Anyway, one thing I received through Wizardblox was a transformation potion that changed me into a Krokotopian mummy for an hour (I love how they run with their little Krok legs).  I landed in the commons area of Wizard City, and my screen blew up with friend requests.  I couldn’t hide in the mass of players when I was standing twice as high as them.  I had to quickly run out of the zone with the annoying friend request in the middle of my screen.

I was later reading the forums at Wizard101 Central where players were complaining about the “scamming” attempts they received when they rode around on their ~$20 wings.  The attempt in Wizard 101 went something like this.  The player would receive a friend request, and click accept.  The new “friend” would then ask for the player to buy a pair of wings for the “friend.”  The obvious reaction should be to unfriend the offending… err… “friend.”

This was a completely foreign phenomenon for me.  In the subscription games I played there were moochers, sure, but the culture was very resistant to any sort of panhandling.  Furthermore, the mooching seemed to mostly happen publicly in open chat channels.  The elite hardcore wearing their elite armor on their elite mounts did not seem to be singled out.  People were congratulated, occasionally, on having the most epic mount costing a million gold or having glowy hands from the collector’s edition.  On the flip side, jealousy often came to the table as well as backhanded remarks on the afflicted gamer’s lack of girlfriend, job, and life therefor.  Yet, begging seemed to be a rarity.

In Wizard101, I think the degrees of separation between perceived real life liquidity and in-game fame were far less than the other MMOs I played.  Players wearing wings must have money to throw around.  Let’s be their friends in the vain hope they will spread their good fortune.  Why else would they want to wear those expensive wings?

Interestingly enough, I did not see a similar occurrence with Guild Wars recent costume sale.  Individually the costumes were nearly a third of the cost of the Wizard101 wings, which clearly had an effect.  Guild Wars costumes were for the masses, and they were priced accordingly.  They were still an unnecessary luxury item, but $10 is an average lunch on the East Coast.  $20, however, gets into, the “other” realm of ‘what other things could I buy with $20 that I might want.’

Even more importantly is the community built around the finer points of the business model. In Guild Wars, even with all their luxury items like character slots, sex changes, and costumes there is no way, as far as I am aware, to gift anything to another account.  In Wizard101, there is a gifting system where real money can be turned in to friendship.

Yet, I find no fault in what KingsIsle is doing for Wizard101.  We are going to see more and more luxury items in MMOs which reflect on our own disposable income.  This is not a new thing as collector’s editions filled with special wings, exclusive dances, and different faces have been around for years.  Now, it’s just a little easier for those that are hardcore with their jobs and families to prove their worth… and I am only being half facetious.

–Ravious
federal agents mad cause I’m flagrant

The biggest news in the past few weeks is the official announcement coming from ArenaNet on the first Guild Wars novel: Ghosts of Ascalon.  The book is set for release this summer, and it will detail the story behind the peace agreement between the charr and the humans set one year before the events of Guild Wars 2.  The most fun way I’ve heard the book described was at PAX 2009 where they described it as ‘like Canterbury Tales with explosions.’  It’s described this way because not only will the main characters be dealing with the physical ghosts of Ascalon to retrieve the Khan-ur macguffin, but they will have to deal mentally with some of the ghosts of their pasts.  It will only be available at the outset as a paperback, but Regina has said that if the books turn out to be popular a possible hardback reprint is a possibility. Check out the very thorough FAQ for the book on the Guild Wars website.

There were also two Guild Wars 2 interviews: one at IncGamers on a variety of questions from the community, and the other at TenTonHammer on Guild Wars 2 lore.  The latter is a good interview with some new questions and questions that attempt to clarify those already asked.  There are tidbits on possibly encountering the other Elder Dragons in expansions, faction-like orders that try to bridge racial gaps to combat the dragons, underwater asura labs, and hints at the importance of the snakelike Forgotten race.  It’s worth the read.

The IncGamers interview has a bit more on mechanics. We get a hint at racial skills, such as the “Prayer to Kormyr” that can remove conditions, but not as well as the profession skills that can remove conditions.  There will be “hot-button” PvP, which seems similar to the grab and go style of Random Arenas or Alliance Battles. Weapons will be restricted by profession, and the ability to chat with your guild via the internet when not in game.  There are also some good lore questions on the norn and charr.  The rate at which ArenaNet is dropping hints on gameplay is agonizing, but hopefully as things coalesce on their side we will get some more concrete information.

