A MMO Valentine Wedding

I was vaguely aware of Trion's plans to hype their in-game marriage system for Valentine's Day, but I wasn't expecting a world event prompt.  There happened to be someone in the guild getting married, so I stuck around to "liveblog" it.

The ceremony took place outside the Hammerknell raid instance.  I assume no raid mobs are going to come charging out the gates to kill everyone, but you can never tell with an MMO.  The happy couple happens to be a male and female character, but the NPC officiant refers to them as the spouse of the Sun and Moon to get around dealing with the marriage gender issue.  Apparently it was a Dwarven ceremony, as the priest proceeded to bless a mug of ale and then instruct the couple to "forge a hammer" in the ritual of the Heart Forge.  The thing is also fully voiced, complete with harp-like wedding elevator music. 

Anyway, I received an achievement for witnessing this shindig.  Also included are booze, cake, and a wedding souvenir collection item.  No wedding guests were killed during the festivities.

Trion asks that you hold your divorce proceedings for 24 hours so they can get a count for their PR stunt.

That said, I wonder if this level of MMO-Valentine's festivities is more than your average player wants to see.  People who are actually spending the time with loved ones aren't in game.  People who are in game - especially anyone observing Involuntary Singleness Awareness Day (I-SAD) - may be there precisely because they would rather have a break from this over-commercialized holiday.  What do you all think?  There's a poll up on the sidebar of the blog if you don't feel like doing more than clicking on this question.

Poll Results: Blizzcon Reaction

Based on an impression that the reaction to Blizzcon and Pandaria was generally strongly positive or strongly negative, I asked the following poll question:

What was your reaction to Blizzcon?

• Pandas = Jumped The Shark. Will never pay Blizzard again. - 42 Votes, 32%
• Signed up for the year-long subscription. - 28 Votes, 21% (includes my vote)
• Something in between these two extremes. - 60 Votes, 46%

There is indeed a silent moderate plurality in between the two extremes, and it's possible that these folks would take the lead in a legitimate random scientific poll.  Even so, I wonder if Blizzard may actually be happy with these sorts of numbers. 

There's a solid core - larger than I had expected - who like the direction the game is taking enough to make the long term commitment.  There are a larger number, at least amongst those who are willing to come to blogs to vote and comment, who are dissatisfied, but how many of those were really going to be in Blizzard's corner for the long haul in any case? 

Where cash store mounts are concerned, I've long maintained that anyone willing to cancel their subscription over a cosmetic mount was already on their way out the door for other reasons.  An entire expansion of Pandaren may be a bigger impact on the tone of the game, but I think the direction of WoW (both in general and under the recent dev team) is reasonably well understood at this point.  Perhaps in this context, it actually makes sense that so many people already know what they think of the expansion.

Poll: What was your reaction to Blizzcon?

New poll up on the blog, since I haven't done one of these in a while.  My impression is that the overwhelming majority of Blizzcon reactions have been extremely positive or extremely negative.  Your options (on the sidebar at PVD) are:

What was your reaction to Blizzcon?

• Pandas = Jumped The Shark. Will never pay Blizzard again.
• Signed up for the year-long subscription.
• Something in between these two extremes.

I will probably only leave this open for a week or so, since I'm more interested in the immediate reaction than the longterm.  Go vote!

Poll Results: Almost All of You Reuse Character Names

Subject line says it all. Two weeks ago, I asked:

"Do You Reuse Character Names In Different Games?"

The results are in. The Aye's have it by a lopsided score of 67-6 (91%).

I don't vote in my own polls, cause that would kind of defeat the purpose (I already know what I think), but I guess I'm in the weird minority - the whole reason why I asked the question was because I didn't want to re-use a name I'd carefully saved two years ago; I'd since used that name for my EQ2 main.

On the plus side, the vast majority of you can reuse character names from other games for whatever new alts you're making if you pick up Cataclysm. ;)

Poll: Do You Reuse Character Names?

I was considering rolling up a Runekeeper alt in LOTRO, and I even have an alt name reserved on Allarond's server. The only issue is that the name in question is Lyriana. I've since gone on and used that name elsewhere, for my EQ2 Dirge.

I've reused names from time to time. Lyriana has also been a Blood Elf mage, and a minstrel in the LOTRO beta. Cheerydeth has been a Death Knight, a Witch Hunter, and a Rogue, though I came up with an explanation for that. Then again, I knew that Cheerydeth the first was not going to be with me forever, and Cheerydeth the second's career got cut short along with my Warhammer subscription. By contrast, Lyriana (the third?) has had a successful and ongoing career, and I think I would associate the name more closely with the dirge than any other character I put the name on.

