Category Archives: Games

TSM Examples

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So you wanna learn to flip. Let’s take a look at the data set available in TSM to make better decisions.

What I’m looking for here is the 10% in blue in the top right. That’s the posted cost vs. the relative cost of a given item, and where flipping can work. Now in this case there are many items for sale, and at quite a few different price points. What makes this a good idea to flip is that there is only 1 item at 25g, the next one is 190g. So buy this one, post it for 189g and you make the difference. This is the simplest example, and there are quite a few.

Let’s look at the fundamental data next.

This is a more typical view of any AH posting. Lots of an item, and someone is trying to dump stock. 21g is all from the same player, and then prices jump up to 191g. Theoretically you could buy the 10 items and flip them all for 190g. But…

Look at the data highlight. The TSMAuctionDB data is the important one.

  • Min Buyout is the cheapest item on the AH
  • Market Value is the value across AH, on YOUR server. On high volume items, this is the number to look at.
  • Region Market Value Avg is specific to your region, and the average posted value. Region meaning, US, EU and so on.
  • Region Sale Avg is the recorded sale average in your region. The is what people are buying for and not terribly useful unless you’re talking about things with low volume. For BoE this can have some use as they are often low volume.
  • Region Sale Rate and Avg Daily Sold are metrics to see how much volume is in the market. Low numbers means that it can take a while to sell.

So in this case, while people are asking for 191g, the reality is that on my server the avg sale price is 115g and very few are sold on any given day. It would not be a good idea to flip here. To simplify, you want something that is low relative buyout compared to it’s true value, and where either you are the ONLY poster, or the difference between your buy and your post is meaningful (e.g. 150g or more).

Bots a Lots

So let’s see what the AH looks like now that a few bot bans have come across. This is just a dip until the next bot software comes about…

The reason the % are all above 100% is because there was a massive glut of herbs a few days ago. Bots were just flooding the market, and Death Blossom in particular was really hit. 2 weeks ago it was 20g, now it’s 7g. As the market normalizes, it will be interesting to see where this all goes.

I’ve personally set this metric to only buy at 80% of market value (which is higher than the overall market value). If herbs cost too much, then there’s no profit on alchemy. With some herbs still going for 30g, I can blow through 10k in gold without really trying.

Crafter View

This one can be a right pain, as the items that post the largest profits are often the ones requiring the most grind. I don’t mean effort to get mats, or expensive to make. I mean GRIND, as in behind a faction or some sort of super random drop.

The basic crafting window is like this. If it’s green, you make money assuming you buy stuff at market rates. You can see that the flask would cost me 722 to make, and would give me 61g in profit. That’s about 8%. I can make more per craft on other items.

Here’s a high value Transmute.

I could make this, and maybe turn a profit. As much as I’d like to make 10k, the odds are better than I’d make 5, and it would cost me 2 per day to make. There are quite a few transmutes out, and very few of them actually turn a profit. Even more so if you can’t get the mats at a good deal. In this example, Primal Fire is supposed to be 500g, but on my AH it’s 1800g.

The larger point I’m trying to make is that the base UI is not one that’s made to make money. Even TSM is only a tool, and unless you know how to use it, you’re odds better at losing money than making it. I’ve got a fair chunk of optimizing I can make to speed up the scanning and posting. I enjoy the optimizing much more than the actual profit making.

Paying for a Sub

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I’ve written a lot on in-game finances, mostly in WoW. I played that game for a while too, enough that I haven’t paid for a sub since MoP launched. The rebuilding of the WoW Auction House had a rather dramatic impact on the overall economy, especially in the context of stack management and undercutting. What’s interesting about WoW in particular, is that gold is relatively immaterial for most gameplay. Only when you focus on a specific slice of the population, does gold really mean something.

In traditional demographics you have a bell curve, with smaller populations at the low and high ends, with a big bunch in the middle. Of course, that depends on the scales you’re using, but in the larger sense it’s a desirable outcome – if only in that controls applied to the demographic can hit the most people at once. If your population is equally distributed, it’s actually harder to make change. If you have multiple peaks, then it’s nearly impossible to implement change without massive disruption.

The concepts of faucets and sinks in an economy are somewhat easy to understand. Money shows up, money then leaves. In games, the faucets are entirely controlled by the developers and then exploited by the players. WoTLK’s daily quests decimated the market with the massive faucets, to a point where Blizz has never really recovered. WoD’s garrisons were WoTLK 2.0 in that regard, as it was even more money coming in and players having no real obligation to interact with the world (also see the start of mission tables).

Shadowlands’ faucets are similar. WQ regularly award 250-300g. Mission tables are the same (though longer investment). Each calling/emissary quest puts ~2,000g in your pocket. Then there’s the actual drops you get as you go through these motions. Let’s just low ball it at 2k per day. Depending on your server and player engagement the amount entering fluctuates. Let’s say 1,000 people do the daily – that’s 2m gold per day entering the system.

Sinks have not scaled in the same sense. You are still limited to flight paths, repairs and the AH % cut. I made a Kul Tiran Druid for level up fun (heirloom armour). In the leveling process I was able to buy access to every flight skill and 30 slot bags with thousands left over when I was done. The net result is that the “floor” of gold available to people is miles higher now than ever before.

