Player: Please, please, please release a Season 4 Arena and don’t introduce ANY new gear.

Then I think you will have a VERY good indication how popular the Arena is on its own merits.

Kalgan: About as popular as a Sunwell without any loot in it?

After this I’m done commenting mmorpgs for a while, because as I already explained it only leads to more and more. And I don’t intend to waste my time.

I was reading some news about WoW’s arena’s system. And those news fit exactly the model I anticipated and that I summarized with this lame image:

Now it all looks obvious, but at the time it was pure guesswork as we were five months before the release of the expansion and the PvP revamp. Everything I wrote in that long post was quite correct and I remember on the forums I had to fight a battle because everyone continued to repeat that Blizzard learned from mistakes and that you could save up arena’s points, and so, ideally save up enough of them to buy the best rewards.

While I was saying that no, Blizzard didn’t learn a damn thing and that no matter what people expect, the arenas system was made by Kalgan for his need of being l33t. And so they were going to add some kind of reset system to make Arena’s reward truly l33t, either by resetting your points after each arena season, or by adding rank requirements.

My point: nothing is going to change. They are maintaining the status quo where a small subset of players have access to the best gear, while the majority sits at the bottom of the pyramid. So making the elite stronger, and the noobs noober(?).

And now I read of the two upcoming changes:
1- They are rising rank requirements for arena loot
2- They are stopping powerlevelling

I never participated in a single arena’s match, but I’m sad to see I was right. From what I read you can’t purchase arena’s loot with points, but you also have to maintain a certain rank. EXACTLY LIKE IN THE OLD HONOR SYSTEM.

From Tobold’s blog comments:

This will remove most people below 1500 now from the arena, creating a whole new playing field. And arena ratings on honor gear? Ridiculous.

It seems to me like the Arena has turned into what the honor system was at it’s launch. Something for the hardcore players. And of course as usual, the casuals will be steamrolled even if they’ve got a set two seasons below the current.

It seems that with patch 2.4 and this PvP announcement that Blizzard is returning to the WoW 1.0 model of hiding gear and patterns in inaccessible raid dungeons and behind PvP rating/ranking obstacles.

There will always be teams who win against better geared opponents because they outplay them. But this will get harder and harder. Just think about how much damage a S4 warrior will do to a S2 equipped cloth or leather wearer. With an equipment spiral like that, skill matters less and less.

And I’m writing this because I’d really want to see in the face those that FOR MONTHS argued with me. And then make fun of me if I point out to them that once again I was right.

The morale is in the article:

Saving your points (or even your honor) for Season 4 may not be as effective anymore though, if you can’t also muster up the ratings to purchase the gear.

Last Kalgan’s move to catassing. You know he is l33t. And you know where he’s heading with all this.

Then there’s the powerlevelling. Every idiot playing a MMO knows that it would be stupid to let a level 1 player group with a level 60 player and gain the level 60 player’s experience.

Apparently, considering they are fixing it now, Kalgan didn’t think of this:

Together, these rules (which Tom Chilton alluded to but did not reveal in a recent interview) should mean that a person cannot simply ride a high rating team to victory, but will instead need to fight their way up the ladder to gain points regardless of what team they join.

Because before you could group with the l33t and get their points/ranks. Which created the perfect opportunity to offer RMT to be up there for one turn, grab the loot, and leave.

And with this Kalgan made the last move to make arenas exactly the same of the past honor (catass) system.

Congratulations. You are back home.

Old summary:
– The Honor system is pure catass, players complain for two years
– Blizzard gives up and transforms Honor points into currency
– But doing that then every player will be able to eventually get the best rewards! *SHOCK!*
– So they nudge back the Honor system in the food chain
– And add on top an Arena system that is more Hardcore than ever and whose rewards dwarf everything that was in the game till that point

This has been my theory since the first hours I’ve seen WoW’s client with my eyes. I was discussing this on the forum today, so I will repeat here the concept, also because I think it’s one of the most important aspects that made the game successful and that I’ve NEVER seen commented.

