Tag Archives: design

Changes are a Comin’

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The first bit of news relates to Wildstar.  Megaservers are coming next week, so you’ll be able to find people to play with again.  Yay!  Also, Drop 3 & 4 are being combined and targeted for November.  It’s making it hard to figure out what is in and what is out of scope of that change.  The Reddit feeds are good enough to try and keep track but there’s still some mystery to be had.  Of interesting note, January is Carbine’s timeframe for “solo friendly” content.  I could write for miles about that topic.  MILES I say.  But in short, delaying all your content until after WoW and SWTOR have launched their expansions is an odd play of hands.

WoW is dropping patch 6 today, which is the precursor to the actual expansion.  This includes all the system changes but not the actual new content (zones, dungeons, level increase, garrisons, etc…).  So you get to see item squish, removal of guild levels (yay!), removal of reforging, changes to glyphs (you now get a bunch at default), removal of some difficulty achievements, a new group finder (not LFG/LFR), the new Flex raid model, massive class balances, new stats, new character models and just plain cleanup.  Though they are removing one type of Anti-Aliasing that was a GPU hog, in order to accommodate the players with scientific calculators.  It’s a rather significant downgrade to fidelity, if that means anything to you.

You can read the link for all the notes and there are plenty but the core of the matter is that this is the stage-setting patch for the expansion – where Blizz applies the final tweaks to the system to make sure that the swap from Beta makes sense.  I fully expect the raid scene to take a dive for 2 weeks, a few emergency patches and a trainwreck of “I can’t faceroll anymore” posts to result from the squish change.

What I find odd as lacking, is a revamp of the heirloom items or experience normalization that typically happens near expansion time.  Where 1-85 is pretty quick (you can do 80-85 in 2 zones), the experience from 85-90 isn’t up for debate.  It’s arguably a fun experience, at least compared to the junk of Cata (thank goodness for flying) but if they are selling level 90 characters… then you’d think there’d be some QoL changes to this experience as well.  I am expecting some post soon that changes that to everything working until at least 90, at least by 6.1.

Quick math… level 25 guild + heirlooms until 80 = 60% increase to experience from quests and kills.  Which also combines with rested experience.  And these items are fairly easy to acquire (except the ring…damn that fishing derby).

I am quite curious to see how all these changes play out.

EDIT: I am putting dollars to donuts that Blizz implements a system similar to SWTOR’s Legacy framework, or Marvel Heroes’ Synergy section.  And therefore completely removes the existing Heirloom function.  And for 6.1.  Any takers?

WoW – Interesting Dev Credit

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In somewhat interesting news, it appears that Jay Wilson, mr Diablo 3 lead , is listed in the credits for WoW’s next expansion.  I posted a bit about this gentleman in the past.  He left D3 for an unknown Blizz project, though any executive that leaves that type of position, usually doesn’t do it in the middle of sweeping changes, at least voluntarily.

I’ve been more than vocal on D3’s original implementation.  The AH was a good idea with a horrible implementation.  It impacted the rest of the design.  Itemization was broken until D3 launched on consoles.  “End game” didn’t really exist until a year after launch.  So yeah, I think the game is Blizzard’s worst received game at launch ever but that they stuck with it and today’s game is really quite good.  It’s telling that the company still takes value in the brand and one of the reasons they are still on my “must buy” list of developers.  It takes FOREVER for change, but changes happen.

Oddly, this reminds me of Hellgate:London.  Flagship launched a decent ARPG but made some missteps in terms of end game, or at least long term appeal.  Plus the dev cycle for patches didn’t really work.  The meat here is that Bill Roper, then lead of Flagship, got a bunch of ex-Blizzard folk to help out.  That didn’t really work mind you and Bill became a game albatross.  He showed up at Cryptic during the Champion Online and STO days and hoo-boy did that go over like a lead balloon.  He’s working at the cash cow Disney Infinity now though, so good on him.  Bill took full blame of Flagship and honestly, he did try hard to get it going.  I think this has more to do with fan investment in the product and just sheer disappointment that it could not succeed.

Jay though, he’s a slightly different beast.  Maybe it’s more along the lines of an open-mic issue where he was simply ill-equipped to handle the issues or that the ship was simply to big to correct after launch.  Some may be aware, but D3 underwent a rather massive design shift in combat mechanics about 6 months before live.  I would easily argue for the better as everyone has always been positive about the gameplay experience.  The other stuff though, maybe it was a lack of experience or understanding, but in the end nearly all the other systems were removed/replaced/updated.  AH is gone.  Smart loot replaces the insane RNG of strength on wands.  Stat balance changes itemization.  Lengendaries are actually legendary.  Multiple end-game options. Social tools.  Ladders and seasons.  Tons of stuff.  And I pin this on him as he was the lead.  You want the title, it comes with the ups and downs.