And yet, the cost of a WoW token has been relatively stable for years. If more money is entering, and less leaving, should this token not increase? That begs the questions as to whom is buying and who is selling. Which I can get into in another post.

I won’t bother talking much about the Druid bot infestation. Seeing any Druid with ilvl68 gear picking an herb is an automatic report for me. They are a sink to the economy, as the sales through the AH have a % cut. While they may annoy players, at the system level they do more to normalize than anything Blizz has ever done.

Shadowlands Tools

I mentioned the basic daily faucet of emissaries. Even doing it every day you’re only going to see 50k or so by the end, still well short of 120k. Selling harvest mats can be a major increase of income. Necrolords who have completed their campaign have a distinct advantage of accessing an area that is KOS for anyone else for herbs. With such poor travel options in WoW today, it’s easy to pick up herbs between destinations – and selling them for 2-5k a day isn’t all that hard to do.

I prefer to wait until I have 3 callings at the same time, as often they will overlap. Gives 5-6k in easy gold, then a few piles of herbs to sell. This process was enough to make about 200k in the first month.

Using the AH normally is ok, you can see what stuff is selling and make your choices to sell. If you want to really simplify your life, just installing TSM and leaving it at its default setting is going to be easy money. It should scan everything in your bag, look at what’s on the AH, and then post for a bit less than the cheapest one there. You want simple, and this is super simple.

Optimizing

TSM is a tool. It can be used for many things, but in order for that to work best, you need to customize the tool. High volume items (like herbs) are much different than low volume items (like transmog). 50g profit is a LOT when compared to a 100 crafting cost, but is peanuts when it costs 1,000 to make it. Same as with % gains… you need higher margins for lower values to make sense of things.

Let’s say I find an item that’s selling for 10% of value. I can buy it and repost hoping to get 100%. Doing this for an item posted at 20g means 180g profit. Doing this for an item posted at 2,000g means an 18,000g profit. TSM has the ability to be configured to take this into account.

You can also narrow down searches to categories or even items, so that you speed up the scanning process. I have a transmog category with 3,000 items. That takes 20 minutes to scan through and I certainly need to drop that down. But… I’ve also made 50k in the first day with that larger scan.

Maybe I want to craft items instead. TSM has a per-craft profit calculator, so that I’m buying herbs are lower than average value in bulk, then selling only when the profit it at its highest. I want to make 100g per flask, not 50g, so the system will only post when I am at that threshold.

And similar to the GME debacle, it take analysis to make smart decisions. If the average value of an item is 1000g, and the scan shows that the current post is 10%, I need to make sure this is a reasonable item to flip. Are there other items that area less than the average value? If so, can I buy them all and then flip? Is the projected profit worth the time (I draw the limit at 500g per flip). How much and I willing to extend myself on a single purchase? Maybe I could flip that BoE epic and make 20k. But it would cost me 100k to take that chance. Could I use that 100k on say 50 smaller transactions to make the same amount?

And importantly, how much time do I really want to put into this? All I want is to pay for a month’s sub. There’s no AH dinosaur to go for. There’s nothing that I need. Do I aim for 500k to cover 4 months, and then just play? Do I only bother with 1 month at a time? I could spend an hour or two a day just flipping, or I could spend 10 minutes, or even none.

Future post will go into some of the thought process behind picking a flip, with examples.

Supply, Demand, and Perspective

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It’s really fascinating how financial models apply to online social interactions – in particular anonymous ones. If you don’t have a known person, then it’s no different treating a box or AI. The empathy gap is serious, and there’s a VERY large thread related to the pros/cons to internet anonymity. That is not this post.

This post is about the concepts of supply and demand in relation to WoW’s Mythic + content – M+. In order to access M+, you need to complete basic Mythic difficulty dungeons. Your performance gives you a key to access higher levels of M+. Those events are then timed. There are three end conditions

  • Beat the timer and get +1key to a different dungeon, and 2 pieces of gear.
  • Beat the dungeon but not the timer and you lose a key level to a different dungeon, and get 1 pieces of gear.
  • Leave the dungeon without completing and the key goes down a level, but stays the same dungeon (allowing people to manually downgrade the key level)

This makes it so that the risk of success / failure is entirely borne by the owner of the key. The penalty for not making time is not horrendous. It’s not that you need to redo the dungeon, its just that you get a slight downgrade on the key. In this context, the supply of keys is limited, as it gates access to content, and by proxy, the supply of key owners is also limited. Further, due to the difficulty / reward structure of M+, there’s an even further limit to the number of high level keys. I think it’s something like 3% of all runs are currently M15.

Since it takes 5 people to run a dungeon, there’s 5x more people without keys than with keys. This means that the supply of all possible players is larger than the amount of keys. Not that they don’t have keys (they likely do) just that only the key used to start the dungeon gets upgraded, and you’ll have plenty of people with +2 keys trying to run +10 dungeons.

Financial math says that systems with low supply and high demand put the power of decisions with the owners of supply (read keys). If there are only 3% of M+ runs that are at 15, that means that of the 100% of players in M+, 97% of them will not get in. It’s not to say they won’t try, it’s to say that they won’t get in.