–Ravious
of course these things are contrivances

As a quick aside, this is largely why I don’t alt.  My main has a rich history and story that would take any alt months and months of dedicated play (and player wrangling) to match.  Playing an alt, in my opinion, is even worse than replaying a game like Mass Effect 2 because most often the alt experience will be a shadow of the main read.  I’ll leave that thought now for another time.

From what I hear, Bioware in Mass Effect 2 did a fairly good job at personalizing the story.  It is nice knowing that my actions had an effect on the world.  MMOs do this in more simple ways by opening up content gates or having NPCs mumble differently when I walk by.  Now, headed as you might guess, by Bioware, the flavor of their MMO is on a personalized experience.

From the first time I ever played World of Warcraft I have hypocritically wished that my adventure would be personalized.  I would have loved to deal with finality the wolf problem around the Abbey and to let the poor farmers in the Westfall farm their lands after I had dealt with the zombomachines.  But, there is a huge difference between a terminal quest chain with consequences for the player and a choice that forever blocks the path not taken.

Does the degree of importance in the storytelling decision matter? 

For instance, Guild Wars has a few quests where two quests will be exclusive of each other.  In the A Loose Cannon / A Peaceful Solution quest branch players have to choose which errand they want to run.  The path ends there, though.  There is no length quest chain with hugely different stories for either path. Neither NPC is of huge importance later on in the game by coming to a personalized rescue… “Hey, remember that one time you helped me out.”  It’s a simple decision with simple consequences.

Lord of the Rings Online is pushing further along with Alternate Drama Sequences.  These are the inverse, in a way, of quest branching in that the NPCs will react to what players have done in the past instead of making them choose for the future.  Still, this is a conservative, well-thought personalization.  With the use of the games reflecting pools, I can revisit the drama sequence where I am guessing the NPCs will react to any updates to my completed quest log.  (Be sure to wave to Arwen when you see her.)  The path not taken can be revisited if I choose.

The ones I dislike are the ones with unforeseeable consequences.  The choices that should be made with a strategy guide and a quest flow chart in hand so I know exactly what I am missing out.  Developers are not always so fair as in the Guild Wars example above.  Sometimes in video games players will be punished for a selfish choice.  Sometimes the players will receive a pat on the head for choosing the right thing.  Sometimes developers like to make players choose between little reward now or huge reward later.

In MMOs, I also don’t want a “personalized experience” with far-reaching (and unforeseeable) consequences.  By their very nature we are supposed to keep characters around for hundreds of hours of play.  Would you want to play through, let’s say, 50 hours of leveling and questing, in order to get back to where you were before to make the different decision? I sure as spit would not.

I think that MMO devs are making very cool strides towards better storytelling, but even though marketing might think differently “personalized” storytelling is not always better in a persistent game.  If MMO storytellers insist on forcing players to choose, and forever destroy another path, there better be a pretty good reason for it.  For the most part I would prefer they leave the road not taken to Frost and single-player games.

–Ravious
where we’re going, there are no roads

Still it was a productive weekend in terms of gaining wealth.  I received boxes and boxes of fireworks and some shiny new celestial summoning stones.  Between this festival and last week’s Wintersday redux, I advanced some titles by possibly up to 10%.  These titles are paramount achievements filled in the vein of the purest grind.  That is, unless one takes in to account festivals. The titles/achievements are, for example, the Drunkard title, which requires the character to be drunk for 10,000 minutes (you know, almost 7 days).  There is also a Sweet Tooth title or the Party Animal title, each which require 10,000 points.  The average item gives 1-3 points/minutes, 5 for good ones.  Any way I cut it, that is a lot of time and energy to max out one of the titles.

But, if I plug away and get 10-15% of the title every Festival, it does not seem that bad.  It becomes a weird sort-of “backburner” achievement.  It requires focus and attention, but it is achievable to casual players.  They are thousand-year achievements.

