If you were to start playing World of Warcraft right now, you could make decent money farming copper. The enemies are not gray to you, so you would not be the most efficient farmer, but people who earn lots of gold per hour are happy to give you a bit of it on the auction house. On a non-trade example, when I went back to Asheron’s Call with a fresh account, I financed several dozen levels by hopping a portal to a high-level hunting zone and scavenging a pack of trash loot that players left in their wake. If I had thought of it, I could have made a service of being the town-visiting pet from Torchlight, if anyone would trust a new character with their stuff/money.

The past weekend was Canthan New Year in Guild Wars. This is an amazing source of money for a new player. Offering to sell Lunar Tokens for 200g and Fortunes for 600g, I was deluged with buyers. There were quests that rewarded 25 Tokens, and the established players had run them in previous years; they were effectively level 5 quests that awarded 5 platinum. I financed my first set of prestige armor off those. If you could get your newb to Lion’s Arch, you could convert Tokens to Fortunes profitably (if slowly) playing Rock-Paper-Scissors.

An economy that is orders of magnitude above where you are can be daunting, but if you can get involved in it at all, the profits to be reaped are huge.

: Zubon

Newb Boon is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

The Wi Flag is the phenomenon of not just bad luck but actually being cursed by the game. Monsters will run across a dungeon to kill you, ignoring your friends. This is, of course, just odd luck and an observer effect, even though we have all seen it happen. And then someone checked the code in Asheron’s Call and found out it was true due to a bug in assigning aggro.

Enjoy the link and your weekend.

: Zubon

Our Favorite Bugs: The Wi Flag is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

What I imagined under the name “Ultima Online” and the reality were rather different, but I would not come to learn that for years. I did not look into it immediately because my friend who told me about it went on to describe it as already broken. She told a story that I have never checked in the past decade: the code throttled how many grand masters there were of each skill by making it harder to advance as more people were advancing that skill. This would reward less common paths, but if 10,000 people were making horseshoes, blacksmith advancement would be very slow. So went her story, “sword” was an obviously popular skill, so improvement there went at a glacial pace, and characters were being slaughtered by chickens and deer as they vainly tried to get their first few points, while the first grand masters ran rampant.

Google was young in those days, and we were not in the habit of verifying what some guy said about online games. More importantly at the time, it seemed perfectly plausible. We all know some poorly implemented systems that spoil grand projects. Heck, it still sounds plausible, doesn’t it? The founding MMOs had experiments that did not always work. If I told you that some obscure MMO (and you know I love to cite obscure crap) had such a newbie-unfriendly system, where you ended up slaughtering 500 bunnies to compete for a limited number of sword-advancement points per server per day, you might just shake your head and mutter something about Korean grind-fests.

The effect was that my group of friends did not rush to UO. (It would be a year before I knew what EQ was, even after seeing it in stores. “Oh look, yet another fantasy CRPG I have never heard of.” Why would I bother picking up the box?) No, some of them joined late in the beta for this exciting new game called Asheron’s Call…

I was hesitant to get started. My 486 computer had a 1 GB hard drive. I played StarCraft, and fully upgraded zerglings attacked once a second. Beyond needing to play on someone else’s computer, I did not expect it to last long. Multiplayer games had a 3-4 month lifespan in our group. I had followed them through three RTSes while sitting out several passing games. (You fall naturally into the late adopter position when you have the worst computer in your group.) By the time Asheron’s Call emerged from one person’s toy to something the group was seriously engaging, they had been in for a couple of months and beta was ending. Surely they were almost burned out, no point in jumping in now. Besides, it had a monthly subscription fee. That was something new, a big commitment, and a potentially meaningful expense in my younger self’s budget.

Soon, it was live and the majority of our group was playing. In less than a month, getting folks together for AoE2 or Brood Wars became difficult. I read the manual. Someone had the official tip book, so I looked through that. (This was back in the day when “game experience may change during online play” was new and paper books on MMOs did not seem idiotic. It was also under the paradigm of “minimal spoilers” instead of “watch a video of every boss fight before entering the dungeon.”)