Falling back to the reward item above, the owner of the key loses a LOT if they don’t make the time on the clock. They are incredibly incentivized to select the best options to improve their odds of winning. If they have the choice between someone who is overpowered for the content and pretty much everyone else… they are going to pick the former. If they have two equal power candidates, then they are going to look at the meta specs (e.g. tanks are going to be DH, not Warrior).

Which, a small tangent, I agree that the meta is not representative of the masses. However, the meta of M+ has a psychological downstream impact.

Let’s compare that to you having a barrel of blueberries in front of you, and the task of baking a single pie. You’re going to select the best looking berries and ignore the ones with twigs, or bumps, or too tiny. The anonymity of WoW makes it so that people are effectively the same – they are just numbers. The odds that you group with someone twice from a LFG / LFR structure are astronomically small.

Now, if you’re the blueberry this stinks! It certainly feels like those job postings that are entry level and asking for 10 years of experience. How is that reasonable? Well, it’s reasonable because there are people with 10 years experience willing to take entry level positions. Your perception is one that the system is unfair, and there’s no way for you to get that experience if you’re not given the shot.

Options?

Run your own key groups. You may ethically think that you won’t be so prescriptive, and it’s certainly possible that’s the case to start. But power corrupts, and you’ll find out why the system works the way it does pretty quickly. This would increase supply of keys, and reduce demand of other players.

Only run with a guild. This is a great option for those with guilds who are large enough to support the structure and various combinations/levels. You can also run this with friends too. This exponentially changes the supply/demand metric, to the point where it may not even apply.

Blizz makes systematic changes that reduce the penalty for not making time. We are in expansion 3 of M+ with zero changes to the way this works. The meta of weekly rewards has been tweaked (the Vault now), but nothing on the individual mechanics, structure, or incentives. So… not likely to actually change.

Blizz makes it so that more people have high level keys. While this sounds cool in theory, it would also mean that more people need to step up to leadership positions. The supply of keys would skyrocket, but the supply of people wanting to lead groups… that’s a big ?

Blizz somehow implements a scoring system. This would effectively be an automated screening tool for making M+ groups, using in-game measurements. You couldn’t apply for things you’re not qualified for, and people would have less applicants to stream. Raider.IO is just another version of GearScore from yore. Modders will fill the void.

It’s absolutely fascinating to see this situation unfold, and the various perspectives applied. With Blizz all but mandating that M+ is the core activity in WoW (there are M+ invitationals after all), it’s no surprise to see so many people enter and push the system forward. Victim of their own success really, with a highly complex and competitive environment somehow trying to be accessible to the masses. Imagine if LoL didn’t have ladder ranks? Or rocket league didn’t have a casual mode? Quite curious where Blizz goes from here… if M+ is the content of choice and piles of people are not able to access it… do we get another LFR?

Core, Satellites, and Sprinkles

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Let’s pingback to Kaylriene on his post on SL thoughts after 2 months. This really is a larger game design challenge, and one that as consumers we can feel but often have trouble articulating. Why is it that some games just work despite clear flaws, while others fail even if they are relatively even?

I posit this is more related to psychology and analogous to Maslow’s tower of needs.

In game terms we can instead view this as the core systems, which are then supported or perhaps dependent on satellite systems. Take the first Mass Effect, the core systems were RPG focused on story and character development. The inventory was horrible, and everyone is best to forget the vehicle portions – yet they were not a requirement to enjoy the game. Invert that to something like Anthem, where the core systems were inventory (it’s a loot game after all) and combat. The latter was seen in a positive light, but the former was disastrous.

Or you know, look at Marvel Avengers. The core activities are meaningless and people have just noped their way out.

Look at every GOTY candidate. They all have near perfect core experiences, with some having some challenges on the satellite systems. God of War is near perfect from start to end, every aspect. Horizon’s combat, development, and storylines are great… yet it’s pulled down by the ubisoft-world-map-icon-palooza system. Some even start throwing sprinkles on top of it all, because their foundations are so solid. Hades is a spectacular achievement in system design, and yet they threw in extra cosmetics, an integrated soundtrack, relationship development, and a super complex dependency chart that dictates what dialogue is presented. We get to a point where we’re comparing an indie company as being objectively better than multi-billion dollar developers (such as Last of Us pt 2).

WoW View

But to WoW for a minute here. I do think that SL’s core systems (dungeons, covenants, raids, borrowed power) are all relatively well balanced. Maybe not perfect, but balanced within relatively acceptable levels. The things you need to do generally work. Where SL stumbles is in the things you can optionally do. I could post a bunch of things, you could read Kaylriene’s post, you could visit Reddit or the official forums… suffice to say the list is quite long. The major balance issues are in satellite systems. In the general sense, the rewards for activities in SL is much lower than in recent memory… which is sort of anathema to the concept of carrot and stick.

If we time travel a tad, it’s been a long time since the core systems ‘worked’.

