Category Archives: WoW

HardCORE

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Exodus (some might know them as vodka), a large 25 man raiding guild in WoW, is calling it quits.  They were an ultra competitive group and the post summing up their exit is very interesting.  I’ll summarize the quote (bold for emphasis):

In the last few years this game (despite many people quitting and guilds dying) isn’t to blame for vodka/Exodus’ demise it’s the raiding community. You see… we’ve basically been killing ourselves off slowly since day 1. … the time commitment and the level of shear dedication and determination it takes and costs to be at the very top. Raiding for many many hours on end is fun, CAN be exciting, and at the end of it all can really prove who really wants that world first/us first/realm first the most.  Unfortunately we (hardcore raiders) pushed too hard. The competition is slim because the competition is literally eating each other (well not that literally). Good luck to everyone left in the race for this expac, but I don’t know how much longer this sort of thing can last.

I think it’s important to read the original quote but the TLDR; version is simply that hardcore raiding has a smaller and smaller pool of eligible players.  Those that do make the cut get burned out on the crazy race for world firsts. Many guilds run 16-18 hour days until that world first run is over.  No human being with children can run those hours or any with a typical full-time job, so you’re looking at getting people just out of school (or in post-secondary) to fill the slots.  There’s just too much competition for their attention at that age that it’s difficult to motivate them.  Especially if they haven’t been part of the MMO scene from the start.

This isn’t to through the genre under the bus.  I was a big raider in EQ and early WoW.  I knew quite a few in the real world before I met their in-game counterparts.  I made a choice for a family life and put the raiding away.  Some didn’t and they are quite happy where they are today.

That being said, it’s rather clear that today’s trend of a more social/casual attitude towards gaming is not a fad but a reality.  Games that want to attract a hardcore base will have to be niche from design as there simply aren’t enough people left in the general public with the time or energy to consume it.

Slightly related, Camelot Unchained hit its kickstarter goal (and passed by 10%).  I am glad it was able to make the mark and look forward to what is put out.  I hope that the game launches and gets some success, if only to break the MMO-themepark mold.

Dance the Dance

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After having played the recent Batman series, I have found a new love for the combat dance.  In my younger days, I played a lot of arcade fighters and usually held my own.  There was just one local guy who could really whoop me and I learned the combat dance from him.  The dance is a series of timed moves that work symbiotically with each other, in what can only be perceived as “what I was trying to do in the first place”.  In older games, this was called (and might still be) juggling.  Today, there’s a rhythm to most games that involve combat so that when you watch an elite player, they don’t so much memorize the buttons as they memorize the pattern of the buttons.

As there is a difference in complexity between the Waltz and the Tango, so true is it in combat games.  If memory serves, Paladins in WoW have had a longstanding tradition of horrible dances.  The 2-4-6 combo was a series of 3 attacks that you cycled continuously on end.  Hunters are the same.  Most SWTOR classes also suffer this simplistic formula and Rift often suffers from the 3 button macro effect. Some games, like StarCraft for example, have very complex combat patterns and require not only dexterity to accomplish it in short time frames but also the ability to adapt on the fly.

Back to the MMO world though, and the thought process behind generation and consumption in terms of combat.  Abilities are limited by 3 main things – time, resources and condition.  The first one is usually just a cooldown, preventing you from continuously spamming your most effective abilities.  The second can be a bit more complex.  Perhaps your character has a single energy pool, where abilities need a certain amount in order to activate.  More complex characters have a dual pool, where you need resources from two separate pools to do something – like Rogues, Energy and Combo Points.  The third type is where a set condition is required in order to activate an ability.  Say they need to be poisoned, or you need to be at a certain distance.  All this combines into a complexity ladder for a given character and in turn, the popularity of that character.

