there's no reason why they couldn't live in harmony with other nations. Well, OK, maybe the Forsaken would have issues, but I'm starting to get the impression they're strong enough to stand alone. They don't seem to be getting much military assistance from their allies in any event, so they may feel they are having their hands tied by the Horde leadership.

The Trolls don't really need the Horde's assistance in retaking the Darkspear Isles any more - that job's done. Given Garrosh's bad relationship with Vol'jin, they're unlikely to get much help from their orcish neighbours in the near future anyway.

The Tauren are in conflict with the Alliance, but mostly as a result of their ties to the Horde. A little druidic mediation could easily lead to a ceasefire there, allowing the Alliance to concentrate its forces on Orgrimmar. Whilst they had a lot in common with Thrall's Horde, they have very little with Garrosh's. In fact, they're probably more natural members of the Alliance than the new, rampaging, Horde.

The Sin'dorei have only ever been members of the Horde for pragmatic reasons - culturally there's nothing in common. Now that Kael'thas is gone, the door might be open for them to re-join the Alliance too. That might be tempting for another reason, too. The only really dangerous force on their doorstep is the Forsaken, who aren't exactly famous for being good team players. Alliance troops in Silvermoon may provide more protection than a piece of paper saying you're friends.

That leaves the Orcs and the Bilgewater goblins. The latter do need a strong neighbour in their current state, but wouldn't really be a huge help in the war effort. The Orcs do need allies right now - they're in a huge war. But do those allies need them?

The twenty most powerful people in Azeroth

2010-11-07T12:18:00.007Z

With Forbes publishing their list of the most powerful people on the planet this week, it got me thinking: who are the most powerful people in Azeroth at the start of Cataclysm? For the purposes of this list, I've only included humanoids; dragons, demons and the like have been left out.

I'm sure your list will differ, so debate away!

1. The Jailer of the Damned
Straight in at number one this year, Bolvar Fordragon has taken on what is probably the hardest (and most powerful) roles Azeroth has to offer. With the fall of Arthas, Bolvar heroically sacrificed himself to take control of the Scourge and prevent it running amok in Azeroth. Bolvar vies with Thrall as one of the nicest guys in Azeroth, but the fact remains that whatever is left of him controls a giant army of undead minions. Should he choose to unleash it, for good or evil, it would be the most powerful force on Azeroth once more, under his complete control. All of this makes him the most powerful person on Azeroth.

2. Sylvanas Windrunner
Even under the relatively close oversight of Thrall, Sylvanas's apothecaries managed to create a blight so powerful that it harmed Arthas himself. Under the unsophisticated supervision of Garrosh, she has thrived, using both military might and Azeroth's equivalent of WMD to cut a swathe through Gilneas. A Lich Queen in all but name, her authority at home is unquestioned and her forces were barely halted at Gilneas City. For any other playable faction, the question "would they win if they took on the whole of Azeroth?" has a clear answer: "no". For the Forsaken it's "hmmmm, maybe...if they planned it right." That's what makes Sylvanas the number two on this list.

3. Varian Wrynn
Repulsive egomaniac he may be, but you have to hand it to Varian when it comes to old-fashioned rule by force. He's building castles to keep the peasants from revolting and his troops are everywhere. As a result, there's no serious challenge to his leadership of his nation and he has a large and disciplined army. That makes him number three.

4. Thrall
He may be this year's biggest faller, but Thrall still matters more than any other orc. Despite handing over the formal title of Warchief to Garrosh, if Thrall ever came back to reclaim the title, all but a hardcore group of Garrosh loyalists would welcome him with open arms. Couple this with his links into the Earthen Ring and he's still one of the most powerful people in Azeroth. He may be a little busy being loved-up with Aggra right now, but the old fella's still got it.

5. Trade Prince Steamwheedle
Azeroth's man of mystery. We don't even know the real name of the head of the Steamwheedle Cartel, but they're everywhere. He may not have a large standing army, but he's got the resources to hire one pretty quickly if he needs to. His neutral position between the Alliance and Horde, combined with huge wealth, gives him huge bargaining power, Cataclysm or no.

6. Cho'gall
A member of both the Shadow Council and Chief of the Twilight's hammer clan, Cho'gall is one of the major forces behind the Cataclysm. He'd rate more highly if he was his own man (or should that be ogre? ogres?), but he's really just a pawn for C'Thun.

7= Tyrande Whisperwind / Malfurion Stormrage
Whilst the night elves aren't the greatest force in Azeroth, Tyrande and Malfurion are arguably the wisest leaders out there, so they make the best of limited resources, which gives them influence beyond mere numbers.

9. Varok Saurfang
He may be sitting on his backside in Northrend at the moment, but the Orcish military's true loyalty lies with Saurfang, not Garrosh. If it came to a power struggle, there's no doubting who the winner would be. Saurfang may be holding back for now, but his is real power of the "boots on the ground" variety, which beats official titles every time.

10. Muradin Bronzebeard
The newly unified dwarf nation is a potentially powerful force, but is riven by divisions. The loyalty of Moira Thaurissan and her Dark Iron followers is questionable at best and betrayal from within is a real possibility. This makes Muradin's hold on power rather tenuous, even if the forces he commands are theoretically strong.

11. Garrosh Hellscream
What? The Warchief of the Horde outside the top 10? In normal times, this would seem strange, but Garrosh is in a very weak position right now. He doesn't even have the full backing of orcs themselves, let alone the rest of the horde. The Tauren mistrust him after what happened with Cairne, Vol'jin's trolls are close to seceding, and Sylvanas openly defies him. Garrosh is the classic case of "all mouth and no trousers". He talks big, but his true power is very limited.

12. Lor'Themar
Despite winning Azerothian Paperclip Collector's Man Of The Year for the third year running, Lor'Themar has yet to show that his unrivalled skills in the efficient procurement of office stationery translate to the broader world stage. His simple slogan of "Hey, at least I'm not Kael'Thas" is enough to keep him in power for now, but in times of war, the Sin'dorei may turn to more experienced leaders such as Liadrin.

13. Moira Thaurissan
Moira's Dark Irons may be mistrusted by the other dwarves, but her heritage gives her a powerful claim to the throne that some may support. A bid for power may not be too far away.

14. Magatha Grimtotem
Following her involvement with the death of Cairne, Magatha has lost her direct influence in Thunder Bluff. However, the Grimtotem are still a strong force and her links to Twilight's Hammer mean she may rise again.

15. Baine Bloodhoof
The tauren are a proud and noble people, but their leader has been thrust into the job unexpectedly, in a situation where mistrust between the tauren and orcs is at an all-time high. It's not yet clear whether Baine has the skills to handle this situation.

16. Jaina Proudmoore
Whilst the forces under her direct command are limited, they are supplemented by her powerful magic, particularly her unique: "make an army size portal to anywhere whenever the plot demands it" spell. This would make them an effective fighting force in practice, as they could run rings around conventional armies.

17. Vol'jin
Vol'jin is skilled leader and a hero to his people, having led them to their new home in the newly renamed Darkspear Isles. However, the Darkspear are few and he has powerful enemies, not least Garrosh himself. It will take all Vol'jin's skill to keep himself and his people alive through the troubled times of Cataclysm.

18. Genn Greymane
The people of Gilneas were once a powerful nation, but the Worgen curse and subsequent Forsaken invasion have hit them hard. They are a homeless people now, and would struggle without the assistance of the Alliance. However, the leadership skils Genn has shown during the recent years of turmoil should see them rebuild rapidly.

19. Trade Prince Gallywix
Probably the least secure of all the faction leaders in his position, he has a rag-tag band of Goblins under him, who mostly hate his guts. Getting out of that sticky situation may prove a little tricky for a minor trade prince.

20. Gelbin Mekkatorque
He may have a mechanostrider with frikkin' laser beams, but Mekkatorque couldn't even organise the retaking of Gnomeregan from a bunch of Troggs. His real power is very limited.

The mask

2010-11-02T20:03:00.001Z

One of the things that has always fascinated me is the different way gamers view online anonymity. As anyone who's read my rants about Real ID will know, I value my privacy pretty highly and I've found it hard to understand why others don't feel the same. Sure, we've all had bad experiences with people hiding behind that mask acting like arseholes, but then some people just ... are aresholes, and I'd never put it down to anything more than that; the majority of the anonymous players I've met have been perfectly polite and respectable.

There's a superb article by Jamie Madigan over at GamePro that sheds a little more light on this from a game designer's perspective. Madigan quotes one designer, John Comes of Uber Entertainment, as saying:

"Anonymity gives the illusion of zero consequences and the issues it causes have factored into every game I've designed."

That's so far from my own experiences that it's hard to imagine how we can be observing the same thing - how can I be seeing friendly, cooperative behaviour from anonymous players on my RP server in WOW, while others are seeing malignant dog-eat-dog social breakdown?

Fortunately, Madigan comes to the rescue. The research he quotes suggests that anonymous people don't just automatically behave badly but, in the absence of a strong sense of self, look for cues from others as to the "right" way to behave. Anonymous players thrust into a server with a strong community may actually behave better than they would otherwise. Put the same people into an environment where aggression and selfishness are the norm, and you get bad behaviour.

I'd always put it down to personal prejudice that the behaviour of the people from the PvP servers that Argent Dawn sadly shares a battlegroup with was so much worse than my nice little fluffy-kitten-filled RP realm, but Madigan's article implies that it's the hostile nature of PvP servers that makes people act that way.

It seems my drunken philosopher friend was right...

Balanced for whom?

2010-10-25T21:24:00.002+01:00

I've been having quite a lot of fun pottering around in the Cata beta, doing all the Alliance quests I never bothered with until now, so it's taken me a while to get round to trying out all the 4.0.1 changes in "real WOW".

As a first step, I tested out my arcane mage to see how the rotation and DPS compared to what it was previously. It seemed like a good place to start - mages are reported to be doing fairly good DPS in 4.0.1 (perhaps a little too much in the case of fire) and I'm fairly familiar with the arcane changes and the glyphs needed. Straight off the block, without much practice, I'm doing comparable DPS with arcane to before, with my unfamiliarity with the new rotation compensated for by the fact that it's so ... absurdly ... simple (see above). Peak arcane damage is obtained by ... spamming one button. Vanilla frost mages and destro locks may remember that feeling. The only reason to stop spamming that one button is because you're running low on mana, when you have to move to a lower-cost (but still simple) rotation until you have your mana regen back. Then it's back to AB spam.

Next step is my warlock. Destro was reported to be doing pretty good DPS, so I thought I'd give that a try. Not so good - my DPS was half what it was before, even after checking gems/glyphs/enchants. Right now I do lousy DPS even with EasyDestro to help me.

My mage and warlock have fairly similar gear, and both specs are reported to be doing good DPS, so what's up? Well, let's take a look at the destro warlock priority flowchart kindly provided by The Cursed Gnome:

I think most people would agree this this is a whole bunch more complicated than the current arcane mage rotation - the reason why the same player in equivalent gear is doing way more DPS with arcane than destro is fairly basic - arcane is simply easier at the moment. Of course a lot of these differences will fade as I become more familiar with the destro rotation, but the core problem will remain: destro takes more concentration than arcane, which means it's harder to keep up max DPS whilst avoiding all the other hazards a raid might throw at you. Not impossible, mind, just harder: I suspect a high-end progression raider would have no difficulty with either.

All of which raises the question: "what skill level should you balance around?". Rather than turn this into a mage vs warlock debate (the two specs I discussed above were just the first ones I happened to test), let's consider two imaginary specs, red and blue, as shown on the diagram below.

The curve along the bottom shows a normal distribution (sometimes known as a bell curve), to represent the variation in player skill. In this case, by skill I mean the ability to execute a complex rotation / priority system in a raid environment, with all the attendant distractions. The red and blue lines represent the DPS that is achieved by our two specs in a raid environment, assuming that they're balanced when played perfectly.

It's that "perfect play" assumption that causes the problem. Stick to it and the blue and red specs will be equally represented amongst the best players, but for the vast bulk in the middle, blue is clearly a better choice. Unfortunately, if you balance around the abilities of the typical player (or even the typical raider), so that the lines cross there, red will be significantly better for elite players and the blue spec will vanish from high end content.

The ideal way round this would be to make DPS scale equally well with skill (and gear), but that's a tricky task. In 4.0.1 at least, Blizzard aren't there yet. The simplicity of arcane makes it clearly a better choice for anyone below the elite, for whom the complexity of destro means that it delivers worse results in practice. This is purely a personal preference, but it seems to me that the "sweet spot" for complexity is roughly where fire and affliction are now. Arcane seems too easy and destro too complex.

Unprepared for the life of a ruler

2010-10-19T18:31:00.004+01:00

Some of the kindly folks at MMO Champion have posted screenshots from the PTR covering the moment when Thrall appoints Garrosh leader of the Horde.

It's all a bit strange to me - who's been teaching Garrosh all those long words and humility? It's either just incredibly lazy writing on Blizzard's part (another personality change for Garrosh *sighs*) or something sinister is going on. None of this conversation seems to match the Garrosh we know from Cataclysm.

So what's going on? Is he possessed by some sinister external force at the time the conversation takes place, or is this the "real" Garrosh and the testosterone-fueled halfwit from Cataclysm the plant? I do hope there will be some rational explanation for this at some point.

Edit:

It seems Garrosh does have some fans. Even I smiled at this one!

