Archive for the 'World of Warcraft' Category

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New Content Is Shared Content

Posted by Zubon on November 8, 2010 in City of Heroes/Villains, Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer Online and World of Warcraft. 6 Comments

Fantasy MMOs tend to start with race-based newbie zones and meet up some number of levels in, thinning to a smaller number of high-level areas before expanding again at the cap (discussed previously). Games with strictly divided PvP factions get a more strongly separated version of this, as you can send your night elf to play with your dwarf friend but not your orc friend. Some games will bring everyone together sooner, others will create several paths to the level cap. Please, make an alt while we work on the expansion.

You spend years making this base content. It takes a lot of work to recreate that leveling path several times, even if you recycle content across the paths (a roc is a red vulture, sure, why not). Unless you are Cryptic, this is something like a four-year development cycle. Now that the game is live, you are expected to patch in new content every one to three months while working on bugs and balance. At least you have some half-developed content that was meant for live, maybe even an advertised feature that was not completed on time; City of Heroes/Villains gets a special prize for patching in the last 10 levels after release twice. Oh, and you likely have an expansion every year or two, and that needs to be big enough to justify selling a new box.

Making new content for each faction is time-consuming, creates balance issues, and has limited value given the number of players at the level cap in multiple factions. Or you can make the new content once and send everyone through it. You will need faction-specific details, but the more overlap you have, the less content you need to develop. Add neutral factions that deal with everyone. Add common enemies. This conveniently encourages PvP and/or cross-faction teams, depending on how you set it up.

So you have one Outland and one Northrend. Albion, Midgard, and Hibernia fought over the one big dungeon, and now their descendants in WAR do the same. Superheroes and supervillains both fight the Hamidon, the Honoree, and Romulus (CoX is odd for having the Statesman Task Force and Lord Recluse Strike Force, very different parallel content). Holiday and event content is often mirrored, with the same content slightly redecorated for the factions’ cities or low-level areas.

I don’t know that I would prefer it any other way. It sometimes feels like corner-cutting, but I do not want to need level-capped characters across multiple factions to see all the new toys, and making two sets of them means more time or more cost. I would rather have two sets of content that I can experience on my main. Although it strikes me that Blizzard has the billions of dollars and the staffing and is still producing shared content at a Blizzard pace.

: Zubon

Most Typical Member

Posted by Zubon on October 27, 2010 in City of Heroes/Villains, Dark Age of Camelot, EVE Online, Everquest, General and World of Warcraft. 11 Comments

Prototype theory holds that we conceptualize through categories in which some members are more central than others. If I ask you to name a piece of furniture, you are quite likely to come back with “chair,” “table,” or “sofa”; if you immediately thought “armoire” or “ottoman,” you are weird; if you went with “Charles, or Susan if it’s a girl,” you are very weird. If you asked an American for the best example of a bird, the most bird-like bird around, you will get far more robins than penguins and almost no emus.

The usual concept of a western MMO seems clearly descended from DikuMUD, through EQ and terminating in WoW. I would tend to insert DAoC in there, sometimes described as “EQ without the parts that suck,” but I may be atypical. Perhaps I am uncreative, but I do not see much more room for the Diku model to evolve. It has reached its full flower in WoW. You can have refinements and variations (-raids, +PvP, +story, -classes, +Tolkien, -fantasy, +F2P), to say nothing of lousy clones, but it will take something massive to change the view of the most typical member. There is a lot of room (and money) in WoW’s orbit, but if you do not want to be (seen as) conceptually subordinate, you need to head a good distance away.

We have some less typical members, most notably EVE Online. You all know how I love to pull out “here is how City of Heroes solved that problem,” or how I mix a dozen niche games into my bloviations. These can be annoying in the MMO blogosphere when commenters contribute them independently, not in the sense of “here is an alternate way of implementing that” but rather “your entire argument is invalid because it does not apply to my game (or playstyle).” It is as if you were complaining about birds pooing on your car, only to have a passerby disdainfully remark that there are not any penguins in the area and they could not have flown over your car anyway. Well, no, that is not what I meant by “birds,” but thank you for contributing.

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Shared Loot Table

Posted by Zubon on October 8, 2010 in City of Heroes/Villains, Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer Online and World of Warcraft. 8 Comments

I have seen quite a few debates about random drops versus tokenization. Should bosses have a 2% chance to drop the Ubersword of Epicness or should they drop 2 badges (and a vendor in town exchanges the Ubersword for 100 badges)? There are merits in each direction, although I tend to favor tokenization because random drops tend to encourage endless grinding of a single dungeon/boss.

