As Blizzard wraps up the first content patch of the Warlords of Draenor era, I'm marking something like 3 weeks in the expansion. I'd say that overall it's a good expansion, but I'm not yet convinced of the staying power given that we are almost certainly at least a year from the next edition.
My tale thus far:
- Advanced my main from level 90 to level 100 in 9 days, including full clears of Shadowmoon Valley, Gorgrond, Talador, and portions of the Spires of Arak.
- My garrison is currently as upgraded as possible given my late start, with all buildings at level 2 (if gated by an achievement I have yet to complete) or 3. I've collected 30 followers, all of whom are level 100, and am rapidly working on upgrading them to purple quality and ilvl 630 gear. I'm actually about to start tearing down some buildings where I have already obtained the best rewards.
- Polished off Spires of Arak and cleared out Nagrand.
- Captured all pets that can be battled in the wild in Draenor.
- I'm advancing professions as quickly as the time-gates allowed. One detour here - I'm continuing to farm the Pandaria farm for cloth, so I can make nearly free 28-slot bags every two weeks or so.
At this point, I have some amount of stuff that I can loot for zero effort in about 20 minutes each day at my Garrison. There's a daily quest that I've done once to go to a level 100 area and farm a relatively modest amount of an endgame currency - I can see this getting old pretty quickly. Otherwise, I can level an alt (including the "free" instant 90 that came with the expansion box) for fun and additional garrisons.... or go do dungeons. I don't know that I'm going to be sold on doing dungeons.
There is a lot to like in Draenor. The world is pretty and does much more to encourage exploration than recent expansions have done. There are constant little blips in the world for looting treasure, killing rare spawns, and even triggering events by just taking the time to kill mobs attacking a town without a quest to do so are in some ways a bigger innovation than anything Blizzard did in Pandaria. The story is alright, though a bit focused on having major villains escape to go be raid bosses (perhaps appropriate for revisiting Draenor).
But overall, I'm a month in with a month left on a 60 day time card and I'm not entirely sure what to do with that time. Perhaps tomorrow's patch will shake things up, but this does not bode entirely well.
Showing posts with label PVE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PVE. Show all posts
Monday, February 23, 2015
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Wasted Content in WoW 5.4
World of Warcraft's patch 5.4 finally dropped this week, adding another gear reset to the game's progression. As a result, the unfortunate but efficient way to win Pandaria's endgame is to skip the overwhelming majority of the endgame content. It just seems like such a waste, and I continue to question whether having stats on gear is even worthwhile if it's going to waste this much content.
Raids gone by
By design, players can jump straight from heroic 5-man content into the new looking for raid content (with a very brief visit to Throne of Thunder - more on how this works in the next section). This is a good thing if your goal is to join your friends in the new content, either because you are returning to the game or rolling up a new alt. It's probably a good thing if all you want is to beat the Garrosh raid once on LFR mode to say that you've been there and looted that. If you were actually enjoying playing through multiple tiers of content and steadily acquiring new gear as you did so, however, this sort of spoils a fair chunk of content.
I have now run the Throne of Thunder LFR's once each (with an additional run through a partially completed final wing this week). That's four raid wings I could be doing weekly and getting real gear upgrades each time. At least I finished the five LFR wings from patch 5.0 before this new content arrived, because changes to gear vendors render that content pretty much entirely obsolete.
I can still go back and do the old content as it was designed - in fact, the expansion's Legendary questline sort of favors that approach (you can go straight to the Ogrimmar raid and do almost all of the steps there, but you will be grinding the same content for a very long time) - but knowing that I'm getting worse rewards for the same time investment feels like doing it wrong.
Appendix: Comparing 5.3 to 5.4
For context, an explanation of what changed and how it got us here:
Endgame PVE in WoW uses two currencies, which were not changed in the new patch. Justice points are obtained in relatively large amounts and there is no cap on how many you can earn as long as you're spending them before you get to the 4000 point cap in your currency wallet. Valor points are typically obtained in smaller amounts per reward, and there is a weekly cap in how many you can earn.
In patch 5.3, these currencies were of somewhat limited value. Your goals were to get to ilvl 460 to get into LFR and then slowly increase your ilvl up to 470 and then 480 for the higher tier content. The problem was that the justice point gear was low enough that it wasn't going to boost your average by very much, and you couldn't actually purchase any of the valor gear without first grinding reputation (primarily through solo daily quests). As a result, I basically skipped random 5-mans, and got to 460 primarily by doing the daily random scenario once per day and spending the rest of time working on miscellany (the farm, archeology, etc). Then I did the LFR's as intended.
Patch 5.4 removed the reputation requirements and downgraded almost all of the gear from the valor vendor to the justice vendor. As a result, ilvl 496 gear that previously required lengthy reputation and valor grinding to obtain is now quickly earned through unlimited random dungeons for easily obtained justice points. This obsoletes the five LFR wings from 5.0, as it takes longer to earn fewer, lower quality rewards that will still actively hurt your average for the newest content in patch 5.4.
Additionally, ilvl 522 rep rewards from the 5.2 raid now require only friendly reputation with that raid's faction. You'll get this in maybe 2 hours by running 3-4 wings of 5.2 LFR's. Once you have this rep, the return on your time in 5.2 content is questionable - you can earn valor points faster in other formats (including heroics) and those points get you ilvl 522 vendor rewards rather than scraping for a chance at ilvl 502 stuff in the 5.2 LFR's.
Raids gone by
By design, players can jump straight from heroic 5-man content into the new looking for raid content (with a very brief visit to Throne of Thunder - more on how this works in the next section). This is a good thing if your goal is to join your friends in the new content, either because you are returning to the game or rolling up a new alt. It's probably a good thing if all you want is to beat the Garrosh raid once on LFR mode to say that you've been there and looted that. If you were actually enjoying playing through multiple tiers of content and steadily acquiring new gear as you did so, however, this sort of spoils a fair chunk of content.
I have now run the Throne of Thunder LFR's once each (with an additional run through a partially completed final wing this week). That's four raid wings I could be doing weekly and getting real gear upgrades each time. At least I finished the five LFR wings from patch 5.0 before this new content arrived, because changes to gear vendors render that content pretty much entirely obsolete.
I can still go back and do the old content as it was designed - in fact, the expansion's Legendary questline sort of favors that approach (you can go straight to the Ogrimmar raid and do almost all of the steps there, but you will be grinding the same content for a very long time) - but knowing that I'm getting worse rewards for the same time investment feels like doing it wrong.
Appendix: Comparing 5.3 to 5.4
For context, an explanation of what changed and how it got us here:
Endgame PVE in WoW uses two currencies, which were not changed in the new patch. Justice points are obtained in relatively large amounts and there is no cap on how many you can earn as long as you're spending them before you get to the 4000 point cap in your currency wallet. Valor points are typically obtained in smaller amounts per reward, and there is a weekly cap in how many you can earn.
In patch 5.3, these currencies were of somewhat limited value. Your goals were to get to ilvl 460 to get into LFR and then slowly increase your ilvl up to 470 and then 480 for the higher tier content. The problem was that the justice point gear was low enough that it wasn't going to boost your average by very much, and you couldn't actually purchase any of the valor gear without first grinding reputation (primarily through solo daily quests). As a result, I basically skipped random 5-mans, and got to 460 primarily by doing the daily random scenario once per day and spending the rest of time working on miscellany (the farm, archeology, etc). Then I did the LFR's as intended.
Patch 5.4 removed the reputation requirements and downgraded almost all of the gear from the valor vendor to the justice vendor. As a result, ilvl 496 gear that previously required lengthy reputation and valor grinding to obtain is now quickly earned through unlimited random dungeons for easily obtained justice points. This obsoletes the five LFR wings from 5.0, as it takes longer to earn fewer, lower quality rewards that will still actively hurt your average for the newest content in patch 5.4.
Additionally, ilvl 522 rep rewards from the 5.2 raid now require only friendly reputation with that raid's faction. You'll get this in maybe 2 hours by running 3-4 wings of 5.2 LFR's. Once you have this rep, the return on your time in 5.2 content is questionable - you can earn valor points faster in other formats (including heroics) and those points get you ilvl 522 vendor rewards rather than scraping for a chance at ilvl 502 stuff in the 5.2 LFR's.
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Gear Catch Up Versus Bolster
I've been spending some time working on the tips from Blizzard's official guide on "catching up to 5.3" to gather some of the endgame gear from the patches I didn't play at the time. I'm enjoying most of the process and it's going reasonably quickly, but I can also see how a new player just looking to play current content with their friends would lose patience with even this significantly accelerated pace. Is this system really better than just automatically bolstering characters up to the entry level gear - a mechanic we're seeing increasingly for PVP in other games?
The Catch Up Method
Blizzard's guide is helpful and I highly recommend it to anyone who does have a new max level character in World of Warcraft. I also find it unfortunate that the developers of an MMO are in the position of having to write this document, and especially unusual that the authors are encouraging customers to skip so much of the content that Blizzard spent so much money developing.
To oversimplify greatly, the guide's main point is to get to the bare minimum gear level required for the computer to let you queue for the lowest level of the automated raid finder, and then take advantage of several mechanics that have made gearing up in these raids much faster than it was a year ago. To this end, the authors identify several low-hanging fruit in the reward scale - the kind of advice that five years ago you'd read on a player site like Player Versus Developer, rather than having the developer themselves TELL you to do X content and not Y content because the rewards are better. They even go so far as to suggest fooling their own queueing system by equipping easily obtained PVP gear - this stuff may actually be worse than the random quest rewards you already had on from leveling because some of its stat budget gets spent on PVP stuff, but the item level is high and this is all the group finder cares about.
Personally, I don't feel that players who get something early, when doing so is hard, should have a right to demand that future players must work as hard for the same rewards. However, when you consider how often WoW in particular resets its entire itemization curve, and how extreme the catch up curve is, it starts to seem like your accomplishments will be so temporary that it's hardly worth working for them - better to just show up at the end of the expansion, like I have, drive through quick to see all the sights once, and come back in a year or two for the end of the next expansion. Meanwhile, the new or returning player is forced to spend time - the guide says a week or two but this appears to assume far more effort far more consistently than what I've been putting in - grinding dailies and running random groups until they have enough gear not to hinder their friends in current tier raid content.
Bolster and other automated solutions
Just giving players the stats they need to do the content they want seems counterintuitive to a genre that is built on persistent character progression. Then again, this has happened in a variety of settings - Guild Wars 2 in particular made a big deal of this feature - and in particular in PVP settings.
I'll pick on SWTOR for a moment because their situation has evolved - and brought with it some serious growing pains. Like many games, SWTOR has a PVP-specific character statistic, which causes problems when placing new characters who do not have this stat against characters who are fully geared out - even if the newbie's gear is very good for normal gameplay, they will fare very poorly.