The trouble with Cataclysm

2010-10-18T19:37:00.003+01:00

In general, I'm a huge fan of the latest WOW expansion, Cataclysm. Blizzard have introduced widespread changes to the game (to the extent that it can almost be considered WOW 2) and advanced the broader plot and relations between the Horde and Alliance in a realistic way.

I like the way the classes have been revamped and I'm overjoyed at the inclusion of Goblins from an RP perspective. Even the way Blizzard has worked in ~~werewolves~~ Worgen has been reasonably compatible with existing lore and will likely draw a new fanbase to the game. Better still, they'll be drawn to the Alliance, which means the grand influx of drooling LOLers that has afflicted the Horde since the arrival of the Blood Elves may abate somewhat.

So what's the problem? Well, I've just seen the Cataclysm trailer, which places heavy emphasis on the expansion's big nemesis, Deathwing, and I'm really not bothered if he lives or dies. He's just a big dragon. We've fought countless big dragons before and it doesn't feel all that special. I know Deathwing is deeply grounded in lore, but I just don't feel any animosity towards him. I really disliked Kael'thas and Arthas, because they had defined personalities that you could get to grips with. But Deathwing? Meh.

I want to wipe that smug smile off Varian's face or laugh at Garrosh headbutting himself to death against a steel mirror, but Deathwing is just a void. Apart from being big and fierce, what do we know about his personality?

Without that kind of emotional involvement in his demise, I can't escape the feeling that this may lead to us all feeling a bit let down when Deathwing finally falls. Does anyone really care?

Junk gear

2010-10-11T21:28:00.001+01:00

Blizzard's plans to introduce reforging in Cataclysm are a welcome change for high level items, as in principle they mean that more gear can be used, rather than disenchanted.

The trouble is, reforging applies only to high level items (I think the lower limit is iLevel 200 in the Beta at present), which leaves a whole bunch of stuff (e.g. in Outland) which was designed for the old stat weightings (e.g. spirit being useful for mages) that is now useless.

It's hard to see what the benefits of this lower limit on reforging are. As things stand, many formerly useful quest rewards are now just vendor trash. Of course this could be resolved by re-working all the items in Outland and Northrend, but wouldn't it just be easier to remove the lower limit on reforging?

I'm baffled...

And I didn't speak up because I was not a ...

2010-10-07T22:00:00.003+01:00

Keeva has an excellent post on the use of offensive language here. What I find curious about the post is the almost apologetic tone of it, as if it is somehow unreasonable to ask people to stop being racist, sexist or ablist.

I'll be a little more direct. If you ever describe someone you dislike as a "retard", something you dislike as "gay", someone you think is being mean as a "Jew" or a victory as "rape", the very least you can expect is a permanent /ignore. I don't care if it was "just a joke" or "that's just how people like me speak" or that you think it's "political correctness gone mad".

If you're in any party or raid I have any control over, I will kick you. If I'm an officer in your guild, I will /gkick you.

Except ... I don't.

I rage at my monitor, sometimes put repeat offenders on /ignore, but mostly I stay silent and do nothing. Anything for a quiet life; just collect the epics and go. I suspect most other people do too.

Perhaps we get the community we deserve...

Free to pay

2010-10-06T15:51:00.005+01:00

One of the perennial debates in the world of MMOs is about the relative merits of the free-to-play (F2P) and monthly subscription (MS) models of payment.

In theory, these two models are very different. F2P games give you basic content for free, but rely on you buying "extras" (such as in game items that make you more powerful or faster levelling) to bring in income. MS games have a clear source of income so can optimise the gameplay around fun, rather than suffering from the need to build in obstacles that the F2P games want you to buy your way around.

Until a year or so ago, my preference was clearly for the MS model. I've enjoyed games built around that, but not the F2P rivals. Now things are starting to get blurred, though. With Blizzard seemingly moving towards a hybrid subscription + extras model in WOW, I started wondering if there was a better way to do this.
What I'd like to suggest is what I'd call a game-time as currency (GTAC) approach. To explain what I mean, I'll use the familiar example of WOW, converted to the GTAC model.

Let's assume that, rather than paying $15 per month to play the game, players pay $15 for 150 days of play (HOP), or 10c per HOP. Now imagine that auction house (AH) goods can be priced in HOP or gold and that HOP can be transferred between players as gold can. No change to the rules for which items are BOE or BOP would take place.

This will provide players with a big choice when they get an epic drop. Rather than disenchant it or sell it for more (largely useless) gold, is it worth selling it for HOP, which have real monetary value? This would have two effects: hardcore players would have a means of funding their playstyle and casuals who are short of time could still gear up for the latest raid tier. In Gevlon's terms, the goblins could play for free, subsidised by the M&S.

It would also be revenue-neutral for the game manufacturer, which would remove the perverse incentives that can mar F2P games, where the temptation is to make paid items essential for progression.

There's a big difference between HOP and gold, though. HOP are a "hard" currency, whose value is baselined against real-world money. Gold, by contrast, is a soft, fiat currency, which means that Blizzard can print more on demand by increasing drop rates and gold farmers can increase the supply by playing 24/7. This is what leads to the mudflation that plagues so many MMOs. Money can be created from nowhere, increasing the supply of it compared to the quantity of goods, leading to an increase in prices over time. This is particularly noticeable in the price of low-level "twink" items, that are out of reach for newcomers to the game, as the price is driven by the money-generating capacity of higher levels alts.

Of course the first thing you should do when proposing a change like GTAC is to ask the question "what could possibly go wrong?". It seems to me that there are three main potential obstacles: gold farmers, beggars and player-rejection.

One possible consequence of GTAC is that gold-farmers would be able to subsidise the cost of their activities by selling rare drops for HOP. In the short term, this may be an issue, but longer term I suspect not. This is because HOP are likely to displace gold as the primary currency for buying high value items and, unlike gold, "HOP don't drop". HOP farming itself may remain, simply because a third-world labour force may be prepared to charge it's time out for less than their rich western customers. However, this is no different to the current issues with gold farming. The real potential problem comes from the increases value that could come from hacked accounts, which would be worth HOP, not just gold. To get around this, I suspect that HOP trading would need to be limited to accounts with authenticators.

As with farmers, HOP beggars are likely to remain an issue. The advantage of GTAC is that if they are ignored for long enough, HOP beggars will vanish of their own accord, as they run out of play time.

Player rejection is a far trickier issue. Being able to "buy success" is an emotive topic in games. My answer to this would be that buying from other players is fundamentally different from buying from the game company. The people who are selling that success are your fellow players, who gain reciprocally by having reduced playing cost. MMOs are complex games and not every part of the game will appeal equally to everyone; allowing this kind of trading lets you focus on the parts of the game you enjoy and allows others to do the bits you don't for you, with appropriate recompense.

This leaves us with one final question: why bother with HOP at all? Why not simply allow real money trading in game? My reasoning for using this slightly indirect trading method is to avoid MMOs being classified as (and perhaps even becoming) gambling games: essentially a fruit machine with a fancy UI, where you keep playing in the hope of that one epic drop that will make you rich. With HOP, the most you can ever hope to acquire is a lifetime's free play, which isn't going to make anyone's fortune.

I'm sure there are plenty of other issues associated with GTAC that I haven't thought of, so all comments are welcome.

Edit:

Vok of Unreal Realities rightly points out in the comments below that EVE uses a very similar system to this, called Plex.

The coolest classes in WOW

2010-08-27T15:17:00.009+01:00

WOW.com has an interesting discussion topic this morning, entitled: "Does gender influence class choice?", written by a guest writer, Henry Phillips. Phillips has carried out a survey of the preferred class choice of players and matched them up with gender, to see if there are any difference.

Unfortunately, such self-selecting opinion polls are notoriously unreliable, suffering from a number of biases based on who is sampled, the way questions are worded and the tendency of people to say what they think would be appropriate, rather than what they truly believe. These make Phillips's conclusions questionable (and that's before you get to the speculation that he builds on those numbers).

So, is everything he's done worthless? No; in fact it gives us some very useful information, although it's not the information he intended to gather. Phillips has kindly linked to a web page containing the actual responses and the statistics he gathered from them. We can compare those numbers with the figures from Warcraft Realms (WR) about what classes people actually play (as opposed to the ones they say they play). The differences between the two tell us a lot about the way different classes are perceived by the player base (or at least the players sampled by Phillips). A class that shows up as popular in his statistics, but not in the actual played class statistics could be considered "cool"; it's over-reported in his data set either because people are proud of playing it or because they believe that's the right answer to give. Conversely, a class that is more popular in the WR data than in Phillips's survey might be considered "uncool" - people who play that are less likely to admit it.

Sadly, the WR data don't seem to include DK class numbers, but it's possible to compare the other classes. By taking the ratio between the percentage of people who reported playing a class to Phillips to the percentage of people who actually do according to WR, it's possible to identify which classes are considered coolest by WOW players.

As you'll see from the chart at the top of this post, there are two stand-out cases: the shaman and hunter. Far more people actually play hunters than admit to it, whereas far more people claim to play a shaman than actually do. In fact, by this measure, a shaman is over twice as cool as a hunter.

Perhaps it's the association with ~~Mr Perfect~~ ~~Old Lardarse~~ Thrall that makes a shaman seem cool and the old "huntard" tag that makes people reluctant to admit to playing them.

P.S.

My main is SAN is a shaman. In case you haven't guessed!

So let’s talk about the men in World of Warcraft

2010-08-23T09:52:00.002+01:00

Pewter has posed an interesting question over at The 'mental shaman:

"So how do my male readers feel hurt (if at all) by the sexism and prejudice they encounter in WoW, and how the game depicts men, both on the small ‘quest’ level and the overall narrative? What issues do you think the game (or gaming) gets wrong, what could it do better?"

It seems to me that there are two main aspects to this: the way the game treats male characters and the way the other players respond to men.

In most cases, the game treats male and female players just the same. There's a brief hint of difference in the way Sergra Darkthorn treats male and female characters, where she is supportive of female ones and warns male ones not to underestimate her, but that doesn't seem to me to be a bad thing - it's realistic. She operates in a very macho environment and she's fighting fire with fire. Conqueror Krenna in Conquest Hold goes a little further with her two pretty male belf ~~pets~~ bodyguards, but again I see this more as a result of trying to out-macho her male counterparts, rather than being insulting to men in general.

The game provides us with an abundance of male role-models, from the rampant egomania of Varian Wrynn and Garrosh Hellscream to the near-perfection of Thrall. I say near-perfection in Thrall's case, because (as anyone who's followed him around Undercity in the Wrathgate series knows) he does have a fat arse; it's hard to think of any other flaws, though. To me it's that breadth of role-models that prevents the game from seeming prejudiced. There are some loathsome male characters, but there are equally many strong and wise ones.

I think I'd say that the game itself treats men pretty fairly. There are good and bad ones, mostly with plausible reasons for acting the way they do.

My experiences of the player-base have perhaps been coloured by the fact that I've mostly played on English language EU RP realms. They're mostly filled with fairly sociable people from northern european countries, where sexism is relatively low compared to the world as a whole. Almost all the RP guilds I've been involved with have been run by women and I've never once felt left out or marginalised because I was male. I'm perhaps less plugged-in to the server wide social networks than they were, but that's more about my own lack of interest in these things than any anti-male prejudice. I've known plenty of men who were part of that circle. I've never once felt that I was either excluded or included in an event because of my gender.

I can think of one case where a female player was what I would call excessively flirty and wouldn't take hints of lack of interest, but that pales into insignificance compared to the horror stories of stalking I've heard from female friends.

Overall, I'd say my answer to Pewter's original question has to be no. I've had a great time playing WOW and never once felt disadvantaged by my gender. I've seen instances of sexism towards women, homophobia and racism that were far worse than anything I've experienced.

Close the walls up with our Orcish dead

2010-08-22T16:50:00.004+01:00

In peace, there’s nothing so becomes a man,
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.

The title of Warchief is used to denote the leader of the Orcs in WOW. It's a term with a very clear implication: that the primary role of a leader of the Orcish people is to lead them into battle. Equally obviously, it's a role that Thrall has gone far beyond. He's a leader of the wider Horde, a spiritual leader through his shamanic links to the Earthen Ring and a subtle politician who sees the futility of the endless conflict between the Alliance and Horde.

From our external perspective it's easy to see Thrall as the perfect leader and very hard to see how anyone could possibly think Garrosh was fit to lead in the same way. I've made quite a few posts on the topic myself!

What's started me questioning this view is reading the introduction to Seamus Heaney's version of Beowulf, which places great emphasis on the cultural context the stories were set in. Beowulf's world is one where the lords and kings are, above all, war chiefs. They are the leaders and protectors of their people. The world is full of enemies and a ruler who cannot defeat or deter them is doomed. To quote Heaney:

"All conceive of themselves as hooped within the great wheel of necessity, in thrall to a code of loyalty and bravery, bound to seek glory in the eye of the warrior world. The little nations are grouped around their lord ... a lord dies, defencelessness ensues; the enemy strikes".

For all of Thrall's modernist consensus building, it seems to me that this is closer to the tribal Orcish mindset. Garrosh is of the "big dog" school of politics; it's not enough to be strong, you must also show show it to deter others. If Thrall is the ideal leader of a democracy in wartime, Garrosh is the ideal leader of a prison gang. Never blink, never compromise.

Garrosh is the kind of man who draws a line in the sand and dares you to cross it. If you do, you know he will kill you or die trying. If you don't, he'll cross it himself, because you must have been afraid if you didn't.