How about it, readers? Do you reuse names between characters, or is it important to you that your characters have unique names? Voting's open in the sidebar for the next two weeks or so.

An Era Of Endgame Fatigue?

A bit over a month back, I asked the following poll question:

Which of the Following Would You Like Added To Your Favorite MMORPG?

Repeatable max-level content for your main? 43 (43%)
One-time leveling content for new players and alts? 55 (56%)

The content for alts jumped out to an early lead, and held the majority position for the entire month or so the poll was open. Though this result definitely speaks to the popularity of rolling alts, part of me wonders how much of it represents burnout with the repeatable content endgame grind.

Up Close and Personal With The Endgame
None of the major games I can think of has increased its level cap recently, so it stands to reason that many of us have gotten up close and personal with whatever developers have come up with to entertain players when they're run out of content.

The LOTRO community is apparently up in arms against formal "radiance" requirement for endgame dungeons - you must repeat the lower end dungeons until you assemble a set of armor with enough radiance to allow you to function. Warhammer had launched with a similar system, only their required that players win a random roll against hundreds of siege participants. This got at least somewhat fixed, and now Mythic is free to deal with population balance issues. Just yesterday, I wrote that I'm largely uninterested in the most recent WoW loot, in part because of the pace of gear inflation.

Keen's got a post lamenting the state of reputation systems in modern MMORPG's, which are now mainly used as a way of tracking progress towards rewards rather than actually tracking how various factions think of your character. In the comments, I mentioned how unique my gnome mage's trusty old epic Stormwind Horse was back in 2006. What I didn't mention is the grind. Getting a cross-faction mount in WoW prior to the TBC era required turning in thousands of runecloth for reputation, and then paying 1000G for the actual mount (with no discount for any existing mounts you already owned). I got this gold and runecloth (and gold with which to buy runecloth) from pure grinding, hitting places like Gahrron's Withering in the West Plaguelands for hours at a time.

I can't imagine ever spending that much time on a single mount ever again. Part of this is because mounts are much easier to come by, and much meaningful in WoW today. Part of this is that modern grinding tends to be broken up by a wider variety of daily quest gimmicks. Part of this is that there are other games that I could be playing instead of chasing some grind. The bottom line, though, is that I just don't care quite as much anymore. I've been there, and done that.

Judging from the blog buzz, I'm guessing that I am not alone. If you look at what games bloggers were playing at the end of the string of major releases last fall and what they are playing today, you'll find that many players are now trying something different. Maybe they didn't stick with LOTRO very long the first time, or have never played EQ2, or even decided to go back to WoW.

This could prove to be a major problem for the industry going forward, since the rate of content generation required for WOW-style quest hubs may not be sustainable. If we're all sick and tired of grinds and gear resets and all the other tricks that MMO devs use to keep us paying after we've run out of original content, the industry (especially smaller games, with smaller budgets) could be in for some hard times.


Here's the screenshot I took back on March 31st, 2006, to commemorate that first milestone horse.

Poll: Endgame Vs. Leveling Content

Here's a little poll to follow up on something I thought of over in the comments at Unwize's post on WoW and LOTRO's old content revamp policies.

Which of the Following Would You Like Added To Your Favorite MMORPG?
-Repeatable max-level content for your main?
-One-time leveling content for new players and alts?

Polling will be open in the sidebar at http://playervsdeveloper.blogspot.com/ for approximately a month.


Devs Defending Their $15

During the TBC era, Blizzard chose to focus four of the expansion's eleven new outdoor adventuring zones, and two of the expansion's three new cities, on level 1-20 content for the new races. Pre-60 content was also a major focus of one of the three major content patches of the TBC era. By contrast, the only new content for characters below level 68 in the Wrath era through two of its three planned content patches (barring some 11th hour pre-PTR unveil of old-world revamp content for patch 3.2) is the brief starting quest area for new Death Knights.

My guess is that this is no more an accident than easier raid difficulty or the addition of the Death Knight class. But why would Blizzard reverse course so dramatically on pre-60 content? Gevlon describes the changes to raid difficulty as Blizzard doing "the goblin thing, defending their $15". My suspicion is that Blizzard's internal metrics showed that spending time on the pre-60 world was not an efficient way of defending their $15.

