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Introducing Suzina, The MMO player

I’m a 27 year old married woman. I’m sure that gives you one impression of who I am. I’ll be finishing my degree in psychology next month, which probably only shifts your vision of me slighly. But here’s the rub: I’m an MMO player. I don’t have a lot of identity wrapped up in that. I don’t introduce myself to strangers as an MMO player, and rightfully so. Telling someone in the “real world” that you spend more than 40 hours per week in a virtual world isn’t going to win you any reputation points. I’ve sunk my time into Lotro, Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest 2, Final Fantasy XI, and Ultima Online. Three of those I helped beta-test. Oh… who am I kidding. I just played them early and called myself a “beta tester”.

Before graphical MMOs existed, I played text-based muds. Some summers in high-school I would play my favorite Mud so much that I had dreams in pure-text. When I was in elementary school, I used to play Dungeons & Dragons with my older brother and his friends. Maybe I’m just addicted to online grinding, but maybe there’s something all these games have in common. In any event, I find myself thinking about my virtual worlds enough to make we want to write about them too. That’s what brings me to Kill Ten Rats.

Individual Expression or Group Coherence?

I thought that limited class options helped pick-up groups in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ while making City of Heroes PUGs sometimes vulnerable to ineffective “concept” builds. Ravious commented that Guild Wars PUGs were improved by being able to see what skills other people were using, with the implication that you could educate the newbs or avoid people who look useless. (For the unfamiliar: you equip one bar of abilities in Guild Wars, and that is all you can use until you go back to town and change your bar. Many options, few available at once.) These experiences suggest to me that putting characters in small boxes lets you build things more easily.

Is this trade-off I am proposing between ease of grouping and narrowness of class roles a false dilemma? Can you have highly flexible character roles and still have the ability to assemble groups quickly? DC and Champions Online have both planned to bridge this divide by having roles that change on the fly instead of classes. That is, you build your character with “fire hammer,” “healing flames,” “fire shield,” and “blinding smoke,” and have a dial that makes you a DPS, tank, or support class. If you turn it to DPS, you deal more damage, but take a defensive penalty (alternately: set the dial to give only bonuses and not mention that the penalty is built in).

If the trade-off exists, which direction should your game take? I am a fan of individual expression, but as a game designer I would be more interested in seeing people play together frequently and smoothly. Bind people to each other, make cooperative play in your game a good thing, and let social factors help you retain players. This is why you add bottlenecks, downtime, and forced grouping: bring people together for interaction and bonding. Or maybe this is all crap, because WoW made its billions as an extremely solo-friendly game, but then the end-game is entirely raid-centric, forcing people into class roles.

Do you like being able to over-specialize? Planned supergroups in City of Heroes are awesome. Brutal Speed was a simple City of Villains idea: Corruptors with Kinetics, Brutes with AE attacks, everyone with Leadership, no one with knockback. A standard group was any 5 Brutes and any 3 Corruptors, with no further thought needed. No one needed to take Hasten or Stamina, because you always had 3 Speed Boosts available. And the little Leadership toggle bonuses stacked nicely when everyone had them. In The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, our Casualties of War group has low DPS because we all went with tanks and support classes. Why go for that soloing build if you will always have a group available?

: Zubon

Funcom’s World of Darkness

I can’t help but feel a little disappointed in CCP/White Wolf if Funcom comes out with an onion-layered dark world MMO before the makers of EVE do.  Massively gives a peek at Funcom’s upcoming game The Secret World, which honestly seems pretty cool.  It is a story-driven, time traveling, action-oriented, classless MMO in the vein of Call of Cthulhu or The King in Yellow, from what I surmise.  And, the producer is Ragnar Tørnquist who brought us the excellent The Longest Journey games.  It sounds very intriguing, but still I have that little pang of fanboism hurting.