Another one that immediately came to mind was Warhammer Online’s Bestiary achievements.  They start out, like any good achievement-based drug, and give a sampling when a player kills 25 of a mob type, like a Bandit.  Then players get another hit at 100 kills, and every power of 10 thereafter, up to a whopping 100,000 kills.  If I could kill 5-10 Bandits a minute it would take me 1-2 weeks of game time  to kill enough Bandits.

I’d be surprised if the average Warhammer Online player has much more than a couple weeks of active game time in a whole year of subscribing to the MMO.  A week is 168 hours long, for your convenience.  I’d be more surprised if any but the most determined of players spent the bulk of that time killing one type of mob.

Still, the carrot exists in these two MMOs and others.  I’m just not sure what it tastes like.

–Ravious
everything is a pretext for a good dinner

Of course for farmers there is a different tactic.  Take a necromancer Hero, and run it into the middle of the enemy group before they turn red.  Pop Holiday Blues (AoE well degen), Snow Fort (temporary invincibility), and Snowcone (heal) to ball up the mobs.  The mobs waste their good skills on the sacrifice, and players and the AI allies can easily take out the clumped up enemies.  The rewards are very good for something that can be run in under 2 minutes.

I thought about how much fun I was having.  I was getting good rewards.  There was enough variation that I had to stay a little bit on my toes, and the action was pretty much constant.  While there are some people who feel Snowball Dominance is actually being exploited or the rewards are too good, I think the quest hits the perfect trifecta for grinding.  Lose any one of the points on the triangle and the grind goes to slogfest.

Since I usually choose what I want to grind based on reward, that factor is the most obvious.  Variation is helpful to not going brain numb, but it is probably the least important factor.  Merely moving across the landscape to cut down mobs might be variation enough.  The one that always gets me is the constant action factor. 

As an example, I had to hunt (pre-revamp) Loneland wargs in Lord of the Rings Online for a trait I wanted.  But, wargs are scattered across a multitude of spawn points.  There is no warg den filled with wargs to slay.  Instead there are wargs surrounded by roaming goblins, and wargs that share spawn points with spiders and orcs and crows.  For the latter, if I killed a warg at a spawn point (and believe me, I learned them all for this stupid grind), there was a pretty good chance a spider or orc would spawn there next time. 

In other words, I was not constantly advancing my grind.  The grind came in spurts between running and killing things I really would rather avoid in the hopes that a warg would spawn there next.  I was not in a happy state.

I think this is one reason why Guild Wars remains near the top of X-Fire’s play charts when the game was designed with very little sticky content.  Guild Wars has constant grind available at all times.  With private instances, Heroes, and map warping, the downtime caused by non-advancement actions is minimal.  Lord of the Rings Online is also creating a constant happy grind with skirmishes, which also gives its version of private instances, Soldiers (i.e., Heroes), and map warping.

The key, in my humble opinion, to grind is making it constant.  Intermittent grind is the grind everybody hates, and developers beware that the greatest cause of intermittency are parties.  This is something Blizzard strove to destroy with its random dungeon grouper.  When the grind is constant, rewarding, and has slight variations to keep it mildly fresh, no one complains because everybody is playing.

–Ravious
impaired my tribal lunar-speak

The easy answer is gold farmers.  There are literal wars going on against the bastards.  They lie, cheat, steal, and exploit the system for one purpose.  To flip the digital drugs to a player looking for a fun time.  Then while that player enjoys the product, they try to lie, cheat, steal, and exploit the player.  Yet, they lack true power.  Yes, they might cause gold inflation.  Yes, they might cause a developer to create un-fun mechanics to curb the gold farmers.

Still, in my usual play sessions gold farmers really don’t affect me.  They can’t join and grief my 6-man dungeon run.  They don’t have time to play in advanced PvP scenarios.  I can ignore their annoying blather.  And, I can make their whole existence meaningless by choosing not to buy gold.  I wish I could force all other players to never buy gold too, but the fact that I have the choice sends gold farmers further down the food chain.  And, for players that do give them power by giving them account information, credit card information, or merely buying their digital product I hope that those high up on the food chain take care of them too. Gold farmers do not exist in my community.  They are outsiders, aliens, that scrabble for purchase in hopes of being a lowly interloper.  At most what I have for them is pity that this is their chosen way to exist.