Blizzard did not add any additional content for level-capped solo and small group players (or 25-man raiders for that matter) for nearly a year that passed between patch 2.1 and 2.4. Given the chance to add new quest hubs to the game in patch 2.3, they chose to focus on a low level zone instead of new content for level 70 players. The thing is that level 70 repeatable content, provided players are willing to take part in it, can last a level-capped player with nothing else to do for months. The new Dustwallow quest lines provide several hours of additional content for players who have other alternatives for their leveling needs.

I'm sure players used the content once it was available. The real question is how many chose to make new characters specifically because of the new content (as distinct from exp curve changes that also went in with that patch)? How many chose to stick with those new characters once they'd used up the new content and got deposited back in the old world content that they weren't interested in repeating before patch 2.3? Collectively, how much additional time did players, new or old, spend in pre-60 Azeroth because of these changes? How does this number compare to the amount of additional time - and subscription fees - that would have been spent on new level 70 daily quests?

Given Blizzard's actions since that time, I think we can guess what answer they arrived at, based on their internal numbers.

However much we complain about the state of pre-58 Azeroth, it was good enough to get millions of players through to level 58, and, as Saylah discovered, more players are still signing up over four years later. Low-hanging fruit like adjusted level curves or lowered mount requirements are a very good investment in the task of helping new players catch up. More time-intensive revamps, when they come at the expense of content for players who are out of things to do, may not be.

Then again, perhaps you feel that it isn't worth doing repeatable content grinds that will be reset in the next expansion. That's why I'm curious to hear what all of you think. Happy voting! :)

Poll Results: What games are PVD readers following?

My most recent poll asked readers which games they follow. You were permitted to choose as many of the options as you wanted, so hopefully no one decided to mess with the data by clicking "none of the above" in addition to other options. ;)

Results
- World of Warcraft 120 (83%)
- Warhammer 35 (24%)
- LOTRO 15 (10%)
- EQ2 18 (12%)
- None of the Above 4 (2%)
Total Votes: 143

As expected, the majority of my readers follow WoW; the majority of my posts are still about WoW, and most of my inbound traffic comes from WoW blogs. (The post spread, based on my own arbitrary tagging, is 189 posts tagged for WoW, 48 for Warhammer, 22 for LOTRO, and 21 for EQ2, some posts are tagged for multiple games.)

I have a healthy minority who follow Warhammer (half of whom also apparently follow WoW), smaller numbers who follow EQ2 and LOTRO, and a handful of you who either read this blog even though you don't play any of the games I write about on a regular basis or just can't resist clicking on every last checkbox you see. ;)

Nothing major about the blog is going to change based on these results, I was just curious to see what the numbers would look like. Maybe I'll repeat this thing in another year and see if the numbers have changed any.

New Poll and New Emblem Heirloom Rewards

I've got a new poll up on the sidebar if you're actually reading this at my blog (http://playervsdeveloper.blogspot.com/), asking which of the games that I follow you all are actually interested in. I'm curious because I have always viewed this as a multi-game blog, but most of my traffic seems to be WoW-related (perhaps because most of my posts, in the aggregate, are WoW-related). It probably won't affect what I write about on a grand scale, but there are adjustments I can make to have posts be more relevant if it turns out that none of you care about certain games.

In other news, to save this from being a boring housekeeping post:

New Emblem of Heroism Heirlooms in Patch 3.1
Vaneras, one of the EU CM's, now says that there WILL be new Emblem of Heroism Heirloom Items in patch 3.1. Not really news, except that I've been operating under the opposite assumption based on blue posts as recent as last week that made it sound like they weren't planning on rolling out more Heroism rewards. Guess we'll have to wait and see what the new items are (perhaps relics/totems/librams might be a candidate, since those items don't exist in low level content?), if Blizzard doesn't change its mind again next week.

(I don't ordinarily go into old posts to update them, but I'm making an exception for last week's heirloom item advice in case people find it via google and are confused by the conflicting blue comments.)

Tightening the grasp on Wintergrasp

Wintergrasp has been a bit of a frequent topic here of late. Wintergrasp has taken up the mantle that Alterace Valley held in the previous expansion - a siege PVP event combined with substantial incentives for players who might not like more traditional PVP to participate. Incentives drive player behavior, even when they're very incentive-focused (like myself) - as I've written, a fair chunk of my gaming priorities in WoW at the moment hinge around which faction possesses the Wintergrasp Keep at the moment. That makes it an interesting case study for player incentives.

