Category Archives: Games

Leveling Speed

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What feels good for someone could feel off for another.  And in a game with multiple options, leveling between choices can vary wildly as well.

There’s really nothing that replaces the first time for pretty much anything in life.  It’s all shiny and new.  Games certainly have that in spades, where it may be mechanics that open up over time, or a story that just hits all the right notes.  Horizon: Zero Dawn was a damn feast in both those spaces, where more and more things just kept coming at you.  God of War’s story is just mind boggling the first time you run through it.  While both are made to play be played a main time, then perhaps a New Game+ (or much later), MMOs are instead meant to be replayed ad nauseum.  The leveling portion (getting another class/character to top level) is a part that just really struggles to come close to the first time.

Most MMO’s today suffer from this fatigue, not so much because the of the repetitive nature of the game, but because the games themselves are so old and that the leveling portion itself is a fraction of the totality of the game.  Since I’m leveling alts in WoW, I’ll pick on that for now.

There are few milestones in the leveling portion

  • 1 to 20 – starting experience
  • 21 to 60 – core skills (~24 hours from 1 to 60)
  • 61 to 80 – Frozen Throne + flying! (15 hours)
  • 81 to 90 – Pandaria (4 hours)
  • 91 to 100 – Warlords (4 hours)
  • 101 to 110 – Legion (4 hours)
  • 111 to 120 – BfA (12 hours)

Character progression-wise, 1 to 60 is where the real meat is.  You get pretty much the entire toolset by 30, and flying at 60, so the rest is all filler.  I still like to think that each milestone should be of similar duration, simply because the expansion mechanics do some somersaults.  I mean, you KNOW you’re in WoD because of the unskippable intro quest.  All told, it’s about 50 hours to get to 110.

Assuming you have heirlooms, war mode, and flying unlocked for every zone.

81 to 110 is all done within a similar timeframe – but only if you’ve unlocked flying everywhere – takes maybe 2 hours to get through each phase.  The 61 to 80 portion feels like it takes longer than the 21-60 part, but that’s not at all true.  Catalcysm was just after WotLK and we were still in the hub/fetch quest model.  There’s an insane amount of backtracking that is jut completely ignored once you can fly – and if you have any plans of visiting that content at all, it’s worth every second to unlock flying (remember to use a Human for any rep-based gains).

Now, the differences between classes is absurd.  A Hunter with War Mode skills (2 massive DPS boosts on relatively short cooldowns) can take out absolutely anything – even the 3+ targets in BfA.  It’s right on the edge of being a complete joke.  The other side of that spectrum is something like the Shaman, where even a single regular target can kill you.  I get the concept that each class has strengths and weaknesses, and for the most part they sort of all fit into this middle pack.  And because the class kits are determined way back at the start of the journey, the rest of the ride can be quite painful.

Now, the fundamental question here is Does It Matter?  In the context of leveling alts, not at all.  It’s just a repeat of what came before (minus the Legion Class Hall stuff, which can be awesome).  It’s a speedbum.  Where it does matter is in the goal of bringing in new main characters (either new players, or existing players changing classes).  The player’s enjoyment of the toolkit + leveling experience has a pretty big impact on the viability of that class long term.

If you have a chance, play a DH for an hour or so.  Then play any other class in the leveling process.  Or a WW Monk vs. a Rogue (or cat druid).  Some classes/specs have such a dynamic toolkit that moves beyond 2-3 keys, and their abilities just look damn cool.  Hate on Pally if you want, but there’s no denying that it looks like a Paladin should look.

Long post to short point.  I dont for a second imagine that Blizz has the resources necessary to re-jig the leveling experience or class kits.  I am hopeful that they address the time-to-level portion so that people can get to relevant content and current mechanics sooner.  Right now, Shadowlands seems to clock in at 1-50 taking ~20 hours – I still think that’s twice as long as needed.  It would be amazing if they somehow made the older content relevant again… but in nearly every respect that matters, that ship left port years and years ago.

 

 

Throttling the Market

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WoW had a stealth fix applied that impacts people who play the Auction House, effectively throttling the number of transactions after a certain limit is reached.  High level

With this hotfix, we’ve implemented a new system that effectively gives each player a “budget” of AH actions per minute, and only kicks in once that budget has been exceeded. The system is tuned so that is should never affect players using the AH typically: buying consumables, listing gathered or crafted goods for sale, searching for specific items you want to purchase, etc. It should be essentially impossible to encounter the new limits for most players.

The first question I have is why?  I can only assume this is a throughput/TX issue where the servers were taking a major load and impacting other parts of the game.  It’s entirely possible that a very small fraction of players are causing a majority of the game load.  This is sort of like how time dilation works in EvE, where there isn’t a hard cap, simply a soft one that allows things to move at a snail’s pace.  Degraded service, rather than failed service.

