Via the Ratonga Warlock, comes the announcement that EQ2 has opened its spell name consolidation poll.
The issue
As a bit of background, EQ2 for whatever historic reason gives a different name to each new rank of a spell you obtain. For example, the basic Dirge lifedrain/damage attack is known as:
"Singing Strike" at level 1
"Singing Blade" at level 8
"Singing Thrust" at level 15
"Thuri's Doleful Thrust" at level 29
"Bereavement" at 43
"Grievance" at 57
"Siphon Blade" at 71 (current highest rank)
Though I'm sure there are interesting lore reasons for this - for instance, characters in the game probably wouldn't tell you they were teaching you "Singing Blade (Rank 3)" - it can be very confusing. I had to look that list up, because I have no idea what any of my bread-and-butter attacks are called at any given level. Instead, I rely on a combination of the icon and keeping the keybindings constant. This makes it hard to tell what abilities will be affected by your AA points, much less have conversations with other players about what spells do.
Anyway, SOE decided to consolidate the spell names within each line (within each class, not for the entire game), and they're holding a massive series of polls - one for every spell line for every one of the game's 24 classes - to determine what the lines will be called going forward.
Lessons from spell names
I based my votes for Dirge ability names primarily on what names sounded cool. I can usually guess what spell we're talking about when you give me the whole list of names, but have no idea what spells for other classes do. There are some interesting trends in the polls and voting:
- In that Singing Strike -> Siphon Blade line I listed above? The poll shows a split between "Singing Blade" and "Thuri's Doleful Thrust". I have no idea who Thuri is, or what is so doleful about his or her thrusting. Perhaps I would see nostalgia value in the name if I did. (Some of the other "named" spells reference the EQ pantheon of gods, most of which I've at least heard of, but it seems that many classes have one or more unfamiliar names attached to spells.) There are also some spells where an otherwise unimpressive name is the community favorite because it had that name in EQ1.
- Some classes actually do identify with having different spell names as they level. For example, the Conjurors (pet class that summons elementals for tanking or damage) have made numerous write-in comments on their polls (e.g. the poll for their tanking pet line) AGAINST consolidating the names. A level 1 Conjuror's tanking pet is a little beetle, and they slowly gain the ability to summon more powerful pets, up to a massive golem. The conjurors (and their necromancer counterparts) rightly point out that "Tanking Earth Elemental Rank 2" is a less interesting name for a pet than "Tellurian Soldier".
- Sometimes, players have no idea what name to pick. Take this warlock poll, which appears poised to name the "freeze" line "encase", but is a pretty significant 4-way split with votes for every option but "deter" (which has nothing to do with ice - this is the kind of name you get when you have to name 100+ spells for 24 classes).
- Some of the lines have some really random names. Here's another warlock poll in which SOE has managed to name the ranks of a poison AOE attack:
Gas Cloud (good)
Putrid Cloud (good)
Grievous Blast (no longer a cloud, nor does it sound specifically poisonous, and I'd guess it was a single target spell if I didn't know otherwise)
Dark Nebula (uh, kind of cloudlike but nothing to do with poison)
Nebula (kind of cloudlike but not even referencing darkness)
Radiation (the fact that we call it "radiation poisoning" does not mean that radiation is like a biological poison).
Dark Nebula currently has a substantial lead in that poll.
- Another funny little trend is that many spell lines can't even agree whether the spell in question is a noun or a verb (see example wizard poll). Some spell lines actually managed to keep their naming relatively consistent (take this druid line where all the spells are somehow "untamed"), but many do not.
A single target direct damage attack by any other name....
If you're going to consolidate spell names anway, you might as well get the fan favorites, though I wonder what they will do with the closer votes (e.g. three separate options with over 25% of the vote, as with the Freeze line above).
Beyond that, there's an interesting question about what's in a spell name. Is it supposed to sound cool? Offer clues as to what the spell actually does? (This is one thing that I wish EQ2's spell names would do better.) Should spells be named after famous characters (either lore, or actual players)? What would you name the spells on your favorite character, if you could? Or would you not want to rename a spell that you've been using for a long time now, even if a better alternative came along?
It's an interesting little exercise for something that emerged out of a need to clean up the naming system.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Mage Rewards With Spirit and Patch 3.1
On a recent Naxx PUG, I spent a greed roll to collect the [Boots of Persuasion]. These seem like exactly the kind of item I usually try to avoid - technically ilvl 213, but a downgrade from the ilvl 200 [Sandals of Crimson Fury] due to wasting large amounts of item budget on spirit. So, what was I thinking?
Changing the rules on mage gear
The change to mages' Molten Armor, nerfing the base ability to allow it to scale with levels of spirit available only to raiders, still smarts. However, it appears to be a done deal, so we might as well make the best of it. Those boots are a downgrade now, but I may be able to squeeze a slight upgrade out of them when the spirit changes go live.
I've posted a few gear guides for mages since Wrath came out, and there are a number of items that are improving as a result of mages getting crit rating from spirit (currently 55% with the Molten Armor glyph, subject to further changes on the PTR). The rundown:
Rep Rewards
- The [Pigment-Stained Robes], available at level 76 and honored with the Kalu'ak, picks up almost 31 crit rating as a result of the change. As a leveling reward, this is notable because many mages may already have the 3% spell hit most specs need to cap against +2 mobs. Suddenly the spirit version is better in some cases than the 38 hit rating on the [Turtle-Minders Robe] (available from the same rep vendor).
- The [Gnomish Magician's Quill] picks up a bit over 9 crit rating, but is still a bit lackluster. Wands just don't get that many stats to work with. Then again, most players will probably complete the revered rep requirement through quests, so it is at least easy to obtain.
- Two separate glove options - the [Muddied Crimson Gloves] for revered with the Frenzyheart (gains 28 crit), and the level 80 [Sterile Flesh-Handling Gloves] for revered with Ebon Blade (22.5 crit rating), gain a bit of ground. The only catch with the Ebon Blade version is that you need to finish many of the level 80 quests in Icecrown to unlock the daily quests, and you might get better gloves via dungeons or whatnot in the mean time.
- For those siding with the Oracles over the Frenzyheart, there's the [Fishy Cinch] (28 crit rating).
- Wyrmrest offers the [Ancenstral Sinew Wristguards], which gain just shy of 15 crit rating from the spirit changes, and the number goes up to 19 if socketed with a purple gem that includes spirit. (This +4.4 applies to any such partial blue gems in your gear, which improves some already-good items like the [Sandals of Crimson Fury] that don't have spirit by default but do carry a blue gem slot.)
Emblem of Heroism Rewards
- The [Elegant Temple Gardens' Girdle] gains 23.65 crit (slightly more if you happen to be putting a yellow gem in it), but is still not recommendable over the [Plush Sash of Guzbah] under any circumstances whatsoever (not even if you don't need the hit, in which case you'd probably be wearing a different belt anyway).
- The [Ward of the Violet Citadel] remains the top choice in off-hands for mages who aren't at the hit cap, but the [Handbook of Obscure Remedies] is suddenly a competitive option for mages who don't need the hit rating, offering up 21 crit and 25 haste in exchange for 25 crit and some redundant hit rating.