Also, like AV before it, Wintergrasp has been the subject of some direct developer intervention to try and level the playing field. This was an issue because the battlefield strongly favored the faction attacking the keep prior to patch 3.0.8 - I even started a poll asking whether the keep was defensible during peak hours. The voting in the poll started out with most participants agreeing that the keep could NOT be defended (by a 2:1 ratio), but the numbers have improved to 60/40 with an increasing number of people responding that the keep CAN be defended after the patch. (The poll is still up in the sidebar if you're reading this on my actual blog, I'll leave it until I come up with something else I'd like to fill the space with.)

What happened?

The Patch 3.0.8 Changes
Judging from the patch notes when 3.0.8 hit the test realms, it appeared that the changes would favor the offense even more strongly than the old system did. The final door to the fortress keep was weakened, the orb that actually grants control of the keep became instantly captureable, and the vehicles that attackers require in order to break down the walls became slightly more durable. In my view at the time, this substantially outweighed increased hit points for the exterior keep walls.

What Blizzard did NOT mention in the patch notes, a fact that also did not get coverage on the news sites I read, was a new mechanic involving the zone's Southern towers. There are three towers on the south end of the map, controlled by the attacking faction, which awarded some bonus honor points depending on whether or not they remained standing to the end of the match, but were irrelevant to the outcome of the actual match.

(There are also a pair of destroyable vehicle workshops in the south that the offense can use to build vehicles. In my experience, though, these workshops are tactically irrelevant since any offense that cannot hold at least one of the two midfield workshops is getting so badly pummeled that being able to spawn vehicles on the wrong side of the map isn't really going to help them.)

Now, the towers provide a damage buff - 5% for each tower left standing to the offense (up to 15%) and 5% for each tower destroyed for the defense (i.e. the defenders steal 5% of the bonus with each tower demolished). There is also a daily quest for defenders to be present for the destruction of one of the southern towers, and, most significantly, destruction of all three towers now removes 10 minutes from the game clock. This does not guarantee a defensive win - it remains possible for an organized group to plow through the keep walls in under 10 minutes - but it is substantially easier to hold the keep for 20 minutes than 30.

Effects on the battle
There are a few caveats here.

- First off, a defensive effort where someone is free to drive off down south with some tanks is already in somewhat decent shape - an overwhelming offense will still overwhelm. In fact, the easiest way to get at the southern towers is to, at least temporarily, seize the midfield siege workshops, and this alone will slow the offense.
- Second, the incentives are not overwhelmingly large. Players need to obtain 15 kills of players or NPC's to even get access to tanks, which means diving into the action with everyone else. Moreover, a player who is down south is not soaking up honorable kills and quest credit in the melee at the keep walls, so the players who choose to go attack the southern towers are actively sacrificing their personal gain for the good of the team. (I will only go make the attempt once I have completed the other dailies, which is often too late to affect the match.)
- Third, destruction of the towers also requires some teamwork. A single tank will take a long time to finish the job, especially if the driver has to hop out to kill NPC guards. Meanwhile, there are zone-wide notices that happen when towers are attacked (the tower is "damaged" with most of its health remaining), or destroyed, and someone from the attacking team will probably show up to defend at least the final tower.

These points aside, this new tower mechanic provides the defense something concrete to strive for beyond "kill stuff for 30 minutes straight", and is a limited first step towards incentives to spread out from the lag-inducing keep battle. I'd like to see more value added to these and other locations, as the main fight remains very crowded, but the towers are better than nothing.

Another asymmetric map?
I've speculated that Blizzard has pushed Alterac Valley to the wayside - it's not included in the quest to exchange one of each battleground mark of honor for honor points - because they finally gave up on trying to balance its asymmetric map. As a result, I would not have expected them to repeat that mistake.

However, one major strategy that has emerged in Wintergrasp is to hit the northwest corner of the fortress wall. This method is effective partially because it is out of sight (i.e. players expect the fighting to be front and center) and partially because the defender's graveyard is situated such that defenders must ride all the way around the keep to get back to the northwest corner of the fortress (the ramp down from the graveyard runs behind the keep and lets out in the northeast).

The minor asymmetric quirk here is that the easiest way to hit this point is to spawn vehicles at the western vehicle workshop. Though either side can hold that workshop - and most competent offenses will hold both of the two midfield shops - the west shop is closer to the Horde's zone-in point on offense. I don't know that this alone is enough to swing matches - the attackers still need to go and get their 15 kills before they can pilot a tank, by which point a good offense will have the shop anyway. Then again, there's no particular reason why the graveyard in the fortress can't be behind the fortress' center with ramps down to either side, and doing so in this case (unlike AV) would not require massive rebalancing to the entire zone map. Why leave in an imbalance where there does not need to be one?

