Epic EQ2 Expansion Preparations

Thanks to Sev, Ely, and Pratt of the Halasian Empire, Lyriana finally snagged her epic weapon (the group version, not the even fancier raid version) today. Overall, the questline sent us into a variety of dungeons from the Kunark expansion (a more recent expansion has added tougher dungeons at the same level cap) and had an interesting, if perhaps a bit random, story to tell. I'm glad I was able to get this in before the expansion, just in time to have a very solid weapon for going back on the leveling trail.

(Ironically, it was snowing once again here in Washington - snow apparently tends to work out well for Lyriana.)

I was also able to finally decide on a last name for my winged Dirge. For whatever reason, my "disarm traps" skill, used to open chests safely, is massively behind - currently at something like 120/400. The result is that I almost always set off an explosive trap of some sort when I open chests. Despite repeated apologies and warnings about this, Sev and Ely apparently find it amusing for me to detonate every chest we come across. As a result, I decided to /lastname Lyriana "Lockbreaker" (as opposed to "Lock Disarmer" or "Safe-lock-opener").

Meanwhile, I've been slowly but surely working on tradeskills for my alts while I still have the 10% bonus exp for having a maxxed crafter. This isn't something that I work on when I have a full evening of it, but it's a relatively peaceful way of killing 20-30 minutes here and there, and I'm rapidly gaining the ability to craft just about anything and everything my small army of alts could want.

I don't know how much further I'm going to advance in EQ2 over the next two weeks until the expansion arrives. Technically, I could try and get a piece or two of void shard armor and/or some other loot, but it seems somewhat pointless so close to a gear reset - the epic weapon is a more iconic upgrade, and one that I will probably be willing to wear cosmetically even if I eventually replace it. I guess we'll see what I'm feeling like on a day to day basis, but I'd be ready to go if the expansion arrived tomorrow.

Turbine and Cryptic's Approaches to Paid Content Patches

A mere five months after the retail release of Champions Online, Cryptic has announced for plans to charge for a new zone for players working their way towards the game's level cap. The state of the content in that level range must be dire indeed if Cryptic is convinced that players will pay to escape the current leveling zones. It's relatively common for games to launch with a less than polished upper level experience and patch these areas up to par later, but most companies don't have the nerve to charge extra for such additions.

(As an aside, it boggles my mind that Cryptic managed to get this headline for Champions' Online on the very week where players will have to decide whether they want to cancel their Star Trek pre-orders.)

Speaking of a game that spent its first year patching up its leveling experience for no additional fee, Turbine has just announced the Volume III patch for LOTRO. If these are the highlights, the patch will be somewhat underwhelming - there's no mention of new zones or dungeons, but they found the room to spotlight new icons for Jeweler recipes and opening up existing skirmishes to full raid groups (I didn't know that there were skirmishes that weren't open to raids to begin with).

If I'm correct in reading between the lines, the new patch will send players to a variety of existing content (including an old raid zone) to collect Rangers for the War of the Ring. It certainly appears that I was right when I suggested that the new business model for LOTRO is to save all the major features for future paid expansions, leaving only minor additions and polish for the non-paid updates.

At the end of the day, you can argue that it is better to charge a $15 monthly fee and have mini-expansions that come out to $2.50/month than to charge a $17.50 monthly fee outright, since the player has the choice to play for less if they are so inclined. Perhaps there's even a smidgen more accountability when part of the game's revenue is dependent on the developers producing content that is worth purchasing in a timely fashion. (Then again, that kind of pressure could be a bad thing if it means that we will only get bite-sized chunks of content henceforth, rather than meatier experiences like Moria.) Either way, it's a trend that shows no sign of slowing down.

The EQ2 Battlegrounds No One Asked For

The EQ2 devs have been taking about adding instanced PVP to the game for a while now, and the details finally arrived yesterday. Let's see if we can find a trend in the feedback:

• Cuppycake: "Is the EQ2 main player base interested in PvP? I really don’t think so, but I could be wrong."
  
• Spinks: "So my question is, were any players actually asking for this?"
  
• Syp: "I guess that’s kind of cool, but as Spinks said, you don’t usually think “PvP” when EQ2 is brought up."
  
• Riannon, my EQ2 guild leader, via Twitter: "I'm not terribly excited about the #EQ2 "battlegrounds" announcement. Just not a PvPer, and not sure it will appeal to a lot of players."
  