- The [Encircling Burnished Gold Chains] gain just shy of 19 crit rating to sit alongside 25 hit rating, making it one of the biggest winners amongst gear mages might actually use in entry level raiding - it carries the low price tag of 25 emblems. Usual caveats about the hit cap apply, you might prefer the [Lattice Choker of Light] if you're in that boat. That said, do a price check on the BOE [Chain of Latent Energies] before you spend the badges in either case. I've been waffling on whether to purchase that one for a while now, but the price finally got driven down to a mere 700 gold by all the Naxx-farming guilds on my server, so I finally snapped one up. The chain beats both alternatives.
- The [Tattered Dreadmist Mantle] is technically a mage Heroism item with spirit, but remember that spirit won't give crit rating until you get Molten Armor at level 62. I maintain that the [Exquisite Sunderseer Mantle] from Wintergrasp is superior.
- The [Heroes' Frostfire Robe] is the other big winner, gaining 33 crit rating to go with the 51 it already has. I'm still reluctant to spend 80 emblems on a robe I could win outright off of Archavon any week now, but the spirit on the robe is much less of a handicap to its budget than it used to be.
Emblem of Valor Rewards
I haven't actually looked at mage Valor rewards before, because every single one besides the tier armor tokens and PVP gear spends a crippling amount of its budget on spirit or mana regen. What do I make of the five items with spirit now?
- The BOE [Wraps of the Astral Traveler] gain 23.65 crit rating. Compared to the [Azure Cloth Bindings] I'm wearing now, I'd be losing 26 crit rating to gain 6 spell power and 28 spell hit. Good deal if you need the hit, not so good of a deal if you don't. I can't imagine spending 60 badges on this thing, but I'll watch the AH prices to see what it actually ends up costing in gold.
- The [Disguise of Kumiho] gains 20 crit rating. Compared with my [Deathchill Cloak], I'd be gaining 6 spell power and 38 int in exchange for 22 crit and 12 haste after the patch. You recover about half of the crit due to the intellect, but that's still nearly a 4:1 trade of combat ratings for spell power. I love my spell power, but that's way past the point where I draw the line.
- The [Band of Channeled Light] is a potentially major winner. It would be displacing my [Signet of Hopeful Light], which is already an upgrade of 7 haste and 7 spell power before you account for the 17.6 spirit crit rating. (It would also come in above the potential Arena S6 honor ring or rings.) I'll still be going after my T7.5 shoulder token first, but this ring is a potentially great value at 25 emblems, especially if it becomes feasible to farm 4 per week from Wintergrasp through the new boss.
The Valor Shoes
The last two items in our round-up are a pair of boots at 40 Emblems of Valor each, the haste-based [Slippers of the Holy Light] and the hit-based [Xintor's Expeditionary Boots]. Each item gains just over 30 crit rating from their massive chunks of spirit. It's a bit complicated to do a direct comparison with the [Sandals of Crimson Fury] since the latter item has a socket, but players may be choosing to use that socket for a blue or purple gem to feed their metagem requirement.
Let's say that you compare the Sandals and the Slippers, presuming that the sandals have been socketed for 9 spell power and 8 spirit. The slippers gain 2 spell power and about 27 crit, in exchange for 14 haste. This is generally going to be an upgrade for most mages (less so for Frost specs, who have terrible crit scaling at the moment), but not a door-buster. If you swap out that purple gem for a red one (only fair to the sandals, since the outfit with the slippers would be making up that purple gem somewhere else), the tide turns slightly - the slippers lose 8 spell power and 14 haste, in exchange for 30 crit, which is starting to fall into side-grade territory, depending on how you value your combat ratings.
As always, the hit shoes will fare substantially better if you need the hit rating, and substantially worse if you do not.
Finally, those of you with money to burn will note that the BOE [Arcanic Tramplers], which drop off of Malygos-25, also stand to gain over 30 crit rating. This will blow even the red-socketed sandals out of the water, gaining 3 spell power and 30 crit rating in exchange for only 5 haste rating, and is also the only BOE ilvl 226 item in the game at the moment, if you care for the bragging rights.
Longterm effects of spirit, or the lack thereof
While this post has covered part of the silver lining for the molten armor redesign, my point with the previous example is that spirit may now be a DPS stat, but that doesn't automatically make it a good one. The spirited Tramplers are two full tiers above the ideally-stated sandals, and only pulled out into a commanding lead after Blizzard increased the Molten Armor number in testing (it could still drop before the patch is released, though I suspect that is unlikely). The emblem of valor shoes, a single tier above the sandals, can be arguably called side-grades.
This is where Blizzard's spirit revamp for mages still falls short - items that have spirit weigh in about a tier below where they would be without it. That's fine if literally every item in the game carries spirit (as long as mages are balanced around that fact), but becomes a problem when they choose to continue to sprinkle in items that do not spend budget on spirit.
If Blizzard is not very careful with their itemization (I'm not bored enough to go through the entire Ulduar loot table, given that I'm probably not going to see the place for months, if ever), it's going to be very very easy to identify the best-in-slot mage items. Just look for the one without spirit or MP5 and you have your winner. To the extent that this means the spirit-less mage can arrange their entire gearset to gain a entire tier over their comrades, at the cost of being limited to one precise cherry picked gear set, this could end up being a very poor design call.
Changing the rules on mage gear
The change to mages' Molten Armor, nerfing the base ability to allow it to scale with levels of spirit available only to raiders, still smarts. However, it appears to be a done deal, so we might as well make the best of it. Those boots are a downgrade now, but I may be able to squeeze a slight upgrade out of them when the spirit changes go live.
I've posted a few gear guides for mages since Wrath came out, and there are a number of items that are improving as a result of mages getting crit rating from spirit (currently 55% with the Molten Armor glyph, subject to further changes on the PTR). The rundown:
Rep Rewards
- The [Pigment-Stained Robes], available at level 76 and honored with the Kalu'ak, picks up almost 31 crit rating as a result of the change. As a leveling reward, this is notable because many mages may already have the 3% spell hit most specs need to cap against +2 mobs. Suddenly the spirit version is better in some cases than the 38 hit rating on the [Turtle-Minders Robe] (available from the same rep vendor).
- The [Gnomish Magician's Quill] picks up a bit over 9 crit rating, but is still a bit lackluster. Wands just don't get that many stats to work with. Then again, most players will probably complete the revered rep requirement through quests, so it is at least easy to obtain.
- Two separate glove options - the [Muddied Crimson Gloves] for revered with the Frenzyheart (gains 28 crit), and the level 80 [Sterile Flesh-Handling Gloves] for revered with Ebon Blade (22.5 crit rating), gain a bit of ground. The only catch with the Ebon Blade version is that you need to finish many of the level 80 quests in Icecrown to unlock the daily quests, and you might get better gloves via dungeons or whatnot in the mean time.
- For those siding with the Oracles over the Frenzyheart, there's the [Fishy Cinch] (28 crit rating).
- Wyrmrest offers the [Ancenstral Sinew Wristguards], which gain just shy of 15 crit rating from the spirit changes, and the number goes up to 19 if socketed with a purple gem that includes spirit. (This +4.4 applies to any such partial blue gems in your gear, which improves some already-good items like the [Sandals of Crimson Fury] that don't have spirit by default but do carry a blue gem slot.)
Emblem of Heroism Rewards
- The [Elegant Temple Gardens' Girdle] gains 23.65 crit (slightly more if you happen to be putting a yellow gem in it), but is still not recommendable over the [Plush Sash of Guzbah] under any circumstances whatsoever (not even if you don't need the hit, in which case you'd probably be wearing a different belt anyway).