Outside of Dave Rickey, who wrote in his blog about the importance of tools and how always the worst programmers are put to develop tools, as it is not fun or really gratifying. Can’t post the link because it was swallowed by the internet along with the blog.

So look at this sample picture that was posted.

It is nothing crazy, but it explains my idea. See all those tiny hills that make the mountains in the background? Now, do you think that a designer modeled and textured every one, one by one?

So here I repeat my theory.

—
I believe that a lot of WoW’s beauty comes from ground textures and terrain modeling.

My controversial opinion is that it isn’t about good art, but good TECH.

If you notice WoW’s terrain is modeled in a way that is easily recognizable and every zone has the same rounded style. What I think is that Blizzard is using an editor that with a few clicks of your mouse creates pretty terrain while also placing textures on the fly, depending on the height and slopes.

Not only it allows them to keep that style consistent, but I also think they can make the terrain very quickly (and a new zone is just a set palette of new textures). Even the grass placeable are probably added by the editor itself.

What I’m saying is that this editor must have some preset brushes that do everything on their own (mostly). You give a general direction, a few mouse clicks and the terrain comes to life with all the textures placed and blended following a precise formula. That ALSO makes all the game, everywhere, look consistent (because they turned textures and modeling conventions into RULES, then applied by the editor itself).

Even *YOU* can make a pretty zone in a very short time, if you had the right tools.

—
You can import WoW’s textures even in NWN2, so what?

I’m talking about tools that let you manipulate objects. Not the objects themselves. You can let someone make a picture pixel by pixel, or you can give him some broader tools. What you are saying here is that MS Paint is the exact same program of Photoshop.

SURE IS.

But can’t you see that doing what Photoshop does into MS Paint would require years of work?

Tools.

So: try to use NWN2 editor to make a small zone with the terrain that look similar to WoW. Even use an existing zone as a model. I’m sure it will pass six months and you are still tweaking things.

And I’m sure it would only take a few hours to make a good looking zone with the editor Blizzard is using and that is giving that consistent look to ALL the terrain in ALL their zones.

You think this is the result of awesomely awesome art direction, or that maybe there’s one slave who’s doing all the terrain in all WoW. I say it’s because a multitude of designers are using the same tools, so producing similar results.

And I know this because I did use tools in various games, and I know that the most difficult thing is to actually make things look DIFFERENT from everything else in the same game and produced by the same tools.

—
In short: WoW’s designers are using Photoshop-level tools, all other designers doing other MMOs are using MS Paint-level tools.

Generalizing and simplifying a lot, that’s why everyone else is behind.

—
Follow up here. In the same way Warcraft 3’s editor as the “apply cliff” tool, WoW likely has an “apply rounded hill” kind of tool that automatically shapes the terrain AND applies appropriate textures. With no effort at all.

So saddening:

Tom Chilton, Lead Designer: The big objective is to build WoW into a viable eSports game platform.

And then worse:

Tom Chilton: Before this, we didn’t really have a good forum for competitive eSports. WoW PvP was just kind of there. For example, our battlegrounds always had the limitations of the Horde having to play against Alliance, it was very themed toward the conflict within the game itself.

So the “eSport” is a way to surpass the “limited” form of factional-themed PvP.

This is surely a new drift that wasn’t there in their original plans. Subjectively: for the worse.

Tom Chilton: I’ll tell you, it’s been a slow evolution. When WoW first came out, we didn’t really have any semblance of organized PvP. We had Tarren Mill versus Southshore…

GameSpy: Which was awesome!

Tom Chilton: That’s nostalgia speaking! I remember you were interviewing me at E3 a couple years ago and you not thinking that it was so awesome.

We kind of slowly went from there, to trying to bring some organization to it with the Battlegrounds. Giving the game a little more capability for players to feel like it was a fair, controlled encounter. Then it was (the arenas) a natural evolution from that.

Natural evolution.