• Stargrace, via Twitter (having tweeted that she doesn't feel like posting about this on her blog): "I am not excited at all, in fact, I'd say I'm feeling pretty 'blargh' about the whole thing, sadly."
  
• Feldon at the EQ2 Wire: "....the rewards are NOT being designed as a progression path, and you will NOT need this gear to solo, group, or raid in the Sentinel’s Fate expansion. However it is conceivable that some raid guilds will expect players to have certain gear."

So, the most positive reaction of the bunch is that it is possible that players who don't want to PVP won't be required to do so, but that we can't be sure yet. Ouch. What happened?

Good idea on paper...
On paper, this must have seemed like a great idea. The only PVP in EQ2 currently is a ganking-enabled world-pvp ruleset that dwindled down to a single server last year due to lack of population. This conceivably harms the appeal of EQ2 to players who care about PVP. Meanwhile, Warsong Gulch is nearing its fifth birthday in WoW, and players are STILL voluntarily queuing up to run it back to back all night.

The problem is, as basically everyone is pointing out, that EQ2 is a five year-old game that has not had PVP for five years. Anyone for whom this was a dealbreaker already left during that time. SOE may be under the impression that it can attract new players with the promise of PVP, but there are a number of challenges between them and victory on that front.

For one thing, the new cross-server battlegrounds will only have a single level bracket, from 80-90, which means that 80 levels of PVE content separate newbies from PVP glory. By contrast, Warhammer offers PVP at level 1, and WoW offers it not that much later. Second, and more importantly, you probably aren't going to fill battlegrounds entirely with newbies, which means that you're going to need to convert some existing players to a system that they haven't needed for years now. This would be the source of concern that the incentives/bribes will be so powerful that they could become required for PVE content.

The problem with imitating WoW...
Personally, I think that having a viable PVP game adds a versatility to WoW that is one of the game's strengths. I also don't have any moral issue with other studios copying features from WoW, much as Blizzard will not hesitate to pilfer any improvements in SOE's version of battlegrounds. The problem is rather that, when you try to attract WoW players by offering a feature that WoW has, they're going to expect you to deliver as well or better than what they already have in Azeroth.

SOE's on the right track, starting with a cross-server (including both US and EU servers) setup. Filling the queues for even three types of battleground matches might have been a challenge on single servers that are currently getting by with zero types of battlegrounds. The next feature that they've hopefully picked up is the "queue for all battlegrounds from everywhere in the world" button. There's a reason why Blizzard immediately copied this feature from Warhammer, and players are not going to tolerate having to travel to a specific location and wait there while the queue is in progress.

Finally, there's the ever so trivial white elephant crab in the room - all the class and incentive balance issues that have made Ghostcrawler the de facto face of the WoW development team. It's not easy building a system where half of your players have to lose any given encounter but still enjoy the experience enjoy to get right back in line to try again. Good luck with that, guys.

Bad idea or the worst idea?
At the end of the day, SOE felt that this project was worth sending its dev team to work on it instead of doing other things. Perhaps they know something about the playerbase (e.g. through surveys and cancellation polls) that the most active members of the EQ2 community (Feldon and Stargrace were both recipients of puzzle pieces in the announcement rollout) do not.

That said, something about this feature feels off. Battlegrounds appear to be slated for the patch that will go with next month's expansion launch. They will effectively require the expansion, in that the battlegrounds will have a single level bracket where level 80's who don't buy the expansion can expect to get steamrolled by level 90's. A thinking person might conclude that battlegrounds are a major feature of the expansion, worthy of at least a bullet point on the box/advertising.

Instead, SOE did not even bother to confirm the feature until a mere two weeks before launch day. When has an MMORPG ever decided not to promote the addition of an entirely new type of gameplay? More than anything else, that omission seems telling, like SOE is well aware that this is NOT something that the existing playerbase is going to be excited about.

All of which begs the question - who exactly DID want this feature added to the game? I guess we'll know when we see if anyone whatsoever bothers to queue up next month, at a time when they could be exploring the new PVE content instead.

Baseball Completionism Incentives

Kotaku reports on an interesting non-MMORPG incentive issue with this year's editon of MLB: The Show. The game will have six historic stadiums that can be unlocked in one of two ways:
1. Pre-order the game from participating retailers
2. Complete every one of the game's "trophy" achievements, a task that Kotaku describes as something that "takes a LOT of doing".