- The [Ward of the Violet Citadel] remains the top choice in off-hands for mages who aren't at the hit cap, but the [Handbook of Obscure Remedies] is suddenly a competitive option for mages who don't need the hit rating, offering up 21 crit and 25 haste in exchange for 25 crit and some redundant hit rating.
- The [Encircling Burnished Gold Chains] gain just shy of 19 crit rating to sit alongside 25 hit rating, making it one of the biggest winners amongst gear mages might actually use in entry level raiding - it carries the low price tag of 25 emblems. Usual caveats about the hit cap apply, you might prefer the [Lattice Choker of Light] if you're in that boat. That said, do a price check on the BOE [Chain of Latent Energies] before you spend the badges in either case. I've been waffling on whether to purchase that one for a while now, but the price finally got driven down to a mere 700 gold by all the Naxx-farming guilds on my server, so I finally snapped one up. The chain beats both alternatives.
- The [Tattered Dreadmist Mantle] is technically a mage Heroism item with spirit, but remember that spirit won't give crit rating until you get Molten Armor at level 62. I maintain that the [Exquisite Sunderseer Mantle] from Wintergrasp is superior.
- The [Heroes' Frostfire Robe] is the other big winner, gaining 33 crit rating to go with the 51 it already has. I'm still reluctant to spend 80 emblems on a robe I could win outright off of Archavon any week now, but the spirit on the robe is much less of a handicap to its budget than it used to be.
Emblem of Valor Rewards
I haven't actually looked at mage Valor rewards before, because every single one besides the tier armor tokens and PVP gear spends a crippling amount of its budget on spirit or mana regen. What do I make of the five items with spirit now?
- The BOE [Wraps of the Astral Traveler] gain 23.65 crit rating. Compared to the [Azure Cloth Bindings] I'm wearing now, I'd be losing 26 crit rating to gain 6 spell power and 28 spell hit. Good deal if you need the hit, not so good of a deal if you don't. I can't imagine spending 60 badges on this thing, but I'll watch the AH prices to see what it actually ends up costing in gold.
- The [Disguise of Kumiho] gains 20 crit rating. Compared with my [Deathchill Cloak], I'd be gaining 6 spell power and 38 int in exchange for 22 crit and 12 haste after the patch. You recover about half of the crit due to the intellect, but that's still nearly a 4:1 trade of combat ratings for spell power. I love my spell power, but that's way past the point where I draw the line.
- The [Band of Channeled Light] is a potentially major winner. It would be displacing my [Signet of Hopeful Light], which is already an upgrade of 7 haste and 7 spell power before you account for the 17.6 spirit crit rating. (It would also come in above the potential Arena S6 honor ring or rings.) I'll still be going after my T7.5 shoulder token first, but this ring is a potentially great value at 25 emblems, especially if it becomes feasible to farm 4 per week from Wintergrasp through the new boss.
The Valor Shoes
The last two items in our round-up are a pair of boots at 40 Emblems of Valor each, the haste-based [Slippers of the Holy Light] and the hit-based [Xintor's Expeditionary Boots]. Each item gains just over 30 crit rating from their massive chunks of spirit. It's a bit complicated to do a direct comparison with the [Sandals of Crimson Fury] since the latter item has a socket, but players may be choosing to use that socket for a blue or purple gem to feed their metagem requirement.
Let's say that you compare the Sandals and the Slippers, presuming that the sandals have been socketed for 9 spell power and 8 spirit. The slippers gain 2 spell power and about 27 crit, in exchange for 14 haste. This is generally going to be an upgrade for most mages (less so for Frost specs, who have terrible crit scaling at the moment), but not a door-buster. If you swap out that purple gem for a red one (only fair to the sandals, since the outfit with the slippers would be making up that purple gem somewhere else), the tide turns slightly - the slippers lose 8 spell power and 14 haste, in exchange for 30 crit, which is starting to fall into side-grade territory, depending on how you value your combat ratings.
As always, the hit shoes will fare substantially better if you need the hit rating, and substantially worse if you do not.
Finally, those of you with money to burn will note that the BOE [Arcanic Tramplers], which drop off of Malygos-25, also stand to gain over 30 crit rating. This will blow even the red-socketed sandals out of the water, gaining 3 spell power and 30 crit rating in exchange for only 5 haste rating, and is also the only BOE ilvl 226 item in the game at the moment, if you care for the bragging rights.
Longterm effects of spirit, or the lack thereof
While this post has covered part of the silver lining for the molten armor redesign, my point with the previous example is that spirit may now be a DPS stat, but that doesn't automatically make it a good one. The spirited Tramplers are two full tiers above the ideally-stated sandals, and only pulled out into a commanding lead after Blizzard increased the Molten Armor number in testing (it could still drop before the patch is released, though I suspect that is unlikely). The emblem of valor shoes, a single tier above the sandals, can be arguably called side-grades.
This is where Blizzard's spirit revamp for mages still falls short - items that have spirit weigh in about a tier below where they would be without it. That's fine if literally every item in the game carries spirit (as long as mages are balanced around that fact), but becomes a problem when they choose to continue to sprinkle in items that do not spend budget on spirit.
If Blizzard is not very careful with their itemization (I'm not bored enough to go through the entire Ulduar loot table, given that I'm probably not going to see the place for months, if ever), it's going to be very very easy to identify the best-in-slot mage items. Just look for the one without spirit or MP5 and you have your winner. To the extent that this means the spirit-less mage can arrange their entire gearset to gain a entire tier over their comrades, at the cost of being limited to one precise cherry picked gear set, this could end up being a very poor design call.
Monday, April 6, 2009
What is the Value of Large Raid Groups?
It appears that my post on an unfortunate OS-25 PUG from last Friday hit a popular topic amongst the blogosphere; the post is already one of my most-commented posts ever, and will see more traffic today thanks to Tobold's take on Unheroic Raids.
Though the story was definitely worth telling in its own right, I actually brought it up in part to introduce a bigger (and possibly more contentious) question, which I decided to bump to a second post to give it the space it deserves.
What good are large raid groups anyway?
Let's be clear, I'm NOT suggesting that Blizzard take 25-man raids out of WoW tomorrow. We've already changed the raid cap once post launch, and it was hugely disruptive to existing social structure. My server alone has 35 guilds that have cleared Naxx-25, most of which would experience significant drama shifting to a smaller raid format. Blizzard can't change the size again midway through an expansion cycle, and possibly shouldn't change it at all. For the sake of this discussion, though, I hope we can agree that "because that's how it is now" is a social issue specific to the current population of WoW, rather than a design issue that dictates that the most recent iteration of raid caps (10 and 25 man versions of everything) is the best.
Consider this quote from Ghostcrawler without the historical artifact that the raid caps are what they are:
Compensating for other players
Tobold's piece sums up the indictment against the "unheroic raid" nicely - the larger group allows better (whether in terms of gear, skill, experience with the quirks of the encounter etc) players to cover for worse players. He also points out that the problem is not anywhere near as simple as adding X% to each boss and calling it a day.