Wow, this looked like exactly what I was expecting from online D&D. You really run around a world, with monsters and dungeons and towns. You level up and research spells and search for the legendary weapons the lore alludes to. I made a character on a friend’s account, an intentional throwaway to feel the game out (no respecs back in the day) and because I did not expect to be on his account much (or for the game to last long).

I made sure to train unarmed combat. Almost every RPG campaign, if it runs long enough, has a bit where the characters at least temporarily lose all their equipment. I wanted to be ready for that module where you all wake up in a prison cell. I had two or three weapon skills on a mage; the book recommended giving yourself diverse combat options. I had both categories of enchantment buffs, unknowingly starting what would become a long career in support magic.

It was, in retrospect, just about the worst possible starter character. It lacked offensive oomph without tanking ability, its support skills were minimal, and I had no one to support anyway since I borrowed my friend’s account when folks were not playing together. Still, there I was in a virtual world, smacking down monsters with my staff! (Not a euphemism.)

I gained a handful of levels in my first few play sessions. (Not the multi-hour play sessions that have become our norm.) At times it felt slow, lying down between Shreth fights to recover health. Then again, advancement felt rocket fast. Experience points appeared after every single kill, sometimes with bonus points mid-fight, rather than at the end of a pen-and-paper module. D&D campaigns could take years to reach higher levels, most of them ending in the mid-levels, and here I was already several levels along in just hours. Your first Achiever buzz is easy to reach.

Besides, this is how the book suggested that advancement worked. You found an area with monsters that were challenging but not life-threatening, you fought a few, then you rested while your health recovered and they respawned. The ideal Happy Hunting Ground would have enemies that respawned about as quickly as you recovered the health from the last fight. We may not have had a concept of “farming” at the time, but darned well did it, and it was new and exciting. (It was also comforting and familiar, since we had done something familiar in CRPGs like Final Fantasy or Pool of Radiance, seeking random encounters to level.)

We took “spell research” seriously. Asheron’s Call, for those who never played under the original system, had you learn and cast spells by putting components in a spell window (order mattered). There were dozens of components determining the school of the spell, damage or stat type, positive or negative, self or other, etc. There were commonalities you could learn, and once you recognized the animations and magic words, you could reverse-engineer most of a spell’s formula just by watching someone cast it.

Anyway, when the manual said we could discover new spells, we thought we could discover new spells. Not as in new to our character, new to the game. Another term we did not have was “emergent gameplay,” but we were expecting it. Our mental model was that each component added something to a spell, like recipe ingredients or building blocks, and the resulting spell was the product of those inputs. Add a bit more fire component and you got more fire. It was not clear to us that there were set formulas for every spell in the game. We thought we could break new ground instead of uncovering an existing path.

I started a week or two before the first patch, the Sudden Season. At the time, we were scornful. Why add more upper-level content? It is not as though many players were past level 20 or that many would ever get past 30. Have you seen the xp curve at that point? And yet there the developers were, wasting time on the hardcore few, making content hardly anyone would ever see. (Yes, the casual vs. hardcore debate was there from the start.)

If you cannot see how very wrong that line of thought was, consider that my last Asheron’s Call character did not get finish acquiring her basic skills until level 60. And that was far far from the bleeding edge most of a decade ago. And Asheron’s Call has a soft level cap; even when the hard cap was level 126 128, you could keep earning experience points to improve your skills even if you could not learn new ones.

Back then, VN Boards was where it was at, along with Crossroads of Dereth, and our server of Morningthaw had a vibrant community. Rant sites were in their early days before we started calling them “blogs.”

: Zubon

The Early Incursions: Asheron’s Call is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

One of these recently reminded me of someone from my Asheron’s Call monarchy who was a bit of an annoying kid. He was earnest, enthusiastic about leveling, eager for attention, and very much attached to me after I went out of my way to help him one evening. Nothing wrong with him, I just did not have the energy to care for a puppy. I met another puppy in LotRO, and fending off the attentions of extroverted adolescents is much more important when they have access to built-in voice chat.

I say this not because I am shaking my cane at the kids on my lawn. I say this because I just realized that the “annoying kid” has probably graduated from college by now. He might have a kid or two of his own. The current batch of adolescents had not yet started school when I met him. I am old old old.