My guess is that the team was told to think of something they could hold back from the base game as a pre-order "exclusive", and decided that the platinum trophy reward was a good choice. Players who are dedicated enough to complete the trophy are seriously committed to the game, and will probably do so regardless of any extra incentive. Meanwhile, many players would not even bother trying for the trophy due to its high requirements, and therefore would not have done so even for extra ballparks.

Finally, and most to the point, it's a non-subscription console game. The developers don't really have a reason to care if players finish the top trophy or not, as they won't be paid any more if the pursuit makes the game last an extra month. In fact, one could argue that the developers are better off NOT encouraging players who don't want to finish the trophy to try it anyway. The devs will be looking to sell an updated copy of the game next year, and don't want to have customers get sick of it. As with Blizzard's infamous holiday meta-achievement, any such effort is bound to push players in the direction of some aspect of the game that they weren't playing because they frankly don't enjoy it.

More broadly, there's an interesting question here about the point of having rewards for 100% completion of a game in the first place. In some ways, historic ballparks fit that particular bill nicely, since they're cosmetic additions that might perhaps liven up the game slightly for players who have already seen it all. There wouldn't be much point in having a reward that has an in-game function, since the game, unlike a persistent world MMORPG, won't carry over into next year's edition. Then again, bragging rights are still good for something, or would have been if they weren't up for grabs with every pre-order. Perhaps something more visible, like throw-back uniforms that could be used in online play, would have been a better choice of status symbol in this particular game.

A Review of Soloing Mirkwood and LOTRO's Direction

Allarond finally wrapped up Volume 2, Book 9, the epic plotline of the Siege of Mirkwood mini-expansion, over the weekend. He still has a series of epilogue quests, including quests to complete the group dungeons of Don Guldur. There are also at least a dozen remaining quests in various subzones of Mirkwood, which, collectively, will probably be enough to max my reputation with the local elves. Even so, I think I've got a pretty good handle on what the expansion contains at this point.

A focus on solo content
Mirkwood is the first time in my MMORPG experience that I have been able to clear out an entire expansion without needing a group. Moria had a healthy focus on solo content, but there was still the occasional group quest or instance that I would have to abandon, and it was not possible to complete key portions of Epic Volume 2 (which sets up the action in Mirkwood) solo. By contrast, it appears that literally all of the group content in Mirkwood has been tacked on to the optional epilogue at the end.

Part of the reason why Mirkwood gets away with this is because the soloable content is designed to tax characters to their limit. Allarond hit his hour-long emergency cooldowns and consumables pretty hard to survive, and many quests would still have been reasonably challenging with a second character. The content also contains great graphics and an impressive storyline, which I'd put head to head with any single player RPG out there.

The other part of the equation is the scaling "skirmish" system, which is used in every situation in which players would normally have to complete a group instance during the epic book. The skirmish can be set for groups of 1, 3, 6, or 12 players (though all of those players will need to do the solo-only instanced quests to unlock the skirmishes before being allowed to participate), and is probably the most time-efficient way of crafting this sort of story content without leaving anyone out.

Has Turbine chosen to concede the achiever demographic?
Though I can't argue with the expansion's efficiency - skirmishes can be used by all, and group-only leveling content tends to become a problem as games age - part of me wonders at the motivation for this dramatic of a shift.

Turbine has always struggled to keep pace with top end achievers. I originally left the game after reaching level 40, of its launch level cap of 50, a "mere" four months after the paid retail launch, only to find the content severely lacking. By a year later, Turbine had devoted its efforts to fleshing out that sparse stretch of content, where most developers would have moved on to the next paid expansion for max level players.

Today's max-level characters face the same challenges. Turbine has had to stick with a highly unpopular "radiance" gear grind because there simply isn't enough content to let players to move on to the next dungeon when the natural progression of their skill and gear would otherwise allow them to do so. This means that the system needs an incentive to keep players coming back even longer, after they have their radiance gear, to gear up newcomers. So the Mirkwood dungeons are also the source of new legendary item scrolls that provide players with yet another option for sinking tons of time into enhancements for replace-able "legendary" gear.

All of this would be a problem, perhaps a fatal one, if endgame players were the game's primary market. I can think of no reason whatsoever why I'd choose to grind LOTRO's three level 65 small-group dungeons over the other games I play when those games offer more choices (19 daily double dungeons in EQ2 and 16 random heroics in WoW), even before WoW effectively removed the unpleasant task of looking from groups with their automatic group finder. One can only conclude, then, that these endgame grinds are not what are keeping LOTRO in business.

Rather, I'm guessing that LOTRO's core market is the crowd that levels solo and, most importantly, slowly.