  • BfA – few of the core systems worked. Whether the Azerite Gear or the Corrupted items, or AP grind. The satellite stuff was ok, but had some serious challenges.
  • Legion – the core was generally good, but the AP grind was painful, as well as the heavy RNG on legendaries
  • WoD – the garrison is well, maybe let’s not talk about it. This is where flight was disabled too I may add.
  • MoP – The core systems here worked, by and large. The initial rep grind was tough, and the “forging” system came into play.
  • Cataclysm – the only core was a new talents system, the rest was all satellite. That is a major genesis of the LFR system as no one was engaged in the content.
  • WoLK – the core here was solid, and implemented a pile of new systems. The challenge was on the reforging mechanic and talents, which were removed/revamped in Cata.
  • TBC – The core was amazing here, yet hindered by the attunement system that made it very hard to “catch up” to relevant content
  • Vanilla – I just refer to this as the true sequel to EQ. The core was just a refinement of that game, and changed the MMO landscape as a result.

Each person has a different driver to play a game. Some people need the core to be solid and ignore the satellites, others can ignore the core and just focus on the outside stuff (I’m sure some people enjoy pet battles more than dungeons). It’s not a common thing where a game can do both well. In the MMO space, designers tend to focus on core as the driver for the multiplayer aspect, which in turn drives retention. It is FAR from easy, it requires vision and passion. It certainly requires consuming your product.

Here’s hoping that somewhere in this mess, we as consumers can find a better way to recognize and reward quality. And where it doesn’t exist, find a way to help the developers (who are by and large extra passionate) to find their way forward.

Kyrian Trial of Ascension

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With the rather ho-hum review so far, I did want to hit on something I think is working rather well. While each covenant has their own unique activity, I’ve only invested real time into the Kyrian one. The Trial of Ascension is a sort of brawlers guild variant, where you play as one of three characters against boss events. It’s entirely solo content.

I’m a bad news / good news person. So the bad stuff first.

  • You need to farm materials (5 types) to unlock new enemies (10 of them), create items (5 of them) and then various single use items. They drop in all 4 zones, with a 20% rate on specific mobs. Alternatively, you can buy a box with 20 of each in them from 5 Medallions of Service (MoS)
  • It costs 1 MoS per boss attempt. MoS are not a guaranteed drop or reward. You can craft 1 MoS for 8x of each farmable material, which is super painful.
  • If you go into a boss blind, you will not succeed on the first attempt (reasonable!) Some bosses have 1 hit kills. But it costs you a MoS.
  • It costs 45,000 anima to unlock all the bosses and difficulties. It costs a further 45,000 anima to unlock all the rewards (I hear some prince in Nigeria is interested in this model). Imagine you got a drop from a raid boss and it cost you 1000 anima to use it?

Long story short, it’s a grind to access this activity, a grind to participate, and another grind to claim your rewards.

Now for the good stuff!

  • Each of the 10 bosses has unique mechanics that change depending on difficulty. The quests to unlock them can be interesting in their own right. There’s very limited RNG, nearly everything is pattern based.
  • You have 3 characters to choose from, each with their strengths and weaknesses.
  • You have the option to equip gear (permanent) or charms (1 time use) to add benefits to a run. Things like improved speed, a shield, healing, more damage and whatnot.
  • The increased difficulty requires smart playing to get through. Face tanking isn’t an option. Depending on your normal class, this will require some interesting mechanical changes.
  • All stats are normalized, meaning your regular character’s gear has no impact.
  • Most fights take less than 5 minutes.
  • The challenge is learning the appropriate tactics and then executing them as close to perfect as possible.

Blizzard has built a very interesting activity that’s a merger of the Withering and Mage Tower events from Legion. It’s an active battle simulator that treats all players the same, and has a cost of entry. That is a reasonable design goal (maybe less in an MMO, since it’s solo only) that as a distinct activity, it really quite fun.

Yet, Blizz being Blizz, they’ve put in a ridiculous grind to participate in the fun. The mats require a massive grind. The MoS require you to do Callings for the best drop chance. The anima costs are completely insane given the current drop rates from content. It also requires renown unlocks to access 2 of the 3 characters since you need to have bindings to them. These are simple fixes… increase the drop rates on the grind to 100%, drop multiple MoS per calling (5 per day), cut the anima investment costs by 50% and remove all anima costs for the rewards. It will still take a month to get through all the content. Focus on the actual content as the time investment, rather than granting access to the activity.

As it is now, this feels like some of the best content in SL is something everyone is going to avoid. I’d be curious as to how the activities feel in other Covenants.

Mandatory Buffet

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The only benefit to consumers for a buffet is the sheer variety of options for a fixed cost. The quality is rarely that of a focused restaurant. The benefit to the restaurant is that they have a much larger client base and a rather consistent income stream because of it. The expense management aspect is similar to other restaurants (people make different choices), yet there can be massive spikes with no corresponding income spike. You should be able to identify trends and accommodate, but the launch is going to be rough – or if you get a sports team show up. Consumers generally sour on buffets if there is not enough food, or if the quality dips beyond a certain level (e.g. it’s cold).

Why is this relevant? Most games offer a buffet type approach. Assassin’s Creed is a perfect example of this, you have dozens of possible activities. MMOs also have this, in that you can craft, hunt, dungeon, raid, or other. The difference is in the structure of the buffet in that things are an option or not.

MMO players have differing goals. Some like the social part, some the achievements, some discovery, some the competition. Most games have a gate that prevents access to a given function, either player level or player power. Some are soft gates (you can try something while underpowered but it will be very hard) or they are hard gates (you simply cannot access the feature).