Balance-wise, I am more curious as to where this threshold exists.  Long gone are the days where people posted single items rather than stacks, clogging up the AH space.  It was why I stopped playin a Hunter – getting ammo was stupid complicated.  Getting rid of thousands of individual posting isn’t a problem that needs solving anymore.

A long time ago I used to play the AH, maybe 30 minutes a day or so.  Made enough money to get a dozen+ WoW tokens.  I can’t see how anyone would have the Brontosaurus mount who wasn’t using something like TSM to make money.  It’s entirely the purpose of that mount after all.  Entirely normal to run a few hundred changes in a few minutes – cancelling auctions and reposting at a different price.  Filling up in materials.

The sidenote here would be snipe scans.  That takes a look across the entire AH for things that are well below market value.  It’s nearly impossible to find these manually.  Someone continually polling the entire AH would be a massive drain on server.

Should be interesting to see how this plays out in the long term market value.  It’s certainly a number Blizz can change over time, and I’m sure they are seeing server TX volumes take a massive nosedive.  Even more curious if this is account-wide, or character specific.  If there’s a hard drop (e.g. cap goes away after an hour) or if it’s a variable rate limit.

There’s a real world analogy here, where the majority of stock market transactions are high volume automated systems, making pennies a trade, but having millions of transactions a day.  It would be something to see what TX throttling would have as an impact to the market volatility.  Course that won’t ever happen, for reasons that are clearly obvious that the people making the most money in this behavior are also the ones who make the rules…

WoW Expansion Content

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Going through the leveling process a few times now on alts is certainly putting the various expansions basic content in focus.  Where it doesn’t do a great job is at the max level content, since it’s not really relevant today.

Leveling content, for a dozen reasons, is not a focus.  That there’s any quality at all is impressive given that 99% of the content is seen once per leveling stream.  The older hub/spoke model has turned into a storyline 3-5 quest node system instead.  You discover a zone, get some basic Qs, then branch out.  When you don’t spend half your time travelling.  The content from Legion is pretty much the same in BfA, even in terms of how much of that content is expected to be completed.

As the clock is turned back, WoD really was the kickstart for this model.  The hubs were larger/denser, but the bits were there.  Area bonus quests, hidden chests, rares, quest chains that culminate in a big showdown.  Pandaria had big hubs, but also a kick at a better integrated storyline to explore the world.  Cataclysm, WotLK, TBC are just… well they are just not good.  You pick up 5-10 quests, head out around the map, then come back for another wave of quests.

Now, once you’re at max level, things start opening up.  Dailies have been around for a very long time, but really took off in WotLK.  Pandaria brought in rep/rewards to a larger level.  WoD had the Apexis stuff, with rotations.  Legion brought World Quests and BfA just cut & pasted it forward.

Dungeons have been all over the map.  They were only ever relevant up to WotLK.  Pandaria had some at launch, but never tweaked them past that.  WoD’s were completely ignored as garrison rewards were better.  Legion tied a bunch of quests to them, and implemented Mythic mode for better rewards.  BfA has next to no reason to do normal/heroic dungeons – everything is mythic.

The system around Mythics is essentially a 5 person raid. It’s honestly a good system, allowing for difficult content in smaller chunks.  Long gone are the days of 40 person raids.  Now we have mythic raids and flex raiding.  These two systems really do focus on the core gameplay loop for WoW in the past few expansions – competitive PvE.  It builds a tiered community, and one that is always circling the drain.  Some bad flashbacks on the whole TBC keying mess.  If the carrot is a stat stick with slightly better stats, then eventually that horse stops running.  Those types of horses aren’t exactly common, so you end up with poaching/mergers of groups and the conflict that follows.  It’s not a sustainable model.

Tangent

I’ve gone back with my mage to get their class mount in Legion.  The class hall has no comparison in any other expansion.  The quest line, the exploration, the quests the characters… all of it.  The downside here is that characters only get to see it once, and it’s gated with table quests.  But it’s there!  Suramar as a zone had a pile going for it… and the daily zombie quest is much better than the Horrific Visions grind.  The Mage Tower was neat as it wasn’t power bases, but cosmetics.  There was depth and breadth in pretty much all the content.  The major gaps were around the proliferation of RNG.

On Track

The kicker for me is what is deemed worthy of “making the cut” from one expansion to another.  Some bits are so well used they can’t really be removed once added.  LFG is one.  LFR is another, stemming entirely from atrocious raid completion numbers in Cataclysm.  Transmogs aren’t going anywhere, and Pet Battles are a system that is screaming for the spotlight.  Mythics are now the content du-jour.