Look at WoW and the seemingly immense proliferation of Mages and Hunters.  Both have a single resource, little restrictions in terms of timed abilities and very limited conditional factors.  Both are all over the place.  Then look at Warlocks and Rogues.  They are extremely dependent on time (due to Damage over Time effects), multiple resources and plenty of conditional factors.  And that’s just DPS.  For tanks, with changes in Pandaria to an active mitigation – where you need to press buttons rather than stack stats – this means that the combat dance becomes ever more complex.  There are your buttons for attacking, your buttons for defending and your buttons for “oh my god”, all of which use the same complex resource management system of the base class.  Tanks not only have to understand  dance with a dozen more steps, they also need to pay more attention to the music to even be able to dance without falling down.

There’s certainly a balance to be had between a simple dance and a complex one.  In all honesty, I think all classes should have a basic, smooth dance that allows for a player to add complexities when needed.  Rift does the former but not much of the latter.  WoW doesn’t really do transition between the dances all that well – either it’s dumb easy or carpal tunnel syndrome complex.  I think concept of easy to play, difficult to master should be the baseline.  If the game metrics are showing that people are having a really hard time with a class structure, maybe it’s just time for a complete re-write.

Balance for the Sake of Balance

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Wildstar is on my map for future MMO.  It seems more focused on the action/adventure portion than the “mash 1-2-3” of current games.  I also like the art style, and if you’re going to spend dozens of hours staring at a screen, might as well like what you see too.

There’s only a bit of stuff on the site so far but one of the more interesting links is on balance.  Sure, you get the typical crud about trying to and actually achieving balance but some of the more interesting comments are:

Gazimoff: Glass cannons that are all glass and no cannon. If I’m playing a spellcaster, give me a Yamoto Cannon, not a Pea Shooter.
sirchatters: When the developers give up unique classes and just make everything fair/even. I prefer a few paths be bad than all the same.
qn2Quid: I get annoyed when special abilities are removed to create class balance, classes should be different and feel unique
jleithart: When I don’t understand why things are nerfed. patch notes should give an explanation for the reason I’m nerfed.
jkkennedytv: many players confuse 1v1 for game balance. Biggest frustration is for devs having to filter misinformation.
Gazimoff: Also: Buff Spellslingers.

This is why prefer Rift’s class balance efforts to WoW’s.  Rift knows that some builds are simply horribad and some are great.  It doesn’t focus on the details of the builds but more on the feeling of the builds.  WoW has all specs having to be withing 5% of each other, which is simply impossible to do when trying to balance raids, dungeons, single player, duels, arena and battlegrounds.  A mage should be a glass cannon.  Most games today make them a ranged tank.  Games either need to accept that balance isn’t possible at a high level or build their systems to ignore the need for balance (lower difficulty).

Wildstar is doing a few things right.

  1. The focus is on PvE first and PvP will fall in later.  Focus.
  2. Balance on fun skill vs number skills. This is a major problem I have with ToR.
  3. Due to the telegraphing mechanics of the game, CC really ins’t a factor.  AE attacks put markers on the ground, dodge them.  Active combat!
  4. Skills work on everyone.  In most games, (TOR especially) a bunch of skills don’t work on bosses for balance reasons.  They will work with diminishing returns but they will work from the start.

Expansions Are Fun

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So I’m a week into Storm Legion now and it got me thinking, what exactly is it about an expansion that tickles my feathers.  I really like having to learn something new.  This obviously precludes the argument of something NEW to do.  I can assure you that simply extending the content without some new mechanic doesn’t interest me in the least.  Horse Armor is not an expansion.

WoW’s expansions have typically added some new mechanic to the game.  Heroic dungeons came in BC, Lich King added phasing but changed grouping mechanics, Cataclysm added zero to the game and Pandaria added pet battles.  From a class perspective, I’ve played a Rogue in that game since launch.  I’ve see only minor changes for the most part, with a couple large swings along the road – such as the introduction of Mutilate.  Still, from Lich King to Pandaria, the Rogue has been practically identical.  That’s over 5 years ago and the playstyle has been more or less identical – all the expansions have essentially added more of the same.