CCP/White Wolf announced the World of Darkness MMO sometime in 2007, shortly after the two companies’ “merger” (read:acquisition).  Since then we have heard nothing.  According to Massively, on the other hand, The Secret World started concepting in 2002.  I have not seen when official production began, but I do not think we will get The Secret World until 2011.  On the other hand, World of Darkness has been running like a submarine, and one can only guess if and when that game will come about.

I guess I should be a little thankful that this game genre is finally coming to an MMO.  I think that The Secret World is going to take a lot more from Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (one of my top ten games of all time) rather than having vampire and werewolves, especially as protagonists.  Still, the two games would be like brothers, each in their own dark world.  If anything, maybe this will push CCP out of the deep to counteract any of Funcom’s marketing “firsts” and “onlys.”

–Ravious
lost carcosa

Yes, Get It Right

I keep hearing this in a LOTRO context, but it’s a general point: “It’s a no-win situation. Release now and people will complain because about bugs. Wait and fix the bugs, and people complain about a lack of updates.” Man, it’s just like your boss down at the Pizza Pit. He always wants it “done right” and “on time.” What a drag.

This is why we cannot have nice things. Too many gamers do not care or have given up hope of anything better. Zones were crashing last night, and I was listening to people in the global channel chorusing, “It’s an MMO. Get used to it.” They shout down people who want to be able to play the game they paid for.

When players complain, why do so many responses end with “or go play WoW”? Our commenters have “WoW has/had problems too!” hotkeyed. That’s right, WoW swept and vastly expanded the market by making an MMO only as buggy as a regular PC release. That’s what “polish” means at this point.

You will keep getting broken games because you are willing to pay for them. You are willing to reconfigure your system, learn the work-arounds for bugs and incoherent “working as intended,” and crawl through barbed wire to get your nugget of fun. Meanwhile, the mass-market will not put up with that crap, so they get a well-done, profitable MMO-lite, while you hide in your irrelevant niche with the broken shell of your dream game, complaining about the Big Mac-eating, Usher-listening mainstream. Because everyone ships late with bugs and missing features, so STFU and accept it.

: Zubon

srsly? You went with Usher there?

Chronicles of Spellborn Intro

Melmoth says it all. Keen echoes him. My main reaction was, “‘Go kill boars and bears.’ Are you serious?” Later this week, I will spin this comment into a post about how great the Warhammer intro is. I will otherwise quote them to review:

I had visions…that character customisation was aiming for City of Heroes levels of flexibility…. there are statistically a large number of overall outfits that can be created. Fundamentally though, there are a pool of five or six sets of matching armour available, and the same of clothing, and one can mix and match from each set to create a unique look.
…
Am I at fault for setting my expectations against the output of their hype machine? … I’ve come to realise that the amount of money these companies spend on marketing could be spent on improving their game such that it’s not an embarrassing bug ridden piece of half-realised promises and pie-in-the-sky design ideals.
…
Disappointment set in fairly early on in my experience…
…
I’ve experienced all of this through only the starter area, and people may decry my passing judgement based on such a small section of the game, but let me explain…

…the problem for me is nothing stands out and grabs me. I didn’t once feel like “I must play this game!” or “This game justifies spending money” or “I want to log in when I get home!” – ultimately I didn’t think “This is a ton of fun”. I had to think about why for a second. The answer here is that Spellborn just does not stand out. Why would I (or you) stop playing WoW, or LotRO, or Darkfall, or any other game to play Spellborn? I couldn’t come up with an answer.

If you have nothing better to do, or at worst want to risk downloaders remorse, give it a try. …

: Zubon

Right premise, wrong conclusion

WoW’s (former?) head dev Jeff Kaplan gave a nice little chat at the GDC. You can find it easily elsewhere in the world wide net. But I’d like to call attention to the following snippets, on quest texts and the medium:

Kaplan explained the age-old internet phrase, relating it to WoW quests that are simply too wordy.

“World of Warcraft quest designers are limited to 511 characters,” he said. “That’s all that will fit into the data entry. And all you programmers know why it’s not 512.”