In WoW, there are both. The hard gates are usually related to levels (90% of the game is locked at max level), or to a quest. The quests are notable in WoW, as most items are time gated. Even if you have all the pre-requisites done, you still have to wait for that gate to be accessible (covenant storylines, twisting corridors). The soft gates are power related, or ilevel. You need a certain level to do dungeons, another for raiding, and so on. If you want to access the full buffet, then you need to increase your power level or renown level.

To increase renown, you need to do your covenant quests. These require you to do a set of activities (you don’t get to choose which):

  • collect souls from the maw (weekly)
  • collect 1000 anima (weekly) – anima comes from WQ + dungeons
  • complete some combination world quests (daily)
  • complete a specific dungeon (uncommon daily)
  • complete a PvP event

If you want to increase your power level, you need to:

  • complete the odd WQ that has a reward
  • complete the covenant story (through renown + dungeons) and boost your item level
  • complete relevant dungeons and get a drop
  • complete raids and get a drop
  • complete PvP and raise your rank
  • open the weekly vault, which stems from completing mythic+ dungeons, raids, and/or PvP
  • complete the weekly open world boss and get a drop
  • complete 2+ Torghast runs to get ash for legendary upgrades

Assuming you’re a fresh 60, that’s a big buffet! Nearly all of it is right at your door when you start too. You’re going to try as many pieces as you can, then develop a taste for one or two. Then you realize you’ll need…

  • to do WQ for the weekly anima quest
  • to run the Maw once a week for the souls quest
  • to do WQ for renown increases
  • to run Torghast multiple times (at least twice) to get soul ash for your legendary
  • to PvP for renown and vault rewards
  • to raid for vault rewards
  • to run M+ dungeons for vault rewards

“Need” may be a harsh word, you don’t need to do any of it. You can ignore all the systems if you want, and just do the content you enjoy. The game will hamper that enjoyment if you don’t engage in more systems, but that’s entirely up to you. That loot is so incredibly sparse, if ever you do see something drop, you’re going to jump on it and forcibly try any avenue to get that artificial number to increase.

The cynic in me see this design approach as on par with mobile games and their focus on engagement. Or, as we’ve all seen reported, Monthly Average Users (MAU). The game is purposefully designed to tunnel you into ALL activities, whether you enjoy it or not. If you don’t enjoy content and (feel the) need to do it, then that is not a positive feedback loop. If that content is not working properly (e.g. Beastwarrens bugs, placeholders in Torghast, anima rewards that don’t scale, broken mission tables, broken WQ gimmicks, etc…) and you need to do it, then ugh.

In the individual mechanism space, on the whole, Shadowlands improves on BfA. You never have a reversion of power. The borrowed power mechanic doesn’t scale to absolutely stupid levels. You’re never looking at triple RNG (-forging). But as I’ve mentioned before, I can’t see how the game could have gotten worse than BfA. It reminds me of an Eddie Murphy joke.

Shadowlands feels like this.

Covenants

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Or, as I like to call them, Class Halls 2.0.

There’s been a lot of talk about Covenants, as they are the main feature of Shadowlands – driving the majority of the story, providing a reward structure, and a “borrowed power” mechanic. Picking one is easy. Changing one means you’re losing ~2 weeks of time gated content.

I’ve got Kyrian and Venthyr storylines running. They are interesting and varied, taking place across multiple zones. I won’t go into a pile of details, due to spoilers. I would be surprised if anyone picked a Covenant due to the story (maybe for aesthetics though, which is another topic). They are time gated, and catch up mechanics are present. They do not, as of yet, appear to intersect.

The reward structure is very similar in both. You get a travel hub to speed up zone travel, which is great, cause zone travel is horrendous. Side note – crappy travel means I harvest a ton of herbs/ore without really trying. Somewhere around 200k in profit in 3 weeks. You get access to a very odd mission table structure that is completely unbalanced. Venthyr/Kyrian are running at half the power of the other two factions, and the UI is so bad that it’s frankly not worth trying unless you use something like Venture Plan. Another item is a sort of temporary event generator that you’ll likely do once and never again – primarily due to the horrendous travel time and lack of rewards. Finally, each faction gets their own unique side activity. Venthyr throw parties, Kyrian have a very interesting battle arena, gated through grinding components. It’s a cool concept, meant to emphasize world exploration. Maybe at some point I’ll do more of it.

A small pit stop on identifying people in a covenant. It seems a lost opportunity that people within a covenant would not want to work together, or identify other people in their covenant. Tabards at the minimum. Player power, not so much, cause that would sway guild/player choice. Yet there are certainly some opportunities here… like more Stygia if you group in the Maw. Even the Horde / Alliance differentiator is completely absent here.

The borrowed power though, that’s where things go a bit sideways. There are lateral choices for some classes, and outright bad choices for others. DH can swap between Kyrian and Venthyr, but Necrolords are an insanely bad choice. Icy-Veins has a pretty good summary of how people have selected their covenants. The “pretty” factions lead, which further pushes the Elf/Blood Elf value. Necrolords are 16% of the total, which given both their ability and unique activity… yeah.