Let me, as I often do, mention a third-way solution used in City of Heroes (and a fourth). City of Heroes has used both, but the most sought after items (purple crafting recipes) are random drops from a shared loot table. CoX applies it even to trash mobs, but you could restrict it to bosses and let all of them have a chance to drop all the rare items. That would be an even larger lottery, but you would not have only one boss in the game that dropped the one item you want. Of course, players might replicate “grind one dungeon endlessly” by optimizing for the most time-efficient dungeon, but I am not in the mood to ponder people who want to spend their $15/month doing something they do not consider fun (if you like grinding the efficient dungeon, hey, double-win for you). OTOH, I can understand why you might prefer fewer rolls with higher chances to many rolls with a lower chance of that specific item.

Several games use a menu as a middle-ground between drops and tokens. When you win, you pick one item from a short list. WAR chests are a good example. Another implementation is to give a token that can be redeemed for one of several items, rather than tokens you accumulate as currency. CoX combines menus with randomness by including “a random pick from pool D” as an option on the prize menu. Another middle ground is to have a fixed drop that is variable by class, usually done as a barter item that some or all classes can trade in for their equivalent of the item.

My thought is that players want both fixed and random elements in their game rewards. They want to know that they are going to get something, and little nuggets of achievement are encouraging, but they also want some chance to hit it big. Slot machines make a lot of money, and developers can embrace that without making everything random.

: Zubon

Player Skill in WoW

Posted by Zubon on October 2, 2010 in World of Warcraft. 23 Comments

Player skill is mostly irrelevant in a gear-centric game. SynCaine makes this point with respect to why players obsess about eking out the last percent of benefit from builds. I think we are mostly familiar with this argument, and it is 90+% true, but this comment from Sean Boocock is a well formulated statement of the counter-argument: some people are so ridiculously good that they break the curve, we dismiss them as aberrations, and forget that they are examples that demonstrate how sufficient skill can overcome most anything short of a hard gear check. (Most of the other comments are “WoW sucks,” “Darkfall sucks,” and “you suck,” so skip them; poor signal-noise ratio.)

: Zubon

Pro-Social Design

Posted by Zubon on September 15, 2010 in City of Heroes/Villains, Final Fantasy XI, General, Lord of the Rings Online, Team Fortress 2 and World of Warcraft. 4 Comments

The question arose last week: how do you design around/against people being idiots and jerks? “You can’t fix stupid.” There is no 100% solution, because some people really are that dumb and others will go to great lengths as griefers, but there are better and worse designs in terms of the behavior they reward. If the system rewards pro-social behavior, it promotes harmony. If the player must make sacrifices to help others, you will see destructively selfish if not predatory behavior. Economics in two words: “incentives matter.”

For example, consider Marks of Triumph in The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™. The epic quest chain is a big feature for LotRO, but it was punctuated with instances that demanded full groups. If most of the population had completed them all, how did newer players and alts get through the epics? You asked someone to repeat one. Repeating one was a way to help friends, but you got jack for it. Your friends had to give something up, and you would not meet new people unless someone was a very charitable stranger (or, lucky day, you find a few people who need it, a couple of whom have charitable friends). Game update: repeating one of those instances began to award (once per five days) a Mark of Triumph; accumulate several Marks to barter for various rewards. The rewards were rather nice for when they were released. Pro-social behavior increased.

Because of how Marks were awarded, you did not need someone new to repeat the quest. This has the further benefit of letting you repeat older content without completely sacrificing character advancement, and developers want players to pay for recycled content. The downside is that it is more efficient to get a level-capped group and cycle through all the Mark instances rather than actually helping near-cap players on their first run-through. On balance, however, Marks increased pro-social behavior more than they inhibited it.

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Nothing and Everything as Endgame Content

Posted by Zubon on September 13, 2010 in Borderlands, City of Heroes/Villains, Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft. 9 Comments

I see more games trying to avoid having their earlier content become completely irrelevant while improving their endgame. You do this by having a version of the old content that scales to the new level cap; games without levels have this mostly baked right in anyway. Feel free to comment with your favorite game; World of Warcraft and The Lord of the Rings Online™ are the ones I know best for having another version of older dungeons available at the level cap. Borderlands had its own version: after you beat the game the second time, everything levels to the cap, from the final zone to the first skags.

City of Heroes took a different approach, and it seems to have worked against them from many players’ perspectives. Everything scales, and you can always drop back profitably, so every instance remains relevant as you level. Everything is endgame content and leveling content. Perhaps because of that, City of Heroes has never built much that is endgame content in name. A favorable interpretation is that very little is held back and hidden behind a grind; a less favorable interpretation is that there is little new to do at the cap, which quickly becomes “there is nothing to do at the cap.” Those who took the latter interpretation generally unsubscribed. The illusion of scarcity is an important marketing principle.

: Zubon

Changing Times (1)

Posted by Zubon on September 7, 2010 in General and World of Warcraft. 3 Comments

You used to suspect eBay when you met someone at the level cap with decent gear who did not know what half his abilities were, how to function in a group, or where common locations were. Now that is normal.