Cheaters, on the other hand, do affect me.  They are part of the community.  They do exist in pick-up-groups and random scenarios.  And, I am powerless to let their actions touch me until I become disheartened enough to just pull the plug.  Unlike gold farmers, cheaters don’t try and ruin lives and credit reports, but they do ruin fun.  I am much more likely to leave a game due to a cheater’s actions than a gold farmers.

This causes a disconnect between the MMO developers and me.  They have their publicized crusade against gold farmers.  Mythic even had a gold farmer-banning counter to proclaim loudly to the world that this simply will not stand, man.  But, players that packet-hack, .dll hack, or simply use exploits for achievements seem on the safer side.  They might get banned, and those with company-approved voices will, when pushed, proclaim that this evil will also not stand, but it is clear to me where the gunsights are set.

Turbine’s Mines of Moria had a ton of instance ”exploits.”  One of my kinship’s most contentious was The Forges exploit where by running past the first boss until he reset the hard mode timer would never start to countdown.  Then the group of players could take their leisurely time through hard mode to get their bound token.  Then at the bottom, the battle with the end boss was supposed to be a moving battle where the players had to stay ahead of the wall of fire.  Instead, players could hole up on one specific spot at the exit cave and ignore the silly fire-running mechanic.  These exploits took months to fix.  Months!  On top of that, I cannot recall a stamp down on the use of these exploits.  Recently, there was an exploit in a skirmish where one could gain untold amounts of skirmish tokens, which of course amounted to gold.  This exploit, by comparison, came with an immediate ”if you use it you will be banned”-statement and was fixed very quickly.

Guild Wars is currently having issues with hackers going through a .dll to gain loads of information not readily available on screen.  The cheaters that use the hack allegedly can get a readout of the enemy team’s health in PvP matches and the “bot” can watch and interrupt the entire team’s skills with robot precision.  There is another alleged bot that runs Rollerbeetle Racing with near perfection.  It seems there was one hotfix ArenaNet used to combat the .dll hack, which the hackers easily hotfixed around.  But, ArenaNet has been silent on the use of any of these specific items.  When pressed they will claim that 3rd party programs affecting Guild Wars is against the license agreement.  These exploits are even worse than a PvE dungeon cheat because people choosing to play in PvP or Rollerbeetle Racing cannot choose not to be affected.  I want to hear “you ain’t got no problem, Ravious. We on the motherf—-r.  Go back there, chill them ninjas out and wait for the Wolf who should be coming directly.”  Sadly, nothing from ArenaNet has even come close, and I am leery about entering in to any PvP match because I don’t want to play with or against cheaters.

Cynically, I have my ideas, and at the most distilled level it comes down to this: who is the customer?  A gold farmer is not a customer.  A gold farmer is a leech.  A vampire.  A thief.  A cheater is a customer, and if nothing else the customer is playing and seemingly enjoying the game more by cheating.  Which one helps the bottom line?  I am probably being unfair.  I know I am marginalizing the gold farmer problem, but I feel developers are marginalizing the cheating problem.  This is what I see.  You want to show me something else, then tell me the Wolf will be here in ten minutes.

–Ravious
recycling bins or bullet casings

Yes, we have a lot of ideas on our minds, probably more than we will be able to implement. We love the game and always try to come up with new things we hope players will enjoy. Who knows, maybe players will bear witness to some of the cataclysmic events that transform Tyria prior to Guild Wars 2?

ArenaNet keeps mildly hinting at using Guild Wars as a platform to introduce some Guild Wars 2 lore, but that is an overly candid response to an easily shunted question.  We know that skill balance is a top priority, but we haven’t heard anything about upcoming features or content. Hopefully after the dust from the skill balances clears, the Live Team can preview what else they are working on.

The second is that the popular Guild Wars fansite Guild Wars Guru was hacked, and the hacker was able to obtain some personal information.  Read about it here, but the bottom line is to change your passwords to Guild Wars Guru and Guild Wars 2 Guru (and Auction Site).  I would also watch any other sites / games where you combo your email, username, and/or current Guru password.