Some quest designers ask for more space, Kaplan said, saying, “Why are there only 511 characters? We gotta have more, let’s blow that out.”
But Kaplan would prefer to see WoW quests go in the other direction.

“I actually wish that the number was smaller. I think it’s great to limit people in how much pure text they can force on the player. Because honestly… if you ever want a case study, just watch kids play it, and they’re just mashing the button. They don’t want to read anything.”

And this other little choice gem:

Kaplan prepared the crowd for a rant at this point.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. We’re so fortunate and privileged to work in a medium that is not only an art, but a revolutionary interactive form of entertainment. It’s unfortunate to see so many games try to be what they’re not, including our game at times. Of course we should embrace the concept of story… art, literature, film, song, they’ve all embraced story as well. But they all tell it in their own unique way.

I feel like we need to deliver our story in a way that is uniquely video game. We need to engage our audience by letting them be the hero or the villain or the victim. [Art, film, literature], they’re tools. But we need to engage our players in sort of an inspiring experience, and the sooner we accept that we are not Shakespeare, Scorsese, Tolstoy or the Beatles, the better off we are.

“If it makes us feel better, Shakespeare couldn’t 3D model his way out of a paper bag,” concluded Kaplan.

“Basically, and I’m speaking to the Blizzard guys in the back: we need to stop writing a fucking book in our game, because nobody wants to read it.”

Dear Mr. Jeff Kaplan (Jeff K.? lawls, etc.), if you’re reading this, my humble comment: It’s not about 511 characters or more, and it’s not that people don’t want to read your quest texts because they’re too long. People skip your texts because the quality of the texts stinks. A good writer can work wonders with 511 characters. What I would suggest to you, sir, is not to lower the limit, or raise it. The solution is pretty obvious: Hire better writers. There are tons of good writers out there that produce excellent stuff and are dying to get some work. When you outsource the writing to a programmer, marketing guy, cousin or whatever you’re only doing a disservice to the game.

EASK

I have come to realize that I am an enthusiastic Explorer but often a prickly Achiever. I am most fond of exploring gameplay, rather than being visually stimulated by whatever the new zone is. Most MMOs gate the Explorer content behind Achieving, which works fine at lower levels when things go quickly, and then becomes really annoying as you proceed.

Gating new powers behind levels: fine, good way to let people get used to a few before hitting them with everything. Games average two per level to one every other level, then slow down. Eventually, you might get one every four levels, and that one is an upgraded version of an existing power. Meanwhile, leveling goes from twice a night to every few days. Instead of trying a few toy every thirty minutes to an hour, I am trying a new toy every week or two. That is when a grind can become really annoying.

Continue reading EASK

What’s in a name?

I’m in a quandary.

I am to server transfers what Madonna is to adopting children from Malawi and I find myself in a situation where I’m thinking of going back to the server where a lot of my friends are returning to after having spent the last few weeks and months cajoling them into resubbing. Although we have decided to start from scratch again, I’m not really willing to leave my undead Warlock where he is after finally getting him to 80 and spending a little while making money and getting gear together. I don’t particularly like the server I’m on and I don’t click with the guild I’m currently in but as I’m only a social member, my departure will probably go unnoticed.

The problem I face is this: since I left the server I’m thinking of returning to, someone has taken my character’s name. Not just a someone but a smelly, pointy eared Night Elf Death Knight.

It’s my own fault. I didn’t leave a placeholder character with that name just in case I ever decided to return to that server but, then again, I didn’t think I ever would. I’m sure I’ll probably be able to live with a new name as well because, well, to paraphrase a famous level 80 Bard, “That which we call a warlock by any other name would still devour the souls of his enemeie – unless thou art a gnome in which case thine foes will laugh themselves unto death.” So while I may not be entirely pleased at the thought of having to change his name, I’m more concerned about coming up with a suitable alternative.

This troubles me more than being able to find a PUG competent enough to run Heroic Nexus without wiping.