Is that the kind of leadership the Horde need? Of course not. His inability to compromise with his allies will split the Horde apart in the long term, and his inability to think strategically will lose him any war eventually. But in the short term, that hyper-aggression will win him some victories and his people will love him.

Remind me who the good guys are again...

2010-07-27T17:27:00.002+01:00

Warning - the remainder of this post contains Cataclysm lore spoilers. Don't read any further if you want to keep the plot fresh.
One of the side effects of trying to avoid spoiling the Horde experience in Cataclysm is that I've been spending a lot of time playing Alliance characters. My gnome is locked out by some weird server-quirk, so I've been playing a human priest instead, which means I've been exposed to some of the new lore about Stormwind via the quests in Westfall.

The general theme of questing in this area is that whilst the war has been going on in Northrend, money has been diverted to the military ahead of the ordinary people. This means that there are a large number of homeless and destitute people who have been driven out of Stormwind and left to fend for themselves in Westfall.

Apparently their beloved king, who appears to have plenty of money available to spend on rebuilding Stormwind, maintaining a huge army and constructing giant statues of himself can't spare a single copper for trivial things like feeding the people, something that the other Alliance races manage just fine. Who does this remind me of ... ?

Oh yes, I remember!

As a player, you're throw into the middle of this, helping to defeat the new Defias leader. Before her identity is revealed, she has you embark on evil quests such as ... errr ... feeding the poor. The same poor homeless people that Wrynn's bully-buys won't even let into their sparkly new castle in Westfall. Yep, there's money for that too.

This makes me extremely uncomfortable as a roleplayer. The game effectively forces me to prop up a fascist dictator and side with him in oppressing the masses. Where's the choice here? Why can't I choose to help the victims of Wrynn's rampant egomania rise up against him?

It seems Orgrimmar isn't going to be the only place that needs a revolution.

Blogger now works with iPad

2010-07-24T10:02:00.000+01:00

It seems the recent changes to Blogger have added basic iPad compatibility.

I can't link images or do anything fancy yet, but it's a start.

A little problem

2010-07-23T06:00:00.012+01:00

Sadly, Azeroth is still deeply gnomist, despite all of SAN's protests. This boat to Theramore is too high for a poor little gnome to get on board!

Fortunately, we gnomes are an ingenious race...

I think warlocks have infiltrated Blizzard HQ

2010-07-22T06:00:00.018+01:00

According to the latest Catacysm patch notes, "Frost Armor is now trained at level 54. Up from 7".

So levelling mages who aren't frost now have one of their main means of defending themselves from incoming mobs removed. This won't affect raiding or instances, just a mage's ability to level.

Now betas are the right place to be experimenting with different game balance options, but this one is so bizarre that it's unfathomable. How did the design review meeting go?

Undercover Warlock #1: "The trouble with mages is that they're overpowered at melee range. Giving them armour that's almost as good as a warlock who has only a flimsy little voidwalker, sacrifice, demon armour, fear and drain life to protect him is just unfair."

Undercover Warlock #2: "Damn right! Nerf mages. We took away their water but they were still over-powered. Some of them survived fights with a mob their own level."

Mage class designer: "Errr... isn't that what all classes are supposed to be able to do?"

UW #1: "All classes ... except mages. Look, it says so here in the master game design document. See that bit in bloo... I mean red ink ... next to the typed bits? 'All classes should be equally balanced apart from mages, who are overpowered and should be be nerfed'"

Mage CD: "I'm sure that wasn't there this morning..."

UW #2: "Oh yes it was! I remember it very clearly. Nerf mages... that's the key message".

UW #1: "Look, let's be fair and take a vote on it. All those in favour of nerfing mages raise your hands ... and now all those against ... Well, that settles it then, two votes to one in favour of nerfing mages."

UW #2: "Next time we review them I think we need to take a look at how much mana they have. Some of them have been know to cast several spells in a row, you know."

Mage CD: "Heeelp!"

UW #1 and #2 in unison: "Muahahahaha!"

I'd love to know the rationale behind this change. It makes the game considerably harder for new players, without having any impact on end-game. Presumably it will get reverted once Azeroth is knee-deep in newbie mage corpses, but until then, perhaps it's time to try out a priest.

Mages ahoy!

2010-07-21T19:42:00.002+01:00

Gazimoff of Mana Obscura has proposed setting up a mage forum along the lines of The Warlocks' Den.

It's an excellent idea, so pop along here and support him.

Playing versus testing

2010-07-21T06:00:00.002+01:00

My little gnome mage got into his first Dungeon Finder group yesterday, only to find himself the only non-worgen in every party I've been in. In some ways it's not surprising. Worgen are the new alliance race, so it's natural that people would want to try them out. However, the flip side of this is that the starter zones for the other races are almost empty.

Part of the problem here is that people play betas for a variety of different reasons.

Some are playing it to help out with the development of a game they like and their primary purpose in playing beta is to identify bugs and report them. These are the ideal kind of beta-players as far as the developer is concerned.
For some others, it's more about playing the new content, possibly because they feel they have done everything in the existing game. The trouble with this approach is that you are just burning through the new content even sooner and are likely to reach the "bored with Cataclysm" stage earlier. It seems to me that it's better to take a break from the game if you're bored, rather than play the beta.
Some people see beta as a "try before you buy" option - it allows them to decide whether the game is enough fun to be worth spending money on. The trouble with this group is that they are prone to respond to the game as if it were finally released content. This makes them intolerant of bugs, rather than glad to see them.

Of course, most beta-testers don't fall neatly into one category or another. Whilst I'm doing my best to identify any problems and report them, there's no escaping the fact that I am enjoying the new content tremendously.

Sometimes it pays to read the quest text

2010-07-20T17:19:00.003+01:00

Reading this quest made me smile. I love gnomes...

Cataclysm beta: random thoughts 2

2010-07-20T06:00:00.048+01:00

Oooh, I like the new arcane tree at low levels. Arcane Barrage + Arcane Missiles is both lethal and efficient, arguably OP if you're used to hit & run tactics. I feel like a tiny death machine right now. Let's see how well it scales with level.
So many flight points. Very good for little legs.
I suspect those gnomish parachutes aren't 100% safe.
The quest flow is greatly improved in Dun Morogh.
Flying trolls in Ironforge. I /wave :)
Looks like I spoke too soon about how good Blizzard's quest objective mapping is. I seem to have reached a level where they aren't on the map. Presumably they're incomplete.
There's a much wider variety of quests in the starter areas - far more to do than just "kill 10 foozles".
The ideal way to spend talent points hasn't been determined yet, so I'm just picking what looks about right. It brings back the days of WOW before the theorycrafters had optimised the fun out of everything and is more enjoyable as a result. I'm sure that won't last, though. EJ are bound to have people in beta setting up their shiny new spreadsheets now.
Because I no longer feel the urge to min/max everything, I haven't bothered with tradeskills or the auction house really. Quest greens are fine by me.
Cataclysm isn't quite WOW 2.0, but it is very close.

Cataclysm beta: random thoughts

2010-07-15T18:00:00.004+01:00

Comments on the Cataclysm beta that don't actually tell you much about it!

I've decided to go Alliance in the beta. I am naturally "For The Horde!", so this way I can test without spoiling the real game for me.
This allows me to play a gnome. I love gnomes. For me, the Alliance is basically gnomes + blah blah blah.
Where's my gnome starter zone? I'm stuck next to all those scruffy beardy fellows who reek of booze!
Playing the game "naked" after being spoiled by addons all these years is a very strange feeling. How am I supposed to know my arcane missiles finisher has procced without power auras flashing a big light in the middle of the screen for me? What? Look at my action bars? That's crazy talk!
Worgen look absolutely fantastic. It really brings home how old the models for the other races are. Please upgrade them to match, Blizzard. Pretty please!
A serious fashion mistake has been made. Gilneans have been given top hats. Clearly goblin starter gear should include a top hat, cane, monocle and tuxedo. My first mission when the game goes live will be to acquire these for my goblin.
Starter gear in general is gorgeous now.
With all the clever phasing in the new zones, how do the other races get rep with the new factions? They can't do the starter quests.
The built-in objective tracker is now almost as good as Quest Helper. I suspect I will do without QH in the expansion.
Whilst it isn't bug free, the beta client is extremely stable. It's certainly better than Vanguard and AOC were at launch. Sing hoh! for Blizzard's quality control team. Well done, chaps - I suggest you ask for a pay rise - I understand Apple are looking for some good quality control people right now!
The mockney accents in the Worgen starter zone make Dick van Dyke look like Olivier.
The test servers aren't RP. Aaaaaaahhhh! The names! They burn my eyes!
Heirlooms, on a beta server? That's a bit over-enthusiastic, isn't it?
You have been disconnected from the server...

Too ... much ... temptation ...

2010-07-14T19:28:00.005+01:00

I'd read that a new wave of Cataclysm beta invites was being sent out, but I hadn't received one. To be honest I wasn't sure if I really wanted to join. I enjoy beta testing games and trying to give constructive feedback, but I was wary of "spoiling" the game on release by having explored the new content.

Still, that temptation was there, so I logged on to by Battle.net account to take a peak (not to download it or anything, just to see ... honest) and there it was - a second game listed on my account, the Cataclysm beta. Following it through brought me to the option to download it.

I am weak...

No, really, I'm doing it for the greater good. They probably don't have that many Mac users in beta. I'm ... helping ... yes, that's it!

I have less willpower than Lor'themar at a paperclip convention.

The vision thing

2010-07-13T06:00:00.054+01:00

Larisa has posted an interesting quote from the Teamliquid forum. It's impossible to know how accurately this reflects the mood within Blizzard, but if it does, the consequences are disturbing.

Nachtjäger, Suramar, 59 Night Elf Death Knight post 35821 wrote:
"Got in touch with my ex-flatmate, whose sister works as a GM for Blizzard, to see what the internal buzz on this was. Apparently, at the moment the employees are largely as pissed as the players, and she stated that despite attempts to keep it hushed, it has become known that the big creative players within Blizzard are pretty much as unhappy about this as we are. Everybody has been told they are not free to comment on this situation outside of specially prepared statements.
It's still going ahead, however (and here's where in-house rumours and hearsay really start coming into play): from what they've picked up, the Blizzard leads have been told in no uncertain terms that the non-gameplay-related direction of the game is working to a different blueprint now. GC and company are free to play with shiny new talent trees all they like, for example, but for the first time the decisions regarding Battle.net implementation, Real ID, and plans for the general acquisition of new players for the business are no longer in Blizzard's own hands, and that's not going down too well."

If true, this is a bad sign for Blizzard as well as the player base. Once the suits start over-ruling the professional game designers, the quality of the product goes downhill pretty rapidly. It may lead to short term gains as you cash in on your existing player base to gain advertising revenue, but if people stop playing your games in the long term because they've been designed by marketing men rather than gamers, the company is doomed.

It's surprisingly easy to run large corporations into the ground in a fit of executive vanity; the collapse of GEC (once one of the largest companies in the UK) and the recent banking crisis are good examples. When large organisations go crazy at the top, there's little the people on the ground can do about it. They can (and should) warn about the consequences of these decisions, but they are often over-ruled by "visionary" executives who have "seen the future" in whatever the flavour of the month is. Right now, that flavour is Facebook; a few years ago it was Google. Remember all those "me too" search engines? No, neither does anybody else.

Ultimately, this kind of executive hubris will be punished by the markets. Shareholders will lose their dividends and then sack the board. The company may even go bust. But by then it will be too late; the games we love will be gone.

Real ID: merely a setback

2010-07-12T06:00:00.044+01:00

Now that dust has settled on the whole Real ID crisis, I think it's time to take stock.

Blizzard have backed down on their ill-concieved proposals and they deserve credit for that, as do the countless bloggers, forum posters and unsubscribers whose protests brought that about. It's tempting to see that as the end of the story; the evil suits have been defeated and the customers have won. Gevlon's cynicism was misplaced and all is well with the world.

Well, it's not that simple. Blizzard is a large organisation and this sort of decision isn't made by a single rogue individual. An internal scapegoat may be found (probably the hapless chump who thought a spot of inspirational change leadership would look good on his CV and put his name on the presentation to the board), but the people who said "yes", who thought this was all a terrific wheeze until it went wrong, they'll remain. They'll point to the opinion polls that show the players want Real ID and pass this off as an error of implementation rather than an error of policy.

So stay on your guard. The mass media may grow bored of this once the initial surge of protests dies down, but that doesn't mean it's over. We may have won the battle, but the war isn't over yet.

Colin Firth sunday

2010-07-11T06:00:00.003+01:00

Especially for Issy & Pilf:

Curses! Foiled again!

All killer and no filler

2010-07-08T20:50:00.002+01:00

As Supernanny says, "Positive attention and praise are the most effective rewards for good behaviour, but sometimes it's important to give your child boundries and let them know that certain behaviour is unacceptable."

Well the blogosphere has been doing a lot of boundary setting for our favourite child recently over the Real ID outburst, so it's time for a little positive attention and praise.

