As we celebrate Saturnalia, your song of joy: Ninja Raiders. Hat tip to Spinks.
: Zubon
Category: World of Warcraft
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.A Guild Wars Wintersday Plus
The annual Guild Wars Wintersday has arrived. We get the usual, awesome tidings of newly balanced PvP snowball fights (complete with hidden rocks and yellow snow), grentchs stealing gifts from the poor war-torn children of Tyria right in town, and fun PvE quests. This all leads up to the finale between Dwayna, goddess of good holiday cheer, and Grenth, who would destroy it to determine what hats we can wear in the coming year. And, we all know how important hats are.
Feature is a Word, Like Love
When I started reading about the new grouping feature in World of Warcraft, I was blown away. Here, I thought that Turbine had triumphed in the slaying of “activation energy” to play the vanilla MMO with skirmishes, and Blizzard possibly one-ups them. It’s a tough call to actually announce a winner. While the goal of both skirmishes and the random grouping feature in World of Warcraft is to decrease the time spent not playing. They attack it in very separate ways. Skirmishes are content. Random grouping is a feature.
The Breakups
I unsubscribed to Dungeon and Dragons Online today. I really only subscribed to get the 1000 points, which was all I needed to buy the 32 point build. Now I have a dual-wielding khopesh paladin, and all is well. They will still get my money in non-monthly ways. The breakup was easy. Logged in to the master account. Do you want to unsubscribe? Are you sure? Done. If you want to help us with an exit survey, that’d be swell. I almost had to search to find that last sentence it was so inconspicuous. The relationship we had wasn’t working, but the breakup was clean enough to tell me we could still go have a beer once in awhile.
The so-called number 1 MMO was a different story. She started crying, showing me cute and “memorable” pictures of stuff we might have shared. I had to scroll through her sob story of how she might change for me, and then she begged for help. All I could say while wishing my friend would call now telling me my Aunt died was “it’s not you, it’s me.” By the time I got away I was embarrassed for her. Would I have to go through this every time I wanted to hang out with her?
Like Dan Savage, I seek to employ the campsite rule outside of… well, campsites. I want to constructively tell the devs why I am leaving because it can only benefit everybody. But, when I am being paintballed with marketing cowdung my constructive thoughts go right out the window. On the other hand, when it is clear the company respects my time and money, I will actively seek out the feedback link.
–Ravious
put a leash on her, turkish
Random Variation
Given a large number of trials, any random series will produce a large number of perverse-looking short streaks. If 100 people flip a coin 5 times, you should expect 6 of them to get the same result on every flip, but it will look strange to those 6 people. One-in-a-million chances happen all the time in a world of seven billion people. If millions of WoW players attack 100 times a day each, that is a lot of chances for long streaks of misses (and longer strings of hits).
More recently for me, it took two weeks to complete the Chasing Marcia achievement because one of the daily quests just did not appear for two weeks. What are the odds of that? Well, not bad. There are 5 quests, so 0.8^14=4.4% chance that any one quest will not appear for two weeks, but since there are five ways it could happen, there is a 22% chance. You should expect that to happen quite a few times each year, and if you started the dailies today, you should expect that 22% chance it will take you more than two weeks. (Maybe Blizzard does have some kind of streakbreaker in there, and maybe I just hallucinated having done the daily on a day I missed.)
I know all this and was just vaguely amused at the fishing streak. A similar thing contributed to my leaving The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ for about six months. I was trying to complete the Annuminas armor set, which involves getting the boss drop in each of three dungeons. With six fellowship members, that is a pretty clean 1/6 chance, minus the occasional member who just felt like running the dungeon but did not need that piece. In 16 tries, I won that 1/6 roll once. This should not be surprising: the expected value is to run each dungeon six times, and for everyone who wins a roll on the first time, there must be someone who just keeps running it and running it. I was not even up to 18 tries, and who knows, maybe it would have worked out perfectly and I would have won the next two. Independent probabilities, however, do not work that way: you still have a 1/6 chance, and I should expect another 12 tries to finish the set. And by that 16th trip, you get really sick of telling the new people to keep the silence-aura ghosts away from the healer.
Hence the approach of giving everyone a few badges, 1/6 the necessary token, or whatever.
: Zubon
WoW Crafting
The production skills have almost no gameplay value. They can produce useful in-game things, and it is something to do as MMO players always need, but there is no fun in it. Recipe + ingredients + click + wait. It is convenient and dull, especially in volume. It encourages alt-tabbing, never a good sign for game design.