So maybe Jay just went back to what he does well, building core systems and not the overall architecture.  It’s certainly behind closed doors, without a need to interact with the playerbase.  There are very few good jacks-of-all-trades, maybe a few dozen in the entire industry.  I know in mine you could fit them all into a bar.  It would certainly be interesting to see where he’s at now and how he feel the transition has been.

#WoW – Flex Raids and New Features

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The previous post related to my opinion that Warlords of Draenor is bringing very little to the table.  Thinking on that a bit, I realize that WoW’s strongest foot forward has generally been mid-patch and not expansions, with a few exceptions.

Blizzard makes good stories and solid art.  Expansions focus on that and while there are certainly exceptions where the story is horribad, the vast majority is solid if not exceptional given the tools they have at hand.  My opinion here is that time travel is often a poor device for story telling as a premise.  Sci-fi always succeeds when the story is about the people and the context is just there for flavor.  I’m curious as to how WoD will handle that given that the “wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff” is pretty hard to manage without causing a bunch of retcons.

Blizzard is quite poor at new but really good at updating existing systems.  The resistance requirements from vanilla turned into attunement for BC which turned into gear score later on.  40 man raids turned into 25 and 10, and then Flex.  LFG was a list originally, then automated, then LFR and now a near feature for feature rip from an exiting game mod.  Questing has undergone some big iterations, with the Cataclysm model of stories and MoP’s cinematic/integration story approach.  Leveling curves have been normalized.  Itemization has gone from 4 stats, to 16, to gems everywhere, to gems nowhere, to 8 stats and now RNG stats.  Talents went from the Diablo 2 model, to massive cookie cutter trees, to a rather homogenized flat structure with minimal variance.  Heck, some systems are so poorly thought out they just cut them from the game – reforging is one clear example.

Even the “new” stuff they put it was done in other systems first.  Transmogrification existed in many other games – LOTR and RIFT in particular – and those systems are still better than WoW’s (also in D3 now).  Pet battles is a direct rip from other MMOs and a clear link to Pokemon.  Proving Grounds was done in TSW first and in that game, it’s used as a gating mechanic as it should be.  Brawler’s Guild is an extension of that, with mixed results.

The point I’m trying to make is that Blizzard’s first kick at the can is usually not that hot, if it’s a departure from what’s out there now.  If they are applying incremental improvements on existing systems, then yes, super.  And this is ok.  They have millions of people playing a game, finding areas that they can optimize.  Blizzard has maybe 100 people on system design?  The law of averages says that Blizzard is going to lose.  Any dev would.  My issue is in the amount of time it takes for this beast to change course and actually find what works.

I think that WoW does 3 things better than other companies.  It tells better stories.  The Pet Battle system is best in class.  And Flex raids are the way forward.  It took a mod and a fan site for them to realize that Pet Battles could actually work and if I recall from stats taken in game, there are more people who participate in that activity that any type of raid (LFR — Heroic).  Its’ really rather well done, through a simple interface that’s had some iterations over time.  WoD is bringing new pets, no new systems.

Flex raids are next, or more generally, scaled group content with group caps.  When WoW was on the incline or at least stable in terms of population, the group caps were manageable (after they dropped from 40) but sub-optimal.  The LFR system stemmed from the idea that less than 10% of the population raided in Firelands (<1% heroic) and it made sense to expose more of the story.  LFR numbers were crazy, something around 80%+ of all max level players participate and regular raids were still very low, under 10%.  MMO Champion has all the stats by the way, just lazy to link to dozens of posts.  So Blizzard had an issue.  Clearly people wanted to raid but such a massive drop between models was causing issues… what was the problem?  LFR provided a way to complete content with a variable amount of people, and the system just filled in the holes to reach the thresholds.  The problems with LFR were obvious.  Random people do bad things and it was a “roll of everything!” mentality.  How to get the benefits of LFR (variable groups) and lose the downside (asshats).  In comes Flex.

Flex was added to provide people with non-faceroll content (somewhat on par with Normal) with a variable group of people they knew.  Getting 10 people is still not obvious but having 16 means that you don’t have 6 people picking up snacks for 5 hours while the rest is having fun.  The new Flex system will be applied to everything moving forward except heroic content.  I mean, it’ll be called Flex Heroic but it’s the same challenge as today’s normal.