I haven’t actively played EvE for any stretch of time but a few of the expansions over the years, the largest certainly the transfer of NPC stations to player-owned.  EQ and EQ2 have added plenty of mechanics over the years – mercenaries and AA top the list somewhat here.

Rift is 18 months old and 1 expansion in.  Classes were practically re-written from top to bottom a few weeks back to the point where my ability to play a given soul is technically different while being strategically the same.  My Shaman still uses melee attacks to deal damage but it much more thought based now then the previous macro-heavy build.  They also added the Alternate Advancement feature a few patches back, which gives a horizontal progress to top level players.  The new “no tagging” combat model allows for less griefing but perhaps more bad sport (simply hit once and run away).  I’ve yet to run any new dungeon or heroic raid but from what I can tell, they are under the same model as previous – if perhaps less reliance on resists.  Dimensions are certainly new and wow, I’m having fun there.

Expansions should feel different but familiar.  They shouldn’t just be-reskins of previous content.  The only way that sort of stuff works is in PvP games, where the content is delivered by the players.  PvE games need horizontal progress to feel different and give people something to do.  If you’re simply re-hashing what’s been done, then you’re in for a rough ride.

Gating Content

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I’ve talked about this a few times in the past but it would appear that Blizzard is unable to address the issue with any level of clarity.  From an MMO design perspective, gating is good.  Gating is the proverbial carrot on the stick to get people to log back in again and again.  Gating can be done with time, skill, money… nearly any variable you can think of.  Typically though, the MMO factor is time.

You want to kill the toughest boss?  You need to put in the time to learn the pattern and get the gear to beat him.  You want that special mount?  Grind that faction baby!  You want that unique pet?  Grind out pet battles!

The issue isn’t the fact that there’s a carrot, it’s the type of carrot for the type of horse.  To assume that all carrots are made the same when your game has 10 million players is lunacy.  I know it’s not design by democracy but it’s also not design by hubris either.

Faction gain is currently gated behind not only a time mechanic but a system mechanic as well.  The fact that you are limited to 8 quests a day and that it will take 20 days of quests to reach your goal is one issue.  The fact that those 8 quests can take 90 minutes (damn Goat Steaks) is another one completely.

Putting the 20 day gate in front of a character (not a player) isn’t a huge deal.  It is a large design swing decision from the past 4 years though.   Putting 6 of those gates in front of the player at the same time forces the player to choose which one is a priority.  The hiccup is that they can get those 6 done in 20 days OR they can take up to 120 days to get them all done.  That is a massive variance.  And that’s per character.  Bob forbid you have 2 or more (say one is a pure DPS).   Oh, I forgot to mention that the currency used to buy the rewards for capping out faction doesn’t come from gaining faction?  It comes from running dungeons?  Kind of important.

The system mechanics are another hurdle.  While one faction might be simple (Cloud Serpent comes to mind) others are simply stupid.  Extremely low drop rates, heavy hitting enemies that can kill a fresh 90 in a few hits, fast (and slow) spawns, thick enemy groups and crazy competition make many faction quests a chore to move through.  Anyone who’s done the Goat Steaks quest for the Tillers has probably found the worst quest in all of Panda-land.  Now, it isn’t that these quests are hard that’s the problem, it’s the aggregate effect of it all.  6 hard quests a day is doable.  50 is not.

Finally, there’s the entire principle of putting a dungeon/gear carrot in a non-dungeon/gear process, while still requiring the dungeon process.  Let’s not forget that you can’t simply pick a faction to get all your rewards, you actually need to get them all.

As individual systems, each has value and design importance.  The issue is in the aggregate impact on players.  It’s like a group of people sat in a room, divvied up the various components, designed in isolation and then patched it all together.  There lacks the cohesive vision we’ve come to expect from Blizzard (mind you D3 follows this trend) and that is distressing from a company that traditionally could do no wrong.