Bioware's first attempt to solve this problem was to make the entry level PVP set available for relatively reasonable sums of credits. Next, they moved to giving every new level 50 character a full set of entry level PVP gear for free (in the process significantly upgrading whatever random stuff you had on when you hit the cap). In the new expansion, they started implementing an automated "bolster" system that is intended to scale your stats up to some baseline level. There were many loopholes (i.e. better to go in naked than wearing mediocre gear, because this would get you an overcompensating bolster bonus) but it sounds like most of the issues have settled down.
The end result is that players show up in whatever gear they're wearing, but are boosted up to the amount of PVP stats found on the new entry-level set. This begs the question of why that's a non-zero number to begin with, rather than just using the entry level as the baseline if you're going to set everyone to at least that number anyway. Players can still spend PVP currency to get the entry level PVP gear - and I think the intent is for this to be slightly better than the automated bolstering - but the overall effect is that you should NOT need to go do something you do not want to do as a prerequisite to doing something you do want to do with your friends.
The cost of NOT bolstering
Getting back to World of Warcraft for a moment, prior to the current expansion, the developers stated that about a third of the quests in the expansion pack were daily quests so that players working on any one faction would have a variety each day the logged in. Today, the guidance straight from the developer is that all of this content is completely optional. The 3-man scenarios and 5-man instances also seem to be things that you spend only brief time in if you really want to - the real rewards are quicker and easier if you somehow get into the raid finder.
It just seems like such a waste. Time and limited resources wasted by the developer on content that won't be worth doing in six months. Time wasted by players grinding out gear, enchantments, etc, that will be blanked constantly. Time spend playing but not enjoying the game in the notoriously reward motivated random groups (that would not exist if not for the daily rewards). And - in my case as someone who actually likes small group content - entire chunks of the game that aren't worth doing because the raid finder is easier and more rewarding.
Would it really be worse to take stats off of gear altogether, give everyone what they need to do the content they're trying to do, and let players spend as much time as possible doing what they want with the people they want?
(P.S. Random speculation - a purely subscription game makes its money based on how long players spend playing, so it's especially odd to see the last big subscription game standing giving players advice on how to skip so much of the content. Either the lost revenue for NOT handing out this advice is even worse - players burning out and quitting early - or perhaps Blizzard is thinking about laying the groundwork for a business model shift where their money is less proportional to time /played.)
The Catch Up Method
Blizzard's guide is helpful and I highly recommend it to anyone who does have a new max level character in World of Warcraft. I also find it unfortunate that the developers of an MMO are in the position of having to write this document, and especially unusual that the authors are encouraging customers to skip so much of the content that Blizzard spent so much money developing.
To oversimplify greatly, the guide's main point is to get to the bare minimum gear level required for the computer to let you queue for the lowest level of the automated raid finder, and then take advantage of several mechanics that have made gearing up in these raids much faster than it was a year ago. To this end, the authors identify several low-hanging fruit in the reward scale - the kind of advice that five years ago you'd read on a player site like Player Versus Developer, rather than having the developer themselves TELL you to do X content and not Y content because the rewards are better. They even go so far as to suggest fooling their own queueing system by equipping easily obtained PVP gear - this stuff may actually be worse than the random quest rewards you already had on from leveling because some of its stat budget gets spent on PVP stuff, but the item level is high and this is all the group finder cares about.
Personally, I don't feel that players who get something early, when doing so is hard, should have a right to demand that future players must work as hard for the same rewards. However, when you consider how often WoW in particular resets its entire itemization curve, and how extreme the catch up curve is, it starts to seem like your accomplishments will be so temporary that it's hardly worth working for them - better to just show up at the end of the expansion, like I have, drive through quick to see all the sights once, and come back in a year or two for the end of the next expansion. Meanwhile, the new or returning player is forced to spend time - the guide says a week or two but this appears to assume far more effort far more consistently than what I've been putting in - grinding dailies and running random groups until they have enough gear not to hinder their friends in current tier raid content.
Bolster and other automated solutions
Just giving players the stats they need to do the content they want seems counterintuitive to a genre that is built on persistent character progression. Then again, this has happened in a variety of settings - Guild Wars 2 in particular made a big deal of this feature - and in particular in PVP settings.
I'll pick on SWTOR for a moment because their situation has evolved - and brought with it some serious growing pains. Like many games, SWTOR has a PVP-specific character statistic, which causes problems when placing new characters who do not have this stat against characters who are fully geared out - even if the newbie's gear is very good for normal gameplay, they will fare very poorly.
Bioware's first attempt to solve this problem was to make the entry level PVP set available for relatively reasonable sums of credits. Next, they moved to giving every new level 50 character a full set of entry level PVP gear for free (in the process significantly upgrading whatever random stuff you had on when you hit the cap). In the new expansion, they started implementing an automated "bolster" system that is intended to scale your stats up to some baseline level. There were many loopholes (i.e. better to go in naked than wearing mediocre gear, because this would get you an overcompensating bolster bonus) but it sounds like most of the issues have settled down.
The end result is that players show up in whatever gear they're wearing, but are boosted up to the amount of PVP stats found on the new entry-level set. This begs the question of why that's a non-zero number to begin with, rather than just using the entry level as the baseline if you're going to set everyone to at least that number anyway. Players can still spend PVP currency to get the entry level PVP gear - and I think the intent is for this to be slightly better than the automated bolstering - but the overall effect is that you should NOT need to go do something you do not want to do as a prerequisite to doing something you do want to do with your friends.
The cost of NOT bolstering
Getting back to World of Warcraft for a moment, prior to the current expansion, the developers stated that about a third of the quests in the expansion pack were daily quests so that players working on any one faction would have a variety each day the logged in. Today, the guidance straight from the developer is that all of this content is completely optional. The 3-man scenarios and 5-man instances also seem to be things that you spend only brief time in if you really want to - the real rewards are quicker and easier if you somehow get into the raid finder.
It just seems like such a waste. Time and limited resources wasted by the developer on content that won't be worth doing in six months. Time wasted by players grinding out gear, enchantments, etc, that will be blanked constantly. Time spend playing but not enjoying the game in the notoriously reward motivated random groups (that would not exist if not for the daily rewards). And - in my case as someone who actually likes small group content - entire chunks of the game that aren't worth doing because the raid finder is easier and more rewarding.
Would it really be worse to take stats off of gear altogether, give everyone what they need to do the content they're trying to do, and let players spend as much time as possible doing what they want with the people they want?
(P.S. Random speculation - a purely subscription game makes its money based on how long players spend playing, so it's especially odd to see the last big subscription game standing giving players advice on how to skip so much of the content. Either the lost revenue for NOT handing out this advice is even worse - players burning out and quitting early - or perhaps Blizzard is thinking about laying the groundwork for a business model shift where their money is less proportional to time /played.)
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Mid-April Outlook
It's been a few months since I posted a round-up/outlook post, though I suppose some of what I've been doing can be inferred from what I've been posting about.
- I finally got back to the level cap in WoW a few weeks back, and I'm not opposed in principle to continuing on into the endgame. The problem is more practical - where in my schedule to find time for this stuff. The current expansion sounds like it is doing some interesting things in terms of story tied to daily quests (i.e. hit a new tier of rep, see some new plot). The problem - not new to this expansion - is that I can get story of similar quality from other games without the grind requirement. I never finished Cataclysm's Molten Front storyline, and I'm told that LOTRO has a similar feature around rebuilding a city in Rohan that will probably fall off my plate for similar reasons.
- DDO remains a back-burner project for me, but it's one that I actually pick up from time to time (albeit usually just for one evening if the mood strikes me). My character has some interesting things coming in his next few levels, and it's possible that his entire build is going to be blown up by a massive overhaul to the game's enhancement system that is now in early development. If I can get to level 20 before that happens, I will have the option of true reincarnating to start over as a build that works with the new rules. I'm willing to call this a goal, though I don't know if it will happen.
- A year and a half into its run, SWTOR seems to have settled in as my current MMO of choice. I have long-term concerns about the game's business model, but in the short term I have only scratched the surface of things that interest me in the game.
My Trooper is now halfway through the (brief) expansion story, my Agent will probably follow close behind, and I could see spending at least some time at endgame on one or both of these characters. (Aside: One small but significant difference between SWTOR and other MMO's is that all reputation scores are shared amongst your legacy and mirrored across factions - both characters add to my legacy reputation while playing through the new content.)
Given enough time, I could imagine someday completing all six of the remaining class stories. My next two 50's should be my level 20 Sith Warrior and either my Jedi Consular or my Sith Inquisitor (both currently level 12) to complete all four class buffs for my legacy. The fact that I can look at my character select screen and legitimately consider clicking the "play" button next to five separate characters in the same game is something that I can't imagine in any other game at the moment. - I don't know that anything new is likely to make its way onto my schedule in the near future. If I had to pick a wild card, though, based on current info, I'm surprisingly intrigued by the relaunch of Final Fantasy XIV. Perhaps this is more of a game that I WANT to like based on the IP than a game that is likely to be suitable for my gaming style. Perhaps the magnitude of the improvements to the game won't live up to the hype. I sat out the game's first launch and I probably won't be there for day one of its second launch, but I could imagine giving this game a shot sometime later this year if the word of mouth goes well, especially if they offer some form of free trial.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
A Week Post 2.0 In SWTOR
SWTOR's patch 2.0 has been around for a week now - along with the expansion for those who pre-purchased early enough to comply with EA's "early access" ultimatum. (Aside: I have heard no outcry, or even mention, of this unprecedented marketing move amongst the SWTOR sites I read, so presumably this tactic is here to stay.) I chose to hold off in favor of waiting until the next time I would be subscribed anyway to play on alts, in order to qualify for the lower subscriber pricing.
The timing mostly worked out for me, in that the extra week was enough to get my Operative across the line to level 50. A few observations from the intervening week:
The timing mostly worked out for me, in that the extra week was enough to get my Operative across the line to level 50. A few observations from the intervening week:
- Class Changes: Like most MMO's which award a point per level to spend on a talent/skill/etc tree, the SWTOR team faced the challenge of how to deal with adding five new points for the five new levels. Their solution was uninspired - they added five points of generally uninteresting filler requirements to each existing tree to ensure that the five new points would be consumed getting back to the character build you had prior to the expansion. My Operative felt especially hard hit, having just gotten to the point where she could have some off-tree points before the patch, only to immediately re-invest them back into her main tree.
This irritation aside, I don't have too many complaints on the class fronts. There were some tweaks, in particular to some of my medium use cooldown (~60 abilities) on both my Vanguard and Operative. Both seem to play mostly alright.