In perhaps the closest we're going to get for an apology for the disposable "legendary" item system, players have a brief conversation with the dwarf who was involved in the quest that granted players their first legendary item at the start of the Moria expansion. Turbine has the dwarf crack a joke about how weapons are meant to be replaced, as if Middle Earth was not a place where most characters' named weapons stay with them until they die. In an ironic twist to drive that point home, a separate questline in the epilogue has players returning a fallen comrade's named weapons to their home.

Moving Forward
My guess is that Turbine will never again require the use of group content to see the game's headline epic story content. While one part of Turbine's team was replacing all of the group instances in Mirkwood with skirmishes, another is in the progress of overhauling the launch game's "Volume 1" quests, adding in temporary buffs to allow players to solo the group content. That's a lot of work to invest in accessibility if the plan is to return to "LFG or forget the plot" in Volume 3.

The big question, then, is what exactly we will see when the new volume launches next month. Adding large amounts of landmass and content at the current level cap, when there's already plenty of content to use en route (you actually cannot complete the Epic book before 65, due to the minimum level requirement on the final skirmish) seems like it would just become redundant next (mini?)expansion. Also, if Turbine was in a position to deliver significantly more landmass than Mirkwood by February, why did they go ahead with a mini-expansion in December instead of a full-sized one now?

Then again, perhaps the revamps of the 40's and 50's suggest that Turbine is not afraid of breaking a few metaphorical content eggs with some redundancy. Either way, the content has been well worth the visit so far (with the caveat that the best stuff starts 50+ levels into the game, a bit removed from newcomers). Time will tell whether this model can ultimately pay off.

The Death Penalty Difficulty Fallacy

Discussion of the Rise of the Leet King exercise continues on the blogosphere. Responding to some suggestions about harsher death penalties from Tobold's original post, Gevlon says the following (bolded emphasis mine):

- Slower leveling: long =/= hard. Saying "cheese" is easy. Saying it 10K times is long, but not harder. Yet it would be great if one could finish his questlines without greying out all the quests and monsters.
- Experience loss death penalty: Definitely yes. Without death penalty all content, regardless difficulty can be brute-forced: you try and try and try until the RNG gives it to you. So without death penalty nothing is hard, just long (need more tries).

For someone who spends a lot of time talking about opportunity costs, I'm especially surprised to see Gevlon of all people fall for the "harsh death penalty = more difficult" fallacy.

ALL MMORPG death penalties are really just time
When you die in WoW, you suffer two penalties:

- Time lost running as a ghost back to your corpse to revive, recast any buffs, and deal with any respawned mobs.
- Money spent on repair bills and refreshing any consumables that ended early because of your demise.

The time is, obviously, time. The money, however, can also be measured in terms of the time it would take you to replace it.

Now let's look at the exp penalty that Gevlon says prevents players from repeatedly retrying content until they win via RNG default. Experience debt on death delays your next level, while the losing levels outright might obligate you to go back and regain the level immediately before you can continue what you were doing. Still, both penalties are ultimately reversed by spending more time playing to re-gain the lost exp.

How about item loss? Games with item loss/decay very rarely feature items that simply cannot be replaced. EVE veterans repeat the motto "don't fly it if you can't afford to replace it". In this context, loss of items is effectively loss of money, which we've already established is actually loss of time.

But what if the game goes even further, and actually inflicts irreversible harm to the character, whether it's permanent loss of an irreplaceable item or even the almost-never used extreme of permadeath? Even in this case, the amount of damage the developer can inflict on the player can be reduced to a quantity of time - the time it would take to replace their character re-starting from scratch.

Unless the developers are actually charging you real world money by the death - and playing a game with that business model would be a real leap of faith - there are no penalties that cannot be reduced to an amount of time that it takes to recover from the damage.

The effect of increasing time penalties
Though all penalties are ultimately an amount of time, there is no question that the amount in question differs drastically from game to game. In WoW, I find that the gold cost for repairs and consumables is all-but irrelevant in the context of my daily income. In EQ2, the experience debt for a death can be fully paid off with a handful of mob kills, or logging off for the night. By contrast, losing a level in FFXI can put the player in the difficult position of having to seek a group that's farming in a different level range.

Even so, all of this is merely increasing the time the player is penalized for their mistakes. And, as Gevlon himself says barely a line before falling for the death penalty fallacy, long is not necessarily hard. If anything, the game that players actually experience when harsh death penalties are implemented becomes easier, not more challenging. Players are not willing to risk failure when the penalty in their time is so steep, and thus they are far more inclined to demand group-mates who outgear the content or can otherwise demonstrate that they will provide a SAFE experience.