The state of the siege
Overall, Wintergrasp is much more competitive than it used to be, and I'm more willing to show up for defensive battles as a result. I still think the map favors the offense, but it's no longer an unbeatable advantage, and that's a big improvement.

Poll: Is Wintergrasp Defensible During Peak Hours?

Is it possible to defend Wintergrasp during peak hours? Suicidal Zebra was on the wrong end of a battle that would argue that it is possible to defend the keep. My experience has been completely the opposite. On Hyjal-US, Wintergrasp changes hands very reliably every two hours and fifty five minutes (2:30 of control by the victor and not more than 25 minutes of seige by the next offensive campaign) or so during peak hours. (It's a West coast server, I'd define peak hours broadly as between 3 PM server - when the East Coast folks start tricking home from work through til 10 PM server - when I usually go to bed and therefore stop tracking who has the keep.)

Lag conquers all?
This may, in part, be due to the massive lag the zone experiences. In the first month or so of the expansion, a strong defense could win the battle - I remember one fight in which we were able to defend the orb for over 12 minutes by focused AOE. Now, with more players hitting level 80 every day, it's not uncommon for the Alliance to have two full 40-man raid groups in the zone, with the Horde not lagging that far behind (maybe a single Tenacity buff).

Lag is a tremendous advantage for the offense, as the goal of the defenders is to destroy enemey tanks (a task that takes longer when a 2.5 second spell takes 10 seconds to cast - your target may no longer be in range when the spell finishes) and damage enemy players in the flag room to interrupt their capture attempts (which, again, requires that your spell/ability actually happens sometime in the next 10 seconds). Since we started having server-crippling lag in the keep, I cannot remember a single prime time match where the keep did not change hands.

Did Blizzard go too far to protect the smaller faction?
My first reaction when I heard that an outdoor world PVP zone was going to play a larger role in Wrath was skepticism - wouldn't the more populous faction control it all the time? Tenacity was one prong of Blizzard's attack (indeed, having tenacity can be a big advantage for the offense, since they are more dependent on the survival of their tanks) on this front - if your side is outnumbered, you get substantial buffs to help even the odds.

Beyond that, though, I'm starting to wonder if they designed the keep itself to be taken. There is no active win condition for the defenders - destroying the enemy's southern vehicle workshops has minimal effect on the battle (it takes so long to drive tanks north that no one does it to begin with), and it is difficult (if not impossible) to destroy or capture the midfield workshops without leaving the keep undefended. The walls look tough if you're plinking them with a catapult, but they'll crack pretty quickly under pressure from even a single tank. The only major advantage the defense has is the ability to AOE the orb with a relatively close graveyard within the fortress, but this has been crippled by the lag and targeted for elimination with instant flag captures on the 3.0.8 PTR (along with tougher vehicles and a weaker final keep door).

You still need a certain minimum number of players to capture the keep - I'd guess the number is somewhere around 30, so there will be players not in tanks available to guard the tanks, which are not good at fighting off enemy players. When 10 people show up to attack the keep, they're not going to get very far. Barring that situation (which happens in off-peak hours), it really seems that the attackers always win.

Somehow, the match is a lot less fun knowing that its outcome is a foregone conclusion - I don't even go anymore unless I have yet to complete the daily quests or I'm looking for an Archavon group after the Alliance offensive. I guess this keeps the lower population faction happy - both sides are equally unlikely to have custody of the buff during the time when they would like to be doing Archavon or looting shards in instances. Then again, being able to keep control of those benefits was the single largest incentive for helping your faction win the battle, and, instead, that incentive is just divided 50/50.

The Poll
Anyway, I'm curious to hear whether other people have observed the same trend in Wintergrasp.

Is Wintergrasp Defensible During Peak Hours?
- Yes, a good defense can hold the keep.
- No, the keep flips every 3 hours like clockwork.

Poll is open in the sidebar if you're reading this on my blog, it'll stay open for maybe a month or so. For those of you who do see the keep withstanding the seige on a regular basis, I'd also be curious to hear in the comments whether there are enough participants in the battle to cause major lag in the keep, just to see if that's the difference-maker.

Happy voting! ;)

Poll Results: Would you play Blizzard to start a (non-DK) WoW character at level 55?

My latest poll got a lot of votes - apparently the expansion day traffic took the time to vote while they were here, and the results were interesting.