The changes to the talent system in Cataclysm described by Zarhym are extremely well thought out. In summary the idea is:

Talent points are now awarded every other level, alternating with new skills.
The top of each talent tree is now at 31 points, with almost all the "filler" removed and replaced with real useful attributes. To quote Ghostcrawler: "Almost without exception, the talents we cut were the ones everyone took or the ones nobody took".
Signature talents will be available from the first talent point, so you feel like a proper prot paladin/ affliction warlock / fire mage etc from day one. For example, Ret pallies will get divine storm at level 10!
Once you choose a talent tree at level 10, the other trees will be locked out until you have at least 31 points in your main tree. Presumably this is to prevent players taking all the signature talents from each tree to create some super-hybrid. It will also make choices easier for new players, as they won't end up with an unfocussed and ultimately uncompetitive build due to lack of understanding of how the trees are supposed to work.
Dual spec will work as before.

This is a great change in many ways. First of all, it will introduce real choice at early on, whereas currently there's bog-all difference between (say) an elemental and a resto shaman at low levels.

What's more, it will help to eliminate "dead levels" (e.g. the odd numbered ones below 60 in the current game), where nothing more interesting than a flash of light and a free heal happens when you reach them. Now there's something substantial to look forward to each time.

Eliminating the mandatory and forbidden talents (assuming that this can withstand the onslaught of the theory-crafters) should also help increase the variety of play-styles in the game.

Well done, Blizzard, good job!

I am a child now

2010-07-08T07:00:00.001+01:00

Today I was going to produce a post explaining how to opt out of Real ID using the parental controls feature of battle.net to pretend that you are a child. Fortunately Tobold has saved me the trouble.

It's ridiculous that we have to go to so much trouble to deactivate a feature that hardly anybody wants. It's hidden away in a section where no normal person would think to look. A cynic might think Blizzard didn't want you to find it...

Real ID - the press wade in

2010-07-07T21:51:00.001+01:00

It seems the row over StalkMe has now reached the mainstream press.

The BBC has coverage here.

AP have covered it here.

An opinion piece from Gaming Today is here.

A rare pro-StalkMe post can be found on CrunchGear.

So far, the coverage is predominantly neutral, stating the arguments on both sides. Lets see how it develops.

Real ID: a bad idea just got worse

2010-07-06T22:19:00.029+01:00

Displaying a level of bone-headed stubbornness that would make Garrosh Hellscream blush, it seems that Blizzard have decided to extend their ~~RealID~~ StalkMe system to the WOW forums as well.

The original scheme was dumb enough. Your real name is exposed to anyone you add to your friends list, and anyone who is on any of your friends' friend lists. Random internet nutters will be able to know what you are doing in any of Blizzard's games. Want to log on to an alt for quiet half hour's relaxation to make a change from raiding? Tough luck - you can run, but you can't hide. Want to post a sensible point on the WOW forums without some nerd-rage-fuelled stalker knowing your real name? Tough luck - it's StalkMe or nothing.

What's worse, the system defaults to on and requires an extremely convoluted workaround involving pretending to set up parental access controls. There is no clear or obvious way to disable StalkMe. Apparently there is also a bug which allows your StalkMe info to be passed on to anybody via an addon, friend or not

Was the whole of Blizzard on holiday during the Facebook privacy crisis? Is there truly nobody in the company with enough brainpower* to see the consequences of this? That at some point some random stranger is going to use StalkMe to track down someone they encountered online and harass them in real life.

To see what can go wrong, let's look at what happened when a Blizzard employee (Bashiok) posted his own real name to "prove how safe it is". Oops! Looks like he's had to take down his Facebook page already! For a mere $50 I could buy:

Includes all 2 records for *NAME DELETED* in CA.

Report includes: (when available)

	Full Name		Address
	Age & DOB		Phone Number
	Relatives		Address History
	Avg. Income		Property
	Criminal Check		Bankruptcies
	Liens		Judgments
	Aliases		Lawsuits
	Neighbors		Death Records
	Marriage		Divorce

No privacy concerns there, eh?

They've been warned repeatedly by the players about the potential problems. I don't think I've met anyone who actively thinks its a good idea. Views range from apathy to ferocious opposition.

Get a grip, Blizzard:

Allow people to display a pseudonym instead of their real name.
Make it easy and obvious how to disable StalkMe.
Make it default to off, with an active decision to opt in, verified by authenticator, required.

If not, you're heading for some seriously bad publicity and a lot of lost accounts.

* This is probably unfair. I'm sure there are plenty of people within Blizzard who warned of the foolishness of this change. The real question is: what's going on inside the company that caused this advice to be ignored?

P.S.

There's an excellent post on this at Empowered Fire.

And another one by Larisa.

Yet another one at Escape Hatch.

And at Righteous Orbs.

Still more from Windsoar.

And from Soul Warding.

Kurn is also opposed.

As is Klepasovic.

And Miss Medicina.

Tobold has now weighed in against it too.

As has Shawndra from Escapist Scrawl.

And Endyme.

Spinks is opposed too.

As is KiwiRed, who has also posted an extensive list of posts on the subject.

And Pewter.

Kae too.

More objections at Storm, Earth and Fire.

Gnomeaggedon has cancelled his account.

Ciderhelm at Tankspot calls StalkMe "unethical and dangerous".

Pilf is also opposed.

As is Random.

Shakesville has joined the chorus.

Stylish Corpse describes it as "Fail of the Century".

Dwism simply says: "this is a dumb idea".

Scott Jennings is "not happy with this".

Apple says "Cut the crap, stop forcing us to abandon you in order to maintain some privacy".

Yva describes StalkMe as "a stepping stone for aforementioned cyber bullying and stalking".

Suicidal Zebra is concerned that this is a precursor to "the bait-and-switch, where this 'feature' is dropped but another slightly less offensive one is put in its place".

Kiryn points out that "Blizzard will be violating their own forum code of conduct, which specifically states that releasing personal information about other players is a bannable offense".

Anna says that "I don’t feel safe, both for reasons of hacking and for reasons of stalking/harassment".

Please note that I am not just judiciously selecting blogs that agree with me here. ~~Not~~ One single post on this subject on my blog reader is in favour of this change: that's from Rohan.

Getting the message, yet, Blizzard?

Update:

You can complain about this change on the battle.net forum, US WOW forum or EU WOW forum.

Go do it!

It is a truth universally acknowledged

2010-07-05T18:07:00.003+01:00

that a single man in possession of a full set of epixx, must be in want of a wife.

Pilf's post about WOW Hunks makes an important point - that, contrary to basement-dwelling cliché, many male WOW players are in fact highly eligible. Thinking about my own group of RL friends who play WOW, there are surveyors, managers, engineers, charity workers and journalists.They're all nice guys, none of them live with their mothers and they all have active social lives. Add to that the Greater Internet Romantic Hero effect and you've got what seems like quite a catch.

That's great if you're a female gamer, because you also have a shared interest, but not so wonderful if you're the kind of girl who hates computers and likes to settle down for an evening watching Friends. If start playing WOW just to meet men and don't actually enjoy it yourself, you're in danger of becoming a WOW widow.

Besides, all those so-called men are women IRL anyway!

-- Agnetha

It's not dead, it's resting...

2010-06-29T19:05:00.006+01:00

Larisa's musings on the recent resurgence of WOW is dying posts have got me thinking. As she rightly points out, the game has been "dying" for over three years, with no noticeable impact on its actual subscription numbers.

Let's take a look at the current figures from MMOdata. The important things to look at here are the actual data points, not the smoothed extrapolated curves (I'll get onto them in a moment). The real subscription numbers are pretty good. WOW's figures may have levelled off, but this is the kind of "death" that any other MMO maker would ... err ... kill for.

But what about those smoothed curves? Surely they prove that WOW will decline in future - they all turn down post 2010. Well, no. Seeing curves like that sets my boffin-sense a tinglin' *

(*Boffin-sense is like spider-sense, but with the ability to locate Kirsten Dunst replaced by the ability to spot bad use of statistics. It's not a good deal.)

Extrapolation from numerical data is a tricky business and using a crude tool such as as spreadsheet's trendline feature can give highly misleading results. Let's look at some example data to show what I mean. I've created some artificial WOW-like subscription numbers that show an underlying trend of continuous increase, with a random variation on top. As you can see from the graph below, using a crude spreadsheet extrapolation appears to show a future decline, even though the real trend is actually upwards.

Putting it simply, those curves that appear to show a decline are meaningless. WOW is bound to join the choir invisibule at some point, but the curves from MMOdata don't prove anything.

More of the same

2010-06-28T20:20:00.000+01:00

Another World Cup, another predictable defeat for England at the hands of Germany.

The reasons are pretty obvious: the England squad were less tactically aware, had inferior technical skills and lacked organisation and discipline. Yet if you were to believe the British press, that's not the problem at all. Oh no, it was the lack of "passion" that was our undoing, as if somehow doing the same dumb thing more enthusiastically would solve everything. If only we had eleven Garrosh Hellscreams in our team, tactics and skill would be rendered magically irrelevant.

We see this same delusion in WOW amongst the Gearscore-obsessives. We didn't fail to kill the boss because our tactics were wrong or we didn't play well. We failed because an arbitrary magic number wasn't high enough.

The trouble with this kind of delusion is that it's very hard to shift. Even when presented with pretty incontrovertible evidence that it isn't Gearscore or passion that matters, but skill and teamwork, people still persist in believing it. It can't be that they were doing the wrong thing, they just weren't doing enough of the right thing!

Perhaps people find that comforting - the problem isn't them, it's the lack of gear. Nobody could defeat an ICC boss with just T9 gear and a 25% buff. They didn't fail, the task was impossible.

Unfortunately, that's a recipe for perpetual failure. If you aren't prepared to look honestly at what went wrong, rather than blaming some mythical scapegoat, you'll never improve.

Congratulations, Germany. You've cleared the trash, now it's on to the boss-fight.

Strong Voodoo (part 3)

2010-06-28T19:47:00.002+01:00

"Well dat be up ta yas. Ya wan' stay 'ere, dat be fine. Ya get back on ya box. But if yas wan' live, ya come feel da see breeze on ya."

"I have never been. It is near the sea I hear...?"

All polite an' propah, but Doll look frighten'. Maybe she like bein' in dat cage. Troll be use' ta dat. Elfie scared oh wild place an' dis one be tiny, a lil wide-eyed rabbit. Maybe I play a little.

"Oh ya. Sun an' sea an' jungle."

"Jungle!?"

"Oh ya, on dem islan' nearby. Darkspear islan', I might add. Wid raptas and tigers an' all maner o'dangerous ting. Jus' waitin' fa a tasty morsel."

"Oh!"

"Dem gobble ya right up if ya don' learn ta move right."

"Now I feel you are just trying to scare me,"

Maybe, maybe. But wid no fear, ya jus dead. Cage be safe, but it make ya sleepy.

"But if ya let go, ya learn 'ow ta tink like a troll, ta move wid da jungle, dey tink ya one o'dem. An' den dey know oo be da real boss. Ya need ta be rule by 'ere ... not 'ere"

I touch ma 'eart, ta show Doll what I means, dem ma 'ead ta show da wrong way. She look away, preferrin' da walls o'da cage ta dat open door.

"Ya tink ya can try dat?"

Hehe - she noddin'. Maybe Doll ain' dead yet.

"Dat's da spirit! Now ya got ta come wid me. OK - follow me, darlin'. I takin' ya ta da wild place."

I 'eads out o' dat cage, Doll followin', slow, like she bein' pulled back. I don' like dis place.

"Ya gets no suchine down 'ere, no wind, no sun. No wonder a' elfies be so frail. Yas look like a ghos', darlin'."

I don' like dat funny elfie-magic dat lead out o' dat cage. It ain' natural. Spirit don' make it, god don' make it. Jus' folk dat tink dey gods. Troll seen dat before. We get civilise an try make ourself god. We fell.

"Dat ting make ma 'ead spin"

"It is a great achievement..."

See? As soon as Doll leave dat cage, she got more fight in 'er.

I don' like dem zepplin much eithah, but at leas' dey made o' ting I understan'. Fire an' metal an' air. An ya can feel da wind spirit on 'em. I look out at dem skies as we rides. Doll jus' cling on an' close 'er eye. Scared o'da wind, too, eh?

"Euch, those things make me giddy."

"I seen a crash'd one in da nortlan'. Dey ain' too safe, I reckon. Now, ya got sometin ta ride, darlin'?"

I calls ma rapta an moun' quick. Dat woun' in ma leg from catchin' 'em las' week fa young ones sting bad. I smile quick - nevvah let raptah know 'e 'urt ya. If 'e tink 'e boss, 'e start gettin' 'ungry. Raptah know true. In dis worl' der be predatah an' prey. Best be da firs' one, eh? Doll's chicken cook up nice, I reckon.

"Dis be a rapta - don' take ya chicken too close, or 'e may eat im. Raptas be like da spirit o'da jungle."

"Beady eyed and viscious...?"

"Dey vicious, alrigh'. An' quick too. One minute ya by walkin' along, minden ya own business, den WHAM! ... dey got ya. Savage, dey be. No warnin', jus' speed an deat'. Dat be why we rides 'em. So dey know oo be boss."

"You enjoy the pursuit, the taming...?"

Bettah eatin' dan bein' eaten, eh?

"I wen' out wid ma brothas an sistahs a couple o'days ago ta get some more. Dey don' like dey tamin', dat be sure. One near bit ma leg off!"

She look nervous again'. Sometime troll keeps rapta cage fa too long. Dey get slow, can' 'unt no more. Ya let dem out aftah dat an' dey fren' eat 'em.

"That sounds brutal."

