Category: World of Warcraft

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Grouping as the Better Option

Some games require grouping. We hate that, especially when certain classes are required, because you can easily spend half your in-game time looking for group members. Some games encourage soloing. We often like that, but single-player games deliver a much better solo experience. Some games discourage grouping, often as an accident of game mechanics, which is just poor. Some games encourage and reward grouping without requiring it, which is the best of all possible worlds.

I have a very long version with many examples after the break, but that is the core of my message today: encourage grouping, do not require it, and make sure the game mechanics really do encourage it.

You encourage grouping by increasing rewards for groups and adding abilities that require groups to take full advantage of them. You require grouping by giving enemies ridiculous numbers of hit points, failing to scale encounters for different numbers, or making encounters that demand (or all but demand) several specific abilities that are spread across the classes. You discourage grouping by making quests difficult to do together and failing to scale encounters for different numbers. Yes, a lack of scaling can both require and discourage grouping.

Continue reading Grouping as the Better Option

Pack Space

Storage is broken in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. It works, as in I have rarely heard of its losing folks’ stuff, but as a game mechanic it is broken. This is not true for everyone: if you are not a crafter, collector, or social player with several outfits, and you are past level 30, you are fine. Turbine has done some good things to alleviate problems, such as simplifying the crafting items and increasing stack sizes. Once you save a cosmetic outfit, you can get rid of the items. Still, forum discussion directed me to what WoW is planning. Even before that, it would be nice if a game took advantage of the gameplay innovations from previous games. Keyrings, for example, should be required if you have keys. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ lacks keyrings.

Note in the WoW plans “Pet and mount tabs” and “currency user interface.” That is, don’t store mounts in the vault, and track all those barter/reputation items the way you track money.

Continue reading Pack Space

Translations and Mistranslations

So, WoW finally opened up its Latin American servers this past 25th, and made available a localization and language pack to go with it (optional, though. you can play just fine on Latin American servers with the good ol’ vanilla English client and launcher). Being the native Spanish speaker that I am, I decided to give it a whirl. See if I could get in touch with a few friends from really down south and get together in-game.

But nothing could prepare me for the translation to Spanish. How do I want to put it? Okay, let’s try this: It’s repugnant. How about that? Need more qualifiers? Happy to oblige: Obscure, Nonsensical, halfway between machine translation and surrealism.

I won’t make a laundry list of all its sins. But having done a lot of translation work in the past myself, I had to switch back to English before my liver gave up the ghost. I can mention a few things, though:

Continue reading Translations and Mistranslations

Seen in May

Jeff Freeman discusses pricing models and ponders gaming one-night-stands.

Brian “Psychochild” Green (I think he legally changed his name to that, complete with quotes, since I never see him called anything else. I forgot to check his license at IMGDC) spoke of the early stages of MMO development. This one is good enough to come back to single time, but I’m telling you now so that you can read it a few times before we discuss it. (via)

Alex Taldren suggests that Princess Peach should get a job.

Alex also suggested that MMO Gamers are lazy and not really gamers.

Should this t-shirt remind me of Scott Jennings?

Saylah at Mystic Worlds discusses We We Solo in MMOs. (Okay, that was April, but I read it in May.)

How about (the apparently nearly most influential person in the MMO world) Scott Hartsman on being organizationally broken? Bonus chance to hate on Dell, if you like. I have commented previously on an outsider’s view of organizational failures in MMOs.

“The Midnight Squad” trailer from City of Heroes is pretty good. I have some editing disputes, but their call. The other one for Issue 12 is less entertaining, but it has some fun with costumes in the crowd. If you missed the magic and Rikti connection in Issue 10, this is a good time to hit that part of the story again.

Many people reviewed Age of Conan. Many many many, too many for me to remember whose I’ve seen. Here are Ethic, Saylah, Keen and Graev, ferv0r, and pretty much all of Tobold and Bildo’s sites for late May. Need a leveling flowchart? Jalum’s review that I linked earlier is probably non-relevant, especially since the miracle patch(es) seems to have miracled pretty well (by varying accounts). I hear a strange mix of “great launch,” “meh, yet another WoW clone with 5% difference,” and “game-breaking bugs and exploits” (to say nothign of the early launch).

Are you reading Ding!? Also pre-May (February), but I think it is a recent addition to our blogroll. WoW-themed webcomic from Scott Kurtz.

Another new friend on our blogroll: The Battered Shield. He has some interesting stuff to say.

Ending off-topic, Greg forms words to list 100 Must-See Movies.