As I put it in the comments on my post from last weekend, the game can't distinguish between a competent group of players who are making a good faith effort, and a group where some overgeared members are carrying some less-than competent individuals (which, in all fairness, certainly includes me from time to time, as I try to learn encounters on a whirlwind tour of farming zergs) averaging out to the same overall effect. All the game can do is ramp up the difficulty to the point where the whole group has to perform at the higher level, kicking the underperformers out of the raiding game altogether. Some folks may be alright with that, but I'll quote the crab again to sum up the issue:
Accomodating specialization
One big difference between smaller raids and larger raids is that size allows the developers to make assumptions about group make-up. A 10-man group is going to struggle to field more than 2 traditional tanks or 3 healers. You almost certainly cannot presume an optimal mix of buffs and debuffs. In short, the capabilities of a 10-man group are going to be much harder to predict than the capabilities of a 25-man group, because the designers have less control (short of making certain classes massively over- or under-powered) over which 10 players end up in the group. It's easier to just make the group larger and therefore presume that somehow all the buffs etc wound up in the group.
(This also raises various balance issues, which I have discussed previously.)
That said, now we're back to precisely the kind of out-of-game logistical issue that seems to have nothing to do with a raid's in-game effort or performance. Last night, I re-visited Naxx-25 with a PUG and turned out to be the only source of the improved scorch debuff (the other two mages were arcane specs - and yes, I actually respecced to a real Frostfire build, because I feel like I need to not be embarassing myself on damage meters if I'm going to do these PUG raids, so I get invited back), in a raid that also did not have a source of replenishment.
This was obviously not a guild, but, if it had been a guild run, should they really have been punished for not having these major buffs? Should 24 players have been forced to sit and wait until they could find not just any mage, but a mage with precisely those two buffs (looking ahead to the 3.1 era)? This argument isn't new, and in some ways isn't different from a group of 24 waiting while dozens of DPS are LFG because they need a healer, but adding more specialized slots to fill exacerbates the problem. (Which was, in turn, why Blizzard has been buffing hybrid DPS and nerfing the value of raid buffs this expansion cycle.)
The difficulty of balancing parallel content
As I wrote in the context of the leveling PVE game, balancing two parallel content tracks is hard, which is probably the reason why Blizzard tried to avoid doing so for as long as they did. The current system is a bit of an experiment - the crab implies that they're watching to see whether players will actually use the hard mode 10-man content in Ulduar. However, he also notes that it's been very hard to get the balance right because encounters don't always scale well to both group sizes - in many cases, the 10-man versions are harder as a result.
Obviously, if WoW did move to only having 10-man raids, they'd have to deal with group composition issues more often, but at least they wouldn't have to get two versions of every encounter up and running.
Tackling the content shortage
As I pointed out, the current 10/25 man split is Blizzard's attempt to make the content sufficiently popular to justify its continued development costs. They make the content once, tune it 2-4 times (10/25, regular and hard), and hope that it will somehow keep everyone happy. How could this still work if there were no 25-man raids?
Well, who said that the accessible content and the hard content actually needs to be the same content? Blizzard can't actually develop two whole raid zones, but they wouldn't need to; they already have a dozen mostly unused raids from previous endgames. Would less-hardcore guilds really be that said if the two choices in patch 3.3 were a hard-mode only 10-man Icecrown showdown with Arthas and a non-hard-mode 10-man level 80 version of the Black Temple and the chance to finally meet Illidan? An accessible form of Icecrown would follow at level 90, as the Sunwell-capable guilds of 2011 are tackling the all-new hard modes for the next expansion.
I suppose we might see forum posts complaining that the hard content isn't worth doing because it is hard and only offers one tier's worth of loot upgrades compared to the accessible stuff from 2+ years back that suddenly offers upgraded loot. Then again, we'll always see forum complaints, and I suspect that the actual number of unhappy peple would be far lower than we have at the moment.
Keeping a balance with accessibility
I didn't mean my last post to say that I think that all raids everywhere in Wrath are too easy. Tobold argues that Naxx-10 is in the perfect place balance-wise for an entry level raid. Watching my guildies in the Knights of Honor progress through Naxx and finally down Kel'Thuzad last week (just in time to take a crack at Malygos before the patch), I think Tobold is spot on. A competent guild that isn't going to run its members into the ground should have access to content where they can make slow and steady progress over the weeks between patches, and Blizzard may end up dropping Ulduar at exactly the moment when KOH needs it.
My point is simply that the current "1 raid, 4 versions" philosophy requires Blizzard to juggle a lot of separate things at the same time, and it appears that they dropped at least one of those four balls (normal-mode 25 man content at expansion launch) during the attempt. Perhaps they really will have everything exactly right in Ulduar, but I suspect that things will continue to be a work in progress. Is the increased social interaction (some positive, some not so much) that having larger 25-man raids offers really worth all the challenges that the attempt to maintain both tracks requires? I guess we're going to find out.
Though the story was definitely worth telling in its own right, I actually brought it up in part to introduce a bigger (and possibly more contentious) question, which I decided to bump to a second post to give it the space it deserves.
What good are large raid groups anyway?
Let's be clear, I'm NOT suggesting that Blizzard take 25-man raids out of WoW tomorrow. We've already changed the raid cap once post launch, and it was hugely disruptive to existing social structure. My server alone has 35 guilds that have cleared Naxx-25, most of which would experience significant drama shifting to a smaller raid format. Blizzard can't change the size again midway through an expansion cycle, and possibly shouldn't change it at all. For the sake of this discussion, though, I hope we can agree that "because that's how it is now" is a social issue specific to the current population of WoW, rather than a design issue that dictates that the most recent iteration of raid caps (10 and 25 man versions of everything) is the best.
Consider this quote from Ghostcrawler without the historical artifact that the raid caps are what they are:
"If your contention is that 10 player raiding is harder than 25 player raiding, then we disagree. The logistics of managing 25 players in our minds outweighs the "marginalizing individual effort" that you mention. I could see a way to have 10 and 25 drop the same loot but also share a lockout. Anything else will just kill 25 player raiding IMO, which is not something we want to do."My response, again, absent the consideration that 25-man guilds are the current raid size, is "so what?" Why is the game offering rewards for the purely out-of-game logistical activities required to field larger raid groups? Let's take a closer look.
Compensating for other players
Tobold's piece sums up the indictment against the "unheroic raid" nicely - the larger group allows better (whether in terms of gear, skill, experience with the quirks of the encounter etc) players to cover for worse players. He also points out that the problem is not anywhere near as simple as adding X% to each boss and calling it a day.
As I put it in the comments on my post from last weekend, the game can't distinguish between a competent group of players who are making a good faith effort, and a group where some overgeared members are carrying some less-than competent individuals (which, in all fairness, certainly includes me from time to time, as I try to learn encounters on a whirlwind tour of farming zergs) averaging out to the same overall effect. All the game can do is ramp up the difficulty to the point where the whole group has to perform at the higher level, kicking the underperformers out of the raiding game altogether. Some folks may be alright with that, but I'll quote the crab again to sum up the issue:
"Previously the answer was basically “You aren’t worthy to face the end villain of this game you have invested hundreds of hours in,” which we thought was sort of a lame answer. Now you can see Arthas, but you aren’t going to get his best, most prestigious loot if you aren’t awesome.Or, as I would put it, the old way was a good deal if you make the cut, but not so much of a good deal if it turns out that Illidan was right when the first thing you heard after buying the TBC disc was that you were not prepared. Blizzard apparently felt that the only way they could justify the budget required to field high quality raid content was to produce accessible raids that could, in theory, ramp up with hard modes. The current expansion cycle is going to put that theory to a huge stress test.
