Zubon

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Paladin Leveling

In case I have not mentioned often enough, this class just keeps getting more awesome. In the 40s, Paladins get a big ranged attack that can be used only when the target is below 20% health, instant cast with a 6 second cooldown. Almost every enemy that flees does so at 20% — giant magic hammer to the back! Most of them do not even get to turn — giant magic hammer to the face!

Caster mobs remain a weakness, particularly in numbers. Curses can be annoying.

The Retribution talent line continues to add little bonuses of a few percent each. They add up nicely. I still need to get that Glyph of Exorcism to add even more damage.

In the early 50s, the Plaguelands are just a gift. Undead undead undead, and many areas have large groups with no casters. This comes just after you get the anti-undead AE nuke/stun. I walked up to a farm, saw the fields covered with zombies, and thought, “It’s… it’s so beautiful.”

: Zubon

Of Community Norms

Of course, I am the one with the problem. Community norms differ, and if you arrive with different norms, failure to meet your expectations is your problem, not theirs. “Impolite” is a culture-relative term.

If most lower-level instance runs have been “level 80 plus 1-4 alts” for the past year, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that someone is going to do it for you. The group leader might be amiss in putting together anything else without warning people. If you receive a tell with two to four characters and a question mark, your interlocutor might reasonably expect you to recognize that as an invitation to a specific instance, zone, or quest line.

I find it annoying and rude that people use the trade channel for guild recruitment when there is also a dedicated guild recruitment channel. I am obviously at odds with the norm, because I have never seen a single message on that channel. Realistically, one channel will absorb almost all the discourse no matter what it is labeled. In City of Heroes, it was our badges channel; in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, global looking for fellowship. Whichever channel has the most people will have the most chatter and attention-seekers, so it should not be surprising to see a trade channel filled with discussion about who sucks.

Announcing what items you just put on the AH, though, you’re obviously a screwball.

: Zubon

Do It For Me

Unlike most games, WoW lets you “earn” experience by being in a group with someone of far higher level than you, watching as he slaughters hordes of enemies at your level. Sure, you get reduced experience, but your xp-per-minute is great at 0 risk.

At least on my server, low-level characters seem to expect others to do things for them. I presume that most are alts. It is easier to ask guildmate Bob to run you through Deadmines than to find a group for it, and you need not worry about losing rolls on loot. And could you do it when I am at the minimum level to enter the dungeon, so I can get better xp and loot? And could you summon me, because I cannot get there safely on my own? I occasionally see people LFM for groups, but they are usually looking for someone to run the dungeon for them.

The cycle: you can’t find a group because everyone has level 80 friends run them through, so you have a level 80 friend run you through.

This becomes a problem when you slip and actually group for group content. A Warrior invited me to a dungeon then asked who could tank. All the enemies in the place (and everyone he invited) were higher level than him: great for him! Turns out I was one level above what the meeting stone would summon: even better for him, and not his running problem. Still, I wanted to finish some quests, so I would pick up a few other quests and meet folks there. Except that three of five stood in town and mentioned occasionally that they would like to be summoned. When I passed through Stormwind on the way there, I noticed the Warrior arguing with the religion spammers IN ALL CAPS that ALIENS pretended to be FALLEN ANGELS in the Bible and would try to DECEIVE us in COMING YEARS. The three were still standing in town when I got to the meeting stone, where the other member had gone AFK, got ganked, and was still AFK when I quit after waiting out the hope reservoir. As I left, someone mentioned that he might be a bit slow because he was painting his house.

This presents a higher level of crazy than usual, but standing around with a sense of entitlement seems to be a norm. Give me what I want; give it to me faster; if I actually have to spell out what I want, ur a griefer or noob lolsauce.

In LotRO, we sometimes become annoyed with new players for not already knowing what to do when we have run the quest line four times before. In WoW, they seem to become annoyed with new players because newbies expect party members to “show up” and “do things.”

: Zubon

Meaningful PvP

On one hand, this is a really great post about PvP from the perspective of someone with that K orientation who wants a PvP-based game. Syncaine makes all the points you would want about why someone wants PvP with consequences and who the niche is, with the awareness that it is a much smaller market than the PvE theme park I am currently trying. Even if you consider PvPers and Killers some foreign species, the post retains great anthropological value. It does not need my help to recommend it.

On the other hand, a lot of it comes down to “the niche is even smaller than previously realized.”

On the gripping hand, it is potentially the No True Scotsman fallacy in motion. The PvP game must be “well-executed” (grant the potentially tendentious claim that Darkfall is), which is the most common excuse for why the last five PvP-centric games failed. Players who quit did not really want meaningful PvP, because they cannot take losing to people who are better than them. And hey, both may be completely true in this case, but that becomes an increasingly narrow edge on which to balance as “the niche” gets defined down to an increasingly small population. Many players on that edge will bleed into the Fundamental Attribution Error: if I did not like the game, it was poorly executed; if you did not like that game, it’s because you are a whining loser noskillz carebear. I imagine someone on the Darkfall forums has made a hobby of tracking players’ moving from the second claim to the first as they ragequit.

: Zubon

The Tyranny Of Levels

WoW has reinforced for me, in ways I had nearly forgotten, the way that levels swamp all considerations of skill or even sanity. This is especially striking coming off a long binge of Team Fortress 2, where a good headshot kills anything.

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.