Would you pay Blizzard to start a new (non-DK) character at level 55?
31 votes, 22% - Yes! 20-60 is the worst content in the game.
32 votes, 23% - Maybe, if the price was right (e.g. $25/character)
13 votes, 9% - No, I don't need more alts.
61 votes, 44%- No, there's no point to paying NOT to play the game.
Total: 137 votes

A divided community
I deliberately split out people who have no need for the service from people who are opposed to it on principle, and the results are interesting. Without the people who don't need more alts, you're looking at an almost dead even split between people who are opposed to paying for a head start and people who would be open to it at some price.

I was concerned that even offering a "maybe" option (for a cost in the range of what Blizzard charges for character transfers) would bias the results - wouldn't EVERYONE who wanted the service have some point at which the price was wrong? Apparently not, as the votes fell evenly between the two options. Maybe those 31 people were more concerned with making the statement that they want out of the game's pre-TBC content than with the caveat that the price had to be reasonable, but it's a striking result none the less.

What was I getting at?
There were serveral things going through my head when I made this poll:

- Blizzard had just confirmed at Blizzcon that some form of paid character customization was in the works. (The implication in more recent interviews has been that this might allow face changes, perhaps even race/gender, rather than anything that affects gameplay, but there's no real hard information on the topic.)

- Death Knights get a 54 level head start (well, call it 50 due to the speed with which you can get those first four levels, but still) and various other goodies that seriously discourage new alts of any other class.

- Blizzard does not have the time it would take to revamp old world Azeroth up to TBC standards, even further discouraging playing other classes though said content.

- The new "recruit a friend" program is designed to help new players skip past the old world as quickly as possible to help them reach the level their friends are playing at. It also allows dedicated players willing to dual box to level one or more alts of their own from literally one to 60 by abusing the free levels granted to help the veteran's low level alt keep pace with their recruit's new character.

Collectively, I've long argued that Blizzard will have no choice but to allow all classes to start at a higher level at some point in the future. The precedents I listed above suggested to me that they might at least be considering offering the higher starting level for outright sale.

Is cash for levels a good idea?
Pidge sums up the argument against cash for levels pretty succinctly in a comment on the original poll:

"After playing since launch and levelling multiple characters to 70, I couldn't see such a move as anything else than a shameless money-grub and slap in the face. I bet a LOT of other players would feel the same.

There's nothing "heroic" about starting a character at level 55, so that justification for making it free for DKs just doesn't wash."

I don't disagree in the slightest. A certain portion of the staying power of World of Warcraft is built on consumer confidence of sorts. Players are willing to put up with a time-reward curve that gets slower and slower as you get closer to being out of content in part because their time is an investment. For me personally, that is a big part of what has kept World of Warcraft at the top of my playlist for four years while I've tried and left quality offerings from Turbine, Mythic, etc al. I'm confident that Blizzard WILL (eventually) put out a next patch or expansion that I'm going to want to play, and therefore I'm willing to spend time earning temporary upgrades to help me take on that content more effectively.

Messing with that investment is a fine line. Most MMORPG players accept that it will be easier to level down the line, and that their gear may be reset from time to time. Actually removing earned honor points, however, was more than players were willing to tolerate. It's a fine line to walk, and, while charging real world money may add insult to injury, even a non-paid level 55 service would rock the boat.

That said, the fact that so many people in my unscientific poll were not only eager to skip past the low level content but were willing to pay actual money to do so suggests to me that the current state of the game is untenable. There are other problems to be faced in skipping players past content and dropping them into a high level character they have never played before - Blizzard handled this very well when it came to Death Knights, but probably does not have the time to plan a similar rollout for the other nine classes. Perhaps we will see a leveling improvement patch, similar to patch 2.3, sometime during Wrath's patch cycle (such as the largely mysterious 3.2 patch).

The fact remains that something has to change, and that Blizzard's ongoing course has been to facilitate skipping the content in whatever ways they can. I hope they come up with something more creative than asking for straight up cash, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.

Poll: Would you pay Blizzard to start a (non-DK) WoW character at level 55?

I was talking about alts yesterday, and I got to thinking about whether WoW may have a "paid instant level 55" service in its future. This doesn't seem like too much of a stretch, with the recruitment exp bonus and a wide variety of other paid features in the game of late. What say you?

Would you pay Blizzard to start a new (non-DK) character at level 55?
- Yes! 20-60 is the worst content in the game.
- Maybe, if the price was right (e.g. $25/character)
- No, I don't need more alts.
- No, there's no point to paying NOT to play the game.

Polling is open in the sidebar, and will stay up for a month or so. I'll hold my potentially bias-inducing commentary til whenever I close the thing.