The other (mostly) minor annoyance is the addition of uncontrollable giggling to my Operative. This audio cue is intended to provide players with a better indicator that they have gained a resource type used for certain special abilities. Unfortunately, it does make you sound like a homicidal school girl, giggling every time you knife a foe. I've chosen to play my Operative with some light and some dark so I guess it doesn't entirely kill my chosen characterization, but I've had other players comment on the giggling and it is a bit of a jarring addition. - Currencies come and go: Each planet players encountered during the leveling game previously had its own planet-specific token currency. The good news was that you had zero incentive to hoard the things to get better gear on the next planet. The bad news was that you might finish the planet without enough to purchase what you wanted, and end up with multiple rows of unspent commendations in your currency tab. (This was especially problematic for non-subscribers, who currently cannot lift the penalty on NPC vendor prices by any means other than subscribing. Werit's datamining suggests that this unlock may be coming in the future.) Now all the planetary commendations through level 50 stack, which effectively reverses the good and the bad. Now you can save up, but you have an incentive to wait for higher levels to get the best possible gear.
In other news, all old endgame currencies (four that I can recall) were merged down into one legacy currency, and there are now three new tokens for the new endgame (the lowest of which can be earned in some of the older content). I suppose this is no better or worse than anyone else has done it - at least SWTOR has a currency tab so all these things aren't taking up space. - Pleasant surprise on stability: For a patch of this scale, 2.0 has seemed remarkably stable. Downtime to deploy the patch was minimal and servers came up ahead of schedule. There have been some cosmetic bugs, like world bosses spamming red text to the entire planet, but I've seen much worse from releases with far fewer moving parts. Kudos to the team for what looked like a smooth launch from where I sit.
- A Non-Spoiler Word On Spoilers: Technically not at all related to 2.0, but I've found myself strangely willing to read spoilers for my class story. This seems counter-intuitive, but also in some ways empowering. To the extent that the game is a work of interactive fiction, knowing the major plot outcomes (if not necessarily everything that is going to happen along the way) means that I'm making an informed decision on what kind of story I would like to see. I don't think that knowing all of the major decision points hurt my enjoyment of the tale any more than knowing the outcome of the Lord of the Rings trilogy or other tales harmed the enjoyment of the path it took to get there.
Monday, April 8, 2013
Fruits of SWTOR Double Exp
SWTOR celebrated the run-up to its new expansion with four consecutive double exp weekends (but no non-weekend days), and I used the time to work on my Imperial Operative. I advanced from level 19 to level 45, completed half of Chapter 1, all of Chapter 2, and skipped the entire first planet of Chapter 3 due to having greened out all of the content before I arrived. In the process, I claimed the Agent/Smuggler class buff and 40 presence for my legacy. As is often the case when an exp bonus changes my crowded gaming calendar - bear in mind that I was up against the wire to hit WoW's level cap - the underlying exp curve has some quirks (deficiencies?).
As a matter of principle, I don't see much point in experience boosts - especially such massive ones. You get exp for playing the game, you either are or are not enjoying the game, and if you are enjoying the game then why make the game end more quickly? (Shintar wrote on this topic part way through the promotion.) Typically, when you see me grabbing at exp, it's more because there is something I'm less fond of that stands between myself and exp.
In SWTOR's case, the challenge is that Bioware spent large amounts of time crafting great story content scattered amongst eight classes. Short of extremely drastic measures - such as four consecutive double exp weekends - you will need to complete shared generic content for your faction, which is generally less interesting and does not change on future characters, to make your levels. If you are also playing as a non-subscriber - which I do sometimes in SWTOR - you have even less leeway to skip content due to several stacking penalties on your exp gain.
As a result, the point of playing the double exp for all it was worth was not to skip content - though I did skip entire planets (while focusing my questing efforts on planets I saw less of during my first playthrough). Rather, the point was to save the content for future characters. That I will mostly likely be positioned to play the new expansion on both factions, using my previously level 50 trooper and my soon to be level 50 agent is a side bonus.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Re-Capping Pandaria
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| I stopped what I was doing to go get the last chunk of exp from a pet battle daily. It seemed appropriate. |
When I discussed my earlier troubles getting interested in the expansion, several commenters suggested that the later zones were better. Indeed, I skipped over nearly half of the continent to dive into Towlong and the Dread Wastes, which do have stronger stories. Throw in a level or so worth of exp from pet battles and archeology, a level or so from running random dungeons, and I was able to get to the cap despite covering a relatively small portion of the content.
I did see a bit of the farmville minigame - it seemed like progress was largely blocked until you have access to level 90 dailies - and otherwise I spent my last day of prepaid time using my newly re-unlocked flying mounts to clean up some odds and ends out of my quest log. (This included the Pandaren elemental pet tamer series - the final pet taming quest I had yet to complete - which requires either a flying mount or a player willing to taxi you to the locations.)
It's really early for me to have much of an impression of the endgame, but I was surprised at how much my experience playing the game improved upon regaining the flying mounts. Blizzard isn't wrong that the ability to swoop in trivializes many quests, but that ship has long since sailed. If anything, Pandaria's abundance of quick daily quests scattered around the landscape is especially suited to flying in and out... or especially unsuited to being forced to do without flight for five levels.
I came into MMO's in November 2004 due to WoW's solo PVE game and I still enjoy solo PVE in numerous other MMO's. Thus, it was a surprise that Blizzard has somehow managed to make the process of leveling something that was standing in the way between myself and the content, rather than something I looked forward to. I am interested in many of the things that I have yet to do in this expansion but in some ways I'm not sure that I'm looking forward to the inevitable follow-up expansion that will likely be announced at Blizzcon this year. I'm not sure if that's an endorsement or a condemnation of Pandaria on its merits - I suppose time will tell.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Fun While Playing To Win
The Tales of Tyria Guild Wars 2 Podcast closed up shop last week with an interesting and insightful comment on the state of MMO's - the idea that games can't just be fun in the abstract, but need to be fun when you are playing them to win.
Bridger and company aspired to world-competitive levels in GW2's world versus world non-instanced PVP combat. They found that the most effective strategy in this format is to form up into the largest concentrated force possible, to ensure that you can quickly kill off your foes, capture your objectives, and move on to the next point. Defensive measures that might otherwise have served as force multipliers to help smaller groups hold off the masses through sound strategy - such as siege engines - were inadequate.
Bridger's comment was that any game can be fun when you're messing around with your friends - a past example involved splitting his entire guild into five-man groups just to see how many different "orange swords" conflict icons they could light up on the minimap simultaneously. To be worth playing competitively, however, the game has to be fun when playing to win. Sheer force of numbers as a dominant strategy simply wasn't fun.
I can't speak to the merits of Bridger's claims, having never even played Guild Wars 2 (that I continued to listen to his podcast after deciding not to bother picking up the game is pretty much my highest endorsement). That said, I find it compelling because it fits with what we see across the genre.
In many cases, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the design of gear grinds, daily quest grinds, random group (PVE or PVP) grinds, and all the other things that modern MMO's use to attempt to drive player engagement. Some are buggy, some are excessive, and but many are technically well implemented and most are fun in some form if you are running them with your friends - that would be why they're your friends. Where MMO's may be falling down is in the experience of a player who is playing the game to win - to contribute as much as they can to their raid group or just to beat a personal best time to collect their daily rewards.
I often write that incentives have been highly successful in changing player behavior and highly ineffective in changing player preferences. As Bridger notes, the underlying game itself has to be fun or burnout will be inevitable.
Bridger and company aspired to world-competitive levels in GW2's world versus world non-instanced PVP combat. They found that the most effective strategy in this format is to form up into the largest concentrated force possible, to ensure that you can quickly kill off your foes, capture your objectives, and move on to the next point. Defensive measures that might otherwise have served as force multipliers to help smaller groups hold off the masses through sound strategy - such as siege engines - were inadequate.
Bridger's comment was that any game can be fun when you're messing around with your friends - a past example involved splitting his entire guild into five-man groups just to see how many different "orange swords" conflict icons they could light up on the minimap simultaneously. To be worth playing competitively, however, the game has to be fun when playing to win. Sheer force of numbers as a dominant strategy simply wasn't fun.
I can't speak to the merits of Bridger's claims, having never even played Guild Wars 2 (that I continued to listen to his podcast after deciding not to bother picking up the game is pretty much my highest endorsement). That said, I find it compelling because it fits with what we see across the genre.
In many cases, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the design of gear grinds, daily quest grinds, random group (PVE or PVP) grinds, and all the other things that modern MMO's use to attempt to drive player engagement. Some are buggy, some are excessive, and but many are technically well implemented and most are fun in some form if you are running them with your friends - that would be why they're your friends. Where MMO's may be falling down is in the experience of a player who is playing the game to win - to contribute as much as they can to their raid group or just to beat a personal best time to collect their daily rewards.
I often write that incentives have been highly successful in changing player behavior and highly ineffective in changing player preferences. As Bridger notes, the underlying game itself has to be fun or burnout will be inevitable.
Friday, February 15, 2013
Mixed Early Thoughts On Pandaria
When my initial impressions of WoW's Pandaria expansion were primarily negative, I made a conscious decision to hold judgement - and not post on the blog - while I tried to figure out why.
I knew some portion of the issue was a disruption to my routine - after spending the overwhelming majority of my time in WoW during the last two years either running random dungeon groups or working on pet battles, suddenly the five new levels stood in between me and what I was used to doing for probably the first time in my MMO career. Some portion was the learning curve associated with yet another major overhaul to the game's class system. Some portion was that the story simply needed time to ramp up.
I'm glad I took the time. Having cleared the Jade Forest, and hit level 87 in the process, I have found truth in both the mitigating factors but also potentially some degree of disappointment with the expansion itself.
Changing the time-to-kill
Over the years, I've found that I'm notoriously bad at predicting what class I am going to like in a new MMO. Many things that sound good on paper turn out to be not so fun in practice. The one indicator that works most of the time is the time it takes to solo an individual mob - a seemingly highly technical thing to look at but a major impact on my personal playstyle.
When individual mobs die very quickly, I would rather play a ranged character so that I'm not spending all of my time chasing after my next target. (This was a particular problem for SWTOR melee because your NPC companion switches targets automatically, while I'm still trying to figure out what direction to run in.) When mobs take comparatively long to beat down, I often prefer to play a melee character, as they are better suited to being in melee range and spend less time and effort kiting mobs around in an attempt to avoid damage.
WoW has historically been a game that tended very strongly towards short mob life expectancy - in Wrath in particular, solo mobs could take no more than 2-4 hits and live a total of 10 seconds each - really short compared to soloing in any other MMO. As such, it makes sense that I tried melee and ended up sticking with a mage. With Cataclysm - and now especially Pandaria - it seems that they have made a conscious effort to slow combat down. Health pools for both players and mobs are larger. The mage has been given the tools to deal with this - all three mage specs can now have a snare on their primary nuke spell and access to previously spec-specific defensive abilities.