Here we get into the themepark & sandbox debate.  Themeparks can only fit X people on a ride and rarely will they start without the ride being full.  Sandboxes can acomodate any number of players.  EvE, AA, Darkfall, UO all work with any number of people.  SWTOR, LOTR, FF14, WS and every other themepark can only fit X people.  It’s somewhat interesting that WoW is first out of the gate for a variable themepark size, catching up to 15 years of since UO first did it in mass market…but hey, welcome to 2014!

Gaming and School – A Clash of Cultures

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This will be a very meta post.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, my wife is a high school teacher and I have a rather large set of opinions around our education system from front to end.  That we’re still using the same system from WW2 is a problem, though many school boards are trying to implement changes.  The problem with change is people and teachers are notoriously against change.  That’s sad really because the kids are simply not paying attention anymore.  There’s just too much competition for places of edu-tainment and the real world does not relate to school structure in any way.

So the meta part is that my wife goes to seminars and that my eldest daughter started school this year in a new program that focuses on critical thinking rather than memorization (one of my 4 key tenets of growth).  I write a lot about how game design intersects with the social structures we see day to day and my wife recently texted me about Minecraft as a teaching prediction tool.

KTR had a recent post that went into this topic, Progress vs Progression and I think it relates to the discussion a fair amount as school systems are often focused on progression rather than progress.  Do the same thing over and over again and expect different results (Einstein anyone?)  But more specifically, I want to focus on Minecraft’s design.

Minecraft is like virtual Legos.  I have a rather large collection of large Legos.  My kids are 2 and 4, so the regular pieces aren’t yet an option but I do plan on just ordering a few hundred pieces online in the future.  What I do have now though is enough to keep both kids occupied for some time and lets their imagination grow.  Once second it’s a plane, the other it’s a snake, and always with some story attached to it.  I’d hazard to guess that more people have played with Lego than have watched Star Wars, or Harry Potter or whatever other social phenomenon we hear tell.  Legos are a simple tool (~7000 unique pieces) with an infinite amount of possibilities.  (Apparently, four 2×4 Lego pieces have over 3 billion possible combinations.)    AFOL is a massive subculture.

Minecraft takes that little tool we all know and then turns it around a bit.  Different blocks have different properties (harder, liquid, precious, etc…) and combining them in particular formations creates specific tools (picks, shovels, doors, etc…).  I can build a house with multiple stories and windows, or I can build a rudimentary calculator, or I can build a life-size replica of the Starship Enterprise.

Sure, in between all that I can hunt skeletons, clearcut a forest, build a moat and die multiple times but that’s flavor.  The meat of the game is building and building without goals.  The lack of goals spawned many imitators, most notably Terraria.  This lack of an imposed progression tracking system, and in it’s place a self-imposed list of victory conditions is one of the largest departures in gaming in a very long time, at least in terms of popularity.  I mean, sandboxes have always been popular but not 56 million+ popular.  Minecraft is worse than Chrono Trigger, you can find the application on any system, iOS, Android, Console, PC, Raspberry Pi…People know it, people have played it, people dress us as Creep for Halloween.

So how does this affect education you ask?  Well it’s a system of personal goals and limitations that can be shared between other players.  Westeros was rebuilt!  Social constructs are built, with long terms goals based on small components.  Remember, each massive item is built from the same small bricks. The only difference between your outhouse and a sprawling city is time and vision.  School does not focus on this, instead if focuses on memorization by rote.  You need to know every component of the outhouse and every component from the city as 2 different entities with little in common.  Minecraft is all about building big dreams with only a small amount of tools and one that rewards tinkering rather than perfection.  Oh, that door really doesn’t work?  Tear it down and start again but you don’t have to tear down the entire building.  Success is iterative and one that requires some critical thinking to see how all the pieces fit together.  I could write entire articles and feats of reverse engineering in Minecraft.

All this to say is that Minecraft forces people to ask solid questions about final design and not blindly accept something as fact.  It allows experimentation and groupthink, encourages creativity.  These skills are essential for the real world (and the basis of critical thinking), that is if you’re not aiming to be a sheep of some sort packing shelves for a living.  (Mind you, there is potential for nobility in that career).  Think big, think different, using the same tools as everyone else.  Minecraft celebrates and expands on this.  School focuses on memorization and conformity.  Some schools are changing but the old guard certainly needs to see the light of day.

 

Gaming Toxicity – What’s Next?