Accomodating specialization
One big difference between smaller raids and larger raids is that size allows the developers to make assumptions about group make-up. A 10-man group is going to struggle to field more than 2 traditional tanks or 3 healers. You almost certainly cannot presume an optimal mix of buffs and debuffs. In short, the capabilities of a 10-man group are going to be much harder to predict than the capabilities of a 25-man group, because the designers have less control (short of making certain classes massively over- or under-powered) over which 10 players end up in the group. It's easier to just make the group larger and therefore presume that somehow all the buffs etc wound up in the group.
(This also raises various balance issues, which I have discussed previously.)
That said, now we're back to precisely the kind of out-of-game logistical issue that seems to have nothing to do with a raid's in-game effort or performance. Last night, I re-visited Naxx-25 with a PUG and turned out to be the only source of the improved scorch debuff (the other two mages were arcane specs - and yes, I actually respecced to a real Frostfire build, because I feel like I need to not be embarassing myself on damage meters if I'm going to do these PUG raids, so I get invited back), in a raid that also did not have a source of replenishment.
This was obviously not a guild, but, if it had been a guild run, should they really have been punished for not having these major buffs? Should 24 players have been forced to sit and wait until they could find not just any mage, but a mage with precisely those two buffs (looking ahead to the 3.1 era)? This argument isn't new, and in some ways isn't different from a group of 24 waiting while dozens of DPS are LFG because they need a healer, but adding more specialized slots to fill exacerbates the problem. (Which was, in turn, why Blizzard has been buffing hybrid DPS and nerfing the value of raid buffs this expansion cycle.)
The difficulty of balancing parallel content
As I wrote in the context of the leveling PVE game, balancing two parallel content tracks is hard, which is probably the reason why Blizzard tried to avoid doing so for as long as they did. The current system is a bit of an experiment - the crab implies that they're watching to see whether players will actually use the hard mode 10-man content in Ulduar. However, he also notes that it's been very hard to get the balance right because encounters don't always scale well to both group sizes - in many cases, the 10-man versions are harder as a result.
Obviously, if WoW did move to only having 10-man raids, they'd have to deal with group composition issues more often, but at least they wouldn't have to get two versions of every encounter up and running.
Tackling the content shortage
As I pointed out, the current 10/25 man split is Blizzard's attempt to make the content sufficiently popular to justify its continued development costs. They make the content once, tune it 2-4 times (10/25, regular and hard), and hope that it will somehow keep everyone happy. How could this still work if there were no 25-man raids?
Well, who said that the accessible content and the hard content actually needs to be the same content? Blizzard can't actually develop two whole raid zones, but they wouldn't need to; they already have a dozen mostly unused raids from previous endgames. Would less-hardcore guilds really be that said if the two choices in patch 3.3 were a hard-mode only 10-man Icecrown showdown with Arthas and a non-hard-mode 10-man level 80 version of the Black Temple and the chance to finally meet Illidan? An accessible form of Icecrown would follow at level 90, as the Sunwell-capable guilds of 2011 are tackling the all-new hard modes for the next expansion.
I suppose we might see forum posts complaining that the hard content isn't worth doing because it is hard and only offers one tier's worth of loot upgrades compared to the accessible stuff from 2+ years back that suddenly offers upgraded loot. Then again, we'll always see forum complaints, and I suspect that the actual number of unhappy peple would be far lower than we have at the moment.
Keeping a balance with accessibility
I didn't mean my last post to say that I think that all raids everywhere in Wrath are too easy. Tobold argues that Naxx-10 is in the perfect place balance-wise for an entry level raid. Watching my guildies in the Knights of Honor progress through Naxx and finally down Kel'Thuzad last week (just in time to take a crack at Malygos before the patch), I think Tobold is spot on. A competent guild that isn't going to run its members into the ground should have access to content where they can make slow and steady progress over the weeks between patches, and Blizzard may end up dropping Ulduar at exactly the moment when KOH needs it.
My point is simply that the current "1 raid, 4 versions" philosophy requires Blizzard to juggle a lot of separate things at the same time, and it appears that they dropped at least one of those four balls (normal-mode 25 man content at expansion launch) during the attempt. Perhaps they really will have everything exactly right in Ulduar, but I suspect that things will continue to be a work in progress. Is the increased social interaction (some positive, some not so much) that having larger 25-man raids offers really worth all the challenges that the attempt to maintain both tracks requires? I guess we're going to find out.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
LOTRO Retrial Three Reloaded
Turbine ended up extending the retrial weekend into more like a retrial festival, due in part to some server instability and other issues. (Perhaps it would have made sense to wait a bit longer after the major patch before bringing in company?) I realized that this meant I could make the once per week rep items for the Jeweler's guild a second time, so I decided to sign on. A few notes:
Rewarding crafting Rep
I don't have access to the current expansion recipes, but taking a second pass through the three tiers that I do have was enough to qualify me for the lowest tier of rep rewards. Most of the rewards were recipes I would have used in my late 20's, but one was something relatively unique - a recipe with a cooldown that converts one freshly mined gem into five of the component I'd actually use in jewelcrafting. Not that low level gems were very expensive back when I leveled, but it's a nice little perk that probably helps make leveling more economical. I guess it's doubly useful for a player like myself who isn't really out in the field farming low level gems, since one or two of them would probably be enough to cover me for a long time coming. Similar recipes for higher level gems are available as you advance your rep.
I will say that I was a bit surprised to hit a rep reward so quickly. Progress would have been much slower if I was actually the appropriate level (I would have had one tier's worth of rep item recipes instead of three), but my gains show no slowing down. It's nice not to have to grind indefinitely (the game's old reps tended to require hundreds of solo mob kills for tokens, sometimes with nary a quest in sight), but it also looks like something I'm going to burn through pretty rapidly if I actually take a serious shot at it.
More Crafting notes
All the crafting exp from making the rep items was enough to finish the basic portion of the jeweler tier. I never worked on the final pre-expansion jeweler tier because they named the rare mineral required "Misty Mountain Silver" and therefore decided that it should only drop in the Misty Mountains zone (which was, at the time, half of its current size). This drove its value so high that I couldn't bring myself to waste it on crafting exp when I could sell it to buy top end crafted gear for myself instead. They renamed the mineral "ancient" silver and put it in all the zones that you would have expected it to drop in, and now prices are reasonable enough that I don't feel I'm wasting it anymore. Again, I'm a bit surprised that I hit this so easily during the retrial (even though basic proficiency is only 1/3 of the way to capping out exp for the tier). The good news is that I will now presumably qualify for the expansion recipes immediately when I purchase it.
One more tradeskill note, the superior workbench required for high level jewelcrafting is located in an out of the way town that did not have a bank, which was pretty irritating; I actually did some rep grinding with the Dwarves back in the day for access to their workbench (though it is located in an almost-as-inconvenient corner of their city). Anyway, Turbine redid the area to make a crafting hall that includes a banker, which was a huge step up.
The only quirk is that, as an indoor location, you have to zone into and out of the hall. I don't know why LOTRO's indoor locations are so limited on this point - you can ride from the Shire all the way to the footsteps of Moria without ever viewing a loading screen, but stepping into the bank for 30 seconds to grab something requires a loading screen on the way in and another one on the way out. It helps for a few indoor locations with NPC's (usually members of The Fellowship) who won't be there anymore once you complete the quest, but the rest of the time it seems irritating. Oh well.
Other tidbits
- I don't know when they made this change, but it's now possible to dismount without clicking a confirmation window by re-clicking your mount button. Having to confirm my desire to dismount every time I wanted to mine something or speak with an NPC had gotten really old, so huge step forward.