Still, it's a big difference in feel, and this threw me for a real loop when trying to get back into leveling content. In any other game, I would probably just switch over to one of my several melee alts (85 Warrior, 70 Pally, 45 Rogue, and instant Death Knight on the server of my choice), but with so many years behind this particular character as my main in WoW, that's a bit of a tough sell just because the class design winds are blowing in a different direction this year.
Atmosphere of Pandaria
Assuming you don't hate the stylized graphics on principle, WoW has been getting prettier with every expansion. Cataclysm's approach of tacking on a few new areas to fill in gaps within the old world map made the expansion in some ways disjointed, but they did a very good job of making each zone feel like WoW's take on a specific environment (desert, undersea, etc). With a new, thematically consistent continent, Blizzard has tackled one consistent theme - China - and done so with some of their best results to date.
On the downside, the story definitely took a while to grow on me. One Pandaren in Warcraft III was cool, and the idea of an expansion of them sounded cool, but the reality of an entire continent of bears talking in Chinese-accented English going on about the serenity - and comic appetite - of their people may be overusing the gimmick after all.
Meanwhile, the story has inadvertently driven home how absurd WoW's current faction setup really is. The majority of the expansion's content, as with past years, pits players against common foes, often on behalf of neutral NPC factions. There is a strong effort to push individual storylines for the Horde and Alliance, but this only drives home how these are NPC factions that players are forced to live with.
Players have no more influence over the actions of "their" side of the conflict than they do over the numerous groups of NPC's. It is immediately obvious from the narrative that enlisting the local population to fight a war on a land where negative emotions can take physical form with catastrophic results is not a good idea. However, your NPC's are no less hapless than any of the others in avoiding this outcome, and for this we divide the playerbase permanently in half, only to once again be sent off to kill common enemies once the storyline is complete. At this point, the game would be better served leaving the two sides in place and having player characters be a third faction who can hang out with whichever group of NPC's they prefer for story purposes.
Moving Onwards
With the preliminaries resolved - the initial zone, two of the five levels, and yes, incidentally, taming pretty much every battle pet that moves on the continent so that's no longer competing with PVE questing for my attention - it'll be interesting to see how the experience shapes up. The thing that's odd about my Pandaria experience is that I'm clearly not tired of the sandbox PVE experience - that's what's competing for my time in numerous other games. It's possible that in another month, I'll be back to my routine of hitting the dungeon queue and doing whatever else strikes my fancy while I wait for the group to form. Or perhaps I need to face reality and switch to a melee character.
Regardless, my path forward in WoW is murky in a way that it hasn't been for years.
I knew some portion of the issue was a disruption to my routine - after spending the overwhelming majority of my time in WoW during the last two years either running random dungeon groups or working on pet battles, suddenly the five new levels stood in between me and what I was used to doing for probably the first time in my MMO career. Some portion was the learning curve associated with yet another major overhaul to the game's class system. Some portion was that the story simply needed time to ramp up.
I'm glad I took the time. Having cleared the Jade Forest, and hit level 87 in the process, I have found truth in both the mitigating factors but also potentially some degree of disappointment with the expansion itself.
Changing the time-to-kill
Over the years, I've found that I'm notoriously bad at predicting what class I am going to like in a new MMO. Many things that sound good on paper turn out to be not so fun in practice. The one indicator that works most of the time is the time it takes to solo an individual mob - a seemingly highly technical thing to look at but a major impact on my personal playstyle.
When individual mobs die very quickly, I would rather play a ranged character so that I'm not spending all of my time chasing after my next target. (This was a particular problem for SWTOR melee because your NPC companion switches targets automatically, while I'm still trying to figure out what direction to run in.) When mobs take comparatively long to beat down, I often prefer to play a melee character, as they are better suited to being in melee range and spend less time and effort kiting mobs around in an attempt to avoid damage.
WoW has historically been a game that tended very strongly towards short mob life expectancy - in Wrath in particular, solo mobs could take no more than 2-4 hits and live a total of 10 seconds each - really short compared to soloing in any other MMO. As such, it makes sense that I tried melee and ended up sticking with a mage. With Cataclysm - and now especially Pandaria - it seems that they have made a conscious effort to slow combat down. Health pools for both players and mobs are larger. The mage has been given the tools to deal with this - all three mage specs can now have a snare on their primary nuke spell and access to previously spec-specific defensive abilities.
 |
| POM, Ice Barrier, and Living Bomb, now all on one spec |
Atmosphere of Pandaria
Assuming you don't hate the stylized graphics on principle, WoW has been getting prettier with every expansion. Cataclysm's approach of tacking on a few new areas to fill in gaps within the old world map made the expansion in some ways disjointed, but they did a very good job of making each zone feel like WoW's take on a specific environment (desert, undersea, etc). With a new, thematically consistent continent, Blizzard has tackled one consistent theme - China - and done so with some of their best results to date.
On the downside, the story definitely took a while to grow on me. One Pandaren in Warcraft III was cool, and the idea of an expansion of them sounded cool, but the reality of an entire continent of bears talking in Chinese-accented English going on about the serenity - and comic appetite - of their people may be overusing the gimmick after all.
Meanwhile, the story has inadvertently driven home how absurd WoW's current faction setup really is. The majority of the expansion's content, as with past years, pits players against common foes, often on behalf of neutral NPC factions. There is a strong effort to push individual storylines for the Horde and Alliance, but this only drives home how these are NPC factions that players are forced to live with.
Players have no more influence over the actions of "their" side of the conflict than they do over the numerous groups of NPC's. It is immediately obvious from the narrative that enlisting the local population to fight a war on a land where negative emotions can take physical form with catastrophic results is not a good idea. However, your NPC's are no less hapless than any of the others in avoiding this outcome, and for this we divide the playerbase permanently in half, only to once again be sent off to kill common enemies once the storyline is complete. At this point, the game would be better served leaving the two sides in place and having player characters be a third faction who can hang out with whichever group of NPC's they prefer for story purposes.
Moving Onwards
With the preliminaries resolved - the initial zone, two of the five levels, and yes, incidentally, taming pretty much every battle pet that moves on the continent so that's no longer competing with PVE questing for my attention - it'll be interesting to see how the experience shapes up. The thing that's odd about my Pandaria experience is that I'm clearly not tired of the sandbox PVE experience - that's what's competing for my time in numerous other games. It's possible that in another month, I'll be back to my routine of hitting the dungeon queue and doing whatever else strikes my fancy while I wait for the group to form. Or perhaps I need to face reality and switch to a melee character.
Regardless, my path forward in WoW is murky in a way that it hasn't been for years.
 |
| At least there are Chinese dragons to collect? |
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Blizzard Pays For Overemphasizing Item Level
Via Blizzard tweet, we learn that WoW's patch 5.2 will remove the ability to upgrade the quality of endgame epic gear which they added to the game in patch 5.1. The studio was forced to backtrack not due to the design merits of the system, but rather because they have spent years emphasizing the importance of item level (ilvl) in the game's incentive structure. They have no one to blame but themselves that players are now over-reacting to anything that affects this meta-statistic. To understand why, we need to look at both the history of ilvl and how it has been used as an incentive.
Making a book-keeping stat into an incentive
Item levels were originally an internal number used to determine how many stats each item got. In principle, you could use this meta-stat (after accessing it via third party database or UI add-on) to compare gear (or to argue on the forums that a specific item should have higher stats based on its ilvl), but in practical terms it was irrelevant to players for years post-launch.
Ilvl shot to prominence midway through the Wrath of the Lich King era when players began using a third-party add-on called "Gearscore" to add up the ilvls of a player's gearset as a quick and dirty way to check whether the player's gear was plausible for the content your group intended to complete. Gearscore was not without controversy, but Blizzard brought it into the game's base UI anyway, adding the average ilvl of the player's gear to the UI and using it as a screening mechanism for the random group finder in patch 3.3.
This change happened comparatively late in that expansion cycle, and applied primarily to content that players were already routinely and trivially completing (easy 5-man heroic dungeons). Going out to get gear specifically to meet a minimum ilvl to be allowed into content came later, most prominently with the addition of the raid finder in Cataclysm's final patch. During the same window, we've seen each raid expand to three separate tiers of loot - differing primarily in ilvl and associated minor bump in stats - that only further emphasize that increasing ilvl is an incentive in its own right, and not just something that happened incidentally as you upgraded your gear.
Comment Update: Commenters point out that ilvl scaling is actually less linear than I remembered, making the upgrade system too powerful, not too weak. The rest of the reasoning in this post about why focusing on ilvl as an incentive is a bad idea stands (and actually makes more sense with the correction).
A Technical Increase In Power
The new item upgrade system in patch 5.1 crossed an important line - increasing the ilvl of gear (along with marginal bumps to its stats) was explicitly used as an incentive. The intent was to extend the benefits of continuing to earn valor points (from daily quests, random dungeons, etc) by allowing them to be used for small upgrades to certain gear. A bump of 8 ilvl's may sound significant until you consider the context.
In the launch game, ilvl's corresponded roughly to the level at which the player obtained the item. However, max level group content at each of the game's level caps led to dramatic inflation of item levels, such that gear at level 90 is approaching ilvl 400. As a result, the new system was only a 2% boost to the ilvl of one of your pieces of gear (out of 15-16 depending on whether you use a two-handed weapon).
Even if you did eventually get this bump across the board (I'm not familiar with whether every single slot could actually be upgraded this way), a 2% increase in ilvl for all of your gear does not directly lead to a 2% increase in DPS or other output. Other factors, including your inherent base statistics, scaling rules for increased combat ratings, and most importantly actual player performance are also going to impact character performance.
In short, this mechanic was technically an increase in character power, but functionally small enough that it's all-but cosmetic.
Running into the "optional" debate
Blizzard's defense of the item upgrade system hinged on two arguments. First, they state that players will quit if there is not stuff for them to do, and that many players will not do any in-game activity that does not increase their character power. I think we can agree that this is mostly sound reasoning, with the caveat that most players would really prefer that "stuff for them to do" take the form of new content on a more frequent basis, rather than incentives to run the old stuff into the ground.
Having said all of that, Blizzard tried to have it both ways by saying that the upgrades, while intended as an incentive to convince players to get valor points, are optional. This argument is sound from a game design perspective for all the reasons I discussed above about the actual significance of such a small boost to ilvl. Unfortunately for Blizzard, the correct design approach lost a battle of perceptions brought on by their own decisions to emphasize item level in incentive structures.