Cosmik on WoW’s Honor Points, about one year ago:

The first curious thing is that you don’t get your honor points immediately. Instead you get an “estimate”, which tends to be far too low, and then get your real honor points the next day. Imagine experience points worked that way! “We estimate you have gained experience for two more levels today, but come back tomorrow for the exact value and the actual reward.” I wondered, if honor points are given out on an absolute scale now, why would it take one day to calculate the honor points? It’s better than the previous once-a-week calculation, but still not very logical.

My reply, one year ago:

Yeah. That question is gold. That’s exactly what I was wondering a week ago on Q23, we are on the same line. No one could really understand this and the best guess is that it’s all STILL because of those FUCKING diminished returns. My god, sometimes Blizzard is so absolutely stupid that isn’t believable.

This can really make sense only in Kalgan’s mind, because for the rest of the world this is blatantly flawed. And at this point isn’t anymore just flawed, but also completely unexcused.

NO ONE STILL HAS A CLUE ABOUT HOW THIS SYSTEM WORKS.

THAT “best guess” was the friggin cause of all the fucking mess the Honor System was.

Proof coming from TODAY‘s patch notes (currently 2.4).

* Diminishing returns on honor for kills is being eliminated.

HENCE:

* Honor will now be instantly calculated, and available for player use.

My point still stands:

I’ll tell you what you should do: you should demote that designer who is responsible for all this and replace him with someone who has at least half a clue. I do not want Kalgan fired. But I DO want him REPLACED. At least. Take his own responsibility for all this shit.

But, even more important, why the fuck PvP has to always receive this treatment? I mean in general, why the fuck PvP has always to be the afterthought? Why it always has to have the worst, careless design?

If your average bloggers figure out game design better than a team of senior designers who are paid to do that job professionally and have better insight about how the game works, then something is wrong.

Admit your failure on this system, and face your responsibilities.

The title is appropriate.

Now I’m not anymore so upset of having lost the honor points bonus of the last month. And all those players who ground honor points for two months now see the result: some less fun playing the expansion. The same applies to raiders. You get some fun before, and some less fun after. A compromise.

I’m quite happy of my own. The very first two introductory quests in the Outlands are already offering me upgrades to my relatively crappy gear (and I even did some raidin’). I’m taking this veeeeery slowly so that I can play for a bit longer before hitting the raiding wall again.

But this is also the main topic now. The mudflation. Raph wrote a few things about this. But he talks about the economy, where in WoW this aspect is completely IRRELEVANT. He obviously speaks a bit in general, but WoW has other problems, concretely.

It’s not necessary to make a big list, because WoW’s economy is the one that works better. And it works well because it’s very simple (and we can argue whether this is good or not). It’s all ruled by money sinks and, imho, applied even too diligently. My 60 warrior never got more than 40 gold during his lifetime and I also had to go farming (something that I really despise) in a few cases because I was completely broken and couldn’t even afford repairs. Epic mount? No thanks, I despise buying money more than I despise farming.

What are the main money sinks in WoW? Training skills as you level up, repairs and “maintenance”. Maintenance including all the added money required to support high-end activity such as raiding.

That works. The economy works even too well. But, again, it’s pretty irrelevant for the player. What instead matters in WoW is the CONTENT mudflation. And the content mudflation works on different premises.

Mudflated content (in my own definition) is content whose functions overlap. Two pieces of content have the same function in the game, one is clearly better then the other, and it replaces the other. The result is: content is removed from the game.

Also: path of least resistance. When we have two paths, one is preferred over the other. Such are games.

We design games with content reduction in mind. I already underlined the absurdity of this concept more than two years ago, the week that Blizzard announced the expansion. I also pointed out what was going to happen and why:

The rise of the level cap is a quick “fix”, both in the sense of game-drug and as a functional and effective way to give back to the players that experience that they loved along the way and that faded when they hit the top, when they had to adapt their habits to the bigger raids and guilds. It works basically like the nostalgia. It’s like if you are warped back ten levels without even remembering to have gone through them and have to repeat the experience like if it was the first time. In this genre the possibility to refresh the sense of awe and achievement is definitely something precious and satisfying for the players. So: why not?

