Category: World of Warcraft

Quote of the Day

The most succinct summation of my thoughts on the World of Warcraft player-gouging news:

Since people who actually form their own groups are likely to be the more social players anyway, Blizzard effectively will be going the opposite way from Valve and charging the people who most want and are able to build social networks for their friends.

–Spinks

To get up to speed in one corner Blizzard who wants to charge people to play with friends in different servers, and in the other corner Valve who wants to give more free-benefits to those that are more socially influential. N.B. players are also charged a subscription for accessing Blizzard’s servers; what extras that subscription is paying for any more, I am not sure.

–Ravious

Wrath Reminiscences

A friend was telling me about playing WoW with her son. He did perfectly fine except for the reading parts, since he is only now 7 and English is not his first language. He was, however, capable of learning how to raid as a DPS character. When she needed to go to the bathroom during a raid, she would have him sit in for her. Nothing helps the guild leader reinforce that you are not doing a good job like having a 5-year-old on Ventrilo telling people to stop standing in the fire and not to shoot the sheeped mobs.

: Zubon

The Real Game Begins at 60 70 80 85

Gordon wonders why we do not go all the way and sell leveling and raiding games separately. Many people have taken the option of simply ignoring the raid game that is duct-taped to their leveling/achievement game, the same way you can completely ignore PvP in most games. This would be one of the reasons I had a short tenure in WoW: the gear resets alone made it feel enough like a sequel rather than an expansion, so adding synchronized online dancing was some completely other game wrapped in the same box.

I bought the Orange Box long ago. It did not make me complete Half Life 2 before playing Portal.

: Zubon

Guild in Transition

I never fell into a guild that worked well for me in WoW, which is one of several reasons I played for only a few months. I have friends across many servers, which severely limited the network effect, and my refer-a-friend buddy had a busy semester, leaving me mostly alone.

I joined a guild with friendly people I met along the way, but that was just moments before they decided to transition from a family guild to a serious raiding guild. This is possibly the worst of all possible states to be in, neither here nor there. Events were scheduled and failed to happen. Guild leaders angrily reminded people to show up if you sign up (and RSVP “no” on the required plug-in if not). Raid organizers would angrily wonder why they were bothering if people were not going to sign up. And then there were the new people…

You need a certain number of raiders (more if casual, fewer if hardcore) to ensure that you will have your 10 or 25. Getting to that threshold involves recruitment. I recognize that if you are not growing, you’re dying, but rapid growth is not only disruptive but also involves delving deeper into the barrel. I could politely refer to some as jerks with delusions of grandeur. I recall one fellow in particular who immediately announced his intention to be server- or world-first on clearing ICC (said ICC having just been announced). He was the sort to go on at great length about his awesome DPS and how horrible everyone else in all his groups was. Will the copy-and-paste from the DPS meter come before or after the stream of profanity?

My current LotRO guild is flirting with transition. It has absorbed another couple of guilds. The guild raid corps is hardcore and just the right size, which makes it difficult to cycle in folks who are not serious raiders while vulnerable to having a couple of people unsubscribe. Having a core group of just the right size, any second group active in a week is worse than your average PUG, a casual mix of the undergeared and inexperienced. We lack a farm team, but everything is okay so long as nothing ever changes.

: Zubon

Wiping By Design

I have many disagreements with the dominant theory of raid design, one of which is gear-based alternative advancement that divides content into tiers based on arbitrary numbers rather that create fake difficulty. Whether or not you like synchronized dancing online, you should see something perverse in a system where everyone might perform all the steps perfectly but still fail the dance because they have not spent enough hours grinding gearscore.

The math on this gets interesting when the target gearscore is above what is possible as you start a new tier. This is one way to spread content over time. The first time you visit a new tier, let’s say that your gear plus tactics plus random rolls give you a 20% chance to beat the boss; the other 80% of the time, your tank is not geared enough to take back-to-back crits, your DPS does not down the boss before a lag spike leaves someone in a pit of fire, etc. An 80% chance of failure sounds pretty bad, but many players seem willing and able to accept it, especially given that you can try more than once per night, and you have a (1-0.8^5=) 67% chance to win before you wipe 5 times.