Players were already complaining that they felt daily quests were not optional because the resulting reputations are required to purchase entry level gear to start raiding. Allowing item upgrades exacerbated the situation because players eventually either run out of reputations to grind or else acquire superior gear by other means. I don't believe the system worked on all gear, but it worked on enough gear to make these players feel that they were now obligated to continue doing stuff they did not want to do in order to get valor points to pay for the upgrades.
I don't think Blizzard's position was wrong from a design perspective. However, as I wrote a few months ago, I think they lost this battle for the same reason that they lost the battle over dungeon difficulty early in Cataclysm.
Failure of the skinner box
Blizzard is still in the business of trying to sell a service to customers, and you can only get so far by telling a customer who is dissatisfied that the merits of your design trumps their preferences. If you tell the customer that they need ilvl - directly through minimum requirements for the raid finder and indirectly by using ilvl as an incentive - you should not be surprised that they believe they need ilvl. Once that has happened, it is natural for these customers react poorly when told that they have to do something they do not want to do in order to get the ilvl they think they need.
As Tobold points out in a post examining the motivations for botting, MMO's have increasingly misused incentives as a means of pushing players into trying other forms of gameplay - daily quests, dungeons, PVP, etc - that they do not enjoy. History has shown time and time again that this CAN change player behavior, but DOES NOT change player preferences. The numerous unsavory reactions - joining PVP matches only to try and sit AFK for the currency rewards, requiring gearscores far in excess of what content was designed for, and threatening to cancel because you feel "forced" to do daily dungeons - are a natural response.
I recognize that studios are struggling to produce enough material to keep people paying, and that they need to get each player to use as much content as possible. I recognize that incentives can be the difference between enough players in the dungeon queue to fill groups in a timely fashion and leaving newcomers high and dry. In the long term, though, reducing the game to a "Skinner box" activity that you do only because it is a prerequisite for something you actually want to do (e.g. raiding with your friends) is a recipe for burnout and churn. This particular example of pushing an arbitrary number far beyond its functional significance was an extreme case, but it is by no means the end of the issue.
Making a book-keeping stat into an incentive
Item levels were originally an internal number used to determine how many stats each item got. In principle, you could use this meta-stat (after accessing it via third party database or UI add-on) to compare gear (or to argue on the forums that a specific item should have higher stats based on its ilvl), but in practical terms it was irrelevant to players for years post-launch.
Ilvl shot to prominence midway through the Wrath of the Lich King era when players began using a third-party add-on called "Gearscore" to add up the ilvls of a player's gearset as a quick and dirty way to check whether the player's gear was plausible for the content your group intended to complete. Gearscore was not without controversy, but Blizzard brought it into the game's base UI anyway, adding the average ilvl of the player's gear to the UI and using it as a screening mechanism for the random group finder in patch 3.3.
This change happened comparatively late in that expansion cycle, and applied primarily to content that players were already routinely and trivially completing (easy 5-man heroic dungeons). Going out to get gear specifically to meet a minimum ilvl to be allowed into content came later, most prominently with the addition of the raid finder in Cataclysm's final patch. During the same window, we've seen each raid expand to three separate tiers of loot - differing primarily in ilvl and associated minor bump in stats - that only further emphasize that increasing ilvl is an incentive in its own right, and not just something that happened incidentally as you upgraded your gear.
Comment Update: Commenters point out that ilvl scaling is actually less linear than I remembered, making the upgrade system too powerful, not too weak. The rest of the reasoning in this post about why focusing on ilvl as an incentive is a bad idea stands (and actually makes more sense with the correction).
A Technical Increase In Power
The new item upgrade system in patch 5.1 crossed an important line - increasing the ilvl of gear (along with marginal bumps to its stats) was explicitly used as an incentive. The intent was to extend the benefits of continuing to earn valor points (from daily quests, random dungeons, etc) by allowing them to be used for small upgrades to certain gear. A bump of 8 ilvl's may sound significant until you consider the context.
In the launch game, ilvl's corresponded roughly to the level at which the player obtained the item. However, max level group content at each of the game's level caps led to dramatic inflation of item levels, such that gear at level 90 is approaching ilvl 400. As a result, the new system was only a 2% boost to the ilvl of one of your pieces of gear (out of 15-16 depending on whether you use a two-handed weapon).
Even if you did eventually get this bump across the board (I'm not familiar with whether every single slot could actually be upgraded this way), a 2% increase in ilvl for all of your gear does not directly lead to a 2% increase in DPS or other output. Other factors, including your inherent base statistics, scaling rules for increased combat ratings, and most importantly actual player performance are also going to impact character performance.
In short, this mechanic was technically an increase in character power, but functionally small enough that it's all-but cosmetic.
Running into the "optional" debate
Blizzard's defense of the item upgrade system hinged on two arguments. First, they state that players will quit if there is not stuff for them to do, and that many players will not do any in-game activity that does not increase their character power. I think we can agree that this is mostly sound reasoning, with the caveat that most players would really prefer that "stuff for them to do" take the form of new content on a more frequent basis, rather than incentives to run the old stuff into the ground.
Having said all of that, Blizzard tried to have it both ways by saying that the upgrades, while intended as an incentive to convince players to get valor points, are optional. This argument is sound from a game design perspective f
Players were already complaining that they felt daily quests were not optional because the resulting reputations are required to purchase entry level gear to start raiding. Allowing item upgrades exacerbated the situation because players eventually either run out of reputations to grind or else acquire superior gear by other means. I don't believe the system worked on all gear, but it worked on enough gear to make these players feel that they were now obligated to continue doing stuff they did not want to do in order to get valor points to pay for the upgrades.
I don't think Blizzard's position was wrong from a design perspective. However, as I wrote a few months ago, I think they lost this battle for the same reason that they lost the battle over dungeon difficulty early in Cataclysm.
Failure of the skinner box
Blizzard is still in the business of trying to sell a service to customers, and you can only get so far by telling a customer who is dissatisfied that the merits of your design trumps their preferences. If you tell the customer that they need ilvl - directly through minimum requirements for the raid finder and indirectly by using ilvl as an incentive - you should not be surprised that they believe they need ilvl. Once that has happened, it is natural for these customers react poorly when told that they have to do something they do not want to do in order to get the ilvl they think they need.
As Tobold points out in a post examining the motivations for botting, MMO's have increasingly misused incentives as a means of pushing players into trying other forms of gameplay - daily quests, dungeons, PVP, etc - that they do not enjoy. History has shown time and time again that this CAN change player behavior, but DOES NOT change player preferences. The numerous unsavory reactions - joining PVP matches only to try and sit AFK for the currency rewards, requiring gearscores far in excess of what content was designed for, and threatening to cancel because you feel "forced" to do daily dungeons - are a natural response.
I recognize that studios are struggling to produce enough material to keep people paying, and that they need to get each player to use as much content as possible. I recognize that incentives can be the difference between enough players in the dungeon queue to fill groups in a timely fashion and leaving newcomers high and dry. In the long term, though, reducing the game to a "Skinner box" activity that you do only because it is a prerequisite for something you actually want to do (e.g. raiding with your friends) is a recipe for burnout and churn. This particular example of pushing an arbitrary number far beyond its functional significance was an extreme case, but it is by no means the end of the issue.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Examining SWTOR's endgame
When I first hit level 50 in SWTOR, I was in no hurry to try the "elder game". My leveling path went solely through solo story content - I don't believe I joined a single group - and I was not in the mood to make the transition to grinding dungeons and farming daily quests. Having returned, I have been pleasantly surprised to find the game well-designed and executed.
However, given how much progress I made in a single month, I can see why Bioware is touchy about calling its max-level content the "endgame". SWTOR's high production value story-driven content is especially vulnerable to growing stale with repetition, and its incentive curve is already buckling under the pressure of how to accomodate new players.
Grouping for An Assassin
My immediate incentive to jump into SWTOR's group content was the addition of the HK-51 assassin droid in last month's patch 1.5. Though NPC companions are only used while solo - they take up a slot that is almost certainly better filled with a human player in max level content - the quest to obtain this new companion has multiple steps that require group content. Worse, two of the steps that basically require a second player occur in special instances that are specific to this questline. With no incentive to ever repeat this content in the future, I rushed out to complete them ASAP for fear that it would no longer be possible to find players who still needed them.
Setting aside the issue of whether players will ever be able to complete this quest chain in the future, Bioware got what they wanted. I claimed the free level 50 starter gear from the mission terminal (at the time, there was only PVP gear, but now you can supplement this with some PVE stuff), respecced my character into the DPS tree that sounded easier to play, and jumped into the hard mode flashpoint queue.
The first few groups got a lousy deal with such a green newbie. When solo players complained that this arc required groups, many players responded by arguing that grouping should be required for something in a MMORPG. I'd be curious how many of those players would have changed their minds and concluded that they would rather not have had me taking up a slot in their party. The good news is that the learning curve settled down eventually, I enjoyed the flashpoint game enough to continue beyond the required two hard mode runs, and eventually I picked up enough gear - and perhaps experience - to vaguely carry my weight.
Incentives ahead, but short-lived?
Your first few group zones at max level in an MMORPG are generally pretty rewarding, as everything is an upgrade. After running around a dozen hard mode flashpoints - each of the eight options once, and a few repeats - my character has left behind almost all of the endgame starter gear. Most of my Tionese gear (the PVE starter set - I actually bought this stuff with dungeon tokens, but players now receive it for free) has since been handed down to my companions, while I'm wearing mostly Columi stuff (originally found in the easy mode of the game's first raids), and a few pieces from the next tiers up.
Unfortunately for the game's longevity, very few outright upgrades remain for me in flashpoint content. A few pesky drops aside, most of the upgrades that I can still obtain come from the "black hole commendation" vendor. Like WoW, SWTOR hands out raid quality gear as an incentive to keep players running the flashpoints (and also at least some daily quests). I could see this getting old really quickly given how much non-skippable story dialog happens in the flashpoints.
The other goal I've been pursuing are cold hard credits. On a good day, I pull down several hundred thousand credits, which I've been able to use to purchase a variety of stuff - legacy perks, and F2P unlocks to use when my subscription expires. This too has a limit, especially for the non-subscriber with the strict limits on currency.
Overall, it was a fun month, and perhaps there's another month or so worth of stuff to do at some point, but this endgame does not feel sufficiently robust to continue for month after month. Perhaps it should have been no surprise that the game's subscriber retention suffered as it did.
However, given how much progress I made in a single month, I can see why Bioware is touchy about calling its max-level content the "endgame". SWTOR's high production value story-driven content is especially vulnerable to growing stale with repetition, and its incentive curve is already buckling under the pressure of how to accomodate new players.