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I’ve talked about this one at length already but it bears repeating after recent events.  There are a lot of asshats in the gaming sphere and the level of anonymity that the internet provides is a cloak they abuse.  The concept of privacy on the internet is something we’re eventually going to have to give up (or have already if you pay attention).  The advent of social tools without the social skills to use them makes for a mess of a time.  This is still the Wild West and the sheriff is more or less whoever wants to wear the badge.  There are many countries that are making changes to their laws to make people accountable for their actions on-line – the UK is the most advanced in this (but also has amazing trolls).  Canada is getting better but the US is like a ballpit of dumb when it comes to this – in particular around their understanding of what Free Speech actually means in a legal sense.

And let’s be clear about this.  Reasonable people saying reasonable things don’t get attention.  It passes the logic test, and we say “they’re ok”.  It’s the people on the extremes that get attention because what they say makes little sense.  So you end up hearing the 1 idiot spouting stupid (and we getting dumber for hearing it) and the moderate voice that counters it is barely heard because everyone is arguing against dumb.

Never argue with an idiot; they’ll bring you down to their level and beat you with experience. –

Back to the gaming world now.  League of Legends (LoL) is making a few changes to their system.  You might remember them from the concept of tribunals a few years ago.  A group of (volunteer) players who act as a council to vote on players who have been reported for bad behavior.  They assign bans or time outs or what-have-you, based on in-game logs.  The recidivism rate is actually surprising, with something like 90% of them never coming back to the tribunal.  But let’s make no mistake here, with the millions who are playing, there are still many who cause issues and the penalties are currently very black/white.

There’s an old story about UO and the Trammel split, where Origin at the time didn’t understand the problem with griefers and the open PvP plaguing the game.  If you recall, it was not a terribly complex thing to lose your house to a greifer, people would stack bag and bags of crap to hide their keys so that the PvP looters would take forever to find the right one.  The concept was as this “a griefer is one who costs you more money than they pay”.  So you might make $15 on that griefer but if they cause 2 people to quit, you’ve lost money.  And UO was losing money.  I am not saying the split was the right choice (in fact I would easily argue other things could have been done – I was a noto-hunter in the day, which could have been a much more elegant solution) but it was a hard solution to a very large problem.

XBONE has a reputation system of 3 tiers.  Regular, borderline and scumbag.  Ok, I’m paraphrasing but you get the idea.  Regular and borderline play in one bucket, scumbags play in another.  Your rating decays over time so you can come back to the clean area.  I haven’t seen any reports on this program since launch mind you…

LoL once again.  They are implementing a new type of penalty where poorly rated players can no longer play ranked games.  Ranked games have rewards, they are seasons, they allow you to join the professional circuit.  It’s pretty similar to the XBONE solution except that non-ranked games are where the casual players are found.  This is really putting the wolf in with the sheep, when you look at it from the outside.  I’m sure there’s some thought as to how this can impact the bottom line but it’s rather clear that the bad players need more types of punishment.  I’m guessing the matchmaking process aligns no only your skill level but your player reputation, which should make it fun to watch from the outside.

I know Hearthstone’s approach to this is to not allow chat at all.  Just some basic pre-canned messages.  People will quit before losing, which is another topic.  When Heroes of the Storm does launch, and as with all Blizzard items attracts DragonSoul to complain/grief, I am extremely curious as to their plans for managing that issue.  (And yes, I realize I’m avoiding the SC2 scene, which is arguably pretty tame).  Once we get passed LoL into Blizzard casual-land, I’m of the opinion we’ll have reached a gaming crest of toxicity management

#Diablo3 – Where Should I Farm (Numbers!)

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This is going to be an analytics discussion, so some math is to be found.

Diablo 3 is a slot machine.  You pull the lever (kill the baddie) and stuff pops out.  Sometimes it’s good stuff but most times it’s crap.  You need to pull that lever a whole bunch of times to get something decent.  And the prize itself, while it might have a nice look, when you get to the meat of it, there are things wrong with it.  Such are the RNG (random number generator) gods!  For the purposes of this article, I’ll only focus on Legendary (or set) items.

In order to sway the odds, Diablo 3 has a whole bunch of number crunching below water. Enemy difficulty (regular, rare, unique, etc…) have different odds of dropping items.  Game difficulty (normal, torment, etc…) have different odds of dropping items.  Rifts and Greater Rifts have different odds of dropping items.  Actually, Greater Rifts are still under debate, so I’ll scratch that for now – in particular because it takes 11:30 minutes to clear one.  Some of these odds are additive, some are multiplicative.  Let’s start with that concept first.

Additive odds are simple enough; you just put the numbers together.  So 25% + 15% + 7% = 47%.  Multiplicative odds are harder to get around.  25% * 15% * 7% = 30.7% and much less obvious.  Sometimes you even add the odds and then multiply.  You get crazy formulas.