The concepts of invasions started in MoP, but really took hold in Legion.  The 8.3 version works for the most part (minus the bug variant in Uldum).  It’s somethign to do, every other day or so.  And provides another catch up mechanic.

But there remains a larger gap in the middle tier, the training wheels if you will to the Mythic world.  I’m calling back to the badge model of WotLK here, one where FF14 has done a tremendously solid job of making basic group content relevant.  Daily badge limits, and buy-ins to +10ivl upgrades is a start.  Piles of cosmetics.  Have pets drop.  Have mounts as a random reward for filling a specific role.  Make it a horizontal progress system.  I don’t see Blizz having the willpower to implement something like this.  I mean, technically it’s only a tweak to the timewalking system.  Pretty sure there are over 100 different dungeons WoW could re-use.

You’ll notice I haven’t even touched on professions.  The less said about them the better.  I am surprised that the fishing/cooking combo is still as valid today as it was in WotLK.

It will be interesting to look at BfA a month after Shadowlands has launched.  The paint is still relatively fresh on 8.3, and it’s already a massive improvement on 8.0/8.1. Yet, taking some time to take a solid detour in the Legion content really puts the variety and quality of content to the forefront.  Would be super cool to have a solid experience again.

 

 

RNG Sprinkles

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Part of the process of leveling of an alt (Void Elf Priest), I’m getting a clear reminder on multiple aspects of the dev thinking process over the years.  Quest design from Cataclysm in particular is a level of gameplay that really takes me for a loop.  MMO dev has come a long way.

The pace of leveling (or really, futility of it in WoW) is another post.  This one is about character design.

Quite a few class/spec combos really devolve into 3 main buttons, which are cooldown/resource related.  Talents then add a proc mechanic.  If you’re lucky, you’ll get another long cooldown button to press.  So what you see at level 20 is pretty darn close to the rotation you see until you ding 120.  I won’t get too much into the balancing challenges posed by talents, just enoguh to say that there are ones that are clearly better than others with only a small amount that aren’t viable.

The ability “un-pruning” for Shadowlands may address this, but effectively requires some redesign work for each class/spec.  That’s a ton of work.

But THIS post is about the RNG of character development – specifically Azerite and Corruption, as each are item-specific.  I’ve yet to find a spec that didn’t have a clear winner in the Azerite trait category.  There’s been a lot of tweaking since launch, but you’re not going to find a Frost Mage that isn’t stacking 3x Flash Freeze (2 stacks give more than 3 stacks of anything else).  The was a main pain point I had with the original system, where you would have a great trait, then get a clear ilvl upgrade but without the trait and just ignore that new piece.  The end result is a best-in-slot list that has massive variations, and you’re looking for 1 drop from 1 boss that is not so much optimal as super-powered.  Some Azerite traits will change player rotations, making some more suddenly more viable to use.

Corruption is the inversion of Azerite traits.  Instead of have the points on hand, you’re working on credit.  Your corruption “debt” has penalties to playstyle, but provides an insane boost.  Infinite Stars & Twilight Devastation are like a nuke on a fly.  They can account for 50% of a player’s DPS.  There are other traits that have benefits (Masterful for Frost Mages is quite impressive), but that requires a level of math that isn’t obvious without sims.  You put IS on any player, and they will immediately see the difference.  Doesn’t change the playstyle, you just have a massive passive source of DPS.

Oh, and Corruption is applied through RNG on drops, or RNG through a vendor with grindable currency requirements.  There’s no way to target a trait, other than grind currency and hope the vendor eventually has it in stock.  I’m cool with the RNG part, I am less so with the crazy passive power gains.  If you thought Titanforging was bad, then this would make you go up the wall.

The design choices here are quite odd.  The “plan” was to have scaling difficulty and less of a gap between a fresh 120 and a max 120.  That really didn’t work at launch of BfA, and Corruption traits seem to be the answer to it.  There are certainly catch up mechanics to get over that hump, give everyone a passive DPS boost, and sort of sweep 8.0/8.1 under the rug like it didn’t happen.  Azerite traits could use a bit of balancing, but the method of acquisition is straightforward enough.  Corruption as a concept is actually really cool, and parts of the implementation are a nice twist – the debt aspect in particular.  It’s the sum of the parts that I find irritating.  May just be time to accept the fact that stat squishes are going to be part of each expansion, as the power curve inside each is now at the exponential level.

 

 

 

 

WoW: War Mode

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In the previous post I mentioned that War Mode had great benefits for leveling – in particular in the portions that are pre-Legion.  The BfA content with War Mode puts you in the same zones as fully geared 120 players – you’re going to die a few times.  Still worth it if the bonus is 20%+.

