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.

Dinosaurs on the Dancefloor

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Dancing Dinosaurs

A must-read if I do say so, Wired interviews Peter Moore.

When you take an industry vet and put them in the task of predicting the future, you’re never sure what you’re going to get.  Moore is an interesting gent though, seemingly always on the cusp of pushing something new forward.  He’s the primary reason for EA opting out of Steam and setting up Origin (a profit generator, if not the most efficient path) and has quite the interesting view of the market as whole.  Of note.

It’s going to be a while before we can say, alright, here’s a 15-gig client for free. Although we’re getting there with Star Wars, which is the first change, although that’s an MMO world in which we can micro-transact.
I still think we still have 18 million people who are very willing to buy our FIFA game each iteration, and then I don’t even know what the pass through rate of that game is from used game sales. Ultimately, we don’t get to play in any of that revenue. But I could ultimately put my hand out and say 25 million people right now have experienced FIFA 12. Without a shadow of a doubt.

No disrespect to Zynga, but you don’t want to be so focused on Facebook that you don’t see mobile coming. All of a sudden you’re one platform, you’re so reliant on one company.

“I just didn’t want to pay $15 a month. I felt kind of locked in. I love the game, but I’m locked in,” and for a lot of people 15 bucks a month is a lot of money. So when we looked at the data that was streaming out of it…. It was very clear to us that if we could knock down that initial barrier to entry that is price, that we could blow out the funnel and instead of dealing with several hundred thousand people on a regular basis we could get into millions.

If I said to you for $15 a month you have access to most of that which EA has created over its history and everything that’s new coming in, like a Netflix model coming in, I believe a lot of people would pay for that for 15 bucks.

Quite a few nuggets in that interview.  F2P isn’t a simple switch.  TOR folks left because they didn’t think it was worth 15$ a month (not that 15$ was too much, but that it didn’t justify the cost), an EA streaming service is an option and of course, taking a massive dig at Zynga’s inability to play the big game.

It’s a rare thing to get an honest interview from EA about anything.  Moore somehow manages to hold the corporate line while giving a solid opinion.

Imagine That

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One of my favorite things in Rift is Instant Adventures.  You can start these practically at level 10 and they throw you into random quests with a group of people, up to 40 I think.  Could be escorting someone, could be protecting a specific area, could be killing a boss, could just be random attacks.  The point is, that in a small timeframe (well under a minute) you can join a group of people and have fun.  You can continue to do this all the way to 50.  Probably all the way to 60 with the expansion pack around the corner.  Rift is certainly defined by the ease of grouping.

WoW this expansion re-introduced group quests, called them scenarios, only allows 3 players in one group and locked them to level 90 only players.  It takes about a minute to start one and to complete one can take 5 minutes like it can take 20.  Plus, if you slack for 30 seconds, you could kill everyone around you.  No /afk for you!

The metric for short adventures is the “fun” stick.  Do I have fun?  In Rift, the answer is yes.  Each is different and the people make it fun to boot.  In WoW, the answer is yes, for now.  While the Rift rewards are always relevant, the WoW rewards stop being relevant once you have dungeon/faction equipment.  Since scenarios are fixed stories, once you’ve run each a few times, you know exactly how they will work out the next time.  Small groups made of players from different servers doesn’t make for community either.  Mind you, the people who DO select scenarios in the first place are people who aren’t necessarily gear hunting but looking for something different.

I do wish they were available before level 90 though.  They are such a nice addition to the game but they are put in such a place that people have to make a conscious decision to partake in the fun.  Do you run dailies for 15 minutes?  Do you run a dungeon for 45?  Do you run a scenario that only rewards cash (and story) for 15 minutes?  Or Raid, or pets, or god knows what else.

I’ll keep giving them a shot.

Damned If You Do

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Are you considering changing the reputation system?  So many dailies are burning us down from the game.  Tabards back?

When we tried limits, folks said we were playing nanny.  When we tried nothing, folks said they didn’t have anything to do.

Blizzard has an interesting problem at hand.  This quote from Ghostcrawler, has a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” mentality to it and I can empathize to some degree.  When you have nearly 10 million clients, you can’t keep them all happy.  When you integrate disparate systems, you’re going to upset some people.

Excluding Lich King, most of WoW’s trajectory has been aligned with the more hardcore activity crowd.  Tangible goals and rewards.  This makes sense in terms of accomplishment and sense of place – makes a bit less sense from a financial perspective if you want to keep 10 million people playing.  The casuals clearly are the majority in games (even 80% of EvE players have never touched NullSec) and therefore subsidize the activities of the hardcore.  Blizzard’s challenge over the past few years was expanding on that casual market – which is has in terms of player ratios.  Keeping them around is a challenge though, especially when you have quality competition on the market (F2P for one).

So for years the hardcore have had the upper hand in terms of game direction.  This expansion is clearly not aimed at their efforts.  Kung-Fu panda and pets does not scream hardcore.  Yet in order to keep that group occupied, they integrated hardcore activities into casual content.  The best raiders have a “need” – real or artificial – to complete casual content in order to progress on the hardcore front.  A true shoe-on-the-other-foot issue if I’ve ever seen one.

Who do you please?  The casual market who is bringing in the dollars?  The hardcore market which consumes the most and gives you the highest visibility?  I mean, does anyone in their right mind care that the Will of the Emperor is a raid boss MORE than the fact that there are hundreds of pets to collect in-game?  The battlefront seems to have changed and you’re never going to please the masses.

The Failings of /Ignore

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This post brought to you by the musings of Azuriel.

Back in the day, you had 1, maybe 2 characters in an online game.  Worlds were relatively small.  You couldn’t name change at will.  There were process barriers that limited your ability to be a dink online.  If you had a bad rep in EQ, you never grouped again.  If you had a bad rep in UO, you were camped.

Today’s PvE (and some PvP) games have an /ignore ability that essentially blocks all communication between your character and another.  Rarely does this list work at the account level (I can’t think of one off the top of my head).  Really though, if a person is a dink with one mask, they will be a dink with another.

What are the limitations of ignore?

  • only works per character, not account
  • only stops chat
  • it’s personal, no social reprocussions
  • most systems allow name changes, invalidating the ignore

What can be done about it?

  • make ignore block the account.
  • make it so that after X amounts of ignore, you get put in a penalty box.  Limit the chat ability, trade ability, grouping ability
  • make it meta.  LoL has a tribunal for serial trolls.  This system should exist everywhere.
  • ignored players cannot group with you, unless manually done (no LFD, LFR, PvP stuff)

All of this is for the negative side.  We could put in some benefits to being nice in game.

  • You have enough distinct +1 scores, you get a higher rating in the queue (up to a certain cap).
  • At a certain rating, you get mailed costumes for social events.
  • Players at a certain rating can run in-game events with in-game resources (weddings, races, etc…)

The social aspect of gaming has had so many barriers broken down that society can’t manage itself.  While it’s great that I can group with a friend from server X (having only 1 server is another story) is great the problem is the butt-heads from that server are also around.

It’s 2012.  We can do better.  We should do better.