Category: World of Warcraft

Minecraft and Warcraft

I am out of town today, so let me refer you to Tesh’s post about playing online with his daughter, “How Minecraft Ruined World of Warcraft“:

She then asked if we could go catch fish in the canals, and when she made my Dwarf jump into the canal, she saw the crabs and naturally wanted to go grab them. Since we didn’t have the fishing skill or a quest to gather crabs, again, we couldn’t do much more than swim around and wish.

She lost interest in the town until she happened to notice an apple tree.

Ah, to see things come full circle. She got excited and wanted to pick the apples. She is truly her father’s daughter, a quirk which is quite heartwarming. When I told her she couldn’t pick the apples, she got quiet for a while. She then announced that she wanted to play Minecraft.

: Zubon

Two Hypotheses About LotRO DPS

Every LotRO player has his favorite “Huntard” story, but I find far less of that then you hear about WoW DPS classes. Of course, you hear more of everything about WoW; that kind of thing happens with millions of players. I have two theories.

Hunters have no flashy effects. You can make your arrows look like tracer shots with light and fire oil, but you basically get arrows. Fwip fwip fwip. No fireballs, no glowing rays, no bear pets. Even if you two-shot some huge target, the default option is for you not to see your teammates’ damage. It is hard to have the braggadocio when you cannot show off.

LotRO group composition differs. The standard WoW group is 60% DPS. Grab three random people and you have a good chance of getting at least one idiot. If a LotRO group has more than one DPS, odds are that most are also providing support, debuffs, tanking, etc., and even Hunters toss in crowd control. (Parenthetical: a healer with five Hunters/Champions is an awesome group.) The center of the show is in the melee scrum; the Hunter is a half-off-camera damage source.

Except for those times when you have idiots who always pull aggro or over-pull. If anyone notices that there is a Hunter in the group, you probably have a bad Hunter.

: Zubon

Shattered

Today is the sixth anniversary of that MMO. It’s also the day that the Shattering finally takes place and the game world of Azeroth changes.

A criticism levelled at a lot some new MMOs is that they are trying to be World of Warcraft (and I’m not referring solely to Alganon). SWG’s aforementioned NGE, for example, seemed to be inspired not in the least by WoW’s success. So it seems somewhat meta that Blizzard are reshaping their old world to be more like itself – only better. Taking lessons learned from two successful expansions, out go all those damned tedious quests which require you to traipse back and forth between continents and in come new storylines for zones that bring the questing experience more in line with Outland and Northrend zones.

Incidentally, The Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest that Jeff Kaplan admitted may have been a mistake in its original incarnation is still in the game. Now, however, you only have to collect one page instead of twelve.

Triceratops Summer: Beyond the Illusion of Permanence

What do you do when there is no tomorrow? Blizzard invited me back for a free pre-Cataclysm week, and this might inadvertently be the best possible gift to my MMO mental health.

What would you do in your MMO if progress were not saved? Would you even play? The immediate effect I see is the removal of Achievement. Yes, the servers will save whatever I do, but it is not as though I will be re-subscribing. The characters effectively go away after that week. How would you play differently if your characters were deleted at the end of the week?

This should be Explorer heaven: see as much as you like in a limited time frame. There is not much for the Achiever, as character advancement is meaningless, which raises the further question of how meaningful it ever was. And how far can you advance in a week? Okay, that could be an amusing Achiever expedition. There might be more for the Socializer, but I never much loved my server, there are few I would want to see that I do not have access to out-of-game, and I am not one to form new bonds only to sever them a week later. It could be Killer heaven, except that my characters would be several thousand gearscore behind the competition (and/or a large level grind).

I do not know if a week in WoW would be worth the download and install time, but the offer has given me much food for thought about what I do in-game and why.

: Zubon

New Content Is Shared Content

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

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.

Continue reading Most Typical Member

Shared Loot Table

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

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

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 Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. 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.

Continue reading Pro-Social Design

Nothing and Everything as Endgame Content

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 Onlineâ„¢ 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