War Mode as a concept is neat.  Add some extra risk for some extra rewards.  Where things gets messed up is in the actual risks and rewards.  So let’s start this backwards.

The rewards themselves scale from 10% to 30%, depending on faction balances.  At low amounts, the rewards aren’t exactly stellar.  1 death per hour is enough to offset a 10% gain to experience.  But let’s say you’re 120.  The rewards are limited to gold, war resources, and azerite power.  War Resources have been meaningless since 8.1.  Azerite Power has marginal use today.  Gold is always useful.

The risks are more complex.  You are sharing space with the other faction, and therefore you can be killed by the other faction.  You only share space with people who also have War Mode on, and if your % is high (20%+) then odds are there are MORE of the other faction than yours.  So yeah, the chance of dying is higher but in practical respects, most other levelers have no interest in attacking you.  People at 120 do, which makes leveling in BfA zones riskier.  The way WoW is built, most classes offer AE attacks as an effective way of dealing with content.  AE often triggers a PvP battle if you’re next to someone.  So you are going to be less effective if you avoid AE attacks.

Since the rewards are related to completing activities, you want to complete those activities safely and quickly.  Is it better to get 10% more gold completing a quest alone, with threat of PvP, or to complete a quest with 5 other people, no chance of death, and 5x as fast?  Any elite WQ is effectively impossible if there’s no one around to help.  So in this respect, it isn’t really a risk, it’s an active hurdle.  At max level, if you are not in a critical mass of other players, then there’s no point to War Mode.

Does it matter?

Really, does it?  Is WoW a PvP game?  Taking  BfA’s (poorly received) storyline out for a minute, when’s the last time we saw PvP as any sort of driver for content?  Even WoD had both factions working together, so you need to go back to Pandaria (early parts) – 8 years ago.

On even footing (like a BG), the Horde has a marginal advantage to the Alliance due to some racial skills.  That inherent advantage has attracted min-maxers where every advantage counts.  That adds yet another advantage to PvP for Horde players.  There are only two ways to offset that advantage – more “good” Alliance players, or more “power” for Alliance players.

War Mode tries to get there with incentivizing playing Alliance.  But the rewards are so miniscule that they cannot be seen at all as any advantage to pull someone AWAY from playing Horde.  Even if you were to swap all racials between factions, the playerbase is stronger on Horde and enough to offset the racial imbalance.  Not to mention the $$$ impacts of a faction change.  There’s only a small percentage of players who would pay to swap for a 1% gain to power.  There’s an astronomically larger percentage that goes “I’ve got friends and dozens of hours invested in this character, I’m good.”.

Way Forward

War Mode for leveling has next to no risk, it’s all reward.  Shadowlands is re-writing the leveling experience anyhow.  Unless the incentives are massively swapped (e.g. a % boost to primary stats in non-instanced content), there’s really no purpose to it for max level characters.

A good experiment, in the social carrot aspect is much larger than Blizzard had assumed.  But unlikely to matter in the long run.  Better off putting money in breaking the faction divide and getting people playing together.

WoW Alts

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When BfA launched my first 120 was my Monk.  Seems to have been the case since Pandaria, for reasons I’ve gone into a bunch of times.  My 2nd was a Horde Demon Hunter, on another server due to the DH restrictions.  I wanted to see the Horde storyline and DH is a ridiculously efficient leveling class.  When both hit 120, there was a major gearing wall, and the azurite system made by blood boil.  I dropped out until a few weeks ago.

I figured with double faction and xp, it was an ok time to use my pile of WoW tokens.  When I started, the roster looked like this:

110: Hunter, Rogue, Death Knight, Demon Hunter, Paladin, Druid

100: Shaman

80: Mage, Warlock

Warrior and Priest as bank alts.

Before I get into the details, there’s a question of why?  Alts are easier to play in BfA than Legion (by FAR!), and allow running older raids for pets/drops with less waiting for lockouts.  Also lets you see if you want to run another class as a main / fun factor.  It is in no way practical to run multiple max level characters.

Goals

First up was unlocking flying.  That took just over 3 days, as I had already unlocked Pathfinder 1 way back at launch.  Mechagon was the holdout faction, even with a contract that added +10 per world quest.  The bugger here is that Mechagon doesn’t have world quests, only dailies.

While I was unlocking that portion, I was testing the waters with the 8.2/8.3 content.  The Heart of Azeroth boost in Naz is quick enough, and you unlock a huge power increase.  That’s enough to survive the invasions that 8.3 brought, though you need an ilvl close to 420 to do the horrific visions for the cloak upgrade.  The side areas can’t really be done by anything but a tank and low ilvls.