What’s interesting to me is the breakdown on a class basis. For multi-spec classes, this can get a bit muddy as people have a preference. That Druids pick Night Fae first, in all specs, and like 9:1… that’s a problem. Same with Paladins and Monks for Kyrian. The “pure DPS” classes you’d expect somewhat flat choices, though it’s more like no one wants to be a Necrolord Mage.

Is it hard to balance skills across all the class/spec variations? Heck ya. Is it OK to have preferences, sure. Less OK is when one option is superior to all others. This falls back into the argument of paragon/renegade, where is everyone makes the same choice, there really isn’t a choice to be made. It’s also a challenge from a design perspective, as you can’t really change the powers too much, as people will then math it out and show that a new bad choice is present and want compensation to change. It’s a very interesting spot they’ve painted themselves into.

In a general sense, I think Convenants work. They provide thematic tools to expand on the player experience. Covenant abilities could have used more time in the oven, but the issue at hand is related to reducing the penalty from swapping between choices (which will get worse as more renown ranks are unlocked). Combat Tables should just be removed from the game at this point, right up there with Archeology.

Overall it sort of works. This is a bit like falling upwards from BfA though. They are better than garrisons in that they are not instanced, and don’t pump out insane raid level rewards. But they are worse in story telling as compared to class halls. When “it’s ok” is seen an improvement, expectations are out of whack.

Ring in the Year

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Clearly 2020 sucked. Some good bits in there, but overall still something I’m happy is in the rear-view mirror. 2021 at least has some measure of hope.

The year reinforced the idea that my kids have won the ovarian lottery. The only other possible advantage they could have had is being male (I write this conscious of its implications), and even then in my country the gap is a whole lot smaller than others. They have 2 well-to-do, bilingual, caring, educated parents, who have had no financial impacts from this pandemic. They were provided with equipment to continue learning at a distance. Full health care. If 2020 did something right, it was making me more aware of that situation and thankful for it.

2020 did bring us Hades, which is just a simple testament to all that is good in gaming. A developer that respects its clients, its staff, and has a clear vision in development. Ghost of Tsushima is in a similar boat, though a larger organization with a tad more resources. The less said about others, the better. Gaming was a major outlet for most of the global population, if sales are any indication.

WoW launched an expansion, which is an improvement on BfA. Admittedly, it would seem to be more effort to be worse than BfA, so that is a somewhat backhanded compliment. The game has certainly not solved the borrowed power problem, in fact it’s pretty much doubled down on it here. People are cool with it because the power is only in one direction, compared to BfA’s continual power loss. My single largest gripe here is the horrible travel mechanics. The removal of the Flight Master’s whistle is shades of dumb on par with the initial removal of flying. Bastion has next to no flight points, and Revendreth is a vertical nightmare. And the Maw is just… for a game pillar, it’s still suffering from broken hunts (which are how you improve movement).

Kids are still kicking it with Minecraft. To a rather crazy degree working together. They don’t do any chat-based online games, for sanity reasons mostly. So no Fortnite in this house, while Rocket League is a-ok.

The wife and I watched the 2 seasons of The Mandalorian over the holiday break. Having Dave Filoni involved is evident in the quality and consistency of the storylines. The rotating directors make for varied storytelling approaches as well. I won’t lie, I geeked out fierce in the Krait dragon battle. No deep spoilers here, but the ending of season 2 pretty much closed the loop on nearly every thread that mattered to me. I can see how it will be used as a launching pad for a half dozen other Star Wars stories.

Wonder Woman ’84 was also on deck as my wife is a major fan. I really liked the first one (minus the last battle), and this one is ok I guess. There’s a lot of logic leaps in to follow here, even for a superhero movie. And it’s hard to ignore the fact that Wonder Woman rapes a stranger, when the film goes to great efforts to paint the opposite picture for Cheetah. It looks cool, and it’s better than nearly every other DC movie out there.

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel that my hockey will start again in the fall. Most of the country should have their shots by then. I am missing it something fierce. The backyard rink is up and running, though the very mild weather is making is a tad tougher than normal to manage. Snowshoeing is likely the main activity for the foreseeable future.

Even the summer is looking somewhat promising. The cottage is great as a getaway, but even better when we’re able to share it with people. The whole remote work efforts are making me strongly consider getting high speed internet for a few months, which is going to be costly but likely practical. I could always get a cell boost up, which is going to be a similar cost but only 1 time.

2021 has some interesting games on line. Horizon 2, God of War 2, Monster Hunter Rise (where I will be super tempted to get a Switch), maybe a clean Baldur’s Gate 3, Deathloop, Gotham Knights, and a slew of more indies all look promising. And without hockey, my gaming budget is a LOT higher. If ever video cards start to actually be launched, maybe I’ll build a new rig. Upgrading bits is fine, but a full rig today makes little sense.

As for the blog, 2020 was one of my more active years. I needed it for a multitude of reasons, and don’t see that going away in 2021. I’ll add a bit more to my reading list, as there are some really neat voices out there that provide some great perspectives.

Next post will follow the annual predictions that most blogs put out. Take care and happy new year!