Grouping for An Assassin
 |
| The HK-51 companion has some interesting design. The droid is a specialized DPS beast designed to chew through the stronger mobs in daily quests - for each five mobs HK-51 damages, he can open the next fight by one-shotting a "strong" level mob, which can save a lot of time and danger. |
Setting aside the issue of whether players will ever be able to complete this quest chain in the future, Bioware got what they wanted. I claimed the free level 50 starter gear from the mission terminal (at the time, there was only PVP gear, but now you can supplement this with some PVE stuff), respecced my character into the DPS tree that sounded easier to play, and jumped into the hard mode flashpoint queue.
The first few groups got a lousy deal with such a green newbie. When solo players complained that this arc required groups, many players responded by arguing that grouping should be required for something in a MMORPG. I'd be curious how many of those players would have changed their minds and concluded that they would rather not have had me taking up a slot in their party. The good news is that the learning curve settled down eventually, I enjoyed the flashpoint game enough to continue beyond the required two hard mode runs, and eventually I picked up enough gear - and perhaps experience - to vaguely carry my weight.
Incentives ahead, but short-lived?
 |
| Triumph of the very blue speeder bike, obtained for running each hard mode flashpoint once |
Unfortunately for the game's longevity, very few outright upgrades remain for me in flashpoint content. A few pesky drops aside, most of the upgrades that I can still obtain come from the "black hole commendation" vendor. Like WoW, SWTOR hands out raid quality gear as an incentive to keep players running the flashpoints (and also at least some daily quests). I could see this getting old really quickly given how much non-skippable story dialog happens in the flashpoints.
The other goal I've been pursuing are cold hard credits. On a good day, I pull down several hundred thousand credits, which I've been able to use to purchase a variety of stuff - legacy perks, and F2P unlocks to use when my subscription expires. This too has a limit, especially for the non-subscriber with the strict limits on currency.
Overall, it was a fun month, and perhaps there's another month or so worth of stuff to do at some point, but this endgame does not feel sufficiently robust to continue for month after month. Perhaps it should have been no surprise that the game's subscriber retention suffered as it did.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Optional Is the New Hard
Two years ago, players were complaining that the dungeons of World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion were not fun because they were too difficult. The Blizzard response - that content should possess non-zero challenge - was as accurate as it was irrelevant. Customers were dissatisfied with the level of fun they were having with the results of the design, not the quality of the design itself.
Today, Blizzard argues that various non-raid activities - such as daily quests and running the looking-for-raid difficulty in pick-up-groups - are optional for raiding because only the very top difficulty setting is balanced so tightly as to assume that players have the best gear available. I like to call this the "pants optional" argument - no MMO I am aware of has a mandatory requirement that characters wear pants, but very few players opt to go pantless. The choice technically exists, but is largely uninteresting, as there is almost always (*) no benefit to going without pants and the player would then be obligated to upgrade the rest of their gear to off-set the stats from the missing leggings. More to the point, every bit by which you exceed the theoretical minimum requirement gives the player - and the group of 9-24 friends they are raiding with - that much more margin for error to help secure victory.
We could sit here and argue the academic/semantic merits all day, but this misses the point for the same reason Blizzard's 2011 defense of the game's difficulty missed the point. If paying customers feel like they are obligated to do something that they do not believe is fun, it does not matter if the customer is theoretically incorrect. Lecturing the customer on why they are incorrect, not as good at playing the game as people who are beating the content with the minimum gear, and need to find new friends with lower expectations - however accurate all of these statements may be - is not a good business strategy.
The structural issues with Cataclysm as an expansion probably would not have gone away had the game's initial cadre of heroic dungeons launched with lower difficulty and shorter completion times. Even so, it was an inauspicious start to what turned into the game's least successful era to date. If Blizzard continues to build a game whose core endgame mechanic is upgrading character performance through acquisition of better gear, and continues to require non-raid content for access to upgrades that raid players want, Pandaria may not be off to any better of a start.
(*) - There have been several eras of WoW in which certain tanking classes were obligated to intentionally lower their mitigation when attempting content that was significantly below their gear level, because their classes were dependent on taking sufficient quantities of damage in order to generate resources. Several players I knew would remove their characters' pants in this scenario, because it was the quickest and most humorous way to accomplish this.
Today, Blizzard argues that various non-raid activities - such as daily quests and running the looking-for-raid difficulty in pick-up-groups - are optional for raiding because only the very top difficulty setting is balanced so tightly as to assume that players have the best gear available. I like to call this the "pants optional" argument - no MMO I am aware of has a mandatory requirement that characters wear pants, but very few players opt to go pantless. The choice technically exists, but is largely uninteresting, as there is almost always (*) no benefit to going without pants and the player would then be obligated to upgrade the rest of their gear to off-set the stats from the missing leggings. More to the point, every bit by which you exceed the theoretical minimum requirement gives the player - and the group of 9-24 friends they are raiding with - that much more margin for error to help secure victory.
We could sit here and argue the academic/semantic merits all day, but this misses the point for the same reason Blizzard's 2011 defense of the game's difficulty missed the point. If paying customers feel like they are obligated to do something that they do not believe is fun, it does not matter if the customer is theoretically incorrect. Lecturing the customer on why they are incorrect, not as good at playing the game as people who are beating the content with the minimum gear, and need to find new friends with lower expectations - however accurate all of these statements may be - is not a good business strategy.
The structural issues with Cataclysm as an expansion probably would not have gone away had the game's initial cadre of heroic dungeons launched with lower difficulty and shorter completion times. Even so, it was an inauspicious start to what turned into the game's least successful era to date. If Blizzard continues to build a game whose core endgame mechanic is upgrading character performance through acquisition of better gear, and continues to require non-raid content for access to upgrades that raid players want, Pandaria may not be off to any better of a start.
(*) - There have been several eras of WoW in which certain tanking classes were obligated to intentionally lower their mitigation when attempting content that was significantly below their gear level, because their classes were dependent on taking sufficient quantities of damage in order to generate resources. Several players I knew would remove their characters' pants in this scenario, because it was the quickest and most humorous way to accomplish this.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Back at the LOTRO Cap
Not much new to report here, but one minor quirk - because Turbine's model offers free players access to the current level cap, exterior zones, and epic story, it is important that I finish this content now, rather than after the expansion. There's no option not to purchase the new level cap, and therefore no option NOT to advance beyond it until I've run out of content. Ah well, at least it's been a good ride thus far.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
TOR Trial Thoughts
SWTOR's patch 1.2 finally landed last week, and I finally took the game for a spin. A few thoughts on the experience arriving four months after the game's launch and playing the game through the 15 levels of the trial...
Getting In
For a game that seems to want new players, they appear to be trying everything except what all the other subscription titles (and most non-subscription titles) are doing - the one week trial requires a referral and does not offer any benefit to the person who sent sent you said. Anyone who does not have someone to refer them needs to wait for fixed weekend events which are shorter than the referral trial. While I guess I can see an advantage to making the community seem more populated by concentrating newbies into specific weekends, this process feels convoluted compared to basically all the other MMO's out there.
Fortunately, hunting for someone willing to send an invite also allowed me to get a head start on the first and hardest irrevocable choice in the game - picking a server. This turned out to be easier than I anticipated, as basically everyone I asked suggested the RP-PVE server Sanctum of the Exalted, home of the Republic Mercy Corps and numerous bloggers.
Trooping
Anyway, I signed into the game and rolled up a cyborg trooper named Aldebaran. (In keeping with my custom, this is a location from Star Trek Online - the sector in which Deep Space K-7 resides in Eta Erdani block.) I've previously said that I don't see why this class is even in the game - compared to Han Solo (smuggler), Boba Fett (Bounty Hunter), and people with Lightsabers (four of the eight classes), it wasn't clear to me why anyone would choose to be a cannon-fodder stormtrooper. Setting that concern to the side appears to have been a good call. I've found a fun story, and if anything perhaps it's easier to reconcile being one player amongst hundreds as a trooper than it would be as a Jedi given that so much of the movie lore revolves around a handful of force-users changing the course of the galaxy.
Lore aside, this class is also one of the most unique I've played in MMO's. The trooper's resource are energy cells for their weapons, which regenerate over time but at a slower rate as they are depleted - you can burst if you need to but there will be a longterm penalty to doing so. The really unusual part, though, is that this is not your squishy ranged class. In fact, I selected the Vanguard advanced class, which allows me to function as a full-fledged tank with damage reduction and short-to-medium ranged skills. Meanwhile, many of my abilities can be cast on the run, rather than channeled, making it feel much more dynamic than your standard stand-and-nuke class. Overall, several big pluses.
The Business
Bioware made some headlines last week with an odd promotion - a free month of game time for everyone who had already reached level fifty, an offer that was later extended to accounts that had hit Legacy level 6 in a move to appease alt-o-holics. Azuriel has a good take on this odd move - it was pitched as a reward for loyalty by players, but it actually demonstrates the opposite sentiment from Bioware - cold calculation that something needs to be done to hold players who are hitting the end of the road from leaving and disrupting their communities.
During about half of the trial week, I have gotten a character to the trial cap (currently level 15) and also reached the permitted levels in three crew skills (slicing for cash, bioanalysis and biochem for potions). I could probably do the same on a second character, but I'd rather continue to advance my main and unlock the Legacy system first, so I can receive exp and perks for my future alts. I see relatively little way in which Bioware would lose by making this an unlimited level-capped trial - yes, someone could in principle play all the newbie planets, but all of these are just the first chapters of stories that successful players will want to continue.
Overall, my outlook on the game so far remains the same. While I think this game is less vulnerable to churn than most MMO's because players will be tempted to come back to play additional stories, I'm already seeing where the focus on story may harm replay value. In a very brief visit to the beta last winter, I played through level 6 or so on Ord Mantell as a Smuggler. My trooper had different class quests but the same sidequests, and I already felt like I'd been there and watched these cutscenes before, even though it was months ago. Legacy perks may help by offering the chance to skip more of the content on subsequent playthroughs, but this will also reduce the amount of additional subscription time that followup characters will require.
This game is not in trouble yet, but I definitely can't blame them for being proactive in attempting to keep it from getting there.
For a game that seems to want new players, they appear to be trying everything except what all the other subscription titles (and most non-subscription titles) are doing - the one week trial requires a referral and does not offer any benefit to the person who sent sent you said. Anyone who does not have someone to refer them needs to wait for fixed weekend events which are shorter than the referral trial. While I guess I can see an advantage to making the community seem more populated by concentrating newbies into specific weekends, this process feels convoluted compared to basically all the other MMO's out there.
Fortunately, hunting for someone willing to send an invite also allowed me to get a head start on the first and hardest irrevocable choice in the game - picking a server. This turned out to be easier than I anticipated, as basically everyone I asked suggested the RP-PVE server Sanctum of the Exalted, home of the Republic Mercy Corps and numerous bloggers.