I find the gathering skills inappropriately engaging. The world is full of little boxes of candy, just for me! I was tempted to drop Blacksmithing, pick up Skinning or Herbalism, and gather my little heart out. At least you are out there doing something besides watching the little bar fill, and it progresses naturally as you play. Continue reading WoW Crafting
Why Not Sell Epics?
Walk with me on a thought experiment. When the last Lich King dungeon opens and loot goes to tier 10, what if WoW adds an item shop selling tier 9?
As Blizzard PR, I would immediately describe this as a way of opening content. We want everyone to be able to experience everything in Wrath of the Lich King before Cataclysm goes live, and this is a way of bypassing gating. Of course, you can still earn everything in-game, so we’re not taking anything away from you, just providing more choices for our players.
I would assume that the game designers would immediately recoil, just because they are gamers. The kind of people who make WoW are the kind of people who play WoW, and it became a raiding game because they recruited raiders to design it. Achievers do not sell Achiever content to non- or lesser Achievers.
As a Blizzard business analyst, however, this sounds like win-win-win. First, some number of people will buy the items. That number is probably larger than most would like to admit. This is almost free money, as the content being sold was already in-game, and the item shop already there. Second, some smaller number of people will quit in protest. You lose their $15/month, but that is going to be less than the new revenue. You now have more revenue from fewer players. Furthermore, many of the people leaving are the ones who feel that their previous accomplishments were trivialized. That is, these are the hardcore raiders who are always pushing the bleeding edge of content. These people cost you money. They play 40+ hours a week (with all the costs associated), they place CSR calls that cost you more than $15/month, and they constantly complain that there is nothing to do because they burned through the content as fast as possible. So they now are complaining about something different; who cares? Third, that complaining is just more visibility, where people who disagree with the decision are out advertising it. I am increasingly accepting that there is no bad publicity, since everyone still seems happy to talk about EA games after #EAFail.
I do not like the idea as a player, but I cannot see how it fails to make business sense. Too extreme, too many people would quit? What if they sold tier 5? Would you quit over that? I can get a long way down the slippery slope before many are willing to step off.
: Zubon
Blame November Rain
This week has been really “blah” all around. There have been some exciting things. Like a possible new boss battle in Guild Wars. The Volume 1, epic quests becoming soloable in Lord of the Rings Online. And of course, the Evil Empire’s RMT sale of drunk panda pets. It’s all great, I guess. I would probably care more if it had not rained the past two weekends.
Mostly I have been plugging away at Borderlands. I gave up on multiplayer. Yes, I have tried every suggestion (GameRanger, Hamachi, port opening, etc.), and 90% of the time the system refuses. What drives me absolutely batty is that 10% of the time it lets me co-op and nothing has changed! Until I see a fix from Gearbox, I am just going to assume I bought and am playing a singleplayer FPS. And, quite a good one at that.
Last night I decided to head off to bed after turning in a quest, and along the way I got a purple-named revolver that shoots AoE electrical bursts. I stayed up for another half an hour just roaming around the main zone looking for bandits to electrocute with magnum bullets.
–Ravious
she sure got the boogie
Re-Quest
My buddy invites me to his Ventrilo server, so we can chat while we are in our respective games. He is running his five-man dailies in WoW, I am starting a second playthrough in Borderlands.
“So, what’s this ‘playthrough’ BS? Does anything change, or do you just do the same boring-ass quests over again? Who wants to do that?”
“Aren’t you playing WoW right now?”
: Zubon
We Are All RMTers
Many developers have recognized that “play as much as you like” is leaving money on the table, while “pay as much as you like” directs your efforts away from the unemployed and towards capturing as much consumer surplus as possible.
WoW quietly became a came with a cash shop, only the cash shop offered account/character services rather than the usual cosmetic items, bonus xp, and sometime uber loot. WoW has officially started its cash shop. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ has started with the adventure pack, DDO is now a F2P (free to pay, free to play) game, but I don’t recall hearing any RMT for Asheron’s Call. Most of the recent releases have their cash shops built right in, and others are adding them. The more unfortunate games are adding core services and things that were supposed to be part of the basic package as cash add-ons. Wizard101 has been bulking up its shop.
Which games are left without ways for you to spend dollars beyond a monthly fee?
: Zubon