And…Curtain

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Last night I was able to finish the quest line of dailies to get my flying snake (dirty!).

wow cloud serpent

Today, I was able to finish my daily quest chain to fully unlock my farm.  You can see the final part of it happening here, with that big brute knocking back the final rocks.

wow tillers farm

The only thing I haven’t done much of is pet battles.  I used to be pretty strong into Pokemon but I don’t think I want to pay 15$ a month for that single service.

I’ve done plenty of scenarios, plenty of dungeons.  The former are ok but are so distinct from the rest of the game it feels like an afterthought.  Would be awesome if scenarios were somehow linked to the rest of the game, giving a sense of progress.  Dungeons are a bit better in that they give loot (I’m about 30 runs in and 4 pieces of gear) though again, there’s nothing inherently linked.  Everything is too meta.  Raids are just complex dungeons.

MMOs are about people and I’ve met my fair share.  Overall, most are nice but I think that has more to do with MoP being fresh.  Up until week 3 of the expansion, there were still server queues.  Week 4 came around and nothing.  Nosy Gamer has a longstanding post about this issue of player populations.  I expect that by the end of November, any uptick that WoW has seen will be gone.  Especially given the design decisions of late (*cough*Brawler’s Guild*cough*).

The “new” content for this expansion pack has been consumed.  Blizzard gated certain things with the time factor but not skill or story or player investment.  Gone are the days where you do X to unlock Y, then Y to unlock Z, then Z for A.  While I understand that the gating issues of TBC were bad in regards to raids they are NOT bad in terms of PvE content.  Sandboxes thrive on that model.  Instead of giving me 5 hours of work split over 5 days, how about I can do that 5 hours in 1 day instead?  That way, if I miss a day, I’m not feeling lost.  And if I get an extra hour one day, I have something to do.

So what did Panda-land bring?  Same dungeon design (easier that Cata, harder than LK, 30m chunks).  Same raids (though LFR from the start).  Nearly all PvE content locked behind dailies (artificial time barrier).  New air mount behind quest (accomplishment I suppose).  The farm is the start of a player home (far short of the line).  Pet battles are a collector’s dream (and achievers) but that can’t be all there is.

Would I say that MoP was worth the cash?  In terms of $ per hour, yes.  In relative terms compared to other MMOs, no.  There has to be more.

Monetary Systems

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Talking to my brother made me think a bit more about WoW and the economy.   In the real world, the economy is either in a closed or open system.  A closed system says that there is a set amount of money to be moved around people and no new money can be created.  Think of this as a poker game with no buy-ins.  An open system has no controls on the money going into the pot.  The Zimbabwean dollar is a super good example.  They’re on version 3 and I think the conversion rate is 1: 1 trillion, trillion.  Just massive inflation.  In North America and Europe, we have a hybrid system.  You can’t print money but the banks can.  This is what drives inflation.  If it was closed, then the people are the short end of the stick could never buy anything since the rich would have it all (which is a sort of problem today).  In no system is there a way to remove money.  You might throw pennies away but that’s actually against the law.

WoW is like our world.  There are specific controls as to how money goes into the system.  The difference is that there are controls to remove money as well.  Quests and item drops add money to the system, in a controlled manner.  Blizz knows exactly how much money goes into the game everyday.  The removal is in money sinks or purchases.  So repairs, flights, AH fees and NPC purchases all lower the amount of money you have.  Auction Houses just transfer money between hands (though there is a nominal AH fee).  Inflation in a game happens when the controls that put money into the system are not proportionate to the ones removing money.  Since there’s always more money entering that leaving, the pool gets bigger.  People who are already rich are going to proportionately get richer in this model too, as compared to the average.  The old saying “it takes money to make money” applies.  In order to balance both the dispersion of wealth AND the lack of money sinks, Blizzard put in vanity items (mounts and bags) a while back.  They now have a Black Market Auction House where items are selling for 50-250K.  I have about 200K over all my characters, so even though I’m considered “rich” I’m still not rich enough for this market.