: Zubon

As a LotRO Hunter, I have contributed to that. Why find the dungeon when someone can summon from the campfire?

Unique Mechanic

Posted by Zubon on September 1, 2010 in City of Heroes/Villains, Warhammer Online and World of Warcraft. 13 Comments

Is it just me, or do the unique class mechanics stand out more in Warhammer Online than in most other games? The more I reflect on it, the more I see it in other games, but it just seems more prominent in WAR.

By “unique class mechanic,” I mean the special feature that guides many of a class’s skills/abilities. (They are not truly unique in WAR, because one class on each side has it.) The orc and elf tanks tier up, the chaos and dwarf ranged DPS summon turrets, and the human and dark elf healers have an energy pool they can refill with melee combat. The mechanic mattered to different degrees based on your class and spec line; it never felt all that exciting on my chaos healer, while my dwarf ranged DPS had turret- or gun-improving talent options.

My unsubstantiated feeling is that the earlier in the design process that the mechanic was added, the more vital it feels. City of Heroes gives every class something special, but it does not feel terribly special. City of Villains mechanics do feel special, because the classes are built around them. Brutes, Stalkers, and Dominators are defined by their special mechanics. Blasters and Defenders? Eh, it’s a bit of a bonus.

You get a reset on that timer if you completely re-do the class. Then you can re-build around a new core. I expect a bit of that to happen in Cataclysm, so that there is less feel of “mana or something slightly different,” although you do get rather different effects from bars that build up during combat and those that empty out. Or I could be completely wrong, because what do I know about WoW, but you have certainly seen classes re-done so that they fulfill the same role with radically different mechanics.

Unique class mechanics create additional balance issues, but for the moment I am wondering which I would prefer: designing classes entirely around the mechanics or just using them as a bit of flavor on whatever else they would do. There is a delicate balance in the latter, sometimes done well with race: if you can be a dwarf cleric or an elf cleric, you want there to be some interesting difference in how they play without making it an effectively forced choice because one race synergizes so well. “Sometimes” because there is that narrow range between “doesn’t matter” and “forced choice.”

: Zubon

On the treadmill

Posted by Dragon on August 26, 2010 in General and World of Warcraft. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the grind.

(Our sponsors would like to apologise in advance for the slightly more personal and self-indulgent nature of this post. Thank you for your custom.)

To achieve competence in sport necessitates training. Training involves doing the same thing over and over and over and over again: to build up strength, endurance and capability; to learn about your team-mates in co-operative games; to learn the rules; to perfect your technique.

If you want to run a marathon, you don’t just turn up on the day and do it. You train for it. You go out running. You start small; 5km, then 10, 15, up to half-marathon, work your way up to 20 miles and then you’re probably ready. You go out, 3 to 5 times a week, trudging around the same routes that were stunning and interesting at first but soon lost their charm after the 18th time, or, when the weathers bad and you’re a fair-weather runner, in the gym, pounding away mindlessly on the treadmill, getting the miles into your feet, conditioning your body and your mind ready for the challenge. There will be times when it will hurt, times when you don’t enjoy it and times when it goes badly and all these times will make you question why you’re doing it to yourself. And you won’t have a good answer.
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A Local Peak

Posted by Zubon on August 25, 2010 in General and World of Warcraft. 5 Comments

Improvements can take place through natural evolution as long as each previous design is studied and the craftsperson is willing to be flexible. The bad features have to be identified. The [designers] change the bad features and keep the good ones unchanged. If a change makes matters worse, well, it just gets changed again on the next go-around. Eventually the bad features get modified into good ones, while the good ones are kept. The technical term for this process is “hill-climbing,” analogous to climbing a hill in the dark. Move your foot in one direction. If it is downhill, try another direction. If the direction is uphill, take one step. Keep doing this until you have reached a point where all steps would be downhill; then you are at the top of the hill–or at least a local peak.

– The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

Local peaks are not bad things. They are, within a certain range, as good as it gets. But if you want to go higher, you need to go down to go up. Many have seen the local peak and noted only that all paths away lead down, so we can do naught but muddle about at this height.

Ideally, you are not hill-climbing in the dark and your vision is leading you in the right direction. Some people will head in the right direction but not go far enough to get higher. Some will not even make it to the next hill, backtracking towards the familiar local peak, perhaps getting tired and falling short. You could break your legs trying to straddle the divide. People atop the local peak will point to the failures below.

And then someone proves that the next hill over is higher. They climb and keep climbing. It often seems to be the next guy who makes it to the top first, while the trailblazer was tired from trying all those false paths along the way. And, of course, there is a rush from the last local peak to this one, which is now proclaimed to be the greatest summit ever, the greatest summit possible.

: Zubon