"Life is brutal, darlin'. Ya fancy city may 'ide dat from ya, but der be folk der oo kill ya if dey get da chance. At least wid rapta ya die quick."

Ya may die in jungle, but at leas' it ovah. Rapta won' cage ya. Rapta won' torment ya jus' fa fun.

Dat bettah. I 'ear da soun' o' drum once more as we get closah ta Sen'jin. I breath da rhythm, fillin' ma lung wid life. Salt air mix wid it, wave break an' ma spirit rise.

"Ya can feel da sea wind, now, eh? It caress ya skin like da fines' lovva."

I wave ta ma kin in Sen'jin. Dis jungle. Dis 'ome.

Strong Voodoo (part 2)

2010-06-09T20:02:00.001+01:00

I feel dat jungle callin'. Tiger may be cage', but 'e still feel dat 'untin' urge.

"'ey der, elfie. What you doin' on dat box, eh? 'e 'ired ya ta bring in dem customer, eh?"

I looks over at snot-boy by dem boxes. 'e like me even less now. Troll be use' ta dat. We bin makin' war, makin' peace an makin' baby since time began. We seen us empire rise, an' we seen us empire fall. Elfie tink 'e been aroun' so long dat 'e can fahget where 'e came from. 'e tink dat 'e ain' troll no more, 'e civilise', 'e superiah. Troll know 'e ain' civilise'. Troll know 'e jungle.

"Good evening... troll."

Hehe. Elfie tongue-tied. Doll speak fah 'im:

"And I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

Doll know jus' fine, I reckon. We play a little.

"Well why else a lady sittin' on a box den? Should ya no be dancin' or sometin'?"

"Dancing? Do I really look like that's something I would indulge in?"

I shrugs. What wrong wid dancin? It be fun, eh? Ya can get all 'igh an' fancy wid ya civilise' way, but if ya no 'appy...

"I seen a lot o'dat roun' 'ere. I tink it be da custom..."

"I think it depends on the 'class' of elf you associate with."

Too good fah dancin', are ya? Maybe troll ain' da only prisonah in dis cage. Maybe we free Doll up a little.

"What ya mean by dat? I tought all yas elfies was 'igh class?"

"Even the ones that dance? I would disagree..."

Could be dem pin pierce more dan ya limb, eh darlin'? Look like dey pin ya 'eart before dey drop ya.

"Ya not tink dancin' be classy, den? Ya should come down ta Sen'jin some time den. Catch yaself some rhythm."

Almos' a smile der, almos'. Maybe Doll like a lil trip ta da jungle.

"I'm uncertain as to whether I have 'rhythm'..."

"Well, I don' mean ta be rude, darlin', cos I know yas elfies like ta dance an' all, but sometime yas look like ya got a broom stuck up yas. Too stiff, ya see."

Troll like dancin'. We always got rhythm in us ear. We got move, cos if we don', dem drum-beat turn ta soun' o' war. Drum drive us, change us seein', bring us loa.

"Are you suggesting that I should.... loosen up? Be like those of my kin, with no sense of dignity?"

Dignity, eh? I 'eard story about when troll 'ad dignity. It made us stop dancin', start actin' propah an civilise'. Respec' da boss-man, cos 'e got dignity. Forget jungle, forget rhythm. Forget who ya be. Us empire gone now. We ain' got dignity no more. Troll 'appy.

"Well what ya mean by dignity, eh? Not doin' sometin' cos 'e no be proppah? Well oo get ta say what dem rule be, eh?"

"Now me, I dance when I wan', not when some rulebook say so."

"Then your life must be infinitely less complicated than the lives of many."

Doll look at me all crazy. Like she got do what boss-man say be right. I seen dat look in Troll. Dead Troll. Ya got dance if ya wan stay alive, eh?

"Look - I shows ya. Get down o'dat box fa a while."

Doll almos' fall off box. Like she trippin' ovah 'er own pin.

Me? I got drum-beat in ma ear now. I flows wid it, letting it take me. Movin' fa love, movin' fa war, dey ain' so far apart. Civilise' folk dance fa othas, ta show 'em 'ow proppah dey be. Troll dance fa troll. When Troll dance, der ain' no outside, jus' dat jungle within.

I comes down, touchin' dat stone wid ma feet once more. Stone be cold. Dis 'ole place be cold. Doll shrink a little.

"Yas gotta let go. If ya be afraid o'fallin, ya never get 'igh."

"I feel our upbringings are very different. But... I... I envy your ability to let go. It looks like you have... fun.

Doll say dat las' word like it be da wors' ting in da worl'. Like proppah civilise' people don' 'ave fun. Oo need fun when ya got dignity, eh?

"Maybe so, darlin', maybe so. But I ain' got notin ta let go of, ya see. Ya need ta cut dem string dat 'old ya up. Move on yas own."

"You may be right. But here and now, this would not be the right place."

"Maybe we needs ta take ya down Sen'jin den. Sa ya can feel da rhythm. Maybe try some o'dem ol' witch doctah potion, eh?"

"Are you asking me...?"

Askin' ya what, Doll? Askin' ya what?

Strong Voodoo (part 1)

2010-06-06T18:55:00.003+01:00

This is part one of a set of posts in response to Pilf's exceptional "Pure Shores" series. Think of it as a reflection of what she wrote, but in a distorted mirror.

Since I can't match her rate of production, I'll split the posts over a few days.

Troll ain’ made fa city. We got jungle in us ‘eart’, raptah in us eye an’ drum-beat’ in us ear. Sure, we built 'em. Great one’ dat take an hour ta ride across. City a 'undred time biggah dan dem tiny place dey young one build. Fah a t’ousan’ generation we done da same ting. Troll build city ta escape da jungle, but den we bring it inside da wall.

Ya evah seen a tiger in a cage? ‘alf broken, but ‘alf savage. Dat be a troll in a city. Darkness always overtake us in da en’. We go crazy. We kill us own god.

So when I go ta city, I keeps it short. I don’ stop ta look roun’. I use ma magic ta fin’ what I wan’, den I ‘ead out, ‘fore dat cage door close. Silvahmoon may be a gilded cage, made pretty wid gold an’ magic, but it still be a cage. So today I drif’ away intah ma farsight an’ fin’ da fellah I wants. Get a few ting an’ get back ta da beach.

Der ‘e be, all fancy ‘air an’ snot. Dem elfies don’ like troll ‘ere, but dey ‘orde now, so ‘im got serve me. ‘im won’ like it, though. Nex’ ta ‘im be what ya see all da time in’dis place. Dem dancin’ girl ya see on dey mailbox, ‘opin’ ta charge fa what’s free. Troll ain’ da only fella dat go crazy in city.

Dis one be differen’, tho. She ain’ dancin’. Jus’ collapse on da box next ta ‘im. A broken voodoo doll, t’rown away aftah da magic be spent. Wooden, wid limb arrange wrong, like she been drop der, pierced t’rough wid invisible pin. ‘er face ‘idden behin’ pale powdah, more dead dan livin’. Oo call dis spirit up, I wondah.

“ ‘ey der elfie”.

Everybody's wearing a disguise

2010-05-30T19:11:00.001+01:00

One of the perennial topics of debate about role-playing games is the relationship between our character's behaviour and our own real-life personality. This is most commonly framed in terms of the bad acts our characters carry out, such as mass slaughter of enemies in battlegrounds. By any real world standards, these acts are evil, yet most roleplayers wouldn't decide that the player behind the character is also evil. We see it as acting, not a reflection of our true selves, so we can easily refrain from doing those things in real life.

Things get a little more tricky when you're dealing with our character's admirable traits, such as cleverness, courage or confidence. A skilled performer can feign these just as well as they can play the role of a villain, even though they don't possess these attributes in real life. In other words, Gabriel's theory could just as easily be seen as:

The interesting question then becomes: "if we can act out these positive roles in-game, why can't we do the same in our own lives?". Why can't I take on the role of my smooth-talking troll merchant outside the game and make some money?

It seems to me that, as with the question of acting out evil characters, the key difference is one of context. Many years ago, in a late-night whiskey-fueled discussion, a philosopher friend of mine challenged the whole notion of people having a personality. His argument (insofar as I can remember it, given the blurring effects of the booze), was that what people see as being characteristics of an individual are in fact the result of a complex interaction between that person and society. They do some things and get positive feedback, so do more of them. They do others and get negative responses and so do them less. If they had been in a different environment, their behaviour may have been completely different.

In other words, we act differently in-game because others around us are also acting differently. It's up to us whether we meet Mr Dickwad or Mr Darcy.

Thanks to Pilf of /moar alts for the inspiration for this post.

Real life epixx beat in game ones

2010-05-27T20:51:00.001+01:00

I have a shiny new iPad. It is pretty. If only the blogger compose feature worked properly with it!

If anyone knows of any good blogging apps for it, I'd love to know. So far, all I've seen is Blogpress, which is ok, but far from perfect, as I really don't fancy editing raw HTML just to make a post.

Anatomy of failure

2010-05-25T22:20:00.005+01:00

Brad McQuaid has recently made one of his intermittent blog posts, which brought me back to thinking about Vanguard.

On paper, this "WOW killer" had everything going for it:

Backing from Microsoft (you aren't going to find many pockets deeper than theirs).
A lead designer who was one of the leading lights of EQ, with many years experience behind him and a team of former EQ developers with a good understanding of the pitfalls of MMO design.
A clear vision of what kind of game it was trying to be, with the emphasis on rich, complex gameplay and social interaction.
Innovative game mechanics such as Diplomacy.
An art style guided by the well-know fantasy artist Keith Parkinson.
An innovative chunking mechanism intended to remove the barriers between different regions. There were to be no instances in Vanguard, just one giant world.
Wonderful class design (I dream of WOW having classes as interesting as the Disciple, Psionicist or Blood Mage).
Detailed in-game player and guild housing.
Based on an established game engine (Unreal Engine), thus de-risking the issues associated with graphics and game mechanics.

Reading through this list, it seems like Sigil had addressed most of the concerns of discontented WOW players. What could possibly go wrong? Well, pretty much everything as it turned out.

Microsoft withdrew their support.
The game launched riddled with bugs that the developers knew were there (they had been repeatedly reported in beta). Major features were simply absent from the game at launch.
Even high end machines, well above the recommended spec, could barely run the game.
The game launched to generally poor reviews.
The respectable initial 240K initial box sales dropped to 40k subscriptions after a few months.
Sigil folded in controversial circumstances and the remnants of the game were eventually taken over by SOE.
The original fourteen servers were eventually merged down to four.

How did such promising ingredients turn into such a mess? Well, I'd argue that it wasn't a failure of game design, but of project management. As MMO players, we tend to think about games in terms of how they feel to us. Do we like the features or the play style? How does it look? How does the game work socially? Vanguard aimed to tick all the boxes, yet the reality is that it failed, despite a huge investment. Whilst these are all important factors, they aren't all that is needed for a successful game. They are, in the language of mathematicians and logicians, "necessary, but not sufficient".

I was involved in the beta testing of Vanguard and the beta forums were a fascinating place. Leaving aside all the WOW-hate that seems mandatory in fans of such games, there were some valuable discussions about the general principles of game design, with Brad McQuaid a frequent participant. At the time, I thought this was great: "Wow, the lead designer is actually answering my questions about why the game has been made in this way!" Detailed answers, too, not just canned corporate responses - the things people love about Ghostcrawler in the WOW forums. Gradually, it started to dawn on me that this was a problem. Brad was supposed to be running the company and making sure the game got out the door in a good state, yet there he was spending time on the forum debating game design theory.

This is a common issue with highly creative people. They may be perfectly capable managers, but the truth is that they find such a role boring and they generally only take it on to give them freedom from "the suits", who they see as constraining their creative vision. As a result, they tend to drift back towards the aspects of the job they enjoy and neglect the parts they find tedious.

Focussing on time and cost may seem dull, as it doesn't add to the feature list of a game. Indeed it often leads to treasured features being cut in order to make the delivery date with a robust product. But it's essential if you're going to turn those dreams into reality.

In fact that might be seen as Blizzard's true secret weapon. Their pragmatic approach means that the game gets launched in a solid state and makes a good profit, whereas companies that try to "live the dream" and refuse to compromise fail.

Return of the king

2010-05-18T18:17:00.000+01:00

It's not often I post twice in a day, but this is worth it. BRK is back and blogging.

Welcome back, Dan. We've missed you.

Blurality

2010-05-18T15:18:00.003+01:00

Now that my SAN shaman has reached 80, I'm starting the process of gearing up for higher level content via heroics. This means a typical wait time of about 15-25 minutes, depending on whether I queue as a healer or DPS. I'm no Sharicasami, so the instant groups that come with tanking aren't an option, even if the dungeon finder allowed me to queue as one.

So that leaves me with an unpredictable amount of dead time while waiting for a group, which raises the question: what to do with that time?

There are only so many dailies that you can endure without wanting to gouge your own eyes out with a spoon, but there are plenty of small tasks I should be getting round to at home. The trouble is this: my computer is tucked away in the spare room, so if my group pops up while I'm loading the dishwasher, I'm not going to know. Yesterday I had what I thought was a bright idea: wouldn't it be great if I had some kind of pager that let me know when the queue is up so that I could go back to the game?