Poll Results: Progress Towards Rewards

At the beginning of the month, I asked a poll question about progress towards rewards. Well, the results are in. The question was "Which do you prefer?", fifteen of my readers responded, and the options were (in reverse order):

Slower but more efficient progress towards multiple rewards?

This poll wasn't a fair fight, I said as much in my commentary when I opened the poll, and the results bore it out. Twelve of my fifteen responses chose this route. Indeed, this seems like it is in some ways the "correct" answer. Case in point, my recent decision to go for max fishing skill. Technically speaking, I should have plunked my tail down by the uneventful body of water of my choice and reached 375 in a day. Instead, I chose to do the fishing daily quest every day and wait for the skill points to come in passively. Sure enough, I got the last point of Pre-Wrath fishing skill earlier this week. I also raked in a substantial amount of money from the fishing quest and its vendor-able rewards. Good times all around.


Rapid progress towards one reward?
This option was less popular but still took in 20% of the vote (3/15). And, sure enough, there are times when getting the one reward quickly can help you gain additional rewards, such as a minimum amount of PVP gear for survival, or a weapon if your class is unusually dependent on weapon DPS upgrades.

Brewfest might also be a good example of one-reward-at-a-time: other than the instance boss, all of the other rewards are earned by a single currency. You're not raking in any other compensation as you work towards your outfits, kegs, or brew club applications, and it's a currency, so you'll need to earn more as needed to buy the stuff you want. The advantage, though, is that you get each item you're after comparatively more quickly that is typically offered in a rep/daily quest grind, because that item is ALL you're getting for your time.


Random chance for a reward?

Those of you who have been counting may have noticed that no one selected the first option in my poll, random loot. This is in some ways remarkable because random chances at obtaining loot is absolutely standard in the industry, be it Warhammer's "Vegas Style" public quest rewards or low percentage drops from either raids or daily quests (take that cake recipe that I've been after for a while now and FINALLY got today).

It doesn't seem that anyone really LIKES knowing that they could do the quest/boss/etc an ungodly number of times and still never get their loot. And yet, somehow, this is just another one of these things that we MMORPG players put up with because we accept despite their non-fun nature. This being a blog that focuses heavily on incentive structure in games, I actually got a few comments defending the practice of random loot, and I agree with every one.

And yet, we come back to the 50+ times I ran the daily cooking quest chasing after a drop in the sub-2% range. There are reasons why random loot should be in the game, primarily focusing around longevity (or, to put it less charitably, the reality that players will exhaust all the new content in a game far faster than content can be created, requiring developers to come up with ways to convince players to repeat content they've already done). But there are also good reasons why it should not be in tere, and thus it's interesting that developers haven't found a way to make this feasible just yet.

(Wrath Note: At least some of Wrath's daily quests will feature tokens that you cash in for rare recipes instead of a random shot at getting the recipes outright. That said, all the PVE content continues to be itemized with the same random boss loot table system that's been around for ages.)

Poll: Progress towards rewards

I've been thinking about how I choose the stuff I do in WoW these days (yes, I know, loot incentives are kinda the title of my blog, bear with me), when I remembered that there is a poll feature that I haven't used in a bit. So, without further ado:

All else being equal, which do you prefer:
A) Random chance of immediately obtaining a reward (e.g. 10%)
B) Fixed, rapid progress towards a single reward (e.g. 10% of the rep or honor points needed to get a reward)
C) Slower, more efficient progress towards multiple rewards (e.g. if you can do two quests in the same area and make 6% progress each towards TWO rewards in the time it would have taken to do option B)

Go forth to yon sidebar and vote, I'll wait. :)



Alright, so here are my thoughts.

Random Loot
This is my least favorite option by a wide margin, and I'm not alone. And yet, this seems to be the developers' favorite, as the very best loot in many games is often primarily handed out by random drop tables. The problem with random loot is simple; that 10% chance that the boss drops the loot doesn't actually mean that you're going to get your item if you kill the boss 10 times. You might get it on attempt 1, you might get three in a row, you might not see the loot at all in 15 tries. So what's this annoying mechanic still doing in MMORPG's?

Do developers prefer to waste players' time by handing out worthless rewards so players will need to come back for the stuff they want?
In some cases the answer is yes.

Do devs think that the happy day when the boss drops the two best items from his loot table outweighs the multiple unhappy days when he drops things no one wants?
I talked about WoW's current daily cooking and fishing quests last week, and let's just say that I'm not going to be going out of my way to do any of the current cooking quests ever again if I finally get the cake recipe.