The third is I have to say with one of my last controversial posts on Guild Wars, I had the weirdest pingback ever.  We are breaking grounds with the MMO genre people! (And go River Rats!)

–Ravious
remember two things

Guild Wars came very close to shirking the entire thing.  Agro does not really exist like it does in World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online.  Each battle with PvE mobs is reminiscent of a PvP battle.  Players have 8 bodies against the team of enemies to kill.  Because PvE can feel so much like PvP (especially in comparison to the stark contrast of PvE/PvP in World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online), ArenaNet moved away from the holy trinity to a more enlightened trinity: the three lines.

The three lines role system is a simple concept.  The front line is most reminiscent of the holy trinity’s tanks.  The front line tries to harrass, damage, and cripple the enemy as much as possible.  They try to lower the efficiency of the enemy group by forcing kiting and generally distracting the focus of the group.  They are generally more durable than the other lines, but they have no way of forcing mobs on to them in the heat of battle because there is no vanilla agro in Guild Wars.  The main difference is where the holy trinity’s tanks try to focus the enemy on to them, the enlightened trinity tries to disrupt the enemy.

The mid-line are most reminiscent of the holy trinity’s DPS.  This is not wholly accurate because the front line can deal plenty of damage.  The mid-line is a versatile anomaly.  The mid-line can DPS, disrupt, and harass just like the front-line, but the main difference between the front line and the mid-line is the tradeoff of power and versatility for survivability.  The mid-line are usually casters or ranged attackers that can target a wider area without needing to chase down their quarry in to melee range.  The specific roles are most diverse in the mid-line.

Now before I get to the backline, I have to interrupt the flow with the problem, as I see it.  For the most part with the front line and mid-line, ArenaNet stayed away from the tank-healer-DPS combo.  Battles were more dynamic in both PvP and PvE where weak spots had to be located.  The problem (again in my limited world-view opinion) is that the game was built for PvP.  The developers, when creating Prophecies, fully expected the nice little storybook campaign they created to lead the majority of players to PvP.  Still, they did have some PvE, which had to be balanced between difficulty and fun.  Every PvE encounter could not emulate a full blown PvP match, and even worse was that in PvP intelligent opponents had some modicum of survival instilled in their lizard brains.  In PvE the mobs basically commit kamikaze like a rabid animal.  In PvP, if 3 of your 8 teammembers are dead when you win, you still win.  In PvE if 3 of your 8 teammembers are dead after the battle, you were on your way to losing because of death penalty.

Enter the monk profession.  Monks repaired the balance in PvE because they could offset the damage caused by reckless, kamikaze PvE mobs, and they then destroyed the enlightened trinity.  The backline were healers, and healers were the backline.  Sure, the healers felt more proactive than the healers in other MMOs, but just like in the holy trinity in Guild Wars healers were required in PvE.  The elegant versatility of the front line and mid-line makeup was overshadowed by the pressing need, always, for a monk or two.  This one profession completely shaped the gameplay throughout all of Guild Wars 1.  Cries of “looking for one monk, then ready to go” were very common in the days of Guild Wars Prophecies, and rarely, if ever, did a group need another specific profession.

Now my turn to give some terrible idea.  In my dream MMO, there would be no healer.  Players would have skills that healed themselves and reinforced their class concept like the few heals the non-healer classes have in Guild Wars.  A good example is the Mesmer heal which steals energy from an enemy and converts it to life for the Mesmer.  Even moreso, for a game with a three-line trinity concept I would split the healing between the lines to reinforce the line concept.  Frontline crusaders would have strong heals which only target themselves or allies standing next to them.  Midline casters would have weak spot heals and heal-over-time spells, and the backline would have expensive group heals to control the flow of battle.  I would not have given one class the title of healer.

Guild Wars 2 mechanics information should be coming “soonish,” and they have been very quiet about the professions that would be available.  My hope is that they further reinforce their path to an enlightened, versatile line trinity and completely separate themselves from ye old holy trinity.  Guild Wars 1’s class role system, though, is set.  Barring a complete overhaul little can be done to soften the healing prowess of one class, the monks.  For Guild Wars 2 I have hope that the holy trinity will be properly vanquished and we shall soonish see how much they disagree or agree with me.