On second thoughts, though, I'm not sure that's such a great plan. There's a danger of ending up in this blurred reality, where we're half in a virtual world and half in the real one. The various remote access options (such as the Armory app for the iPhone) already do this to an extent and the proposed enhancements to allow remote auction house access go still further. Add to that the possibility of remote access via services such as Gaikai and we're starting to enter a world where we're neither fully playing the game nor taking a break from it. We've already seen this sort of thing happen in the world of work, where mobile phones and remote email access mean that many people are never fully disconnected from their employment.

My concern is that WOW (or other games for that matter) may cease to be a form of entertainment that you immerse yourself in, but just be part of this blurred world, which is neither fully real nor fully virtual. I'm really not sure about this new blurality. It's easy to see the benefits in terms of convenience, but I worry that we'll start to enter a world where we're never fully paying attention to where we are. Maybe the transition to cyberspace isn't going to be an abrupt Matrix-like jump, it'll just happen 1% at a time.

Uncommon people

2010-05-17T18:25:00.000+01:00

Gevlon and his Undergeared team have now downed Marrowgar in only blue gear. This is an incredible achievement considering how few people have done it even with T9 epics raining from the skies. I suggest you all keep a copy of the link to reply to the next request for gearscore / achievement links when you wish to raid.

Sic semper tyrannis

2010-05-13T18:23:00.002+01:00

Sic semper tyrannis is a latin phrase, that roughly translates to "thus always to tyrants". It was attributed to Brutus upon the killing of Julius Caesar, although that's probably an early example of a retcon, as none of the contemporary sources mention it. The right to kill (perceived) tyrants that it implies has been a huge influence in the history of the USA, from the founding of the country, through the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to the Oklahoma bombing.

The rise of Garrosh in Cataclysm puts us in a very similar situation, and hence opens up some interesting roleplaying opportunities. His style is likely to be very different to that of Thrall, which means that there are bound to be some disaffected people in the Horde who don't like the new regime and see it as tyrannical. However, this puts us in a difficult position as roleplayers. Our character may indeed oppose Garrosh and wish to be rid of him, but the game mechanics simply don't permit us to assassinate our own leaders. This means that we have to think of reasons why our characters can't achieve their goal and how they would cope with that.

If you're interested in roleplaying an opponent of the new regime, the first thing you have to decide is why your character is opposed to it. There are a number of possible motivations, which may blur together:

Ethical - you believe the new ruler is behaving immorally and should be removed on those grounds alone. It's possible that Saurfang falls into this category.
Loyalty to the old regime - you were an ally or follower of the previous leader and are now suddenly excluded from the inner circle. It's arguable that Vol'jin feels this way.
It should have been me - your character thinks that he/she would be a much better leader than this clown. Why can't everybody else see it?
The frustrated loyalist - your character is a former loyal follower of the new leader, who was cast aside or ignored when they came to power. This approach wouldn't work from day one, but would be an interesting long-term character development: "after all I did for him in Northrend, now he doesn't even bother speaking to me".
The ruthless pragmatist - your objection isn't to the new leader's policy or methods, merely to his competence in carrying them out. He needs to be disposed of for the good of the Horde.
Don't mess with us - your character is part of a faction that is at odds with the new leadership and wants it removed so that they can prosper.
The special snowflake - your character doesn't feel they receive the recognition they deserve in wider society and feels that, by killing the leader, at last someone will notice them. Many real-world "lone gunman" assassination attempts are motivated by this.

Now onto the tricky bit: what we might call the Wile E. Coyote problem. Fundamentally, the writers can't allow you to achieve your aims or the world would be changed for everybody. Strictly speaking, of course, they may yet choose to do this via phasing. The fall of Garrosh could turn out to be the Cataclysm version of Wrathgate, but we have no evidence to support that right now, so let's assume that he remains in power. That leaves us with an RP question to answer: why hasn't our character succeeded? Again, there are many possible options:

Lack of power - your character may wish to kill off Garrosh, but he/she simply isn't capable of doing it, so he remains in the background, trying to come up with schemes that might work. This provides us with lots of RP options: holding secret meetings trying to gather support or watching Garrosh to try to find a weakness.
Wrong method - your character isn't prepared to do what it takes to remove Garrosh. For example, you may want him gone, but be sworn to use only peaceful protest, which he cheerfully ignores.
Hesitation - you have the plan, but are perpetually waiting for that "perfect" moment to strike which, of course, never comes.
Fear of the consequences - you have the means to strike, but hold back. For example, you may have the forces to carry out the coup but do not act, for fear that the resulting split would leave the Horde vulnerable to Alliance attack.
Fear of failure - you are simply too scared of what might happen to you if you stand up to Garrosh. Look what happened to Cairne Bloodhoof.
Personality flaw - even though you're in the right, your unpleasant nature means that nobody is prepared to support you. For example, your own naked lust for power may cause people to think of you as a worse option than Garrosh.
Simple bad luck - you've tried, but it always goes wrong, no matter how carefully you plan. This is the problem Wile E. has: the anvil always ends up landing on your head rather than your enemy's!

Alternatively, of course, you could RP a Garrosh loyalist who is attempting to hunt down the traitors. But then you'd probably smell.

The resistance starts here

2010-05-11T23:34:00.002+01:00

Massive spoiler alert

If what I'm about to discuss is true, this is a massive spoiler for Cataclysm, so I'm going to hide it away behind the "read more" link below. Please don't continue if you want Cataclysm to be a surprise.

Still with me? OK, we'll start with a screenshot. I originally found out about this via the Scrolls of Lore forums, although a spot of Googling led to further discussion on WOWhead and MMO Champion. Now in this case, I don't think we have true multiple sources for the same information, just one source that's been repeated. However, it's so interesting that I've decided to go with it, even though it may prove to be a fake, because it raises important issues about the direction the Horde is taking.

What we can see in the picture appears to be the big secret that Vol'jin reveals to the players in the new troll starter zone, which I discussed recently. According to the leak/hoax, the full dialogue is as follows:

Garrosh Hellscream: Don't talk back to me, troll. You know who was left in charge here. Have you not stopped to ask yourself why Thrall chose me instead of you?
Vol'Jin: Dere's no question why, Garrosh. He gave ya the title because he needed ta see once and for all if ya could overcome the pride and bloodlust dat have long run in ya family. I t'ink he did not expect de answer to be apparent so soon.
Garrosh Hellscream: You're lucky I don't gut you right here, whelp. You are foolish to think you can speak to your Warchief in such ways.
Vol'Jin: You're no Warchief of mine. Ya've not earned my respect, and I'll not see the Horde destroyed by ya thirst for war.
Garrosh Hellscream: And what exactly do you think that you are going to do about it? Your threats are hollow. Go slink away with the rest of your kind to the slums; I will endure your filth in my throne room no longer.
Vol'Jin: I know exactly what I am going to do about it, son of Hellscream. I will watch and wait as ya people slowly become aware of ya ineptitude. I will laugh as dey grow to despise ya as I do.
Vol'Jin: And when da time comes dat ya failure is complete and ya "power" is meaningless, I will be dere to end ya rule swiftly and silently.
Vol'Jin: Ya will spend ya reign glancin' over ya shoulder and fearin' the shadows, for when da time comes and ya blood slowly drains out, ya will know exactly who fired da arrow dat pierced ya heart.
Garrosh Hellscream: You have sealed your fate, troll.
Garrosh spits at Vol'Jin.
Vol'Jin: And you yours, "Warchief."

Assuming it's true (and this is a big assumption at this stage), this suggests that Vol'jin will be at the core of the resistance to Warchief Dumberer's rule. I'm overjoyed at this - those of us who loathe Garrosh as he's currently written will have somewhere to go in RP terms if Cataclysm pans out as expected. It also suggests that this rule will be short, which lends support to the second option I discussed earlier, with the possible twist that it may be Vol'jin who rides to the rescue, rather than Thrall.

So, should we believe it? I'm really not sure. The writing of Vol'jin's speech is a little clumsy - he drops some consonants, but says "and" in full. That could be because it's fan-made, or an early unpolished piece of alpha dialogue. It fits pretty well with lore and will be popular with the Garrosh haters (like me), but that's also what you'd expect from a skilled piece of trolling. I want this to be true, but it's that very longing that makes me wary.

Still, my heart is saying "Vol'jin! Vol'jin! Vol'jin!". I'll see you in the Echo Isles, along with 90% of the Horde. Let's leave Garrosh alone in his fortress. We don't need him.

Update:
Both Scrolls of Lore and MMO Champion have now removed the content I am referring to, as Blizzard have objected. Make of that what you will.

No lifers

2010-05-07T10:46:00.001+01:00

A common topic of debate on gaming blogs is the extent to which raiders are "no life" basement dwellers who only get where they are because they play the game more than others. The common response to this is that it isn't time spent gathering epixx that matters, but skill. Gevlon's Undergeared project is an attempt to prove just that.

However, this leads open an important question: where does skill come from? It's widely believed that talent is somehow an innate thing, that the l33t players have and the hoi poloi don't. There's been quite a bit of research done on this topic, which is well summarised in Geoff Colvin's book "Talent is overrated". To quote the Amazon summary of the book:

"Greatness doesn't come from DNA, but from practice and perseverance honed over decades. And not just plain old hard work, but a very specific kind of work. The key is how you practice, how you analyze the results of your progress and learn from your mistakes, that enables you to achieve greatness."

In other words, top performers do do a lot of work, but it's not the gear you need to grind, it's the skills. Yes, a skilled player with an undergeared character may do better than an unskilled one with good gear, but that's only because they have spent years developing those skills through practice.

What this suggests is that the whole debate on skill vs time is misplaced. They are the same thing.

Special offer

2010-05-06T12:27:00.006+01:00

In light of the ongoing argument between Tobold and some EVE players, I thought I'd offer a handy cut-out and keep guide to arguing with Big T. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the troll-o-matic 2010!

Too easy or too hard?

2010-05-04T19:48:00.008+01:00

It can be bit tricky to gather hard information on how many players have completed the various kinds of raid content in WOW. There are some sites like GuildProgress that list the success different guilds have had, but that's not quite the same thing as measuring the number of players. High end raiding guilds will have more than the requisite number of players, so that they have substitutes if one of the first team can't make it. Casual guilds may have less than the required number of raiders and make up the rest from a network of friends or PUG-raiders. On top of that, many players have multiple raiding alts.

However, that doesn't mean we can't say anything useful about raiding numbers, merely that we have to accept that any figures are approximate and interpret them accordingly. To generate the numbers in the figure below, I've made a few simplifying assumptions:

There are approximately 6M players in the EU & USA (the only regions GuildProgress has data for).
Each listed guild has 25 raiders. That's probably an small underestimate for 25-man raiding guilds, but a large overestimate for 10-man guilds. However, there are a number of floating raiders who don't raid with the guild they are a member of, so the overall totals should be about right.
I've defined the "hardest" raid as 25-man for Naxx/Ulduar & 25-man heroic for the Coliseum & Icecrown Citadel. The easiest in each case is defined as being 10-man regular. I have heard arguments that 10-man content can be less forgiving of individual errors than 25-man, but in my view the difficulty involved in organisation makes the 25-man runs harder overall.
The number of players who have completed the content was found by multiplying the number of guilds that GuildProgress has listed as completing it by 25. The figures were gathered on 3rd May 2010, after the second ICC nerf.

Looking at the graph, it seems that Blizzard have certainly come a long way in their attempts to open up raiding. Over 40% of players have at least finished Naxx. That's not the majority, but it is at least a sizeable minority and I'd guess that's most of the players who would like to raid. They've also managed to create some very challenging content. Despite the double nerf to ICC, only a tiny number (about 1 in 17,000) have completed the hardest raid in the game. Nobody completed it before the first nerf.

Only three percent of players have "seen the content" at all, even in the easiest form. In broad terms, then, Blizzard seem to have achieved their goals. I'd say that's a vindication of their chosen approach in Wrath, which runs contrary to the high level of complaints about the state of raiding.

There is one interesting quirk in the numbers which is worth commenting on. The number of players who have finished Coliseum is 12x higher than the number who have completed the (lower tier) Ulduar. I'd suspect that there are three possible reasons for this:

Ulduar is in fact harder than Coliseum.
Coliseum is much faster to complete, so more popular.
Changes in the emblem system make Ulduar loot redundant.

Given that Ulduar is a far more interesting place than the hastily cobbled-together Coliseum, I find that quite depressing. It suggests that the majority of raiders really are more motivated by loot than challenge. They're looking for the quickest, easiest way to get those purple pixels.

So is raiding too easy or too hard in Wrath? Both. It depends which content you're talking about. I'd say that Naxx & ICC were about right for their intended audiences, but Ulduar and Coliseum were the wrong way round.

There may be trouble ahead

2010-04-28T20:30:00.005+01:00

There's new information up on MMO Champion about the home city the trolls will acquire in Cataclysm.

It looks wonderfully trollish, if a little empty in these screenshots. But what interests me is the quote from Wryxian about the lore behind the new starter zone. Wryxian says:

"The impending cataclysm will spark rivalry among the Horde leadership"

and

"But it won't be long before Vol'jin trusts you with vital -- and potentially dangerous -- information about the political struggles plaguing the Horde and, ultimately, the fellow members of your tribe."

What could this possibly mean? Vol'jin and Cairne are the two wise heads in the current Horde leadership (after Thrall himself). There have been rumours that Cairne will be killed in the new expansion and if Vol'jin is exiled as well, that sounds like bad news. With Thrall missiing, will there be anybody left to hold back Warchief Dumberer from the road to war? I fear Saurfang's days may be numbered.