Does random loot in group environment help conceal the fact that most of the players present didn't actually get anything tangible for their time?
Maybe this is only a subset of the first point, but it does deserve some special attention. Now sure, most raiding guilds will come up with some sort of out-of-game loot distribution system (e.g. DKP) to reward players for showing up. Anyone who has ever raided can probably produce paragraphs on what was wrong with their loot distribution, no matter what that system was. In my view, once your players are having to post rules and spreadsheets at some out of game location to handle an in-game task, the devs in question fail.


Rapid Progress vs Efficient Progress
Given the option between one reward quickly and two rewards less quickly, I'm going to take the long view. If I'm not planning to stick with the game long enough to get both rewards, it probably isn't even worth my time to keep playing for the first one. If I do obtain both rewards, going for one first and then the other represents a waste of time.

That said, there are situations where this one gets reversed. Maybe you're just starting out with a new raiding/arena/RVR guild and your short term performance really matters. Maybe the amount of time you save by doing the two tasks in parallel isn't enough to really matter.

Still, I find that the most rewarding activities in game are the ones where I'm making progress on more than one front. Perhaps that's gold AND a shot at a random reward, or honor AND progress towards an achievement (whenever patch 3.0 happens) or reputation for two factions with nearby quests.

Then again, I think about this stuff too much. And that's why the polling booth is open. :)

Poll Results: What Would You Do in the Wrath Beta?

My blog's first poll asked the question:
"What would you do if you got into the Wrath Beta?" (introduced in this post)

Nineteen people responded, and the results were:
3 votes (15%) - Level an existing character as far as possible
7 votes (36%) - Roll a Death Knight
9 votes (47%) - Save most of the content for launch

It's intriguing that the poll split nearly straight down the middle between saving content and diving right in. Obviously, this wasn't a multi-question survey, but I would have been fascinated to delve more into the why's of such a marked split. Did people feel too busy to both work on current content and test new material? Were people who currently have more alts more willing to spend the time testing a character that will go away when the expansion launches? Are players who are more concerned with making progress quickly when the game launches more likely to want to learn as much as possible up front?

I wasn't sure what to expect going into it, but I hadn't expected things to be that even, and I can't help but wonder if the numbers are trying to tell us something.

What would you do in the Wrath Beta?

Today came the news that signups for the Wrath beta are live. This is a sign that they're getting ready for the open beta kickoff, which I suspect will probably happen in the next month. All of which begs some interesting questions, which I've turned into this blog's first ever poll: What would you do if you got into the Wrath Beta?

Some people don't want to know about the new content so they will be surprised by more of it when it finally comes out. Others wouldn't have the time to check it out if they wanted to. But let's say that you don't mind spoilers (or, at least, are willing to put up with them in exchange for potentially amusing screenshots of unfinished content). What do you do when you get into the beta?

This is what happens when Blizzard forgets to set the "face mask turns off facial hair" button.

One obvious choice is to copy your existing characters into the beta. This way, you're playing a familiar, often well-geared, character, and diving right into the most eagerly anticipated content. You're also going to be best equipped to give Blizzard feedback on the content you're testing, though realistically it seems that they're not taking major feedback by the time they open the testing up to even a closed sample of the public. The downside, of course, is that your characters will have to repeat the whole process when the expansion goes live. That isn't to say that you won't get to experience quirky bugs (e.g. the time Blizzard accidentally replaced the texture of the Fel Reaver with a bear; yes, an actual, regular-sized bear), but there's only going to be so much content to see.


There's no unfinished quest content here, really. (Screenshot taken in mid-November 2006, shortly after Blizzard announced the apparently much-needed TBC delay.)

But this expansion, like TBC before it, also offers an alternative. There's a new class, one that the vast majority of the WoW playerbase doesn't have experience with. The downside to taking a death knight for a spin is the starting level; you'll be rolling through fifteen levels of existing content before you even get to Northrend, and, if you actually LIKE your Deathknight, you'll be doing it all again when the expansion launches. Then again, being one of the earliest level 80 DK's in the world is an experience that you only get one shot at.

Personally, I think I'll be going the DK route if I get into the Wrath beta. I will, of course, copy over my existing level 70's and check out the new talents, but the opportunity to test the DK is unique enough that I wouldn't want to miss it. I'm not really doing anything on the live servers that can't wait for a few months, and I'm sure I'll be able to come up with some way to shake things up when it comes time to take my real characters into Northrend. Besides, you never know what's going to happen on the beta servers.


OH HAI. I AM IN UR CITY, PWNING UR SCRYERS TIER.