: Zubon

Old is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Hopefully the personal story acts as a guide through the zones because that will be necessary. Players need more purpose than pure exploration… — Ravious

He is probably right, but I wonder.

The first generation of graphic MUDs had far less guidance. I started with Asheron’s Call, which had almost none. There was no quest book. Some NPCs would trade for something in a dungeon or from a monster, and that was how most quests were structured. Some locations had stories that you could follow. For the most part, though: here, have a world, go nuts. (I could not tell you the current state of Dereth.)

We moved away from that pretty immediately. Asheron’s Call 2 was organized by vaults the way The Lord of the Rings Online™ has its epic story, although it was a ways from the now-familiar on-rails quest hub structure. A Tale in the Desert added levels and EVE added certificates to help guide people. Can I hope that Darkfall is a last sandbox without a trail of breadcrumbs?

I understand the desire for guidance. I know the feeling of “so now what?” But I also liked the Asheron’s Call feeling of deciding what I want to do tonight. It was more of scattered attractions than theme park rides. And that left us wondering what else me might find if we ran fifteen minutes in a random direction.

: Zubon

Pure Exploration is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Healing is great for marginal teams that are barely scraping by, but moving a team from “non-functional” to “winning” or from “winning” to “dominating” is a job for non-healer support. The best times I have had on any support character have been when healing is a secondary role. It is nice to have that in your pocket, in case things go pear-shaped, but support is at its best when healing is unnecessary. Debuffing is great, buffing is usually better, and control is invisibly wonderful if often fragile.

As with many things, City of Heroes does this the best of any game I have played. It is not readily apparent in the early levels, when defenses and abilities are weak and healing is necessary. It starts in the mid-levels and comes into its own in the late game. Everyone who got tired of things in the 30s? You missed the best part of the game (although I concede a love for the frantic newness of the low levels). Kinetics is the big star, with Fulcrum Shift as its last ability, putting your entire team at the damage cap. Life at the damage cap is a beautiful thing. Along the way, Defenders might put you at the speed cap; put all enemies at the speed, damage, or accuracy floor, or all at once; give everyone endless endurance (mana) and regeneration good enough to make healing redundant; and be the best pulling class around. Controllers do all of that with slightly lower numbers and the bonus ability of turning the enemies into statues. If you were not loving the game in the late levels, you were playing with/as a healer and not a Defender.

This is not CoH-specific. Playing a support mage in Asheron’s Call was a beautiful thing, letting my friends specialize all their attacks while multiplying their damage. There was a special joy in debuffing an enemy’s magic skills and watching it fizzle its attack spells repeatedly. My Theurgist in Dark Age of Camelot was a primary damage class that was more valued for its run buff, stuns and slows, and especially the bladeturn chant (self-refreshing group buff: the next enemy attack misses). A Minstrel will improve his legendary items’ healing cost and power buffs in The Lord of the Rings Online, but one “required” legacy is increasing the group melee damage buff, and the damage reduction from traiting for buffs is greater than the healing increase from traiting for heals. World of Warcraft is kind enough to make many buffs last ten to thirty minutes, for your ease as a buffer.

The life of a healer is usually boredom or panic. In a good group, there is not much to do. In a bad group, there are too many people demanding your attention at once, and in a badly designed encounter, you have people going suddenly from full health to nearly dead. Buffers are not half-AFK waiting for a green bar to go down, and there is always something interesting to do as a debuffer.

: Zubon

Support is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Since we are going this way now, let’s get Asheron’s Call and heck even Asheron’s Call 2 running on the same model.

The return of AC2 is an appealing notion. If that happens, I need a way to reclaim an old account with just the associated e-mail address (not the log-in name). I never made that Lugian Tactician. I also have an old AC1 account in storage; I might remember the account name on that one.

: Zubon

Comment Spotlight is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I stand by my repeated claim that optimizing the new player experience is of paramount importance. You must grab my attention within five minutes, and you must deliver a satisfying hour or two for my first play session. Without that, any free trial is worthless, and you may even lose some people who have thrown down $50 for a box. This is the part of the game that every single player will see on every single character, and if you cannot do a good job here, I have no hope for the rest of the game. Yes, it is hard to make things interesting while giving the player only a few buttons to play with. Suck it up, we all have hard parts in our jobs. That’s why they pay us.