: Zubon

See? Blizzard learns

Hey, like the Brontosaurus sometimes, but better late than never. WotLK info from Bliz, via WoW Insider :

  • All 5-man dungeons will have a Heroic mode
  • Heroic dungeons will have a separate loot table than non-Heroics
  • A new token system will be used, similar to the Badge of Justice one used now (*)
  • The 5-man instances are designed to not take more than an hour (*)
  • All raid dungeons will have both 10-man and 25-man versions (*)
  • The 10 and 25-man progressions will not depend on each other (*)
  • There will be no attunements or keys necessary for any raid (*)
  • The 25-man loot will be a tier higher than the 10-man loot
  • The 10 and 25-man versions of the same raid will be on different timers so that each can be attempted on the same day by the same people (*)

I know a couple hundred people that will be happy.

(*): A lot of people (myself included) have been asking for something like this – or very, very similar – for two years now. This is Bliz, opening the cage of raiding and letting it out to play with everybody. Designing for the 1% was, and is, just bull. Grats on this one go to Irvine.

P.S.: Tempted to explain why each of those points is a very good thing, but I trust our readers don’t really need any explanation. Plus, people always tell me I type and talk too much.

The Birds

The BirdsA WoW guildie of mine organized a pretty awesome druid flash mob earlier this week. The concept: Get a bunch of druids together, fly around Nagrand as a flock (in bird form) and find an unsuspecting Horde, swoop down to the ground, surround him, and stare at him until he cracks, a la Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”.

WoW Insider has a pretty great writeup of the event, which included druid skywriting, mobs of cheetahs running down Horde on Quel’Danas, and other craziness. There must be other cool possibilities here. I think it would be fun to get a lot of hunters to hide inside of a building near a questing area, then when a horde approaches, use Eyes of the Beast to send out a ton of turtle pets to swarm him.

I’m a little surprised fun events like this don’t happen more often in virtual worlds, given how much easier it is to execute creative, crazy ideas. But I guess you still have the burden of actually organizing a lot of people to do something, which is a non-trivial task in the virtual world, too.

Speculating on WoW’s successor

Tobold posted some musings about what Blizzard will eventually do with their next MMO that got me thinking.

Tycho over at Penny Arcade speculated a few weeks back that Blizzard’s new MMO project will simply be an engine update for WoW, but I don’t think this will be the case. It seems inevitable that someone will eventually come out with something better designed, more accessible, more fun than WoW, just as WoW did the same for Everquest. And of course Blizzard would like that “someone” to be them.

I’m also not convinced that “the next big game” will be significantly more advanced than WoW, graphically. When you get into the sort of subscriber numbers that WoW has, you’re reaching far beyond the market segment of hardcore gamers, which means you’re targeting people that don’t make a point of upgrading their PC every 2-3 years. So you’ve got hardware limitations to deal with.

I’m also of the opinion that graphics technology today is already “good enough.” It can (and will) continue to get better, sure, but the main thing that distinguishes WoW for me visually is not the graphics technology, it’s the aesthetic. The art, the architecture, the style and spirit that goes into the world is something I find beautiful. I think it’s wonderful that graphics technology is advanced enough so that artistic beauty is finally the biggest differentiator in terms of a game’s visual impact.

– James

Virtual materialism

We’ve all heard grumbling here and there about the latest WoW patch’s new high-end loot. The new loot can be obtained much more easily than before the patch, when you had to complete high-end raids to get gear of this caliber. The grumbling generally revolves around the idea that it’s unfair and demoralizing to raiders who obtained similar gear when it was more difficult to do so.

My feeling on this is, so what? The change is not massive, and there are good reasons for it — it will help more people see high-end content before the expansion comes out. But more importantly, there’s more to WoW than gear. What about the experience of learning to work as a team? What about the satisfaction of overcoming a really tough boss fight? What about the aesthetic beauty of seeing a new dungeon? What about meeting new people and making new friends as you play together?

Being overly-focused on gear is simply materialism brought to the virtual world. It’s not a very fulfilling path. I’m not saying gear is bad, or material goods are bad, just that treating them with the proper priority is an important part of having a fulfilling life in a virtual world as well as the physical one.

Two Point Four aka The Last Freebie

Recent changes in my Real Life have forced my Online Life to pretty much be non-existent. A full time job and full time college will do that to you, plus lots of other personal obligations, such as helping my wife study for her classes – which she passed, with flying red, white, and blue colors and became an American Citizen just yesterday – but I do miss being able to pass my days away in Warcraft. Especially now that we have ‘the new shiney’ of patch 2.4.

Continue reading Two Point Four aka The Last Freebie

Behavioral Economics in MMOs, Part 1

Lately, I’ve been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, a book on the relatively new science of behavioral economics. Classical economics states that, given all necessary information, people and therefore markets will behave rationally and in their own best interests. However, behavioral economics states that people will very often behave irrationally, and that we must modify economic theory based on that irrationality. The most interesting point, to me, and the one that the book takes its name from, is that, while people may behave irrationally in regards to economic choices, they do so in a predictable fashion. Okay, it’s interesting, but what does it have to do with MMOs? A lot, as it turns out.
Continue reading Behavioral Economics in MMOs, Part 1