Enemy difficulty is also part of this calculation, where non-regular (so Rare, Elite and Unique) seem to have a sliver of a chance to drop even a rare item whereas a pack will drop 3+ items.  The quality of an item is dependent on if that enemy even drops something.  So you can’t say a normal enemy doesn’t drop legendaries, it barely drops anything in the first place.  You’re looking at a solid 100 enemies before seeing something.

Game difficulty and rift difficulty is as follows.  Normal until Master gives a 0% boost outside rifts and 25% in rifts.  Torment 1-6 gives 15% to 131% boost outside rifts and a 44% to 189% boost to drops inside rifts.  So at any difficulty level, it’s clear that you should be in a rift, the increase is noticeable.  Torment 1+ is required for level 70 legendaries.  Torment 2+ has  50%+ odds of dropping a legendary in a bounty.

Game difficulty also increases enemy hit points, where Torment 1-6 go from 819% to 8590%.   That’s a massive increase.  They also hit harder but that’s less important for this point.  You want to kill them fast.

Each build has a “clear on normal” build which is built on efficiency and speed.  Or, 1-hit-kill specs.  The clear builds mean you mow down everything on the screen quickly and get to focus on the elite packs instead.  The bonus from this is the extra experience from the kills, increasing paragon levels which increases your power and makes you kill faster.  So… yeah, killing regular enemies quickly is good.  This brings up the concept of “clear speed” where you can complete an objective in X amount of time – typically this applies to Bounties (5 quests with a chance at a reward) and Rifts.

So that’s a pile of information.  And you’re wondering, what the heck does this actually mean?  Me too!

Depending on your leveling path, you either did the content in order or simply re-ran bounties a bunch of times.  You hit 70, and finally started to use your Blood Shards with Kadala, gambling on gear.  You focus on armor, getting some decent stuff.   Unless you have a really crappy weapon, don’t bother gambling on one.  Find a good clearing build and run a few normal bounties in Act 1 until you have a better weapon.  Find a 1 hit kill build next and increase the difficulty from normal until you find one that is no longer 1 hit kill.  There are great odds that this stays on normal and that’s ok.  You’re going to reach a point where you’re 80% optimal on rare items.  This means you have imperial gems slotted, you have 80% of the maximum roll on your primary stat (plus Critical Hit Damage, Critical Chance), some critical hit and damage as well as a decent (~8K) life on hit.  Your weapon should have a gem slot and it should be an emerald.  You’re now ready for Torment 1.

Actually, maybe you’re not.  This is where the magic really happens is the Time to Clear (TTC, which is really similar to a TTK acronym).  Greater Rifts (GR) have a 11:30 TTC, if you want to increment your rift level by 1 (for more loot).  A TTC that’s lower means you need to leave the GR, so something else, then come back to kill the guardian.  The “something else” should be Act 1 bounties, trying to get a Ring of Royal Grandeur – a legendary ring from the bounty cache.  You should be able to clear all 5 quests in 2 GRs, depending on dungeon layout.  Once you’ve completed the Act 1 bounty and closed the GR, leave the game and restart.  GRs get harder over time, so your TTC will eventually reach and exceed the 11:30 and you’ll be unable to continue but have to restart.  The benefit of GRs is legendary gems (should have them all in ~15 rifts) and a decent chance at a legendary on the boss kill.  But you’re only killing the boss every 11:30 minutes plus. Due to this, greater rifts aren’t usually worth a whole lot until you can clear T6 rifts reliably – you’re not there for the gear but for the challenge and the gems.

The alternative, if you have a decent TTC, are regular rifts.  Once you’re 80% optimal, you need to run Torment 1.  TCC by that point is less gear dependent and more skill based.   The question becomes, “do I move up in difficulty?”  The answer is related to TTC.  Let’s look just at the difference between T1 and T2.

T1 = 819%hp, 44% bonus to legendary

T2 = 1311%hp (60% increase), 65% bonus to legendary (47% increase)

So let’s say your TTC in T1 is 5 minutes.  You get a 47% increase in rewards. The real metric here for choice is that your TCC cannot exceed 47%, or you’re actually falling behind.  That means a new TCC of 7:23 or less.  Other clear times are: T3 (10:13), T4 (13:31), T5 (17:09) and T6 (21:28).  Now the difficulty climbs too, due to the HP increase.  So your damage needs to climb as well.  Let’s say you’re at 200K DPS.  T1 to T2, to clear at the same rate, your damage needs to increase to 320K.  From T1 to T6 you need to reach 2.1 million DPS.  And that’s not even calculating the extra damage enemies will cause.