In retrospect, the original Asheron’s Call tutorial dungeon was truly horrible, only tolerable because these MMO things were just so new and exciting. The Lord of the Rings Online™ does a great job with its introductory instances, basic gameplay while introducing the setting and giving you some big name characters, and you don’t realize it is foreshadowing when an NPC saves the day while you watch. City of Heroes has a weak tutorial (including a “run in a straight line for 20+ seconds” segment), which City of Villains does better. World of Warcraft makes the less common choice of opening in its main game world, with no tutorial instance, but it manages to be dull for every race. Warhammer Online makes the same choice brilliantly by immediately tossing you into a warzone (best: Dwarf versus Greenskin newbie zones). The Champions Online tutorial just feels laboriously long. The Chronicles of Spellborn has a LotRO-style opening that ends well in a big fight with chthonic horror, but the gameplay along the way manages to be tedious even while very short. I remember starting A Tale in the Desert back before there was a tutorial, just drop you in the world and go; easily the most hardcore PvP game (with permadeath!) ever made. Wizard101′s tutorial explains things very well but is painfully slow and impossible to skip or hurry on a second character.

That hurdle overcome, the next question is where the most time is going to be spent in-game. Correct me if your game’s metrics suggest otherwise, but for most MMOs, it seems to be at the level cap. If nothing else, that is where your loud community is: the hardcore, the devoted, the guild community leaders who style themselves opinion-leaders or -makers (and may be). Any sane amount of content will occupy casual players, so giving people something to do at the “end” is how you keep and mollify the hardcore. How you do this well is widely disputed and the main topic of hundreds of blogs, so I will table (American sense) that issue.

World of Warcraft does this part famously well. Even if you do not like the WoW end-game, or the current end-game at any given moment, they have done a great job of recruiting and retaining players by putting an emphasis on late-game dungeons and raids. (Personally, I heard “the game begins at 80″ so many times that it was part of the reason I quit.) City of Heroes does this part famously sparsely, launching without the last ten levels and encouraging altoholism rather than building lots of level 50 content. Years into the title, there are exactly two raids and not a whole lot of level 50 task/strike forces (we try not to count the Shadow Shard content, out of politeness). Warhammer Online seemed to collapse (still does?) horribly at the level cap. Dark Age of Camelot had excellent realm-versus-realm combat but had horrible backlash when it added alternate advancement PvE content at the cap, creating a higher effective (and therefore required for PvP) cap. Back when I played, Asheron’s Call had a soft cap that amounted to an endless late-game. EVE Online has its PvP empire wars, to which Darkfall aspires. The Lord of the Rings Online™ has the ersatz version of the WoW end-game, taking the same approach but with very little content and alternate advancement grinds. It does, however, recycle its old end-games into new late-games better than WoW as the level cap rises.

Next up is the early game. If everyone is going to see that tutorial and new player experience, this is next, where you hope they all continue. It would be #2 on the list were it not for the amount of time your players can spend at the level cap between expansions. It remains very important, especially if it will consume most or all of the average player’s first month. A good start gave you a chance, but this is where you seal the deal and get the player to subscribe past the trial week or free month.

Age of Conan excels here, with near-universal acclaim for the Tortage experience. World of Warcraft varies between races/zones; playing on the Alliance side, I found I did not much like any early zones except for humans, although I recall a fondness for some early undead content. Dark Age of Camelot was good for its time but grindy and punitive in retrospect. City of Heroes/Villains does well except for a few painfully placed missions; maybe some of those are intentional, to make the travel powers that much sweeter. Warhammer Online is exquisite in tier 1, and if you have never played, you can go player tier 1 for free right now as much as you like. This is probably the worst time for EVE Online as players reach the “now what do I do” point. I have not tried the re-done LotRO low-level experience, but I always loved the Shire.

(Cynically, we also note that this is as far as most get in beta. There will be few to judge you on anything past this at release. This makes it a high priority while downgrading the importance of anything that will therefore have a smaller effect on your box sales.)