This may be an interesting plot-line from Blizzard's point of view, but I feel a little nervous about it. Part of the reason why I like playing Horde in WOW is that they aren't the clichéd stupid baddies. I'm not sure how I'd feel about serving under Garrosh. I don't feel any kind of loyalty or respect for him.

In RP terms, perhaps we'll see the remains of the "old Horde" loyalists gathering in the Echo Isles, whilst the "Me smash!" crew flock to Orgrimmar. It's hard to see this kind of political situation remaining stable without Thrall to hold it together - the Darkspear's loyalty has always been to him as an individual, rather than the Orcs as a whole.

If this were the real world, you'd expect the Horde to splinter within a few years, as many countries forged from disparate groups do when a strong leader departs the scene. It's hard to read Blizzard's thinking on this one. It could go several ways, from the breathtakingly cynical to the courageous:

"Only the lore nerds care about this rubbish. Most players aren't interested. And what are Warcraft lore nerds going to do, quit playing WOW? They'll whine a bit then they'll be back"
"We need a greater level of conflict to make the lore work for of Warcraft 4. So Garrosh will succeed in his coup temporarily (while we launch WC4), but in the long run, Thrall will ride to the rescue".
"This is just the first step on the way to a massive change in the game in future expansions. Ultimately, the Horde will split into Good-Horde and Bad-Horde. The Good-Horde will be the basis of a new third faction headed jointly by Thrall & Jaina, which other neutral-ish groups such as Theramore humans may also join. In future, some races, such as orcs & humans will have to choose between one of two factions when they create the character."

I hope for outcomes two or three. I fear the first.

Some animals are more equal than others

2010-04-27T17:34:00.009+01:00

There's been a general trend of class homogenisation in WOW since Wrath, which looks likely to continue into Cataclysm. This started with replenishment being taken from a unique shadow-priest speciality and given to warlocks, frost mages, ret paladins & survival hunters, but has spread to many other things, such as crit buffs. The homogenisation trend has also shown itself in other ways: ret paladin burst DPS was nerfed because it was hard to balance in PvP, as was the warlock's fear.

In some senses, this can be seen as a good thing. Blizzard's intention is that players should "bring the player, not the class", so that there are no class/spec combinations that are so powerful that they simply must be taken on a raid. It also has the benefit of evening things up in PvP - classes that are more similar are easier to balance, which makes skill play a bigger role.

So this makes homogenisation a good thing, right? PvP is fairer, everybody gets to raid, all is good. Sadly, it's not that simple. Homogenisation has quite a few disadvantages too:

Blandness: the more similar classes get, the more they resemble the same thing, but with different icons and animations. One of the reasons WOW has been so successful is the high level of re-playability - doing the same content as a frost mage used to feel like a completely different game to doing it as a destro-warlock. Nerf fear and give the destro-warlock a daze effect to compensate and you've got two classes that play in quite a similar way. This means that it's less fun to level up alts and play them in either raiding or PvP. If you're one of those players who has one main & perhaps a bank alt, that may not bother you, but for altoholics, that significantly reduces the appeal of the game. They'll get bored sooner and their subscriptions may vanish for long periods of time.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others: giving the same buff to multiple classes may seem like a good thing, but it has consequences. Whereas before class A may have been preferred to class B because it brought a super-buff, we now have a situation where both bring the buff, so the choice is made based on other criteria, such as DPS. Now it will always be the case that one class will have better DPS than another, because perfect balance is impossible. If there's one thing we can be sure of in WOW, it's that the theorycrafters at sites like Elitist Jerks will find that better DPS class. This leaves us two possibilities: either class A brings more DPS and class B remains benched, or vice versa. Either way, the min/maxers will still take one and bench the other (and those who copy them will blindly follow), so there's no overall improvement from the situation before. Nobody's going to bring a frost mage to a raid when other classes provide the same buff, but with more DPS.
Bring the player, not the class is a myth: top raiding guilds have always picked the best players. These are skilled people who can pretty easily re-spec to match the needs of the day. That hasn't changed as a result of homogenisation. There is still a "best" spec and only that will do in the top raiding guilds. The people who aren't interested in bleeding-edge raiding will still take non-optimal groups and deal with any problems by waiting to get better gear before they deal with particular encounters, just as before.

I'd like to see the game go in exactly the opposite direction: make classes more different, not less. Yes, that will mean that (for example) affliction warlocks are worse in some encounters than arcane mages. As long as the encounters are designed in such a way that slow and steady DPS is better for one boss and burst for another, that's fine. It may also mean that PvP is less "fair". Frankly, I don't care - I'd rather be pwned than bored.

Resto-druid HOTs have been blanded into the ground because of PvP and their direct heals buffed. Now they're just different-shaped priests. I don't want that. Give me a variety of different encounters in the same instance, where HOTs are better for one and direct heals better for another. If that means I play my druid on some fights and my warlock alt on others (whilst Bob plays his rogue on some fights and his priest on others), so be it. That really is bringing the player not the class.

Bored

2010-04-24T22:59:00.008+01:00

I've just listened to Totalbiscuit's latest podcast and the core of the show was a long rant about how bored he is with WOW at the moment. Apparently Blizzard aren't producing enough content for him and what's there is too easy. So easy, in fact, that only a handful of guilds in the whole world have finished ICC on 25-man hard mode. That's what? About a hundred people out of the 12 million that play WOW, or 0.001% of the player base. Clearly far too easy.

For a man who is continuously complaining about people who think they are entitled to get something from the game, he's remarkably vocal about his own entitlement.

Blizzard's job isn't to funnel all their efforts into entertaining a small group of hardcore raiders whilst abandoning the rest of the player base, it's to provide a broad range of content for everyone. Other games have tried the hardcore approach, of course. The massive revenues and total market domination abject failure of Vanguard shows how well that works.

If you're bored with WOW (or anything else in life for that matter), there's a simple solution. Go do something else. Don't just sit there whining about it. Play a different game or, perish the thought, walk away from the computer and go outside. The world is full of interesting plays, books, films & places to visit.

Complaining about being bored is annoying enough coming from children. It's ridiculous coming from adults.

The mysterious vanishing guild

2010-04-23T17:31:00.003+01:00

I logged onto my main a couple of days ago to find that my entire guild had vanished. Since I was one of the officers in that guild, that was something of a surprise to me!

At first I suspected that the GM's account had been hacked, so I tried to get in touch with her via the alt she was on at the same time. Nope, no hacking, she'd just decided to close it down. When I asked why, I got a complex story along the lines of "A left because they fell out with B, C went to play on a different a server, the GM had fallen out with D because they'd been nasty to her friend E etc".

Now that's a fairly normal story of guild problems, but what I found baffling was why the GM didn't discuss this with her officers. The guild had been a typical small one, with no internal conflict that I'd ever seen, yet it seems that there was a complex swirl of difficult relationships beneath the surface that had never been discussed. As far as I can tell, this whole feud was being carried out via MSN or private whispers and never emerged into guild chat.

It's not the decision to end the guild that I find baffling here, it's the furtiveness about it. At the very least, the GM could have asked the officers if they wished to take it over. If nothing else, it would have been handy for my bank alt.

Perhaps this all goes to show how ephemeral social structures can be in MMOs. It's easy to simply disband a group you find inconvenient or ignore people you don't feel like talking to. It's already happened with PUGs - many people treat them as disposal tools to get loot. If the drop they're after doesn't turn up, they quit, leaving everyone else in the lurch. Who cares, eh? It's not like there's real people in the game with you.

Perhaps we are moving into the age of the disposable guild as well. It's always existed to a certain extent, especially amongst wannabe hardcore raiders, who guild-hop relentlessly in an attempt to gear up on the backs of others. But I wonder what that will do to the game long-term. For an MMO, the social relationships are the game (no matter what Gevlon says). Without other people, the repetitive content, undemanding graphics and lack of plot would make WOW a poor single-player game.

It will be interesting to see what effect Blizzard's proposed guild-changes in Cataclysm have on this.

The idiot tax

2010-04-19T19:09:00.012+01:00

Billions of innocent pixels have lost their lives this week across the blogosphere as debate raged over the merits of a virtual horse. Some raged against it, as Totalbiscut did in his TRH video, but hundreds of thousands more (as many as 700,000 if internet rumour is to be believed, which it frequently isn't) spent real world money to acquire it. At 25$ each, that's a revenue of $17.5M straight into the already over-stuffed Blizzard bank. If Mike Morhaime wasn't gold-capped before, he surely is now.

So what kind of fool would spend $25 on a cosmetic item that provides no substantial benefits? Well, pretty much the same kind who would spend a fortune on a pair of Jimmy Choos or an Armani suit when the alternatives offer far more functionality at a lower price. The same ones who spend money on wine when tap water is both cheaper and healthier. The same ones who spend $15 a month to play a video game when they could be saving it up for a rainy day. Fools like us, in other words.

Now you may not want to buy the magic sparkle pony (I think it's hideous), but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing if other people do. There's no impact on game balance and it's extra revenue that supports the game you are playing, keeping your subscription down. The WOW subscripton in the UK hasn't risen since the game was introduced, not even in line with inflation, which averaged around 3%. If they had done that, prices would be 16% higher. Cosmetic in-game items and other services like paid realm-transfers help make up that income, which is falling in real terms. Effectively, the people who pay for these things are subsidising the rest of us.

This sort of "idiot tax" is common in the real world. Taxes on alcohol or cigarattes help fund vital public services and national lotteries fulfil a similar role. They are entirely optional - if you're short of money or don't think it's fun, you don't have to pay the tax.

So there's no need to mock or be angry with people who do. Be grateful. They're saving you money.

The sun will rise

2010-04-15T19:44:00.006+01:00

For me, one of the most interesting changes in Cataclysm is the introduction of Tauren paladins, or Sunwalkers. Of course all the existing races are getting additional classes in Cataclysm, so what makes the sunwalkers special? Most of the other new classes are a natural extension of what the race already has or had. For example, Wildhammer Dwarves already have shamanic powers and the Night Elves used to practice magic in the past.

The Tauren have no history of links to the holy light - they are a simple people who worship nature as personified by the Earthmother. however, in Tauren mythos, the Earthmother's eyes are themselves special - they are known as An'she (the sun) and Mu'sha (the moon). Mu'sha is a deity that is familiar to many players under her night elf name of Elune; she is strongly associated with the druidic powers shared by the Tauren and Night Elves.

An'she has been barely discussed in lore so far. The only real reference is a vague hint that can be found in the conversation between Tahu Sagewind and Aponi Brightmane that can be heard if you follow the quest An Injured Colleague. Superficially, this is one of the strangest quests in the game. You pick it up just next to the portal to Thunder Bluff in Dalaran, jump straight through and drop it off. There is no challenge, no continuation. The only reason it exists is to take players to a place they might not normally visit so that they overhear the conversation. Tahu and Aponi are talking about the lack of balance in the current Tauren beliefs - they give great reverence to the moon, but ignore the sun. In all likelihood, this is Blizzard's way of introducing the beliefs behind the sunwalkers into the game.

In my view the Tauren are a great fit for paladins, they are probably the only Horde race that could unambiguously be described as good, but this is a big challenge to the way they see the world. New religions can be incredibly disruptive and different Tauren may respond to it in highly varying ways.

Rejection: "This is a heresy that disrupts our ancient ways - it can lead to no good".
Tolerance: "I don't agree with them myself, but Aponi is a good person, so let her have her say".
Acceptance: "They are right, we have neglected An'she. It is time to redress the balance".
Fanaticism: "We have been deceived all these years by those who followed the elves' goddess. An'she shows us the one true way".

It's the interaction between these different responses that makes it interesting. Could the currently harmonious Tauren society become factionalised in response to this new faith? Could there be conflict between those who reject the new ways and the fanatics?

So if, like me, you're rolling a Sunwalker the day Cataclysm comes out, now is the time to start thinking about how they fit in. There's more to being a paladin than spamming consecrate!

I'll leave you with a free preview.

No, this isn't a beta leak. It's someone having fun with a graphical bug.
It's still cool, though.

Bring back the A team

2010-04-10T10:07:00.025+01:00

No, not them.

There's been a lot of talk in the blogosphere over the last few years about how Blizzard no longer have their best people working on WOW and have moved their most talented people to other projects, such as the new unannounced MMO. I've been largely skeptical about this, as I think Wrath was a superb expansion and generally changed the game for the better.

However, the recent Cataclysm class change announcements are starting to make me doubt that view. Some of the proposed changes seem bizarre and ill-considered to me and look like the work of inexperienced designers who haven't really thought through the consequences of what they're proposing. There are two key principles game designers should follow when making changes to a game with a large established player base.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
What could possibly go wrong?

Some of the proposed changes seem to violate those. I won't go through them all (MMO champion has good coverage), but try to pick out some examples to explain what I mean.

Death Knight

"One of the biggest changes we're making is converting Blood into a dedicated tanking tree."

Eh? I can understand that it makes design difficult to have 3 trees all both suited to DPS and tanking, but blood feels like the wrong choice for the tanking tree to me. You tank with frost presence and frost is relevant to slowing enemy attacks and associated with defence in the game already (e.g. frost mages). A far more sensible arrangement would be:

Blood - specialist single target DPS, self healing makes it a good levelling spec.
Frost - tanking.
Unholy - specialist melee AOE class

Druid

"Tree of Life is changing from a passive talent to a cooldown-based talent, similar to Metamorphosis. Mechanically, it feels unfair for a druid to have to give up so much offense and utility in order to be just as good at healing as the other classes who are not asked to make that trade."

