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.

Oh, It's a Wave Alright

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Massively has a post on a recent meeting of the minds in regards to F2P.  Cryptic (Champions Online, Star Trek), Riot (League of Legends) and EA (SWTOR) all have a bit to say, though the focus is on the first and last in that list.

I learned that Craig Zinkievich is now the COO of Cryptic.  I remember him from the STO days of beta and launch.  He quit when they went F2P then came back a few months later.  Any comments that Craig puts out, I tend to take with a grain of salt.  He’s a solid dev, smart head on his shoulders but sometimes it seems like he lacks an understanding of the genre.  A forest for the trees type of guy.  Anyways.

Craig’s point that SWTOR was the last great hope for subscription games rings hollow.  I’ve said it about 100 times now but SWTOR failed because of lack of incentive to pay 15$ a month to play.  Once you reached level 50, there was simply nothing to do of value past the first week.  I don’t get why Craig can’t see this as it’s the exact same reason STO went F2P.  If you provide people value for their money, they will pay.  WoW, Rift and EvE are only 3 of the examples needed to push this point across.

EA has a good line that basically says F2P competition is good for gamers as it increases the quality of games within the pool.  While I agree with the comment in spirit, this is so massively not true it’s hard to contain my morning coffee.  If this were true, then there wouldn’t be any Prada purse knockoffs and Wal-Mart wouldn’t be around.  Competition doesn’t increase overall quality, it decreases it to absurd levels.  You might have an outlier with a great product but the mass is still garbage.  The only time this comment is true is when competition breaks a monopoly.  The iPhone smart phone monopoly and the web browser monopoly are great examples.  F2P is currently a massive sea of garbage.  Finding anything of quality is more of a measure of luck than content.  Hello Zynga?

F2P is not the wave of the future; it is simply a “new” monetization platform.  Are the design decisions for SWTOR going to be different now than they were before?  No, it’s still a MMORPG themepark-a-palooza.  There are still raids, PvP, dailies and all that junk.  Instead, they will nickel and dime you through that content.  It’s simple math.  They need money to operate.  How they get that money is up to them.

The difference between a F2P model and a subscription model is in the return on investment. (ROI)  A sub model has to wait many years to get all the cash back.  SWTOR could have waited 3 years and started printing money but the ROI requirement from investors was to get the cash faster.  F2P can make all their money back in the first 2 months (many Asian models are based on this as is Zynga) by gouging players who will pay MORE than 15$ per month.  Of course, that initial blip of cash disappears after your game hits month 3.  Guild Wars 2 will be showing that off pretty quickly I bet.

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.

State of the Game Over

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Syp has a post up in regards to the PR spin that SWTOR is giving before the F2P launch.  I tend to agree with the majority of his observations though with a few additions of my own.

Format

When I first read it, I thought” holy wall of text Batman!”  Then I thought “finally a state of the game, 1 month shy of the 1 year anniversary”.  The next, “Jeff Hickman is running the boat now?  Hmmm”.  Still, the format is solid, a quick intro and followed by a few items with descriptors.  I’m thinking it took him all of an hour to write that out and wondering why it took so damn long for this type of contact to occur.  +1

Content

Saying you were EP of Warhammer Online is not something to brag about unless you can speak to a specific feature set/time period of work.  The only thing I could think of that would be worse is introducing yourself as Bill Roper.

The issues stated don’t make sense.  If your game was awesome, people would be playing it.  They aren’t leaving because of the subscription fee.  These two items cannot be exclusive.  Slow updates is also a weird one.  They are certainly slower than Rift but they are lightyears faster than WoW.  If you bring a quality product to the table, that offers a superior experience to the free variants, people WILL PAY YOU FOR IT.  Hate WoW as much as you want but it’s the reason it can charge for money.  It’s the reason Rift and EvE do too.  If you’re going F2P, then you’re admitting you do not have the quality of game you think people should pay for.  Turbine admitted it (LOTRO, DDO), Cryptic as well.

Losing Devs

Balls-on for talking about it.  Shame the reasons given are as reasonable as pixie dust.  You don’t lose the owners, the EP, 90% of the content leads and 30% of all the staff when things are peachy.  Normal cycle is one thing (say a 10-20% turnover rate) but you don’t lose 5 big names in a week.  Whether they left on their own accord or were asked to leave, that’s a different matter.