At this point, importance tapers off until you reach that end-game. Unless there is some modal point where most players end their second and third months, you focus on building the game out linearly. That early hook gives you some momentum through the mid-game. As long as the late-game is not so horrible that it is not worth getting through, players will get through those last few levels to see the glorious level-capped wonders they have heard to much about.

(Cynically, we note that promises to work on this area will carry you a long way. Wherever the population is centered at the end of the first month, just before subscription renewal time, announce you are going to fix that point and the range just beyond it. Repeat at month two. Warhammer Online did this brilliantly with developer letters just before renewal time in the early months. It helps if you can predict this point and really have improvements coming down the line, but developers are notoriously poor at predicting how quickly players consume content.)

You can see a great many games that have already embraced this approach. Part of it is just a natural consequence of sequential development. You worked really hard on the newbie zones in early beta, you worked on the glorious end-game wonders so you could show them off for the press, and then you fill in the middle as you get a chance, ideally trying to keep just ahead of the bulk of testers and/or players.

Some games really do fall down in the mid/late-game, hard enough to start seriously losing players. I love the 30s and 40s in City of Heroes/Villains, when all your powers and slots are finally coming together, but many people find it grindy without the quick progression from the early levels. Warhammer Online was appalling in the mid-tiers at launch, with poor PvE (“and such small portions!”) while the PvP balance problems were becoming apparent as all the powers and talents finally came together.

I’m stopping that thought so we can reflect. The mid to late levels are where you character finishes getting all of its abilities, with that “complete” point varying wildly across games and classes. If your game has horrible balance problems, they may be hidden under new shininess and quick growth, but they will become apparent in the mature levels. This is where the steam runs out for we the gameplay-Explorers. It is also where Achievers can jump ship as advancement slows down. This must disappoint the Killers: the sheep leave just as the wolves get the really fun ways to kill them all.

Zubon, it is sounding a lot like you’re saying that every part is important. And yes, I would love to say that, but experience suggests a few reasons why these later (but not end-game) levels are less important for retaining subscribers.

First, I am suggesting an extreme case of the game imploding. I do not know how many people ever experienced the Age of Conan end-game because the MMO blogosphere sounded like wailing from the fiery pits of Hell as people left Tortage. It is clearly possible to do far too little in that range, but many games get to “decent” at least.

Second, many of the extreme collapses are also end-game failures. They are balance problems or flaws in the fundamental systems that are to sustain players through the rest of the game, and there is no good news to reach after suffering through a near-empty, just-after-release late-game. These problems are not apparent in the early levels or not important enough to care about, while they first become visible in the mid or late levels. The Warhammer Online problems with city sieges compounded issues with the late-game open world RvR (plus a bit more), while the game had the same balance structure as most editions of D&D: just fine early on, when the numbers are small and luck can trump design oddities, but exploding into catastrophe as you multiply those oddities over many levels.

Third, “good enough” works. I would love to say that MMO players have discriminating tastes and high standards, but that is obviously false. We will put up with a lot of crap and flame anyone who suggests that quality and professionalism are below acceptable standards. One thing that Star Wars: The Old Republic has going for it is that at least some of their developers understand that the mass market will not put up with the crap we will, so selling to all those non-MMO addicts will involve improved accessibility and functionality (whether that idea has survived the EA merger is beyond me).

Kvetching aside, think of MMO players in two categories. For newbies, it is all new and exciting. Think back to your cherished memories of early struggles in your first MMO, and realize that you would never put up with EQ-at-launch today. Many of the problems in MMOs are not so bad once, just that we keep hitting the same bugs/grinds/AARGH for years. You will deal with it to see the new shiny when everything is new and shiny. New players are also more likely to play at a sane pace, perhaps try to experience everything on a first character (they don’t realize it is “first” not “my” character yet) before moving on to the next zone, thus giving more development time for that mid-game.

For veterans, we are obviously insane enough to put up with it, and we are already thinking long-run. Hardcore players are going to blast through come Hell or high water, and if the late-game content is weak, that is just more reason to push through to the promised land of Level Cap. You know common workarounds from previous games, you are tapped into the community to get tips on what is bugged and how to circumvent it, and you are already inured from years of suffering in previous MMOs. You have a community to help see you through, a guild of people to talk to, and you are not going to abandon your guild because (a) you like them or (b) you tell yourself you are playing to spend time with these people rather than get the next Ding! pellet.