Trooping
Anyway, I signed into the game and rolled up a cyborg trooper named Aldebaran. (In keeping with my custom, this is a location from Star Trek Online - the sector in which Deep Space K-7 resides in Eta Erdani block.) I've previously said that I don't see why this class is even in the game - compared to Han Solo (smuggler), Boba Fett (Bounty Hunter), and people with Lightsabers (four of the eight classes), it wasn't clear to me why anyone would choose to be a cannon-fodder stormtrooper. Setting that concern to the side appears to have been a good call. I've found a fun story, and if anything perhaps it's easier to reconcile being one player amongst hundreds as a trooper than it would be as a Jedi given that so much of the movie lore revolves around a handful of force-users changing the course of the galaxy.
Lore aside, this class is also one of the most unique I've played in MMO's. The trooper's resource are energy cells for their weapons, which regenerate over time but at a slower rate as they are depleted - you can burst if you need to but there will be a longterm penalty to doing so. The really unusual part, though, is that this is not your squishy ranged class. In fact, I selected the Vanguard advanced class, which allows me to function as a full-fledged tank with damage reduction and short-to-medium ranged skills. Meanwhile, many of my abilities can be cast on the run, rather than channeled, making it feel much more dynamic than your standard stand-and-nuke class. Overall, several big pluses.
 |
| Firing on the enemy. Note also my companion's mighty invisible gun, looks like he's killing foes via ranged pelvic thrust. |
Bioware made some headlines last week with an odd promotion - a free month of game time for everyone who had already reached level fifty, an offer that was later extended to accounts that had hit Legacy level 6 in a move to appease alt-o-holics. Azuriel has a good take on this odd move - it was pitched as a reward for loyalty by players, but it actually demonstrates the opposite sentiment from Bioware - cold calculation that something needs to be done to hold players who are hitting the end of the road from leaving and disrupting their communities.
During about half of the trial week, I have gotten a character to the trial cap (currently level 15) and also reached the permitted levels in three crew skills (slicing for cash, bioanalysis and biochem for potions). I could probably do the same on a second character, but I'd rather continue to advance my main and unlock the Legacy system first, so I can receive exp and perks for my future alts. I see relatively little way in which Bioware would lose by making this an unlimited level-capped trial - yes, someone could in principle play all the newbie planets, but all of these are just the first chapters of stories that successful players will want to continue.
Overall, my outlook on the game so far remains the same. While I think this game is less vulnerable to churn than most MMO's because players will be tempted to come back to play additional stories, I'm already seeing where the focus on story may harm replay value. In a very brief visit to the beta last winter, I played through level 6 or so on Ord Mantell as a Smuggler. My trooper had different class quests but the same sidequests, and I already felt like I'd been there and watched these cutscenes before, even though it was months ago. Legacy perks may help by offering the chance to skip more of the content on subsequent playthroughs, but this will also reduce the amount of additional subscription time that followup characters will require.
This game is not in trouble yet, but I definitely can't blame them for being proactive in attempting to keep it from getting there.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Pre-F2P Early Aion Impressions
I had an evening with no immediate plans last week, and Aion has been on my list of things to investigate now that it's going free to play. Since Xaxziminrax asked nicely, I decided to give the game an early look. Obviously, I can't comment on the new (and somewhat nebulous) business model, but at least I won't be stuck in an overcrowded newbie area trying to figure out where to put my hotbuttons.
Rolling a Daeva
Aion has precisely two races, Elyosians and Asmodians, for the two player factions. However, these races have a surprising degree of customization - height, body type, and color are all up for grabs if you want a large or small character. The result is actually much more robust in terms of appearance options than we have in some games that offer more races but much less customization. I also seem to recall someone mentioning back when the game launched that going small was actually an advantage in PVP because it made your character hard to see, go figure.
The game has four basic classes that branch into a total of eight subclasses. While I concede that MMO's in general don't do the best job in helping the player make an informed class choice, this one felt especially lacking because it's not apparent what your subclass choices will do before you've even tried your main class. The usual subclasses include a tank, a healer, two melee DPS (the non-tank warrior and the stealth rogue), two kiting DPS (a mage and the archery rogue), all of which I promptly ruled out for lack of interest. This left me with two options - the Chanter and the Spiritmaster.
My brain suggested the Chanter - the hybrid cleric option, which offers some healing, buffs, and off-tanking. I frequently pick this type of class because I'm willing to trade off some DPS for more versatility and variety. My gut told me to do something different, which left the pet-based mage class. I don't think I've ever actually used a pet class as my main in an MMO, but somehow this one felt like the right call.
Killing Asmodian Rats
Once I zoned in, what I found was about as standard of a solo MMO experience as you can get. The usual array of hotbars and linear quest progression push the player through their first 9 levels. There are a few tweaks to the usual - if you click to loot an object on the ground, such as a harvesting node or quest item, and fail to pick it up, you can click it again and the loot window will pop up instantly. Unfortunately, you need this feature frequently, as it seems very easy to accidentally interrupt spellcasts, looting, and other such activities.
As with the character models, the intro zone is generally rather pretty, and there is at least occasionally some creative creature design. For instance, there are mobs called Snufflers, which are mini-armadillo's with elephant snouts. The Green Armadillo approves, even if some of these had to die for one of the many standard critter kill quests.
There's also the now standard map that shows quest objectives, identifies what mobs drop items you need, etc. It may be worth noting that some of these features were new and innovative at the time Aion launched with them.
The only other thing that stood out during my first 9 levels was the game's combo system. As I gained levels, my main DPS spells picked up chain upgrades. If I cast the fireball-equivalent twice in a row, the second will be an instant cast attack that also adds a magic debuff. The frostbolt-equivalent snares on the first cast and applies a knockback if comboed. These secondary effects have cooldowns attached to them, but I could see some interesting tactical decisions in when to apply a combo versus continuing to cast your most damaging spell. There's also some sort of a UI talking about default combos, which suggests that I might eventually be given more choice/strategy in how to use this system.
Ascending and beyond
When you hit one exp shy of level 10, which appears carefully tuned to require all of the quests in the newbie area unless you go grinding, your progress stops until you can complete the ascension questline. Through this process, you pick your subclass - with only one quest panel's worth of text from an NPC to explain what you're getting - earn your wings, and travel to your faction's main city. Here are the usual amenities, including auction houses, bankers, and weird cat creatures with sunglasses who you can pay to expand your inventory.
I'm reasonably aware that there is a lot I have yet to learn about the game, including what exactly my new fire elemental does, whether/how I can use the wings, etc. So far, however, what I've seen is a bland and underwhelming solo quest grind that has little to recommend it over all the other options in the crowded marketplace. I can definitely see how this game struggled under the old subscription model, and it will be interesting to see whether F2P can revive it.
Rolling a Daeva
 |
| Blue dude on the right is the standard look for Asmodians, the green girl is what I rolled up. |
The game has four basic classes that branch into a total of eight subclasses. While I concede that MMO's in general don't do the best job in helping the player make an informed class choice, this one felt especially lacking because it's not apparent what your subclass choices will do before you've even tried your main class. The usual subclasses include a tank, a healer, two melee DPS (the non-tank warrior and the stealth rogue), two kiting DPS (a mage and the archery rogue), all of which I promptly ruled out for lack of interest. This left me with two options - the Chanter and the Spiritmaster.
My brain suggested the Chanter - the hybrid cleric option, which offers some healing, buffs, and off-tanking. I frequently pick this type of class because I'm willing to trade off some DPS for more versatility and variety. My gut told me to do something different, which left the pet-based mage class. I don't think I've ever actually used a pet class as my main in an MMO, but somehow this one felt like the right call.
Killing Asmodian Rats
Once I zoned in, what I found was about as standard of a solo MMO experience as you can get. The usual array of hotbars and linear quest progression push the player through their first 9 levels. There are a few tweaks to the usual - if you click to loot an object on the ground, such as a harvesting node or quest item, and fail to pick it up, you can click it again and the loot window will pop up instantly. Unfortunately, you need this feature frequently, as it seems very easy to accidentally interrupt spellcasts, looting, and other such activities.
As with the character models, the intro zone is generally rather pretty, and there is at least occasionally some creative creature design. For instance, there are mobs called Snufflers, which are mini-armadillo's with elephant snouts. The Green Armadillo approves, even if some of these had to die for one of the many standard critter kill quests.There's also the now standard map that shows quest objectives, identifies what mobs drop items you need, etc. It may be worth noting that some of these features were new and innovative at the time Aion launched with them.
The only other thing that stood out during my first 9 levels was the game's combo system. As I gained levels, my main DPS spells picked up chain upgrades. If I cast the fireball-equivalent twice in a row, the second will be an instant cast attack that also adds a magic debuff. The frostbolt-equivalent snares on the first cast and applies a knockback if comboed. These secondary effects have cooldowns attached to them, but I could see some interesting tactical decisions in when to apply a combo versus continuing to cast your most damaging spell. There's also some sort of a UI talking about default combos, which suggests that I might eventually be given more choice/strategy in how to use this system.
Ascending and beyond
 |
| Wings of a Daeva, as seen in a story quest |
I'm reasonably aware that there is a lot I have yet to learn about the game, including what exactly my new fire elemental does, whether/how I can use the wings, etc. So far, however, what I've seen is a bland and underwhelming solo quest grind that has little to recommend it over all the other options in the crowded marketplace. I can definitely see how this game struggled under the old subscription model, and it will be interesting to see whether F2P can revive it.
 |
| The inventory expansion fox-cat-thing. |
Monday, March 12, 2012
Scroll of Resurrection: Game Vs World
While I was struggling with internet access issues last week, Blizzard announced that they'd gone ahead and implemented that crazy idea EQ2's David Georgeson kicked around last year - a free boost to level 80, but only as a promotion for lapsed subscribers. MMO Melting Pot has two posts rounding up the blog reaction so far, and even this list only scratches the surface.
The conflict
This debate emphasizes the split between MMO's as games versus MMO's as worlds. As a game, the correct answer to the question "can I play with my friends?" is always yes. By contrast, the very structure of the persistent online world is full of "no" answers to that question.
A solution worth trying?
In the short term, I think there are legitimate questions about whether this approach will work or is a good idea. As Azuriel points out, some of these goodies represent money left on the table for Blizzard, and it's not clear how many of the returning players Blizzard will be able to retain. That said, I think it was overdue for someone to try this, and Blizzard is one of the best positioned, even after the rough year.
As long as entire segments of the game - such as solo content, non-raid group content, etc - are reduced to a prerequisite that raiders must complete to be allowed to advance, there will be consequences to the way that players who actually want to use this content are able to experience it. In Cataclysm, Blizzard expended a staggering amount of resources on new leveling content that even their core demographic for this material - longtime players like myself with high nostalgia value and willingness to roll alts - can't use the content because the rush to level cap ruined the exp curve for everyone else.