- I confirmed that my retrial account did NOT have access to the new expansion classes. I thought some of the various bloggers who were trying out the game's free trial for new players were allowed to roll up the new classes from the getgo, but perhaps their situation is less complicated than mine because the only way for them to obtain the game is by purchasing the all-in-one pack that includes the expansion. (I.e. either they become an expansion-enabled account or they cease to be, while I could technically resubscribe as a non-expansion account). Blizzard has figured out how to run an expansion trial that temporarily disables any expansion-only characters if you don't upgrade, but apparently Turbine felt this wasn't worth their time.
Overall, a bit more time with the retrial helped unearth some of the various little quality of life improvements that games tend to make when you're gone for a year and a half (albeit with return visits for three retrials). I don't know that I necessarily would have spent more time on it had I known it would last a week and a half, since Allarond is still stuck at the level cap. Regardless, my point is that a well-improved game is moderately effective at selling itself if given the chance. Having a time-limited - but not so limited that there's no chance to take advantage of it - retrial is a pretty good way of doing just that.
Rewarding crafting Rep
I don't have access to the current expansion recipes, but taking a second pass through the three tiers that I do have was enough to qualify me for the lowest tier of rep rewards. Most of the rewards were recipes I would have used in my late 20's, but one was something relatively unique - a recipe with a cooldown that converts one freshly mined gem into five of the component I'd actually use in jewelcrafting. Not that low level gems were very expensive back when I leveled, but it's a nice little perk that probably helps make leveling more economical. I guess it's doubly useful for a player like myself who isn't really out in the field farming low level gems, since one or two of them would probably be enough to cover me for a long time coming. Similar recipes for higher level gems are available as you advance your rep.
I will say that I was a bit surprised to hit a rep reward so quickly. Progress would have been much slower if I was actually the appropriate level (I would have had one tier's worth of rep item recipes instead of three), but my gains show no slowing down. It's nice not to have to grind indefinitely (the game's old reps tended to require hundreds of solo mob kills for tokens, sometimes with nary a quest in sight), but it also looks like something I'm going to burn through pretty rapidly if I actually take a serious shot at it.
More Crafting notes
All the crafting exp from making the rep items was enough to finish the basic portion of the jeweler tier. I never worked on the final pre-expansion jeweler tier because they named the rare mineral required "Misty Mountain Silver" and therefore decided that it should only drop in the Misty Mountains zone (which was, at the time, half of its current size). This drove its value so high that I couldn't bring myself to waste it on crafting exp when I could sell it to buy top end crafted gear for myself instead. They renamed the mineral "ancient" silver and put it in all the zones that you would have expected it to drop in, and now prices are reasonable enough that I don't feel I'm wasting it anymore. Again, I'm a bit surprised that I hit this so easily during the retrial (even though basic proficiency is only 1/3 of the way to capping out exp for the tier). The good news is that I will now presumably qualify for the expansion recipes immediately when I purchase it.
One more tradeskill note, the superior workbench required for high level jewelcrafting is located in an out of the way town that did not have a bank, which was pretty irritating; I actually did some rep grinding with the Dwarves back in the day for access to their workbench (though it is located in an almost-as-inconvenient corner of their city). Anyway, Turbine redid the area to make a crafting hall that includes a banker, which was a huge step up.
The only quirk is that, as an indoor location, you have to zone into and out of the hall. I don't know why LOTRO's indoor locations are so limited on this point - you can ride from the Shire all the way to the footsteps of Moria without ever viewing a loading screen, but stepping into the bank for 30 seconds to grab something requires a loading screen on the way in and another one on the way out. It helps for a few indoor locations with NPC's (usually members of The Fellowship) who won't be there anymore once you complete the quest, but the rest of the time it seems irritating. Oh well.
Other tidbits
- I don't know when they made this change, but it's now possible to dismount without clicking a confirmation window by re-clicking your mount button. Having to confirm my desire to dismount every time I wanted to mine something or speak with an NPC had gotten really old, so huge step forward.
- I confirmed that my retrial account did NOT have access to the new expansion classes. I thought some of the various bloggers who were trying out the game's free trial for new players were allowed to roll up the new classes from the getgo, but perhaps their situation is less complicated than mine because the only way for them to obtain the game is by purchasing the all-in-one pack that includes the expansion. (I.e. either they become an expansion-enabled account or they cease to be, while I could technically resubscribe as a non-expansion account). Blizzard has figured out how to run an expansion trial that temporarily disables any expansion-only characters if you don't upgrade, but apparently Turbine felt this wasn't worth their time.
Overall, a bit more time with the retrial helped unearth some of the various little quality of life improvements that games tend to make when you're gone for a year and a half (albeit with return visits for three retrials). I don't know that I necessarily would have spent more time on it had I known it would last a week and a half, since Allarond is still stuck at the level cap. Regardless, my point is that a well-improved game is moderately effective at selling itself if given the chance. Having a time-limited - but not so limited that there's no chance to take advantage of it - retrial is a pretty good way of doing just that.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Ashamed Of Victory
Longtime PVD commenter Fedaykin has been telling me that the worst that a PUG raid can inflict on me is something to write about and that OS-25 PUG's are even easier than Naxx. He turns out to be right on both counts, and I don't know that I've ever been more ashamed to walk out of a dungeon with the win.
The ugly details
Tobold says that he doesn't want to reveal his server because he doesn't want to use the very large platform that is his blog as a blunt instrument in this kind of situation. Obviously, I can't (and wouldn't) go back and anonymize Greenwiz's server, and mine is a substantially smaller platform than Tobold's, but his reasoning is sound. All names are omitted to protect the guilty.
The highlights of my first ever OS-25 PUG:
- The raid leader was apparently a freshly dinged Death Knight (wearing an atrocious mix of green and blue items) with one of those names that tends to spell trouble. You know, the ones so immature-sounding that one can make inferences about the player who would give a character that name, and generally turn out to be correct.
- The raid's lone druid ignored repeated calls for MOTW, and, when he finally realized that he was the lone druid, said that he would get us before the boss because he didn't want to shift out of Moonkin form. He also used whatever the spell Moonkin have which has the knockback effect, kicking trash mobs out of the AOE kill zone.
- The raid started out hopeful that even "scrubs" should be able to down Sarth with one of his Drake adds up. That impression was swiftly downgraded to "let's just try to finish" after at least one player died on each and every trash pull. (The raid leader may have contributed to this by assigning a different random plate-wearer to tank each pull, and not doing anything to ensure that healers had assignments.)
- Someone accidentally aggroed the third drake while we were fighting the pat that walks up to it. (Again, one might blame the raid leader for not moving the raid back.
- The MT for the actual fight against the dragon decided to tank the boss right in the middle of the path of the WALLS OF BLEEPING LAVA. In his defense, he did not know he was main tanking the encounter until moments before the pull, since the raid leader did not make up his mind (and initially assigned the job someone who clearly would not survive, only to have the raid protest en masse). He figured out that he was probably doing something wrong, so he proceeded to pull the dragon down to the ranged DPS spot, bunching the whole raid in a small area with a bunch of adds and a tail-swiping dragon. If the WALL OF BLEEPING LAVA had forced us to move, it would probably have hit 3/4 of the raid in the chaos and caused a wipe.