Given that you only ever get an average of X items in a rift, regardless of quality, you’re better off clearing them faster than raising the difficulty.  I could graph out the optimal place to run rifts, based on your damage output but there are a few other factors at play.  The goal is to clear as fast as possible, unless you can increase the difficulty and still remain below the new clear time.  So!  What you want to do is get a TTC of 5 minutes for a T1 rift first.  Don’t even bother with the other rifts until you can get this one down as it’s very unlikely you’ll get any benefit from harder rifts (exception is playing in groups).  Once you have T1 down to an art, then see if a T2 can fit in your time window (7:23).  If it can’t, then get better at T1 rifts.

That was a really long post that hopefully added some clarity on the “where should I be farming” discussion. The short answer is “T1 rifts until you can clear them in 5 minutes”.  There is very little incentive of moving up in difficulty if you’re aiming for optimal performance.

Raiding – Who’s It For?

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I used to raid back in the day.  You know, when we trash meant something and you stayed logged on to farm mats.  Oh, what glorious days it was to raid 5 hours a day, 5 days a week and then farm the other 2 days!  Kids today have it much to easy.  What with the CoD, Destiny, D3 pop-in and play gamestyle.  Where’s the challenge of getting 20-40 cavedwellers to wake up from their late nap to log in? And then proceed to ignore all instructions for the first 45 minutes?  Oh, too easy I tell you, much too easy!

Some odd Wildstar numbers for you here.  So from the horses’ mouth, 120-150 20 man raids, 7 40 man raids that have cleared 3 of the 9 bosses.  The math comes to around 4000 raiders.

Let’s look at WoW for a second, where Raiding is arguably, no longer the top-tier end game activity (pet battles!).  Here’s the link and it accounts for data ~6 months after the raid released.  7.3 million character, 2.3 million accounts, looking at the final tier of raiding, SoO.  70% completed the first boss on LFR, 40% flex, 20% normal, 10% heroic.  50% completed the last boss on LFR, 18% flex, 13% normal, 0.8% heroic.  Assuming the “accounts number”, WoW’s hard mode attracted ~1% of the playerbase.  I’ve mentioned before that WoW’s heroic is pretty close in difficulty to Wildstar’s default raid level.

Back to Wildstar.  Assuming the same 1% ratio (and that’s a very large assumption) they are sitting at around 400k subs, which I think is a pretty decent number.  Of course, it takes magic math to get there.

But the crux of the argument is that their design vision, hardcore 40 man raids, are being consumed by a tiny, tiny fraction of the playerbase.  You’re leaving 99% of the rest of playerbase with next to nothing to do as end-game currently consists of either daily grinds, or getting into the raiding sphere.  Hate on WoW’s LFR as much as you want, they’ve found a way to get 50-70% of their playerbase to USE the material they’ve built.

Now you’re going to LFR for 1 of 2 reasons.  First, and I’m going to assume this is the minority here, to see the story/content through.  Raids, since BWL at least, have had pretty decent narratives.  If you didn’t raid Icecrown, then you’re probably wondering what ever happened to the Lich King after having seen him every 15 minutes while leveling.  Second, they do it for gear.  Gear for gear’s sake, or to get into the real “raiding” that starts at Flex.

Flex for a minute. This to me is the smartest move WoW ever made when it comes to raiding.  There were many months of tweaking, in order to avoid breakpoints but today’s implementation is near perfect.  Solid enough challenge, built for social guilds and allows you to take a night off with the missus.

Back on point, raids are by their very nature exclusive.  They require not only a decent amount of RPG-savvy (stats through gear + good build + good tactics) but also coordination of multiple people over long periods of time (3+ hours).  Sometimes the latter is the hardest part and calling a raid off because you only have 32 people instead of 40 happened often in vanilla.

So while Wildstar has it’s own little problem in that they need something for people to do other than raid, they also need to look at how they can make raiding more accessible so that they aren’t spending millions on content that only 4000 people get to see.

#Wildstar – What Works and What Doesn’t

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Editorial alert!  Editorial Alert!  Bring out the pitchforks!

With Wasteland 2 out the door shortly, followed by Civ:BE a month after, I’ve come to the conclusion that Wildstar time is taking a backseat.  I like the game, certainly.  There’s just nothing left for me to do that I think is worth investing my time in.  Sort of.

What works

Good news to start.  The stuff that works, works really well.  The LAS and action combat is amazing.  I’ve only have this level of fun in Neverwinter but Wildstar takes it to a new level.  Picking and choosing skills between battles, applying strategy to it all, paying attention to what’s on screen.  All that works.  It’s a major skill gap for a lot of people but it’s great once you get the hang of it.