I was keeping mental notes of what happened when.

The Alt Plans

Heirloom gear to 120 (head, shoulder, chest, legs, cloak) gives +45%xp.  The generic 100% boost helps.  The choice was with or without war mode.  I wanted to try without to see what happened.

Gearing would be weird bit, since scaling in BfA is all over the place.  I know that starting BfA gives you a weapon, and that there’s 1 quest per zone that gives you another.  Starting Nazjatar gives you a i370 weapon, and there are really high odds you get enough mana pearls to get 4 benthic (i385) armor pieces.  Get that sorted out, then WQ to fill in the ring/trinkets, and then armor again.  Mechagon is effectively useless for this.  That’s enough to start an invasion from 8.3.

The Execution

The Rogue was the next up to 120.  Stormsong Valley + another dozen or so quests in Drustvar (unlocking the first village).  That was pretty quick, a single death, but felt like I was hitting with a wet sponge compared to my Monk.  Gearing went relatively smoothly, focusing on upgrading the worst pieces first.  The cloak quest was painful to get through.

Next is the DH to 120.  Drustvar + up to the boat crash section in Tirigarde.  While it took more quests, the Drustvar experience was much faster than Stormsong due to the quest design.  Stormsong has at least 4 quest hubs that are just a massive pain to get through due to mob density.  If people aren’t leveling, then it’s just not fun.

Finally, I brought my mage up with War Mode enabled.  I’ll talk about that mode in a bit, but the experience gains were massive.  Drustvar alone was enough to hit 120, and that’s without any rested XP.  However, the mage died a LOT.  A bit from ganking, but way more due to power balancing.  They have no real armor, making them ultra dependent on damage output.  I leveled Frost, which is super proc dependent, which is greatly impacted by Mastery.  Crappy gear = low weapon power + low mastery. = low damage.

War Mode

This is a really, really weird system.  +25% experience and +25% rewards (gold while leveling).  Since every single zone up until Legion is designed to be faction specific quest lines, you rarely ever see anyone from the other faction.  When you do, it’s clear you’re both leveling. The gains are significant XP-wise, but 25% more gold on a 3g reward is meaningless.

Legion has some rough spots, as you can’t really use AE or trigger a massive fight.  If I did, it was often just easier to stand there and die than waste time fighting back.  The optional “clear this area” quests were skipped for that reason.  It was pretty quick, though I have to say the Artifact Weapon stuff is a bummer without the special skills.  Since Legion doesn’t give any weapon rewards, getting the artifact at 100 is the only thing you’ll see for 10 levels.

War Mode in BfA.  80% of Drustvar is cool.  The last 20% in the haunted village is less so.  I got ganked, and then corpse hunted for 10 minutes.  Being level 5 or 119, you are going to get stomped by any geared 120.  The flipside is that the XP gains are solid (saved ~1hr or so), and the BfA gold rewards are significant.  Was around 10k total by the time I hit 120.  That said, the second I hit 120 I turned off War Mode.

Why?  Cause 95% of world content is better in a group, and that means AE.  AE + War Mode = massive battles.  Useless battles.  I would much rather complete a WQ / event 5x faster than get 25% more gold.  More in another post.

Lessons Learned

There are many, many tools to help level up faster.  Only a few are really worth it.  Doing dungeon runs in LFG can be substituted.

  • Heirlooms armor – getting +45% xp is easy enough (head/chest/shoulder/back).  I suggest only having 1 cloak for all alts, rather than 3 of the (int/str/agi) if money is a thing.  A single piece costs 500+1000+2000+5000 = 8,500 gold.  Armor type matters (e.g. cloth for casters)
  • Heirloom weapons – from 1-100 this is very useful and relatively cheap.  At 100 you get an artifact weapon, and BfA is over quick enough.  1-100 costs 2,250 for a single weapon.  Getting it to BfA quality adds 10,500 to the cost.  The stats on the thing make a difference too.  Hunters are the worst here, since they are the only gun users.
    • Flying.  Sweet baby jeebers, make sure this is unlocked before leveling in a zone and that you buy the associated skills (Master is optional)
  • Zones: 1-60 any Vanilla zone is fine.  60-80 you want to do Borean Tundra (this is the slowest portion).  80-90 is Jade Forest.  90-100 is the starting WoD zone of your faction.  100-110 is Azshara.  110-120 is Drustvar / Vol’dun.  You’re only going to see 1 zone per level range.
  • Bags:  Get 20 slot bags.  You’re going to fill up like crazy.
  • War Mode: Turn it on.
  • Professions:  Mining and herbalism gives great xp.
  • Treasures / Rare mobs:  Treasure chests are worth collecting for xp.  Rare mobs should generally be avoided.
  • Gold: At best you’re going to make 15,000g from 1-120 doing quests and selling loot, and nearly all of it coming from BfA content.  Flying (280%) will cost you ~5,000g.