My monk is a great example of this problem.  When I started him, I gave him 800g to at least be able to afford a flying mount at 60.  He needed it as the gold input wasn’t high enough at my levelling speed.  Flying is likely a luxury for any new player.  By the time he hit 90 however, he had over 10K in cash and had spent an extra 10K on more flying options.  This was without using the Auction House once.  Obviously, the money taps are a tad too high as there’s no luxury for my monk, everything is affordable.  In the time since he hit 90, he sold all his cooking materials (meat from the kills), did some dailies (@20g per turn in) and ran some dungeons.  He’s over 20K now, with not a whole lot to spend it on.  It really makes you wonder how gold sellers are making any type of profit in game when money is absolutely of no concern anymore.

Opportunity Cost

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Economics class today!  As I mentioned a few posts ago, I tend to play the Auction House in whichever game I play.  I like tangible rewards for effort.  Back in the nebulous days I used eBay with UO and that made my gaming hobby free (other than time).  You know, back when a PC was 2000$.  Skip ahead to today and my online guides have paid for pretty much every high tech toy in the house.  Still, there’s a certain cache to in-game money so I play the AH.

Everyone has heard the buy low, sell high motto.  The concept is simple enough, sell for more than you bought.  The sell portion is pretty easy, it’s (sale cost – posting fee – AH % cut).  So in fact, the number you post for sale is not the number you will actually get.  Important distinction.

The buy portion though, that’s where people get confused.  If you are outright buying from the AH to sell, then the number is the buy price.  If you are farming, then you have two cases.  First, you are passively farming; that is, you are collecting items while doing something else, like questing.  WoW cooking mats are a great example, you’re getting meat and fish all the time without trying.  Second is active farming, where you run routes to collect X.  Here you need to calculate your time.  If you spend an hour actively farming, then keep track of it.  If you are crafting things, then you need to calculate your source cost (buying or farming), the cost of making the item (usually free) and then take into account the amount of time to make the item.  This time factor is called Opportunity cost (for farming and crafting).

The Ore Shuffle is a good example.  In WoW you buy stacks of ore.  You end up prospecting it into gems.  Gems can either be sold as is, cut into better gems or you can make them into jewellery.  The latter option is sent to your enchanter to disenchant into mats, than you then sell.  You can also Transmute the gems or Enchant with the mats but that’s a bit more complex.  Figure out your sales numbers and go to town on the best profit.  But wait!  What about the time it takes to run all of this?

WoW Ore Shuffle

Prospecting a stack of 5 takes 2 seconds.  A stack of 20 gives 6 uncommon gems and 1 blue gem. Cutting a gem takes 2 seconds.  Crafting jewellery takes 1.5 seconds.  So your best case is 8 seconds of work to get those gems at a basic level and worst case, 20 seconds to cut/jewellery them.  Then it’s 2 seconds to DE per item, so another 12 seconds at minimum.  All said and done, you’re 1 stack in, ~35 seconds of work.   Take 10 stacks and you’re at 5 minutes.  Let’s say those 10 stacks give you 100g profit, you’re actually making 2000g an hour.

Second option in the same vein is outright buying the gems that you know sell well cut.  It’s 2 seconds per gem and each gem gives you 10g profit.  You might think it’s not worth it but you’re making 18,000g per hour now.  Your opportunity cost is the time spent doing something for a lower profit potential than something with a higher profit potential.

When you’re looking to make money on the AH, it isn’t only about the cash you get in the end.  It’s about being as efficient as possible with your time so that your effort per hour gives back the largest amount of money.

Monks, Schmunks

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I played a Rogue in WoW for 6 years.  I had alts but the Rogue was it.  When Cataclysm came out, I started playing with a Shaman for kicks.  He had been there since BC and was sitting at level 5 for something like 4 years.  Got him to 85, played some dailies and dungeons.  He was a ton of fun because he gave me not only the option to range DPS but also heal.  After a few weeks of this, it was clear that melee DPS has some serious design issues.  Its sole advantage is the passive DPS you get simply by auto-attacking.  If you’re not in range, you aren’t dealing damage.  Ranged attackers are just a better fit.