Raids.  Now this is taken from the subset of raiders who are actually raiding and the videos produced.  I’ve raided in most MMOs that have the option.  From EQ’s zerg-fest, to Vanilla’s healer rotation and Rift’s sparkle-fest.  There’s the right level of challenge and skill needed to beat Wildstar raids and the general consensus from raiders is that it’s worth the effort to get there.

Housing.  Outside of EQ2, and maybe some UO, I don’t think I’ve seen a better housing system.  And it’s getting better next patch.  This is really a super tool.

What doesn’t

Class balance and stats.  Bluntly, the system as it stands today needs some re-work.  At max level there are only a few useful skills, per role.  Esper DPS are using a healing skill for some reason, that’s a problem.  Stats are undergoing an overhaul right now, where melee and ranged attackers are getting normalized.  This isn’t as bad as SWTOR’s haste issue (where it was something you actively removed from gear) but the core stats is miles more important than anything else today.  There needs to be more softcaps and cross values from skills.  It sort of reminds me of the Diablo3 v.1, stack primary, issue.

Crafting.  Crafting has a great theory in the system.  There’s some randomness, which can be mitigated with a few things but the crafted gear today is better than raiding gear.  And that’s the level 49 gear, not 50.  There’s a ton of potential and the plans from Carbine on rebalancing drops makes sense.  At the least, it needs a use for low level items, otherwise it’s just a grind to max level with vendored results.

Attunement.  It currently prevents access to the best part of the game and the general cause of people leaving over time.

Stuff to do at 50.  Right now it’s just dailies.  Shiphands don’t scale to 50.  Housing instances don’t scale to 50.  Dungeons have no purpose other than attunement.  Adventures have no purpose other than attunement.  It’s like a giant funnel rather than an open field.  Dailies that take 30 days to max out…

The rewards at 50.  There aren’t any really.  See the crafting point above.  From 50 until you complete a raid and get a drop, there’s no real incentive.  Housing is the same at 40 as it is at 50.  Crafting can be maxed out at 30.

End Statement

There’s a ton of potential here.  The story is solid.  The combat mechanics are super solid.  The housing is solid.  The math needs some rework.  The “what the hell do I do at 50?” issue needs some massive investigation and likely a re-shifting in priorities.  The updates we get from Carbine indicate that’s underway.  Though turning a ship of this size takes time… time I’ll be using playing some other games in the pipe.

The Balance Between Challenge and Rewards

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You should be reading Spinks.  The most recent post about Wildstar difficulty has me thinking….

I wrote about it in the difficulty curve post from last week but as a reminder, Wildstar has a rather ridiculous skill wall at the tail end of progress.  Getting to the first dungeon is an OK challenge, no facerolling.  Dungeons will kill you, repeatedly until you learn to avoid the red and interrupt.  Then level 50 hits and you hit a mountain of challenges.  Design for the 1% gets you 1% after all.  And we’ve seen Carbine pull back from that strategy.

So until the most recent patch, where attunement requirements were reduced to semi-sane levels (just need to complete, not complete in under X time), people were indeed faced with two choices.  1) spend the time to repeat content until you get what you want and 2) spent the time gaining the skill to do 1).  There are more players in 2) than in 1), that’s a given.

I’ll compare to WoW for a second, as it seems to be a decent baseline of easy-mode.  There is ZERO skill requirement for 2) on anything LFR and below.  Normal raids are more about paying attention than anything else.  Heroic raids… different matter, depending on your gear set.  Wildstar doesn’t have anything close to the LFR skill plateau, so there will always be time spent learning the skill.  No one playing Wildstar has ever played a LAS-active combat-NoTab-interrupt heavy MMO before.

Then there’s the time sink (attunement) to even get to the time sink (raids).  Let’s say everything is peachy and you complete a successful run on the first try.  There’s a solid 20 hours of attunement progress (not content, since you’ve likely already done it before jut not on hard mode) before you get to raids.  And that 20 hours requires X amount of time to get the skill to start it.

This reminds me a lot of ESO and their original VR system.  You got to 50, realized you only completed 30% of the game and had to repeat content/grind for another 60% to get to the end game, in a rather higher difficulty setting too.  Zenimax was smart enough to remove that after 2 months and VRs are going away completely before end of calendar.

All of this is taking about time, not even the rewards. If I’m going to spend 20 hours doing something, I’d like some progress to show for it.  Wildstar today, has crafted gear that’s on par or better than some raid drops and nearly all the attunement progress you could hope to get.  So it’s 20 hours with nothing to show for it.