While we can argue whether the current content will go or not right in the toilet, what is sure is that the current *progress* will.

We could assume that the players will retain their current gear for most of the hike to 70 but if this is true Blizzard would lose one of the strongest “fun” points: the sense of achievement. In the current game levelling is fun because you acquire new skills, spend talent points, get access to the mount and acquire progessively and constantly new gear. If the next 10 levels become just a grind with each level just giving out higher stats and nothing else, the “magic” would vanish easily and the expansion would finally feel rather dull. A game where you retain the same sword for 10 levels is a game that isn’t fun. So what could happen? Where is the line that will part the brand new level 60 character ready to move to 70 and those other players that have been at 60 for more than one year and collected all sort of powerful items? From my point of view the expansion will HAVE TO replace the gear for *all* the players.

And the implicit contradiction: why we burn and remove content when content production is the bigger problem we have today? Scott Hartsman offered the answer to this:

All of that “database deflated” content is called “shared experiences,” and they’re critical to a game’s success in the era in which they’re relevant. In the long run it loses value. That’s a given.

However, it’s absolutely critical to have it there in the short term, in order to get a game to the point where it can actually lose that value. That’s a problem of success. We should be so lucky to have that content beginning to lose its original value.

What happened in WoW with the expansion? The first result is obvious. It completely erased all the content from level 58 and above. Every instance past BRD is now completely USELESS. And I’m not exaggerating.

In particular. The most useless piece of content of the whole game is now that “tier 0.5” they added about a year ago after all the protests against the raiding game. Completely. Useless.

The point is: the mudflation from the perspective of those who build these kinds of games isn’t THE PROBLEM. The mudflation is THE SOLUTION. Read Raph with this in mind.

P.S.
And if you are a good game designer you would also notice that for a new player the quality of the game is inversely proportional to the mudflation. The more you open the gap between the early and late game, the less players around, the more the solo grind is prolonged.

It was discussed these days that Blizzard didn’t offer a digital download of their expansion (I commented this on Brandon’s blog).

Well, they are going to. Or at least I read it and I’m sure. It’s just that these days I read things and then forget where. So go find the link yourself.

Now. If only they offered it in time for the release I could have spared the ~$60 for taxes+shipment of my US copy.

Yes. $60 for importing, $40 for the actual game.

I collected some statistics about the new server caps on WoW as I anticipated in one of the previous posts. I wish I could quote the original plan where they wrote in detail about these new server caps but it is gone (and here you hear me swear, as it always happen when I cannot fucking find what I’m searching). This is taken out the server split FAQ:

Are any other measures being taken to avoid forcing a realm split?

Yes. One measure is to raise the player caps for all realms when The Burning Crusade launches. This will be possible in part because of the hardware upgrades that we’ve worked to put in place since the original launch.

So I went checking how many players they allowed on a single server.

Before this expansion the server caps were set between 3200-3400 players. Counting alliance + horde. From my new surveys it looks like Blizzard didn’t go all that far. The new cap seems to be between 3700-3800 or so. I’ll run more tests to see more precisely if little more or little less, but that number should be already fairly correct.

So we have a +500 players more or less. On the Silvermoon server there was a queue as I logged in to take the numbers and when I was done the queue was still there. I counted 2600 alliance characters and 1200 horde. So around 3800 overall.

About the two new races: usually 2/3 of Draenei are Shamans, and 2/3 of Blood Elves are Paladins.

I would post all the graphs but they aren’t all that interesting. The level 60 wall is starting to cascade on levels 61, 62 and 63. While the graph only hints at some more activity between level 1 and 20, but still very flat. Only around 1/4, 1/5 of players are starting new characters, while the others are storming the Outlands in the race to 70.

EDIT: I ran more polls today and I can count between 3750-3850 players. So the new cap is probably 3800.