Ironically, we're seeing precisely the same behavior in WoW today, despite its supposed lack of death penalty. The fact is that a five-man group that wipes twice on every boss and needs to replace someone midway through via votekick or frustration can easily spend double or triple the time it takes an overgeared raid team to clear content that's five tiers below them. And, sure enough, players bail out on unpopular dungeons and immediately votekick their team-mates if gearscores and achievement checks raise concerns that someone will not be able to pull their own weight. Perhaps even WoW has more of a death penalty than people realize.

Mario, the Rise of the Leet King and MMORPG Difficulty

Tobold has posted a bit of satire titled Rise of the Leet King, in which he points out that many of the things that were supposedly harder about pre-WoW MMORPG's were merely more time consuming. I made a similar argument with 100% less Fake Jeff Kaplan last year. What is so hard about difficulty in MMORPG's?

Character Progression and Relative Difficulty
In a somewhat related discussion, Evizaer blasts the "theme park MMO" for its treadmill mechanics "because the in-game rewards are only useful on the journey". Effectively, character progression is a lie, because the relative power of the player compared to the appropriate level enemy (which is generally what the "theme park" MMO will have you fighting) stays approximately the same no matter how much work the player invests. More generally, though, this game mechanic critique is true in just about every game with character progression, be it levels, skills, gear, or whatever.

If you look at Super Mario Brothers, Mario basically does not have any character progression. Mario gets all of his abilities at the beginning, but levels get progressively harder. In the absence of character advancement, the player must improve in skill (or brute force memorization of where the foe that killed them last time came from) to continue to succeed.

By contrast, the entire point of levels in RPG's is for players (and developers making the content) to remain at approximately the same power level relative to the advancing content. Though the relative difficulty of the content does sometimes increase (more commonly in single player RPG's than MMORPG's), it is understood that a level 20 foe can be beaten by a level 20 character (or group thereof), and a level 55 foe can be beaten by a level 55 player.

Why Doesn't Mario Scale To The MMORPG?
One reason why MMORPG's don't increase in difficulty the way that Mario does is scalability. There is a theoretical limit to how difficult a level in Super Mario Brothers can get - once the entire screen, save for a single Mario-sized hole, is filled with enemies, it actually can't get any harder without becoming impossible. Long before that point, however, all but the most dedicated of gamers will have given up on the game. Fortunately for Nintendo, Mario games have a finite number of levels, so the game ends before it gets there. If you're looking to keep an MMORPG running for years, which you'll need to if you are sinking millions into development, that's not an option for you.

Perhaps the far larger issue, though, is that pesky "multi-player" aspect of the game. Some people are simply better at Super Mario Brothers than others. Nintendo's approach to this in the most recent game has simply been to throw all the players on the screen at once and give them the option of literally carrying their buddies to the finish line if they're so inclined. Though this is much more fun than the old model of taking alternating turns attempting each level solo, it has the effect of drastically reducing difficulty. With multiple players, the action continues as long as at least one player survives, with the others having the opportunity to jump back in (and keep the level rolling forward for the first player, should they subsequently die).

If you want to have multiple players without trivializing the difficulty, you have to design the content in a way that causes the entire group to fail if one player cannot make the cut. That's a big problem if you're going to start pushing the envelope in terms of things that actually increase the difficulty, rather than merely the time required to play the game effectively. Ironically, as Tobold notes, the only thing developers seem to have found that makes the game harder is to lean more and more heavily on player reflexes, with raid fights that require split-second response times. Pushing that side of the gameplay is bound to leave some players - and eventually most players, and all of the other players stuck in groups with those players - behind.

The business difficulty with game difficulty
Some players value the opportunity to progress more than their in-game comrades, and would gladly allow the game to reassign them to a new guild/raid team based on their current DPS/HPS/TPS numbers. These players are just as likely to declare victory and go home, taking their subscription dollars with them, when they decide that they've done what there is to do in the game. By contrast, players who have social ties in the game have far more of a reason to stick around, even after they have finished the game's content. As Evizaer uncharitably puts it, the "friends you make and the good times you share" are the thing that justifies the time spent on repetitive and occasionally shallow gameplay.

In short, increasing difficulty in a way that removes players from the friends that are keeping them in (and paying for) the game is the very last thing that a developer wants to do.