Bugs all over the place

This was such a massive issue in beta, it’s a wonder that it’s still a problem in live.  Certainly the Hero Engine is partly to blame for this but jeebus, get some better testing practices ASAP.  BW games are traditionally riddled with bugs but you simply can’t afford that practice in an MMO.  At least not while people are paying you to fix it.

Server Population

Who in their right mind thinks this is an issue for the general public to see?  There’s no one left on these servers, consolidate them.  Done.

Summary

State of the Game addresses are supposed to talk about what’s happened between this one and the previous one.  They then state what’s planned in the near future and some vision statements.  Answering questions is good but it doesn’t belong here, it should be its own thing.  So a cheer for actually addressing your paying audience but boo for doing 2 weeks before they all decide to stop paying.

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.

Bad Design or Hidden Design

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As you can tell from the majority of my posts, I’m fascinated by game design.  This bleeds over into the real world, where I work in IT architecture.  Both take a systematic approach to a problem and attempt to design an intuitive system that fits into a grand vision.  You won’t be firing spaceships in WoW anytime soon but you might be doing sea battles, as an example.

EA’s design philosophy over the past 5 years has been to milk the crap out of existing IPs and dilute the story elements in favour of mechanical systems.  The systems are core to any multiplayer game, as they need to be balanced.    Dragon Age 1 could never achieve multiplayer balance but sure as heck that’s the goal with DA3.  I’m not a big fan of this plan.  Activision is pretty much in the same boat.

I like the recent indie push, with the lower entrance fee for developers.  This has a side effect of a glut of games coming out, many of them pure garbage. The plus side is that word of mouth on the internets is exponential, so finding a game like FTL (Faster than Light) is easy.  The design philosophy here is simple. The graphics are stylistic choice and the game flow (cohesion) is key.  There’s a solid reason people think Borderlands 2 is up for Game of the Year and Halo 4, COD and BF aren’t on any short list I’ve heard about.  FPS games are shells of what they once were.

Back to the MMO world and to WoW in particular.  In the next content patch (5.1, which has been talked about for a month…who knows when we’ll actually see it) they are releasing a PvE content box called the Brawler’s Guild.  You queue up, get thrown into a ring and have to defeat an enemy, 1v1.  Test realm doesn’t give any tangible rewards, other than achievements.  Still, the concept is really damn cool.  Sort of like Pet Battles but for people instead.  Here’s the catch.  Queues are physical rather than logical.  If there are 25 people in the zone, then there is a 25 person queue.  LFD/LFR/Scenarios don’t care about that part but the Brawler’s do.

So let’s say you design a new PvE box of content.  Nearly everything you’ve designed from that point avoids the queue issue either through instancing, phasing, logical grouping or simply by spreading the content around the world.  How would you avoid queues for this?  Physical queues don’t make sense.  Once you hit a specific number of people around you, then the queues become ridiculous.

Next question.  How do people get access to this content?  Everything is gated right now, either by level, by gear, by exploration or by gold investment (mounts and pets).  Apparently, you put it on the Black Market Auction House so people can bid on entry and you set the limit per day to 10 invites.  This sort of works like a massive gold sink for a server, maybe dropping 1 million gold per day.  Then you have the people who are invited give out 10 invitations each, and those can give 10 as well.  This is called exponential growth.  100 the first day, 1100 the second day, 11100 on the third – assuming everyone uses up their invites.

Combine those two together now.  The first day, you have 100 people lined up, so queues for sure.  The second day, jeebus.  By the third, might as well give up.  Clearly there is missing something in this story.

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.

Now What?

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Over the weekend I had a chance to finally jump into some heroic dungeons.  I had been level 90 for a week but I only qualified for Scenarios due to the level of my gear.  A couple drops and quests in Dread Wastes and I was ok to go.

Firstly, Heroics is not the right name.  These are basic level 90 dungeons.  In fact, if you do the dungeons while levelling, you’re likely to have a harder time.  Each one can last 20 minutes up to 45 minutes, with 3-5 bosses.  Each has some weird mechanic and a few are quite gimmicky.  Hopper in the Brewery is a good example; you get swamped continuously with virmen (sort of rats) and need to use a hammer to keep them airborne.