As damaging as paying to skip to max level (the next logical step in this progression) may be to the MMO's, I think the consequences of continued inaction may be worse.
The conflict
This debate emphasizes the split between MMO's as games versus MMO's as worlds. As a game, the correct answer to the question "can I play with my friends?" is always yes. By contrast, the very structure of the persistent online world is full of "no" answers to that question.
- Wrong server/faction? No.
- Wrong class? No.
- Wrong spec/group role? No.
- Wrong level? No.
- Not enough gear? No.
- Don't own enough expansions? No.
- Not located in the right location (back in the days when traveling across the world could take all night)? No.
A solution worth trying?
In the short term, I think there are legitimate questions about whether this approach will work or is a good idea. As Azuriel points out, some of these goodies represent money left on the table for Blizzard, and it's not clear how many of the returning players Blizzard will be able to retain. That said, I think it was overdue for someone to try this, and Blizzard is one of the best positioned, even after the rough year.
As long as entire segments of the game - such as solo content, non-raid group content, etc - are reduced to a prerequisite that raiders must complete to be allowed to advance, there will be consequences to the way that players who actually want to use this content are able to experience it. In Cataclysm, Blizzard expended a staggering amount of resources on new leveling content that even their core demographic for this material - longtime players like myself with high nostalgia value and willingness to roll alts - can't use the content because the rush to level cap ruined the exp curve for everyone else.
As damaging as paying to skip to max level (the next logical step in this progression) may be to the MMO's, I think the consequences of continued inaction may be worse.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Do MMO's Teach Players To Bend The (Loot) Rules?
Allocation of scarce resources is never an easy question, but it seems like sometimes MMO players are an especially tough crowd on this front. Which got me thinking - perhaps we are a tougher crowd precisely because of the games we play?
MMO gameplay can be broken down into two basic skillsets - the player's ability to react to situations correctly and quickly, and the player's ability to min-max. From our very first quest to rid the world of 10 rats, we are taught to optimize our performance. This tactic kills rats faster with less risk to the player, while that weapon skill is ineffective compared to its peers.
Can we then truly be surprised when players apply these same approaches to maximizing their gains out of whatever loot system - random rolls, DKP, etc? My guess is that loot rules in general distribute loot according to the letter of the rule, rather than how their designers (developers or guild officers) intended. If there is a loophole, though, one might expect a pack of MMO players to be the first to find it.
MMO gameplay can be broken down into two basic skillsets - the player's ability to react to situations correctly and quickly, and the player's ability to min-max. From our very first quest to rid the world of 10 rats, we are taught to optimize our performance. This tactic kills rats faster with less risk to the player, while that weapon skill is ineffective compared to its peers.
Can we then truly be surprised when players apply these same approaches to maximizing their gains out of whatever loot system - random rolls, DKP, etc? My guess is that loot rules in general distribute loot according to the letter of the rule, rather than how their designers (developers or guild officers) intended. If there is a loophole, though, one might expect a pack of MMO players to be the first to find it.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Returning to the Open World (of Warcraft)?
WoW's Winter's Veil holiday is up and running with one minor but interesting change from last year. Two years after introducing a dungeon finder and allowing most players to spend all their time in cities, Blizzard is actually trying to move things back into the open world.
Blizzard has turned the Abominable Greench into a daily boss mob, complete with the obligatory daily loot box containing 24 Justice Points, previously retired presents from previous years' events, and the possibility of a new holiday minipet (a rock elemental representing a lump of coal). Unlike the revamps they just finished applying to all of the other holidays in WoW's calendar, however, this new event is not run using the dungeon finder. Instead, you have to physically fly to Hillsbrad - yes, in the actual open world - and wait for a tank and a healer to arrive.
The fight itself is intentionally easy; any tank and healer combination can probably duo the boss if necessary, but you won't have to. So far, I've had suitable "groups" form in under 10 minutes every day, morning or night, that I've attempted the event. I use quotes because you don't actually need to be grouped - all players in the area during the fight, or who show up for a minute or two after, can get credit, even if they are not grouped with the player(s) who killed the mob. It's even a rare occasion for cross-faction cooperation - the healer needs to be the same faction as the tank because you can't heal hostile players, but DPS from both sides are free to pitch in.
Towards Pandaria
Given that the event only drops cosmetic items - other holiday bosses also have loot - its popularity is probably a minor success. I'm even working on Archeology, since I'm flying by zones that have relics in them anyway. That said, it's possible that Blizzard is using this as a trial run for promised open world content in Pandaria.
If so, the real question is whether players are willing to accept being forced to go back out into a world that so many have been so quick to abandon since the Dungeon Finder arrived. Blizzard's lack of success with selling players on the concept of challenging 5-man dungeons in Cataclysm, after the easy zergs of Wrath, may bode poorly for the popularity of extending this trend from optional holidays to WoW's core gameplay.
The fight itself is intentionally easy; any tank and healer combination can probably duo the boss if necessary, but you won't have to. So far, I've had suitable "groups" form in under 10 minutes every day, morning or night, that I've attempted the event. I use quotes because you don't actually need to be grouped - all players in the area during the fight, or who show up for a minute or two after, can get credit, even if they are not grouped with the player(s) who killed the mob. It's even a rare occasion for cross-faction cooperation - the healer needs to be the same faction as the tank because you can't heal hostile players, but DPS from both sides are free to pitch in.
Towards Pandaria
Given that the event only drops cosmetic items - other holiday bosses also have loot - its popularity is probably a minor success. I'm even working on Archeology, since I'm flying by zones that have relics in them anyway. That said, it's possible that Blizzard is using this as a trial run for promised open world content in Pandaria.
If so, the real question is whether players are willing to accept being forced to go back out into a world that so many have been so quick to abandon since the Dungeon Finder arrived. Blizzard's lack of success with selling players on the concept of challenging 5-man dungeons in Cataclysm, after the easy zergs of Wrath, may bode poorly for the popularity of extending this trend from optional holidays to WoW's core gameplay.
Monday, December 5, 2011
The Time Gamble for 4.3 Heroic Valor
I've had a bit of time to play around with the dungeon finder, where I've noticed something unusual about the new Heroic dungeons.
When patch 4.1 added the two troll instances to WoW's heroic pool, the newer, more challenging instances were separated in a different tier, with separate Valor point awards (much to the chagrin of people who wanted to get their weekly valor cap but who got tired of running those two zones repeatedly). Patch 4.3 adds three new instances, and these are indeed available as a separate category in the dungeon finder. What is gone is the additional Valor award.
You can now get seven VP grants per week (the last of which will be reduced from 150 to 100 due to the weekly cap), regardless of whether you take the option that only includes the new zones, or the other option (which includes all of the Cataclysm heroics you are eligible for, including the 4.1 and 4.3 instances). This makes for an interesting gamble on players' time versus reward ratios.
This is one of those times when I wish we could actually see the numbers. It would be fascinating to see which of the options players end up picking.
When patch 4.1 added the two troll instances to WoW's heroic pool, the newer, more challenging instances were separated in a different tier, with separate Valor point awards (much to the chagrin of people who wanted to get their weekly valor cap but who got tired of running those two zones repeatedly). Patch 4.3 adds three new instances, and these are indeed available as a separate category in the dungeon finder. What is gone is the additional Valor award.
You can now get seven VP grants per week (the last of which will be reduced from 150 to 100 due to the weekly cap), regardless of whether you take the option that only includes the new zones, or the other option (which includes all of the Cataclysm heroics you are eligible for, including the 4.1 and 4.3 instances). This makes for an interesting gamble on players' time versus reward ratios.
- The newer zones seem to be reasonably quick, drop better loot (until you have something better yet anyway) and have a higher starting item level requirement, which means that you're not going to be added to a group with people who have not done at least some dungeons in Cataclysm. However, the 4.3 zones are still a bit tougher than what you see in the old zones, so the chances - or at least the fear - of failure is potentially higher.
- If you go the unrestricted random route, the basic Cataclysm Heroics are going to be even quicker because players grossly outgear them, resulting in a high speed, low risk clear if those are chosen. However, you run the risk of drawing one of the new zones, or, worst of all, one of the time consuming and challenging troll heroics, which now no longer has any additional reward. I've seen a lot of people immediately drop groups upon zone-in, and I assume these folks were hoping for the easy win.
This is one of those times when I wish we could actually see the numbers. It would be fascinating to see which of the options players end up picking.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Combat Pacing and Feel
A few semi-related ramblings about combat pacing, which are aimed in the vague general direction of this question: To what extent can/should the mechanics of actually playing the game (pushing buttons etc) influence what roles the player can perform?
- LOTRO got a bunch of complaints in the early days for "sluggish" feeling combat. I think this can be chalked up to several different factors; the time to kill a solo mob is much higher than in WoW (which was the only other MMO that focused on solo content at the time LOTRO launched), there were some issues with lengthy animations that would have to complete before characters to execute their next attack, and there may have been some other factors as well. Regardless, this was a major critique of the game at the time of its launch.
Speaking of things dying quickly, I've been getting much more interested in healing now that I'm actually grouping in games that aren't WoW, and a big part of that may be that WoW has always had faster paced combat - with less reaction time for the healer.
- I blogged about DCUO weapons last week, and I've since earned enough skill points to allow my main to equip any weapon he wants (though he only has special attacks for a handful). Weapons differ drastically in their combat speed, what types of click combinations are necessary to execute special attacks, etc. Some, like the slow 2-handed weapon and brawling types, I dislike for slow speed. Some, such as dual pistols and staves, I'm not so fond of due to the attack sequences. The assault rifle I dislike because it has a really bad habit of hitting far away mobs that I did not intend to pull, which I suppose is a valuable lesson in firearm safety courtesy of SOE and Superman.
At the end of the day, I have some options I can live with - Bows and 1-handed weapons are my current favorite. I think these are passable options for my two roles (DPS, healing), but it's certainly possible that there is a more optimal choice that I'm not using because I don't like it.
- When talking about their plans for the new monk class in the Pandaria expansion, Blizzard admitted that the design of not having an auto-attack may be so far out there that they will have to fight to keep it through testing. DCUO meanwhile has confirmed its new Flash-themed DLC pack, and stated that the new "Lightning" powerset will do some sort of ward-based smart-healing. Given my namesake, you'd think that I've be playing a Green Lantern, but I'm less interested in their group role (crowd control/regen) than in healing. I'm reasonably happy with the Sorcery powerset I'm using on my main, but the Flash powerset may or may not make the new DLC more appealing, even if the subject matter is of less interest.
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