Cyberpunk Setting New Bars

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Most people are aware of the concept of precedence. Primarily used in legal settings, this allows you to compare two items that are similar and respond in a similar fashion. When the issue is brand new, then there’s a big argument around it, getting to a nation’s highest court. The ruling then sets precedence, allowing for future similar discussions to be solved much quicker. (The whole Trump voting thing lost because of precedence, and on rulings that a first day law student would know better than to try.)

The psychological impact of precedence is the real matter at hand. Individuals like surprises, people do not. Society is based on a set of rules and has trouble adapting when those rules are challenged or changed. Subverting expectation works in things like art, but rarely in other mediums. Uber decimated the taxi industry (and still doesn’t pay people enough, nor does the company actually make money). The pandemic has shown that society can manage work remotely – at least a LOT more than previously thought. That will cut the travel/hospitality industry to the knees, or any business dependent on “rush hour”. Change is by nature disruptive, but it also tends to set new expectation. And from that point on, precedence is set.

Precedence in gaming is a thing too. WoW is the bar by which nearly every MMO has been judged for 15 years! If your quests don’t have a ! around them, are they quests? If it doesn’t play like FIFA, is it really football/soccer? People don’t say “it’s a tactical game”, they say it plays like XCOM. There are so many games we’re forced to compare, and those comparisons have judgment.

All of that to Cyberpunk. Not the first company that’s an industry darling to make a mistake. It’s not the first game to have crazy hype. It is not the first game to promise so much more than it delivered. It is not the first game to subject its developers to insane crunch. It’s not the first game to launch to meet stockholder demands. And it’s not the first game to offer generous refunds.

You don’t have to look too far back here. Anthem was in this bucket. The good news for players was the EA pass structure, meaning most people were out like $20 instead of full retail. Diablo 3 offered refunds for everyone for a month after launch. Star Citizen still has not launched, and I’m astounded that it’s not the largest case of gaming fraud in history. Day 1 kitchen sink patches are expected now. There are plenty of discreet examples across time that show that this has happened before. Plenty of reasons that explain why pre-orders are bad for everyone.

What Cyberpunk has done instead is bring this all to 11.

  • CD Projekt was riding ultra high after a great track record – including the highly regarded Witcher 3.
  • It’s been hyped like mad for 8 years, and been taking pre-orders for nearly 3
  • It clearly launched in a overly buggy state, and is for practical purposes, not playable on last-gen consoles. This makes everyone look bad, including Sony/MS.
  • It promised, multiple times, to not have crunch. Then management demanded it for the last 6 months. They will, certainly, have a loss of talent because of this choice.
  • It’s launch was primarily a financial matter, so that they could claim the pre-order negative balance. It sold 8 million of them! WoW Shadowlands was the “highest ever” with 3.7m, a week before. Side note – it also has cost the company ~20% of total value due to stock depreciation (~$1.8b dollars), way more than the pre-orders generated.
  • The refunds are unheard of. You can’t even buy the game digitally right now for anything but PC. If you do have a copy, every single vendor is offering some form of refund. See prior line item to get an idea of the financial impacts of this.

Many games have launched in a state similar to this. Few have checked as many boxes as Cyberpunk, and checked them so forcefully. Some have come back from the dead (No Man’s Land), most have just cut their losses and moved on. This absolutely spectacular failure and set of consequences could have and should have been mitigated. Consumers are anti-ethical by nature, they could give 2 shits about crunch as long as the product has value (RDR2 in gaming, and the existence of WalMart in general). This was a cluster of mistakes that anyone with half a brain should have seen coming, and yet, here we are.

No, what Cyberpunk has actually done is a much larger problem. They’ve set a precedence for consequences of failure so absolute that the next person to fail even remotely close has to measure up to this response. How refunds are managed, and the decision to support or tank a game here on out for video game is the real target. This may not seem like a big deal to consumers, refunds are part of life right? Yeah, on the other side of the machine is a financial team that measures risk and liability. 80% of the people impacted by that decision have zero power to impact it. EA and Acti/Blizzard execs are sweating bullets thinking “this could be us!”

The optimist in me says this will mean games will have to launch with higher QA standards than what we’ve seen. That quality will not only be rewarded, but expected. The pessimist in me says that this will put an elite bar on games where anything that doesn’t score say an 80 on metacritic is a target for a massive refund drive from gamers, and that there really isn’t any way for suppliers to push back.

And to close here, I feel ultra bad for the CD Projekt development team. They knew this was going to happen (well, maybe not the refunds) and management did nothing. They did nothing multiple times! The company has lost billions of dollars from this. That usually comes with consequences, and these folks do not need that additional stress over the holidays. All because someone wanted to print a number on a quarterly review. Rather than a few execs taking a smaller bonus, they’ve now put the entire company under the lens.

Development Work

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A long while ago, I worked as a code monkey for a small company. Google searches indicate they are still operating, that’s oddly comforting. I’ve worked quite a few IT jobs in the past 20 odd years, and while the technology may have changed, the processes really haven’t all that much. SDLC is still the same idea, except now we call crunch things like “SCRUM” or “AGILE”. Back then, we just called it “get it done”. Everything was pretty fresh in the early ‘00s, and the pasty basement dwellers only needed a case of Coke to meet a deliverable.