I’m in Diablo3 right now.  It’s a loot pinata and there’s a certain challenge to it.  Even if I don’t get an upgrade in a session, I will get horizontal progress for Paragon levels.  I’ll get more gems, gold, crafting materials.  I get something if not a direct power increment.  Rift and EQ both have alternate advancement buckets, so that there’s some progress even at max level.  It’s well done in my opinion, adding some customization and benefits for continual play.  FF14 allows you to run another class on the same character.  Marvel Heroes lets you swap heroes in-game, using the same inventory/boosts.

It’s not about always giving away new cars ever turn of the road or a shower of purples.  You do need some indication of progress, some piece of the carrot on that stick that somehow convinces you “just one more turn”.  That the 20 hour attunement, or the 4 nights of wiping on a single boss is good use of your time.

Gaming Value

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Syp has an article in related to Collector Edition costs.  Syncaine has one related to FF14’s long term subscriber benefits.  I know UO for the longest time had veteran rewards.  And with all this talk about F2P, one has to wonder how much value you’re actually getting for your money.  And not just in the MMO space.

Value per hour

Let’s not kid ourselves.  Gaming is a very cheap hobby, assuming you have the console/PC to run it.  Let’s say you don’t though.  A console is $500 with enough controllers and cables and crap, then $15 a month for multiplayer.  A PC is about $1500.  Both get you a solid 5 years before needing replacement if you game heavily.  So let’s say it costs about $280 a year for a console and $300 for a PC (closer than you thought I bet!).  That’s less than a dollar a day.

Games run $60.  People play about 22 minute a day, 22 hours a week, for a core gamer.  Games run all over the place in terms of completion time.  Single player games are around 8 hours, RPGs run 20+, multiplayer is all over the place so let’s guess at 100 and MMOs are even larger so let’s say 200 (3 months @ 22 hours) – but they also cost ~$15 a month in subscriptions.

So a singe player game is $7.5/h, RPG is $3/h, multiplayer is $0.6/h and MMOs are $0.3/h for F2P and $0.5/h for a 3 month subscription.  That’s pretty cheap if you think about it.

Value per event

Single player events are contained – you finish the game and you’re done.  Only a few have replay value and the number of people who just complete a game are below the 25% mark.  Multiplayer games are different, each session can be a new event.  You can join a tournament.  You could be grinding like a maniac, and I consider that a single event.  MMOs are quite a bit different.  Sandboxes make their own events, though they do have patches.  Burn Jita is an event that has nothing to do with the developer.  And the value of a sandbox event is typically higher due to the player’s sense of involvement – mind you they are more spread out.  I mean, you hear about a capital ship battle once every 3-6 months.

Themeparks have a set number of events (or rides I guess), usually dictated by the patch/expansion cycle.  I will take an example that is not WoW, but instead a patch cycle of 3 months of content, 18 months for expansions.  So launch, patch, patch, patch, patch, patch, expansion.  Now, expansions shouldn’t ever cost more than half of a launch price – so $30.  95% of the content is already there and the development has been fairly well subsidized by your previous payments.  It’s not a new game, it’s a big DLC.  The patches, content patches mind you, should as a whole equal half the content of an expansion pack.   By that I mean, content patches should have new zones, new events, new items, new systems, etc…What an expansion provides is a vertical progress (new levels) and a LARGE package of content (zones, events, etc…)

Value for extra content

And that’s just baseline content.  The original CE issue is that the prices are all over the place.  Early access, beta access, a pinky ring, some scarf that no one can see.  All of that junk makes no sense to me.  But hey, people still believe buying lottery tickets is a smart move.  A CE should have actual value.  Physical items (like coins, statues, maps, books), digital non-game items (soundtracks, art), digital in-game items (mounts, re-usable dyes, titles, costumes).  Why would you ever pay for $30 more for an item that has 2 hours of use (such as a ring that grants extra experience for 10 levels).

Player value

And this gets me to my final point, you the player.  You pump in quarters to the machine and get to play.  The developer gets money.  You are content for other players (certainly in F2P games).  The deal can be broken at any time and the reason to keep paying is a personal/social one.  FF14 (and a few others) have tweaked that a bit.  Play for X amount of time and get this bonus item (a mount, a trophy, etc…).  Or if you are a subscriber, get a significant discount on future items, including expansions.  I mean, you’ve subsidized the game this far, why keep paying?  Certainly in this age of instant themeparks, if you can get 3 months out and there’s no new events, why keep paying (outside of social circles).  You can just hop into another themepark and drop 3 months of cash and cycle through.  Games that treat you with respect as a client earn more business in the real world.  It’s about time the virtual one caught up.