- When the boss died, the raid leader promptly ninjaed a T7.5 glove token for himself, and then proceeded to handle the rest of the loot distribution with the level of competence you might expect given the rest of the raid so far. He had consistent difficulty finding players on the loot interface, or reading the chat window to determine who won. The aforementioned moonkin decided to contribute to the idiocy by rolling on everything that dropped, including plate, and repeatedly rerolling if his number was not the highest. A typical raid leader would probably have kicked the guy, but our raid leader was an actual ninja looter, so I suppose his tolerance for such things was high.
Summing it up...
All in all? I'm outraged. Because of the incompetence, disorganization, and outright theft? Not at all. (I do already own T7.5 gloves, and got the 4 emblems of valor which were my main interest in running the raid in the first place.) Because we one-shotted the dungeon in about 30 minutes despite all these things.
I have zero problems with farming trivial content for loot on a regular basis - I'm still faithfully farming Archavon every week, and even though the fight is so easy that I can occasionally near the top of the damage meters with my non-raid-viable Frost-based Frostfire spec in a raid that still somehow manages to down the boss in three minutes. Still, even I have some low standards for encounters requiring some minimal competence for victory. Simply put, last night's OS-25 PUG deserved to fail. And instead we won, in a single attempt, with minimal casualties on the boss encounter.
There's a broader question, which I'd like to cover in more detail and will save for next week. In the mean time, though, this highly successful debacle of a raid has left even a proponent of raid accessibility like myself wondering if perhaps the bar has been set a bit too low.
The ugly details
Tobold says that he doesn't want to reveal his server because he doesn't want to use the very large platform that is his blog as a blunt instrument in this kind of situation. Obviously, I can't (and wouldn't) go back and anonymize Greenwiz's server, and mine is a substantially smaller platform than Tobold's, but his reasoning is sound. All names are omitted to protect the guilty.
The highlights of my first ever OS-25 PUG:
- The raid leader was apparently a freshly dinged Death Knight (wearing an atrocious mix of green and blue items) with one of those names that tends to spell trouble. You know, the ones so immature-sounding that one can make inferences about the player who would give a character that name, and generally turn out to be correct.
- The raid's lone druid ignored repeated calls for MOTW, and, when he finally realized that he was the lone druid, said that he would get us before the boss because he didn't want to shift out of Moonkin form. He also used whatever the spell Moonkin have which has the knockback effect, kicking trash mobs out of the AOE kill zone.
- The raid started out hopeful that even "scrubs" should be able to down Sarth with one of his Drake adds up. That impression was swiftly downgraded to "let's just try to finish" after at least one player died on each and every trash pull. (The raid leader may have contributed to this by assigning a different random plate-wearer to tank each pull, and not doing anything to ensure that healers had assignments.)
- Someone accidentally aggroed the third drake while we were fighting the pat that walks up to it. (Again, one might blame the raid leader for not moving the raid back.
- The MT for the actual fight against the dragon decided to tank the boss right in the middle of the path of the WALLS OF BLEEPING LAVA. In his defense, he did not know he was main tanking the encounter until moments before the pull, since the raid leader did not make up his mind (and initially assigned the job someone who clearly would not survive, only to have the raid protest en masse). He figured out that he was probably doing something wrong, so he proceeded to pull the dragon down to the ranged DPS spot, bunching the whole raid in a small area with a bunch of adds and a tail-swiping dragon. If the WALL OF BLEEPING LAVA had forced us to move, it would probably have hit 3/4 of the raid in the chaos and caused a wipe.
- When the boss died, the raid leader promptly ninjaed a T7.5 glove token for himself, and then proceeded to handle the rest of the loot distribution with the level of competence you might expect given the rest of the raid so far. He had consistent difficulty finding players on the loot interface, or reading the chat window to determine who won. The aforementioned moonkin decided to contribute to the idiocy by rolling on everything that dropped, including plate, and repeatedly rerolling if his number was not the highest. A typical raid leader would probably have kicked the guy, but our raid leader was an actual ninja looter, so I suppose his tolerance for such things was high.
Summing it up...
All in all? I'm outraged. Because of the incompetence, disorganization, and outright theft? Not at all. (I do already own T7.5 gloves, and got the 4 emblems of valor which were my main interest in running the raid in the first place.) Because we one-shotted the dungeon in about 30 minutes despite all these things.
I have zero problems with farming trivial content for loot on a regular basis - I'm still faithfully farming Archavon every week, and even though the fight is so easy that I can occasionally near the top of the damage meters with my non-raid-viable Frost-based Frostfire spec in a raid that still somehow manages to down the boss in three minutes. Still, even I have some low standards for encounters requiring some minimal competence for victory. Simply put, last night's OS-25 PUG deserved to fail. And instead we won, in a single attempt, with minimal casualties on the boss encounter.
There's a broader question, which I'd like to cover in more detail and will save for next week. In the mean time, though, this highly successful debacle of a raid has left even a proponent of raid accessibility like myself wondering if perhaps the bar has been set a bit too low.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Concerning Hobbit Expansions of 2011
Where to, Mr. Frodo?
Kill Ten Rats found out via the forums that Ridersofrohan.com points to LOTRO's site, and now it's being widely reported that this will be the game's next expansion. (See Massively, Nerf The Cat, and Ardwulf's Lair for commentary.) Seems like a slam dunk to me - the game thus far has followed the Fellowship and the majority of the Fellowship ends up in and around the Rohan/Isengard conflict. There are also obvious expansion-worthy features such as the Battle of Helm's Deep and a revamped mount system.
The more interesting question is where the game will go next. Ardwulf thinks it will continue to follow the volumes of LOTR, but his post got me thinking that the next expansion AFTER Rohan may be to Mirkwood, Dale, and the Lonely Mountain.
According to the FAQ at theonering.net, the upcoming Hobbit film is due out in December 2011. That's about the right time for the third LOTRO expansion, and interest in these areas of Middle Earth may never be higher. Turbine has been quick to point out that their license includes LOTR and The Hobbit (but not any of Tolkein's other works - I don't know if that will pose problems or not for taking the game that way during the War of the Ring), so it would appear to be a waste NOT to take advantage of the hype.
Meanwhile, there is the practical consideration of where the game can and will expand to in the future. The closer players get to Mordor and the final, climactic battles, the less sense it will make to send players off in the opposite direction. The end of the campaign in Isengard might actually be an ideal point in the story for someone to send players out to check on the East.
("Gandalf shall take the fool of a Took hence to Gondor with all haste to rid us of his stupidity," Aragorn said. "Theoden and Eomer shall marshall the Riddermark - remember, no girls allowed in the warband! Legolas and Gimli shall accompany me on a path too dark to mention until it gets patched in an expansion or two down the line. Legolasxx, Lagolas, and Legolaaaas, that leaves only you to go forth to Mirkwood and Dale and muster our allies there. Do not fail us, for Middle Earth depends on you!")
Obviously, it doesn't do much good to hold onto the expansion that launches Mordor for so long that the game loses popularity and is canceled before we get there. Regardless, conditions seem just about right for a Hobbit-themed expansion in late 2011/early 2012. Let's come back to this in a few years and see if I was right. :)
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Bristlebane and the Cost of Do-It-Yourself
EQ2's live events have consistently impressed me with both their quality and their incentive design. The Bristlebane Day (named for a trickster god in the EQ pantheon) festivities are no exception. Lyriana now owns possibly the single most amusing April Fools' item in an MMO, after a quest that, appropriately, had her killing rats.
If that cloak looks like someone made it up by tacking every beneficial stat in the game onto one item using a web-based item generator, well, there's a minor catch. It can only be equipped in the cosmetic slot. The one that doesn't give stats. Well played, SOE, well played.