Panda-land came out and I played my Shaman.  Well, the ranged limitations are obvious now.  I can get hit and it hurts.  A level later, I decided to try a monk out.  90 levels later, here I am enjoying it.  The mobility gives you some advantages of the ranged attacker while the attacks give the melee damage advantages.   Still, there are some concerns.

The Brewmaster spec makes sense but plays awkwardly.  Nothing is ever 100% and you always feel like it’s an uphill climb to find balance between keeping all your buffs up.  You practically need a mod to keep track of them so that you can concentrate on the actual battle.  I also have some serious concerns about scaling with gear due to the Stagger mechanic.  Mastery is currently a horrible stat (for all Monks) but especially so for Brewmasters when you aren’t gaining a direct stat, instead the chance to defer a % of damage to another time.  If I dodge 1% of attacks, I’m taking 1% less damage.  If I Stagger 1% more damage, I’m still taking the damage.

The Wind Walker is the DPS spec.  You can play this as a set it and forget it spec and run out of Energy constantly or really get into it and try to pace the fight.  The first is way more fun but about 20% less effective than the latter.  The next patch is addressing some concerns (Tiger Palm stacks for one).  The mastery system here gives you a free cast of one of 2 skills.  The first is crappy (Tiger Palm) but the second is good.  Mastery gives half the bonus though, since your chance is evenly split between both abilities and really, only impacts Energy regeneration.   Haste solves that problem for you, directly.

The Mistweaver is the healer, using a completely different gear setup (INT). Gear is a major problem since you level in different gear and quest rewards are determined by your spec at turn in. Trying to fill in the gaps at 90 is annoying.  You can play this in easy mode, using 2 abilities for 95% of combat.  This is eye-bleedingly boring.  You can’t heal from range as you need Chi, which requires a melee attack.  Very strange for a game that has spent 8 years with ranged healers.  The advanced version of the healer is very complicated.  Traditional healers only look at Hit Point boxes in the UI, barely looking at the combat itself.  Monks need to do this AND avoid all the crap going on in melee range.

I don’t hate the monk but it’s quite clear that they are still in the design phase with some serious tweaks needed to keep them competitive.  Blizz has stated that they wanted to avoid the OP Death Knights from Lich King.  To this, they have succeeded.  While I see many Monks levelling, I see very few at max level due to the system complexities.  Maybe we’re looking at the next Rogue/Warlock.

The Challenge is in Stopping

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Thank goodness we gained an hour over the weekend.  I don’t think I would have woken up today without it.  There’s an old saying that goes something like “you only get good at something once you stop”.  The guys got together to make tourtieres (a french variant on meat pies) for the day and what originally seemed like disaster turned out really well in the last hour.

Games sort of follow this path don’t they?  The last boss is typically such a crazy challenge that you would not have been able to win had you had to face them in the first 5 minutes.  When a game hits that plateau of skill challenge and then drags on the rest of the game at that level can cause burnout.  I’m not talking about the NES days of Contra or Ninja Gaiden either.  They were difficult for other reasons.  Dark Souls is great because the challenge is continuous.  As soon as you clear one obstacle, another presents itself.

MMOs have this built in too – which is one reason PvP tends to make a game last longer.  The challenge is continuous when you are against another person. PvE content is different though.  I like playing a Monk in WoW because there’s a new challenge in learning the class and the new game mechanics.  I hate playing my Rogue in WoW because he’s been the exact same thing since Lich King.  Raids certainly present some challenges but they are often statistical rather than operational.  You either have the DPS/Healing or you do not.  Once they release a raid where your hit points mean nothing and you simply have to wait out the clock on a death ride, then I’ll give it a shot.  Until then, there’s not a whole lot of difference between hitting a post with a pattern than hitting a boss with a pattern.

It’s certainly a conundrum for any MMO today.  How do you add challenge to a genre that has been based on challenges for years?  What’s left in the bag that can make players say “one more time and I got this?”