Heirloom Table

To give you an idea of where you can re-use Heirloom gear, as a full set of armor + weapons for 1-120 = 55,250g.  Druid as a Cat saves money.  Shaman as Enhancement as well.

STAT TYPE WEAPON
WAR STR PLATE 2HDN/1HND
DK STR PLATE 2HDN/1HND
PAL STR PLATE 2HDN/1HND
MNK AGI LEATHER 2HND/1HND
ROG AGI LEATHER 1HND
DRU AGI/INT LEATHER 2HND/1HND
DH AGI LEATHER 1HND
HUN AGI MAIL RANGED
SHM AGI/INT MAIL 2HDN/1HND
WLK INT CLOTH STAFF/1HDN+OFF
PRI INT CLOTH STAFF/1HDN+OFF
MAG INT CLOTH STAFF/1HDN+OFF

The Hunt for Fun

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At some point, the RPG went from ROLE playing to NUMBER playing.  Sure, the P&P games always had numbers (THAC0 was my bane), but they were more indicators than absolutes (the quad power gain of wizards is a thing long gone).  The dice had a major impact, and with a solid DM, you could act your way through a ton of content.  When’s the last time you saw a Bard trick a dragon to killing their mate because they thought there were planning to usurp them?  That sort of insanity is only found on paper.

There was a point of yore where even video games focused on the classes rather than the numbers.  They were simpler times, where zerg-rushes and tank/spank was the norm for challenging combat.  No we’ve moved into roles, where pretty much any class in a given role can fulfill that role to the 98th percentile.  Unless you’re aiming for a world first, you’d be hard pressed to only accept a priest instead of a pally to heal.  On one hand, this has provided a larger breadth of viable choice to the players, in that it’s practically impossible to make game breaking decisions.  On the other, this has homogenized the content where the player really isn’t relevant.  In WoW, the Proving Ground NPCs are pretty much as effective as any LFG group.

So if the choice is not the class utility, it becomes the class fun/constraint as the driver.  Mat Rossi (BlizzWatch) is a super example, where he only plays Warriors – always has, always will.  Not because of game utility, but because of his enjoyment of the class.  The “fun” aspect is the skill kit – what the class can do, and how it makes you feel.  In WoW, I have to say I absolutely love the Demon Hunter toolkit.  Double jump, eye beam, and metamorphis are used often enough to pack a visual punch.  I can only play a Panda as a Monk ’cause my brain can’t make that race be anything else, or that class be any other race.

Other classes, they have some interesting bits.  I love the concept of a Rogue, always have.  The implementation in WoW isn’t fun to me anymore.  Paladins feel like holy crusaders.  Hunters have the whole pet collection bit that is borderline obsessive (pet battles scratch that itch too).  The Druid utility kit is admirable, but the bear/cat rotation is just boredom.  Monks have a great toolkit and have that old martial arts movie feel to them (as long as you play a Panda).  I can’t seem to find fun in Warriors, Mages, or Priests.  Mechanically they are sound, but they feel like the archetype.  I mean, imagine if Mages had an avatar form, where they because the focus of their given element!  Or Warriors had a bladespin move that sucked opponents towards them.  Or if Priests called down a Valkyr (I know) for a major group heal.

Looking back, this is one of the best parts of Legion.  There are classes I played solely for the class halls (Shaman) and their story.  As much as it was largely about following Illidan about, I still felt like my character mattered and the smaller story did too.  Aside from hunting Sylvanas and then Azshara/N’Zoth, can someone tell, me what the character did in BfA?  If you didn’t raid, then there’s no actual character beats.

I’m picking on WoW here because it’s low hanging fruit.  What I find fun, others don’t, and vice versa.  WoW is a buffet of choice.  Buffets aren’t known for amazing cuisine, but they are known for pleasing a very large crowd.  If I look to something like Monster Hunter, the weapon choice is the most important factor.  I love Charge Blade.  Love it to death.  The bow guns are amazing for their utility, but nothing beats a SAED to the head of a massive dragon.  That the game tries to make all weapon choices viable – without forcing you to master everything, is a great achievement (and my largest gripe with Dauntless).

Now, I may optimize my character to be best at what they do, but my choice of that particular class is still based entirely on if it’s fun. And we can all use some fun in our lives.  Now if there was ever a fishing class… oh man.