This is now my third cosmetic cloak, and I'm happy to swap in the latest version as each event rolls around. That said, the quests are worth doing in any case because they also award experience and alternate advancement points. Perhaps most importantly, time limited live event quests are not designed to require a massive amount of time in an extremely narrow window (unlike a certain other event).
During the time it would have taken....
One thing that struck me as odd in the proceedings was a discussion of whether one of the collection items is rare/ultrarare. Collection items are looted from sparkling spots on the ground, and the April's Fool versions are marked by especially prominent blue smoking sparkles that will be available for the rest of the week. The devs claim that all of the items in the holiday collection are random (in normal collections, one of the items is often rare and expensive), but both anecdotal accounts and market conditions seem to argue otherwise, as multiple people (myself included) have had difficulty obtaining one particular item.
Anyway, I didn't have the possibly rare item after concluding my other business in the zones that could drop it. What can a level 41 character with no rich, long-established level 80 main, do in this situation? In my case, the answer was to buy the item off the broker for 60 gold and then go harvesting. In under an hour, I obtained multiple rare harvests - I used one for a spell upgrade for myself and the rest collectively sold for well above what I paid for that last collectable.
Most likely, the person I bought the item off of would have earned much more money for their time harvesting, and I suppose I should be grateful that they never figured this out. More to the point, most of the people who are not happy with the rarity of the item should have been at least as able as the guy who's been playing the game for two months to buy their way out of the problem.
The value of self-sufficiency?
Us MMORPG players are not always that far up to par on the whole concept of opportunity cost. I'm certainly not immune - I spent a while leveling an alt as a provisioner to cook food for Lyriana, thinking that I was getting tradeskill experience on an alt AND getting products to eat for my trouble. It took until the mid-20's before I really stopped and evaluated what it would cost to buy the food I wanted from other players in the context of the amount of time I was spending attempting to cook it (along with the money for training and ingredients).
In hindsight, I'm very glad I elected to level Lyriana as a Jeweler, the profession which also makes her spell upgrades. Spell upgrades are a sufficiently specialized market that there isn't a lot of competition in the market for a specific upgrade to a specific spell (in a game with 24 classes, each of which gets 1-3 spells per level for 80 levels). I can buy the recipe book and the rare ingredient needed to make whatever spell upgrade I want for half of what the finished product costs. This is definitely worth my time and trainer costs to level the profession.
Food clearly isn't. Neither are potions. I'd considered leveling an alt as a carpenter, as they can make strongboxes - containers that go as high as 36 slots intended primarily for use in peoples' banks. Then I discovered that I can buy the 36-slot box for a mere 12 gold. Why level the crafter to level 80 when a single level 30-40 rare harvest can buy me four of the finished product? The same goes for gear to some extent - gear can get expensive, but a character who is leveling only needs to replace it every 10 levels. Perhaps rangers might actually burn enough arrows to make Woodworking worthwhile, but otherwise I'm not sure that my next crafter won't be another scholar-class, if I even decide to level another one.
This odd dichotomy where finished goods are strangely less profitable than the raw materials they were made out of is pretty universal to MMO's. I don't know how you fix this - WoW went the opposite direction with crafting in TBC, where professions existed primarily for self-only perks rather than making stuff for other people, and the results were dicey from a balance perspective (raiders became leatherworkers en masse). Maybe you just give up, and figure that the crafting market will be what it ends up being.
It's just unfortunate if, as EQ2 has, you've spent a fair amount of time making a good crafting system. It can be grindy at times, but I'm glad I'm doing it, and there is a fair chunk of content I would have missed out on had I decided to go harvest-and-buy from the getgo.
If that cloak looks like someone made it up by tacking every beneficial stat in the game onto one item using a web-based item generator, well, there's a minor catch. It can only be equipped in the cosmetic slot. The one that doesn't give stats. Well played, SOE, well played. This is now my third cosmetic cloak, and I'm happy to swap in the latest version as each event rolls around. That said, the quests are worth doing in any case because they also award experience and alternate advancement points. Perhaps most importantly, time limited live event quests are not designed to require a massive amount of time in an extremely narrow window (unlike a certain other event).
During the time it would have taken....
One thing that struck me as odd in the proceedings was a discussion of whether one of the collection items is rare/ultrarare. Collection items are looted from sparkling spots on the ground, and the April's Fool versions are marked by especially prominent blue smoking sparkles that will be available for the rest of the week. The devs claim that all of the items in the holiday collection are random (in normal collections, one of the items is often rare and expensive), but both anecdotal accounts and market conditions seem to argue otherwise, as multiple people (myself included) have had difficulty obtaining one particular item.
Anyway, I didn't have the possibly rare item after concluding my other business in the zones that could drop it. What can a level 41 character with no rich, long-established level 80 main, do in this situation? In my case, the answer was to buy the item off the broker for 60 gold and then go harvesting. In under an hour, I obtained multiple rare harvests - I used one for a spell upgrade for myself and the rest collectively sold for well above what I paid for that last collectable.
Most likely, the person I bought the item off of would have earned much more money for their time harvesting, and I suppose I should be grateful that they never figured this out. More to the point, most of the people who are not happy with the rarity of the item should have been at least as able as the guy who's been playing the game for two months to buy their way out of the problem.
The value of self-sufficiency?
Us MMORPG players are not always that far up to par on the whole concept of opportunity cost. I'm certainly not immune - I spent a while leveling an alt as a provisioner to cook food for Lyriana, thinking that I was getting tradeskill experience on an alt AND getting products to eat for my trouble. It took until the mid-20's before I really stopped and evaluated what it would cost to buy the food I wanted from other players in the context of the amount of time I was spending attempting to cook it (along with the money for training and ingredients).
In hindsight, I'm very glad I elected to level Lyriana as a Jeweler, the profession which also makes her spell upgrades. Spell upgrades are a sufficiently specialized market that there isn't a lot of competition in the market for a specific upgrade to a specific spell (in a game with 24 classes, each of which gets 1-3 spells per level for 80 levels). I can buy the recipe book and the rare ingredient needed to make whatever spell upgrade I want for half of what the finished product costs. This is definitely worth my time and trainer costs to level the profession.
Food clearly isn't. Neither are potions. I'd considered leveling an alt as a carpenter, as they can make strongboxes - containers that go as high as 36 slots intended primarily for use in peoples' banks. Then I discovered that I can buy the 36-slot box for a mere 12 gold. Why level the crafter to level 80 when a single level 30-40 rare harvest can buy me four of the finished product? The same goes for gear to some extent - gear can get expensive, but a character who is leveling only needs to replace it every 10 levels. Perhaps rangers might actually burn enough arrows to make Woodworking worthwhile, but otherwise I'm not sure that my next crafter won't be another scholar-class, if I even decide to level another one.
This odd dichotomy where finished goods are strangely less profitable than the raw materials they were made out of is pretty universal to MMO's. I don't know how you fix this - WoW went the opposite direction with crafting in TBC, where professions existed primarily for self-only perks rather than making stuff for other people, and the results were dicey from a balance perspective (raiders became leatherworkers en masse). Maybe you just give up, and figure that the crafting market will be what it ends up being.
It's just unfortunate if, as EQ2 has, you've spent a fair amount of time making a good crafting system. It can be grindy at times, but I'm glad I'm doing it, and there is a fair chunk of content I would have missed out on had I decided to go harvest-and-buy from the getgo.
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