That sounds pretty standard for raiders. You wipe a few times, but you down the boss. As you practice and improve your gear, you wipe less, and then you get that boss on farm status. You might be performing exactly the same dance steps, but your gearscore is higher, so you no longer are facing a 4-to-1 odds for exactly the same sequence of button presses.

This strikes me as perverse and unsatisfying for the same reason that Desktop Dungeons did. You might have been a few percent more on-the-ball that time you won, but more likely the dice just fell slightly on your side of the margin of error. You get the illusion that you did it, yay team, but you are just grinding finite probabilities (or, when your gearscore is higher, grinding near certainties).

On the other hand, all my respect to those who overcome massive gaps in gearscore to succeed through perfect execution. The folks who are consistently getting server firsts a month before most people can beat phase 1 are not just hitting 5% chances consistently.

: Zubon

Different Directions

Tobold ponders the directions of WoW and Rift. WoW, he says, is pushing raiding towards high selectivity based on gear and/or skill (I find the former more annoying in a game). Rift, he says, merrily invites everyone by having easier content and not limiting numbers. Players, he suggests, seem to be preferring the latter; I might append that vocal players of Rift seem to be expressing that preference, while subscriber numbers make it premature to ponder anything as a WoW-killer.

The day before, a LotRO developer diary lovingly described the design philosophy behind the new raid: higher difficulty, perfect execution, learning via wiping repeatedly. It explicitly contrasts skirmish Tier II (higher numbers) with the new raid Tier II (different abilities), although I might again append that I would be surprised if higher numbers (i.e. gear dependency) were not a factor.

My long-running game was City of Heroes, so I enter with an expectation that you can bring a full group of almost anything and beat almost anything. A few fights all but demand something from a small set of options, but those are notable because they are rare rather than the norm. Add to this the City of Heroes assumption that you will be able to play with your friends now rather than waiting two months for them to hit the level cap, and you have a very different philosophy than gear-gated tiers of raids.

I refer back to Tobold’s excellent discussion: does this encounter test the worst, best, or average player? The most restrictive content will test the worst player. Raids demanding synchronized dance and perfect execution wipe if you add one new or slightly undergeared guy. (See Spinks on the different effects of this philosophy in single- and multi-player games, or try a LotRO PUG Durchest raid in which one of your three tanks is not geared above the boss’s potential one-shot damage range.) Not restricting encounters by player count gives you a fourth option: testing the sum, so you can beat the Rift by bringing more people. Combining unrestricted attendance with testing the worst player would be apocalyptically horrible.

I cannot tell you what the mass market wants, because I am obviously an outlier, but I will favor a design that makes it easier to join with my friends, all of them, whatever level they are. Lowering the minimum difficulty threshold tends to do that.

: Zubon

Wrong Context

All yesterday, I kept seeing headlines about like “Blizzard Cancels Hundreds of Flights Across the Midwest” and how many people Blizzard was forcing to stay at home. WoW has really gone mainstream. Was there a patch or something? I also heard about crashes and such, so maybe it did not go well.

: Zubon

Sentence of the While-I-Was-Out

Melmoth compares Stormwind and Bree-town:

There’s nothing terribly wrong with Azeroth, you understand, just like there’s nothing ostensibly wrong with Club 18-30 holidays, or college frat parties, it’s just that once you’ve lived a quieter more reserved life of gentle evenings with a nice glass of red and a good book in front of an open fireplace, it’s hard to go back to whipped cream and beer bongs and some strange man’s penis being repeatedly beaten against your forehead while someone screams in your ear to eat the green jelly out of the lady’s underpants faster.

Elsewhere, Penny Arcade summarizes the backstory of the hero’s journey ominously.

: Zubon

World of Warcraft Player’s Guide to Guild Wars 2

There are still many misconceptions to the unreleased Guild Wars 2. Blogger-in-arms, Hunter, tackled many of these (especially the ones that irritated him) over at Hunter’s Insight. I’ve had this post in draft mode for awhile, and Hunter’s article finally pushed me to complete it.

So, you’ve heard about that Guild Wars game, and you’ve noticed that Guild Wars 2 is one of the most anticipated MMOs to launch. However, your digital home is World of Warcraft. Then this guide is for you!

Continue reading World of Warcraft Player’s Guide to Guild Wars 2