Putting the RPG in MMORPG

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There’s been a homogenization of MMOs in the last 10 years, where there really isn’t a whole lot to distinguish one game from the other.  In continuum of RPG features, older games were more in the RPG space, with playing a specific role, choices made, and impacts that were felt over time.  Something like an FPS had little RPG to it, so that the start of a game resembled the end of a game (think Halo).

Time goes on and both of those have started to meet in center.  Nearly every game released today has a stats mechanic, often employed as a carrot for retention (bigger stats).  Fornite and League of Legends may have everyone start on “even” footing, by the end of the game there are large power spikes from the RPG mechanic.  Not to dismiss that an “underpowered” player can’t use skill to overcome, but the disadvantage is there.

MMORPGs on the other hand are moving into a more digestible experience, where the gap between a long term player (investment) isn’t so far away that no new players can come into the game.  Say what you will about WoW’s model, but it is much more willing to let new blood in as compared to EvE’s skill point system.  But is the WoW model where a new player can level to max in about a weekend’s effort the right path?  Or where a new 120 can hit near raid level stats in a couple days?

I’m going to posit that it doesn’t matter primarily because the world of RPGs has so many options today.  20 years ago the people using MMOs were the typical geeks (self-included), so the RPG aspect was attractive.  UO hit that button something fierce.  EQ was a glorified chat bot that tested those social structures that made geekdom work.  WoW’s greatest achievement isn’t the size of the playerbase, its that it normalized the playerbase in the eyes of society.  My kids will never know a world where video games were derided, where geek is something that’s ostracised.  The conversation has moved to from “you play games?” to “you play that game?”  I’ll take that shift as a positive one.

Within a game you’re always going to have exclusionary activities.  There’s not a developer on the planet that isn’t running some sort of heatmap of players vs. engagement.  I am not some ultra wise guru that can divine the inner workings of games or gamers.  So if a situation seems ultra obvious to me now, it most certainly was obvious to the developers beforehand.  NGE in SWG was immediately clear.  The Trammel split is not what killed UO, it was how long it took to be implemented vs. the launch of EQ.   Atlantis in DAoC.  EQ2’s grind vs. WoW’s open beta must have made people sweat bullets.  Someone, somewhere, greenlight FF14 v1.0 as being acceptable.

The decisions are not bad except when measured to the stated goals.  You want to increase the player base, you need to make it more accessible, not less.  You want to respect the existing player base, you don’t wipe all their progress and have them start as fresh as a green leaf.  You want to provide a perception of value, you make sure that the rewards are measurable and trend forward (*cough*azerite*cough*).  You want to provide an element of choice, you need to make sure that there are multiple relative options to choose from.  All of this is simple when written down.  All of it is a nightmare to code and balance.  But at the end of the day, that’s what gamers are paying for, and the insane amount of player choice today means that if devs don’t do this, then players will just move on.  There is no single horse in town anymore.

The Golden Age

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The first Age is always the Golden one. Where things are new. Where the impossible seems possible. Where mistakes are made and accepted as part of growth. Where hindsight after many years makes you really question the sanity of that time as the time context is gone.

 

Bhagpuss has a summary series on EQ through the ages. It starts, as they all start, with a Golden Age, a pinnacle, a decline, a resurgence and then… meh. It’s always meh for the current age.

 

You can apply the model to pretty much anything. Sci-fi. Cinema. Music. Food. And when you apply today’s paradigms, you can pull out all sorts of nonsensical items. Fahrenheit 451 has nothing to do with books – it’s a social commentary on technology making people into zombies. But since we’re all zombies beholden to technology, we don’t get that.

 

UO, EQ, WoW at launch were a gift from the higher heavens. Each of them was pure and focused and perfect. Time made them less so. Design decisions brought them to earth. The magic was lost. They are broken today. Hyperbole clearly, yet people still want to defend the idea because they find solace in it.

 

We were all 15-20 years younger. All our lives were simpler. We all had more time. It was new and different. It had other people! People like us! It was a level of social acceptance that really didn’t exist elsewhere. It was geeky before geeky was sexy. It provided shelter to people with different social skills and holy crap did that resonate.

 

Mechanically the games were ok. They were best guesses. UO was a skinner box, where PvP greifing was discovered (and exploited). EQ in particular was a glorified chat tool with the insane downtime in the game. WoW made the meta (resistances and raid checks) more challenging than the gameplay. Without each of those steps, the market would not be what it is today. And in the aggregate, there is no way that geek would be cool without them. Each built on the success of others and pervaded our larger social fabrics. Not everyone knows EQ, but everyone knows WoW – gamer or not.