Interestingly, in the 5 or so heroics I ran, I only met one “go go go” person.  I actually mentioned to the group that I thought they were extinct, to might lols. Everyone so far has been quite friendly.  I had a brand new tank in one group.  That was a lot of fun since it was a low pressure situation.  I’m sure I’ll start scraping the bottom of barrel at some point but this lower point of entry seems to also reduce the stress level of other players.

In all the heroics I’ve run so far (maybe 8), I’ve seen 2 upgrades.  So, statistically, I’ve seen 2 upgrades out of a possible ~35 drops – not the best ratio.  This is compounded by the gear variants. As a monk, I only have 2 types – AGI or INT leather.  A paladin though, they use 3; STR, INT and tanking.   At last count, I see 12 gear variants.  Poor design is when you have one gear variant per class.  Like shamans having not only casting mail but healing mail gear.  That means that on any given boss, I have a 1 in 12 chance of seeing an upgrade (or close to it).  Not so motivating if I only wanted gear – especially if you go a run and no one wants anything that drops.

RIFT took a similar path but with a simpler foundation, there are only 7 types needed and since there aren’t “classes” you don’t see gear that no one wants.  I mean, every Cleric uses tanking gear just like they all use casting gear.

Back on topic.  I’m reaching the point I normally come to when playing an MMO, lack of appreciable progress.  Going the dungeon route just leads to the raiding route, an end point I’m not a fan of.  Dailies could be their own topic.  How many times do I have to heal those baby serpents before you clue in that I’m a good guy?  Farming is what you think it is, except for the moving part.  There could have been massive progress towards player housing here.  Scenarios are a run for achievements type of event.  Challenge modes do not interest me.  Pet battles are an interesting side project though.  I think I can stretch this out a couple weeks until Storm Legion comes out.

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?”

A Man and the Sea

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WoW Fishing

In the real world (what’s that!?) I love to fish.  I enjoy catching the fish, certainly, but I much prefer the act of fishing.  I could stand hip deep in water, just casting for hours on end, without the need for a single bite.  The concept of the “heroic journey” applies here.  The actual activity is the reward for me, not the end goal.

I remember playing Link on my old GameBoy and spending way too much time in that fishing game.  I’m sure I spent more time fishing in OoT than I did actually playing the rest of the game.  In contrast, I don’t enjoy the “bass pro” games since they are reward based, not activity based.

I was a GM fisherman in UO back when all you got was fish.  I had more than one actually, quite a few sea captains.  It was unexplored country for nearly 3 years.  The sea community was something to behold.  When treasure hunting came around, all of a sudden everyone and their aunt had a boat and it was like downtown at 5pm. All we were missing were the horns.  I fished in EQ too.  It had even less to offer than UO other than something to do while waiting for the boat.  /gems eventually came in to supplement that.

Then WoW came around and for 2 years, fishing meant nothing to the masses.  It was a massive timesink (was until Cata actually) and just something you did to have fun.  BC brought in the use for fishing pools and some quests as well as the first fishing tourneys.  LK brought another fishing tourney and made fish a requirement for raiding.  Cata pretty much ignored fishing.  Panda-land has a fishing quest hub (which oddly, rarely has anything to do with actually fishing) that can provide some neato rewards.  Still, since the rewards require a massive time investment (say 5000+ successful fishing casts @ 10sec per cast) and the rewards are all flavour, you have very few people trying it out.  Other than the blip during LK, the fishing community has been a small one and a friendly one.  El’s Anglin’ is a super example of that laid back attitude.

Rift has fishing as well but it seems to be more of a mini-game rather than a leisure activity.  I still enjoy it tremendously but the zen-like feeling just doesn’t seem to be there.  WoW has many spots that are clearly for fishing.  I have a favourite pool in Jade Forest with nothing around but peaceful wildlife and mountains.  Rift doesn’t have quite spots – at least none that I can see.  There is no peaceful repose.  Hopefully the expansion pack will cover that portion as I think the actual fishing mechanics are stronger in Rift.

Imagine that, a heroic journey by fishing pole.