Why? Seriously - how does this improve the game one jot? You don't go into tree form for any reason other than healing. If you want to add DPS or other activities, it's easy to drop into caster form. Even assuming that Blizzard's reasoning is correct, why does it not also apply to shadow priests, bears or moonkin? Why should they "have to give up so much ... utility" in those special forms? This proposal breaks rule 1 - a pointless, irrational change that adds nothing to the game and wastes developer time and effort that would be better spent elsewhere.

Hunter
To be fair, most of the hunter changes seem quite sensible. It always felt strange for a physical DPS class to use mana and the current implementation of ammo is just an annoyance. I'd prefer it if ammo remained (in a non-consumable form) to allow hunters more choices, but overall the hunter class changes aren't bad.

Mage

" We are planning to remove spells that don't have a clear purpose. Amplify Magic, Dampen Magic, Fire Ward, and Frost Ward are being removed from the game, and we may remove more."

Don't have a clear purpose? Do you even play this game? Fire ward protects you against fire damage. You know - that hot burny stuff bosses fling about all over the place that kills squishy little mages. Similarly for frost ward. Non-frost mages have few enough defences as it is and I've been saved many times by judicious use of these spells. This proposal breaks both rules. There's nothing wrong with the way the spells function now and this change could have horrible consequences for mages who play as anything other than frost.

Priest

"Leap of Faith (level 85): Pull a party or raid member to your location. Leap of Faith (or "Life Grip") is intended to give priests a tool to help rescue fellow players who have pulled aggro, are being focused on in PvP, or just can't seem to get out of the fire in time."

The potential for griefing with this spell is huge. Jump off cliff, life-grip, levitate on self or pull people *into* fire. Also, it moves the responsibility for for moving out of the fire from the person standing in it to the healer. You can see it now: "it's not my fault - you should have life-gripped me". Spectacularly ill-considered breach of rule 2.

Rogue
I'll not comment on the rogue changes, because I've never really played one enough to understand the class properly. Not meddling with things you don't understand? Perhaps I should add that as rule 3.

Shaman

"Cleansing Totem will be removed from the game, as we want dispels to be a decision for players, not something done mindlessly."

For me, cleansing totem is one of the signature shaman abilities - it's what makes people smile when they have a shaman in the group. I can understand the reasoning behind the change, but it's still a shame. I hope some of the old instances with mass poisoning going on that only a cleansing totem can handle will be re-designed. I'll miss you, cleansing totem.

Warrior

"Heroic Leap (Level 85): This ability makes the character leap at their target and apply the Thunder Clap ability to all enemies in the area when they land."

To quote Mr Punch: "That's the way to do it!" A fun ability that solves an actual problem in the game: the difficulty of generating snap AOE threat in PUGs full of idiots. Generally speaking, the warrior changes look sensible to me.

Warlock
Generally, these changes seem quite well though out. The VW looks like being the levelling pet of choice, with its enhanced AOE threat. The guys doing the W class changes seem to be on a roll!

General

The random re-allocation of which classes can cure which ailments seems completely pointless to me. Clear break of rule 1: there is nothing wrong with the way things are now, so why are Blizzard wasting developer time and effort scrambling everything? It would be much better spent adding new abilities & re-working the existing ones to smooth out the progression now that ranks have been abolished.

Developing, balancing and testing new abilities is difficult. It's time to focus effort on changes that actually improve the game, not pointless shuffling of things that are working OK already.

Overall, I'm left feeling rather nervous about Cataclysm, which I'd previously been looking forward to. I do hope it won't turn into WOW's NGE moment.

War in the Ghostlands

2010-04-08T14:48:00.003+01:00

"Tell us! Tell us what ya see, ol' man, Be dis da en' time?"

The old Amani shaman focussed his mind once more and gazed out from the hills, his magic taking him far away.

"I sees a big army o'da Bright Ones. Dey gather in dat village dem dead fellas smashed."

"Dey comin' fa us?"

"Maybe, maybe. We all gotta die some day, even da loa."

But this army was not for the Amani. A force was coming from the south: humans, dwarves, more elves and those tiny children they send into battle as a strange sacrifice. Even trolls gods aren't that cruel.

These two armies fought for hours, over a stretch of barren wasteland. Nobody was defending their home, nobody was defending their family. Just fighting over flags. The shaman though back to the tales he'd heard of the old Gurubashi Empire, their ancient rivals. Their world fell like that... fighting, brother against brother, until nothing was left but a few ruins.

"Dey fightin' each othas! All dem new-fellas are fightin' 'emselves. Akil'zon be laughin' tonight!"

The troll watched as the Alliance army advanced, confident of victory from the initial skirmishes, then was driven back as they encountered the main Sin'dorei forces. Back down the road, back to the Plagueland. He watched the final insult, as they killed the prisoners and didn't even eat them. Consuming your foes is respect - it shows their strength is worth stealing.

"Dem Bright Ones be crueller dan any troll, dat's fa shu."

Burn, baby burn!

2010-04-04T21:51:00.006+01:00

Are shaman the new AOE grinding class?

Today I'm going to share a little trick that hasn't been discussed much in any of the forums or blogs I've seen. Exploiting the unique combination of heavy armour and AOE DPS that elemental shamans have. Not in a raiding sense, but for levelling. It's something that I discovered by accident when a load of mobs re-spawned on me in what I thought was a safe area. An elemental shaman can burn down vast swathes of enemies in one go - a trick normally reserved for frost mages and prot paladins. Your great advantage is that you have the DPS of a mage, combined with the armour of a plate-wearer.

I'm not just talking about easy-kill low level mobs here, I'm talking ones at or above your level. Only two of the dead beasties you see in the picture above were at my level. The rest were above it. The only reason I was limited to six for this picture was because that's all there were in the room. You can easily handle more than that - at no point in this fight did I fall below 75% health or mana.

You're crazy #1: shaman AOE is terrible!
Well, that depends what you mean. Shaman DPS has caused some concerns at the Icecrown Citadel level, particularly AOE. The problem there is that to get half-way decent AOE, you have to:

run in;
drop your magma totem right in the middle of a pack of mobs;
run out;
fire nova;
cast for a while until the magma totem perishes, weaving in fire nova when it's off cooldown;
repeat.

Given the short life of a magma totem (20 seconds), that's a lot of running for each AOE. If the mobs get moved, it all goes to rats. Now imagine that you know where the mobs are - right on top of you. Then there's no running and no missed DPS due to movement, it starts to look a bit different.

You're crazy #2: you'll just get squished!
Not really. You're a mail wearing class with a shield who can self heal, not a wizard in a dress. For example, my little L45 shaman wearing approximately 50/50 caster greens & blues has 46% damage reduction with stoneskin totem up. Not raid tank material, certainly, but up there with plate DPS classes. What's more, because most of the damage comes from the automatic ticks of the magma totem + sporadic instant-cast fire novas, I can easily heal in-between those.

You're crazy #3: this will only work with imba gear.
My little shaman is my first character Horde-side on AD. I have no heirlooms, no enchants and just junk gear I've picked up from dungeon-finder PUGs. No twinking was involved.

You're crazy #4: why isn't everybody doing it, then?
A good question. I don't really know the answer to this, but it may be because the crucial change (to fire nova) was made after the expert shammies were all at level 80 and raiding. Why should they be worrying about how to level?

You're crazy #5: these specialist AOE builds are great for showing off, but they sacrifice single target DPS.
I haven't used a specialist AOE build here. I currently have Call of Flame, but no Improved Fire Nova or Glyph of Fire Nova. I'm just using a fairly regular elemental shaman levelling build. If I had those extras, AOE grinding would be even more effective.

You're crazy #6: you'll run out of mana.
Oh Water Shield, how I love you. Thanks to the large numbers of beasties beating on you, you get a steady mana regen from water shield. Improved Shields would make this better, but I'm too low to start branching out into the enhancement tree. It's fine as it is right now.

OK - maybe it might work. How do I get started?
I'm currently running with this build, with Glyph of Lightning Bolt, Glyph of Flametongue Weapon and Glyph of Water Walking. In other words, completely non-optimised for AOE. I dread to think how effective this approach might be if you actually tuned your spec for it, as frost mages and prot paladins have to.

Wear any old green/blue caster mail you can pick up. It's important to wear mail here (not cloth like you might use for an instance) and carry a shield.

From then on, it's easy:

Round up a bunch of mobs (start with 3-4 until you've got the hang of it, then increase gradually). Avoid mobs with an interrupt, or you'll just be a mess of mail and blood on the floor. You can handle a single caster, provided you bring all the others to him. That's one more than a frost mage can handle, by the way. Mobs with poison or disease are less of a problem for you than other AOE classes, because you have a Cleansing Totem. If you get dazed during the pull, drop a Stoneclaw Totem to keep them busy while you gather the others.
Drop totems. Generally speaking, you'll want to use Magma, Stoneskin, Mana Spring and (some junk air totem). Wrath of Air is good when you get it, but that requires level 64. If the mobs cause poison or disease switch the mana spring totem to cleansing. You'll finish the fight on slightly less mana, but you'll still win.
Fire nova whenever it's off cooldown.
If your Water Shield is down, refresh it.
If you have a load of health and it's off cooldown, cast Chain Lightning.
Refresh the Magma Totem as needed.
Otherwise, heal yourself.
Repeat until mobs are dead.
Remember: if it all goes wrong, you still have your Ankh!

Enjoy!

This is the hour of the Forsaken!

2010-04-02T11:28:00.015+01:00

Chastity's superb recent post on Wrathgate from the perspective of the Forsaken has prompted me to write about something that's been brewing at the back of my mind for several months now. Just what exactly is going on at Wrathgate?

Let's go back to the cinematic. If you want to re-view it, it's available here or hidden away in your main Warcraft folder, under Data->(Folder name depending on your language)->Interface->Cinematics.

It starts off with Bolvar Fordragon calling out Arthas from Icecrown Citadel, surrounded by a group of Alliance troops. The Horde forces are up on the hill and there is no sign of Fordring any of the Argent Crusade. The dragons (who appear later) are still back in Wyrmrest Temple. So this isn't (at first, anyway) a combined assault, it's an Alliance-only operation. This leads us to the first big question: why?

At first sight, it seems to be foolish to assault Icecrown when more than half your forces are missing. Why not inform the Horde that the attack was about to start? The only conclusion I reach is that this is a deliberate choice, made in the (mistaken) belief that the Alliance was strong enough on its own to defeat the Lich King. Perhaps they were taken in by the ease of progress so far, but whoever made that decision seriously miscalculated. This brings us to the second big question. Who made that decision? That kind of recklessness hardly seems very Bolvar-like, which leads me to suspect that it's King Dumb Varian Wrynn behind it all.

Why would he do such a thing? His wariness about involving the Horde may be understandable, but not bringing in Fordring? Unfathomable. This leaves us with two possibilities: either his ego is just so huge that he thinks he doesn't need the help of the only man who has actually stood against Arthas successfully so far, or he did tell Fordring and the Argent Crusade refused to take part, as they regarded the whole venture as ill-judged.

The results, of course, are catastrophic. The Horde forces are caught on the hop and end up rushing down the forces they have on the scene at the time. That means there's only Saurfang Jr there to command them. Bolvar may be the best hero the Alliance has to offer, but Saurfang Jr certainly isn't the best the Horde have. He's the kind of guy you put in charge of doing the preparation work, with the intention of calling in the old man for the actual battle. Do you really think Saurfang Sr would have failed to secure the high land overlooking the battle or rage-charged in against Arthas? The poor boy was completely out of his depth.

Of course we can't be certain that the Alliance kept the Horde in the dark about the attack. But that leads us down an even more sinister path. It's hard to see Thrall or Saurfang Sr being this disorganised, but that leaves Overlord Dumberer Garrosh as the person who was told. Did he deliberately withhold that information from the rest of the Horde command? And who leaked news of the attack to Putress, giving him enough time to bring up his plague-wagons?

It's hard to see this as a bid for personal glory on Garrosh's part, as he wasn't there. A cunning plan to wipe out the Alliance forces and Arthas at the same time, with the added benefit of hurting Saurfang Sr? Maybe Garrosh isn't so dumb after all - he's cunning, playing dumb. Or perhaps he's being manipulated by the same demonic forces that controlled his father, whose intention is to weaken Arthas, the Horde and Alliance simultaneously. In other words, is this the start of an even greater plot-line, where the orcs start to fall under demonic influence once more? That would have massive repercussions for the game later on.

All of this brings us to our final question: why did the dragons turn up when they did? Five minutes earlier and Arthas would have been toast. Game over. But they held back, and the reason why has yet to be explained. Were they afraid that they couldn't defeat Arthas? Not told about it? The know it's due to happen, because they're involved in some of the pre-wrathgate quests, and they've got Chromie there, so knowing the future shouldn't be a big deal. Perhaps they foresee the consequences of arriving earlier as being worse. Arthas isn't worth intervening against, but the Forsaken plague is? How potent was that stuff?

Edit
Perhaps the dragons foresaw the role that Bolvar was later to play and felt they had to allow Wrathgate to happen to have him in the right place at the right time in future. That doesn't answer the other questions, though.

Wrathgate seemed like such a simple, dramatic event the first time I saw it. But every time I think about it, it seems more mysterious.