Of PvP Servers and Games

PvP gives you ways to punish undesirable behavior. Nothing suggests to someone that he may have violated community norms quite the way decaptiation does. Really open PvP lets you take that option to those nominally on your own side, like the guy who parked a mammoth on an event NPC or that other guy who is constantly spamming in town.

PvP also gives griefers far more opportunities for undesirable behavior. How much time are you willing to take away from your plans to police those who are just in it for the lulz? And MMOs reward nothing if not time: how are your levels and gear relative to this guy who obviously has far too much time on his hands?

In practice, PvP policing will take place only where griefing and ganking would be inconvenient for the top tier of characters. Level-capped enemies rampaging through the mid-level zones? Meh, they’ll get bored and leave before I can be bothered to get there. They’re killing the auctioneers? Oh, it’s on!

Seriously, who has time to stand around the newbie areas just in case someone decides to pick on them? That’s what we have NPCs for! If only we did not fight far away from the NPC guards…

: Zubon

Quick Hits from the 40s

Rather than hit you with another wall of text (not that one), I have a few quick notes, with some thoughts I’ll be spinning across the week.

Not much going on in The Hinterlands, is there? It’s a quick couple of stories and out. I missed Badlands, Swamp of Sorrows, and the Searing Gorge entirely. I spent the levels in Feralas and Tanaris. I suppose that gives me some repeatability if I take those zones through the Blasted Lands for this level range.

I thought the giant turtles of Dustwallow Marsh were awesome, but now I see that I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I hit the 40s, I put away childish things. For now we see the turtles of the Tanaris Desert, and they are yellow and pale blue, and they are even cooler. Who doesn’t love big, grumpy creatures in cuddly springtime colors? Also on the color beat, I cannot say that I care for painting a vulture red and calling it a roc.

As a Paladin, you hit level 50 and get Holy Wrath, an undead-/demon-only area effect nuke and stun. And then they send you to the Plaguelands, where there are level-appropriate undead in convenient clusters all over the place. They are even spread just right so that you can pick how many you want on this fight.

I have had pretty much no positive grouping experiences. This will be a post of the day later this week, but the only good groups I have had are my refer-a-friend (do everything together) and sharing kills for “kill ten rats” quests. The rare groups that arise have been various mixes of horrible and inconsiderate.

I was invited to join a PvP server. Almost all the PvP I have seen has been level skulls ganking people. I have three PvP deaths that are not from level skulls, all of which were higher-level characters, only one of which was vaguely comparable (only three levels higher, alone), and that was the fight I accidentally initiated. On a different note, I tried dueling my refer-a-friend on my Druid, and I have no idea how I could conceivably overcome the advantage of heirloom gear. I have no twink gear on any of my characters, and I don’t see how I could hope to win a fight other than springing upon a lower-level character. Even once I hit the level cap, the competition has been there for a year of farming.

Summarizing most of those points, the A game is core, the E game is still amusing as I wander around seeing new things at a good clip, the K game is just annoying, and the S game is mostly people that make me glad the classic WoW zones are largely empty.

: Zubon

City of Too Many Heroes

Superheros are exciting and cool because they are special, relatively rare, and interesting in a meaningful way. An MMO where everyone can be a superhero completely destroys each of those points: superheros become plentiful, mundane, and end up performing repetitive tasks.

Andrew has an entirely valid point. This is, however, a sub-genre of superhero stories. You do not see them often, and far less often well thought through, but you do see Astro City and others that take the notion of having a city of superheroes. I wish I could remember more, but my reading of comic book deconstructions is way behind. There have been comics about the equivalent of superhero internal affairs and the clean-up crews that deal with all these heroes. Other comics occasionally toy with the idea, like Silver Age stories where there are entire cities of Supermen or JLA Rock of Ages.

I will cite this last for how it is hard to do well, because while Rock of Ages was a great story arc, the DC universe then politely ignored the social implications of literal angels appearing on Earth or temporarily granting the entire planet superpowers. Or even what happened in those hours of ubiquitous demipowers.

: Zubon

Further Frontiers in Quality of Life

Why it’s City of Heroes, of course, Issue 16.

Super-sidekicking: “Each player in the group’s level is set to the level of the owner of the active team task. If no team task is selected, everyone in the group’s level will be set to the level of the team leader.” You earn xp while exemplared, so everyone can always team with everyone.

They used to let you change your game difficulty with a simple 1 to 5 slider. That is now two sliders and two toggles. Max difficulty lets you solo against level [your level +4] enemies spawned for a group of eight. Minimum difficulty lets you solo against level [your level -1] enemies, with bosses changed to lieutenants and archvillains changed to elite bosses.

Want to change your look? Change your powers’ colors or animations, individually or collectively, including new weapons for the weapon-wielders and animations for the “I hit things” powers. Preview all those animations and enjoy the newly tabbed costume creator. If that is not enough variety, you can set these separately for each of your costumes. Are we still limited to 5 costumes per character and 36 characters per server? I might eventually run out of things to decorate. Oh, and every class got at least one new power set, although only one is completely new, the rest being proliferated from other classes.

Masterminds got Thermal Radiation at the same time that they got power customization. Want to bet on how many ninjas covered in black fire are currently rampaging across the Rogue Isles? I do not see any new missions or task forces, but the graphics overhaul probably took two-thirds of forever. There are developer diaries.