Today’s world is different, it’s bigger for one. Coding is not a 1 person shop anymore, it’s dozens of people, if not hundreds. It’s commenting code, it‘s libraries, it’s devshops, it’s grey hacks, pen-tests, throttling, package controls and a dozen other things. Oh, and QA, the one thing we always never had time to do.

There’s a fair chunk of news about how companies treat their staff, and whether crunch comes with the game or not. Crunch exists for only one reason, bad management. Either they didn’t scope out the work properly, made assumptions with mitigations that weren’t accurate, or failed to manage the schedule and their bosses. I’ve been both impacted, and was the cause of crunch. It’s not that crunch “suddenly shows up”, it’s that priorities are not managed. You don’t realize with a month to go that you need yet another month, you defer making the decision until things are that red.

This topic is top of mind when comparing things like Cyberpunk 2077 and Hades, two games that were up for best game direction and somehow Cyberpunk 2077 won. I don’t begrudge CD Projekt delaying the game over so many years to deliver something, I think that’s the right approach. And that the developers share in overall profits is great. Added incentives against meta critic scores annoys me to no end (which are apparently ignored here, just given out). It’s the last 6 months of dev work, after 8 years of effort. It’s the last minute delays that no one is aware of until media lines are out. This isn’t some line worker, or supervisor. I doubt it’s even at the director level. This is top brass stuff finally making the right call, understanding that the years of effort making it are about to be undone with a buggy mess that will just mean more crunch to patch.

And let’s not forget what Rockstar went through to get RDR2 out the door. 80 hour work weeks are insane.

Then you look at Hades, where early access (beta) showed where they were going with no big expectations past that. Things came out when they were clean, and iteration was key. Staff has mandatory 20 days off a year, and then there’s a mental health check to manage workload. In short, the people matter more than the work, which obviously creates a better work environment, and therefore a better product.

Time Management

Who hasn’t tried to do something while completely exhausted? How often does that thing go the way you want it to? I’ve made TONS of mistakes while exhausted that took me longer to fix than if I had just come back to it later. Doing it once and a while, to get over some unexpected emergency (like helping someone manage their personal stuff), that is part of the job of being manager. Doing it consistently, over multiple weeks and months… you never get a chance to recover and will continue to make mistakes along the way.

Now, compound that over dozens of people, all working at much less than 100%, for long periods of time. Their heart is there (assuming they are compensated), but their brains aren’t.

Motivators

There are 2 big things that motivate people – money and pride. For most people, the money thing isn’t really motivating, because you’ll get paid on this game or the next. If you get a stock bonus, then you’ll get it eventually. Few people ever get a bonus for meeting a milestone, except executives. Few people ever get a bonus due to share performance, executives excepted as well. Now the reality is that cash flow is required to pay people to work on a game. No money in = no game development work done.

Pride though, that’s a big one. No one should be ok with delivering a stinker. They may feel powerless in that space (again, a failure of management) but they are not actively trying to make a bad experience. There’s not a chance any dev working on Anthem was looking at that product and going “yeah, that’s good”. But someone in that path decided it had to ship, no matter the state of affairs.

Money Matters

Tangent here for a sec. Codemasters is entertaining an offer from EA for 1.2 BILLION dollars. Take Two had offered just under 1 BILLION. Primarily for the Dirt and F1 franchises. That’s insane. Taking a step back, the EA bid is seen as defensive, since they already have a bunch of racing franchises – defensive meaning they will cut like crazy. Take Two would benefit from extra work, but no mistakes either, some serious cuts would follow. Any Codemaster employee that is not an executive (who is certainly going to gain from the stock purchase) is likely updating their resume right now. This is the business of entertainment.

Come Backs

There are only so many FF14, For Honor, and No Man’s Sky possible. Very, very rarely will you see something launch as a right mess and come back to some measure of success. Instead you’ll get lists like this one (I am still ticked that Infinite Crisis didn’t work). None of them died out of the gate, each one had a team working feverishly to do what should have happened before launch. Each one eventually came to the conclusion that the battle couldn’t be won – curious as to how many devs actually came to this conclusion before their bosses.

Solutions

Is there a single answer to all this? You’ll see “union” listed as top of pile, and certainly there’s some serious value here. Even just recognizing the “class of worker” would have huge impacts. Should games simply cost more? How does something like Hades or Into the Breach become profitable yet ME: Andromeda is a hot mess? Maybe the hype cycles need to be cut. Maybe the idea of meta critic bonuses have to be eliminated. Maybe the consumer needs to be educated and make smarter purchases? (If FIFA/NFL are any indication, I have a better chance of getting pregnant)

The real challenge here is that coders are often disposable. Entry level positions are everywhere, and an environmental artist graduates every 20 minutes. Someone coming into the market thinks it’s part of the deal to bleed themselves dry to get something out the door because they are competing against someone who will. It’s a right nightmare.

Talking about it is a major first step. Having a pile of good examples to share is another. Replacing the “old guard” is even more important, where people with different ideas come to lead. Understanding that our darling dev shops from yesterday are large conglomerates beholden to shareholders today is another. Buying stock of these companies and being part of the stakeholder process is another… they were a couple votes shy of cutting Bobby Kotick’s salary bonuses last time. Making personal purchase choices is always an option, but that lives in a grey zone that each person manages to their own delight.