So for all those reasons, I believe that if you sink the hooks in deeply, your players will probably view their first 40 or 80 hours as an investment rather than a sunk cost, and they will keep pushing on unless the game is truly painful with little promise of improvement. Or they are the much maligned, possibly mythical “tourists” who were never going to stay anyway, so again it does not matter.

Get the first day right: bait. Get the end-game right: long-term storage in the fish tank. Get the early game right: sink the hook. They may wriggle, but you will keep quite a few on the line with even a decent mid- to late-game. Or without the horrible fish metaphor: your early word of mouth gives the game life, and the long-run word of mouth sustains it.

: Zubon

Early, Middle, Late is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Level-related modifiers stack to make it pointless to play outside a narrow range. It would be enough to have the numbers get larger with every level, as they do, so good luck using that 50 damage attack against the 200,000hp enemy. Most games add a modifier based on level differences: it is not just that you get higher stats and better accuracy as you level, but also that you have a bonus to hit lower-level targets, with a corresponding penalty against bigger targets. You also face reduced damage against them, above and beyond their improved defenses, while they get those benefits against you, the lower-level target.

Let’s linger there a moment. Long long ago, City of Heroes had its “purple patch,” which imposed level modifiers. Your 50 damage attack against the 200,000hp enemy would only do 20 damage, and that was before applying the enemy’s defenses. Even if you could take down higher level enemies, it was not worth it for the time involved. (And, just in case you found a time-efficient way to do it, much higher level enemies yielded less or no experience.) WoW feels similar. Asheron’s Call assigns levels to enemies but intends them as rough guides to how powerful they are, with modifiers to experience gains but not relative effectiveness.

This makes fighting an even-con elite easier than a higher-level normal foe. Sure, it may have three times as many hit points, but I do not have an arbitrary accuracy penalty, so I can hit the thing. I can kill a caster six levels higher than me, but it takes a few minutes, and I could get the same reward from killing two lower-level foes in half the time.

: Zubon

I am open to the notion that WoW looks this way due to the way weapon skills work, rather than some additional penalty. A level-based hard cap on weapon skills creates the same effect.

The Tyranny Of Levels is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

The problem is non-trivial. The seasons change as you cross onto a new map, but few comment on the walk from the perpetual winter of Dun Morogh to the perpetual spring of Loch Modan. You must have noticed at some point, but did you notice when the transition happened?

Some of this is gamer suspension of disbelief: we are used to having everything change when we get to a new level of the game, and moving to a new zone is the MMO equivalent. The game environment also facilitates this the same way it keeps you on the theme park quest path: channelization. How many zones have wide-open borders that you can traverse, rather than walls of impassable mountains with narrow openings?

Those openings can become rather like tunnels for about a draw distance, so that you see big rocks covering the transition point. The transitions to and from Loch Modan really are tunnels, enclosing you so that you cannot see the set being swapped, like taking an elevator in Portal. In other zones, see bridges and rivers serving a similar purpose. You may note this as a problem at the border of Westfall: river and bridges, yes, but it is brief enough for you to see the transition. On the way in, there are quest-givers to distract you, but Duskwood makes it look like the world ends across the river.

Touring through some other games of my acquaintance: City of Heroes does the same thing, complete with loading screens. Asheron’s Call never does, since you can run everywhere from anywhere, and there are large areas over which you can watch the land change. The Lord of the Rings Online™ Volume One: Shadows of Angmar™ is mostly open, with channelization into the lategame zones and the ones added post-release. The Lord of the Rings Online™ Volume Two: Mines of Moria™ channels everything, but it is set in caverns anyway. Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates has separate islands, with boats as loading screens (WoW does the same at points). A Tale in the Desert takes the same approach as Asheron’s Call, with some really impressive geography reflecting years of effort from volunteer world-builders.

: Zubon

Impassable hills are also good for hiding the Potemkin village nature of most of the landmass. Cataclysm needs to re-do the whole landmass anyway so flying mounts cannot show that there is nothing behind the backdrops.

Airlocks is a post from: Kill Ten Rats