 

The Silver Age is what follows the Gold. It is a time of trials and tribulations. Of experimentation to see what sticks and what doesn’t. It’s an age of refinement, not of creativity. What down the road will often be seen as catastrophic failures, but those are needed in order to stage a rebirth. And everyone loves a rebirth story. 

We’re in a time where ages are measured in shorter and shorter spans.  The Dark Ages lasted 1000 years!  Renaissance was 300.  Golden Age of sci-fi was less than 10.  Gold + Silver + everything else is just a tad over 20 for MMOs.  2 years for Gold EQ (which I’ll let others debate).

Time is a fickle thing.  Einstein had it right, our concepts change depending on the context.  A game is perfect when it fits your needs perfectly, and is horrible when it doesn’t.  That’s not the game, that’s you.  Viewing it through the Age lens, is just applying the larger social needs vs the game.  UO thought non-stop PvP was what people wanted, it wasn’t.  SWG thought people wanted a combat revamp – woo did they not.  EQ thought doubling down on challenge would keep people around – nope.  Blizz thought people wanted to play Cataclysm and hit walls of difficulty, people didn’t.  There isn’t a single dev that had instructions to follow.  They did what they thought was best… and here we are looking back with so much hindsight it’s like judging a baby that can’t do a backflip.

Games have grown.  We have grown.  It’s a veritable buffet of choice today.  I’m certainly appreciative of it.  Thankful for the people that came before to lay the foundation.  Time to enjoy today.

The Joys of Fishin’

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I should build a category for this topic. I keep coming back to it.

I love to fish. I’ve found that most people who love to fish love it for the same reason, and it’s a reason that’s hard to properly explain. Getting fish into the boat is the perk. The act of fishing is the reward.

I’ve been somewhat fascinated by fishing in video games. I mean the real act of fishing, not the Bass Tourney type games. Where fishing is a side thought, a pastime that takes a 180 from the rest of the content.

Ultima Online’s fishing was like this. For the longest time it provided no benefit – just more fish. Boats were used as a method of transport – and once you had runes, then there wasn’t a whole lot of point to boats. Eventually they revamped fishing to be its own world. You’d fish up messages in a bottle, go out to sea to fight serpents and collect maps, then dig up treasure on islands. At the time, I had done most everything the game offered and this was an awesome combination of the best parts. I had 2 character builds that I built up and kept selling those accounts to fund real life things (FWIW, they went for $600USD then or ~$900USD today).

Fishing in MMOs since then has been relatively simple. Rift is the gold standard in terms of it as activity. You only need a pole, but can craft lures to get better, and it’s not a 1-2 click event. Rewards are achievements mostly, with some pets included. FF14 is close, but the leveling system makes it less fun. Its a profession versus a pastime.

WoW takes a weird approach. Pat Nagle is the most famous NPC who has never thrown a punch. For 15 years he’s sent anglers to their death chasing the weirdest of quests. There have been raid bosses that needed fishing. The common part between expansions is that fishing is a core requirement for the best food buffs. So there’s some reward to being a fisher, rather than anything else. But the fishing meta usually involves some super convoluted plot to have you explore the world and get some super rare set of fish and unlock a neat gimmick.

  • Vanilla: Stranglethorn fishing tourney, time-based and you needed to get a special fish first to win.
  • TBC: Daily fishing quests for pets!
  • WotLK: Daily quests, the fountain coins, and a new fishing tournament
  • Cataclysm: Daily quests like TBC.
  • Pandaria: The anglers faction node – with the ultimate reward of a Water Strider (and the Raft).
  • WoD: More daily quests for rare fish, with cosmetic rewards. There’s a water strider here too, but it’s much harder to get than the Pandaria version. Pat Nagle lives in your garrison though, so that’s neat.
  • Legion: A fishing pole artefact that requires fishing ultra rare fish. Can breathe underwater, walk on water, teleport to nodes and avoid combat.
  • BfA: A simple start of catching all fish types in Mechagon, which goes to 11 quickly with special goggles that cause fish bubbles to spawn. Clicking the bubbles in certain zones / time of day / being dead catches different fish. Reward is a personal ocean to fish from.

I’ve never won a fishing tournament. The timing just doesn’t work for me, and the only time I did well (3rd place) I didn’t even realize it was going down. Aside from that, I’ve completed 90% of the fishing activities per expansion. The Angler faction was amazing. The Legion fishing quests were a ton of fun, and the pole artefact is still amazing. BfA feels more like finding a secret to get the ultra rare drops figured out, more tedious than actual fishing (since I need to move to collect bubbles).

It’s still impressive that I keep falling back into the fishing mode. After all these years and all these games. If it has fishing, it automatically gets a play. Now give me my Weather Beaten Hat and give me a cold one.