–Ravious
how long should we play the martyr

My go to crafting in most MMOs are always consumables.  In early World of Warcraft days I was a herbalist potion-maker, and in Lord of the Rings Online I easily chose the Historian profession, which gives access to the Scholar skills.  Scholars make all sorts of wonderful consumables like potions of every color, battle scrolls, and bow chants.  They can also make dyes for clothing, books for hunters, and legendary items for loremasters and minstrels.  They are a fun profession to have, but Turbine made me change (and I am only slightly being facetious).

There are many tiers of potions, which mostly follow the leveling curve.  With Siege of Mirkwood expanding the game, there is yet another tier with the codeword “Steeped.”  The new faction of goldie elves loves Steeped potions, and for basically nothing in terms of the barter items any player can be fully stocked with potions.  So the Scholar’s bread and butter for the Auction Hall is gone to an NPC vendor.  This basically left me with black dye for a way to meaningfully make money because the rate of return on the other items was so pitifully low.

On the other hand, Turbine gave the weapon crafters a huge boon since level 65 legendary items are either only dropped by mobs or crafted.  The choice was obvious to me.  I was no longer gaining what I felt were meaningful benefits to the Scholar profession, and I decided that making my own legendary items was a better fit.

So, I clicked through the multiple warnings telling me that I would lose all knowledge and rank of my Scholarly self.  I knew this full well, but it did not make it any easier.  I still felt like a year of thick memories and achievements were dumped down the drain.  Hopefully I would re-emerge from the harsh chrysalis stronger and more sure of my character, but something truer than what can be found on a stat page was lost.

There is a reason, developers, that I don’t like alt’ing.  I don’t like your decisions to insulate my characters from one another save for a pittance like legacy items or a shared bank account.  I have achieved something already, and I don’t want to grind through veritably everything all over again to prove myself again.  It’s bad enough that you make me level an alt as some compensatory passtime when my main is at the end game ready to rock’n'roll.  If you were happy to acknowledge some of my hard won accomplishments like killing 450 wargs in Angmar or gaining Kindred reputation with Rivendell to any degree, I would be happier to alt.

To my knowledge, Guild Wars is the only MMO that even comes close with their account-based Hall of Monuments. Even then I feel that working on my main is more meaningful than distributing the workload throughout the various other characters because progress is not shared for the majority of accomplishments.  And, that’s the bottom line.  What is meaningful to me.  Some people love re-creating the journey through another pair of eyes.  Some people love the challenge of killing another 450 wargs to get a trait on their new character.  I do not.

So, I will miss the Scholar profession, but it was an educated choice I made.  I am excited about my new profession cranking out hundreds of swords and prospecting metals instead of pillaging artifacts of the past.  What pains me is that except for a few stock piled black dyes and a ton of potions which were made on the eve of the change, I have no acknowledgment of my time as a master Scholar.  This clean slate business, either alt’ing on a fresh, clean character or choosing a new crafting profession, just feels anathema to the persistence we hold so dear in our genre.  The persistence of me.

–Ravious
well, maybe towards those other… jokers, but not you

The tl;dr version is that security holes existed in the NCSoft Master Account page, according to fans, that allowed people to randomly access other people’s accounts by merely signing in to their own accounts.  Then you could do fun things like change game account passwords without needing old game account passwords or jot down personal information.  The powers that be are working hard this weekend to fix or ameliorate security and information issues.

The most pertinent posts are: The OP.  The Aion fan who knows things.  ArenaNet’s Community Manager response.  ArenaNet’s Support Liaison response.  Holiday Hacker’s guide to the NCSoft page.  ArenaNet’s Community Manager response in lieu of the support response.

Good luck to all those that were hacked, and thank you to all the people working this weekend to deal with the issues.  It wouldn’t be even half as bad if there was a way to recover deleted Guild Wars characters, which is something that should be fixed in Guild Wars 2.  But, still a good quick New Year’s resolution is to change your passwords for the precious pixels we pretend to own.

–Ravious
a crescendo, annie